The name "dogmatics" is taken from the Greek word dogma , which appears in Holy Writ in Luke 2:1; Acts 17:7; Ephesians 2:15; Colossians 2:14; Hebrews 11:23, and means an ordinance, a behest, a decree. In the New Testament, it is mostly used for the decrees of rulers or the commandments of the law, but it can also mean the teachings or beliefs that one holds to be true and binding. Thus, in the Christian church, "dogma" came to mean the truths of faith that are acknowledged by the church and set forth in its confessions. Dogmatics, then, is the knowledge-wit of those dogmas, the orderly setting forth of the teachings of the Christian faith as they are drawn from Holy Writ and confessed by the church.
Nijmegen. -- Rapid Press Printing of the Orphan Institution.
The task of dogmatics is to set forth the thoughts of God as they are laid down in Holy Writ, and as they are lived in the church. It seeks to bring to light the oneness of faith amid the manifoldness of its outworkings. In this work, we strive to hold fast to the Reformed heritage, drawing from the wellsprings of Scripture, and shunning the snares of worldly wisdom. May the Lord bless this endeavor, that it might strengthen the saints and uphold the truth once handed down.
With a short word may the standpoint of this dogmatics be set in the light. Not only the believer, but also the dogmatician has to make confession of the fellowship of saints. Only with all the saints can he grasp what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and acknowledge the love of Christ, which goes beyond knowledge. First in and through their fellowship does he learn to understand the dogma, wherein the Christian faith speaks out. Moreover, in this fellowship of saints there lies a strengthening might and an outstanding comfort. Dogmatics is now not in honour; the Christian dogma shares not in the favour of the time. Hence, after the word of Groen van Prinsterer, Unbelief and Revolution , sometimes a feeling of forsakenness, of loneliness. But all the more does it then stir to thanks, to be able to call upon the bond of the forefathers. For these grounds, more heed has been given to the fatherly and schoolish theology, than is otherwise the way with Protestant dogmaticians. Men like Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas, belong not solely to Rome. They are fathers and teachers, to whom the whole Christian church owes duties. Furthermore, the Roman theology after the Reformation has not been overlooked. Among Protestants there is often too little knowing both of what they have in common with Rome and what sets them apart from Rome. The awakening of Roman theology under the oversight of Thomas makes it twofold needful for the Protestant Christian to give himself a well-aware and clear reckoning of his standing toward Rome.
However, this dogmatics cleaves most closely to that kind which the Christian faith and teaching took in the sixteenth yearhundred through the Reformation, namely in Switzerland. Not for that this is the only true one, but because it is, after the mind of the writer, the somewhat purest outshowing of the truth. In no creed has the Christian in its godly, rightwise, and teachingly kind come so to its right; nowhere is it so deep and broad, so roomy and free, so truly all-churchly grasped as in that of the Reformed churches. Therefore it is all the more to bewail, that this reforming of faith and teaching, even as that of church and learning, was so swiftly stayed. There is, notwithstanding much good which the later unfolding gives to behold not only here in the land, but even so in England, Scotland, America, yet soon standstill came in and warping followed. Choosing rather to call upon the older kin, which in freshness and springliness far outstrips the later, the writer hereof deems it the right of the dogmaticker, to sunder between wheat and weeds in the tale of Reformed teaching. To laud the old only because it is old, is neither Reformed nor Christian. And dogmatics tells not what has held good, but what ought to hold good. It roots in the yore, but works for the to-come.
Therefore, in the end, this dogmatics also desires to bear the mark of its age. It would be a hopeless toil to loose oneself from the now; but it would also not be meet for God, who in this era speaks to us no less loudly and gravely than in former kindred. Heed has been given to the sundry paths that cross one another in the theological realm. Amidst them all, a spot has been sought and a stance taken. Where parting was duty, reckoning has been rendered. But even then, striving has been made to esteem the good, where it was to be found. Ofttimes, prolonged study uncovered affinity that at first seemed not to be at all.
Built upon this foundation, this dogmatics strives to be a handbook for those who devote themselves to its study. Even where it cannot gain agreement, may it awaken to further study. With this in view, the questions and the sundry solutions that have been essayed are set forth as objectively as possible. Literature is cited to such a degree that one may swiftly orient oneself and join in working toward the solution.
This first part treateth of the introduction and the principia. The second part shall handle the dogma. Probably this shall see the light in two portions, which in no wise shall be greater in compass than this first part, and shall follow as speedily as may be. A full index shall conclude the work.
1. The Name Dogmatics. The name dogmatics is still of young date. Formerly, wholly other names were in use. Origen gave to his chief dogmatic work the title Peri Archon . Augustine described his Enchiridion to Laurentius by the addition, or on Faith, Hope, and Charity . John of Damascus gave an Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith . With Isidore of Seville the name Sentences arises, which in the 13th century makes way for Summa Theologiae . Melanchthon spoke of Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum , or Hypotyposes Theologicae . The expression loci is borrowed from Cicero, and is a translation of the Greek topos . Aristotle understood under topoi the general rules of dialectic, which were known of themselves and stood firm, and therefore could serve as elements of proofs, Rhet. lib. II c. 22 § 13. Metaph. lib. IV c. 3 § 3. Cicero transferred this doctrine of the topoi from dialectic to rhetoric, and understood thereby those places where the orator could find the arguments which he needed in his speech. He explains the expression by sedes , notae argumentorum , and points out as such sources the concept, the definition, the division, the root meaning of the word, the synonyms, etc. Top. II c. 2. This use of the word loci does not entirely agree with the meaning in Aristotle, and was further changed in later logic. Melanchthon himself explains in his Dialectica , lib. IV, the expression loci by certain signs, by which the heads of things that must be said and treated are indicated. Loci communes are, according to Cicero, de Orat. III 27. Brutus 12, such propositions that have reference to no particular object, are general, and therefore hold always and everywhere; in distinction from loci proprii , which are concrete and therefore are valid only in a particular subject or in a special science. Melanchthon wished in his loci communes to give only the chief chapters of the Christian religion, as they were especially treated by Paul in his epistle to the Romans. He himself describes them therefore by hypotyposes , design, sketch, outlines of theology. And the German translation by Spalatin rendered the title by: Main Articles and Foremost Points of the Whole Holy Scripture . Name and content of Melanchthon’s dogmatics thus stand in contrast with the scholastic Sententiae and Summae . It intended not to give a complete dogmatic system to the learned, but rather to lead the unlearned into the knowledge of Holy Scripture. Cf. Heppe, Dogm. des Deutschen Protest. 1857 I; Herzog u. Plitt, Real. Enc. ; Sanseverino, Philosophia Christiana , ed. nov. Neap. 1878 III. From this it can be explained that the name loci communes found no entrance among the Roman theologians, with a single exception. They do use the expression loci , but not in the sense of Melanchthon, but in that of Cicero or Aristotle. They understand thereby not the articles of faith, but the principles or sources of Theology, Dens, Theologia ad usum Seminariorum . Mechl. 1828 I 5; Billuart, Summa S. Thomae sive Cursus Theologiae 1747 I 47; Daelman, Theologia seu Observ. theol. in Summam D. Thomae 1759 I 18. The famous work of Melchior Canus, Loci Theologici 1563 takes the expression in the same sense and treats not dogmatics itself, but its sources, which are ten in number: Scripture, tradition, Pope, councils, church, church fathers, scholastics, reason, philosophy, history. On the other hand, the name loci communes of Melanchthon was taken over by many Lutheran and Reformed theologians, such as Chemnitz, Hutter, Gerhard, Calovius; Martyr, Musculus, Hyperius, Ursinus, etc. But yet it had soon to yield to another title. Zwingli had published dogmatic writings under the title of Commentary on True and False Religion , Brief and Clear Exposition of the Christian Faith . Calvin chose the name of Institutes of the Christian Religion . And later theologians from the Lutheran and Reformed church returned to the old name of theology. For distinction from other theological disciplines, which gradually increased in number and weight, this name of Theology had to be further defined. For this served the addition didactica , systematica , theoretica , positiva , and since L. Reinhart, Synopsis theologiae dogmaticae 1659, also that of dogmatica . This description lay at hand, because the truths of faith had long been denoted by the name of dogmas, and the separation of dogmatics and ethics begun with Danaeus and Calixtus required for both disciplines a separate name. Since then this addition has acquired such great dominion that it has banished the main concept of theology and has appeared independently, that it has found approval among theologians of all confessions, and has not been able to be displaced by the newer names of doctrine of faith, doctrine of salvation, Christian doctrine, etc.
2. The word dogma , from dokein , to deem, betokens that which is set forth, decreed, and therefore stands fast, to dedogmenon , statutum, decretum, placitum. In Holy Writ it is used of the commands of the rulers, LXX, Esth. 3:9; Dan. 2:13; 6:8; Luke 2:1; Acts 17:7, of the ordinances of the Old Covenant Eph. 2:15; Col. 2:14, and of the decrees of the gathering at Jerusalem, Acts 15:28; 16:4. Among the ancient writers it hath the meaning of decree or command, and in philosophy that of truths upheld by themselves or by proofs, Plato, de Rep. VII c. 16; Arist. Phys. ausc. 4, 2; Cic. de fin. 2, 32; Acad. prior. 2, 9 § 27; Seneca Epist. 94, 95. In these senses the word is also taken up in divinity. Josephus, c. Ap. I, 8 saith that the Jews from childhood hold the books of the Old Covenant as theou dogmata . In the same sense the church fathers speak of the Christian faith or teaching as to theion dogma , of the taking on of flesh by Christ as dogma tes theologias , of the truths of belief that hold in and for the church as ta tes ekklesias dogmata , and likewise of the teachings of heretics as dogmata ton heterodoxon and so forth. Cf. Suicerus, Thesaurus Eccles. s.v.; Herzog² s.v. Dogmatik; H. Cremer, Wörterbuch der neutest. Gräcität s.v. This same sense the word keepeth among the Latins, as Vincentius in his Commonitorium c. 29, and among the Protestant divines such as Sohnius, Opera 1609 I 32; Ursinus, Tract. Theol. 1584 p. 22; Hyperius, Methodus Theol. 1574 p. 34; Polanus, Synt. Theol. 1625 p. 133.
3. The Use of the Word. The use of the word teaches us in the first place, that with dogma all manner of commands, decrees, philosophical truths, theoretical propositions, practical rules, and the like can be denoted, but the common thing therein is, that there is always a certain authority underlying it. A dogma is a proposition that has authority, Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 2te Aufl. I. 15. In the word dogma, however, there lies in itself not, upon what authority it rests. Among the different dogmas, that authority is also different. Among political dogmas, that authority is the government; among philosophical dogmas, the inward evidence or the strength of the proofs; among religious or theological dogmas, that authority lies only in God's testimony, whether this according to the Protestants is heard only in the Scripture, or according to the Romans also in the church. A proposition has authority in church and theology only for that reason, because it rests upon the testimony of God.
Unrightly therefore by and since Schleiermacher is the essence and character of a dogma sought in the ecclesiastical establishment and proclamation, Schleiermacher, Christl. Sitte, S. 5; Rothe, Zur Dogm. 10; Schweizer, Christl. Glaub. I. 23; Daubanton, Theol. Studien, bl. 136-145; Kuyper, Encycl. III 395 v. On the Roman standpoint there might yet be something to say for this, because the church is infallible. But the Reformation acknowledges no truth save only on the authority of God in the Holy Scripture. The Word of God establishes the articles of faith, and besides no one, not even an angel, Art. Smalc. Pars II art. 2. Dogmas and articles of faith are only those truths, which in the Scriptures are properly set forth as to be believed, Hyperius, Methodus theol. p. 34, 35. They are only such sentences, to which belief or obedience is needful because of the command of God, Ursinus, Tract. Theol. 22. And therefore this proposition returns time and again among the Reformed theologians: the principle, into which all theological dogmas are resolved, is: the Lord hath said, cf. Ritschl, Lehre v. d. Rechtf. u. Vers. 3te Aufl. II 2.
But from the character of authority, which is proper to a dogma, it follows yet in the second place of itself, that it as such is also acknowledged in a certain circle. There lies undoubtedly in the concept of dogma a social element. A truth may stand ever so firm; if it is not acknowledged, it is in the eyes of others nothing more than a sentence of a doctor, a private opinion. The concept of dogma includes, that the authority which it possesses, knows also to make itself acknowledged and maintained. Therefore there must be distinguished between dogma as to itself and dogma as to us. A proposition is dogma in itself, abstracted from all acknowledgment, if it rests upon the authority of God. But in order not to identify one's own opinion with the truth of God, it is for every believer and especially also for the dogmatician of the highest import to know, which truths from the Scripture under the leading of the Holy Ghost in the church of Christ have been brought to general acknowledgment. The confession can thus be called the dogma as to us.
But also in this subjective sense is dogma by no means limited to what is expressly taken up in the symbols and ecclesiastically established. The church has a life and a faith, that is much richer than comes to expression in the confession. The confession formulates by no means the whole content of the Christian faith. It belongs also not to the essence of the church, is accidental, and almost always born out of special circumstances. It usually takes up only what within or without her has found contradiction. Even as therefore the wood burns not because it smokes, but the smoke yet is a sign of fire, so also a proposition is not a dogma because the church acknowledges it, although the acknowledgment by the church is an important, albeit always fallible, proof of the truth thereof, Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit, 2te Aufl. I, 97 f.
In the third place, the use of the word dogma teaches us yet, that it now in broader, then in narrower sense was employed. Sometimes the whole Christian religion is denoted therewith, and Basil the Great, de Spiritu Sancto c. 27 can understand under δογματα (in contrast with κηρυγματα, the articles of faith drawn from the Scripture) the ecclesiastical ceremonies and rites, Suicerus, Thes. Eccl. s. v. δογμα. Polanus in the same place says, that dogma in broader sense embraces all that is comprehended in the Holy Scripture, not only the doctrine of the gospel and law, but also all sermons, sacred histories, and the like. Commonly however the word was employed in narrower sense, for the doctrine of the gospel and law, for those sentences, to which belief or obedience is needful because of the command of God, Ursinus in the same place 22. It embraced thus not only the doctrinal, but also the ethical truth. Later however the word dogma became yet more narrowly bounded, in that the doctrine of the law was distinguished and separated from the doctrine of the gospel; dogmas were now only those sentences, to which belief is needful because of the command of God. Polanus went yet further and made also distinction between the dogmas and the principles of theology. Thus dogma became the designation of the articles of faith, which rest upon the authority of God's Word and therefore bind all to faith. And dogmatics is then the system of the articles of faith.
4. The Material Concept of Dogmatics. Nevertheless, with that the concept of dogmatics is still only established in a formal sense. A definition of dogmatics as the science of dogmas helps little, as long as we do not know the matter, the content of the dogmas. To determine the material concept of dogmatics, we must remember that dogmatics originally was an adjective for describing the main concept of theology. Accordingly, in former times dogmatics was commonly understood as the doctrine of God principally and of creatures, according as they are referred to God as to their beginning or end, Thomas, Summa Theol. I qu. 1 art. 3 and 7; Alb. Magnus, Sent. lib. I dist. 1 § 2; Petavius, Opus de theol. dogmatibus cap. 1. --Gerhard, Loci Comm., prooemium de natura theologiae; Hase Hutterus Redivivus § 11; H. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. Kirche § 2. --Fr. Junius, Opera Omnia I fol.; Polanus, S. Theol. lib. I cap. 1-4; Gomarus, Disput. Theol., thesis 1; Owen, Θεολογουμενα, sive de natura, ortu.... verae theologiae, libri sex. Oxon. 1661, lib. 1 cap. 1-4; Voetius, Diatribe de theologia. Ultraj. 1668; Coccejus, Summa theol. cap. 1.
Others, however, had objections to making God the main concept of dogmatics, and preferred to name its object otherwise. Lombardus, Sent. I dist. 1, followed Augustine, who in doctr. christ. lib. I cap. 2 says: all doctrine is either of things or of signs, and therefore assigned to theology two matters for treatment: things, that is, God, world, man, and signs, that is, sacraments. But this incomplete determination was soon given up and improved by the commentators. Alexander Halesius and Bonaventura, Proleg. qu. I in 1 Sent. and Breviloquium Pars I cap. 1 named Christ and his mystical body, the church; Hugo a St. Victor, De sacr. lib. I c. 2, named the works of restoration as the matter and content of theology or dogmatics. And Lutheran and Reformed theologians also described the content of dogmatics in this way. Calovius, Isagoge ad theologiam 1662, strongly opposes that God is the proper object of theology; etymology decides nothing here, theology on earth is quite something else than in heaven, we strive here indeed for knowledge of God, but do not attain it. To make God the object of theology is as wrong as to make the Prince the object of politics, instead of the republic; the proper object of theology is man insofar as he is to be led to salvation or religion. And so also by Amesius, Medulla Theol. I c. 5; Maestricht, Theor. pract. Theol. I c. 1 § 47; Marck, Merch der Christ. Godg. I § 34; Moor, Comment. in Marckii Compendium I; Burmannus, Synopsis Theol. I c. 2 § 30; Limborch, Theol. Christ. I c. 1, the living unto God through Christ, religion, the worship of God is made the content of dogmatics.
The subjective, practical view of theology thus gradually began to gain more ground. And when now the philosophy of Kant limited human knowing to visible things, Agnosticism declared the unknowability of God, historical criticism undermined supernatural revelation, this subjective, practical view became the prevailing one. Schleiermacher conceived dogmatics as the doctrine of faith, and defined dogmas as conceptions of pious states of mind, Der Christl. Glaube § 15, 16. And since then almost all theologians have made this transition. Not God, but religion is the object of theology. And indeed, religion in general as a historical and psychological phenomenon, Tiele, Gids Mei 1866; Idem, Theol. Tijdschr. 1ste aflev. 1867; Rauwenhoff, Theol. Tijdschr. 1869 bl. 1 v. 163 v. Wet op het Hooger Onderwijs van 1876, or more specifically the Christian religion, as it comes to revelation in Scripture and church. Accordingly, then to dogmatics is given as content the religion or Christian doctrine, as it is either drawn from Holy Scripture, or confessed by one or another church, or known by personal experience.
5. Now already Thomas in his time noted against those who gave another setting forth of Theology, that they came thereto because they attended to those things which are handled in this science and not to the reason according to which they are considered, Summa Theol. I q. 1 art. 7.
In theology and so also in dogmatics, much more than only about God is handled; also angel and man, heaven and earth, yea all creatures come therein to speech. But the question is, under which viewpoint and with which goal they are handled in theology. For all these things are handled also in other sciences; the peculiarity of their handling in theology lies therein, that they are beheld in their relation to God, ut ad principium et finem , Kaftan, Wahrheit der Chr. Rel. S. 3.
Furthermore, the setting forth of dogmatics as the science of the religio christiana in itself would not yet be so wrong, if, as in former times, thereunder that religion was understood which was objectively laid down in Scripture. But after Kant and Schleiermacher this setting forth has gotten another meaning and dogmatics has become the setting forth of that historical appearing which is called Christian religion and which also shows itself in a peculiar faith and teaching.
If now dogmatics is understood in this sense, then it ceases to be dogmatics and becomes simply a setting forth of what in a certain circle is held for truth in the religious realm. But science is concerned with truth; if dogmatics truly wills to be science, then it is not satisfied with the setting forth of what is, but ought to point out what must count as truth. Not the hoti , but the dioti , not the actuality, but the truth; not the real, but the ideal, the logical, the needful ought it to show.
As soon as it however tries that, it comes straightway back to God, become/s in proper sense again theology. For whoever makes Christianity the object of its own science, goes forth not from the fact of the being of that Christianity—for then the handling of that historical appearing in the literary faculty would be fully enough—but from a special valuing of that fact, Gunning and Saussaye Jr., Het ethische beginsel der Theologie 47.
Theology as a separate faculty science presupposes that in those historical facts of Christianity God has revealed himself in a special way, presupposes and demands thus the being and the revelation of God. That is, theology demands, to be and remain theology, that all things in it be beheld sub ratione Dei .
And if against this the unknowability of God be brought in, then holds the rule: qui nimis probat, nihil probat . If God is not knowable, therewith falls not only dogmatics and theology, but also religion, for this is built upon the knowledge of God.
Thus dogmatics is the scientific system of the knowledge of God, that is, of that knowledge which He concerning himself and concerning all creatures as in relation to Him in his Word has revealed to the church.
1. On the Place of Dogmatics in the Encyclopedia of Theology. There is almost no difference of thought about the place of dogmatics in the encyclopedia of theology. All bring it under Systematic or Dogmatic Theology, that is, to that group of fields which deal with the dogma, and to which, besides dogmatics, also ethics, symbolics, history of dogmas, and elenctics belong. Only Schleiermacher, in his Brief Presentation of Theological Studies , second edition, added it to historical theology, because it is the knowledge of the connection of the teaching that holds in the church at a given time, as in his The Christian Faith ; also Rothe, in his On Dogmatics , and thus gives a statistic of the present. Schleiermacher came to this peculiar view because he wanted to separate dogmatics as strictly as possible from apologetics. While the latter, as part of philosophical theology, has to show what Christian truth is, the former has only to describe what holds as truth in one or another Christian church. Yet Schleiermacher by no means intended thereby to give dogmatics only a referring character; he certainly assigns it a critical task and demands that it be systematic, that it give its own conviction, and that it describe not what has held, but what holds, as Dr. Is. van Dijk says in Concept and Method of Dogmatics ; Hagenbach, Encyclopedia . But thereby it already goes beyond the purely historical description. The Christian community cannot be content with an objective report of its faith-content, but demands that its faith also be unfolded and set forth as truth. The dogmatician also does not stand neutral outside and over against the faith of the community, as over against the religious teaching of Mohammedans and Buddhists, but belongs to that community, and thus also describes what holds and must hold as truth for him. And finally, there is an essential difference between works like those of Hase, Schmid, Schweizer, and Heppe, which give an objective description of the Lutheran and Reformed teaching, and dogmatics, which wants to show and present the truth of the religious convictions. If Schleiermacher, calling dogmatics a historical field, meant nothing else thereby than that it is a thetical, positive science, which does not seek its object but finds it and now describes it, then his intention is to be valued, but the name is still incorrect. However, if he cherished the opinion that dogmatics had only to describe a historical given and made no claim to normative truth, then his view was certainly incorrect and is now generally rejected. Hagenbach, Encyclopedia ; Herzog, second edition.
2. Belonging thus to the branches of dogmatic theology, dogmatics must be well distinguished from her sisters. All branches in this part of theology have to do with the dogma, that is, with the truth as God has revealed it, but each in its own manner. It can be hearkened unto, as it is clearly and strongly confessed by the congregation in her confession, and then arises the symbolic theology. It can be set forth in simple, understandable form, as milk (1 Peter 2:2) to the youthful members, the children of the congregation, and then catechetical theology speaks, well to be distinguished from catechetics, the art of doing that. It can be upheld in its truth and right over against opponents, and then elenctical theology fulfills her task. It can also be set forth thetically and positively, but in a scholarly, systematic form, for the developed consciousness, and then dogmatics is practiced. All these branches have in common with one another that they display the treasures of Sacred Scripture, but each in its own way.
Dogmatics does that, as men of old said, in a scholastic, school-like manner, that is, in such wise as it ought to be done in the schools of knowledge. Naturally, here if not all, yet much depends on the standpoint that the dogmatician takes. If with the pietists and biblical theologians he assumes a sharp opposition between Scripture and church doctrine, then he will cleave as closely as possible to Scripture, even in words and expressions, and think through the found matter as little as possible. If he sees in the confession of the church, in the history of dogmas, no corruption but development of Scriptural truth, then his dogmatics will be churchly and confessional in color. And if he stands rationalistically over against both Scripture and church, the convictions of faith that he sets forth will bear especially a negative character. All that is a difference of method and comes later to discussion. But just therefore it is not good, with Prof. Doedes, to distinguish three kinds of dogmatics, namely New Testament or Christian, churchly, and critical. For thereby equal rank and right of existence is granted to all three, confusion increases yet more, the New Testament dogmatics stands as the Christian one par excellence over against the other two, the two first kinds of dogmatics can go entirely outside one's own conviction, and the critical dogmatics becomes alone that of one's own independent consideration.
The task of dogmatics is rather always one and the same. She is and can by her nature be nothing other than a scholarly setting forth of religious truth, an enarration of the Word of God, a displaying of the treasures of Sacred Scripture, a tradition unto a pattern of teaching (Romans 6:17), so that in her we have a form and image of the heavenly doctrine. Dogmatics is thus itself not the Word of God; she is always but a faint image and a weak likeness thereof; she is a fallible, human endeavor to think after and speak after, in one's own free manner, what God aforetime in many portions and in many manners spake through the prophets, and in these last days hath spoken unto us by the Son (Polanus, Syntagma; Heidegger, Corpus Theol. Christ. Loc. I). The question how dogmatics can best fulfill this her task is a question of method and must be treated separately later.
3. The Closest Kin is Dogmatics to Ethics. The word dogma in old times embraced both, the articles of faith and the precepts of the decalogue, the dogmas of faith and the dogmas of morals. Ethics was either taken up into dogmatics, as with Lombard, Thomas, Melanchthon, Calvin, Martyr, Musculus, Sohnius and others, or worked out in a second part after dogmatics, as with Polanus, Amesius, Heidegger, Wollebius, Wendelinus, Maestricht, Brakel and others, or also handled wholly on its own, sundered from dogmatics, as with Danaeus, Ethices Christ. libri III 1577, Keckermann, Walaeus, Polyander, Amyraldus, Pictet, Driessen, Hoornbeek, Heidegger, Osterwald, J. A. Turretinus, Stapfer, Beck, Wyttenbach, Endeman; see A. Schweizer, Die Entw. des Moralsystems in der ref. Kirche , Stud. u. Krit. 1850, Heft 1; Gass, Gesch. der chr. Ethik II Bd., 1te Abth. 1886; Luthardt, Gesch. der chr. Eth. , 2te Hälfte 1893. The sway of Aristotle, which already began with Melanchthon's philosophia moralis 1539, held back the unfolding of Christian ethics. The sundering which later came in had the outcome that ethics lacked its own ground, sought this in ill hour with philosophy, as a corrupted theological ethics came to stand foe-like over against dogmatics and thrust it from its place, and at last wholly wiped out the bounds between itself and dogmatics. To prove this serve the fruitless strivings to sunder the two. With Kant religion has no own content more, but is only the grasping of the good as God's behest, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft , ed. Rosenkranz. Schleiermacher gave to both as content the Christian life, but dogmatics sets forth that life in kindred rest, ethics in kindred stirring, Die Christl. Sitte , ed. Jonas, 2te Aufl. 1884. Rothe saw the shortfall of this sundering and therefore made dogmatics a historical craft, which handled the dogmas of the church, ethics a speculative lore, which unfolds its stuff dialectically from the God-awareness, Theol. Ethik , § 15. Dorner, Glaubenslehre I; Sittenlehre ; Herzog² 4; Wuttke, Christl. Sittenlehre I; Palmer, Moral des Christ. and others, sunder both as knowing and doing, understanding and will. Doedes, Encycl. § 52 n°. 4 and Van Oosterzee, Chr. Dogm. § 4 n°. 4 as lore of salvation and as lore of life; Gunning, Het ethische beginsel der Theologie as life of Christ in the church and in the single one; Daubanton, Theol. Stud. III as lore of God and lore of man, and so forth. All these sunderings limp in that they seek a ground-deep rift between dogmatics and ethics. And there is none. Theological ethics, well to be sundered from philosophical ethics, has no own ground, but roots wholly and all in dogmatics. The given lines of parting beget a twofoldness between God and man, single one and fellowship, salvation and life, rest and stirring, understanding and will, and pave the way thereto, that ethics goes seeking an own ground along speculative philosophical paths, as with Rothe, loses its theological mark and from its speculative height looks down scornfully on the historical, positive dogmatics. If dogmatics and ethics must be handled asunder, what for sundry grounds is wished, but yet always by many warned against, as Sartorius, Nitzsch, Beck, A. Dorner, Ueber das Verhältniss der Dogm. u. Ethik in der Theol. Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. Oct. 1889; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis I; Wendt, Die Aufgabe der System. Theol. 1894, then the sundering between both can only lie herein, that man, howsoever at all times utterly hanging on God, yet also is a free and self-standing working being. Through the grace of the Holy Ghost born again and renewed, the sinful man also receives again delight and strength to live after God's behests. Dogmatics sets forth the deeds of God for and to and in man, ethics sets forth the deeds which the renewed man now does on ground and in the strength of those deeds of God. In dogmatics man is suffering, receives and believes; in ethics he himself steps forth working. In dogmatics come the articles of faith, in ethics the precepts of the decalogue to handling. There is handled of faith, here of love, obedience, good works. Dogmatics unfolds what God is and does for man and makes him know God as his Maker, Redeemer, Sanctifier; ethics sets out what man now is and does for God, how man wholly and all, with understanding and will and all strengths, yields himself to God out of thankfulness and love. Dogmatics is the system of the knowledge of God, ethics that of the service of God. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III; H. Schultz, Grundriss der ev. Dogm. 2te Aufl. 1892; Wendt, t. a. p. Both lores are not self-standing over against each other, but form together one system, are belonging members one to another of one body, Wendt, ib.
1. The Method of Dogmatics. By the method of dogmatics is to be understood in a broad sense the way in which the dogmatic stuff is gotten and handled. Three things come therein into reckoning: the Scripture, the confession of the church, and the personal belief of the dogmatician. According as these three are overlooked or used and then set in kinship to each other, so differs the starting point and therefore the path and the outcome of dogmatics. In truth it always goes thus, that every Christian, even the dogmatician, receives his belief-overtuigings from the ring wherein he is born and brought up. Through preaching the church is founded and handed over from kin to kin. Belief is from the hearing. The handing-down, by Rome declared unfailing, was not by the Reformation wholly cast off and soon thereafter became a might that bound all freedom. One received the dogmatic stuff from the hands of the church and the school. Materia theologiae proprie sunt loci communes, materia remota est S. Scriptura , say Alsted and Alting, Schweizer, Glaub. der ev. ref. K. And after the backlash of the so-called Biblical Theology, in this hundred-year the fellowship-like element in religion, the churchly mark of dogmatics has again from sundry sides been set in the clearest light. There is scarcely anyone who denies the confessional boundedness of religion and dogmatics, Schleiermacher, Glaub. ; Rothe, Zur Dogm. ; Lange, Dogm. ; Herzog e. a. Here in this land the Groningen God-learned ones again laid stress on the church, H. de Groot, De Gron. Godg. , Instit. theol. nat. ; Voorlez. over de gesch. der opvoeding des menschdoms door God , II. And even modern god-divines commonly shut in the handling of the belief-lore with the churchly dogma. Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. ; Lipsius, Dogm. ; Scholten, Leer der Herv. Kerk .
2. But the church with her confession cannot yet be the principle of dogmatics. The Greek and Roman churches have indeed declared the tradition infallible, but at all times churches, sects, and directions, to whom the Christian character could not be denied, have appealed from that tradition to the Holy Scripture. Even in Biblical Theology the attempt has been tried, to come to a doctrine of faith from Scripture alone without the help of church and confession. It was already prepared by Erasmus, Joh. Jansen, the Socinians, and the Remonstrants, in the preface to the apology of their confession. It found support in the many sects that thereafter arose in and beside the churches of the Reformation. It was introduced into the churches themselves by Calixtus and Coccejus, and gained more and more ground in the 18th century. Its intention becomes known, for example, from the works of A. F. Büsching, Epitome Theol. Christ. e solis S. S. verbis concinnatae et ab omnibus rebus et verbis scholasticis purgatae , and Gedanken von der Beschaffenheid und dem Vorzüge der bibl. dogm. Theologie vor der scholastischen . Still in this century such a Biblical direction in dogmatics is advocated by Beck and his followers, by Doedes, Leer der zaligheid , and also by Ritschl and his school, who return from the dogmatics corrupted by Greek philosophy to the revelation of God in the person of Christ.
3. But even therewith is the likelihood of strife between the teaching of Scripture and the personal belief of the dogmatist not yet taken away. As long as the truth is outwardly laid down for the dogmatist in Scripture or in church teaching, it seems that no right can befall the personhood of the dogmatist. Dogmatics then abides as a setting forth of the teaching of Scripture or church, but maybe without the personal agreement of the dogmatist. That is, however, no dogmatics. For this dwells not in a historical telling, but sets forth what must hold as truth, and thus holds within the personal belief of the dogmatist. Since the overlordship in matters of belief has wholly fallen away for many, and the inward belief has been made free from the outward belief, the godly awareness, the inwit, the feeling, the wit or however one may name it, has become the wellspring and yardstick of the godly forthsettings. The whole godlore is, through and after Schleiermacher, both among the right-believing and among the newfangled, awareness-godlore. Scholten, Schweizer, Biedermann, Lipsius may still go out in the handling of dogmas from the churchly wording, yet in the end they give nothing other than their personal faith. And also godlore men like Martensen, Dorner, Hofmann, Philippi, Frank and others, take their outgoing in the awareness of the believer. Here in this land, Van Oosterzee took up the Christly awareness among the wellsprings of dogmatics. Des Amorie van der Hoeven the Younger sang in Faith of the Heart: the unspeakable word stands in our heart to read, and Christ gave it sounds. Beets sang: To be wholly outward is the call, is manly. But would it be likely? Oh, soothe yourself with no show! The frameworks are personal or unmanly. And Prof. Van Manen showed, in his incoming speech at Groningen, the personal kind of teaching godlore. From that personal kind of dogmatics, Doedes makes clear the boundless bewilderment that reigns in her field.
4. Already this survey of the three dogmatic schools makes it clear that none of the three can do without the others. Each one, taken by itself, becomes lopsided and falls into error. The critical school, which casts aside confession and Scripture as wellsprings of knowledge and seeks to draw all religious truth from the inward self, is first of all at odds with daily life. Even in faith matters, we are shaped by our surroundings. We take in our godly notions and feelings from those who nurture and rear us, and stay ever bound to the folk amid whom we dwell. Sound mind-lore shows that wit and heart, reckoning and inward voice, feeling and fancy can nowhere stand as wellsprings of truth. Just as we are bodily tied to the world of things and must draw meat and drink, shelter and garb from it, so too are we soul-wise, in craft, learning, worship, uprightness, beholden to the world beyond us. All our knowing comes from without; there are no inborn thoughts. Above all, feeling cannot be deemed a wellspring of knowledge, for feeling is never foremost, but ever after; it only answers to what stirs it and yields a sense of delight or woe, of sweet or bitter. Tholuck, art. Gefühl in Herzog; Bender, Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol.; Philippi, Kirchl. Glaub.; Hodge, System. Theol.; Hoekstra, Godg. Bijdr.; Id. Wijsgeerige Godsdienstleer. The self-ruling claim of the godly and upright man ever hangs together with god-belief or all-godhood. God-belief makes man free of God and world, teaches the full strength of his wit, and leads to wit-rule; all-godhood lets God come to showing and self-knowing in man and fosters hidden-lore. Both undo outward truth, leave wit and feeling, understanding and heart to themselves, and end in unbelief or over-belief. Wit picks apart all showing, and feeling gives the Roman as much right to deem Mary the sinless queen of heaven as the Protestant to fight this belief. Schweizer, Glaub. der ev. ref. K. It is therefore striking that Holy Writ never points man to himself as wellspring and yardstick of godly truth. How could it, when it sets forth the soul-man wholly, in his understanding (Ps. 14:3; Rom. 1:21-23; Rom. 8:7; 1 Cor. 1:23, 2:14; 2 Cor. 3:5; Ef. 4:23; Gal. 1:6, 7; 1 Tim. 6:5; 2 Tim. 3:8), in his heart (Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Jer. 17:9; Ezech. 36:26; Mark. 7:21), in his will (Joh. 8:34; Rom. 7:14; 8:7; Ef. 2:3), and also in his inward voice (Jer. 17:9; 1 Cor. 8:7, 10, 12; 10:28; 1 Tim. 4:2; Tit. 1:15) as shadowed and spoiled by sin. For the knowing of truth, it ever points him to the outward showing, to the word, the teaching that has gone forth from God (Deut. 4:1; Jes. 8:20; Joh. 5:39; 2 Tim. 3:15; 2 Petr. 1:19, and so forth). And even where the outward truth becomes our own through faith, that faith is yet never like a spring that brings forth living water from itself, but like a stream that bears the water to us from afar.
5. Rome hath excellently understood this impossibility of a religious and moral self-rule, and therefore bound man, upon pain of the salvation of his soul, to the infallible church. This, and thus in the last instance the infallible Pope, is for the Roman Christian the beginning-point of his faith. The Papa dixit is the end of all gainsaying.
But history teacheth that this theoretical or practical infallibility of the church hath not only in Rome, but also in the churches of the Reformation, at all times met with gainsaying and opposition. Not the unbelieving, but the godly circles are they in the first place who have felt this power of the hierarchy as a galling band upon the conscience. Through all ages there hath been not only a learned, societal, statecraftly, but also a deeply religious and moral opposition against the hierarchical power of the church. It will not do to explain this opposition from unbelief and disobedience, and as if on purpose to misjudge the religious motives which lay at the ground of the opposition of the diverse sects and directions. None dareth to damn all these sects because they came in revolt against the church and her tradition. Even Rome shrinketh back from this conclusion. The extra ecclesiam nulla salus is a confession which falleth too heavy even upon the strongest faith.
The law which we see ruling on every field goeth also through in religion and morality. There is on the one hand a revolutionary spirit which would level to the ground all that hath historically grown, to then begin building anew; but there is also a false conservatism which taketh pleasure in leaving the existing untouched only because it existeth, and, according to the well-known word of Calvin, malum bene positum non movere . Everywhere and on every field there is in its time a certain radicalism needful to restore the balance, to carry forward the unfolding, and not to let the stream of life run into the sand.
In art and learning, in state and society, and so also in religion and morality, there gradually ariseth a rut which oppresseth and violateth the rights of the personhood, the genius, the invention, the inspiration, the freedom, the conscience. But then in its time there always riseth up the man who cannot endure under that pressure, who casteth off the yoke of bondage, and who taketh up again for the freedom of man, for the freedom of the Christian. Those are the turning points in history.
Thus Christ himself once stood forth against the tradition of the elders and returned to the law and the prophets. And thus the Reformation once had the boldness, not for the sake of any learned, social, or statecraftly interest, but in the name of the Christian man to protest against Rome’s hierarchy. Even among the sects and directions which later arose in the Protestant churches, that religious, ethical motive is oftentimes not to be misjudged. Also the theologia biblica defendeth an important piece of religious truth. When church and theology choose rest above strife, they themselves awaken the opposition which remindeth them of their Christian calling and task.
Rome can of course never approve such an opposition and must condemn it beforehand. The Reformation itself sprang therefrom and cannot withhold from others what it took for itself. And Holy Scripture, though far from all revolutionary revolt, hath yet made lawful the right of gainsaying against all human command that fighteth with God’s Word, in the kingly word of Peter: We must obey God rather than men , Acts 5:29.
6. Thus it seemeth that only that method is the true one, which is applied by the biblical theologians. But this direction also suffereth from great one-sidedness. It deemeth itself wholly unprejudiced over against the Scripture and purely and objectively to give again her content. But it forgetteth, that every believer and every dogmatician receiveth his faith-convictions first of all from the hand of his church. He cometh therefore never from without, without any knowledge and preconceived opinion to the Scripture, but bringeth from home already a certain conception of the content of the revelation and beholdeth thus also the Scripture with the spectacles which the church holdeth forth to him. Every dogmatician standeth, when he goeth to the work, whether he acknowledgeth it or not, in that historical appearance of Christendom, wherein he is born and brought up and cometh as Reformed or Lutheran or Roman Christian to the Scripture. One cannot here simply divest himself of his surroundings, one is always child of his time, product of his environment, Toorenenbergen, De Chr. Geloofsleer; Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm.
The outcome answereth also to this expectation; all dogmatic handbooks, which by the biblical direction in the light are given, mirror faithfully the personal and ecclesiastical standpoint of the author; they can make no greater claim to objectivity than those of the ecclesiastical dogmaticians. The pure Gospel, which Ritschl for example findeth back in Luther and in Jesus, answereth wholly to the conception, which he himself hath formed thereof. All these biblical directions are also continually judged by history, they do their usefulness for a time and awaken a forgotten truth, but they change not the stream of the ecclesiastical life and have no endurance in themselves. Commonly they come forth from a religious conviction, which can no more find itself in the Scripture. Indeed they begin ever with appealing from the confession to the Scripture, but they go soon from the Scripture back to the person of Christ and end therewith to assail also his authority. And always history showeth then again, that Christendom is preserved relatively purest in the confessions of the churches. But such a biblical conception is not only practically impossible, it is also theoretically untrue. The Scripture is no lawbook, whereof the articles but need to be looked up, to know in a certain case her opinion.
It is composed of many books of sundry persons, from very different times, with divergent content. It is no abstract, but an organic, living unity. It containeth nowhere a sketch of the doctrine of faith, but this must be derived from the whole organism of the Scripture. The Scripture is not arranged thereto, that we prate after her, but that we as free children of God shall think after her. But then is also all so-called presuppositionlessness and objectivity impossible. Then is there so much study and after-thinking of the subject connected therewith, that one person is thereto altogether unable. Thereunto are ages needful. Thereto is the church appointed, which hath the promise of the leading of the Spirit into all truth. Who isolateth himself from the church, that is, from Christendom, from the whole history of dogmas, loseth the Christian truth. He becometh like a branch, which is torn from the tree and withereth away, a member which is separated from the body and therefore is destined for death. Only in the communion of saints is the length and breadth, the depth and height of the love of Christ to be understood, Eph. 3:18. Thereto cometh also, that the advocates of this direction forget, that Christendom is universal and can and must enter into all forms and conditions. They set grace hostile over against nature and reckon not enough with the incarnation of the Word. For even as truly as the Son of God became man, so also the thought of God is laid down in the Scripture, flesh and blood in the consciousness of men. Dogmatics is and ought to be, the divine thought fully entered and taken up in our human consciousness, spoken freely and independently in our tongue, in its essence fruit of the ages, in its form of this age (Da Costa).
Therefore is also the opposition untrue, which is oft made between Biblical Theology and Dogmatics, as if the one giveth the content of the Scripture, the other that of the ecclesiastical dogmas. For dogmatics intendeth nothing other than to expound the thoughts of God, which He hath laid down in the Holy Scripture, Maresius, Syst. Theol. loc. 1. § 8. But it doeth that, as behoveth, in scientific manner, in a form and after a method, as are scientifically required. In this sense have the Reformed formerly defended the right of the so-called theologia scholastica. They had naught against it, that the revealed truth also in simpler form under the name of theologia positiva, catechetica etc. was set forth. But they combated strongly, that these two differed in content; what distinguished them, was only a difference in form and method. And by taking this standpoint, they on the one hand as strongly as possible maintained the unity and connection of faith and theology, of church and school, but on the other hand also held high the scientific character of theology. The thoughts of God might be ever so high and wonderful, they were yet no aphorisms, but formed an organic unity, a systematic whole, which also could be thought in and given again in a scientific form. The Scripture itself urgeth to this theological labor, as it layeth not on the abstract knowing, but on doctrine and truth, knowledge and wisdom everywhere the strongest emphasis.
7. A good method of dogmatics must therefore reckon with all three givens, with Scripture, church, and personal belief. Then alone is it feasible to be kept from gross one-sidednesses.
Yet it still comes down to setting the bond in which these three givens stand to each other. As a rule, it goes so that we take in our godly beliefs from our surroundings. That is the case in all faiths, and also in Christendom. We are all born as limbs of a church. The bond of grace takes us in from our birth onward. God's pledges in Christ hold not only for the faithful but also for their seed. In weighty times, like our own, it oft befalls that later there comes a sore break between the belief of childhood and the personal belief. If this break is of such kind that one must indeed forsake one's own church but yet can link oneself to another historically standing church, then it is somewhat swiftly healed. There is then indeed shift, but no loss of the faith itself, of the Christian name, of the fellowship, of the avowal. There abides then still a dogma that stands fast and yields us stay and balm in life. On this standpoint there abides therefore also a dogmatics feasible, which sets forth the truth of God, as it found acknowledgment in a certain church.
But oft the doubt grips much deeper into the godly life. Many lose all belief and come to skepticism and agnosticism; here there is no more speech of dogmatics, of belief, of avowal, of fellowship; bare denial is unfit for building fellowship. Others however, unable to uphold the belief of childhood, strive with earnest toil and strife to win their own godly belief. Also herein, of course, the sway of the surroundings makes itself felt; wholly self-standing one never comes to a godly belief. Only there is then this unlikeness, that what was no longer found in a church is now sought in a wisdom-school. Every wisdom-lore has in this age been grasped in turn, to awaken and uphold certain godly beliefs. Also on this standpoint there is no more speech of dogmatics. There is only still a godly belief, a belief-lore, a wisdom-lore of the faith, a wisdom-bound faith-lore.
Dogmatics is thus only possible for him who stands in fellowship of faith with one or another Christian church. This lies also in the nature of religious faith. Religious conceptions are distinguished from scientific ones, among other things, in that they rest not on one's own insight, on the authority of any man, but solely on the authority of God. But this implies that they have also found faith and acknowledgment in a religious circle, that is, in a church. Therein alone is the religious authority of a religious conception made known. A church believes her confession not because she scientifically sees its truth, but solely on the ground of the Word of God, whether this be expressed only in Scripture or also through churchly organs. He who seeks his religious conviction from a philosophical school confuses religion with science and receives nothing but an ever uncertain, by many disputed, sententia or opinio doctoris . Religious faith, however, by its own nature is bound to a community and to her confession. Here too it is as everywhere else. Abstractions, universals, exist not in reality. The tree, the man, the science, the language, the religion, the theology are nowhere to be found. There are only particular trees, men, sciences, languages, and religions; just as a language is connected with a people, just as science and philosophy are always pursued in a certain direction and school, so religion and theology are only to be found and nurtured in a kindred community. A church is the natural soil for religion and theology. Just as there is not yet the church, so there is not the religion and the theology. There are only different churches, and so also different theologies. And this shall endure until the congregation in Christ shall have reached her full growth and all have come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. This unity is not to be grasped by force, but can best be promoted as each thinks through the faith of his own church and presents it most purely. Not outside the existing churches, but through them does Christ prepare His one holy, catholic congregation. And not outside the different churchly dogmas, but through them is the unity of the knowledge of God prepared and obtained. In this way the dogmatician can also work most fruitfully for the purification and development of the religious life and doctrine of his church. Connection with what exists is the condition for improvement in the future. In the now lies what shall become, Twesten, Vorles. über die Dogm. This significance of the church for theology and dogmatics is grounded in the bond which Christ Himself has laid between both. He has promised to His church the Holy Ghost, who should lead her into the truth. The history of dogmas thereby stands in a glorious light. It is the explication of Scripture, Lange, Christl. Dogm.; Schoeberlein, Princip. und System der Dogm.; the exposition which the Holy Ghost has given in the church of the treasures of the Word. The dogmatician has thus not to draw the material for his dogmatics only from the written confession of his own church, but to consider this in connection with the whole peculiar faith and life of his church, and this again with the history of the whole church of Christ. He stands thus on the shoulders of the forefathers. He feels himself surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and lets his testimony flow together with that voice of many waters. Every dogmatics ought also to join in the song of praise which is brought to God by the church of all ages.
8. But thereby is the history of dogmas and the confession of the church not yet exalted unto an infallible authority. There is a distinction betwixt the way whereby the dogmatist is formed, and the principle whence dogmatics receiveth her matter. In every branch of knowledge, the practitioner beginneth to live from the tradition. The first knowledge of his craft he alway obtaineth through authority. He must first take into himself the history of his craft and ascend unto the height and the present state of his knowledge, that thereafter he may go independently to the labour and acquire for himself a proper insight into the object of his inquiry.
But no man will therefore hold the tradition, which pedagogically was of such great import, for the fount of his knowledge. Not otherwise is it with the dogmatist. Pedagogically the church goeth before the Scripture. But according to logical order, the Scripture is the sole principle of church and theology. In case of difference, whereof the possibility upon the Reformed standpoint can never be denied, must church and confession yield unto the Scripture.
Not the church but the Scripture is autopistos , judge of controversies, its own interpreter. Nothing may be placed on the same level with it. Church, confession, tradition, all must conform to it, submit to it. The Remonstrants indeed accused the Reformed that they, by the confession, did short to the authority, sufficiency, and perfection of the Holy Scripture. But the Reformed, though deeming confession needful in this dispensation of the church, to explain the Word of God, to ward off heresies, and to maintain the unity of the faith, fought as strongly as possible against the confession having any authority alongside the Scripture. The Scripture alone is the norm and rule of faith and life; the confession deserves belief only because and insofar as it agrees with the Scripture and remains, as fallible human work, revisable and examinable by the Scripture. The confession is thus at most a secondary norm, not of truth but of the doctrine received in some church, and therefore binding on all who wish to live in fellowship with the church. Within the church the confession has authority as an accord of fellowship, as an expression of the faith of the congregation, but it believes and upholds that confession only on the ground of the Scripture. All Christian churches are one in the confession that the Holy Scripture is the principle of theology, and the Reformation acknowledged it unanimously as the sole principle. The Dutch Confession expresses this in article 5, and all Lutheran and Reformed theologians are unanimous herein. It is true that in article 2 of the Dutch Confession it is confessed that God is known by two means, namely, by nature and by Scripture, and natural theology has been maintained in its truth and worth by all Reformed theologians. But in the first time, before rationalism had falsified Reformed theology, it was clearly seen that nature and Scripture do not stand independently and loosely beside each other, any more than natural and revealed theology. Calvin took up natural theology into the body of Christian dogmatics, and said that Scripture is the spectacles whereby the believer beholds God more clearly also in the works of nature. Natural theology originally had absolutely no aim to pave the way gradually and step by step to revealed theology; one did not take the provisional standpoint of reason with it, in order then by reasoning and proof to climb up to the standpoint of faith. But from the beginning the dogmatician stood on the foundation of faith, and viewed nature also as a Christian, as a believer; and then he discovered, with his Christian eye, armed with the Holy Scripture, also in nature traces of that God whom he had learned to know through the Scripture, in Christ, as his Father. Subjectively, therefore, in dogmatics there came not first the natural reason and then faith to the word; it was always the believing Christian who expressed his faith in the catechism, in the confession, in dogmatics. And objectively likewise nature did not stand as an independent and self-sufficient principle beside the Holy Scripture, both supplying their own set of truths. But nature was viewed in the light of Scripture, and Scripture contained not only the truth revealed in the strict sense, but also the truths which the believer can discover in nature. Thus Alsted acknowledges a natural theology in the unregenerate, but this is confused and dark; for the believer the principles and conclusions of natural theology are repeated clearly and plainly in the Scripture.
Although there is therefore a knowledge of God from nature, dogmatics nevertheless has but one single external principle, namely, the Holy Scripture, just as also but one single internal principle, namely, the believing reason. And now not merely in such a way that the Holy Scripture would be only a norm and no source, but specifically in the sense of principle of theology.
There is between earlier theologians and those of the present time a great difference. Since Schleiermacher went back from the object to the subject, a host of theologians have come to see in the church and her confession the source of dogmatic truth. Not only have they, and rightly, acknowledged and declared the confessional and churchly character of dogmatics, but they have also made the confession of the church into a source of knowledge and lowered the Holy Scripture to a norm (Schleiermacher, Glaub. § 19; Rothe, Zur Dogm.; Schoeberlein; Gunning en Saussaye, Het ethisch beginsel; Dr. Van Dijk, Begrip en methode der dogm.; Dr. Daubanton, Confessie en Dogmatiek), or also placed the confession alongside the Holy Scripture as a source of knowledge (Lange, Dogm. II; Van Oosterzee § 9; Von der Goltz, § 18; Reiff, I).
And Dr. Gunning even claimed that the doctrine of Scripture as source instead of as norm was not Reformed, but properly Remonstrant. But this view rests on a wrong understanding of the relation between church and Scripture. In the first time of the Christian church there could still be talk of a pure tradition, which ran parallel with the writings of the Apostles. But those two streams have long since flowed together. There is now no knowledge of the Christian truth anymore, except only from the Holy Scripture. Even though the religious life in the church feeds itself much more from edifying works than from Scripture (Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. II), they are yet only channels through which the truth of Holy Scripture is brought to the believers in a more graspable form.
Moreover, dogmatics is something wholly other than symbolics. The latter describes and explains the confession of the church. But dogmatics dogmatizes, that is, it sets forth what on the religious field holds not as truth, but what must hold as truth. It ought indeed to stand in connection with the confession, just as with the school and the church. But dogmatics stands yet independently alongside the confession; it expounds the truth of God in its own way. Scripture is given to the church, but also to the school, to science; and both read and search, explain and describe its content. Confession and dogmatics work upon each other therein; the confession is in its turn just as dependent on dogmatics as this on the former. Dogmas are not brought forth by the church, but are fruit of theology. First there were the Apologists, then came Nicaea. First the Reformers appeared, and later followed the Protestant confessions, etc. (Harnack, Dogmengesch. I, and my article Theol. Stud.).
And finally, the doctrine of Holy Scripture as the unique principle of theology is also alone purely reformatory and Reformed. The Dutch Confession teaches in articles 2 and 7 expressly that the knowledge of God and His service is drawn only from Scripture, and that it is thus indeed a source and not only a norm. Calvin (Instit. I. cap. 6), Melanchthon in the preface to his Loci, and all dogmaticians declare that the knowledge of God can be obtained only clearly and fully from Scripture. Every dogmatics almost begins with the doctrine of Scripture as the unique principle of theology. The properties of authority, sufficiency, perfection, which the Protestants over against Rome ascribed to Holy Scripture, prove the same (Daubanton, Theol. Stud.). That they thereby preferred not to speak of fountain, but of principle, does not weaken this wholly unique meaning of Scripture for dogmatics. The name principle is even to be preferred above that of fountain. The latter expression indicates the relation between Scripture and theology as a mechanical one; and makes it seem as if dogmas could be drawn from Holy Scripture as water from a fountain. But principle points to an organic connection. Dogmas are not in Scripture, but the matter thereof lies contained in it. Scripture contains the germs, the seeds from which dogmas grow up in the church under the teaching of the Spirit. Dogmatics is the truth of Scripture, passed through the thinking consciousness of man, and given back in scientific form.
9. However, thereby the personal mark of dogmatic theology is not done away with. That can and may not be, for dogmatics is not a historical report, but a showing of what must hold as truth in the realm of faith. That personal mark of dogmatics flows not from this, that all bonds to the object are cut through and each now but sets forth what he likes. For then dogmatics leaves off being a knowledge-work and is nothing but a private thought. If dogmatics, according to Prof. Van Manen, must let go the false belief that there is an outwardly given, outward truth, then there is no dogmatics more. Then there are but inward thoughts, of which the one is as good as the other. Every knowledge-work, which lays claim to that name, must have an own object, living in the true world; takes for granted further, that that object is knowable; and is then bound to that object as strictly as may be. For dogmatics no other call holds; it too must have an own thing, that thing must be knowable, and to that thing it is wholly bound. But the gainsaying of such an own, knowable object may never be made good with a call upon the personal mark of dogmatic theology. That is a mixing of two wholly sundry matters. Of a personal mark of dogmatics there can first be speech, when beforehand it stands fast that it has an own object.
Indeed, every branch of knowledge, whether of the workings of nature, of history, of law, of right living, and so forth, has an object that is found in the true world. Yet for that reason, every such branch still bears a personal mark; one surely less than another, reckoning for instance in a much smaller measure than history. But as the branches of knowledge are less outward in shape, and lie nearer to the heart, so much the more does the sway of the person's own being grow.
A man cannot, in the seeking of knowledge, any more than elsewhere, shed himself of himself; he brings his upbringing, his outlook on life, his heart and conscience, his leanings and loathings, and these of themselves wield sway over his searching and thinking. This in itself is not wrong; the twofoldness that splits man into two halves and lowers him in the seeking of knowledge to a bare understanding is in deed unworkable and in thought wrongly deemed.
The call is only that man always and everywhere, even when he seeks knowledge, be a good man, a man of God fitted for every good work. And it is no otherwise in dogmatics; yea, here this is all the more so. For dogmatics deals right with the deepest beliefs of faith in man and with the heart of all knowledge. Here above all is the call that man be a good man, that he stand in the right bond to God, to know whom is everlasting life.
Therefore is it also the teaching of Scripture, that the outward revelation fulfills itself in the inward enlightening. The Reformed teaching of Scripture stands in the closest bond with that of the witness of the Holy Ghost. The outward word stays not outside us, but becomes through faith an inward word. The Holy Ghost, who gave the Scripture, gives also witness to that Scripture in the heart of the believers. The Scripture itself cares for its own triumph in the awareness of the church of Christ. Thereto feels the believer himself bound with all his soul to the Scripture. In it he is led in by the Holy Ghost, the Teacher of the church. And all his aim is, to take up into his awareness those thoughts of God, laid down in the Scripture, and to understand them by thinking. But thereby he stays a man, with his own bent, upbringing, insight; faith itself arises in each man not in the same way and is not in all of the same strength; the mind differs in sharpness, depth, clearness of thought; the sway of sin keeps working after, even in his awareness and understanding. And as a fruit of all these sways, the teaching of God-knowledge keeps a personal mark. That is here, as in every knowledge-field, the case. Even prophets and apostles saw the same truth from sundry sides. The oneness of faith is no more reached than the oneness of knowledge. But right through the manifoldness, God leads His church to meet the oneness. When that oneness of faith and of knowledge is reached, then has dogmatics also fulfilled its task. So long, however, stays to her the calling entrusted, to utter on the field of knowledge the thoughts which God has laid down for us in the Holy Writ. To this task will the dogmatics-man be best fitted, if he lives in faith-fellowship with the church of Christ and owns the Scripture as the only and enough groundwork of the knowledge of God. The dogmatics-man thus receives the content of his faith from the hands of the church. In a teaching-wise sense he comes through the church to the Scripture. But thereby may he, no less than any believer, stay standing. He has the calling, to break down the dogmas, which he has learned to know through the church, even to their fibers, and to trace how they root in the Holy Scripture. So would his task herein be, that he first gave over the dogmas outwardly, and thereafter led them back to the Holy Scripture; his way would then be historical-analytical. But though this way for a single dogma by itself maybe has much to commend; and though it is in dogmatics also underhand of worth; yet has it this against, that thereby it comes not to a knowledge-wise whole. The dogmatics-man does therefore better to tread another path; not from the river to the spring, but from the spring to the river. Without doing short to the truth, that the church in a teaching-wise sense goes before the Scripture, he can yet in the Scripture itself as the groundwork of God-knowledge take his stand, and then from there unfold the dogmas. He then as it were brings forth again the thought-work of the church; he lets us see, how the dogmas have grown out organically from the Scripture; how not one single text, but the Scripture in her whole is the firm, broad ground, whereupon the dogmatic building has risen. This blending, birth-wise way then gives him in the second place the gain, that he can also show the oneness and the bond among the dogmas. The sundry dogmas are no lone standings, but they shape a oneness. There is truly but one dogma, that is born from the Scripture and in sundry special dogmas branches and splits itself. The way of the dogmatics-man can and may be no other than orderly. And lastly has he yet the calling, to make aware in this birth-wise and orderly unfolding of the dogmas also of likely strayings, to fill likely lacks, and thus to work at the unfolding of the dogmas in the forthcoming. That is the judging task, whereto the dogmatics-man is called, but which in the orderly working of the dogmatic stuff already lies shut in of itself. In that way he strives in dogmatics to give an unfolding of the riches of wisdom and of knowledge, which in Christ are hidden and in the Scripture are spread out.
1. As soon as dogmatics arose, there was also need of a dividing of the stuff which was handled therein. That dividing was in the beginning most simple. The three chief works of Clemens Alexandrinus, namely, Cohortatio ad gentes, Paedagogus, and Stromata, are indeed bound together by the thought of the upbringing of mankind by the Logos, but hold yet no proper dividing; and the last work unfolds indeed the true wisdom of Christendom over against Heathendom and Judaism, but Clemens says himself at the outset of the sixth and at the close of the seventh book of that work, that he therein only wrote what came before his mind, and that one therefore must not marvel at the lack of order.
Origenes' work Peri Archon, De Principiis, strives already to bring some order into the stuff, and has then also four head thoughts: God, world, freedom, revelation; the first book handles of God, the Trinity, and the angels; the second of the world, the God of the Old Testament, the good and evil, the taking on of flesh, and the uprising; the third of the freedom of the will, the temptings, and the world's end; and the fourth of the Holy Writ, its inbreathing and unfolding.
The sundry loci over God, angel, man, Christ, and suchlike, come here already to the fore, but not yet in good order and right bounding, and also yet unwhole; the teaching of the sacraments is wanting, that over the Writ comes at the latter end, and a dividing ground is not yet to be found. This dividing of Origenes is bettered and taken over by Theodoretus in the fifth book of his Hairetikes Kakomythias Epitome, Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, which holds a sketch of the rightwise faith. One after another is handled herein of God, world, angel and man, Christ, Writ and sacrament, uprising and doom, while there at the last some upright chapters over maidenhood, rueing, fasting are added thereto.
Moreover, this same groundwork lies at the bottom of the Ekdosis Akribes tes Orthodoxou Pisteos of John Damascenus. The dividing into four books was first in the Middle Ages brought into the work, after it by behest of Eugenius III by the law-learned Johannes Burgundis from Pisa into Latin was rendered, and Petrus Lombardus in his Sententiae with the dividing into four books had gone before. Damascenus begins with the teaching of God, Trinity, marks (book I), speaks then of the world, shaping, angels, men, and foreseeing (book II), handles thereafter the person and work of Christ (book III and IV, chap. 1-9), and ends with sundry saving (faith, baptism, and suchlike), upright (law, sabbath, and suchlike), and last things chapters (book IV, chap. 10-28).
Beside this, the Apostolic Confession of Faith, in linkage to the baptismal formula, already early on offered another ordering for the dogmatic matter. The Expositio symboli of Rufinus and Augustine’s book De fide et symbolo provided commentaries thereon, and handled the chief things of the Christian faith by means of the Trinitarian schema, which lay at the ground of the Apostolic symbol. But Augustine was not only in this ordering an example for many later ones, but in his Enchiridion ad Laurentium he treats the whole dogmatic and ethical matter under the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love; yet in a very uneven wise. After an introduction, chapters 1-8, Augustine sets forth that which must be believed from chapter 9 to chapter 113, chiefly by means of the Apostolic symbol, but then devotes only three chapters (114-116) to hope, wherein he takes the Lord’s Prayer as a guide, and the remaining chapters 117-122 to love. Faith, prayer, and commandment thus form here the schema of dogmatics, which later often, especially in catechisms, was taken over. Also Isidore of Seville has in the first book of his Sententiarum sive de summo bono libri III , in the main this order of the Apostolic symbol and handles in 30 chapters about God, creation, world, angels and men, Christ, the Holy Ghost, the church, Scripture and sacraments, resurrection and last things, and then treats in the second and third book solely ethical matter.
2. The Division of Lombardus. The division which Lombardus chose in the Middle Ages calls to mind more that of Origenes, Theodoretus, and Damascenus. His Sententiae are divided into four books. The first treats of the mystery of the Trinity; the second of the creation and formation of bodily and spiritual things: creation, angels, the six days' work, mankind, the fall, sin; the third of the incarnation of the Word: the person and work of Christ, faith, hope, love, the four chief virtues and other ethical subjects; the fourth book of the sacraments: concerning seven sacraments, the resurrection, the judgment, heaven and hell. Here already a marked advance is to be seen: the subjects are not only better grouped and bounded, but the whole is also split into four parts, each with its own distinct object; the ethical matter is not added at the end as with Theodoretus but taken up in the dogmatics itself; the sacraments, formerly only briefly discussed, are treated at length; on the other hand, the arrangement leaves much to be wished for in many ways, and various subjects such as Scripture, church, and especially also the soteriological come almost not at all into discussion.
Most Scholastics joined themselves to this work of Lombardus and wrote commentaries on it. Some brought happy improvements in the ordering of the matter. Thomas develops, for example, in the prologue to his commentary on the Sententiae in a fair wise, that first God, and then his works: creation, restoration, and perfection are the subjects of the four books. But a place of honor is also taken from a formal viewpoint by the Breviloquium of Bonaventura. First, Bonaventura lets a prooemium go before his work and gives therein in seven paragraphs a fair overview of the teaching of Scripture, especially of its content, which he briefly unfolds in its length and breadth, depth and height. And then he gives in seven parts a sketch of the truth of faith; part 1 treats of the Trinity, part 2 of the creation of the world, part 3 of the corruption of sin, part 4 of the incarnation of the Word, part 5 of the grace of the Holy Spirit, part 6 of the sacramental medicine, and part 7 of the state of the final judgment. Here is a firm, methodical course, a complete mastery of the matter, a pure bounding of the subjects, and also a consciously chosen principle of division; for in part 1 chapter 1 Bonaventura says that, although theology treats all those seven subjects, it is yet one science, for God is not only the first principle and effective exemplar of things in creation, but also restorative in redemption and perfective in retribution.
Wholly otherwise is the division of Thomas in his Summa . This work has three parts, the parts are divided into questions, and these again into articles. Part I treats in 119 questions of God and his creation, before and outside of sin: God as principle and exemplar of all things. Part II speaks of mankind as his image, and falls again into a first and second; the first comprises 114 questions, begins with the end goal of mankind, namely blessedness, and develops with an eye thereto the will qq. 6-17, the good and sinful quality of human deeds, passions and habits qq. 18-54, the virtues in general qq. 55-70, the sins in their division, seat, cause and effects, qq. 71-89, then the outward and inward motives which spur mankind to the good, the law, the gospel, grace and merit, qq. 90-114. The second of this second part treats then in 189 questions of the sins and virtues in particular, especially according to the order of the three theological and the four cardinal virtues. After thus the end goal of mankind is set and his virtues and sins are set in the light, Part III describes the way along which we can come to the blessedness of immortal life, that is, Christ and the sacraments. In 90 questions the person and work of Christ and then the sacrament concept, baptism, confirmation, eucharist, and penance are described. Here ends the work of Thomas; he left it unfinished at his death. The supplement, which is added thereto from his other writings, contains 99 questions, continues the sacraments, and treats in qq. 69-99 the state of souls after death, the resurrection, the judgment, blessedness and damnation. An appendix speaks in 3 questions yet of purgatory. The division of Thomas deviates from that of Bonaventura not only, but stands also in many respects behind it. Indeed in Part I q. 1, a lengthy development is given of the essence of theology, but over against that the doctrine of Scripture remains wholly undiscussed. Further, Thomas jumps at the beginning of the second part at once to the end goal of human life, and is thereby driven often to anticipate what can first be treated later. The Christian virtues, the gospel, the law, grace, which Thomas takes up in this second part, presuppose the person and work of Christ. The division of Thomas already hangs together with the Roman doctrine of the supernatural order, to which mankind must be raised. After the first part has treated of God, the second part speaks of mankind, who as image of God is destined for supernatural grace but cannot reach it, and the third then points in the person of Christ and the sacraments the way along which mankind can come to this his destiny. God, mankind, Christ are thus the subjects of the three parts.
Finally, the questionary form of treatment is also not without objection. Thomas sets every truth of faith in the form of a question, and brings to bear all that is brought against it by opponents. With an appeal to one or another authority, Scripture, church fathers, Aristotle, he however proves the truth of what is asked and draws the conclusion. This is then elucidated and finally defended against the brought objections.
3. These divisions were for the most part taken over by the later Roman theologians, not only in the commentaries, which for example were furnished by many medieval theologians and also later by Estius and others on the Sententiae of Lombardus or by Suarez, Valentia, Vasquez, Billuart, Daelman and suchlike on the Summa of Thomas; but also in self-standing dogmatic works. Thus was the division of Thomas taken over by Martin Becanus in his Theologia Scholastica, Mainz 1619, the method of loci of Theodoret, Damascenus, Lombardus by Petavius, Opus de Theologicis Dogmatibus, Paris 1644. Proleg. cap. I § 4. But the scholastic way had yet another sway upon the division of the matter. Bonaventura had already taken up the doctrine of Scripture in the prooemium; Thomas handled beforehand the being of theology: the unfolding of the scholastic way led to the sundering of articuli mixti and puri, to the doctrine of the praeambula fidei and motiva credibilitatis. Thus the matter for the prolegomena grew ever broader. And when the Reformation soon came forth with the sole authority of Scripture, it became needful for the Roman theologians to give an account also of the principia of theology. Melchior Canus above all in his Loci Theologici 1563 unfolded the doctrine of the loci, that is, of the wellsprings of Theology. This work is no dogmatics, but a topica, in Cicero’s sense. He handles in 12 books ten wellsprings of theology, namely Scripture, tradition, Pope, council, church, church fathers, scholastics, reason, philosophy and history, whereof the seven first may be brought back to two, Scripture and tradition, and the last three are but ministerialiter theological. In this wise there has little by little become needful before the dogmatics proper a broad leading-in, which also through the root-wise strife against theology from the side of philosophy and suchlike has grown into a whole foundational dogmatics. Most Roman dogmatics handle therefore in a first part the being or notion of theology, the praeambula fidei (theologia naturalis), the motiva credibilitatis (religion, revelation, prophecy, wonders, wondrous spreading of the Christian faith, martyrs and suchlike), the faith, the wellsprings (Scripture and church), theology and philosophy (faith and reason), notion of dogmatics. Thus with Klee, Heinrich, Jansen, Scheeben, Liebermann, Perrone and others. Perrone’s work for example handles vol. I de vera religione, and in the two last parts VIII and IX over the loci theologici; these two did indeed appear later after the dogmatics proper, but belong according to the writer’s own saying, vol. VIII, praef., in matter to follow upon the first part. In these loci Perrone on purpose, in sundering from Canus, lets the church go before the Scripture. And thus is the ordering with most Roman dogmatic writers of the newer time. The church thrusts ever more to the forefront; she is the principium fidei. The course of the dogmatics is then wontedly that of the method of loci. One begins with God, beheld in Himself as one and three-in-one; and then goes over to God, beheld in His kinship to the creatures, and that first as Deus Creator, then as Deus Redemptor, thereafter as Deus Sanctificator and at last as Deus Consummator.
4. The dogmatics among the Reformers was from the outset anti-scholastic and was first set forth in a very simple and practical form. Melanchthon’s Loci , which appeared in 1521, arose from lectures on Paul’s epistle to the Romans. They are thoroughly practical, treating only anthropological and soteriological topics, especially those of sin and grace, law and gospel, and leaving the objective dogmas of God, Trinity, creation, incarnation, satisfaction entirely untouched.
But the edition of 1535 was greatly expanded by Melanchthon and ushered in the second age of the Loci ; it was dedicated in a preface to Henry VIII, began with 5 new chapters on God, unity, Trinity, creation, and cause of sin, was enriched in the middle with some chapters, and expanded the three last ethical chapters to ten chapters of ethical, ecclesiological, and eschatological content, together 39 chapters or articles.
In 1543 the Loci entered their third age: a preface to the pious reader was added; the number of loci falls due to simplification from 39 to 24; but the content has significantly increased. The last edition prepared by Melanchthon himself is that of 1559.
The successive editions show an ever greater drawing near to the synthetic arrangement, which begins with God and descends to his works in nature and grace; but noteworthy therein is that the prolegomena are wholly lacking, that the Christology comes short because Christ’s person and work are not treated separately, that the dogmatic and ethical remain closely bound together, and the whole is not ended with the eschatological dogmas but with some ethical chapters.
Phil. Melanchtonis Loci Theol. ed. Augusti 1821. Die Loci C. des Ph. M. in ihrer Urgestalt nach G. L. Plitt. 2nd ed. by Dr. Th. Kolde, Erlangen: Deichert 1890. Herzog. Zöckler Handb. der Theol. Wiss. II. And the edition of the Loci in the Corpus Reformatorum .
Zwingli’s Commentarius de vera et falsa religione and his Fidei Christianae Expositio also handle some dogmatic loci, but were soon overshadowed by Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis .
The first edition appeared in Latin at Basel in March 1536 and contained a preface from August 1535 to Francis I, and thereafter six chapters on the law, the faith, the prayer, the sacraments, the Roman sacraments, and freedom. It was thrice enlarged in 1539, 1543, and 1559. The last edition was about five times greater than the first, and contained indeed increase and expansion, but no change. Melanchthon in the later editions became synergistic and crypto-Calvinistic; Calvin remained the same. Melanchthon’s Loci became more synthetic in form, but kept the character of a series of loci; Calvin’s Institutio gained more and more a systematic form.
The edition of 1559 contains four books, on the knowledge of God as Creator, as Redeemer, as Sanctifier, and a last book on the outward means of grace. The arrangement is thus not purely Trinitarian but is drawn from the Apostolic Creed; hence a fourth part comes at the end, dealing chiefly with church and sacraments. The first book gives much more than the title promises, handles also the sources of the knowledge of God and the doctrine of the Trinity. Cosmology and anthropology are divided over the first and second books. The third book contains besides soteriological also many ethical chapters, as well as the doctrine of election and of the resurrection.
The starting point of the Institutio is theological, but Calvin goes not out from an abstract concept of God, but from God as he is known by man from nature and Scripture. Köstlin, Calvins Institutio nach Form und Inhalt in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung , Studien und Kritiken . Godgeleerde Bijdragen . Gass, Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik . Pierson, Studien over Johannes Kalvijn and the edition in the Corpus Reformatorum .
5. Lutheran and Reformed theologians have at first almost wholly followed this synthetic ordering of Melanchthon and Calvin. It was held for the best for sundry reasons. Not only Reformed such as Hyperius in Methodus Theol. 1574, Alsted in Theol. schol. didact. in the preface, Ursinus in Opera , Heidelb. 1612, H. Alting in Oratio inauguralis de methodo loc. comm. Heidelb. 1613, Leydecker in de Verit. Rel. Christ. 1690; but also Lutherans, such as Flacius in Clavis Scripturae Sacrae , vol. II, tract. I, Declaratio tabulae trium methodorum theologiae , by Gass in Gesch. der prot. Dogm. I, have given preference to the synthetic method, because therein, as Hyperius says, from the first beginnings through forms and differences unto the end is the progress made. This ordering was therefore preferred, because it followed the selfsame historical course which God in His revelation had foredrawn; because it offered the least occasion for aprioristic speculation and best kept the positive character of theology; and because it was like unto the method in the other sciences, which also begin with the simplest elements or beginnings and then go forward to the compounded. This ordering remained then also in the Lutheran church the ruling one unto Calixtus; one finds it in the main with Strigel, Selneccer, Heerbrand, Chemnitz, Hutter, Gerhard, and so forth. In Reformed theology it is followed unto Cocceius, by Sohnius, Musculus, Hyperius, Ursinus, Martyr, Wollebius, Polanus, Amesius, and so forth. But yet it is in some weighty points changed. Already soon was to the proper dogmatics a foreword added, wherein the concept of theology, the doctrine of Scripture, a few times also, for example with Amesius and Maestricht, the being of faith was handled. Dogmatics was thus divided into two parts, the principiis theologiae and the articulis fidei , Polanus in Syntagma Theol. . In the body itself came better distinction and bounding, and also more orderly setting of the loci: the election, handled by Calvin in the third book, came forward in the doctrine of the decrees, the doctrine of world, man, Christ, and so forth, each got its own place; the end of dogmatics was not taken up by some ethical heads, but by the consummation of the age; the ethical stuff was either brought to speech in the soteriology or also well in a second part, the operibus , in distinction from the first de fide , handled, or with Danaeus and Calixtus wholly sundered from dogmatics. The handling of the sundry loci became in the 17th century ever more scholastic; the bond with the life of faith was ever less felt.
6. The Reaction Against This Scholasticism. The reaction against this scholasticism could not tarry for long. It began in the Lutheran church with Calixtus, in the Reformed with Coccejus. Calixtus viewed theology as a practical knowledge and followed in his Epitome theologiae of 1619 the analytical ordering. This was not new insofar as Thomas also, after the doctrine of God in the second part, passes to the destiny of mankind and in the third part describes the way that leads thereto in Christ. But Calixtus begins at once with the end, the destiny of mankind. Part I treats of the end, that is, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection, and the last judgment. Part II speaks of the subject, that is, of God, angels, mankind, sin. Part III treats of the means, that is, of predestination, incarnation, Christ, justification, word, sacrament, and so forth. These three parts form the common part, which concerns all believers; but there follows yet a proper part, which deals especially with the church and is of particular interest for the office-bearers. Though there was much good in emphasizing, over against the scholastic treatment of theology, its practical character, yet this ordering is burdened by many objections. Apart from the fact that the doctrine of the church treated in the proper part is a truth of interest to all believers; it makes a strange impression that dogmatics begins with the end, immortality, and so forth; the second part must treat of the subject of theology, mankind, but also contains the whole doctrine of God; the third part answers best to its title, but does the soteriology too little justice in the soteriology.
Yet this analytical method was followed by the later Lutheran theologians, Calovius, Quenstedt, König, Baier, Scherzer. And also among the Reformed it found entrance. Barth. Keckermann at Danzig had already before Calixtus in 1603 brought to light a systema S. Theologiae , in which he, appealing to Ursinus in his Catechesis, defines theology not as a contemplative science but as an operative discipline, or still better as a religious prudence for attaining salvation, chapter 1. Therefore he chooses with decision the analytical method, for the synthetic method belongs to the sciences, but the analytical fits the operative disciplines. And so he divides his theology into three parts. In the first part he treats of the principles of theology, namely God, the principle of being, and his Word, the principle of knowing. From these two only the end and the means leading thereto become known to us. In the second part he says with a single word that the end of theology is life, eternal salvation, as also Ursinus in his catechism question 1 sets this foremost. The means to attain this end are twofold: knowledge of our misery, and deliverance from that misery, book II, chapter 1. Book II thus treats of mankind and its sin, and Book III of the means of salvation, election, Christ, church, justification, sacraments. Noteworthy is still that Keckermann with fondness compares theology with the medical knowledge and even borrows names from it for the different parts of his theology. Bonaventura in Breviarium Part I, chapter 1, had already done this before him. Following him and others, Keckermann speaks of a pathological, therapeutic, dietetic part of theology.
In like manner, Cocceius exchanged the theological standpoint for the anthropological one. The new thing in his Systema doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648) consisted not in the covenant concept as such, which already appears in Zwingli and Calvin and was unfolded by Bullinger, Olevianus, and Cloppenburg.
But it lay herein, that Cocceius for the first time arranged the whole dogmatic material from out of this concept, and thereby aimed to give a more biblical-theological, anti-scholastic dogmatics; further, that in the ordering of the material he followed the historical order of the dispensations of the covenant, distinguished these dispensations so sharply that their unity was lost and could only be kept by arbitrary typical exegesis;
and finally, that he views the whole history of the covenant of grace from beginning to end as an abolishing of the covenant of works; sin, Christ, New Covenant, bodily death, and resurrection are the five turning points, through which step by step the covenant of works is robbed of all its strength and working.
This arrangement is burdened by many drawbacks; it takes its standpoint not theologically in God, but in the covenant between God and man, and thus can handle the doctrine of God and man only beforehand in an introduction, by way of assumption;
it wipes out through its historical course the boundary between the history of revelation and dogmatics, and thereby weakens the latter; it falls into manifold repetitions and naturally comes to overdrive on the one hand the likenesses and on the other hand the distinctions in the sundry dispensations of the covenant.
Yet it found following among many, among others Momma, Heydanus, Vitringa, Braun, Witsius, and also among Lutherans, such as W. Jäger (1702). And even Leydecker, a follower of Voetius and foe of Cocceius, sought to link the trinitarian arrangement with the covenantal one in such wise that the following households of grace were brought into bond with the three persons and the threefold working in the Trinity.
7. But an even greater change came in the form of dogmatics through the sway of wisdom-lore. Above all, this shows itself in that the true stuff-like dogmatics grows ever poorer, and the shape-like part wins ever in breadth and outreach. Till now it was wholly otherwise; the forewords were wholly lacking, or were small in bulk and dealt at most with god-lore and Writ; all might was given to the working out and warding of the sundry dogmas. The ground-work lay so steadfast that it was not searched at all; all toil was bestowed on the building that was raised upon that groundwork.
This changed through wisdom-lore, through the rights that wit stepwise took upon itself over against opening-baring. It was no longer sated with the lowly role of handmaid, and yearned for a voice in the gathering. In the stuff-like part this led to all school-wise working of the dogmas being shunned as much as might be; one goes back from the avowal to the Writ and hails the tale-wise, Writ-like way; the dogmas are made simpler and worn smooth and lose their mark-worthy trait; all deeper in-thinking of the dogmas is banned; simpleness becomes shallowness. But even greater was the sway on the shape-like part of dogmatics. Here one forsook the Reform-like outset of belief and turned back to that of the Roman god-lore. First off, one deemed that mankind's wit, even outside belief, could bring forth all truths of inborn god-lore from itself; inborn god-lore went before opened god-lore as fore-steps of belief, wit was set free from belief, from opening-baring, both stood self-standing beside each other. S. van Til handled them both sundrily in his Theologiae utriusque compendium, cum naturalis tum revelatae 1706.
Next, that wit not only got its own ground beside opening-baring, but stretched its might even over that opening-baring itself. To it was granted the right to search the truth of opening-baring. In inborn god-lore one stood on steadfast groundwork, on a sheer wit-craft-like base; from this standpoint opening-baring was also searched, and when wit had shown the truth of opening-baring through sundry wit-like and tale-like proofs, as so many grounds of belief-worthiness, it was indeed wit-like to believe that opening-baring and yield to it. So the forewords were spread out more and more. First is handled godliness as sundered from god-lore; thereafter inborn god-lore and the inborn or wit-truths; next opening-baring, whose might-be, needfulness, and deed-likeness are broadly shown; and at last the Holy Writ, whose truth is upheld by sundry tale-like, judging, wit-like proofs. And only after that long way does one come to the true dogmatics, which looks as spare and as simple as might be. The whole standpoint is changed; the outset is no more belief but wit. What wonder that this in god-oneness and wit-rule wholly denies the opening-baring, an opening-baring that indeed gives nothing new and is wholly needless.
This order of handling is in-kind own to the school-like and Roman god-lore. The Socinians never rose above this wit-rule standpoint, Fock, Der Socin. And the Remonstrants turned back to this way. Limborch, Theol. Christ. speaks in cap. 1 of god-lore and godliness, in cap. 2 of the being of God and then in cap. 3 ff. over the Holy Writ. Episcopius spreads this leading-in stuff even more in his Instit. Theol. , speaks first even over the needs of the god-lorer, and then over the deed-like mark of god-lore, inborn god-lore, godliness, opening-baring and the Holy Writ.
Stepwise this spreading of the forewords broke into the right-belief dogmatics too. The sundering of dogmatics into two parts: of belief and of works brings Amesius and Maestricht to, at the outset after god-lore and Writ, also speak of the kind of belief; Marck and Moor speak in the third head over godliness; Brakel begins with a head over inborn god-lore. There is thus much sundry-ness and muddle over what belongs in the leading-in. But stepwise in the 18th year-hundred a row of under-things begins to stand fast for the leading-in as god-lore, inborn God-kenning, opening-baring, Writ; for byspell in J. A. Turretinus, Werenfels, Osterwald, Buurt and all god-lorers of wit-rule and over-inborn sway.
8. Indeed, by Kant was that rationalistic foundation of dogmatics undermined, and indeed Schleiermacher sought to save faith and the doctrine of faith, by limiting them to feeling and the describing thereof. But in truth, in this order of dogmatics no change has come. The assaults upon the Christian religion in this age direct themselves in the first place against the foundations themselves. In former ages faith was mightier and the question: why do I believe, hardly arose. The groundworks seemed so steadfast, that a searching thereof was wholly needless; all strength was bestowed upon the uprearing of the building. But now dogmatics is assailed right in her philosophical suppositions; not one or another teaching in dogmatics, but the possibility of dogmatics is denied (Pierson, Ter uitvaart 1870). Mankind's knowing-power is bounded to the seen things; revelation is deemed impossible; the Holy Writ is by historical criticism bereft of her godly authority and even the right and worth of godliness is earnestly gainsaid. By and in part through all this is the godly life strongly lessened; there is indeed much stirring in the godly realm, but there is little true godly life. Faith feels itself no more sure; even among the faithful there is much doubt and unsteadiness. The childlike and at the same time heroic: I believe, is seldom heard and has given place to critical doubting. One believes perchance still his confession, but one confesses no more his faith (Schweizer). In times of stirred-up godly life one speaks as having might, and not as the scribes; then sounds it: I know in whom I believe, from the lips. But in a critical time like ours there is uncertainty right over the beginnings, over knowledge-source, method, proof, and so forth. The formal part is therefore yet the foremost part of dogmatics. A whole apologetics goes before dogmatics (Hoekstra, Godgel. Bijdr. 1864). Schleiermacher has indeed made dogmatics into a positive, historical knowledge and sought to free her from all apologetics. But he let the philosophical theology go before the historical theology, whereto dogmatics belongs, which must take her outgoing-point above Christianity, in the godly fellowship-life in general, and from thence critically to settle the being of Christendom (Kurze Darstellung des theol. Stud. 2nd ed.). In truth he has thus not freed theology from philosophy, but as strongly as may be made her hanging upon her. This comes also out therein, that he in his Glaubenslehre lets a broad incoming go before with sundry teachings from ethics, the philosophy of religion and apologetics. Now has the ensample of Schleiermacher, to let encyclopedically the philosophical theology go before the historical, indeed found following but with few; but in linking to him it is yet become wont, to begin dogmatics with an apologetic part. Thus wrote Voigt a Fundamentaldogmatik, Lange a philosophical dogmatics, that went before the positive, Van Oosterzee laid an apologetic groundwork, Dorner lets a fundamental part or Apologetics go before, Biedermann a principled part, Lipsius and Nitzsch a teaching of beginnings, and so forth. The counsel of Liebner (Jahrb. f. d. Th. 1856) to unfold in the incoming only the notion of dogmatics, since otherwise a whole dogmatics comes before the dogmatics, and the notions of religion, revelation already suppose the teaching of God and man, is little followed. The matters that in this teaching of beginnings are handled, are not with all alike, but run yet mostly over the notions: kind of our knowledge in godly things, religion, revelation, Holy Writ and church. The headpiece theology, formerly manifoldly taken up, is shifted to the Encyclopaedia. The indwelling of the stuffly dogmatics is very sundry. Some follow the trinitarian indwelling, such as Martensen, Lange, Kahnis, Ebrard, Schweizer. Others go out from Christ and handle the suppositions, the person and the work of Christ, such as Liebner, Thomasius, Lange. The withstanding of sin and grace, with the thereto foregoing supposition of the kinship of God and world, lies at groundwork to the indwelling of Schleiermacher and Rothe (zur Dogm.). Hofmann, Philippi, Luthardt, have taken the covenant-notion, that is, the fellowship of God to outgoing-point and handle the spring, the disturbing, the outward restoring, the inward making-true and the fulfilling of that fellowship. The kingdom of God is chosen to dividing beginning by Van Oosterzee; the notion of love by Schoeberlein; that of life by Oetinger, Reiff, and so forth, while lastly many follow the wonted order of theology, anthropology and so forth, such as Vilmar, Hodge, Shedd, Böhl and others.
9. The Division of Dogmatics into General and Particular Parts. Regarding first the division of dogmatics into a general and a particular part, this is not only made needful by the principled strife against dogmatics, but is also in itself helpful and good. Already early there was felt a need to set forth the being of theology and its beginnings in the light before the true dogmas. Polanus already made a sundering between the beginnings and the articles of faith. And by degrees it has become an urgent need for the believer, not only to know what, but also why he believes.
But to that end the task of the first, general part of dogmatics is set. This first part has not to meddle with all kinds of encyclopedic questions, such as the being, the history, the division of theology, as some still do. Formerly that happened, because theology was made one with dogmatics, and because the theological encyclopedia was not yet followed as its own field. Now however the unfolding of the being of theology must be left to the encyclopedia; in dogmatics belongs only the setting forth of the name, thought, method, division, and history of dogmatics itself, as that is done in the foreword.
But also in another way the beginning part of dogmatics must be bounded. The method, which already arose with the Schoolmen and then later also found entry among the Protestants, namely first to handle the natural knowledge of God (forewords of faith) and thereafter all the historical and reason-proofs (motives of belief) for the revelation, earns rebuke, because it in the outset and in beginning gives up the standpoint of faith, overlooks the forthright mark of dogmatics, goes over to the ground of the foe, and thus is truly reason-bound and makes dogmatics hanging on wisdom-lore.
To this belongs also the striving to make one the theology or natural worship with the bond of works and then to handle it as a foremaking for the revealed theology, which is in deed one with the bond of grace, as some do. Both make the natural worship (bond of works, state of wholeness), the law-worship (bond of grace before the law and under the law) and the loosing-worship (bond of grace after the law) into three times in the worshipful unfolding. Thereby the revelation is not only bereft of its over-natural mark, but also a use is made of the Reformed division against its meaning. The bond of works, before the fall, is no foremaking of but shapes a withstanding to the bond of grace, which first steps forth in the tale after the breaking of the bond of works through sin.
The sundering of natural theology and revealed is on the other hand a wholly other, not a tale-wise but one that still abides and lasts in theology. Against such a reason-making of worship and theology must with Schleiermacher, Rothe, Frank, Ritschl, and others the forthright mark be upheld. Also the beginnings of faith are articles of faith, which rest not on manly reasonings and proofs but on godly might. The acknowledging of the revelation, of the Writing as God's Word is a fruit and deed of faith.
In dogmatics from the outset to the end the believer is at word, both in the beginnings as in the articles of faith; he owns and gives reckoning of his faith, of ground and of inhold. In the first part thus only the beginnings of faith are unfolded. These are twofold, outward and inward beginning, thingly and shaping, as Voetius says, even as the worship thingly and selfly must be sundered. And in these two is handled the whole first part of dogmatics.
In the ordering of the stuff in the second part, the trinitarian indwelling is to be forsaken, because it naturally cannot take up the handling of the Trinity itself in one of the three economies and thus must let it go before by way of under-setting in a chapter beforehand. Furthermore, there is in this indwelling the peril that the works ad extra are much too much taken as works of the persons and too little beheld as works of the being, as fellowship works of the three persons, or also on the other side that in upholding the oneness the Trinity is only taken economically and in her being-wise character mis-kenned. At last, to this indwelling is yet the shadow-side bound, that the loci over shaping, angel, man, sin, church, and so forth, shared under the persons of the Trinity, cannot come to their right. But yet much more beswears exist there against the Christ-like indwelling. How much alluring it also may have at the first eye-glance, it is yet unbrookable. It rests firstly oftentimes on the unright fore-stelling, as if not the Scripture but set the person of Christ the beginning and the ken-source were of the dogmatics, and yet we wit of Christ nothing off than out and through the Scripture. Furthermore, Christ is very sicker the mid-point and the head-inhold of the Holy Scripture, but just because he is the middle-point, he is the out-going point not; he under-sets God and the man, like he also not straightway by, but first many year-hundreds after the behest in the history is up-trodden. Following is it outside twifel, that Christ has opened to us the Father, but this speaking of God through the Son does the speaking of God in sundry wise through the prophets not to naught; not the New Testament alone, nor also alone the words of Jesus, but whole the Scripture is a Word of God, that through Christ to us comes. At last it is clear, that the Christ-like indwelling the loci over God, shaping, world, man only by way of under-settings and post-lates handle and thus not in their rich betokening unfold can. The other indwellings, on-loaned from the three virtues belief, hope, love, belief, bede and behest, from the bestemming and the end-goal of the man, from the bond or the fellowship of God and man, from the rich of God, from the begrips of life, love, ghost, and so forth, may work-wise much for have and in a catechism on her stead be; they can for a dogmatics, that the system of the kenning of God is, not in marking come. They are thereto not mid-wise and all-manner enough. They are then also or from outside on-brought and be-heer the system not, like by Van Oosterzee; or they are as indwelling-beginning sternly fast-held but do to sundry loci too short.
10. The content of dogmatics is the knowledge of God, even as He has revealed it in Christ, through His Word. The distinctive mark of the believer's knowledge lies herein, that he views all things religiously, theologically; that he beholds all things in the light of God, under the aspect of eternity. That is the distinction between his worldview and a philosophical or scientific one. In dogmatics, it is ever the believer, the Christian, who speaks. He speculates not about God; he proceeds not from an abstract, philosophical notion of God, and comes not through natural theology to revealed theology. He reasons not about God as He exists in Himself, for this knowledge is wholly unattainable. He describes only that knowledge of God which has been revealed to him in Christ. Even when he thus treats of God, His attributes, the Trinity in the first part of dogmatics, he speaks and thinks as a believer, as a Christian, as a theologian, and not as a philosopher. In every dogma, therefore, beats the heart of religion. Dogmatics is no philosophical system; dogmatics is theology. But for this very reason, the dogmatician describes in his system of the knowledge of God not how he came to faith and through faith gained subjective and successive insight into the diverse truths of faith. That would be an analytical method, which is excellent in a catechism but fits not in a dogmatics. Rather, he explicates the content of his faith, even as it is objectively spread out in the revelation, by God Himself, before his eye of faith. He derives the principle of division and the arrangement of the material not from his own life of faith, but from the object itself which he has to describe in his dogmatics; not from the believing subject, but from the object of faith. Though we heartily agree, therefore, that in dogmatics always and everywhere, from beginning to end, the believer thinks and speaks; yet this is something altogether different from his deriving also the ordering of the dogmatic material from his own experience. Thereby dogmatics would be misconstrued in its character, pass over into anthropology, and cease to be theological. It remains such only if the system of dogmatics is derived from its own material and content.
If this starting point is well chosen, there are but two arrangements that commend themselves for it. The first is the already discussed trinitarian arrangement. There lies in it much allure; thence it ever and again found entrance and also wielded great sway in philosophy. It commends itself by its purely theological character. God is beginning and end, alpha and omega. Nature and history are subsumed under Him. All things are from God and unto God. The trinitarian guards against uniformity and warrants life, unfolding, process. But therewith is at once its peril pointed out. It is too speculative, it sacrifices history to the system, it so lightly takes up cosmogony into the trinitarian life of God and then becomes theogony. The philosophy of Erigena, Böhme, Baader, Schelling, Hegel serves as proof. Therefore that arrangement deserves preference which is theological and at the same time bears a historical-genetic character. It too takes its starting point in God and views all creatures only in relation to Him. But going forth from God, it descends to His works, in order then through these to climb back up to Him and to end in Him. Also in this arrangement God is thus the beginning, the middle, and the end. From Him, through Him, and unto Him are all things. But God is here not drawn down into the process of history, and history comes here better to its right. Between God and His works distinction is made. In those works He appears as Creator, Restorer, and Perfecter. He is the effective exemplar in creation, the restorative in redemption, the perfective in retribution. Dogmatics is the system of the knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself in Christ; it is the system of the Christian religion. And the essence of the Christian religion consists therein, that the creation of the Father, laid waste by sin, is restored again in the death of the Son of God and recreated by the grace of the Holy Spirit unto a kingdom of God. Dogmatics shows us how God, who is all-sufficient in Himself, nevertheless glorifies Himself in His creation, which, even when rent asunder by sin, is gathered together again in Christ (Eph. 1:10). It describes to us God, ever God, from the beginning to the end—God in His being, God in His creation, God against sin, God in Christ, God breaking all resistance through the Holy Spirit and guiding the whole creation back to the goal He decreed: the glory of His name. Dogmatics is thus no dull science. It is a theodicy, a hymn of praise to all God's virtues and perfections, a song of adoration and thanksgiving, a glory to God in the highest.
1. The Holy Scripture is no dogmatics. It holds all the knowledge of God needful for us, but has not shaped this knowledge in dogmatic form. The truth is laid down therein as the fruit of revelation and inspiration, in a tongue that is the direct outflow of life and therefore ever stays fresh and first-hand. But it has not yet become a matter of deep thought and has not yet passed through the thinking mind. Here and there, as in the Epistle to the Romans, there may be a beginning of dogmatic unfolding; yet it is no more than a beginning. The time of revelation had to be sealed before that of dogmatic reworking could begin. The Scripture is the gold mine, but it is the church that digs out the gold therefrom, stamps it, and turns it into common coin.
This dogmatic handling of the content of Holy Scripture is, however, not the work of one lone theologian, or of a single church or school, but of the whole church through all ages, of all the new mankind reborn through Christ. As there is oneness and unbroken flow in the growth of every branch of knowledge, so is it also in theology and in dogmatics. These too have a history. Not only in this sense, that the matter and substance were little by little, over the span of ages, made known by God; nor only thus, that the sundry truths were by the church little by little more clearly set forth and brought into life; but also in this wise, that the learned awareness grew ever more to a clear sight into the living whole and the order of that revealed truth. The learned nature of dogmatics and theology has also run through a history.
The Apostolic Fathers, among others edited by Hefele-Funk, Tübingen 1878-1881. Gebhardt, Harnack, Zahn, Patrum apostolicorum opera . Leipzig 1875-’77, minor edition repeated. Leipzig 1894. Hilgenfeld, Novum Testamentum extra canonem receptum , second edition Leipzig 1884, translated by Duker and Van Manen, Old-Christian Literature . Amsterdam 1871, stand wholly on the standpoint of a simple, childlike faith. Christianity was no fruit of mankind's searching, but of revelation and therefore called for faith in the first place. Men still echo the Holy Writ. The biblical notions, such as of Christ as Lord, his death, faith, turning, church, watching, prayer, alms, uprising, life, deathlessness, and so forth, are indeed taken over, but without thought awakening and the inwardness thereof being pondered and unfolded. Christianity moreover found most entry among the lowly and unlearned. All the more is all striving bent thereon, to turn the Christian truth into living and to bring it forth in deed also in worship and ordering to lordship; not on knowing but on a holy life, on the keeping of Christian virtues of love, meekness, peace, oneness and so forth is the weight laid. The ring of thoughts wherein men move is therefore yet narrow; many biblical notions are wholly lacking, and others are weakened or changed; the works-holy view of Christianity is made ready. Over all are the writings of the Apostolic Fathers stronger and richer in right living than in teaching. Notwithstanding the same letter form and in part the same churches whereto they speak, the sundering and the farness between the Apostles and the Apostolic Fathers strikes the eye full strongly. The heathen mind could not so swiftly take in the Christian thoughts, Lübkert, Die Theologie der apostolischen Väter , in Niedner’s Zeitschrift für historische Theologie 1854. Sprinzl, Die Theologie der apostolischen Väter , Vienna 1880. Lechler, Das apostolische und nachapostolische Zeitalter , 3rd edition. Zöckler, Handbuch der theologischen Wissenschaften Supplementband 1889. Dorner, Entwickelungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi , 2nd edition I. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte I.
2. Yet theology could not abide in this simple repetition and practical application of Scriptural truth. The opposition which Christianity gradually met from heathen culture compelled reflection and defense. In the earliest times, the heathen power limited itself to persecution, hatred, contempt, and mockery, as voiced by Tacitus and Lucian. But little by little, the heathen world had to reckon with Christianity and assailed it scientifically. Heinrich Kellner has purposely described this spiritual reaction of ancient heathenism against Christianity in his Hellenismus und Christenthum , and at the end also pointed out its kinship with the present-day strife against Christianity.
The chief scientific assailants were Celsus, Porphyry, Fronto (the friend of Aurelius, as appears from Minucius Felix), and later still Julian, who, as shown by Cyril's refutation, wrote a book against the Christians. All the arguments which have been brought against Christianity through all ages are already found in them; for instance, against the genuineness and truth of many Bible books, the Pentateuch, Daniel, the Gospels; against revelation and miracles; against various dogmas such as the incarnation, satisfaction, forgiveness, resurrection, eternity of punishment; against the morals, such as asceticism, world-contempt, uncouthness; not to speak of the slanderous charges of worshipping an ass's head, child-murder, adultery, and the like.
Yet this scientific strife also did not overcome Christianity. And the heathens saw themselves driven either to bring the old religion to new life, as the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists tried, or to mingle and unite Christianity with heathenism, as happened in Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Above all, Gnosticism was a mighty attempt to take up Christianity into a combination and fusion of all sorts of heathen elements—Neoplatonic philosophy, Syrian and Phoenician mythology, Chaldean astrology, Persian dualism, and the like—and thus to strip it of its absolute character.
The chief question therein was how the human spirit had come into the bonds of matter and could now be freed therefrom. Commonly in Gnosticism, God is the abstract, indistinct unity. From him matter, the cause of evil, cannot be explained. This is derived from a lower god, the demiurge, who stands between the highest God and the sensible world and is identified with the God of the Old Testament. For the redemption of the spirits bound in matter, various aeons proceed from God, which represent the various religions and reach their height in the aeon Christ. Christianity is thus not the only but the highest religion. Christ, however, is conceived docetically, for it depends not on the fact, the history, but on the idea. Therefore the highest blessedness consists also in knowledge; knowledge with asceticism makes blessed. Faith, theology, may be good for the undeveloped; gnosis, philosophy, is the highest; it is the possession of the spiritual ones.
These ideas were brought into agreement with Scripture by allegorical exegesis and set forth in forms and images borrowed from mythology and adorned by fantasy. They changed Christianity into a kind of philosophy of religion, of speculative philosophy, which through all ages, even to the systems of Hegel and Schelling, has exercised its influence.
Against these sundry attacks, warding off was needful. The Christians were driven to think upon the content of the revelation, and to set a true, Christian gnosis against the false. The revealed truth becomes the object of ordered, learned thinking. Theology arose, not from and for the church and for the training of her servants, but by reason of and to fend off the attacks that were aimed at Christendom. Of course, for such a thinking work, knowledge of heathen philosophy was needful; theology in truth arose with the help of and through linking with philosophy. The Gnostics had already tried this, but there was a weighty difference in the way wherein the Gnostics and wherein the Apologists sought that linking. That difference lies not therein, that the former undertook a sharp, and the latter a step-by-step Hellenizing of Christendom. But with the Gnostics the positive, unyielding content of the Christian faith was lost, with the Apologists this was kept; with the former the use of philosophy was in substance, with the latter mainly in form; the former were therefore forsaken by the church, the latter owned; the former set forth the sundry philosophies as a faithly unfolding, wherein Christendom also was taken up, the latter sought to show the Christian faith, which they owned and took up, as the highest truth, as the true philosophy, which gathers in itself all truth-parts from elsewhere. This last is even the groundwork of the Apologists, and they work it out thus: God is one, unspeakable, ghostly, and so forth, but He is through the Logos also maker of the world, utmost cause of all that is, and beginning of all upright good. The Gnostic twofoldness is here overcome; the world bears everywhere the mark of the godly Logos, even matter is good and made by God. Man is from the beginning made good, received wit and freedom, and was meant for deathlessness; this he must and could reach in the way of free hearkening. But he has let himself be led astray by the demons and is now come under the sway of fleshly lust, fallen into wandering and death. Here too twofoldness is shunned, and the cause of sin is sought in the will of man. But therefore new means are now needful, to bring man back from the way of falsehood and of death and to lead him to deathlessness. God showed Himself through the Logos from the oldest times, and gave knowledge of the truth also to some heathens, but chiefly to the prophets among Israel, and at last in His Son Jesus Christ. In Him all earlier truth is upheld and fulfilled. Through Him as teacher of truth, man is again brought to his end. The Apologists are thus wit-minded and upright-minded; yet, for ensample, in Justin the striving is not wanting, to grasp Christ also as Reconciler and Redeemer, through whose blood we receive forgiveness of sins. Edition of the Apologists Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Hermias, in Migne ser. gr. t. 6. Of them Justin is by far the weightiest, Semisch, Justin the Martyr, Breslau 1840. Böhringer, Church History in Biographies I 1 p. 96-270. Aubé St. Justin Philosopher and Martyr. Paris 1861. Weiszäcker, The Theology of Justin Martyr (Yearbook for German Theology 1867, p. 60-119). Engelhardt, The Christianity of Justin the Martyr. Erlangen 1878 and Herzog's Real-Encyclopedia² 7, 318. Stählin, Justin the Martyr Leipzig 1880. Harnack History of Dogma I 413-464. Dr. H. Veit, Justin the Philosopher and Martyr's Justification of Christianity. Strasbourg, Heitz. 1894.
3. The Beginnings of Theology Among the Apologists. The beginnings of theology among the Apologists were, however, not only weak but in many ways also not free from one-sidedness and error. The problems that arose were many and mighty; the bond between theology and wisdom-lore, the teaching of the Logos in his bond to God, the meaning of Christ and his death, and so forth, were far too deep for the right insight to be gained all at once. Differences of thought showed themselves often. As soon as theology came, there came also a sundering of paths and schools. Two kinds of dogmatic paths can soon be marked out.
On one hand, that which is shown forth by Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius, and also by Irenaeus, of whom only the head-work Refutation and Overthrow of the Falsely-Named Knowledge , often quoted as Against Heresies in five books, has been kept, and his learner Hippolytus of Rome, likely the writer of the Philosophumena or Refutation of All Heresies , first ascribed to Origen. All these stand in stark foe-ship against wisdom-lore. Irenaeus warns very earnestly against it, and Tertullian bans it wholly and as sharply as may be, in the well-known place: what have Athens and Jerusalem, the academy and the church, Christians and heretics in common, and so on.
Yet they all make the most child-like use of it again; Tertullian is so weighty for theology because he brought in a number of terms for the threefold and Christ-teaching lore, such as trias , trinitas , satisfacere , meritum , sacramentum , una substantia and tres personae , duae substantiae in una persona , and so forth. But they stand thereby on the ground-stand of the church's belief; they are historical, upholding, true-to-life, and make between belief and theology, pistis and gnosis , no kind-like but at most a much-like sundering.
And though there is yet no speech of a dogmatic framework among these men; the teachings stand loose beside each other, a set forth groundwork is not to be found, even in the Christ-teaching by Tertullian and Hippolytus the Gnosticism is not wholly overcome; but yet the theology of these men, above all of Irenaeus, has been that of the following ages. All the later teachings are to be found in him. The oneness of God, the being-oneness of Father and Son, of the God of shaping and of reshaping, the oneness of the God of the Old and of the New Bond, the shaping of the world out of nothing, the oneness of the mankind kin, the spring of sin from the will's freedom, the two natures of Christ, the full showing forth of God in Christ, the uprising of all men, and so forth, are by him clearly spoken out and upheld against Gnosticism. Christendom has in Irenaeus first unfolded its own, self-standing godly wisdom-lore.
For shortness' sake, here are named some works touching the Councils, Church Fathers, Churchly writers, and so forth, and writings thereon.
The acts of the councils are gathered in: Joa. Harduinus, Conciliorum collectio regia maxima . Paris, 1714. 11 tomes in 12 volumes, running to 1714.
J. Domin. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio . Florence, 1759-1788. 31 volumes; a new, bettered edition has been coming forth since 1885 at Paris.
Acta et decreta sacrorum conciliorum recentiorum. Collectio Lacensis (Maria Laach), 7 volumes. Freiburg in Breisgau, 1870-1890, holding the acts of the councils from 1682 to 1870.
The chief decrees of councils and Popes are gathered by H. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum et definitionum , 6th edition enlarged by Ign. Stahl. Würzburg, 1888.
The history of the councils is most fully handled by Karl Joseph von Hefele, Conciliëngeschichte, nach den Quellen bearbeitet , 7 bands. Freiburg, 1855-1871, 2nd edition. Bands 1-4 by Hefele himself, bands 5-6 by Knöpfler; the work is carried on by Hergenröther, who added bands 8-9 thereto in 1887 and 1890.
The Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers have been published, among others, by: Andr. Gallandius, Bibliotheca veterum patrum antiquorumque scriptorum ecclesiasticorum , Venet. 1763-1781, 14 tomi fol. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, sive Bibliotheca universalis.... omnium S. S. Patrum, doctorum scriptorumque ecclesiasticorum, sive latinorum, sive graecorum . Paris 1844 sq. 473 tomi; series latina 221 tomi, series graeca 166 tomi, patrologia graeca latine tantum edita 86 tomi. Furthermore, sundry Church Fathers have been separately published by the Maurist monks (Cf. art. Herz), such as Origen by Delarue Paris 1733, Chrysostom by Montfaucon 1718, Augustine by Delfau and others 1679-1702 and so forth. And lastly, there appeareth an excellent edition of the Latin Church Fathers at Vienna under the guidance of the Imperial Academy of Sciences: Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum . Vindob. 1866 sq. wherein already sundry Church Fathers such as Minucius Felix, Cyprian, Arnobius, Lactantius, and so on, or portions of Church Fathers Tertullian, Augustine and so forth have appeared. See further Bellarmine, De Scriptoribus ecclesiasticis Romae 1613. Ed. du Pin, Nouvelle Bibliothèque des auteurs ecclésiastiques , 47 vol. Par. 1686-1714. Cave, Historia literaria script. eccles . 2 vol. Lond. 1689, Basil. 1741. Walch, Bibl. theol. sel . Jenae 4 vol. 1757 sq. Ritter, Geschichte der christl. Philosophie , 4 Theile, Hamburg 1841-1845. Ueberweg, Grundriss der Gesch. d. Phil. der patr. u. schol. Zeit . 6e Aufl. 1881. Nirschl, Lehrb. der Patrol. u. Patristik , 3 Bde. Mainz 1881-1885. Alzog, Grundriss der Patrologie , 4e Aufl. Freiburg 1888. G. Krüger, Gesch. der altchristl. Litteratur in den ersten drei Jahrh . Freiburg 1895.
As helps may serve: for the churchly Greek, the wordbook of J. C. Suicerus, Thesaurus ecclesiasticus , 2nd ed. much enlarged, Amst. 1728, 2 tomes; for the middle-age Greek, C. Dufresne, lord du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis . Lugd. 1688, 2 tomes; for the middle-age Latin, C. Dufresne, lord du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis . Par. 1678, 3 vols.; new edition by the Benedictines in 6 parts 1733-36; by G. A. L. Henschel, Par. 1840-50 in 7 parts; and by Leopold Favre in 10 parts 1883-87. Also Forcellini, Totius latinitatis lexicon , in 4 parts Padua 1771; new edition by Furlanetto in 4 parts. Padua 1828-’31: English edition at London 1826; German by Voigtlander and Hertel at Zwickau and Schneeberg 1829-33, new edition in Italy by Corradini at Padua 1859 and by D. Vinc. De Vit in 6 parts at Prato 1858-79. For the place-names: J. V. Muller, Lexicon manuale, geographiam antiquam et mediam cum Latine tum Germanice illustrans , Lips. 1831. J. G. Th. Graesse, Orbis latinus oder Verzeichniss der lateinischen Benennungen der bekanntesten Städte usw. Dresden 1861.
Wholly otherwise was the stance taken by the Alexandrian theologians towards philosophy and Gnosticism. In sundry places, chiefly in Alexandria, there arose towards the end of the second century and at the beginning of the third a striving to work the Christian matter scientifically and thus to mediate it with the consciousness of the age, Harnack, D. G. The origin and rise of the Catechetical School in Alexandria is unknown to us, Guericke, De schola quae Alexandriae floruit catechetica. Vacherot, Hist. crit. de l’école d’Alex. Herzog, but it was already in being about 190 and soon grew in esteem and sway. The first teacher known to us through his remaining writings is Clement of Alexandria. But he is overshadowed by Origen, the most swayful theologian of the early ages.
Their striving was to turn the churchly doctrine of faith into a speculative science. Indeed, they upheld the faith, and in distinction from the Gnostics took their starting point in the positive teaching of the church. Clement even called faith a gnosis syntomos , prized it higher than heathen wisdom; Christianity is a way to salvation for all mankind and can only be taken hold of through faith; the content of that faith is summed up by the church in her confession, and the fount of truth is solely the revelation, the Holy Scripture. All this is held as firmly by Clement and Origen as by Irenaeus and Tertullian. But the difference begins here, that the Alexandrians took there to be a qualitative difference between faith and knowledge. Faith may be good and needful for the simple; the learned have not enough in it. Theology must strive to unfold the content of faith into a science that rests not on authority but finds in itself its warrant and confirmation. The pistis must be raised to gnosis . Here gnosis is no longer a means to ward off and fight heresy but becomes the end. The pistis leads only to a bodily Christianity, but theology must draw forth from Holy Scripture the spiritual Christianity. What Philo had tried for the Jews, Clement and Origen undertook for the Christians; they carried on the work of Justin Martyr.
To reach this end, they must needs have knowledge of and make use of philosophy; they do not cleave to any one system, but draw from the whole Greek philosophy since Socrates, chiefly from that of Plato and the Stoa. And with its help Origen gives a system that without doubt bears witness to keen insight and deep thinking might, but which also oft runs the risk of letting theology sink into philosophy. Subordination of the Son, eternity of creation, pre-existence of souls, dualism of spirit and matter, earthly cleansing, restoration of all things are so many parts in Origen's system that brought it into strife with the faith of the church and later wrought his condemnation. With Scripture all this was brought into accord by a pneumatic, allegorical exegesis.
But in truth, in this theology of Origen the Christian religion is dissolved into ideas. It seeks a transaction between church and world, faith and science, theology and philosophy, a compromise between the foolishness of the cross and the wisdom of the world, and is thus the fairest and richest type of the mediating theology that ever and anon arises in the church, Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria. Oxford. Harnack D. G., art. in Herzog and the literature cited there and by Harnack; also Zöckler, Supplement.
4. In the beginning of the third hundred-year span, the groundwork of Christly godlore was laid. The church has, over against Heathendom and Jewdom, over against Gnosticism and Ebionitism, wittingly taken a steadfast stand, and saved the self-standing of Christendom. But now in the third hundred-year span sundry inward strifes arise. The great strife of the third hundred-year span ran over the kinship of the Logos (and the Ghost) to the Father, and the heresy that must be fought was Monarchianism in its two shapes of dynamical and modalistical Monarchianism. The first, such as the Alogi, Theodotus and his fellowship, Artemas and his fellows, and above all also in the East Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch since 260, sought to uphold the oneness of God in such wise that they held Son and Ghost not for persons but for attributes and denied the Godhead to Jesus; Jesus was a man, in a sundry wise fitted by the godly Logos and salved with God's Ghost. The modalistical Monarchians however taught that the Godhead itself in Christ was flesh become; they thus acknowledged the Godhead of Christ but made one the Father and Son and so came to patripassianism. This feeling was in the third hundred-year span very widespread and found much following; it was warded and forstood by Noetus, Epigonus, Cleomenes, Aeschines, Praxeas, Victorinus, Zephyrinus, Callistus and above all Sabellius. The Monarchians and anti-Trinitarians are fought by Hippolytus in Contra haeresin Noeti , and Philosophumena , and also in the so-called Parvus Labyrinthus (in Euseb. h. e. 5, 28), by Tertullian adv. Praxeam , Novatianus de trinitate , Dionysius Alex. adv. Sabellium , Eusebius contra Marcellum , de eccles. theologia , and de fide ad Sabellium . See Harnack D. G. I, and art. Monarch. in Herzog² 10. Dorner, Gesch. d. Lehre v. d. P. Christi , 2e Aufl. I. Lange, Gesch. u. Entw. der Systeme der Unitariër vor der nic. Synode , 1831. Hagemann, Die römische Kirche in den 3 ersten Jahrh. 1864. At the end of the third hundred-year span stood the dogma of Christ's Godhead and of his sundering from the Father fast. There were three hypostases in the godly being, Father, Son and Ghost. This was the belief both in the East and in the West, Harnack D. G. I. The thoughts, wherewith the thinking in the following hundred-year span shall busy itself, such as monas , trias , ousia , hypostasis , prosopon and so forth, already be, but shall first later win their set kind and fast worth. The groundwork is laid, and the borders are marked out, within which the Christly thinking shall try its strength.
5. The Period from the 4th to the 8th Century. The period from the 4th to the 8th century is wholly taken up in the East by the Christological strifes. The homoousia of the Son, who became man in Christ, with the Father was the dogma above all others. The religious interest at stake herein was that God himself must become man, so that we men, freed from death, might be led to immortality and the beholding of God, and be made partakers of the divine nature. The Godhead of Christ is the essence of Christendom. None hath better understood this than Athanasius. His history is that of his age. For him, all Christendom centers in the redemption unto everlasting life through the true Son of God. Therein he upholds the specific character of the Christian religion, frees the doctrine of the Trinity from cosmological speculations which were yet linked therewith in Origen and Tertullian, and preserves Christendom from worldliness.
Athanasius is a Christologian. He deeply feels the religious import of the Godhead of Christ. Christ must be God to be our Savior. By this wholly unique meaning of the Christological dogma, no proper dogmatic systems see the light. Yet there are a number of weighty dogmatic treatises. Arianism is opposed by Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, in his Epistolae de Ariana haeresi deque Arii depositione , by Athanasius in all his writings, especially in his Orationes contra Arianos , by Basil in his Libri V adv. Eunomium and in his Liber de Spiritu Sancto , by Gregory Nazianzen in his Orationes V de theologia , by Gregory of Nyssa in his Libri s. orationes XII c. Eunomium , by Cyril, Hilary, Ambrose, Fulgentius, and others, and condemned at the Synod of Nicaea and Constantinople.
The Godhead and homoousia of the Holy Ghost was defended against Macedonius of Constantinople by Athanasius in his Epistolae ad Serapionem , by Basil in his work against Eunomius and in his treatise de Spiritu Sancto , by Gregory Nazianzen in sundry of his Orationes theologicae , by Gregory of Nyssa in his adv. pneumatomachos Macedonianos , and especially also by Didymus in his works de Trinitate libri tres and de Spiritu Sancto , and was established at the Synod of Constantinople in 381.
Already during the question concerning the homoousia of the Son, a second question arose about the human nature and its union with the divine nature. Apollinaris acknowledged that the Redeemer must be God, but he could not be a full man, for then there would be two beings and two persons, and no unity would come. The Logos therefore took on ensouled flesh and therein himself formed the spirit, the I, the principle of self-consciousness and self-determination. But he was opposed by Athanasius in de incarnatione domini nostri J. C. contra Apollinarem and de salutari adventu J. C. , by Gregory Nazianzen in his Epistolae ad Cledonium , and by Gregory of Nyssa in his Antirrheticus adv. Apollinarem , and condemned at the Synod of Rome in 377 and of Constantinople in 381.
When the two natures were established, difference arose over the manner of their union. Not substantially and essentially, but morally and relatively, said Nestorius; there are in Christ two persons, hypostases. But he found a strong opponent in Cyril of Alexandria, who attacked him in sundry works such as de incarnatione Unigeniti , adversus Nestorii blasphemias contradictionum Libri V , and so forth, and he was condemned at the Synod of Ephesus in 431. The view directly opposite, that of Eutyches, was opposed by Theodoret in his Eranistes or Polymorphos and by Leo the Great in his Epistola ad Flavianum , and was condemned at the Synod of Chalcedon in 451.
6. Yet Chalcedonianism brought no peace; the confusion grew, for Monophysitism was too strong in the East. It did find a mighty defender in Leontius of Byzantium (485-543), called by Harnack the first scholastic, and was also acknowledged at the fifth synod in Constantinople (551). But the Monophysites were not won, not even by the labors of Justinian I. The monergistic and monotheletic strife that arose in the seventh century ended with the fixing of two wills in Christ at the sixth synod in Constantinople (680). And to this day there are Monophysite Christians in Syria (see the article on Jacobites in Herzog, Dr. H. G. Kleyn, Jakob Baradeus , Leiden 1881). They hold to one nature in Christ (for example, not in two natures), forsake Chalcedon and acknowledge the so-called robber synod at Ephesus, use leavened bread at the Lord's Supper, make the cross with one finger, have taken over image and saint worship from the Greek and Roman church, and stand under the "Patriarch of Antioch" who yet commonly dwells in Diarbekr. Of dogmatic weight is the creed of Baradeus in Kleyn (p. 110 ff.). There are further Monophysites in Egypt, called Copts, under a patriarch dwelling in Cairo (Herzog); in Abyssinia, under an Abuna, named by the patriarch in Cairo and abiding in Gondar (Herzog); in Armenia under a Catholicos in Etchmiadzin, a cloister near Erivan in Armenia. See Hofmann, Symbolik §§ 62-68, with the writings named there and in Herzog; Kattenbusch, Confessionskunde I.
But dogmatically, not only the Christological writings are of import; other treatises also come into reckoning. The teaching of God, his names, attributes, providence were handled in linkage to the apologists, who had upheld the Christian God-notion over against Gnosticism. Men went mostly out from the natural God-knowledge, from God as a simple, unchangeable being, whose being could be proven psychologically, cosmologically, and teleologically, who was indeed unknowable in his essence, but in Scripture revealed as Three-in-One. Chrysostom, Homilies 12 against the Anomoeans or on the Incomprehensible Nature of God, Pseudo-Dionysius on the Divine Names, Chrysostom on Providence Book III. Theodoret on Providence Orations X.
Cosmology and anthropology were chiefly handled in linkage to Genesis 1-3, and so that Origenism was shunned. God had shaped the world through the Logos after the pattern of a heavenly ghostly world; sin arose through the free will and is outweighed by punishment and redemption. Basil, Homilies IX on the Hexaemeron. Gregory of Nyssa, Apologetic Explanation on the Hexaemeron and on the Making of Man, Ambrose Book VI on the Hexaemeron. Augustine, on Genesis against the Manichaeans Book II, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis an Imperfect Book. John Philoponus, on the Eternity of the World against Proclus, and on the Creation of the World Book VII, Anastasius of Sinai, Anagogical Contemplations on the Hexaemeron, Books XII.
Furthermore, very many tracts were also written on virginity, monkhood, perfection, priesthood, resurrection, and so forth, such as by Ephrem Syrus, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, besides many apologies against Jews, Heathens, and Heretics. The most noteworthy for the history of dogmatics are the Hypotyposes, Theological Institutes Books VII, in fragments with Athanasius, and gathered in Gallandi's Library III, Routh Sacred Relics III and Migne Greek Series 18, of which the three first books handle of God, the Father and Creator, the Son and the Spirit, the fourth of angels and demons, the fifth and sixth of the incarnation, and the seventh of the creation.
Furthermore, the Catecheses of Cyril, 18 lectures for the enlightened on the truths of the faith and five for the newly enlightened on the mysteries, baptism, anointing, eucharist, liturgy. Plitt, on Cyril of Jerusalem's Extant Catechetical Orations. Heidelberg 1855. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration in 40 chapters contains a philosophical proof-bringing for the head-truths of Christendom, God's being, essence, trinity, creation and fall, redemption, sacraments, especially penance and eucharist, and eschatology.
Chrysostom's Two Catecheses are chiefly moral speeches to the catechumens. Theodoret gave a compendium of the Christian faith in the 5th book of his Summary of Heretical Fables. Maximus the Confessor handled the faith-truths of the church in short chapters, 200 on the teaching of God, 300 on the incarnation and sin, 500 on love.
Of great meaning were also the five writings on Divine Names, on the Heavenly Hierarchy, on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, on Mystical Theology besides 10 letters, which saw the light in the fifth century and for a long time passed as writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. They used Neoplatonic philosophy and pantheistic mysticism to elucidate and work out the Christian teaching and were soon highly esteemed, commented on by Maximus the Confessor, Pachymeres and others, used by theologians, mystics, ascetics especially in the Middle Ages and almost set equal with Scripture.
All the elements of dogmatic unfolding were at last summed up and united by John of Damascus in his Fountain of Knowledge. This work consists of 3 parts. In part 1 Philosophical Chapters he gives a sketch of philosophy as handmaid and tool of theology, namely of logic after Aristotle and Porphyry. Part 2 is historical, On Heresies and gives an overview of the heresies up to Mohammed. Part 3 Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is the proper dogmatic part in 100 chapters; he acknowledges therein to give nothing but what the fathers have taught and also cites the Greek fathers, and Pope Leo time and again. J. Langen, John of Damascus, Gotha 1879. Grundlehner, John of Damascus, Utrecht 1876.
A history of theology and dogmatics in the Eastern Church after Damascenus does not yet exist. The patristic time, wherein the great forming of dogmas took place, ended about with Justinian I (527-565), or also with Photius around 860. All this time from the 6th to the 9th century is a time of passing over. The strife over images (726-842) is therein the mark-worthy happening. Harnack, D. G. II. K. Schwarzlose, Der Bilderstreit, ein Kampf der gr. K. um ihre Eigenart und um ihre Freiheit , 1890. Relics and images were also already in use before the 5th century, but the Christ-like dogma came to uphold them. The own-like of Christianity seemed therein to lie, that it made the Godly sense-like and body-like now-present. The image became soon from token to bearer and tool of the holy. The heathen-way came back in the Christ-like church. But the upholding of images was rightly bound with that of the freedom of the church and with the worshipful concerns that were then there. Over against that stood the emperor's party, which fought the images but therewith also wished to under-lay the church to the state, which wished to let the emperor set fast a church-like dogma, which by fighting the images wished to meet Jews and Mohammedans. In the honoring of images, all the right-belief drew together. In the sense-like, one wills to own and enjoy the Godly. John Damascenus was one of the strongest upholders of the honoring of images, in his De Imaginibus Orationes III ; he brings them with the flesh-becoming of God in Christ in the narrowest bond and sees in their fighting Judaism and Manichaeism. The dogmatic right-making of the honoring of images is the last work of the church in the East been. The Byzantine time, from the 9th century to the in-taking of Constantinople by the Turks (1453), steps in. It is a time of rest, of might-lessness in bringing forth. The Greek church is that of the right-belief; she keeps only; the Christ-like dogma is the dogma by outstanding. Yet there is until 1453 a strong learned life been. The writings of the Byzantine theologians, from Damascenus onward to those who lived through the in-taking of Constantinople, form in the Cursus Patrologiae Graecae of Migne the bands 94-161.
After Damascenus, whose dogmatics is still to this day the norm, deserves from the Byzantine time above all to be named Photius, patriarch of Constantinople (891), whose head-work Myriobiblos or Bibliotheca holds learned out-takes from sundry writers and who as dogmatic stepped forth in his Mystagogia tou Hagiou Pneumatos , ed. Hergenröther, Ratisb. 1857; cf. Gass in Herzog², Hergenröther, Photius, Patriarch v. K. , Regensburg 1867-69. Further, Euthymius Zigabenus in the 12th century, who on behest of emperor Alexius I wrote a Panoplia Dogmatike tes Orthodoxou Pisteos etoi Hoplothēkē Dogmatōn , and Nicetas Choniates around 1220 who filled up the work of Euthymius in his Thesauros Orthodoxias , in part given out, cf. Ullmann, Nic. v. Meth., Euth. Zigab. und Nicetas Chon. oder die dogm. Entw. der gr. K. im 12 Jahrh. , Stud. u. Kr. 1883 4tes Heft. Further is the work of Nicolaus Kabasilas, Peri tes en Christō Zōēs Logoi Hepta given out by Gass 1849; and a handling of Demetrius Kydonius Peri tou Kataphronein ton Thanaton by Kuinoel, Lips. 1786.
After the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Greek church in the East would have been wholly destroyed or shrunken to a mere sect, if it had not found upholding in the Russian realm, which was Christianized in the 10th century and took over the Greek-Orthodox faith in its wholeness and without question.
Of the theological writings after that time, we know even less than in the earlier age. Migne's edition goes no further and leaves us here forsaken. An overview of names and works is given in Neohellenic Philology , a writing by Constantine Sathas, Athens 1868. The strivings toward union with Rome at the councils of Lyon 1274 and Florence 1439 are known to us from the acts. The letters of the Tübingen theologians in 1576 with the patriarch Jeremiah II were put forth at Wittenberg 1584, Gass Symbolik der griechischen Kirche 45 f.; on that of Cyril Lucaris with many Protestant theologians and statesmen, see Gass, article Lucaris in Herzog second edition 9, 5 f., Kattenbusch 141 f.
One cannot sum up the history of this writings in one word: stiffening, orthodoxism, and the like. The weighty point of the Greek church has shifted to Russia, and Russia is yet young, has no past as yet, and is only now arising. Its bookish and learned life has but lately begun. From the last century is named Theophanes Procopovich, who is deemed the father of Russian orderly theology, Philaret, History of the Church of Russia II 209 f. And from this century Philaret, Detailed Catechism of the Right-Believing Catholic Eastern Church in the work of Philaret History of the Church of Russia II 293 f. Macarius, Handbook for the Study of Christian Orthodox Dogmatic Theology , German by Blumenthal 1875. See Zöckler Supplement 112 f. Kurtz, Textbook of Church History § 68. Gass, Contributions to the Churchly Writings and Dogmatic History of the Greek Middle Ages , 2 volumes Breslau 1844-47. Also: A. von Reinholdt, History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to the Newest Time 1886. K. Krumbacher, History of Byzantine Literature 1891. Kattenbusch, Confessions 252-287.
The teaching understanding of the Greek (Russian) church is to be found with Walch I 431 sq. E. J. Kimmel, Monuments of the Faith of the Eastern Church , 2 volumes 1850. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom I. 1881. p. 24-82; II 57-73; 275-554. Mesoloras, Symbolics of the Orthodox Eastern Church I 1883. W. Gass, Symbolics of the Greek Church 1872. H. Schmidt, Handbook of Symbolics , 1890. S. 30 f. Hoffmann, Symbolics p. 130 f. Kattenbusch, Textbook of Comparative Confessional Knowledge I: The Orthodox Anatolian Church I 1892.
Furthermore, one may seek counsel on the churches in the East, chiefly in Russia, from the works named by Walch Bibliotheca Theologica Selecta II 559 sq. Le Quien, Oriens Christianus , 3 volumes 1740. J. Mason Neale, History of the Holy Eastern Church I 1850. Gass, article Greek and Greek-Russian Church, Constantinople in Herzog second edition. J. Silbernagl, Constitution and Present State of All Churches of the East , Landshut 1865. Victor Frank, Russian Self-Witnesses. I Russian Christendom . Paderborn 1889. H. Dalton, The Russian Church , Leipzig 1892. Presbyterian and Reformed Review January 1892 p. 103 f. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Realm of the Czars and the Russians , authorized German edition with closing remarks by L. Pezold and J. Muller. Sondershausen 1884-90. III Volume: The Might of Religion, Church, Clergy, and Sects in Russia. H. Dalton, Evangelical Currents in the Russian Church of the Present , Heilbronn 1881. Nik. von Gerbel-Embach, Russian Sectarians , Heilbronn 1883 (both in Current Questions of Christian Folk Life Volumes VI and VIII). On the Stundists: The Stundists, the Story of a Great Religious Revolt . James Clarke, Fleet Street, London. Dr. Ferd. Knie, The Russian-Schismatic Church, Its Teaching and Its Worship . Graz 1894. Kattenbusch 234 f. 542 f.
8. The Church and Theology in the West. The church and theology in the West from the beginning bear their own stamp. In Tertullian, Cyprian, and Irenaeus this already stands out clearly. In the East, the ruling thought in dogmatics is this: that man through sin is made subject to decay and now by God Himself in Christ is set free from death and made partaker of life, immortality, and the godly nature. The ideas of substance, essence, nature stand foremost here and foster stillness, rest, both in doctrine and in life. In the West, on the other hand, the weight falls on the bond wherein man stands to God. And this bond is that of a guilty one over against a righteous God, whose biddings he has broken. Christ, however, through His work has won the grace of God, the forgiveness of sins, the strength to keep the law. And this drives forth to a working life, to heedfulness and yielding. In the East, men cleave chiefly to John; in the West, to Paul. There the weight lies in the flesh-becoming; here in the death of Christ. There the person, here the work of Christ stands foremost. In the East, the foremost thing is the God-manly nature, the oneness of both natures in Christ; in the West, on the other hand, the sundering of both natures, the Mediator's stead which Christ holds between God and man. There reigns the mystical, liturgical; here the lawful, kingly element. Kattenbusch, Confessionskunde . This sundering is there from the outset. The cleaving asunder was a matter of time. With the rise of Constantinople began the open strife. Constantinople could not point to an apostolic spring and drew all its meaning from statecraft, from the emperor's court. It would be a second Rome. The bishop of Constantinople, according to the council of 381, canon 3, got the "primacy of honor" after the bishop of Rome, because it was the new Rome. Therewith it was content, with a stead beside Rome. The East would have one church, yes, but in two halves, with two emperors, two head boroughs, two bishops of even rank. The Greek church calls itself the orthodox; it deems itself in full holding of the truth; it rests and joys. But it calls itself also the Anatolian; it binds itself to a sundry land and is therewith fulfilled. Wholly otherwise was it with Rome. Rome upheld itself not as a state borough beside Constantinople, but set itself as the apostolic seat high above Constantinople. Rome stood for and warded a godly stake. It grounded its claims and rights soon on Matthew 16:18, and called for a worldwide, a catholic stead. In the Western church there sits therefore an onward-pressing, a world-winning bent. These twofold ways drove East and West asunder. When thereto came sundries in customs, rites, and above all in the confession of the filioque , the cleaving became ever more readied. In 1054 it came formally to pass.
Yet was the West in many respects beholden to the East. Here indeed was the church first founded. Here stepped forth the Apostolic fathers and the Apologists. Here was fought the mighty strife against Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Here were the theological and Christological dogmas established at the councils. Synods arose there, in the second century, first in Asia Minor. The ecumenical councils, from 325 onward to the middle of the ninth century, were all held in the East, in Asia Minor or Constantinople, and are all acknowledged by the Western church up to that of 879. The objective foundations of church doctrine are the same in East and West.
Since the second half of the second century, Eastern theology also penetrated into the West. Victorinus Rhetor, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Rufinus brought the theological thought-world of the East to the West. Old Testament exegesis, Platonic theology, monasticism, the ideal of virginity made their entry into the West and there wedded with the Western spirit.
Ambrose, who died in 397, studied the works of Clement, Origen, Didymus, especially of Basil, and brought over to the West the Old Testament exegesis (Hexaemeron, de Paradiso, de Cain et Abel, etc., after Basil), the ideal of virginity in the sense of the mystical marriage of the soul with Christ (de virginitate, liber de Isaac et anima, after Origen, Methodius), and also the doctrine of the Trinity and the Christology of the Cappadocians (Libri V de fide, Libri III de Spiritu Sancto, liber de incarnationis dominicae sacramento).
Hilary of Poitiers, who died in 368, dwelt during his exile from 356 to 359 in Asia Minor, informed the bishops of Gaul in his work de Synodis seu de fide Orientalium about the Christological strife in the East, defended this doctrine in his work de Trinitate in 12 books, and in his exegetical works on Matthew and some psalms made ample use of the typological and allegorical exegesis.
Victorinus the rhetorician, highly praised by Augustine in Confessions 8:2, introduced in his writings Liber ad Justinum Manichaeum contra duo principia Manichaeorum et de vera carne Christi, in his liber de generatione divina, and in his polemic Adversus Arium Libri IV, the Neoplatonic philosophy into theology and thereby exerted the greatest influence on Augustine.
Rufinus, who died in 410, spent many years in Egypt and Palestine, and consorted with the hermits, with Jerome, Didymus in Alexandria, John in Jerusalem, and was especially significant in that he adapted many Greek works of Josephus, Eusebius, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, etc., into Latin. Moreover, he wrote a Historia monachorum, biographies of 33 saints in the Nitrian desert, and Peregrinationes ad loca sancta; various commentaries on books of the Old Testament; and finally an Expositio symboli apostolici, whose value for history is greater than for dogmatics.
Finally, here must be named Jerome, who died in 420. Though reared in Rome, he spent the greatest part of his life in Syria and Palestine. His merit lies especially in his many Scripture studies; in theology he is little independent, and very anxious for his orthodoxy; in his exegesis he often hails the allegorical method of Philo and the Alexandrian theologians, especially he is a eulogist of asceticism; he defended the maidenhood of Mary against Helvidius, the meritoriousness of fasting and of celibacy against Jovinian, the veneration of martyrs and of their relics against Vigilantius, and speaks, according to Luther's word in the table talks, always of fasting, food, virginity, and scarcely ever of faith and hope and love.
9. All this dogmatic unfolding of the East and West runs out upon Augustine. The teaching of the Trinity and of Christ from the Eastern theologians; the teaching of man, sin, grace, faith, atonement, merit from Tertullian and Ambrose; the new-Platonism of Victorinus; the teaching of Cyprian on church and sacrament; the monkish ideal of Jerome and Hilary; all that is taken over by Augustine and by him, in his rich life-knowing, made into his own ghostly goods. A theological, dogmatic framework has Augustine not given. The stuff that came to him from all sides, out of Scripture, lore, wisdom-lore, streamed in and which he through his rich ownhood widened and increased, let itself not at once oversee and order. The foremost that Augustine in this behold has given, is his Enchiridion on faith, hope, and love, a clearing of the foremost faith-truths by the hand of the apostolic symbol. But to gainsayings it lacks not in his teaching, foremost not to those between his church-teaching and his grace-teaching. It has been shown that those gainsayings are not to be evened out, and that the thoughts of Augustine let themselves not gather into a framework. And yet there has been no church-father who so deeply all godly-lore riddles has in-thought and so wrestled has to come to oneness. He is the first been who himself clearly sought to give reckoning of all those godly-lore askings which later in the forewords of the dogmatics would be handled, and who to the last soul-wise and knowing riddles through-pierces. The fast point from which he goes out is the man, his self-witting, his un-out-rootable thirst toward and need for truth, bliss, the good, which all one are. This out-going-point is sure and trustworthy (against the doubters), while the doubting itself yet belief in truth under-lays and the self-witting the last ground of truth is. Augustine became himself by such a burning truth-love eaten up. Now takes Augustine well two knowing-tools on, sense and understanding. But the knowing gotten through the latter goes that of the first far beyond. The sense-like is the truth itself not, it is there but a likeness of. Everlasting, unchangeable truth is only through the thinking to find. Well denies Augustine not that we also through the seeable hence to the unseeable can climb up, but wontly seeks he the way to the truth not outside us through the kind hence, but through man's own ghost. There finds he in his, in the to all own rede everlasting, unchangeable truths, which themselves again back-point to and themselves gather in God: the highest truth, the highest being, the only good, everlasting rede, beginning of all things. Therefore, while God the full truth, the being, the good, the fair itself is, therefore is there in Him alone rest for the man, for his thinking and willing. Self-knowing and God-knowing are the two poles between which all his thinking itself moves. The wit of kind becomes well not scorned, but yet after-set. I long to know God and the soul! Let me know myself, let me know Thee! God is the sun of the ghosts. We see and know no truth but in and through his light.
But philosophy is nevertheless insufficient. Not merely through the weakness of reason to find the way unto truth, but chiefly because pride stands in its path. And humility alone is the way unto life. There is therefore yet another path unto truth, namely, authority, faith. It presupposes on the one hand some knowledge, but on the other hand seeks after knowledge and strives toward understanding. Not only the being of God and the immortality of the soul, but also the Trinity did Augustine seek to prove from nature and chiefly from man himself. But God is for him not the abstract, attributeless being, but the living God, the highest truth and the highest good, the highest blessedness, and therefore the only and full satisfaction of man's heart. All of Augustine's thinking is religious, theological; he sees all things in God. In that light he also beholds the world; it is on the one hand a non-being, a shadow, fleeting, but on the other hand as God's creation a work of art, fashioned after the ideas in God's mind, and gradually, step by step, by degrees realizing those ideas, and forming a unity that contains the richest diversity; the things differ among themselves in measure of being and thus of truth and goodness. It is a cosmos, resting upon idea and number, order, measure, held together by one will, one reason, a most ample and immense republic; wherein miracles are only against what is known of nature, wherein sin is merely a privation, compensated by punishment, and contributes to the beauty and harmony of the whole. In the most beautiful poem of creation, this antithesis is also needful; sin is like the oppositions in a speech, the barbarisms in language, the shadow on a painting. Augustine seeks to fit evil into the order of the whole. But thereby he does not excuse sin. For he sets the end of things not in the ethical good, but in this, that creation is and more and more becomes a harmonious revelation of all God's virtues and perfections. And thereto sin is also made serviceable by God's will.
Furthermore, one knows how deeply and earnestly Augustine conceived of sin. You have not yet considered of what great weight sin is. He saw it around him and felt it: man seeks God and has need of Him, and he cannot and will not come unto Him. In man there is only good left in that he exists. Mankind is a mass of perdition. Sin is chiefly pride in the soul and concupiscence in the body. Sin was in Adam the deed of us all and therefore became the lot of us all. It is lack of God, privation of good, not only a deed but a state, a corrupted nature, a defect, want, corruption, a not being able not to sin. The virtues of the heathen are splendid vices. Redemption from that state is only through grace, which takes its beginning already in predestination, which reveals itself objectively in the person and work of Christ, the certain and proper foundation of the Catholic faith, but which must also come subjectively in us as internal grace, and pour into us faith and love. But that grace works in Augustine only within the bounds of the visible church. This is for him an institution of salvation, dispenser of grace, seat of authority, warrant of Scripture, dwelling place of love, building of the Spirit, yea, the kingdom of God itself. Augustine deeply felt the importance of community for religion; the church is the mother of believers. The doctrine of predestination and of grace cannot be reconciled with this concept of church and sacrament. Many who seem outside are inside, and many who seem inside are outside. There are sheep outside and wolves within the fold. Also, Augustine indeed taught the perseverance of the saints, but he dared not affirm the subjective assurance thereof. And precisely because of this view of church and sacrament, faith and forgiveness could not come to their right in Augustine's theology. Faith and love, forgiveness and sanctification are not clearly distinguished. It is as if faith and forgiveness are but provisional; Augustine passes at once from these to love, sanctification, good works. Communion with God, religion, thereby becomes the result of a process that faith, love, good works, and so forth gradually bring about. Salvation, eternal life, the vision and enjoyment of God, become yet again a fruit of merit, and asceticism is one of the means whereby man attains this end.
Thus hath Augustine become of the greatest weight for the after dogmatics. He overrules the following ages. Every reformation turns back to him and to Paul. In every dogma hath he found a shaping that is taken over and echoed by all. His sway stretches out to all churches, ways, and fellowships. Rome calls upon him for her teaching of church, sacrament, and overlordship; the Reformation felt itself akin to him in the teaching of forechoosing and grace; the schoolmen built onward upon the fineness of his beholding, the sharpness of his wit, the strength of his deep thinking, Thomas was called the best reader of Saint Augustine; the mystics found stuff in his new-Platonism and godly fire; Romish and Protestant godliness strengthens itself through his writings; fasting and piety find feeding and upholding in him. Augustine belongs not to one church, but to all churches together. He is the Teacher for all. Even wisdom-lore can overlook him only to its own harm. And through his fair, spellbinding style, through his fine, careful, highly own and yet widely mankind-like uttering, is he more than any other church father still to be enjoyed today. He is the most Christ-like and the most newfangled of all church fathers, he stands of all the nearest to us. He hath put the beauty world-outlook in stead of the right-doing one, the olden by the Christ-like. Our best, deepest, and richest thoughts in dogmatics we owe to him. Augustine hath been the dogmatics-man of the Christ-like church.
10. The Augustinian Doctrine. The Augustinian teaching was for more than a hundred years the mark of fierce strife; it held the minds sundered. It found not only foes in Pelagius, Coelestius, Julian, the true Pelagians, but also among many monks in Gaul, among whom are chiefly named John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, who in his Commonitorium not only sets forth the marks of tradition but at the end also takes side against the strict Augustinianism, Eucherius of Lyons, Hilary of Arles, Salvian of Massilia, Faustus of Rhegium, Gennadius of Massilia, writer of De fide sua ceu de dogmatibus ecclesiasticis in 88 chapters.
On Augustine's side stood, besides Possidius of Calama in Numidia, Orosius of Bracara in Spain, Marius Mercator in Constantinople, and others, especially Prosper of Aquitaine, Vigilius of Thapsus in Numidia, Fulgentius of Ruspe, writer of De fide ad Petrum seu de regula verae fidei , a short sketch of the chief truths of the faith, Caesarius of Arles, Avitus of Vienne, and others.
The synod at Orange in 529 gave in the strife some decision in favor of Augustine, but did not forestall that semi-Pelagian thoughts found ever more ingress. The preventing grace was taken up, but the irresistible grace and the particular predestination were not decidedly taken on. Wiggers, Versuch einer pragmatischen Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelagianismus , Hamburg, Perthes, 2 parts, 1833. Idem, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie , 1854-1859, handles the same strife from Gregory to Gottschalk. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte III.
In the aftertime, little remained of Augustinianism. Pope Gregory the Great, who died in 604, named beside Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose as the fourth great church teacher, brought forth nothing new, but took to himself the thoughts of the earlier church teachers and wrought them in sundry ways for life. His bent is practical and at the same time mystical-allegorical. He formed no system, but simply kept what was gotten, made the dogmas ready for clergy and lay alike, and chiefly schemed the sundry mediators and means (angels, saints, Christ, alms, soul-mass, purgatory, penance) that make it behooveful for man's weakened will to be freed from the pains of sin.
By all this, he wrought with true care at the upbringing of the new folks and at the shaping of the clergy. He sanctioned the outward lawful worship of the Roman church and gave to medieval Catholicism its own true stamp. He is the capstone of the old, the groundwork of the new world. Through his liturgical writings and his church song, he brought in the Roman worship among the Germans. By making popular the dogmas of the church fathers, he made the church's teaching fit for use among the uncouth, heathen Germans and furthered superstition, asceticism, and works-righteousness.
With Boethius and Cassiodorus, he had great sway on the shaping and birth of knowledge among the Germans. Cassiodorus, who died about 565, wrote a Liber de artibus ac disciplinis liberalium litterarum and therein spoke of the meaning of each of the seven free arts, and in his work De institutione divinarum litterarum gave a method for theological study. Boethius, through his translations and explanations of Aristotle's logic and Porphyry's Isagoge, led in the knowledge and use of Greek philosophy among the Germans. And Gregory brought over theology in the church to the Germans. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte III. Lau, Gregor I nach seinem Leben und seiner Lehre geschildert , Leipzig 1845, article in Herzog. Alzog, Patrologie .
Amid all lack of culture and amid the unrest of the folk-migrations, there could be no talk of a learned life among the Germanic folks in the first times. The first traces are to be found in the Bible translation and the Arian creed of Ulfilas, who died in 383.
Toward the end of the 5th century, the East and West Goths, Vandals, Suevi, Burgundians, Heruli, Lombards, and others were already Christianized in an Arian sense. But Clovis (481-511) took up the Roman Christianity with his Frankish kingdom. Patrick, writer of the Confessiones , is the apostle of the Irish, dying in 465. Scotland was Christianized by Columba, who died in 597. The Anglo-Saxons were turned by Augustine with 40 monks, sent thither by Pope Gregory I in 596. Fridolin and Columbanus (who died in 615) and others worked in France and Italy; the latter left behind weighty letters and also a regula coenobialis . Alemannia, Bavaria, Thuringia, Frisia, and so forth were Christianized in the 6th and 7th centuries. Boniface is the apostle of the Germans in the 8th century, dying in 755.
The Saxons were brought over last under Charlemagne through wars from 772-804, and the North chiefly by Ansgar, who died in 865. One of the first dogmatists is Isidore of Seville, who died in 636; his writings are of grammatical, historical, archaeological, dogmatic, moral, and ascetic content and encompass all that could be known in that time. He brings the classical and patristic learning over to his folk. He is not original, but gives extracts from heathen and Christian works. In his Originum sive etymologiarum libri XX , he speaks in book 6 about the Scripture, in book 7 about God, the angels, prophets, apostles, clergy, believers, in book 8 about the church, in book 9 about the folks.
His Libri III Sententiarum sive de summo bono is chiefly excerpted from Augustine and Gregory and was an example for the medieval collectors of sentences. Book I handles God, creation, time, world, sin, angel, man, soul, Christ, Holy Ghost, church, heresy, law, Scripture, Old and New Covenant, prayer, baptism, martyrdom, wonders, antichrist, world's end; books II and III are of ethical content. It is a compendium that hands over the theological wealth of the former ages to the Germanic folk. But it did not come to an independent working-out.
Charlemagne sought indeed with might to bring in the old culture into the Frankish kingdom. And truly, in the Carolingian period there was no lack of men of great learning, but diligent gathering and unindependent reproducing remain yet the marks of the period, which begins with the 7th century and ends first with the Crusades. Augustine and Gregory were the authorities.
The foremost among these Carolingian theologians was Alcuin, who died in 804, who fought the adoptionism of Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel in Liber contra haeresin Felicis , Libri VII contra Felicem , and Libri IV adversus Elipandum , and further wrote De fide sanctae et individuae Trinitatis Libri III , De Trinitate ad Fredegisum quaestiones , and Libellus de processione Spiritus Sancti . In all these works Alcuin shows his closeness with the works of the church fathers; he refutes the adoptionist errors with the same proofs that earlier against Nestorianism, for example, were used by Cyril.
The study of Augustine led Gottschalk in the 9th century to confess the twofold predestination; he found backing from Prudentius of Troyes, Remigius of Lyon, Ratramnus, Lupus of Ferrières, and others, but was at the same time fiercely fought by Rabanus, Hincmar, Erigena. The filioque came from Spain into the Frankish kingdom and was taken up in the creed. Already at the synod of Gentilly in 767 one had the belief that it was symbolic. It was defended with skill by Charles's theologians, Alcuin in De processione Spiritus Sancti , Theodulf of Orleans in De Spiritu Sancto . The synod at Aachen in 809 decided that the filioque belonged in the creed.
Image-worship found opposition in the Frankish kingdom; the 7th ecumenical synod, which demanded service and adoration of images, was not acknowledged, but after the 9th century the opposition slowly fell silent. And lastly, in the Carolingian period the mass was further unfolded, chiefly by Paschasius Radbertus in Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini (831), who was fought by Rabanus and Ratramnus. Radbertus is also known as writer of a compendium De fide, spe et caritate , which gathers faith-truths into a certain whole.
Above all, in this period still deserves to be named John Scotus Erigena, who died around 891, though he belongs more at home in philosophy than in theology. He is not the father of scholasticism but of speculative theology. He joins himself to the gnosis of Origen and the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius. His ground-thought is the Neoplatonic emanation teaching.
In his work De divisione naturae he says first that theology and philosophy are truly one. The right reason and the true authority do not fight. Faith has its truth, as affirmative theology, in Scripture and tradition, but reason, as negative theology, strips this truth of its wrappings and tracks out the idea thereof. Thus he changes the dogmatic truth into a cosmic and theogonic process. All being he gathers under one thought, nature, which in 4 steps of being, through the Logos, shows itself in the world of appearing and returns again to God.
11. After the tenth hundred-year, the dark age, a new life awakens everywhere. From the cloister at Cluny goes forth a godly reform, which carries on in the begging orders of the twelfth hundred-year. Godliness is taken up as a following and copying of the life of Jesus, above all in his last suffering-week. The crusades bring new thoughts and widen the sight-circle. The might of the Popes grows and sets nothing less than world-lordship as its ideal. Knowledge gets in the high schools its own breeding-ground and steps forth in god-lore as scholastics. God-lore scholastic marks, in sundering from the god-lore positive, which sets forth the dogmas in straightforward, set-wise shape, that the dogmatic stuff is worked through after a knowledge-wise method, as used in the schools. Scholastics is in itself nothing other than knowledge-wise god-lore. It begins where the god-lore positive ends. This is happy when it has spoken out and proven the dogmas. But the god-lore scholastic goes out from those dogmas as its first-beginnings, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 2 and 8, and seeks from there by reasoning to trace the together-hang of the dogmas, to delve deeper into the knowing of the opened truth, and to ward it against all with-striving. In the Middle Ages, however, the scholastics got through sundry happenings a sunder kind, that has brought it into ill repute.
First, it was in the Middle Ages with well-spring study very sorrowfully set. The beholding was in lore not gainsaid as first-beginning of knowing, but in deed one laid oneself simply by the over-leaving and deemed that the earlier kin-ships had already enoughly put beholding to work and fully laid it down in the books. Body-lore, healing-art, soul-lore and so on, all was studied from books. In god-lore the stuff lay fully before eyes in the Writ, but above all in the over-leaving, in the church-fathers, gatherings and so on. The scholastics stood there not judging and doubt-wise, but child-like believing over against it. Belief was the out-going-point of the scholastics. One sought the dogmatic stuff in the Writ and the over-leaving and took it on without any judging. Of the Writ came thereby often not much to right. Hebrew and Greek one knew not. Word-lore-wise and tale-wise sense lacked almost wholly. One drew the stuff above all from the church-fathers, from Augustine, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, Isidore, False-Dionysius, Damascene and Boethius.
Thereto came now in the second stead, that the thinking through the lore-wise writings of Aristotle little by little was trained, to work this dogmatic stuff speech-wise and together-wise. First there were from Aristotle only the two lore-wise writings on kinds and on out-legging in Latin over-setting, besides the in-leading of Porphyry on the kinds, and sundry out-layings above all of Boethius known; from Plato one had only a deal of the Timaeus in over-setting and further hangings-on by Augustine, false-Dionysius and others. The knowledge outside god-lore was sundered in the three-way and four-way and was held in the all-round work of Cassiodorus. Only since the middle of the twelfth hundred-year became the Tool of Aristotle fully known and in the beginning of the thirteenth hundred-year also his other works over over-body-lore, body-lore, soul-lore and right-living.
From this wise-lore one borrowed the speech-wise method, but further also sundry riddles and askings over the with-holding of belief and rede, god-lore and wise-lore, over the realness of the all-manner thoughts, over the own-ships of God, the wonders, the shaping from everness, the soul and so on. Aristotle became forerunner of Christ in natural things, even as John the Dipper in free gifts. All kinds of world-shaping, nature-wise, soul-wise, wise-lore stuff was thereby taken up in the dogmatics. The dogmatics was no more a belief-lore but became a together of wise-lore, an all-round of knowledge, wherein sundry wise-lore stuff was taken up but wherein the godliness often came short.
And at last the whole this scholastic together was set forth in a shape, that the longer the more to earnest bedenkings gave rise. Not only was the stuff so speech-wise worked, so hair-fine out-plucked and so law-wise handled, that the together-hang with the godly life of the gathering was wholly broken; with liking one held oneself busy with all kinds of sharp-witted askings over angels and devils, heaven and hell and so on. But the asking shape, wherein all was poured, furthered the twi-doubt and let auctoritas and ratio often wholly asunder go and foe-like over against each other stand. Many times seems the sake of a dogma wholly lost; but a single call on a text, on a church-father makes all again good. The in-druck stays however, that it with the dogma hopeless by stands. The tongue was in the long not fit, to gladden with the in-hold of the together. The wild Latin, that one wrote was after the mark of Paulsen well a be-witness, that one self-standing thought and free shaped the words, that one for his think-beelds had need of, but could yet not enough, so soon as the sense for the olden, the straightforward fair again somewhat awakened.
12. Scholasticism. Scholasticism unfolds in three periods: an old age, a middle age, and a new age. It begins with Anselm. He still lives in the simple trust that belief can be raised to knowledge, and he seeks to prove this for the being of God in his Monologium, and for the becoming-man and atonement in his Cur Deus homo. He does it not yet in the Aristotelian-scholastic form, but more in the manner of Plato's dialogues; yet scholastic thinking takes its start with him.
Lombard gave in his four books of Sentences not just single treatises, as Anselm did, but a full handbook of teachings on God and on right living. He supplied the groundwork for scholastic theology, and he himself already makes broad use of wisdom-lore to make clear and uphold the truth.
Alexander of Hales wrote a Summa of all theology, which is truly a commentary on Lombard's work; but while Lombard reasons straight through a subject to its end, Hales clothes his thoughts in a strict reasoning form, using syllogisms. With that, the scholastic way was set for good.
It did not go without strife. Many had qualms against using Aristotle in theology. There always remained followers of Plato, who deemed him much more in keeping with church teaching. John of Salisbury, Gerhoch, Walter of St. Victor, Peter Cantor, Alan of Lille, William of Auvergne, and others warned of the dangers of wisdom-lore; and Abelard seemed a frightful warning.
But the scholastic way, backed by renowned men, gained ground. Soon Aristotle's wisdom-lore, though changed here and there, was deemed the best upholding of church teaching. The teachings on God were most fully worked out in this way by Albert the Great (died 1280), Thomas Aquinas (died 1274), and Bonaventure (died 1274). All three wrote a commentary on Lombard's work, and many followed them later. Fleury in his day already counted 244.
Besides, Albert wrote a Summa theologiae (unfinished) and a Summa on created things; Thomas a Summa theologiae (unfinished) and a Summa on the truth of the catholic faith against the heathen; Bonaventure a Breviloquium.
All three brought scholasticism into high honor, secured for theology an honored place among the learnings, and with outstanding thinking-strength handled the deepest riddles. But scholasticism could not stay at that height.
With Duns Scotus (died 1308), trust is already shaken. He spurns name-lore (nominalism), but fights Thomas wherever he dares and can. The Franciscan de Rada (died 1608) later tallied in his Theological Controversies between Thomas and Scotus no fewer than 86 points of strife. The foremost were those on the knowability of God, the differences in God's traits, birth-sin, Christ's merits, and so on, and above all the spotless conceiving of Mary.
Scotus is still a real-lore man (realist), but he is also doubting and sets theology and wisdom-lore side by side. Wisdom-lore does not reach God; theology rests only on sway (authority), on unveiling. But above all, name-lore brought scholasticism to decay; it had already risen with Roscelin, Berengar, but gained ground mainly in the 14th and 15th yearhundreds.
Peter Aureol (died 1321), writer of a commentary on Lombard and of Quodlibeta, said that the all-things (universals) do not truly dwell in things, but are only thoughts; the real is always single.
William Durand of St. Pourçain (died 1332) denied the all-things and spurned the learning-like mark of theology; it is no oneness, it cannot show the truth of teachings on God nor overthrow the grounds against them.
William of Ockham (died 1349), who denied the pope all might over worldly kings, upheld them in their stand against the pope but also sought shelter from him in turn, fell upon both Thomas's school and Scotus's. He took delight in showing theology's unsureness; God's being, oneness, all-might, the world's end-likeness, the soul's un-body-likeness, the need for unveiling, and so on—all unprovable. All is only because God wills it so. There are no grounds of wit (reason). God could become man, but he could also become a stone. Plato-lore and Augustine-lore fade from theology. All becomes whim. Theology sinks into doubt-lore (skepticism).
Though in the schools real-lore mostly held sway, it had no more shaping strength; the form grew stiffer, the tongue more outlandish, the way more cunning; sharpness replaced depth, show took the place of learning-earnestness; teachings on God fell into an endless wrangle.
Besides, Ockham's name-lore gained followers: Adam Goddam, Armand de Beauvoir, Robert Holcot—from whom the saying may stem that something can be true in theology and false in wisdom-lore—John Buridan, Peter of Ailly, and Gabriel Biel (died 1495), the last scholastic.
Alsted, Scholastic Didactic Theology. Voetius, Disputations I. Ueberweg, Outline of the History of Wisdom-lore, Volume II. Windelband, History of Wisdom-lore. Ritter, History of Wisdom-lore, Volumes VII-VIII. Erdman, Outline of the History of Wisdom-lore I. Bach, History of Teachings in the Middle Ages, 2 volumes. Schwane, History of Teachings in the Middle Time. Harnack, History of Teachings III, and other works on teaching-history by Hagenbach, Thomasius, Seeberg, Nitzsch, and so on. Prantl, History of Logic, Volumes II-IV. Siebeck, History of Soul-lore, 2nd Part. Reuter, History of Godly Awakening in the Middle Ages, 2 volumes. Werner, The Scholastics of the Later Middle Ages, 3 volumes. Stöckl, History of Wisdom-lore in the Middle Ages, 3 volumes. Hauréau, History of Scholastic Wisdom-lore, 2nd edition. Rousselot, Studies on Wisdom-lore of the Middle Ages. Pierson, History of Roman Catholicism, 3rd part. The same, On Name-lore and Real-lore. Nitzsch, article Scholastic Theology in Herzog's 2nd edition. Von Eicken, History of the Middle Age Worldview. Kaulich, History of Scholastic Wisdom-lore. Löwe, The Fight between Name-lore and Real-lore in the Middle Ages, its Rise and Course. Maywald, The Teaching of the Double Truth, and so on.
13. A Special Form of Scholasticism. A special form of scholasticism was mysticism, which was of old deemed a foe to scholasticism but is now better understood in its kind and character. The mystics never fought against scholastic theology; men like Hugo and Richard of St. Victor handled sundry parts of theology in their writings after the same way as Lombard, and on the other hand, scholastics such as Hales, Albert, Thomas, and Bonaventure also left behind many mystical writings. Mysticism is even taken up into scholastic theology, as in Thomas's Summa Theologica II, 2 qu. 179 and following. Thus there is no speech of strife or enmity.
Moreover, the church and theology at all times have marked the difference between true and false mysticism; Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Erigena, Almarich, Eckhart, Molinos, Böhme, and suchlike have ever been condemned, but the writings of pseudo-Dionysius, Albert, Bonaventure, and others have always been praised and upheld by the Roman Church. Therefore there must be a sundering between orthodox and pantheistic mysticism. The first stood not as a foe against scholasticism, but was sundered from it.
First in method: scholasticism followed the breaking-down way of Aristotle and sought by reasoning to climb from finite things to God; mysticism followed the building-up way of Plato and sought from the higher beholding, which the soul reached by grace, to gain insight into the truths of faith.
In beginning: scholasticism arose chiefly through the knowing of Aristotle's writings, and had as its mark the sentences of Lombard; mysticism arose chiefly through the knowing of the works of pseudo-Dionysius, which found way into the West through Erigena's rendering.
In being: scholasticism is the striving, with the help of wisdom-lore, to win learned knowledge of the opened truth; mystical theology had as its mark the mystical fellowship with God, which was given to some chosen ones by special grace, and set forth how and by what path the soul could come thereto, and what light from thence, from that fellowship with God, could be shed over the truths of faith.
Mysticism in this wise had at all times its spokesmen in the Christian church, and is found in greater or lesser measure in all church fathers; it hangs closely together with the monkish ideal; it goes out from the thought that there is not only a knowledge of God through the understanding, but also an undergoing, a finding, a fellowship with God through the heart. In the Middle Ages it bound itself chiefly to Augustine, who first plumbed the depth of the soul's life and gave it in unmatched speech, and to pseudo-Dionysius, who marked the steps and landmarks along which the soul could climb from the finite to the boundless God. Through workaday trainings, such as self-denial, cleansing, self-torment, world-flight, and the like, or also through thoughtful musing, such as hearing, reading, prayer, thinking, weighing, brooding, the soul can already here on earth come to a state of beholding or enjoying God. Thus is mysticism understood and set forth in sundry works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas, Gerson, and Thomas à Kempis.
But it lay near at hand that mysticism, thus laying weight on beholding, came to scorn knowledge; in the enjoying of the heart, the clearness of awareness and the worth of knowledge went to loss; it came oftentimes under the sway of Neoplatonism and took on, for instance in Eckhart who died in 1327 and others, a pantheistic bent.
For further reading: W. Preger, History of German Mysticism in the Middle Ages , 2 vols. Görres, Christian Mysticism , 2nd ed., 5 vols. Harnack, History of Dogma III. Article on Mysticism in Herzog's encyclopedia. The histories of dogma and philosophy named above with the scholastics, besides writings on Tauler, Eckhart, and others. Kleutgen, Theology of Former Times IV. Further writings in Kihn, Encyclopedia and Method of Theology .
14. However, in the Middle Ages there lacked not protests against the way wherein church and theology were unfolding. Sundry sects arose therein, Cathars, Albigenses, the followers of Amalric of Bena, David of Dinant, Ortlieb, the sect of the free spirit, and so forth, and renewed the old Manichaean and Gnostic errors. Reuter, History of Religious Enlightenment in the Middle Ages, Berlin 1875-77. L. Flathe, History of Heretics in the Middle Ages, 3 vols., Stuttgart 1845. Kurtz, Textbook of Church History. Doellinger, Contributions to the History of Sects in the Middle Ages, 2 parts, Munich, Beck, 1890. The Waldensians came into conflict with Rome through their teaching of the freedom of preaching. Comba, article in Herzog. Haupt, Waldensianism and Inquisition in Southeastern Germany, Freiburg, Mohr, 1890. In many circles there was a return to Augustine and Paul. Bradwardine, died 1349, in a writing defended the cause of God against Pelagius as a bold defender of God's grace. Lechler, On Thomas Bradwardine, a Commentary, Leipzig 1863, and article in Herzog. Wyclif, died 1384, was dependent on him, as Hus, died 1415, in turn on Wyclif. Wyclif's works have been published since 1882 by the Wyclif Society in London. His teaching is best known from his Summa in 12 books, abridged and systematically summarized in his Trialogus, edited by Lechler, from his treatise On Christ and His Adversary Antichrist, edited by Buddensieg, and from his tractate On the Church, edited by Loserth. That Hus was wholly dependent on Wyclif has been shown by Loserth, Hus and Wyclif, Prague and Leipzig 1884. Even within the church many arose who desired a reformation in head and members. Peter d'Ailly, died 1425, Gerson, died 1429, Nicholas of Clémanges, died 1414, Nicholas Cusanus, died 1464, and others defended the episcopal system; and the reformatory councils of Pisa 1409, Constance 1414, and Basel 1431 spoke out in that spirit. The council at Constance in the 4th and 5th sessions declared that an ecumenical council has its authority immediately from Christ and that the pope is also subject thereto. But all these reformations had little success. They were criticisms of the existing from the same principle. Harnack, History of Dogma III.
And when in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation arose, the Roman Church soon took position against it. Before the Council of Trent, the foremost theologians were Cajetan, died 1534, Dr. Eck, died 1543, Cochlaeus, died 1552, Sadolet, died 1547, and others. They distinguish themselves still thereby that they boldly acknowledge the defects of the church. Their writings are mostly polemical against the Reformers. The most noteworthy is Dr. Eck's Enchiridion of All Commonplaces against Luther and Other Enemies of the Church, 1525, which was reprinted 46 times up to 1576. Hugo Laemmer, The Pre-Tridentine Catholic Theology of the Reformation Age, Berlin 1858. Theology was, especially through the mockery of the Humanists, in disrepute; on the Middle Ages one looked back as a time of Gothic barbarism; and even the pious desired more simplicity and truth, more practical Christianity. It required some courage for the Roman theologians and also some time was needed to come to reflection and to take up again the thread of scholasticism. The Council of Trent indeed took various decisions for reformation, but chose as strongly as possible party against the Protestant Reformation. The dogmas over which there was dispute with the Reformation, such as the doctrine of tradition, sin, free will, justification, the sacraments, were formulated sharply and clearly in the Roman sense; but the mutual differences were left to rest. The question of pope and council, of Thomism and Scotism, and so forth, was not discussed or handled as cautiously as possible. Harnack, History of Dogma III. Herzog 16, and the literature cited there. On the occasion when at Trent they deliberated about holding lectures on Holy Scripture in all monasteries, a Benedictine abbot proposed to add thereto a prohibition of scholasticism. But the Dominican Soto took the word, refuted the objections, praised the usefulness of scholasticism, and found general approval. Kleutgen, Theology of the Former Time IV.
Gradually scholasticism was restored to its honor, but with modification. Melchior Canus, died 1560, devotes in his work On the Theological Places a whole book to the defense of scholasticism, book VIII: On the Authority of the Scholastic Doctors, and admits that many scholastics have been guilty of various faults; he condemns those defects but decidedly defends the scholastic method. It was simplified and stripped of exaggeration, but otherwise retained. A second change consisted herein, that Lombard more and more made way for Thomas. In the Middle Ages the Sentences of Lombard had been the dogmatic handbook; and even after the Reformation, Soto, died 1560, Maldonatus, died 1583, Estius, died 1608, and others still wrote commentaries on that work. But the famous Cajetan delivered a commentary on the Summa of Thomas. And Francis Vittoria, died 1566, Jerome Perez, died 1556, Bartholomew of Torres, died 1558, and others followed his example. Toward the end of the 16th century, Lombard was replaced in most schools by Thomas; he was purer, more extensive, more methodical, and penetrated deeper into the dogmas than Lombard.
Furthermore, this was yet a distinction between the old and the new scholasticism, that the latter bound itself much more closely with positive theology. In the Middle Ages positive dogmatics, that is, the proof of truth from Scripture and tradition, was almost wholly neglected; but now this was taken up into dogmatics and worked out with great learning. Canus wrote a separate work on the sources of proof, which he calls theological places; by all neo-scholastics, Gregory of Valencia, Suarez, Bannez, Diego Ruiz, and so forth, the study of Scripture and tradition is diligently pursued. Exegesis, church history, patristics, archaeology, and so forth become their own independent sciences. Theology is still something other and more than dogmatics. And because finally the new scholastics did not enjoy that rest as the theologians in the Middle Ages, but were attacked from all sides and had to defend the Roman doctrine on all points, there remained no place and no time for subtle questions and ingenious distinctions; form, method, language, expression became simpler; the works of Canisius, Canus, Petavius, Bellarmine, and so forth are written in pure Latin and in a pleasant style, and are in this respect favorably distinguished from the works of the medieval theologians. But what also was changed and improved, the spirit remained the same. Rome has not denied itself and has learned nothing even through the Reformation. Even the proper character of the Roman doctrine has come to light more clearly after and through the Reformation. Pelagianism and Curialism have developed further after the Council of Trent and have achieved a complete victory. Compare for the history of Roman theology after Trent: Walch, Select Theological Library I. Pfaff, Introduction to the History of Theological Literature, 1724. M. Bruehl, History of Catholic Literature in Germany from the 17th Century, 2nd ed., Vienna 1861. H. Hurter, Nomenclator of Recent Catholic Theological Literature, 4 vols., Innsbruck 1871-83. Karl Werner, History of Apologetic and Polemical Literature of Christian Theology, 5 vols., Schaffhausen 1861-67. Idem, History of Catholic Theology in Germany from the Council of Trent to the Present, Munich 1866, 2nd ed. 1889. Idem, The Holy Thomas Aquinas, 3 vols., Regensburg 1858-59. Vol. I Life and Writings. Vol. II Teaching. Vol. III History of Thomism. Idem, Francis Suarez and the Scholasticism of the Last Centuries, 2 vols., Regensburg 1861, 62. Schwane, History of Dogma in Modern Times, Freiburg 1890. A. Stoeckl, History of Philosophy in the Middle Ages III 1866. Herzog 15. Harnack, History of Dogma III.
15. The Neo-Scholastic Theology. The neo-scholastic theology sprang up in Spain and was chiefly wrought at the high schools of Salamanca, Alcala (Complutum), and Coimbra. Franz de Vittoria (1480-1566), born in Vittoria in Cantabria, belonged to the Dominicans and was sent by his order to Paris to give himself to the study of theology. There he delved chiefly into Thomas. Having come back to Spain, he became a high teacher at Salamanca and spread there the teaching of Aquinas, on whose Summa he also wrote a commentary. Among his learners belonged the most renowned god-learned men of Spain: Melchior Canus (died 1560), Loci theologici (1563); Dominicus Soto (died 1560), Commentaries on the Fourth Book of the Sentences (1557-60) and De natura et gratia libri III (1547) against the Scotist Catharinus; Barthol. Medina, Exposition on I-II of Thomas (1576).
The Thomistic theology was chiefly wrought by the order of the Dominicans, to whom, besides those named above, also belonged: Petrus de Soto, teacher at Dillingen (died 1563), Institutiones christianae (1548), Methodus confessionis (1553), Compendium doctrinae catholicae (1556), Defensio catholicae confessionis (1557) against Brenz; Dom. Bannez, Commentaries on I of Thomas , 2 tomes (1584, 1588); Didacus Alvarez, De auxiliis gratiae divinae et humani arbitrii viribus et libertate etc. (Lyon, 1611), De incarnatione verbi divini (Lyon, 1614); Vincentius Contenson, Theologia mentis et cordis , 2 tomes (Cologne, 1687); J. Baptista Gonetus (died 1681), Clypeus theologiae thomisticae (1659-69), Dissertationes theologicae de probabilitate casuistarum ; Natalis Alexander, Theologia dogmatica et moralis secundum ordinem catechismi Concilii Tridentini (Paris, 1703); Billuart (died 1757), Summa Sancti Thomae hodiernis academiarum moribus accommodata , 19 tomes (Liège, 1747-59), new printing by Palmé in Paris in 8 volumes; and further still Fr. de Sylvestris, Joh. Viguerius, Joh. Gonsalez, Martin Ledesma, Joh. Vincentius, Balt. Navarretus, Raphael Ripa, Franz and Dominicus Perez, Gazzaniga (died 1799), Praelectiones theologicae (Bologna, 1790), and others.
To the Dominicans join the Carmelites, of whom chiefly renowned is the Salmanticensis collegii Carmelitarum discalceatorum cursus theologicus in D. Thomam , 10 volumes (Lyon, 1679 and following). But the Scotistic theology also found in the new tide still followers and upholding, by Ambrosius Catharinus (died 1553), Fr. Lychetus, Commentaries on Books I, II, III of the Sentences of Scotus (Venice, 1589); Frassenius (died 1711), Scotus Academicus , 4 tomes (Paris, 1662-77); Dupasquier (died 1718), Summa theologiae scotisticae ; Barth. Durandus, Clypeus Scoticae doctrinae ; Thomas van Charmes, Theologia universa ; and further by Brancatus, Mastrius, Faber (died 1630), Bonaventura Bellutus (died 1676), Lukas Wadding (died 1657), out-giver of Scotus’ works at Lyon (1639) and following, and others.
The Franciscan de Rada, bishop of Trani (died 1608), gave in his work already named above an overview of the strifes between the Thomists and the Scotists.
However, scholastic theology was chiefly wrought by the Jesuits, who more than any other order have bestowed their help to its awakening and thriving. In a methodical way and with outstanding skill they took the Counter-Reformation in hand. As foes in strife against the teaching of the Protestants, among them stood forth Possevinus (d. 1611); Bellarmine (d. 1621), Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith against the Heretics of This Time , Ingolstadt 1581. Gretser, Complete Works in 17 Volumes , Regensburg 1734 and following. Becanus, Manual of Controversies . The most renowned theologians from the order of the Jesuits are Peter Canisius (d. 1597), Sum of Christian Doctrine and Instruction 1554, issued 400 times in 130 years, and a smaller catechism: Institutions of Christian Piety 1566. Francis Toletus (d. 1596), On the Summa of St. Thomas in 4 volumes, newly issued at Rome 1869. John Maldonatus, learner of Toletus and Soto at Salamanca (d. 1583), renowned expounder of Scripture, and writer of many dogmatic treatises, on the sacraments, on free will, on grace, and so forth. Leonard Lessius, teacher at Leuven (d. 1623), Disputations on Grace, Divine Decrees, Freedom of Will, and God's Conditional Foreknowledge Antwerp 1610. On the Perfections of God in 14 Books , Antwerp 1620. Theology 1651 and so on. Louis Molina, teacher at Evora, later at Madrid (d. 1600), The Harmony of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Reprobation 1588, on justice and law, and commentary on the first part of Thomas. Gregory de Valentia, teacher at Dillingen, Ingolstadt, Rome (d. 1603), Analysis of the Catholic Faith 1585. Theological Commentaries on the Summa of St. Thomas in Four Volumes 1602. Martin Becanus, teacher at Mainz (d. 1624). Manual of Controversies and Scholastic Theology , 3 parts 1612-1622. Roderick Arriaga, teacher in Valladolid, Salamanca, Prague (d. 1667), Theological Disputations in 8 volumes 1643 and following. Francis Suarez (d. 1617), Commentaries and Disputations on Thomas in five volumes, and many treatises on grace and so forth; a short excerpt from his theology is The Theology of the Reverend Father Francis Suarez S.J., Sum or Compendium by Author T. Noel S.J. in Two Volumes, Paris, Migne 1858. Gabriel Vasquez (d. 1604), Commentaries on the Summa of St. Thomas , Ingolstadt 7 volumes 1609 and following; Didacus Ruiz de Montoya (d. 1632), Commentaries on Various Places of Thomas , Scholastic Theology 1630. Key to Theology 1634; Antoine, Universal Speculative and Dogmatic Theology , Paris 1713; Denis Petavius (d. 1652), On Theological Dogmas , 5 volumes, unfinished Paris 1644; and further still Melchior de Castro, Lusitanus, Zunniga, Tannez, Hurtado, Ripalda (d. 1648), Mendoza, Lugo (d. 1660), Arriaga, Gotti (d. 1742), Zaccaria (d. 1795), and others. A separate naming is yet deserved by the Theologia Wirceburgensis , written by the Würzburg teachers S.J., dogmatic, polemic, scholastic, and moral, 14 volumes Würzburg 1766-1771, new edition in 10 volumes Paris 1880.
The Jesuits for the most part followed Thomas, but because of their Pelagianism they departed from him in the teaching on sin, the free will, and grace. This became the cause of a long-lasting strife. It began with Baius, professor at Louvain, who died in 1589, who set forth the teaching of Augustine on sin and the bondage of the will, and also rejected the immaculate conception of Mary. Already in 1560 various theses of Baius were rejected by the Sorbonne, and Pope Pius V condemned 79 propositions of Baius in the bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus of 1567. Baius recanted. But therewith the strife was not ended. It flared up anew in 1588 through the work of Molina, Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis . The Thomists, mostly Dominicans, attacked this work, especially through one of their most famous representatives, Bañez, who died in 1604, who taught a physical predetermination.
Thomists (Bañez, Sylvester, Alvarez, Lemos, Reginald, and others), respectively Augustinians (Noris, who died in 1704; Laurence Berti, who died in 1766; Bertieri) and Jesuits, Molinists or Congruists (Bellarmine) stood over against each other for many years. A multitude of controversial writings on sin, free will, and grace saw the light.
The commission appointed in Rome was dissolved in 1607 without taking a decision; and the pope said that he would later pronounce judgment and that in the meantime one party might not condemn the other as heretical. In 1640, when the work Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, appeared, the spark was again thrown into the powder. The strife lasted into the eighteenth century. The men of Port-Royal stood on the side of Jansenius: Arnauld, who died in 1694; Pascal, who died in 1662; Nicole, who died in 1695; Sacy, who died in 1684; Tillemont, who died in 1698; Quesnel, who died in 1719. But learning and eloquence availed not. In various bulls of 1653, 1656, 1664, 1705, and 1713, Jansenism—and therein Augustine, and even Paul—was condemned, and later the bull Unigenitus of 1713 was repeatedly confirmed.
And just as in dogmatics Pelagianism triumphed, so in ethics Probabilism and in ecclesiology Curialism or the Papal system gained the victory.
16. But at the beginning of the 17th century, the flowering time of neoscholasticism was past. Throughout all Europe, the reason-worshipping spirit arose. The philosophy of Bacon and Descartes thrust aside that of Aristotle. Even theologians who took up the scholastic teachings deemed that another way was needful; such as Bossuet, who died in 1704, the renowned upholder of the Gallican order and foe of the Protestants, Exposition de la doctrine de l’église cath. sur les matières de controverse 1671, Histoire des variations des églises protest. 2 vols. Paris, 1688. Fénélon, who died in 1715, Thomassinus, who died in 1695, Dogmata theol. The historical and critical studies, which were chiefly pursued in France, drove back the true theology. Many learned Maurists and Oratorians even fell into unbelief. In the schools, scholasticism yet ruled long into the deep of the 18th century. Also, the sundry paths of Thomists, for example, Peri, Quaest. theol. 5 vols. 1719-32, Scotists, for example, Krisper, Theol. scolae scotisticae , 4 tomes 1728-48, Molinists, for example, Anton Erber, Theol. specul. tractatus octo 1787, and Augustinians, for example, Amort, Theol. eclectica moralis et scholastica , 23 tomes, Augsburg, 1752 and following, lasted side by side. But scholasticism yet drew back more and more into the schools. Other deistic, naturalistic fellowships arose, gained the upper word, and wielded sway over Roman theology. The scholastic philosophy was set aside in France by Descartes, in Germany by Leibniz-Wolff. In Austria, in 1752 the peripatetic teaching was forbidden, and in 1759 the guidance of theological and philosophical studies was taken from the Jesuits. The order was lifted up in 1773 by Clemens XIV. The Gallican order was upheld in 1763 by Nic. van Hontheim, suffragan bishop of Trier, in a work De statu ecclesiae et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis , and brought in as church law by Joseph II in 1781. The confessional differences were forgotten; in stead of the strife against the Protestants comes that against free-thinkers, unbelievers, and the like, by Klüpfel, Fahrman, Stattler, Storchenau, Burkhauser. Theology comes wholly under the sway of the shifting philosophy. The Enlightenment had its spokesman in Ad. Weishaupt, professor at Ingolstadt, founder of the order of Illuminati. Kant’s sway is marked in Ildefons Schwarz, Peutinger, Zimmer. Jacobi’s philosophy found followers in J. Salat and Cajetan Weiller. Thanner stood under the sway of Schelling. The foremost theologian who in the 18th century stood firm against all errors was Alphonsus of Liguori, who died in 1787, taken up by Pius IX in 1871 among the doctors of the church.
17. Also in this nineteenth hundredyear, rationalism at first abode ruling in many Roman rings. There was in Germany a great party that wished to bring the setup and teaching of the Roman church into agreement with the calls of the newer tide, Dalberg died 1817, Wessenberg died 1860, Werkmeister and others. Hermes, teacher at Bonn died 1831, Introduction to Christian Catholic Theology 1819, 1829, Christian Catholic Dogmatics 1834, 1836, sought to rest the revelation, the authority on reasonable grounds, and gave to reason in the judging of what is revelation the same rights as the Wolffian wisdom-lore had done. At first Hermes had many followers, Achterfeldt, who gave out his dogmatics, Braun, von Droste-Hülshoff, teacher in the laws at Bonn, Spiegel, archbishop of Cologne; but when Pope Gregory XVI on 26 September 1835 doomed the Hermesianism, his sway fell. Anton Günther died 1863 in Vienna, Foreschool to Speculative Theology 1828, Peregrinus' Guestmeal 1830 and so forth, joined himself to Hegel's stance, that wisdom-lore and speculative god-lore are truly one. There is no twofold truth and sureness. But believing is the beginning and underlay of all knowing, and all belief, even in the revelation, can pass over into knowing and be raised to clearness. Also Günther had many followers, Pabst, Merten, Veith, Gaugauf, Baltzer, Knoodt; but he was doomed in 1857. Franz von Baader died 1841, Lectures on Speculative Dogmatics , Collected Writings , Leipzig 1850-57 in 15 parts, under sway of Böhme and Schelling, sought healing not in backturning, but in new unfolding of the old, in renewing of the dogmas, and wished along theosophical ways to raise believing to knowing. His followers were Schaden, Lutterbeck, Hoffmann, Hamberger, Sengler, Schlüter, but Baader was censored for his fighting of the primacy. J. Frohschammer, Introduction to Philosophy and Outline of Metaphysics 1858 and so on, cast off the scholastic and the idealistic wisdom-lore, and sought to build up metaphysics, theology not on the withdrawn reason but on the concreet, allgemeen, historical deed of the God-awareness in mankind. Theology and wisdom-lore thus fall together for him in inhold; they differ only in method; the natural and the overnatural are not strictly to be sundered. Pius IX doomed this wisdom-lore in a writ to the archbishop at Munich 11 December 1862. His works were placed on the index, he himself in 1863 withheld. Frohschammer however did not underlay himself and abode in many writings fighting for the freedom of lore and against the claims of the pope. So by Rome on one side the unfetteredness of lore was fought, but on the other side yet also in her betokened freedom acknowledged. After the overthrow came in France the traditionalism up, namely the teaching, that the higher metaphysical truths are not to be found by reason, but only gotten from the revelation, which from the first man onward in mankind by tradition is forthborne and in the tongue is kept. This theory was with skill warded by de Bonald, Philosophical Researches on the First Objects of Moral Knowings , Paris 1817, Lamennais, Essay on Indifference in Matter of Religion , Paris 1817, and Bautain, On the Teaching of Philosophy in France in the 19th Century , 1833, Philosophy of Christianity , 1835. But it could find no grace at Rome. Bautain undersigned in 1840 six theses that were laid before him, and called back his teaching. And even so was the ontologism of Gerdil died 1802, Gioberti died 1852, Rosmini died 1855, Gratry died 1872, Ubaghs and others cast off, which went back to the idealism of Malebranche and led off all higher truth from the straight beholding of God and of the ideas.
All these condemnations prove that Rome, after the rationalism of the former age, became more and more self-aware and came to an awakening. There has also been a revival of the Roman Church and theology after the revolution. Romanticism came to the good of Rome and wrought many converts: Winckelmann, Stolberg, Schlegel, Ad. Müller, Z. Werner, Schlosser, Haller, and so forth. In France there came a reaction against the revolution and unbelief through Chateaubriand (Génie du christianisme ), Joseph de Maistre (died 1821), Bonald, Lamennais. Puseyism or Tractarianism, which began under Pusey and Newman in 1833 at Oxford, led many to the Roman Church and strengthened the high-church, ritualizing, and romanizing direction in the Episcopal Church. The believing theology that arose in Germany at first joined itself in many points to Schleiermacher. His teaching on Scripture, regeneration, justification, and church held many elements that the Romans could wield to their own gain. And that indeed befell with skill and zeal by Görres, Baader, Phillips, Döllinger in Munich; Klee in Bonn; Möhler, Hirscher, Drey in Munich and Tübingen; Staudenmaier and Kuhn in Giessen, and so forth. The men of this direction were not yet wholly and fully to the heart of Rome and Jesuitism; they all still strove for mediation, they sought a reconciliation of faith and knowledge, they tried through the speculative method to prove the dogmas and were all too liberal toward the Protestants and made weighty concessions now and then. But they had outstanding spokesmen, and added much to the revival of Roman theology.
But nevertheless, in the long run, this conciliatory and mediatory direction did not suffice. Gradually the neo-scholastic direction arose. In 1814 the Jesuit order was restored, and its sway over the Papacy waxed ever greater; its might spread forth in all lands. The "freedom of knowledge" was withstood by it with all strength. All the aforesaid condemnings culminated in the renowned encyclical of 8 December 1864, and in the Vatican Council of 1870, wherein the unfailingness of the Pope was proclaimed. This neo-scholastic direction was chiefly upheld in Italy by the thinker Sanseverino, Philosophia Christiana , 7 vols. new ed. Naples 1878, and by the divine J. Perrone, Praelectiones Theologiae , 9 vols. 1838-43; in Germany by J. Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit , 5 parts 2nd ed., Münster 1867 and Philosophie der Vorzeit , 2 parts, Innsbruck 1878, and A. Stöckl in sundry works of wisdom-lore. The present Pope set his seal thereon on 4 August 1879, by commending the study of Thomas in his encyclical Aeterni Patris . And since then there hath been a mighty and widespread striving to restore the authority of Thomas in every realm of learning. Statecraft and law-lore, soul-lore and right-living, divinity and wisdom-lore are studied in his spirit. In the selfsame spirit was dogmatics handled by Franzelin, Scheeben, Heinrich, Bautz, and others; here in the land by G. M. Jansen, professor at Rijsenburg, Praelect. Theol. Fundam. Utrecht 1875-76, Theol. Dogm. Spec. 1877-79. See further writings with Kihn, Enc. u. Meth. der Theol. , Freiburg 1892.
18. For the History of Lutheran Dogmatics. For the history of Lutheran dogmatics, the following can serve as aids: Walch, Bibl. theol. selecta I 35 sq. Pfaff, Introductio in historiam theol. litterariam 1724 p. 204 sq. G. Frank, Gesch. der prot. Theol. , 3 Parts 1862-75. Dorner, Gesch. d. prot. Th. 1867. Gass, Gesch. der prot. Dogm. , 4 Parts 1854-67. Tholuck, Das kirchl. Leben im 17 Jahrh. 1861-2. Id. Das akad. Leben des 17 Jahrh. 1853-4, together forming the Vorgesch. des Ration. Id. Gesch. des Ration. , First Part, 1865. Id. Der Geist der luth. Theologen Wittenbergs im 17 Jahrh. 1852. Kahnis, Der innere Gang des deutschen Protest. , 2 Parts, Leipzig 1874. Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus , 3 Parts 1880-6. Harnack, Dogmengesch. III 691 f. Zöckler, Handbuch der theol. Wiss. , Supplement 144 f.
Luther was no systematic thinker; he left behind no dogmatics. Yet all the more was he an original, a creative spirit. He hath anew discovered the Christianity of Paul and Augustine, understood the Gospel once more as a glorious message of grace and forgiveness, and restored religion within religion. Thereby he hath become fruitful for all theology, and for the whole of dogmatics; even the ancient dogmas were taken up by him but enlivened with a new religious life. Th. Harnack, Luthers Theologie , 2 Parts, Erlangen 1862-66. J. Köstlin, Luthers Theologie , 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1883. Lommatzsch, Luthers Lehre vom eth. relig. Standp. , Berlin 1879.
Before the Lutheran Reformation had a confession, it already had a dogmatics in Melanchthon’s Loci of 1521, reissued by Augusti 1821, Plitt 1864, Bindseil in Corpus Reform. XXI p. 62. This work, arising from an exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, was practical, simple, soteriological, without any scholasticism, truly much more a confession than a dogmatics. In this work the German Reformation found its unity for a time.
But already in 1526 Melanchthon drew back somewhat from the confession of strict predestination, and soon he began to diverge from Luther on other points, especially concerning the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. This disagreement with Luther cometh out most clearly first in the new editions of the Loci of 1535 and 1543, then in the alteration of the Augsburg Confession in 1540 and 1542, and finally in the Leipzig Interim and the adiaphoristic strife thereby occasioned.
Now two parties stood over against each other. On one side the followers of Melanchthon, the Philippists, especially at the academies of Wittenberg and Leipzig, such as G. Major, Paul Eber, Joh. Pfeffinger, Victor Strigel † 1569, whose Loci Theologici arose from lectures on Melanchthon’s Loci and were published by Pezel in 4 parts 1582-5, Christ. Pezel † 1604, writer of Argumenta et objectiones de praecipuis articulis doctrinae christ. , Neost. 1580-89, Sohnius, Opera . Herb. 1609, and others. Cf. H. Heppe, Dogm. des deutschen Protest. im 16 Jahrh. 3 Vols. Gotha 1857.
On the other side stood the Gnesio-Lutherans, especially in Weimar and Jena, such as Nic. von Amsdorf † 1565, Matth. Flacius † 1575, writer of the Solida Confutatio et condemnatio praecipuarum sectarum and many other polemical writings, Joh. Wigand † 1587, Joh. Marbach † 1581, Joachim Westphal † 1574, who especially opposed Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, Tileman Heshusius † 1588, and others.
The manifold dogmatic disputes that arose in this first period among the Lutheran theologians—over the law with Agricola, over justification with Osiander, over Christ’s descent into hell with Aepinus, over the active obedience with Parsimonius, over the adiaphora, synergism, and crypto-Calvinism with Melanchthon and his fellows, over good works with Major, over original sin with Flacius—led finally to and were settled in the Formula of Concord of 1580. Frank, Die Theologie der Konkordienformel , 2 Parts, Erl. Deichert 1858-61. It was the work especially of Jakob Andreae † 1590 and of Mart. Chemnitz † 1586, the foremost Lutheran theologian in this century, writer of the Examen Concilii Tridentini , 4 tomes 1565-73, reissued by Preuss 1861, of a treatise de duabus naturis in Christo , etc. 1571, enlarged 1578, and of Loci Theol. , published after his death by Leyser in 1592.
19. When thus the Lutheran dogma was ready, it was handled and unfolded in the seventeenth hundredyear in a scholastic wise. Heerbrand died 1600, Compendium theologiae 1573, weightily enlarged 1578, and Hafenreffer, Loci Theologici certa methodo ac ratione in libros tres tributi 1603, already made the beginning therewith. The scholastic handling is then forthset by Leonhard Hutter died 1616, Compendium locorum theol. ex Scriptura sacra et libro Concordiae collectum 1610, Joh. Gerhard died 1637, Loci Communes theologici , 9 tomes 1610-22, best printing by Cotta 1762-87, reprinted Berlin-Leipzig 1864-75, and reaches her highpoint in Dannhauer died 1666, Hodosophia christiana , Hülsemann died 1635 Breviarium theologiae 1640, Calovius died 1686 Systema loc. theol. 1655-77, Quenstedt died 1688 Theologia didact-polem. 1685, Hollaz died 1713 Examen theol. acroamaticum 1707, König died 1664 Theol. positiva acroamatica 1664. The strength of this dogmatics lay in her objectivity. The dogmas lie ready, the subject yields itself to them without gainsaying; they are only outworked and applied through scripture-wisdom, dogma-lore, strife-wise, scholastic, and deedful ways. But already in the seventeenth hundredyear came there a backlash against this method. The Philippism was not overcome by the Formula of Concord; it kept its followers, foremost in Altdorf and Helmstadt. Georg Calixtus, high teacher at Helmstadt died 1656, came through his study of Aristotle, through his knowing of Roman and Reformed god-learned men, and through his loathing of the scholastic right-belief to a mild, peace-seeking god-lore. In his works de praecipuis religionis christianae capitibus 1613, epitome theologiae 1619, de immortalitate animae et resurr. mort. 1627, he stood up for a sharper sundering of wisdom-lore and god-lore, and went back to the first Christendom of the four foremost hundredyears, to seek in the common of all Christly confessions a oneness of Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman.
20. Calixtus naturally met with much strife in his syncretism. But the age of objectivity passed away. In the 18th century, the subject asserts itself; it reclaims its rights and rises in revolt against the might of the objective. In the Pietism from 1700 to 1730, subjective piety becomes the starting point, and the center of gravity is shifted from the object to the subject. Spener, the father of Pietism (1635-1705), wielded tremendous sway through his person and his works, such as Pia Desideria (1678), Allgemeine Gottesgelahrtheit aller gläubigen Christen und rechtschaffenen Theologen (1680), Tabulae Catecheticae (1683), Theologische Bedenken (1712), and so forth.
In Halle, the chief Pietists were Francke (died 1727), Breithaupt (died 1732; Instituta Theologica , 1695), Freylinghausen (died 1739; Grundlegung der Theologie , 1703), Joachim Lange (died 1744; Antibarbarus Orthodoxiae , 1709; Mosaisches Licht und Recht ), Rambach (died 1735; Der wohlunterrichtete Katechet , 1722). In Württemberg, Pietism allied itself with biblical realism and apocalyptic hopes in figures like Hedinger (died 1704), Bengel (died 1752), and Oetinger (died 1782). Naturally, orthodoxy, for instance through Löscher in Dresden (died 1749), opposed this Pietism with great enmity. But the time for orthodoxy had passed. In the years 1730-60, it formed an alliance with Pietism in Buddeus (died 1729; Instituta Theologica Dogmatica et Moralis ), Weismann (died 1760), Crusius (died 1775), J. G. Walch (Einleitung in die Dogmatische Gottesgelahrheit , 1749), and his son Ch. W. F. Walch (Breviarium Theologiae Dogmaticae , 1775), and transitioned into a heartfelt-pious direction that stresses the practice of faith, shuns scholastic subtlety, is moderate in polemic, and devotes its strength chiefly to learned historical inquiries.
With Pietism is akin the Herrnhutism, which likewise was a reaction of feeling against intellectual orthodoxy. The father of von Zinzendorf was a Spenerian. But while Pietism seeks to lead to conversion through a struggle of repentance, Herrnhutism strives to achieve this through the preaching of the dear Savior. It would know nothing of law, but only of the Gospel. Here grace so wholly displaces nature that Jesus even replaces the Father; Jesus is the Creator, the Ruler, the Father, the Jehovah of the Old Testament. And his person and suffering were conceived by Zinzendorf, under Roman influence, in such a pathological manner that the kinship of mysticism and sensuality, especially in the first romantic period (1743-1750), came very clearly to light.
Parallel to Pietism runs Rationalism. Both, each in its own way, undermined the authority of orthodoxy; both shift the center of gravity to the subject. Rationalism arose through the philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz (died 1716), and Wolff (died 1754). They made clarity, mathematical clarity, the norm of truth. Carpovius, professor of mathematics in Weimar, sought in his Oeconomia Salutis Novi Testamenti seu Theologia Revelata, Dogmatica Methodo Scientifica Adornata (1737-65) to demonstrate the church's doctrine by mathematical method. Canz, Reusch, Schubert, Reinbeck, especially S. J. Baumgarten of Halle (died 1757; Evangelische Glaubenslehre , edited by Semler, 1759-60) and J. L. von Mosheim of Göttingen (died 1755) belong to this Wolffian direction.
In the main, these men were still orthodox, but the religious import of truth is no longer felt; the doctrine of faith becomes an object of historical learning and intellectual demonstration. No wonder that among other Wolffians, such as Töllner (System der Dogmatischen Theologie ), Heilmann (Compendium Theologiae Dogmaticae , 1761), J. P. Miller (Instituta Theologiae Dogmaticae , 1767), Seiler (Theologia Dogmatica Polemica , 1774), a freer stance toward the church's doctrine is already adopted.
21. When this rationalistic course is then nourished and strengthened from without by English Deism and French unbelief, after 1760 in Germany the Enlightenment arises, which seeks to bring the sound understanding of the individual man to lordship over all objective truth. Everywhere the positive, the traditional, the historically grown must yield to the rational, the clearly understandable. Wolff and his fellows had still deemed revelation reasonable. But the Enlightenment was deistic and rationalistic. Frederick the Great was its king, Berlin its midpoint, the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 1765-1805 its organ. Dogmatics was wrought in this rationalistic spirit by W. A. Teller, Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens 1764; Religion der Vollkommneren 1792. Henke, Lineamenta institutionum fidei christianae 1793. Eckermann, Compendium theologiae 1791 and especially by Wegscheider, Institutiones theologiae christianae dogmaticae 1815, 8th edition 1844. Against this Rationalism, orthodoxy took on the weakened form of Supranaturalism. It dared no more to take its standpoint positively and thetically in faith, but held in common with its foes the groundwork of reason; only it sought from thence yet to come to revelation, whose needfulness, possibility, and actuality it defended. The content of revelation, however, shrank stepwise within it; the dogmas are freed as much as may be from all that offends and made fit for reason through so-called biblical setting forth. On this standpoint stood Doederlein, Institutiones theologiae 1780. Morus, Epitome Theologiae christianae 1789. Knapp, Vorlesungen über die christliche Glaubenslehre 1827, especially Reinhard, Vorlesungen über die Dogmatik 1801. Storr, Doctrinae christianae pars theoretica 1793, and others. While a reconciliation of Rationalism and Supranaturalism was essayed by Tzschirner, von Ammon, Schott, and especially by Bretschneider, Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche 1814.
22. For the Lutheran Dogmatics in the 19th Century. Besides the works cited above, the following come into reckoning: Mücke, The Dogmatics of the 19th Century, Gotha 1857. E. Lichtenberger, History of Religious Ideas in Germany, Paris, Fischbacher. Thilo, The Scientific Nature of Modern Speculative Theology Illuminated in Its Principles, Leipzig 1851. O. Flügel, The Speculative Theology of the Present, 2nd ed., Cöthen 1888. Hagenbach, On the So-Called Mediating Theology, 1858. Carl Schwarz, History of Recent Theology, 1857, Dutch by Krabbe. Hartmann, The Crisis of Christianity in Modern Theology, Berlin 1880. O. Pfleiderer, The Development of Protestant Theology in Germany since Kant and in Great Britain since 1825, Freiburg 1891. Frank, History and Critique of Recent Theology and So Forth, edited by P. Schaarschmidt, Erlangen, Deichert, 1894. Kattenbusch, From Schleiermacher to Ritschl, Giessen 1892. For Scandinavia: Presbyterian and Reformed Review, October 1893.
The peculiar mark of Lutheran dogmatics in this age lies therein, that it stands almost wholly under the sway of philosophy. In the former age, through Rationalism, it had well-nigh wholly lost its groundwork, method, and inwardness. It had become a gathering of reasoned thoughts on God, goodness, and deathlessness. Kant was the first who, by his sharp critique of pure reason, wholly undermined this reasoned groundwork of dogmatics. His critique was disheartening, even shattering, for the rationalism and happiness-seeking of the Enlightenment. But through the practical Reason he seeks to win back what he lost through the pure Reason. The categorical imperative, the moral awareness, gives us right to postulate the being of God, freedom, and deathlessness. Dogmatics is built upon morals; godliness becomes a means for goodness; God a needful help for mankind. The inwardness of godliness and dogmatics, unfolded by Kant in his Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1793), is purely rationalistic; Kant stands yet wholly in the 18th century; the historical, the positive, holds no worth for him; he sets man apart from all swayings; only the self-ruling Reason-religion is the true godliness. But through his critique of reason, through his call upon moral awareness, through his stern view of morals—which even led him to speak of the root evil in man and the needfulness of a kind of rebirth—he has been of great sway upon theology. Not only man's moral calling, but also the weakness of reason to reach the overworldly, became a proof for the needfulness of revelation, of faith and authority. And in this Kantian spirit, dogmatics was wrought by Tieftrunk, Elucidations on the Theoretical Part of Christian Religion (1793), Stäudlin, J. E. C. Schmidt, Ammon, and others.
23. Another Reaction Against the Enlightenment. Another reaction against the Enlightenment came from the side of feeling. Sentimentality was a mark of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Even as in England Shaftesbury stood against Hume, in France Rousseau against Voltaire, so also in Germany did feeling assert its rights among men such as Hamann, Claudius, Lavater, Stilling, Herder, and Jacobi over against the cold Rationalism. They all proceed from immediate experience, from the strength and depth of the heart; that is the deepest essence, the truly human in man, thereon rests religion, therefrom springs faith, herein man hears the divine. And from hence he sees and discovers the divine around him in nature, in history, above all in Christ, the most human of all men. The content of faith differed among these men, all the more because they were averse to any system; but the ground of faith is the same in all. Feeling, faith, Reason, inspiration, enthusiasm, experience, or however one may name it, is in all the foundation and norm of truth. Jacobi pointed, over against the advancing criticism, to the immediate sense, wherein another, higher objectivity dawned for man. He thus came to a steadfast dualism of head and heart, of philosophy and faith, of sensible and spiritual world. In dogmatics this dualism was applied by de Wette, Bibl. Dogmatik , 3rd ed. 1831, Dogm. der prot. Kirche , 3rd ed. 1840, Ueber Religion u. Theol. , 2nd ed. 1821, Das Wesen des christ. Glaubens vom Standpunkt des Glaubens , 1840, and after him by Hase, Evang. Dogm. , 1826, 6th ed. 1870. Common to all is the parting of believing and knowing, of aesthetic (ethical, religious) and understanding (empirical) worldview, of ideal and sensible world. The truth, required by the religious feeling or consciousness, is untouchable for the understanding; it belongs to another, not perceivable world.
24. Closely akin to this direction is the theology of Schleiermacher. In his Speeches on Religion of 1799 and the Monologues of 1800, he stands wholly under the sway of romanticism. Religion is feeling, feeling for the universe, sense for the infinite, the bent of the heart toward the eternal, even as Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge of God. Schleiermacher thus takes his standpoint also in the subject, but not in understanding or will, but in feeling. God is to him the unity of the world, no object of thought, for thought ever moves in oppositions, but only to be enjoyed in feeling. And that enjoyment of God in feeling is religion. But therewith Schleiermacher straightway joins the idea of fellowship. From the essence of religion springs the longing for fellowship, for exchange of that which is enjoyed. Religions differ, according as the infinite determines feeling otherwise and shapes fellowship otherwise.
In his Doctrine of Faith , the philosophical ground-thoughts are the same, but here feeling is more closely defined as utter dependence, God conceived as absolute causality, and Christianity described as an ethical religion, wherein all stands in relation to redemption through Christ. Dogmas are and remain descriptions of subjective states of the heart, but yet of such as are determined by the Christian fellowship, and thus by the person of Christ.
By these three ideas—of the immediate self-consciousness as source of religion, of fellowship as necessary form of existence for religion, and of the person of Christ as center of Christianity—Schleiermacher has become of incalculable influence. All theology after him depends on him; his dogmatics has been taken over by none, and yet he has made his influence felt on all directions, liberal, mediating, confessional, and in all churches, Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed.
Nearest akin to him are the so-called mediating theologians, Nitzsch, Twesten, Neander, J. Müller, Rothe, Dorner, Martensen, Schenkel, and so forth. The peculiar and common trait of all these men is the subjective starting point. They all go forth not from an outward authority but from the heart, from religious consciousness. They first accept truth as content of subjective Christian experience. But thereby they do not abide; they wish to go beyond Schleiermacher, and thereto they join Schleiermacher’s subjective religious starting point with Hegelian speculation. The agnostic elements in Schleiermacher, which he held in common with Kant, were exchanged for the Hegelian doctrine of the knowability of the Absolute. Truth, first accepted as content of religious experience, must thereafter on the path of speculation be grasped as necessary to thought and legitimated before the bar of philosophy. Thus would faith and knowledge, the natural and the positive, church and culture, Scriptural authority and criticism, ancient and modern worldview be reconciled and satisfied with one another.
25. This was indeed also the striving of Hegel. Hegel is the most consistent idealist; the Cartesian starting point comes here to its last conclusions. Thinking produces being, all that is is thus logical, reasonable. But he binds this thought with that of becoming, of evolution. The realization of the thought in being happens little by little, from step to step. In man that thinking first comes to awareness. But on the lowest step, as natural, finite spirit, man feels himself sundered from God. In religion, above all in the Christian, he however sees that sundering lifted up; God and man are one. This oneness of God and man is the being of all religion, but is not fittingly uttered in the worship; it is there shrouded in shapes of forethinking and feeling. Only in philosophy does the idea come to its fitting grasp; it is the utter knowing, the knowing of mankind of God, the knowing of God of himself. After these wise thoughts Hegel sought to make plain all Christian dogmas, Trinity, becoming man, atonement, and so forth. Many believed in the Hegelian atonement of theology and philosophy; the so-called right side, Marheineke, Daub, Göschel, Rosenkranz, wrought the dogmas in his spirit and sought to unite Hegelian guessing and orthodox theology. But little by little it became open what danger lay hidden in the Hegelian philosophy for the Christian dogmas. Feuerbach, Strauss, Vatke, Bruno Bauer drew the outcomes and gave up the forethinking, which is the garb of religion, to hold only the bare thought. Strauss saw in the Gospel tales unwitting symbolic makings of the ideal truth, that the Unending pours itself out in the ending, yet not in a single man but in mankind; this is the true son of God, the ideal Christ. In his Glaubenslehre 1840 he tries to show that the history of each dogma is at the same time its judging and loosing. Religion and philosophy differ in shape, but therefore also in inhold; philosophy takes the place of religion. The neo-Hegelians, Biedermann, Pfleiderer, have indeed become more watchful, but have yet taken over from Hegel that thinking stands above the religious awareness and thus has the task to unclothe the religious forethinking of its timely, sense-like shape, to set forth its ideal kernel, and to bring it into agreement with our whole world-outlook.
26. While Hegel's philosophy thus led to the casting away of Christendom, it became known especially since 1830 that Schelling had little by little forsaken the identity system and now unfolded a positive philosophy, wherein not needfulness but freedom held sway, and wherein the will and the deed stepped into the stead of the logical unfolding.
Even as Hamann, Lavater, and others in the former age, so Schelling little by little came to the belief that there is yet another, deeper being and life than that of the logical understanding, namely that of the will, of the deed, of freedom.
But all life is a becoming, a interplay of opposites. So it is in God, and so it is in the world. In God there is first the dark ground of nature, then the understanding, and from both the will is born. In the world there is first chaos, then the spirit, thereafter the ordered world. And so in religion there is first the natural drive in Heathendom, then the Word or the Light in Christ, and at last the being of God in all.
Under the sway of Böhme and Oetinger, Schelling bound therewith sundry theosophical musings. Theosophy ever busies itself with two riddles, with the crossing between God and world and between soul and body.
The first riddle is unriddled hereby, that the ground of the world is sought in the nature of God, and that the theogony, the threefold unfolding in God, is more or less made one with or at least set alongside the world-begetting. God himself comes first to full unfolding of his being in and through the world unfolding.
The second riddle is unriddled in the like wise by the thought of spirit-bodiliness. The spiritual, God, the soul, is not in strict sense without body, indeed not stuffly, but overstuffly, and so the spirit has in its turn the task to spiritize and to make spiritual the body, the world, whose gross stuffliness is an outcome of sin.
This theosophical musing of Schelling found entry into theology: Baader, Görres, Windischmann, J. F. von Meyer, Steffens, Wagner, Stahl, Rothe, Hamberger, Fr. Hoffmann, Keerl, Osiander, Lange, Delitzsch, Bähr, Kurtz, Splittgerber, have all in greater or lesser measure undergone his sway.
27. It was natural that opposition arose against this manifold mingling of theology and philosophy from the side of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Upon the theology of mediation must needs follow one of separation. The study of the confession, the historical dogmatics of de Wette, Bretschneider, Hase, Schmid, Schneckenburger benefited the confessional consciousness. Old Lutherans such as Guericke and Rudelbach, Neo-Lutherans such as Harms, Hengstenberg, Keil, Philippi, Vilmar, Kliefoth, Höfling, Thomasius, Hofmann, men of the positive Union such as Kahnis, Luthardt, Zöckler, H. Schmidt, Frank, Grau, and so forth, labored for the restoration of the old Lutheran theology. Yet they too were children of their time. Pietism wrought on in men like Hengstenberg and Tholuck. Vilmar, Löhe, Münchmeyer, and others were not free from Roman overreaching in their view of church, sacrament, and office; the South German theologians in Erlangen, Thomasius, Hofmann, and also the present positive theologians stand freer over against the confession and swerve in weighty points—Christology, satisfaction, Scripture—from the old-Lutheran dogmatics. Even so orthodox a Lutheran as Philippi, like Hofmann and Frank, sets out from the subjective faith-consciousness and thus has borrowed his starting point from Schleiermacher. Beside these confessional ones stand the Biblical theologians, among whom Beck is the foremost, who wish to build up the dogmatic system not from the believing consciousness nor yet from the confession but solely from the Scripture. But Beck took that Scripture in the sense of that mystical theosophy which since Oetinger and Michael Hahn has been pursued in Swabia, as a system of heavenly truths that were imprints of heavenly powers and which through the working of the Holy Ghost implant these in the soul of man, and thereby oft came to a quite willful exegesis, and to a system that was indeed deep and original but also not free from a one-sided asceticism and individualism.
28. From yet another side came withstanding against the blending of wisdom-lore and god-lore. Liebmann, in his work Kant and the Epigones , Stuttgart 1865, and F. A. Lange, in his History of Materialism 1866, gave on wisdom-seeking ground the watchword: back to Kant. The guess-work of Hegel and Schelling had led to naught; the understanding must again come to awareness of its end-likeness and boundedness, and claim no knowledge of the above-senselike. There may beside it remain room for belief, the shaping-power, but the rede is bounded to the sense-perceivable. This standpoint of the New-Kantianism was taken on dogmatic ground by Lipsius and Ritschl. But with not unimportant difference. Lipsius acknowledges, Ritschl denies the hidden element in godliness. Lipsius deems godliness an own, self-standing might, Ritschl lets it almost wholly go up in the right-living. Lipsius deems godliness in the first place a matter of the single one, Ritschl of the fellowship. Lipsius seeks to bring the godly fore-thinkings in any case yet into agreement with the outcomes of knowledge-lore, Ritschl sunders god-lore and knowledge-lore wholly and all. For Lipsius is the grace of God in Christ, for Ritschl is the God-kingdom founded by Christ the head-inhold of the opening-forth, and so on. But both yet link themselves to Kant’s shunning of over-world-lore, to his teaching of the boundedness of the manly ken-might. Therefore Ritschl wills full sundering of over-world-lore (wisdom-lore, knowledge-lore) and godliness (god-lore). Godliness and god-lore speaks no being- but worth-deeming judgments. It says naught about the unkennable being of things but speaks only of the worth and meaning that they have for us. By such a sundering Ritschl seeks to assure to godliness and god-lore an own, for knowledge-lore untouchable stead. Godliness rests not on knowledge-lore, but is grounded on an own beginning, on the right-living kind of the man. It has an own inhold, namely no being- but worth-deeming judgments, that is, sheer godly-right-living utterances. It has an own goal, namely to make the man in right-living wise unhangly from the world. Ritschl’s god-lore has now great sway, not only in but also far outside Germany. Sundry causes make clear her uprising. The seeming at-one-ment of believing and knowing, the godly-right-living up-taking of godliness, the linking to the opening-forth of God in Christ, to the Holy Writ and to the god-lore of Luther and Melanchthon, the throwing-off of all god-lore of kind and school-wise dogmatics and so on, have given this god-lore a sudden spreading and an out-of-the-way uprising. A throng of men, Herrmann, Kaftan, Häring, Harnack, Schürer, Gottschick, Kattenbusch, Stade, Wendt, Schultz, Lobstein and so on, have linked themselves to her, and fit her beginnings to the whole field of god-lore knowledge. Yet is the Ritschlian teaching of the ken-might, the full sundering of god-lore and over-world-lore, the right-living-like up-taking of godliness, the bounding of godliness to worth-deeming judgments, and so on, unfulfilling. Also this direction will in the long run neither the head nor the heart be able to fulfill, see my writing on the God-lore of Ritschl in the God-lore Studies of Dr. Daubanton and others 1888.
29. Amid all agreement, even unto the confession of predestination, there was from the beginning a weighty difference between the German and the Swiss Reformation. The diversity in land and folk, where Luther and Zwingli arose, the difference in birth, upbringing, temper, and life trials helped to drive them apart. It lasted but a short while before it came to light that both Reformers were of another spirit. In 1529 the peace was yet signed at Marburg, but only on paper. And when Zwingli fell away and Calvin, notwithstanding his high esteem for Luther and his nearing in the teaching of the Lord's Supper, yet in principle chose the side of Zwingli, then the rift between Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism grew ever greater and became a deed that could no more be undone. The historical searches into the marking difference of both in this age have clearly shown that a difference of principle lies at the ground thereof. In former times one simply tallied the dogmatic differences, without leading them back to a common root, Hoornbeek, Summa Controv. 1653. But Max Goebel, Die relig. Eigenthümlichkeit der luth. u. ref. K. 1837, Dutch trans. Gron. Smit 1841, gave the first trial of a historical and principled clearing of their difference. Since then sundry men have furthered that search, such as Ullmann, Semisch, Hagenbach, Ebrard, Herzog, Schweizer, Baur, Schneckenburger, Guder, Schenkel, Schoeberlein, Stahl, Hundeshagen, whose works are named and weighed by Voigt, Fundamentaldogmatik, 1874, Scholten, Leer der Herv. Kerk, 4e dr. and so forth. The difference seems yet best given thereby, that the Reformed is godward, the Lutheran manward. The Reformed stays not in the tale of yore, but climbs up to the thought, to the everlasting decree of God; the Lutheran takes his standpoint amid the tale of salvation and has no need to thrust deeper into the counsel of God. Among the Reformed therefore the choosing is the heart of the church, among the Lutherans the rightwising is the article of a standing or falling church. There the first and foremost asking is: how comes God to his glory; here contrariwise: how comes man to bliss. There the strife is chiefly against heathenry, the worship of idols; here against Jewry, the holiness of works. The Reformed has no rest till backward he has led all to the decree of God and has sought out the wherefore of things and forward has made all serve the glory of God; the Lutheran is sated with the that and joys in the bliss which he through faith shares. From this difference in root the dogmatic strifes in the teaching of the likeness of God, birth-sin, the person of Christ, the order of salvation, the holy signs, church rule, right living and so forth may readily be cleared.
The history of Reformed dogmatics is much more hard to set forth than that of the Lutheran. The Reformed church is not bound to one land and folk, but has spread itself in sundry lands and among sundry folks. The Reformed type is not laid down in one confession but has found utterance in many confessions. The dogmatic unfolding, for instance, in the teaching of election, of justification, of regeneration, of the sacraments, and so forth, has been in the Reformed church much richer and more manifold than in the Lutheran. And lastly, the history of Reformed dogmatics has been much less studied than that of the other churches; there lies here still a field open for searching.
The chief works that handle it are: C. M. Pfaff, Introductio in historiam theol. literariam , Tüb. 1724. Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I. B. Pictet, De Christel. Godg. , Dutch transl. 1728 part III. A. Ypey, Beknopte letterk. gesch. der system. Godg. 3 parts, 1793-98 I II. Id. Gesch. v. d. Krist. Kerk in de 18e eeuw , Utrecht, 1797 parts VII and VIII. A. Schweizer, Die Glaub. der ev. ref. K. 1844 I. Id. Die Centraldogmen der ref. K. 2 vols. 1854, ’56. J. H. A. Ebrard, Christl. Dogm. 2nd ed. 1862 I. J. H. Scholten, Leer der Herv. K. I. C. Sepp, Het godg. onderwijs in Nederl. gedurende de 16e en 17e eeuw , 2 parts, Leiden, 1873, ’74. Furthermore the works named above of Gasz, Dorner, Frank, Ritschl, and so on, and the writings to be named later.
30. The Reformed dogmatics begins with Zwingli. In him the groundwork thoughts are already present: the theological starting point, the utter dependence of man, predestination, the human nature of Christ, the spiritual understanding of church and sacrament, the ethical and political bent of the Reformation. But Zwingli still has many lacks in his theology; through his humanism he grasps sin and atonement too shallowly; through his spiritualism he sets God and man, divine and human righteousness, sign and signified thing in the sacrament, and so forth, in abstract dualistic opposition to each other; his clearness and brightness of thought cannot make up for the want of depth; and to a somewhat rounded and hanging-together system it does not come with him. Zwingli has only drawn the broad outlines within which the sundry directions in the Reformed churches later moved. First Calvin's ordering and systematic mind gave to the Swiss Reformation its marked-out teaching and steadfast ordering. His theology stood already firm at the first putting forth of his Institutes in 1536. There is broadening, unfolding, but no change. Calvin sets himself apart therein from Zwingli, that he drives out all wise-learning and humanistic thoughts and cleaves as strictly as may be to the Scripture. Further, he upholds better the outwardness of the Christian faith, of God's covenant, of the person and work of Christ, of Scripture, church, and sacrament, and therefore stands stronger against the Anabaptists. Moreover, he overcomes both the opposition of Luther between the ghostly and worldly as that of Zwingli between flesh and spirit, and is therefore indeed strict but in no wise ascetic. At last, he brings in his thoughts oneness and system, something which neither Luther nor Zwingli could do, and yet forgets not thereby the bond with the Christian life. Calvin knew by and by to win all Switzerland, also in the matter of the evening meal teaching (Consensus Tigurinus 1549) and predestination (Consensus Genevensis 1552, Second Helvetic Confession 1564), Hundeshagen, Die Conflikte des Zwinglianismus, Lutherthums und Calvinismus in der Bernischen Landeskirche von 1532-1558, Bern 1842. The Institutes of Calvin were soon studied everywhere. Those of Bern called upon Calvin later as much as those of Geneva, Zurich, Basel, and Schaffhausen. Wholly in Calvin's spirit was dogmatics handled in Switzerland in this 16th hundred-year by Beza, Tractationes theologicae 1570, Petrus Martyr Vermiglius, Loci Communes 1576, Musculus, Loci Communes 1560, 1567, and Aretius, Theologica problemata 1579.
From Switzerland, Calvin's theology extended itself to France. He dedicated his Institutes in 1536 to Francis I with a preface. He became the soul of the French Reformation. His doctrine was generally received; his works were translated into French and spread abroad; men sought counsel and comfort from him, and many went to Geneva to be trained for the service of the word.
The foremost theologians in France in this century were Chandieu (died 1591), who under the pseudonym Sadeel or Zamariel wrote sundry theological treatises, such as De verbo Dei , De Christi sacerdotio , De remissione peccatorum , and others; Marlorat (died 1562), author of Thesaurus S. Scripturae in locos communes rerum et dogmatum , published in 1574 by Feugueraeus; and du Plessis Mornay (died 1623), who is known for his Traité de l’Eglise (1578), Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581), and especially also for his Le mystère d’iniquité, c’est à dire l’histoire de la papauté (1611), which is very inaccurate in its citations.
Through the exiles to East Friesland, the Palatinate, Cleves, and from the South, Calvinism also entered into the Netherlands. Calvin's Institutes were already translated into Dutch in 1560. Dathenus, de Brès, Modet, Marnix, Caspar Heydanus, and others were strict Calvinists. Many sought their training in Geneva and Heidelberg. But already in 1575 the academy at Leiden was founded, and in 1585 that at Franeker.
Feugueraeus, Danaeus, Saravia, Trelcatius Sr., Bastingius, Junius were at Leiden; Lubbertus, Lydius, and Nerdenus were at Franeker the most renowned professors in this century. The theological labor consisted chiefly in polemics against Rome and against the Anabaptists.
Yet nevertheless, sundry dogmatic handbooks already saw the light: from Gellius Snecanus, Methodica descriptio et fundamentum trium locorum communium S. Scr. 1584; from Bastingius the first exposition of the Catechism 1590; from Feugueraeus Propheticae et apostolicae, i.e. totius divinae et canonicae scripturae thesaurus 1574; from Trelcatius Sr. Loci Communes 1587; from Junius Theses Theologicae (Opera Omnia I 1592).
Also in England and Scotland did Calvinism find entry. It came there into strife not only with Rome, but also with the reformation that was undertaken from above by Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The reform-minded folk, who under Mary fled to the mainland, came there to know the teaching of Calvin, Bullinger, Beza, Martyr, and others, and soon upon their return were irked by the halfness of the English reformation. The difference first ran over the ceremonies. In teaching, Puritans and Anglicans were at the outset in agreement. English theology bore until the beginning of the 17th century a steadfast Calvinistic stamp. At the universities, Calvin's Institutes were taught. Even the bishop-led church rule was upheld by Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, and others not as the only true one, but only for the sake of the church's well-being. But when in and since 1567 the nonconformists, among whom Pilkington, Whittingham, Thomas Sampson, and Humphrey from Oxford were the foremost, split away, the strife spread over the whole church rule. The strongest backer of the elder-led church form was Thomas Cartwright, teacher at Cambridge, set aside in 1570, died in 1603. And toward the end of the hundred-year span, there came also a split in teaching; William Perkins, died 1602, and William Whitaker, died 1595, high teachers at Cambridge, sought to uphold foreordaining still in the nine Lambeth articles, which they laid before Elizabeth's counselor Whitgift, but the high-church and Pelagian feeling took ever more the upper hand. In Scotland, however, Calvinism was brought in with might by John Knox, died 1572, John Craig, died 1600, and others, and at last also acknowledged by the King in 1581.
In Germany, the Reformed church and theology were less hanging upon Calvin. The Heidelberg Catechism, the theology of Pareus, Ursinus, Olevianus, Hyperius, Boquinus, also of à Lasco, shows in many ways its own mark. Hofstede de Groot, Ebrard, and Heppe have set forth this oddness from Melanchthon; but this showing is unhistorical and well enough gainsaid. Much better is it drawn by Prof. Gooszen in two study works on the Heidelberg Catechism 1890 and 1893 and by Dr. Van ’t Hooft, The Theology of Heinrich Bullinger 1888, from the follower of Zwingli in Zurich. Yet there is between the theology of Calvin and of Bullinger no weighty difference, but only a formal and method-wise one. It is the sundering between supra- and infralapsarianism, between the strict-theological and the covenantal starting point, that has ever been in the Reformed churches and has been acknowledged on both sides as Reformed; cf. my writing Calvin and Reformed in De Vrije Kerk , February 1893, and the answer of Prof. Gooszen, Geloof en Vrijheid , December 1894. Beside Ursinus and Olevianus, then, in Heidelberg also wrought the strict-Calvinistic Zanchius.
31. The Rise of Scholasticism in Reformed Theology. Already towards the end of the 16th century, the scholastic method arose in Reformed theology. The simple treatment of the dogmas, as we find it in Calvin, Hyperius, and Sohnius, could not suffice in the long run. In Martyr, Sadeel, and Junius, we already encounter familiarity with the questions that were handled by the scholastics in the Middle Ages. Especially Zanchius, who died in 1590, in his works De tribus Elohim , De natura Dei , De operibus Dei , De incarnatione (Opera Omnia in 8 volumes, Geneva 1619), and Polanus a Polansdorf, who died in 1610, in his Syntagma Theologiae , were exceedingly well acquainted with the theology of the church fathers and the scholastics.
In a scholastic manner, dogmatics was then treated in the Reformed churches in this century, in the Netherlands by Trelcatius Jr., Scholastica et methodica locorum omnium S. Scr. institutio 1604, Nerdenus, Systema theol. 1611, Maccovius, Collegia theologica 1623, third edition 1641, Loci Comm. Theol. 1626, Fr. Gomarus, Opera theol. omnia Amsterdam 1664, Gisb. Voetius, Disputationes sel. 5 parts, Utrecht 1648-59, and elsewhere especially by J. H. Alsted, professor at Herborn and Weissenburg, who died in 1638, Theol. scholastica didactica, exhibens locos communes theol. methodo scholastica 1618.
The scholastic method, however, did not find general approval by any means. Maccovius received at the Synod of Dort the admonition to speak with the Holy Spirit, not with Bellarmine or Suarez. Heringa, De twistzaak van Maccovius , Archief voor Kerk. Gesch. III 1831. De twist van Maccovius en Amesius , ibid. and Van der Tuuk, Joh. Bogerman . And the dispute of Maresius against Voetius had its ground in the same scholastic method. Maresius called Voetius a paradoxical theologian, counted no fewer than 600 paradoxes in his theology, and accused him especially of deriving the asphalt lake of the scholastics into the fountain of Siloam; see his Theologus paradoxus retectus et refutatus 1649 and against it Voetius, Disput. Sel. V.
But even where one guarded against philosophical terminology, scholastic distinctions, and vain scholastic questions, and presented the truth in a simpler form, the 17th century was nevertheless the century of objectivity. The material lay ready; it needed only to be ordered. Tradition became a power. Not only Scripture, but also the confession, yea even the dogmatic treatment, acquired an untouchable authority and caused Camero to utter the complaint that one could not deviate in doctrine from those who seemed to be pillars, without being persecuted, Schweizer, Centraldogmen II 237.
The foremost theologians in our land were Polyander, Walaeus, Thysius, and Rivetus, writers of the Synopsis Purioris theologiae , Trigland, Hoornbeek at Leiden; Maccovius, Acronius, Amesius, Schotanus, Bogerman, Cloppenburg, Arnoldus at Franeker; Ravensperger, Gomarus, H. Alting, Maresius at Groningen; Voetius, Essenius, Mastricht, Leydecker at Utrecht; further Bucanus at Lausanne, Wollebius at Basel; Danaeus, Franc. Turretinus, and B. Pictet at Geneva; J. H. Heidegger and J. H. Hottinger at Zurich; Chamier, Bérault, Garissoles at Montauban; Tilenus, Dumoulin, Beaulieu at Sedan; moreover Benj. Basnage, David Blondel, Sam. Bochartus, Jean Mestrezat, Charles Drelincourt, Jean Daillé, and especially the theologians at Saumur: Camero, Amyraldus, Cappellus, Placaeus, cf. Félice, Histoire des Protestants de France 7th ed. 1880.
In England, in the 17th century, the high church and Arminian direction gained ground; it found support under the Stuarts, among the archbishops, among the nobility, and was promoted by Bancroft, the successor of Whitgift 1604-1610, who in a sermon in 1589 defended the episcopate as necessary, Buckingham 1625-28, Archbishop Laud 1628-45, Lord Clarendon who died in 1674. On the other hand, there were still many theologians in the Anglican church who defended Episcopalianism but nevertheless remained faithful to Calvinism. Thus Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1583-1604, counselor of Elizabeth, Archbishop Abbot 1604-1623, who fell into disfavor in 1622, the delegates to the Synod of Dort: Carlton, Hall, Davenant, professor in Cambridge, later bishop of Salisbury, Determinationes quaestionum quarundam theologicarum , Cambridge 1634, Ward, Goad, Balcanqual, and further men like Burton, Warton, Prynne, Rouse, Preston, Usher, Corpus theologiae , Dublin 1638, Dutch translation by Ruytingius, 't Lichaam der Godd. leer Amsterdam 1656, Morton, Joh. Prideaux, Lectiones theologicae , Scholasticae theologiae syntagma 1651, Saunderson, Hammond, Opera Omnia London 1684, Westfield, Stillingfleet, Op. Omn. London 1709, Tillotson Archbishop of Canterbury, Works London 1704, John Pearson, Exposition of the Creed 1659, Lectiones de Deo et ejus attributis , Burnet who died in 1715, professor in Glasgow, later bishop of Salisbury, An exposition of the 39 articles . Roger Boyle, Summa theologiae christ. Dublin 1687. J. Forbesius a Corse, professor at Aberdeen, Instructiones histor. theol. de doctrina christ. 1699. Thomas Pierce, Pacificatorium orthodoxae ecclesiae corpusculum 1685. Foggius, Theol. speculativae schema 1712. W. Beveridge, Thesaurus theol. or a complete system of divinity London 1710-11. Th. Bennet, Instructions for studying 1 a general system or body of divinity, 2 the 39 articles of religion , London 1715.
Among the Puritans in this period are especially known Bradshaw, Raynolds, Baynes, Byfield, Rogers, Hooker, White, Archer, Hildersham, Davenport, Lightfoot, Seldenus, Twissus, Calamy, Gataker, Baxter, Bates, Mead, Owen, and others. Arminianism had great influence in England, both among the dissenters and among the Anglicans. And besides that, Amyraldism was also brought into England from France. Both often flowed together and found their union in the Neonomian theory, which gave occasion to an important and long-lasting controversy. The Neonomians laid the ground of justification in faith, as for example the Arminian John Goodwin, the friend of Milton, in his The banner of justification displayed , Imputatio fidei 1642, Richard Baxter, Justifying Righteousness , Dr. Dan. Williams, Works , 1750. Benj. Woodbridge, The method of grace in the justification of sinners 1656. Over against them stood others, who were wrongly called Antinomians but should properly be called Anti-Neonomians, and placed the ground of justification solely in the imputed righteousness of Christ, such as Dr. Crisp, Dr. Tully, Justificatio paulina sine operibus 1677. Isaac Chauncy, Neonomianism unmasked 1692. Id. Alexipharmacon, a fresh antidote against neonomian bane 1700. John Eaton, The honeycombe of free justification by Christ alone 1642, William Eyre, Vindiciae justificationis gratuitae 1654, and others, compare Witsius, Misc. Sacra II p. 753 sq. James Buchanan, The doctrine of justification , Edinburgh Clark, 1867.
On the whole, however, the center of gravity of English theology lay not in the dogmatic but in the biblical, church historical, patristic, archaeological, and practical studies. The political and ecclesiastical relations naturally gave occasion thereto, Gass, Gesch. der prot. Theol. III 297 f. Ypey, Syst. Godg. II 268 v. and further Weingarten, Die Revolutionskirchen Englands 1868. Neal, Historie der Puriteinen , Rotterdam 1752 v. Marsden, History of the early and later Puritans from the reformation to the ejection of the nonconf. clergy in 1662 , 2 vol. London 1852. Dr. Stoughton, History of religion in England from the opening of the long Parliament to the end of the 18th century , 8 vol. 1881. Dr. Tulloch, Rational theology and Christ. theology in England in the 17th century , 2 vol. 1872.
Richer and more powerful in proportion was the dogmatic life in Scotland. Here Calvinism had found a suitable soil and was further developed in a strict, positive spirit. The foremost theologians in this period were: Rollock, since 1583 principal of the university at Edinburgh, writer of commentaries on the epistles of Paul, the Psalms, Daniel, and especially also of a treatise on effectual calling; John Welsh of Ayr, who wrote against Romanism; John Sharp, who published a harmony of the prophets and the apostles; the brothers Simpson, Patrick, who gave a church history, William, who wrote on the Hebrew accents, and Archibald, who gave an exposition of the seven penitential psalms; Boyd of Trochrigg, professor at Saumur, in 1614 principal of the university at Glasgow, famous for his commentary on the epistle to the Ephesians, which not only gives an exposition but is a true thesaurus and contains all sorts of dogmatic and theological excurses, on Trinity, predestination, incarnation, sin, baptism, and so on; David Calderwood, who sojourned in this land and wrote his Altare damascenum against the Anglican episcopate; Samuel Rutherford, professor at St. Andrews, known not only by his Letters but also by many other works, Exercitationes apol. pro divina gratia 1637, De Providentia , Examen Arminianismi , The spiritual Antichrist , and others; George Gillespie, writer of Nihil respondes , Male audis , Aaron’s Rod blossoming , Miscellanies ; and further still Baillie, Dickson, Durham, Dr. Strang, James Wood, Patrick Gillespie, Hugh Binning, and others, cf. David Calderwood, The history of the Kirk of Scotland , 7 vol. Edinburgh 1842. Buckle, History of civilization in England , 5 vol. Leipzig 1865, ch. 17-20. James Walker, The theology and theologians of Scotland , Edinburgh Clark 1872.
This positive development of Reformed dogmatics reaches in a certain sense its height and at the same time its endpoint in the Canons of Dort 1618/19, in the Confession and Catechism of Westminster 1646, in the Consensus Helveticus 1675, and the Walcheren Articles 1693.
32. But already in the seventeenth century were the beginnings present, which undermined the Reformed theology and brought it to decay. In the Reformation age there was not only a Lutheran and Calvinistic reformation, but besides that two other parties arose, namely the Anabaptists and the Socinians, who precisely in the Reformed church and theology in Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, America at all times have been of great sway. They stand for the mystical and the reasonable element in religion and theology.
For the Anabaptists and Mennonites: older writings from Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bullinger, a Lasco, de Bres, Modet, Marnix, Taffin, Caspar Heydanus, Spanheim, Faukelius, Schotanus, Hoornbeek, Cloppenburg and others in Walch Bibl. Theol. sel. and newer writings from Arnold, Schenkel, Erbkam, Hase, Halbertsma, Blaupot ten Cate, Hoekstra, Gorter, Cramer and others in Scholten, L. H. K. Furthermore L. Keller, History of the Anabaptists and their Realm in Münster 1880. Goebel, History of Christian Life and so forth I 1849. Ritschl, History of Pietism I 1880. J. H. Maronier, The Inward Word , Amsterdam 1890. L. Keller, The Reformation and the Older Reform Parties , Leipzig 1885, sundry essays of Sepp in his Historical Inquiries , 2 volumes 1872/3 and Church Historical Studies 1885. A. Brons, Origin, Growth, and Fortunes of the Baptist-minded or Mennonites , Norden 1884. Articles Anabaptists and Mennonites in Herzog².
For the Socinians and Unitarians of earlier and later times compare Fock, The Socinianism 1847. Trechsel, The Protestant Antitrinitarians before Faustus Socin , 2 volumes 1839/44. Article Socin in Herzog². Harnack, History of Dogma III.
Arminianism had already in the sixteenth century its forerunners in Coolhaes, Coornhert, Wiggerts, and others, but became a power in the church at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It came into opposition against the confession of God's absolute sovereignty on the well-known five points: predestination, satisfaction, man's corruption, conversion, and perseverance.
See their Remonstrance, offered to the States in 1610, the Confessio and the Apologia pro confessione, composed by Episcopius; of the confession appeared in 1665 a Dutch edition by Uytenbogaert.
Arminius, Opera Theologica . Frankfurt, 1631.
Uytenbogaert, Instruction in the Christian Religion . 1640.
Episcopius, Institutio Theologica .
Limborch, Theologia Christiana , fifth edition. 1730.
Curcellaeus, Opera Theologica . Amsterdam, 1675.
Cartesianism was in principle a complete emancipation from all authority and from all objectivity, and a building up of the whole cosmos from the subject, from thinking. Cogito, ergo sum . The rejection of all tradition and the seemingly certain mathematical method, by which Descartes concluded to the existence of the world, of God, of the spirit, pleased many. Descartes gained many followers, also among the theologians. Renerius and Regius in Utrecht; Raey, Heerebord, Abr. Heydanus in Leiden, and further Roell, Bekker, Joh. v. d. Waeyen, Hautecour, Andala, took over Cartesianism and brought rationalism into the church. The relation of reason and revelation now became the chief question; reason emancipates itself from revelation and strives to regain its independence, A. C. Duker, Schoolgezag en eigen onderzoek . To this was now added Cocceianism, which indeed was akin to Cartesianism in method. Cocceianism was also a reaction against the traditional theology and thus soon toward the end of the century entered into alliance with Cartesianism.
The new thing in Cocceius (who died in 1669) was not his doctrine of the covenant, as is now generally acknowledged, for this already appears in Zwingli, Bullinger, Olevianus, and others, and here in this land in Snecanus, Gomarus, Trelcatius, Cloppenburg, and others, but his federalistic method. Cocceius’s Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento (1648) was a biblical-historical dogmatics, made Scripture not only the principle and norm but also the object of dogmatics, and thus placed the theologia scripturaria over against the theologia traditiva , the covenant over against the decree, history over against the idea, the anthropological method over against the theological; the danger of this method consisted therein, that it drew down the eternal, unchangeable (substance of the covenant) into the stream of the temporal, historical (economy of the covenant) and thus transferred to God himself the idea of becoming.
But many followed the Cocceian method: Heydanus, Wittichius, Momma, Burman, Braun, Van der Waeyen, Witsius, Camp. Vitringa, S. van Til, Joh. d’Outrein, F. A. Lampe, and others, Diestel, Studien zur Foederaltheol. The strife between Voetians and Cocceians and thereafter that between green and dry, free and stiff Cocceians lasted deep into the 18th century. It ended in fact with a victory of Cocceianism and Cartesianism. Scholasticism had had its time; the bloom of Aristotelian philosophy was past. Most chairs were occupied by Cocceians. The coming of Lampe to Utrecht in 1720 was a victory for the Cocceians.
The dogmatic handbooks which now saw the light are mostly Cocceian: Melchior, Systema (1685). C. Vitringa, Korte grondstellingen der Godg. (1688). S. van Til (1704). T. H. v. d. Honert, Waeragtige wegen Gods (1706). Ravestein (1716), J. v. d. Honert (1735), and others. In the main they are still orthodox, but they are mostly small in compass, avoid all scholasticism, and deviate on many points already from the old representation. Doubt arises concerning the particular satisfaction, election, generation of the Son (Roell), the Trinity (P. Maty), the covenant of works (Alting, Vlak, Bekker, and others), reason and revelation (Roell).
The Voetians were more and more pushed back, and withdrew into silence. Marck’s Merch (1686, Dutch translation 1705) and Brakel’s Redel. Godsd. (1700) were the last dogmatics in their spirit, but also already weaned from the strength of the earlier ones. Pietistic, Labadistic, antinomian ideas penetrated their circles: Lodenstein, Labadie, Koelman, Lampe, Verschoor, Schortinghuis, Eswijler, Antoinette de Bourignon, and others.
33. Thus was the course of theology in all Reformed churches. In France, the academy of Saumur became the midpoint of sundry stirring theses. Camero, who died in 1625, not only joined Piscator in Herborn in denying the reckoning of Christ's active obedience, but also taught that the will ever follows the understanding, and that thus the bending of the will in the new birth was no bodily but an upright deed. Amyraldus, who died in 1664, in his Treatise on Predestination , made the common teaching of the will of the sign, of the earnest and well-meant offer of grace, into a separate decree that went before that of election. He thereby laid a Remonstrant groundwork under the Calvinistic building and ran the risk of weakening man's powerlessness unto faith into a moral one. Cappellus, who died in 1658, claimed in his work Arcanum Punctationis Revelatum , given out namelessly at Leiden in 1624 by Erpenius, that the Hebrew points, as to their shape, were later found out by Jewish learned men and joined to the text, and drew forth gainsaying from Buxtorf in 1648. In his Critica Sacra of 1650, he taught that the Hebrew text was not unharmed, and in his Diatribe on the True and Ancient Letters of the Hebrews of 1645, that the Samaritan writing was older than the Hebrew square writing. Placaeus, in On the State of Fallen Man before Grace of 1640, denied the straightway reckoning of Adam's sin. Claude Pajon, who died in 1685, gainsaid the needfulness of inward grace, and was withstood by Jurieu in his Treatise on Nature and Grace of 1687. Thus the theological strife in France ran chiefly over the kind of inward grace. Camero bound it to the enlightening of the understanding, Amyraldus made the outward grace all-embracing, Pajon taught the needless ness of a special inward grace. Thereby deism and rationalism were made ready.
In England there was great variety among the nonconformists. The Presbyterians, after the Westminster Synod, declined both in number and in sway, and had to yield place to Independency, which was already embraced in the 16th century by Robert Browne, Johnson, Ainsworth, and John Robinson (died 1625). During the civil war, it grew in might and esteem.
At the Westminster Synod, the Presbyterians still held the greater part and the Independents had but few voices: Thomas Goodwin (died 1680), Philip Nye (died 1672), Jeremiah Burroughs (died 1646), William Bridge (died 1670), William Carter (died 1658), Sydrach Simpson (died 1658), Joseph Caryll (died 1673), and others. But already in October 1658, at a gathering in London, delegates from more than a hundred Independent churches were present. There the Savoy Declaration was drawn up.
Their foremost theologian was Dr. John Owen (1616-1683). Milton's Doctrina Christiana was published in 1827 at Brunswick.
Baptism also appeared sporadically in England in the 16th century, but began to form its own churches only from 1633 onward. In 1644 it numbered 7 churches in London and 47 outside. In 1677 the Baptists issued a Confession of Faith, which differed from the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration only in church government and baptism. On the basis of this confession, William Collins drew up a catechism in 1693, which was widely accepted. The Calvinistic Baptists are distinguished from the General, Arminian, or Free-will Baptists. Baptism later spread especially in America through Roger Williams (died 1683).
For dogmatics it has done little, but it has brought forth mighty preachers in John Bunyan (died 1688), Robert Hall, John Foster, and others.
The time of the civil war was in England, in religious and theological fields, a season of the greatest confusion. All kinds of thoughts and leanings mingled together. Formerly these were held as so many sects, but much better are they seen, with Weingarten, as shadings within the one great party of the Saints. Arminian, Baptist, chiliastic, antinomian, and even libertine feelings found entry. There reigned a religious individualism.
In Quakerism this reached its height. The freeing from tradition, confession, church bond is completed therein, that each believer is set on his own, even loosed from Scripture, and in himself, in the Spirit, in the inward light, possesses the wellspring of his religious life and knowing. All that is outward—Scripture, Christ, church, office, sacrament—is set aside; the believers live from their own inward beginning and distinguish themselves also in society by their own manners, customs, clothing, and so forth.
George Fox (1624-1691) was the founder of this sect; Robert Barclay (1648-1690) was its theologian; and William Penn (1644-1718) its statesman.
All these individualistic movements paved the way for Deism.
The realism of the English folk-character, the nominalism of Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham, the empiricist wisdom-lore of Francis Bacon (d. 1626) had already made it ready.
And when now in the 17th century bewilderment arose in the godly beliefs, and all England was split into bands and sects, there awoke in many the thought that only in that which was shared by all could the kernel of godliness lie.
Latitudinarianism found entry and ran out into Deism.
The rank of Deists was opened by Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648), who in his works De Veritate (1624) and De Religione Gentilium (1645) brought back the kernel of godliness to five truths: the being of God, the worship of God, goodness, sorrow for sin, and reward; but this first, true, and clean worship of God has been falsified in sundry ways by the priests.
This was the plan of Deism. From thence was now undertaken the strife against the revelation.
Locke (d. 1704), The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), laid upon reason the judgment over the revelation.
John Toland (d. 1722), Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), spoke out that Christianity holds not only nothing against but also nothing above reason.
Anthony Collins (d. 1729), Discourse on Freethinking (1713), praised the free, that is, unbelieving thinking.
Thomas Woolston (d. 1731) wrote Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour (1727-30) and sought to unfold them by allegory.
Matthew Tindal (d. 1733), Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), set aside the whole revelation.
Deism ended in doubtfulness with Henry Dodwell, Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742).
And this doubtfulness was fulfilled in the wisdom-lore realm by David Hume (d. 1776).
34. Around 1750, the decay of Reformed theology set in everywhere. The dissolving elements, already present in the former century, work on and undermine dogmatics. After Cocceianism had gained the victory in this land, from 1740 to 1770 came the period of the Tolerants. The power of the truth was denied; from the confession men withdrew to the Scripture; peculiar Reformed doctrines, original sin, covenant of works, particular satisfaction, and so forth, were let go; under fair form and biblical name, all sorts of Remonstrant and Socinian errors arose. The professors of the Reformed religion at most still submit to what is at hand, but they live no more in it and speak no more from it. The old dogmatics became an object of historical study. Prof. Bernhard de Moor wrote a Commentarius perpetuus in Marckii Compendium , 6 vols., Leiden 1761-71, and Rev. Martinus Vitringa gave a commentary on the Doctrina Christianae religionis of his father Campegius Vitringa, under the title Doctrina Christianae religionis per aphorismos summatim descripta , sixth edition. To which is now added Hypotyposis theologiae elencticae in usum scholarum domesticarum of Campegius Vitringa, edited by Martinus Vitringa, who added a preface, prolegomena, and annotations, as well as the analysis of the renowned Theodorus Scheltinga, 9 parts, Amsterdam 1761. Among the few who with heart and soul held fast to the old Reformed doctrine and defended and further developed it with talent, Alexander Comrie (died 1774), ABC of Faith 1739, Properties of Saving Faith 1744, Explanation of the Catechism 1753, Letter on Justification 1761 (cf. Dr. A. G. Honig, Alexander Comrie , 1892), Nicolaus Holtius (died 1773), Treatise on Justification by Faith 1750, and J. J. Brahé, Remarks on the Five Walloon Articles 1758, take a first place. The first two engaged in their Examination of the Design of Tolerance , in 10 Dialogues, Amsterdam 1753-59, the strife against the Tolerants, among whom the professors J. van den Honert, J. J. Schultens, and Alberti especially had to suffer. Besides them, J. C. Appelius also deserves to be mentioned, who is known by his strife over the Lord's Supper, Modest and Bold Inquiry , etc. 1763; On the Lord's Supper 1764; Remarks on the Right Use of the Gospel ; Continuation of the Remarks , etc.; The Reformed Doctrine 1769.
But from 1770 onward, the so-called neology waxed ever greater in sway. English deism, French unbelief, and German rationalism found here a fruitful soil. The revolution was a total turn in notions. Orthodoxy was led over into the 19th century in the form of a not rationalistic but rational, tempered, biblical supranaturalism, and had as such its chief spokesmen in P. Chevallier, Schema Institutionum theol. 1773-75. Br. Broes, Institut. Theol. theor. 1788. J. van Nuys Klinkenberg, Onderwijs in den godsdienst 12 delen 1780 and following. Samuel van Emdre, Katechismus der H. Godg. 1780. W. E. de Perponcher, Beschouw. Godg. 1790 and so on, in particular H. Muntinghe, Pars theologiae christ. theoretica 1800. And likewise it went in other lands. France had in the 18th century no own Reformed theology anymore. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes banished the best strengths beyond the land. In the 18th century, Paul Rabaut died 1794 and Antoine Court died 1760 earned the honor-name of restorers of the Reformed church in France. The French preachers received their training mostly in Lausanne, where an own seminary was set up for the French students after the plan of Antoine Court. In Switzerland, the Consensus Helveticus 1675 could not stem the rationalism. J. E. Wettstein and his son in Basel, J. C. Suicerus and his son Henricus in Zurich, Mestrezat and Louis Tronchin in Geneva brought already qualms against it; already in 1685 were efforts put in work to set it aside, and in the 18th century these in Geneva, Basel, Appenzell, Zurich, Bern and so on were crowned with good outcome. J. F. Osterwald, preacher at Neufchatel died 1747 forms the passage from the 17th century orthodoxy to the 18th century rationalism. In his Traité des sources de la corruption, qui règne aujourd’hui parmi les Chrétiens 1700, Catéchisme 1702, Compendium theol. Christ. 1739 he laments the dead orthodoxy and the finely spun-out dogmas, keeps silent many teachings, for example about election, and seeks revival of morals. With him formed J. A. Turretinus died 1737, Opera 3 vol. and S. Werenfels died 1740, Opuscula , ed. 2. 1739 the Swiss triumvirate. The tempered orthodoxy by them upheld led soon to decided heterodoxy in J. J. Zimmermann died 1757. Opuscula 1751-59. J. J. Lavater died 1759 article Geneva in the Dictionn. Encycl. of Diderot and d’Alembert, J. Vernet, Instruction Chrétienne 1754. The mathematical method of Wolff was applied to theology by D. Wyttenbach, Tentamen theol. dogm. methodo scientifica pertractata , 3 tomi 1747, J. F. Stapfer, Institut. theol....... ordine scientifico dispositae , 5 vol. 1743, Grundlegung zur wahren Religion Zurich 1751-52, Bernsau, later professor at Franeker, Theol. dogmatica, methodo scientifica pertractata 1745-47, in Germany by Ferdinand Stosch died 1780, Summa paedagogiae scholasticae ad praelectiones academicas in theologiam revel. dogm. 1770, Sam. Endemann professor at Marburg Instit. theol. dogm. 1777 and Sam. Mursinna professor at Halle, Compendium theol. dogm. 1777. In England the dogmatics was nearly wholly taken up by the questions about foretelling, wonder and revelation, which by deism were set on the order. Though the apologetics oftentimes was tinged rationalistic, it yet had many and among them also some outstanding spokesmen, Samuel Clarke died 1729, Nathan Lardner died 1768, Joseph Butler died 1752, Richard Bentley, William Whiston, Arthur Ashley Sykes, Thomas Sherlock died 1761, Daniel Waterland died 1742, John Coneybeare, John Leland, James Foster, William Warburton died 1779, Richard Watson died 1816, William Paley died 1805, Evidences of Christianity 1794. Natural Theology 1802 and so on. Among the dogmatic works, which in this period saw the light, are the chief those of Hutchinson, of which an extract is given in A letter to a bishop concerning some important discoveries in philosophy and theology 1735; of Stackhouse died 1752, A complete body of speculative and practical divinity 1709, Dutch translation 1758, Isaac Watts died 1748 known not only by his spiritual songs and logic but also by his catechism 1728, Philipp Doddridge died 1751, Rise and progress of religion in the soul 1745, and others. Among the Scottish divines in the 18th century come to the fore Thomas Boston died 1732, A complete body of divinity , 3 vol. 1773, Fourfold State , Dutch translation 1742, A view of the covenant of grace , Dutch translation by Comrie 1741; Adam Gib, and the first five Seceders, Fisher, Wilson, Moncrieff and the brothers Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, whose works also in Dutch are translated, new edition, Amsterdam 1856. Of import was the so-called Marrow controversy, which in 1717 began on occasion that the work of the Independent Edward Fisher, The marrow of modern divinity , appeared in 1647, was anew issued in Scotland. The neonomian strife, which in the former century in England was fought, was thereby transplanted to Scotland. The book was assailed by Principal Hadow of St. Andrews in a work, titled The antinomianism of the marrow detected 1721. One charged the “Marrow divines”, among whom Boston was the chief, with antinomianism, but kept oneself not free from neonomianism. The General Assembly condemned some theses in the Marrow book as errors; which also gave occasion to the separation of the Erskines, who had ranged themselves on the side of Boston. The neonomianism was the preparation for the rationalism, which little by little also in the theology and church of Scotland pierced through and in men as Simpson, Mc. Laurin and others already clearly noticeable is. James Buchanan, The doctrine of justification 1867. Merle d’Aubigné, Germany, England and Scotland , Rotterdam, 1849.
35. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Reformed theology was nearly everywhere in a sorrowful decay. In the form of supranaturalism, theology was here practiced by Van der Palm, Van Voorst, Borger, Clarisse, Kist, van Hengel at Leiden, by Abresch, Chevallier, Muntinghe, Ypey at Groningen, Heringa, Royaards, Bouman, Vinke at Utrecht, by many able and foremost preachers Dermout, Broes, Donker Curtius, van Senden, Egeling and others, and by many writers in the Stolpian legacy of 1756, Teyler's Society of 1778, and the Hague Society of 1787. This supranatural direction sought to be rational, not rationalistic in the sense of Wegscheider, Röhr, Paulus; it upheld revelation and proved its needfulness, possibility, and truth on sundry rational and historical grounds.
It sought to be biblical and was anti-confessional, anti-philosophical, anti-Calvinistic; it gained a dogmatics that was deistic in theology, Pelagian in anthropology, moralistic in Christology, collegialistic in ecclesiology, and eudaemonistic in eschatology. In the northern provinces of the land, it was about 1835 replaced by the Groningen theology, which on the footsteps of the Socratic philosophy of Van Heusde, who died in 1839, replaced the idea of revelation and doctrine with that of upbringing, and thus took up an ethical element in the bond between God and mankind.
God was here not in the first place Teacher, but the great Upbringer, who through nature and history, through the person and the church of Christ, trained mankind as His children unto wise and godly Christians, unto God-likeness. The strife it met from orthodox, soon also from modern sides, and the inward growth to an Evangelical direction made it so that about 1850 it had to give place to the Modern Theology. This arose with Opzoomer, who became professor at Utrecht in 1845 and applied the empiristic philosophy of Mill and Comte to religion. He came to antisupranaturalism. Scholten gave in his Doctrine of the Reformed Church at last a modern dogmatics under Reformed banner. And Kuenen stood forth as upholder of evolution in the field of the Old Testament Scripture.
There was thus by degrees a growth on theological ground toward unbelief; the modern theology has no dogmatics more. Over against these negative directions, however, in this century in our fatherland arose the positive directions of the Awakening and the Separation, of the Utrecht and the ethical-irenic school, and at last of Calvinism, which strives also theologically to win its own standing.
In Germany, the Reformed theology has gone ever further backward. The Reformed church had in Germany won a broad field. Her theology was practiced in Heidelberg, Duisburg, Marburg, Frankfurt on the Oder, Herborn, Bremen, Halle. So it stayed until the middle of the eighteenth century. But then came the Enlightenment, in 1817 the Union, thereafter the sway of the philosophy of Kant, Schleiermacher and others, and all these causes have brought the Reformed church and theology in Germany wholly to decay.
Indeed, in the beginning of this century there came some awakening also of the Reformed awareness, with Krafft in Erlangen, G. D. Krummacher in Elberfeld, Geibel in Lübeck, Mallet in Bremen, and others. But this was yet not strong enough. Even men like Ebrard, who died in 1888 in Erlangen, Heppe, who died in 1879 in Marburg, have through their Melanchthonianism done great harm to the Reformed cause. Only Wichelhaus, who died in 1858 in Halle, Karl Südhoff, who died in 1865 in Frankfurt on the Main, Böhl in Vienna, Dr. A. Zahn in Stuttgart, O. Thelemann in Detmold, Kohlbrugge, who died in 1875 in Elberfeld, and others, set themselves steadfastly on the ground of the Reformed confession. Now there is in Germany no single theological university or school, and no single theological professor of Reformed confession more.
36. In Switzerland and France there came a revival through the Reveil, which was transplanted there from Scotland. The Reveil (cf. Wagenaar, Het reveil en de afscheiding. H. von der Goltz, Die reform. Kirche Genfs im 19. Jahrh. Bazel u. Genf 1862. Léon Maury, Le réveil religieux dans l’église réformée à Genève et en France, Paris, Fischbacher 2 vol. 1892. W. van Oosterwijk Bruijn, Het Reveil in Nederland, Utrecht 1890. Pierson, Oudere Tijdgenooten 1888) was a mighty, ghostly movement, but was from the outset unchurchly and anticonfessional. It stood on a broad Christian groundwork and marked itself further by its lone-seeking, highborn, methodistic, and alms-giving kindred.
In Switzerland it laid stress above all on two teachings, the choosing (Cesar Malan † 1864. Biographie by Malan Jr. Amst. Höveker 1874) and the inbreathing (Merle d’Aubigné † 1872. Gaussen † 1863). But Alexander Vinet 1797-1847, who came under the sway of the Reveil in 1822/’23, went forth theologically from another thought. The life-spring of his belief and his godlore was the oneness of Christendom and inwit. Thereby he came to urge so strongly on the bond of teaching and uprightness, on the right-living side of truth; thereby he came to his with-working and to the casting off of choosing and so forth. Vinet held fast, however, to the head truths of Christendom until the end (Dr. J. Cramer, Alex. Vinet als christ. moralist en apologeet geteekend en gewaardeerd, Leiden, Brill 1883, and the writings noted there).
Much further, however, went his learner E. Scherer, who was first sternly right-believing but bit by bit broke with his yore, and ended his life in full unbelief. Since then there came in France and Switzerland a free Protestantism (Pécaut Le Christ et la conscience, Paris 1859, Martin-Paschoud, Réville; Cougnard, Buisson). So there stood two paths, a free and an evangelic, over against each other.
But under the latter the ground-thoughts of Vinet worked through, later yet upheld by the sway of Ritschl. There are now three paths to mark out: a free or left side, Bouvier in Geneva; a middle path, Pressensé, Astié, Sécrétan, Sabatier, Leopold Monod, Chapuis, Dandiran, Lobstein; and an evangelic, mildly right-believing, Godet father and son, Porret, Berthoud, Martin, Doumergue, Bertrand, H. Bois, Gretillat. The strife between these two paths runs now above all over two askings. The one touches the wield in matters of belief, whether this namely lies in the Writ, in Christ or in wit and inwit. The second yields the selfhood of Christ, whether he namely is truly God or by kenosis has emptied himself or also is only a man, stepwise differing from us (cf. Gretillat in The Presb. and Ref. Review, July 1892 and July 1893).
37. An Overview of Theology in England and Scotland. An overview of theology in England and Scotland is given by Pfleiderer in The Development of Protestant Theology in Germany since Kant and in Great Britain since 1825 , Freiburg 1891. Ad. Zahn, Outline of the History of the Evangelical Church in the British Empire in the 19th Century , Stuttgart 1891. Dr. Carl Clemen, The Present State of Religious Thought in Great Britain , Studies and Critiques 1892, 3rd Issue. G. Elliott, Pictures from Church Life in England , Leipzig Academic Bookstore. G. d’Alviella, Religious Evolution among the English, Americans, and Hindus 1884. Walker, Present Theological Drifts in Scotland , Presbyterian and Reformed Review January 1893.
The religious England, as we know it today, is a work of Methodism. John Wesley (1703-1791) was no learned theologian, but a mighty preacher, who made the gospel personal, and turned it into a life-question for every man; see J. Wedgwood, John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction of the Eighteenth Century 1870. The Methodism that arose through him and George Whitefield (1714-1771) was not firstly a straying from one or another of the 39 Articles, but it gathered all the truth of religion around two midpoints, namely, around the sudden, aware feeling of guilt and grace, that is, around the personal turning, and secondly around the showing of that new life in a wholly new shape, therein standing that one went out to turn others, held back from sundry things of no weight, and held Christian fullness already within reach in this life.
This one-sidedness led thereto that little by little sundry teachings were fought, changed, or deemed of lesser worth; see on Methodism the article by Schoell in Herzog's second edition. Saussaye, Religious Movements . Möhler, Symbolics §§ 75-76. Schneckenburger, Lectures on the Doctrinal Concepts of the Smaller Protestant Church Parties 1863. Kolde, Methodism and Its Opposition , Erlangen 1886. The same, The Salvation Army ibid. 1885, Dutch translation by Dr. A. W. Bronsveld.
Methodism has wrought an unreckonable sway on Independents, Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans; Wesley has been the remaker of English and American Protestantism, the revivals have not since left the Protestant churches, he was the Archbishop of the Slums, the father of the inward mission, the founder of Christian socialism. Yet Methodism was mainly bound to the folk. In the higher rings, in statecraft, wisdom-lore, writings, the cold freedom-thinking still held sway. Against that came backlash through the romantic mood (W. Scott, Southey, S. T. Coleridge died 1834), which on churchly and theological ground was brought over into the Oxford movement.
This movement has greatly strengthened the high-church party, which already stood from the 16th century onward, and strongly furthered Roman teaching and rite in the Anglican church. See article on Tractarianism in Herzog's second edition. Also the writers of Lux Mundi 1890, Canon Holland, Moore, Illingworth, Talbot, C. Gore and others, sought to renew Puseyism and make Christian teachings believable, by setting them in the light of the newer times.
Beside the high-church is the broad-church party arisen, which already in the 17th and 18th centuries was readied by Latitudinarianism, and in this century got outstanding spokesmen in Thomas Arnold died 1842, Hampden died 1868, F. D. Maurice died 1872, Ch. Kingsley died 1874, Whately died 1863, F. W. Robertson died 1853, A. P. Stanley died 1881. Loathing the Methodism of the low-church party, they all in earnest and noble wise strove for a mending between Christendom and upbringing. The church must, in their deeming, become a rearing-school of the folk; religion must mend with all that is true, good, and fair, wherever it be found; and Christendom must chiefly show its strength in the upright renewing of the fellowship.
This broad, forbearing standpoint found ever more agreement. The rise and onward march of ritualism, the many sects and ways, the need of the lower fellowship, and chiefly also the Higher Criticism, which already with Bishop Colenso made its entry into the English world, and then was spread by Rob. Smith, T. K. Cheyne, S. R. Driver, have given the broad-church way the upper hand. One of the foremost spokesmen in the present time is F. W. Farrar, dean of Westminster Abbey.
But not only within, also far outside the State Church is this broad standpoint now taken by many. Among the foremost spokesmen now belong the Baptist J. Clifford; the Congregationalists E. W. Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New 1889, Dr. Joseph Parker in London, Dr. Fairbairn of Mansfield College, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology , see Theological Studies of Dr. Daubanton, May, June 1894; the Presbyterians Prof. Henry Drummond, The Natural Law in the Spiritual World , Summum Bonum etc. Marcus Dods, A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, or Christianity Defensively Stated , Edinburgh Clark 1892. James Lindsay, The Progressiveness of Modern Christian Thought , Edinburgh Blackwood 1892. Horton, Inspiration and the Bible . Rev. J. B. Heard, Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Edinburgh Clark, Hulsean lectures, Prof. Edw. Caird, The Evolution of Religion , 2 vols., James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, as Centering in the Incarnation , Edinburgh Elliot 1893, see my essay, Theological Studies of Dr. Daubanton 1894.
And further still Flint, Milligan, Gloag in the Established Church of Scotland, Brown, Rainy, Davidson, Salmond, Laidlaw, G. A. Smith in the Free Church, Cairns, Muir, Thomson, J. Smith in the United Presbyterian etc. Besides by its Christ-centered starting point, which gathers all around the in-fleshing, this way marks itself yet by its uniting bent. The churchly differences are wiped out or shown as of little meaning; in deed one works together with men of all churches and ways; and in thought many strive even for the oneness of all Protestant churches, as for example J. Clifford.
W. T. Stead surely goes the farthest, as he hopes for a "church of the hereafter," which shall lead the whole fellowship mending, take in all upbringing, even to the playhouses, and hold all men. Ofttimes goes therewith yet the hope on a restoring of all things on the other side of the grave; see of the rich writings only The Wider Hope, Essays and Strictures on the Doctrine and Literature of Future Punishment by many writers, lay and clerical, London, Fisher Unwin 1890.
The strict Calvinism loses ground by the day. Here and there it is yet upheld, in the Scottish Highlands, in Wales etc., but of a learned handling and warding there is no more speech. Thereagainst the teaching of unfolding spreads in England by the day. After Deism already had put the wonders, foretellings, and opening to a dreadful sifting, under the sway of Darwin's offspring-teaching, the unknowingness of Spencer, the trial-lore of Stuart Mill, and the stuff-lore of Tyndall, Huxley, Evolution and Ethics 1893 see Times Mirror, April 1894, this religious loosening has gone yet further onward.
The sifting of Christian teachings got an unthought, strong help from Edwin Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches 1881, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church , Hibbert Lectures 1888, who even as already Hampden before him in The Scholastic Philosophy in Relation to Christian Theology 1832, deemed the teachings from the binding of heathen wisdom-lore with the first Christendom.
Unitarianism, which in 1773 founded its first gathering and now in James Martineau, A Study of Religion, Its Sources and Contents 1888, The Seat of Authority in Religion 1890 has an outstanding spokesman, wins step by step in sway. Many have even wholly broken with Christendom, G. Eliot, Ch. Bradlaugh, A. Besant, W. St. Ross, Morley, J. C. Morison, see Ch. Bradlaugh, A. Besant and Ch. Watts, The Freethinkers Textbook 1876; and seek their religious fulfilling in Buddhist god-wisdom (Mrs. Blavatsky, A. Besant), in uprightness (M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma 1873, God and the Bible 1875, who marked religion as uprightness touched with feeling and God as the everlasting might, not ourselves, which makes for rightness), or in a fellowship for upright upbringing (founded 1876 in America, 1886 in England. W. M. Salter, The Religion of Morality , German by G. von Gizycki, Leipzig 1885) or even in Mohammedanism, for which in 1891 in Liverpool a mosque was opened.
38. On the History of Dogmatics in America. For the history of dogmatics in America, one may among other things consult: Encyclopedia of Living Divines and Christian Workers of All Denominations in Europe and America , being a supplement to Schaff-Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge . Edited by Rev. Ph. Schaff and Rev. S. M. Jackson, New York, 1887. Adolf Zahn, Outline of the History of the Evangelical Church in America in the 19th Century , Stuttgart, 1889. Fr. Nippold, American Church History Since the Declaration of Independence of the United States , Berlin, 1892.
All churches have been successively transplanted from England and other lands of Europe to America and Canada. The Episcopal Church is the oldest and richest, and dates back to the immigration in Virginia in 1607. The Dutch Reformed Church was established there since the discovery of the Hudson and Manhattan Island in 1609. The Independents or Congregationalists first landed at Plymouth in 1620. The Quakers were led by William Penn to Pennsylvania in 1680. The Baptists gained a firm footing in America on Rhode Island through Roger Williams in 1639. The Methodists found entrance there through Wesley in 1735 and Whitefield in 1738. The German churches, both Lutheran and Reformed, were established there since the middle of the previous century. The Presbyterian churches are divided there into various groups. A sketch of Presbyterian theology is given by Prof. Schaff in his Theological Propaedeutic , 2 parts, New York, 1892-93, and in The Independent , New York, vol. 45, nos. 2321, 2324, 2329, and 2330. For Congregationalism, see Congregationalists in America , edited by Dr. Albert E. Dunning, New York, Hill and Co., 1894.
Nearly all these churches and directions within churches were of Calvinistic origin. Of all religious movements, Calvinism has been the mightiest in America. It is not limited to one or another church, but under various modifications it is the enlivening element in the Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, Dutch, and German Reformed churches, and so forth. From all sides it was brought to America, from England, Scotland, France, Holland, Germany. It shaped the character of New England during the colonial period from 1620 to 1776.
However, a distinction must be made between the Puritan Calvinism, which came chiefly from England and found entrance in New England, and the Presbyterian Calvinism, which was introduced from Scotland into the Southern, Middle, and Western States. Both forms of Calvinism had as their basis the Westminster Confession of 1647, but in both there soon arose a strife between an old and a new school.
The first and foremost theologian of New England was Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), article in Herzog, second edition; biography by Prof. A. V. G. Allen, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Co., New York, first volume of American Religious Leaders . His works were published in 4 volumes at New York, Carter and Brothers, 1881. He combined deep metaphysical thinking power with earnest piety. In 1734, even before Wesley's coming to America, a remarkable awakening took place in his congregation at Northampton; and later he, with his friend Whitefield, often led and defended such revivals.
Theologically, he waged the strife chiefly against Arminianism, which penetrated New England through the writings of Daniel Whitby and John Taylor. He sought to strengthen Calvinism through his metaphysical and ethical speculations, but in fact weakened it through his distinction between natural and moral inability. He became the father of the Edwardians, New Theology Men, New Lights, as they are called, who indeed upheld the Calvinistic doctrine of God's sovereignty and election, but combined therewith the rejection of original guilt and the universality of the atonement, just as the Saumur theologians did in France.
His son Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801) in the doctrine of satisfaction essentially proposed the theory of Grotius. Samuel Hopkins, a pupil of Edwards (1721-1803), whose works were published in 1852 at Boston by Prof. Park of Andover, wrote a system of theology in which he reproduced Edwards's system and especially developed disinterested love to God in the sense of Fénelon and Madame Guyon. Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840), Works , Boston, 1842, was one of the foremost defenders of Hopkinsianism. With Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) and Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858), Edwards's system was modified in a Pelagian sense. And in the present time at Andover, under the leadership of Dr. Egbert C. Smyth, professor of church history, it has led to the defense of a progressive orthodoxy and to the doctrine of future probation.
The Old School in the theology of New England was especially represented by Dr. Bennet Tyler (1783-1858) and Dr. Leonard Woods (1774-1854), who defended the old Calvinism. However, Puritanism has more and more forsaken the standards of Dordrecht and Westminster. At the synod of the Congregational churches in America, at St. Louis in 1880, a new confession of 12 articles was prepared, in which the characteristic Reformed doctrines are omitted.
39. Theology in the Presbyterian Churches in America. Theology in the Presbyterian churches in America has followed a like path. Here also came a split not only among the theologians, between the Old Lights and the New Lights, but also in the churches between the Synod of Philadelphia and New York from 1741 to 1758. One of the first theologians was John Dickinson (1688-1747), whose foremost work is a defense of the five articles against the Remonstrants. The Old School found chief upholding in Princeton College, founded in 1812, and was there set forth by Dr. Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), Dr. Charles Hodge (1797-1878), Systematic Theology (London and Edinburgh: Nelson, 1873, 3 vols.), and his son and follower Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823-1886), Outlines of Theology , edited by W. H. Goold (London: Nelson, 1866); Evangelical Theology (ibid., 1890).
The so-called Princeton Theology is in the main a reworking of the Calvinism of the seventeenth hundred-year, as it is laid down in the Westminster Confession and the Consensus Helveticus, and foremost worked out by F. Turretinus in his Theologia Elenctica . The same framework is also upheld by the Southern theologians James H. Thornwell (1812-1862), Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871), and Robert L. Dabney. One of the youngest spokesmen of the Old School is W. G. T. Shedd, since 1890 emeritus professor at Union Seminary in New York, Dogmatic Theology (2 vols., New York: Scribner, 1888).
Between Hodge and Shedd there is however a noteworthy difference. The first is a federalist and creationist, the second is a realist and traducianist. Both however agree in this, that they take the choosing very broadly and bring thereunder all children who die young. The New Lights broke away from the Old School, besides in the sway of the general synod, the revivals, the union with the Congregationalists, and so forth, foremost also in the matter of birth-sin and the special atoning, whereto later were added the inbreathing of Holy Writ and the end-times teaching.
Spokesmen of this new path were Albert Barnes (1798-1870), Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), and Thomas H. Skinner (1791-1871), who however none of the three left behind a full teaching framework. Barnes and Beecher were charged with heresy but cleared. Yet it came anew to a split in the churches in 1837, when the Old School got the greater part in the General Synod and cut off four synods from fellowship. In 1869 they were however brought together again, chiefly through the sway of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, founded in 1836.
Here the dogmatics was taught by Dr. Henry B. Smith (1815-1877), System of Christian Theology , edited by W. S. Karr, 4th ed. (New York: Armstrong, 1890), who sought a middle way between Old and New School in the Christ-centered standpoint. One of his learners, Lewis French Stearns (died 1892), wrote Present Day Theology , and therein upholds all the newer thoughts about inbreathing, foreseeing, kenosis, forechoosing, and bliss. Another professor at Union Seminary, Dr. Charles Briggs, was charged with unsound teaching in 1892, because he holds reason as a wellspring, takes errors in the Writ, acknowledges the Higher Criticism, The Bible, the Church and the Reason ; Messianic Prophecy ; Inspiration and Inerrancy , and so forth, and in 1893 was doomed by the General Assembly.
But therewith the storm is not over. The Reformed churches in America are living through a hard time. The teachings of the unerringness of Holy Writ, of the Three-in-Oneness, of the fall and the weakness of man, of the special atoning, of choosing and casting away, and so forth, are hiddenly denied or openly fought. The overhaul question is for now set aside in the Presbyterian church, but will likely come to the fore again. The now-time seems not helpful for the thriving of Reformed theology; see my writing The Future of Calvinism , Presbyterian and Reformed Review, January 1894.
The knowledge of God is the sole and proper end of all things. For all things are from Him, through Him, and to Him; and so too must all knowledge lead back to Him, who is the beginning and the end. In the realm of dogmatics, we seek to unfold the riches of God's self-revelation in Scripture, that the church might rightly confess and live out the truth of the gospel. Thus, dogmatics is not mere speculation, but the orderly setting forth of the doctrines of faith, drawn from the holy writ, for the building up of the saints.
1. The Concept of Principle in Philosophy. According to Simplicius, the Neoplatonic commentator on Aristotle, Phys. 32, and likewise according to Hippolytus in his Refutatio omnium haeresium I 6, cf. H. Ritter and L. Preller, Historia philosophiae graecae 1886, Anaximander was the first who named the ground of things, which he held to be the apeiron , with the name of arche . Yet perhaps he thereby only meant that the apeiron was the beginning and the first of all things, Ed. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, 4th ed. I 203. But in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, this word gained the meaning of the last cause of things. Aristotle understands by archai in general the first things in a series, and especially the first causes, which cannot be drawn from any others; he gives in Metaph. V. 1. 1013, a, 17 this definition: pasōn men oun koinon tōn archōn to prōton einai hothen ē estin ē ginetai ē gignōsketai , that is, whence something is or becomes or is known.
Such causes he took especially in twofold realms, that of being and of consciousness, in metaphysics and in logic. The being of things was drawn by him from four archai , namely, hylē , eidos , archē tēs kinēseōs , and telos , Phys. II, 3, 194b, 16, etc. But likewise he took such last causes in logic. For Aristotle noted that by no means can a proof be given of everything; of many matters we have not a mediate knowing through proof but an immediate knowing through reason. The proofs themselves must, to avoid a regress into the boundless, go forth from such propositions which as immediately sure are not open to proof and need it not. And these propositions Aristotle called archai apodeixeōs , archai syllogistikai , archai amesoi , or also as general assumptions of all proof axiōmata , Anal. post. I 2, 72a, 7, etc., and he says there of them: legō d’ archas en hekastō genei tautas, has hoti esti mē endechetai deixai .
In the same sense the Latin principium was used. Cicero speaks, for example, of rerum principia Acad. IV 36, principia naturae Off. III 12, principia naturalia Fin. II 11, principium philosophiae Nat. D. I 1, principia juris Leg. I 6, etc. In agreement with the above-cited definition of Aristotle, later in logic threefold principium was distinguished, principium essendi , existendi , and cognoscendi , according as the being, the becoming, or the knowing of any thing must be drawn from something else.
From principium was causa then again so distinguished, that causa named the principium as determining something insufficient to itself for existing by its inflow, and as prior in time or at least in nature to the thing which it caused. Thus causa is a special kind of principium ; every causa is a principium , but not every principium is a causa , J. F. Buddeus, Elementa philosophiae instrumentalis, ed. 5th 1714, I 140 sq. 288 sq. Liberatore, Instit. philos. ed. 8th Rome 1855 I 217.
2. The Principle in Theology. This manner of speaking was also adopted in theology. In Holy Scripture, archē has not only ofttimes a temporal meaning (Mark 1:1, John 1:1, etc.), but also several times a causative significance. In the Septuagint, the fear of the Lord is called the archē tēs sophias (Proverbs 1:7), and in Revelation 3:14 and Colossians 1:18, Christ is named the archē of creation and of the resurrection. The church fathers oft speak of the Father as archē , pēgē , aitia of the Son and the Spirit (Athanasius, Against the Arians II; Basil, Against Eunomius I; Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith I 9, etc.), even as Augustine calls the Father the principium totius divinitatis (On the Holy Trinity IV, chap. 20). Thus God is the principium essendi or existendi of all that is created, and therefore also of knowledge, and particularly again of theology.
On this latter field, it was always expressly repeated that God is the principium essendi of theology. There was a special reason for this. There is no knowledge of God possible except from and through God (Matthew 11:27; 1 Corinthians 2:10ff.). It was an axiom of earlier theology: from God must be learned what is to be understood of Him, because He is known only through Himself as author . That there is some knowledge of God in the creature is owing only to God. He is knowable only because and insofar as He Himself wills it. Already the analogy of a man proves the truth of this. A man is to a certain degree the principium essendi of our knowledge concerning his person (1 Corinthians 2:11); he must reveal himself, make himself seen through appearance, word, and deed, that we may somewhat learn to know him. But with a man this is always relative; he oft reveals himself quite unwittingly and against his will; he many times reveals himself in character traits and peculiarities which are unknown to himself; he sometimes reveals himself otherwise than he is, falsely and untruly, etc. But all that does not apply to God. He is in an absolute sense the principium essendi , the principal efficient cause of our knowledge of God, for He is utterly free, self-conscious, and true. His self-knowledge, His self-consciousness, is the principium essendi of our knowledge of God. Without God's self-consciousness, no knowledge of God in the creatures. Pantheism is the death of theology.
The relation now of this self-knowledge of God to our knowledge of God was formerly expressed thus: the former is the theologia archetypa of the latter, and the latter is the theologia ectypa of the former. Our knowledge of God is an imprint of that knowledge which God has of Himself, but always in a creaturely sense. The knowledge of God in His creatures is but a weak likeness, a finite, limited sketch accommodated to the human or creaturely consciousness of the absolute self-consciousness of God. But however great the distance may be, the principium essendi of our knowledge of God is God Himself alone, who reveals Himself freely, self-consciously, and truly.
3. The Principium Cognoscendi. From this principium essendi is now the principium cognoscendi to be set apart. That there is theology, we owe only to God, to His self-awareness, to His good pleasure. But the means, the way, whereby that knowledge of God comes to us, is God's revelation, here yet taken in a wholly broad sense. The nature of the thing brings this with it. A man becomes knowable to us only therefrom, that he reveals himself to us, that is to say, that he shows himself, speaks, or acts. Appearance, word, and deed are the three forms of revelation of the one man to the other. Even so it is also with the Lord our God; His knowledge also flows to us only out of His revelation; and that revelation can only be His appearance, word, and deed. The principium cognoscendi of theology is therefore the self-revelation or self-sharing of God to His creatures. Whether that self-revelation of God now comes singly to each man or is laid down for the whole mankind in the Scripture or in the church, can first be searched out later. Now let it suffice, that the self-revelation of God, by the strength of the nature of the thing, can be the only principium cognoscendi of our God-knowledge. Only let this remark be added thereto, that, if that self-revelation of God is laid down in the Scripture or in the church, that Scripture and that church can only have an instrumental, and thus in a certain sense chance, passing meaning. The Holy Scripture is therefore at most the causa efficiens instrumentalis of theology.
For, the goal of theology can be no other than that the reasonable creature know God and, knowing Him, glorify Him (Prov. 16:4; Rom. 11:36; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 3:17). It is His good pleasure to be known by men (Matt. 11:25, 26). God's self-revelation therefore aims to bring His knowledge into the human mind and thereby again prepare glory and honor for God Himself.
But that self-revelation of God cannot end outside, before, or at the human, but must go on into the human himself; that is, the revelation cannot be only outward but must also be inward. Therefore, in former times a distinction was made between the principium cognoscendi externum and internum , the verbum externum and internum , revelation and illumination, the working of God's Word and of His Spirit.
The verbum internum is the principal word, for this brings the knowledge of God into the human, and that is the goal of all theology, of the whole self-revelation of God. The verbum externum , the revelation laid down in Holy Scripture, serves therein as a means; it is the verbum instrumentale , needful perhaps for sundry side reasons in this dispensation, but yet in its essence timely and chance-like.
4. The Three Principles of Theology. Thus we have come to know three principles. First, God as the essential principle of theology. Next, the external cognitive principle, namely, God's self-revelation, which, insofar as it is laid down in Holy Scripture, bears an instrumental and temporal character. And finally, the internal cognitive principle, the illumination of man by God's Spirit. These three are one in that they have God as their author, and that they have one and the same knowledge of God as their content. The archetypal theology in the divine consciousness; the ectypal theology, bestowed in revelation and laid down in Holy Scripture; and the theology in the subject, the knowledge of God, insofar as it enters from revelation into the consciousness of man and is taken up there—all three are from God. It is God Himself who unlocks His self-knowledge, communicates it through revelation, and brings it into man. And in content also they are one, for it is one and the same pure and true knowledge of God which He has of Himself, which He communicates in revelation, and which He brings into the human consciousness. They may and can therefore never be separated and detached from one another. But on the other hand, they must indeed be distinguished. For the knowledge which God has of Himself is absolute, simple, infinite, and in its absoluteness incommunicable to the finite consciousness. Therefore, formerly the archetypal theology was also limited to that portion of God's self-knowledge which He had resolved to communicate to creatures. But this distinction makes the relation between archetypal theology and ectypal theology into a mechanical one, and forgets that the absolute lies not only in the quantity but also in the quality. Nevertheless, there lies in it the true thought that the ectypal theology, which is bestowed upon creatures through revelation, is not the absolute self-knowledge of God, but that knowledge of God as it is accommodated to and made suitable for the finite consciousness, thus anthropomorphized. This ectypal theology, which lies objectively before us in revelation, is external but is destined to be transferred into the consciousness of rational creatures, to become internal ectypal theology, theology in the subject, but undergoes therein again changes according to the nature of the subject. It differs not in essence and reason, but yet in degree and manner in Christ (theology of union), in the angels and the blessed (theology of vision), in men on earth (theology of wayfarers, of the way, of revelation), and then again among these in prophets and apostles, in theologians and laymen differently. It is modified in each one's consciousness according to his capacity. But in content it is and remains one and the same knowledge, which goes forth from God and is transplanted along the way of revelation into the consciousness of His rational creatures. These three principles, distinguished and yet essentially one, rest in the Trinitarian being of God. It is the Father who through the Son, as Logos, in the Spirit communicates Himself to His creatures.
Cf. concerning these principles of theology: Thomas, Summa Theologica, qu. 1; Fr. Junius, De Vera Theologia; Gomarus, Disputationes Theologicae, thesis 1; Voetius, Diatribe de Theologia Ultraj.; Owen, Theologoumena, sive de Natura, Ortu... Verae Theologiae, libri 6; Alsted, Methodus Sacrosanctae Theologiae, octo libris tradita, Praecognita Theologiae; and further the first chapters on theology in various dogmatics of Turretin, Cocceius, Marck, Moor, Vitringa, etc. Dr. A. Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology.
1. Science ever consists in a logical bond between subject and object. The tie wherein we set these twain to each other shapes our view of science. At all times there have been two paths that in this wise stand straight against each other, Rationalism and Empirism. They arose already in the Greek lore of wisdom. Even there the clash was made of aisthesis and logos , of sense-perceiving and thinking, and thus also of doxa and episteme . The school of Elea, Plato, the Neoplatonists stood on the side of rationalism; sense-perceiving gives no knowledge, it has for its aim shifting shows, and teaches us only that somewhat is and so is, but not why it is so; moreover it beguiles us oftentimes and yields us false seemings, as the bent stick in the water, the uprising sun and suchlike, which only by thinking can be cleansed of their untruth. Therefore thinking stands far above sense-perceiving. This alone brings us episteme ; science comes not from without, it is a birth of the manly spirit. In the newer lore of wisdom this rationalist path arose again with Cartesius, who, casting all away, at last found his steadfast outset in thinking and thenceforth deemed to being, cogito ergo sum . Therewith the need of thought, the logical link, the reckoning order of ground and outgrowth became with Spinoza the yardstick of truth. The sense-world is at most a stirring but no wellspring of our knowledge, the manly spirit can bring forth all knowledge from itself, with its own means, by thinking. Nos idées, même celles des choses sensibles, viennent de notre propre fond , Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain I ch. 1. Kant has now tempered this rationalism insofar as he drew not the stuff but only the shapes of perceiving from the manly spirit (transcendental, critical idealism). But Fichte saw rightly that such a sundering was unfeasible, and therefore spake that all parts of our knowledge, even to perceiving itself, were aforehand and set by the I (utter idealism). Now this rationalism with these wise-men was still ever bounded to the realm of the knowing-might, and thus only meant in a knowledge-theory wise. But this inward rationalism was spread by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel to an outward rationalism; not only knowledge, but also being, not only seemings but also the things themselves are only sprung from thinking, thinking and being are one (metaphysical idealism). There is stride in this tale of rationalism; thinking, not sense-perceiving, gives truth; it brings thereto in itself the beginnings, the seeds of all knowledge; it shapes the form of our thought-world (Kant), and also its stuff and filling (Fichte), yea it shapes and builds the whole world, not only of thinking, but also of being.
2. In whatever sundry shapes this rationalism has arisen, it has yet always one groundwork thought, namely, that the spring of knowledge is to be sought in the subject. It is well to grasp that men came to this thought. Setting aside the untrustworthiness of sense beholding, there is between the forthsettings in us and the things outside us such a beingly difference, that the first cannot be cleared from the last. Stuff cannot work on the ghost; ghostly showings, such as the forthsettings are, are only to be cleared from the ghost; like can only be known by like. From this follows, that the being and the withworking of stuff and ghost, of things outside us and forthsettings in us, either can only still be upheld by guessings like the occasionalism (Geulinx), the harmony fore-set (Leibniz), the beholding of the ideas in God (Malebranche) and so on, or that simply the twoness of stuff and ghost must be gainsaid, and that thing and forthsetting, being and thinking, are beheld as beingly one. For, so says the idealism, if thing and forthsetting are two, then we must despair of the knowledge of the thing; we can yet never test our forthsetting of the thing to the thing itself; we can never come out of ourselves, out of our forthsetting-world; nous ne pouvons nous mettre à la fenêtre, pour nous voir passer dans la rue (Scherer). We stay always within the ring of our forthsettings and come never with the thing itself, but always again with our forthsetting of the thing, in touch; only the aware exists for us; I can only think the thought, not the thing; what is not my thought, is for me unthinkbar, unknowbar, exists for me not. And this idealism is then yet strengthened by what the lore of the body of the senses now teaches. Already Democritus made sundering between such ownships as heaviness, thickness, hardness, which are thingly and lie in the things themselves, and others, such as warmth, cold, taste, hue, which are only selfly in our feelings present. This sundering of thingly and selfly, how-much-ly and what-ly ownships is taken over by Cartesius, Hobbes, Locke, who first named them primary and secondary ownships, and then in this hundred-year especially worked out by Helmholtz in his Handbook of Body-lore Sight-lore, and Teaching of the Tone-feelings. According to this so-called half-idealism there are outside us in the world only workly movings of the bits, the stuff is what-less. Our senses receive only inpressings through the moving and waving of the bits; those inpressings are what-ly alike; but in our brains we bring forth from those one-shape movings the boundless sundryness of the beholding-world. Light, sound, hue, taste, warmth, cold, all what-ly ownships, which we deem to behold in the things, exist not outside but arise and exist only in the manly ghost. A same moving of the stuff, touching our touch-sense, makes the inpressing of warmth; and falling in the eye, gives us the feeling of light. The world is in her under-standing not, but yet in her shape a forthbringing of the man. So has the idealism ever longer ever more in the wisdom-lore field won and even from the kind-lore mighty uphold received.
3. Objections Against Idealism. Yet there are very serious objections against idealism. In the first place, it is at odds with all experience. We are all by nature realists, and the idealists themselves are so in practice. In truth, idealism is a matter, an opinion of the school, which stands in direct strife with life and experience. It explains not how and why every man comes naturally and unwittingly to ascribe objectivity and self-standing reality to the perceived appearances, and not merely to take them as inner states of consciousness, while we yet clearly mark the difference between inward states and outward things, between what is within and without us, between dream (hallucination) and reality.
Moreover, man is never and in no field self-ruling, but everywhere and always hangs upon the nature around him. By his body he is bound to the earth. Shelter, food, clothing he receives from her; it would be strange if it were otherwise with him in the realm of understanding. Just as we prepare food and clothing with our hands, yet draw the stuff therefor from nature outside us, so also with the understanding we receive the stuff from without. The understanding is here too an instrument, not a wellspring. Idealism makes one the organ with the wellspring of knowledge, makes as it were the eye the wellspring of light, draws the thought from the thinking.
That cannot be, for a thing and its likeness, being and thinking, esse and percipi are twain and cannot be made one. They are indeed wholly unlike in kind. A thing rises not in us like a dream, nor follows in reason from former likenesses, but comes oft suddenly from without to me and breaks the chain of my likenesses; it is unbound from me, and has a being outside me; it has properties which cannot be ascribed to the likeness thereof. The thing which one calls a stove, for instance, is warm, but the likeness of that thing in my consciousness has no such property. If nevertheless thing and likeness are made one, idealism must lead to utter illusionism; not only the world without me becomes seeming, but I myself am naught but a likeness, an appearance to myself. All becomes a dream, there is no reality anymore, nor truth.
Idealism may now have no sway on the trade and ways of its followers, for life is oft better and stronger than the teaching, yet it is not to be seen how, for instance, godliness and uprightness can still be upheld in theory, if both are no real bonds to beings outside me but only to likenesses within me. The twofoldness of thinking and being, from which idealism in Plato, Descartes, Kant goes forth, thus ever turns again into the oneness of both in Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the inward reasoning leads to utter and outward reasoning. But the bare, empty thinking, the most widespread ground of substance, the absolute, the being, the thinking, from which idealistic wisdom takes its starting point, is not able to bring forth the rich full being. From that dry bare thing the living world cannot be explained, from that lifeless one the manifold of appearances.
The rock on which all pantheism founders is the manifold; there is no crossing found from the bare to the full, from the widespread to the single. Schelling spoke it openly, that it is hard to come to reality. At last, a marking as of Kant between the form which we ourselves bring to the perceiving, and the stuff which comes to us from without, or as that of the half-idealism between outward, first, and inward, second appearances is therefore untenable, for a bound between both cannot be shown. The stuff of a likeness belongs, as Fichte also spoke, just as much to the likeness as its form. And the first measure-like properties, yea also the bodies themselves, are just as much perceived appearances as the kind-like properties of tone and color and so forth.
There is no ground to take the witness of one sense, the touch, and cast away that of the other four, and thus make an outlier only for the properties of spread, hardness, and so forth. There is no hindrance to ascribe to the forms of perceiving, time and space, and to the kinds of thinking also outward reality in the things themselves. And the lore of the senses hinders us not to see just in the sundry measure-like bonds and stirrings the outward ground of the kind-like appearances.
F. Pillon, L’évolution historique de l’idéalisme, de Démocrite à Locke , in L’année philosophique , sous la direction de F. Pillon. Georges Lyon, L’idéalisme en Angleterre au 18e siècle . Dr. Glossner, Der moderne Idealismus . Ernst Laas, Idealismus und Positivismus . E. von Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung des transcendentalen Realismus . Id. Das Grundproblem der Erkenntniss-theorie . Id. Neukantianismus, Schopenhaueranismus und Hegelianismus . Stöckl, Lehrbuch der Philos . E. L. Fischer, die Grundfragen der Erkenntniss-theorie . Id. Theorie der Gesichtswahrnemung . Al Schmid, Erkenntnisslehre . L. Strümpell, Die Einleitung in die Philosophie . Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philos . C. A. Thilo, Die Wissenschaftlichkeit der modernen specul. Theol . Flügel, Die specul. Theol. der Gegenwart . J. T. Beck, Vorlesungen über Chr. Glaubenslehre . F. J. Stahl, Philos. des Rechts . Nathusius, Das Wesen der Wissenschaft . Gretillat, Exposé de théol. systém . Pierson, Bespiegeling, gezag en ervaring . Opzoomer, Wetenschap en Wijsbegeerte . Land, Inleiding tot de wijsbeg . Bilderdijk, Verhandelingen, ziel-, zede- en rechtsleer betreffende : over de oorzakelijkheid, van het menschelijk verstand, enz.
4. Empiricism. Directly opposite to Rationalism stands Empiricism, which already had its forerunners among the Greeks in the Atomists, then appeared in the Middle Ages as Nominalism, afterwards entered as a philosophical direction in the modern era with Francis Bacon, and through Locke, Hume, and the French Encyclopedists has in this century culminated in the Positivism of A. Comte, the experiential philosophy of Stuart Mill, the Agnosticism of H. Spencer, and the Materialism of Büchner, Czolbe, Moleschott, and others.
Empiricism also appears in diverse forms and systems, yet it always takes this principle as its starting point: that only sense perception is the source of our knowledge. Whilst Rationalism lets the objective world be wholly or partly directed by the human mind, Empiricism subjects the consciousness wholly and fully to the world outside us. Mankind brings nothing to the striving for knowledge except the faculty of perceiving; from this all intellectual activity takes its beginning and origin. Innate concepts, therefore, do not exist; all preconceived opinions must the scientific inquirer set aside. From the temple of truth, which he would build in his consciousness, he must remove all idols; no anticipation of the mind, but interpretation of nature, mere experience must guide him (Bacon). The human mind is and must be a blank slate, on which nothing is written, wholly without presuppositions. Only then is knowledge trustworthy, when it is built up solely and only from perception. Concepts without intuitions are empty. The further mankind removes from experience and rises above it, the less trustworthy he is in his scientific striving. Therefore, there is also no science possible of the supersensible (noumena) and of the supernatural. Metaphysics, theology, the spiritual sciences in general, even according to Comte psychology, are no science in the proper sense. Science is limited to the exact sciences. And even within the circle of perceptible phenomena, our knowledge is confined to the that and how; the what and the why remain hidden. Cause and purpose, origin and destiny of things lie beyond our reach; only the mutual relations of things, the invariable relations of succession and similitude, are the object of scientific inquiry.
Whether there is something else behind and above the perceptible phenomena, whether the soul, God, the beyond exists, may perhaps be made acceptable by other means, through practical reason, faith, imagination, and the like, but scientifically all that is and remains an unknown land. The goal of science can therefore no longer consist in giving a world explanation, but extends only to such a knowledge of reality that we can thereby order our life and draw practical benefit from it. To know is to foresee; science, whence foresight; foresight, whence action. But this absolute bondage of the mind to the world of perception has led others to the attempt not only to explain the thought content of the mind, but also consciousness and the mind itself from the world; Empiricism has ended in Materialism.
Here too there is progress, history, development to be noted. First the thought content, then the faculty, finally also the substance of the mind is derived from the material world.
E. Laas, Idealismus und Positivismus, 3 Bde.
Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger, 2e Aufl. Leipzig.
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Algemeene grondslagen der stellige wijsbegeerte door A. Comte, ’s Hage (bevat de twee eerste lessen uit Comte’s werk).
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L. Büchner, Kraft und Stoff, 16e Aufl. Leipzig.
5. This empiricism hath indeed a mighty stay in the dependence of man upon the nature that surroundeth him, but it is yet beset by weighty objections. First, it standeth firm that the spirit of man in his intellectual working is never in an utter sense passive or even receptive, but alway in greater or lesser measure acteth actively. For it is not the eye that seeth and the ear that heareth, but man himself, who through the eye seeth and through the ear heareth. The simplest sensing and imagining already supposeth awareness, and thus a working of the soul. A blank slate, whereon the outer world can write what it will, is the human spirit never; it is itself that perceiveth, bindeth the perceptions, likeneth, judgeth. But there is more; Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason , Introduction § 2, saith rightly: Experience teacheth us indeed that something is thus or thus fashioned, but not that it cannot be otherwise. Now we have not only particular and chance truths, but also general and needful truths, in logic, mathematics, and the like, which the empiricists have in vain sought to draw from experience. The principle of causality, for example, is truly called the bulwark of the intuitive school; and all toil spent to explain this principle and foundation of all knowledge from the will's determining, from habit, and the like, hath been fruitless. Dr. G. Heymans, Sketch of a Critical History of the Concept of Causality in Modern Philosophy , Leiden, Brill 1890. Dr. E. Koenig, The Development of the Causal Problem from Descartes to Kant , Leipzig, Wigand 1888. Spruyt, Essay on a History of the Doctrine of Innate Ideas , Leiden, Brill 1879. Yea, all sciences go forth from a row of unproven and unprovable sayings, which are taken a priori and serve as starting point for all reasoning and proof. Aristotle hath already seen this; there is no going back without end; just to have proving strength, the proofs must at last rest in a saying that needeth no proof, that resteth in itself, and therefore can serve as principle of demonstration. Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks . Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , 6th ed. Leipzig 1887. A building cannot stand in the air, and a reasoning can only rest on a foundation that lieth fast by evidence, and not by proof. The starting point of empiricism is hereby judged, but also its view of knowledge is under grave doubt. For it belongeth to knowledge by its kind to give knowing of the general, the needful and everlasting, the logical, the idea. Knowing of appearances, persons, facts, and the like is good, but is yet only a readying work; breaking down goeth before, but the binding together must follow. Knowledge is there first when we see through things in their cause and being, in their end and destiny, when we know not only the that but also the why, and thus discern the causes of things. But empiricism is driven to deny to all sciences the name of knowledge and leave it only for the exact sciences. But this narrowing is for a twofold reason unworkable. First because besides, and then only in a certain sense, the purely formal sciences (logic, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry) no knowledge is workable without a wise-thinking element, and in every knowledge thus the finding, the insight, the fancy, that is, the giftedness and in bond therewith the knowing guess hold a very weighty place. And secondly, because the name of knowledge then at last can only be kept for some helping fields, and just that knowing which for man is the weightiest and which he chiefly seeketh in searching, is banished from the heritage of knowledge. It yet remaineth true, what on the pattern of Aristotle, Ethics 10,7; Parts of Animals 1,5; On the Heavens and the World 2,5, Thomas Aquinas said in Summa Theologica I qu. 1 art. 5, ad. 1: The least that can be had of knowing of the highest things is more to be wished than the surest knowing that is had of the least things. And Schopenhauer spake in like spirit: They cease not to praise the sureness and certainty of mathematics. But what helpeth it me to know so surely and trustily that wherein I have no stake? In Van Oosterzee, For Church and Theology . Besides, the world of ghostly things, the world of worths, of good and evil, right and custom, religion and moral, of all that breedeth in us love and hate, lifteth us up and comforteth or also casteth down and sorroweth, that whole rich unseen world is even so for us a reality as the world of working, which we perceive with our senses. Its might on our life and in the tale of mankind is yet much greater than that of the seen things around us. One may freely set before man the demand that he bound his searching because on this field no knowing is workable; that demand striketh against what Schopenhauer hath called the metaphysical need of the human spirit. Man is not only an understanding but also a willing and feeling being; he is no thinking machine but hath by his head also a heart, a world of stirrings and passions. These he bringeth with him in his knowing work, he cannot in his working in study chamber and workshop shut himself out. It can be no demand that man in knowing work, that is, in one of the noblest and highest workings of his spirit, lay silence on his mood, on his heart, on the best that is in him, and thus maim himself. This only may alway and so also for the doer of knowledge be demanded, that he be a good, a true man, a man of God, fitted for all good work, also for this work of knowledge (compare above). If however knowledge both in the inward and outward sense is bounded, one will get nothing else than that yet along other ways provision in the metaphysical need is sought. Kant took the way of practical reason, Comte brought in a service of mankind and hallowed himself as high priest, Spencer boweth humbly before The Unknowable. All seek in one way or another, even unto spiritism, magic, theosophy, amends for what knowledge giveth them not. And religion with all ghostly knowing, first scornfully driven out the foredoor, is again, but then oft in superstitious shape, let in the backdoor. Drive out nature with a fork, yet it ever cometh back. The unavoidable outcome is then only this, that knowledge is left undefended and unarmed to materialism. Thereto hath empiricism in truth led. If the content and soon also the understanding faculty of the soul cometh wholly and all from the outer world, why should then also the substance of the soul at last not be explained from it? Over against this yet alway stand the “seven world riddles” to a torment and a vexation for materialistic thinking. The ghostly is yet not explained from the stuffly, even as it hath not befallen rationalism to draw the being from thinking. The crossing between both is not found. Here is a cleft that neither idealism nor materialism can bridge. It is even not bold here to speak not only of an Ignoramus but also of an Ignorabimus. But when we see how empiricism and rationalism, despite the great promises and the yet greater hopes, in this age have run out on nothing else than materialism and illusionism, and in spite of their withstanding yet each other furthered and helped in hand—the idealism of Hegel ran out in Feuerbach and Strauss on materialism, and materialism goeth in many nature searchers again into half or whole idealism—then there is in any case well ground to ask whether there is not need for review of all the newer wise-thinking, both in its Cartesian and in its Baconian bent; whether there are not other and better beginnings of knowledge that keep us from both materialism and idealism? Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , 6th ed. 1887. E. v. Hartmann, Natural Science and Philosophy , Collected Studies and Essays, Berlin 1876. E. L. Fischer, The Basic Questions of the Theory of Knowledge , Mainz 1887. Schmid, Doctrine of Knowledge , Freiburg 1890. Stöckl, Textbook of Philosophy . Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy . Strümpell, Introduction to Philosophy . W. Dilthey, Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit , Leipzig, Duncker u. Humblot 1883. Emil du Bois-Reymond, On the Limits of Nature Knowing. The Seven World Riddles . Leipzig, Veit u. C. 1882. Pressensé, The Origins , Paris Fischbacher 1883. P. Vallet, Kantism and Positivism , Paris 1887. Gretillat, Exposition of Systematic Theology . D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Life and Direction 1865. Id. Empirical or Ethical (Ernst en Vrede. 1858) etc.
6. The starting point of the lore of knowledge ought to be the ordinary, daily experience, the general and natural certainty of man concerning the objectivity and truth of his knowledge. For philosophy does not create the faculty of knowing nor the knowing itself, but finds it and now seeks to explain it; and every solution that does not explain the faculty of knowing but destroys it, and does not understand knowing but makes it into an illusion, is thereby judged. Only such a lore of knowledge has a chance of success which on the one hand does not leave the ground of experience but on the other hand also penetrates into the whole depth of the problem. Prior homo, quam philosophus vel poeta , Tertull. de test. an. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari . The natural certainty is the indispensable foundation of science. Scientific knowing is no destruction but a purifying, expanding, completing of ordinary knowing, Kaftan, Die Wahrheit der Chr. Rel. Basel, 1889. Every man indeed takes for granted the trustworthiness of the senses and the being of the outer world, not by a logical conclusion from the working, in this case the representation in his consciousness, to the cause outside himself, nor yet by a reasoning from the opposition which his will meets, to an objective reality which offers that opposition; but before all reflection and reasoning, each one is fully assured of the real being of the world. This certainty is not born from a syllogism and rests on no proof, but is immediate, spontaneous, arising in me with the perception itself, not a product but the foundation and starting point of all other certainty. Denn die ganze Welt der Reflexion ruht und wurzelt auf der anschaulichen Welt , Schopenhauer, Welt als W. u. V. 6e Aufl. Only herewith must well be distinguished between the certainty which is at once given with the actual perception of an object, and that which later, after the perception has long passed, follows from the remaining representation. Of the first is here only treated, and this is no conclusion from a reasoning, but immediate, present in me with the perception itself. Cf. Ed. Zeller, Ueber die Gründe unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Aussenwelt 1884. E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnisstheorie 1887. Paulsen, Einl. in die Philos. Flügel, Die Probleme der Philosophie und ihre Lösungen, Cöthen, Schulze, 2e Aufl. 1888. Schmid, Erkenntnisslehre 1890 II. Land, Inl. tot de wijsbeg. bl. enz.
7. Already this one fact, the natural certainty concerning the trustworthiness of the senses and the reality of the outer world, proves that there exists another certainty besides the scientific, demonstrative one. The empiricists have wrongly denied this. Experience teaches only that something is, but not that it must be; it teaches us only the accidental, the changeable, the reality. Yet we also have general, necessary truths, of which we are certain not through observation and reasoning, but a priori. Most philosophers have therefore assumed, alongside the scientific or mediate certainty, also a metaphysical, intuitive, immediate certainty, also called a certainty of faith, of evidence. Aristotle was the first to see clearly that knowledge in the last instance is built upon unprovable, evident truths. Some, such as Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Rosmini, have sought to explain this unchangeable, eternal character of truth by the doctrine of innate ideas. But this doctrine rests on an untenable dualism of subject and object, makes the human mind independent of the cosmos, is in principle rationalistic, and leads logically and also historically to absolute idealism. This was the reason why the doctrine of innate ideas was unanimously rejected by the scholastic and also by the Reformed theologians. They even adopted the empiricist thesis: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, and spoke of man before he perceives as a blank slate, on which nothing is written. And they maintained this because man, in distinction from the angels, is bodily; his body is not a prison but belongs to his nature, and through that body he is bound to the cosmos. Thus, on the one hand, they rejected rationalism as decidedly as possible, not only in the form of innate concepts as taught by Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, but also in that of innate forms as in Kant, and in that of the innate idea of being as in Rosmini and the ontologists. But on the other hand, the above-mentioned expressions must not be understood in the sense of Locke's empiricism. When Thomas calls the human mind a blank slate, he by no means denies that the intellect itself is innate to him. Leibniz added to the saying "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" the restriction "except the intellect itself." Thomas expresses it even more accurately: the species of other intelligibles are not innate to it, but its own essence is innate to it, so that it does not need to acquire it from phantasms. And Voetius explains the above saying in such a way that it does not exclude that the intellect can notice and know in the sensibly perceived world also the eternal and unchangeable, for example, in the works of nature also their author, namely, God. And this is also the proper thought of their theory of knowledge: the human mind is not able and in any case not in the position to produce, outside the sensible world, from its own resources, with its own means, the knowledge of things, not even the knowledge of the eternal principles, common notions. From the outset it is bound to the body and thereby to the cosmos, and therefore the intellect can come to no activity except through and on the basis of the senses. At the beginning the intellect is pure potentiality, a blank slate, without any content, and is first aroused from outside by the sensible world to activity, to actuality. The impulse thus comes from the sensible world; it acts upon the human mind, awakens it, and urges it to action. But as soon as the intellect begins to work, it immediately and naturally works also in its own way and according to its own nature. And the nature of the intellect consists in this, that it possesses the power, faculty, inclination, aptitude to form, in and with perception, immediately, naturally, involuntarily, without any labor, without prior study, without reasoning, those fundamental concepts and principles which stand firm a priori, before every reasoning and before all proof, and therefore deserve to be called eternal truths. Thus thinking itself, as soon as it begins to work, naturally feels itself bound to the laws of thinking; in thinking itself the laws of thinking are enclosed and come to light. Thus experience teaches us what a part and what a whole is, but the intellect immediately comprehends that a whole is greater than its part. Thus experience teaches us what is good and what is evil, but the practical intellect knows immediately that the one must be done and the other left undone. This does not mean that every person can now also give a clear account of these fundamental concepts and principles to himself or others; but every person, even the simplest, applies these fundamental concepts and principles in life, without any scientific reflection, unconsciously and with the greatest certainty. The difference between this doctrine of the faculty of knowledge and that of rationalism and empiricism lies in these two points: first, in a peculiar conception of the intellect, which brings with it its own nature and accordingly also works in its own way; and second, in this, that this intellect, working thus according to its own nature, does nothing other than abstract from the perceived things that logical element which also lies hidden in those things by nature. Rationalism as it were forces things to conform to the intellect, fits them into forms of which it does not know whether they fit, constructs the world according to a play of concepts. Empiricism forces the mind to conform to the sensible world, clips its wings in its ideal flight, and finally explains it from matter itself. But the theory of knowledge which gradually arose in Christian theology and was first thought out in its main features by Augustine maintains both: the freedom and the bondage of the human mind; the freedom to ascend to the world of the ideal, the bondage by which even in this flight it does not lose the world of reality under its feet.
8. The Starting Point of All Knowledge in Man. The starting point of all knowledge in man is thus the sense perception. Oude noein ho nous ta ektos me met' aistheseos onta , Arist. de sensu c. 6, Zeller Philos. d. Gr. III. Omnis cognitio intellectualis incipit a sensu , Thomas S. Theol. I. qu. 84 art. 1 and 7. Intellectus noster nihil intelligit sine phantasmate , id. C. Gent. III 41. And all Christian theologians were of the same thought. The fault of the scholastics, both among Protestants and Roman Catholics, lay only herein, that they were done with perception much too soon and thought it almost fully taken up and laid down in the books of Euclid, Aristotle, the church fathers, the confession, on every field of knowledge. In that belief they left perception behind and began at once with the concepts already gotten, Spruyt, Proeve. Therefore it could almost be called a finding when Bacon went back to sense perception as to the only wellspring of knowledge. Yet it was no finding, but indeed a needful freshening for knowledge, for this must always go back to the wellsprings. Not from books, but from the real world must truth be drawn. Beholding is the wellspring of all true knowledge. Die Anschauungen sind die Kontanten, die Begriffe die Zettel , Schopenhauer, Die Welt u. s. w. 6e Aufl. II cf.. At this sense perception now each sense has its own kind and its own task; each seeks in the showings the kindred, the touch sense makes us know the workly, taste and smell make us know the blending qualities, the hearing unlocks to us the world of tones and the sight that of colors, Arist. by Zeller, Philos. d. Gr. III. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 78 art. 3. Schopenhauer, Die Welt u. s. w. II. Land, Inleiding. Bilderdijk, Taal-en Dichtk. Verscheidenheden, 1821 II. Verhandelingen, ziel-, zede- en rechtsleer betreffende 1821 bl.. Brieven V. The senses thus each for themselves take not the whole thing in, but only certain qualities at that thing. The perception likeness that arises in our awareness is put together from many sundry inprints, which by the sundry senses received, along the nerve threads transplanted into our brains, there in an unexplainable way turned into feelings, and bound into a whole. There are no simple feelings, they are all already put together from sundry others; each thing that we see, each tone that we hear is already a knot of perceptions. The manly mind is therefore at the simplest perceptions already working; he is no blank slate, upon which the outer world only writes what it will, no looking glass, wherein the thing merely throws back itself. But each perception likeness is in the awareness itself shaped from the makers, which by the sundry senses from the thing are brought. Therefore the asking is of such great weight, what the bond is between the perception likeness, the fore-stelling (phantasia, phantasma, species sensibilis, perception, Vorstellung ) in our awareness and the realness, the thing, outside us. The Greek wisdom-lore went on the whole out from the thought, that like could only be known by like; phasi gar gignoskesthai to homoion toi homoioi , Arist. de an. I 2. Some drew therefrom that the soul of man must be made up from the same beginnings and bits as the real world, and that at perception stuffly bits from the things broke into the soul. Aristotle however took this so, that the soul is not in deed but in might all the thought --he psyche ta onta pos esti panta , de an. III, 8-- and that the things by perception and thinking got an ideal being in the soul. The scholastics took this over and said: cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognitionis, non per modum cogniti , that is, the things go not themselves over into the soul, but only their likeness, their shape, eidos, forma, species, similitudo , Thomas S. Theol. I qu. 75. I 2 qu. 5 art. 5. II 2 qu. 23 art. 6 ad 1. S. c. Gent. I II,. There is thus on one side an beingly sundering between the thing and its fore-stelling, for the first is outside us, has there a real being, but the second is in us and has only an ideal being. But there was on the other side yet also a full matching; the fore-stelling is a likeness, a faithful ideal after-shaping of the thing outside us. The newer wisdom-lore however, heeding the working of man's awareness at the shaping of the perception likenesses, has dug between thing and fore-stelling a how longer how broader cleft. The perception likenesses are no species, formae, but at most yet marks, tokens, drawings of the outer world, freely shaped in our mind after the lead of the changings that from outside through the senses and nerves into our brain knots are brought. If this is so, the thingly world fades ever further from our sight, it loosens itself up in seeming; for a checking of the perception likeness at the realness is therefore unmightful, while we can never near her, and the perception likeness always shoves itself in between her and us, Land, Inleiding, and the earlier named writings. The wandering that lies at the ground of this lore seems this to be, that the own thing of our perception is not the thing outside us, but one or other inprint or shaking of our nerves in us would be. Now it is surely true, that no fore-stelling can be shaped in our awareness, without shakings in the nerves being transplanted to our brain knots. But also the likeness that is thrown on the net-skin of the eye, nor the changings in the brain knots from the nerve shakings are the sake, wherefrom the feeling and fore-stelling in our awareness arises. All mind-measuring searches, how weighty also, have brought us no step nearer to the clearing of this wonder-full showing. We stand here before a, as it seems, unsolvable riddle. The nerve shakings can be followed into the mid of the brains, their strength and speed can be reckoned; but the fore-stelling that thereafter arises in our awareness is wholly other in kind therefrom. She is a soully, ghostly deed, from bodily showings, like the nerve shakings are, never to be cleared. So then the fore-stellings can be no offsprings, that by the nerve shakings to us ourselves unaware in our awareness are brought forth. And they can also be no aware shapings of our mind, after the lead of the changings in our brain knots, for the straightforward ground, that no one of this whole working of the nerve shakings knows anything at the perception, and first through set bodily search gets knowledge thereof. There comes yet besides, that the nerve shakings and changings in the brain knots sometimes indeed, at seeing without marking, at hearing without understanding etc. go on wholly and purely workly, but that they yet at the own perceiving always already go with a soully deed. It goes not so, that the nerve shakings first are brought over into our brains, and that first thereafter the awareness wakes and from those changings in the brain knots shapes the fore-stelling; but the perception itself through the senses is a deed of the awareness. It is the mind of man, that sees through the eye and hears through the ear. Thing of the perception is thus not any showing in me, but the thing outside me. The same mind, that sees the thing, is it also, that shapes the fore-stelling. Both are soully deeds. Therefore there is also no ground to doubt, that we in the fore-stellings have a faithful, ideal after-shaping of the things outside us. Besides it is to a certain height unmattering, whether we name the fore-stellings eide, species, formae , marks, tokens etc. of the things; for also these words are likenesses, and for the most deal borrowed from the sight perception. If but stands fast, that the fore-stellings in their whole and in their deals are faithful out-tellings of the world of realness outside us.
9. But with these conceptions the human mind does not abide. Scientific knowledge springs not from the senses but from the understanding. Not mere beholding, but earnest thinking upon the beheld appearances have made Copernicus the father of astronomy and Newton the finder of the law of heaviness.
The beholding of appearances is needful and good, but it is not the only nor the highest. The mark of knowledge is not the single but the overall, the reasonable, the thought. The Greek wisdom-lore has already seen this. Socrates was the first who knowingly thought the thought of knowing and made it the groundwork of his wisdom-lore; knowledge is wit, not of the show, but of the being of things.
Plato sundered between doxa , which had as its holding the everyday, sense-born wit, and episteme , which had the truly being of things as its holding. And Aristotle marked knowledge in the same wise as wit of what is, of the overall, of the first grounds and beginnings.
Above all, Augustine has set this understanding-wit foremost. He casts not away the wit through the senses, he upholds its truth against the Academics in a sunder writing, and owns that we understand the unseen things of God through those which are made. But he yet underdeems its worth, even as Plato; the sense-like gives only doxa , it is not truth itself, it is but a likeness thereof. Wit of kind is without avail. There are truly but two things that are weighty to know, God and ourselves: deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino . And this wit he gets not by looking outward, but by looking inward; noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas ; not through sense-beholding but through thinking; aliud est sentire, aliud nosse .
The schoolmen, cleaving nearer to Aristotle, have better seen the worth of sense-beholding, but yet fully owned the meaning of the understanding for knowledge. Thomas uttered this short and clear thus, scientia non est singularium , understanding is of overalls. Knowledge has to its mark the overall and needful, and can therefore only be yielded by the understanding. For while sense-beholding looks upon things as to their outward mishaps, it is rightly the ownness of the understanding, that it thrusts through to the inward of the thing, thrusts to the being of the thing. Its own mark is the whatness of the stuffly thing.
The understanding namely makes as intellectus agens , that is as outdrawing might, as we would name it, from the sense-conceptions the overall loose; it lets the single fall away therefrom, it shines as a light over them, makes them understandable, lets the overall become knowable therefrom, and then as intellectus possibilis , that is as understanding wit-might, takes that overall into itself and makes it the own of the mind.
Now, there is truly no difference here, that not the sensory beholding but the understanding is the organ of knowledge. Even empiricism has not gainsaid this. Bacon, Hume, and J.S. Mill fully acknowledge that sensory beholding is indeed the first but not the only means, and that the understanding through induction seeks to draw the general from the particular. It was Bacon's very aim to find a trustworthy method by which general-valid judgments could be formed from particular beholdings. But with the concepts that the understanding shapes from the representations, the question returns with double earnestness, which was already posed above with the beholding-images: what is the bond between these concepts of the understanding and the world of reality?
And here Nominalism and Realism part ways. Both directions come forth in essence already in Greek wisdom-lore. Plato and Aristotle were realists, though with distinction; and the true thought of nominalism we find already, among others, in the Cynic wise-man Antisthenes, who gainsaid the reality of general concepts and said against Plato: "I see a horse, but horseness I do not see," and in the Stoic wise-men, who held the thoughts merely for phantoms of the mind. In the Middle Ages, this view of general concepts was renewed and got the name of nominalism. Roscellinus was of the mind that general concepts were merely a breath of the voice, thought-things, to which no reality answers; in reality there are no general but only particular, individual things, there is no mankind but only men, and so forth. The strife between realism and nominalism lasted until the 15th century. Cf. A. Stöckl, History of the Philosophy of the Middle Ages. Hauréau, On Scholastic Philosophy. Schwane, Dogmatic History of the Middle Age. Further, histories of dogmas by Bach, Thomasius, Münscher, Baur, Harnack, etc., histories of philosophy by Ueberweg, Erdmann, Windelband, etc. A. Pierson, On Realism and Nominalism. Id. History of Roman Catholicism. Spruyt, Essay.
But even thereafter the matter has not departed from philosophy. The strife between realism and nominalism is no point of scholastic sharpness, but of deep-reaching meaning. Nominalism has come forth in new shape as empiricism again in the newer philosophy, Spruyt, Essay passim. Hugo Spitzer, Nominalism and Realism in the Newest German Philosophy with Consideration of Their Relation to Modern Natural Science. Janet, Elementary Treatise of Philosophy. Land, Introduction. Pierson, Philosophical Inquiry.
If now nominalism has the right on its side, then it is done with all knowledge. For one of two: if we can gather the matching marks of a group of things in a concept and word, then this happens either without ground and those words and concepts stand for no worth in reality; or the things are alike in reality to each other and have shared marks. In this case, however, the concepts are no empty thought-things, but the sum of essential qualities of the things, and thus no names but things. Therefore realism without doubt had right, when it took the reality of general concepts, not in Platonic or ontological sense before the thing, but in Aristotelian sense in the thing, and therefore also in the mind of man after the thing. The general, which we utter in the concept, exists not just so, as universal, outside us (cf. above); but in each sample of the kind, particularly made individual and marked out, it yet has its ground in the things and is therefrom by the working of the understanding drawn out and uttered in a concept, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 85 art. 2 ad 2. Summa contra Gentiles I 65. With the concepts we thus do not withdraw from reality, but draw nearer to it ever more. It seems indeed that we, shaping concepts and judgments and conclusions, ever more lose the firm ground under the building of our knowledge and soar high in the air. It seems strange and wondrous that we, turning the representations into concepts and working these again after the laws of thinking, gain outcomes that are in agreement with reality. And yet whoever gives up this conviction is lost, Land, Introduction. But that conviction can also only rest in the faith that it is the same Logos who both shaped the reality outside us and the laws of thinking in us, and set both in organic bond with each other and let them answer to one another. Thus alone is knowledge possible, that is, knowledge not only of the changing show but of the general, of the logical in the things. Surely, the being itself of things, their standing-out, stays outside us; never do the things themselves in reality enter into us; the being is thus never to be neared by us, it is a fact that must be taken up and that makes the groundwork of thinking. But insofar as the things also stand logically, have come forth from thought and rest in thought (John 1:3, Col. 1:15), they are also graspable and thinkable for the human spirit.
10. Plato made clear this process of knowledge by a fair and striking likeness. Like as the sun outwardly lights the object and inwardly our eye, so is God or the idea of the good the light, whereby the truth, the being of things, becomes seen, and likewise our mind can behold and acknowledge that truth. Aristotle, in the same way. Augustine took over this likeness: God is the sun of spirits. In the unchanging light of truth our mind sees and judges all things, in ipsa incommutabili veritate mens rationalis et intellectualis intuetur, eaque luce de his omnibus judicat , from de Gen. ad litt. book 8 chapter 25. As we with the bodily eye can see nothing unless the sun spreads its light over it, so also we can see no truth except in the light of God, who is the sun of our knowledge, Solil. I chapter 8, 13, de Trin. 12 chapter 15. Deus intelligibilis lux, in quo et a quo et per quem intelligibiliter lucent, quae intelligibiliter lucent omnia . Thomas speaks many times in the same wise, and uses the same likeness, S. Theol. I question 12 article 11 ad 3, question 79 article 4, question 88 article 3 ad 1. II 1 question 109 article 1 ad 2. S. c. Gent. 3 chapter 47. Only Thomas pointed out that this must not be understood in a pantheistic way, as Averroes taught under Neoplatonic sway, and therein later followed by Malebranche and the ontologist school. Like as we, says Thomas, in natural seeing, not by being ourselves in the sun, but by the light of the sun that shines upon us, so also we see things not in the divine being, but by the light that from God shines in our own understanding. The reason in us is that divine light; it is not the divine logos itself, but has part therein. To God belongs being, living, understanding by essence, to us by partaking, S. Theol. I question 79 article 4. This likeness of the sun led to speaking in a sound sense of the natural light of reason. Zanchius, Opera III. Under which nothing else was understood than that lasting property or power of the human mind, whereby it is made able forthwith at the first beholdings to form those ground notions and ground beginnings, which further lead him in all beholding and thinking. The light of reason is thus in the first place like to the active understanding, to the power of abstraction, that shines over the objects and brings forth the understandable therefrom, and further to that store of common notions, which our mind just through the power of abstraction makes its own. But in both senses that light is to be thanked to God, or more set to the Logos, Psalm 36 verse 10, John 1:9. He it is who makes this light rise in us and upholds it ever. And thus it is not to the man, who is but a tool, but to God to be thanked, when through the beams of that light the truth unveils itself before our mind.
This fair imagery makes clear to us what the principles are from which all knowledge springs. Not only in theology, as the previous section showed us, but in every branch of knowledge there are three principles to be marked out. Here too God is the principle of being; in His self-awareness lie the ideas of all things; all things rest upon thoughts and are shaped by the word. But it is His good pleasure to bring over from this archetypal knowledge in His godly awareness an ectypical knowledge into man, who is made after His likeness. But He does this not by letting us behold the ideas in His essence (Malebranche), nor by giving them all to us already at birth (Plato, teaching of innate ideas), but by spreading them out in the works of His hands before man's mind. The world is an embodiment of God's thoughts; it is a fair book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters that give us to behold the unseen things of God; it is no writing-book, in which according to the fancy of the idealists we would have to fill in the words, but a reading-book, from which God makes known to us what He has written down therein for us. The shaped world is thus the outward principle of knowledge for all branches of knowledge. But that is not enough. To see, an eye is needful. If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? There must be matching, kinship between object and subject. The same Logos, which shines in the world, must let His light also beam in our awareness. That is the understanding, the reason, which, itself coming from the Logos, finds out and owns the Logos in things. It is the inward principle of knowledge. As knowledge in us is the sealing of things in our souls, so on the other hand forms are nothing but a certain sealing of godly knowledge in things , Thomas, in Liberatore, The Theory of Knowledge of St. Thomas Aquinas . Thus it is God alone who from His godly awareness brings in the knowledge of truth through the creatures into our mind; the Father, who through the Son in the Spirit reveals Himself to us. Many say: Who will show us good things? The light of Thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord!
1. Just as knowledge has its principles, so also religion has its own. To learn to know these, it is first of all needful to set forth the being of religion, above all in its otherness from knowledge and art. The name religion sheds little light. Cicero, in De Natura Deorum 2, 28, draws the word from relegere , to read again, to do over, to mark closely, and thereby marks religion as an ongoing and earnest heeding of all that belongs to the worship of the gods, cf. De Inventione 2, 22 and 53. Lactantius, in Institutiones Divinae 4, 28, draws it from religare and thus understands by religion the bond that binds man to God. A third drawing, from relinquere , is found in Gellius, Noctes Atticae 4, 9, and shows that all that belongs to religion is set apart from the unhallowed because of its holiness. Augustine, in De Civitate Dei 10, 4, once links it with re-eligere : in religion we choose again God, whom we had lost through sin, as the wellspring of our blessedness. J. C. Leidenroth, in Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Pädagogik von Seebode, Jahn und Klotz 1834, takes on the ground that the three verbs diligere , negligere and intelligere have another perfect than lego and its compounds, a lost stem ligere , Sanskrit lok , Greek λεύσσειν , German lugen , English look , cf. lucere , with the meaning of to see; diligere would then mean to behold with love, negligere not to see, intelligere to see into; and from that also religere , to look back, and religio , the looking back with dread, cf. respectus . The drawings from religare , relinquere , re-eligere meet with speechcraft hindrances and also do not unfold the odd meanings that religio holds in Latin. Between the drawing of Cicero and that of Leidenroth the strife is not yet settled; but in deed both meet herein, that religio marks godliness as a mood of shy dread towards the Godhead and as an anxiously close heeding flowing therefrom of what the worship of the gods calls for. Cf. the verse in Figulus (Gellius, Noctes Atticae 4, 9): religentem esse oportet, religiosum nefas . H. Voigt, Fundamentaldogmatik , Gotha, Perthes 1874. F. A. B. Nitzsch, Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik , Freiburg, Mohr, 1889. Hoekstra, Wijsgerige Godsdienstleer I 52ff. The word is therefore wholly unfit to give back the full inhold of the Christian godliness. But the use and the drawing of Lactantius, which found broad incoming, have Christened the word. The Vulgate took it up in Acts 26:5, James 1:27. The word has gone over into all European tongues, and in our tongue also, alongside godliness, piety (from the Gothic fruma , Latin primus , stepping to the forefront, worthy, bold, e.g. Statenvertaling Gen. 42:11, etc.), god-fearing, godliness, it has gained and kept burgherright.
2. The Holy Scripture gives no definition and has no general thought to mark the showing of religion. It has sundry words for its outward and its inward sides.
The outward godliness is one with God's showing forth, and stands in the bond, berith , which God gave to Israel, and that thus in full wise a godly setting up, diatheke , may be called, Exod. 20:1 ff., 34:10 ff., 27 ff.; Isa. 54:10, etc. The orderings in that bond, which Israel must keep, together shape the filling of the torah , teaching, lore, law, lawbook of the Lord, and are marked with sundry names. They are called debarim words Num. 12:6; Ps. 33:4, etc., mitsvot biddings, Gen. 26:5; Ex. 15:26, etc., pikkudim behests, Ps. 119:4, 5, 15, etc.; hukkim settlings, choices, Ex. 15:26; Lev. 25:18; Ps. 89:32; Job 28:26, etc.; mishpatim rightdoings, right sayings, Num. 36:13; Ps. 19:10, etc.; derakhim , orahot ways, paths, Deut. 5:33; Job 21:14; Ps. 25:4; etc.; mishmarot laws that are to be kept, Gen. 26:5; Lev. 18:30, etc. The many sayings show how in Israel's godliness the outward, the setting of God stands foremost. To that outward godliness answers inwardly the yirat YHWH , the dread of the Lord. This shows the inner mind of the godly Israelite over against the holy laws, which are set before him from God's side to keep. But this dread is truly sundered from the fearful shunning, which at first in the Latin word religio lies shut up. That shows therefrom, that this dread of the Lord goes over into and is bound with sundry other godly moods, such as believing he'emin Gen. 15:6; Isa. 7:9; Hab. 2:4; trusting batach Ps. 26:1, 37:3, 5; taking haven chasah Ps. 5:12, 37:40; leaning samukh , cleaving fast dabak 2 Kings 18:6; hoping qivvah , awaiting chikkah , yea even loving of God chashak Ex. 20:6; Deut. 6:5; Ps. 91:14. The rights of the Lord bide not as a thing of fright and dread standing outside and above the Israelite, but become a thing of his love. He thinks on them with his wit and keeps them with his will. They are his delight the whole day.
In the New Testament we meet in the being of the thing the same upholding. But now God gives his showing forth not in a row of laws, but in the person of Christ. This is the way and the truth, John 14:6. The hodos tou kyriou Acts 18:25, 19:9, 23, 22:4; the didache or didaskalia Matt. 7:28, 22:33; John 7:16, 17; Acts 2:42; Rom. 6:17; 1 Tim. 1:10, 4:6, 16, 6:1, 3; 2 Tim. 4:2, 3; Titus 1:9, 2:1, 7, 10; the euangelion Mark 1:1, 14, 15, etc.; the logos tou theou Matt. 13:19; Mark 2:2, 4:14 ff.; 2 Cor. 9:19, etc. all gather around Christ and are nothing but unfolding of his person and work. Accordingly then also the inward mind changes. The wonted Greek words were not fit, to give this in its own kind again. Deisidaimonia is used by Festus of the Jewish Acts 25:19, and the like-word by Paul of the heathen godliness Acts 17:22. Theosebeia comes but once 1 Tim. 2:10. Eusebeia gives to know holy awe for God; it is in meaning kin to the Latin pietas , and shows thus a mood, like that also in children over against their elders etc. is there; many times this word comes in the N.T., foremost in the Shepherd letters; what the eusebeia truly is and ought to be, is first in the Gospel shown 1 Tim. 3:16. Also the dread is in the N.T. not wholly gone from the inward godliness Luke 18:2; Acts 9:31; 2 Cor. 5:11, 7:1; Rom. 3:18; Eph. 5:21; Phil. 2:12; 1 Pet. 1:17, 3:2, 3:15, but it comes yet much seldomer as writing of the godly mind; it has in most steads link to sundry happenings, e.g. God's doom, and is by love taken away Rom. 8:15, 1 John 4:18. The wonted word for the inward godliness in the N.T. is pistis . To the glad tidings of forgiveness and of bliss in Christ answers from man's side the faith, which is a childlike trust on God's grace and therefore also straightway works love in our heart. Pistis and agape are the ground moods of the Christly godliness. The words latreia Rom. 9:4, 12:1; Heb. 9:1, 6 and threskeia Acts 26:5; Col. 2:18; James 1:27 mark the worship, which to God from the beginning of faith is brought.
3. The Holy Writ thus giveth no description of the essence of religion, as it, according to the modern notion, lieth at the groundwork of all religions. But it portrayeth and describeth as religion only that bond betwixt God and mankind, which by God Himself is ordered and set forth.
Likewise did the former theology, in fixing the essence of religion, ever proceed from the true religion. And this way still commendeth itself by its rightness. It can only be gainsaid by those who deem that the kinds of true and false fit not upon religions, forasmuch as no knowledge of the supernatural is possible, and that thus the conceptions have naught at all to do with the religious temper. This indifferentism is, however, as shall later appear, untenable; knowing also is an essential part of religion.
Granted for the nonce that there is a knowledge of the supernatural and that a true religion doth exist; then is there no single hindrance thinkable, to draw from it the definition for the essence of religion and to wield this as a measure in the judging of the other religions. No single religion can have aught against being tried by the pure thought of religion. The false is known only by the genuine, and the lie is uncovered by the truth. In no realm is a right judging and valuing of things possible without a steadfast, positive measure. So it is in law, in morals, in the beautiful arts, and so it is also in religion. The study of religions taketh for granted that we at least in some wise know what religion is.
Following the example of Holy Writ, we must, in the inquiry into the essence of religion, make a distinction between its objective and its subjective side. This distinction lies at hand and is present in every religion. The objective religion goes before. All men find it at their birth; they grow up in it even as in household, society, church, state, and the like. These are all objective institutions and powers, which do not arise arbitrarily from and by man, but which take him up at his birth, form and nurture him, and even against his will continue to rule him his whole life long. It is at odds with history and with soul-lore to proceed, in determining the essence of religion, from the subjective religion and then to see in the various religions nothing but changing forms and indifferent expressions of its life. In that way, daily experience is misprized, the power of the objective religion is denied, and all relation of object and subject is overturned in a revolutionary manner. Very surely, the objective religion also has its origin, which must be sought out and explained. But all religions, whose origin is in any measure known, show us that they arose in connection with what already was, and stand in the closest bond with the whole historical setting. There is no single religion that is a pure expression of the religious disposition and can be explained from that alone. The subjective religion alters and reshapes the existing religious notions and customs and often quickens them with a new life. But it creates not; it itself arises always and everywhere under the sway and working of the existing religions. Founders of religions there are therefore not in the proper sense. The objective religion is the hearth of the subjective religion, Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd.
Moreover, all religions wish to be regarded, not as expression and form of a religious disposition, but as fruit of revelation. They trace their origin not from man but from God. One may let this appeal to revelation stand or not; the fact speaks too strongly and is too general, that it should not be explained. It points out that the concept of religion is inseparably bound to that of revelation. There is no religion without revelation. Revelation is the foundation and origin of all religion. It therefore does not befit the man of learning to eliminate this concept of revelation already beforehand and to see in the religions nothing but forms of one same essence, expressions of one same religious disposition. Holy Writ also derives the objective religion from revelation. God, who in sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, Hebrews 1:1. Besides, it lies also in the nature of the matter that revelation and religion are most closely bound together. God alone can determine the manner in which He will be served by men. It is not for men to institute and form the worship of God, but to receive and keep that which is handed down from God, Conf. Helv. II art. 19. According to the teaching of Holy Writ, God has done this partly through nature, partly through his Word. The objective religion thus coincides with the Torah, taken in the widest sense, that is, with all that instruction of the Lord which comes to us from law and gospel, word and deed, history and prophecy. It is the chief content of Holy Writ and the matter of dogmatics. The objective religion is nothing else than the manner in which God himself has determined that He will be served and honored.
Formally, all religions agree. But the agreement stretches yet further. All religions are made up of certain parts which constantly return. First, there is in every religion a tradition concerning its divine origin; every religion appeals to revelation; that is the historical, the positive element, the element of tradition. Next, there is in every religion a certain teaching, in which God reveals to man that knowledge which is needful for his service; this is denoted by the word dogma. Further, every religion contains certain laws, which prescribe to man what he is to do and leave undone to be able to live in fellowship with God; that is the moral teaching which every religion brings with it. And finally, there are in every religion a greater or lesser number of ceremonies, that is, of solemn forms and customs, which express, accompany, and strengthen the fellowship of man with God also in the outward; that is the cultic or liturgical part in religion. In the various religions, the mutual relation of these parts is very different; in some there is much dogma and little cultus and contrariwise; in others there is a rich tradition and a small number of moral precepts, and so forth. But in all religions, all four elements are present. The true religion also, as laid down in Holy Writ, has its history and dogma, its morals and its cultus, F. A. B. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm. H. Siebeck, Lehrb. der Religionsphilosophie.
4. To that objective religion corresponds in man the subjective religion. Very common of old was the description of religion as the right way of knowing and worshipping the true God. It appears already in Lactantius, Instit. div. 4,4, and has been kept until this age. Yet it is not above reproof. It says nothing about the inward bent of mind which is needful for serving God; it points not out the bond that exists between knowing and serving God, but sets them simply side by side; and it makes no mention of the other parts that lie in religion.
The schoolmen delved deeper into the matter and searched out the inward bent from which religion springs in man. Thomas traces it to the virtues. These he divides into three kinds: virtues of the understanding (wisdom, knowledge, insight, and the like), moral virtues (the four chief virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance), these two groups were drawn from Aristotle. And to them were added as a third kind the three heavenly or godly virtues: faith, hope, and love, Thomas, S. Theol. II 1 qu. 57, 58, 62.
Religion is now placed by Thomas not under the godly virtues but under the moral virtues. For the godly virtues have this mark, that they have God as their straight aim; they order us to God forthwith and straightway as to an aim, ib. II 1 qu. 62 art. 2; but in religion God is not the aim but the end, the true aim in religion is the worship that is brought to God. It is thus no godly virtue that has God as aim, but a moral virtue that deals with those things that lead to the end; it orders man to God, not as to an aim, but as to an end. Among the moral virtues, however, it is the foremost, because it stands in the nearest tie to Him who is the goal of all virtues, namely God, ib. II 2 qu. 81 art. 5, 6.
Further, religion is reckoned by Thomas to that moral virtue which is called justice. He takes religion namely as that virtue whereby men show to God the worship and reverence that is due. Though James 1:27 also counts the visiting of orphans and widows and the like as religion, yet religion in its own and narrower sense is only a bond to God and never to men. And though all things must be done to the honor of God, the honor that is brought to God in religion is yet meant in a special sense and strictly taken includes only that which belongs to the reverence of God. It is thus one with latreia , S. Theol. II 2 qu. 81 art. 1-4.
This setting forth by Thomas, which has been taken up by very many, cf. C. R. Billuart, Summa S. Thomae sive Cursus Theologiae , Petrus Dens, Theologia ad usum seminariorum , P. Collet, Instit. Theol. moralis , and the like, is however in the first place too narrow, for it sets forth only the worship and thus falls together with latreia . The subjective religion is not only a service, a honoring, but foremost an inward bent which speaks itself out in that service.
Besides, the sundering of moral virtues and godly virtues is too otherworldly and twofold. There lies of course some truth in it, namely this, that even in fallen man remnants of God's likeness and moral virtues abide, even religion is not wholly uprooted. But the moral virtues and also the religious bent must be made new and born again, to be truly good. Thomas owns also that the godly virtues, faith, hope, love bring about the deed of religion, which works certain things in order to God, S. Th. II, 2 qu. 81 art. 5 ad 1, but they themselves are shut out from religion; and while the virtues of understanding and morals are after man's nature, the godly virtues are above nature, I, 2 qu. 62 art. 2.
The Reformation changed this understanding of religion chiefly in twofold wise. First, the divines of the Reformation make a better and clearer sundering between piety as the root and worship as the deed of religion. And second, faith, hope, and love are not set as sundered godly virtues beside religion, but rightly as the foremost deeds of the inward worship taken up into religion itself.
Religion, says Zwingli, Opera ed. Schuler et Schulthess, III 155, takes in the whole piety of Christians, faith, life, laws, rites, sacraments; it stands in that cleaving whereby man trusts God unshaken as the highest good and uses Him in the stead of a father, ib. 175, it is the wedding of the soul and God, ib. 180.
In Calvin we meet three thoughts: 1° the knowledge, the knowing of God, the sense of His virtues; 2° this knowledge is a fit teacher of piety; it begets piety, which stands in reverence joined with love of God, which the knowing of His kindnesses brings about; and 3° it is this piety again, from which religion, in the sense of worship, is born, Inst. I. 2, 1.
Likewise Zanchius, Op. IV 263 sq., sunders between worship, which marks the outward or inward deed whereby we honor God, and religion or piety, which is the virtue from which worship is born. Polanus says, Synt. Theol. 580 A, religion differs from the worship of God, as cause from fruit. Religion or piety is the inward cause of the worship of God.
The worship, fruit of piety, is then sundered as with the schoolmen into inward and outward; the first has as chief deeds faith, trust, hope, adoration, love, calling upon, thanksgiving, sacrifice, obedience; and the outward worship is again either moral (confession, prayer, and the like) or ceremonial (sacraments, sacrifices, holy things). Zanchius IV 410 sq. Ursinus, Catech. qu. 94-103 and the unfolding thereof, also Tract. Theol. 1584 I. Polanus, Synt. Theol. p. 32 F. Hoornbeek, Theol. pract. Lib. 9 cap. 6-8. Id. Summa Controv. Alsted, Theol. Catech. Moor, Comm. in Marckii Comp. I. 44 sq.
For the Lutherans compare Calovius, Isag. ad S. Theol. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. Kirche 6th ed. Hase, Hutterus Rediv. Loc. 1 § 2. Herzog² 12:645.
5. Subjective Religion Subjective religion is first of all a hexis , habitus, a certain disposition in man, which through the working of objective religion passes into acts (internal and external worship). Such a habitus is in every man; the seed of religion is implanted in all, Calv. Inst. I. 4, 1. But this habitus is in fallen man corrupted and brings forth, when quickened by a false and impure objective religion, also a worship that is idolatry, self-willed religion. Therefore, for a pure religion it is needful that first the objective religion coming to us from without makes us know God again as He truly is, and that second the corrupted habitus of religion in man be reborn and renewed. In this sense subjective religion is thus a virtue infused by the Holy Spirit, Hoornbeek, Theol. pract. II.
Yet with this not enough is said. Man has many virtues, both in his understanding and in his will. The peculiarity of that virtue which works in religion must thus be further pointed out. Formerly this virtue was described as piety, reverence, fear, faith, and so forth, and so also nowadays as honor, awe, fear, feeling of dependence. Yet all these descriptions are not definite enough; all these affections we have in greater or lesser measure also toward creatures. There must be an essential difference between religious worship and civil worship, between latreia and douleia , between the affections of fear, reverence, awe, and so on, as we cherish them toward God and toward creatures.
That difference can only lie therein, that in religion the absolute dignity and power of God comes into account and the absolute subjection on our side, Hoornbeek, Theol. pract. II. From creatures we are only in part dependent; we stand as creatures on equal line with them; but God is a being from which we are utterly dependent and which in every respect has the decision over our weal and our woe. Among the heathens this absoluteness of God is as it were divided among many gods, but yet each god in his domain is clothed with such power that man for his happiness or unhappiness is utterly dependent on him.
It is especially Schleiermacher who in his Christ. Gl. § 4 has defined religion as an absolute feeling of dependence. Against this definition many objections have been brought, which among others are briefly given by Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsdienstleer I. Indeed this description in Schleiermacher has a sense which cannot be allowed. Dependence is with him so pantheistically conceived that it objectively relates only to the world-whole and subjectively is limited to the feeling. Yet there lies in Schleiermacher's definition an important element of truth. What makes man a religious being and drives him to religion is the awareness that he stands to God in a relation which specifically differs from all other relations in which he is placed.
This relation is so deep and tender, so rich and manifold, that it can hardly be expressed by one concept. But certainly that of dependence comes first and most in consideration therefor. For in religion man feels himself in relation to a personal being who has his lot in every domain of life and for time and eternity in hand. Therefore God in religion is not exclusively conceived as power; for also as Gracious, Merciful, Righteous, Holy, and so on, God stands over against man yet always as Sovereign, as Absolute, as God. And man stands over against Him always as creature; he is that over against no one and nothing else, he is that only over against God. And therefore this creaturely dependence is not the essence but yet the foundation of religion.
Man however is not only creature, but also a reasonable and moral creature; his relation to God is therefore wholly other than that of angels and animals. The absolute dependence in which man stands to God therefore does not exclude freedom. He is dependent, but in another way than the other creatures; he is so and in such sense dependent that he at the same time remains a reasonable and moral being, that he is akin to God, his offspring and his image. Absolutely dependent is he so that the denial of this dependence never makes him free, and yet its acknowledgment never degrades him to a slave. On the contrary, in the conscious, willing acceptance of this his dependence man comes to the highest freedom. He becomes man in the same measure as he is child of God.
The Holy Scripture makes no inquiry into the essence of subjective religion as it is still found in all men and under all religions. It would also be an unbegun work. For the religious disposition is in the various religions so different that at most a very general and vague concept can be given for it. Scripture however stamps that religious disposition which the Christian feels toward God and his revelation with the name of faith. That is the central concept in the subjective religion of the Christian. Over the nature of that faith there has at all times been great difference in the Christian church. The religious life is so rich and deep that it can ever be viewed from another side. But in faith these two elements are always enclosed: first, that man over against God and his revelation is wholly receptive and utterly dependent on God, and second, that he just through acknowledgment of this dependence becomes partaker of forgiveness, sonship, salvation by grace.
An analogy of this subjective religion in Christianity is certainly also in other religions, but only in the Christian religion is the subjective relation of man to God wholly normal. Dependence and freedom are here reconciled with each other. The sovereignty of God remains here fully maintained and the kinship of man with God is yet fully acknowledged. Man is the more religious and becomes the more conformed to the image of God, the deeper he realizes and acknowledges his dependence. Therefore all virtues toward creatures can be exaggerated; but with regard to God no exaggeration is possible. One can never believe, trust, love Him too much, and so on; faith can never expect too much, Voigt, Fundamentaldogmatik. Aug. Dorner, Stud. u. Kr. Kahnis, Die luth. Dogm. 2e Ausg. Abr. des Amorie van der Hoeven Jr. De godsdienst het wezen van den mensch, Leeuwarden.
6. The subjective religion passes, through the working of the objective religion, from its habitual state into deeds. These deeds are inward or outward, and thus make a distinction between the inner worship and the outer worship. Religion and worship stand to each other as cause and fruit. Yet this does not mean that the worship is a free finding and utterance of the subjective religion. All ethelothrēskeia is forbidden, Mt. 15:9; Mk. 7:7; Col. 2:23. Both the antinomian Anabaptism and the legalistic Romanism are here to be shunned. God alone sets forth how He will be served. And the new birth of the subjective religion, spoiled by sin, of the habit of religion, lies just in this, that the believers receive an upright longing to live not only after some but after all God's behests in fullness. It is their meat to do the will of the Father. Jesus spoke and did nothing, save that to which He had a behest from the Father. Therefore the Scripture lays such strong weight on walking in God's behests, on keeping His statutes, and the like. And to this end God renews man, to bring him, who is turned away from His service, again in the inmost of his being into agreement with His will and law, laid down in the objective religion.
The inner worship takes in the deeds of faith, trust, fear, love, prayer, thanksgiving, and the like, and the outer worship shows itself in confession, prayer, song, service of the word and of the sacraments, vows, fasting, watching, and so forth. This is thus partly moral, partly ceremonial; and can again be lone or fellowship. In the latter case it is private or public; the shared, open worship is ordered in the church orders. In all these religious doings the awareness of utter dependence is the religious ground-thought, the quickening kernel. Loosed from that, they become letter-service, lip-work, cold and dead formalism. But quickened by that, they all gain their own religious mark. Even creatures are the aim of our faith, of our hope, of our love, and so on. What stamps all these doings as religious is that they set us in bond to a Person, from whom we with all things in utter wise and yet again in our own way, that is, as reasoning creatures, hang.
The being of religion can yet lie in nothing else than in this, that God just as God is glorified and thanked. Every religion that falls short herein wrongs the honor of God and in that same measure also ceases to be truly religious. On the other hand, true religion lies in such a mind-set of man, which on the one side roots in the deep awareness of his utter dependence on God as Maker, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and the like, and on the other side stretches out to walk after all God's statutes in uprightness.
7. After the being of religion has been looked into, the place must be set which it holds in man, amid his faculties and workings. At once then the bond becomes clear in which religion stands to knowledge, art, and uprightness. Already the schoolmen put the question whether religion was an understanding virtue or a moral one, and Thomas said the latter, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 81 art. 5. But first in the newer wisdom-lore, above all after the religions of the folks became more known, has the being of religion been made an object of mind-lore and tale-wise search. Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts 1780 and Herder’s Ideen zur Philos. der Gesch. der Menschheit 1784 made a beginning with it. And since then the tale and the wisdom-lore of religions has become a beloved study. For the setting of the being of religion, the now-going search nearly always goes out from the religio subjectiva , and the right, the might, the worth of the religio objectiva is nearly all-around mis-kenned. This is an outcome of a wisdom-lore fore-set, that all religions in being are alike and only in shape differ. But this religious un-caring is therefore un-holdable, because all religion needfully shuts in a knowing and sets the realness of its object; as soon as however this is the case, a religion falls under the kind of true and untrue. If religion were nothing but feeling and fancy, it would bind to its shapings only an art-wise worth. But every religion is steadfast in the realness and the truth of its objects (gods, foretellers, holy places and so on), and is without that belief un-be-standing, cf. Dr. Bruining, Theol. Tijdschr. Nov. 1894. In deed each one then also fits the kind of true and untrue to the religions; the religion-wiseman believes not in the truth of the gods of the folks, though he also worths the religious mind-set which in their worshiping often speaks out.
Furthermore, the sundry religions themselves stand long not un-caring over against each other; they behold themselves and each other not as standing in bond of lower and higher, but of true and false. The wiseman stands with his un-caring quite alone. Frederick the Great may say: in my realm each shall become blessed after his own fashion, the religions themselves think wholly otherwise about it. And they can not otherwise; what the one sets, the other nays. They shut out each other, and can not both be true. If Christ is the Sent One of the Father, then Mohammed is it not. And at last the religious un-caring rests still on the sinful thought that it is un-mattering to God how He is served. It takes from Him the right to set the way of His service. In each case it goes out from the thought that God has not fore-written His service, thus from the fore-hand naying of the opening-baring. The setting that the religions in being come together and in shape differ is turned about much righter; they differ in being but come together in shape. Thereby must at last still the mark be made that the un-caring in sake of religion can stretch itself more or less far out. The together-mixing holds the churchly, the God-belief holds the Christly, the new-way holds the religio objectiva , the free uprightness holds all the religious for un-mattering. In deed and outward-wise there is however nothing un-mattering, neither in the kind, nor in the stead, nor in knowledge or art. All, even the least, has its set place and meaning in the whole. Un-mattering is man only for what he knows not; what he knows becomes also of itself by him taxed and worth-ed. God is un-mattering for nothing, because He knows all. Cf. Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion , 9e éd. Paris 1835, above all tome premier, whose fore-word begins: the sickest age is not that which passions for error, but the age which overlooks, which scorns the truth.
8. The general belief that religions are sundry forms of one kernel. goes forth from the thought that the kernel of godliness lies not in the outward godliness, but in the inward godliness. The first is of no weight; on the latter, on the godly bent or mood, it hangs. After that bent must therefore search be made, to set the kernel of godliness. But where and how must that search be done? Two ways offer themselves, the tale-wise and the soul-wise. The tale-wise, upheld for byname by Dr. A. Bruining in Philosophy of Godliness , Theological Tidings , wills to set the kernel of godliness from tale-wise search and likening beholding of godly showings. But this way is truly unmaying, for each search of godlinesses already underlays a notion of godliness; a likening search of all godlinesses is an undoable toil; and in godlinesses rightly the godly bent is deepest hidden and nigh all beholding flees. What know we yet of the mood and bent that underlies the godly showings in the sundry ways and churches within Christendom! The soul-wise way, warded among others by Hugenholtz in Studies on Godly and Moral Ground and Rauwenhoff in Philosophy of Godliness , wills to unfold the kernel of godliness soul-wise and yearns therefore that the doer of godliness-lore be a godly man and as such behold and deem the godly showings. Here is on itself nothing against to say. In the study of godlinesses to leave one's own godly wit out of reckoning, like Dr. Bruining wills, were the same after the good mark of Dr. Hugenholtz, as thrusting out one's own eyes out of dread for sight-beguile. But then may yet be asked that such a searcher of godlinesses bring no false but a true and clean uptake of godliness; else he tries all godlinesses only at his own maybe full wrong fore-showing and at that of his mind-kins, for byname at the newfangled uptake of godliness. If the asking however so stands, then is there between right-believers and newfangled no asking more of way, but only of the truth or untruth of the godly fore-showing, whereof both go out. And then is the warrant for the truth of the godly fore-showing, which the right-believer brings at least even great as that for the newfangled uptake of godliness; for yon draws her from the Holy Writ and is in overstemming with the church of all eld, and this is of short tide and only in a small ring of mind-kins gilt.
9. The Philosophy of Religion. The philosophy of religion has now chiefly set forth three views of the essence of religion (subjective). First, the intellectualistic, which places the essence of religion in knowledge, and its seat in the understanding. Gnosticism already said that gnosis brings salvation, that knowledge is the redemption of the inner man, Irenaeus adv. haer. I cap. 21. This Gnosticism has at all times found defenders in the Christian church, but has especially arisen again in the newer philosophy. Spinoza holds understanding and will to be one and the same, Eth. II prop. 49, lets the love of God be born from the clear and distinct knowledge of man of himself and his affections, ib. V prop. 15, and calls this intellectual love, ib. prop. 32. The highest virtue of the mind is to know God, V prop. 27, and our mind is part of the infinite intellect of God, II prop. 11. This knowledge of God, that is, of things under the aspect of eternity, II prop. 44, is the highest rest of the mind, V prop. 27. According to Schelling in his first period, there is only an absolute knowing possible of the Absolute, as identity of the finite and infinite; religion thus loses all its independence here, faith is an incorrect, impure conception of the idea, Philosophie u. Religion.
Especially Hegel has worked out this intellectualistic determination of the essence of religion. With him, the Absolute is thought itself, which enters into oppositions and from these returns again to identity with itself. The whole world is thus a development of the spirit, a logical unfolding of the content of reason, a process in which the idea first objectifies itself in nature and then returns from there in the spirit to itself again. One of the moments which this process passes through is religion. It is the human spirit in whom the Absolute comes to itself and becomes conscious of itself. And this self-consciousness of the absolute spirit in the finite spirit is religion. Religion is thus essentially knowing, not feeling and not acting, but knowing, and indeed of God through the finite spirit or objectively God's knowing of himself through and in the finite spirit. Man knows of God only insofar as God in man knows of himself; this knowing is God's self-consciousness, but also a knowing of the same from man, and this knowing of God from man is man's knowing of God. The spirit of man to know of God is only the spirit of God itself, Vorles. über die Philos. der Religion.
Religion, however, is not the highest knowing; it is but a knowing of the absolute in the form of sensible, historical representations. The highest, true knowing is first attained in philosophy. Religion is therefore temporal, a lower form, suitable for the undeveloped. But philosophy frees the idea from the sensible representations of religion and thus comes to an absolute, adequate, conceptual knowing of God, ib. cf. Strauss, Christl. Gl. I 12. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christenthums 1841, and Strauss, Christliche Glaubenslehre 1840, Der alte und der neue Glaube, 2e Aufl. 1872, drew the consequence and completed the break with the Christian religion. Idealism turned into materialism. Just as already in the previous century by La Mettrie, cf. Stöckl, Gesch. der neueren Philos. I, so now again by many the faith in God was held to be the greatest and most harmful error. Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Edgar Bauer, Max Stirner preached the nakedest egoism. The materialism that arose about 1850 in Germany judged no differently, Büchner, Kraft und Stoff 1855, 16e Aufl. 1885; Specht, Theol. u. Naturwiss. 3e Aufl. 1878; Moleschott, Kreislauf des Lebens 1852; Carl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft 1854; Czolbe, Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus 1855.
10. Now hath Hegel very well seen that religion also holdeth knowledge and that godliness and metaphysics are most nearly akin. The kind of the thing maketh this also clear. Religion is ever a bond of mankind to a godly Might standing above him. Religion is therefore not and cannot be without a certain forethinking of God; and this again shutteth in other forethinkings about world and mankind, spring and end goal of things. These godly forethinkings have for the believer a beyond-earthly meaning; he is at the deepest overpersuaded of their outward trueness and truth. As soon as he beginneth to hold these forethinkings for outbirths of his fancy, for ideals without trueness, or also despairs of the knowableness of the beyond-earthly, it is done with his religion. The doubting mind slayeth the mark of religion and therewith this selfsame. Also with the understanding must God be served; but if the understanding seeth that the religious forethinkings answer not to a worklyness, it ceaseth to be godly. Godly and thoughtly world-outlook, godlore and knowledge are not the same but yet can by no means strive with each other. Such a twoness is in unyielding strife with the oneness of the mankindly ghost, Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie . II. Die Religion des Geistes , 2nd ed. Leipzig, Friedrich.
But Hegel erred nevertheless herein, that he set religion and philosophy in relation to each other as lower and higher, as representation and concept, and thus conceived them as successive moments of one process. The Hegelians such as Strauss and Biedermann saw the unrightness hereof themselves. Content and form are never so mechanically and outwardly bound, that a whole change of the one leaves the other unaltered. The turning of religious representations into philosophical concepts touches also the religious content itself. The history of the Hegelian philosophy soon brought this to light. There remained with her of the Christian dogmas as good as nothing over; Trinity, incarnation, satisfaction kept the orthodox names but were wholly otherwise interpreted. The facts of Christianity were reckoned to the form and deemed worthless. In their stead one got concepts which had no content more. A second fault of Hegel lay therein, that he gave to religion and philosophy a like content and yet held the first for a lower form of the second. Religion was thereby lowered to a relative good, that only yet had worth for the simple and the undeveloped. The philosophers were far above it lifted and had enough with philosophy. This now rests on a total mis kenning of the essence of religion. For religion and science are well akin but yet also heaven wide differing. Though they have oftentimes a same content and object, these come yet in both under a wholly other viewpoint. In science it is about knowledge, in religion it is about comfort, peace, salvation to do. Religion and philosophy are even less than the état théologique, métaphysique and positive of A. Comte each other historically following states of the human spirit, but are differing viewpoints, under which oftentimes a same thing can be beheld. Also the deepest philosopher comes therefore with all his knowledge not out above religion; through science can he never satisfy his religious need. Science may tell him that and what God is; only through religion knows he that that God is also his God and his Father. Science may teach him that there is sin and grace; only through religion becomes he partaker of the salvation of forgiveness and of the childship of God. Though science could know all, and though she could solve all metaphysical problems; then yet gave she only theoretical knowledge, and no personal sharing in the goods of salvation. Not to knowing, but only to believing is salvation bound. But it is far from it, that science and philosophy can bring it so far. Just on the weightiest questions she stays the answer owing. The expectation which Renan in 1848 could cherish of science, showed himself in 1890 nothing but an illusion, Renan, L’avenir de la science. Pensées de 1848. 2e éd. Paris 1890. Science says us neither what God nor what man is; she leaves us unknown with the origin and the destiny of things. The appearances she takes wahr, but the noumenon stays her hidden. She can never replace religion and never repay her loss, Voigt, Fundam. dogm. Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie. H. Siebeck, Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Pfleiderer, Grundriss der christl. Gl. u. Sittenlehre.
11. Others have therefore set forth religion by moral dealing and sought its seat in the will. Pelagianism in its sundry shapes, Semipelagianism, Socinianism, Remonstrantism, Deism, Rationalism, and such like, have made ready this outlook, insofar as faith in this bent is filled up by or even stands alone in a new obedience. Teaching is then but a means and underling; the main thing is love; on a virtuous, moral life it hangs. Spinoza also has beside the intellectualist this moralist outlook. Holy Writ is God's word, because it holds the true religion, the godly law, Tract. theol. pol. cap. 12 § 18 sq. It means nothing beyond obedience, cap. 13, and this obedience toward God stands in love of neighbor alone, ib. § 8. Wisdom-lore and faith are so sundered that the one has for its end truth, the other obedience and godliness, cap. 14 § 38. The understanding or careful knowing of God is no gift to all believers, but obedience is; this is asked of all, cap. 13 § 9. But above all Kant has given way to this moralism. The thinking wit can namely not reach the over-sense. God, freedom, deathlessness are not to be shown by knowledge. They are only after-thoughts of the doing wit to fulfill the moral law and to gain the highest good, that is, bliss bound with worth. Believing is thus holding for true not on thinking grounds but on doing grounds. The moral becomes groundlay of religion. And religion, seen from within, is the knowing of all our duties as godly biddings. Religion here is not straightway and forthwith grounded in man's kind, but only through the moral. It has also no own inhold and stuff, but is nothing but a nearer setting of the moral; not in the thing but only in the shape lies the sundering between both. Kant had then also to own that no worship has been content with his religion. All worships hold besides the clean wit-faith many other teachings, a teaching-like historical belief. But he clears this from the weakness of man's kind, which is not lightly swayed that a moral walk is all that God asks of us. Calling it is to cleanse the church-belief more and more and make it pass into the clean wit-belief, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft , ed. by K. Rosenkranz 1838. Kant’s religion stood therefore in truth in nothing else than the rationalist threefold: God, worth, deathlessness.
But J. G. Fichte went further and led from the moral awareness no other after-thought than that the I sees the whole not-I, the world, as the “sense-made stuff” of his duty, knows it as so ordered that his moral willing and dealing lies on the line of the moral end of the whole, in other words, that there is a moral world-order. Here religion is wholly taken up in the moral. Cf. Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung 1798. This moralism is deepened in ethicisme, in that the moral is taken not only mind-wise but also over-being-wise. The will, the good, the love is then the own being, the first-being, the Utter; therefrom is all, the threefoldness, the world, the loosing, to be cleared; that might of the good makes itself real in the man-world by means of the moral. That is the ground-thought from which Schelling went out in his second time: there is in the last and highest stead no other being than willing, willing is first-being, Ueber das Wesen der menschl. Freiheit, Sammtl. Werke VII 331 f. Above all Rothe has brought this ethicisme into god-lore; godliness has no own inhold but falls in truth together with true morality, Theol. Ethik § 114-126; the church goes therefore also over into the state § 440. Since then this ethical bent has gained great sway. The ethical is by turns seen as groundlay (Neo-Kantians), inhold (Ethicals among the Mediating god-lorers and among the Moderns), or even as whole making-good (Morale indépendante. The ethical stirring in religion) of religion. The ethical bent among the Mediating god-lorers trod in the footstep of Schleiermacher and Rothe, cf. my Theol. van D. Ch. de la Saussaye , Leiden 1884. Here in the land Hoekstra sought the groundlay of worshipful belief in the doing wit, in the will, Bronnen en grondslagen van ’t godsd. geloof 1864. The ethical Moderns joining him set forth worship as hallowing to the moral ideal, as clean morality, Dr. Hooijkaas, God in de geschiedenis 1870. Godsdienst volgens de beginselen der ethische richting onder de Modernen , four fore-sayings by Hooijkaas, Hooijkaas Herderschee, Oort and van Hamel, ’s Bosch 1876. cf. Rauwenhoff, Wijsb. v. d. godsd. 1887. Rauwenhoff himself sets the being of religion in belief in a moral world-order, Wijsb. v. d. godsd. 373 v. Kin thereto is the teaching of the Morale Indépendante, cf. C. Coignet, La morale indépendante dans son principe et dans son objet , Paris 1863. Vacherot, La religion , Paris 1869 cf. Bibl. v. mod. Theol. 1870 I 333 v. Caro, La morale indép. Paris 1876. E. Bersier, sur la question de la mor. indép. in the Handelingen der Ev. Alliantie 1867. Cramer, Christendom en Humaniteit 1871 and likewise that ethical stirring which from America has gone through into England and Germany, and unheeding for all worship owns no teaching but love to the good. See W. M. Salter, De godsdienst der moraal , Dutch by Dr. Hugenholtz 1889, cf. Lamers, De godsd. evenmin moraal als metaphysica 1885. Bibl. v. mod. Theol. 1887, 4e st. Kuenen in de Hervorming 1888, answer of Salter ib. 15 Dec. 1888. Dr. Felix Adler, Die ethischen Gezellschaften , Berlin, Dümmler 1892. Die ethische Bewegung in Deutschland , vorbereitende Mittheilungen eines Kreises gleichgesinnter Männer u. Frauen zu Berlin, ib. 1892. St. Coit, Die ethische Bewegung in der Religion , vom Verf. durchges. Uebersetzung v. Gizycki. Leipzig, Reisland 1890. Against: Dr. M. Keibel, Die Religion u. ihr Recht gegenüber dem modernen Moralismus . Halle, Pfeffer, 1892. Also Otto Dreyer, Undogmatisches Christenthum , Braunschweig 1888; Egidy, Ernste Gedanken , Leipzig 1890 (cf. Gids Mei 1893); H. Drummond, Summum Bonum, Pax Vobiscum, The spiritual law in the natural world ; Tolstoi, Vernunft u. Dogma, Wie ist mein Leben? both by Otto Janke, Berlin. Worin besteht mein Glaube , Leipzig 1885 etc. strive for an undogmatic, doing, moral Christendom, a Christendom of the Bergrede.
12. Now there is no doubt that godliness and uprightness stand in the closest bond with each other. This kinship shows itself first in this, that godliness itself is an upright bond. Godliness rests indeed upon a mystical oneness of God and man, but is itself no bodily fellowship of both, but an upright tie of man to God. God has no godliness; but God's indwelling in man breeds from his side that tie to God, which we call godliness, Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsdienstleer. This tie is therefore of upright kind; it is ruled in that same law of uprightness, which also sets the other bonds of man to his fellow-creatures; all godly deeds of man are upright duties, and the whole of godliness is an upright bidding. On the other hand, the upright life is again a service of God. To visit widows and orphans, James 1:27, is no deed of godliness in the proper sense, but can yet be called godliness, because godliness must show and strengthen itself therein. The schoolmen therefore made a sundering between acts elicited and acts commanded of godliness, Thomas, S. Theol. This faith without works, without love, is a dead faith. Love to God proves itself to us in love to the neighbor, Jeremiah 22:16, Isaiah 1:11, 1 John 2:3, James 2:17, and so on. Our whole life ought to be a service of God. The heading: I am the Lord thy God, stands also above the biddings of the second table. Love is the one great beginning, that fulfills the whole law, Romans 13:13. The law of uprightness is one living whole, so that whoso breaks one bidding, wrongs the whole law, James 2:10. The neighbor must be loved for God's sake, and the sin against the neighbor is also a sin against God. This bond of godliness and uprightness makes it already clear, that uprightness can never make up the inhold nor yet the groundwork of godliness. In spite of their close kinship, both are in being sundered. Godliness is always a bond to God, uprightness to men; godliness has for its beginning faith, uprightness love; godliness shows itself in those godly deeds, which together form a worship inward and outward, uprightness shows itself in the deeds of rightwiseness, mercy, honesty, and so on, toward the neighbor; godliness is ruled in the first, uprightness in the second table of the law. This sundering between godliness and uprightness cannot be upheld by all-godliness, because God here has no own being, sundered from the world; a folkly tie between God and man is here not workable; love to God can then show itself no otherwise than in love to the neighbor. Also Godfarerness cannot, because of the gainsaying of the fellowship of God and man, breed no proper godliness. There is yet belief in God, but no serving of God otherwise than in the fulfilling of the upright biddings. But on Godbelieving standpoint man stands in bond to the world but also in an own, sundered bond to God as a folkly being. Godliness is therefore something in being other than uprightness and shows itself in an own row of deeds. If this however be so, then uprightness cannot be the groundwork of godliness, but contrariwise this must form the base for that. The bond to God is then the first and the midmost, which sets all other bonds of man. Both in tale and in wit is uprightness always grounded in godliness. Godliness urges the upright duties, and uprightness seeks the hallowing of godliness. An uprightness of its own comes nowhere in the soothfastness. Everywhere and among all folks uprightness finds her last ground and her last goal in godliness. Uprightness loses the ground under her feet, when she is bereft of the godly wield in the inwit. All uprightness has grown in tale out of godliness, and though the ghostly gifts of mankind to uprightness, thanks to their birth, can for a time stand alone, when they are loosed from their mother-soil, yet is this alone-standing workliness timely very bounded and already in the second kinmaking the marks of the downfall of uprightness show themselves, E. v. Hartmann, Relig. philos. Stuffwise are by no means all bindings and deeds, which men hold for upright, in oneness with the will of God. But the shape-wise, that which makes all duty to unyielding duty, what binds man in the inwit, that is from God. There is no uprightness without overwit. Men, wonts, ways, and so on, cannot bind outright in the inwit. That can God alone. Therefore is the inwit holy and inwit-freedom an unyielding ask and an unyielding right. The biddings and forbiddings, that lie not fast in the inwit, are not felt as upright. A law, that has no groundwork in the folk-inwit, is mightless. By strength of this bond there is also a backworking of godliness and uprightness on each other. Timely they can both in a single and in a folk fall asunder and even strive with each other. But they cannot rest, before they are in oneness and evenweight. What is deemed good in godliness, cannot be doomed in uprightness, and contrariwise. The bond to God and to men must both bear one same upright mark, be ruled in one same law of uprightness. Godliness and uprightness, worship and upbringing must root in one same beginning. That is the case in Christendom. Love is the fulfilling of the law, and the band of wholeness. H. Schultz, Religion und Sittlichkeit in ihrem Verhältniss zu einander, religionsgeschichtlich untersucht (Stud. u. Kr.). J. Köstlin, Rel. u. Sittl. (Stud. u. Kr.). Pfleiderer, Moral u. Religion. Rothe, Theol. Ethik. Martensen, Die christl. Ethik. Janet, La morale. Hoekstra, Godsdienst en zedelijkheid Theol. Tijdschr. Id. Wijsg. Godsdienstleer. Lamers, Godsd. en zedel. Ch. de la Saussaye, Lehrb. der Religionsgesch. C. Stage, Relig. u. Sittl. Vortrag. Lamers, De Wetenschap v. d. godsd. Hugenholtz, Studiën op godsdienst- en zedekundig gebied. Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie. Siebeck, Handbuch der Rel. Phil. Kaftan, Das Wesen der christl. Religion. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm.
13. Views on Religion as Feeling. Finally, there are also those who give to religion a place in the feeling, and for that sometimes even take up a separate faculty in man. Mysticism and pietism had in former times already paved the way thereto. But first through the Romanticism of the last century did this view for a time come to dominion. Romanticism was in general a reaction of the free, unbound life of the heart against the objective, all-binding and regulating classicism. The subject raised itself above the laws which on every field of life were set to its spontaneous utterance; the fancy resumed its rights over against the understanding; the organic view came in the place of the mechanical; the idea of becoming drove out that of making. On every field the eye opened for the free, the natural, the genial; becoming, growth, development was the manner whereby things arose; not the useful but the beautiful, not prose but poetry, not labor but play, not handiwork but art had the highest worth. The mannerism of former times turned into a shallow sentimentality. Such was the movement which in England found its voice in Young, Southey, Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge. In France it was brought in by Rousseau, who in his Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard (Emile, book 4) builds up all his deistic dogmatics and morals out of the feeling: le sentiment est plus que la raison, notre sensibilité est antérieure à notre intelligence. In Germany, Winckelmann opened the eyes to the beauty of Greek art; Lessing set over against the poetry of French classicism the genius of Shakespeare; Herder pointed in history to the revelation and working of the eternal, godly nature; Hamann, Claudius, Lavater, Stilling went out from the rich subjectivity and set this over against the flat, mechanical view of the Enlightenment; Kant and Fichte placed the I of man in the foreground. Everywhere there was a break with objectivity; the subject became absolute principle.
Under this sway, Jacobi called upon the feeling as the immediate perceiving of the divine. Religion is feeling for the true, beautiful, and good; wonder, love, esteem for the godly; and such a feeling is innate to us as the ground-drive of human nature. The aesthetic rationalism of Jacobi was so worked out by Fries and de Wette that they made a strict parting between the empirical-mathematical world-view of the understanding and the ideal, aesthetic-religious world-view of the feeling.
Schleiermacher's view of religion is to be explained out of this same romantic direction. In the second speech of his Discourses on Religion (1799), he describes religion as the immediate consciousness of the being of all the finite in and through the infinite. It is no knowing and no doing, no metaphysics and no morals, but feeling of the infinite. Object of that feeling is no personal God with whom man lives in fellowship, but the universe, the world as whole, as unity thought. And organ for the perceiving of that infinite is not understanding, reason, or will, but the feeling, the direction of the heart toward and the sense for the infinite. This feeling is not further described. And still vaguer is the answer to the question when that feeling becomes determinedly religious feeling. Schleiermacher answers thereto in the third speech only in figurative speech: one must unlock his feeling as widely as may be for the world as whole, behold all in the one and the one in all, take up all the particular as a revelation of the infinite, and so forth. This all says not much; it seems that in the end every feeling is religious which is stirred by the world-whole and reveals to us the highest unity. In any case, the religious feeling is not clearly bounded over against the aesthetic.
In the Christian Faith we meet in the ground of the matter the same view. Also here piety is feeling (§ 3), and indeed absolute feeling of dependence (§ 4). But there is yet a twofold difference. In the Discourses, God was the whole; in the Christian Faith, He is the absolute causality of the world; accordingly, the feeling there was sense for the infinite, and here immediate self-consciousness and absolute dependence. God gets here more an own existence distinct from the world, and religion therefore also an own content distinct from the feeling for the world. There is thus some nearing to theism to be spied. But the ground-thought is yet in so far the same, as God is not thought transcendent above but only immanent in the world, and the organ for the godly is not the reason, the conscience, and so on, but the feeling.
This view of religion is not only taken over by some mediating theologians, be it also with change, but is found in beginning with all who beside the mechanical seek to build up yet an aesthetic world-view and therein take up religion or even let it wholly go up. Lange says that the kernel of religion consists not in a doctrine about God and so on, but in the uplifting of the heart above the reality and in the creating of a homeland of the spirits. Above the world of facts, the world of being, man builds through his fancy a world of values, a world of poetry. Pierson holds a like ideal-forming; the feeling of man, stirred from without, creates out of the notions which the understanding gets from the sense-perceivable world, religious, ethical, aesthetic ideals, which indeed are no realities existing independent of us but yet of great worth for our life.
Opzoomer even took up a separate religious feeling and saw therein the source of religious notions. Rauwenhoff deems the essence of religion indeed laid in the faith in a moral world-order but yet ascribes the form of religion, worship of a personal God, to the fancy. Compare also Guyau, The Irreligion of the Future; Dr. R. Koch, Nature and Human Spirit, and so on.
14. Also in this conception it is without contradiction that feeling holds an important place in religion. Religious representations in themselves and without more are not yet religion; only then does it arise when man enters into a real, personal relation to the object of those representations. And such a personal relation to God cannot but work upon the feeling; it leaves man not cold and indifferent, but stirs him to the deepest of his soul; it awakens in him a strong feeling of pleasure and displeasure and fosters a whole series of affections, consciousness of guilt, sorrow, repentance, regret, sadness, joy, gladness, trust, peace, rest, and so forth. Religion awakens the deepest and tenderest affections in the human heart. There is no power that grips and stirs more deeply, more universally, more strongly. All these affections aroused by the religious representations give to religion warmth, intimacy, life, strength, in contrast to the deadness of intellectualism and the coldness of moralism. The heart is the center of religion.
But therefore the feeling is not yet the only religious function, not the only seat and fount of religion. The feeling, here taken not as a separate faculty, which it is not, but as the whole of the passions and affections, is by nature passive; it reacts only to that which is brought into contact with it by the consciousness, and then becomes a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. It has nothing in itself and brings forth nothing from itself, but judges the things, the representations, that come from without, only according to whether they be agreeable or disagreeable. In itself the feeling, every affection, is neither good nor evil, neither true nor false. These be categories not properly of the affections, but of the representations. Of the affections they can only be used, insofar as these are aroused by true or false representations, and accompanied by good or evil directions of the will. In religion, therefore, it is not the feeling, but the faith, the religious representation, that is first; but that faith also works upon the feeling. However, when, as with Schleiermacher, the feeling is loosed from the faith, from the religious representation, and made the proper and only fount and seat of religion, then the feeling loses its quality, becomes wholly independent of the category of true and false, of good and evil, and properly every feeling as such is already religious, true, good, and beautiful. And that was the dreadful error of all romanticism.
Naturally, then, the error lies at hand, to confound and identify the religious feeling with the sensual and with the aesthetic feeling. From history, the kinship and the transition are known to everyone between religious and sensual love. But equally perilous is the mingling of religious and aesthetic feeling, of religion and art. Both are essentially distinct. Religion is life, reality; art is ideal, semblance. Art cannot bridge the gulf between ideal and reality. It does indeed lift us for a moment above reality, and makes us live in the realm of ideals. But this takes place only in the imagination. Reality remains the same thereby. Art does indeed show us in the distance the realm of glory, but it does not bring us into it and make us citizens thereof. It does not atone for our guilt, it does not dry our tears, it does not comfort us in life and death. It makes the There never Here. That religion alone does. It is and gives reality. It bestows life and peace. It posits the ideal as true reality and makes us partakers thereof. Therefore, the aesthetic feeling can never replace the religious feeling, nor can art replace religion. Yet both stand in connection. Religion and art have been closely bound from the beginning; the decay of the one brought about that of the other; the deepest driving force of art lay in religion.
In religion, particularly also in the worship, the imagination has its right and its worth. In the religious process, the imagination is indeed involved, but not as a principle of production, but only as a principle of animation. The power of imagination can always only shape already given materials and impulses, but it can never first create religion itself. But the stage is least of all suited for a moral institution (Schiller). The theater cannot replace the church, and Lessing's Nathan cannot replace the Bible (Strauss). Ideals and creations of the imagination are no compensation for the reality that religion offers. The religious feeling, however deep and intimate it may otherwise be, is then only pure when it is aroused by true representations.
15. The result is therefore that religion is not limited to one of man's faculties, but encompasses the whole man. The relation to God is total and central. We must love God with all our understanding and with all our soul and with all our strength, and so forth. Precisely because God is God, He claims us wholly, both soul and body, with all our powers and in all our relations. Indeed, there is order also in this relation of man to God. Here too, each faculty in man abides and works according to its own nature. Knowledge is the first; there is no right service of God without right knowledge. Ignoti nulla cupido . Unknown is unloved. He who draws near to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him, Hebrews 11:6. Faith cometh by hearing, Romans 10:13, 14. The Gentiles fell into idolatry and unrighteousness, because they held not God in knowledge, Romans 1:18 and following. But that knowledge of God pierces into the heart and stirs there sundry affections of fear and hope, sorrow and joy, guilt and forgiveness, misery and redemption, even as they are portrayed to us throughout all Scripture, above all in the Psalms. And through the heart it works again upon the will; faith shows itself in love, in works, James 1:27; 1 John 1:5-7; Romans 2:10, 13; Galatians 5:6; 1 Corinthians 13, and so forth. Head, heart, and hand are alike, though each in its own manner, taken up by religion; it claims the whole man, soul and body, into its service.
Therefore religion also comes into touch with all other powers of culture, especially with knowledge, morality, and art. Proudhon once said: il est étonnant, qu’au fond de toutes les choses nous retrouvons la théologie . But Donoso Cortes rightly answered thereto: dans ce fait il n’y a rien d’étonnant que l’étonnement de Mr. Proudhon . Religion as relation to God marks out the place wherein man stands over against all other creatures. It contains dogma, law, and worship, and therefore stands in close bond with knowledge, morality, and art. It encompasses the whole man, in his thinking, feeling, and doing, in his whole life, everywhere and at all times. Nothing falls outside religion. It spreads its power over the whole man and mankind, over family and society and state. It is the foundation of the true, the good, and the beautiful. It brings unity, coherence, life into the world and history. From it knowledge, morals, and art take their origin; to it they return again and find rest. It is the beginning and the end, the soul of all things, the highest and deepest. What God is to the world, that is religion to man.
And yet she is distinguished from all the powers of culture and preserves her independence over against them all. Religion is central; science, morals, and art are partial. Religion embraces the whole man, but science, morals, and art are rooted in the diverse faculties of understanding, will, and feeling. Religion aims at nothing less than eternal blessedness in fellowship with God; science, morals, and art are limited to the creatures and seek to enrich this life by the true, the good, and the beautiful. Thus religion is to be equated with nothing; she takes in life and in the history of mankind a place that is her own and independent, a place that is unique and all-controlling.
Her indispensability can even be proved from this, that man at the very moment when he rejects religion as a delusion, yet makes some creature or other his God, and in another way seeks compensation for his religious need, in the service of mankind (Comte), in moral idealism (Salter), in the forming of ideals (Lange, Pierson), in spiritism, theosophy (Mad. Blavatzky, Mrs. Besant), or in other religions such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and the like. Cf. H. Druskowitz, Moderne Versuche eines Religionsersatzes. Heidelberg 1886. Id. Zur neuen Lehre. 1888.
16. Of the origin of religion there is no more a satisfying explanation than of that of language. The drawing of religion from fear, from priestly deceit, from ignorance, is still somewhat common in certain atheistic circles, but finds no scholarly defense. Darwin, The Descent of Man , translated by Dr. Hartogh Heys van Zouteveen, 3rd ed. 1884, seeks religion in its seed, embryonically, already among the beasts, for instance in the love which a hound feels for his master, and which is paired with a feeling of under-likeness and dread. But this likeness fails for sundry reasons. First, we know little of the inward, soul-like life of beasts; further, godliness is ever bound with worship, rites, and a godly deed, such as prayer, offering, and the like, comes not among beasts; and moreover, there are in beasts doubtless certain traits of faithfulness, cleaving, and so forth, but these make up godliness no more than the same traits among men toward one another are already godliness; the proper object of religion, a power above the senses, is wholly unknown to beasts. It therefore abides for the nonce with the word of Lactantius, Instit. div. 7, 9: religion is well-nigh the only thing which sets man apart from brutes, cf. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Religion I 207. Abr. d. A. v. d. Hoeven, De godsdienst het wezen van den mensch . 1848. Hartmann, Religionsphil. I. Saussaye, Lehrb. d. Relig. gesch. I 10 f. Lamers, Wet. v. d. godsd. II 150 f. Hoekstra, Wijsg. godsdienstleer I 1 f. The reckoning of religion from soul-lore, E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture 1872, from fetish-worship, Fr. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte 1871, and from the honoring of forefathers, H. Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions , being part VI of The Principles of Sociology , London 1886, § 583 etc., goes out from the wholly willful under-setting that the lowest forms of religion are the first, and holds side-showings of religion for its essence. Also the striving of Max Müller, for instance in his De oorsprong en de ontwikkeling van den godsdienst nagegaan in den godsdienst van Indië , Utrecht 1879, to draw godliness from the feeling of the boundless, has rightly found little entry; the beholding of the endless in nature leads of itself and without more utterly not to the thought of the boundless and still much less to the worship of the Boundless One, of God. Even as un-takeable is the guess-work which seeks the origin of religion in the drive to cause, in man's need for a reckoning of world and life, cf. Peschel, Völkerkunde 1881; Voigt, Fundamentaldogm. 1874, for religion is, in spite of all kinship, in essence sundered from lore of being and wisdom-lore and answers wholly other needs of man. And lastly there are also few more who, with Cicero de nat. deor. 1,15. 2,5. Sextus Emp. 9,18 and the hope-filled reasoners of the last age, let religion arise from childlike song-craft, thankful feeling, the simple gladness, which among the guiltless nature-man were awakened by the lordly and blessing-rich nature, and which up-brought him to the knowing and worship of an above-nature being, which gave all that, cf. still Pfleiderer, Relig. phil. II 24 f.; lore sees nowadays in that painting of the guiltlessness of nature-men and of the fairness and well-doing of nature nothing other than a song-like idyll. The sooth shows us everywhere a hard struggle for life.
Therefore there reigns now also a wholly other conception concerning the origin of religion. Nature stands oftentimes hostile over against mankind. She has it with her storms and tempests, with her scorching heat and piercing cold, with her raging forces and unbridled elements, laid upon the being and the life of man. He sees himself continually bound to protect his life over against her, to uphold his being. But he is weak and powerless. And so he calls then in the fearful conflict between himself and nature, between self-feeling and need-feeling, an unseen might to aid, which stands above nature and can help him in the strife. Mankind wills to be happy, but he is not and cannot through his own strength become so; therefore he strives in religion to make all those personal powers favorable to himself, which according to his conception are present in the appearances of nature. This explanation of religion has the peculiarity, that it lets religion arise not from theoretical but determinedly from practical motives; not from conceptions, but from affections of fear, dread, need-feeling, and the like. It is in so far a return to the primus in orbe deos fecit timor of Petronius. Furthermore, it is already found with Hume, cf. Stud. u. Krit. 1890, 2tes Heft, and in the Système de la nature , cf. Stöckl, Gesch. der neueren Philos. 1883 I, but is especially in the newer time in very wide circles accepted as the best solution of the question concerning the origin of religion. Yet it comes not with all in the selfsame form. Some say, that religion arose from the self-preservation drive in general; mankind wills in religion to become partaker of some good, whatsoever good this be, a sensual, physical, egoistic good or also a moral, spiritual good; he wills in one word a happy life, deliverance from physical or also from ethical evil. So W. Bender, Das Wesen der Religion und die Grundgesetze der Kirchenbildung Bonn 1886. Ed. Zeller, Ursprung u. Wesen der Religion (Vorträge und Abhandlungen, II 1877). J. Kaftan, Das Wesen der christl. Religion , Basel, Bahnmaier 1881. H. Siebeck, Lehrb. der Religionsphilos. 1893. Others seek the origin of religion determinedly in the ethical self-assertion, in the upholding of man's moral freedom and worth over against the necessity and the compulsion of the physical world. Kant postulated in this wise already on ground of man's moral nature the being of a God, who could make the world of necessity serviceable to that of freedom, the nature-law to the moral-law, the physical to the ethical. And in the selfsame wise reason Ritschl, Die christl. Lehre von der Rechtf. u. Versöhnung , 2e Aufl. III 1883. W. Herrmann, Die Religion im Verhältniss zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit , Halle, Niemeyer 1879. cf. also Rauwenhoff, Wijsbeg. v. d. godsd. Finally there are also yet those, who in religion acknowledge not only an ethical but also a mystical element, and who therefore deem it not less or more in a free will-deed but in the nature of mankind grounded; mankind seeks according to these in religion indeed surely ethical self-assertion, but yet also something other and more, namely fellowship with, life in God, and thereby just also freedom over against the world; religion is foremost a relation to God, and thereafter to the world. So Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie , 2e Aufl. Berlin 1883. II. Id. Grundriss der christl. Glaubens- und Sittenlehre . 3e Aufl. Berlin, Reimer 1886 § 10. Lipsius, Lehrb. der ev. prot. Dogm. 2e Aufl. 1879 § 18. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm.
17. Yet this explanation of religion, however widely accepted, cannot satisfy. First, the idea of God remains unexplained here. Commonly it is said that the undeveloped, childlike natural man makes no distinction between the personal and the impersonal, thinks the forces in nature after the likeness of himself, and deems all things dwelt in by souls and spirits. The groundwork and supposition for religion is then the so-called animistic worldview. But firstly, it is highly unlikely that the plain distinction between personal beings and impersonal things was unknown to the first men. Next, the belief in souls and spirits that dwell and work in the appearances of nature is in itself not yet religion; these souls or spirits become religious objects only when the notion of the divine is carried over to them. There must be in man a certain awareness of deity, to be able to make the souls and spirits, which he thought present in the forces of nature, into objects of his religious worship. Indeed, the psychological method tries to reverse the order; according to it, the natural man first placed himself in a religious relation to one or another personally thought natural force, and later abstracted from it the notion of the divine. But in any case, it does not go thus with historical men; all receive first through teaching and upbringing the notion of deity and develop on that ground a religious relation. And there is no single proof that it went otherwise with the first men or could go otherwise. A religious relation to one or another power always supposes already the idea of God; and this remains unexplained in the above-mentioned method.
Besides, the arising of religion in the subjective sense also remains ungraspable in this psychological analysis. Let the belief in personal beings in nature be granted; but why is, and especially when does, the seeking of some bodily or moral good from those beings become religion? Religion arises only then, when not in general help is asked, as men also seek from each other and in art and science, but when in a wholly special way faith, trust, awareness of dependence toward an unseen divine power is awakened in the heart. Religion always supposes a certain distinction between God and world, between the power of a being above and the underling forces in nature. Indeed, that divine power can then be thought as dwelling in the appearances of nature, but the object of religious worship is yet never the natural force in itself but the divine being that reveals itself and works in it.
The greatest objection against the above-named explanation lies however herein, that God thereby becomes nothing other than a helper in need, a being whose being is thought out to provide man with one or another good. Religion becomes a means to satisfy the bodily or moral, but always yet selfish needs of man. Self-seeking is the spring and source of religion. The first form, in which this explanation of the origin of religion was given above, speaks this out clearly and openly. In the second form, religion is derived not from bodily but from moral needs; deity is no product of happiness-seeking wishes but a postulate of practical reason. Yet this gives little difference in the heart of the matter. The subjective and selfish starting point is not overcome; God remains a servant of man. The third form tries to shun this self-seeking, by acknowledging in religion a mystical element and thus making God the straightforward object of religious worship; but even here this mysticism came later, it was not the beginning and source of religion.
In the above-named explanation, in whatever form it is set forth, man always stands first in relation to the world; and out of the clash with that world religion and the idea of God are born. God thus comes to stand in the third place; He becomes a wish-being, a product of man's self-seeking, a help-means in the strife against nature. The kinship of all these explanations with that of Feuerbach springs clearly into the eye. But why, so it can be asked, does man not content himself with the forces present in nature? Why does he not seek in knowledge, art, toil, and so on, in all the factors of upbringing, the help that he needs in the strife against nature? How is it to be explained that man keeps believing in the gods, creations of his wishes, even where so oftentimes they disappoint him and leave him to his own lot? Whence that he brings all things, even the dearest that he has, as offering to his gods and deems nothing too costly for their worship? How comes it at last that he keeps serving the gods, even as by other means and ways his lordship over nature spreads out bit by bit? If the above-named explanation of the origin of religion is the right one, then it loses over against art and knowledge its self-standing and its end is reached as soon as man can save himself in another way.
18. But, setting aside these special objections, there is grave misgiving against the method itself, whereby the origin of religion is searched out. What does it mean that the arising of religion must be explained in a learned way? It cannot mean that the religion of the first man or of the first men is traced back through history. For the history of religions leaves us wholly in the lurch here; the historical method is of no avail. To hold the religious forms of the lowest, wild folk as the first beginning; to this, as is more and more seen, all right is lacking. The method can thus be no other than the soul-wise one, and this can of course never bring it further than to a guess, which seems likely and for lack of better may for a time rejoice in a general agreement. But what is the question that this soul-wise method sets itself in seeking after the origin of religion? Yet no other than this: from what causes and strengths in man or in mankind has religion come forth? Thus must that point be sought, where yet not religious life-strengths of man bind themselves to the life-seed of religion? Holsten, by Rauwenhoff. By guess must thus a man be taken, so undeveloped and barbarous, that of religion with him there is yet no speech. A first beginning, inborn seed of religion may on this standpoint not be acknowledged. For then is this first beginning feeling, or however one will name it, a learnedly unexplained something, a kind of mystical opening, a taking for granted already of that which one seeks to explain, Dr. Bruining, Gids June 1884. The soul-wise method demands thus, that religion be explained from factors in man, which in themselves are not religious, but which through certain binding, under the working of nature from without, make religion arise. But such a godless man is a pure thought-thing, an equally empty and void drawing-away as the nature-man of Rousseau and of the holders of the social bond; in the true world has he never been. Religion itself becomes so wholly a yield of chance, even as the moral with Darwin. A "mere chance," says Prof. Rauwenhoff, could bring man thereto, to make one or another thing from nature into a god for himself. Another binding of the factors, and there would never have been religion. Therewith religion loses her self-standing place, her all-ness and needfulness; even her worth and her right are then no more to be upheld. For it is not true, what Zeller, Talks and Treatises II asserts, that the worth of religion is unbound from the way of her arising; if the origin of religion is by chance, she loses the steadfast groundwork, whereon she must rest. And also her right of being is then in earnest wise threatened. For if religion is so explained, that the being of God thereby need in no wise be taken, then is she, even if her arising soul-wise be a needfulness, in the higher sense yet nothing other than an absurdity. The soul-wise method seeks indeed to grasp religion without the being of God. Man is merely nature-being, nature-yield. He it is, who through sundry happenings is led to religion and brings forth the God-idea. God shapes not man, man shapes God. The inward religion is the wellspring of the outward religion. Man settles, whether he and how he will serve God. The soul-wise method is hereby judged; she is in beginning at odds with the being of religion and wrecks therefore the showing that she has to explain, Kant, Lotze, Albrecht Ritschl, a critical study by L. Stählin, Leipzig 1888. Compare further on the origin of religion Rauwenhoff, Theol. Tijdschr. 1885. Id. Wisdom of Religion. Saussaye, Textbook of Rel. History I and the literature there noted. Siebeck, Textbook of Rel. Wisdom. Hoekstra, Wise Godly-learning I.
19. The foregoing inquiry driveth us to choose another starting point and to follow another method. The essence and origin of religion are not to be explained by the historical and psychological method; her right and worth cannot thereby be upheld. It availeth not to grasp religion without God. God is the great presupposition of the worship of God. His being and revelation is the groundwork upon which all religion resteth. Now it is indeed called unscientific to go back to God in the explaining of any appearance; and verily He may not serve as an asylum of ignorance. But it is yet a poor science which may hold no reckoning with God and seeketh to explain all things outside and without Him. In the scientific explaining of the worship of God, this holdeth in double measure. For God is here the proper and direct object. Without Him all religion is an absurdity. The choice standeth here only between these twain, that either religion is a folly, forasmuch as God existeth not or is utterly unknowable, or that she is truth but then inescapably and in strict logical and scientific sense demandeth and presupposeth the being and revelation. Whoso cannot accept the first is driven to take the second and to acknowledge God as the principium essendi of all religion. There is worship of God, only because God is and willeth to be served by creatures. Then only, when the being of God standeth fast, is the essence and origin, right and worth of religion to be grasped.
But religion demands yet more. It takes for granted not only that God is, but also that He shows Himself in one way or another and makes Himself known. All godlinesses have this thought of showing. It is not thrust upon religion from without, but flows from her spring and being of itself. There is no religion without showing; showing is the needful match of religion. The being of religion lies not only inward in a godly bent, which shows itself as it wills, but also in an outward godliness, in a teaching, right-living, and worship, which only have sway for the believer because, by his reckoning, they hold God's will and service. The spring of religion cannot be pointed out in tale nor cleared in mind-lore, but must needs point to the showing as her outward ground. The sundering between religion on the one hand and knowledge and craft on the other does us the same thought of showing. The world-kind, the world around us is the well of our knowing and the teacher of craft. But in religion that same world comes under another sight, namely, as God's showing, as a making known of His everlasting might and godhead. In religion man seeks something wholly other than in knowledge and craft. In religion he seeks not a growth of his knowing nor a fulfilling of his fancy, but an everlasting life in fellowship with God, a true change of his being, a freeing from sin and woe. In religion it is about God Himself, because he knows that in God alone he can find rest and peace. Therefore religion demands another well than knowledge and craft; it takes for granted a showing that brings God Himself to him and sets him in fellowship with Him. Religion in her being and spring is an outcome of showing. Bit by bit this is also acknowledged. The wisdom-lore of godliness, which for a while deemed the thought of showing unworthy of earnest speech and only gave it a naysaying judgment, is driven to reckon with it. The grasping of that showing is yet very sundry and sometimes very awry; but the deed speaks strongly, that many take up this thought again and seek to give it an upholding meaning. The Holy Writ goes out from the being and the showing of God. God leaves Himself not without witness, and therefore there is from man's side a seeking, whether he might find and feel Him. Showing was there according to the Writ both before and after the fall. Showing is the outward beginning of knowing for religion.
If the being and spring of religion are thus set forth from revelation, this must not be taken in the Socinian wise, as if religion were not grounded in man's kind but arose from an outward sharing of teaching. In that case Schelling would rightly have marked: if the first man were not in himself already aware of God, and such awareness must come to him through a special act, then those who hold this must themselves claim a first atheism of man's awareness. Religion would then be a gift added on, not truly belonging to man's kind. But man is man because he is the likeness of God; he is at once as man a religious being. Religion is not the being of man, as des Amorie van der Hoeven Jr. less rightly put it, for religion is no substance but a habit or strength; yet it is a true trait of man's kind, so naturally given with it and so inseparably bound to it, that though spoiled by sin, it could not be rooted out. Therefore religion is also widespread and has such great might in life and history. Whether one will or no, one always meets at last in man a certain religious bent. One may name it diversely, seed of religion, sense of godhood (Calvin), religious feeling (Schleiermacher, Opzoomer), faith (Hartmann, Relig. Philos. II), and so forth, but it is always a certain readiness of man's kind to become aware of the godly, whereto the wise-seeking into religion must turn back and end. Beyond that it cannot pierce. For one of two: religion truly belongs to man's kind and is thus given with it from the start, or man was at first no religious being, thus no man but a beast, and has slowly grown into a religious being; and then religion is chance and a passing step in the unfolding process. The ask whereto wise-seeking at last comes down is this: was man from the beginning man, likeness of God, kin to God, a religious being, or has he slowly grown thereto? Was nurture or rough, wild kind the first state of mankind? Is the beginning of mankind full or half? Cf. Schelling, Vorles. über die Meth. des akad. Studiums, Werke I. Who would uphold religion in its being, and deems and owns it as a true trait of man's kind, takes the beginning of man full and lets him from the start be kin to God and religiously bent. Such a one can have no more bar against the state of wholeness, wherein Scripture lets the first man step forth. According to Scripture, man was from the first eye-blink of his being man, shaped after God's likeness, and thus from that same eye-blink also a religious being. Religion did not come later by sunder shaping or in the long way of unfolding, but lies of itself shut up in man's being shaped after God's likeness. Indeed that first state is marred and spoiled by sin, but man stays kin to God, he is of God's kin and keeps seeking Him, if haply he might feel after Him and find Him. To the outward revelation of God answers thus in man a certain skill, fitness of his kind, to mark the godly. God does no half work. He shapes not light alone, but also the eye to behold that light. To the outward answers the inward. The ear is laid for the world of tones. The word in shaped things answers to the word in man and makes knowledge workable. The fair in kind finds echo in his fairness-feeling. And so there is not only an outward, outward revelation, but also an inward, inward one. The former is the outward knowing-spring of religion, and the latter the inward knowing-spring. Both springs stand in tight bond with each other, as light with the eye, the thought in the world with the rede in man. The ask, which of the two was first, the outward or the inward revelation, is wholly needless. In the same eye-blink that God showed Himself to man by shaping him after His likeness, this one knew God and served Him, and the other way. And the true, right religion can only be in a full harmony of the inward with the outward revelation; truly religious, likeness of God, bondman of God, child of God, man in full wise is he who loves God, as He is and makes Himself known through revelation, with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strengths.
Even as in knowledge, so also in religion three kinds of springs are to be sundered. There is religion, because God is God and as God will be served by His rede-full shaped things. Thereto He shows Himself to man in word and deed -- outward knowing-spring, and makes him inwardly fit to know and love God through that revelation -- inward knowing-spring. The shapes wherein revelation happens outward and inward can be shifted fitting to the sundry states wherein man as changeable shaped thing can be. They are other in the state of wholeness and marring, in the state of grace and glory. But the three springs stay the same. There is no religion, save that God makes Himself known to man outwardly and inwardly. And again these springs find also in religion their ground in God's threefold being. It is the Father who in the Son and through the Ghost shows Himself. None knows the Father, save whom the Son through the Ghost will show, Mt. 11:27, Joh. 16:13, 14, 1 Cor. 2:10. Cf. Schleiermacher, Der Christ. Gl. § 4. Schelling, Philosophie u. Religion, Sämmtl. Werke Abth I. Bd. VI. Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, Sämmtl. Werke, Abth. II. Bd. 1-4. Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, 2e Aufl. Leipzig. J. A. Dorner, Christ. Glaubenslehre, Berlin, Hertz. Aug. Dorner, Ueber das Wesen der Religion, Stud. u. Krit. J. T. Beck, Vorles. über Christl. Glaubenslehre, Gütersloh. M. Kähler, Wissenschaft der Christl. Lehre, Erl. J. Köstlin, Der Glaube, sein Grund, Wesen und Gegenstand. Gotha. Id. Der Ursprung der Religion. Stud. u. Krit. Id. Die Begründung unserer sittlich-religiösen Ueberzeugung. Berlin. Gloatz, Spekulative Theologie, Gotha I. Heman, Der Ursprung der Religion, Basel. C. Pesch, Der Gottesbegriff, Freiburg. Dr. T. Cannegieter, De taak en methode der Wijsb. v. d. godsd. Dr. Francken in Geloof en Vrijheid. Drijber ib. Pressensé, Les Origines.
1. Religion, in its being and spring, when searched out, leads of itself to the thought of revelation. The tale of religions makes us know this thought as the needful fellow of all religion. The wisdom-lore of religion can no longer pass by this thought in stillness. But the way in which revelation is taken up in god-lore and wisdom-lore is not always in keeping with that thought itself. The thought of revelation brings with it a certain filling, which must be owned in its truth, to still be able to speak of revelation. It may not be wielded as a flag that hides a false load. In the first stead, revelation is a through-and-through religious thought; not wisdom-lore, but religion, not rede but the tale does it to our hand. To knowledge and wisdom-lore must thus be gainsaid the right, to set this thought beforehand and thereafter to shape the tale-wise and religious showings, which are gathered under the name of revelation, to fit it ready-made.
It speaks of itself, that wisdom-wise setups such as all-god-ism and stuff-lore cannot own this thought in its right. In these setups there is no room for revelation. Both are by their beginning unable to judge revelation and thus also religion, with which it is unbreakable bound, after worth. If God does not be and after Feuerbach’s saying, the hidden of god-lore is man-lore, then religion and revelation are therewith of themselves doomed and nothing but a dream-sight of the manly ghost. And even so all-god-ism can from the kind of the thing grant no realness to revelation. If God and man are in stuff one, there is a tie of man to God, like that which comes to stand in religion, no longer may-be. Religion is then at most the coming to self-knowing of God in man, the back-turn of the Full to itself in manly knowing. Revelation can here be nothing other than a name for religion in man, beheld from its thing-wise side. So says for by Ed. von Hartmann, that revelation thing-wise and belief self-wise are one and the same deed, taken from the godly and from the manly side. An outward, thing-wise revelation there is then not. Revelation is nothing but the dwelling and working of God in every man. Leaving now the ask, whether herein also a truth lies shut up and the thing-wise revelation must not self-wise fulfill itself in the lighting, it is yet clear, that revelation after the thought, which religion and the tale of religions make us know, hereby fully goes to loss.
Religion forsooth is always a tie of man to a godly selfhood, whose thing-wise and real being for the religious knowing is lifted above all doubt. As soon as man begins to doubt the sundering and self-standing being of the mark of his worship, it is done with his religion. This tie of man to God in religion is of right-wise kind. Religion is no bodily or over-bodily fellowship of God and man, like so oft said. It be-stands not in a being-oneness, a bodily oneness or fellowship of man with God. It is no stuff of man, and makes not his being, his inmost out. Religion under-lays just always, that God and man, though kin, yet are sundered. And it itself be-stands then, not in a tie of God to man, for God has no religion, but in a tie of man to God. This tie is out-wardly not bodily, over-bodily, real, but right-wise, good-wise of kind. It be-stands therein that man knows and loves God and lives for Him, Denzinger, Hoekstra. Religion under-lays well, that God and man stand in kinship and in good wise also in fellowship with each other, but is itself yet not two- but one-sided. How inward religion and revelation then also hang together with each other, they are yet two; they are not two sides of one and the same thing, but being-ly and thing-ly sundered from each other.
Like the eye and the light, the ear and the tone, the word in us and the word outside us are kin and yet sundered; so is it also with religion and revelation. It is on religious ground even as on every other field. We come naked into the world and bring nothing with. We receive all our food as well in ghostly as in kindly wise from outside. And also in religion the filling comes from outside through revelation to us.
2. Revelation. Revelation, as this concept is handed to us by religion and here taken in the broadest sense, is all action which goes forth from God to bring and keep man in that peculiar relation to Him which is marked by the name of religion.
It is of first importance here to grasp this revelation always and everywhere as an action, as a deed from God's side. God does nothing without thought; He does all things with purpose and has an aim in everything. Revelation is never an unconscious emanation, an unwitting shining forth of God in His works; but always a conscious, free, active making Himself known to man.
Religion and revelation both rest by their nature on the foundation of theism, that is, on the faith that God and man are not severed but yet distinct. Strongly put, revelation always presupposes that there are two worlds, a supernatural and a natural, a heavenly and an earthly. And now revelation is every working that goes forth from that other unseen world into this seen world, to make man ponder the things that are above.
The ways and forms in which God reveals Himself can be diverse, even as one man can make himself known to another in various manners. God can reveal Himself directly and immediately; and in so doing, He can employ ordinary or extraordinary means. These forms are in a certain sense of secondary, instrumental meaning. But always revelation, whether it comes to us in ordinary or unusual ways, is a deed from God's side.
He who understands it thus is in principle a supranaturalist, whether he accepts the possibility of miracle or not. The question of naturalism and supranaturalism is not first decided at the so-called supernatural revelation, but is properly decided already here at the entrance, at the concept of revelation in the general sense. Deism is untenable. There is only a choice between theism and pantheism (materialism). Pantheism has no revelation and therefore no religion anymore. Theism is of itself supranaturalistic, not in the historical sense of that word, but in this sense, that it acknowledges an order above this nature and accepts a working from yonder world in this one.
Religion, revelation, supranaturalism, theism stand and fall together. The aim of revelation is none other than to awaken and nurture religion in man. All that intends this and serves it is revelation in the proper sense. Revelation coincides with all God's works in nature and grace. It embraces the whole creation and re-creation. All that is and happens is for the pious a means to lead him up to God.
The usual definitions, that revelation would consist in the imparting of doctrine or of life and the like, prove already here to be much too narrow. In His revelation, it is God's concern to place man in a religious relation to Him. Religion, however, embraces the whole man with all his faculties and powers. In revelation, God draws near to the whole man, to win him wholly for His service of love.
Indeed, revelation cannot have as its aim to place the single man in a religious relation to God. Mankind is one whole. It is the object of God's love. Revelation thus has as its end-goal to make mankind itself as one whole into a kingdom, a people of God.
Revelation is no isolated fact that stands by itself in history. It is a system of God's deeds, beginning with creation, ending in the new heaven and the new earth. It is instruction, upbringing, guidance, government, renewal, forgiveness, and the like; it is all that together. Revelation is all that God does to re-create mankind unto His image and likeness.
3. The Distinction between Natural and Supernatural Revelation. Christian theology soon came to make a weighty distinction in this revelation. On the one hand, the connection and agreement between the religion of the Christians and the worship of the heathens, between theology and philosophy, could not be wholly denied; and on the other hand, Christianity was yet a proper, self-standing religion, in every way differing from that of the heathens. Thus men were led to the distinction between natural revelation (religion, theology) and supernatural revelation. In substance, it is already found among the oldest church fathers. Justin Martyr speaks of a human teaching, which is gained by the inborn seed of the word in every kind of men, and of a knowledge and beholding which only becomes our share through Christ, Apol. II 8, 10, 13. Tertullian has a separate treatise on the testimony of the soul , and speaks of a knowledge of God from the works of creation, and of another more full one through men filled with God's Spirit, Apolog. II c. 18. Irenaeus speaks many times in the same sense, adv. haer. II c. 6, 9, 28. III 25. IV 6. Augustine acknowledges a revelation of God in nature, de Gen. ad litt. 4, 32, de civ. Dei 8, 11 sq. 19, 1 etc. but sets alongside reason the authority, the faith, c. Acad. 3,20 de util. cred. 11, which alone leads to the true knowledge of God, Conf. 5,5, 7,26, de civ. 10,29. With Damascene, de fide orthod. I. c. 1 sq. this distinction already bears the mark of a dogma. Also the later division of natural theology into innate and acquired is already to be found among the oldest church writers. Tertullian appeals to the inward witness of the soul and to the beholding of God's works. Augustine says expressly that God can be known from the seen things, de Gen. ad litt. 4,32 but points especially to self-awareness and self-knowledge as the way to the everlasting truth, de vera relig. 72, de mag. 38, de trin. 4,1. Damascene, de fide orthod. I c. 1 and 3, already clearly sets the inborn and the gained knowledge of God alongside each other.
Not so soon were the bounds between both kinds of revelation marked off. For a long time men still tried to prove the Christian dogmas from nature and reason. Augustine sought to prove the Trinity, de trin. lib. 9-15, Anselm in his Cur Deus homo the incarnation and satisfaction, Albertus Magnus, cf. Stöckl, Philos. des M. A. II. 384 f., and Thomas, S. c. Gent. II. 15 sq. the creation a posteriori. Furthest in this went Raymond of Sebond, who in his Book of Nature or of Creatures , later wrongly called Natural Theology (ed. by J. Sighart, Sulzbach, 1852 without the prologue, which was condemned in 1595) sought to build up the whole Christian doctrine of faith from the nature of man, without help from Scripture and tradition and shunning the scholastic method. But this reasoning proof was yet but a help that came afterwards; the dogmas stood a priori firm on the ground of revelation; they are helped in the faith of unseen things through those which are made, Lombard, Sent. I dist. 3, 6. cf. 2, 1.
Otherwise the knowledge which could be gained from nature was limited to some mixed articles, which centered around the three notions God, virtue, and immortality, Thomas, S. c. Gent. Lib. 1-3. The distinction between natural theology and supernatural theology was however in the scholasticism ever more strictly drawn and passed over into an utter opposition. Through the natural revelation there was of God and godly things some strictly scientific knowledge to be gained, Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 1 art. 5, cf. Bellarmine, Controv. IV p. 277 sq. Thomas is so sure of this, that he raises the question, whether in that case the taking of these truths known from nature does not lose all its merit. For believing is only meritorious when it is not knowing but a taking for true on authority, a deed of the understanding from the moving of the will moved by grace, ib. II 2 qu. 2 art. 9. The answer to that question is that knowing indeed lessens the reason of faith; but that yet always in the believer the reason of love remains, that is, the mind-set to take the known also ever again on God's authority as true, ib. II 2 qu. 2 art. 10; and this mind-set to believe the mixed articles on authority remains for special reasons (see later under No. 7), also always needful.
To this knowledge from nature and reason is now by the supernatural revelation added the knowledge of the mysteries, but this rests solely on authority and is and remains from the beginning to the end a matter of faith. The mysteries of Christianity belong to an order which not for an accidental reason, through sin, but which by its very being for every man, also for the sinless man, yea even for the angels in the proper sense is supernatural and therefore can never be known otherwise than through revelation. With the special revelation this peculiar Roman teaching comes nearer to speech. But here let it already be noted that knowing and believing, reason and authority, natural and supernatural revelation with Rome stand dualistically alongside each other. Rome thus acknowledges on the one hand the right of rationalism in the field of natural revelation and condemns the excessive supernaturalism which deems no knowledge possible even in the mixed articles except through revelation. And on the other hand it holds to supernaturalism in the field of the mysteries as strictly as may be and condemns all rationalism which a priori or a posteriori in the dogmas seeks to escape authority and faith and to pass them over into knowing. It rejects both Tertullian and Origen and condemns as well the traditionalism of de Bonald as the rationalism of Hermes. The Roman church confesses, according to the Vatican Council, sess. III Const. Dogm. de fide cath. cap. 2, that God.... can be known certainly by the natural light of human reason from created things, but that it pleased God, by another and supernatural way, to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race.
4. The Reformation adopted this distinction between natural revelation and supernatural revelation, and yet in principle gave it an entirely different meaning. Indeed, the Reformers accepted a revelation of God in nature. But man was so darkened in his understanding by sin, that he could not rightly know and understand even this revelation. Therefore, two things were needful, namely, that God should include again in the special revelation those truths which in themselves are knowable from nature; and that man, to behold God again in nature, must first be illumined by God's Spirit. To understand the general revelation of God in nature, objectively the special revelation in Holy Scripture was needed, which Calvin therefore likened to spectacles, and subjectively man needed the eye of faith to behold God also in the works of his hands. Equally weighty was the change brought by the Reformation in the view of supernatural revelation. This was not chiefly supernatural because it belonged in itself to another order and surpassed the understanding even of sinless man and of the angels; but it was supernatural above all because it far exceeded the thoughts and desires of sinful, fallen man, as will be shown later. Among the Reformers, natural theology thus lost its rational independence. It was not treated separately but taken up into Christian doctrine, Zwingli, Comm. de vera et falsa relig. ; Calvin, Inst. I c. 1-5; Polanus, Synt. Theol. I cap. 10; Martyr, Loci Comm. loc. 2 etc. But sundry causes hindered this Reformational principle in its unfolding and full outworking. There was excess and overstrain on one side. Anabaptism wholly rejected the natural order and sought in revolutionary wise to set up a kingdom of heaven on earth. The Socinians rejected natural theology altogether, and drew all knowledge of God from revelation, Catech. Racov. qu. 46-49; Fock, Der Socin. Luther, in fighting the scholastic teaching that natural things remained whole, went so far as to deny to Aristotle, to reason, to philosophy in theological matters all right to speak, and called reason in religious things stock-blind, stark, and utterly blind, Köstlin, Luthers Theologie II; Luthardt, Ethik Luthers ; Strauss, Glaubenslehre I. Strict Lutherans followed the Master; and the Formula of Concord, though granting that man's natural reason or understanding has some dim spark of knowledge left, that there is a God, and holds some part of the law, II Pars. Sol. Decl. II. de lib. arb., J. T. Müller, Die symb. Bücher der ev. luth. K. , yet lays such one-sided stress on the darkness and powerlessness of natural man in religious matters, that the bond and tie between special and general revelation is wholly broken; man in spiritual things and for conversion or regeneration is nothing more than a stone, a block, or clay, ib. Müller.
The reaction against it could not fail to appear. In Anabaptism and Socinianism, the overmuch supranaturalism turned into rationalism. Luther was driven, since he could not deny all insight and judgment to reason, to make a sharp parting between the ghostly and the worldly, the heavenly and the earthly, the everlasting and the timely. And in his footsteps, the Lutheran divines made a distinction between two hemispheres, one lower, the other upper; in earthly things reason is still free and able to much good, here it is to some degree self-standing and unbound from faith.
Calvin also, though by his teaching of common grace in a much better plight than Luther, yet did not always overcome the old twofold opposition of natural revelation and supernatural revelation. Thereby reason gained some say beside faith. It seemed that it need not always be led by faith, but in one, be it ever so small and uncaring field, was free and unbound. With this granted to it, or at least not earnestly gainsaid right, it has made gain; step by step it has spread its might. First in burgherly matters, then in knowledge, soon in wisdom-lore, and at last also in divinity it raises itself beside and against faith.
Alsted gave out a Natural Theology in 1615 apart, and reckoned as its inhold a sevenfold set of dogmas: God is, above all to be loved, uprightly must one live, what thou wilt not have done to thyself, do not to another, to each his own must be given, none must be harmed, more is set in the common good than in the sundry. Many Reformed divines followed this ensample, chiefly when the wisdom-lore of Descartes won sway.
Through English Deism and German rationalism, natural or rational theology grew so in might and esteem that it cast out revealed theology as wholly needless. Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648) gave to natural religion five articles as inhold: there is a highest God, he ought to be worshipped, virtue and godliness are the chief parts of divine worship, one must sorrow for sins and turn from them, there is from divine goodness and rightness reward or punishment both in this life and after this life.
But after it had banished revealed theology, it itself was also judged in turn. Kant showed in his Critique of Pure Reason that this is bounded to the sense-perceivable appearances and can pierce neither to the oversensible nor to the overnatural. The history of religions showed that no single religion had enough with natural revelation, that nowhere a natural religion was, and that all religions were positive. And the criticism of Scripture undermined supernatural revelation and wiped out the bounds between it and natural revelation.
Thereby the belief became widespread that to get any knowledge of God, another way than that of reason and learned proof-leading must be taken, namely that of faith or of moral trial or of fancy. Natural theology and religion, and therewith also natural revelation, lost their worth. The proofs for God's being, the soul, immortality were given up and banished from dogmatics. Pierson said even that teaching in natural theology at the state high schools was a mis-spending of the land's pennies. Nevertheless, it is taken up again in the law on higher teaching under the name of history of the teaching about God and of wisdom-lore of religion.
Prof. Doedes cast it out in his Encyclopaedia, but handled it yet in deed again in his Introduction to the Teaching of God (2nd ed. 1880) and The Teaching of God (1871). All points thereto, as shall be shown in the locus de Deo, that the proofs for God's being are rising again in worth. The good thought that lies in the old natural theology is slowly being better acknowledged.
5. The Scripture does acknowledge the notion of a fixed order of nature, but yet in revelation it makes no distinction between the natural and the supernatural. It uses for both the same words, for example, galah , phaneroun and apokaluptein , also for the natural revelation in Job 12:22, 33:16, 36:10; Rom. 1:18, 19. Nösgen makes therefore wrongly an objection to giving the name of revelation already to God's revealing in nature. Properly speaking, from the standpoint of Scripture all revelation, even that in nature, is supernatural. The word itself holds nothing about the way in which something is made open, but says only that something which was hidden comes to light. In the realm of faith, it shows that God has His own, self-standing life, set apart from nature, and now from His hiddenness in one way or another steps forth before the eyes of reasoning creatures. Of revelation one can therefore speak in the proper sense only if one acknowledges the supernatural, an order above this nature; and everyone who uses the word in this sense is in principle a supernaturalist, even if he allows only a revelation in a natural way. The distinction between natural revelation and supernatural revelation is not drawn from God's action, which shows itself in the one and in the other revelation, but from the way in which that revelation happens, namely, through or beyond this nature. In origin all revelation is supernatural. God works always, John 5:17. That working of God began outwardly with the creation. The creation is the first revelation of God, the beginning and groundwork of all following revelation. The biblical notion of revelation is rooted in that of creation, Oehler, Theol. des A. T. 1882. Through the creation God first stepped forth outwardly for creatures and revealed Himself to creatures. When God creates the world by His Word and makes it live by His Spirit, therein already lie the outlines of all following revelations drawn. But to the creation the providence joins itself at once. This too is an almighty and everywhere-present power and deed of God. All that is and happens is a work of God in the proper sense, and for the godly a revelation of His virtues and perfections. So does the Scripture behold nature and history. Creation, upholding, and ruling are one mighty, ongoing revelation of God. No nature-poetry has outdone or matched that of Israel, Pierson, Geestel. Voorouders I Israel bl. 389 v. All in nature speaks to the godly of God. The heavens tell God's glory, the firmament His handiwork. God's voice is on the great waters. That voice breaks the cedars, thunders in the thunder, roars in the stormwind. The light is His garment, the heaven His curtain, the clouds His chariot. His breath creates and renews the earth. He rains and gives sunshine over the righteous and the unrighteous. Trees and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, and all things come to the believer not by chance but from God's fatherly hand. The Scripture's view of nature and history is religious and therefore also supernatural.
According to Scripture, religion and supernatural revelation are most closely bound together. It tells of such a revelation not only after, but also already before the fall. The bond between God and man in the state of integrity is pictured as a personal fellowship. God speaks to man (Gen. 1:28-30), gives him a commandment which by nature he could not know (Gen. 2:16), and as with His own hand brings the woman to him for help (Gen. 2:22). Even the covenant of works is not in that sense a covenant of nature, that it springs up of itself from man's natural bent, but is a fruit of supernatural revelation. And since the covenant of works is nothing other than the form of religion in man created after God's image, who had not yet attained the highest, so it can be said that Scripture cannot think of pure religion without supernatural revelation. The supernatural does not war against man's nature, nor against the nature of creatures; it belongs, so to speak, to the very being of man. Man is the image of God and akin to God, and through religion he stands in a direct bond to God. The kind of this bond includes that God reveals Himself to man created after His image, both outwardly and inwardly. There is no religion without tradition, dogma, worship; and all these are woven together with the idea of revelation. All religions are therefore positive and rest not only on natural but always also on real or supposed supernatural revelation. And all men by nature acknowledge the supernatural. Naturalism, like atheism, is a finding of philosophy, but it has no ground in human nature. As long as religion shall belong to the being of man, man shall also be and remain a supernaturalist. Every believer, of whatever stripe, though he may be a naturalist with his head, is yet a supernaturalist with his heart. He who would banish the supernatural from religion, thus from prayer, from fellowship with God, kills religion itself. For religion presupposes real kinship and fellowship with God and is with heart and soul supernaturalistic. It is inseparable from the faith that God stands above nature and that He can deal with it according to His good pleasure, that He makes the natural order serve the moral order, the kingdoms of the world to the kingdom of heaven, the physical to the ethical. Therefore it has been rightly said that the plea for a clean heart is as supernaturalistic as that for a healthy body (Pierson). The theist who truly wishes to be a theist and yet fights against supernatural revelation is by no means done with this denial. He must either go back to deism or pantheism, or go forward and also accept the possibility of supernatural revelation. There is no natural religion. The rationalistic trilogy is untenable. The only true opposite of acknowledging the supernatural is therefore not rationalistic deism, but naturalism, that is, the belief that no higher power exists than that which is present in the current natural order and reveals itself. But then also falls all right to believe in the triumph of the good, in the final victory of the kingdom of God, in the power of the moral world order. For the good, the true, the moral world order, the kingdom of God are things which in themselves have no power to make themselves real. The hope that men will bring them to rule and bow before the power of truth is disappointed every day by experience. Their triumph is assured only if God is a personal, almighty Being and can lead the whole creation, despite all opposition, to the goal He intends. Religion, morality, the acknowledgment of a destiny for mankind and the world, faith in the victory of the good, the theistic worldview, faith in a personal God—all these are inseparably bound with supernaturalism. The idea of God and of religion involves that of revelation. Pierson, Gods wondermacht en ons geestelijk leven 1867. James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World , Edinb. 1893. Cf. Rauwenhoff, Wijsbeg. v. d. godsd.
6. Supernatural revelation, however, may not be equated with immediate revelation. The distinction between mediate and immediate revelation has oft been taken in sundry senses. Immediate was of old called every revelation that came without go-between to the receiver himself; and mediate that which was borne to others through angels or men. Insofar as the revelation to prophets and apostles mostly came personally, whereas to us it comes only through their writings, the first could be set against the last as immediate revelation over against mediate revelation.
Among the rationalistic and modern theologians these names have oft received a wholly other meaning, and thereby increased the confusion in the view of revelation. In strict sense there is no immediate revelation, neither in nature nor in grace. God always makes use of a means, whether taken from the creatures or freely chosen, whereby He reveals Himself to men. Through signs and tokens He makes them feel His presence; through deeds He proclaims to them His virtues; through speech and tongue He makes known to them His will and thought. Even where He reveals Himself inwardly through His Spirit in the consciousness, this revelation yet always takes place organically and thus by a mediate way. The distance between Creator and creature is much too great for man to perceive God straightway. The finite is not able to grasp the infinite. Whether in the state of glory there shall be a vision of God by essence can first be examined later. But in this dispensation all revelation is mediate. As God is and speaks in Himself, He can by no creature be beheld or understood. Revelation is therefore always a deed of grace; in it God stoops down to His creature, which is made after His image. All revelation is anthropomorphism, is a certain becoming man of God. It always takes place in certain forms, in sundry modes.
In the natural revelation His divine and eternal thoughts are laid down in creaturely wise in the creatures, so that they can be understood by man in thinking. And in the supernatural revelation He binds Himself to space and time, takes on human tongue and speech, and makes use of creaturely means, Gen. 1:28, 2:16 ff., 21 ff., 3:8 ff. And through these means man perceived and understood God just as well and as clearly as now the godly hears the speech of God in all nature. So little impossible and deceiving is the revelation of God in nature and history for the believer, so also is the supernatural revelation, wherein God makes use of uncommon means, but for which He also in special wise opens the eyes.
Natural and supernatural revelation thus go together according to the teaching of Scripture in the state of integrity. They are no opposition but fill up each other. They are both mediate and bound to certain forms and means. They both rest on the thought that God in grace bows down to man and becomes like unto him. And they both have these modes, that God makes His presence felt, His voice heard, His works beheld. Through appearance, word, and deed God from the beginning made Himself manifest to men.
Remarkable it is now, that the sin, which through the first man enters into the world, brings no change in the fact itself of the revelation. God continues to reveal Himself; He withdraws not Himself. First of all, through the whole Scripture, a natural revelation is taught to us. God's revelation began in the creation and continues in the upholding and governing of all things. He reveals Himself in the nature round about us; displays therein His everlasting power and godhead, and proves in blessings and judgments and by turns His goodness and His wrath, Job 36, 37. Ps. 29, 33:5, 65, 67:7, 90, 104, 107, 145, 147. Isa. 59:17-19. Mt. 5:45. Rom. 1:18. Acts 14:16. He reveals Himself in the history of nations and persons, Deut. 32:8. Ps. 33:10, 67:5, 115:16. Prov. 8:15, 16. Acts 17:26. Rom. 13:1. He reveals Himself also in the heart and conscience of every man, Job 32:8, 33:4. Prov. 20:27. John 1:3-5, 9, 10. Rom. 2:14, 15, 8:16. This revelation of God is general, in itself perceivable and understandable for every man. Nature and history are the book of God's almighty power and wisdom, of His goodness and righteousness. All peoples have acknowledged this revelation to a certain degree. Even idolatry presupposes that in the creatures God's power and divinity reveal themselves. Philosophers, natural inquirers, and history searchers have oftentimes spoken in striking wise of this revelation of God, for example, Xenophon, Memor. I 4, 5. Cicero, de nat. deor. II 2, de divinat. II 72. Zöckler, Gottes Zeugen im Reich der Natur, 2 Th. Gütersloh 1881. By Christian theology this general revelation has at all times been unanimously accepted and defended, Iren. adv. haer. II 6. Tertull. de testim. animae, adv. Marc. I 10. August, de civ. Dei 8:9 sq. 19:1, de trin. 4:20 etc. Joh. Damasc. de fide orthod. I c. 1 and 3. Thomas, S. c. Gent. lib. 1-3. S. Theol. I qu. 2 etc., cf. further H. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der relig. Erk. II S. 27-45. Especially by the Reformed theologians was this general revelation upheld and highly valued, Calv. Inst. I c. 4 and cf. further Schweizer, Gl. der ev. K. I 241 f. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. S. 1 f. Scholten, Leer der Herv. Kerk I 304-326. Doedes, Inleiding tot de leer van God 2nd ed.
But according to the Scripture, this general revelation is not in strict sense natural only, but it also contains supernatural elements. The revelation which took place right after the fall bears a supranatural character (Gen. 3:8 ff.) and becomes through tradition the possession of mankind. The original knowledge and service of God remains for a long time preserved in a more or less pure state. To Cain grace is granted for righteousness: he even becomes the father of a lineage that begins with culture (Gen. 4). The covenant which after the flood is established with Noah and in him with all the new mankind, is a covenant of nature and yet no longer natural, but the fruit of unmerited supernatural grace (Gen. 8:21, 22; 9:1-17).
Oftentimes the Scripture speaks of wonders which God wrought before the eyes of the heathen, in Egypt, Canaan, Babel, and so forth, and of supernatural revelations which befell non-Israelites (Gen. 20, 30, 40, 41; Judg. 7; Dan. 2:4, etc.). A working of supernatural powers in the heathen world is a priori neither impossible nor even unlikely. There may be truth in the appeal to revelations which is common to all religions. And conversely, not all that belongs to the realm of special grace is in strict sense supernatural. Whole periods pass in the history of Israel, many days and years in the life of Jesus, and likewise in the lives of the apostles, in which no supernatural revelation takes place, and yet they form a weighty part in the history of revelation.
When Jesus preaches the gospel to the poor, this is of no less weight than when He heals the sick and raises the dead. His dying, which seems natural, is of no lesser meaning than His supernatural birth. Therefore the distinction between natural and supernatural revelation is not identical with that between general and special. For denoting the twofold revelation which underlies the heathen religions and the religion of Scripture, the latter distinction is to be preferred over the former.
7. This general revelation is, however, for sundry reasons insufficient. In this also all Christian theologians are of one mind.
Irenaeus, in Against Heresies 2, 28, argues against the Gnostics the boundedness of mankind's knowledge. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho , introduction; Tertullian, On the Soul c. 1; Lactantius, Divine Institutions 3, 1; 4, 1; Arnobius, Against the Nations I, 38; II, 6; all paint the weakness of reason in very strong hues.
Augustine denies not that there is also among the heathens some truth, whereby Christians may gain profit, On Christian Doctrine 2, 60. But philosophy is not the true way unto salvation. It can teach but few and but little, On the Trinity 13, 12; The City of God 12, 20; On the Usefulness of Believing 10, 24. It knows well the end, but not the way that leads unto the end, Confessions 5, 5; 7, 26; The City of God 10, 29. Ofttimes it leads astray and holds the truth in unrighteousness, On the Trinity 13, 24; seeks it not in a godly wise, Confessions 5, 4; lacks the love that is needful for knowledge of the truth, The City of God 9, 20; is hindered by its own pride in the knowledge of the truth, for only lowliness is the way unto life, The City of God 2, 7. Therefore there is need of another way unto the truth, namely, authority, On True Religion c. 24; On the Morals of the Catholic Church 1, 2.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I qu. 1 art. 1; Summa contra Gentiles I, 4, argues the needfulness of revelation even for the mixed articles known by reason.
The Roman Church has clearly spoken the insufficiency of natural theology in the foreword of the Roman Catechism, and in the Vatican Council sess. 3 cap. 2 on revelation, and can. 2, 2-4.
And the Protestant theologians deemed no otherwise about this insufficiency of the general revelation: Calvin, Institutes I. 5 § 11 and following, and cap. 6; Heidegger, Corpus Theologiae I § 9-13; Trigland, Antapologia cap. 17; Owen, Theologoumena I cap. 6; Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae I qu. 4; van den Honert, Commentary on Marck's Compendium I 61 39.
The sufficiency of the general revelation and of the natural religion built thereon was in former times taught only by the Pelagians, who took three ways unto salvation, namely, the law of nature, the law of Moses, and the law of Christ. Also there were always in the Christian church some theologians who judged more kindly of the heathens and also believed in the likelihood of their salvation, such as Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Erasmus, Zwingli, and others; cf. Vossius, Historia Pelagiana 1655 p. 383 and following.
But with these this belief rested mostly not on the teaching of the sufficiency of the general revelation, but on the supposition that God also wrought with his special grace among the heathens, either in or after this life.
On the other hand, the full sufficiency of the general revelation and of natural religion was taught in the 18th century by the deists and rationalists, such as Herbert of Cherbury, Tindal, Collins, Rousseau, Kant, and others. Literature in Lechler, History of English Deism 1841, and article "Deism" in Herzog's Realencyklopädie ²; Bretschneider, Systematic Development of All Concepts Occurring in Dogmatics 1841 p. 35 ff.; Clarisse, Encyclopaedia 1835 p. 405 and following; Doedes, Introduction to the Doctrine of God 1880 p. 197 ff.
Concerning the insufficiency of the general revelation, there can scarce be any doubt.
It proves itself from this, that this revelation at most yields us some knowledge of God's being and of some of His attributes, such as goodness and righteousness; but it leaves us wholly unknown with the person of Christ, who alone is the way unto the Father, Matt. 11:27; John 14:6, 17:3; Acts 4:12. The general revelation is therefore insufficient for man as sinner; it knows of no grace and forgiveness; oftentimes it is even a revelation of wrath, Rom. 1:20. Grace and forgiveness, which must be the essence of religion, is a deed of good pleasure, not of nature and necessity. The general revelation can at most make known some truths, but brings no facts, no history, and thus changes nothing in the being. It enlightens the consciousness somewhat and curbs sin, but it recreates not the nature of man and world. It can instill fear, but no trust and love, Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 66, 218.
The knowledge which the general revelation can provide is not only scant and insufficient, but it is also uncertain, ever mingled with error, and for the far greater part of men unattainable. The history of philosophy has been a history of systems breaking down one another; and it ended among the Greeks in skepticism, in the Middle Ages in nominalism, and now in agnosticism. The truths most needful for religion—God's being and essence, the origin and destiny of man and world, sin and forgiveness, reward and punishment—have been by turns taught and contested. In philosophy there is no sufficient certainty to be gained concerning all these questions. Cicero, Tusc. 1,5 therefore rightly asks: Among the philosophers, do not the best and weightiest confess that they are ignorant of many things, and that many things must yet be learned by them again and again? But even if some thinkers came to some true and pure knowledge, it was still mingled with all manner of error. Every philosophical system has its lacks and flaws. Plato, whose system according to Augustine, de civ. 8,5 is the nearest akin to Christianity, defends the exposing of weak children, pederasty, community of wives, and the like. Even in morals there is great difference and uncertainty; truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond (Pascal). I know not how, but nothing can be said so absurdly that it is not said by some philosopher, Cic. de divin. 2,58. And even if the philosophers had been in possession of the fairest and purest doctrine, yet authority would have been lacking to them to gain entrance for it among the people. Oftentimes therefore they themselves in the practice of life join again with the folk-belief and folk-customs; or they withdraw from the people in haughtiness with an Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Their mutual strife and the opposition between their doctrine and life weakened their influence. And even if all this had not been the case, yet the doctrine of the philosophers could never have become or remained the religion of the people, because in matters of religion an intellectual clericalism and a scientific hierarchy is unbearable. Therefore Thomas was wholly right when he said that even in those truths which the general revelation makes known to us, revelation and authority are still needful, because that knowledge is suited only for a few, would require a long time of inquiry, and even then would remain imperfect and uncertain, S. Theol. I qu. 1 art. 1, II 2 qu. 2 art. 4. S. contra Gent. I, 4.
The insufficiency of the natural revelation is clearly shown by the fact that no single people has been content with the so-called natural religion. The general religion of the deists, the moral religion of reason of Kant, the piety and obedience of Spinoza, are all nothing but pure abstractions, which in reality have never existed. Even if the five articles of Herbert or the rationalistic trilogy of Kant had been wholly certain and strictly scientifically provable, yet they would have been unfit to found a religion, a church. For religion is something essentially other than science; it has another source and foundation. The eighteenth century could find delight in such truths of reason and empty abstractions. The nineteenth century with its historical sense soon saw that such a natural religion exists nowhere and can exist nowhere. Now it is generally granted that all religions are positive and rest on revelation, Schleiermacher, Glaub. § 10 Zusatz. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III 4, 500. Id. Unterricht in der christl. Religion S. 20. Frank, System der chr. Wahrheit. I 512 f. Doedes, Encyclopaedie 190, 191. W. Bender, Zur Geschichte der Emancipation der natürl. Theol., Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1883 S. 529-592. R. Rütschi, Die Lehre von der natürlichen Religion u. vom Naturrecht, Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1884 S. 1-48. Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd. I 19 v.
8. However, with that, the general revelation hath not lost its worth and meaning. First, it is of great meaning for the heathen world. It is the firm and abiding groundwork of the heathen religions. The Holy Scripture passeth a stern judgment on Ethnicism and declareth its spring from falling away from the pure knowledge of God. Indeed, this knowledge, which was man's first heritage, yet wrought on for a time (Gen. 4:3; 8:20), and the creation showed forth God's everlasting might and godhead (Rom. 1:20). But men, being foolish in their thoughts and darkened in their hearts, knowing God, did not glorify or thank Him as God.
Moreover, the confusion of tongues and the scattering of the peoples (Gen. 11) surely had great sway in the growth of polytheism. The Hebrew goy , the throng bound by birth and tongue, nation, beside am the folk bound by oneness of rule, pointeth hereto. For goyim , ethne is mostly used of the heathen folks, and meaneth not only peoples but also heathens; the word hath a national but at the same time an ethical-religious meaning, even as the Latin pagani and our heathens . The oneness of God and thus also the cleanness of religion was lost in the cleaving of mankind into peoples. Each people got its own national god. And once the thought of the oneness and absoluteness of God was lost, other powers could by degrees be owned and worshipped as gods beside that one national god; the idea of the godlike becometh unclean and sinketh, the sundry powers of nature come to the fore and rise in worth; the bound between the godlike and the creaturely is wiped out; and religion can even fall into animism and fetishism, into witchcraft and magic.
The mark of the heathen religions consisteth therefore according to Scripture in idolatry. The heathen gods are idols, they be not, they are lies and vanity (Isa. 41:29; 42:17; 46:1 ff.; Jer. 2:28; Ps. 106:28; Acts 14:15; 19:26; Gal. 4:8; 1 Cor. 8:5). In those religions even a demonic might worketh (Deut. 32:17; Ps. 106:28; 1 Cor. 10:20 ff.; Rev. 9:20). The state wherein the heathen world abideth outside the revelation to Israel, outside Christ, is set forth as darkness (Isa. 9:1; 60:2; Luke 1:79; John 1:5; Eph. 4:18), as ignorance (Acts 17:30; 1 Pet. 1:14; Rom. 1:18 ff.); as fancied vain wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18 ff.; 2:6; 3:19 ff.); as sin and unrighteousness (Rom. 1:24 ff.; 3:9 ff.).
The heathen world is in its origin, character, and destiny a tremendous problem. By itself, the solution which Scripture gives thereof is not only not absurd, but it even commends itself by its simplicity and its naturalness. Yet philosophy, both that of history and of religions, has not been satisfied with that solution and has put forward another view, which stands in direct opposition to that of Scripture. Indeed, the glorification of the childlike state of the peoples, as was customary in the previous century, now finds no more agreement. But the theory of evolution, which now serves for explanation, is equally at odds with Scripture. Just as natural science seeks to derive the living from the lifeless, the organic from the inorganic, man from the animal, the conscious from the unconscious, the higher from the lower, so the religious science of modern times seeks to explain religion from an earlier religionless state and pure religion from the primitive forms of fetishism, animism, and the like.
David Hume already began therewith in his Natural History of Religion . With Hegel it fitted entirely into the framework of his pantheistic philosophy, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 1832. And since then it has found ever more dissemination and defense: Buckle, History of Civilization in England 1858; W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe 1865; E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization 2nd ed. 1870; Id. Primitive Culture 1872; Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages 1865; Id. The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man 1870; H. Spencer, The Principles of Sociology 1876-82; F. von Hellwald, Cultural History in Its Natural Development up to the Present , 3rd ed. 1883; O. Caspari, The Prehistory of Mankind with Regard to the Natural Development of the Earliest Spiritual Life 1873; G. Roskoff, The Religious Nature of the Rudest Natural Peoples 1880; Ed. von Hartmann, Philosophy of Religion , Leipzig; O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion on Historical Basis , 2nd ed. 1883-84; H. Siebeck, Textbook of the Philosophy of Religion 1893; A. Reville, Prolegomena to the History of Religions , Paris 1881; C. P. Tiele, The Place of the Religions of Natural Peoples in the History of Religion 1873; Id. On the Laws of the Development of Religion , Theological Journal 1874; Id. History of Religion 1876, etc.
However generally this doctrine of evolution may be accepted, in any case it has no higher rank than that of a hypothesis. But it does not explain the phenomena. In natural science it still always rebounds against the facts of life, consciousness, speech, language, will, and the like. And in religious science the origin and essence, the truth and value of religion continue to protest against it. Furthermore, that the natural peoples represent the original state of mankind, that fetishism and animism are the oldest forms of religion, and that the first humans were like children or savages, are opinions that lack sufficient ground and therefore also encounter more and more contradiction. Schelling assumed in his Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation a relative monotheism as original. Max Müller acknowledges a so-called henotheism as the primitive religion, Lectures on the Origin and Development of Religion ; German Review September 1878. Cf. Rauwenhoff, Philosophy of Religion and Hoekstra, Philosophical Theology . Also the opinion that the different religions are successive moments in one developmental process is much less probable than that which holds them to be degenerations of one kind, Kähler, Science of Christian Doctrine I 185.
The doctrine of Scripture concerning the origin and essence of heathenism is therefore more or less decidedly still defended by Lüken, The Unity of the Human Race and Its Spread over the Whole Earth 1845; Doedes, The Application of the Development Theory Not to Be Recommended for the History of Religion 1874; E. L. Fischer, Heathenism and Revelation 1878; Zöckler, The Doctrine of the Original State of Man , Gütersloh 1879; Id. Article Polytheism in Herzog²; Lenormant, The Origins of History According to the Bible and the Traditions of Oriental Peoples , 3 vols. 1880-84; Diestel, The Monotheism of Heathenism , Yearbook for German Theology 1860; A. Tholuck, The Moral Character of Heathenism 3rd ed., Works VIII 1865; J. N. Sepp, Heathenism and Its Significance for Christianity , 3 parts Regensburg 1853; C. Pesch, God and Gods: A Study in Comparative Religious Science , Freiburg 1890; Formby-Krieg, The Monotheism of Revelation and Heathenism , Mainz 1880; Ebrard, Apologetics , 2nd ed. Gütersloh 1878-80; Vigouroux, The Bible and Modern Discoveries in Palestine, Egypt, and Assyria , 4 vols.; James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World , Edinburgh, Elliot 1893; S. H. Kellogg, The Genesis and Growth of Religion , New York and London 1892. Cf. Ch. de la Saussaye, Textbook of the History of Religions .
9. But, however strictly the Scripture also judges over the kind of heathenism, just the general revelation which it teaches sets us in strength and gives us right, to acknowledge all the elements of truth that are also at hand in the heathen religions. The study of religions stood formerly only in service of dogmatics and apologetics. The religion-founders, such as Mohammed, were simply held for deceivers, foes of God, helpers of the devil. Cf. Dr. Snouck Hurgronje, De Islam. But since those religions have become more closely known, this explanation has shown itself untenable; it was at odds both with history and with soul-lore. According to the Holy Scripture there is also among the heathens a revelation of God, an enlightening of the Logos, a working of God's Spirit, Gen. 6:17, 7:15. Ps. 33:6, 104:30, 139:2. Job 32:8. Eccl. 3:19. Prov. 8:22 ff. Mal. 1:11, 14. John 1:9. Rom. 2:14. Gal. 4:1-3. Acts 14:16, 17; 17:22-30. Many church fathers, Justin Martyr, Apol. 1,47, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. I 7 and others, took a working of the Logos in the heathen world. Augustine speaks many times very unfavorably over the heathens, but yet acknowledges also, that they saw the truth in shadow, de civ. 19,1 de trin. 4.20, that the truth was not wholly hidden from them, de civ. 8:11 ff. and that we thus with the true in the heathen wisdom-lore must make our gain and take it to ourselves, de doctr. chr. 2,60. Not so far in the human soul is the image of God worn away by the stain of earthly feelings, that no lines as it were utmost remain in it, whence it may rightly be said, even in the ungodliness of their life they do some things of the law or know them, de spir. et litt. c. 27, 28. Also many unclean acknowledge much truth, Retract. I c. 4. Thomas says not only, that man as a reasoning being, without over-natural grace, can know the natural truths, S. Theol. I 2 qu. 109 art. 1. but witnesses also II 2 qu. 172 art. 6, that it is impossible for any knowledge to be wholly false, without mixing of some truth, and calls thereon the words of Beda and Augustine: no false teaching is there, which does not sometimes mix some truths with falsehoods. The Reformed were yet better off through their teaching of the common grace. Hereby they were on one side kept from the error of Pelagianism, which taught the sufficiency of natural theology and bound salvation to the keeping of the law of kind; but could they yet on the other side acknowledge all the true and fair and good that was also at hand in the heathen world. Knowledge, art, moral, household, fellowship life and so on were led off from that common grace and with thankfulness acknowledged and praised, Calv. Inst. II, 2. § 12 ff. II 3. § 3 ff. Zanchius, Opera VIII 646 sq. Wttewrongel, Christ. Householding I 288-299. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 12. § 52. Id. Twist des Heeren met zijn wijngaart cap. 19. Turret, Theol. El. 10:5. Vossius, Hist. Pelag. 3:3. Pfanner, Systema Theol. Gentilis cap. 22 § 33. Trigland, Antapologia cap. 17. Moor, Comm. in Marckii Comp. IV 826-829. Cf. my speech over The Common Grace, Kampen 1894. Commonly this working of the common grace was now well seen in the moral and understanding, fellowship and state-wise life, but less often in the religions. Then only of some natural religion, inborn and gained, was spoken, but the bond between these and the religions not shown. The religions were led off from deceit or daemonish inflows. But not only in knowledge and art, in moral and right, but also in the religions there is a working of God's Spirit and of his common grace to be marked. Calvin spoke rightly of a seed of religion, a sense of godhood, Inst. I, 3, 1-3. I, 4, 1. II, 2, 18. Indeed, the religion-founders were no deceivers and no tools of Satan, but men who religiously laid out for their time and for their folk a calling had to fulfill, and on the life of the folks a favorable inflow have worked out. The sundry religions, with how much error also mingled, have to a certain height the religious needs fulfilled and comfort in the smart of life given. Not only cries of despair, but also tones of trust, hope, yielding, peace, under-throwing, suffering-bearing and so on come to us from the heathen world. All the elements and forms, that are essential to religion, God-concept, guilt-awareness, need for redemption, offering, priesthood, temple, worship, prayer and so on come spoiled but come yet so also in the heathen religions forth. Even here and there lacks it not at unwitting foretellings and striking awaitings of a better and purer religion. Therefore stands Christianity not only antithetically over against heathenism; it is also the fulfilling thereof. Christianity is the true but therefore also the highest and purest religion, it is the truth of all religions. What in Ethnicism is caricature, is here the living original. What there is show, is here being. What there is sought, is here to be found. Christianity is the explaining of Ethnicism. Christ is the Promised to Israel and the Wish of all heathens. Israel and the church are chosen for the sake of mankind. In Abraham's seed are all kindreds of the earth blessed. See besides the above-named works of Fabri, Sepp, Tholuck and others also yet Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1, 1. 4, 5. 6, 8. Coh. ad gentes § 6. Origen, c. Cels. 4, 4. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III² 184. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. I 2. Beck, Einleitung in das Syst. der christl. Lehre 2e Aufl. 1870 S. 45 f. Saussaye in my Theol. van Prof. Dr. Ch. d. l. S. bl. 31 ff. 46 ff. 83 ff. V. von Strauss und Torney, Das unbewusst Weissagende im vorchristl. Heidenthum (Zeitfr. des christl. Volkslebens VIII). Staudenmaier, Encycl. der theol. Wiss. 1835 § 428 ff. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm. 134 f. Kuyper, Encycl. III 445 ff. 563 ff.
10. But the general revelation has worth not only for the heathen world, but also yet in and for the Christian religion. Its value lies not therein, that it yields us a theology or religion natural, a moral faith of reason, which in itself would be enough and could do without all the positive in religion. Such a natural religion is nowhere found and is also not possible. Even so little is it the meaning of the general revelation that the Christian should draw from it his first knowledge about God, world, and man, to fill this up later with the knowledge of Christ. Ritschl and his followers set it forth so, as if the dogmatist in the loci about God and man took the stuff only from the general revelation, and then first drew the stuff for the following loci from Holy Writ. The dogmatist would then first stand outside and before the Christian faith, and then in the later dogmas take his stand in that faith. But this is not the way of the Reformation dogmatics, at least in the beginning. When the Christian confesses his faith in God the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, then is that in the full sense Christian faith. And the dogmatist does not first rid himself of this his faith, to put together from the general revelation a reasonable teaching about God and man and later fill this up with the revelation in Christ. But he draws his knowledge only and alone from the special revelation, that is, from Holy Writ. This is his one principle. But he bounds this special revelation not to the person of Christ, as he is drawn in some parts of Writ, for example, in the Synoptic Gospels or only in the Sermon on the Mount. The whole revelation, which is gathered in Writ, is a special revelation, which comes to us in Christ. Christ is the midpoint and inholding of all that special revelation, which begins at Paradise and is fulfilled in the Apocalypse. The special revelation has now known and worthily weighed the general, and has even taken it over and as it were taken it in. And so does also the Christian, so also the dogmatist. He stands in the Christian faith, in the special revelation, and sees from there also into nature and history. And now he finds there tracks of that same God, whom he learned to know in Christ as his Father. Just as a Christian, through faith, he sees the revelation of God in nature much better and clearer than he could mark it before. The fleshly man understands not the speech of God in nature and history. He searches the whole world-all, without finding God. But the Christian, armed with the glass of Holy Writ, sees God in all and all in God. Therefore we meet in Writ a nature-poetry and a beholding of history, such as is nowhere found. The believer thus finds with his Christian confession also in the world his right place; he is no stranger therein, and sees there no other might ruling than that which he also in Christ calls upon as his Father. Through that general revelation he feels himself at home in the world; it is God's fatherly hand, from which also in the natural all things come to him.
In that general revelation he further has a firm ground, upon which he can meet all non-Christians. He has the same foundation in common with them. By his Christian faith he may hold an isolated standing, he may not be able to prove his beliefs to others; yet in the general revelation he has a point of linking with all who bear the name of man.
Like as the classical propaedeutic lays a common basis among all men of learning, so the general revelation holds all men together despite all sunderings of religion. Inwardly, for the believer, the knowledge of God from nature comes after that from Holy Writ. We are all born into a set positive worship. Only the eye of faith sees God in the making; here too it holds that only the clean of heart see God.
But outwardly, nature goes before grace, the revelatio generalis before the revelatio specialis . Gratia praesupponit naturam . The gainsaying that natural worship and god-lore is enough and has its own self-standing being takes nothing from the truth that from the making, from nature and yore, from heart and inwit, a speech of God comes to every man.
No one flees the might of the general revelation. Worship belongs to the being of man. The thought and being of God, the ghostly self-standing and everlasting lot of man, spring and goal of the world, the rightwise world-order and its endmost win are riddles that give the manly ghost no rest.
The over-worldly need cannot be downtrod. Wisdom-lore always seeks anew to fulfill it. It is the general revelation that keeps this need lively. It hinders man from lowering himself to a beast. It binds him to the over-senselike world. It upholds in him the knowing that he is shaped after God's likeness and finds no rest but in God.
The general revelation wards mankind, so that and until it is found and righted by Christ. In so far was natural god-lore formerly rightly called a praeambula fidei , a godly fore-making and upbringing to Christendom. The general revelation is the ground-work upon which the special uplifts itself.
And finally, the rich meaning of the general revelation comes out in this, that it holds nature and grace, creation and re-creation, the world of reality and the world of values, together in unbreakable bond. Without the general revelation, the special loses its tie with the whole cosmic being and life. Then the link is missing that binds the realm of nature and the kingdom of heaven to each other. Whoever with the critical philosophy denies the general revelation strives in vain to regain by the way of practical reason or of fancy what he has lost. He has lost the foothold for his faith. The religious life stands loose beside the ordinary, human being; the image of God becomes a gift added on; religion becomes, as with the Socinians, foreign to human nature; Christianity becomes a sectarian appearance and robbed of its catholicity; grace stands hostile over against nature. Consistent it is then, with the ethical moderns, to take up a radical parting between the might of the good and the might of nature. Ethos and physis lie wholly sundered. The world of reality and that of values have naught to do with each other. In principle, Parsism and Manichaeism are renewed. Over against this, the general revelation upholds the oneness of nature and grace, of world and God's kingdom, of the natural and the moral order, of creation and re-creation, of physis and ethos, of virtue and bliss, of holiness and blessedness, and in all this the oneness of the godly Being. It is one and the same God who in the general revelation leaves Himself not without witness to any, and who in the special revelation makes Himself known as a God of grace. General and special revelation thus work upon each other. Praemisit Deus naturam magistram, submissurus et prophetiam, quo facilius credas prophetiae discipulus naturae (Tertullianus). Natura praecedit gratiam, gratia perficit naturam. Ratio perficitur a fide, fides supponit naturam.
1. The Special Revelation. History teaches that no single religion has enough with the general revelation. The Christian religion also appeals to a special revelation. Scripture is the book of special revelation. The words with which it expresses the idea of revelation are mainly these: גלה to uncover, niphal to be uncovered, to show oneself, to appear, to be revealed, Gen. 35:7; 1 Sam. 2:27, 3:21; Isa. 53:1, 56:1; Hos. 7:1, etc. ראה to see, niphal to be seen, to show oneself, to shine, Gen. 12:7, 17:1, 18:1, etc.; ידע to know, niphal piel hiphil hithpael to make known, to teach, Num. 12:6; ἐπιφαινειν to appear, Luke 1:79; Titus 2:11; substantive ἐπιφανεια, appearance, especially of Christ in his second coming, 2 Thess. 2:8; 1 Tim. 6:14; 2 Tim. 4:1; Titus 2:13; 2 Tim. 1:10 of Christ's first coming; ἐμφανιζειν to make manifest, visible, passive to show oneself, to appear, Matt. 27:53; John 14:21, 22; γνωριζειν to make known, Luke 2:15; Rom. 9:22; Eph. 3:3, 5, 10; δηλουν to make known, 1 Pet. 1:11; 2 Pet. 1:14; δεικνυναι to show, John 5:20; λαλειν to speak, Heb. 1:1, 2:2, 5:5; especially also ἀποκαλυπτειν and φανερουν.
These two words are not to be distinguished as subjective, inward enlightenment and objective, outward showing or revelation, as Scholten thought in L. H. K. and Dogm. Christ. Initia . For ἀποκαλυπτειν is often used of objective revelation, Luke 17:30; Rom. 1:17, 18, 8:18; Eph. 3:5; 2 Thess. 2:3, 6, 8; 1 Pet. 1:5, 5:1. Nor does the difference lie in this, that φανερουν denotes the general revelation of God in nature, and ἀποκαλυπτειν the special revelation of grace, as Neander thought in Gesch. der Pflanzung und Leitung der christl. Kirche durch die Apostel , for φανερουν is often used of the special revelation, John 17:6; Rom. 16:26; Col. 1:26; 1 Tim. 3:16; 2 Tim. 1:10, etc.; and ἀποκαλυπτειν occurs in Rom. 1:18 also of the general revelation. A constant difference in the use of both words is hard to point out in the New Testament.
But etymologically, ἀποκαλυπτειν conveys the taking away of the covering by which an object was hidden, and φανερουν the making manifest of a thing that was hidden or unknown. In the first, therefore, the stress falls on the clearing away of the hindrance that prevented the knowing of the hidden; on the mysterious character of that which until now was not perceived; and on the godly deed that took away that cover and made the mystery understood. The second word points in general to something that was hidden and unknown now becoming manifest and coming into the light. Ἀποκαλυψις removes the cause by which something was hidden; φανερωσις makes the thing itself manifest. With this is connected that φανερωσις is always used of objective revelation, ἀποκαλυψις of both objective and subjective revelation; that φανερωσις often denotes both the general and the special revelation, but ἀποκαλυψις mostly always the special and only once the general. And both words are again distinguished from γνωριζειν and δηλουν in that the first two bring things into the light, bring them under observation, and the last two as a result make them now also the content of our thinking consciousness.
Cf. Dr. F. G. B. van Bell, Disput. theol. de patefactionis christianae indole ex vocabulis φαν. et ἀποκ. in libris N. T. efficienda . Niermeyer, Gids . Rauwenhoff, De zelfstandigheid van den Christen . Cramer, Jaarb. v. wet. Theol. . Cremer, Wörterbuch s. v. Herzog. Voigt, Fundamentaldogm. . Van Leeuwen, Prol. van Bijb. Godg. .
The Christian religion thus agrees with all historical religions in that it appeals to revelation. But the agreement extends still further, even to the forms and ways in which the revelation takes place. All means of revelation can be reduced to a threefold kind. In the first place, the religious faith desires a God who is near and not far off (Acts 17:27); it was therefore at all times convinced of the appearing of the gods in one or another shape, under one or another sign, at one or another place. Holy places, holy times, holy images are found in almost every religion. The gods are not like unto men and do not live with them on equal footing; the profane realm is set apart from the sacred; but the gods yet dwell with and among men at certain places, in special objects, and bestow their blessings at certain times. Idolatry, taken in the broadest sense, is born from the need for a God who is near (Ch. de la Saussaye, Lehrb. der Rel. gesch.).
In the second place, all religions hold the belief that the gods in one way or another reveal their thoughts and will, whether through men as their organs, such as soothsayers, oracles, dreamers, necromancers, seers of spirits, etc., or artificially and outwardly through the stars, the flight of birds, the entrails of sacrificial animals, the play of the flame, the lines of the hand, the chance opening and falling open of a book, etc. (mantikē, divinatio). No great man has ever been without divine inspiration (Cic. de nat. deor.). (Cf. Cicero de divinatione, Plutarchus, de defectu oraculorum, A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité. Saussaye t. a. p.)
And finally, in all religions there is present the belief in special intervention and help from the gods in times of need; widely spread is magic, that is, that art by which men with mysterious means, holy words, formulas, amulets, potions, etc., make the divine power serve them and bring forth wondrous works (Ennemoser, Gesch. der Magie. Alfr. Maury, La magie et l’astrologie dans l’antiquité et au moyen-âge. Lenormant, Les sciences occultes en Asie. Saussaye ib.). Theophany, mantik, and magic are the paths along which all revelation comes to man. This general religious belief in appearing, foretelling, and wonder is surely not, in any case not solely, to be explained from deceit or demonic working, nor from ignorance of the natural order, but is a needful element in all religion. The religious need seeks fulfillment; and where it does not find this in a real revelation of God coming to meet it, it seeks it in the way of self-willed worship (ethelo-thrēskeia). It takes into service those mysterious powers in man himself or outside him in nature, which can bring him into rapport with a supernatural world. Superstition is the bastard form of true religion. Superstition is the caricature of faith (pistis). The present-day phenomena of spiritism, theosophy, telepathy, magnetism, hypnotism, etc., serve as proof of this, and perhaps also show that in the so-called night side of human nature there lie hidden powers which can work a more immediate rapport with a supersensible world and in any case can sufficiently explain the belief in such rapport, without the hypothesis of deliberate deceit, etc. There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy (Shakespeare). (Cf. art. Modern Bijgeloof in Tijdspiegel Jan. 1895.)
The Holy Scripture seems not to deny all reality to such phenomena (Gen. 41:8; Ex. 7:8; Deut. 13:1, 2; Mt. 7:22, 24:24; 2 Thess. 2:9; 2 Tim. 3:8; Rev. 13:13-15). But the religion in the Old and New Testament will decidedly have nothing in common with all these religious phenomena. It stands in principle opposed to them. It neither acknowledges nor tolerates them; it forbids them most strictly (Lev. 19:26, 31, 20:27; Num. 23:23; Deut. 18:10, 11; Acts 8:9, 13:6, 16:16, 19:13 ff.; Gal. 5:20; Rev. 21:8, 22:15). Prophets and apostles come out most strongly against them, lest they be placed on the same level with the heathen soothsayers and sorcerers. There may sometimes be, for example in the appearances to the patriarchs, agreement in form, but there is difference in essence.
Theophany, mantik, magic are, like offering, temple, priesthood, worship, etc., essential elements in religion. They therefore appear in all religions, also in that of Israel, and in Christianity. The Christian religion also has its offering (Eph. 5:2), its priest (Heb. 7), its temple (1 Cor. 3:16), etc. The distinction between Christianity and the other religions lies not in that all these needful elements of religion are lacking there, but is found in this, that all that appears in heathenism as caricature, in Israel as shadow and image, and here has become true, spiritual reality. Thereby it can be explained that Israel's religion on the one hand shows so much agreement in form—circumcision, offering, tabernacle, priesthood, etc.—with the heathen religions and on the other hand is in principle distinguished from them, so that only from Israel the Messiah has come forth.
This principal distinction lies in this, that in Holy Scripture the initiative in religion is not taken by man, but by God. In the heathen religions it is man who seeks God (Acts 17:27); he tries in all sorts of ways to make God descend to him, and pulls Him down into the dust (Rom. 1:23); he attempts by all kinds of means to gain power over God. But in Scripture it is always God who seeks man. He creates him after His image. He calls him after the fall. He preserves Noah. He chooses Abraham. He gives to Israel His laws. He calls and equips the prophets. He sends His Son. He sets apart the apostles. He will one day judge the living and the dead. Ethnicism teaches us to know man, in his restlessness, in his misery, in his discontent, and also in his noble aspirations, in his eternal needs; man both in his poverty and his riches, in his weakness and in his strength; ethnicism bears its noblest fruit in humanism. But Holy Scripture teaches us to know God in His coming to and seeking of man, in His compassion and grace, in His righteousness and His love.
But theophany, prophecy, and miracle are also here the means by which God reveals and gives Himself to man (Oehler, Ueber das Verhältniss der altt. Prophetie zur heidn. Mantik. Id. Altt. Theologie. Tholuck, Die Propheten u. ihre Weissagungen. Staudenmaier, Encycl. Schultz, Altt. Theologie).
2. Theophany (Angelophany, Christophany). Oft in Holy Writ there is speech of an appearing of God; sometimes without any further setting forth, Genesis 12:7, 17:1, 22, 26:2, 24, 35:9; Exodus 6:2, compare also Genesis 11:5; Exodus 4:24, 12:12, 23, 17:6; Numbers 23:4, 16; 1 Samuel 3:21; 2 Samuel 5:24; but elsewhere in the dream, Genesis 20:3, 28:12 and following, 31:24; 1 Kings 3:5, 9:2; or also in the prophetic sight, 1 Kings 22:19 and following, Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1:4 and following, 3:12 and following, 8:4 and following, 10:1 and following, 43:2 and following, 44:4; Amos 7:7, 9:1; Daniel 7:9 and following, Luke 2:9; 2 Peter 1:17; and manifold times yet in clouds of smoke and fire as tokens of His presence; so to Abraham, Genesis 15:17 and following, to Moses, Exodus 3:2, 33:18 and following, on Sinai, Exodus 19:9, 16 and following, 24:16, compare verses 9-11, Deuteronomy 5:23, 9:15; Hebrews 12:28, over the people, Exodus 13:21 and following, 14:19-24, 40:38; Numbers 9:21, 14:14; Deuteronomy 1:33; Nehemiah 9:12, 19; Psalm 78:14, above the tabernacle, Exodus 33:9, 40:34 and following, Leviticus 9:23; Numbers 9:15-23, 11:17, 25, 12:5, 17:7, 20:6; Deuteronomy 31:15; Psalm 99:7; Isaiah 4:5, and in the holy of holies Exodus 25:8, 22, 29:45, 46; Leviticus 16:2, 26:11, 12; Numbers 7:89, compare also yet to Elijah 1 Kings 19:11 and following.
These appearings take not for granted any bodily form of God, Exodus 20:4, 33:20; Deuteronomy 4:12, 15, but they are sense-perceivable tokens, whereby His presence becomes known, even as the Holy Ghost on Pentecost Day makes Himself known through wind and fire. Therein is also not to be thought of an outflowing of this cloud from the divine Being, but of a presence of God revealing itself in creaturely forms. In those tokens the divine glory, kabod , doxa , is made manifest, Exodus 16:10, 24:17; Leviticus 9:6, 23, 24; Numbers 14:10, 16:19, 20:6; and therefore that glory is also set forth as a devouring fire Exodus 24:17; Leviticus 9:23, 24 and as a cloud 1 Kings 8:10, 11; Isaiah 6:4.
But God appears not only in unpersonal tokens; also in personal beings He visits His people. Encompassed and served by many thousands of angels Isaiah 6:2, 6, He sends these in manly shape to this earth, to make known His word and will. They come forth already in Genesis 18, 19, 28:12, 32:1, 2; Deuteronomy 33:2; Job 33:23; 1 Kings 13:18 and according to Acts 7:53; Galatians 3:19 also served at the giving of the law, but they are go-betweens of revelation above all after the Exile, Daniel 8:13, 9:21, 10:5; Zechariah 1:7-6:5. Still oftener they step forth in the New Testament; they are present at the birth of Jesus, Matthew 1:20, 2:13, 19; Luke 1:11, 2:9, time and again in His life, John 1:51; Matthew 4:6, at His suffering, Matthew 26:53; Luke 22:43, at His rising and ascent to heaven, Matthew 28:2, 5; Luke 24:23; John 20:12; Acts 1:10. In the history of the apostles they come forth manifold times Acts 5:19, 8:26, 10:3, 11:13, 12:7, 23:9, 27:23; Revelation 22:6, 16. And at His coming again Christ is accompanied by the angels Matthew 16:27, 25:31; Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; 1 Thessalonians 3:13 and so forth.
Among all these messengers of God the Angel of the Lord takes a special place. He appears to Hagar, Genesis 16:6-13, 21:17-20; to Abraham, Genesis 18, 19, 22, 24:7, 40; to Jacob, Genesis 28:13-17, 31:11-13, 32:24-30 compare Hosea 12:4; Genesis 48:15, 16; to and in the time of Moses, Exodus 3:2 and following, 13:21, 14:19, 23:20-23, 32:34, 33:2 and following, compare Numbers 20:16; Isaiah 63:8, 9, and further yet Joshua 5:13, 14; Judges 6:11-24, 13:2-23. This Angel of the Lord is no unselfstanding sign, nor yet a created angel, but a personal, fitting revelation and appearing of God, from Him set apart, Exodus 23:20-23, 33:14 and following; Isaiah 63:8, 9, and yet with Him one in name Genesis 16:13, 31:13, 32:28, 30, 48:15, 16; Exodus 3:2 and following, 23:21; Judges 13:21, 22; in might Genesis 16:10, 11, 21:18, 18:14, 18; Exodus 14:19; Judges 6:21; in deliverance and blessing, Genesis 48:16; Exodus 3:8, 23:20; Isaiah 63:8, 9; in worship and honor, Genesis 18:3, 22:12; Exodus 23:21.
After the deliverance from Egypt the Angel of the Lord steps back. God dwells among His people in the temple 1 Kings 8:10 and following; 2 Chronicles 7:1 and following; Psalm 68:17, 74:2, 132:13 and following, 135:21. Thither goes out the soul's longing of Israel's godly ones, Psalm 27:4, 42, 43, 48, 50, 63:3, 65, 84, 122, 137. But this theophany is unwhole. God dwells not in a house made with hands 1 Kings 8:27; Jeremiah 7:4; Micah 3:11; Acts 7:48, 17:24. In the holy of holies only the high priest might go in once a year. The theophany reaches in the Old Testament not yet its end and its goal. Therefore there is yet another and more glorious coming of God to His people looked for, both to deliverance and to judgment, Psalm 50:3, 96:13; Isaiah 2:21, 30:27, 40 and throughout, Micah 1:3, 4:7; Zephaniah 3:8; Joel 3:17; Zechariah 2:10 and following; 14:9. The Angel of the covenant steps forth again in the prophecy Zechariah 1:8-12, 3; and shall come to His temple Malachi 3:1.
The theophany reaches its high point in Christ, who is the angelos , doxa , eikon , logos , huios tou theou , in whom God is fully revealed and fully given, Matthew 11:27; John 1:14; 14:9; Colossians 1:15, 2:9, and so forth. Through Him and the Spirit, whom He sends forth, the dwelling of God among and in His people becomes already now true, ghostly reality John 14:23; Romans 8:9, 11; 2 Corinthians 6:16. The church is the house of God, the temple of the Holy Ghost, Matthew 18:20; 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19; Ephesians 2:21. But also this indwelling of God in the church of Christ is yet not the last and highest. It reaches its full outworking first in the new Jerusalem. Then is the tabernacle of God with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His people and God Himself shall be with them and their God. They shall see His face and His name shall be on their foreheads, Matthew 5:8; 1 Corinthians 15:28; 1 John 3:2; Revelation 21:3; 22:4.
Compare article Theophany and Shekinah in Herzog. Article Cloud- and Fire-Pillar in Winer, Biblical Real Dictionary. Trip, The Theophanies in the Historical Books of the Old Testament, Leiden 1858 and the literature there cited. Schultz, Old Testament Theology, 4th edition 1889 page 507 and following. Oehler, Old Testament Theology, 2nd edition 1882 page 195 and following. Smend, Textbook of Old Testament Religious History 1893 page 42 and following. Weber, System of Old Synagogue Palestinian Theology, Leipzig 1880 page 179 and following. Cremer, Dictionary s. v. doxa . Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, 2nd edition 1861 page 49 and following. Keerl, The Doctrine of the New Testament on the Glory of God, Basel 1863. Van Leeuwen, Biblical Theology page 72 and following.
3. Prophecy. By prophecy we understand here the imparting of God of His thoughts unto man. Ofttimes the name of inspiration is used for this; and insofar also more fitting, as the notion of prophecy is broader than that of inspiration and also takes in the proclaiming of those thoughts to others. But inspiration is, on ground of 2 Tim. 3:16, chiefly used of the written revelation. And the word prophecy was formerly many times used in our sense, Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 171 art. 1. It also takes in the receiving of the thoughts of God, because a prophet is only he who proclaims God's word. And it brings out better than inspiration the intent of God, with which He imparts His thoughts, namely, that man himself be a prophet, a proclaimer of His virtues. The thoughts of God now, which in prophecy are imparted, can bear upon the past, as in the historical books of Scripture, or on the present or on the future. But always prophecy sets the thoughts of God over against those of men, His truth over against their falsehood, His wisdom over against their folly. This imparting of God's thoughts unto man can, according to Scripture, take place in sundry ways. Sometimes God Himself speaks in an audible wise, in human voice and tongue, Gen. 2:16, 3:8-19, 4:6-16, 6:13, 9:1, 8 and following, 32:26 and following; Ex. 19:9 and following; Num. 7:89; Deut. 5:4; 1 Sam. 3:3 and following; Mt. 3:17, 17:5; Joh. 12:28, 29. In many places God is set forth as speaking, without further marking of the wise in which that speaking took place, outward or inward, in dream or vision, and so forth. The trustiest mark bears this speaking of God with Moses, who is not affrighted nor falls down when God speaks to him, but with whom God spoke mouth to mouth, and dealt as a friend with his friend, Num. 12:6-8; Ex. 33:11, 34:29; Deut. 5:5, 18:15, 18; 2 Cor. 3:7; Gal. 3:19; Hebr. 3:5. Cf. Thomas S. Theol. II 2 qu. 174 art. 4. Witsius, de proph. I 7. Episcopius, Instit. Theol. III 2. The Jews spoke later of a Bath-Kol, a heavenly voice, whereby God revealed Himself; but this stood lower than the former prophecy, and had come after the spirit of prophecy had ceased, Weber, System der altsyn. pal. Theol. 187, Herzog 2, 130. But ofttimes God, in the imparting of His thoughts, joins Himself to those lower forms, under which also among the Heathen the gods were thought to make known their will. There is then in the form a nigh full likeness. Thereto belong chiefly the lot, the Urim and Thummim, the dream and the vision. The lot was used on many happenings, on the great day of atonement Lev. 16:9, in dividing of the land, Jos. 13:6, 14:2 and so on, Neh. 11:1; of the Levites' cities, Jos. 21:4; of spoil Joel 3:3; Nah. 3:10; Ob. 11; of garments, Mt. 27:35; Joh. 19:23; in deciding in hard cases, Jos. 7; 1 Sam. 14:42; Prov. 16:33, 18:18; Jon. 1:7; in choosing to an office, 1 Sam. 10:19; Acts 1:26; 1 Chron. 24:5; Luk. 1:9, and so on; also the ordeal, Num. 5:11-31 can be reckoned hereto, Herzog 8 762. The Urim and Thummim, LXX δηλωσις και αληθεια, Vulg. doctrina et veritas, light and right, come seven times Ex. 28:30; Lev. 8:8; Num. 27:21; Deut. 33:8; 1 Sam. 28:6; Ezra 2:63; Neh. 7:65. The U. and Th. are not the same as the 12 noble stones on the breastplate of the high priest, as Josephus Ant. III, 8, 9 and many after him think, but were things that were hidden in the breastplate, according to Ex. 28:30 and Lev. 8:8, Philo, Vita Mosis 3. But how they made known God's will, by glistening of the stones, by a voice, by inspiration, and so on, and also wherein they consisted, in two stones with the tetragrammaton, or in little images, or in a neckchain made of noble stones, or in stones for lotting, is wholly unknown. The last thought has in newer times gained backing in the text of 1 Sam. 14:41 changed by Thenius 1842 after the LXX. The U. and Th. would then have been lots with yes and no and also used Judg. 1:1, 20:18; 1 Sam. 22:10, 15, 23:6, 9-11, 30:7 and following; 2 Sam. 2:1, 5:19, 23. But therewith are answers, not of yes and no, but of long marking out and spreading forth Judg. 20:27; 1 Sam. 30:7 and following; 2 Sam. 5:23, 21:1; Judg. 1:1, 20:18; 2 Sam. 2:1, above all 1 Sam. 10:22; 2 Sam. 5:23; 1 Chron. 14:14, not well to be made clear. The U. and Th. belonged however surely to one same kind of revelation as the lot; they come chiefly in the time of Solomon and seem then to make room for the ownlike prophecy. Cf. art. U. and Th. in Herzog. Winer Realwört. Riehm, Wörterb. Keil, Archaeol. 35. De Wette-Räbiger, Archaeol. S. 281 f. Oehler, Altt. Th. S. 334 f. Schultz, Altt. Th. 257 f. Dosker, Presbyt. and Ref. Rev. Oct. 1892 p. 717 etc.
Next, dreams appear in the Holy Scripture as a means of revelation.
They were held as such throughout all antiquity, Homer, Odyssey 19:560 ff. Iliad 1:63, 2:22, 56. Aristotle, On Prophesying by Dreams . Cicero, On Divination 1:29. Philo, On Dreams , etc. And still many attach great worth to dreams, Splittgerber, Sleep and Death , 2nd ed. 1881 I 66-205.
Now, it was known at all times that dreams were also very deceitful. Homer Odyssey 19:560 ff. Aristotle, in the same place, and also the Holy Scripture oft points to the vanity of dreams Psalm 73:20; Job 20:8; Isaiah 29:7; Ecclesiastes 5:3, 7; Sirach 31:1 ff., 34:1 ff.; and oft ascribes them to false prophets Jeremiah 23:25, 29:8; Micah 3:6; Zechariah 10:2.
But nevertheless God oft makes use of dreams to make known His will, Numbers 12:6; Deuteronomy 13:1-6; 1 Samuel 28:6, 15; Joel 2:28 ff.; they occur among Israelites, but also many times among non-Israelites Genesis 20, 31, 40, 41; Judges 7; Daniel 2, 4 and contain either a word, a message from God, Genesis 20:3, 31:9, 24; Matthew 1:20, 2:12, 19, 22, 27:19; or a showing of the fancy, which then oft needs interpretation Genesis 28, 37:5, 40:5, 41:15; Judges 7:13; Daniel 2, 4. Literature, G. E. W. de Wijs, Dreams in and outside the Bible 1858. Witsius, On the Prophets I ch. 5.
The vision is akin to the dream, Gen. 15:1, 11; 20:7; Num. 12:6. Already the names ro'eh , chozeh , navi , and perhaps also tsopheh , by which the prophet is called, Kuenen, De Profeten. Id. Godsd. v. Isr. Id. Hist. Cr. Ond. König, Der Offenbarungsbegriff. Delitzsch, Genesis. Schultz, Altt. Th. Smend, Lehrb., and the names mar'eh and chazon for the prophetic sight, do likely show that the vision was no uncommon means of revelation. But these words have oftentimes lost their first meaning and are also used when no proper sight takes place, 1 Sam. 3:15; Isa. 1:1; Ob. 1; Nah. 1:1, and so forth.
Visions are manifold times named and set forth in the Scripture, from Genesis even unto the Apocalypse. Gen. 15:1, 46:2; Num. 12:6, 22:3, 24:3; 1 Kings 22:17-23; Isa. 6, 21:6; Jer. 1:24; Ezek. 1-3, 8-11, 40; Dan. 1:17, 2:19, 7, 8, 10; Amos 7-9; Zech. 1-6; Matt. 2:13, 19; Luke 1:22, 24:23; Acts 7:55, 9:3, 10:3, 10, 16:9, 22:17, 26:19; 1 Cor. 12-14; 2 Cor. 12:1; Rev. 1:10, and so forth.
The vision was many a time joined with a certain rapture of the spirit. Music, dance, and ecstasy go together; prophecy and poetry are akin, 1 Sam. 10:5 and following, 19:20-24; 2 Kings 3:15; 1 Chron. 25:1, 25; 2 Chron. 29:30. When the hand of the Lord falls upon the prophets, Isa. 8:11; Ezek. 3:14, 11:5, or the Spirit comes over them, they oftentimes come into a state of entrancement, Num. 24:3; 2 Kings 9:11; Jer. 29:26; Hos. 9:5, and fall to the earth, Num. 24:3, 15, 16; 1 Sam. 19:24; Ezek. 1:28, 3:23, 43:3; Dan. 10:8-10; Acts 9:4; Rev. 1:17, 11:16, 22:8.
In that state, the thoughts of God are given unto them to see or hear in symbolic form. In images and sights is His counsel revealed unto them, Jer. 1:13 and following, 24:1 and following; Amos 7-9; Zech. 1-6; Rev., and so forth; chiefly concerning things to come, Num. 23 and following; 1 Kings 22:17; 2 Kings 5:26, 8:11 and following; Jer. 4:23 and following, 14:18; Ezek. 8; Amos 7, and so forth. Also in that state they hear sundry voices and sounds, 1 Kings 18:41; 2 Kings 6:32; Isa. 6:3, 8; Jer. 21:10, 49:14; Ezek. 1:24, 28, 2:2, 3:12; Rev. 7:4, 9:16, 14:2, 19:1, 21:3, 22:8, and so forth. Even are they taken up in the spirit and carried away, Ezek. 3:12 and following, 8:3, 43:1; Dan. 8:2; Matt. 4:5, 8; Acts 9:10, 10, 11, 22:17, 23:11, 27:23; 2 Cor. 12:2; Rev. 1:9, 12, 4:1, 12:18. Daniel was sick some days after receiving a vision, 7:28, 8:27.
Yet the ecstasy wherein the receivers of revelation oftentimes were, was no state whereby the consciousness was wholly or partly quenched. Such was indeed the state wherein the Greek manteis gave their oracles, Tholuck, Die Propheten und so weiter. And Philo, Quis rer. div. heres. Justin Martyr, Dial. c. Tryph. Coh. ad Graecos. Athenagoras, Leg. pro Christ. Tertullian, adv. Marc. And in later times Hengstenberg in the first edition of his Christol. des A. T. have thus understood the ecstasy of the prophets. But these receive visions not in sleeping but in waking state, not only in loneliness, but also in the presence of others, Ezek. 8:1. During the vision they remain aware of themselves, see, hear, think, speak, ask, and answer, Ex. 4-6, 32:7 and following; Isa. 6; Jer. 1; Ezek. 4-6, and so forth, and later they recall all and tell it exactly, König, Der Offenbarungsbegriff. Kuenen, De profeten. Oehler, Altt. Theol. Orelli in Herzog.
Therefore the soul's state of the prophets during the vision was held by most divines to be a self-aware, spiritual beholding, an alienation of the mind from the body's senses, and not an alienation from the mind; so among others by Origen, de princ. Augustine, ad Simplic. Thomas, S. Theol. Witsius, de proph. Buddeus, Inst. theol. dogm. And in later times by Hävernick and Keil in their introductions to the Old Testament. Oehler, Altt. Theol. Tholuck, Die Propheten. Kueper, Das Profetenthum des Alten Bundes. Orelli bei Herzog. König, Offenb. Only hath König, to uphold the objectivity, added the peculiar thought that all visions were outward, bodily, and sensibly perceivable.
Truly many appearances as Gen. 18, 32; Ex. 3, 19, and so forth, are to be held objective after the writers' intent. There is a difference betwixt theophany and vision. But yet the aforesaid visions, 1 Kings 22:17 and following; Isa. 6; Jer. 1; Ezek. 1-3; Dan.; Amos 7-9; Zech. 1-6, and so forth, are surely inward and spiritual. Many are of such kind that they cannot be sensibly pictured or perceived. König goes too far when he makes the objectivity and truth of revelation hang upon its outwardness, and can think no working of God's Spirit in man's spirit save through the outward senses. He forgets that there are also hallucinations of sight and hearing, that the outward as such does not yet shut out self-deceit, and thus the certainty of revelation is not enough proven by its outward mark alone, Orelli bei Herzog. Kuenen, H. C. O. Van Leeuwen, Bijb. Godg. Borchert, Die Visionen der Propheten, Stud. u. Krit.
As the last form of revelation, the inward illumination must still be named. Hengstenberg in his Christology of the Old Testament thought that ecstasy was the common state in which the prophet dwelt when receiving the revelation. But this view has been fought by many, among others by Riehm in his Messianic Prophecy , König in his The Concept of Revelation , and is now widely forsaken. Ecstasy is not the rule, but the outlier, as Kuenen states in his Prophets and in History of the Old Covenant . Most revelations to the prophets, even in the Old Testament, took place without any vision, for example in Isaiah, Haggai, Malachi, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. Indeed, the word "vision" is often used for the God-speech, but this happens even where nothing is seen, as in Isaiah 1:1, 2:1; Amos 1:1; Habakkuk 1:1, 2:1; 1 Samuel 3:15; Obadiah 1; Nahum 1:1, and so on. The revelation then happens inwardly through the Spirit, as the Spirit of revelation.
Indeed, König in his The Concept of Revelation claimed that the Spirit is not the beginning of revelation but only the beginning of illumination, that is, that Jehovah reveals but the Spirit only makes one inwardly ready for that revelation. König came to this because he wished to uphold the outwardness and objectivity of the revelation and bind the inward Spirit to the outward word of Jehovah. But Numbers 11:25-29; Deuteronomy 34:9; 1 Samuel 10:6, 19:20 and following; 2 Samuel 23:2; 1 Kings 22:24; 1 Chronicles 12:18, 28:12; 2 Chronicles 15:1, 20:14 and following, 24:20; Nehemiah 9:30; Isaiah 11:1, 30:1, 42:1, 48:16, 59:21, 61:1, 63:10 and following; Ezekiel 2:2, 3:24, 8:3, 11:5, 24; Micah 3:8; Hosea 9:7; Joel 2:28; Zechariah 7:12—these cannot be understood only as a formal, inward fitting by the Spirit. They clearly teach that the prophets spoke not only through but out of the Spirit, that prophecy flowed forth from the Spirit in them.
There was also a working of the Spirit that fitted the prophet inwardly, but this is not the only one; it cannot be so sharply sundered from the other revealing work as König does. On König's standpoint, where revelation is wholly outward, it is also needless, as Kuenen notes in History of the Old Covenant . And the lying spirit in 1 Kings 22:22 clearly teaches that the Spirit is the wellspring of the word, as Herzog states. Jewish theology saw in the Spirit not only the wellspring of illumination but also of revelation and prophecy, as Weber shows in his System of Ancient Synagogal Palestinian Theology .
The New Testament declares just as clearly that the Old Testament prophets spoke out of and through the Spirit of God, Acts 28:25; 1 Peter 1:11; 2 Peter 1:21. Yet there is a difference in the way the Holy Spirit inwardly shares the revelation in the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit comes down from above and for a time upon someone. He comes upon the prophets, Numbers 24:2; 1 Samuel 19:20, 23; 2 Chronicles 15:1, 20:14; becomes mighty over them, Judges 14:19, 15:14; 1 Samuel 10:6; falls upon them, Ezekiel 11:5; clothes them as a garment, Judges 6:34; 1 Chronicles 12:18; the hand, that is, the might of the Lord, seizes them, Isaiah 8:11; Ezekiel 1:3, 3:22, 8:1, 37:1, 40:1.
Over against this working of the Spirit, the prophets are mostly passive; they hold their peace, fall to the ground, are dismayed, and dwell for a time in an unwholesome, ecstatic state. The Spirit of prophecy is not yet the lasting holding of the prophets; there is still sundering and distance between them; and the standing of the prophets is still set apart over against the folk. All prophecy is still unwhole. It therefore looks forward and awaits a prophet upon whom the Spirit of the Lord shall rest, Deuteronomy 18:18; Isaiah 11:2, 61:1; yes, it foretells the fulfilling of Moses' wish that all the folk of the Lord might be prophets, Numbers 11:29; and bears witness to a coming dwelling of God's Spirit in all the children of the Lord, Isaiah 32:15, 44:3, 59:21; Joel 2:28; Ezekiel 11:19, 36:27, 39:29.
In the New Testament, the highest, the only, the true prophet appears. He as Logos is the full and fulfilled revelation of God, John 1:1 and following, 18, 14:9, 17:6; Colossians 2:9. He receives no revelation from above or without, but is himself the wellspring of prophecy. The Holy Spirit does not come upon Him or fall upon Him. He dwells in Him without measure, John 3:34. Out of that Spirit He is conceived, through that Spirit He speaks, works, lives, and dies, Matthew 3:16, 12:28; Luke 1:17, 2:27, 4:1, 14, 18; Romans 1:4; Hebrews 9:14.
And that Spirit He gives to His followers, not only as the Spirit of new birth and hallowing but also as the Spirit of revelation and illumination, Mark 13:11; Luke 12:12; John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13, 20:22; Acts 2:4, 6:10, 8:29, 10:19, 11:12, 13:2, 18:5, 21:4; 1 Corinthians 2:12 and following; 12:7-11. Through that Spirit, special persons are still fitted for the office of prophet, Romans 12:7; 1 Corinthians 14:3; Ephesians 2:20, 3:5, and so on. True foretelling is not lacking in the New Testament, Matthew 24; Acts 20:23, 21:8; 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Thessalonians 2; Revelation. But all believers share in the anointing of the Spirit, 1 John 2:20; and are taught by the Lord, Matthew 11:25-27; John 6:45. All are prophets who proclaim the worthiness of the Lord, Acts 2:17 and following; 1 Peter 2:9. Prophecy as a special gift shall be done away, 1 Corinthians 13:8. In the new Jerusalem, the name of God shall be on all foreheads. Falsehood is fully shut out there, Revelation 21:27, 22:4, 15.
See Schultz in his Old Testament Theology , 4th edition; and further König, The Concept of Revelation in the Old Testament , Leipzig, Hinrichs, 1882. Kuenen, Historical-Critical Investigation , 2nd edition, 1889, volume II. Smend, Textbook of Old Testament Religious History , 1893. Kuyper, Encyclopedia , volume II. C. H. Cornill, The Israelite Prophetism , Strasbourg, 1894.
4. Miracles. Like as mankind, besides through his showing and his word, also through his deeds makes himself known, so God shows Himself not only through His words but also through His works. Word and deed stand in close bond. God's word is a deed, Ps. 33:9; and His doing is a speaking, Ps. 19:2, 29:3; Isa. 28:26. Both, word and deed, go with each other in the first making as well as in the new making. Commonly the word goes before, as promise or as threat, but it holds the deed as in seed within itself. His word turns not back empty, but does what pleases Him, Isa. 55:10, 11. The word calls for the deed; the wonder goes with the foretelling; not only the mind, but also the being must be made new.
The words with which in the Holy Writ the deeds, the works of God are marked, are sundry. After their outward showing they are niphelaoth Ex. 3:20, 34:10; Ps. 71:17; pele Ex. 15:11; Isa. 25:1, great tokens, mighty things, or mophetim Ex. 4:21, 7:19; Ps. 105:5, something shining, both Gr. terata , something special, unwonted, that sets itself apart from the common happenings. They are called geburôth Deut. 3:24; Ps. 21:14, 54:3, 66:7, dunameis , maasim Ps. 8:7, 19:2, 103:22; Isa. 5:19 or alilôth Ps. 9:12, 77:13 erga megaleia , for the great, godly might that shows itself in them. Above all they are named ôth Ex. 3:12, 12:13, and so on, because they are a proof and token of God's nearness.
These works of God are first to be marked in His making and upholding. All God's works are wonders. Also the works of the world are oftentimes in the Writ marked with the name of wonders, Ps. 77:13, 97:3, 98:1, 107:24, 139:14. From this one may not, with Scholten in Supranaturalism in Bond with Bible, Christendom and Protestantism Leiden 1867, draw that the Holy Writ knows no sundering between the world and wonder. Surely, the thought that a wonder would be against the laws of the world and thus unfeasible does not come up. Rather, all the Writ goes out from the faith that for God nothing is too wondrous, Gen. 18:14; Deut. 8:3 and following; Mt. 19:26. But therefore there lacks not a sundering between the wonted order of the world and the unwonted mighty deeds of God. The Old Covenant knows a steadfast order of the world, set ways that hold for heaven and earth, that lie fast in the Lord's setting, Gen. 1:26, 28, 8:22; Ps. 104:5, 9, 119:90, 91, 148:6; Eccl. 1:10; Job 38:10 and following; Jer. 5:24, 31:25 and following, 33:20, 25. And the New Covenant makes an even clear sundering, Mt. 8:27, 9:5, 24, 33, 13:54; Lk. 5:9, 7:16, 8:53; Jn. 3:2, 9:32, and so on. Wonders are a beriah a making, something new, that otherwise is never seen, Ex. 34:10; Num. 16:30. The happenings that in the Holy Writ are told as wonders are also by us yet deemed wonders; over the marking of those happenings there is no sundering, cf. Herzog² 17:360. Pierson, God's Wonder-Might and Our Ghostly Life 1867. Gloatz in Stud. u. Krit. 1886, 3rd Part. W. Bender, The Wonder-Notion of the N. T. Frankfurt 1871. Schultz, Old Test. Theology .
Moreover, the Writ owns that also outside the showing forth unwonted strengths can work and unwonted things can befall, Ex. 7:11, 22, 8:7, 18, 9:11; Mt. 24:24; Rev. 13:13 and following; a token or wonder is in itself thus not enough to seal a foreteller, Deut. 13:1-3. But yet it is only Israel's God who does wonders, Ps. 72:18, 77:15, 86:10, 136:4. Sometimes He brings those wonders Himself straightway to stand; sometimes He uses men or angels. But always it is God who does them. His dunamis is shown therein, Lk. 5:17, 14:19; Mk. 7:34; Lk. 11:20; Jn. 3:2, 5:19 and following, 10:25, 32; Acts 2:22, 4:10. It is the Ghost of the Lord who works them, Mt. 12:28; Acts 10:38.
The miracles have their beginning and their groundwork in the creation and upholding of all things, which is a lasting work and wonder of God, Ps. 33:6, 9; John 5:17. All that happens has its deepest ground in the will and might of God. Nothing can withstand Him. He does with the host of heaven as He pleases, Isa. 55:8 ff.; Ps. 115:3. This might and freedom of God is proclaimed by nature, Jer. 5:22, 10:12, 14:22, 27:5; Isa. 40:12, 50:2, 3; Ps. 33:13-17, 104; Job 5:9 ff., 9:4 ff., and so on. But it comes forth most of all in the history of His folk, Deut. 10:21, 11:3, 26:8, 29:2, 32:12 ff.; Ps. 66:5 ff., 74:13 ff., 77:15 ff., 78:4 ff., 135:8 ff.; Isa. 51:2, 9; Jer. 32:20 ff.; Acts 7:2 ff.
In this history, the miracles stand out above all. They happen with sundry aims. At times, to punish the ungodly, Gen. 6:6 ff., 11, 19; Ex. 5 ff.; Lev. 10:1; Num. 11:30 ff., 14:21, 16:1 ff., 21:6, and so on; Matt. 8:32, 21:19; Acts 13:11, and so on. Then again, to save and free God's folk, to bring welfare and healing, such as the plagues in Egypt, the passage through the Red Sea, the wonders in the wilderness, the healings of Jesus. Oftentimes they also have the straight or sideward intent to strengthen the sending of the prophets, the truth of their word, and thus the faith in their witness, Ex. 4:1-9; Deut. 13:1 ff.; Judg. 6:37 ff.; 1 Sam. 12:16 ff.; 1 Kings 17:24; 2 Kings 1:10, 20:8; Isa. 7:11, and so on; Matt. 14:33; Luke 5:24; John 2:11, 3:2, 5:36, 6:14, 7:31, 9:16, 10:38, 12:37; Acts 2:22, 10:38, and so on. Prophecy and the gift of wonders go together. All the prophets and also the apostles have the awareness that they can work wonders. Moses was great also in his wonders, Ex. 5-15; Deut. 34:10-12. His sin once lay in doubt of God's wonder-might, Num. 20:10 ff. Around Elijah and Elisha gathers a ring of wonders, 1 Kings 17-2 Kings 13. With the later prophets, wonders take not such a great place anymore. Oft they make use of so-called token deeds, to strengthen their prophecy therewith and as it were to begin to fulfill it, 1 Kings 11:29-39, 20:35 ff., 22:11; Isa. 7:3, 8:1, 20:2 ff., 21:6, 30:8; Jer. 13, 16, 18, 19, 25:15, 27, 28:10 ff., 32:6, 43:8; Ezek. 4, 5, 6:11, 7:23, 12:3, 17:1; Hos. 1-3; Acts 21:10 ff. But yet wonders are still told of them, and they have the belief that they can work wonders, Isa. 7:11, 16:14, 21:16, 38:7 cf. 2 Kings 20; Jer. 22:12, 30, 28:16, 29:22, 36:30, 37:7 ff.; Dan. 1-6.
But all those wonders in the Old Testament have not wrought a lifting up, a renewing of nature. They had their working. They have punished and blessed mankind by turns, and in every case kept it from downfall. They have created in Israel a folk of its own, freed it from the bondage of Egypt, kept it from blending with the heathen, and shielded it as God's folk against the crushing might of nature. But they were for the moment, passed by, lessened in working, and were forgotten. Life took its wonted course. Nature seemed to win. Then prophecy lifted its voice and spoke that Israel could not go under and blend into the nature-life of the heathen. God will come anew and in greater glory to His folk. God will not forget His bond; it is an everlasting bond, Ps. 89:1-5; Isa. 54:10. With that coming of God, the old time passes over into the new. That is the turning point in world history. It is the Day of the Lord, on which He will show forth His glory and spread out His wonder-might. God then gives wonder-signs in the heaven, Amos 8:8 ff.; Joel 2:30. The whole nature, heaven and earth, shall be shaken, Amos 9:5; Isa. 13:10, 13, 24:18-20, 34:1-5; Joel 2:2, 10, 3:15; Mic. 1:3 ff.; Hab. 3:3 ff.; Nah. 1:4 ff.; Ezek. 31:15 ff., 32:7 ff., 38:19 ff. The judgment shall go over the ungodly, Isa. 24:16 ff. and so on, but it shall also cleanse and free. God shall save His folk by His wonders, Isa. 9:3, 10:24 ff., 11:15 ff., 43:16-21, 52:10, 62:8. He does something new on the earth, Isa. 43:19, brings Israel again from the dead, Ezek. 37:12-14, and makes it share in a fullness of ghostly and bodily blessings. Forgiveness of sins, holiness, a new bond, Isa. 44:21-23, 43:25; Ezek. 36:25-28; Jer. 31:31 ff.; Zech. 14:20, 21, but also peace, safety, welfare shall be its share. Even nature shall change into a paradise, Hos. 2:17 ff.; Joel 3:18; Jer. 31:6, 12-14; Isa. 11:6-8, 65:25; Ezek. 34:29, 36:29 ff.; Zech. 8:12. There comes a new heaven and a new earth, and the former things shall not be thought of anymore, Isa. 65:17, 66:22.
This Day of the Lord, this world to come, in contrast with this present world, has, according to the showing of Scripture, begun with the New Testament. The coming of Christ is the turning point of the times. A new ring of wonders gathers around His person. He is Himself the utter wonder, come down from above and yet the true, full man. In Him the creation is in beginning restored, lifted again from its fall to its former glory. His wonders are signs of God's nearness, proof of the Messianic time, Matt. 11:3-5, 12:28; Luke 13:16, a part of His Messianic work. In Christ a godly power comes forth, which is stronger than all the spoiling and wasting might of sin. This might He attacks, not only on the edges, by healing sicknesses and woes and doing sundry wonders; but He thrusts into its midst, breaks and overcomes it. His becoming man and satisfaction, His uprising and heaven-going are the great freeing deeds of God. They are the groundwork restoring of the kingdom of glory. These saving happenings are not means only to show something, but they are the showing of God Himself. The wonder here becomes history, and history itself is a wonder. The person and work of Christ is the midmost showing of God; all other showing gathers around it. But even after Jesus' going away, His wonder-might goes on in the learners, Matt. 10; Mark 16:18; Luke 8. And not only in the Acts are many wonders told, 2:43, 3:5, 5:12-16, 6:8, 8:6, 7, 13, 9:34, 40, 13:11, 14:3, 16:18, 19:11, 20:10, 28:5, 8; but also Paul bears witness to this wonder-might of the apostles, Rom. 15:18, 19; 1 Cor. 12:9, 10; 2 Cor. 12:12; Gal. 3:5, cf. Heb. 2:4.
For a time this wonder-might goes on yet in the gathering. But it has ceased, when Christendom is set fast and the church is the thing wherein God glorifies the wonders of His grace. The ghostly wonders are those in which God now shows His might and His glory. Yet Scripture points onward to a forthcoming time, wherein the wonder will anew do its working. The world to come is first fulfilled in the new heaven and the new earth, wherein righteousness dwells. Then the wonder has become nature. Ethos and physis are made one. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world are one, Rev. 21-22.
5. The System of Revelation. The system of revelation, which the Scripture makes known to us, has been all too much overlooked and forsaken in Christian theology. Only in later times has the notion and being of revelation become the mark of deeper searching.
Formerly, no need was felt for it. Between Christians and heathens, the likelihood of revelation was not in strife. Strife was there only over the truth of that revelation which is taught in the Old and New Testament. And this was shown on sundry grounds by the apologists against the onslaughts, chiefly of Celsus and Porphyry.
Otherwise, the thoughts on revelation came down to this outline: God can only be known by God. All knowledge and worship of God therefore rests on revelation from His side. But the revelation of God in kind and history is not enough. Therefore, a special revelation is needful, which reaches its high point in Christ.
The following theologians, chiefly also the schoolmen, bestowed all care on setting and marking out the bond between kind and revelation, knowing and believing, wisdom-lore and theology, but did not think through the notion of revelation and brought it up only in passing.
The Protestant theologians also gave too little heed to this notion. They at once made revelation one with the Holy Scripture and did not wholly flee the bare above-kindly and one-sided wit-wise understanding, which by degrees in theology had been shaped of it.
Socinianism drove this above-kindly and wit-wise notion of revelation to the height.
Remonstrantism had in truth the same showing.
Between wit-rule and above-kind-rule there was over the notion of revelation no difference; for both it stood in an outward telling of teaching.
It was not to be wondered at, and also fully earned, that such a revelation-notion could not withstand the judgment of god-rule and wit-rule. What was the godly worth of a revelation, which gave nothing but some wit-wise truth, that maybe later by wit itself yet would be found?
Yet it showed forth, that men all too soon had settled with the notion of revelation. Godliness and revelation showed in deeper tale-wise and wisdom-seeking search a much nearer kinship, than men formerly had deemed. So came the notion of revelation in the newer theology and wisdom-lore again more to worship, and sundry strivings for rebuilding were tried.
Hamann, Claudius, Lavater, Herder, Jacobi, and others pointed to the kinship between religion and art, and linked revelation with gifted inspiration. The thought of revelation was thus broadened, so that all things became revelation. Religion, poetry, wisdom-lore, history, tongue are sundry outpourings of one and the same first-spring life. All things godly and mankindly all things. And in the midst of all these revelations stands Christ; to Him all things point, around Him all things gather, Ehrenfeuchter, Christenthum und moderne Weltanschauung. Schleiermacher too, in his Glaubenslehre, firmly cast off the rationalist teaching of revelation. He sought its own-kindness not in whether it bears an above-nature mark, but in the new and first-spring, wherewith a person or happening steps forth in the tale of days. Revelation is therefore kin to poetic and hero-like quickening, and truly stands in the waking of new, first-spring stirrings of the godly feeling. Through Schleiermacher that understanding of revelation was readied, which lets its being not in the sharing of teaching but of life. Rothe, in Zur Dogmatik, has about revelation as inspiration the same thought, but he takes therewith as a making-up part of revelation yet an outward, tale-bound showing, so that the inward revelation, the inspiration, may not be spell-like and workmanly. The own-kindnesses of the thought of revelation among the god-learned who less or more cleave to Schleiermacher, stand then chiefly herein: revelation is to be sundered from the God-breathing, from the Holy Writ, the Writ is not the revelation but its witness; revelation is a godly, nearer yet a saving-lore thought, with gifted, poetic, hero-like quickening well kin but not one; it is fellow to religion alone; going out from God as Redeemer, it has no teaching about sundry bodily, tale-bound, and over-worldly things for its inhold, but only godly-upright truth, it is sharing of life, self-sharing of God; it is not in strict wise above-nature, but truly kindly and mankindly; it is lastly not only outward (showing), but also inward and ghostly (inspiration). Therewith is there yet sundryness about beginning, outreach, end of revelation, but in head-thing this yet is the understanding, as it is found with Nitzsch, System der christlichen Lehre. Twesten. Martensen. Lange. Dorner. Frank, System der christlichen Wahrheit. Kähler, Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre. Saussaye, my theology. Gunning and Saussaye, The ethical beginning, and so forth. But not only Schleiermacher and his school have brought the revelation-thought to new life, but also Schelling and Hegel have tried the same in their wise. Through them rationalism got a deep-thought mark. They sought not to wreck the Christly revelation through a wit-critique, but sought deep-thought-wise to track the deep idea, which lay at ground to it and to all Christly dogmas, and set themselves thus as deep-thought rationalism over against the common rationalism of former times. According to Schelling in his first tide, the whole world was the self-revelation of God. The kindly world is the seen ghost, the ghost the unseen kindly world. God's being becomes known to mankind out of the whole kindly world, above all however out of the unfolding of the mankindly ghost in art, religion, and lore. And so taught also Hegel, that God reveals Himself not to mankind through a passing happening in time, but He reveals Himself in mankind himself, and becomes Himself aware in mankind. And this becoming aware of Himself of God in mankind, is the knowing of mankind of God, is religion, Religionsphilosophie. Revelation is with Hegel thus even with the needful self-revelation, with the becoming aware of Himself of the Utter in the mankindly ghost; the tale of the god-services is the tale of the coming to Himself of the Utter in the mankindly awareness, and reaches its high-point in Christendom, which speaks out the oneness of God and mankind. To this thought about revelation, as self-sharing of God to each mankind, cleaves in head-thing that understanding of revelation, which we find with Marheineke, Grundlehren der christlichen Dogmatik. Rosenkranz, Encyclopädie der theologischen Wissenschaften. Erdmann, Glauben und Wissen. Strauss, Glaubenslehre. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christenthums. Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik. Pfleiderer, Grundriss. Lipsius, Dogmatik, Philosophie und Religion. Scholten, Initia. Leerboek der Historisch-kritische Inleiding. Shared is to these the naysaying of the above-nature mark of revelation, but otherwise is there great sundering about inhold, outreach, and wise. From both throngs sunders itself yet again the thought of revelation in the school of Ritschl. The own-kind of this understanding lies herein, that very little worth is bound to the sundering of kindly and above-nature revelation, that stress is laid on the set mark of each religion and on the tale-bound, outward in the revelation, and that for Christendom that tale-bound revelation above all or even only is found in the person of Christ, Ritschl, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung. Kaftan, Wesen der christlichen Religion. Herrmann, Der Begriff der Offenbarung. G. v. Schulthess-Rechberg, Der Gedanke einer göttlichen Offenbarung. Nitzsch, Lehrbuch der evangelischen Dogmatik. Cf. the Groningen school here in the land, Hofstede de Groot, De Groninger Godgeleerden in hunne eigenaardigheid.
A clear and bright understanding of revelation is still lacking in dogmatics. There is difference among theologians about everything that comes into reckoning with that concept. Perhaps a boundary can be drawn between those who accept a supernatural or only a natural revelation. But even then the question arises, whether the supernatural character of revelation lies in the manner wherein it came to us, or in the new, original nature of the content (Schleiermacher). Wherein is further the supernatural revelation set apart from the natural revelation in nature and history, especially from the religious, poetic, heroic inspiration, which is also found outside Christendom and so often has been brought into connection with the Christian revelation (Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, Schleiermacher)? Where is then that supernatural revelation to be found, also in the religions of the heathens, or only in Israel, or even solely in the person of Christ (Schleiermacher, Ritschl)? How far does it stretch out after Christ, is it bounded to Him, or is also the working of the Holy Ghost in regeneration, conversion, and the like, still to be reckoned under the concept of revelation (Frank)? Is its content in the first place knowledge, so that it enlightens the understanding (Hegel, Biedermann, Scholten), or is it chiefly mystical in kind, a working on the heart, an affection, an awakening of the feeling (Schleiermacher, Lipsius, Opzoomer, the Ethicists)? Is in revelation the outward, the historical, the manifestation, whether then in nature (Hegel, Scholten), whether in history (Schelling, Ritschl), or specifically also as wonder (Rothe) the chief thing, or does the weight lie in the subject, in the self-revelation of the absolute Spirit, of God, to man (Biedermann, Lipsius)?
6. The Revelation. The revelation, which the Scripture makes known to us, consists not in sundry incoherent words and deeds, but is one historical and living whole, a mighty world-ruling and world-renewing order of God's works. It appears, as we saw, in three forms: theophany, prophecy, and wonder—Shekinah, Nebuah, and Beriah. But these three stand not loosely beside each other; they form one whole and aim together at one goal. Already through the general revelation God leaves not himself without witness to mankind; He reveals himself in nature and history, He speaks in heart and conscience; He works wonders of might. The general revelation also may be called revelation. For in a broad sense, revelation is all action that goes forth from God to set mankind in a religious bond with Him. But through sin another revelation becomes needful, which indeed stands in manifold ties with the general revelation but yet is in essence, in form and content, distinct from it. For it directs itself to fallen mankind, and must therefore be a revelation of grace. The special revelation is God's seeking of and coming to mankind. He must now so reveal himself and so speak and so work, that mankind may again be renewed after His image. Therefore God comes to mankind in a manly wise. The becoming-man is the central fact in the special revelation, which spreads light over all its realm. Already in the creation God makes himself like unto men. But in the re-creation He becomes man and enters into our estate. And this becoming-man, which is the proper content of the special revelation, takes in a certain wise its beginning straightway after the fall. The special revelation of God enters into history, and forms a history that runs through the ages. It takes on such a historical mark, because mankind itself, to whom it directs itself, exists only in the historical form. It shares in mankind's life, follows it on its paths, walks with it through the times unto the end. It reaches deep back into the life of creation, joins itself to providence, and lets its light shine through the prism of manly persons, states, and happenings. It makes use of all character and individuality, of all bent and gift, that are given in creation. It clothes itself in the forms of type and shadow, of image and symbol, of art and poetry, of letter-form and chronicle. It takes over in religion the customs that are found in other faiths, such as circumcision and offering, temple and priesthood. It deems even lot and dream and vision not too lowly to use them as tools. So deeply does the godly descend into the manly, that the bounds between the revelation and the false religion seem to be wiped out. God-speech and oracle, prophecy and soothsaying, wonder and magic seem to draw near each other.
And yet it is another heart that beats in Israel's religion. The peripheral and atomistic view appeals to such facts of agreement between the religion of Scripture and the religions of the peoples, but it explains not the revelation in its character and meaning, and finally knows not what to do with Scripture. Therefore this view must yield to the central and organic one, which from the midpoint lets the light shine forth unto the outermost bounds. And that center is the incarnation of God. He it is who in the special revelation descends and makes himself like unto men. The subject of the special revelation is in the proper sense the Logos, the Angel of the LORD, the Christ. He is the mediator of creation, John 1:3; Col. 1:15, but also of recreation. Του γαρ δια της ἰδιας προνοιας και διακοσμησεως των ὁλων διδασκοντος περι του Πατρος, αὐτου ἠν και την αὐτην διδασκαλιαν ἀνανεωσαι , Athan. de incarn. c. 14. Cf. Iren. adv. haer. IV 6. He is the subject of the revelation already in the Old Testament, the angel of the covenant, who led Israel, Ex. 14:19, 23:20, 32:34, 33:2; Isa. 63:8, 9, the content of prophecy John 5:39; 1 Pet. 1:11; Rev. 19:10. Through theophany, prophecy, and miracle He prepares His coming in the flesh. The Old Testament revelation is the history of the coming Christ. Theophany, prophecy, and miracle run out unto Him. In Christ they come together. He is the revelation, the word, the power of God. He shows us the Father, declares unto us His name, accomplishes His work. The incarnation is the closing, the goal, and the end both of Israel's history, and therewith the midpoint of all history. Bis hierher und von daher geht die Geschichte (Joh. von Müller). The incarnation is the central wonder; es ist das Wunder aller Wunder, da das Göttliche unmittelbar mit dem Menschlichen sich berührt , Ranke, Weltgeschichte VIII 72.
When the revelation of God in Christ, in his person and work, hath appeared and is set forth in Scripture, another dispensation cometh in.
The Holy Ghost went to dwell in the church; thereby the mark of the times was changed. This age passed over into the age to come. Even as in the first span all things were readied for Christ, so now all things are drawn from him. Then was Christ shaped to be the head of the church, now the church to be the body of Christ. Then was the Word, the Holy Writ, made whole, now it is wrought out. But yet this dispensation also taketh a stead in the framework of revelation.
The revelation is upheld, though shifted after the kind of the dispensation. The revelation, as aiming at and bringing forth Christ, hath reached its end. For Christ is here, his work is fulfilled, and his word is ended. New, upholding parts of the special revelation can no more be added. The question is therefore also of lesser weight, whether in the Christian church the gift of foretelling and of wonders still lasteth. The witness of the church fathers are so many and strong, that for the oldest times this question can hardly be gainsaid.
But even if those gifts have abode, the stuff of that special revelation, which gathereth in Christ and is laid down in Scripture, is not made fuller thereby; and if they have lessened and ceased, that revelation is not made poorer thereby. Howbeit this may be, the special revelation in Christ yet in some wise goeth on in this dispensation. Though all foretelling in the Christian church hath ceased and all wonder in the right sense is bygone, the church itself is from twinkling to twinkling a fruit of the revelation. The ghostly wonders endure. The grace of God in Christ showeth its glory in enlightening and new birth, in faith and turning, in hallowing and keeping. Christ is the go-between; it is for the church he careth; he came to make the world anew and to shape mankind afresh after the likeness of God. The special revelation findeth its goal in the bringing to pass of a new order of things. And therefore it goeth on, in shifted shape, that is, in ghostly wise even now. Its resting stead it findeth first in the showing forth of Christ, in the new heaven and the new earth, wherein righteousness dwelleth.
The revelation according to Scripture is thus a historical unfolding, an organic whole, an ongoing godly deed to break the might of sin, to build his kingdom, to restore the cosmos, to the anakephalaiōsis tōn pantōn en Christō , Eph. 1:10.
In the theophany God sets himself again as the one and true God over against the idols of man's own making; in prophecy He places his thought as the truth over against the lie of Satan, and in the wonder He shows his godly might over against all works of unrighteousness. In the revelation God sets and upholds his I over against all not-I, and brings it, despite all withstanding, to widespread acknowledgment and to full triumph.
Soteriological is thus the whole revelation. It goes out from Christ, both in the Old and in the New Testament. But soteriological then understood in the sense of Scripture, not in a religious-ethical sense, as if the revelation would contain only religious and ethical truth; still much less in an intellectual sense, as if the revelation consisted only in teaching. But soteriological in the scriptural sense, namely, that the content of the revelation is not teaching or life or stirring of the heart, but that it is all that together, a godly work, a world of thoughts and deeds, an order of grace, which fights and overcomes the order of sin on all fields.
The goal of the revelation is not only to teach man and to enlighten his understanding (rationalism), to make him practice virtue (moralism), to foster religious stirrings in him (mysticism). But God's goal with his revelation stretches much further and broader. It is no other than to draw man, mankind, the world out from the might of sin, and to make God's name shine forth again in all creatures. Sin has spoiled and wrecked everything, understanding and will, ethical and physical world. And therefore it is also the whole man and the whole cosmos, for whose saving and restoring God undertakes with his revelation.
Soteriological is thus very surely God's revelation, but the object of that sōtēria is the cosmos, and not only the ethical or the will with shutting out of the understanding, and not the soulful alone with shutting out of the bodily and physical, but all together. For God has shut up all under sin that He might have mercy on all, Rom. 5:15ff., 11:32; Gal. 3:22.
7. This living view of the unveiling has been misread in the Christly church in twofold wise, both by the over-naturalism and by the inbornism (witcraft). Against both must it therefore be further set in the light and upheld. First against the over-naturalism, that mainly arose in Rome and then works on in sundry paths within the Protestant fold. The Writ knows well the sunder between the everyday run of things and out-of-the-way works of God, but yet makes not the withstanding of inborn and over-inborn. This comes first among the church fathers. The sunder unveiling is made one with the over-inborn and set against the inborn. Clemens of Alexandria, Strom. 2, 2 speaks already of hyperphyes theoria , which one gets through belief. Chrysostomus, Hom. 36 in Gen, calls the wonders hyper physin and physei meizona . Ambrosius, de mysteriis c. 9, sets grace, wonder, hiddenness against the order of inbornness. Johannes Damascenus speaks many times of the wonders, such as the begetting of Christ, the eucharist and so on, as hyper physin , hyper logon kai ennoian , de fide orthod. IV 12-15. Since then has the sundering of inborn and over-inborn found entry and gained burgher-right in all the Christly god-lore. Without doubt has this sundering also right to be. The Writ may not make it with so many words; yet it owns a everyday order of inbornness and therewith deeds and works, which have their cause only in the might of God. The unveiling in the Holy Writ underlays that there is yet another, higher and better world than this inbornness and that there is thus an order of things above this inbornness. The thoughts of inborn and over-inborn must therefore be clearly set. Inbornness, from "nascor" to be born, marks in the overall that which without outland might or inflow from outside, only after its inward strengths and laws unfolds itself. Inbornness stands then even against craft, upbringing, tilling, yore-lore, which not of themselves, freely arise, but through mankind's doing come to stand. But further is the thought of inbornness outstretched to all the world-whole, for so far as this not from outside but from within out, through indwelling strengths and after own inborn laws moves and unfolds. Over-inborn is then all that goes beyond the strengths of the made inbornness and has its cause not in the shaped things but in the all-might of God. In this wise was the sunder unveiling in the Christly god-lore uptaken. In her whole taken, had she her spring in a sunder deed of God, which not in the everyday run of inbornness but in an own, therefrom sundered, order of things had unveiled itself. Therewith was then further sunder made between the over-inborn in full wise, as something going beyond the strength of all shaped thing, and the over-inborn in kin wise, as it overtops the strength of a set cause in the given umbstandings; and forth also between the over-inborn as to stuff, as the deed itself is over-inborn, e.g. the upwaking of a dead, and the over-inborn as to wise, as only the wise of doing is over-inborn, e.g. the healing of a sick without means, Thomas, S. c. Gent. III 101. Also in these sunderings lay in itself yet no threat. Even must they against a wit-lust, that denies or weakens the over-inborn, be warded. The out-saying over-inborn is namely in the later god-lore and wit-lore oftentimes in very shifted wise understood, and by turns with the over-sightly (Kant), the free (Fichte), the unknown (Spinoza, Wegscheider), the new and first-springing (Schleiermacher), the belief-ethish, the ghostly (Saussaye), and so on made one. But such a shifting of the fast-standing and clear meaning of a word leads to mishearing. If one with over-inborn means nothing other than the over-sightly, the ethish, and so on, one does better to shun the term. And the bewilderment becomes yet greater, if one mixes the inborn and the over-inborn through one another and to this mingling then gives the name of the Ghost-bodyly, God-mankindly, and so on. The thought of inbornness umbfolds all the shaped, not only the stuff, the matter, but also soul and ghost; not only the bodyly but also the soully, the beliefly and the ethishly life, for so far as it from the mankindly inlay of itself upcomes; not only seeable, but also unseeable, over-sightly things. The over-inborn is not with the first-springing, the gifted, the free, the beliefly, the ethishly, and so on alike, but is the clear and fast-standing name only for that which from the strengths and after the laws of the shaped things is not to be cleared. To so far is the sundering, between inborn and over-inborn, that arose in the Christly god-lore, fully right, steadfast, clear, cutting off all bewilderment. Saving what was said above, is sunder unveiling, in her three shapes of god-showing, foretelling and wonder, over-inborn in strict wise.
But in Christian theology, the concept of the supernatural was bit by bit narrowed even more straitly. It was on one side sundered from the creation and on the other from the ghostly wonders of rebirth and the like.
The first sundering was made, forasmuch as the supernatural does not be for God, but only for us, and underlays the wonted order, called into being by the creation. Of the supernatural one can only speak, if the nature beforehand already is. And on the other side were rebirth, forgiveness, hallowing, mystical oneness and the like, indeed held for straightforward deeds of God, but yet not reckoned to the supernatural opening, because they are not unwonted and seldom but in the church belong to the wonted order of things. The church herself is well supernatural but yet no wonder. Also the supernatural and the wonder are again sundered. All the supernatural is no wonder, but well the other way. Wonders are not only supernatural, but over that also unwonted and seldom happenings in nature or grace. They befall not only beyond the order of some sundry nature, but beyond the order of the whole created nature. Angels and devils can in ownlike sense do no wonders, but only such things, that seem wondrous to us and befall beyond the order of created nature known to us.
Thomas speaks not only of wonders beyond and above, but also against nature. And Voetius said, that wonders well are not against the widespread nature but above and beyond her, but yet also sometimes could be against some sundry nature. And wonders had thus the following marks: straightforward work of God, above all nature, falling into the senses, seldom, to the strengthening of truth.
How much good there now also may be in these settings and sunderings made by the schoolmen, they brought yet no small peril with them. The sundry opening was on one side loosed from the creation and the nature; though it was acknowledged, that supernatural opening had stead not first now but also already before the fall, and thus on herself could not be in strife with the nature, yet this was not inthought. On the other side was the sundry opening set against the ghostly wonders, the works of grace, that ongoingly have stead in the church of Christ and thus sundered from the reshaping and the grace. The sundry opening came thus wholly on herself to stand, without bond with nature and yore. Her yorewise and lifelike kind was misdeemed. She went not into world and mankind in, but abode outside and above her hovering. She was at last uptaken as a lore, as a proclaiming of unbegripped and ungrippable hidden things, whose truth was strengthened by the wonders. She was and abode in one word a gift overadded of the worldwhole.
8. In Rome this supranaturalistic and dualistic system is consistently wrought out. In it there are two conceptions of man, of his nature and destiny. Man in puris naturalibus , without the image of God, even as he truly is after the fall, can have a pure knowledge of God from his works, can serve and fear Him and stand in a normal, in itself good servant-relationship to Him, can practice all natural virtues, even the natural love toward God, and can thus bring it to a certain state of blessedness in this life and in that which is to come. If he bring it not so far, then that is his own fault and is to be ascribed to the not using or ill using of the natural powers bestowed upon him. But God willeth to give unto man yet a higher, supernatural, heavenly destiny. Then must He thereto bestow upon man dona superaddita as well before as now after the fall. He must grant him a supernatural grace, whereby he can know and love God in another, better, higher wise, can practice better and higher virtues, and can attain a higher destiny. That higher knowledge consisteth in the fides ; that higher love in the caritas ; those higher virtues are the theological, faith, hope, love, which are essentially distinguished from the virtutes cardinales (intellectuales et morales ); and that higher destiny consisteth in the sonship of God, the birth from God, the mystical union, the fellowship in the divine nature, the θεωσις , deification, the vision of God, and the like. This doctrine is already prepared in some utterances of the church fathers, but is yet first developed by the scholastics, especially by Halesius, Summa universae Theol. II qu. 91 m. 1. a. 3. Bonaventura, Breviloquium V cap. 1. Thomas disp. de verit. qu. 27. S. Theol. I 2. qu. 62 art. 1. In the strife against Baius and Jansenius it was established by the church, Denzinger, Enchir. symbol. et definit. num. 882 sq. and emphatically declared by the Vatican Council, Sess. III cap. 2: revelatio absolute necessaria dicenda est , -- -- quia Deus infinita bonitate sua ordinavit hominem ad finem supernaturalem, ad participanda sc. bona divina. quae humanae mentis intelligentiam superant , with appeal to 1 Cor. 2:9. Cf. Canones II 3. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit , 2e Aufl. 1872 II. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der relig. Erk. I II. Scheeben, Handb. der kath. Dogm. II 1878. Id. Natur u. Gnade Mainz 1861. Schäzler, Natur u. Gnade . Oswald, Religiöse Urgeschichte der Menschheit 2e Aufl. 1887 § 1 f.
It must now be acknowledged that the distinction in the state before and after the fall does not lie in revelation itself. There was supernatural revelation also in paradise, Gen. 1:28ff.; 2:16ff.; it therefore did not first become needful through sin. Even in the state of uprightness there was a revelation of grace, for even then the bond of love in which God set Himself toward man was a showing of unmerited goodness. What sin has therefore made needful is not revelation itself, but the specific content of revelation, that is, special grace, the revelation of God in Christ, the incarnation of God.
God's revelation was needful also for religion in the state of uprightness. But the Christian religion is grounded on a particular, definite revelation. This is what Paul has in mind when in 1 Cor. 2:4-16 he speaks of the wisdom of God, which has always been hidden and has not risen up into the heart of man.
Rome cannot truly deny this itself, unless it takes up the teaching that, supposing God willed to give man a supernatural end, the whole supernatural order that now is—in the incarnation, the church, the sacraments—would also have been needful without and apart from sin. But with that, the saving character of revelation would be wholly lost, the fall would lose its meaning, and sin would have brought no change at all.
The teaching of the supernatural end has therefore always met with much strife in the Roman Church, from Baius, Jansenius, Hirscher, Hermes, Günther; but it hangs closely together with the whole Roman system, which is built not on the religious contrast of sin and grace, but on the grading in the good, on the ranking of creatures and virtues, on the hierarchy in bodily and in upright sense.
The Reformation, however, had but one thought, one understanding of man, namely, that of the image-bearer of God, and this held for all men. If that image in the narrower sense is lost, then with it the whole human nature is marred, and man can no longer have a religion or uprightness that answers God's demand and his own true thought. Then his religion and his goodness, however fair they seem, are yet rotten at the root. There is no natural religion. All religions have become superstitions. But therefore the Christian religion is also in essence one with the true religion in the state of uprightness. The Reformed drove this so far that they said that Adam also had knowledge of the Trinity and faith, that even then the Logos was mediator, not of reconciliation but of union, that even then the Holy Spirit was the author of all goodness and strength, and so forth.
The true thought lay therein, that the will of God is no whim that by turns shapes this and then that thought of man; that the understanding of man, the nature of God's image, and thus also religion must be one. And from this it finally followed that revelation was not utterly but in part, not as to substance but as to manner, needful. Religion is one before and after the fall; that it is Christian, however, has become needful through sin. The Christian religion is a means, not an end; Christ is mediator, but the end is God all in all, 1 Cor. 15:28.
Therewith is now further given, that the revelation cannot stand absolutely over against nature. With Rome there is a quantitative opposition; the natural religion is essentially different from the supernatural religion; both stand beside each other; they are two wholly different conceptions, two fully distinct systems and orders; the order of grace lifts itself high above the order of nature.
But the Reformation has changed that quantitative opposition into a qualitative one. Revelation stands not over against nature, but over against sin. That is the might which revelation seeks to break, but nature it restores and fulfills. The creation itself is already revelation. Revelation was there before the fall. Revelation is there also now in all the works of God's hands in nature and history. His everlasting power and Godhead are understood and seen through from the creatures.
Analogies of prophecy and wonder are there also outside the special revelation. The inspiration of heroes and artists, the wondrous strengths that sometimes come to light, can serve for clearing up and strengthening of the revelation facts mentioned in Scripture. Even the mantic and magic in the heathen religions are showings that as caricature still show likeness with the first likeness in the revelation.
Yea, this revelation itself as it were reaches back into nature, joins itself thereto and readies itself therein. The common grace points toward the special grace, and this takes that in service. Nature commends grace, grace mends nature. Even creation itself is built up on redemption lines, Orr, The Christian View of God and the World . See further my speech on Common Grace, Kampen.
9. The Chief Strife Against Revelation. The chief strife against revelation first took its beginning in the newer philosophy. Spinoza keeps the word revelation yet and deems it even needful, Tract. theol.-polit. cap. 15, but he understands nothing else thereunder, than that the simple folk cannot find the true religion, the word of God, through the light of reason, but must take it on sway, ib. cap. 15. cap. 4. Otherwise Spinoza owns no revelation in its own sense; all decrees of God are everlasting truths and one with the laws of kind, ib. cap. 4; 3; 6, etc.; prophecy and wonder were put to a sharp critique and cleared up in a kindly way, ib. cap. 1-6. This critique was carried on by deism and rationalism.
But rationalism can show up in sundry shapes and shifts its meaning ever and anon, cf. Kant, Religion innerhalb usw. Wegscheider, Instit. Theol. § 7 d. § 11-12. Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. aller in der Dogm. vork. Begriffe, § 34. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm. In the first stead, rationalism marks that bent which indeed takes an above-kindly revelation, but lays the deeming over the truth and sense of that revelation to reason; thereto belonged many Cartesian theologians, such as Roell, Wolzogen, G. W. Duker, and also Leibniz, Wolff and others.
Next, rationalism is the name for that deeming which yet deems an above-kindly revelation might-be, but only of such truths which reason sooner or later would yet have been able to find. The revelation is then only timely and by-hap needful; it serves only as readying and upbringing for the broad sway of the Reason-religion; it gives only swifter and easier, what reason otherwise by longer and harder way would have reached. Such is the grasp of revelation with Lessing, Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts 1780, Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung 1792, and Kant, Religion usw. 1793.
In the third stead stands as rationalism that theology known, which denies all above-kindly revelation, but yet takes that God through sundry layings of his Foreseeing has fitted folk and opened ways, which can bring mankind to a better and cleaner knowledge of religious truth. Of these Wegscheider is the foremost spokesman, Instit. theol. I § 12, and further Röhr, Henke, Gabler, Paulus, Gesenius, and so on.
And at last the name of rationalism is yet given to that bent, which since the mid of the 17th hundred-year was called naturalism, in England deism, and also atheism, materialism, and which denying all revelation, held the natural religion for fully enough. Thereto belong Spinoza, Lud. Meyer, Voltaire, Rousseau, Reimarus, Nicolai, and so on.
The arguments brought forward by this rationalism against revelation come down to this: Revelation is first of all unfeasible from God's side, for it would bring with it that God was changeable, that his creation was unwhole and lacking and therefore needed mending; and that He himself, otherwise a slothful God, then only works when He works in an out-of-the-way manner.
Furthermore, revelation is also unfeasible from the side of the world, since knowledge has more and more come to the finding that this world is always and everywhere ruled by an unbreakable framework of laws, which leaves no room for a supernatural stepping-in by God; knowledge goes out from this causal linking of things and can do no other; the supranaturalism makes knowledge unfeasible, sets whim in place of rule; as knowledge has then also gone forward, all showings have lost their supranatural mark; there is even no right to hold a showing for supranatural against all undergoing; the supernatural would be the super-divine.
Next, revelation, even if it had happened, is yet for the receiver himself and still more for those who live after him, unknowable and unprovable: how is it ever to be made out that a prophecy or a wonder comes from God, and not, for instance, from the devil? By what is a revelation knowable for him who receives it and for those who live later? Such marks are not to be given. They who take up a revelation believe therefore only on mankindly sway, and hang in the highest and weightiest things on men. How many men between God and me!
And lastly, revelation strives against mankindly reason; for whatever one may say, all revelation that is above reason is thereby also against reason, it therefore underpresses reason and leads to fanaticism; but besides, if revelation shares something that is above reason, then it can also never be taken up and blended in and stays ever as an ungrasped mystery outside our awareness; and if it shares something that reason itself could have found, then it is needless, gives at most only sooner and lighter what otherwise would yet be gotten, and robs reason needlessly of its strength and drive.
10. The Revelation in Holy Scripture. The revelation, which is laid down in the Holy Scripture, is a troublesome fact for everyone who denies it. For even those who fight against its possibility and reality must still strive for an explanation of its historical arising. It did not come forth from deceit, any more than religion did. The belief in revelation is not something willful or chance-like, which only comes to pass here or there under special surroundings, but is in essence proper to all religion. The matter of revelation is not as simple as rationalism sometimes thought it to be. This shows itself right away in that all strivings, from the naturalistic side, to make clear the biblical wonder-tales in a natural way, have up to now suffered shipwreck.
If the revelation, in all its shapes, of theophany, prophecy, and wonder, is not truly above-nature but only in that sense from God as all working of man has in Him its last cause; then one is driven to take refuge either in the so-called material or in the formal understanding of the wonder-tales. That is, on the one hand, one can leave the facts to some degree untouched and take them for truth; one then seeks to make them clear from the un-knowing of the folk about natural causes and from the religious need to ascribe all things straightway to God, Spinoza, Tract. theol. pol. cap. 1 and 6. Hase, Dogm. § 19. Leben Jesu § 15. Strauss, Glaub. I 280. Scholten, Supranat. in verband met Bijbel, Christ. en Prot. 1867, bl. 8 v.; or one makes them clear bodily from unknown nature-powers, Kant, Religion ed. Rosenkranz 101. Morus, Epitome Theol. Christ. p. 23. Schweizer, Glaub. der ev. ref. K. I 324 f.; or soul-wise from a special skillfulness, to fore-feel the forthcoming, Bretschneider, Dogm. I S. 300. Hase, Dogm. § 137, and to heal the sick without means, Weisse, Philos. Dogm. I S. 115. Ammon, Gesch. des Lebens Jesu 248; or end-wise from such ordering and arraying of the bodily and soul-wise powers lying in nature, that they bring forth an uncommon outcome and spur to knowing of God's fore-sight and to belief in the preacher, Wegscheider, Inst. Theol. § 48. Bretschneider, Dogm. I 314.
Or on the other hand, one can seek loosening in the formal or birth-wise making clear, that is, in a special grasping of the tidings about the revelation; one then calls to help the Eastern showing and clothing, and the fitting of Jesus and the apostles to the folk-notions, cf. Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. aller in der Dogm. vork. Begriffe, 4e Aufl. S. 135 f. Herzog² art. Accomodation; or one seeks counsel by the likeness-wise, Woolston, Discourses on the miracles of our Saviour 1727; or by the natural, Paulus van Heidelberg, Philol.-krit. u. histor. Commentar über das N. T. 1800-1804. Leben Jesu 1828. Exeg. Handbuch über die 3 ersten Evang. 1830-33; or by the myth-wise, Eichhorn, Gabler, G. L. Bauer, Strauss, Leben Jesu 1835; or by the sign-wise making clear, A. D. Loman, Gids Febr. 1884. Cf. Wegscheider, Instit. Theol. S. 214. Bretschneider, System. Entw. S. 248 f. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der relig. Erkenntniss II 156 f. 335 f. 405 f.
But all these explanations have had little success. The Scripture is simply not to be interpreted naturalistically or rationalistically. The very facts of revelation, which the Scripture tells us, stand in the way of all such attempts. For it is true that the revelation in Scripture has, in form, many likenesses with that on which other religions base themselves; yet it stands in principle over against them, it makes a firm distinction between these and itself; it knowingly and fully assuredly ascribes its origin only to an extraordinary working of God. The Scripture forbids all soothsaying and sorcery, Num. 19:16, 31, 20:6, 27; Deut. 18:10 ff .; Isa. 8:9; Jer. 27:9; Acts 8:9 ff ., 13:8 ff ., 19:13; Rev. 21:8, 22:15. Prophets and apostles will have nothing to do with them. They stand straight against them and follow no cunningly devised fables, 2 Pet. 1:16. Prophecy was not in old times brought forth by the will of man, but the Holy Ghost drove the prophets, 2 Pet. 1:21; 1 Cor. 2:11, 12. The wonder is a sign of God's presence. The clear self-awareness, which we find everywhere in the prophets, and the fully bright self-witness, which goes with the revelation everywhere in Scripture, offer an insurmountable stumbling block to the naturalistic explanation. Also the psychological method of Strauss, Glaub. I 77. Kuenen, De profeten I 106 ff ., cannot do justice to this self-awareness and self-witness of prophets and apostles, yea of Christ himself. We may thankfully acknowledge that the modern view of revelation no longer thinks for a moment of holding the prophets and apostles for deliberate deceivers. But it cannot escape the conclusion that all these men were poor deluded ones and in good faith wanderers, since they appealed to a supposed revelation and came forth with an imagined godly authority.
The matter does not stand so, as if the revelation only contains certain facts, whose interpretation it leaves to our insight. But it itself throws a peculiar light on those facts; it has, so to speak, its own view and its own theory about those facts. In the revelation of Scripture, word and fact, prophecy and wonder always go hand in hand. Both are needful, that both the consciousness and the being may be recreated and the whole cosmos redeemed from sin. The light needs the reality and the reality needs the light, to produce the beautiful creation of His grace. To apply the Kantian phraseology to a higher subject, without God’s acts the words would be empty, without His words the acts would be blind, Dr. Vos, The idea of biblical theology as a science and as a theological discipline , New-York, Randolph and Co. See also Kuyper, Uit het Woord I. Both, word and fact, are in the revelation so closely woven together, that the one cannot be taken or rejected without the other. Every attempt to explain the revelation facts naturalistically has thus far always ended with the acknowledgment that between the supernatural worldview of Scripture and that of the naturalists a deep chasm yawns and reconciliation is impossible.
Professor Scholten gave a striking example of this. First he still took the sayings of the Johannine Jesus as truth. Then he tried to explain those sayings according to his changed insights, and to make exegesis serve his heterodox dogmatics. And finally in 1864 he openly acknowledged that the worldview of the fourth evangelist was other than his own. The Gospel according to John . Every negative direction acknowledges in the end that the revelation of Scripture is still most purely understood and rendered in orthodoxy. Radicalism leaves the Scripture for what it is and has done with the revelation. Thereby the question is led back to its deepest principle. The acknowledgment or non-acknowledgment of the revelation is decided by our whole life- and worldview. Not historical criticism but self-criticism, not science but faith, not the head but the heart gives the deciding stroke here. From the heart also comes forth folly, Mark 7:22. Our thinking roots in our being. Operari sequitur esse (Schopenhauer). What philosophy one chooses depends on what kind of man one is. Our thinking system is often only the history of our heart (Fichte).
That the acknowledgment or non-acknowledgment of the revelation is in the last instance a question of faith, is sufficiently proved thereby, that neither of the two, neither the supernatural nor the naturalistic view is able to clear away all difficulties or solve all objections. The naturalistic view seems strong when it takes single wonder stories by themselves and isolates them from the whole; but that whole itself, the system of revelation and therein again the person of Christ remain for it an unsolvable riddle and a stone of stumbling. Conversely, the supernatural view has not yet succeeded in fitting all particular facts and words of the revelation into the order of the whole. But here there is yet agreement with the revelation in its whole, insight into its system, the conception of its mighty harmony. If now the acknowledgment of the revelation were a philosophical thesis, it would be of relatively little weight. But a deep religious interest is bound up with it. Religion itself hangs together with the revelation. He who gives this up, loses also the religion that is built on it. The revelation of Scripture and the religion of Scripture stand and fall with each other.
11. The Worldview Which Stands Against That of Scripture. The worldview which stands against that of Scripture, and in principle must fight all revelation, can best be named monism. Monism, both in its pantheistic and in its materialistic form, strives to bring back all powers, stuffs, and laws that are to be noted in nature to one single power, stuff, and law. Materialism takes only atoms that are alike in kind, which everywhere and always work after the same mechanical laws, and by binding and loosing bring all things and showings to be and to pass away. Pantheism likewise owns nothing but one single beingness, which is the same in all creatures and everywhere changes and reshapes itself after the same logical laws. Both are quickened by the same drive, by the drive and longing for oneness which belongs to the manly mind. But while materialism seeks to find again the oneness of stuff and law which rules in the bodily world in all other, historical, soully, godly, rightwise, and such showings, and so tries to make all knowledges into nature-knowledge; pantheism tries to make plain all showings, even the bodily ones, out of the mind and to turn all knowledges into mind-knowledge. Both are naturalism, insofar as they maybe yet make room for the oversensual but in any case not for the overnatural, and for knowledge and craft, for godliness and rightness, have enough in this world-frame, in the this-side. Strauss, The Old and the New Faith . E. Haeckel, Monism as Bond Between Religion and Science . Konrad Dieterich, Philosophy and Nature-Knowledge, Their Newest Bond and the Monistic Worldview . Dr. M. L. Stern, Philosophical and Nature-Knowledge Monism . T. Pesch, The Great World-Riddles . Stöckl, Textbook of Philosophy . Schanz, Apology of Christianity .
The worldview of Scripture and of all Christian god-lore is a wholly other. It is not monism but god-belief, not natural but overnatural. According to this god-believing worldview there is a manifold of beingnesses, of powers and stuffs and laws. It strives not to wipe out the sunderings of God and world, mind and stuff, soully and bodily, rightwise and godly and such showings, but to find the harmony which holds all things together and binds them, and which is the outflow of the shaping thought of God. Not sameness or one-shapeness, but oneness in manifoldness is the goal of its striving. In spite of all claims of monism, this god-believing worldview has right and ground of being. For monism has not thriven to bring back all powers and stuffs and laws to one single. Materialism strikes against the soully showings (Du Bois Reymond, The Seven World-Riddles ), and pantheism cannot find the overgoing from thinking to being and knows no rede with the manifold. Being itself is a mystery, a wonder. That there is something, and whence it is, forces wonder from the thinking mind, and this is therefore rightly named the beginning of wisdom-lore. And the more that being is thought into, the more wonder grows, for within the ring of being, of the world-frame, we see sundry powers step forth, in the workly, growthly, beastly, soully world, and further in the godly and rightwise, beauty-wise and thought-wise showings. The shaping shows us a climbing order. The laws of the upholding of power, of causehood and of ongoingness (nature makes no leaps) are indeed taken into service of monism and misused. But nevertheless there step forth ever in nature powers which are not to be made plain out of the lower. Already in the workly nature causehood rules only in a "what-if" wise. Like causes have like workings, but only under like surroundings. In the living steps forth a power which is not from the unliving. Even the beast is a wonder against the growthly nature and still more the mind against life, against the mere feeling nature, Hegel, Philosophy of Religion . In the understanding, in the will, in godliness, rightness, craft, knowledge, law, history there are powers at work which truly sunder from the workly. The striving to make plain all these showings workly has till now been idle. The mindly knowledges have till now kept their own standing place. Dilthey, Introduction to the Mind-Knowledges . Drummond, Nature-Law in the Mind-World . Though unwillingly, Prof. Land, Introduction to Wisdom-Lore must yet own that knowledge is for now needful to stay twofold and even manifold.
Each of those powers works according to its own nature, according to its own law and in its own way. The powers differ and therefore also their workings and the way in which they work. The idea of natural law arose only gradually. Formerly, men understood by lex naturae an ethical rule which was known by nature. Later this term was transferred to nature in a very improper sense, for no one has prescribed these laws to nature, and no one is able to obey or transgress them. Hence there still reigns great difference concerning the concept and meaning of natural laws. In the 17th century God gives the natural laws, in the 18th nature itself does it, and in the 19th the individual natural scientists take care of it (Wundt). But this much is certain, that the so-called natural laws themselves are no power which holds sway over the phenomena, but nothing more than a, often very defective and always fallible, description of the way in which the powers lying in nature work. A natural law says only that certain powers, under like circumstances, work in the same way. Ed. Zeller, Vorträge . Wundt, Philos. Studien . Hellwald, Culturgeschichte . Hartmann, Philos. des Unbewussten . Lotze, Mikrokosmos . Article Naturgesetz in Herzog ². The regularity of the phenomena thus rests in the end upon the unchangeableness of the different powers which work in nature and of the last elements or substances of which it is composed. The laws differ according as those elements and powers are distinct. The mechanical laws are other than the physical; the logical again other than the ethical and aesthetical. In a physical sense giving makes poorer, in an ethical sense it makes richer. The laws of nature, that is, of the whole cosmos, of all creatures, are therefore no cordon around the things, so that nothing can enter or come out, but only a formula for the way in which, according to our observation, every power works according to its nature.
All these elements and powers with the laws dwelling in them are, according to the theistic worldview, upheld from moment to moment by God, who is the last and highest, intelligent and free causality of all things. They have as creatures no continuance in themselves. It is God's omnipresent and eternal power which upholds and governs all. In Him, in His thought and in His government, lies the unity, the harmony, which holds and binds all things together in the richest diversity and leads them to one goal. Thereby there is unitas, mensura, ordo, numerus, modus, gradus, species in the creatures, as Augustine often says. Aliis dedit esse amplius, aliis minus, atque ita naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinavit , Augustine, de civ. Dei 12, 2. God is present in all things. In Him all things live and move and have their being. Nature and history are His work. He works always, John 5:17. All things reveal God to us. His finger may be more clearly noticeable to us in one event than in another; the pure in heart sees God in all His works. Miracles are therefore by no means necessary to make us know God as upholder and governor of the universe. All is His deed. Nothing happens without His will. He is present with His being in all things. And therefore all is also a revelation, a word, a work of God.
12. Supernatural Revelation and the Worldview. With such a worldview, a supernatural revelation is by no means at odds. Nature does not stand for a single moment apart from God, but lives and stirs in Him. All strength that arises therein comes from Him and works according to the law that He has laid therein. God stands not outside nature and is not shut off from her by a fence of laws, but is present in her and upholds her by the word of His might. He works from within, and can bring forth new strengths that differ in kind and working from those already there. And these higher strengths do not undo the lower ones, but take their own place beside and over against them. The human spirit strives every moment to withstand the lower strengths of nature in their working and to rule over them. All culture is a might whereby mankind rules over nature. Art and knowledge are a triumph of the spirit over matter. In like manner, in revelation, in prophecy and wonder, a new godly strength arises, which indeed takes its own place in the world but by no means clashes with the lower strengths in their laws. Of a so-called lifting up of nature's laws by wonders there is no speech. There is no piercing through of nature. Thomas said already: when God does something against the course of nature, the whole order of the world is not undone, but the course that is of one thing to another.
Yes, even the order of cause to its effect is not undone; though the fire in the furnace did not burn the three young men, in that fire the order to burn still abode. By the wonder no change is brought in the strengths that lie in nature, nor in the laws whereby they work. The only thing that happens in the wonder is that the working of the strengths present in nature is held back at a certain point, because another strength steps in, which works according to its own law and brings forth its own working. Knowledge has therefore nothing to dread from the supernatural. But let every knowledge stay on its own ground and not take upon itself the right to lay down the law to the others. It is the right and duty of natural knowledge to seek within its realm for the natural causes of happenings. But let it not rule over wisdom-lore, when this searches into the beginning and end of things. Let it also acknowledge the right and self-standing of godliness and god-lore, and not undermine the ground on which these rest. For here godly grounds for belief in a revelation come to speech, over which natural knowledge as such cannot judge. Also among the sundry knowledges the goal lies not in sameness but in harmony. Let god-lore honor natural knowledge, but claim like handling for itself. Let every knowledge stay on its own ground. The wiping out of borders has already wrought too much muddle. From this has also come the claim of Hume, Voltaire, Renan, that no wonder has ever been enough set forth, and that the steady witness cannot be overthrown by a few testimonies. Renan, in Life of Jesus , says: we do not say, the wonder is impossible, we say, there has not yet been a wonder set forth, and refuses to believe in a wonder, as long as a gathering of sundry learned men, body-knowers, stuff-knowers and so on, has not looked into such a deed and after oft-repeated trial has set it forth as a wonder. With such a beforehand, the wonder is judged beforehand: for with the wonders of Scripture the chance for such a trial is given neither to Renan nor to any of us. Wonders belong after all to history; and in history another way holds than in nature-lore. Here the trial has its place. But in history we must make do with testimonies. If however on historical ground the way of trial must be brought in and laid on, there is no single deed that can withstand the test. Then it is done with all history. Therefore let every knowledge stay on its own ground and search there after its own kind. With the ear one cannot see, with the ell not weigh, and with the trial one cannot test revelation.
Moreover, nature, the cosmos, is still far too much thought of as a machine, which is ready-made and now driven by one force and ever moves according to one law. Deism held this clumsy notion, but it is still unknowingly shared by many and serves in the fight against revelation. But nature, the cosmos, is no piece of work that is finished and now has some independence; rather it is physis , nature in the true sense, it is ever becoming, it finds itself in a lasting goal-directed unfolding, it is led in following times toward a godly end. In such a view of nature, miracles again have their full place. Hellwald says on the last page of his Kulturgeschichte , that all life on earth shall one day sink into the endless rest of death, and ends with the hopeless words: Then shall the earth, robbed of its air and living world, circle the sun in moon-like barrenness, as before, but the human race , its culture, its striving and seeking, its makings and ideals, shall have been . To what end? Of course, in a system that ends with such an unanswered question, revelation and miracle would be nothing but an absurdity. But Scripture teaches us that revelation serves to remake the creation, which was spoiled by sin, into a kingdom of God. Here revelation takes a fully fitting and goal-directed place in the world-plan that God has shaped for Himself and that He brings to pass in the course of time. In this sense Augustine already said, a wonder happens not against nature but against what is known of nature, de civ. c. Faustum . The saying has often been taken in a wrong sense for a theology that sought to grasp miracles as the working of a power that is by nature in man or in nature, or also restored in him by rebirth or faith. This odd view is already found in Philo and Neoplatonism, has then often echoed among sundry Christian thinkers, in Scotus Erigena, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Böhme, Oetinger, cf. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der relig. Erk. and is now and then also met in mediating theology, Twesten, Vorles. Martensen, Dogm. Schleiermacher, Glaub. Sack, Apologetik Lange, Philos. Dogm. Saussaye, mijne Theol. van Ch. d. l. Gunning, Blicken in de openbaring . Revelation, inspiration, and miracle then belong to the first makeup of human nature. Indeed this makeup was weakened by sin, but it yet comes forth in poetic and heroic inspiration, in magnetism and other kindred happenings. Along ethical ways, by oneness with God, by ascetic cleansing, by rebirth and so forth, however, this makeup can be renewed and strengthened. All believers are thus truly inspired and can work miracles. Si humana natura non peccaret eique, qui eam condiderat, immutabiliter adhaereret, profecto omnipotens esset , Erigena, de div. nat. . Miracles are, according to Zimmer, Ueber den allgem. Verfall des menschl. Geschlechts , signs of man raised above the rule of nature, in which the glory of the first human pair before their sin is shown. When the soul is turned in love to God, says Böhme, then it may work wonders as it will. In a kindred sense C. Bonnet, Recherches philosophiques sur les preuves du christianisme , Geneva 1771, let prophecy and miracle be preformed beforehand in nature and come to pass by the working of ordinary natural powers. Some thinkers in the last century therefore spoke of rationes seminales, primordiales et radicales of miracles. But this try at explaining miracles cannot be taken. It mixes the natural with the above-natural, the supernatural with the religious-ethical, and wipes out the bounds between prophecy and soothsaying, miracle and magic, inspiration and enlightenment. So too the aforesaid saying of Augustine may not be explained. Under the known nature he means nature in our sense. And with an eye hereto he even says that the miracle is against nature, as Thomas and Voetius did later. But that same miracle is now from the beginning taken up by God into nature in a wider sense, that is, into the God-set end of things, into the godly world-plan, F. Nitzsch, Augustinus’ Lehre vom Wunder , Berlin 1865. The same thought was later also spoken by Leibniz, Theodicée . God has from the beginning taken up miracles into His world-plan and brings them to pass in His time; miracles are not to be explained by the natures of created things, but reasons of an order higher than that of nature lead Him to do them. According to Leibniz, miracles thus do not lie seed-like, in potency, shut up in the natural powers, as Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm. explains Leibniz, but are making-up parts in God's world-plan. Insofar miracles surely belong to nature. They come not from outside into the being cosmos to upset it, but they are taken up in the world-idea itself and serve to mend and fulfill the fallen nature. Yea, even without sin there would have been room for prophecy and miracle in the world. The above-natural did not first become needful by the fall. Not revelation and miracle in themselves, only the saving mark that both now bear, is caused by sin. Insofar even the miracle is no strange thing added to the fallen creation. Revelation and religion, prophecy and miracle are in themselves no added gifts. They are fully natural, insofar as they belong to God's world-idea and to the world-plan that He, in spite of all foes, brings to fulfillment in time.
Nevertheless, revelation forms an order of things that is distinguished from the ordinary ordo naturae ; a system of words and deeds of God, which itself is governed by one principle and appears before us as an organic whole. Revelation is no single act of God in time, isolated from all of nature, but is a world in itself, distinguished from nature and yet adapted to it, akin to it, destined for it.
In this system of revelation, which begins at paradise and ends only in the parousia, there is still much that is dark and unexplained. Main lines can be drawn. Both in the history of prophecies and of miracles there is order and progress to be discovered. Revelation also has its own laws and rules. It is the noble task of the historia revelationis to trace these out and to discover the system that lies hidden in its history.
But there are still many facts whose proper meaning for and connection with the whole are not yet perceived; still many words and deeds that cannot be brought under any rule. Let this not cause wonder and least of all be exploited as a ground for unbelief. The philosophy of nature and of history is also far from finished with its labor. It too stands every moment before cruxes that it knows not how to explain. Yet for that reason no one doubts the unity of nature and the plan of history.
Compared with these, revelation is even in a favorable position. Its main lines stand firm. As it begins in paradise and ends in the parousia, it forms a grand history that spreads light over all of nature and history and therein, according to Augustine’s word, guards the extraordinary by the ordinary against excess and ennobles the ordinary by the extraordinary.
Without it we walk in darkness, go to meet the eternal rest of death, and have no answer to the question, whereto all has been. But with it we find ourselves in a world that, despite all sinful power, is led toward restoration and perfection. Israel the preparation, Christ the center, the church the outworking, the parousia the crown—that is the cord that binds the facts of revelation together.
Therefore is the faith in the special revelation at last truly one with the faith in another and better world than this. If this world with the powers and laws dwelling in her by nature be the only and the best, then must we of course also make do with this. Then are the laws of nature like unto the decrees of God, then is this world the Son, the Logos, the very image of God, then is in the order of nature, wherein we live, already the full, fitting revelation of God's wisdom and might, of his goodness and holiness. What right is there then to look for that the Hereafter shall yet one day become Here, that the ideal shall pass over into reality, that the good shall triumph over the evil, and the World of Worth once rule over the World of What Is? Evolution brings us not thither. Nothing comes from nothing. Out of this world becomes no paradise. What lies not therein, can not come forth therefrom. If there be no Beyond, no God who stands above nature, no supernatural order, then is to sin, to darkness, to death the last word. The revelation of Scripture makes us know another world of holiness and glory, which comes down into this fallen world, not as teaching alone but also as godly power, as history, as reality, as an harmonious system of words and deeds together and which lifts up this world out of her fall and out of the state of sin through the state of grace onward into the state of glory. The revelation is the coming of God to mankind to dwell with her forever.
Literature on miracles besides those already named: Köstlin, Jahrb. f. deutsche Wiss. and art. Wunder in Herzog. Nitzsch, Syst. der chr. Lehre. Twesten, Vorles. Martensen, Dogm. Lange, Dogm. Rothe, Zur Dogm. Gloatz, Ueber das Wunder, Stud. u. Kr. Dorner, Glaub. Philippi, Kirchl. Glaub. Saussaye, mijne Theol. Oosterzee, Dogm. Kuyper, Uit het Woord. Encycl. Müller, Natur und Wunder, Strassburg, Herder and the litt. there named. Gondal, Le miracle, Paris, Roger et Chernoviz.
1. The history of religions shows not only a close bond between religion and revelation, but further also between revelation and scripture. Magical sayings, worship texts, rite writings, holy laws, priestly writings, tales of old times and myths, and the like are found in the religious field among all folk of higher breeding. But in a yet narrower sense, holy writings are spoken of in the religions. Many folks have also a book or a gathering of books that hold godly might and serve as the rule for teaching and life. To these belong the Shu-king of the Chinese, the Veda of the Indians, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Avesta of the Persians, the Koran of the Mohammedans, the Old Testament of the Jews, and the Bible of the Christians. Together these seven were named by Max Müller in his Vorlesungen über den Ursprung der Religion as the book-religions. Already this showing points out that revelation and scripture cannot stand in a chance, willful bond. Even the history of the teaching of the Koran offers noteworthy likenesses with that of the dogma of Scripture in the Christian church, as in M. Th. Houtsma, De strijd over het dogma in den Islâm tot op El-Ash’ari , Leiden 1875. See further on the holy books Ch. de la Saussaye, Lehrb. der Rel. Gesch. Lamers, Wetenschap v. d. godsd. Max Müller, Theosophy or psychological religion 1893. Lecture 2: The value of the sacred books.
Now, first of all, thought and word, thinking and speaking are most inwardly akin to each other. They are not, as Max Müller in his Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache I 3rd ed. 1875, and Das Denken im Lichte der Sprache , Leipzig 1888, holds, one and the same; for there is also a thinking, a consciousness, an awareness, however dim, without a word. For man can say nothing that he cannot also feel; yet he can feel something that he cannot say, as Augustine says in Serm. 117, c. 5. But the word is nonetheless the full-grown, the self-standing and fully ripened thought, and therefore also the clear, bright thought; an needful helpmeet for aware thinking. Speech is the soul of the folk, the keeper of the goods and treasures of mankind, the bond of men and folks and kindreds, the one great handing-down that makes the world of men, one in body, also one in consciousness. But as the thought takes body in the word, so the word again in writing. Speech too is nothing but a living whole of signs, but of hearable signs. And the hearable sign seeks by nature steadfastness in the seeable sign, in writing. Writing is truly sign-art, and in this broad sense is found among all folks, but has slowly grown from sign- and picture-writing, through word- or thought-writing, to letter-writing. However refined and grown in sharpness, it is unwhole. Our thinking, says Augustine in de trin. 7, 4 and de doctr. christ. 1, 6, falls short of the thing; our thinking lags behind our speaking; and so too there is a great gap between word and writing. The sounds are always only nearly given back in seeable signs. Thinking is richer than speaking, and speaking richer than writing. But yet writing is of great worth and meaning. Writing is the lasting, broad-spread, and ever-made word. It makes the thought the own of those who are far from us and who come after us, the shared good of mankind. It paints the word and speaks to the eyes. It gives body and hue to the thought. Writing is the incarnation of the word.
That holds in general. The Traditionalists, de Bonald, Lamennais, Bautain surely went too far when they said that speech came straight from God, that in speech all hoards of truth were kept, and that man now shares in all truth from and through speech, the handed-down lore.
But there lies yet a good thought in it. And above all in the realm of godliness, word and writ gain a higher meaning. The unfolding is in Christendom a tale of happenings. It stands in deeds, events, that pass by and soon belong to the yestertime. It is an actus transiens, time-bound, even fleeting, and has this time-shape, this fleetingness, in kin with all earthly things.
And yet it holds everlasting thoughts, which not only had meaning for the twinkling wherein it befell, and for the folk to whom it came, but which are of worth for all times and for all mankind.
How is this seeming clash to be brought together? For the oddness thereof has nearly always been felt. The god-belief in England made folk heed it. Herbert of Cherbury spoke out, that only to such an unfolding could belief be given, which befell us ourselves straightway; unfoldings that others have taken in are for us only tale, handed-down lore, and in tale can we never bring it further than to likelihood, de veritate , Lechler, Gesch. des engl. Deismus .
Hobbes said likewise, that an unfolding which others had taken in was for us not to be shown true, Leviathan ch. 32. Locke made the same sundering between original and traditional revelation, Essay concerning human understanding IV ch. 18. The god-belief drew therefrom that the religio naturalis was enough. It made a sundering between deed and thought, the time-bound and the everlasting, chance truths of tale and needful truths of wit.
And the thinking god-denial of Hegel trod in the same path; the thought pours itself not out in a single lone one.
Now this separation has proved in practice impossible. The severing of the idea from history comes, in Christendom as in every other faith, to nothing less than the loss of the idea itself. The saying of Lessing in his writing Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft : Zufällige Geschichtswahrheiten können der Beweis von nothwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten nie werden , made much stir in its day. But that can only be made clear by the unhistorical mind and the god-making of reason in the eighteenth hundredyear. The nowtide hundredyear has unlearned the swooning over needful reason-truths and the scorning of history. It has learned to understand history in its deeper wit and in its everlasting meaning. If the deeds of history were by hap, it itself would become a heap of standalone happenings, without order, without togetherhang, without plan. Then there would be no history anymore, and its beholding a vain, unuseful busying. And then it follows of itself that the history of revelation also loses all its worth. But history is just the making real of God's thoughts, the working out of a counsel of God over his creatures; there is oneness, going, order, logos therein. And such a beholding of history has first become possible through Christendom. It is not found among Greeks and Romans; there were only folks, there was no mankind. The Writ however teaches us to know the oneness of the mankindly kin; it gives us the great thought of a world-history. And in this it itself takes the first and all-ruling stead. The history-truths are thus not by hap, and least of all among these again the history of revelation. It is so needful, that without it the whole history and the whole mankind falls asunder. It is the bearer of God's thoughts; the apocalypse of God's forethought, which filled the apostle Paul time and again with wonder and worship; the revelatio mysterii , without which man gropes in the dark. And on the other side the reason-truths, of which Lessing spoke, are anything but needful. The critique of Kant has shown that otherwise. Just toward those needful reason-truths there reigns nowadays a general doubtful skepticism. The bond is thus just overturned. The historical has been seen through in its everlasting meaning, and the reasonly in its changefulness has come to light.
It is a fact, then, that we inherit all things from our forefathers. We bring nothing into the world, 1 Tim. 6:7. Bodily and soulishly, understandingly and uprightly are we beholden to the world about us. And in godliness it is no otherwise. The revelation, which standeth in history, can come to us in no other wise than by the path of tradition, in the broadest sense. A question, why this revelation is not given to every man, as Rousseau in his Profession de Foi , and Strauss in his Glaubenslehre , cometh not rightly into play. It supposeth that the revelation holdeth naught but teaching and forgetteth that it is history and must be so. The heart of the revelation is the person of Christ. And Christ is an historical person; his taking of manhood, his suffering and dying, his uprising and heaven-going are meet for no repeating. Yea, it belongeth rightly to the ensarkosis , that he goeth into history and liveth in the form of the time. He would not have been like us in all things, if he had not bowed himself to time and room, to the law of becoming. The revelation, not as teaching but as in-fleshing, can of its kind be naught else but history, that is, to fall in a set time and be bound to a set place. The in-fleshing is the oneness of the being, ego eimi , John 8:58, and the becoming, sarx egeneto , John 1:14. Moreover, even in the revelation God followeth the ground-lines which he hath drawn for the together-living of mankind. Mankind is not a heap of single folk, but an living whole, wherein all live from each other. The revelation followeth this law; the new-making joineth itself to the making. Even as on every field by means of tradition we get share in the goods of mankind, so also in godliness. This too belongeth to the thought of the in-fleshing. It is itself an act passing over, but through tradition it becometh the own and the blessing of all men. That this revelation is yet bound to such a small whole of men yieldeth a hard riddle, which later must be searched more nearly; but this fact in itself, though stirring, can never for those who know it be a ground to cast it away. Many folk live in a state of rough wildness. This too cometh to pass after the will and good pleasure of God. Yet it cometh into no man's mind therefore to scorn the blessings of upbringing. Rousseau dreamed of the nature-man, but he abode still in France.
2. The bearer of the ideal goods of mankind is language, and the sarx of language is writing. Also herewith God in the revelation joins Himself. To fully enter into mankind and to wholly become her possession, the revelation takes on the morphē , the schēma of Scripture. The Scripture is the servant-form of the revelation. Yea, the central fact of the revelation, namely the incarnation, leads unto the Scripture. In prophecy and miracle the revelation descends so low and so deep, that it even disdains not the lowest forms of the human, particularly of the religious life as means. The Logos Himself becomes not anthrōpos merely, but doulos , sarx . And even so the word of the revelation takes on the imperfect, flawed form of writing. But thus alone does the revelation become the good of mankind. The goal of the revelation is not Christ; Christ is center and means; the goal is, that God again dwell in His creatures and in the cosmos reveal His glory. Theos ta panta en pasin . Also this is in a certain sense an enanthrōpēsis tou theou , an incarnation of God. And to reach that goal, the word of the revelation passes over into writing. Also the Scripture is thus means and instrument, no goal. It flows forth from the incarnation of God in Christ, it is in a certain sense the continuation thereof, the way, wherealong Christ makes dwelling in His church; the preparation of the way unto the full indwelling of God. But in this indwelling of God it has then also its telos , its end and goal, 1 Cor. 15:28. Even as all the revelation, so is it a transient act.
Thereby becomes clear the relation in which the Scripture stands to the revelation. The earlier theology let the revelation almost wholly merge into the theopneusty, into the gift of the Scripture. It brought the revelation only in passing to speech, and grasped it much too narrowly. It seemed as if behind that Scripture nothing lay. And the Scripture came wholly loose and isolated to stand. It rooted not in the history. It had much of it, as if it suddenly from the heaven had come fallen. The mighty conception of the revelation as a history, which at the fall begins and first in the parousia ends, was to it almost wholly strange. This view is untenable. For the revelation goes in far the most cases before the theopneusty and is therefrom often by a long time separated. The revelation of God to the forefathers, in the history of Israel, in the person of Christ was sometimes first centuries and years thereafter described; and also the prophets and apostles set their revelations often first a good time after the receipt to book, e.g., Jer. 25:13, 30:1, 36:2 ff.
Furthermore, many persons, such as Elijah, Elisha, Thomas, Nathanael, etc., were organs of revelation, who yet never wrote a book that in the canon was taken up; others on the other hand received no revelations and did no wonders, and yet brought them well into writing, such as e.g., the writers of many historical books. Further had the revelation place in sundry forms, dream, vision, etc., and meant the making known of something that hidden was; the theopneusty was always an inworking of God's Spirit in the consciousness and had to goal the warrant of the content of the Scripture. The newer theology made therefore rightly between the revelation and the Scripture distinction.
But it fell often into another extreme. It made the Scripture so wholly and all from the revelation loose, that this nothing more became than a chance appendage, a willful addition, a human charter of the revelation, which perhaps yet well useful but in any case not needful was. In all kinds of variations is this theme sung. Not the letter but the Spirit, not the Scripture but the person of Christ, not the word but the deed is the beginning of the theology. And Lessing came to the known plea: o Luther! thou great and holy man, thou hast us redeemed from the yoke of the Pope, but who shall redeem us from the yoke of the letter, from the paper Pope.
This view is no less wrong and yet more dangerous than the other. For revelation and theopneusty fall in many cases wholly together. Far not all, what in the Scripture is described, was beforehand revealed, but came under the writing itself in the consciousness up, e.g., in the psalms, the letters, etc. Who denies the theopneusty and scorns the Scripture, loses also for a very great part the revelation; he holds nothing but human writings over. Furthermore is to us the revelation, also where it in deed or word went before the description, only and alone through the Holy Scripture known. We know of the revelations of God under Israel and in Christ literally nothing, than only from the Holy Scripture. There is no other beginning. With the Holy Scripture falls thus the whole revelation, falls also the person of Christ. Just because the revelation is history, is there no other way to know something of it, than the usual way with all history, that is the witness. The witness decides for our consciousness over the reality of a deed. No fellowship with Christ than only through the fellowship to the word of the apostles, John 17:20, 21; 1 John 1:3.
The revelation exists for us, for the church of all ages, only in the form of the Holy Scripture. And lastly is the theopneusty, as later shall appear, a property of the Scriptures, an own and separate deed of God with the making of the Scripture, and thus in so far also itself as revelation-deed to acknowledge and to honor. Scorn or casting away of the Scripture is thus not an harmless handling towards human witnesses concerning the revelation, but denial of a special revelation-deed of God, and thus in beginning denial of all revelation.
Both directions are thus one-sided, as well that which denies the revelation for the sake of the Scripture, as that which denies the Scripture for the sake of the revelation. There the manifestation, here the divine inspiration comes not to its right. Yonder one has Scripture without scriptures; here one has scriptures without Scripture. There is a neglect of the history, here a contempt of the word. The first direction falls into orthodox intellectualism, the second runs the danger of Anabaptist spiritualism. The right view is this, that the Scripture is neither made one with the revelation nor loosed from it and placed outside it. The divine inspiration is an element in the revelation; a last act, wherein the revelation of God in Christ is closed for this dispensation; in so far thus the end, the crown, the enduring, and the publishing of the revelation, medium quo revelatio immediata mediata facta inque libros relata est , Baumgarten by Twesten, Vorles. über die Dogm.
3. The Revelation For the revelation, taken in its whole, reaches its end and goal first in the parousia of Christ. But it falls into two great periods, into two sundry dispensations.
The first dispensation stretched forth to embody the full revelation of God in and to make it a part of the history of mankind. All that economy can be beheld as a coming of God to His folk, as a seeking of a tabernacle for Christ. It is thus chiefly a revelation of God in Christ. It bears an objective mark. It is known by out-of-the-way deeds; theophany, prophecy, and wonder are the ways along which God comes to His folk. Christ is the subject thereof. He is the Logos, who shines in the darkness, comes to His own, and becomes flesh in Jesus. The Holy Ghost was not yet, forasmuch as Christ was not yet glorified. In this dispensation the setting down in books keeps even step with the revelation. Both grow from age to age. As the revelation goes forward, the Scripture grows in bulk. When in Christ the full revelation of God is given, theophany, prophecy, and wonder have reached their high point in Him, and the grace of God in Christ has appeared to all men, then at the same time the fulfilling of the Scripture is there. Christ has in His person and work fully unveiled the Father to us; therefore in the Scripture that revelation is fully set forth to us. The revelation has in a certain wise reached its end. The dispensation of the Son makes way for the dispensation of the Spirit. The objective revelation passes over into the subjective taking-to-oneself. In Christ, in the midst of history, God has shaped an organic center; from thence now in ever wider rings the circles are drawn, within which the light of revelation shines. The sun, rising, bestrews but a small face of the earth with her beams; standing in the zenith, she beams over the whole earth. Israel was but a tool of the revelation; it has done its service and falls away, when it has brought forth the Christ, as far as the flesh goes; now the grace of God appears to all men. The revelation thus goes on, but in another wise and in other shapes. The Holy Ghost takes all from Christ; He adds nothing new to the revelation. This is fulfilled and therefore open to no increase. Christ is the Logos, full of grace and truth; His work is done; the Father Himself rests in His toil. His work cannot be filled up or increased by the good works of the saints; His word not by tradition; His person not by the pope. In Christ God has fully unveiled Himself and fully given Himself. Therefore the Scripture also is fulfilled; it is the full word of God.
And yet, though in another wise, the revelation goes on, for it has its end-goal not in Christ, who is the Mediator, but in the new mankind, in the dwelling of God with His folk. It goes on in all her three shapes of theophany, prophecy, and wonder. God comes to and dwells in the gathering of Christ; where two or three are gathered in His name, there is He in the midst. He works wonders always; He renews her through rebirth, hallowing, and glorifying; the ghostly wonders cease not. God works always. But that is not enough. The world of being not only, but also that of awareness must be renewed. In the Logos was the life but also the light of men; Christ is full of grace but also of truth; the revelation stood in wonder but also in prophecy. Word and deed went together in the first dispensation; they go with each other also in the economy of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost rebirths but enlightens also. But even as the ghostly wonders add no new part to the objective revelation-facts but are only the outworking of the wonder of God's grace wrought in Christ; so also is the prophecy in the gathering, the enlightening of the Holy Ghost, no unveiling of hidden things but the applying of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are held in Christ and are laid out in His word. And both these workings of the Holy Ghost go in this dispensation hand in hand. Prophecy and wonder, word and fact, enlightening and rebirth, Scripture and church go with each other. Even now the revelation is no teaching only, that enlightens the understanding, but also a life that renews the heart. It is both together in unbreakable oneness. The one-sidednesses of intellectualism and mysticism are both to be shunned, for they are both a mis-knowing of the richness of the revelation. Forasmuch as head and heart, the whole man in his being and awareness must be renewed, the revelation goes on in this dispensation in the Scripture and in the church together. And both stand thereby in the closest bond to each other. The Scripture is the light of the church; the church is the life of the Scripture. Outside the church the Scripture is a riddle, a stumbling-block. Without rebirth no one can know her. Who is not sharing in her life cannot understand her sense and meaning. And contrariwise the life of the church is a hiddenness, if the Scripture does not let her light shine over it. The Scripture makes clear the church; the church understands the Scripture. In the church the Scripture strengthens and seals her revelation, and in the Scripture the Christian, the church learns to understand herself, in her standing to God and the world, in her yesteryear and now and hereafter.
Therefore, the Scripture standeth not by itself. It may not be understood in a deistic manner. It rooteth in a history of ages and is the fruit of the revelation among Israel and in Christ. But it is yet no book from long bygone times, that bringeth us only into bond with persons and happenings of the past. The Holy Scripture is no dry tale and no old chronicle, but it is the ever living, eternally youthful word, which God now in this time and evermore sendeth forth to his folk. It is the ever ongoing speech of God to us. It serveth not only to make us know historically what hath befallen in the past. It hath even not the intent to give us a historical tale according to the measure of faithfulness that is required in other learnings. The Holy Scripture is a book with a purpose; all that is written afore is written for our teaching, that we through steadfastness and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.
The Scripture is written by the Holy Ghost, that it might serve Him in His guiding of the church, in the perfecting of the saints, in the building up of the body of Christ. In it God cometh daily to his folk. In it He speaketh to his children, not from afar, but from near. In it He revealeth himself from day to day to the believers in the fullness of his grace and truth. Through it He worketh his wonders of mercy and faithfulness. The Scripture is the abiding link between heaven and earth, between Christ and his church, between God and his children. It bindeth us not only to the past, it bindeth us to the living Lord in the heavens. It is the viva vox Dei , epistola Dei omnipotentis ad suam creaturam . By the word God once created the world, by the word He upholdeth it; but by the word He also recreateth it and prepareth it for his dwelling.
Theopneusty is therefore also an abiding property of the Holy Scripture. It was not only theopneustized in the moment that it was set down in book; it is theopneust. Divinitus inspirata est scriptura, non solum dum scripta est Deo spirante per scriptores; sed etiam dum legitur Deo spirante per scripturam et scriptura ipsum spirante , Bengel on 2 Tim. 3:16. Arisen from the revelation, it is kept lively and made effectual by theopneusty. It is the Holy Ghost, who upholdeth both prophecy and miracle, Scripture and church, and setteth them in bond with each other, and thus prepareth the parousia. For when being and awareness both shall once be wholly renewed, then revelation hath its end. The Scripture is then needful no more. Theopneusty is then the share of all children of God. They shall all be taught by the Lord and serve Him in his temple. Prophecy and miracle have become nature, for God dwelleth among his folk.
4. The Authority of Holy Scripture. The authority of Holy Scripture is acknowledged by all Christian churches. There is no dogma over which there is more oneness than that of Holy Scripture. The birth of this belief in Holy Scripture can no longer be traced. It stands as far back as we can go. In the Old Testament, the authority of Jehovah's behests and laws—that is, of the Torah and likewise of the prophets—is already steadfast. Moses and the prophets have always been men of godly authority among Israel; their writings were straightway acknowledged as having authority. The Jews built upon this a teaching of inspiration, as strict and sole as could be. The Torah stands at the head in the Scripture of the Old Testament; it is in its inhold the same as godly Wisdom, the likeness of God, the daughter of God, the self-enough showing-forth of welfare meant for all folk, the highest good, the way to life. If Israel had not sinned, it would have been enough. But now the writings of the prophets have been added later for unfolding. All those writings are godly, holy, rule of teaching and life, and with an endless inhold. Nothing in them is needless; all has meaning, every letter, every mark, even to the shape and form of a letter, for all comes from God. According to Philo and Josephus, the prophets during inspiration were in a state of rapture and unawareness, which they likened to heathen soothsaying and also spread to others than the prophets, but the godly authority of Holy Scripture stands with them also unshakable. Only, that authority was in truth again weakened by the handed-down lore. The Scripture was namely on its own not full enough. According to the Jewish thought, there was also a spoken handed-down lore, which coming from God, was passed on by Moses, Aaron, the elders, the prophets, the men of the great gathering to the Scripture-learned. It was at last set down in the Mishnah and Gemara, which now as the norm shaped by the norm is added to the shaping norm and with the help above all of thirteen lore-unfolding rules was brought into oneness with Scripture.
The Christian congregation now, with Jesus and the apostles, rejected indeed the whole Jewish tradition, but acknowledged from the beginning the godly authority of the Old Testament Scripture. The congregation was never without a Bible. It received the Old Testament from the hand of the apostles straightway with godly authority. The Christian faith from the outset included the faith in the godly authority of the Old Testament. Clement of Rome teaches the inspiration of the Old Testament as clearly as possible. He calls the Old Testament writings ta logia tou theou , and tas graphas, tas alētheis tas dia pneumatos tou hagiou ; he introduces places from the Old Testament with the formula: the Holy Ghost says; and says of the prophets: hoi leitourgoi tēs charitos tou theou dia pneumatos hagiou elalēsan . He extends the inspiration also to the apostles, and says that they went out meta plērophorias pneumatos hagiou to preach, and that Paul wrote to the Corinthians pneumatikōs . Otherwise, the apostolic fathers provide little material for the dogma of Scripture: the inspiration itself stands firm, but there is still difference about the extent and bounds of the inspiration; of the New Testament writings little is spoken, and apocryphal ones are sometimes cited as canonical.
The Apologists of the second century, Justin, and Athenagoras, compare the writers to a cithara, lyre, or flute, of which the godly plēktron made use as of an organ. The teaching of the apostles stands on one line with that of the prophets; even as Abraham, so we believe tēi phōnēi tou theou, tēi dia te tōn apostolōn tou christou lalētheisēi palin kai tēi dia tōn prophētōn kērychtheisēi hēmin . The Gospels share in the same inspiration as the prophets, dia to tous pantas pneumatophorous heni pneumati theou lelalēkenai .
In Irenaeus there is already the full acknowledgment of the inspiration of both Testaments; Scripturae perfectae sunt, quippe a Deo et Spiritu ejus dictae ; they have one author and one aim. And further, the Holy Scriptures are cited by the church fathers as theia graphē, kyriakai graphai, theopneustoi graphai , heavenly letters, godly voices, holy library, handwriting of God, etc. The writers are called leitourgoi tēs charitos tou theou, organa theias phōnēs, stoma theou, pneumatophoroi, christophoroi, empneusthentes, theophoroumenoi , flooded with the divine Spirit, full, etc. The act of inspiration is presented as a driving, leading, etc., but especially often as a dictating of the Holy Ghost; the writers were the hands of the Holy Ghost; they were not the authors, but only writers, scribes; the author of Holy Scripture is God alone.
The Scripture is a letter of the almighty God to his creature. There is nothing indifferent and nothing superfluous in it, but all is full of godly wisdom; nihil enim vacuum, neque sine signo apud Deum . Especially Origen drove this strongly and said that there was no tittle or iota in vain, that there was nothing in Scripture which did not descend from the fullness of the divine majesty. And likewise Jerome, who said: single words, syllables, points, dots in the divine scriptures are full of senses and breathe heavenly sacraments. The Holy Scripture was therefore without any defect, without any error, also in chronological, historical matters. What the apostles have written must be accepted just as if Christ himself had written it, for they were as it were his hands. In his letter to Jerome he says he firmly believes that none of the canonical writers erred in writing. If there is thus a fault, it is not allowed to say: the author of this book did not hold the truth, but: either the codex is faulty, or the interpreter erred, or you do not understand.
But at the same time, the self-consciousness of the writers in the inspiration was accentuated as strongly as possible over against Montanism; preceding inquiry, difference in development, use of sources and of memory, difference in language and style was fully acknowledged by Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Augustine, Jerome, etc.; even by some a difference in the manner of inspiration between Old and New Testament, or also a difference in degree of inspiration according to the moral state of the writers was accepted. But all that did no harm to the faith in the godly origin and the godly authority of Holy Scripture. These stood generally firm. The practical use of Scripture in preaching, in proof, in exegetical treatment, etc., proves that still more and still stronger than the statements standing by themselves. The church in this first period had more to do with the establishment of the canon than with the concept of inspiration, but understood under the canonical precisely the divine scriptures, and ascribed authority to these alone.
5. The Theology of the Middle Ages. The theology of the Middle Ages abode by the church fathers and hath not further developed the doctrine of inspiration. John of Damascus, in De Fide Orthodoxa 4, 17, bringeth the Scripture but briefly to speech and saith that law and prophets, evangelists and apostles, shepherds and teachers have spoken through the Holy Ghost; and therefore is the Scripture God-breathed. Erigena, in De Divina Natura I 66 sq., saith that in all pieces one must follow the authority of the Holy Scripture, for true authority doth not withstand right reason, but also every authority which is not approved by true reason seemeth to be weak. Thomas treateth the doctrine of Holy Scripture no more than Lombard, but giveth his thought on inspiration yet in his doctrine of prophecy, Summa Theologica II 2 qu. 171 sq. Prophecy is determined a gift of the understanding and consisteth first in inspiration, that is, in an elevation of the mind to perceive divine things, which cometh to pass by the Holy Spirit moving, and second in revelation, whereby the divine things are known, the darkness and ignorance are taken away, and the prophecy itself is completed, qu. 171 art. 1. Further, prophecy consisteth in the gift of the prophetic light, whereby the divine things become visible, even as the natural things by the natural light of reason, ibid. art. 2. But that revelation differeth; sometimes it cometh to pass under mediation of the senses, sometimes by means of the imagination, sometimes also in a purely spiritual wise, as with Solomon and the apostles, ibid. qu. 173 art. 2. The prophecy by intellectual vision standeth in general higher than that by imaginary vision; yet when the intellectual light revealeth no supernatural things, but only maketh the naturally knowable things known and judged in a divine wise, then such a intellectual prophecy standeth below that imaginary vision which revealeth supernatural truth. The writers of the hagiographa wrote oftentimes of matters which are knowable by nature, and they spake then not as from the person of God, but from their own person, yet with the help of divine light. Thomas acknowledgeth thus different wises and degrees of inspiration. He saith also, qu. 176 art. 1, that the apostles received the gift of tongues to be able to preach the gospel to all peoples, but as to certain things which are added by human art for ornament and elegance of speech, the apostle was instructed in his own tongue, but not in a foreign one, and so also were the apostles sufficiently equipped with knowledge for their office, but knew not all that is to be known, for example, arithmetic and suchlike. But an error or untruth cannot occur in the Scripture, Summa Theologica I qu. 32 art. 4. II 2 qu. 110 art. 4 ad 3.
The most broadly is handled of the Scripture by Bonaventure in the prologue to his Breviloquium , ed. Freiburg 1881: the Holy Scripture hath her origin not from human inquiry, but from revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Ghost. No one can know her but through faith, for Christ is her content. She is the heart of God, the mouth of God (of the Father), the tongue of God (of the Son), the pen of God (of the Holy Ghost). Four things come from the Scripture especially in consideration; her breadth: she containeth many parts, Old and New Testament, different kinds of books, legal, historical, prophetic and suchlike; her length: she describeth all times from the creation unto the day of judgment in the three periods of the law of nature, the written law, and the law of grace or in seven ages; her sublimity: she describeth the different hierarchies, ecclesiastical, angelic, divine; her profundity: she hath a multiplicity of mystical understandings. Howsoever the Holy Scripture useth different wises of speaking, she is always true, there is nothing untrue in her. For the Holy Ghost, her most perfect author, could say nothing false, nothing superfluous, nothing diminished. Therefore is the reading and searching of the Holy Scripture so urgently needful; and for this purpose wrote Bonaventure his precious Breviloquium .
Duns Scotus bringeth in the Prologue to his Sententiae indeed different grounds on which the faith in the Holy Scripture resteth, such as prophecy, the inner agreement, the genuineness, the miracles and suchlike, but treateth not the doctrine of Holy Scripture. And also otherwise we find little matter for the dogma of Scripture in the scholasticism. There was no need felt for a special treatment of the locus de Sacra Scriptura, because her authority stood firm and no one gainsaid her. She had in the Middle Ages, at least formally, an undisputed dominion. She was symbolically set forth as the water of life, glorified in praises, even as the image of Christ honored and adored, copied in the costliest wise, illustrated, bound and displayed. She had a place of honor at the councils, was kept as a relic, worn as an amulet about the neck, buried with the deceased, and used as foundation for the taking of oaths. And also she was much more, than the Protestants later thought, read, studied, explained and translated, Vigouroux, Les livres saints et la critique rationaliste , 3e ed. Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes . Herzog². There was no gainsaying of the Scripture. Also Abelard, Sic et Non , ed. Henke et Lindenkohl, Marburg 1851, saith not that prophets and apostles in writing, but only that they sometimes as persons have erred, with appeal to Gregory, who also acknowledged that of Peter; the grace of prophecy was sometimes taken from them, that they might remain humble and acknowledge that they received and possessed that Spirit of God, who knoweth not to lie or be deceived, only as a gift. And no more is Agobard of Lyon a gainsayer of inspiration; only he standeth over against Fredegis of Tours for a more organic conception, which acknowledgeth difference of language and style, grammatical deviations and suchlike, Münscher-v. Coelln, Dogmengeschichte II 1. Churchly was the inspiration and authority of Holy Scripture oftentimes spoken out and acknowledged, Denzinger, Enchiridion n. 296. 386. 367. 600.
6. The Council of Trent. The Council of Trent declared in its fourth session that the truth is contained in the written books and in unwritten traditions, which from the mouth of Christ have been received by the apostles, or by the same apostles, the Holy Spirit dictating, have been handed down as from hand to hand and have come unto us; and that therefore, following the example of the fathers, it receives and venerates all the books of the Old and New Testament, since one God is the author of both, and likewise the traditions... as if either orally from Christ or dictated by the Holy Spirit... The inspiration was here indeed extended to the tradition, but yet also clearly affirmed of the Holy Scripture.
But among the Roman theologians there soon arose great difference concerning the nature and extent of inspiration. Both the authorship of both testaments and the dictating were interpreted in diverse ways. The theologians of the sixteenth century were for the most part still adherents to the stricter direction of the church fathers and scholastics. They were mostly followers of Augustine in the doctrine of grace, Jansenists, Augustinians, and Dominicans. The chief among this direction are Melchior Canus, Loci theologici 1563, Bannez, Commentaria in primam partem Divi Thomae Lyons 1788, Bajus and Jansenius, Billuart, Summa Sancti Thomae tome 2 Würzburg 1758, Rabaudy, Exercitationes de Scriptura sacra ; in this century still Fernandez, Dissertatio critica theologica de verbali Sanctae Bibliorum inspiratione , but also some Jesuits, such as Tostatus, Costerus, Turrianus, Salmeron, Gregory of Valencia, De rebus fidei hoc tempore controversis Lyons 1591, and others. These all teach a positive inworking of God's Spirit upon the writers, which extended even to the individual words.
But soon there arose a laxer direction, and that among the Jesuits. In the year 1586, Lessius and Hamelius opened their lectures at the Jesuit college in Leuven, and there defended among others the theses: 1° that for something to be Holy Scripture, it is not necessary that each of its words be inspired by the Holy Spirit. 2° it is not necessary that each truth and sentence be immediately inspired to the writer by the Holy Spirit. 3° a certain book (such as perhaps the second of Maccabees) written by human industry without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, if the Holy Spirit afterward testifies that there is nothing false therein, becomes Holy Scripture. Here the verbal inspiration is rejected, the immediate inspiration also of many matters, for example of history, which the writers knew, is deemed unnecessary, and even for some books a later so-called subsequent inspiration or a posteriori approbation of the Holy Ghost is held sufficient.
The faculties of Leuven and Douai condemned the theses, but others disapproved this censure, and the pope took no decision. The two first theses found much acceptance, but the third went too far and was adopted by few, among others by Bonfrerius, Frassenius, Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Nouveau Testament 1689 chapter 23, and in this century still by the bishop of Speyer, Haneberg, Geschichte der biblischen Offenbarung , 3rd edition 1863.
Another direction is represented by Mariana, Tractatus varii VIII, edition du Pin, Dissertation préliminaire tome I Paris 1701, J. Jahn, Introductio in libros Veteris Testamenti 1814, and conceives inspiration as a purely negative assistance of the Holy Ghost, whereby the writers were preserved from error. Both these directions held fast to the infallibility of Holy Scripture, but identified this factual outcome with the divine origin of Scripture.
On the other hand, the infallibility in matters which are not in a stricter sense religious-ethical was surrendered, and inspiration limited to the properly dogmatic-ethical by Erasmus, on Matthew 2, Acts 10, and Apologia adversus monachos quosdam Hispanos , Abbé Le Noir, Lenormant, Les origines de l’histoire d’après la Bible Paris 1880, de Broglie, Langen in Bonn, Rohling, Natur und Offenbarung 1872.
Related thereto is the conception of Holden, doctor of the Sorbonne, in his Divinae fidei analysis 1770, and Chrismann, Regula fidei catholicae , who assumed a proper inspiration for the truths of faith and morals, but for the remaining content of Scripture taught only such assistance as all believers enjoy. Of like tendency is also the view in the Roman Tübingen school, whose representatives Drey, Apologetik 1838 page 204 following, Kuhn, Einleitung in die Dogmatik 1859 page 9 following, Schanz, Apologie des Christentums II 318 following, and others, under the influence of Schleiermacher, brought inspiration into connection with the whole organism of revelation, and allowed it to extend in different degrees to the different parts of Scripture.
Most Roman theologians after the Reformation walk a middle way. They reject on the one hand the lax inspiration which would consist only in negative assistance or posterior approbation, for then all decisions of councils, then all that is true would be called inspired. On the other hand, they also deny the strict verbal inspiration, according to which not only all matters but even all individual words are dictated and inspired, for many matters and words were known to the writers and thus needed not to be inspired; the difference in language and style, the use of sources, etc., also proves the incorrectness of verbal inspiration. A real inspiration is thus sufficient, which is sometimes definite revelation, sometimes however assistance.
This theory we find in Bellarmine, De Verbo Dei I chapter 14, compare De Conciliis II chapter 12, XII chapter 14, Cornelius a Lapide on 2 Timothy 3:16, the Würzburg Theology, disputation 1 chapter 1, Marchini, De divinitate et canonicitate sacrae Bibliorum Part 1 article 7, Liebermann, Institutiones theologicae edition 8 1857 I page 385 following, Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae IX 1843 page 66 following, Heinrich, Dogmatik I 382 following, Franzelin, Tractatus de divina Scriptura , Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit I 50, H. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der religiösen Erkenntnis II 108 following, F. Schmid, De inspirationis Bibliorum vi et ratione , Jansen, Praelectiones theologicae I 767 following. See further on these different theories of inspiration Perrone ibidem IX 58 following, Jansen ibidem 762 following, P. Dansch, Die Schriftinspiration 1891 page 145 following.
The Vatican Council indeed proposed no definite theory, but yet decidedly condemned that of the subsequent inspiration and the mere assistance, and declared, after repeating the Tridentine decree, that the church recognizes those books as holy and canonical, not because they, composed by human industry alone, are afterward approved by her (that is, the church's) authority; nor because they contain revelation without error; but because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as author, and as such have been delivered to the church itself. In canons 2, 4 it calls the books once more divinely inspired. In chapter 3 on faith it says that by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God written or handed down.
This decree leaves nothing to be desired in clarity. The Roman church conceives inspiration as a positive inworking of God's Spirit and holds fast to the infallibility of Scripture. And the encyclical of Leo XIII on the studies of Holy Scripture, November 18, 1893, is written in this same faith.
7. The Reformers' View of Scripture. The Reformers took the Scripture and its divine inspiration as it had been handed down to them by the church. Luther now and then, from his soteriological standpoint, passed an unfavorable judgment on some books, such as Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, James, Jude, and Revelation, and admitted smaller inaccuracies, but yet on the other side held fast to the inspiration in the strictest sense and extended it even to the letters. Bretschneider, Luther an unsere Zeit. Schenkel, Das Wesen der Protest. Köstlin, Luthers Theologie. W. Rohnert, Was lehrt L. von der Insp. der H. Schrift. Fr. Pieper, Luthers doctrine of inspiration, Presbyt. and Ref. Rev.
The Lutheran symbols have no separate article on the Scripture, but everywhere presuppose its divine origin and authority, Conf. Aug. praef. art. Art. Smalc. art. Form. Conc. Pars I Epit. de comp. regula atque norma. The Lutheran dogmaticians, Melanchthon in the preface to his loci, Chemnitz, Examen Conc. Trid. Loc. Gerhard, Loci Theol. loc. and others, all held the same view. Not first Quenstedt and Calovius, but already Gerhard calls the writers God's amanuenses, Christ's hands and the Holy Spirit's tabelliones or notaries, ib. loc. cap. Later ones merely developed and applied the principle further, Heppe, Dogmatik des deutschen Prot. Hase Hutt. Rediv. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. cap. Rohnert, Die Inspiration der H. Schrift. Koelling, Die Lehre von der Theopneustie. Among the Reformed we find the same doctrine concerning the Scripture.
Zwingli often places the outward word behind the inward, admits historical and chronological inaccuracies, and sometimes extends the inspiration to heathen writers, Zeller, Das theol. System Zwingli’s. Chr. Sigwart, Ulr. Zwingli. But Calvin holds the Scripture in the full and literal sense for God's word, Instit. I. c., Comm. on 2 Tim. 3:16 and 2 Petr. 1:20; he does not recognize the epistle to the Hebrews as Pauline but yet as canonical, and assumes an error in Mt. 22:9, 23:25, but not in the autographa, Cramer, De Schriftbeschouwing van Calvijn. Heraut. Moore, Calvins doctrine of holy Scripture, Presb. and Ref. Rev.
The Reformed confessions mostly have an article on the Holy Scripture and clearly express its divine authority, I Helv. II Helv. Gall. Belg. Angl. Scot. and so on; and the Reformed theologians all without distinction take this same standpoint, Ursinus, Tract. theol. Zanchius, Op. VIII col. Junius, Theses Theol. cap. Polanus, Synt. Theol. I. Synopsis, disp. Voetius, Disp. Sel. I. etc. Cramer, De roomsch-kath. en oudprot. Schriftbeschouwing. Heraut. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. S. A few times there is a weak attempt at a more organic view. The inspiration did not always consist in revelation, but, when it concerned known matters, in assistance and direction; the writers were not always passive, but also active, so that they used their own understanding, memory, judgment, style, but in such a way that they were yet led by the Holy Ghost and preserved from error, Synopsis. Rivetus, Isag. seu introd. generalis ad Script. V. et N. T. cap. Heidegger, Corpus Theol. loc. but even therewith no least detriment was done to the divinity and infallibility of the Scripture.
The writers were not authors, but scribes, amanuenses, notaries, hands, pens of God. The inspiration was not negative but always positive, an impulse to writing and a suggestion of things and words. It communicated not only unknown but also already known matters and words, for the writers had to know these just then and just so, not only materially but also formally, not only humanly but also divinely, Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. Voetius, Disp. I. The inspiration extended to all chronological, historical, geographical matters, to the words, even to vowels and signs. J. Buxtorf, Tract. de punctorum origine, antiquitate et auctoritate. Anticritica. Alsted, Praecognita Theol. Polanus, Synt. Theol. I. Voetius, Disp. I. Cons. Helv. art. Barbarisms and solecisms were not admitted in the Holy Scripture. Difference of style was explained from the will of the Holy Ghost, who now willed to write thus and then otherwise, Quenstedt and Hollaz by Rohnert, Die Inspir. der H. Schrift. Winer, Grammatik des N. T. Sprachidioms. Voetius ib. Gomarus, Op.
Materially, as regards letters, syllables, and words, the Scripture is from the sense of creatures, but formally, as regards the God-breathed sense, it is wrongly ascribed to creatures, since it is the mind, counsel, wisdom of God. Hollaz, Exam. ed. Teller, by Dausch. In 1714 Nitzsche in Gotha, according to Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, wrote a dissertation on the question whether the Holy Scripture itself was God.
8. But when the theory of inspiration, even as among the Jews and the Mohammedans, had been drawn to its utmost outcome, strife arose from all sides. Also in former times there was no lack of criticism against the Scripture. Jehoiakim burned the scroll of Baruch, Jer. 36. Apion gathered together all the charges which the heathens brought against the Jews concerning the circumcision, the forbidding of swine's flesh, the outgoing from Egypt, the abiding in the wilderness, and so forth. Josephus, against Apion. The Gnostics, Manicheans, and the sects akin to them in the Middle Ages tore the New Testament loose from the Old, and ascribed this to a lower god, the demiurge. Especially Marcion in his Antitheses, and his pupils Apelles and Tatian, going out from the Pauline contrast of righteousness and grace, law and gospel, works and faith, flesh and spirit, directed their attack against the anthropomorphisms, the contradictions, the unholiness of the Old Testament, and said that a God who is wroth, has remorse, avenges himself, is jealous, commands theft and lying, descends, gives a strict law, and suchlike, cannot be the true God. Also they pointed with fondness to the great difference between Christ, the true Messiah, and the Messiah as the prophets awaited him. Of the New Testament Marcion cast away all writings except those of Luke and Paul, and spoiled even these by shortening and interpolation. Tertullian, against Marcion. Epiphanius, Heresies 42. Irenaeus, against heresies passim. Harnack, History of Dogma I. Celsus carried on this strife in a keen-witted way and delivered a sharp criticism on the first chapters of Genesis, the creation days, the making of man, the tempting, the fall, the flood, the ark, Babel's tower-building, the wasting of Sodom and Gomorrah, and further on Jonah, Daniel, the supernatural birth of Jesus, the baptism, the uprising, the wonders, and charged Jesus and the apostles, for lack of better reckoning, with deceit. Porphyry made a beginning with the historical criticism of the Bible books; he withstood the allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament, ascribed the Pentateuch to Ezra, held Daniel for a work from the time of Antiochus, and subjected also many tales in the Gospels to a sharp criticism. Julian later renewed all these attacks against the Scripture in his Words against the Christians. But therewith the end of the criticism of that time was reached. The Scripture came to general and undisputed lordship; the criticism was forgotten. It came to life again in the Renaissance, but was then yet a time long held down by the Reformation and the Roman counter-reformation. Soon it raised itself anew, in rationalism, deism, and the French philosophy. First it directed itself more against the content of the Scripture in the rational eighteenth century; thereafter more against the truth of the writings in the history-minded nineteenth century. Porphyry takes the place of Celsus, Renan follows after Voltaire, Paulus of Heidelberg makes way for Strauss and Baur. But the outcome abides always the same, the Scripture is a book full of error and lying.
As a consequence of this criticism, many have altered the teaching of inspiration. At first, inspiration is still held fast as a supernatural working of the Holy Ghost in the writing, but limited to the religious-ethical; in the chronological, historical, and such like, it is weakened or denied, so that here greater or lesser errors may occur. The Word of God is to be distinguished from the Holy Scripture. Thus taught already the Socinians. The writers of the Old and New Testament indeed wrote divino spiritu impulsi eoque dictante , but the Old Testament has only historical worth, only the teaching is immediately inspired, in the rest a slight erring is possible, Fock, Der Socin. The Remonstrants took the same standpoint. They acknowledge inspiration, Conf. art. 1, but admit that the writers sometimes expressed themselves less exactly and precisely, Limborch, Theol. Christ. I c. 4 § 10, or sometimes also erred in the circumstances of faith, Episcopius, Instit. Theol. IV 1 cap. 4, or stronger still, in the historical books needed and received no inspiration, H. Grotius, Votum pro pace ecclesiae, Clericus, bij Dr. Cramer, De geschied. van het leerstuk der inspiratie in de laatste twee eeuwen. The same teaching on inspiration we find then with S. J. Baumgarten, J. G. Töllner, Semler, Michaelis, Reinhard, Dogm. § 19. Vinke, Theol. Christ. Dogm. Comp. Egeling, Weg der Zaligheid, 3e dr. II, and so on. But this theory yet met with many objections. The separation between that which is needful for salvation and the incidental historical is impossible, since teaching and history in the Scripture are wholly interwoven. It does too little to the awareness of the writers, who do not at all limit their authority to the religious-ethical but extend it to the whole content of their writings. It is at odds with the use of Scripture by Jesus, the apostles, and the whole Christian church. This dualistic view therefore gave way to another, the dynamic one of Schleiermacher, Christ. Gl. § 128-132.
It consists herein, that the theopneusty is transferred from the intellectual to the ethical realm. Inspiration is not in the first place a property of the Scripture but of the writers. These were reborn, holy men; they lived in the nearness of Jesus, underwent his influence, dwelt in the holy circle of revelation and were thus renewed, also in their thinking and speaking. Inspiration is the habitual property of the writers. Herein their writings also share; they too bear a new, holy character. But this inspiration of the writers is therefore not essential, but only gradual differing from that of all believers, for all believers are led by the Holy Ghost. It may also not be conceived mechanically, as if it were only now and then and with some subjects the portion of the writers. God's Word is not mechanically contained in the Scripture like the painting in the frame, but it permeates and enlivens all parts of the Scripture, like the soul all members of the body. Yet not all parts of the Scripture partake of this inspiration, this word of God, in equal measure; the closer something lies to the center of revelation, the more it also breathes the Spirit of God. The Scripture is therefore at once a divine and a human book, on one side containing the highest truth and yet also weak, fallible, imperfect; not the revelation itself but the record of the revelation; not the word of God itself but description of that word; faulty in many respects but yet a sufficient instrument for us, to come to an infallible knowledge of the revelation. Finally, not the Scripture, but the person of Christ or in general the revelation is the principle of theology.
Naturally this theory of inspiration allows very many modifications; the theopneusty can be placed in more or less intimate connection to the revelation, the working of the Holy Ghost can be conceived more or less positively, the possibility of error can be admitted more or less far. But the ground thoughts remain yet the same; inspiration is in the first place a property of the writers and then of their writings, it is not a momentary act or a special gift of the Holy Ghost but a habitual property, it works so dynamically that possibility of error is not excluded in all parts. This theory has almost wholly replaced the old teaching of inspiration. There are only few theologians more, who have not in the main taken it over. See Rothe, Zur Dogm. Twesten, Vorles. I. Dorner, Glaub. I. Lange, Dogm. I § 76. Tholuck, art. Inspir. in Herzog¹. Cremer, id. in Herzog². Hofmann, Weiss. u. Erf. I. Id. Schriftbeweis, 2e Aufl. I III. Beck, Vorles. über christl. Glaub. I, Einleitung in das System der christl. Lehre, 2e Aufl. § 82. Kahnis, Luth. Dogm. I. Frank, Syst. der chr. Gewissheit II. Id. Syst. der chr. Wahrheit, 2e Aufl. II. Gess, Die Inspiration der Helden der Bibel und der Schriften der Bibel, Basel. W. Volck, Zur Lehre von der H. Schrift, Dorpat. Grau, Bew. d. Glaubens Juni, S. Zöckler, Bew. d. Gl. April S. Kähler, Wiss. der chr. Lehre, S. Kübel, Ueber den Unterscheid zw. der posit. u. der liber. Richtung in der mod. Theol. 2e Aufl. S. Pareau et H. de Groot, Comp. dogm. et apol. Christ. H. de Groot, De Gron. Godgel. Saussaye, mijne Theol. van Ch. d. l. S. Roozemeyer, Stemmen v. W. en Vr. Juli. Dr. Is. van Dijk, Verkeerd Bijbelgebruik. Daubanton, De theopneustie der H. Schrift. Oosterzee, Dogmatiek § 35. Id. Theopneustie. Doedes, Leer der zaligheid § 1-9. Id. De Ned. Geloofsbel. bl. R. F. Horton, Inspiration and the Bible 4 ed. London. C. Gore, Lux mundi, 13 ed. London, p. Farrar and others, Inspiration, a clerical symposium, 2 ed. Londen. W. Gladden, Who wrote the Bible, Boston, Houghton. C. A. Briggs, Inspiration and inerrancy, with papers upon biblical scholarship and inspiration by L. J. Evans and H. P. Smiths, and an introduction by A. B. Bruce, London. J. de Witt, Inspiration and so on.
Also Ritschl and his school may here be named, insofar as these over against the consciousness theology lay stress on the objective revelation in Christ and in connection therewith also seek to value the Scripture, A. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. II². W. Herrmann, Die Bedeutung der Inspirationslehre für die ev. Kirche, Halle. Kaftan, Wesen der christl. Rel. S. Nitzsch, Lehrb. der ev. Dogm. E. Haupt, Die Bedeutung der H. Schrift für den evang. Christen, Gütersloh and so on. But this theory satisfies neither the congregation nor also the so-called science. The critical objections against the Scripture concern not the periphery but the center itself of the revelation. Therefore others have gone still further and denied all inspiration as a supernatural working of God's Spirit. The Bible is a chance collection of human writings, be it written by men with a deep religious mind and arisen among a people that by excellence may be called the people of religion. Of revelation and inspiration there is then still only in a figurative sense speech. At most there is a special leading of God's general providence in the arising and the collection of those writings to be noted. Inspiration is only gradual different from the religious enlivening in which all pious share, Spinoza, Tract. theol. polit. cap. 12. Wegscheider, Instit. theol. § 13. Strauss, Glaub. I. Schweizer, Glaub. I. Biedermann, Dogm. § 179-208. Pfleiderer, Grundriss § 39. Lipsius, Dogm. § 179. Scholten, L. H. K. I.
Yet it is remarkable that all these men still to a certain degree continue to acknowledge the religious worth of the Scripture. They see in it not only a source for the knowledge of Israel and of the first Christianity, but seek also still to maintain it as a means of grace for the nurturing of the religious-ethical life, cf. Bruining, Theol. Tijdschr. Nov. bl. Insofar they distinguish themselves favorably from all radicals, who have wholly done with the Scripture, have shaken out all piety for it and have nothing but mockery and contempt for it over. Of this in the first centuries Celsus and Lucianus were the spokesmen; toward the end of the Middle Ages the blasphemy of the tres impostores found entrance; in the 18th century this hate against Christianity was given expression by Voltaire, who from 1760 on had no other name for Christianity than l’infâme and since 1764 mostly signed his letters with écrasez l’infâme; and in this century this enmity against Christ and his word has still increased and spread.
Over against all these more or less negative directions, the inspiration of Scripture in a positive and full sense is still acknowledged and defended in this century, besides by Roman theologians, by I. da Costa, On the Divine Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures , published by Rev. Eggestein, Rotterdam Bredée 1884. Dr. A. Kuyper, The Scripture the Word of God , Tiel 1870. Id. The Contemporary Scripture Criticism , Amsterdam 1881. Toorenenbergen, Contributions to the Explanation, Testing, and Development of the Doctrine of the Reformed Church , 1865. L. Gaussen, Theopneustie or Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures 1840. Id. The Canon of the Holy Scriptures 1860. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, The Authority of the Scriptures 1850. A. de Gasparin, The Schools of Doubt and the School of Faith 1853. Philippi, Ecclesiastical Faith , 3rd ed. 1883. Vilmar, Dogmatics edited by Piderit, Gütersloh 1874. W. Rohnert, The Inspiration of Holy Scripture and Its Opponents , Leipzig 1889. Koelling, The Doctrine of Theopneustie , Breslau 1891. Henderson, Divine Inspiration 1836. Rob. Haldane, The Verbal Inspiration of the Old and New Testament , Edinburgh 1830. Th. H. Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures , 2nd ed. London 1821, 4 vols., vol. I. Eleazar Lord, The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scripture , New York 1858, 1859. W. Lee, The Inspiration of Holy Scripture, Its Nature and Proof , 3rd ed. Dublin 1864. Hodge, Systematic Theology I. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology I. B. Warfield, The Real Problem of Inspiration , Presbyterian and Reformed Review, April 1893. W. E. Gladstone, The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture , 2nd ed. London 1892.
9. The Old Testament The Old Testament yields for the doctrine of inspiration the following weighty moments:
The prophets know themselves in a certain moment of their life to be called by the Lord, Exod. 3; 1 Sam. 3; Isa. 6; Jer. 1; Ezek. 1-3; Amos 3:7, 8, 7:15. The calling went oftentimes against their own wish and desire, Exod. 3; Jer. 20:7; Amos 3:8, but Jehovah hath been too strong for them. The conviction among Israel was general, that the prophets were messengers of God, Jer. 26:5, 7:15, raised up and sent by Him, Jer. 29:15; Deut. 18:15; Num. 11:29; 2 Chron. 36:15, His servants, 2 Kings 17:23, 21:10, 24:2; Ezra 9:11; Ps. 105:15 etc., standing before His face, 1 Kings 17:1; 2 Kings 3:14, 5:16.
They are aware that Jehovah hath spoken to them, and they have received the revelation from Him. He teacheth them what they shall speak, Exod. 4:12; Deut. 18:18, layeth the words in their mouth, Num. 22:38, 23:5; Deut. 18:18, speaketh to them, Hos. 1:2; Hab. 2:1; Zech. 1:9, 13, 2:2, 7, 4:1, 4, 11, 5:5, 10, 6:4; Num. 12:2, 8; 2 Sam. 23:2; 1 Kings 22:28. Especially is the formula used: thus saith the Lord, or: the word of the Lord came to me, or: word, oracle, the spoken of Jehovah. The whole Old Testament Scripture is full of this expression. Time and again the prophetic speech is introduced thereby. Even Jehovah is repeatedly brought in speaking in the first person, Josh. 24:2; Isa. 1:1, 2, 8:1, 11; Jer. 1:2, 4, 11, 2:1, 7:1; Ezek. 1:3, 2:1; Hos. 1:1; Joel 1:1; Amos 2:1 etc. Properly it is Jehovah who speaketh through them, 2 Sam. 23:1, 2, who speaketh by their mouth, Exod. 4:12, 15; Num. 23:5, by their service, Hag. 1:1; 2 Kings 17:13. Their whole word is covered by the authority of Jehovah.
This consciousness is with the prophets so clear and firm, that they even note the place and the time where Jehovah spoke to them and make distinction between times in which He did and in which He did not speak to them, Isa. 16:13, 14; Jer. 3:6, 13:3, 26:1, 27:1, 28:1, 33:1, 34:1, 35:1, 36:1, 49:34; Ezek. 3:16, 8:1, 12:8; Hag. 1:1; Zech. 1:1 etc. And therewith is that consciousness so objective, that they clearly distinguish themselves from Jehovah; He speaketh to them, Isa. 8:1, 51:16, 59:21; Jer. 1:9, 3:6, 5:14; Ezek. 3:26 etc., and they listen with their ears and see with their eyes, Isa. 5:9, 6:8, 21:3, 10, 22:14, 28:22; Jer. 23:18, 49:14; Ezek. 2:8, 3:10, 17, 33:7, 40:4, 44:5; Hab. 3:2, 16; 2 Sam. 7:27; Job 33:16, 36:10, and take in the words of Jehovah, Jer. 15:16; Ezek. 3:1-3.
Hence they make a sharp contrast between what God hath revealed to them and that which ariseth from their own heart, Num. 16:28, 24:13; 1 Kings 12:33; Neh. 6:8; Ps. 41:6, 7. They lay to the charge of the false prophets precisely that these speak from their own heart, Ezek. 13:2, 3, 17; Jer. 14:14, 23:16, 26; Isa. 59:13, without being sent, Jer. 14:14, 29:9; Ezek. 13:6, so that they are lying prophets, Jer. 23:32; Isa. 9:14; Jer. 14:14, 20:6, 23:21, 22, 26, 31, 36, 27:14; Ezek. 13:6 etc.; Mic. 2:11; Zeph. 3:4; Zech. 10:2 and soothsayers, Isa. 3:2; Mic. 3:5 etc.; Zech. 10:2; Jer. 27:9, 29:8; Ezek. 13:9, 12, 21:26, 28, 34; Isa. 44:25.
The prophets are finally aware, in speaking or writing, of proclaiming not their own word but the word of the Lord. Indeed, the word was not revealed to them for themselves, but for others. They had no freedom to hide it. They must speak, Jer. 20:7, 9; Exod. 3, 4; Ezek. 3; Amos 3:8; Jonah, and speak not according to human favor or reckoning, Isa. 56:10; Mic. 3:5, 11. Therefore they are precisely prophets, speakers in Jehovah's name and of His word. And therewith they know then to give all that they have received, Deut. 4:2, 12:32; Jer. 1:7, 17, 26:2, 42:4; Ezek. 3:10. And from the same urge may and must also the writing of the prophets be derived. The literal texts where a command to write is given are few, Exod. 17:14, 24:3, 4, 34:27; Num. 33:2; Deut. 4:2, 12:32, 31:19; Isa. 8:1, 30:8; Jer. 25:13, 30:1, 36:2, 24, 27-32; Ezek. 24:1; Dan. 12:4; Hab. 2:2 and apply but to a very small part of the Old Testament Scripture. But the written recording is indeed a later, yet necessary stage in the history of prophetism. Many prophecies were surely never spoken but were destined to be read and pondered. Most are wrought with care, even with art, and show already by their form to be destined for writing. The recording of the oracles was guided by the thought that Israel was no longer to be saved by deeds, that now and in distant generations the service of Jehovah must find entrance through word and reasonable conviction. They went to writing because they wished to address others than only those who could hear them.
Between the receiving and the spoken or written word there is difference. There would be nothing demeaning for the prophets if they had recorded the received word as literally as possible. But the revelation continued also in the moment of theopneusty and modified and completed the earlier revelation, and this was thus freely reproduced. But therefore precisely the prophets claim for their written word the same authority as for the spoken word. Even the interjections of the prophets between the proper words of Jehovah, e.g., Isa. 6, 10:24-12:6, 31:1-3, 32, or the elaboration of a word of Jehovah by the prophet, 52:7-12, 63:15-64:12 make no exception thereto. The transition from the word of Jehovah to the word of the prophet and vice versa is oftentimes so sudden, and both are so intertwined, e.g., Jer. 13:18 etc., that separation is not possible. They have the same authority, Jer. 36:10, 11, 25:3. Isaiah calls 34:16 his own recorded prophecies the Book of Jehovah.
The prophets do not derive their revelation from the law. Although from their writings the extent of the Torah cannot be determined, yet prophecy presupposes a Torah. All prophets stand on the foundation of a law, they place themselves with their opponents on a common basis. They all presuppose a covenant made by God with Israel, a gracious election of Israel, Hos. 1:1-3, 6:7, 8:3; Jer. 11:6 etc., 14:21, 22:9, 31:31 etc.; Ezek. 16:8 etc.; Isa. 54:10, 56:4, 6, 59:21. The prophets are not the creators of a new religion, of an ethical monotheism. The relation of Jehovah to Israel was never like that of Chemosh to Moab. The prophets never speak of such a contrast between their religion and that of the people. They acknowledge that the people through almost all ages have been guilty of idolatry; but they always and uniformly regard that as unfaithfulness and apostasy, they proceed from the fact that the people knew better. They connect with the people to the same revelation, to the same history. They speak from the conviction that they with the people have the same service of God in common, that Jehovah hath chosen and called them to His service. Therein they find their strength, and therefore they test the people by the relation existing by right between them and Jehovah, Hos. 12:14; Mic. 6:4, 8; Isa. 63:11; Jer. 7:25 etc. The Torah denotes not only God's instruction in general, but is oftentimes also the name for the already existing, objective revelation of Jehovah, Isa. 2:3; Mic. 4:2; Amos 2:4; Hos. 8:1, 4:6; Jer. 18:18; Ezek. 7:26; Zeph. 3:4. The covenant of God with Israel, on whose foundation the prophets stand with the whole people, naturally includes also all manner of ordinances and rights, and the prophets therefore speak repeatedly of commandments, Isa. 48:18; Jer. 8:13, statutes Isa. 24:5; Jer. 44:10, 23; Ezek. 5:6, 7, 11:12, 20, 18:9, 17, 20:11 etc., 36:27, 37:24; Amos 2:4; Zech. 1:6; Mal. 3:7, 4:4; judgments, Ezek. 5:7, 11:12 etc. This Torah must have contained the doctrine of the unity of Jehovah, of His creation and government of all things, the prohibition of idolatry, and other religious and moral commandments, and further also all manner of ceremonial (Sabbath, sacrifice, cleanness etc.) and historical (creation, exodus from Egypt, covenant-making etc.) elements. Over the extent of the Torah before prophetism there may be difference, the relation of law and prophets cannot be reversed without colliding with the whole history of Israel and the essence of prophetism. The prophet in Israel was as it were the living voice of the law and the mediator of its fulfillment.
It is a priori likely that among a people so long acquainted with the art of writing the law also will have existed long in written form. In Hos. 8:12 this also seems to be expressed. This Torah had from the beginning authority among Israel. Of doubt or contest nothing is known. Moses among all prophets held a wholly unique place, Exod. 33:11; Num. 12:6-8; Deut. 18:18; Ps. 103:7, 106:23; Isa. 63:11; Jer. 15:1 etc. He stood to Jehovah in a special relation; the Lord spoke with him as a friend with his friend. He was the Mediator of the Old Testament. Everywhere the law ascribes to itself a divine origin. It is Jehovah who through Moses hath given the Torah to Israel. Not only the ten words Exod. 20 and the Book of the Covenant Exod. 21-23; but also all other laws are derived from a speaking of God to Moses. Every moment the formula occurs in the laws of the Pentateuch: the Lord said or spoke to Moses. Almost every chapter begins therewith, Exod. 25:1, 30:11, 17, 22, 31:1, 32:9 etc.; Lev. 1:1, 4:1, 6:1 etc.; Num. 1:1, 2:1, 3:44, 4:1 etc. And Deuteronomy wills to give nothing but what Moses hath spoken to the children of Israel, Deut. 1:6, 2:1, 2, 17, 3:2, 5:2, 6:1 etc.
The historical books of the Old Testament are all written by prophets and in prophetic spirit, 1 Chron. 29:29; 2 Chron. 9:29, 20:34 etc. The prophets refer in their addresses and writings not only repeatedly to Israel's history, but they are also those who have preserved, wrought, and handed down this to us. But they intend thereby by no means to provide us a faithful and connected narrative of the fortunes of the Israelite people, as other historians aim. The prophets place themselves also in the historical books of the Old Testament on the foundation of the Torah and view and describe from her standpoint the history of Israel, Judg. 2:6-3:6; 2 Kings 17:7-23, 34-41. The historical books are the commentary in facts of the covenant of God with Israel. They are no history in our sense but prophecy, and will be judged by another standard than the history books of other peoples. It is not their concern that we should gain accurate knowledge of Israel's history, but that we in the history of Israel should understand the revelation of God, His thought and His counsel. The prophets are always proclaimers of the word of Jehovah, as well when they look backward in history as when they gaze forward into the future.
What finally concerns the books in the narrower sense poetic that are included in the canon, these all bear like the other Old Testament writings a religious-ethical character. They presuppose the revelation of God as their objective foundation and show the outworking and application of that revelation in the diverse conditions and relations of human life. Ecclesiastes sketches the vanity of the world without and over against the fear of the Lord. Job occupies himself with the problem of the righteousness of God and the suffering of the pious. Proverbs paint for us the true wisdom in her application to the rich human life. The Song of Songs sings the intimacy and the strength of love. And the Psalms show us in the mirror of the experiences of the pious the manifold grace of God. The lyric and didactic poetry enters under Israel into the service of the revelation of God. According to 2 Sam. 23:1-3 David spoke, the sweet psalmist of Israel, by the Spirit of Jehovah and His word was on his tongue.
As the various writings of the Old Testament arose and became known, they were also recognized as authoritative. The laws of Jehovah were laid in the sanctuary, Exod. 25:22, 38:21, 40:20; Deut. 31:9, 26; Josh. 24:25 etc.; 1 Sam. 10:25. The poetic productions were preserved, Deut. 31:19; Josh. 10:13; 2 Sam. 1:18; the Psalms were already early collected for the sake of the worship, Ps. 72:20; of the Proverbs the men of Hezekiah already laid a second collection, Prov. 25:1. The prophecies were much read, Ezekiel knows Isaiah and Jeremiah, later prophets appeal to the preceding. Daniel, ch. 9:2 knows already a collection of prophetic writings, to which Jeremiah also belonged. In the post-exilic community the authority of law and prophecies stands firm, as clearly appears from Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah. Jesus ben Sirach sets law and prophets very high, ch. 15:1-8, 24:23, 39:1 etc.; ch. 44-49. In the preface his grandson mentions three parts into which the Scripture is divided. The LXX contains various apocryphal writings, but these witness themselves to the authority of the canonical books, 1 Macc. 2:50; 2 Macc. 6:23; Wis. 11:1, 18:4; Bar. 2:28; Tob. 1:6, 14:7; Sir. 1:5, 17:12, 24:23, 39:1, 46:15, 48:25 etc. Philo cites only canonical books. The fourth book of Ezra ch. 14:18-47 knows the division into 24 books. Josephus, c. Ap. 1, 8, counts 22 books in three parts. By common consent the Old Testament canon of Philo and Josephus was like ours.
10. The Canon of the Old Testament. This canon of the Old Testament held for Jesus and the apostles, as well as for their contemporaries, divine authority. This is plainly shown by the following facts: a) The formula whereby the Old Testament is quoted in the New is varied but always proves that the Old Testament, for the writers of the New Testament, is of divine origin and bears divine authority. Jesus sometimes quotes a passage from the Old Testament with the name of the writer, for example, of Moses, Mt. 8:4, 19:8; Mk. 7:10; Jn. 5:45, 7:22; Isaiah, Mt. 15:7; Mk. 13:14; David, Mt. 22:43; Daniel, Mt. 24:15, but often also with the formula: it stands written, Mt. 4:4 etc., 11:10; Lk. 10:26; Jn. 6:45, 8:47, or: the Scripture says, Mt. 21:42; Lk. 4:21; Jn. 7:38, 10:35, or even according to the primary author, that is, God or the Holy Ghost, Mt. 15:4, 22:43, 45, 24:15; Mk. 12:26. The Evangelists often use the expression: that which was spoken by the prophet, Mt. 1:22, 2:15, 17, 23, 3:3 etc., or by the Lord or by the Holy Ghost, Mt. 1:22, 2:15; Lk. 1:70; Acts 1:16, 3:18, 4:25, 28:25. John usually quotes by the secondary author, ch. 1:23, 46, 12:38. Paul always speaks of the Scripture, Rom. 4:3, 9:17, 10:11, 11:2; Gal. 4:30; 1 Tim. 5:18 etc., which is sometimes even presented wholly personally, Gal. 3:8, 22, 4:30; Rom. 9:17. The Epistle to the Hebrews mostly names God or the Holy Ghost as the primary author, 1:5 etc., 3:7, 4:3, 5, 5:6, 7:21, 8:5, 8, 10:16, 30, 12:26, 13:5. This manner of quoting teaches clearly and plainly that the Scripture of the Old Covenant, for Jesus and the apostles, was indeed composed of various parts and derived from various writers, but yet formed one organic whole, which had God himself as author. b) Many times this divine authority of the Old Testament Scripture is also decidedly declared and taught by Jesus and the apostles, Mt. 5:17; Lk. 16:17, 29; Jn. 10:35; Rom. 15:4; 1 Pet. 1:10-12; 2 Pet. 1:19, 21; 2 Tim. 3:16. The Scripture is a unity, which can neither in its whole nor in its parts be broken or destroyed. In the last quoted text, the translation: every God-breathed Scripture is also useful, is pressed by the objection that then after "useful" the predicate "is" could not have been lacking. The rendering: every scripture, quite in general, is God-breathed and useful, is excluded by the nature of the matter. There remains thus only a choice between the two translations: the whole Scripture, or: every Scripture, namely, that which is included in the holy writings, vs. 15, is God-breathed. In substance this gives no difference, and with a view to places like Mt. 2:3; Acts 2:36; 2 Cor. 12:12; Eph. 1:8, 2:21, 3:15; Col. 4:12; 1 Pet. 1:15; Jas. 1:2, "all" without the article yet seems also well able to mean "whole." c) Never do Jesus or the apostles stand critically over against the content of the Old Testament, but they accept it wholly and without reservation. In all parts, not only in the religious-ethical sayings or in those places where God himself speaks, but also in its historical elements, the Scripture of the Old Testament is unconditionally acknowledged by them as true and divine. Jesus holds, for example, Isa. 54 as coming from Isaiah, Mt. 13:14, Ps. 110 from David, Mt. 22:43, the prophecy quoted in Mt. 24:15 from Daniel, and ascribes the law to Moses, Jn. 5:46. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are repeatedly quoted and unconditionally believed, for example, the creation of man, Mt. 19:4, 5; Abel's murder, Mt. 23:35; the flood, Mt. 24:37-39; the history of the patriarchs, Mt. 22:32, Jn. 8:56; the destruction of Sodom, Mt. 11:23, Lk. 17:28-33; the burning bush, Lk. 20:37; the serpent in the wilderness, Jn. 3:14; the manna, Jn. 6:32; the history of Elijah, Lk. 4:25, 26; Naaman, ibid., Jonah, Mt. 12:39-41 etc. d) Dogmatically, the Old Testament for Jesus and the apostles is the seat of doctrine, the fount of solutions, the end of every dispute. The Old Testament is fulfilled in the New. It is often presented as if all things happened with the purpose to fulfill the Holy Scripture, that the word might be fulfilled, Mt. 1:22 and passim, Mk. 14:49, 15:28; Lk. 4:21, 24:44; Jn. 13:18, 17:12, 19:24, 36; Acts 1:16; Jas. 2:23 etc. Even in small particulars this fulfillment is noted, Mt. 21:16; Lk. 4:21, 22:37; Jn. 15:25, 17:12, 19:28 etc.; all that happened to Jesus was beforehand described in the Old Testament, Lk. 18:31-33. Jesus and the apostles justify their conduct and prove their doctrine repeatedly with an appeal to the Old Testament, Mt. 12:3, 22:32; Jn. 10:34; Rom. 4; Gal. 3; 1 Cor. 15 etc. And this divine authority of the Scripture extends so far for them that even a single word, yea a tittle and jot, is covered thereby, Mt. 5:17, 22:45; Lk. 16:17; Jn. 10:35; Gal. 3:16. e) Nevertheless, the Old Testament in the New Testament is usually quoted according to the Greek translation of the Septuagint. The writers of the New Testament, writing in Greek and for Greek readers, commonly used the translation that was known to these and accessible to them. The quotations can be divided into three groups according to their relation to the Hebrew text and to the Greek translation. In some texts there is deviation from the Septuagint and agreement with the Hebrew text, e.g., Mt. 2:15, 18, 8:17, 12:18-21, 27:46; Jn. 19:37; Rom. 10:15, 16, 11:9; 1 Cor. 3:19, 15:54. In others there is conversely agreement with the Septuagint and deviation from the Hebrew, e.g., Mt. 15:8, 9; Acts 7:14, 15:16, 17; Eph. 4:8; Heb. 10:5, 11:21, 12:6. In a third group of quotations there is more or less important deviation both from Septuagint and Hebrew text, e.g., Mt. 2:6, 3:3, 26:31; Jn. 12:15, 13:18; Rom. 10:6-9; 1 Cor. 2:9. It also deserves notice that some books of the Old Testament, namely, Ezra, Neh., Ob., Nah., Zeph., Esth., Eccl., and Song, are never quoted in the New Testament; that indeed no apocryphal books are cited but yet in 2 Tim. 3:8; Heb. 11:34 etc.; Jude 9, 14 etc., names and facts are mentioned which do not occur in the Old Testament; and that a few times also Greek classics are quoted, Acts 17:28; 1 Cor. 15:33; Tit. 1:12. f) Finally, as regards the material use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, herein also there is great difference. Sometimes the quotations serve for proof and confirmation of some truth, e.g., Mt. 4:4, 7, 10, 9:13, 19:5, 22:32; Jn. 10:34; Acts 15:16, 23:5; Rom. 1:17, 3:10 etc., 4:3, 7, 9:7, 12, 13, 15, 17, 10:5; Gal. 3:10, 4:30; 1 Cor. 9:9, 10:26; 2 Cor. 6:17. Very often the Old Testament is quoted to prove that it must be fulfilled in the New Testament and is fulfilled; whether in a literal sense, Mt. 1:23, 3:3, 4:15, 16, 8:17, 12:18, 13:14, 15, 21:42, 27:46; Mk. 15:28; Lk. 4:17 etc.; Jn. 12:38; Acts 2:17, 3:22, 7:37, 8:32, etc., or in a typical sense, Mt. 11:14, 12:39 etc., 17:11; Lk. 1:17; Jn. 3:14, 19:36; 1 Cor. 5:7, 10:4; 2 Cor. 6:16; Gal. 3:13, 4:21; Heb. 2:6-8, 7:1-10, etc. Many times the quotations from the Old Testament serve simply for clarification, explanation, admonition, consolation, etc., e.g., Lk. 2:23; Jn. 7:38; Acts 7:3, 42; Rom. 8:36; 1 Cor. 2:16, 10:7; 2 Cor. 4:13, 8:15, 13:1; Heb. 12:5, 13:5; 1 Pet. 1:16, 24, 25, 2:9. In that use we are often surprised by the sense which the New Testament writers find in the text of the Old Testament; so especially in Mt. 2:15, 18, 23, 21:5, 22:32, 26:31, 27:9, 10, 35; Jn. 19:37; Acts 1:20, 2:31; 1 Cor. 9:9; Gal. 3:16, 4:22 etc.; Eph. 4:8 etc.; Heb. 2:6-8, 10:5. This exegesis of the Old in the New Testament presupposes in Jesus and the apostles the thought that a word or sentence can have much deeper meaning and much further reach than the writer suspected or laid down therein. This is also many times the case with classical writers. No one will think that Goethe, in writing down his classical poetry, had in mind all that which is now found therein. Hamerling has clearly expressed this in his Epilogue to the Critics. With the Scripture this is yet in much stronger measure the case, because according to the conviction of Jesus and his apostles it has the Holy Ghost as primary author and bears a teleological character. Not in those few above-mentioned places only, but in the whole conception and explanation of the Old Testament, the New Testament is borne by the thought that the Israelite finds its fulfillment in the Christian. The whole economy of the Old Covenant with all its institutions and laws and in all its history points forward to the dispensation of the New Covenant. Not Talmudism, but Christianity is the rightful heir of the treasures of salvation promised to Abraham and his seed.
Glassius, Philologia Sacra. Surenhusius, The Book of Reconciliation, in which according to the ancient theology of the Hebrews the formulas of alleging and modes of interpreting are reconciled to the places of the Old Testament alleged in the New Testament, Amst. J. Hoffmann, Demonstration of the Gospel by the very consensus of the Scriptures in the oracles from the Old Testament alleged in the New, Tub. Th. Randolph, The prophecies and other texts cited in the New Testament compared with the Hebrew Original and with the Septuagint version, Oxf. Dr. H. Owen, The modes of quotation used by the evangelical writers explained and vindicated, Lond. F. H. Horne, An introduction to the critical study and knowledge of the holy Scriptures, 4 vol. Lond. C. Sepp, The doctrine of the New Testament concerning the Holy Scripture of the Old Covenant. Tholuck, The Old Testament in the New. Rothe, On Dogmatics. Hofmann, Prophecy and Fulfillment in the Old and New Testament. E. Haupt, The Old Testament Quotations in the Four Gospels. Kautzsch, On the Places of the Old Testament Alleged by Paul. E. Böhl, Researches toward a People's Bible at the Time of Jesus. Id. The Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament. K. Walz, The Doctrine of the Church concerning the Scripture Tested according to the Scripture Itself, Leiden. Kuenen, The Prophets. Caven, Our Lord's Testimony to the Old Testament, Presb. and Ref. Rev. A. Clemen, The Use of the Old Testament in the New. Kuyper, Encyclopedia. Hans Vollmer, The Old Testament Quotations with Paul, etc., Freiburg.
11. For the Inspiration of the New Testament. For the inspiration of the New Testament, we find in the writings of the apostles the following data:
a) Jesus’ witness holds in the whole New Testament as godly, truthful, infallible. He is the Logos, who declares the Father, John 1:18, 17:6; ho martus ho pistos kai alēthinos , Rev. 1:5, 3:14; cf. Isa. 55:4, the Amen, in whom all the promises of God are yea and amen, Rev. 3:14; 2 Cor. 1:20. There was no guile, dolos , in his mouth, 1 Pet. 2:22. He is the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Heb. 3:1; 1 Tim. 6:13. He speaks not ek tōn idiōn , like Satan who is a liar, John 8:44. But God speaks through Him, Heb. 5:1. Jesus is sent by God, John 8:42, and speaks nothing but what He has seen and heard, John 3:32. He speaks the words of God, John 3:34, 17:8, and bears witness only to the truth, 5:33, 18:37. Therefore His witness is true, John 8:14, 14:6, confirmed by the witness of God Himself, 5:32, 37, 8:18. Not only is Jesus holy and without sin in the ethical sense, John 8:46, but He is also without error, lie, or deceit in the intellectual sense. It is wholly true that Jesus did not move in the stricter sense on the field of science. He came to earth to declare to us the Father and to fulfill His work. But the inspiration of Scripture, about which Jesus speaks, is not a scientific problem but a religious truth. If He erred herein, He was mistaken on a point that is closely bound up with the religious life, and He can no longer be acknowledged as our highest prophet even in religion and theology. The doctrine of the godly authority of Holy Scripture forms a weighty part in the words of God which Jesus proclaimed. This infallibility in Jesus, however, was no extraordinary, supernatural gift; no donum gratiae and no actus transiens ; but a habit, a nature. If Jesus had written anything, He would not have needed any special assistance of the Holy Ghost therein. He had no need of inspiration as an extraordinary gift, because He received the Spirit not by measure, John 3:34, was the Logos, John 1:1, and the fullness of God dwelt in Him bodily, Col. 1:19, 2:9.
b) Jesus, however, has left us nothing in writing, and He Himself has gone away. Thus He had to take care that His true witness be handed over unadulterated and pure to mankind. To this end He chooses the apostles. The apostolate is an extraordinary office and a wholly special service in Jesus’ church. The apostles are given to Him expressly by the Father, John 17:6, chosen by Himself, John 6:70, 13:18, 15:16, 19, and prepared and fitted by Him in all manner of ways for their future task. That task consisted in this, that they should afterward, after Jesus’ departure, appear as witnesses , Luke 24:48; John 15:27. They had been ear- and eye-witnesses of Jesus’ words and works; they had beheld the word of life with their eyes and handled it with their hands, 1 John 1:1, and now had to bring this witness concerning Jesus to Israel and to the whole world, Matt. 28:19; John 15:27, 17:20; Acts 1:8. But all men are liars, God alone is true, Rom. 3:4. The apostles too were unfit for this task of witnessing. They were not the proper witnesses. Jesus uses them only as instruments. The proper witness, who is faithful and true like Himself, is the Holy Ghost. He is the Spirit of truth, and shall bear witness of Jesus, John 15:26, and the apostles can appear as witnesses only after and through Him, John 15:27. That Spirit is therefore promised and given to the apostles in a special sense, Matt. 10:20; John 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, 20:22. Especially John 14:26 teaches this clearly. The Holy Ghost hypomnēsei hymas panta ha eipon hymin . He will take the disciples with their persons and gifts, with their memory and judgment, etc., into His service. He will add nothing new materially to the revelation, nothing that is not already contained in Christ’s person, word, and work, for He takes all from Christ and in so far only reminds the apostles and thus leads them into all truth, John 14:26, 16:13, 14. And this witness of the Holy Ghost through the mouth of the apostles is the glorification of Jesus, John 16:14, even as Jesus’ witness was a glorification of the Father, 17:4.
c) Equipped with that Spirit in a special sense, John 20:22; Acts 1:8; Eph. 3:5, the apostles after Pentecost also appear openly as witnesses, Acts 1:8, 21, 22, 2:14, 32, 3:15, 4:8, 20, 33, 5:32, 10:39, 51, 13:31. In the giving of witness of what they have seen and heard lies the meaning of the apostolate. Thereto they are called and fitted. Therefrom they derive their authority. Thereon they appeal in the face of opposition and resistance. And God again seals their witness with signs and wonders, and spiritual blessing, Matt. 10:1, 9; Mark 16:15 ff.; Acts 2:43, 3:2, 5:12-16, 6:8, 8:6 ff., 10:44, 11:21, 14:3, 15:8, etc. The apostles are from the beginning, by their own right, the leaders of the Jerusalem church, they have oversight over the believers in Samaria, Acts 8:14, visit the churches, Acts 9:32, 11:22, take decisions in the Holy Ghost, Acts 15:22, 28, and enjoy a generally acknowledged authority. They speak and act by the power of Christ. And although Jesus nowhere gave an express command also to record His words and deeds—only in Revelation is there repeated mention of a command to write, 1:11, 19, etc.—the apostles speak in their writings with the same authority; writing is a special form of witnessing. Also in writing, they are witnesses of Christ, Luke 1:2; John 1:14, 19:35, 20:31, 21:24; 1 John 1:1-4; 1 Pet. 1:12, 5:1; 2 Pet. 1:16; Heb. 2:3; Rev. 1:3, 22:18, 19. Their witness is faithful and true, John 19:35; 3 John 12.
d) Among the apostles, Paul again stands by himself. He sees himself called to defend his apostolate against the Judaizers, Gal. 1-2; 1 Cor. 1:10-4:21; 2 Cor. 10-13. He maintains against that opposition that he is set apart from his mother’s womb, Gal. 1:14; called by Jesus Himself to be an apostle, Gal. 1:1; has seen Jesus Himself personally, 1 Cor. 9:1, 15:8; was favored with revelations and visions, 2 Cor. 12; Acts 26:16; has received his Gospel from Jesus Himself, Gal. 1:12; 1 Tim. 1:12; Eph. 3:2-8, and thus is as much as the other apostles an independent and trustworthy witness, especially among the Gentiles, Acts 26:16; his apostolate too is confirmed with wonders and signs, 1 Cor. 12:10, 28; Rom. 12:4-8, 15:18, 19; 2 Cor. 11:23 ff.; Gal. 3:5; Heb. 2:4; and with spiritual blessing, 1 Cor. 15:10; 2 Cor. 11:5, etc. He is therefore conscious that there is no other gospel than his, Gal. 1:7; that he is faithful, 1 Cor. 7:25; has the Spirit of God, 1 Cor. 7:40; that Christ speaks through him, 2 Cor. 13:3; 1 Cor. 2:10, 16; 2 Cor. 2:17, 5:23; that he proclaims God’s word, 2 Cor. 2:17; 1 Thess. 2:13; even to the expressions and words, 1 Cor. 2:4, 10-13; and not only when he speaks but also when he writes, 1 Thess. 5:27; Col. 4:16; 2 Thess. 2:15, 3:14. Like the other apostles, Paul often appears with apostolic power, 1 Cor. 5; 2 Cor. 2:9, and gives binding commands, 1 Cor. 7:40; 1 Thess. 4:2, 11; 2 Thess. 3:6-14. And indeed he appeals once to the judgment of the church, 1 Cor. 10:15, but not to subject his statement to its approval or disapproval, but on the contrary to be justified by the conscience and judgment of the church, which also has the Spirit of God and the anointing of the Holy One, 1 John 2:20. So little does Paul make himself dependent on the judgment of the church, that in 1 Cor. 14:37 he says that if anyone thinks himself a prophet and has the Spirit, this will just show itself in his acknowledgment that what Paul writes are the commandments of the Lord.
e) These writings of the apostles had authority from the beginning in the churches where they were known. They were soon spread and thereby gained ever wider authority, Acts 15:22 ff.; Col. 4:16. The Synoptic Gospels show such great kinship that one must have been known wholly or partly to the others. Jude is known to Peter, and 2 Pet. 3:16 already knows many epistles of Paul and places them on a line with the other Scriptures. Gradually there came translations of New Testament writings for reading in the church, Justin Martyr, Apol. 1:67. In the first half of the second century these must already have existed, Papias in Eusebius, H. E. 3:39. Justin Martyr, Apol. 1:66, 67. A dogmatic use is already made of them by Athenagoras, de resurr. c. 16, who there proves his reasoning with 1 Cor. 15:33; 2 Cor. 5:10. And Theophilus, ad Autol. 3:4, cites texts from Paul with the formula, didaskei, keleuei ho theios logos . Irenaeus, adv. haer. 3, 11, Tertullian, ad Prax. 15, and others, the Peshitto and the Muratorian fragment place it beyond all doubt that in the second half of the second century most writings of the New Testament had canonical authority and enjoyed equal dignity with the books of the Old Testament. Over some books, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, there remained difference, Eusebius, H. E. 3:25. But the objections against these antilegomena became fewer in the third century. And the Synod of Laodicea in 360, of Hippo Regius in 393, and of Carthage in 397 could also include these antilegomena and close the canon. These decisions of the church were no arbitrary and authoritative act, but only codification and registration of the right that had long existed in the churches with regard to these writings. The canon is not formed by a decision of councils. The canon was not produced by men in one act, as they say, but gradually by God, the ruler of souls and times. In the important controversy of Harnack and Zahn on the history of the New Testament canon, Harnack undoubtedly lays too one-sided emphasis on the concepts of divinity, infallibility, inspiration, canon, on the formal establishment of the dogma of the New Testament Scripture. Long before this happened in the second half of the second century, the New Testament writings had come to generally acknowledged authority through the authority of the apostles, the reading in the church, etc. To this inner process Zahn very rightly draws attention.
f) What principles guided the church, under both the Old and New Testament, in this acknowledgment of the canonicity of the Old and New Testament writings, cannot be determined with certainty. The apostolic origin cannot have been decisive, for Mark, Luke, and Hebrews are also included. Neither does the acknowledgment of canonicity have its ground in the fact that no other writings concerning Christ existed, for Luke 1:1 mentions many others, and according to Irenaeus, adv. haer. 1:20, there was an innumerable multitude of apocryphal and spurious writings. The principle of canon formation cannot lie in the size and importance, for 2 and 3 John are very small; nor in the fame of the writers, Mark, Luke, with the apostles, for epistles of Clement and Barnabas were not included; nor in originality, for Matthew, Mark, and Luke; Ephesians and Colossians; Jude and 2 Peter are dependent one on the other. Nothing else can be said than that the acknowledgment of these writings took place without any agreement, of itself in all churches. With a few exceptions, the Old and New Testament writings were immediately, from their origin, accepted in their entirety, without a word of doubt or protest, as holy, godly writings. The place and time where authority was first accorded them cannot be pointed out. The canonicity of the Bible books roots in their existence. They have authority of themselves, by their own right, because they are. It is the Spirit of the Lord who guided in the writing and brought them to acknowledgment in the church.
12. The Outcome of this Inquiry. The outcome of this inquiry into the teaching of Scripture about itself can be summed up in this, that it holds and gives itself out as the word of God. The saying "word of God" or "word of the Lord" has in Scripture sundry meanings. Ofttimes it marks the might of God, whereby He shapes and upholds all things, Gen. 1:3; Ps. 33:6, 147:17, 18, 148:18; Rom. 4:17; Heb. 1:3, 11:3. Next, it is so named the special unveiling, whereby God makes something known to the prophets. In the Old Testament, the saying comes in this sense on nearly every leaf; time and again it says there: the word of the Lord came to pass. In the New Testament, we find it in this sense only in John 10:35; the word now happens no more and comes not a single time from above and from without to the prophets, it has come to pass in Christ and abides. Further, "word of God" means the inhold of the unveiling; then there is talk of word or words of God, alongside rights, laws, behests, statutes, which are given to Israel, Ex. 9:20, 21; Judg. 3:20; Ps. 33:4, 119:9, 16, 17 and so on; Isa. 40:8; Rom. 3:2 and so on. In the New Testament, it is so called the Gospel, which by God in Christ is unveiled and by the apostles proclaimed, Luke 5:1; John 3:34, 5:24, 6:63, 17:8, 14, 17; Acts 8:25, 13:7; 1 Thess. 2:13 and so on. Not unlikely is it, that the name "word of God" then further in Scripture is used a single time, to mark therewith the written law, thus a part of Scripture, Ps. 119:11, 105. In the New Testament, such a place cannot be pointed out. Also Heb. 4:12 is "word of God" not the same as Scripture. But yet the New Testament truly sees in the books of the Old Testament nothing other than the word of God. God, or the Holy Ghost, is the first author, who spoke through the prophets in Scripture, Acts 1:16, 28:25. Scripture is then so named both for its spring and for its inhold. The formly and matterly meaning of the saying is in Scripture most nearly bound together. And lastly, the name "word of God" is wielded for Christ himself. He is the Logos in a wholly one-of-a-kind sense, revealer and revelation at once. All unveilings of God, all words of God, in kind and yore, in shaping and reshaping, under Old and New Testament, have in Him their ground, their oneness, and midpoint. He is the sun; the other words of God are His beams. The word of God in kind, under Israel, in the New Testament, in Scripture may not for a twinkling be loosed from Him and thought away. There is only unveiling of God, because He is the Logos. He is the beginning of knowing, in broad sense of all wit, in sundry sense, as the Logos become flesh, of all knowing of God, of belief and god-lore, Matt. 11:27.
13. The Holy Writ offers us nowhere a clearly set forth dogma about inspiration, but it gives the matter itself, the fact of theopneusty, and all the elements that are needful for the building of the dogma. It teaches the theopneusty of Writ in the same sense and in the same wise, just as clearly and just as plainly, but also just as little shaped in abstract thoughts as the dogma of the Trinity, of the flesh-becoming, of the atonement, and the like.
This has often been gainsaid. Every wayward and heretical bent begins almost at once with a call upon the Writ against the confession, and seeks to make its straying seem as if bidden by the Writ. But in most cases, deeper searching leads to the owning that the right belief has the witness of Writ on its side.
The moderns now for the most part freely grant that Jesus and the apostles took the Old Testament Writ as God's word, as Lipsius, Strauss, Pfleiderer, and others say. Rothe owns this also toward the apostles, but holds that the churchly dogmatics cannot call upon Jesus for its teaching of inspiration.
This thought, however, stands well-nigh alone and is shared by few. Jesus' forthright sayings about the Old Testament Writ, in Matthew 5:18; Luke 16:17; John 10:35, his drawing upon and use of it, in Matthew 19:4, 5, 22:43, and so forth, speak too strongly thereto, and are nothing freer than those of the apostles.
But this setting against, which Rothe makes between the teaching of Jesus and that of the apostles, uplifts not but truly undermines the sway of Jesus himself. For of Jesus we know nothing save through the apostles; whoso then discredits the apostles and sets them forth as untrustworthy witnesses of the truth, straightway speaks against Jesus himself, who set his apostles as fully trustworthy witnesses and would lead them by his Spirit into all truth.
And thereto belongs for sure also the truth about the Holy Writ. The watchword: back to Christ is beguiling and false, when it stands over against the witness of the apostles.
Very common is also another contrast, which is made to be freed from the self-witness of the Scripture. The Scripture, so it is said, may teach inspiration here and there; but to build up the doctrine of the Scripture concerning the Scripture, the facts must also be taken into account, which the Scripture in its origin, formation, history, composition, and content makes known to us. Only such a theory of inspiration is therefore true and good, which is compatible with the phenomena of the Scripture, and is derived from these very ones. Very often it is then presented as if the opposing party imposes its own aprioristic opinion upon the Scripture, and forces it into the corset of scholasticism. And appeal is made to the fact that, over against all those theories and systems, one wishes precisely to let the Scripture itself speak and only to let it witness of itself. The orthodoxy lacks precisely reverence for the Scripture. It does violence to the text, to the facts of the Holy Scripture. Dr. G. Wildeboer, Letterk. des O. V. This representation sounds beautiful and acceptable at first hearing, but upon closer consideration proves untenable.
The contrast is in the first place not that between one or another theory of inspiration and the self-witness of the Scripture. Inspiration is a fact, taught by the Holy Scripture itself. Jesus and the apostles have given a witness concerning the Scripture. The Scripture contains a doctrine also about itself. Abstracting from all dogmatic or scholastic development of this doctrine, the question is simply this, whether the Scripture in this its self-witness deserves belief, or not. There can be difference over the question, whether the Scripture teaches such a theopneustia of itself; but if yes, then it ought also therein to be believed, just as well as in its utterances about God, Christ, salvation, and so forth.
The so-called phenomena of the Scripture cannot overthrow that self-witness of the Scripture and may not even be summoned against it as a party. For whoever makes his doctrine of the Scripture dependent upon the historical investigation into its formation and structure, begins already with rejecting the self-witness of the Holy Scripture and thus stands no longer in the faith in that Scripture. He thinks to be able better to build up the doctrine of the Scripture from his own investigation, than to derive it in faith from the Scripture; he sets his own thoughts in the place of and above those of the Scripture.
Furthermore, the self-witness of the Scripture is clear, distinct, and even acknowledged as such by the opponents, but the consideration of the phenomena of the Scripture is the result of protracted historical-critical investigation and modifies itself in various forms according to the differing standpoint of the critics; the theologian who from such investigations wishes to come to a doctrine about the Scripture, in fact sets his scientific insight over against the doctrine of the Scripture concerning itself.
But by that way one never comes to a doctrine about the Scripture; historical-critical investigation can give a clear insight into the origin, the history, the structure of the Scripture but never leads to a doctrine, to a dogma of the Holy Scripture. This can naturally only be built upon a witness of the Scripture concerning itself. No one thinks of calling a history about the origin and the components of the Iliad a doctrine.
By this method therefore not only one or another theory about inspiration falls, but inspiration itself as fact and witness of the Scripture. Inspiration, if one still retains that word, then becomes nothing but the short summary of what the Bible is , or rather of what one thinks that the Bible is, and can then be directly in conflict with what the Bible itself claims to be, and for which it presents and announces itself.
The method which one follows is in essence no other than that whereby the doctrine of creation, of man, of sin, and so forth, is not built up from the witness of the Scripture concerning them, but from the independent study of those facts. In both cases it is a correcting of the doctrine of the Bible by one's own scientific investigation, a making dependent of the witness of the Scripture upon human judgment.
The facts and phenomena of the Scripture, the results of scientific investigation may serve for explanation, elucidation, and so forth, of the doctrine of the Scripture concerning itself, but can never annul the fact of inspiration, of which it witnesses.
While on the one hand it is asserted that only such an inspiration is acceptable which agrees with the phenomena of the Scripture, on this side the principle is that the phenomena of the Scripture, not as the criticism sees them, but as they are in themselves, are compatible with its self-witness.
14. Theopneusty or Inspiration. Commonly, in the word theopneusty or inspiration is summed up what the Scripture teaches concerning itself. The word theopneustos in 2 Tim. 3:16 does not appear earlier and is thus perhaps first used by Paul. Etymologically, it can have both an active and a passive meaning, and thus be translated either as: God-breathing, or: breathed by God. But the passive meaning is to be preferred, because it is most supported by the places where the word occurs outside the New Testament and is recommended by the Scripture teaching of the New Testament, 2 Pet. 1:21. In the Vulgate it is rendered by divinitus inspirata .
The word inspiration originally has a much broader sense. The Greeks and Romans ascribed to all who brought forth something great and good an afflatus or instinctus divinus . Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit , Cic. de Nat. D. 2, 66. Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo , Ovid. Fasti 6, 5. The inspiration of poets, artists, seers, and the like can indeed serve to clarify the inspiration of which the Holy Scripture speaks. Almost all great men have declared that their fairest thoughts suddenly and unwittingly arose in their souls and were a surprise to themselves. One testimony may suffice. Goethe once wrote to Eckermann, cited by Hoekstra, Theol. Contrib. 1864, pp. 27, 28: Every productivity of the highest kind, every significant insight, every invention, every great thought that bears fruit and has consequences, stands in no one's power and is exalted above all earthly might. Such things the man must regard as unhoped-for gifts from above, as pure children of God, which he is to receive and honor with joyful thanks. In such cases, man is to be regarded as the instrument of a higher world-government, as a vessel found worthy for the reception of a divine influence. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, 4th ed. London 1854, has therefore pointed to the heroes or geniuses as the core of the history of mankind. In their turn, these geniuses, in every field, have inspired the masses. Luther, Bacon, Napoleon, Hegel have overturned the thoughts of millions and changed their consciousness. This fact already teaches us that an influence of one spirit upon another is possible. The manner thereof is diverse, as when one man speaks to another, as the orator enlivens the crowd by his word, as the hypnotist transplants his thought into the magnetized one, and so forth, but always there is suggestion of thoughts, inspiration in a broader sense.
Now Scripture teaches us that the world is not self-standing and exists and lives out of itself, but that the Spirit of God is immanent in all creation. The immanence of God is the foundation for all inspiration and theopneusty, Ps. 104:30; 139:7; Job 33:4. Being and life are inspired into every creature from moment to moment by the Spirit. Still nearer is that Spirit of the Lord the principle of all understanding and wisdom, Job 32:8; Isa. 11:2, so that all knowledge and art, all talent and genius come forth from Him. In the church He is the Spirit of regeneration and renewal, Ps. 51:13; Ezek. 36:26, 27; John 3:3; the distributor of gifts, 1 Cor. 12:4-6. In the prophets He is the Spirit of prophecy, Num. 11:25; 24:2, 3; Isa. 11:2; 42:1; Mic. 3:8, etc. And so also in the composition of Scripture He is the Spirit of inspiration. This last working of the Holy Spirit does not stand alone; it stands in connection with His whole immanent working in the world and in the church. It is the crown and the pinnacle of all. The inspiration of the writers in the making of the Bible books is built upon all those other workings of the Holy Spirit. It presupposes a work of the Father, whereby the organs of revelation long beforehand from birth, yea even before birth in their lineage, surroundings, upbringing, development, etc., were prepared for that task to which they would later be specially called, Ex. 3-4; Jer. 1:5; Acts 7:22; Gal. 1:15, etc.
Therefore inspiration must not, as the moderns do, be identified with the heroic, poetic, religious enthusiasm; it is not a work of the general providence of God, not an influence of God's Spirit in like measure and in the same manner as in the heroes and artists, although it is true that this influence of God's Spirit in the prophets and Bible writers is often presupposed. The Spirit in creation works toward the Spirit in re-creation. Furthermore, in the proper inspiration there is also presupposed a preceding work of the Son. The gift of theopneusty is bestowed only within the circle of revelation. Theophany, prophecy, and miracle precede the proper inspiration. Revelation and inspiration are distinct; the former is a work of the Son, of the Logos, the latter of the Holy Spirit. There is thus truth in the thought of Schleiermacher, that the holy writers stood under the influence of the holy circle in which they lived. Revelation and inspiration must be distinguished. But inspiration is not identical with revelation. It is rooted in this, but it rises above it. Finally, inspiration usually, though not always, presupposes also a work of the Holy Spirit Himself in regeneration, faith, and conversion. The prophets and apostles were mostly holy men, children of God. This thought of ethical theology thus contains elements of truth. But yet inspiration is not identical with regeneration. Regeneration embraces the whole man, inspiration is a working in the consciousness. The former sanctifies and renews, the latter enlightens and instructs. The former does not of itself bring inspiration with it, and inspiration is possible without regeneration, Num. 23:5; John 11:51; cf. Num. 22:28; 1 Sam. 19:24; Heb. 6:4. Regeneration is a permanent habit, inspiration is a transient act.
With all these named workings of God, therefore, inspiration stands in the closest connection. It must not be isolated from them. It is taken up in all those influences of God in all creation. But here too the evolution-theory must be opposed, as if the higher would come forth only through immanent development out of the lower. The working of God's Spirit in nature, in mankind, in the church, in the prophets, in the Bible writers is related and analogous, but not identical. There is harmony, no identity.
15. Wherein Does It Itself Consist? The Scripture sheds light thereon, as it says many times that the Lord speaks through the prophets or through the mouth of his prophets. From God the preposition hypo is used; He is the speaker, He is the proper subject; but the prophets are speaking or writing as His organs, from them the preposition dia with genitive is always used and never hypo , Mt. 1:22, 2:15, 17, 23, 3:3, 4:14, etc.; Lk. 1:70; Acts 1:16, 3:18, 4:25, 28:25. God, or the Holy Ghost, is the proper speaker, the spokesman, the primary author, and the writers are the organs through whom God speaks, the secondary authors, the scribes or writers. Further clarification is given in 2 Pet. 1:19-21, where the origin of prophecy is not sought in the will of man, but in the driving of God's Spirit. The pheresthai , cf. Acts 27:15, 17 where the ship is driven by the wind, is essentially distinct from the agesthai of the children of God, Rom. 8:14; the prophets are borne, driven by the Holy Ghost and spoke accordingly. And likewise the proclamation of the apostles is called a speaking (en ) in the Holy Spirit, Mt. 10:20; Jn. 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1 Cor. 2:10-13, 16, 7:40; 2 Cor. 2:17, 5:20, 13:3. Prophets and apostles are thus theophoroumenoi ; it is God who speaks in and through them. But the Scripture itself leads us to conceive this speaking of God through the mouth of the prophets as organically as possible. There is here a distinction between the prophets and the apostles, and between both again among themselves. Moses stands at the head among the prophets; God spoke with him as a friend with his friend. With Isaiah the driving of the Spirit bears a different character than with Ezekiel; Jeremiah's prophecies distinguish themselves by their simplicity and naturalness from those with Zechariah and Daniel. With all the prophets of the Old Testament the driving of the Spirit is more or less transcendent; it comes from above and from without to them, falls upon them and works momentarily. With the apostles, on the other hand, the Holy Ghost dwells immanently in their hearts, leads and drives, enlightens and teaches them. There is thus very great distinction also in the organic character of the inspiration. But nevertheless the whole Scripture commands us to think the inspiration not mechanically but organically. Not, however, because a mechanical inspiration in itself would be impossible and impermissible and in conflict with the dignity of man. If it is not unworthy for a child to believe his parents and teachers on authority and simply learn from them what it does not know; if it is not unworthy for a servant to receive commands from his lord which he does not understand and only has to execute, what unworthiness would there then be for man to stand in such a relation to the Lord his God? But God has not taken this path; He has in the revelation and the inspiration descended to man and has joined Himself to the peculiarities and even to the weaknesses of his human nature. This too has been a grace of the ensarkosis . Just as the Logos did not overtake a man and unite with him but entered into the human nature and prepared and formed it Himself through the Spirit from whom it was received, so also has the Spirit of the Lord acted in the inspiration. He has entered into the prophets and apostles themselves and has thus taken them into service and wrought them, so that they themselves investigated and thought, spoke and wrote. It is He who speaks through them; but they themselves are it at the same time who speak and write. Driven were they by the Spirit, but they spoke nevertheless themselves, elalesan , 2 Pet. 1:20. Oftentimes the Old Testament Scripture is cited in the New Testament by the primary author, Lk. 1:70; Acts 1:16, 3:18, 4:25, 28:25 and always in Heb. 1:5 ff., 4:3, 5 etc., but just as often by the secondary authors, Moses, David, Isaiah etc., Mt. 13:14, 22:43; Jn. 1:23, 46, 5:46, 12:38. The moments of inspiration are not each to be considered loosely on their own, but stand in connection with all that precedes: the prophets and apostles are from youth prepared and made able for their task; their character, nature, inclination, understanding, development etc. is not suppressed, but, as already formed by the Spirit of the Lord Himself, now also taken into service and used by that same Spirit; their whole person with all gifts and powers is made serviceable to the calling whereto they are called. Investigation, Lk. 1:1, reflection and remembrance, Jn. 14:26, use of sources etc., is therefore not excluded by the inspiration, but is included therein. Almost all books of Old and New Testament are therefore in a certain sense also occasional writings. Of a direct command to write there is mention only in a few texts; they do not cover by far the whole content of Scripture. But also those occasions which drove to writing belong to the leading of the Spirit; precisely through these He drove to writing. The calling to prophet and apostle did indeed of itself and naturally include that to speaking and witnessing, Ex. 3; Ez. 3; Am. 3:8; Acts 1:8 etc., but not that of writing. For many prophets and apostles did not write. From Mt. 28:19 a special command to write is not to be derived. Among the charismata, 1 Cor. 12 writing is not named, Bellarm., de verbo Dei IV cap. 3-4. But the Holy Ghost has so led the history of the church among Israel and in the New Testament, that the deed had to pass over into the word and the word into the writing. From this leading is born in prophets and apostles the calling to write, the impulse to writing. And that writing is the highest, the mightiest, the most general witness, which does not flee away on the breath of the wind but abides eternally. And precisely because the writings of the prophets and apostles did not arise outside but from and in the history, therefore there is a science in theology which investigates and makes known all those occasions and circumstances under which the Bible books arose. When then the prophets and apostles thus writing witness, they also retain their own character, their own language and style. At all times this difference in the books of the Bible has been recognized, but not always satisfactorily explained. It is not to be explained therefrom that the Holy Ghost according to mere arbitrariness now willed to write thus and then otherwise; but entering into the writers, He has also entered into their style and language, into their character and peculiarity, which He Himself had already prepared and formed. Thereto belongs also that He chooses in the Old Testament the Hebrew, in the New Testament the Hellenistic Greek as vehicle of the divine thoughts. Herein too was no arbitrariness. The purism defended in an awkward way a precious truth. Measured by the Greek of Plato and Demosthenes, the New Testament is full of barbarisms and solecisms; but the marriage which in the Hellenistic Greek was contracted between the pure Hebrew and the pure Attic, between the Eastern and Western spirit, was on the field of language the realization of the divine thought that salvation is from the Jews, but is destined for all mankind. The language of the New Testament is not the fairest, grammatically and linguistically considered, but it is indeed the fittest for the communication of the thoughts of God. The word has also in this respect become truly and generally human. And finally, when the prophets and apostles wrote, then their own experience and history oftentimes furnished the matter for their writing. In the psalms it is the pious singer who alternately laments and rejoices, sits down in sorrow or exults in joy. In Rom. 7 Paul depicts for us his own life experience, and through the whole Scripture it is repeatedly the persons of the writers themselves whose life and experience, whose hope and fear, whose faith and trust, whose complaint and misery is described and painted. That rich life, that deep experience, of a David for example, is so formed and led by the Spirit of the Lord, that taken up in the Scripture, it would be for the following generations to instruction, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope, Rom. 15:4. The organic inspiration alone does justice to the Scripture. It is in the doctrine of Scripture the outworking and application of the central fact of revelation, the incarnation of the word. The Logos became flesh, and the word became Scripture; they are two facts which not only run parallel but are also most intimately connected. Christ became flesh, a servant, without form or comeliness, the most despised of men; He descended into the lowest parts of the earth, became obedient unto the death of the cross. And so also the word, the revelation of God entered into the creaturely, into the life and history of men and peoples, into all human forms of dream and vision, of investigation and reflection, even unto the human weak and despised and ignoble; the word became scripture, and as scripture subjected itself to the lot of all scripture. All this has happened, that the excellency of the power, also of the power of Scripture, might be God's and not from us. Just as every human thought and deed is fruit wholly of the action of God in whom we live and have our being, and at the same time wholly fruit of the activity of man, so also is the Scripture product wholly and altogether of the Spirit of God who speaks through the prophets and apostles, and at the same time wholly product of the activity of the writers. All things divine and all things human.
16. This organic outlook has however been used many times to do harm precisely to the first thing, to the authorship of the Holy Ghost. The flesh-becoming of Christ calls for us to trace it down into the depths of its low-making, in all its weakness and shame. The setting forth of the word, of the revelation, bids us also to acknowledge in the Scripture that weak and lowly thing, that servant-form. But just as the manly in Christ, however weak and lowly, yet stayed free from the sinful, so also is the Scripture conceived without spot. Manly wholly and in all its parts, but also likewise all godly. Yet in sundry ways harm has been done to this godly mark of the Scripture. The history of inspiration teaches us that it was first spread out ever further until the 17th century, even to the vowels and points (inspiratio punctualis), and then that it was little by little shrunk and bound, from the points to the words (insp. verbalis), from the single words to the word, the thought (Wort instead of Wörterinspiration), from the word as thought to the things (insp. realis), from the things to the godly-moral inhold, to that which is revealed in the own sense, to the word of God in the strict sense, to the special object of the saving faith (insp. fundamentalis, religiosa), from these things again to the persons (insp. personalis), and from these at last to the denying of all inspiration as an above-natural gift.
Now it is gladdening that even the most nay-saying bent still wants to give the Scripture a place and some worth in the godly life and thinking of Christendom. The teaching of the Holy Scripture is not an opinion of this or that school, no dogma of a sundry church or sect, but a foundational article, a belief-article of the one holy widespread Christian church. Its meaning for all Christendom is seen ever better; its unbreakable together-hang with the Christian faith and life ever better acknowledged. For a time sent back in dogmatics to the means of grace, it has won back with honor the place at the entry to dogmatics. The whole Roman and Greek church still stands unshaken in the confessing of the godly inbreathing of the Holy Scripture. Many Protestant churches and bents have until now withstood all might to drive them from this groundlay. The gathering stays through preaching and teaching, through reading and searching, in the middle or straightway living from the Scripture and feeding itself with the Scripture. Even he who in thought-work denies the inspiration, speaks and deals in the work-day of life many times as if he fully takes it on. The twofoldness of believing and knowing, in which according to many's setting the right-belief is with the teaching of the Scripture, comes not in likeness to the twofold stance of the bridging-godcraft, which on the teaching-stool denies the inspiration and on the preaching-stool truly confesses it. The root-deepness comes ever more to the acknowledging that the inspiration of the Scripture is taught by the Scripture itself and must be taken on or thrown off with it. This all shows that the life is stronger than the teaching and that the Scripture itself always again fights back against every nature-bound clearing. It claims itself to have come forth from the Ghost of God and holds this claim standing against all finding-fault. Every try to strip it of the mystery-mark of its spring, inhold, and strength has until now ended with giving it up and letting the Scripture be the Scripture.
An inspiration is therefore no clearing of the Scripture, and so truly also no thought-work; but it is and ought to be a believing confessing of what the Scripture witnesses about itself, in spite of the seeming that is against it. The inspiration is a dogma even as the threefoldness, the man-becoming, and so on, that the Christian takes on, not because he sees into the truth of it, but because God so witnesses it. It is no knowledge-bound saying but a confessing of the faith. With the inspiration even as with each other dogma it is not in the first place the asking: how much can and may I confess, without coming into clash with knowledge-work, but what is the witness of God and what is according thereto the saying of the Christian faith? And then there is but one answer workable, that the Scripture sets itself forth as the word of God and the church of God in all ages has acknowledged it as such. The inspiration rests on the sway of the Scripture and has gotten witness from the church of all ages.
The dogmatic and religious character of the doctrine of inspiration stands in strife with the inspiratio personalis and fundamentalis . Indeed, there lies in these views also a good thought. For it was surely the persons who, with all their gifts and strengths, were taken into service by the Holy Ghost at the inspiration; and those persons were holy men, men of God, fitted for this work. Also, in the Scripture there is without doubt a difference between more and less weighty parts; not all books of the Bible have like worth. But both conceptions of inspiration weaken the witness which the Scripture gives of itself, and they are not born from the full assurance of faith but from compromise with science. Moreover, the inspiratio personalis yet runs aground on these objections, that it wipes out the difference between inspiration and illumination (regeneration), between the intellectual and the ethical life, between the being borne of the prophets, 2 Pet. 1:21, and the being led of the children of God, Rom. 8:14, between the Holy Scripture and edifying reading. Further, it turns with Rome the bond of Scripture and church into its opposite, robs the congregation of the firmness which it needs, and makes it hanging upon science, which must decide what in the Scripture is or is not God's word. Indeed, many upholders of this inspiration theory seek to escape these objections by appealing to the person of Christ as source and authority of dogmatics, but this helps not, because there is just difference over the question, who Christ is and what He taught and did. If the apostolic witness concerning Christ is not trustworthy, there is no knowledge of Christ possible. Added to this, that if Christ is authority, He is that also in the doctrine concerning the Scripture; the inspiration must then just on His warrant be taken. The above-named theory clashes with the authority of Christ Himself. The inspiratio fundamentalis sets itself apart from the inspiratio personalis in that it yet takes a special working of the Spirit at the writing, but only with some portions of the Scripture. This conception is however so deistic and dualistic, that it is already therefore unacceptable. Besides, word and deed, the religious and the historical, the spoken by God and by men in the Scripture are so woven together and intertwined, that sundering is impossible. Also the history in the Scripture is a revelation of God. And at last these both theories yet do not meet the objections which from the side of science are brought against the Scripture and her inspiration. For these hold utterly not some under points in the outer ring of revelation, but touch her heart and center itself. The inspiratio personalis and fundamentalis is utterly not more scientific and rational than the strictest inspiratio verbalis .
The other theories of inspiration—inspiratio punctualis, verbalis, realis, and also the Word-inspiration of Philippi—differ little among themselves. The working of the Holy Ghost in the writing hath consisted therein, that He, after having prepared the human consciousness of the writers in sundry ways—through birth, upbringing, natural gifts, inquiry, remembrance, meditation, life experience, revelation, and the like—now in and under and with the writing itself did bring forth in that consciousness those thoughts and words, that tongue and style, which could best interpret the divine thought for men of every rank and station, people and age.
In the thoughts are the words comprehended, and in the words the vowels. But therefrom followeth not that the vowel points in our Hebrew manuscripts should originate from the writers themselves. Therefrom followeth also not that all is full of divine wisdom, that every jot and every tittle hath an infinite content. All hath its sense and its meaning very surely, but there in the place and in the connection wherein it appeareth. Not atomistically may the Scripture be regarded, as if each word and each letter, standing alone by itself and isolated, as such, were inspired by God, with its own intent, with its own and thus divine, infinite content. That leadeth to the foolish hermeneutical rules of the Jewish scribes and honoreth not but dishonoreth the Holy Scripture.
But organically must the inspiration be conceived, so that even the least hath its place and meaning, and yet lieth at a much greater distance from the center than other parts. In the human organism nothing is accidental—neither the length, nor the breadth, nor the color, nor the tint; but therefore not all standeth in the same close relation to the center of life. Head and heart take a much weightier place in the body than hand and foot, and these again stand in worth far above nails and hairs.
Also in the Scripture not all lieth equally near about the center; there is a periphery which moveth widely around the midpoint, but it too belongeth to the circle of God's thoughts. Kinds and degrees in the inspiration itself there are therefore none. The hair of the head partaketh of the same life as heart and hand. It is one soul which is wholly in the whole body and in all its parts. It is one Spirit from which the whole Scripture hath come forth through the consciousness of the writers.
But there is indeed difference in the manner wherein the same life is immanent and working in the diverse parts of the body. There is diversity of gifts, also in the Scripture, but it is the same Spirit.
17. Objections to the Inspiration of Scripture. Against this inspiration of Scripture many and very earnest objections are brought in. They are drawn from the historical criticism, which fights against the genuineness and trustworthiness of many Bible books; from the inner contradictions, which often appear in the Scripture; from the way in which the Old Testament is quoted and explained in the New; from the unhallowed history, with which the tales of Scripture many times cannot be brought into agreement; from nature, which both in its beginning and in its being speaks against the Scripture with her creation and her wonders; from religion and morals, which many times passes a condemning judgment over the faith and life of the persons of the Bible; from the present form of Scripture, which as shown by textual criticism is lost in her autographs, corrupt in her apographs, and faulty in her translations, and so forth. It is a vain striving to wipe away these objections and to act as if they do not exist. But yet it serves in the first place to point out the ethical meaning of the strife, which through all ages has been waged against the Scripture.
If the Scripture is the word of God, that strife is not chance but needful and also fully understandable. Because she is the setting forth of the revelation of God in Christ, she must awaken the same withstanding as Christ himself. He came into the world for a krisis and is set for a fall and a rising up for many. He brings sundering between light and darkness and makes open the thoughts out of many hearts. And even so is the Scripture a living and mighty word, a judge of the thoughts and the reckonings of the heart. She was not only inspired, she is still theopneust . As there goes before the act of inspiration much, all the working of the Holy Ghost in nature, history, revelation, new birth, so also much follows upon it. The inspiration stands not by itself. The Holy Ghost draws himself not back from the Holy Scripture after the act of inspiration and leaves her not to her lot, but He bears and quickens her, and brings her inhold in sundry shapes to mankind, to her heart and conscience. Through the Scripture as the word of God the Holy Ghost binds a lasting strife against the thoughts and reckonings of the psychikos anthropos . In itself it needs therefore not the least wonder to bear, that the Scripture at all times has met with gainsaying and withstanding. Christ bore a cross, and a bondservant is not greater than his lord. The Scripture is the handmaid of Christ. She shares in his shame. She awakens the enmity of the sinful man.
From this, indeed, not all opposition to the Scripture can be explained. But yet the attacks to which the Scripture is exposed in this century are not to be considered in isolation. They undoubtedly hang together with the entire intellectual direction of this century. Judgment over persons and intentions does not belong to us; but it would be superficial to assert that the struggle against the Scripture in this century stands entirely on its own, governed by wholly different and much purer motives than in earlier centuries, that now only the head would speak and the heart would remain entirely outside.
Every believer experiences that in the best moments of his life he also stands strongest in faith in the Scripture; his trust in the Scripture increases with his faith in Christ, and conversely, ignorance of the Scriptures is naturally and in the same measure also an ignorance of Christ (Hieronymus ). The connection between sin and error often lies deep beneath the surface of conscious life. In another it is scarcely ever to be pointed out, but sometimes it is discovered to one's own soul's eye.
The struggle against the Scripture is in the first place a revelation of the enmity of the human heart. But that enmity can express itself in different ways. It comes absolutely not only and perhaps even not the strongest in the criticism to which the Scripture is subjected in our time. The Scripture as the word of God meets opposition and unbelief in every natural man. In the days of dead orthodoxy, unbelief in the Scripture was in principle just as powerful as in our historical and critical century. The forms change, but the essence remains one. Whether the enmity against the Scripture expresses itself in a criticism like that of Celsus and Porphyry, or it manifests in a dead faith, the enmity is in principle the same. For not the hearers, but the doers of the word are blessed. The servant who knew the will of his lord and did not prepare nor do according to his will, he shall be beaten with many stripes.
Therefore it remains the duty for every man, first of all, to lay aside this enmity against the word of God and to bring all thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. The Scripture itself everywhere comes forward with this demand. Only the pure in heart shall see God. Regeneration enables one to behold the kingdom of God. Self-denial is the condition for being Jesus' disciple. The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God. The Scripture takes such a high place over against every man that it, instead of submitting to his criticism, rather judges him in all his thoughts and desires. And this has been the standpoint of the Christian church over against the Scripture at all times. Humility was according to Chrysostom the foundation of philosophy. Augustine said: quemadmodum rhetor ille rogatus, quid primum esset in eloquentiae praeceptis, respondit: pronuntiationem; quid secundum, pronuntiationem; quid tertium, pronuntiationem; ita si me interroges de religionis Christianae, primo, secundo et tertio semper respondere liberet: humilitatem . Calvin, Inst . II 2, 11, cites this with approval. And Pascal, Pensées , Art. 8, cries out to man: humiliez-vous, raison impuissante, taisez-vous, nature imbécile..... écoutez Dieu! Thus has the church in all ages stood over against the Scripture. And the Christian dogmatician may take no other position. For a dogma rests not on the outcomes of any historical-critical investigation, but solely on the testimony of God, on the self-testimony of Holy Scripture. A Christian believes not because everything reveals God's love, but in spite of everything that arouses doubt. Also in the Scripture there remains much that arouses doubt. All believers know from experience to speak thereof. The men of Scripture criticism often present it as if the simple congregation knew nothing of the objections brought against the Scripture and felt nothing of the difficulty in continuing to believe in the Scripture. But that is an impure representation. Certainly, the simple Christians do not know the hindrances which science lays in the way of faith in the Scripture. But they yet know in greater or lesser measure the strife which is waged both in head and heart against the Scripture. There is no single believer who has not in his own way come to know the opposition between the wisdom of the world and the foolishness of God. It is one and the same and it is an ever-continuing strife, which must be fought by all Christians, learned or unlearned, to hold the thoughts captive under the obedience of Christ. No one on earth rises above this strife. There remain over the whole heritage of faith crosses that must be overcome. There is no faith without strife. To believe is to strive, to strive against the appearance of things. As long as someone still believes something, his faith is disputed from all sides. Even the modern believer is not freed therefrom. Concessions weaken but do not free. Thus there remain difficulties enough, even for him who childlike submits himself to the Scripture. These need not be concealed. There are crosses in the Scripture which cannot be ciphered away, and which probably also will never be solved. But these difficulties, which Holy Scripture itself offers over against its inspiration, are for a great part not newly discovered in this century; they have been noticed at all times, and nevertheless Jesus and the apostles, Athanasius and Augustine, Thomas and Bonaventure, Luther and Calvin, have all Christians of all churches and through all ages confessed and acknowledged the Scripture as the word of God. He who wants to wait with faith in the Scripture until all objections are cleared away and all contradictions reconciled, never comes to faith. That which a man sees, why should he also hope for it? Jesus pronounces blessed those who have not seen and yet have believed. But moreover, objections and difficulties are there in every science. He who will not begin with believing never comes to knowing. The theory of knowledge is the beginning of philosophy; but it is mystery from beginning to end. He who will not go to scientific investigation before he sees the way paved along which we come to knowledge, never begins therewith. He who will not eat before he understands the whole process whereby the food comes to him, dies of hunger; and he who will not believe the word of God before he sees all difficulties solved, perishes of spiritual lack. With understanding it will not go, grasp the ungraspable (Beets). Nature, history, and every science offers as many crosses as Holy Scripture. Nature contains so many riddles that it can often make us doubt the existence of a wise and righteous God. There are apparent contradictions in multitude on every page of the book of nature. There is an inexplicable remainder (Schelling), which mocks all explanation. Who therefore gives up faith in the Providence of God, which governs all things? Mohammedanism, the life and destiny of uncivilized peoples is a cross in the history of mankind, as great and as difficult as the composition of the Pentateuch and the Synoptics. Who doubts therefore that God also writes that book of nature and of history with his almighty hand? Naturally one can here and so also with the Scripture throw oneself into the arms of agnosticism and of pessimism. But despair is a salto mortale also in the scientific realm. With unbelief the mysteries of being do not decrease but increase. And the discontent of the heart becomes greater.
18. But besides, the organic view of inspiration gives many ways to meet the drawbacks brought against it. It holds that the Holy Ghost, in the writing of God's word, has spurned nothing human to serve as a tool of the godly. God's showing is not aloof and over-natural, but has gone into the human, into folk and standings, into shapes and ways, into tale and life. It stays not high above us floating, but has come down into our standing; it has become flesh and blood and like us in all things save sin. It now makes an unrootable part of this world wherein we live, and goes on its work therein renewing and healing. The human has become the tool of the godly, the earthly the showing of the over-earthly, the seen sign and seal of the unseen. In inspiration, use is made of all gifts and strengths that lie in human kind. Thereby is first fully cleared the unlikeness in tongue and way, in kind and ownness, that may be marked in the Bible books. Formerly this unlikeness was cleared from the will of the Holy Ghost, and a deeper looking was lacking. But with the organic inspiration this unlikeness is fully earthly. Also the use of wellsprings, the knowing of the writers with former writings, own seeking, minding, thinking, and life-knowing is not shut out by the organic view but taken in. The Holy Ghost has himself in that wise readied his writers; He came not at once from above upon them, but made use of their whole selfhood as of his tool. Also here holds the word, that grace takes not away but fulfills kind. The selfhood of the writers is not wiped out but upheld and hallowed. Inspiration asks thus in no wise that we book-wise or beauty-wise set the way of Amos even with that of Isaiah, or that we should deny all outland words and lone wrongs in the tongue of the New Testament.
In the second stead, the organic view of showing and inspiration brings with it that the everyday human and earthly life is not shut out but made serving to God's thoughts. The Writ is God's word; it holds it not only but it is it. But the shape-like and stuff-like share may not in this saying be sundered. Inspiration alone and in itself would not yet make a writing God's word in Writ-like sense. Though a book on earth-lore, for byspell, were wholly given in and in the most letter-like sense from word to word spoken, thereby it became not yet god-breathed in the sense of 2 Tim. 3:16. The Writ is God's word, because the Holy Ghost in it bears witness of Christ, because it has the Word made flesh for stuff and inhold. Shape and inhold go through each other, and are not to sunder. But to paint this likeness of Christ to us full length as before the eyes, thereto is needful that also the human sin and the satanic lie in all its grimness be drawn. On the painting the shadow is needful to make the light shine out brighter. Sin must also in Bible hallows be called sin, and wandering may also in them not be glossed. And while God's showing in Christ thus takes in the unright as foe-thesis, it spurns also not the human-weak and earthly. Christ reckoned nothing human strange to himself, and the Writ forgets also not the smallest cares of everyday life, 2 Tim. 4:13. The Christ-like stands not foe-wise over against the human; it is the healing and renewing thereof.
In the third stead, with the inhold hangs also narrowly the meaning and the goal of the Writ together. All that is written afore is written for our learning. It stretches to learning, gainsaying, bettering, teaching that is in rightwiseness, that the man of God may be full-grown, to all good work fully fitted. It serves to make us wise unto wholeness. The Holy Writ has a through and through belief-ethic goal. It wills not to be a handbook for the sundry wisdoms. It is wellspring only of god-lore and asks that we read and seek it god-lore-wise . In all the fields that gather about the Writ, it must be our doing for the wholeness-bringing knowing of God. Thereto the Writ bids us all givings. In that sense it is fully enough and full-grown. Who however from the Writ would draw a tale of Israel, a life-tale of Jesus, a tale of Israel's or the old-Christ-like book-lore etc., finds himself ever let down. Then there are lacks that can be filled only by guesses. The tale-wise sifting has wholly forgotten this goal of the Writ. It strives to give a tale of Israel's folk and belief and book-lore, and comes beforehand with asks to the Writ whereto it cannot fulfill. It strikes on with-standings that are not to loose, sifts wellsprings and books endlessly, ranks and orders them wholly otherwise, only with the outcome that a hopeless muddle arises. From the four Gospels is no life of Jesus to build and from the Old Testament no tale of Israel. The Holy Ghost meant that not. Clerk-like noting was the inspiration not. The blending of the gospel tales has failed. To straight knowing, like we ask in reckoning, star-lore, blend-lore etc., the Writ fulfills not. Such a yardstick may not be laid to it. Therefore the first-writings are also lost. Therefore is the text, in however small measure, spoiled; therefore the gathering and truly the lay-folk have the Writ not only in a lacking and fallible over-setting. Those are deeds that are not to deny. And they teach us that the Writ has an own yardstick, is of an own out-legging and has an own goal. That goal is no other than that it should make us wise unto wholeness. The Old Testament is no wellspring for a tale of Israel's folk and belief but well for a tale of showing. The Gospels are no wellspring for a life of Jesus but well for a belief-lore knowing of his self and work. The Writ is the book for the Christ-like belief and for the Christ-like god-lore. Thereto it is given. Therefor it is fit. And therefore it is God's word, given us by the Holy Ghost.
19. The Relation of Scripture to the Other Sciences From this it finally becomes clear what relation Scripture bears to the other sciences. Much misuse has been made of the saying of Baronius: Scripture tells us not how the heavens go, but how we may go to heaven. Precisely as the book of the knowledge of God, Scripture has much to say also to the other sciences. It is a light upon the path and a lamp unto the foot, also for science and art. It claims authority over every domain of life. Christ has all power in heaven and on earth. Objectively, the limitation of inspiration to the religious-ethical part of Scripture is untenable, and subjectively, the separation between the religious and the rest of man's life cannot be maintained. Inspiration extends to all parts of Scripture, and religion is a matter of the whole man. Very much of what is mentioned in Scripture is also of fundamental significance for the other sciences. The creation and fall of man, the unity of the human race, the flood, the origin of nations and tongues, and so forth, are facts of the highest importance also for the other sciences. At every moment, science and art come into contact with Scripture; the principles for all of life are given in Scripture. Nothing may be detracted from this. But on the other hand, there is also a great truth in the word of Cardinal Baronius. All those facts are communicated in Scripture not for their own sake, but with a theological purpose, that we might know God unto salvation. Scripture never deliberately concerns itself with science as such. Christ himself, though free from all error and sin, never moved in a stricter sense in the realm of science and art, of trade and industry, of jurisprudence and politics. His was another greatness: the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. But precisely thereby has he been a blessing also for science and art, for society and state. Jesus is Savior, that alone, but that also wholly. He came not only to restore the religious-ethical life of man and to leave all the rest untouched, as if it were not corrupted by sin and had no need of restoration. No, as far as sin extends, so far also does the grace of Christ extend. And so it is with Scripture. It too is through and through religious, the Word of God unto salvation, but therefore precisely a word for family and society, for science and art. Scripture is a book for the whole of humanity, in all its ranks and stations, in all its generations and peoples. But therefore it is no scientific book in a stricter sense. Wisdom, not learning, speaks in it. It speaks not the exact language of science and the school, but that of observation and of daily life. It judges and describes things not according to the results of scientific investigation, but according to intuition, according to the first, lively impression which phenomena make upon man. Therefore it speaks of the land drawing near, of the rising and standing still of the sun, of the blood as the soul of the animal, of the reins as the seat of the affections, of the heart as the source of thoughts, and so forth, and cares not at all for the scientifically precise language of astronomy, physiology, psychology, and the like. It speaks of the earth as the center of God's creation and takes no side between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican worldview. It decides not between Neptunism and Plutonism, nor between allopathy and homeopathy. The writers of Holy Scripture probably knew no more in all these sciences—geology, zoology, physiology, medicine, and so forth—than all their contemporaries. Nor was it needful. For Holy Scripture uses the language of daily experience, which is always true and always abides. If Scripture had used instead the language of the school and spoken scientifically exact, it would have stood in the way of its own authority. If it had decided for the Ptolemaic worldview, it would be unbelievable in an age that honors the Copernican system. It could not then have been a book for life, for humanity. But now it speaks in generally human language, understandable to the simplest, clear to learned and unlearned alike. It uses the language of observation, which will always exist alongside that of science and the school. Therefore it can also endure unto the end of the ages. Therefore it is old, without ever growing old. It is always young and fresh; it is the speech of life. Verbum Dei manet in aeternum .
1. The Doctrine of the Attributes of Holy Scripture. The teaching of the attributes of Holy Scripture has wholly unfolded from the strife against Rome and Anabaptism. In the confession of the inspiration and authority of Scripture there was agreement, but otherwise there was great difference in the locus on Holy Scripture between Rome and the Reformation. The bond in which Rome had set Scripture and church to each other was in root changed in the Reformation. Among the church fathers and schoolmen, Scripture stood, at least in thought, far above church and lore; it rested in itself, was self-trustworthy and for church and godlore the norm that norms. Augustine said, scriptura canonica certis suis terminis continetur , and reasons in Confessions 6,5 and 11,3 so, as if the truth of Holy Scripture hangs only on itself. Bonaventure, in de sept. don. n. 37-43, cited in the Breviloquium, declares: ecclesia enim fundata est super eloquia Sacrae Scripturae, quae si deficiant, deficit intellectus........ Cum enim ecclesia fundata sit in Sacra Scriptura, qui nescit eam, nescit ecclesiam regere . More such witnessings are brought forth by Gerhard, in Loci theol. I cap. 3 § 45, 46, from Salvianus, Biel, Cajetanus, Hosius, Valentia and others. Canisius says in his Summa doctrinae christ. , in cap. de praeceptis ecclesiae § 16: Proinde sicut scripturae propter testimonium Divini Spiritus in illa loquentis credimus, adhaeremus ac tribuimus maximam auctoritatem, sic ecclesiae fidem, reverentiam obedientiamque debemus . And also Bellarmine, in de Verbo Dei , lib. 1 cap. 2, declares yet: Sacris Scripturis, quae propheticis et apostolicis litteris continentur, nihil est notius, nihil certius, ut stultissimum esse necesse sit qui illis fidem habendam esse negat . All were of the mind that Scripture could be enough shown as truth from and by itself; it hangs not on the church, but the other way round, the church on it; the church with her lore may be the rule of faith, but she is not the ground of faith. That is Scripture alone.
But the church with her office and tradition began at Rome more and more to take an independent place and to gain authority beside the Holy Scripture. The relation of both was at first not further defined, but yet soon called for a better ordering. And as the church ever grew in might and self-sufficiency, the authority was more and more shifted from the Scripture to the church. Sundry moments in history point out the process whereby the church rose from a place under, to one beside, and at last also to one above the Scripture. The question, which of the two, the Scripture or the church, had the foremost rank, was clearly and knowingly first put in the time of the reformatory councils. Despite the gainsaying of Gerson, d’Ailly, and above all of Nicolaas van Clémange, it was decided in favor of the church. Trent has sanctioned this over against the Reformation. In the strife against Gallicanism the matter was yet more sharply set forth, and in the Vatican Council of 1870 it was so resolved that the church was declared infallible. The subject of this infallibility, however, is not the ecclesia audiens, nor the ecclesia docens, nor yet the bishops together, gathered in council, but in particular the pope. And he again not as a private person, nor yet as bishop of Rome or patriarch of the West, but as chief shepherd of the whole church. He possesses this infallibility indeed as head of the church and not apart from her, but he possesses it yet not through and with her, but above and in distinction from her. Even bishops and councils have part in the infallibility, not severed from, but only in oneness with and under subjection to the pope. He stands above all, and alone makes the church, the tradition, the councils, the canons infallible. Councils without the pope can err and have erred. The whole church, both docens and audiens, is infallible only una cum et sub Romano pontifice. Therewith is the whole relation of church and Scripture overturned. The church, or more plainly the pope, goes before and stands above the Scripture. Ubi papa, ibi ecclesia. The infallibility of the pope makes that of the church, the bishops and councils, and likewise that of the Scripture needless.
2. From this Roman view of the bond between Holy Writ and church flow forth all the sundry points wherein the teaching on Holy Writ differs betwixt Rome and the Reformation. They touch mainly upon the needfulness of Holy Writ, the Apocrypha of the Old Covenant, the Vulgate rendering, the ban on the Bible, the unfolding of Holy Writ, and the handed-down lore.
In form, the turning about in the bond betwixt Holy Writ and church shows itself most plainly herein, that the later Roman divines handle the teaching on the church in the formal part of dogmatics. The church belongs among the groundworks of faith. Even as Holy Writ in the Reformation, so is the church, the teaching office, or truly the pope, the formal groundwork, the underlay of faith in Romanism.
In opposition to this, the Reformers set forth the doctrine of the attributes of Scripture. It bore entirely a polemical character, but thereby also stood firm in its main points from the beginning. Gradually it was taken up more or less systematically and methodically into dogmatics, not yet by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and the like, but already by Musculus, Zanchius, Polanus, Junius, and others, and in the Lutheran church by Gerhard, Quenstedt, Calovius, Hollaz, and others. But in the treatment there was difference. Sometimes all sorts of historical and critical matters were discussed therein; dogmatics took up almost the whole "Introduction," the canonica generalis and specialis. Also the number and division of the attributes were variously given. Authority, usefulness, necessity, truth, clarity, sufficiency, origin, division, content, apocrypha, councils, church, tradition, authentic edition, translations, interpretation, proofs, testimony of the Holy Spirit—this and much more was brought up in the doctrine of Scripture and its attributes.
Gradually there came more limitation of the material. Calovius and Quenstedt distinguished between primary and secondary affections; to the first belonged authority, truth, perfection, perspicuity, the faculty of interpreting itself, judicial power, and efficacy, and under the latter were reckoned necessity, integrity, purity, authenticity, and the license granted to all to read. Still simpler was the order often followed: authority, necessity, perfection or sufficiency, perspicuity, the faculty of interpreting itself, and efficacy.
But even so, there is still simplification to be made. The historical, critical, archaeological material, and the like, does not belong in dogmatics, but in the biblical disciplines of theology. The authenticity, integrity, purity, and so forth, therefore cannot be fully treated in dogmatics; they come up there only insofar as the doctrine of Scripture offers some data for its condition. The truth needs no separate proof after inspiration and authority, and would thereby rather be weakened than strengthened. The efficacy finds its place in the doctrine of the means of grace. Thus only authority, necessity, perfection, and perspicuity remain. Among these there is still this distinction, that authority is not an attribute coordinated with the others, for it is given automatically with inspiration; necessity, perspicuity, and sufficiency, on the other hand, do not flow in the same sense from inspiration. It can be thought that an infallible Scripture must be supplemented and explained by an infallible tradition. Rome acknowledges indeed the authority of Scripture, but denies its other attributes.
3. The Authority of Scripture. The authority of Scripture has at all times been acknowledged in the Christian church. Jesus and the apostles believed in the Old Testament as the word of God and ascribed to it a divine authority. The Christian church was born and grew up under the authority of Scripture. What the apostles have written must be received as if Christ himself had written it, Aug. de cons. evang. I 35. And Calvin declares in his explanation of 2 Tim. 3:16, that we owe to Scripture the same reverence as to God. That authority of Scripture stood firm until the previous century in all churches and among all Christians. On the other hand, there arose between Rome and the Reformation a serious difference over the ground on which that authority rests. Church fathers and scholastics still often taught the autopistie of Scripture, but the driving force of the Roman principle has more and more placed the church before Scripture. The church, so is now the general Roman teaching, precedes Scripture both in time and in logic. It was there before Scripture, and owes its origin, existence, and authority not to Scripture, but exists in and through itself, that is, through Christ, or the Holy Spirit who dwells in it. Scripture, on the other hand, has precisely come forth from the church and is now acknowledged, confirmed, preserved, explained, defended, and so on by it. Scripture thus needs the church, but the church does not need Scripture. Without the church there is no Scripture, but without Scripture there is indeed a church. The church with the infallible tradition is the original and sufficient means to preserve and communicate the revelation; Holy Scripture came later, is in itself insufficient, but as a support and confirmation of the tradition it is useful and good. In fact, at Rome Scripture is made wholly dependent on the church. The authenticity, integrity, inspiration, canonicity, authority of Scripture is established by the church. In this connection, however, this distinction is made, that Scripture does not depend on the church quoad se , but quoad nos . The church does not make Scripture inspired, canonical, authentic, and so on, by its acknowledgment, but it is nevertheless the only one that can know these qualities of Scripture in an infallible way. For the self-testimony of Scripture does not decide that precisely these books of the Old and New Testament, and no others and no fewer, are inspired; nowhere does Holy Scripture give a catalog of the books that belong to it; the texts that teach inspiration never cover the whole Scripture, 2 Tim. 3:16 applies only to the Old Testament; moreover, an appeal for the inspiration of Scripture to Scripture itself is always only a circular proof. The Protestants are also divided among themselves over the books that belong to Scripture; Luther's judgment on James differs from that of Calvin, and so on. The proofs for Scripture drawn from the church fathers and so on are not firm and strong enough; they have great value as motiva credibilitatis , but they give only probability, human and thus fallible certainty. Only the church gives divine, infallible certainty, as Augustine also said: ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas , c. epist. Manich. cap. 5. c. Faustum l. 28. cap. 2,4,6. The Protestants have therefore also been able to accept and acknowledge Scripture as God's word, because they received it from the hand of the church, Bellarminus, de Verbo Dei IV cap. 4. Perrone, Praelect. Theol. IX 71 sq. Heinrich, Dogm. I 775 f. Jansen, Theol. I 766 sq. The Vatican Council, sess. 3. cap. 2 acknowledged the books of the Old and New Testament as canonical, propterea quod Sp. S°. inspirante conscripti Deum habent autorem atque ut tales ipsi ecclesiae traditi sunt .
Guided by these thoughts, Rome at Trent sess. 4 and in the Vatican sess. 3 cap. 2 established the canon, included in it after the example of the Greek translation and the practice of the church fathers also the apocrypha of the Old Testament, and moreover declared the Vulgate edition to be the authentic text, so that it has decisive authority in church and theology.
4. Over Against the Roman Doctrine. Over against this Roman doctrine, the Reformation set forth the autopistia of Scripture: Calvin, Institutes I c. 7; Ursinus, Tract. Theol. 1584; Polanus, Synt. I c. 23-30; Zanchius, de S. Scriptura ; Junius, Theses Theol. c. 3-5; Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 2 § 29 sq.; Gerhard, Loci theol. I c. 3; and others.
At this difference, the question did not run upon whether the church had no calling to fulfill over against Scripture. It was commonly granted that the church is of great import for Scripture. Her witness is of great weight and a motive of credibility. The church of the first ages possesses in her testimonies a strong support for Scripture. For every man, the church is the guide to Scripture. In this sense, the word of Augustine remains true, that he was moved by the church to believe Scripture. Protestant theologians—Calvin, Institutes I 7, 3; Polanus, Synt. ; Turretin, de S. Scr. auctoritate , disp. 3 § 13 sq.; Gerhard, Loci theol. I c. 3 § 51—have weakened this word of Augustine by letting it bear only upon the past, upon the arising of faith.
But the reasoning of Augustine in that place is clear. He sets before his Manichaean adversary this dilemma: Thou must either say to me, Believe the Catholics, but these warn me precisely not to believe thee; or believe not the Catholics, but then thou canst not appeal to the gospel over against me, for to the gospel itself I have believed through the preaching of the Catholics. The church is indeed for Augustine a motive of faith, which he here makes use of over against the Manichaean. But there is a difference between motive and the last ground of faith. How he sees in the church a motive of faith, he himself clears up elsewhere, in Contra Faustum lib. 32 c. 19, when he says: Why not rather submit thyself to the evangelical authority, so well-founded, so stable, so renowned with glory, and from the times of the apostles even unto our times commended through most certain successions? Compare de util. cred. c. 14.
The church with her dignity, her power, her hierarchy, and the like, ever made a deep impression upon Augustine. She continually moved him to faith, she upheld and strengthened him in doubt and strife, she was the steadfast hand that ever led him back to Scripture. But therewith Augustine doth not mean to say that the authority of Scripture hangs upon the church, that she is the last and deepest ground of his faith. Elsewhere he saith clearly that Holy Scripture hath authority through itself and must be believed for itself: Clausen, Augustinus S. Scr. interpres 1827; Dorner, Augustinus , Berlin 1873; Reuter, Augustinische Studien , Gotha 1887; Schmidt, Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. VI; Hase, Protest. Polemik 5th ed., Leipzig 1891; Harnack, D. G. III.
The church has and holds for every believer unto his death a rich and deep teaching meaning. The cloud of witnesses that lies about us can strengthen and encourage us in the strife. But this is quite another thing than that the authority of Scripture should hang upon the church. Rome dares not even yet openly speak this out. The Vatican Council acknowledged the books of the Old and New Testament as canonical also for this cause, propterea quod Spiritu S. inspirante conscripti Deum autorem habent and as such have been handed over to the church. And the Roman theologians make a distinction between the authority of Scripture quoad se and quoad nos . But this distinction cannot hold here. For if the church is the last and deepest ground why I believe in Scripture, then that church, and not Scripture, is autopistos. And now one of two: Scripture contains a witness, a teaching about itself, about its inspiration and authority, and then the church does nothing but take and uphold that witness; or Scripture itself teaches no such inspiration and authority, and then the dogma of the church about Scripture is judged for the Protestant.
The Roman theologians are therefore in no small strife within themselves. On the one hand, they strive in the teaching of Scripture to prove its inspiration and sway from itself; and on the other hand, when come to the teaching of the church, they seek to weaken those proofs and to show that only the witness of the church gives an unshakeable certainty. If, however, the authority quoad se hangs upon Scripture itself, then it is also quoad nos , the last ground of our faith. The church can only acknowledge what is there; it cannot make what is not. The charge that in this wise a circle-reasoning is made and Scripture is proven with Scripture itself can be cast back upon Rome itself, because it proves the church with Scripture and Scripture with the church. If Rome notes against this that in the first case it uses Scripture not as God's word but as human, believable and trustworthy witness, then the Protestant theologian can also take over this note: first, inspiration is drawn from Scripture as trustworthy witness and thereafter with this Scripture is proven as God's word.
But much more is this of meaning, that in every field of knowledge, and so also in theology, the principles stand fast by themselves. The truth of a principle cannot be proven, but only acknowledged. Principium creditur propter se, non propter aliud. Principii principium haberi non potest nec quaeri debet , Gerhard, Loc. theol. I cap. 3. Zanchius, Op. VIII. Polanus, Synt. I cap. 23. Turret. Theol. El. loc. 2 qu. 6. Trelcatius, Schol. et method. loc. comm. S. Theol. Institutio 1651.
The Holy Writ itself teacheth plainly, that not the church but the word of God, written or unwritten, is autopistos .
The church is at all times bound to that word of God, insofar as it was there and in the form wherein it stood. Israel receiveth the law at Horeb, Jesus and the apostles submit themselves to the Old Testament Writ, the Christian church is from the beginning bound to the spoken and written word of the apostles.
The word of God is the foundation of the church, Deut. 4:1; Isa. 8:20; Ezek. 20:19; Luke 16:29; John 5:39; Eph. 2:20; 2 Tim. 3:14; 2 Pet. 1:19 and so forth.
The church can indeed bear witness to the word, but the word standeth above her. She can bestow on no one the faith in the word of God within the heart. That can the word of God alone, through itself and the might of the Holy Ghost, Jer. 23:29; Mark 4:28; Luke 8:11; Rom. 1:16; Heb. 4:12; 1 Pet. 1:23.
And by that alone it already appeareth that the church standeth beneath the Writ. Therefore the church and the believers can learn to know the inspiration, authority, and canonicity of the Writ from itself, but they can never on their own whim proclaim and establish these.
The Reformation hath rather willed some uncertainty, than a certainty which was gotten only by a willful decree of the church. For the Writ indeed giveth nowhere a list of the books which it holdeth. Over some books there hath been difference of mind in the eldest Christian church and also later. The text hath not that wholeness which also Lutheran and Reformed divines so gladly wished.
But notwithstanding, the Reformation upheld the autopistie of the Writ against the claims of Rome, made the church underling to the word of God, and thereby redeemed the freedom of the Christian.
5. Besides this difference between Rome and the Reformation over the ground of the authority of Scripture, there arose in the seventeenth hundredyear in the Protestant churches themselves an important strife over the kind of that authority. Herein men were at one, that to the Scripture, since she had God as author, a divine authority belonged. Nearer was this authority thereby set forth, that the Scripture by all must be believed and hearkened to, and was the only rule of belief and life. This setting forth led however of itself to the sundering of a historical authority and a normative authority. For God's unfolding is given in the shape of a history; she has run through sundry times. Far from all that stands written down in the Scripture has normative authority for our belief and life. Much of what by God was bidden and set up, or by prophets and apostles was forewritten and ordained, touches us no more straightway and had bearing on earlier living folk. The bidding to Abraham to offer his son; the behest to Israel to slay all the Canaanites; the ceremonial and burgherly laws that held in the days of the Old Covenant; the settlings of the gathering at Jerusalem and so much more are surely as history still needful for teaching and warning, but can and may by us no more be followed. And not that alone, but the unfolding in her writing down has not only the good works of the holy ones but also the wicked deeds of the godless ones written down. Ofttimes come there thus words and doings in the Scripture, which well as historical true but not as normative are set forth; so far is it from that these may be rule for our belief and life, that they rather must be forsaken and misliked. Also the sins of the holy ones, of an Abraham, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Peter and so on are shared for warning, not for afterfollowing. And at last can with many folk, with the forefathers, Deborah, the judges, the kings, the friends of Job, Hannah, Agur, the mother of Lemuel, the singers of some psalms, such as the curse-psalms Ps. 73:13, 14, 77:7-9, 116:11, and further with Zechariah, Simeon, Mary, Stephen and so on the asking be put, whether their words only in shape, what their writing down touches, or also in stuff, what their inhold goes, are inbreathed. Voetius deemed that many of these folk, such as Job and his friends, cannot be reckoned to the prophets and upheld this feeling against Maresius, and further Maccovius, Cloppenburg, Witsius, Moor, Carpzovius. This asking had well no further outgrowths, but was yet in many looks weighty. She brought it first clearly to mindwitting, that there is sundering between word of God in shapely and word of God in stuffly wit, and drove to afterthinking over the bearing wherein both to each other stand. Now was that bearing surely by the most of the abovenamed godlore men all too twofoldly taken up. The authority of history and the history of the norm let themselves in the Scripture not on so withdrawn wise sunder. The shapely and the stuffly meaning of the out-saying word of God are much too narrowly bound. Also in the lying words of Satan and the wicked deeds of the godless ones has God something to us to say. The Scripture is not only needful to teaching but also to warning and chiding. She underteaches and betters us, as well by off-frighting as by on-spurring, as well by shaming as by troosting. But well was it by that sundering made clear, that the Scripture cannot and may not be taken up as a lawbook full of writings. Calling on a text outside the binding is for a lore-teaching not enough. The unfolding laid down in the Scripture is a historical and lifely whole. So will she be read and cleared. And therefore must the lore-teaching that with authority to us comes and will be rule for our belief and life, on the whole lifeshape of the Scripture grounded and therefrom led off be. The authority of the Scripture is another than that of a state-law.
6. The Nature and Ground of the Authority of Scripture. Yet the nature and ground of the authority of Scripture have been brought into discussion especially in the newer theology. In former times the authority of Holy Scripture rested upon its inspiration and was given with this of itself. But when inspiration was given up, the authority of Scripture could no longer be upheld. Indeed, this was tried in all manner of ways, but men saw themselves forced to take up both the grounds and the character of the authority of Holy Scripture in a wholly other manner. The authority of Scripture, insofar as it was still acknowledged, was then based upon this, that it is the true charter of the revelation; that it sets forth the Christian idea in the purest wise, even as water is also purest at the spring; that it is the fulfillment of the Old Testament thought of salvation, and holds the Christian teaching fully, though also in seed, within itself; and that it is the beginning and ongoing renewal of the Christian spirit in the church. These and suchlike thoughts for the authority of Scripture one may find among theologians of the most sundry directions.
Yet all these grounds are not firm enough to bear an authority such as religion needs. They may be taken into reckoning as motives of credibility, but as grounds they are untenable. For first, they make the authority of Scripture in truth wholly unreal by the sundering between revelation and its charter, between the word of God and Scripture. For if not Scripture in its whole, but only the word of God in it, the religious-ethical, the revelation or however one may name it, has authority, then each must for himself settle what that word of God in Scripture is, and each fixes this after his own liking. The weight is shifted from the object to the subject; Scripture does not weigh the man, but he judges Scripture; the authority of Scripture hangs upon man's good pleasure; it abides only insofar as one will acknowledge it, and is thus wholly undone.
But even if all these grounds could claim some authority for Scripture, it would yet be no other than a mere historical authority. And this is not enough in religion. Here we have not enough with a historical, that is, a human and fallible authority. Because religion touches our salvation and stands in bond with our everlasting weal, we can in it make do with nothing less than a godly authority. We must not only know that Scripture is the historical charter for our knowledge of Christendom and that it holds and sets forth the first Christian ideas in the purest wise; but in religion we must know that Scripture is the word and truth of God. Without this certainty there is no comfort in life and in dying. And not only does every Christian need this certainty, but the church itself as an house cannot lack this sureness. For if a preacher lacks the belief in the godly truth of the word that he proclaims, his preaching loses all authority and sway and strength. If he has no godly message to bring, who gives him the right to stand forth before men of like stirrings as he? Who gives him leave to set himself upon the pulpit above them, to busy them about the highest weals of the soul and of life, and even to proclaim to them an everlasting weal or an everlasting woe? Who dares and who can do that, other than he who has a word of God to proclaim? The Christian faith and the Christian preaching both call for a godly authority upon which they rest. Faith will waver, if the authority of the divine Scriptures wavers.
Therefore it can bear no approval, when the nature of the authority of Scripture is defined as moral. Lessing already began therewith when he said, that something is not true because it stands in the Bible, but that it stands in the Bible because it is true. Since his sigh for redemption from the authority of the letter and from the paper pope, believing on authority has been mocked in all kinds of ways. Christian theologians have let themselves be influenced thereby and have altered or opposed the faith of authority. Doedes, for example, in Introduction to the Doctrine of God , 1880, wants nothing to know of believing on authority and speaks only still of moral authority in religion. Saussaye, in My Theology of Ch. d. l. S. , declares that there is no other than moral authority and that the moral is wholly authority. Intellectual authority there is not, but moral authority is morality, religion itself. One believes the truth not on authority, but the truth has authority, that is, has the right that one obey her. This representation suffers however from confusion of concepts. The truth has authority, very surely; no one denies it. But the question is precisely, what on religious ground is truth and where she is to be found. Hereupon there is but twofold answer possible. Either on the one side: what truth is, or if one will, who Christ is, that tell us the apostles, that tells us Scripture; or on the other side: this is decided by one's own judgment, by the reason or the conscience of each man for himself. In the last case there is no authority and no authority of Scripture anymore; she is wholly and altogether subjected to the criticism of the subject. Then it avails nothing also, to say with Rothe, in Zur Dogmatik , that the Bible is the fully sufficient instrument to come to a pure knowledge of God's revelation. For every objective measure lacks, whereby in Scripture that revelation can be judged and found. There is indeed but one ground whereupon the authority of Scripture can rest, and that is her inspiration. If this falls, then it is also done with the authority of Scripture. She contains then only human writings, which as such can claim no single title to be norm for our faith and life. And with Scripture falls for the Protestant all authority in religion. All attempts then still to find back one or other authority, for example in the person of Christ, in the church, in religious experience, in reason or conscience, run out on disappointment. Stanton, The Place of Authority in Matters of Religious Belief , London: Longmans, 1891. James Martineau, The Seat of Authority in Religion , London: Longmans, 1891. C. A. Briggs, The Authority of Holy Scripture: Inaugural Address , 4th ed., New York: Scribner, 1892. L. Monod, Le Problème de l’Autorité , Paris: Fischbacher, 1892. E. Doumergue, L’Autorité en Matière de Foi , Lausanne: Payot, 1892. E. Ménégoz, L’Autorité de Dieu: Réflexions sur l’Autorité en Matière de Foi , Paris: Fischbacher, 1892. G. Godet, Vinet et l’Autorité en Matière de Foi , in Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie , March 1893. They prove only that a religion without authority cannot exist. Religion is essentially distinguished from science. She has her own certainty; not such a one that rests on insight, but that consists in faith, in trust. And this religious faith and trust can only rest in God and in his word. In religion a human testimony and a human faith is insufficient; here we have need of a testimony of God, whereupon we can rely in life and death. Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te! Rightly says then also Harnack, in Dogmengeschichte III, there has in the world been no strong religious faith that has not at some decisive point appealed to an external authority. Only in the pale executions of the philosophers of religion or in the polemical designs of Protestant theologians is a faith constructed that draws its certainty solely from its own inner moments. Compare also P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Zekerheid en Twijfel , 1893. The right and the worth of authority in religion is gradually again acknowledged.
7. But, although religion can only suffice with a divine authority, the nature of that authority must yet be searched more closely. Authority is in general the might of someone who has somewhat to say; the right to speak in one or another matter, hence in Middle Dutch, might, power. Authority can only be spoken of between unequals; it always sets forth a bond of a greater to his lesser, of a higher to his lower. For among men there is no evenness but all kinds of sundering exists, authority can be spoken of among them. And since that unevenness is so great and so manifold, authority among men takes a very broad room. It is even the groundwork of the whole human fellowship. Whoever undermines it, works at the overthrow of the commonwealth. Foolish and perilous it is therefore to set believing on authority in a mocking light.
Augustine already asked: Si quod nescitur credendum non est, quomodo serviant parentibus liberi eosque mutua pietate diligant, quos parentes suos esse non credant....... Multa possunt afferri quibus ostendatur, nihil omnino humanae societatis incolume remanere, si nihil credere statuerimus, quod non possumus tenere perceptum , de util. cred. 12.
In every field we live by authority. Under authority we are born and reared in household, fellowship, and realm. Parents have authority over their children, the teacher over his learners, the overlord over his underlings. In all these cases the authority is clear. It sets forth a might that by right belongs to someone over another. It therefore comes forth with behests and laws, calls for obedience and yielding, and in case of uprising even has right of force and punishment.
But we widen this thought of authority further and lay it also upon knowledge and craft. Here too there is sundering of gifts, and the bond arises of betters and lessers, of masters and learners. There are men who by their gifted bent and steadfast toil have won mastery in one or another field, and who therefore can speak with authority in this ground. From the findings of these masters the lessers, the layfolk, live and learn. Yea, because of the awful spreading of knowledge, even the foremost can only be master in a very small field; in all else he is learner and must trust in the searching of others.
This authority in knowledge and craft bears however another kind than that of parents, teachers, and overlord; it is not law-bound, but upright in kind; it can and may not drive, it has no right of punishment. The persons who come forth here with authority may be ever so high and weighty; their witness holds only as much as they can bring forth grounds for it. Authority here rests therefore not at last in the persons, so that an ipse dixit would be enough, but rests in the proofs on which their saying stands. And since all men have gotten some wit and doom, blind belief here is unallowed and the striving for a self-standing insight, as far as needful and may be, is duty.
Also in the tale of yore this is the case. The knowing of history rests truly wholly on authority, on witnesses of others; but these witnesses need not be believed blindly, but may and must be earnestly searched, so that as much as may be one's own insight comes to its right. In one word, in scientiis tantum valet auctoritas humana, quantum rationes .
This understanding of authority we find at last also in religion and theology. Here authority is not in a lesser degree but in a much higher measure needful than in the household and fellowship, in learning and craft. Here it is a life-need. Without authority and belief, religion and theology cannot abide for a twinkling. But the authority bears here a wholly own mark. It must by its very kind be a divine authority. And already by this it is set apart from the authority in fellowship and realm, in learning and craft. From the latter it differs most in this wise, that in learning and craft one's own insight may deem and settle. But with a divine authority this fits not. When God has spoken, all doubt is done. The divine authority is therefore not to be called moral, at least not in the sense wherein we speak of the moral sway of a person, for religion is not a bond of a lesser to his greater, but of a shaped thing to his Shaper, of a liege to his Sovereign, of a child to his Father. God has right to bid man and to ask unyielding obedience from him. His authority rests in his being, not in the grounds. In so far the authority of God and of his word matches that of the overlord in the realm and of the father in the household. And there is nothing lowly in it and nothing that even a whit cuts short man's freedom, if he childlike hearkens to the word of God and yields to it. To believe God on his word, that is, on authority, is even as little at odds with man's worth as it shames a child to lean with boundless trust on the word of his father. And so far is it from the Christian outgrowing this authority bit by bit, that he rather, the longer the more, with forsaking of all own wisdom, goes to believe God on his word. The believer never on earth outgrows the standpoint of belief and of authority. As he waxes in belief, he cleaves the firmer to the authority of God in his word.
But on the other side there is yet also a great unlikeness between the authority of God in religion and that of a father in his household and of an overlord in the realm. A father drives if need be his child and brings it through chastening to yielding; and the overlord bears the sword not for naught. Driving is unloosed not from the authority of earthly overlords. But God drives not. His unveiling is an unveiling of grace. And therein He comes to man not with biddings and askings, with driving and with chastening, but with the bidding, with the warning, with the plea, to let himself be atoned with Him. God could stand as Sovereign over against man. He will once as Judge deem all who have been unyielding to the gospel of his Son. But in Christ He stoops to us, becomes like us in all things, deals with us as thinking and upright beings; only then again, striking on foehood and unbelief, to take back his sovereignty, to work his rede and ready glory for himself from all shaped things. The authority wherewith God stands forth in religion is thus wholly of its own kind. It is not manly but godly. It is sovereign and yet works in an upright wise. It drives not, and yet knows to uphold itself. It is utter and yet is withstood. It bids and begs, and yet is unbeaten.
And such also is the authority of the Scripture. As the word of God, it stands high above all authority of men in state and society, in science and art. Before it must all else yield. For we must obey God rather than men. All other authority is limited within its circle and holds only in its own realm. But the authority of the Scripture extends over the whole man and over all mankind. It stands above reason and will, above heart and conscience; it cannot be compared with any other authority. Its authority is absolute, because it is divine. It has the right to be believed and obeyed by every one at all times. In majesty it far surpasses all other power. But to bring itself to recognition and rule, it calls no one to its aid. It has no need of the strong arm of the government. It requires not the support of the church. It calls not upon the sword and the inquisition. It wills not to rule by force or violence. It desires free and willing acknowledgment. And therefore it brings this about itself, in a moral way, by the working of the Holy Spirit. The Scripture guards its own authority. Therefore men of old also spoke of an auctoritas causativa of the Scripture, whereby the Scripture generates and confirms in the intellect of man the assent to things that must be believed. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. § 8.
8. In the authority of Scripture there is great agreement among the Christian churches, but in the three other properties that now follow, there is weighty difference. Rome, because of the relation that it assumes between Scripture and church, can neither see nor acknowledge the necessity of Holy Scripture. With Rome the church is self-authenticating, self-sufficient, living out of and through the Holy Ghost; she hath the truth and keepeth it faithfully and purely through the infallible teaching office of the pope. Scripture, on the other hand, having sprung from the church, may be useful and good as a norm, but it is not the wellspring of truth. It is not needful for the being of the church. The church hath not properly the Scripture, but rather Scripture hath need of the church for its authority, completion, explanation, and the like.
The grounds for this teaching are drawn therefrom, that the church before Moses and the first Christian community had no Scripture, and that many believers under the Old and also still under the New Testament never possessed and read the Scripture but lived solely from the tradition.
But not only Rome combats in that wise the necessity of the Holy Scripture; also sundry mystical directions have weakened and misprized the significance of the Scripture for church and theology. The Gnosticism rejected not only the Old Testament but applied to the New Testament the allegorical method and sought thereby to bring its system into agreement with the Scripture. The sensual forms and historical facts have but symbolical meaning; they are a clothing, which for men of lower standpoint is needful, but for the higher developed, the spiritual ones, falls away. The Scripture is no fount of truth, but only a means to lift oneself up to the higher standpoint of the gnosis. In the Montanism a new revelation appeared, which supplemented and bettered that in the New Testament. The Montanism, especially in its tempered form with Tertullian, willed on one side to be nothing new and to maintain fully the authority of the Scripture; and yet it greeted in Montanus a prophet, in whom the Paraclete promised by Jesus, the last and highest revelation, had appeared. The Scripture must in that wise yield to the new prophecy, which was proclaimed by Montanus. The church condemned these directions indeed, and the church fathers combated this spiritualism. Augustine wrote against it in the prologue to his book De Doctrina Christiana; but yet Augustine also assumed that the pious, especially the monks, could be equipped with so great a measure of faith, hope, and love, that they for themselves could miss the Scripture and without it live in solitude, De Doctr. Christ. I c. 39. The spiritualism came up time and again, and reacted against the binding might of church and tradition. Diverse sects, the Cathars, Amalric of Bena, Joachim of Floris, the brethren and sisters of the free spirit, and later the Libertines in Geneva, deemed after the period of the Father and of the Son that of the Holy Ghost to have dawned, wherein all lived by the Spirit and no longer needed the outward means of Scripture and church. The mysticism, which in the Middle Ages flourished in France and Germany, sought by means of asceticism, meditation, and contemplation to attain a fellowship with God, which could miss the Scripture. The Scripture was indeed by way of a ladder needful to climb to this height, but became needless when the unity with God, the vision of God, was reached. Especially the Anabaptists exalted the inward word at the cost of the outward. Already in 1521 the opposition was made between Scripture and Spirit, and this opposition became an abiding mark of Anabaptism. The Holy Scripture is not the true word of God, but only a testimony and description; the genuine, true word is that which by the Holy Spirit is spoken in our hearts. The Bible is but a book with letters; Bible is Babel, full of confusion; it cannot work faith in the hearts, only the Spirit teaches us the true word. And when that Spirit instructs us, then we can well miss the Scripture; it is a timely help but for the spiritual man not needful. Hans Denck identified that inward word already with the natural reason, and pointed to many contradictions in the Scripture. Ludwig Hetzer deemed the Scripture in no wise needful. Knipperdolling demanded at Münster that the Holy Scripture must be abolished and men should live only according to nature and spirit. The mysticism turned into rationalism. The same appearance we see later with the Anabaptist and Independent sects in England, in the time of Cromwell, with the Quakers and with Pietism. The exaltation of the inward above the outward word led always to identification of the instruction of the Spirit with the natural light of reason and conscience, and so to complete rejection of revelation and Scripture. No one has also more sharply combated the necessity of the Scripture than Lessing in his Axiomata against Goeze. He also makes distinction between letter and spirit, Bible and religion, theology and piety, the Christian religion and the religion of Jesus, and says now that the latter existed and can exist independently of the former. The religion was there, forsooth, ere there was a Bible. Christianity was there, ere evangelists and apostles wrote. The religion taught by them can continue, even if all their writings were lost. The religion is not true because evangelists and apostles taught it, but they taught it because it is true. Their writings may and must therefore be explained according to the inward truth of the religion. An attack on the Bible is not yet an attack on the religion. Luther has delivered us from the yoke of tradition; who will deliver us from the yet much more unbearable yoke of the letter?
9. These thoughts on the non-needfulness of Scripture have been chiefly brought in among the newer theology by Schleiermacher. In his Glaubenslehre , sections 128 and 129, he says that belief in Christ rests not on the sway of Scripture, but goes before the belief in Scripture and just gives to that Scripture a special heed for us. Among the first Christians, belief in Christ arose not from the Holy Scripture, and so it cannot arise from it among us either; for among them and us, belief must have the same ground. Scripture is therefore no wellspring of belief, but indeed a yardstick; it is the first link in the row of Christian writings, it stands nearest to the wellspring, that is, the unveiling in Christ, and thus had little risk of taking in unclean parts. But all the writings of the gospel-writers and apostles are, even as all following Christian writings, sprung from the same Ghost, the fellowship-ghost of the Christian church. The church is not built on Scripture, but Scripture is sprung from the church. Through Schleiermacher these thoughts have become the shared goods of the newer theology. They seem so true and so self-speaking that no doubt or weighing is thought of. Among nearly all god-learned men one can find the showing that the church was there before Scripture and thus can also be without it. The church rests in itself, it lives from itself, that is, from the Ghost that dwells in it. The Holy Scripture, sprung from it in the outset, in the freshness of its youth, is indeed a yardstick but no wellspring. Wellspring is the ownself, living Christ, who dwells in the gathering; dogmatics is an outlining of the life, unfolding of the godly awareness of the gathering, and has thereby as a guideline the Scripture, which has told that life of the gathering first and most clearly. The church is thus truly the writer of the Bible, and the Bible is the mirror of the gathering. Lange, Philos. Dogm. Rothe, Zur Dogm. Frank, Syst. der chr. Gewissheit . Philippi, Kirchl. Glaub. Hofstede de Groot, De Gron. Godg. Saussaye, My Theol. van d. l. S. Gunning and de la Saussaye Jr., The Ethical Principle of Theology , and so forth.
All these thoughts, from Rome, the Anabaptism, the mysticism, the rationalism, from Lessing, Schleiermacher and so forth, are among themselves most closely akin. Especially Schleiermacher has through his overturning of the bond between Scripture and church offered Rome a mighty stay. All agree in this, that the Scripture is not needful but at most helpful, and that the church can also out of and through herself abide. The difference lies only herein, that Rome seeks the ground and the likelihood for this ongoing of the Christian religion in the instituted church, that is, in the unfailing pope; Schleiermacher and his fellows in the congregation as organism, that is, in the religious fellowship; and the mysticism and rationalism in the religious individuals. All seek the ongoing of the church in the leading of the Holy Ghost, in the indwelling of Christ, but this has with Rome her organ in the pope, with Schleiermacher in the organism of the congregation, with the Anabaptism in every believer head for head.
It is easy to see that Rome hereby takes the strongest stance. For surely, there is a leading of the Holy Ghost in the congregation; Christ is risen from the dead, lives in heaven, and dwells and works in his church on earth. There is a mystical union between Christ and his body. The word alone is lacking; the outward principle calls also for an inward principle. The Protestantism knew this all very well and confessed it heartily. But the question was this, whether the church for the aware life of religion was bound to the word, to the Scripture, or not. Religion is yet not only a matter of the heart, the mood, the will, but also of the head. Also with the understanding must God be served and loved. For the aware life must then the church have a wellspring whence she draws the truth. Now can Rome with her unfailing pope claim that the Scripture is not needful. The unfailingness of the church makes indeed the Scripture needless. But Protestantism has no unfailing organ, neither in the institute nor in the organism nor in the single members of the congregation. When it denies the needfulness of the Scripture, it weakens itself, strengthens Rome, and loses the truth, which is an unmissable element of religion.
Therefore the Reformation stood so strongly on the needfulness of the Holy Scripture. The Scripture was the "give me where to stand" of the Reformation. She succeeded because she could set over against the sway of church, councils, and pope the authority of God's holy word. Who leaves this standpoint of the Reformation works unwittingly at the upbuilding of Rome. For if not the Scripture but the church is needful to knowledge of religious truth, then becomes she the unlackable means of grace. The word loses her central place and keeps only a preparatory, teaching meaning. The Scripture may be helpful and good, needful is she not, neither for the church in her whole nor for the believers in the sunder.
10. Although the Reformation thus against Rome sought its strength in the Scripture and upheld its necessity, yet it did not thereby deny that the church before Moses had stood for ages without Scripture. It is also true that the church of the New Testament was founded by the preaching of the apostles and lasted a long time without a New Testament canon. Furthermore, the congregation is still ever nourished and planted in the heathen world by the proclamation of the gospel. The books of the Old and New Testament moreover arose little by little; they were spread in small numbers before the art of printing; many believers in former and later times died without ever having read and searched the Scripture, and still the religious life seeks fulfillment for its needs not only in the Scripture but at least as much in all kinds of edifying reading. All this can be fully owned, without thereby doing the least wrong to the necessity of the Scripture. Even had God, if it had pleased Him, surely could have kept the church by the truth in another way than by means of a written word. The necessity of the Scripture is not absolute but ex hypothesi beneplacentiae Dei.
But when understood in this way, this necessity is nevertheless raised above all doubt. Mankind has at all times lived only by the word that goes forth from the mouth of God, Mt. 4:4. The word of God has from the beginning been the seed of the church. Certainly the church was before Moses without Scripture. But there was yet an unwritten word, before it became written. The church has never lived from itself nor rested in itself, but always by the word of God. Rome does not teach this either, but assumes a tradition that keeps the word of God without error. But this must indeed be spoken out against those who let revelation be only in life, in the pouring in of godly strengths, in the stirring up of religious feelings. Thus the church may be older than the written word, yet it is younger than the spoken word.
The common claim that the church of the New Testament was for a long time without Scripture must also be well grasped. It is true that the canon of the New Testament writings was first widely owned in the latter half of the second hundred years. But the Christian gatherings had from the outset the Old Testament. They were founded by the spoken word of the apostles. Very soon many gatherings came to hold apostolic writings, which were also given to others for reading, soon served for reading aloud in the churches, and very soon were spread abroad. It goes without saying that, as long as the apostles lived and visited the gatherings, no split was made between their spoken and written word; tradition and Scripture were as it were still one. But when the first time was past and the gap from the apostles grew greater, the writings of the apostles rose in worth, and their necessity grew step by step. Indeed the necessity of Holy Scripture is not a fixed but an ever-growing trait. The Scripture was not always in its wholeness needful for the whole church. The Scripture arose and was fulfilled little by little. As revelation went forward, so it also grew in breadth. Each time of the church had enough with that share of Scripture that then was, even as it had enough with the revelation that had come so far. The Scripture is, like the revelation, an organic whole that has grown; in the seed was the plant, in the bud was the fruit held. Both, revelation and Scripture, kept even step with the state of the church and the other way round. Therefore no end can be drawn from the earlier states of the church for the now. Let the church before Moses have been without Scripture, let the church before the fulfilling of revelation never have held the whole Scripture; from that follows nothing for that ordering of the church in which we live, wherein revelation has ended and Scripture is fulfilled. For this ordering the Scripture is not only helpful and good, but also surely needful for the being of the church.
11. The Necessity of Holy Scripture. For Scripture is the only sufficient means to preserve the spoken word unfalsified and to make it the property of all men. The heard voice perishes, the written letter remains. The shortness of life, the unfaithfulness of memory, the craftiness of the heart, and sundry other dangers that threaten the purity of tradition make the recording of the spoken word utterly needful for its preservation and spread. This holds in even greater measure for the word of revelation. For the gospel is not after man; it stands directly over against his thoughts and desires; it stands as divine truth over against his lie. Moreover, revelation is not for one generation and one time, but is destined for all peoples and ages. It must run its course through the whole of mankind even unto the end of the times. The truth is one; Christianity is the universal religion. How shall this destiny of the word of revelation be otherwise attained than by its being recorded and written down? The church cannot perform this service of the word. Nowhere is her infallibility promised. She is always in Scripture referred to the objective word, to the law and the testimony.
Properly speaking, even Rome does not claim that. The church, that is, the assembly of believers, is not infallible in Rome's view, nor is the assembly of bishops, but only the pope. The declaration of the pope's infallibility is a proof of the Reformation thesis of the unreliability of tradition, of the fallibility of the church, and even of the necessity of Scripture. For this declaration of infallibility implies that the truth of the word of revelation is not preserved or can be preserved by the church as the assembly of believers, since this too is still subject to error, but that it can only be declared from a special assistance of the Holy Ghost, in which, according to Roman claim, the pope shares. Rome and the Reformation thus agree that the word of revelation can only remain pure in and for the church through the institution of the apostolate, that is, through inspiration. And the dispute runs only on this: whether that apostolate has ceased or is continued in the pope.
On the other hand, the claim of the mediating theology is wholly untenable, that Scripture has come forth from the church and that she is thus properly the authoress of the Bible. One can only claim that if one misunderstands the proper office of the prophets and apostles, identifies inspiration with regeneration, and detaches Scripture wholly from revelation. According to the teaching of Scripture, however, inspiration is a special act of the Holy Ghost, a special gift to prophets and apostles, whereby they could deliver the word of God pure and unfalsified to the church of all ages. Scripture has thus not come forth from the church, but has been given to the church through a special working of the Holy Ghost in the prophets and apostles. Scripture belongs also to the revelation which God has bestowed on his people. In this Rome and the Reformation are at one. But the Reformation maintains over against Rome that this special working of the Holy Ghost has now ceased, in other words, that the apostolate no longer exists and is not continued in the pope. The apostles have laid down their testimony concerning Christ fully and purely in the Holy Scriptures. Through these they have made God's revelation the property of mankind. Scripture is the word of God fully entered into the world. It makes that word general and eternal, wrests it from error and lie, from forgetfulness and transitoriness.
As mankind grows greater, life shorter, memory weaker, knowledge wider, error more serious, and falsehood bolder, so the necessity of Holy Scripture increases. In every field the writing and the press gain in meaning. The art of printing was a giant step toward heaven and toward hell. Holy Scripture shares also in this course of development. Her necessity comes ever more clearly to light. She is spread and made common property as never before. In hundreds of tongues she is translated. She comes before every eye and into every hand. More and more she proves to be the fitting means to bring the truth to the knowledge of all men. That alongside this the religious literature remains for many the chief food for their spiritual life proves nothing against the necessity of Holy Scripture. For all Christian truth is yet drawn directly or indirectly from her. Even the derived stream receives its water from the fountain. It is an untenable claim that something of Christian truth should still come to us outside and without Holy Scripture. In the first century such a thing was possible, but now the streams of tradition and Scripture have long flowed together, and the first has long been taken up into the second. Rome can only maintain this through its doctrine of the continuance of the apostolate and the infallibility of the pope. But for a Protestant this is impossible. The Christian character of the truth can be demonstrated solely and only thereby that it roots with all its fibers in Holy Scripture. There is no knowledge of Christ except from Scripture, no fellowship with him except through fellowship in the word of the apostles.
Cf. Ursinus, Tract. theol. Zanchius, Op. Polanus, Synt. Theol. Synopsis pur. theol. Turretinus, Theol. El. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. etc.
12. Even if the needfulness of Scripture is owned, there can yet be sundry thoughts about the length of that needfulness. Even those who deem that Scripture has had its tide, oft gladly yield that it was of great weight in its tide for the upbringing of men and folks. But in sundry ways the length of that needfulness has been narrowed. Gnosticism owned its needfulness for the soul-men but fought it for the spirit-men. Mysticism held Scripture needful at the standpoint of thinking and brooding, but no more at that of beholding and sight of God. The reason-teaching of Lessing and Kant gave to showing-forth, Scripture, the law-bound worship a child-leading stead, that thereby the lordship of reason-worship might be readied. Likewise Hegel deemed that the shape of beholding in worship was needful for the folk, but that the wisdom-seeker with his graspings had no more want thereof. And oft one hears it spoken that worship is good for the throng to hold them in rein, but that the learned and refined are far uplifted above it.
There lieth in this representation an undeniable and glorious truth. The revelation, the Scripture, the church, the whole Christian religion indeed beareth a temporal, preparatory, and pedagogical character. Even as the Old Testament economy of the covenant of grace hath passed away, so shall this dispensation of the covenant of grace, wherein we live, one day belong to the past. When Christ hath gathered his church and presented her as a pure bride unto the Father, he delivereth up the kingdom unto God. Moreover, the duality of grace and nature, of revelation and reason, of authority and freedom, of theology and philosophy cannot be of eternal duration. The highest in religion consisteth therein, that we serve God without compulsion and without fear, out of love alone, according to the utterance of our own nature. It is God himself in his revelation who aimeth to form men in whom his image is fully restored. He gave us not only his Son but also the Holy Spirit, that he might regenerate us, write his law in our hearts, and make us able for every good work. Regeneration, sonship, sanctification, glorification are the proofs that God traineth his children unto freedom, unto a service of love that never grieveth. Insofar can the above-mentioned representations be called an anticipation of the future ideal. But they are nevertheless of a very dangerous tendency. They all proceed from a confusion between the dispensation of the present and that of the hereafter. Because the new Jerusalem shall need no sun and no moon, both remain necessary here on earth. Because we shall one day walk by sight, yet faith remaineth indispensable in this dispensation. Although the church militant and the church triumphant are one, yet there remaineth a distinction in their condition and life. The boundary line may not and cannot be erased. Unto the heavenly life we bring it never here on earth. We walk by faith and not by sight. We see now through a glass darkly; only hereafter shall we see face to face and know even as we are known. The vision of God is reserved for heaven. Independent, self-sufficient we become never on this earth. We remain bound unto the cosmos that surroundeth us. The standpoint of authority can never be overcome here on earth.
But furthermore, this teaching of the timely needfulness of Scripture digs a deep cleft between the soul-like and the spirit-like folk, between the learned and the throng, between the wise-thinkers and the folk.
And such a cleft has in no wise a right to be. If godliness rested in knowing, then the learned would hold a fore-right over the unlearned. But in godliness all men are alike; they have the same wants. In Christ there is no sundering of Greek and outlander. Godliness is one for all men, however sundry they may be in standing, rank, upbringing, and so on. For before godliness, that is, before the face of God, all those sunderings of rank and fore-rights are worthless, whereby one among men outshines others.
The sundering between those two kinds of men bears witness also to a ghostly high-mind, which itself stands in straight strife with the being of the Christly godliness, with the low-mind, the lowly-ness, and so on, which it calls for. The toll-gatherers go before the Pharisees, and the least is in the kingdom of heaven the most.
Furthermore, there would still be something to be said for this separation, if rationalism were right and revelation consisted in nothing but truths of reason. Then indeed these, though at first known from revelation, could later be drawn by thought from reason itself. But revelation has a wholly other content than a rational teaching. It is history, has grace as its inwardness, the person of Christ as its midpoint, the remaking of mankind as its end. All this can never be found by thought or drawn from reason. To know such a revelation, the Scripture remains needful at all times. Even a revelation of God to each man head by head would not be able to give what now the revelation in Christ through the Scripture offers to all men. The historical kind of revelation, the deed and the thought of the flesh-becoming, and the living view of the human kindred demand a Scripture, wherein God's revelation is laid down for the whole mankind.
Therefore can now also be settled what was yet left in the midst, namely whether the revelation comes singly to each man or is given to all through the Scripture. As one sun with her rays lights the whole earth, so is Christ the uprising from on high, who appears to them that sit in darkness and shadow of death, and so is the one and selfsame Scripture the light on all's path and the lamp for all's foot. It is the word of God to the whole mankind. History itself bears a mighty witness for this needfulness of the Scripture. The highest ghostly mysticism has oft turned into the coarsest rationalism; and the fervent spiritualism has many times ended in the grossest materialism. The necessitas S. Scripturae is proven in the nayward as strongly from the ways that fight it, as in the yea from the churches that confess it.
13. Another Weighty Property of Scripture. Another weighty property, which the Reformation ascribed to the Scripture over against Rome, was its perspicuity. According to Rome, the Scripture is dark, as in Ps. 119:34, 68; Luke 24:27; Acts 8:30; 2 Pet. 3:16. Even in those matters which bear upon faith and life, it is not so clear that it can forgo explanation. For it treats of the deepest hidden things, of God, the Trinity, the becoming flesh, the foreordination, and so forth, and is even in the moral precepts, for example, Matt. 5:34, 40, 10:27; Luke 12:33, 14:33, oftentimes so unclear that misunderstanding and misapprehension have arisen at every moment in the Christian church. For a right understanding of the Scripture, all manner of knowledge is needful—of history, geography, chronology, archaeology, tongues, and the like—which is out of reach for the lay folk. The Protestants themselves write countless commentaries and differ from one another in exegesis at the most weighty texts. Therefore, an explanation of the Holy Scripture is needful. This cannot be given by the Scripture itself; the Scripture cannot be its own explainer. Already Plato, in Phaedrus , said that the letter is mishandled and cannot help itself, and that it needs the help of its father. It is dumb and can give no decision in a dispute. It is like the law, according to which the judge gives sentence, but it is not law and judge at the same time. The learned Jesuit Jacob Gretser made a deep mark at the religious colloquy at Regensburg in 1601, when he spoke thus: Sumus in conspectu sacrae Scripturae et Spiritus Sancti. Pronuntiet sententiam. Et si dicat: tu Gretsere male sentis, cecidisti causa tua, tu Jacobe Heilbrunnere vicisti; tunc ego statim transibo ad vestrum scamnum. Adsit, adsit, adsit et condemnet me! There must therefore be an explainer and a judge who gives decision according to the Scripture. If there is no such judge, then the explanation becomes wholly subjective; each one judges according to his own liking and holds his own individual view for unerring. Every heretic has his letter. Each seeks in the Scripture just his own dogmas, as in the well-known distich of Werenfels. The Scripture is given over to all manner of whim. Individualism, enthusiasm, rationalism, endless division is the end. And what is worst, if there is no unerring explanation, then there is also no utter certainty of faith; the ground whereon the Christian's hope rests is then pious opinion, learned insight, but no godly, unerring witness. And so far is it from this, that anyone can form his own conviction or teaching from the Holy Scripture, that the Protestants in fact, just as well as the Romanists, live from tradition and go by the authority of church, synods, fathers, writers, and the like.
Such an infallible, divine interpretation of the Scripture is however bestowed by God in His church. Not the dead, uncomprehended, dark, and to itself forsaken Scripture, but the church, the living, ever-present, always by the Spirit renewing itself church, is the mediatrix of truth and the infallible interpreter of the Holy Scripture. For each is the best expounder of his own word. The true interpreter of the Scripture is thus the Holy Ghost, who is its author. And this has its infallible organ in the church, or better yet, in the pope. The church is through tradition in possession of the truth; she is led by the selfsame Spirit which brought forth the Scripture; she is akin to it; she alone can understand its sense; she is the pillar and ground of the truth. So also has the practice always been. Moses, the priests, Christ, the apostles declared and decided for the congregation, Ex. 18; Deut. 17:9 ff.; 2 Chr. 19:9 ff.; Eccl. 12:12; Hag. 2:2; Mal. 2:7; Mt. 16:19, 18:17, 23:2; Lk. 22:32; Jn. 21:15 ff.; Acts 15:28; Gal. 2:2; 1 Cor. 12:8 ff.; 2 Pet. 1:19; 1 Jn. 4:1, and popes and councils have followed that example. Therefore the Council of Trent in session 4 decreed that no one may interpret the Holy Scripture against that sense which holy mother church has held and holds, whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, or even against the unanimous consent of the Fathers, and thereby bound exegesis not only negatively, as some Romans seek to take it, but very decidedly also positively. No one may give another exegesis than that which the church through her fathers, councils, or popes has given. The profession of faith of Pius IV, in Denzinger, Enchir. symb. et defin. n. 864 and the Vatican Council session 3 chapter 2 paragraph 4 leave no doubt concerning this. But not only is by this doctrine of the obscurity of the Scripture the scholarly exegesis subjected to the pope. Still more dependent and bound thereby is the layman. The Scripture is on account of its obscurity no fit reading for the laity. Without interpretation it is for the people unintelligible. Therefore the translating of the Scripture into the vulgar tongue and the reading of the Bible by the people, since the misuse that was made of it in the Middle Ages and later, has been more and more restricted by Rome. Reading of the Scripture is not permitted to the laity except with permission of the ecclesiastical authority. The Protestant Bible societies have been repeatedly condemned by the popes, and in the Encyclical of 8 Dec. 1864 placed on one line with the socialist and communist associations, Denzinger, Enchir. n. 1566. And indeed the present pope in his Encyclical on the study of Sacred Scripture recommends Scripture study, but not to the laity, Vincentius Lerinensis, Commonitorium cap. 3. Bellarmine, de verbo Dei, lib. III. M. Canus, Loci Theol. II cap. 6 sq. Perrone, Praelect. theol. IX 98 sq. Heinrich, Dogm. I 794 f. Möhler, Symbolik § 38 f. Jansen, Prael. theol. I 771 s. Herzog art. Bibellesen.
14. The Doctrine of the Perspicuity of Holy Scripture. The doctrine of the perspicuity of Holy Scripture has oftentimes been misunderstood and wrongly set forth, both by Protestants and by Roman Catholics. It does not hold that the matters and subjects whereof Scripture treats are no hidden things that far surpass the understanding of man. Nor does it claim that Holy Scripture is clear in all its parts, so that no learned searching of it would be needful. And no less does it mean that Holy Scripture, even in the teaching of blessedness, is plain and clear to every man without mark of difference.
But it only takes in that the truth, whose knowledge is needful to each one for blessedness, is not alike clear on every leaf of Holy Scripture, yet throughout the whole Scripture is set forth in so simple and graspable shape, that one to whom the blessedness of his soul is dear can readily, by his own reading and seeking, learn to know that truth from Scripture, without help and leading of church and priest. The way of blessedness is therein laid down clearly for the reader who hungers after holiness—not as to the thing itself, but as to the manner of handing it on. The how he may not grasp, the that is yet clear. Zwingli, De claritate et certitudine verbi Dei , Op. ed. Schuler et Schulthess. Luther in Köstlin, Luthers Theol. 2nd ed. Zanchius, de Scr. Sacra , Op. Omnia. Chamier, Panstratia catholica Loc. 1 Lib. I cap. Amesius, Bellarminus Enervatus Amst. lib. 1 cap. 4 and 5. Turretinus, Theol. El. loc. 2 qu. 17. Trigland, Antapologia cap. 3. Synopsis pur. Theol. disp. 5. Gerhard, Loci Theol. Loc. 1 cap. Glassius, Philologia Sacra .
Thus understood, perspicuity is a property which the Holy Scripture repeatedly predicates of itself. The law is given by God to all Israel, and Moses brings all the words of the Lord to the whole folk. The law and the word of the Lord is not far from any of them, but is a light on the path and a lamp for the foot, Deut. 30:11; Ps. 19:8, 9, 119:105, 130; Prov. 6:23. The prophets speak and write to the whole folk, Isa. 1:10 ff., 5:3 ff., 9:1, 40:1 ff.; Jer. 2:4, 4:1, 10:1; Ezek. 3:1. Jesus speaks freely to all the throngs, Matt. 5:1, 13:1, 2, 26:55, etc., and the apostles write to all the called saints, Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1 etc., and themselves ensure the spreading of their letters, Col. 4:16. The written word is commended to all for searching, John 5:39; Acts 17:11, and is written just to give faith, steadfastness, hope, comfort, teaching, etc., John 20:31; Rom. 15:4; 2 Tim. 3:16; 1 John 1:1 ff. There is nowhere speech of withholding the Scripture from the lay folk. The believers are themselves of full age and able to judge, 1 Cor. 2:15, 10:15; 1 John 2:20; 1 Pet. 2:9. To them the words of God are entrusted, Rom. 3:2. The church fathers know nothing of the darkness of Scripture in the later Roman sense. Indeed, they often speak of the depths and hidden things of Holy Scripture, cf. places in Bellarm. de verbo Dei III c. 1; but they praise just as often its clearness and simplicity. Thus says Chrysostom, hom. 3 de Lazaro, when he likens the writings of the prophets and apostles to those of the wise men: Oi de apostoloi kai oi prophetai to enantion apan epoiesan; saphe gar kai dela ta par' auton katestesan apasin, ate koinoi tes oikoumenes ontes didaskaloi, ina ekastos kai di' eautou manthanein dynetai ek tes anagnoseos mones ta legomena. And elsewhere, hom. 3 in 2 Thess., he says: panta saphe kai euthea ta para tais theiais graphais, panta ta anankaia dela. Likewise we read in Augustine, de doctr. chr. 2, 6: nihil de illis obscuritatibus eruitur, quod non plenissime dictum alibi reperiatur , and ibid. 9: in iis quae clare in scripturis tradita sunt, inveniuntur omnia, quae continent fidem moresque vivendi. Well-known is also the word of Gregory I, wherein he likens the Scripture to a river shallow and deep, in which both the lamb may walk and the elephant swim. Even now Roman theologians must acknowledge that much in Holy Scripture is so clear that the believer can not only understand it, but also the unbeliever, rejecting the clear sense, is without excuse, Heinrich, Dogm. I 819. The church fathers thought not of forbidding the reading of Scripture to the lay folk. On the contrary, they urge time and again the searching of Holy Scriptures, and tell of the blessing which they themselves received from the reading, Vigouroux, Les livres saints et la critique rationaliste, 3 ed. I 280 ff. Gregory I commended the reading of Scripture to all lay folk, Herzog² 2, 376. The limiting of Bible reading came first when, from the twelfth hundredyear onward, sundry sects against the church began to call upon the Scripture. The thought then gained ground that the Bible reading of the lay folk was the foremost wellspring of heresy. For self-defense Rome then taught more and more the darkness of Scripture and bound its reading to the leave of the churchly overseers.
15. Indeed, the churches of the Reformation have no mightier weapon against Rome than the Scripture. It deals the deadliest blows to the churchly tradition and hierarchy. The doctrine of the perspicuity of Holy Scripture is one of the strongest bulwarks of the Reformation. It certainly brings with it grave dangers. Protestantism is hopelessly divided by it. Individualism has developed at the cost of the sense of community. The free reading and searching of Scripture is and has been misused in the most shocking ways by all sorts of parties and directions. Yet the disadvantages do not outweigh the advantages. For the denial of the clarity of Scripture brings with it the subjection of the layman to the priest, of the conscience to the church. With the perspicuity of Holy Scripture falls the freedom of religion and conscience, of church and theology. It alone is able to maintain the freedom of the Christian man; it is the origin and guarantee of religious and also of political freedoms. Stahl, Der Protestantismus als politisches Princip . Saussaye, Het Protestantisme als politiek beginsel . Kuyper, Het Calvinisme, oorsprong en waarborg onzer constitutioneele vrijheden . And a freedom that can be obtained and possessed in no other way than with the danger of license and caprice is always to be preferred above a tyranny that suppresses all freedom. God Himself, in the creation of man, chose this way of freedom, which brought with it the danger and indeed the fact of sin, above that of forced subjection. And still He follows in the government of world and church this kingly way of freedom. That is precisely His honor, that He yet through freedom attains His goal, creates order out of disorder, light out of darkness, cosmos out of chaos. Both Rome and the Reformation agree in this, that the Holy Spirit alone is the true interpreter of the Word. Mt. 7:15, 16:17; Joh. 6:44, 10:3; 1 Cor. 2:12, 15, 10:15; Phil. 1:10, 3:13; Hebr. 5:14; 1 Joh. 4:1. But Rome thinks that the Holy Spirit teaches infallibly only through the pope; the Reformation believes that the Holy Spirit dwells in the heart of every believer; every child of God has the anointing of the Holy One. It therefore gives the Scripture into the hands of all, translates and spreads it, and uses in the church no other than the language of the people. Rome boasts of her unity, but this unity seems greater than it is. The division of the Reformation into a Lutheran and Reformed has its analogy in the schism of the Greek and Latin church. Under the appearance of an outward unity, Rome hides an almost equally great inward division. The number of unbelievers and indifferents is in Roman lands no smaller than in Protestant. Rome has no more been able to stem the stream of unbelief than the churches of the Reformation. Already before the Reformation, unbelief had spread in wide circles, for example in Italy. The Reformation did not call this forth, but rather checked it and aroused Rome itself to watchfulness and opposition. Cartesius, the father of rationalism, was Roman. The German rationalists are balanced by the French materialists; Rousseau by Voltaire, Strauss by Renan. The Revolution has struck its deepest roots and borne its bitterest fruits in Roman lands. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether the number of parties, directions, and sects that continually arise would not be just as great in Rome as in Protestantism, if Rome did not have the power and courage to suppress every direction by censure, ban, interdict, if need be by the sword. It is truly not thanks to Rome that so many flourishing Christian churches have arisen beside her. Whatever dark sides the division of Protestantism may have, it yet also proves that the religious life here is a power that continually creates new forms for itself and in all diversity yet also reveals a deeper unity. And in any case, Protestantism with its division is to be preferred above the dreadful superstition in which the people in the Greek and in the Roman church are more and more ensnared. Worship of Mary, veneration of relics, image worship, adoration of saints increasingly displace the service of the one true God. Cf. Trede, Das Heidenthum in der römischen Kirche .
16. The Self-Interpreting Nature of Scripture. Because of this perspicuity, the Scripture also has the faculty of interpreting itself and is the supreme judge of controversies. See Synopsis purioris theologiae, disputation 5, section 20 and following; Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae, Book I, chapter 45; Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, Locus II, question 20; Amesius, Bellarminus Enervatus, Book I, chapter 5; Cloppenburg, De Canone Theologico, disputations 11-15, Opera II; Maresius, Commentarius in Marckii Compendium, I; Gerhard, Loci Theologici, Locus I, chapters 21, 22; Schmid, Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 6th edition.
The Scripture explains itself; the dark places are made clear by the bright ones, and the ground-thoughts of the Scripture as a whole serve to enlighten the parts. That was the interpretation according to the analogy of faith, which was also upheld by the Reformed. The Reformers did not come to the Scripture without fore-thoughts. They took over the teaching of Scripture, the apostolic confession of faith, the decrees of the first councils, almost without question. They were not overthrowers and did not wish to begin all anew, but only protested against the errors that had crept in. The Reformation was not the freeing of the natural man, but of the Christian man. Thus from the beginning there was among the Reformers an analogy of faith, in which they themselves stood, and by which they explained the Scripture. By this analogy of faith they first understood the sense drawn from the clear places of Holy Scripture itself, which was later laid down in the confessions. See Voetius, Disputationes, V; Maresius, Commentarius in Marckii Compendium, I; Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, I, question 19; Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre, I; Zöckler, Handbuch der theologischen Wissenschaften, I; Lutz, Biblische Hermeneutik.
In connection therewith, the church also had a calling with regard to the explaining of Holy Scripture. By virtue of the power of teaching granted her by Christ, and the gift of explanation bestowed on her by the Holy Ghost (1 Cor. 14:3, 29; Rom. 12:6; Eph. 4:11 and following), the church has the duty not only to keep the Scripture, but also to explain and defend it, and to set forth the truth in her confession and to find out and withstand errors. Thus the church also, within her own circle and on her own ground, is judge of controversies, and has to test and judge all opinions according to Holy Scripture. For this she need not be unerring, for even the judge in the state is bound to the law, but is fallible in his judgments. And so it is in the church. The Scripture is the norm, the church is the judge. But here too there is a higher appeal. Rome denies this and says that the judgment of the church is the last and highest. From her even an appeal to the divine judgment is no longer possible. She binds in the conscience. But the Reformation held that a church, however worthy of honor, could yet err. Her explanation is not masterful, but ministerial. She can bind in the conscience only insofar as one acknowledges her as divine and unerring. Whether she indeed agrees with God's Word, no earthly power can decide, but each one can only settle for himself. See Synopsis purioris theologiae, 5, 25 and following. The church can then cast out a man as a heretic, but in the end he stands or falls to his own lord. The simplest believer can and may, with Scripture in hand, if need be withstand a whole church, as Luther did against Rome. Thus alone is the freedom of the Christian, and at the same time the sovereignty of God, upheld. From the Scripture there is no higher appeal. She is the highest court. No power or judgment stands above her. It is she who in the end decides for each one in his conscience. And therefore she is the supreme judge of controversies.
17. Finally, the Reformation also confessed the perfection or sufficiency of Holy Scripture. The Roman Church believes that the Scripture is imperfect in parts and must be supplemented by tradition. She declared at Trent, session 4, that she receives and venerates the traditions themselves, pertaining both to faith and to morals, as if dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Spirit and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession, with equal affection of piety and reverence; and she spoke in the Vatican session 3 chapter 2, that the supernatural revelation is contained in written books and unwritten traditions, which received from the mouth of Christ himself by the Apostles, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, handed down as it were from hand to hand, have come down even to us.
The grounds which Rome brings forward for this teaching of tradition are various. First, it is pointed out that the church before Moses was wholly without Scripture, and that also after that time until now many believers live and die without ever reading or searching the Scripture. By far the most children of God live from tradition and know little or nothing of the Scripture. It would also be strange if this were otherwise in the religious and churchly realm than in every other field. For in law and morals, in art and science, in family and society, tradition is the bearer and nourisher of our life. Through her we are bound to the forefathers, take over their treasures, and leave them again to our children. Analogy already demands that there be a tradition in the church also; but this must here be so much more glorious and certain than elsewhere, because Christ has given to his church the Holy Ghost and through him leads his congregation infallibly into all truth, Matthew 16:18, 28:20; John 14:16.
Besides this come many sayings of Scripture which acknowledge the right and worth of tradition, John 16:12, 20:30, 21:25; Acts 1:3; 1 Corinthians 11:2, 23; 2 Thessalonians 2:14; 1 Timothy 6:20; 2 John 12; 3 John 13, 14. Jesus taught many things orally and through his Spirit to his disciples, which were not written down by them but handed down from mouth to mouth. Church fathers, councils, popes have from the beginning acknowledged such an apostolic tradition. In fact, the church still lives from and out of this oral, living tradition.
The Scripture alone is insufficient. For besides that not all is recorded, various writings of prophets and apostles have also been lost. The apostles indeed received a command to witness, but not to do so in writing. They came to writing only through circumstances, compelled by a certain necessity; their writings are therefore mostly occasional writings, and contain by no means all that is needful for the doctrine and life of the church. Thus we find in Scripture little or nothing of the baptism of women, the keeping of the Lord's Day, the episcopate, the seven sacraments, purgatory, the immaculate conception of Mary, the salvation of many heathen in the days of the Old Testament, the inspiration and canonicity of the various Bible books, and so forth; yea, even dogmas like those of the Trinity, the eternal generation, the procession of the Holy Ghost, infant baptism, and so forth, are not found literally and in so many words in the Scripture. In one word: the Scripture is useful, but tradition is necessary.
Bellarminus, de Verbo Dei, book IV. Melchior Canus, Loci theol. book 3. Perrone, Praelect. Theol. Klee, Dogm. I. Heinrich, Dogm. Theol. II. Jansen, Praelect. theol. dogm. I. Möhler, Symbolik § 38 f. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit 2nd edition I. Dieringer, Dogm. § 126. Liebermann, Instit. theol. I. For the Greek church, Kattenbusch, Confessionskunde I.
18. Over Against the Roman Doctrine of Tradition. Over against this Roman doctrine of tradition, the Reformation set that of the perfection and sufficiency of Holy Scripture. The good right of this strife against Rome has been set in a clear light by the unfolding of the concept of tradition itself. The first Christian churches, even as now the churches among the heathen, were founded by the preached word. The teaching and customs which they had received from the apostles or their fellows planted themselves for a goodly time from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation. This concept of tradition was clear; it marked the teaching and customs which were received from the apostles and were kept and spread forth in the churches. But as the distance grew greater which sundered the churches from the apostolic time, it became ever more hard to make out whether something was truly of apostolic birth. The African church therefore withstood the overmuch worth which, above all in the latter half against Gnosticism, was bound to this tradition. Tertullian, in De virginibus velandis c. 1, said: Our Lord named Himself the truth, not custom. Likewise Cyprian, in Epistle 74, set over against the tradition on which the bishop of Rome leaned, the texts Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 15:9; 1 Timothy 6:3-5, and said: Custom without truth is the age-oldness of error. Christ has named Himself not custom but truth. This must yield to that. Therefore it became needful to set bounds to tradition more nearly and to give its marks. Vincent of Lerins found in his Commonitorium cap. 2 the marks of an apostolic tradition therein, that something has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. For this is truly and rightly catholic.
At first the mark of tradition lay herein, that it was of apostolic birth. Now it is added thereto, that something may be deemed of apostolic birth if it is truly general, catholic. Apostolicity is known by universality, antiquity, and agreement. The Council of Trent, the Vatican Council, and also the theologians hold to these marks of Vincent in bounding tradition. But in matter there is straying; the outcome led further. It could not be upheld that something was apostolic only when it had truly always, everywhere, and by all been believed. Of what teaching or custom could such utter catholicity be shown? The three marks are therefore little by little weakened. The church may indeed not declare something new as dogma and must hold to the handing down, but the keeping of that tradition is not to be thought mechanically as of a hoard in the field, but organically as Mary kept the words of the shepherds and pondered them in her heart. A truth can thus very well have been not or not generally believed afore; yet it is unfailing apostolic tradition when it is now but generally believed. The two marks antiquity and universality are thus no copulative but distributive marks of tradition; they are not both together and at once needful, one of the two is enough. In deed thereby antiquity is offered up to universality. But this last is again bounded. The question arose, who was the organ for keeping and acknowledging tradition. The church in general could not be this.
Möhler, in Symbolik , identified tradition yet with the word living onward in the hearts of the believers, but this answer was much more Protestant than Roman in thought. The task to keep and set fast the teaching could and might not be laid upon the church in general, that is, upon the lay folk. In the church there is to be sundered between the hearing church and the teaching church. Both belong together, and are undying, but the first has only a passive infallibility, that is, it is unfailing only in its believing, forasmuch as and so long as it abides in bond with the teaching church. But this last is yet again not the own organ of the teaching. Gallicanism, the Old Episcopal clergy, and the Old Catholics stayed here, and ascribe infallibility to the bishops together. But this standpoint is untenable. When are those bishops unfailing? Outside or only in the council? If the latter, are they unfailing only when of one mind, or is only the greater part unfailing? How great must this be? Is one voice more enough? Is the council without, and even over against, or only in agreement with the pope unfailing? All questions with which Gallicanism was in earnest straits.
The papal system therefore went a step further and ascribed infallibility to the pope. This primacy of the pope is the fruit of an ages-long unfolding, the outcome of a mind-set which was already very early in the church. Little by little the pope has come to be deemed the unfailing organ of godly truth and thus also of tradition. Bellarmine, in De Verbo Dei lib. 4 c. 9, took up under the marks of tradition also this rule: that without doubt is to be believed to come down from apostolic tradition which is held for such in those churches where there is a whole and ongoing succession from the Apostles. Now there were, says he further, in old time many such churches besides Rome. But now it is only in Rome left. And therefore from the witness of this church alone can a sure proof be taken for proving apostolic traditions. The church of Rome bounds and makes out what is apostolic tradition.
Later theologians, above all among the Jesuits, have unfolded this further. And on the 18th of July 1870, in the fourth sitting of the Vatican Council, infallibility was openly proclaimed as dogma. Now it is indeed sure that the pope in this his infallibility is not thought loose from the church, above all not from the teaching church. Further, the symbols, decrees, liturgies, fathers, doctors, and the whole history of the church are so many monuments of tradition, to which the pope joins himself in setting fast a dogma and with which he has to reckon. But yet tradition formally is not one with the inhold of all those monuments. Tradition is unfailing; but what is tradition is in the last stead made out only by the pope, with, without, or if need be against the church and the councils. The judging whether and how far something has been believed always, everywhere, and by all cannot stand to the church, neither to the hearing church nor to the teaching church, but stands of itself only to the unfailing pope. When the pope proclaims a dogma, then it is by that very thing apostolic tradition.
The mark of tradition is thus in turn sought in apostolicity, in catholicity, in episcopal succession, in papal deciding. Therewith the end is reached. The unfailing pope is the formal beginning of Romanism. Rome has spoken, the matter is ended. Pope and church, pope and Christendom are one. Where the pope is, there is the church, there the Christian religion, there the Spirit. From the pope there is no higher appeal, not even to God. Through the pope God Himself speaks to mankind. Maistre, du Pape .
This outcome of the developmental course of the tradition shows the falsehood of the principle that was at work in it from the beginning. The infallibility of the pope can only be treated at length later, in the doctrine of the church. But it is clear that the good and true element, for which in the first centuries the upholding of the tradition was concerned, has wholly gone to naught. Then it was about the keeping of that which, by apostolic setting, was believed and wonted in the churches. It lay to hand that men then laid great weight on the tradition and did not yet see the needfulness and must-be of the apostolic writings. But the mark of apostolicity, which then of itself belonged to the tradition, must needs fade away when men grew further sundered from the apostolic time. The kindred self-standing of the tradition beside the Scripture waned more and more. The streams of Scripture and tradition flowed into one. And soon after the death of the apostles and their fellows, it became unfeasible to prove anything as of apostolic spring otherwise than by call upon the apostolic writings. Of no single dogma that the Roman church avows outside and without the Scripture can the apostolic spring be shown. The lore of tradition at Rome serves only to rightwise the swervings from the Scripture and from the apostles. Worship of Mary, the sevenfold sacraments, the papal unfailingness, and so forth—these are the dogmas that cannot lack the tradition. In an ill hour has the apostolic handing-down been made one with churchly wonts and with papal dooms. The tradition at Rome is that lowly superstition, the heathendom.
19. Verily, by this doctrine of tradition, the Scripture is robbed of all her authority and power. The Romanists preach the infallibility of both, Scripture and tradition (pope), but acknowledge that there yet exists a great distinction between the two. In both, the cause of infallibility is sought in a special, supernatural working of the Holy Ghost; for Rome understands very well that the infallibility of tradition cannot be derived from the believers as such, from the power and spirit of Christendom that dwells and works in the believers. For there occur in the church and among the believers many errors, which oftentimes rule for a long time and carry away many. The infallibility of the pope is therefore explained, even as that of the Scripture, from an extraordinary working of the Holy Ghost on the ground of Matthew 16:18, 28:20; John 14:16 and following, 15:26, 16:12 and following. But there is yet a distinction. The working of the Holy Ghost in the apostles consisted in revelation and inspiration: that in the pope consists in assistance. The Vatican Council, chapter 4, says: neque enim Petri successoribus Spiritus Sanctus promissus est, ut eo revelante novam doctrinam patefacerent, sed ut eo assistente, traditam per Apostolos revelationem seu fidei depositum sancte custodirent et fideliter exponerent . The Scripture is therefore the word of God in the proper sense, inspired, at least according to many theologians, even to the single words; the decisions of councils and popes are words of the church, which purely render the truth of God. The Scripture is the word of God, the tradition contains the word of God. The Scripture preserves the words of the apostles in their original form, the tradition renders the doctrine of the apostles only as concerns the substance. The books of the prophets and apostles are oftentimes written without inquiry, solely from revelation; but with the divine assistance promised to the church, the persons are always themselves active, inquiring, weighing, judging, deciding. In inspiration, the working of the Spirit was in strict sense supernatural, but in assistance it consists many times in a complex of cares of Providence, whereby the church is kept from error. And finally, the inspiration in Scripture extends to all matters, also of history, chronology, and the like, but through the assistance of the Holy Ghost, the pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, as Pastor and Doctor of Christendom, and when he defines doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal church. Scripture thus has with Rome still some prerogatives above tradition.
But in truth, tradition doth great harm to the Scripture. Firstly, Trent decreeth that Scripture and tradition must be honored with pari pietatis affectu et reverentia .
Moreover, the inspiration of the Holy Writ is taken by most Roman theologians as a real inspiration, whereby not the single words but the matters are given by God.
Furthermore, infallibility with respect to form and with respect to substance are so tightly bound one to the other, that the line betwixt them cannot be drawn.
Besides, the pope is in strict sense only infallible in matters of faith and life, but to be able to be this, he must also be so in judgment over the sources of faith and in interpretation, that is, in determining what Scripture and tradition is, in determining the authority of the church fathers, of councils, and the like; in judgment over errors and heresies and even of dogmatic facts, in the forbidding of books, in matters of discipline, in approval of orders, in canonization of saints, and so forth.
And although the pope is not in strict sense infallible in all else, his power and authority doth yet extend over all things which pertain to the discipline and government of the church, and this power is full and supreme and spreadeth over all pastors and faithful.
Even many Romans demand that the pope, to wield this spiritual sovereignty, must be a worldly prince; and claim that he, if not directly, then indirectly possesseth the supreme power of disposing of the temporal things of all Christians.
The power and authority of the pope far exceedeth that of the Scripture. He standeth above it, judgeth its content and meaning, and establisheth by his authority the dogmas of doctrine and life.
Scripture may be the chief means to show the agreement of present-day doctrine and tradition with the doctrine of the apostles; it may contain much that otherwise would not be so well known; it may be a divine instruction of doctrine which surpasseth all others; yet for Rome it is always only an aid, useful but not needful.
The church was before the Scripture, and the church containeth not a part but the full truth, the Scripture however containeth only a portion of the doctrine. The Scripture needeth tradition, the confirmation of the pope, but tradition needeth not the Holy Scripture. Tradition is no supplement to the Scripture, but the Scripture is a supplement to tradition. The Scripture alone is insufficient, but tradition alone is well sufficient. The Scripture resteth on the church, but the church resteth in itself.
20. The Sufficiency of Holy Scripture. The unfolding of tradition unto papal infallibility, and the degradation of Scripture that necessarily flows therefrom, do of themselves prove the just cause of the Reformation in rising up against tradition. Yet it did not rest with assault alone, but set over against the teaching of Rome that of the perfection or sufficiency of Scripture.
This property of Holy Scripture must also be well understood. It is not thereby asserted that all that was spoken or written by the prophets, by Christ, and by the apostles, is taken up in Scripture; for many prophetic and apostolic writings have indeed been lost, as in Numbers 21:14; Joshua 10:13; 1 Kings 4:33; 1 Chronicles 29:29; 2 Chronicles 9:29, 12:15; 1 Corinthians 5:9; Colossians 4:16; Philippians 3:1; and Jesus and the apostles surely spake many more words and wrought many more signs than are written, John 20:30; 1 Corinthians 11:2, 14; 2 Thessalonians 2:5, 15, 3:6, 10; 2 John 12; 3 John 14, and so forth. Neither does this property imply that Holy Scripture contains all customs, ceremonies, ordinances, and regulations which the church needs for her organization; but only that it fully contains the articles of faith, the things needful unto salvation.
And then this property of Scripture does not yet include that these articles of faith are contained in it literally and in so many words, autolexei and totidem verbis , but only that they are therein set forth either expressly or impliedly, so that without the aid of another source, by comparative study and by meditation alone, they can be drawn therefrom. And finally, this perfection of Holy Scripture is not so to be understood as if Holy Scripture were always the same in degree. In the diverse times of the church, Scripture was unequal in compass until its completion. But in every time, that word of God which existed unwritten or written was sufficient for that time. The Reformation also made distinction between a word agraphon and engraphon , as in the Belgic Confession, article 3. But Rome takes both side by side, and holds them for species of one genus; the Reformation sees in this distinction only one and the same word of God, which for a time existed unwritten and thereafter was set down in writing. The dispute between Rome and the Reformation runs therefore only on this: whether now, after Scripture is completed, there yet exists alongside it another word of God in unwritten form; in other words, whether the written word of God expressly or impliedly contains all that we need to know for our salvation, and thus is the total and adequate rule of faith and manners, or whether alongside it in religion and theology another principle of knowledge must be accepted.
But so stated, this question seems hardly open to twofold answer. The Roman church also acknowledges that Scripture is completed, that it forms an organic whole, that the canon is closed. However highly it esteems tradition, it has not yet in theory dared to set the decrees of the church on one line with Scripture. It still makes distinction between the word of God and the word of the church. But how can ever, so long as one is in earnest with the word of God, the insufficiency of Scripture be taught? The church fathers thought not of it and speak clearly of the full sufficiency of Holy Scripture. Irenaeus says that we know the truth through the apostles, per quos Evangelium pervenit ad nos, quod quidem tunc praeconaverunt, postea vero per Dei voluntatem in Scripturis nobis tradiderunt fundamentum et columnam fidei nostrae futuram . Tertullian admires the fullness of Scripture, and rejects all that is outside Scripture. Augustine testifies: whatever ye hear thence, let this savor well to you; whatever is without, reject ye. And likewise speak many others.
Alongside this they certainly also acknowledge tradition, but they take up therein just an element which undermines their conviction of the sufficiency of Scripture and has ended in the later Roman doctrine of the insufficiency of Holy Scripture and of the sufficiency of tradition. Both, Scripture and tradition, cannot be maintained side by side; what is withheld from the one is bestowed on the other. Tradition can only rise as and insofar as Scripture falls. It is therefore very strange that Rome on the one hand holds Scripture for completed and the canon for closed, yea even acknowledges Scripture for the word of God; and yet deems that Scripture insufficient and supplements it with tradition. Rightly do many Roman theologians nowadays say that Scripture is the not necessary but at most useful supplement of tradition.
21. But this teaching stands in straight strife with the Scripture itself. Never is the church in Old and New Testament pointed to aught else than to the ever-ready, whether written or unwritten, word of God. By that alone can man live in the spirit. In the ever-present Scripture the church finds all that she needs. The later Scriptures take for granted the earlier ones, join themselves thereto, and are built upon them. The prophets and psalm-singers take for granted the law. Isaiah calls in chapter 8:20 all to the law and the witness. The New Testament deems itself the fulfilling of the Old, and points back to naught else than the Scripture that is at hand. Stronger yet speaks the truth that all which lies outside the Scripture is shut out as fully as may be. Traditions are cast off as the biddings of men, Isa. 29:13; Mt. 15:4, 9; 1 Cor. 4:6. The handing-down which arose in the days of the Old Testament led the Jews to the casting away of the Christ. Jesus sets against it his "I say unto you," Mt. 5, and joins himself again against the Pharisees and scribes to the law and the prophets. The apostles call upon the Old Testament Scripture alone and point the churches to naught else than the word of God, which by them is proclaimed. Insofar as the handing-down in the first times willed to be naught else than the keeping of what was personally taught and set forth by the apostles, it bore yet no perilous mark. But from that the Roman handing-down has wholly fallen away. It cannot be shown that there is yet any teaching or any custom coming from the apostles, save insofar as this can be proven from their writings. The handing-down at Rome, whence the mass, the worship of Mary, the pope's unfailingness, and suchlike have sprung, is naught but the blessing of the true state of the Roman church, the right-making of the false worship that has crept therein.
The sufficiency of Holy Scripture flows further from the nature of the New Testament dispensation. Christ has become flesh and has fulfilled all the work. He is the last and highest revelation of God. He has declared the Father to us, John 1:18, 17:4, 6. Through Him God has spoken to us in these last days, Hebrews 1:1. He is the highest, the only prophet. Even the Vatican Council, chapter 4, acknowledges that the divine assistance given to the pope does not consist in revelation and in the revealing of a new doctrine. And Rome seeks to prove its dogmas, however new they may be, as much as possible from Holy Scripture, and to present them as development and explication of what is present in germ in the Scripture, Lombardus, Sentences III distinction 25. Thomas, Summa Theologica II 2 question 1 article 7. question 174 article 6. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte I 2nd edition 1892. Heinrich II. But thereby it entangles itself in no small difficulty. For either the dogmas are all in the same sense as, for example, the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, etc., explication of moments that are contained in Scripture, and in that case tradition is unnecessary and Scripture sufficient; or they are indeed new dogmas that have no support in Scripture, and then the divine assistance of the pope is essentially a revelation and revealing of new doctrine.
This last may be theoretically denied, but practically it is accepted. Therefore, the Roman theologians after the Reformation are on the whole more liberal than before that time in acknowledging that some dogmas are grounded only in tradition. And therefore arguments for tradition are now brought forward which formerly were not used, or at least not in that sense and to that degree. Now the insufficiency of Scripture and the right of tradition are proved from the fact that prophetic and apostolic writings have been lost, that Christ did not teach everything to His apostles, that the apostles also orally commanded much to the churches, etc. But that writings have been lost, and whether they were inspired (Bellarmine, de verbo Dei IV chapter 4) or not (Augustine, de civitate Dei 18, 38), matters nothing. For the question is only whether the Scripture at hand contains all that which is needful for us to know unto our salvation; and not whether it contains all that prophets and apostles have written, and Christ Himself has spoken and done. Even if writings of prophets and apostles were still found, they could no longer serve as Holy Scripture. And so it is also with the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. They have spoken and done more than is described to us. Knowledge thereof would be historically important; but is religiously unnecessary. For our salvation we have enough in Scripture, and we need no other writing, even if it came from Jesus Himself. That was the teaching of the Reformation. Quantitatively the revelation has been much richer and greater than Scripture has preserved for us, but qualitatively, substantially, Holy Scripture is fully sufficient for our salvation.
Rome can name no other dogmas than those of Mariolatry, the infallibility of the pope, and the like, which have arisen outside of Scripture from tradition; but all those which have regard to God, man, Christ, salvation, etc., are also according to Rome to be found in Scripture itself. What need have we then of further witnesses? The Roman tradition serves only to prove the specifically Roman dogmas, but the Christian, the catholic dogmas are, according to Rome itself, all grounded in Scripture. This fact also shows that Scripture is sufficient, and that the nature of the New Testament dispensation brings with it and demands this sufficiency of Holy Scripture.
Christ has revealed everything fully, either personally and orally or also through His Spirit to the apostles. Through their word we believe in Christ and have fellowship with God, John 17:20; 1 John 1:3. The Holy Spirit reveals no new doctrine anymore; He takes all things from Christ, John 16:14. In Christ the revelation of God is completed. And likewise the word of salvation is fully comprehended in Scripture. It forms one whole; it itself makes the impression of an organism that has reached its full growth. It ends where it begins. It is a circle that returns into itself. It begins with creation; it ends with the recreation of heaven and earth. The canon of Old and New Testament was first closed when all new beginnings of the history of salvation were present, Hofmann, Weissagung und Erfüllung I 47. The Holy Spirit has no other task in this dispensation than to apply the work of Christ and likewise to explain the word of Christ. He adds nothing new to either. The work of Christ needs not to be supplemented by the good works of believers; the word of Christ needs not to be supplemented by the tradition of the church; Christ Himself needs not to be succeeded and replaced by the pope.
The Roman doctrine of tradition is the denial of the perfect incarnation of God in Christ, of the all-sufficiency of His offering, of the perfection of His word. The history of the Roman church shows us the slowly advancing process how a false principle intrudes itself and first still places itself under Christ and His word, then alongside it, soon above it, to end in a complete replacement of Scripture by tradition, of Christ by the pope, of the congregation by the institution. The development is certainly not yet at an end. It seems an anomaly that the pope, who gradually exalted himself above Scripture, church, council, tradition, is appointed by fallible men, even if they be cardinals. Who can better than he who is himself infallible designate his successor? Thus it is quite possible that the papal sovereignty in the future will prove to be incompatible with the power of the cardinals. In any case, the way of the deification of man by Rome has not yet been fully traversed to the end.
22. Nevertheless, with all this, the good and true is not denied which is contained in the doctrine of tradition. The word tradition has yet a broader meaning than that which Rome gives to it. Rome understands by it a teaching which was handed down by the apostles, preserved by the bishops, particularly by the pope, and by him established and proclaimed; but this view proved untenable.
Tradition can, however, also be understood as the whole of that religious life, thinking, feeling, acting, which is found in every religious community and finds its expression in all kinds of forms, customs, habits, usages, religious language and literature, confession and liturgy, and so forth. In this sense, there is tradition in every religion. The concept can even be extended further to all those rich and manifold bonds which connect the following generations to the preceding ones. In this sense, no family, no lineage, no society, no people, no art, no science, and so on, can exist without tradition.
Tradition is the means whereby all the treasures and goods of the forefathers are carried over to the present and the future. Over against the individualism and atomism of the earlier century, de Bonald, Lamennais, and others, and Bilderdijk among us, have again placed the significance of community, authority, language, tradition, and so forth, in the clearest light. Such a tradition certainly exists also in religion and in the church. Already its universality points to the fact that we are not dealing here with an accidental phenomenon. Tradition we find not only in the Roman church but also among the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and so on.
In the higher religions, there comes yet another reason for the necessity of tradition. They are all bound to a holy scripture which arose in a definite time and in that sense comes to stand ever further removed from the now living generation. The Bible too is a book written in long bygone ages and under all kinds of historical circumstances. The different books of the Bible bear the mark of the time in which they arose. However clear the Scripture may be in the doctrine of salvation and however much it is and remains the living voice of God, it yet often requires for right understanding all kinds of historical, archaeological, geographical knowledge. The times have changed, and with the times the people, their life and thinking and feeling.
Therefore, a tradition is needed to preserve the connection between the Scripture and the religious life of this time. Tradition in a good sense is the interpretation and application of the eternal truth in the speech and life of the present generation. A Scripture without such a tradition is impossible. Many sects in earlier and later times have indeed attempted this. They would know nothing but the words and letters of Scripture; rejected all dogmatic terminology not used in Scripture; disapproved all theological training and science, and sometimes came to demand literal application of the civil laws among Israel and of the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount.
But all these directions thereby condemned themselves to certain downfall or at least to a languishing life. They placed themselves outside society and forfeited all influence on their people and their age. The Scripture is not there to be learned and parroted from without, but to enter into the full rich human life and to form it, to guide it, and to bring it to independent activity in every field.
The Reformation therefore took another standpoint. It rejected not all tradition as such; it was reformation, not revolution. It sought not to create everything anew, but rather to cleanse everything from error and abuse according to the rule of God's Word. Therefore it remained standing on the broad Christian foundation of the apostolic symbol and the first councils. Therefore it was for a theological science which thoughtfully interpreted the truth of Scripture in the language of the present.
The difference in the view of tradition between Rome and the Reformation consists in this: Rome wants a tradition which runs independently alongside the Scripture, a traditio juxta Scripturam or rather a Scriptura juxta traditionem . The Reformation acknowledges only such a tradition as is grounded on and flows forth from the Scripture, traditio e Scriptura fluens .
Scripture was, according to the thought of the Reformation, an organic principle from which the whole tradition, living on in preaching, confession, liturgy, worship, theology, religious literature, and so forth, grows up and is nourished; a pure fountain of living water from which all brooks and channels of religious life are fed and sustained.
Such a tradition is grounded in Scripture itself. When Jesus has completed his work, he sends the Holy Spirit, who indeed adds nothing new to the revelation, but yet leads the church into the truth, John 16:12-15, until through all diversity it comes to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, Ephesians 3:18, 19; 4:13.
In this sense there is a good, true, glorious tradition. It is the way along which the Holy Spirit causes the truth of Scripture to pass over into the consciousness and life of the church. For Scripture is but a means, not an end. The end is that the church, taught from Scripture, freely and independently proclaims the virtues of him who has called her out of darkness into his marvelous light. The external word is the instrument, the internal word is the end. Scripture has reached its destination when all shall be taught by the Lord and filled with the Holy Spirit.
The Knowledge of God
Dogmatics is the lore of God's truth, as it is unveiled in Holy Writ. It seeks to grasp the deep things of God, not by man's wit alone, but by the light of faith, grounded in the sure word of the Scriptures.
In this work, we shall unfold the teachings of the Reformed faith, drawing from the wells of divine revelation, that the church may be built up in the most holy faith.
1. The Internal Principle. To the external principle, which was discussed in the previous chapter, there must correspond in man himself an internal principle. By Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Psychology § 120, life is described as the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations; and indeed all life in man rests upon a reciprocal correspondence of subject and object. Man is in every respect dependent on the world outside him; he is in no field autonomous, he lives from what is given, that is, from grace. But reciprocally, he is fitted to that whole world outside him, he stands in connection with it through sundry relations. His body is taken from the dust of the earth, made up of the same elements as other bodies, and therefore akin to the bodily world. His plant-like life is nourished from the earth; food, shelter, and clothing are bestowed on him by nature; light and air, change of day and night, he needs for his fleshly life; he is a little world, earthly from the earth. As a sensing soul, he received in the senses organs whereby he can perceive and picture to himself the world outside in its sundry proportions. Through the reason that is in him, he lifts himself to the world of understandable things and tracks down the reason that has taken body in the seen world. And in like manner, man stands in religious and moral bond with a true world of ideal and ghostly goods and has received a faculty to perceive and know this world.
The search into the being of religion led us earlier to a certain godly bent in man, to a readiness of his nature to perceive the divine. The Scripture sets this forth thus, that man is shaped after God's likeness, that he is His kindred, and that he owns in the nous an organ to mark God's showing-forth in His making. Religion takes for granted that man is akin to God.
But this religious susceptibility may be proper to human nature, yet it is an abstraction and in reality never comes pure and without content. Whatever rich endowment for knowledge or art may be hidden in a child, it is nevertheless born in a state of helplessness. It depends on the grace of its surroundings. Food and drink, covering and clothing, ideas and notions, sensations and desires we receive from the circle in which we are born and brought up. Religion also is impressed upon us by our parents and caregivers. It is with religion as with language. The faculty of speech we bring with us at birth; but the tongue in which we later express our thoughts is given to us by our surroundings. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation , makes therefore the right remark, that religions enjoy a great privilege over philosophical systems, since they are impressed upon children from their youth. Religion grows from childhood together with the innermost and tenderest life and is therefore almost ineradicable. The rule is, that a man dies in the religion in which he was born. The Mohammedan, the Christian, the Roman Catholic, the Protestant commonly remain faithful to the religion of their youth and their parents until death. Except in times of religious crisis, such as at the rise of Christianity, Mohammedanism, the Reformation, conversions are rare; change of religion is the exception, not the rule. Even most people live and die without ever being shaken in their religious faith by serious doubt. The question why they believe in the truth of the religious ideas in which they were brought up does not enter their thoughts. They believe, find more or less satisfaction in their faith, and do not think about the grounds on which their conviction rests.
If the faith is strong, there is no place for such an investigation into the grounds of faith. He who hungers does not first inquire into the manner in which the bread set before him is prepared. First live, then philosophize. There is a great difference between life and reflection. It is no proof of richness but of poverty in religious life, if the most attention is given to formal questions. When philosophical thinking power is exhausted, one turns to the history of philosophy. When one no longer lives in the confession of the church, its origin and history are investigated. And when faith loses its strength and confidence, an inquiry is instituted into the grounds on which it rests.
2. Yet such inquiry has its good and helpful side. Kant has turned all philosophy into a critique of the knowing might. And no one will scorn the searches that since then have been given to the kind and sureness of our knowledge. But still, hopes stretched too high here are always followed by letdown. The riddles are so tangled here that an answer seems out of reach. All tries to come to a fulfilling reply in this ask are weighed down by earnest hurdles. Sometimes voices rise that warn off further search, for it is wholly worthless. On knowledge-work itself these shape-wise questions have no sway anyway. Whether one be idealist or empiricist, realist or nominalist, there is no knowledge-work to be gotten save along the path of beholding and thinking. Also in god-lore and godliness there is ground to warn against overblown hopes. The lore of knowing does not make up for faith; the shape-part of dogmatics cannot take the stead of the stuff-part. Even the search into the grounds of faith is much harder than that into the grounds of knowing. First off, for believers as a whole it is undoable, in a knowledge-wise way, to give reckoning of the reasons why they believe. Their life out of faith is for them proof enough of the truth and worth of that faith. Whoever hungers and eats, thereby feels on his own the feeding strength of the bread and has no need for search into its blending bits. Next, it is also even for knowledge-wise god-lorers an overdone call that they must first prove the knowledge-wise right of the lore of knowing from which they go out, before they may begin with god-lore work. A god-lorer is yet no wisdom-seeker. Though wisdom-shaping is needful for the god-learned, he needs not first have searched all wisdom-seeking lores of knowing, ere he can step forth as god-lorer. God-lore brings its own knowing-lore with it and hangs on philosophy but not on any wisdom-seeking setup. And at last, the thing of the search lies so deep hidden in the soul-life and is so closely woven together with the finest and tenderest stirrings of the mankindly heart, that it nearly wholly slips from our own beholding and much more from that of others. Godliness roots deeper in mankindly kind than any other strength. For it man has all things over, his silver and his goods, his wife and his child, his name, his worship, his life. Alone godliness has blood-witnesses, martyrs. Holding it, man can lose all, with it he yet holds himself. But forswearing it, he himself goes lost. Who then shall track the root of this life, which is one with the life of man himself? Who shall lay bare the ground on which believing rests? Faith itself is already such a wondrous and hidden strength. We outline it by knowing, yielding, trusting and so on, but straightway feel the weakness of this setting, and have after long reasoning at the end said nothing or very little. The ask: how and why know I, is so hard that all wisdom-seeking think-strength has not yet found the answer. But yet harder is the ask: how and why believe I? It is for ourselves a riddle, for we cannot go down into the depths of our own mood and cannot break through with our look into the dark that lies behind our awareness. And for others it is yet greater hiddenness. For to ourselves sundry moods and stirrings, thinkings and mindsets still count as grounds of faith, which go along with faith and unbreakably bind us to the thing of our faith. But to others we cannot share these; they are not meant for showing and not open to sharing. If we sometimes try it, they lose under the sharing their strength and worth; we feel ourselves least fulfilled by it. And often the end is that what was given as ground cannot bear the test and shows to be no ground. Nevertheless faith holds itself standing against all reasoning and speaks: I can not otherwise, God help me, amen.
3. Therefore, it breeds no wonder that the grounds for the godly faith, and thus also for the Christian belief, are set forth in very sundry ways. On the question: how a man comes to faith and why he believes, the answers run far asunder. Some hold that man in himself, in his own kind, owns enough givings to ken, deem, and take up a godly forthsetting, the opening, the Writ. The tool for the deeming and taking of the opening is by turns sought in the wit; faith then rests on historical-apologetic grounds. Or the rede is marked as such a tool; faith is then built on beholding redes. Or also the inwit, the mood, the heart is beheld as tool for the godly; faith is then grounded on ethical-deedful drives. But always in these leadings a man is underlaid who maybe in one or other wise is readied for the opening, but who yet truly stands outside faith and for whom now the opening must be rightwised through witful or rightwise ways.
The following inquiry shall teach that these grounds are insufficient and that the standpoint taken by these directions cannot be accepted. But already a priori, the inadequacy of these various methods can be seen. For religion is a self-standing greatness; it is essentially distinguished from science, art, morality. It has its own principium cognoscendi externum, namely, the revelation, and therefore demands also its own principium cognoscendi internum. As the eye answers to the light, the ear to the sound, the logos in us to the logos outside us, so must a subjective organ in man correspond to the objective revelation. The religious susceptibility in general, the semen religionis, the nous cannot be considered for that. For firstly, this never and nowhere comes in a pure state and without content. Always from the first awakening it is ingrown in a historical religion and accommodated thereto. But secondly, the revelation in Scripture proceeds from the supposition that man is corrupted even in this his religious disposition and needs recreation. It would therefore destroy itself if it recognized in the psychical man its competent judge. It places itself over against him in a wholly other relation. It does not set itself below him and submit to his judgment, but stands high above him and asks nothing but faith and obedience. Even the Scripture expressly declares that the psychical man does not understand the things of the Spirit of God, that they are foolishness to him, that he rejects and misprizes them in enmity. The revelation of God in Christ asks no support, no justification from men. It posits and maintains itself in high majesty. Its authority is normative but also causative. It fights for its own triumph. It conquers the hearts for itself. It makes itself irresistible. Therefore the revelation falls into two great dispensations. When the economy of the Son, of the objective revelation, is ended, that of the Spirit enters in. Also of this subjective revelation God is the author. From Him the action goes forth. He is the first and the last. Man does not come to the revelation and seek God. God seeks man. He seeks him in the Son, He seeks him also in the Spirit. When God in the last days has spoken to us by the Son, then comes the Holy Spirit, who takes up for Christ with the world, pleads His cause, defends His word, and inclines the hearts of men to obedience. The Holy Spirit is the great, mighty Witness of Christ, objectively in Scripture, subjectively in man's own spirit. In that Spirit man receives an adequate organ for the outward revelation. God can only be known by God; in His light alone can the light be seen. No one knows the Father, save whom the Son wills to reveal Him, and no one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit. God is thus the principium essendi of religion and theology; the objective revelation in Christ, laid down in Scripture, is its principium cognoscendi externum; and the Holy Spirit, who is poured out in the church, regenerates her and leads her into the truth, is its principium cognoscendi internum. In this testimony of the Holy Spirit the revelation closes and reaches its goal. For it is the good pleasure of God to recreate mankind after His image and likeness. Objective revelation is thus not enough; this must continue and complete itself in subjective revelation. Yea, the former is only means, the latter is end. The principium externum is instrumental; the principium internum is the principium formale and principale.
Therefore the Christian church at all times made confession of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. God is the author of the outward revelation; but He is also the one who elects the congregation, founds the church, and in her bears witness of Christ. The Scripture is His word, the congregation is His temple. In so far there is agreement in the confession of all churches concerning the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. Not the natural but only the spiritual man knows the things that are freely given to him of God, 1 Cor. 2:12ff. But otherwise there is yet great difference over this witness of the Holy Ghost, especially between the Roman church and the churches of the Reformation. According to Rome, indeed, the Scripture is given to the church, and indeed to the church as institute, and first through this to the believers. The church receives, preserves, authorizes, explains the Holy Scripture. All revelation of God to the believers is mediated through the institute of the church. Always the church stands between God and the believers. The church is mediatrix, medium gratiae, principium externum. She is the temple of the Holy Ghost. The testimonium Spiritus Sancti expresses itself in Rome only through the church as institute, through the ecclesia docens, through the magisterium, through the pope. But according to the Reformation the revelation, the Scripture, is given, yes also to the church, but to the church as organism, to the congregation, to the believers. They are the temple of the Holy Ghost. The testimonium Spiritus Sancti is the property of all believers. Where two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name, there is He in the midst. In Rome the institute is the essence of the church; according to the Reformation this is a temporal aid, but the essence of the church lies in the gathering of the believers. This is the dwelling of God, the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost.
1. Scarce had Christianity entered into the Greek-Roman world, when it found itself called to a earnest strife. Jews and Gentiles fell upon it and brought forth all manner of objections against it. Then in the second century the Apologists arose, who sought to ward off these attacks and strove to defend Christianity. Justin Martyr, in his Dialogus cum Tryphone , Tertullian, in Adversus Judaeos , and Eusebius, in Demonstratio evangelica , wrote against the Jews. Much greater was the number of apologetic writings against the Gentiles. The foremost are Justin Martyr, Apologia major and minor ; Tatian, Oratio adversus Graecos ; Athenagoras, Legatio sive supplicatio pro Christianis ; Theophilus, Ad Autolycum ; Clement of Alexandria, Cohortatio ad gentes ; Origen, Contra Celsum ; Tertullian, Apologeticus and Ad nationes ; Arnobius, Disputationes adversus gentes ; Minucius Felix, Octavius ; Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica ; Athanasius, Oratio adversus gentes ; Cyril, Adversus impium Julianum ; Augustine, De civitate Dei . In these works the following proofs are brought forward for the truth of Christianity: a) it is safer, of two unsure things, to believe that which bears some hope rather than that which bears none at all, Arnobius, Adversus gentes II 4; b) the agreement of Christianity with the best and fairest, with the seeds of truth, which are also found among the Gentiles through the working of the Logos, Athenagoras, Legatio 6. Justin, Apologia major 20 sq. Minucius, Octavius 19, 20; c) the excellence of Christianity above the heathen religions, so that every human soul must unwittingly bear witness thereto, Justin, Apologia minor 10. Tertullian, De testimonio animae 1. Arnobius, Adversus gentes II 2; d) the moral sway of Christianity on teaching and life, so that the dreadful sins of idolatry, witchcraft, hate, greed, cruelty, and the like are thereby done away, Epistola ad Diognetum 5. Justin, Apologia major 14. Athenagoras, Legatio 11. Origen, Contra Celsum I 26. Arnobius, Adversus gentes I 63. Lactantius, Institutiones divinae III 16. Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica I 4; e) the steadfastness of the martyrs, Justin Martyr, Apologia II 12, and the holiness of the ascetics, Justin, Apologia I 15. Athenagoras, Legatio 33, 34. Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica III 6; f) the prophecies and their fulfillment, Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone 7, 8. Justin, Apologia I 31. Origen, Contra Celsum I 2; g) the wonders, not only in former times but also in the present day, Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone 39, 82, 88. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses II 31, 32. Tertullian, Apologeticus 23. Origen, Contra Celsum III 24; h) the holy character and life of Jesus and the apostles, Arnobius, Adversus gentes I 63. Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica III 3, 5; i) the witness of Scripture, the agreement of the Scriptures among themselves, the plain speech, the godly content, which could not be brought forth by any human wit, Justin Martyr, Cohortatio ad Graecos 8. Origen, De principiis IV 1, besides the wondrous origin, keeping, and spreading of Scripture, Tertullian, Apologeticus 19; and lastly j) the witness of tradition and of the church, Irenaeus, Adversus haereses I 10, III 3. Tertullian, De praescriptione 20. Cyprian, De unitate ecclesiae . Augustine, De civitate Dei etc. Cf. Münscher-von Coelln, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte I. Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte § 29 f. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte I². These proofs have since gained common right in Christian theology. The content of the supernatural truths was beyond the grasp of reason, Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 32 art. 1, Summa contra Gentiles I c. 9. All the more then did it matter to prove that God had revealed Himself. All the proofs that could be brought for this were gathered under the name of rationes inductivae or motiva credibilitatis , Thomas, Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 2 art. 9 ad 3, art. 10. Duns Scotus, Prologus Sententiarum qu. 2. Ludovicus Vives, De veritate fidei christianae . Cf. Frohschammer, Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino . After the Reformation, the proof drawn from the church was especially further wrought out. The church then became for Rome more and more the foundation and rule of faith. Augustine had already said that he was moved by the church to believe the Scripture. The Romanists after the Reformation made the church the strongest ground for faith in Scripture, in revelation. The motiva credibilitatis were often divided into three kinds, Becanus, Theologia Scholastica Tom. II pars. II tract. 1 cap. 6, in such as hold against Jews and Gentiles; in others that have meaning especially for the Romanists themselves; and in a third group that have force against the heretics. To this last belongs now especially the church with her 15 marks, as they are reckoned by Bellarmine, De Conciliis et Ecclesia Lib. IV. What the Reformers said of Scripture is applied to the church. She is as the sun, which spreads her beams and can easily be known by her own light. Among the proofs for revelation the church takes the first and highest place; she is of all the strongest motive to faith. The Vatican Council, Sess. III cap. 3 de fide, declared: for to the Catholic Church alone belong all those things which are so many and so wondrously ordained by God for the evident credibility of the Christian faith. Nay, the Church herself, by reason of her wondrous spreading, excellent holiness, and unfailing fruitfulness in all good things, by her catholic unity and unconquerable steadfastness, is a great and lasting motive of credibility and an unanswerable witness of her divine mission. The worth of all these proofs, also of that of the church, lies therein that they can show the believability of revelation. They are able to bring forth a human faith and to prove the reasonableness of believing. They make the truth of revelation clear in such a measure and to such a height that all reasonable doubt is shut out. If from man's side no sinful self-love and no enmity of heart came into play, then these motives would be strong enough to move to faith in revelation. They make revelation not evidently true, for if that were the case, then no faith would be needed anymore and faith would also lack all merit; but yet evidently believable, Thomas, Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 1 art. 4 ad 2, 4, art. 5 ad 2, qu. 2 art. 1 ad 1. Bellarmine, De Conciliis et Ecclesia IV cap. 3. Billuart, Summa Sancti Thomae hodiernis academiarum moribus accommodata VIII. P. Dens, Theologia ad usum seminariorum II. The Roman theologians therefore commonly take up all those proofs of apologetics in dogmatics and treat them at length, Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae I. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae I. Hake, Handbuch der allgemeinen Religionswissenschaft II. Heinrich, Dogmatik I. Liebermann, Dogmatik I etc. Some even went so far as to deem these proofs sufficient also for the unbeliever, Billuart I. Dens II. But most acknowledged that all these proofs were but motives and that they did not make up the last and deepest ground of faith. That could only be the authority of God, Thomas, Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 2 art. 1 ad 3 and art. 10. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 9. Billuart VIII. Becanus ibid. Dens II. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae I. And that faith in revelation on the ground of God's authority comes not to pass through those proofs but through a help of God, an inner instinct, which moves the will to faith, Thomas II 1 qu. 109 art. 6, qu. 112 art. 2 and 3, qu. 113 art. 4. The Vatican Council, sess. III cap. 3 de fide, acknowledged in like manner on the one hand that faith was a supernatural virtue, whereby, with the inspiring and helping grace of God, we believe the things revealed by Him to be true, not because of the inward truth of the things seen by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself revealing. But on the other hand it yet laid great worth on the apologetic proofs and therefore added straightway: that nevertheless the obedience of our faith might be agreeable to reason, God willed to join to the inner helps of the Holy Spirit outward proofs of His revelation..... which..... are most certain signs of divine revelation and fitted to the understanding of all. It even condemned in canon 3, 3 him who said that divine revelation cannot be made believable by outward signs, and therefore men ought to be moved to faith only by each one's inner experience or private inspiration. This esteem of apologetics hangs together in Rome with the whole system. The supernatural revelation is built up on the groundwork of the natural. The former is only reached step by step and by degrees. Man in pure naturals comes first through proofs to natural theology. This is the preamble of faith. Here even knowledge is possible. The proofs are convincing. In itself there is here yet no talk of faith. He who has come so far and stands on the groundwork of natural theology can now further through the motiva credibilitatis , especially through the signs and marks of the church, see the believability of revelation, and acknowledge the reasonableness of believing. And when thus human faith is gained, and man has readied himself through preparatory acts, he is by infused grace itself taken up into the supernatural order and readies himself again through good works for heaven, for the vision of God. Man goes out from the natural state step by step upward. Each time he comes a degree higher. The pure naturals, natural theology, motiva credibilitatis , preparatory acts, infused grace, good works, vision of God form the sundry rungs of the ladder that stands on earth and reaches into heaven.
2. The Reformation has indeed in principle fought against this hierarchy of Rome and taken up another standpoint. She took her position not in the natural reason, to lead this step by step to the faith, but in the Christian faith. And she spoke out as decidedly as might be, as shall be shown later, that that faith rested solely upon God's authority and was wrought only by the Holy Ghost. But the Protestant theologians have not always strictly held fast to this principle and have oftentimes returned to the teaching of natural theology and of historical proofs for the truth of revelation. Calvin says, Inst. I, 7, 3, that it would be easy for him to prove the godliness of Holy Scripture and brings forward in cap. 8 sundry grounds therefor. And so speak and do also Ursinus, Tract. Theol. p. 1-33. Zanchius, Op. VIII col. 335 et seq. Polanus, Synt. Theol. I c. 17 et seq. c. 27, 28. Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 2, 10 et seq. Du Plessis-Mornay, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne contre les Athées etc. Anvers 1581. Abbadie, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrét. 1684 etc. Cf. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. S. 20-22. Hase, Hutt. Rediv. § 37. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. S. 32, 33. The belief that these proofs were enough to work at least a human faith, has unwittingly helped to set the reason free from faith and to place the dogmas of natural theology and of Holy Scripture outside the saving faith. Therewith began also the rationalism in the Protestant churches. Socinianism cast off the testimony of the Holy Ghost and grounded the truth of Christianity on historical proofs, Catech. Racov. qu. 5-30. Fock, der Socin. 338 f. Remonstrantism went the same way, Episcopius, Instit. Theol. Lib. IV cap. 2. Limborch, Theol. Christ. I c. 4. Id. De veritate relig. Christ. collatio cum erudito Iudaeo 1687. Hugo Grotius, de veritate relig. christ. 1627. Cf. Wijnmalen, Hugo de Groot als verdediger van het Christ. Utrecht 1869. Through Cartesius rationalism also broke into the Reformed churches. Natural theology came to stand on its own beside revealed theology. And within this latter, to reason was granted the right to search and explain the credentials of revelation, H. A. Roëll, Dissert. de theol. naturali 1700 etc. Leibniz spoke the widely held view, when he set revelation over against reason, like an extraordinary ambassador over against a lawful assembly. This examines his credentials and, if it finds them true, goes reverently to hear him. Discours sur la conformité de la foi avec la raison § 29. Deism in England and rationalism in Germany soon drew therefrom that natural theology was fully enough. And supranaturalism, which granted the freeing of reason in natural theology and in the search for the truth of revelation, could appear before that reason with no other than historical and reasonable proofs. In that wise was Christianity defended and dogmatics wrought by a number of men in England, Germany, the Netherlands, of whom we here only recall the names of Butler, The analogy of religion natural and revealed 1736. Paley, View of the evidences of christianity 1794. Id. Natural Theology 1802. Chalmers, The evidence and authority of the christ. revelation 1817. Id. Natural theology 1823; cf. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften I S. 163-224. Reinhard, Morus, Doederlein, Knapp, Storr and others; here in the land by Van Nuijs Klinkenberg, Muntinghe, Heringa, Vinke etc. and the works of the Hague Society. And further we find this standpoint also later with Pareau and Hofstede de Groot, Compendium Dogm. et Apolog. Christ. 3 ed. 1848 p. 179 et seq.; Van Oosterzee, who first took over the standpoint of Schleiermacher Jaarb. v. wet. Theol. 1845 bl. 1-74, but later sought help in an apologetics that went before dogmatics, Jaarb. v. wet. Theol. V bl. 406. De Leer der Herv. Kerk van J. H. Scholten beschouwd 1851 bl. 51, 53. Dogmatiek § 30-34, § 38 etc.; Doedes, who by unprejudiced, pure historical search will learn to know Christianity, Het regt des Christ. tegenover de wijsbeg. gehandhaafd 1847, Modern of Apost. Christ. 1860, De zoogen. moderne Theol. eenigszins toegelicht 1862; abroad with Voigt, Fundamentaldogmatik 1874 S. 184 f. 232 f. Gretillat, Exposé de theol. systématique II 176 s. A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, Edinburgh, Clark 1892 p. 42. W. M. Mc. Pheeters, Apostolical sanction the test of canonicity, Presb. and Ref. Rev. Jan. 1895. Ed. König, Der Glaubensact des Christen, Erl. 1891, S. 143 f. and many other apologetic works, cf. Christlieb, Art. Apologetik in Herzog.
3. But this standpoint has through the history of supranaturalism itself and through the sharp rebuke of Rousseau and Lessing, of Kant and Schleiermacher, shown itself to be untenable. Apologetics without doubt has a right to be; an weighty task is given to it. It must uphold and ward God's truth against all strife, both from within and without. Through sundry happenings it has wrongly fallen into scorn. First, it lost the love of many through the feebleness and craftiness of the reasons which it brought forth against the earnest and learned strife with the Christian faith. Next, it began to stir more and more loathing by the underlaying thought from which it often went forth, that Christendom was a teaching which could be shown by wit. Furthermore, dread of knowledge, which often spoke in so high a tone and so unfailingly set forth its teachings, has often scared believers from warding. Folk still believed, but drew back in fear, and shunned all touch with knowledge; sometimes they eagerly fled to mysticism or to unknowingness. Yet there is no ground to scorn apologetics. The warders of the second hundred-year span, the church fathers, the schoolish god-learned, the reformers and so forth, they all stood in the steadfast faith that God's truth must and could be warded against the strife to which it was laid open from all sides. They did not leave the onsets unanswered. They sought out the foe and rested not until they had overcome him. That faith is already a might and nigh half the win. Doubt and mistrust in the sake we stand for makes us mightless in the fray. But therewith is also already shown the standpoint from which alone a good warding of the truth can be undertaken. Apologetics cannot go before faith and seeks not to prove the truth of the opening a priori. It underlays the truth and the faith in the truth; it stands on the groundwork of dogmatics and now seeks to uphold and ward the dogma against the strife to which it is underlaid. Yet if the Christian opening, which underlays the darkness and wandering of the soul-ish man, gave itself beforehand to his wit for judging, it would thereby gainsay itself. It would thereby set itself before a judgement-seat whose right it had first gainsaid. And once acknowledging the right of wit in the beginnings, it would soon no more be able to strive against that right in the limbs of faith. Supranaturalism must always lead to wit-rule, for it is already wit-ruling in beginning. But set aside from this beginning-wise hindrance, the tale-wise warding proof also leads not to the wished end. It could yet bring it a stretch far in a time when the trueness of the Bible books and the tale-truth of their inhold still stood fairly widespread fast. But the wonders and foretellings of Scripture now themselves need so much warding that they can no wise more serve as reasons. Apologetics would, to prove something, first have to handle the whole so-called inleading knowledge and take in many other fields into itself, before it could begin with the setting forth of the truth; on this wise it would never come to faith, to dogmatics; the shapely part would swell so much that no time and no room would be left for the stuffly part. This long way could then yet be trodden by one who owned enough time and strength and gift to set up such a seeking into the truth of the Christian faith; but it would be wholly unnearable for the simple, who yet even as well as the learned, and not first tomorrow but now already, at this eye-blink, has need of the peace and the troost of faith, and who therefore for the wholeness of his soul would become hanging on a wit-wise and thereby all the more unbearable clerk-rule. And set that this was not yet an overweighing hindrance and that tale-seeking was the only way to the knowing of truth for all folk; then yet the outcome that would be gotten in the best happenings would be no other than a man-faith, which tomorrow could again be shaken and overthrown by other and better seekings. Everness can indeed not hang on a spider's thread. In godliness no man and no shaped thing may stand between God and my soul. To live and die troosted and whole is not workable so long as I rest in a man-wise, fallible witnessing. In godliness there is need not of a lesser but of a much stronger and steadfaster sureness than in knowledge. There is here only rest in the witnessing of God. Also the witnessing of the church is unenough. It is of great worth not only at the birth but also at the ongoing of the Christian faith. It stays a stay until the end of life. It is indeed an ever-motive to faith. We are bound to a fellowship in all our life. A man is a living being of the folk-state. The fellowship holds us upright whenever we threaten to stumble. The cloud of witnesses lying around us heartens us in the fray. It belongs to an unwonted boldness and ghost-strength to stay steadfast when all leave us and stand against us. But fellowship strengthens one's own overwinning. Yet therefore the witnessing of the church cannot be the last and deepest ground of faith. Even Romish god-learned acknowledge that themselves, as will show later. They are with their unfailing church in the seeking of the grounds of faith in no wise in better shape than the Protestants. For they too must ask: on what rests the faith in the church? If on warding proofs, then against them rise the same hindrances that were brought in above. And if on the witnessing of the Holy Ghost, then this teaching is the corner-stone of the Christian faith.
1. Supernaturalism fell under the blows of Rousseau and Kant, of Lessing and Schleiermacher. There followed a mighty turnaround. Classicism gave way in every field to romanticism, the dominion and autonomy of the subject. In the first time, with the feeling of freedom, this reaction went so far that it cast away all that is objective and held the subject to be enough for itself. The subject produces, if not the stuff (Fichte), yet the form (Kant) of the world. The not-I is a product of the I, the moral world-order comes to pass through man himself, and the moral law is freely and kingly set aside by the genius. Schleiermacher also first took this standpoint. But this absolute idealism led to all kinds of dreadful outcomes. The French Revolution showed the danger of this autonomy of man. There had to be something objective that stood fast and had authority. Thus came the restoration, that is, the striving, while keeping the same starting point, yet from the subject to come again to the objective. Of this restoration Hegel was the philosophical spokesman. He raised the subjective, ethical idealism of Fichte to an objective, logical idealism, and replaced the idea of being with that of becoming. The whole world became a process, a unfolding of the logical idea. In this evolution religion also has its place. But that religion clothes itself in forms and symbols, which only by speculative reason can be understood in their deep meaning. Rationalism understood nothing of this, and simply set aside the dogmas of the church, not knowing what to do with them. But those dogmas are full of deep, philosophical sense. Hegel's spirit threw itself upon those dogmas, stripped them of their historical symbolic forms, and tracked down the idea in them. History is but the shell, the husk; the kernel itself is deep, true philosophy. Not the rationalistic teachings of God, virtue, immortality, but the highest and deepest dogmas of Christendom, such as the Trinity, the incarnation, the satisfaction, become the object of bold, philosophical speculation. Outside the Scripture and without any authority, those dogmas are derived as needful from reason and proven as most reasonable. Theology and philosophy were seemingly reconciled, faith was changed by speculative reason into absolute knowledge. This speculative method was taken over and applied to dogmatics, indeed with very different outcomes, by Daub, Marheineke, Strauss, Feuerbach, Vatke, Weisse, and lastly by Biedermann. Biedermann departs on weighty points from Hegel and does not accept his aprioristic method; but starting from the Christian dogmas, he strives yet in the same way as Hegel to break them down into the religious principle that lies at their ground and the historical expression they have taken, and then further to unfold them speculatively and practically. And in like manner here in this land Scholten has tried to distinguish in the Reformed dogmas between clothing and idea, and to interpret them in a monistic and deterministic sense.
2. But this speculative method hath also found entrance in the school of Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher shared with Hegel the subjective starting point, yet he took his stand not in reason but in the feeling. Religion is a peculiar determination of the feeling or of the immediate self-consciousness. Moreover, he conceived that feeling not individually, but historically, as it existed in a religious fellowship and in the Christian congregation particularly shaped by Jesus as the Redeemer. And lastly, he saw in dogmatics no speculative unfolding but only a portrayal of the pious moods of the soul or of the faith of the fellowship; Schleiermacher fought in theory against all mingling of theology and philosophy.
But on the other side, Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of Faith showed nevertheless that his own religious experience departed very strongly from that of the Christian fellowship and was surely also shaped under the sway of Spinoza; and in his Brief Presentation he gave the first place to philosophical theology, which received the task to determine the essence of Christendom. In truth, theology with Schleiermacher became wholly dependent upon philosophy.
The Mediating Theology took with Schleiermacher its standpoint in the consciousness, in the faith, the confession of the fellowship, but joined therewith the speculative method of Hegel, thereby to lift faith unto knowledge and to make authority yield to self-standing reasonable insight. Twesten strives, by means of reasoning from the pious feeling, to derive an orthodox-Lutheran dogmatics. Müller desires, by way of regression, through reflection upon his own experience, from the religious certainty of faith to come unto an objective knowledge of God. Martensen assigns to the regenerate consciousness the task to reproduce in learned wise, from its own depths, the teaching of Scripture and of the church. In Dorner, the Doctrine of Faith is not merely portraying, but also building and forward-moving; it brings the religious knowledge to systematic grounding and unfolding, and seeks to show the Christian idea of God as needful, by pointing out that it is the filling up and perfecting of the God-concept in general. Especially in Rothe doth this speculative method of the Mediating Theology come forth clearly; the God-consciousness is the idea, from which he, with the help of Hegelian dialectic, derives the whole creation, nature, history, sin, redemption.
Among the Mediating theologians there is otherwise great diversity, but they all have starting point and method in common with one another; they go forth not from one or another authority, but from the Christian consciousness of the fellowship, and seek the proof for the truth of faith not in an appeal to one or another authority but in the inward evidence, in the necessity of thought.
3. Even outside the circle of those theologians who in a stricter sense align themselves with Hegel and Schleiermacher, this method has found acceptance. Hofmann does not conceive dogmatics as a description of moods of the soul, nor as a reproduction of Scripture or church teaching, and also not as a development of Christian knowledge from a general principle, but he nevertheless proceeds, like Schleiermacher, from Christian piety. Dogmatics is the unfolding of that which makes the Christian a Christian, of the personal fellowship of God with mankind mediated by Christ. The knowledge and utterance of Christianity is above all the self-knowledge and self-utterance of the Christian (Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed.). Philippi (Kirchliche Glaubenslehre), Kahnis (Lutherische Dogmatik) have this same subjective starting point. Ebrard seeks in dogmatics to show the truth and necessity of the facts of redemption by comparing them at all points with the scientifically developed need for redemption (Dogmatik, § 52, etc.). Especially Frank has taken over and worked out this thought in his System of Christian Certainty (2nd ed., 1884). Hofmann took his standpoint in the factual state of the fellowship of God with mankind. This rests and bears certainty in itself, and Scripture bears witness to it. Here there was thus no place for a system of Christian certainty. The Christian is aware of himself, and therewith all is said. But Frank does not stop here; he seeks to give an account of why the Christian believes all that his faith contains. He thus constructs a System of Christian Certainty . Theology, so he says, in distinction from philosophy, must place itself not outside but in the midst of the Christian consciousness, and from there survey and judge all things, even the natural. The Christian certainty has its ground and essence not in all sorts of outward proofs, nor in an external authority, but in the Christian himself, in his moral experience and self-determination. This particular moral experience is regeneration and conversion. The Christian knows that a change has taken place with him and still continues to take place, so that now two kinds of direction, two kinds of self dwell in him; and he is as certain of this as a sick man who has been healed is aware of his former sickness and his present health. From this experience of regeneration he now naturally and at once posits the whole content of Christian truth; he does so by virtue of the nature of the new life bestowed upon him and can no more rid himself of this truth of faith than of himself. In three circles this Christian truth of faith groups itself around the experience of regeneration. First, the Christian posits by virtue of his new life those truths of faith which are directly and immediately given with the fact of regeneration, namely, the reality of sin, of righteousness, and of future perfection. This is the realm of the central, immanent truths, which still wholly belong to the self -consciousness of the Christian. Around this forms a second circle of truths; the believer can explain this new state only by the reality of the personal God, the existence of God as Triune, and the atonement acquired by the God-man. These three together form the group of transcendent truths, and indicate the factors which have brought about that moral change of regeneration in the Christian. And finally, around this forms yet a third circle of truths, namely, the transeunt ones, which indicate the means whereby the above-mentioned transcendent factors work the experience of salvation in the Christian; and these are church, word of God, Scripture, sacrament, miracles, revelation, and inspiration. Lastly, Christian certainty also includes a certain relation of the regenerate to natural life, to world and mankind.
4. This speculative method had weighty advantages over the apologetic way of the rationalistic age. The clearness, which in the former century was held as the yardstick of truth, had changed the revelation into a teaching, the church into a school, rebirth into moral bettering, the crucified Christ into the wise man of Nazareth. The rationalism had wholly falsified the Christian religion. With scorn the cultured turned away from revelation and religion, from the congregation and faith. It took boldness, as Schleiermacher and Hegel did, to go back to the congregation and her dogmas, and therein, even if only in a certain sense, to find deep religious truth. It was a show of moral strength to break with the rationalistic demand for clearness, to take up for the despised religion of the congregation, and once more to speak out the right and worth of the Christian faith.
More yet, there lay in the starting point of Hegel and Schleiermacher a glorious truth. Thinking and being are most inwardly kin and answer to each other. The rationalism sought to justify religion before the unfit court of sound understanding. But Hegel and Schleiermacher both saw that religion takes its own place in human life, that it forms a self-standing greatness, and therefore also calls for its own matching organ in human nature. Hegel and Schleiermacher differed among themselves in pointing out that organ; the one sought it in reason, the other in feeling. But both rose above the vulgar rationalism, and both pointed to the harmony of subject and object. If with their subjective starting point they had meant nothing else, their overcoming of rationalism would have earned only agreement. For the objective exists for us only insofar as it comes to our awareness. It can be neared in no other way than through awareness. And religion is therefore no reality for me, except insofar as I have taken it up in feeling or reason, or whatever its organ may be in man.
But Hegel and Schleiermacher did not content themselves with the stance that thinking and being answer to each other; they both made them one. This making one of thinking and being is the first falsehood of speculative philosophy. Plato already went forth from it, when he held the ideas for the true world. Descartes took it over in his cogito ergo sum . Spinoza spoke in the same sense of a causa sui , whose essence involves existence. Fichte brought it to lordship in the newer philosophy. The great question thereby is this: do we think something because it is, or is something because we must needs think it logically? The speculative philosophy said the latter. But between thinking and being there may be still so great a likeness; there is a no less weighty difference. From thinking there is no conclusion to being, because the being of all creatures is no outflow from thinking but rests on a deed of might. The essence of things is owing to thinking, the existence only to the will of God. Human thinking thus takes for granted the being; it rises first on the groundwork of the created; we can only think after what is forethought for us and comes through the world to our awareness. If however one with the newer philosophy casts off all stuff that has come to us from without, and takes the pure reason or the bare feeling as his starting point, one keeps nothing over or at most such a broad, contentless, and hazy beginning, that nothing, let alone the whole world or all the Christian revelation and religion, can be drawn from it.
Hegel's philosophy was therefore not so innocent as it at first might seem. It was the outworking and application of Fichte's thesis, that the I posits the not-I, that the subject creates the object. Schleiermacher went back to this principle in theology, because all authority in religion had fallen away for him, the rational and historical proofs for Christianity did not satisfy him, and God also in his view was unknowable to reason.
Like Kant who sought to restore through practical reason what he had lost through the critique of pure reason, so Schleiermacher saw no way to save religion except by starting from the religious subject, from feeling, from consciousness. From this it followed that dogmatics could be nothing other than a description of states of soul and thus properly belonged in historical theology. Theology became anthropology, pisteology, ecclesiology, and ceased to be what it had always claimed to be, knowledge of God.
But Schleiermacher could not stop there; in religion too it is not about reality but about truth for us. The justification of Christianity was therefore assigned in the first part of the encyclopedia to philosophy. Because there is no other ground on which Christian faith rests, philosophy gets the task of upholding religion in its right and worth. The mediating theology took over Schleiermacher's subjective starting point, followed the path he had marked out for the defense of religious truth, and thus naturally came to an alliance with Hegel's dialectical, speculative method.
It could not content itself with the empirical knowledge of the content of Christian consciousness. Such knowledge was after all no science. Not only must the fact of faith be ascertained, but the right and truth of faith must also be demonstrated. And since there was no other proof, recourse was taken to speculation. The speculative theology that arose after Schleiermacher strove for a higher knowledge of Christianity than that which rested on authority and was gained through faith. It was a renewal of the old Gnosticism.
The Christian dogmas, such as the Trinity, the incarnation, the satisfaction, must not merely be confessed as articles of faith but also be seen through and understood in their necessity. The "that" is not enough; the "how" and "why" must also be grasped. The speculative mediating theology therefore sought to escape the lower standpoint of authority and strove to make Christianity rest in itself as absolute truth. It did indeed start from faith but set knowledge as its goal. Necessity of thought was its proof of truth.
That this method would lead to no desired outcome either in philosophy or in theology was to be foreseen and has been strikingly proven by history. Refutation is almost needless. Speculation has long had its day. The philosophy of Hegel led with Feuerbach and Strauss to the casting away of the whole Christian faith. The philosophical working out of orthodox dogmatics by Schweizer, Scholten, Biedermann has only hidden the dogmatic barrenness of modern theology for a short while.
The more right-believing Vermittelungstheologie can rightly boast of the works of Rothe, Dorner, Lange, Martensen, Müller and others, which are full of deep and fair thoughts; but it has nevertheless not at all answered the hope which it had awakened. It did not succeed in turning the foolishness of the cross into a wisdom of the world; it failed to win back the children of this age for Christ through its deep-sighted beholdings. On the contrary, the mediation ended in an even more root-deep sundering of belief and knowledge, of theology and philosophy, of church and world.
The speculation, which was pursued by a part of the Vermittelungstheologie, also went forth from the wrongful under-setting that Christianity was a logical thought-system, from whose first link all following ones could be drawn forth by thinking and reasoning. But if the being of things in general rests not on thinking but on willing; if history, howsoever the fulfilling of a counsel of God, is yet something inwardly other than a reckoning-sample; then is the Christian religion even much more set apart from a logical thought-framework.
For Christianity is history, it is a history of grace, and grace is something other and something more than a logical ending. In the Christian religion, therefore, even the deepest thinker never goes beyond the childlike standpoint of authority and faith.
5. Separate Bespeaking Deserves the Theology of Dr. Fr. H. R. Frank. Separate bespeaking deserves the theology of Dr. Fr. H. R. Frank, high teacher at Erlangen, who died in February 1894. Frank fights as strongly as may be against the so-called prolegomena of dogmatics, in his System of Christian Certainty , second edition, and gives in their stead a System of Christian Certainty . This title is however not overly clear. Certainty is a state of the soul and shuts out system as such. If certainty here is however taken for the objects of faith, of which the Christian is sure, then System of Christian Certainty is as much as System of Christian Truth . That cannot be the meaning, for Frank has given just this title to his second weighty work. In his System of Christian Certainty , he makes himself clearer and says that this his system has as its object the certainty, insofar as it stretches to the truth-content that it warrants, that is, the certainty as a soul-state with all that it assures insofar as it assures it. The system of Christian certainty comes therefore down to a formal outline of the sundry kinds and degrees of certainty that flow forth from the Christian self-awareness towards the objects of faith.
Now it is however not Frank's meaning that the objects of Christian faith would not beforehand be and be known. He says outspokenly the other way. He denies no less that Christian certainty would arise through the word, in Dogmatic Studies . He will not lead those objective truths from the reborn subject. More yet; when he has led all that follows from Christian self-awareness therefrom and has unfolded and fulfilled the whole system of Christian certainty, then he says with clear words that there now follows a turnabout, and that the last becomes the first. The Christian has out of and through his own certainty found the objective ground on which he rests with his faith-life, namely the grace of God in Christ, and from thence he now builds up the system of Christian truth, in System of Christian Certainty .
Frank's meaning is only to give answer to the ask: how comes a man thereto to lean himself on those objective factors of salvation, God, Christ, the Holy Writ, and so on, to take the Writ unbounded as God's word, in System of Christian Certainty and Dogmatic Studies . In the system of Christian certainty, Frank unfolds thus not so much the grounds of faith as well the ways along which a man comes to certainty about the Christian faith-truths. And in the whole, Frank says now that a man gets this certainty not through historical or reasonable proofs and no more through sway, church, handed-down lore, and so on, but only through the undergoing of rebirth, in System of Christian Certainty .
The question which Frank has set before himself for answering is therefore of the utmost importance; it is also needful and good, for the Christian certainty speaks not of itself and is oftentimes subject to doubt. Also the answer which Frank gives to that question is to a certain degree right. Even as the eye is needful to behold the light, so is the regeneration needful to see the kingdom of the heavens.
But doubt may arise whether Frank's System of Christian Certainty answers to this his good intention. And for that doubt there is ground. For the whole system as such is in strife with that expressed intention. If Frank had wished to do nothing more than describe how the believer comes to certainty, then he would have only set in the light the origin and the nature of that certainty and therewith ended. Even as the theory of knowledge only unfolds the grounds upon which the belief in the outer world rests, but does not derive each object in that world from this certainty, so the system of Christian certainty ought to have sufficed with pointing out the grounds of the certainty but not discuss its content.
Then, however, there would also have been no system in the proper sense of the various objects to which the certainty relates possible. Frank, however, does much more; he gives a system. He leads all truths of faith successively, not indeed in temporal but yet in logical, causal sense, out of the regeneration. He lets the Christian from the experience of regeneration gradually come to all Christian dogmas, "as if" he knew nothing of them earlier and by another way.
So Frank does with all dogmas, of sin, guilt, God, Trinity, incarnation, resurrection, and so forth. We get the impression as if all these truths outside Scripture and church can be derived by the Christian from his regeneration. Frank unceasingly confounds with each other the cause of being and the cause of knowing, the objective ground of the truth of faith and the subjective way along which someone comes to certainty thereof. He interchanges and identifies objective truth and subjective certainty. Oftentimes he expresses himself so, as if the regenerate simply posits the objective truths of faith as realities by virtue of his spiritual experience. He speaks of an autonomy of the Christian subject as guarantor of the truth.
6. This all rooteth by Frank in a peculiar theory of knowing. He goeth a good way along with the idealism of the newer lore-wit.
The object is as object, that is, for the subject only present through that setting by the subject. Well acknowledgeth Frank the reality of the outward world, though it be not in an empiric and sense-bound wit, but our knowledge hath it never to do with the Thing in and for itself, but always with the Thing for us. That we to the object an being on itself bestow, cometh thence, that we ourselves compelled see, to the object so and not otherwise to set. Both ways, as well the empirism as the idealism, do that; they differ only in the wise, upon which they it do. Surety is therefore always surety touching an object. It standeth just herein, of the object inwardly to be as of the truth. We come through this reasoning not further, than that our ghost so inwrought is, that he the outward reality of the fore-things, whereof he sure is, must take on; whether the manly ghost this however rightly doth and not at hallucination suffereth, is for Frank no ask. The needwendiness of the setting is for him the last ground of the outward reality. The surety is him not essential but knowing-theory-wise the warrant of the truth. The reality is well being-ground of the surety, but this is know-ground of the reality.
This theory of knowledge doth Frank also apply unto the Christian faith. The objective truths and facts of Christendom do indeed essentially and causally precede faith, but in the sense of the theory of knowledge they follow upon it. Even as in philosophy he taketh the self-consciousness of man as his starting point, so in theology he proceedeth from the self-consciousness of the Christian, from the experience of regeneration. But against this starting point and against this method there are many objections.
a) This regeneration of the Christian and likewise all his other spiritual experiences, including even his certainty, have not arisen spontaneously in the Christian, but from the beginning and continually stand in connection with the objective factors of Scripture, church, and the like. Frank himself acknowledgeth this oftentimes; but wrongly doth he detach the spiritual experience a priori from those objective factors, to set them on their own and to let them rest in themselves. The starting point of Frank, namely, the certainty of the Christian, is a mere abstraction; that certainty resteth from the outset and evermore upon the objective factors of salvation that come to the believer from without.
b) By acknowledging, as was noted above, that the order now reverseth, Frank himself admitteth that regeneration offereth no sufficient certainty for the objective truth of the Christian faith. For if the objective, causal order be indeed as Frank indicateth in his System of Christian Truth, namely, such that the objective precedeth, then this must also be the order of the whole system. The system must be an imprint of the order of being, not of the manner in which someone cometh to knowledge and certainty of the objective truth. For this manner is so diverse that it is not susceptible of any systematic description; compare above.
c) The method whereby Frank constructeth the objective dogmas from the certainty of the Christian is one that fitteth not in the Christian religion and theology. It is borrowed from speculative philosophy. Even as this took its starting point in a general, abstracted from all things, vague principle; so is the self-consciousness of the Christian, detached from all objective factors, his certainty in itself, the cogito ergo sum , the δος μοι που στω for Frank. Therefrom he first concludeth to the immanent truths of faith. Then he calleth upon the method of natural science for aid and concludeth regressively from the effect to the cause, and desireth to explain the new life of the Christian wholly after the empirical method. Just as the natural philosopher through spectral analysis seeketh to know the chemical components of the sun, so doth Frank endeavor by analysis to reduce the life of regeneration to its objective factors. The Christian, reflecting upon his spiritual life, can explain it in no other way than by assuming that God is triune, that Christ hath become man and hath made satisfaction, and the like.
d) This method is also at variance with all Christian experience. In such wise hath no Christian ever come to certainty concerning the objective truth. It goeth wholly outside of reality. Moreover, it is unpractical, for in doubt and unbelief the Christian lacketh precisely that certainty which alone, according to Frank, can warrant unto him the objective truth of his faith. In such times he hath need precisely of an objective word, an objective deed, which holdeth him up and whereto he can cling and from the depth of doubt and temptation be lifted up again.
e) Finally, there are yet various other objections to be brought against the system of Frank. Thus the transition from natural to spiritual knowledge, and likewise the connection between both, suffereth in Frank from obscurity. The distinction of a twofold I in the regenerate is susceptible of all manner of misunderstanding; in regeneration no new I is created in man, but the I of the natural man is renewed. The division of dogmatics into a system of certainty and a system of truth cannot be maintained, because the certainty of the Christian cannot be described without the truth which it concerneth. But the foregoing is sufficient to show that the accusation of subjectivism, though it be vague, is not wholly unjustly brought against the theology of Frank, even as against that of Ritschl.
Cf. concerning Frank: Henri Bois, De la certitude chrétienne. Essai sur la théologie de Frank , Paris Fischbacher 1887. O. Flügel, Die spekulative Theol. der Gegenwart 2nd ed. 1888. Dr. A. Carlblom, Zur Lehre von der christl. Gewissheit , Leipzig 1874. Dorner, Christl. Glaubenslehre I 1879. Pfleiderer, Die Entwicklung der protest. Theol. etc. 1891. Polstorff, Der Subjektivismus in der modernen Theologie und sein Unrecht , Gütersloh 1893. Gottschick, Die Kirchlichkeit der s. g. kirchl. Theol. 1890. Ernst Haack, Ueber Wesen und Bedeutung der christl. Erfahrung , Schwerin 1894.
1. Beside the historical proofs and the speculative reasoning there exists yet a third way, in which men have sought to justify the Christian faith; and that is the ethical-psychological method. This conceives Christianity not as a doctrine that can be demonstrated, or as a historical fact that can be proven; but as a religious-ethical power, which directs itself to heart and conscience. It therefore also does not think that Christianity can be made acceptable to every man without distinction and in all circumstances, but it requires in man a foregoing moral disposition, a sense for the good, a need for redemption, a feeling of dissatisfaction, and so forth. And when Christianity then comes into contact with such a man, it commends itself without reasoning and proof to his conscience as divine truth. For it satisfies his religious-ethical needs, it answers to his higher, noble inspirations, it reconciles him with himself, it frees him from the guilt and the burden of sin, it grants him peace, comfort, blessedness, and in all this it proves itself as the power and the wisdom of God.
This manner of proving the truth of Christianity is already very ancient. Tertullian appealed to the testimony that the soul unwittingly gives for Christ. Arnobius likewise. Among many apologists we find the thought that heathen philosophy and mythology are unable to give a satisfying answer to the questions about God, man, and the world; to fulfill the religious needs and to foster a truly moral life. Christianity, on the other hand, embraces all the true and good that was scattered even in the heathen world; it gives matter for thought, it renews the heart, it fosters all kinds of virtues; Christianity is the true philosophy. "Whatever things have been well said by all belong to us Christians," as Justin Martyr says.
Likewise, Duns Scotus in the prologue to his Sentences points to the reasonableness of the content of revelation, to its moral working, and to its sufficiency for man to reach his destiny. The arguments brought forward by Roman and Protestant theologians for the truth of revelation were not only drawn from miracles and prophecies and the like; but also from the beauty and majesty of the style of Scripture, from the mutual agreement of all its parts, from the loftiness and godliness of its content, from the working and influence that has gone out from the Christian religion upon the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, and political life of the individual and of families and peoples. Bellarmine, Perrone, Jansen, Hake, Calvin in his Institutes, Maresius, the Synopsis of Pure Theology, Vitringa, Hoornbeek, Quenstedt, Glassius, and others.
Even Rousseau in his Emile could not withhold his praise from the life and teaching of Jesus: "Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God."
Supernaturalism divided the proofs for Christianity into outward and inward, and understood by the latter precisely those which showed the agreement of Christianity with the reasonable and moral nature of man, and which were especially powerful for his heart and conscience. The theologians of this direction also saw that the proofs were not sufficient for every man without distinction, that they provided not mathematical but moral certainty, and therefore also presupposed a certain moral disposition on man's side. Knapp, Bretschneider, Muntinghe, Vinke, Voigt, Oosterzee, Gretillat, A. B. Bruce.
Especially, however, the ethical-psychological method hath come into honour through Pascal and Vinet. In both, however, it stood not yet in opposition to the historical proof. The historical proofs even form in the apology of Pascal a needful element and were by him himself very highly valued, Wijnmalen, Pascal as Striver against the Jesuits and Defender of Christendom 1865. But he gave to those historical proofs another place and meaning. His apology is anthropological; it goeth out from the wretchedness of man, and would in him awaken a need for redemption. And then it showeth that this need findeth no satisfaction in the heathen religions and in the philosophical systems, but only in the Christian religion prepared by Israel's faith. And Vinet also spurned not the historical proofs, Discours sur quelques sujets religieux , 6th ed. Paris 1862; Essais de philos. morale et relig. 1837, but he deemeth them yet insufficient and attacheth greater worth to the inward proof. He would that the apologist tread the ethical path and commend Christianity from its ethical side, as the true humanity, to the conscience of man, cf. his l’Evangile compris par le coeur in the Discours aforesaid; and Le regard , in his Etudes Evangéliques 1847, cf. Dr. J. Cramer, Alex. Vinet , Leiden, Brill 1883. Since then this method, with neglect and sometimes even with contempt of the historical proofs, hath been taken up and hailed by Astié, De theol. des verstands en de theol. des gewetens , from the French by D. Ch. de la Saussaye 1866; Pressensé, Les Origines , Paris 1883; Sécrétan, La civilisation et la croyance , Paris, Alcan 1887; Saussaye, my Theol. van d. l. S. ; and further we find this same proof for Christianity in Delitzsch, System der christl. Apol. Leipzig 1869; Baumstark, Christl. Apol. auf anthropol. Grundlage I 1872; Köstlin, Die Begründung unserer sittlich-relig. Ueberzeugung , Berlin 1893; and so forth.
2. The Moral Proof. Related to this method is the moral proof, as it was set forth by Kant. Kant took two springs for our knowledge, the senses for the stuff, and the understanding for the shape of our knowledge. But above that stands now the reason, the pure Reason, whose a priori synthetic ground-rule is this, that it climbs from the conditioned to the unconditioned. By strength of this oddness, the theoretical reason shapes sundry ground-rules or ideas, which are utter, unconditioned, transcendent, and are brought forth by reason not at will, but matching her kind.
Those ideas are chiefly a threesome: God, freedom, and deathlessness. These ideas however cannot be shown in their objective truth, but only drawn from the kind of reason in a selfward way. The things of those ideas are not seeable, and thus not knowable. We come to those ideas only through a needful reason-conclusion. They are all three unprovable in theory. They do not grow our knowledge, but only rule and order it, and make us look upon and behold all things "as if" those ideas had reality.
That they have reality and what they are, the theoretical reason cannot teach us. But now reason is not only theoretical but also practical. That is: it bears a moral law, a categorical imperative in itself and holds forth the duty to us. And it asks that we fulfill that duty without strings, without side-aims, only out of heed for that duty as such.
It thus shows that man yet belongs to another order than that of kind, namely to a moral world-order; that he has to strive toward a highest good, which far outstrips the sense-goods of life and lies in nothing else than in the oneness of worth and bliss. If this bid of duty now is no dream but doable, and the highest good, the oneness of worth and bliss, truly once shall be reached; if in other words the moral world-order in us and outside us one day shall win over the order of kind; then God, freedom, deathlessness must be. These three are thus postulates of the practical reason, their reality is asked by the moral law, the practical reason needs their being.
That is in the main the famous postulate theory of Kant. But it is not above criticism. First, it is not clear who derives these postulates from the practical reason. Kant seems to think that the practical reason itself does this. But then there come two practical reasons, one foregoing and one following, one that sets forth the duty and one that therefrom by reckoning concludes to the being of the ideas. The practical reason then itself becomes theoretical again, Rauwenhoff, Wisdom of Religion . Of more weight is another misgiving, which yet is the ground whereupon the theoretical or practical reason concludes to the being of those ideas; what is the pressing motive for those postulates? If that ground, that motive lies in the practical reason in itself, in the categorical imperative, in the bidding of duty as such; then even the most unrighteous can from the showing of that practical reason conclude to the reality of these three ideas. Now it seems at times as if Kant truly means this. He gives manifold the mark as if the practical reason in itself, without more, to fulfill itself, must set these postulates. He says not only that every morally grown man is able to postulate thus, but that it is unavoidable for every reasonable being to conclude thus; that the suppositions of the being of God, freedom, and immortality are even as needful as the moral law itself, Critique of Practical Reason ; and he proves just that the moral law, to be doable, must take those three ideas as being. But if this is Kant's meaning, then we have here not with mind-wrought but with objective logical postulates to do; and the question rises, why is such a logical postulate then yet no knowing, no part of the theoretical reason? Why calls Kant this knowing only practical? There pleads therefore more for to think that the ground and the motive for these postulates lies not in the practical reason on itself, but in the moral bent, in the moral will of man, who earnestly, though with weakness, strives to obey the duty which the practical reason sets before him. Therefore he declares in the Critique of Pure Reason that the moral faith is a holding for true on mindly, moral grounds; therefore this moral faith says not, it is sure, but I am morally sure; therefore it rests on the fore-setting of moral mindsets. And even so he says, Critique of Practical Reason : the upright may say; I will that there is a God, I let not this faith be taken from me, my moral behoove demands the being of God; and the moral faith is no bidding, a faith that is bidden is a nothing; and the duty-sense is objective and even so the likelihood to deal morally and to be happy; but whether that bond between worth and happiness now is laid by a personal God or by the together-hang of nature, we wit not. The moral behoove gives here the sway; it stands in our choice, but the practical Reason decides for the faith in a wise Maker of the world. Indeed there is with Kant a twofold striving marked, on one side to uphold the reasonableness and on the other side the freedom of faith. The faith in God, freedom, and immortality is in so far objective as it is postulated by the practical reason own to all, but hangs yet also again on the moral bent of the single man. Cf. on the practical Reason and the postulate theory of Kant among others Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , 6th ed. J. Gottschick, Kant's Proof for the Being of God 1878. E. Katzer, The Moral Proof of God after Kant and Herbart , Yearbook for Protestant Theology 1878. B. Pünjer, History of Christian Philosophy of Religion II. Fr. Paulsen, What Kant Can Be to Us , Separate Print from the Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy V. Rauwenhoff, Philosophy of Religion . Leendertz, The Ethical-Evangelical Standpoint and the Christian-Religious Faith 1891 I.
3. The Meaning of Kant for Theology. The meaning of Kant for theology lay chiefly therein, that he made a parting between phenomenon and noumenon, between the world that can be explained and that which is lived, between the world of being and of worths, between knowing and believing, between knowledge and godliness, between the mind of theory and of practice.
Godliness came to stand beside and outside of knowledge, and rested on its own ground-work, on that of man's upright nature. Already forthwith was the sway of Kant's wisdom-lore on theology marked. The over-naturalism argued on the ground of the unknowableness of the over-sensual the needfulness of the unveiling. The reason-worship joined itself to the reasonable uprightness and the uprightness-teaching godliness of Kant. Schleiermacher took over Kant's teaching of the unknowableness of the over-natural and his parting of godliness and knowledge, but sought for godliness a safe hiding-place in the feeling.
But above all, after the emptiness of the historical-apologetic and of the thoughtful proof-leading had become clear, many went back to Kant. Here in this land this happened already through Hoekstra. Unfulfilled by the mind-worship and fore-setting of Scholten, he sought the ground-work of the godly belief with Kant in the practical mind and her after-settings. The belief is according to Hoekstra an upright deed of the will, an after-setting of our inward ghostly man over against the life-knowings; it rests on the belief in the truth of our own inner being. That world-outlook is alone the true one, which answers to our inner being, to our upright needs.
Later Hoekstra has in an writing in the Theological Times more closely set forth his thought, and grounded the godly belief not on our needs, ideals, yearnings in general, but set on the unyielding duty-knowing. In linking to Hoekstra, Ph. R. Hugenholtz, Rauwenhoff, Leendertz, and others let the godly belief root in the upright self-knowing.
The upright moderns have gone yet a step further; setting aside the striving to come to a wisdom-lore framework, they have parted belief and knowledge as sharply as may be and bounded godliness to the realm of the upright. Godliness is upright idealism, yielding to the upright ideal, belief in the might of the good, which might then according to most yet has an outward being, but with some is nothing than a thought of the manly ghost.
Furthermore still J. W. v. d. Linden, Dr. A. Bruining, De Bussy. A like twofoldness is also found with Dr. J. H. Gunning, Dr. J. W. Gunning, and likewise with Doedes, as he makes a parting between the belief, that stands on grounds and the knowledge, that rests on proofs.
4. In Germany, the return to Kant dates from Liebmann’s book on Kant and the Epigones (1865) and F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism (1866). Cf. Hans Vaihinger, Hartmann, Dühring and Lange (Iserlohn, 1876). Ed. von Hartmann, Neo-Kantianism, Schopenhauerianism and Hegelianism (2nd ed., 1877).
In theology, Kantianism was renewed by Ritschl and Lipsius. The principles of Ritschl’s theology and his school are these: First, a separation must be made between metaphysics and religion (theology). The metaphysical concept of the Absolute has nothing to do with the religious idea of God. Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics (1881). Justification and Reconciliation (vol. III). Herrmann, Religion in Relation to World-Knowledge and Morality (Halle, 1879) drew the separation even further, and made a distinction between the object of metaphysics and of religion; between the explainable and the experienced reality; between the natural and the moral world. Cf. also Kaftan, The Essence of the Christian Religion (Basel, 1881).
Next, theology must not take its standpoint before faith, in a natural theology, which does not exist, but in the faith of the congregation. From there it must proceed and view and value everything. Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics. Justification and Reconciliation (vols. I and III). The orthodoxy allowed the saving faith, that is, the trust, to be preceded by the historical faith, the assent, but that was in strife with the original teaching of the Reformation by Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin. In that way, faith would always depend on outward proofs, consist in the acceptance of some truths, and be robbed of all freedom, selfhood, and certainty. Ritschl, Implicit Faith (Bonn, 1890). Gottschick, The Churchliness of the So-Called Churchly Theology (Freiburg, 1890). Traub, Faith and Theology, Studies and Critiques (1893). Herrmann, The Certainty of Faith and the Freedom of Theology (Freiburg, 1887; 2nd ed., 1889). Id., The Communion of the Christian with God (Stuttgart, 1886; 2nd ed., 1892). Id., The Evangelical Faith and the Theology of Albrecht Ritschl (1890). Id., in Proof of Faith (1890). Kaftan, Do We Need a New Dogma? (1890). Id., Faith and Dogma, Journal for Theology and Church (1891; cf. 1893). Kattenbusch, On Religious Faith in the Sense of the Christian (Giessen, 1887).
In the third place, Ritschl’s theology seeks to bind saving faith to the historical revelation in the person of Christ. Faith, just as trust, is not the acceptance of a doctrine but trust in a person. But then faith does not arise of itself from man, but presupposes an object and some prior knowledge of that object. Herrmann even acknowledges that knowledge is a precondition of faith. Communion of the Christian with God (2nd ed.). Journal for Theology and Church (vol. IV).
On what ground does that object, that historical revelation in Christ, stand firm? From whence comes the certainty about its reality? The answer given to this weighty question by the Ritschlians is very diverse. Ritschl himself gives no real answer. He refers the single person to the congregation, which has the experience of the forgiveness of sins and of sonship to God, but does not say what must compel the individual person to join that congregation. He only grounds the being of God and the reasonableness of the Christian worldview on the self-valuation of the spirit. Justification and Reconciliation (vol. III). His followers, however, usually take other paths and let the truth of the revelation in Christ rest on inner experience. The beholding of Christ strikes us by his moral greatness; He makes a deep mark on the unbiased soul, humbles but also lifts up to the trust that God is our Father. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God (1886). Proof of Faith (1890). Gottschick, The Churchliness of the So-Called Churchly Theology (1890). Traub, Studies and Critiques (1893). Cf. Köstlin, The Grounding of Our Moral-Religious Conviction (1893). Frank, Dogmatic Studies (1892). Herrmann fights as strongly as possible that historical proofs can convince us of the truth of the person of Christ; he leaves historical criticism fully free and withdraws nothing from it, but he says yet that the Christ outside us is the ground of his faith. Journal for Theology and Church (1894, vol. IV); he speaks of an undoubted fact; finds that the main traits of the image of Jesus allow no doubt about the historical reality of Jesus, and acknowledges this objective truth not on the ground of proofs, but because he has felt and lived through the power of Jesus’ life over him; because Jesus’ life has the strength to witness itself to our conscience as a real fact. And only that is the content of faith which has the strength to witness itself to the conscience as a real fact.
A deeper unfolding of the truth and certainty of faith is not given to us in the school of Ritschl; the mark which the person of Christ makes on us, the strength that goes out from the gospel in our soul, the moral experience of humility and joy, the agreement of the idea of the kingdom of God with our needs and demands. Kaftan, The Truth of the Christian Religion (Basel, 1889) seems to stand in for the truth of the revelation in the person and life of Christ.
Finally, the content of faith is reduced to a minimum in Ritschl’s theology. Ritschl said, Justification and Reconciliation (vol. III), all knowledges of a religious kind are direct value-judgments. Philosophy also values. But there the value-judgments are incidental and accompanying. In religion they are self-standing; they rest on man’s pleasure or displeasure, on his weal or woe; they bear on his relation to the world, and are unbound from science. If science thus keeps to its field and seeks not to build a worldview, then no strife is possible. Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics. Justification and Reconciliation (vol. III). Implicit Faith. Herrmann went even further and even said that the reality of faith was for science an imagination. Religion etc. But yet Ritschl and Herrmann held fast to the historical revelation of God in Christ as the groundwork and source of religious faith and insofar let religion consist not only in value- but also in being-judgments. It was also all too clear that religious knowing includes just as much the conviction of the reality of its object as scientific knowing. Value-judgments depend on being-judgments or else are nothing but imagination. Kaftan, The Essence of the Christian Religion acknowledges then also that value-judgments presuppose objective truth, though he lets this depend on those in a knowledge-theoretical sense. And Häring, Theology and the Charge of Double Truth (1886) says indeed that practical, moral grounds move us to faith, but adds yet that Christian faith carries not in itself the warrant for the truth of what is believed, for wishing is no proof for the fulfillment of the wish; but that it finds that warrant in the historical fact of God’s revelation in Christ. Cf. Häring also On the Doctrine of Holy Scripture, Studies and Critiques (1893).
Hence, others point out that, though much in Scripture may yield to criticism, yet enough remains firm. The whole appearance of Christ cannot be unhistorical. Faith is unbound from the supernatural birth of Christ. Harnack, The Apostolic Creed (Berlin, 1892), from the resurrection. Harnack, History of Dogma (vol. I). Gottschick, The Churchliness etc. From the wonders. First when historical-critical research would seek to take from us that Christ is our Lord, then would Christian faith rise against it. Cf. Otto Ritschl, The Historical Christ, Christian Faith and Theological Science, Journal for Theology and Church (vol. III). Traub, Studies and Critiques (1893). Erich Haupt, The Meaning of Holy Scripture for the Evangelical Christian (1891). Max Reischle, Faith in Jesus Christ and the Historical Research of His Life (Leipzig, 1893).
Of the rich literature on the theology of Ritschl and his school, let only be named: Stählin, Kant, Lotze, Albrecht Ritschl (1888). Pfleiderer, The Ritschlian Theology, Yearbook for Protestant Theology (April 1889; also separately published at Braunschweig by Schwetske). Id. on Herrmann, Kaftan and Bender, Yearbook for Protestant Theology (1891). Id., Development of Protestant Theology (1891). Flügel, The Speculative Theology of the Present (1888). Frank, The Theology of A. Ritschl (3rd ed., Erlangen, 1891). Flügel, Ritschl’s Philosophical and Theological Views (2nd ed., 1892). G. Mielke, The System of A. Ritschl Presented, Not Criticized (Bonn: Marcus, 1894). Saussaye on Ritschl, Theological Studies of Dr. Daubanton (1884) and my article there (1888).
5. The Same Standpoint Taken by R. A. Lipsius. A like standpoint is at last also taken by R. A. Lipsius, in his Lehrbuch der ev. prot. Dogm. 1876, 2nd ed. 1879, 3rd ed. 1893; Dogmatische Beiträge , in Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1878, also published separately, Leipzig, Barth, 1878; Neue Beiträge , in Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1885, and published separately under the title Philosophie und Religion , Leipzig 1885; Die Hauptpunkte der christ. Glaubenslehre , in Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1889, and published separately, Braunschweig 1889, 2nd ed. 1891.
Lipsius also bounds knowledge to the realm of inward and outward beholding, Lehrb. der ev. prot. Dogm. § 1; Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1885; 1889. Yet Lipsius owns, unlike Ritschl and Herrmann, some right to metaphysics. Our wit feels need and drive to climb from the world of beholding to an unconditioned Ground, and so shapes the thoughts of the Absolute, the soul, and the like, Jahrb. 1885; likewise 1889. Our mind strives for oneness, Jahrb. 1885. But this metaphysical or thoughtful thinking is no true knowledge anymore; it yields no steadfast content, it adds not to our hoard of truth, as Biedermann deems; it gives only form-settings, ground-thoughts, ruling beginnings, Jahrb. 1885. When we yet wish to lay some content therein and gain otherworldly knowledge thereby, then we bear over sense-forms upon them, and wrap ourselves in an antinomy. The wit-wise and the sign-wise grasping of the metaphysical strive with each other, Jahrb. 1885; likewise 1889.
Along this path there is thus no knowledge of the above-sense to be gotten. But there is yet another path, that of the workly, moral needs. Mankind is namely a thinking but also a willing and doing being, and he feels himself driven to uphold himself as such over against the world. From the wither-strife between mankind's mind and the kind arises in him the belief-way. This is a workly affair of the mind, and arises not foremost from wit-wise but from workly needs. The workly, upright drive to uphold himself in his being drives mankind to belief in God, to the setting forth of an above-sense world. Belief begins thus where knowledge ends, Jahrb. 1885. This belief brings its own sureness with it, no knowledge-wise but moral sureness, a sureness of beholding, resting on the lived sureness of my own self, Jahrb. 1885. For another this sureness may be naught but fancy, but for the self itself it is sure, ibid.
Such beholding is also the only yardstick for the truth of the Christly belief-way, of the showing in Christ. The taking-to-self of the historical showing to own holding is the only straight proof for the truth of the Christly belief-way. The own beholding of the believers upholds the historical showing, as this wakes and strengthens that, Jahrb. 1885. And the Christ-follower, thus believing, then makes avowal of above-sense realities; in the teachings he gives not merely a writing of heart-states and worth-deemings, but being-deemings over the bond of mankind to God and of God to mankind and world. These belief-sayings are outwardly true, if they stand in unbreakable, thought-needful bond with the fulfilling of our highest life-calling. Not chance, but needful worth-deemings prove the outward truth of the belief-sayings, Jahrb. 1885. For the believer himself these proofs are enough; and over against unbelievers he has yet always an underhand upholding proof therein, that workly needs drive mankind to belief-way; belief-way is no force, no kind-might, but is workly, soul-needful, and is in so far grounded in mankind's being, Jahrb. 1885.
Teaching-wise the believer besides has the task to join the belief-content with all his knowledge of the world together to one whole. Herrmann has kept believing and knowing as sternly as may be and to the end sundered. But Lipsius lets the content of both well up from its own spring, but wills then at last to grasp them together in a onefold world-sight. The teaching-lore can well not prove the belief-content and not lift believing to knowing, but it can and must bring the Christly, the end-wise world-beholding in bond with the cause-wise world-beholding, with the knowledge of the world gotten from elsewhere, and it has then to show that there is no strife, that the clash is only seeming, that there is indeed oneness. Though the teachings hold no knowledge-wise truth, no wit-wise insights; though they all be likeness-wise and man-shaped; they may yet not be in strife with the steadfast outcomes of knowledge. The oneness of our mind forbids the taking of a twofold truth. The belief-wise God-thought and the thought of the Absolute, freedom and needfulness, end-wise and cause-wise world-beholding and the like must be blendable, Jahrb. 1885; likewise 1889; Dogm. § 3.
Cf. on Lipsius among others Ed. von Hartmann, Die Krisis des Christ. in der mod. Theol. Berlin 1880; Biedermann, Christl. Dogm. 1884 I; Flügel, Die spekul. Theol. der Gegenwart 1888; Pfleiderer, Entw. der prot. Theol. 1891; Bruining, Theol. Tijdschr. Nov. 1894, and so forth.
6. The Ethical, Practical Method. This ethical, practical method for the justification of religion and Christianity surely deserves by far the preference over the historical and speculative proofs. It does not view religion merely as a teaching that must be justified before the understanding, nor as a state of the subject that must be thoughtfully dissected. But it sees in religion a historical, objective power that answers to the moral condition of mankind and finds therein its proof and its justification. Yet this method too is subject to earnest objections. In the first place, the agreement of a religion with the moral needs of mankind is surely of great meaning. The satisfying of heart and conscience is the seal and crown of religion. A faith that cannot comfort in sorrow and smart, in life and death, cannot be the true faith. From other sciences, like logic, mathematics, natural knowledge, and so forth, we do not look for them to offer comfort to the guilty conscience and the sorrowful soul. But a religion that stands helpless at the sickbed and deathbed, that cannot strengthen the doubting and lift up the downcast, is not worthy of that name. The oft-made contrast between truth and comfort has no place in religion. A truth that holds no comfort, that does not hang together with the religious-ethical life of mankind, thereby ceases also to be a religious truth. Just as medical knowledge in all its parts is ruled by the healing of the sick, so in religion it is about peace and blessedness for mankind. But however highly this comfort may be valued in religion and however much it may be taken into account with other proofs as a strong motive of credibility; yet it, alone and by itself, is insufficient as proof. For some comfort and satisfaction is to be found in all religions; the experiences of misery and guilt, of doubt and trust, of suffering and hope are not only among Christians, but also in greater or lesser measure among Mohammedans, Buddhists, and so forth. A religion that offers no comfort and gives no satisfaction to the moral needs of mankind is surely false; but conversely, not every religion is true in which mankind seeks its comfort and satisfaction.
Furthermore, the needs of heart and conscience, which one or another religion fulfills, are either awakened under the sway of that religion itself, and then its satisfaction is quite natural and a rather weak proof; or they arise outside that religion, under other influences and under the working of another faith, and then precisely that peculiar need which this religion assumes is not present, and the satisfaction is wholly lacking. Of an unconscious longing of the soul for Christianity, scarcely anything is found in the real world. Of a ripeness of the peoples for the Gospel, the history of missions teaches bitterly little. The Gospel is not after mankind, not after the needs as mankind itself thinks of them. Outside the revelation, mankind knows not even itself. The oft-repeated claim that Christianity answers to mankind's needs brings with it the earnest danger that the truth is made to fit the human nature. The saying that the truth is truly human because it is godly slips so easily into the opposite, that it is only godly because it is human. Preaching to the mouth instead of to the heart of Jerusalem is not uncommon even on Christian pulpits.
Next, the experience in which the proof for the truth of religion is sought is a very wavering notion. What then in a historical religion can truly be the content of experience? Experienced are some religious-ethical feelings of guilt, sorrow, forgiveness, thankfulness, joy, and so forth. But all else that occurs in a historical religion falls outside experience. For not one of the twelve articles of faith can the "I believe" be replaced by "I experience." That God is Creator of heaven and earth, that Christ is God's only-begotten Son, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of Mary, and so forth, is by its very kind not open to experience. On the groundwork of religious-ethical experience, the truth of historical Christianity can never be built. The outcome of this lifting up of experience to the principle of knowing is only that the content of faith and dogmatics is more and more loosed from all that is historical and limited to the so-called religious-ethical. That, however, is nothing other than a new shape for the already oft-tried-in-vain parting between idea and fact in Christianity. The fruit, however, can no longer be plucked when the tree is hewn down; and the fresh, clear water flows no more when the spring is stopped.
7. Value Judgments. Instead of in the fulfillment of heart and conscience, others have sought the content and proof of the Christian religion in so-called value judgments. Yet this is but another name for the same thing. If thereby nothing else was meant than that a dogma must always hold a religious-ethical worth, no one could bring any objection against these value judgments. In every dogma, as was already said earlier, one must hear the heart of religion beating.
But in the theology of Ritschl, these value judgments gained a wholly other meaning. Loosed from all metaphysics, they became the groundwork and content of dogmatics. And that is impossible. Religion enfolds the conviction of the reality of its object. Religious and ethical valuing presupposes the truth of the person or thing to which it relates. Value judgments are therefore bound to judgments of being; they stand and fall with these. If the valuing of an object is not grounded in its reality, it becomes nothing but a fancy, a shaping of the imagination, or an ideal forming in the sense of Lange and Pierson.
Therefore, it will not do to say: let the facts be thus or otherwise, the valuing decides; for with the facts, this also changes. If Israel's folk and worship grew as the newer criticism sets it forth, the valuing of the Old Testament must be changed in root. A modern beholding of history and an orthodox valuing fit ill together. If Christ is not truly God, then He cannot have the worth of God for the Christian either. And so it is with all dogmas. Religious valuing stands in the closest bond with objective truth. Many mists would vanish if, according to Biedermann’s wish, the fashionable word “value judgments” were banished. Cf. also Scheibe, Die Bedeutung der Werthurtheile für das relig. Erkennen , Halle 1893. O. Ritschl, Ueber Werthurtheile , Freiburg Mohr 1895.
Step by step, the conviction gains ground that religious-ethical experience and valuing, however great their weight, yet cannot warrant the truth of their object nor be the measure for the content of dogmatics. Even in soul-lore, this setting forth is not to be upheld. For the deciding over the reality of things belongs not to will or feeling, to heart or conscience, but to the awareness. Only when the reality of a thing stands fast for the awareness can the other powers of the soul become busy therewith. Wishing, feeling, undergoing, imagining enfold in no wise the reality of their objects. The way to the heart is laid through the head.
Yet many, albeit seeing the weakness of the experiential and evaluative proof, seek to salvage something of it by means of Kant's postulate theory. They grant that the moral nature of man may not lead to a conclusion about the reality of sundry religious notions or even to the truth of the Christian religion; but still they derive from it the right to postulate the actual being of all that which necessarily hangs together with that moral nature, and without which it would be undermined and destroyed. But wherein this consists, no one can point out; the opinions run far apart. Who can also in the abstract determine what is immediately and directly given with the moral nature of man? In each one that moral nature differs according to the surroundings wherein it is shaped. Each postulates just as much as he needs for his religion. Kant derived from the practical reason that which made up the content of his moral religion of reason, the being of God, freedom, and immortality. Fichte had enough with the moral world order. And Rauwenhoff asserts that faith in ourselves necessarily postulates faith in such a state of the world that the law of duty awareness can rule therein. Wherein this state consists is not further told us. The moral world order postulated by Rauwenhoff is nothing other than the good in us. But therewith we come no step further. For this might of the good is even now already present in man and falls wholly together with that moral nature upon which the postulate was built. Whether the postulate includes something more, for example, that the good shall triumph, that once all men shall be able and willing to fulfill it, thereon silence is kept. Rauwenhoff expects this triumph of the good, but on what ground he says not. If however the present state of the world is compatible with the dominion of the moral law in us, why could it not also be so in the future? What right does the moral nature of man give to demand at the end the full victory of the good, the harmony of virtue and happiness, the agreement of natural and moral world order? In Rauwenhoff the postulate theory ends with returning to the point of departure; it gave at the end no more than it already held at the beginning. But setting aside its poor results, the question arises whether the foundation is trustworthy upon which the postulate is built? For the modern philosopher of religion this is not above all doubt. In religion he will know nothing of an original religious nature of man. That would be at odds with a scientific explanation. Religion must be derived from factors which each in themselves are not yet religious. But coming to the moral nature of man, he seems wholly to forget the demand of his scientific explanation. Without troubling himself about the objections brought in from the side of materialistic science, he proceeds from the moral nature of man as from a fixed, unchangeable, original property and builds thereon the reality of a moral world order or even of a whole metaphysical world. The right thereto should at least have been shown. If this inquiry had been set beforehand, it might have appeared that the moral nature of man itself already presupposes religion. In an epistemological sense one may, as with the moral proof for the being of God, climb from the moral to the religious; yet logically and really religion goes before the ethical. There is no morality without metaphysics. The idea of duty involves that of an absolute might which binds in the conscience.
Concerning Rauwenhoff’s Philosophy of Religion, literature is given by Kuenen in his Memoir of R., Society of Dutch Literature 1889, and therewith de Bussy, Guide October 1889. Cannegieter, Religion from Duty Awareness etc. Leiden 1890.
8. A last objection against the above-named direction lies therein, that it always must come to a certain twofoldness of faith and knowledge. Some have spoken this out very sharply. The school-learning ended in the Middle Ages with some theologians in the teaching, that something could be true in theology and false in wisdom-lore. Jacobi owned to be a heathen with the understanding but a Christian with the heart. Herrmann named the reality of faith for knowledge-work an imagining. The ethical moderns called for a full sundering between wisdom-lore and godly life. Most, however, dare not go so far and see the unlikelihood of saying no as wisdom-seekers and yes as godly folk. They acknowledge that in the end there must yet be oneness between the sayings of faith and the outcomes of knowledge-work. Wisdom-lore may not be able to uphold the godly fore-thinkings; yet it must also not be able to show their untruth. Both, the findings of knowledge-seeking search and the sayings of godly faith must be able to be bound into one whole or at least stand beside each other without strife and foe-ship.
This oneness at the end, in the outcomes, men then seek to gain by on the one hand making knowledge-work unknowing in regard to the over-senselike and over-natural, and on the other side strictly binding the sayings of godly faith to the godly-moral. But though men seek in that way to shun the twofoldness in the outcome, in deed they yet hold to it in the tool through which and the way or the method by which men come to knowledge of the truth. The heart is in its field even so good a tool for the truth as the head. Godly-moral undergoing warrants the reality of the unseen things even as strongly as the sense-like beholding does that of the seen world. Faith with its grounds has even as much right as knowledge-work with her proofs.
But it is hard to see how men can flee the twofoldness that they take at the beginning, in ground-law, in the end at the outcome. If head and heart have an own life, in that wise that they each shape a self-standing tool to knowledge of the truth, then is also the oneness of the truth, of the world, yea of God himself, no more to be upheld. Even as inwardly the man falls asunder into twain, and on the one hand is a godless being, shut in the nature-bond, and on the other hand a godly-moral being, burgher of a moral world-order; so outwardly knowledge-work and godliness, explainable and undergoable reality, the world of being and of worth-setting, the seen and the unseen things, the full-come nature-might and the godly God-thought stand sundered beside and soon foe-like over against each other.
Doubtless there lieth in this dualism a certain truth, which must not be gainsaid. There is, namely, besides a logical certainty, also a certainty of faith. But this distinction is, as shall later appear, an wholly other than the separation which is set forth by the dualism described above. For this twofold certainty divideth neither man nor the world into two halves, but maketh within the circle of science itself a distinction betwixt that which cometh to our knowledge immediately and that which cometh by means of proofs.
But the dualism which hath come to dominion in the newer philosophy letteth all creation fall asunder into two wholly sundered circles, and is thereby at odds with the unity of man's spirit, with the unity of science and of truth, with the unity of the world, with the unity of the divine Being itself. Therefore it is also unable to reconcile faith and knowledge with each other; rather it increaseth the strife betwixt both.
For faith cannot be content with that separation, since it seeth itself bereft of all the historical and metaphysical, wherewith it ever hangeth together in greater or lesser measure, and therefore either becometh wholly dependent on science or must withdraw into the vague, mysterious feeling. And science can have no peace therewith, because the decision concerning the reality of things is entrusted to a faculty which utterly lacketh the right and the competence thereto. Both, faith and science, suffer not themselves to be limited in that wise. They grasp into each other every moment.
It can also be no good demand that the religious man cease to serve God when he devoteth himself to science, or that the man of science impose silence on his thinking when he entereth the field of religion.
1. From the foregoing inquiry it has become clear to us that the internal principle of the Christian religion and theology cannot lie in the understanding, the reason, or the heart of the natural man. Neither proofs nor reasonings nor even agreement with man's needs are able to convince us of the divinity of religious truth. On every field, and so also in religion, the internal principle must correspond to the external principle; it must be of like nature therewith. Even as light is only perceived by the eye, so divine truth can only be acknowledged by him who is akin to God and is His image.
All the above-mentioned directions have realized this in greater or lesser measure. Even those who wished to prove the truth of the Christian religion intellectually judged nevertheless that on man's side a certain moral disposition was needful to feel the force of those proofs. Pascal sought in the first part of his apology to bring man to knowledge of his misery and to awaken in him the need for redemption and peace. Through and after Schleiermacher, most theologians have come to the insight that religion is of its own nature and therefore must be known by its own organ in man. The attempt to find that organ in the reason, the conscience, the heart, the feeling was already a step on the right path, and deserved far the preference over the rationalistic striving to demonstrate religious truth to the sober understanding.
But yet therewith not enough was done. If there were no sin, man would possess in himself the ability to discern the truth from falsehood as clearly as the eye distinguishes light from darkness. But no one can claim that this is the case. Sin has darkened man in the understanding and corrupted him in the will. The unclean of heart cannot see God. Therefore it is needful that objectively the truth come to us purely, and that subjectively our eye be opened for that truth.
The Scripture proceeds from this. It does not submit itself to the judgment of the natural man; for only the spiritual man, the regenerate, can discern the things of the Spirit of God and of the kingdom of heaven. Therefore the Scripture itself retains the right and the power to bring man to acknowledgment of its truth. It does this in a spiritual way, not by proofs and reasonings but in the way of a spiritual experience, through the teaching of the Holy Spirit. There is therefore not only a revelation of God in Christ without us, but also an illumination of the Holy Spirit within us; after God has spoken to us through the Son, the Holy Spirit has come to lead us into the truth. God gave not only a Scripture which fully contains the objective revelation, but also founded a church which understands the word of God and confesses it as truth.
It is for this reason also contrary to the essence of the Christian religion to let its truth depend on the investigation and pronouncement of the sinful man. The dogmatician must take his standpoint not before or outside, but in the midst of faith. The methodical doubt of Bacon and Descartes is in its place neither in philosophy nor in theology. Doubt may at most be an occasion to go seek the truth; faith alone finds it; faith is always the deepest ground of the labor of science.
Voetius therefore rightly took the field against the theologia dubitans of Descartes. It is a wrong method when the philosopher divests himself of his natural certainty and the dogmatician of his faith before he begins the scientific labor. Such a method is not only impracticable but also lays on the man of science the appearance as if his conviction and his faith really rest on those grounds which his thinking afterwards finds. Descartes found a firm starting point in the cogito ergo sum . But no one will think that therewith he named the last and deepest ground of faith in his own existence. Even if the incorrectness of this thesis were shown to him, he would yet believe as firmly in his own existence as before. Just as little as philosophy may set aside natural certainty, so the dogmatician cannot take his position outside the faith in which he has often been brought up from youth. Science has not to create its object, but to explain it.
The Christian theology therefore has a subjective starting point. It takes its standpoint in the community which believes and confesses the truth of God. There is no other standpoint. Rome seeks for it but cannot find it. The Reformation also left off seeking for it; it proceeded from the believing subject. And when the theology of rationalism and supranaturalism had given up this standpoint, the newer theology through and after Schleiermacher has in nearly all its directions returned to this reformatory principle. The whole theology has become ethical, in the sense that it has taken seriously the proposition that only the regenerate sees the kingdom of God and that only he who wills to do God's will can acknowledge whether Jesus' doctrine is from God. Nearly all theologians now take their standpoint in the believing consciousness, in regeneration, in religious experience.
There is in all this a remarkable agreement. The accusation of subjectivism against this standpoint is wholly misplaced. There is nowhere, in no single science, another starting point. Light presupposes the eye, sound is only perceptible to the ear. All the objective exists for us only through the mediation of the subjective consciousness. Without consciousness the whole world is dead to me. To desire an objectivity which is not subjectively mediated is an impossible demand. Between the being of things and our own being perception always stands. The subjective starting point has thus the theology in common with all science, yea with all relations which exist between man and world.
The accusation of subjectivism gains right of existence only when the subjective organ, which is indispensable for the perception of the objectively existing, is elevated to the principle of knowledge. The eye may be the indispensable organ for the perception of light, yet it is not the source thereof. It is precisely the error of idealistic rationalism that it identifies the organ with the source of knowledge. Thinking is not the source of the thought, the representation not the cause of the thing, the I not the creator of the not-I; and so neither can faith, regeneration, experience be the source of our religious knowledge and not the principle of our theology.
However much therefore the newer theology rightly takes its standpoint in the subject, it errs when under the influence of idealistic philosophy it changes theology into anthropology, ecclesiology, science of religion. In so far Ritschl has rightly called back the consciousness-theology, which generally arose after Schleiermacher, to the objective, historical revelation in Christ.
2. Most often in Scripture, at least in the New Testament, this internal principle is marked by the name of faith. Also rebirth, cleanness of heart, love toward God's will, the Spirit of God are set forth in Scripture as the internal principle, Mt. 5:8; John 3:3,5; 7:17; 1 Cor. 2:12 and so on. Yet the name of faith earns the foremost place for marking this principle. Not only because faith in Scripture most stands forth as such. But above all, because the thought of faith sets us on the ground of awareness and thereby keeps the bond with the way we on other fields come to knowledge. Earlier we saw that man's reason never and nowhere is the wellspring of knowledge. Inborn thoughts there are none. Man is bodily and likewise in understanding wholly bound to the world outside him. All knowledge comes from without. But all that knowledge is from man's side middled by his awareness. Not the feeling or the heart, but the head, the awareness in its whole breadth (sensing, heed, beholding, understanding, reason, conscience) is the inward tool of truth. When Scripture now names faith the internal principle, it thereby holds the same outlook, and owns that God's showing forth can only come to our knowledge through awareness. Not as if rebirth, love, cleanness of heart were not of the greatest weight thereby; the other side will later show. But the own tool whereby God's showing forth is known is a deed of awareness, namely faith. God's showing forth is a gathering of God's words and deeds, which live outside and unbound from us. How could these ever come to our knowledge but through awareness? God's showing forth is gospel, is pledge, pledge of forgiveness and blessedness; but to a pledge nothing from our side can answer but faith. Only through faith does a pledge become our own. Faith is therefore the internal principle of knowing God's showing forth, and thus also of godliness and godlore, Hartmann, Religionsphilos.
But also for yet another reason it is preferable to designate the internal principle by the name of faith. For thereby the connection is preserved between religious knowing and all other knowing of mankind. There is surely a distinction, but first of all attention should be given to the agreement. We come in religion and theology to knowledge in no other way than in the other sciences. Faith is no new organ that is implanted in man, no sixth sense, no gift superadded. However much it strives against the "natural" man, it is yet fully natural, normal, human. Revelation joins itself objectively and subjectively to nature, recreation to creation. Believing in general is a very common way to come to knowledge and certainty. We begin in every field with believing. Our natural bent is to believe. Only acquired knowledge and experience teach us unbelief, Hoekstra, Sources and Foundations of Religious Faith. Faith is the groundwork of society and the foundation of science. All certainty rests at last in faith. Indeed, the word believing is also used in a weaker meaning, when we do not know something for certain but yet on grounds sufficient for ourselves hold it for likely. Believing then forms an opposition to knowing and is akin to opining. So it occurs in the saying: I know it not, but believe it well. But in this meaning the use of the word by no means goes far. Already the etymology points out that in faith there lies yet another deeper meaning. The word faith is from the same stem as praise, permit, promise, allow, leave, laud, vow; it is akin to love, and expresses a trust with one's whole person, a loving surrender and dedication to someone, Kahnis, Lutheran Dogmatics. Hoekstra, Philosophical Theology. See also Dictionary of the Dutch Language under the word. Also in other tongues the word faith has this original meaning of dedication, trust, certainty, such as aman, emunah; peitho, pistis; fido, fides; foi; faith beside belief, and so on. Believing is therefore often used for all such certain knowledge which rests not on proofs but on immediate, direct insight. Plato distinguished episteme, dianoia, pistis, and eikasia, and understood by pistis the certainty concerning the sensible world on ground of perception, Republic. See Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks. Siebeck, History of Psychology. Therefore he says in Timaeus: For what becoming is to being, that is faith to truth. Aristotle made distinction between knowledge which is gotten by demonstrative way, and knowledge of the principles, which is derived from the nous itself. Now he does not indeed call this last by the name of faith, but yet he says, Nicomachean Ethics: When one in some way believes and the principles are known to him, he knows scientifically. When thereafter in Christendom the word faith got such a deep religious meaning, many church fathers with fondness pointed to the weighty place which believing holds in life and science. Clement of Alexandria understands by pistis oftentimes all immediate knowledge and certainty, and says then that there is no science without faith, that the first principles, among which for example also the being of God, are not proved but believed, Stromata. See Denzinger, Four Books on Religious Knowledge. Strauss, Doctrine of Faith. Especially Augustine has set forth this meaning of faith for society and science in the light. He who believes not, comes never to knowing; unless you believe, you shall not understand, On the Trinity and elsewhere. Faith is groundwork and bond of all human fellowship. If the saying held, what I see not, I ought not to believe, all bonds of blood, of friendship and of love would be broken. If therefore to things which we cannot see, if we believe them not, human society itself, concord perishing, would not stand; how much more is faith, though of things not seen, to be given to divine things? On the Faith of Invisible Things. See On the Usefulness of Believing. Confessions. See Ritter, History of Christian Philosophy. Gangauf, Metaphysical Psychology of Augustine. Thereafter these same thoughts return time and again among Christian theologians, for example in modern times with Dorner, Doctrine of Faith. Lange, Dogmatics. Oosterzee, for Church and Theology. Kuyper, Encyclopedia, and so on. The name of faith is then given to the immediate knowledge of principles; to the trust in ourselves, in our perception and our thinking; to the acknowledgment of the objective being of the outer world; to the mutual trust on which all human fellowship is built; to all that which by intuition is known and done. In such a faith Schiller saw the warrant of the being of that new world which Columbus sought: Were it not yet, it would now rise up out of the floods.
No one who thinks deeply will deny this deep meaning of pistis for life, art, and knowledge. Against those who deem that nothing may be held for true which is not sensibly to be perceived or mathematically to be proven, it stands above all doubt that by far the most and the weightiest that we know rests not on proofs, but on immediate certainty. The realm of this last is much greater than that of demonstrative certainty. And this last is ever built upon the first, and stands and falls with it. The way to come to knowledge and certainty in another wise than by mathematical and logical proofs is thus nothing strange to mankind's nature. Faith in a general, broad sense is an unmissable element in fellowship, and a normal path to knowledge. It was not first made needful by sin; without sin, the intuitive knowledge and the immediate certainty would have taken a yet broader place in mankind's life. Even now is man's originalness greater, as he lives not from reflection but from intuition. As likenesses of the religious faith, all the above-named examples can thus prove excellent service. They have this in common with the godly faith, that the knowledge is immediate, not gotten by after-thinking, and that it yields nothing in certainty to that which rests on proofs. They moreover hold fast the bond that exists between the common way on which we men come to knowledge, and the way of faith which on religious ground leads to certainty. They show that believing in itself is so little at strife with mankind's nature and with the demand of knowledge, that without it there can be no speech of a normal man and a normal knowledge.
3. But on account of this agreement, the difference must not be overlooked that exists between faith as immediate certainty and faith in the religious sense. In religion, particularly in the Christian, pistis gets its own value. The Greeks also used the word in a religious sense, of faith in the gods; but even then it has no religious meaning in itself, just as little as when we speak of faith in God, in the soul and its immortality, and so forth. Believing here is still the ordinary faith that we exercise daily, but applied to religious notions. In the New Testament, however, pistis is wholly determined religiously, in object, ground, and origin; it denotes itself a religious relation of man to God. In Hebrews 11:1, elpizomena , pragmata ou blepomena are called the general object of the Christian faith.
Already hereby is faith in the religious sense distinguished from the knowledge that we possess through immediate certainty. The faith in the outer world, in the senses, in the laws of thought, and so forth, rests on our own inward perception. We have of all these things an immediate awareness. But the object of the Christian faith is unseen and not open to any perception. When something is immediately perceived by ourselves, faith is needless; faith stands over against beholding, Romans 8:24; 2 Corinthians 5:7. Therewith is not in strife the fact that the revelation yet took place in space and time, that the person of Christ could be beheld and touched. For as object of faith, this whole revelation is yet not perceivable. Many saw Jesus and yet believed not in Him; only His disciples beheld in Him a doxa hōs monogenous para patros , John 1:14. Object of faith are words and deeds only sub ratione Dei . But in Scripture, pistis as fides salvifica gets an even more weighty meaning; it has as object not sundry words and deeds of God in themselves, but the grace of God in Christ, the promises of the gospel, Mark 1:15; John 3:16, 17:3; Romans 3:22; Galatians 2:20, 3:26 and so forth.
This special object comes for faith under yet another kind than that of true over against false. And the general nature of faith is thereby so changed, that it goes not up in a firm and certain knowing, in an objective holding for true, but also includes a hearty trust, a full surrender to, a personal taking to oneself of the promises of God, bestowed in the gospel.
Furthermore, faith in the religious sense is distinguished from immediate certainty in that the latter rests upon one's own insight, but the former upon that of others. Already this is noteworthy, that the word faith is not generally used for all those cases wherein knowledge rests upon immediate perception. Faith in the outer world, in the senses, in the laws of thought, in the first principles is commonly denoted as immediate knowledge. And indeed this immediate knowledge, like the demonstrative, rests upon one's own perception and insight. Insofar it can also be called a knowledge in distinction from believing. But with the saving faith it is a different case. This has most surely the grace of God in Christ as its object. But of that grace of God we would carry not the least knowledge, if it had not come to us through the testimony of others, if it were not assured to us in Holy Scripture. Between the person of Christ and our faith stands therefore the testimony of the apostles. The word of God is the means of grace. Indeed, this Scripture comes into consideration for faith only as God's word, 1 Thess. 2:13. For religious faith can rest only in a testimony of God, John 3:33; Rom. 10:14 ff.; 1 John 5:9-11. But nevertheless, faith is bound to that Scripture. It has the grace of God as its object, but as it is testified in Holy Scripture; or, as Calvin expresses it in Inst. III, 2, 6, it has for its object Christ clothed with his gospel. Therefore faith extends in one act both to the person of Christ and to the Scripture. It embraces Christ as Savior and the Scripture as God's word. And therefore both are true: through Christ to the Scripture and through the Scripture to Christ. The Scripture leads to Christ and directs man's thoughts and affections upon Him, who now lives in heaven. Even those who take away all knowledge and assent from saving faith and wish to absorb it wholly in trust cannot do without it, to let this trust arise from an impression made by the image of Christ upon the soul. Even pietism is bound to outward means. It may limit those means and wish to know nothing of a catechism or dogmatics; yet it seeks to lead children to conversion by speaking to them of the dear Jesus, Pierson, A View of Life p. 13. There is also no other way to the heart of man than through his head and his consciousness. God's Spirit alone can work immediately in the heart; we are bound to the means. The Scripture is and remains the means of grace. But conversely, faith in Christ works back again upon faith in the Scripture; it binds and fastens us to that Scripture and makes us trust in it in need and death. Our soul may thus be unbreakably bound to Christ, the living Lord in the heavens, by the mystical union of the Holy Spirit; for our consciousness Christ is, the whole world of things hoped for is there only through the testimony of God in his word. And therefore saving faith always includes a knowledge. Indeed this knowledge of saving faith is essentially distinguished from the knowledge of historical faith. Even if the latter precedes, it is yet later newly grafted upon saving faith and changes its character. It is no mere holding for true but a firm and certain knowledge in the sense of Holy Scripture. The biblical idea of knowledge is altogether different and much deeper than that of common speech. But nevertheless the knowledge which the believer possesses is not immediate and not obtained by one's own insight; it is bound to Holy Scripture; it rests upon the testimony of apostles and prophets as upon the word of God.
Finally, the Christian faith is distinguished from immediate certainty also by this, that it doth not arise of itself from human nature. To the outer world, to the principles, to perception, to the laws of thought, and so forth, every man believeth of himself, without command, on the ground of his own insight. But thus it is not with the Christian faith. Faith is not of all, 2 Thess. 3:2. However fully human it is, no gift superadded, but the restoration of man; yet the natural man standeth hostile over against believing. For faith in the Christian sense presupposeth self-denial, crucifixion of one's own thoughts and will, distrust in ourselves, and over against this, trust in God's grace in Christ. Therefore, even as the fides salvifica hath God himself for its object and resteth upon his testimony; so also hath it Him for its author. He himself it is, who through the Holy Spirit moveth man unto faith and leadeth all his thoughts captive unto the obedience of Christ, Mt. 16:17; Joh. 6:44; 1 Cor. 12:3; 2 Cor. 10:5; 1 Thess. 2:13; 2 Thess. 3:2; Eph. 1:15,16; Col. 1:13; Phil. 1:29. Thereby is the Christian faith wholly and altogether religiously determined. Object, ground, and origin lie wholly and solely in God. By this religious character is the fides salvifica essentially distinguished from the immediate certainty, which is sometimes stamped with the name of faith, and also from the πίστις , whereof the Greeks sometimes spake in a religious sense. The Christian faith is pure religion, religio subjectiva . That man is truly religious who thus believeth; he is the image, child, heir of God.
4. In the Christian church, however, that view soon became the prevailing one, which saw in faith an assent of the understanding to the revealed truth. Very common is the description of faith as a voluntary assent of the soul, as that which draws the soul to assent beyond logical methods. Compare Suicerus, Thes. Eccl. s. v. Denzinger, Four Books on Religious Knowledge. Kleutgen, Theology of the Former Time, 2nd ed. Augustine gives the same definition: to believe is to think with assent, On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 2. What is believing, unless to consent that what is said is true, On the Spirit and the Letter, ch. 31. Faith is the virtue by which things not seen are believed, Enchiridion, ch. 8. Tract. 40 on John, n. 9. On the Trinity, 13, 1. Scholastic theology usually began the inquiry into the nature of faith with the description in Hebrews 11:1 and the last-mentioned definition of Augustine, Lombard, Sentences, 3, 23 and others. Thomas treats of faith in his Summa Theologica, II 2 qu. 1 sq. and says that the object of faith is God, and other things only insofar as they have some order to God, qu. 1 art. 1. The ground of faith lies only therein, that something is revealed by God, ibid., and the author thereof is God alone, ibid. qu. 6 art. 1 and 2. The Vatican Council defined faith as a supernatural virtue, whereby, with the inspiring and helping grace of God, we believe the things revealed by Him to be true, not on account of the intrinsic truth of the things perceived by the natural light of reason, but on account of the authority of God Himself revealing, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, sess. 3, Dogmatic Constitution on Faith, cap. 3. At Rome, faith is a firm and certain assent to the truths of revelation on the ground of God's authority in Scripture and church, Thomas, Summa Theologica, II 2 qu. 2 art. 1. qu. 4 art. 2. Bellarmine, On Justification, I ch. 5, 6. Becanus, Scholastic Theology, tom. II pars 2 tract. 1 cap. 1 sq. Perrone, Theological Lectures. Jansen, Theological Lectures, I. Kleutgen, Theology of the Former Time. Denzinger, Four Books on Religious Knowledge.
In practice, this view of faith had very harmful outcomes. First, faith became in truth nothing other than an understanding assent to a teaching that far outstrips reason, a mysterious doctrine, whether openly to all its sundry dogmas or unspokenly to some needful ones. The sundering between this faith and the fides historica taken up by the Protestants is not feasible in this view and was therefore steadfastly cast off by Roman theology. Rome has naught other than a fides historica .
From this flowed forth further, that this faith, if it was naught other than an understanding assent, could by no means be enough for salvation. It must needs be filled out by another virtue in the will, to wit, love, and then becomes fides formata . Faith thereby loses its midmost stead in the Christian life; it is brought low to one of the seven readyings for the poured-in grace of justification; and the weight comes wholly to rest in love, that is, in good works.
And at last, it was hard to uphold that faith in the foresaid sense was a fruit of the inward grace, as Augustine understood it. The avowal that faith was a gift of God was made feeble. The help and inbreathing, whereof the Vatican speaks, is ofttimes in Roman theology bounded to the gift of a common grace or even to the gift of natural strengths. Believing was the more deserving insofar as it was more man's own free deed and more stood in the taking up of ungraspable mysteries of faith, in a yielding of the understanding.
The Reformation hath altered this Romish view of faith in all respects. It hath restored the religious nature of faith. First, it made a principal distinction between the historical faith and the saving faith. Historical faith might in some cases go before and in itself be of great worth; yet it was and remained essentially different from the saving faith. All the Reformers were of one mind in judging that the saving faith, if not only then yet surely also, consisted in knowledge. None of them let faith dissolve into an unconscious affection or mood of the heart. But the knowledge that was an element of the saving faith was yet wholly other than that of the historical faith. This latter might later serve the saving faith; yet thereby it changed its own character and began to live from a new principle. Among the Reformers, faith therefore regained its own spiritual, religious nature, not gradually but essentially distinguished from all other faith in life and science, yea even from historical faith. Naturally, such a faith could not flow forth from the same principle whence all other faith in man arises. The Reformation was unanimous in confessing that the saving faith was a gift of God. It was no fruit of man's natural powers nor even of common grace. It was a fruit of the special grace of the Holy Ghost, a working of the new, reborn man, and therefore fully sufficient unto salvation. With Rome, faith takes but a preparatory place; and rightly so, for at bottom it is nothing other than historical faith. But with the Reformation, it regained the central place which it holds in the New Testament; it needs not to be supplemented by love, it is sufficient to partake of all the goods of salvation. Whoso thus believes stands not in the forecourt but in the sanctuary of Christian truth; he is ingrafted into Christ, partaker of all his benefits, an heir of eternal blessedness. Yet it was hard, with this deep view of saving faith, to describe its nature rightly and render it in clear words. The theology of the Reformation hath ever wrestled therewith. As to the question wherein the proper act of faith lies, the answers run far apart. It hath been described as knowing, assenting, trusting, taking refuge, and so on, or by one of these or by all together. Only later, in the doctrine of faith, can all this be further examined. But this much stands fast: that faith in the theology of the Reformation was no knowing of some doctrinal truths, but a bond of the soul to the person of Christ according to the Scriptures and to the Scripture as the word of Christ. Saving faith was again through and through religious. God's grace in Christ was its object, God's testimony in his word was its ground, the Holy Ghost was its author. It was in every respect religiously determined.
5. This faith brings with it, according to the Scripture, its own assurance. It is a hypostasis and elenchos of the things hoped for and not seen, Heb. 11:1; not because it is in itself so firm and steadfast, but because it rests upon God's witness and promise, as the following of Heb. 11 clearly teaches. It makes the unseen goods of salvation so sure for us, yea much surer, than our own insight or a learned proof could ever be able to do. Therefore there is in Scripture speech of the parrhesia , Heb. 4:16; pepoithesis , Eph. 3:12; plerophoria , Heb. 6:11, 12, 10:22 of faith; and there is ascribed to it tharsos , Mt. 9:2; kauchēsis , Rom. 5:12; chara , 1 Pet. 1:8, and so forth. It stands over against doubt, care, fear, mistrust, Mt. 6:31, 8:26, 10:31, 14:31, 21:21; Mk. 4:40; Lk. 8:25; Jn. 14:1; Rom. 4:20; Jas. 1:16.
Assurance is throughout all the Scripture a mark of faith. Even in the midst of the heaviest temptations, when all is against, on hope against hope, the believer holds himself steadfast as seeing the Unseen One, Job 19:25; Ps. 23, 32, 51; Rom. 4:20, 21, 5:1, 8:38; Heb. 11, and so forth. Sooner the believer gives up all things, than that he denies his faith. Nothing is too dear to him for his faith, neither his money nor his goods, neither his honor nor his life. Faith is the victory that overcomes the world, 1 Jn. 5:4.
This certainty of faith was unknown to science. It made its entrance into the world with Christianity, Janet et Séailles, Histoire de la philosophie, Paris 1887. The Greek philosophy acknowledged two kinds of certainty: one that comes from sensory perception, and another which is obtained through thinking. Commonly, the first was placed far below the second; sensory perception gave only opinion, but thinking led to knowledge. Aristotle distinguished in the latter again between that which rests on proofs, and that which rests on evidence. There were thus in science three ways to come to certainty: perception, argumentation, and evidence. This threefold certainty gained citizenship in philosophy, with the understanding that the empiricists sought certainty chiefly in perception and the rationalists in thinking.
Beside this scientific certainty, Christianity placed the certainty of faith. Concretely and practically, this certainty was displayed to the skeptical world in the believing community, especially in its martyrs and blood-witnesses. And theoretically, it was expressed and developed in Christian theology. There is in the doctrine of the certainty of faith an important difference between Rome and the Reformation regarding the question whether the certainty of faith also includes the certainty of salvation, the absolute assurance of one's own blessedness.
From Augustine onward, this certainty of salvation has been denied and opposed by the Roman church and theology. Rome asserts that absolute assurance of salvation is the portion only of a few believers who have received it through a special revelation, but it does not at all flow from the nature of faith. Ordinary believers have regarding their salvation only a moral, conjectural certainty, but no certainty of faith. For this certainty there is no place in the Roman system, because it is only possible with the confession of God's electing love, and it would make the laity independent of church and priest. Cf. Augustine, de bono persev. c. 8, 13, 22, de civ. Dei c. 12. Epist. 107, etc. G. J. Vossius, Historia pelagiana 1655. Comment. op Sent. I dist. 17. Thomas, S. Theol. II 1 qu. 112 art. 5. Bellarmine, de Justif. I c. 10. III c. 2 sq. Conc. Trid. sess. 6 cap. 9 can. 13, 14, and later in the doctrine of faith.
However, the Roman theologians do acknowledge the certainty of faith with respect to the objective truths of revelation. More easily, said Augustine, Conf. 7, 10, would I doubt that I live than that there is no truth which is beheld by the understanding through the things that are made. Albertus Magnus distinguished between faith in philosophy and in theology. There faith is nothing other than credulity and no way to knowledge; but in theology faith is a light, making the adhesion and assent most certain.... and therefore it is a way and means to the knowledge of divine truths, in Stöckl, Philos. der M. A. II, cf. further Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 4 art. 8. Bellarmine, de Justif. III c. 2. Billuart, Summa S. Thomae VIII. Dens, Theol. II. Daelman, Theol. I. And with this the Protestant theologians generally agree. No one has expressed this certainty of faith more sharply and strongly than Calvin. With him faith is a certain, firm, full, and fixed certainty, more certainty than apprehension, a confidence and security of the heart, etc. Inst. I, 7, 5; II, 2, 8; III, 2, 14 v., 14, 8; 24, 4, etc. Both among Lutheran and Reformed theologians, faith is a firm assent, a certain knowledge, which excludes all doubt and all uncertainty, Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. S. 299 f. Hase, Hutt. Rediv. § 108. Heid. Catech. vr. 21. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. S. 384 f.
6. By the sciences, and in particular by philosophy, little heed has been given on the whole to this certainty of faith. Only Kant has taken it up and acknowledged it in a changed sense. Kant set forth chiefly three kinds of certainty. The first is the empirical, problematical certainty, which rests upon one's own or another's observation, and consists in an opinion, in a theoretical or practical belief. Next there is a logical, scientific, apodictic certainty, which again is twofold, and bears either an intuitive character, as in mathematics, or, as in philosophy, a discursive one. These are the same kinds of certainty which were already accepted in Greek philosophy. But alongside these Kant now also makes room for moral, assertoric certainty. For according to Kant, the supersensible and the supernatural are unknowable. God has purposely withheld the knowledge thereof from us, that we might not place man's destiny in knowing but in doing, in the fulfilling of his moral calling. With a view to this ethical destiny, man accepts the truth of certain propositions without which he cannot fulfill this ethical task. Thus on practical, psychological grounds he believes in the being of God, the soul, and immortality. This is moral faith. The certainty which man obtains through this faith is not theoretical in nature, but practical, moral. It makes him say, not: I am certain; nor yet: it is morally certain; but: I am morally certain. There is thus a threefold certainty: an empirical, a logical, and a moral, expressed and rendered by the words opinion, knowledge, and belief. Critique of Pure Reason , Doctrine of Method II 3, ed. Kirchmann. The philosophy after Kant has in part taken over this doctrine of certainty from Kant, but has added nothing essentially new to it. Cf. Dr. Franz Grung, The Problem of Certainty , Heidelberg 1886.
On the other hand, Kant's doctrine of the moral certainty has exercised great influence upon theology. When the authority of Scripture and church was undermined, men sought in it the foundation of religion and theology. The well-known text John 7:17, already used by Kant himself, has become the starting point of this direction.
Indeed, there lies in this moral certainty a deep truth, and we may gratefully acknowledge that Kant has given it a place in his philosophy. Of the unseen things we have a wholly other certainty than of those which we can perceive with our senses or prove with our thinking. The faith in the things which one hopes for and does not see, goes not around outside the will, outside the moral disposition and the spiritual experience.
But yet it deserves no recommendation to exchange the certainty of faith of the Holy Scripture, of the congregation, and of Christian theology for the moral certainty of Kant. First, the remark is not superfluous that certainty is always a state of the consciousness. The human spirit can, with regard to a question or a proposition, be in various states; it can stand over against it in a state of uncertainty, doubt, supposition, opinion, etc., but also in a state of absolute certainty. Certainty is the rest of the human consciousness in the found and acknowledged truth. The understanding strives namely toward knowledge, toward truth. That is the nature and the essence of the understanding; the true is its good, its riches, the fulfillment of its need. When it finds that truth, it is therefore satisfied; it rests therein, it feels itself safe and certain. Certainty is rest, peace, joy, blessedness; in veritate requies . Certainty is the normal state of the human spirit, even as health is that of the body. Doubt, uncertainty on the other hand is unrest, discontent, misery.
Strictly speaking, therefore, certainty itself is not moral; it is only called so because the grounds upon which the truth rests with it are of a moral nature. But furthermore, the grounds upon which scientific and moral truth rest are not thus to be separated as theoretical and practical from each other and set over against each other. There exists in reality no such dualism as Kant assumes in his twofold certainty. Subjectively, head and heart, and objectively, the seen and unseen things are not thus to be divided into twain. The heart also exercises influence in scientific investigation. The pistis in a broad sense takes also there a great place. Much of what passes in science for fixed and certain rests on moral or immoral grounds. And conversely, it is yet the consciousness that also in moral certainty weighs and judges the moral grounds, upon which one or another proposition is acknowledged and accepted as true. The will may move the understanding to the acceptance of one or another truth; that acceptance itself is yet an act of the understanding; and the understanding can do this only because it itself in greater or lesser measure acknowledges and perceives the truth. The certainty of faith comes not to pass through theoretical proofs but neither through a decision of the will.
Finally, there have already been brought forward earlier against the postulate theory of Kant various objections. They can yet be increased with these questions: does it agree with the nature of true morality, which yet also consists in humility, lowliness, etc., to postulate on the ground of our moral nature and destiny the existence of God and of immortality? Does the moral certainty also then yet retain its power when the moral man falls into sins, is in temptation and strife, and is tossed to and fro by doubt? Are moral grounds sufficient to build thereon, over against the opposition of science, the faith in God's existence, the consciousness of forgiveness, the hope of salvation?
But even if the moral certainty were also sufficient for the philosopher, it is unusable for the Christian. For even if Kant's religion of reason could rest upon it as upon a firm foundation; it is not able to bear the truth of the Christian religion.
For all these reasons, Kant's moral certainty cannot replace the Christian certainty of faith. This is further proven by the distinction that Kant makes between deeming, believing, and knowing. Deeming, according to him, is holding something as true on insufficient grounds, believing on subjectively sufficient grounds, and knowing on objectively sufficient grounds. Now this distinction holds rightly with regard to believing in everyday life and concerning such things as can be known. Then indeed believing is a lesser and weaker degree of knowing. But in religion, faith is certainty itself. The distinction was more rightly defined already by Augustine. He says: tria sunt item velut finitima sibimet in animis hominum distinctione dignissima: intelligere, credere, opinari. Quae si per se ipsa considerentur, primum semper sine vitio est, secundum aliquando cum vitio, tertium nunquam sine vitio , de util. cred. c. 11. Inter credere autem atque opinari hoc distat, quod aliquando ille, qui credit, sentit se ignorare quod credit, quamvis de re, quam se ignorare novit, omnino non dubitet, sic enim firme credit; qui autem opinatur, putat se scire, quod nescit , de mendac. c. 3. Thomas defines the distinction thus: the nature of opinion is that one accepts something with fear of the opposite; whence it has no firm adherence. But the nature of knowledge is that it has firm adherence with intellectual vision; for it has certainty proceeding from the understanding of principles. Faith, however, holds a middle way; it exceeds opinion in that it has firm adherence; but it falls short of knowledge in that it has no vision, S. Theol. II 1 qu. 67 art. 3. In like sense, Zanchius gave this definition: opinion is a knowledge neither certain nor evident, faith is a certain knowledge but not evident, knowledge is a knowledge equally certain and evident, Op. II 196. Believing and knowing are thus not distinguished in certainty. Faith brings with it a certainty as strong as that of knowledge. Yea, the certainty of faith is of the two the more intensively strong; it is well-nigh unshakable and ineradicable. For faith, a man stakes his life and all. Galileo swore thrice to abjure his belief in the Copernican system. Kepler at Graz busied himself with astrology against his conviction to provide for his livelihood; the needy mother (astronomy) had to live off the foolish daughter (astrology). Who gives his life for a scientific thesis, for example, that the earth revolves around the sun? But religion breeds martyrs. The certainty of faith far exceeds the scientific certainty in intensive strength. Bonaventure, however, rightly distinguishes in certainty between the certitudo adhaesionis and the certitudo speculationis , Sent. III dist. 23 art. 1 qu. 4. The first is greater in the certainty of faith than in scientific certainty, for oftentimes no arguments, no flatteries, no tortures can bring a man to waver in his faith. He clings with his whole soul to the object of faith. But the certitudo speculationis need not always, but can sometimes be stronger in knowledge than in faith. It is the same thought that Augustine expressed: knowing is always without fault, but believing happens sometimes with fault. Believing itself is no proof of the truth of what is believed. There is a great difference between subjective assurance and objective truth. Everything in faith depends on the grounds upon which it rests.
1. As soon as Christian theology earnestly began to think upon the last and deepest ground of faith, it came to the knowledge that no single understanding or historical proof, brought forward for the truth of revelation, could in the end hold for it. The apologists of the second hundred-year span gave great worth to those proofs, and laid stress upon them against heathen naturalism, that faith was a reasonable, free deed of mankind, Just. M. Dial. c. 88. 102. 131. Theophilus, ad Autol. II 27. Irenaeus, adv. haer. IV 37, 5, and so forth. But yet we find with them already the sense that all those proofs are powerless to truly move anyone to faith. For that, something else and more is needful, namely, godly grace, Just. M. Dial. c. 119. Apol. 1, 10. 2, 10. Iren. adv. haer. IV 39, 2. Orig. de princ. I 10, 14, 19. Irenaeus likens it to the dew and the rain, which make the field fruitful, ib. III 17, 2, 3. But Augustine was the first who clearly saw and confessed the needfulness of the inward grace. He elsewhere gives great worth to the church as a motive of faith; but his teaching of the inward grace shows that this was not for him the last and deepest cause of his faith. That was God alone. God works our faith in a wondrous way, working in our hearts, that we may believe, de praed. sanct. 2, 6. For faith is always willing, no one believes unless willing. And God therefore bends the will through his grace and makes us believe with the understanding, Conf. 13, 1. de div. quaest. 1 qu. 2 n. 21, de praed. sanct. 19, de dono persev. 16, and so forth. Also the later god-learned men have given great strength to the fore-runners of faith and the motives of believability; and among these the church took ever a more foremost place. But all grant that those motives make the revelation not evidently true but only evidently believable. They shut out reasonable doubt, and show that it is not unreasonable to believe and indeed unreasonable to take the other side, Thomas S. Theol. II 2 qu. 1 art. 5 ad. 2. S. c. Gent. I c. 9. But they are not enough. Yea, Thomas says outspokenly when he deals with the wise-learned proofs for the three-oneness: whoever strives to prove the three-oneness of persons by natural reason, takes away from faith, S. Theol. I qu. 32 art. 1. Against foes, proofs avail little, because the very shortfall of reasons would strengthen them more in their error, while they would deem us to assent to the truth of faith because of such weak reasons, S. c. Gent. I c. 9. Revelation may be made ever so believable by proofs, it is and stays yet a faith-truth, Bellarm. de Conc. et Eccl. IV 3. It must stay so at Rome also for this reason, lest otherwise the willingness and thereby the worthiness of faith should be lost, Thomas S. Theol. II 2. qu. 2 art. 9 and 10. Faith thus takes the truth not on ground of own insight, but of godly authority. For faith assents to nothing, unless because it is revealed by God, Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 1 art. 1. S. c. Gent. I c. 9. Becanus, II 2. p. 3-17. Billuart, II 2. Tom. 1 de fide p. 1 sq. Dens, II 280 sq. Jansen I 701-711. And to acknowledge that authority of God, there must go before in mankind a change of the will. Faith is indeed a deed of the understanding, Thomas S. Theol. II 2. qu. 4 art. 2, but it takes for granted a bending of the will by grace. The understanding must be set to faith by the will, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 2 art. 1 ad. 3. The assent of faith is thus only from God, inwardly moving through grace, ib. I qu. 62 art. 2 ad 3. II 1 qu. 109 art. 6. qu. 112 art. 2. II 2 qu. 6 art. 1. Gregory XVI condemned in the brief of 26 September 1835 the feeling of Hermes, that the motives of believability were the own ground of faith in revelation. And the Vatican Council set fast in sess. 3, Const. dogm. de fide cap. 3, that the motives could make the godly revelation believable, yet no one can assent to the gospel preaching, as is needful to gain salvation, without the lighting and inbreathing of the Holy Ghost.
2. In truth, Rome thereby takes the same inward standpoint as the churches of the Reformation. The motives, however strong, cannot in deed move one to faith. It is God's Spirit alone who can inwardly convince someone firmly and surely of the truth of the godly revelation. The deepest ground for faith is also with Rome not the Scripture or the church, but the inner light. Sundry theologians have acknowledged this. For clearness' sake, the act of faith may for a moment be broken down into a syllogism. The major premise then reads: God is truthful; if He reveals Himself, His revelation must be taken in faith; the minor says: these facts, for example, the church, the Scripture are revelations of God; and then follows the conclusion: therefore these must also be believed. There is no difference over the major. This stands fast by strength of the idea of God and is acknowledged by all. No one denies that, if God reveals Himself, He also as the truthful one deserves faith. All the more does everything hang on the minor. The difference runs just hereover, whether and where God has revealed Himself. The believing Christian says: in the Scripture or also in the church. But how and why are these acknowledged as revelation of God? If on ground of proofs, of the motives of credibility; then that ground is human, fallible, and the faith not purely godly and sure. The revelation of God can in a godly sense only be believed on ground of God's authority. But that authority of God lets itself be heard only, either without me, in the Scripture or the church, to whose last ground of faith I am just seeking; or within me, in the grace that moves me to faith, in the inner light, the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Whoever will uphold the authority of God as the last ground of faith and thus faith in its godly nature must take one of these two standpoints. Now Canus said without holding back, that the last ground lay in the grace, which inwardly moved him to faith. I believe, said he, that God is three-in-one, because God has revealed it; to this however: God has revealed, I straightway believe, moved by God through a special stirring, Loc. Theol. l. 2 c. 8 ad 4 . With Canus, then, the last ground for his faith lay outwardly in the witness of God; but that he acknowledged this witness as godly was owing to the grace, which moved his will and understanding to believing. This feeling of Canus was indeed taken over by some other Roman theologians, such as Arragon, Gonet, and others; Prof. Hayd even spoke of an unmiddled witness of God in us, that assures us of the godliness of Jesus' person and teaching. But yet by many this misgiving was brought against it, that Canus in truth gives no answer to the asking, on what ground he takes the witness of God in the Scripture and the church as godly. He says only, that God so inwardly through His grace gives him to believe, but lays no further reckoning thereof. Besides, this feeling of Canus also did not commend itself, because, as Suarez already marked, it had so much likeness with and so lightly could lead to the teaching of Calvin over the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Therefore the Roman theologians were set on seeking the last ground of faith elsewhere than in the inner light. Suarez was of judgment, that not only the object, but also the ground of faith itself is again a thing of faith. We believe not only that the Scripture is true, because God has revealed Himself therein; but also the deed, that God has revealed Himself therein, we believe, because God Himself witnesses it in the Scripture. The revelation is at the same time the quo and the quod creditur . For one and the same act believes God and to God. Even as the eye takes in the colors and therewith the light, whereby those colors are seen; even as the understanding knows the drawn truths and therewith the beginnings, whereby they are knowable; so also the faith knows both the revealed truths, as the witness, whereon they rest, as godly. Very many theologians, also in the newer time, have betokened their in-stemming with this feeling of Suarez, but it gladdened not all. The ring-reasoning was yet clear: the Scripture is believed, because it is revealed, and that it is revealed, is again believed, because the Scripture witnesses it. It leads also to a going forth in endlessness: I believe a revelation, because another revelation witnesses it and so on. Well answers Suarez on this misgiving, that the revelation must be believed for itself; that God, revealing Himself, therein at the same time reveals, that He it is, who reveals Himself. But always yet stays the asking open, why we believe the witness, whereby God makes known, that He it is, who has revealed Himself. Lugo taught therefore, that the taking of the deed, that God has revealed Himself in the Scripture, was indeed above-nature, but that it yet could not in own sense be named faith. For believing is always taking something for true on ground of a witness. If now the taking of the deed, that God has revealed Himself, were a believing in own sense, then this under-laid again a godly witness, and so in endlessness. Lugo took therefore on, that the acknowledging of the deed of revelation rested not on the witness of God, but thereon, that the believer the revelation itself with her wonders, foretellings and so on, unmiddled and rightforth as revelation in-saw, even as the understanding the truth of the beginnings unmiddled acknowledges. The revelation makes itself known through her in-hold as godly, even as after the likeness of Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 43 art. 1 a sender makes himself true through the in-hold of his bidding, for by-example, through hidden things, that only his bidder can know. But this setting-forth strikes again on the hindrance, that this acknowledging of the revelation either in deed is unmiddled, in which happening it becomes a new revelation in the under-laying, a beholding of the godly, which we here on earth, as walking in faith, not share in; or that it in deed is with-middled, but then also flows forth out of the showings and measures of the revelation, and so again comes to rest on the proofs for the revelation, on the motives of credibility. Also this loosening is therefore not gladdening. Therefore have again others said: the witness of God is the last ground of faith. On the asking: why believe you? answers the Christian: because God has spoken. Deus dixit . Another, deeper ground can he in this not give. As further is asked him: but why believe you, that God has spoken, for by-example in the Scripture? then can he only yet give to answer, that God inwardly so works him, that he that Scripture as God's word acknowledges. But therewith has he also all said. The witness of God is the ground, but the grace, the will is the sake of faith. The proofs may be motives of credibility, the will is at last the motive of believing. Above finding-fault is also this standpoint not uplifted. For there can be asked and there is also in deed asked, what ground the understanding has, to take the Scripture as word of God. The answer, that the will or the grace moves the understanding thereto, is not enough. The will can yet not move the understanding, to take something for true without ground, whereof it self the belief-worthy not in-sees. The understanding must forsooth self acknowledge, that something godly is and therefore faith earns. Otherwise is the faith un-reasonly and makes the believer with a sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas from the hardship himself off. Also the Roman god-learned have therefore on the asking after the deepest ground of faith no all gladdening answer known to give. Very many withhold themselves simply from a sundering and let the choice between the sundry above-named feelings free. Enough, to make seen, that also Rome with his unfailing church and his unfailing pope nothing before has over the churches of the Reformation. The deepest ground of faith lies also with Rome, even good as with the Protestantism, in the under-laying. Cf. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der rel. Erk. II. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit , 2e Aufl. IV. Von Schäzler, Neue Untersuchungen über das Dogma von der Gnade und das Wesen des Glaubens , Mainz 1867. Al. Schmid, Untersuchungen über den letzten Gewissheitsgrund des Offenbarungsglaubens , München, 1879. Jansen, Praelect. Theol. I.
3. The Reformation wittingly and freely took its standpoint in the religious subject, in the faith of the Christian, in the witness of the Holy Ghost. It is true that in Luther, Zwingli, and Melanchthon there are only a few sayings about the testimony of the Holy Spirit, Köstlin, Luthers Theol. Scholten, L. H. K. But Calvin hath broadly unfolded this teaching and brought it into bond not only with the content but also with the form and authority of Scripture. That Scripture is God's word, saith Calvin, standeth not firm by the church, but stood firm before her decree, for the church is grounded on the foundation of apostles and prophets. Scripture bringeth its own authority with it, it resteth in itself, it is autopistos. Even as light is sundered from darkness, white from black hue, sweet from bitter, so is Scripture known by its own truth. But certainty with us that Scripture is God's word cometh only by the witness of the Holy Ghost. Proofs and reasonings are of much worth, but this witness far outstrippeth them all in worth, it is omni ratione praestantius. As God alone can witness of himself in his word, so his word findeth not faith in men's hearts until it be sealed by the inward witness of the Spirit. The same Spirit who spake by the mouth of the prophets must work in our hearts and persuade us that they have faithfully handed down what was bidden them from God. The Holy Ghost is therefore the seal and strengthening of the faith of the godly. If we have that witness in us, we rest not in any human judgment, but set it down without doubt, as if we beheld God himself therein, that Scripture hath come forth from God's mouth by the service of men. We yield ourselves to it ut rei extra aestimandi aleam positae. But this must not be so understood as if we blindly yielded to a thing unknown to us. Nay, we are aware that in that Scripture we hold the unvanquishable truth and feel non dubiam vim numinis illic, vigere ac spirare, whereby we, willing and knowing, yet lively and mightily are driven to obedience, Inst. I c. 7. Comm. in 2 Tim. 3:16. Calvin knew in this teaching of the testimony of the Holy Spirit to describe no private revelation, but the experience of all believers, Inst. I, 7, 5. This witness of the Holy Ghost was with him not sundered from, but stood in the closest bond with all the working of the Holy Ghost in believers' hearts; by it alone the whole church ariseth and abideth; all the applying of salvation is a work of the Holy Ghost; and the witness concerning Scripture is but one of the many workings of the Holy Ghost in the gathering of believers. The testimony of the Holy Spirit giveth also no new revelations, but maketh the believer steadfast touching God's truth, which is fully contained in Scripture; it maketh faith a sure knowledge and shutteth out all doubt. And it findeth at last its likeness in the witness that our conscience giveth to God's law, and in the certainty we have touching God's being. Cf. Klaiber, Die Lehre der altprot. Dogm. von dem test. Sp. S., Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. Aug. Benezeh, Théorie de Calvin sur l’Ecriture Sainte. Jacq. Pannier, Le témoignage du Saint-Esprit. This teaching of the testimony of the Holy Spirit was taken up in the French, Netherlandish, and Westminster confessions and unfolded in Calvin's spirit by Ursinus, Tract. Theol. Zanchius, Op. Polanus, Synt. Theol. I cap. 16. Trigland, Antapologia. Maccovius, Loci Comm. Alsted, Theol. schol. didact. Maresius, Syst. Theol. I § 33 e. a. Also outside the Reformed theology it found entry among the Lutherans, not yet with Chemnitz, Heerbrand, etc., but indeed with Hutter, Hunnius, Gerhard, Loc. Theol. loc. 1 cap. 3 § 39. Quenstedt, Hollaz, cf. Hase, Hutterus Rediv. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. Klaiber, Jahrb. f. d. Theol. Dorner, Gesch. der Prot. Theol.
But this doctrine found opposition from the side of Socinianism, Fock, der Socinianismus; from Remonstrantism, Episcopius, Instit. Theol. Lib. 4 Sect. 1 cap. 5 § 2. Limborch, Theol. Christ. I c. 4 § 17, and from Romanism, Bellarmine, de verbo Dei IV 4; cf. Pannier, Le témoignage du S. Esprit. Little by little, the internal testimony began also in Reformed theology to lose its place of honor. In Turretin, Theol. El. II qu. 6 § 11 sq. and Decas disput. miscell. p. 30-70, Amyraut, Syntagma thesium theol. in acad. Salmur. 1665 p. 117-143, Maresius, Juge des controverses, chap. 16, 17 and others, it is already weakened, and made one with such enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, whereby the understanding is made able to mark the notes and criteria of the godliness of Holy Scripture. Faith cleaves not straightway and forthwith any more to the Scripture, but flows from the insight into the marks of truth and godliness. Between the Scripture and faith are thrust in the tokens of the truth of Scripture. At first yet in this sense, that the marking and discerning of those criteria is ascribed to an enlightening of the understanding by the Holy Ghost. But rationalism soon deemed even this needless, gave over the searching of the truth of revelation to reason, and grounded the authority of Scripture on historical proofs. Even orthodox theologians scarcely dared any more to speak of the internal testimony, Brakel, Red. godsd. 2:7. Marck, Merch der Godg. 2:6. When the witness of the Holy Ghost is yet brought forward to strengthen the authority of Scripture, it comes wholly at the end, and is changed into a proof from experience, Reinhard, Dogm. 5th ed. S. 69. Bretschneider, Dogm. 1838 I 283 and the literature there cited. Hase, Hutterus Rediv. § 37, note 4. Vinke, Theol. Christ. dogm. Comp. p. 21, 22 etc. Michaelis, Dogm. 2nd ed. Gött. 1784 S. 92, declared that he had never heard such a witness of the Holy Ghost in his heart and found it not in Scripture either. And Strauss, Gl. I 136, claimed that the testimony of the Holy Spirit led to fanaticism or to rationalism and was the Achilles' heel of the Protestant system.
Various causes have, however, wrought together to restore this doctrine of the internal testimony somewhat to its former honour. The criticism of rationalism by Kant; the proof of the Spirit and of power, whereon Lessing called; the romanticism of Jacobi and Schleiermacher, and the barrenness of apologetics have begotten the conviction that the vindication of the Christian religion must go forth from the faith of the congregation. Religious truth must be proven in another wise than a theorem from mathematics. To the revelation which is the outward principle of religion, a fitting organ in man himself must correspond. Indeed, all this differs very much from the testimony of the Holy Spirit, as it was unfolded by Calvin. Oftentimes this testimony is bereft by the newer theologians of its whole supernatural character. Commonly it is linked not with the form, but only with the content, and sometimes only with the religious-ethical content of the Scripture. But even as the Roman, so must also the Protestant theologians acknowledge that the last and deepest ground of faith cannot lie without us in proofs and reasonings, in church and tradition, but can only be found in man himself, in the religious subject. And that conviction redounds to the good of the doctrine of the testimony of the Holy Spirit. A single one may yet plead for the historical proofs and fight against the testimony of the Holy Spirit, such as König, Der Glaubensakt des Christen . Id. Die letzte Instanz des bibl. Glaubens . Most theologians take it up again in dogmatics, and grant it a greater or smaller place, Oosterzee, Jaarb. v. wet. Theol . Dogm . Scholten L. H. K . Twesten. Klaiber, Jahrb. f. d. Theol . Lange. Kahnis, Luth. Dogm . Philippi, Kirchl. Dogm . Cremer in Herzog . Frank, Syst. der chr. Gewissheit . Id. Dogm. Studiën . Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk . Dorner, Gesammelte Schriften . Lipsius, Jahrb. f. prot. Theol . Hodge, Syst. Theol . Pannier, Le témoignage du S. Esprit . Kuyper, Encycl . John de Witt, The testimony of the Holy Spirit to the Bible , Presb. and Ref. Rev .
4. Both the Roman and the Protestant theology, in seeking after the deepest ground of faith, have come out at the religious subject and must take their stand in the faith of the church. Every other way taken to prove religious truth has been shown to be a dead end. Seemingly this is a disappointment; and so it is felt by each one who mistakes the true being of revelation and godliness and changes them into a teaching that can be proved by understanding. But in truth this outcome is a gain for theology. For it shows that theology has come to the insight of the own-kind-ness of godliness and that it is in the same plight as all other fields of knowledge. The starting point in the subject is by no means only theology's own. All that is outward is only to be neared from the inward self; the Thing in itself is unknowable and has no being for us. The world of sounds has true being only for the hearer, the world of thoughts only for the thinking mind. It is vain toil to seek to prove to the blind the outward being of colors. All life and knowing rests on a together-sounding of inward and outward.
And man is therefore so rich because he is bound to the outward world by the most sundry and manifold ties. He is kin to the whole world; bodily, growth-like, feeling-wise, understanding-wise, right-wise, godly-wise he stands in harmony with that world; he is a little world. Now Scripture goes before us to take up all these ties of man to the world in a godly way and to make them known as God-believing. Man has not set himself in this standing to the great world. He is from home laid out for that world, and this in turn for him. Because he is God's likeness, he is also lord of the earth. And not only is it God who once laid these bonds between man and world; He it is also who upholds them and makes them work from eye-blink to eye-blink. It is the same Word through whom all things in and outside man are made. He is before all things and these still stand together through Him, John 1:3; Col. 1:15.
Yet nearer Scripture makes known to us the Breath of God as the beginning and writer of all life in man and world, Gen. 1:2; Ps. 33:6, 104:30, 139:7; Job 26:13, 33:4, namely also of the understanding, right-wise, and godly life, Job 32:8; Isa. 11:2. Inborn is the working of that Breath sundry, according to the standings in which man is to the world. Bodily it still stands only in the drive that makes man and beast seek their food from God, Ps. 104:20-30. It is then still like the inborn drive that unknowingly leads the deed. But higher shape takes this working of God's Breath in the understanding, right-wise, and godly life of man. It then becomes reason, inwit, sense of godliness, which are no resting strengths but opennesses that through in-working of kin showings from the outer world pass over to deed. And this deed can now bear the name of witness, given by the manly mind to the answering showings outside him.
Our mind does nothing other than always give witness to the truth that comes to us from without. It brings forth that truth not by thinking and reasoning out of itself; it yields and shapes it not, it yields it again and thinks it only after. The truth stands before and free of the manly mind; it rests in itself, in the Word wherein all has its stand. From man's side is only needful that he see the truth and take it up in himself; that he give it his witness and thinking and knowing seal it. So Jesus witnessed what He had seen and heard, John 3:32; He gave witness to the truth, John 18:37; and so the apostles were witnesses of the word of life that they had beheld and handled in Christ, John 15:27; 1 John 1:3. Such a witness to give to the truth is for the manly mind rest, joy, bliss. The gap between us and the truth is then fallen away; it has found us, we have found it. There is straight touching. It makes us through itself witnesses to it. All truth makes of him who knows it a witness, a herald, a foresayer. Going into our mind, it brings its own witness with it; it brings it itself forth in us.
Godly taken, it is the Word itself that through our mind gives witness to the Word in the world. It is one same Breath that spreads out the truth outwardly for us and inwardly in our mind lifts it to sureness. It is His witness that in our knowing is given to the thoughts which God has body-forth in the shaped things. Above all in godliness is this witness of the Holy Breath to the truth clear. God leaves Himself not unwitnessed. He shows forth His might and godhead in the shaped things, and Himself gives witness thereto in our understanding through His Breath. All knowing of the truth is in being a witness that the mind of man lays forth about it, and in the deepest ground a witness of the Breath of God to the Word through which all things are made.
5. This testimony of man's spirit to the truth is the presupposition and foundation, and at the same time also the likeness of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. Calvin and others already pointed out this agreement, Instit. II 8, 1. Maresius, Syst. theol. I § 33. Alsted, Theol. schol. did. But likeness is not sameness. The Christian religion has as its outward principle not the general revelation of God in nature, but a special revelation of God in Christ. With this the inward principle must agree. The mind of the natural man is not enough to discern the things of the Spirit of God. God can only be known by God. He that is of God hears the words of God, John 8:47, 3:21, 7:17, 10:3 ff., 18:37. No one can speak of God except he who speaks from and by Him. Therefore, only that same Spirit, who spoke through prophets and apostles, can in our hearts bear witness to the truth and thereby lift it above all doubt and bring it to full certainty.
Such a testimony of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers is very clearly taught in Scripture. In the objective revelation, that is, in the person of Christ and in Scripture as His word, all is contained that man needs for the knowledge and service of God. God's revelation is completed in Christ and fully and sufficiently described in Scripture. But this revelation in Christ and in His word is a means, not an end. The end is the creation of a new mankind, which fully unfolds the image of God. Therefore, the whole revelation must be transferred from Christ into the church, from Scripture into the consciousness; God seeks a dwelling in man. This great, divine work of applying salvation, of leading into all truth, is entrusted to the Holy Spirit. Already in the days of the Old Covenant, He was the author of all religious-ethical knowledge and life, Ps. 51:13, 143:10; Isa. 63:10. But Israel was in a state of childhood and placed under the guardianship of the law, Gal. 4:1 ff. The Holy Spirit was not yet, because Christ was not yet glorified, John 7:39. Therefore, the prophets looked with longing to the days of the New Covenant, in which all would be taught by the Lord and all led by the Holy Spirit, Jer. 31:34; Ezek. 36:25 ff.; Joel 2:28 ff.
According to the promise, this Spirit is poured out on Pentecost. All His working is called by Jesus a witnessing, a glorifying of Himself, John 15:26, 16:14. The Holy Spirit is the true and almighty Witness for Christ. The whole world stands in enmity against Christ; no one takes His part. But the Holy Spirit comes before that world as the Paraclete, as the defender of Christ. He does this first of all in Scripture; it is the testimony, the plea of the Holy Spirit for Christ, which He utters and upholds through all ages. This testimonium Spiritus Sancti in Holy Scripture goes before and lies at the foundation of the testimony that the Holy Spirit gives in the hearts of believers. Just as the thoughts of God are objectively embodied in the world and from there derived by the human spirit, so also the word of revelation is first fully described in Holy Scripture, to be thereafter sealed in our hearts by the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
Here too, the working of man's spirit consists in nothing other than bearing witness to the truth, and thinking after what God has forethought. The testimonium Spiritus Sancti in believers is already seen here to be no new revelation or imparting of unknown truths. It is essentially different from prophecy and inspiration; it only makes the truth, which exists outside and independent of us, understood as truth and thereby assures and seals it in human consciousness. The relation of the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers to the truth of revelation in Holy Scripture is none other than that of the human spirit to the object of its knowledge. The subject does not create the truth; it only acknowledges and affirms it.
But the analogy extends itself still further. The objects of human knowledge are all autopista , they rest in themselves, their existence can be acknowledged but not proven. Proofs in the strict sense are only possible with regard to derived propositions, and consist therein, that these are reduced to general propositions. Proving is: leading back the unknown to the known, the particular to the general, the uncertain to the established. Perhaps it is even more accurate to say, that proving consists in reducing uncertain and disputed propositions to such as are generally accepted as established. For the prima principia , upon which all proofs ultimately rest, are themselves not susceptible to proof; they stand firm only through and for faith. Proofs are therefore only effective for him who agrees with us in these principles. Contra principia negantem non est disputandum . Thus in morals, stealing can be proven as unlawful to him who acknowledges the authority of the moral law, but every proof is powerless against him who denies this authority. The moral law itself is autopistos , it rests in itself, it is like the sun which is only seen by its own rays; it depends on no proof and reasoning; it is mighty because it exists, posits and maintains itself; its power consists in its authority, in the divine majesty wherewith it makes its "thou shalt" heard in our conscience. The moral law would weaken itself if it entered into reasoning with us and submitted to our judgment. It acts categorically, and will know of no exceptions, no excuses. To the question: why dost thou submit thyself to the moral law? there is but one answer possible: because it reveals to me God's will. But if it is then further asked: why believest thou that this moral law is God's will? no sufficient answer can be given. He who yet wishes to answer takes a byway and appeals to various notes and criteria wherein the divinity of the moral law makes itself known to him. But these are not conclusive proofs. And so it is with all principles. They rest in themselves and stand firm only for faith.
On the same wise it is in theology. Proofs are here only possible with regard to the derived propositions. The deity of Christ can be proven to him who acknowledges the authority of Scripture. But the authority of Scripture rests in itself and is not susceptible to proof. The Holy Scripture is autopistos and therefore the ultimate ground of faith. A deeper ground cannot be adduced. To the question: why believest thou the Scripture? the only answer is, because it is God's word. But if it is then further asked: why believest thou that the Holy Scripture is God's word? the Christian must remain without answer. Indeed, he will then appeal to the notes and criteria of Scripture, to the majesty of its style, the sublimity of its content, the depth of its thoughts, the blessedness of its fruits, and so forth; but these are not the grounds of his faith, they are only properties and marks which are later discovered in Scripture by believing thought, just as the proofs for God's existence do not precede faith and support it, but flow from it and are thought out by it. All proofs for faith in Scripture, drawn from its notes and criteria, show most clearly that no deeper ground can be given. The Deus dixit is the primum principium , to which all dogmas, even that concerning Scripture, can be reduced. The bond of the soul to Scripture as the word of God lies behind consciousness and beneath the proofs; it is mystical in nature, just as the faith in the principles in the various sciences.
6. Against this view, however, from sundry sides the misgiving is raised, that thus believing becomes wholly willful. Instead of giving grounds why the Scripture is believed as God's word, one answers that God grants it thus to be believed. Thereby the Mohammedan can prove his faith in the Koran, and every superstitious soul his superstition. The sic volo, sic jubeo takes the place of reason and proof. Cf. for example Scholten against Saussaye, Leer der Herv. Kerk , 3rd edition, preface.
Against this, however, let it be noted in the first place, that the believer indeed can give no deeper ground for the revelation than its godly authority, which he acknowledges through faith. But therefore he still has somewhat to bring forward against the foe of that revelation. It is so, he has no conclusive proofs, he cannot move the adversary to faith, but he has at least as much to say in defense as the other has in attack. Unbelief also rests at last not on proofs and reasonings but roots in the heart. Believers and unbelievers stand in this respect wholly alike; both their convictions hang together with their whole personhood and are only a posteriori upheld by proof and reasoning.
And when now both wage strife against each other with these a posteriori proofs and reasonings, the believers are in no less favorable plight than those who believe not. God is knowable enough for those who seek Him, and also hidden enough for those who flee Him. Il y a assez de lumière pour ceux, qui ne désirent que de voir, et assez d’obscurité pour ceux, qui ont une disposition contraire. Il y a assez de clarté pour éclairer les élus, et assez d’obscurité pour les humilier. Il y a assez d’obscurité pour aveugler les réprouvés, et assez de clarté, pour les condamner et les rendre inexcusables , Pascal, Oeuvres , Paris, Hachette 1869 I 345.
It stands with religion, theism, revelation, and Scripture not yet so hopeless as knowledge has for years wished to make us believe. Theodor von Lerber wrote lately of knowledge not wholly wrongly: ich habe als Dilettant zu oft neben ihr gesessen und ihr in die Karten und auf die Finger geschaut, um noch übermässigen Respekt vor der Dame zu haben. Sie wird mir auf meinen Grabstein schreiben müssen: er dachte klein von mir und starb , in A. Zahn, Socialdemokratie und Theologie , Gütersloh 1895 p. 34.
Historical and rational proofs will turn no one, but they are yet as mighty for the upholding of faith as the arguments of the foe for the right-making of their unbelief. Furthermore, the witness that believers give to the Christian revelation, to the Scripture, is indeed not broadly mankindish, but yet broadly Christian. The whole Christendom is onefold in this confession. The testimonium Spiritus Sancti is not the witness of a private spirit, but of the one and selfsame Ghost who dwells in all believers. Calvin declared, when speaking of this witness, that he described nothing but what was the undergoing of all believers, Inst. I 7, 5.
It is a mighty witness that is given by the church of all ages to the Scripture as God's word. Over no dogma rules there such great oneness. It is a deed that may not be set on one line with hallucination or willfulness, and that in any case needs clearing.
Next, the believer can surely show no deeper ground for his faith than the godly authority of Holy Scripture. But he can well give further clearing about the way in which he has come to this faith. It is so, in the rule one is born and reared in that faith; later he finds out himself that he lies bound to the Scripture with his whole soul, and then seeks to think thereon and give reckoning of this mystical bond.
But more times it befalls that someone on later lifetime comes to turning and to faith in the Scripture. And also they who from youth on have lived out of that faith, are oft shaken and slung to and fro by the judging; only little by little come they to the steadfast surety of faith. What now is the undergoing whereby faith in the revelation is first wakened or later mended and strengthened?
It is naturally sundry in the sundry believers; but it is yet always of religious-ethish, of ghostly kind. What truly makes us believe is not the insight of our understanding nor a behest of our will; but it is a might that stands above us, that bends our will, that enlightens our understanding, that without force and yet mightily leads our thoughts and reckonings captive to the hearkening of Christ.
That confessed Augustine, as he ascribed faith to the inner grace. That acknowledged Thomas, as he said that the assent of faith was from God, inwardly moving through grace. That spoke the Vatican council, as it witnessed that faith comes not to stand without the enlightening and inbreathing of the Holy Ghost. And that was the mind of the whole Reformation: faith is a gift of God, a working of the Holy Ghost.
Believing is a deed of the understanding, is an unmiddled, not through proofs middled, linking of the awareness to the revelation. But that faith underlays a change in the bond of the whole man to God, it underlays the rebirth, the turning of the will. Nemo credit nisi volens . Knowing forces; no one can deny a mathematical setting. But believing is free, it is the deed of the highest freedom, because the deed of the deepest self-denying.
As God binds bliss not to knowing but to believing, then that is a proof that He forces not and will not force. The letter to Diognetus, cap. 7 says so fair: βια γαρ οὐ προσεστι τῳ θεῳ .
Just because faith is no fruit of knowledge-wise proofs, it comes not to stand outside the heart and the will of man. That is the truth that lies in the teaching of Kant and the Neo-Kantians about the moral faith. Faith is no ending of a syllogism. Yet on the other side it is also no will-behest, no postulate. Postulating does the lost son not, as he turns back to the father-house. Faith is also no imperium voluntatis . One cannot believe as one wills. The will cannot behest the awareness to take something as truth, if it itself sees naught of the truth thereof.
Believing is no willfulness, but it is also not blind. It underlays a will-change, operari sequitur esse ; but it is a free, self-born acknowledging of the understanding of God's word. Like the eye, seeing the sun, is straightway swayed of its realness, so beholds the reborn the truth of God's revelation.
For the reborn, faith in the revelation is as natural as for the moral man the acknowledging of the moral law. It is inborn in the kind of the ghostly life; it roots in the hidden depths of the reborn heart. The believer can as little give up this faith as himself. Yea, himself he can deny, his life he can offer up, but his faith he cannot let go.
Faith in the revelation is with the Christian one with faith in himself, Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd. I 222. Kuyper, Encycl. II 77. The Christian would have to give up faith in himself, in his childship, in the forgiveness of his sins, in the truthfulness and troth of God, to see in the revelation not God's word. Faith in the revelation is one with the best that is in him; in his best eyeblinks he stands strongest in that faith.
What comes up against it, he can do no other and may do no other. Lastly, much comes up against this his faith. Not only from without, but much more yet from within. Howsoever the will is bent and the understanding is enlightened, there stays in the believer yet much that lifts itself against this hearkening of faith. Faith is, because it is a proof of things not seen, an ongoing strife.
Sins of the heart and strayings of the head set themselves against faith; and they oft have the sheen for them. There stays a twofoldness in the believer, so long as he is on earth; a twofoldness not of head and heart, but of flesh and spirit, of the old and the new man. Faith keeps more or less an over-natural mark, insofar as it goes above the kind of the soully man.
It is not yet fully natural; as soon as it becomes that, it itself leaves off and goes over into beholding. Faith is just faith, because it sees something that the soully man takes not wahr. But this twofoldness, how painful also, serves yet on the other side to strengthen faith. For if faith comes not up out of the natural havings of man, and is neither an ending of a syllogism nor a behest of the will; then its being there is also a proof for its truth.
Our own ghost drives us not of kind to name God our Father and reckon ourselves under his children. There is an inborn and also easily knowable sundering between the witness of the Holy Ghost, as He says to our soul: I am thy heal, and the luring of Satan as he speaks: Peace, peace and no danger. Potestne quis a diabolo impelli, ut Deum in fide Abba, Patrem vocet? Heidegger, Corpus Theol. loc. 24 § 78.
The Christian faith points back to the testimonium Spiritus Sancti . Or theology sneers and wisdom mocks, God himself is last ground of my faith in God (Beets).
7. The Testimony of the Holy Spirit. This testimony of the Holy Spirit has been by Calvin and the Reformed theologians all too one-sidedly linked to the authority of Holy Scripture. It seemed that it had no other content than the inward assurance of Scripture as the Word of God. Thereby this testimony came to stand on its own; it was cut loose from the life of faith and seemed to point to an extraordinary revelation, which Michaelis was honest enough to confess that he had never undergone. Yet Scripture teaches quite otherwise. In general, the Holy Ghost is promised by Jesus as the Comforter, as the Spirit of truth, who in the first place leads the apostles but then through their word also all believers into the truth, bears witness of Christ in them and glorifies Him, John 14:17, 15:26, 16:14.
To that end He convicts of sin, John 16:8-11, regenerates, John 3:3, and brings to the confession of Christ as Lord, 1 Cor. 12:3. And further, He assures of sonship and of the heavenly inheritance, Rom. 8:14 ff.; 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5; Eph. 1:13, 4:30, makes known all things that are freely given to believers by God, 1 Cor. 2:12; 1 John 2:20, 3:24, 4:6-13, and is in the church the author of all Christian virtues and of all spiritual gifts, Gal. 5:22; 1 Cor. 12:8-11.
It is clear from all these places that the witness of the Holy Ghost is of a religious-ethical kind and hangs together most closely with the believer's own life of faith. It does not go around faith, it is no voice from heaven, no dream or vision; it is a testimony that the Holy Ghost bears in, with, through our own spirit in faith. It is not given to unbelievers but is the portion only of the children of God. Episcopius, Instit. Theol. IV sect. 1 c. 5 § 2, therefore raised the objection that the testimony of the Holy Spirit cannot be a ground of faith, since it first follows upon it, John 7:38, 14:17; Acts 5:32; Gal. 3:2, 4:6.
But faith itself from the first beginning is a work of the Holy Ghost, 1 Cor. 12:3, and receives in the Spirit of adoption its seal and confirmation. The very believing is a witnessing of the Holy Ghost in our hearts and through our spirit. There is only in so far a distinction between the Spirit of God and our spirit in this testimony, as our spirit still again and again resists it and must be continually led to obedience.
Therefore the testimony of the Holy Ghost gives no assurance of the outward truths of salvation apart from linkage with the state of the religious subject. It assures those truths, because they stand in unbreakable bond with regeneration and conversion, forgiveness and sonship of the believer. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is first of all an assurance that we are children of God. That is the central truth, the kernel and the midpoint of this testimony.
But in linkage therewith it also seals the outward truths of salvation, the transcendent and transient truths, as Frank called them. Yet with this further marking, that the testimony of the Holy Spirit reveals to us none of these truths, nor yet sets us in a state to draw them by thinking from the nature of our spiritual life. The enlightening of the Holy Ghost is no fount of knowledge for Christian truth; it makes us know no material truths that are hidden from the natural man; it makes us understand and grasp the same things only otherwise, deeper, spiritually.
Paul says expressly that the Spirit makes us know the things that are freely given to us by God in Christ, 1 Cor. 2, cf. Hoekstra, Grondslag, wezen en openbaring van het godsd. geloof 1861 pp. 165 ff. 184. The Spirit whom believers receive is the Spirit of Christ, who takes all things from Christ and is received from the preaching of the gospel, John 14:17; Gal. 3:2, 4:6; 1 John 2:20, 24, 27. But the truths themselves are known to us from elsewhere, from Scripture; they are only inwardly sealed by the testimony of the Holy Ghost.
From this it follows, that the proper object, to which the Holy Ghost in the hearts of believers gives witness, is nothing other than the divinity of the truth, bestowed upon us in Christ. Historical, chronological, geographical data are never as such, in themselves, the object of the witness of the Holy Ghost. Even the facts of salvation are not as bare facts the content of that witness. No single believer is assured by the witness of the Holy Ghost in a scientific sense of the supernatural conception and the resurrection of Christ. The only thing on which the witness of the Holy Ghost bears is the divinity. But then also the divinity of all those truths which are revealed in Scripture and given to us by God in Christ. It is untrue to let the testimony of the Holy Ghost bear only on that which in a narrower sense is only religious-ethical. Indeed, the divinity is the only direct object of that witness, but this divinity is not only a property of some religious and moral sayings, but equally of facts and deeds. Christ himself is a historical person, the redemption is brought about by historical deeds, and the testimony of the Holy Ghost stamps also upon this history the mark of divinity. Therefore this testimony of the Holy Ghost is rightly brought by Calvin into connection with Scripture as the word of God. For not only does this Scripture by common consent have a rich religious-ethical meaning for the Christian life, but it also contains a teaching about itself. The Holy Ghost reveals to the believer no single truth, neither concerning the person of Christ nor concerning Holy Scripture. The believer can only confess what God in Christ has given him. But Scripture contains also a teaching about itself just as about Christ. And the testimony of the Holy Ghost with regard to Holy Scripture consists in this, not that the believer receives an immediate, heavenly vision of the divinity of Scripture; nor yet that he indirectly concludes from the marks and criteria to its divinity; no more that he ascends from the experience of the power that goes forth from it to its divinity; but in this that he freely and willingly acknowledges the authority with which Holy Scripture everywhere appears and which it itself repeatedly claims for itself. Not the authenticity, nor the canonicity, nor even the inspiration, but the divinity of Scripture, its godly authority, is hereby the proper object of the witness of the Holy Ghost. It makes the believer submit himself to Scripture and binds him in the same measure and strength to it as to the person of Christ himself. It assures him that in need and death, in life and dying, he may trust himself to that word of God and therewith even without fear appear before the Judge of heaven and earth. Historical criticism of Scripture therefore finds opposition in the church only insofar as it does harm to this divinity of Holy Scripture and thereby undermines the witness of the childship of God, the hope of glory, the certainty of salvation. In a certain sense there lies in this testimony of the Holy Ghost a circular reasoning. The divinity of Scripture is proved from this witness and the divinity of this witness again from Scripture. Only the testimony of the Holy Ghost comes here in twofold regard. The believer first feels himself in his soul bound to the word of God and then later learns from Holy Scripture to understand that that faith in Scripture is wrought in his heart by the Holy Ghost. Strictly speaking, the witness of the Holy Ghost is also not the final ground of his faith, for Scripture is self-authentic; but indeed the means whereby he acknowledges the divinity of Scripture. Scripture and the witness of the Holy Ghost stand related as objective truth and subjective assurance, as the first principles and their evidence, as the light and the eye. Once acknowledged in its divinity, Scripture stands for the faith of the church as the word of God unshakeably firm, so that it is the foundation and norm of faith and of life.
8. This witness of the Holy Ghost is not thereby undone, that it in the believers seems so sundry. Bellarmine already brought against it, that Luther and Calvin, despite this witness of the Holy Ghost, passed a very differing judgment on the epistle of James. But the Holy Ghost witnesses in the heart of the believers not only concerning the Holy Writ but likewise in regard to all other truths of salvation. There is no church that in this sense does not take up a witness, an enlightening of the Holy Ghost. And yet thereby sundryness in the confession of the sundry truths is not shut out. We believe one holy catholic Christian church, a fellowship of saints; all believers confess one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and are steeped in one Ghost; and yet there is sundering and strife between the churches among themselves and in the foremost articles of faith. The oneness of the Christian church with regard to the Writ is much greater than in any other teaching; even that of the threefoldness and the Godhead of Christ not left out. Yet all that sundryness does not make us waver in the oneness of faith and of knowing, in the catholicness of the church, in the leading of the Ghost into all truth; for sundryness will abide, so long as the church is unwhole, the heart befouled, the insight bounded, the faith small and weak. In the lone believer the witness of the Holy Ghost is not always alike strong and clear; since it hangs most nearly with the faith and the faith-life, it rises and falls and is open to wavering and withstanding. When in the believer sin gains the upper hand, the awareness of his forgiveness is darkened and the witness of the Holy Ghost loses strength. Our faith in the Writ wanes and waxes with our trust in Christ. The confession of the witness of the Holy Ghost is so high and ideal, that the truth of Christian life often stays far beneath it.
Moreover, it comes to this, that the Scripture is very surely a book also for the single believer, but yet in connection with the church of all ages. The Scripture is given to the whole church, to the believers of all times and places. The single believer nourishes himself always with a small portion of the Scripture. There are whole portions of the Scripture, which for the individual believers, yea for whole churches and times, remain a closed book. But the confession of the Scripture as God's word is a confession of the whole church, with which the single believer agrees, and which he also for his person and according to the measure of his faith upholds and maintains, Hofmann, Weiss. und Erf. The testimony of the Holy Spirit is not a particular opinion, but the witness of the church of all ages, of the whole Christendom, of all the regenerate mankind. That church stood also once in all her members, even as the world, hostile over against the word of God. But the Holy Spirit has taken it up in and by her for the truth of Christ. He has broken her enmity, enlightened her understanding, bent her will; and preserves her by the truth from age to age and from day to day. The whole confession of the congregation is a testimony of the Holy Spirit. It is the yea and amen, that the congregation speaks out upon the truth of God. It is the: Abba Father, thy word is the truth, that rises up from the hearts of all believers. So little is the testimony of the Holy Spirit the Achilles' heel of Protestantism, that it rather deserves to be called the cornerstone of the Christian confession, the crown and the seal of all Christian truth, the triumph of the Holy Spirit in the world. Take away the testimony of the Holy Spirit, not only in relation to the Scripture but to all truths of salvation, and there is no church more. For the testimony, that the Holy Spirit gives to the Scripture as the word of God, is but a single tone in the song, that He lays upon the lips of the congregation; it is but a small portion of that great, divine work, that is entrusted to the Holy Spirit, namely to make the fullness of Christ to dwell in his congregation. But thus considered, this testimony of the Holy Spirit is also over against opponents not devoid of all value. When it is loosed from all its surroundings and cut off from the life of faith, in which it roots, from the communion of saints, in which it blooms, from the whole of Christian truth with which it coheres; very surely, then it loses over against combatants all its power, and the yea of the one is not stronger than the nay of the other. But taken as testimony, laid down by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of all children of God concerning the truth, which there is in Christ the Lord, it fails not to make impression upon the mind, even of the most stubborn combatant. Even then it comes not to stand on one line with a logical reasoning or a mathematical proof. It keeps its own power. But unhappy were the science thereto, if it might only reckon with what is demonstrable. Has the conscience no might, because the immoral man every moment goes against her testimony? Do the principles of science deserve no belief, because the skeptic refuses to acknowledge them? Is the Holy Scripture powerless, because her truth cannot be argued to the natural man? The power of all these moral greatnesses is just therein located, that they themselves do not demonstrate, but in high majesty place themselves before everyone's consciousness. They are mighty through the authority, with which they appear. A father proves not his authority to his children but upholds it with divine right. And so does the Holy Scripture. She has maintained her authority in the congregation of Christ unto this day; she has made all believers, and among them the greatest spirits and the noblest souls, to bow before her authority. What power in the world is to be compared with that of the Scripture? The testimony of the Holy Spirit is the victory of the foolishness of the cross over the wisdom of the world, the triumph of the thoughts of God over the considerations of man. In this sense possesses the testimony of the Holy Spirit an excellent apologetic value. This indeed is the victory, that overcomes the world, namely our faith.
1. The Christian church hath not been content with faith alone, but almost from the beginning hath striven after knowledge of religious truth and hath given being to a special science, theology. Yet it cannot be said that this urge toward science is locked up in faith as such. For faith is certainty and shuts out all doubt; it rests in the word of God and hath enough therein. Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Jesum, nec inquisitione post evangelium. Cum credimus, nihil desideramus ultra credere , Tertullian. Die Frömmigkeit ist ihrer selbst unmittelbar gewiss , Rothe. The right and worth of theological science hath therefore been oft contested in the Christian church. During the Monophysite and Monothelite strifes there was already a party of the Gnosimachi, who deemed all science needless for Christians. They taught that God requires nothing of the Christian but good works and that it is better simplici rudique animo institutum suum persequi, quam multam curam in cognoscendis decretis atque sententiis ponere , John of Damascus. Toward the end of the Middle Ages aversion to theology was widespread. Scholasticism had lost all trust. In all circles and among all sects there was a strong longing for a more simple, practical Christianity, Harnack. Humanism looked down with scorn on scholasticism, Paulsen. And since then the opposition to scholasticism in the Roman church hath scarce ever been silent. Baius, Jansenius, Launoy, many theologians in the former and in this century, among others Günther, have brought forth all manner of grave charges against scholastic theology, Kleutgen, Denzinger.
The Reformation at first took the same standpoint. Luther's judgment on Aristotle, scholasticism, and reason is well-known. Köstlin, Luthers Theol. Melanchthon wrote in the first edition of his loci: hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia ejus cognoscere, non quod isti (scholastici) docent, ejus naturas, modos incarnationis intueri, ed. Augusti. Zwingli said that to be a Christian consists not in chattering about Christ, but in walking as he walked; cf. my Ethiek van Zwingli. Calvin likewise lays strong stress on this practical side of faith, Inst. But many went further than the Reformers and rejected all theology. Carlstadt condemned, with appeal to Mt. 23:8, all scholarly titles and went to live as a farmer among the farmers, Herzog. The Anabaptists and Mennonites would have nothing to do with a scholarly training for the ministry of the word, and gave the right to "exhort" to all believers. Menno Simons passed very strict judgment on the church and her ministers, on study and learning, many times, Alle de Godtgel. Wercken, Amst. First later did the Mennonite teachers receive a scholarly training, Herzog. Sepp, Kerkhist. Studiën, Leiden. And when later in the Protestant churches the scholastic treatment of theology gained ground, there came reaction from all sides. Calixtus and Cocceius, Spener and Zinzendorf, Fox and Wesley, etc., they all were driven by the desire for more simplicity and truth in the doctrine of faith. To that end one must go back from doctrine to life, from confession to Scripture, from theology to religion. Even deism and rationalism were akin to this striving; seeking the general and common that lay at the basis of all religions and confessions, they appealed from the Christian religion to the religion of Christ, from the statutory religion to the religion of reason.
Through the agnostic direction of philosophy, the theology of feeling of Schleiermacher, the historical criticism of Scripture, and other influences, this striving has still increased. The aversion to dogmatics is now general. Many look longingly for a new word, a new dogma, desire a religion without theology, a life without doctrine, and zeal for a practical, undogmatic Christianity (Dreyer, Egidy, Drummond, Tolstoy, etc.). To a certain degree this striving has found its scholarly defense in the school of Ritschl. It came forward with the demand that theology must be wholly delivered from metaphysics, Ritschl, Theol. u. Metaph.; cf. also his studies on the doctrine of God, Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. Harnack in his Dogmengeschichte, and E. Hatch in his work, The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church, London, German translation by E. Preuschen, Griechenthum und Christ. Freiburg; cf. also Kaftan, Die Wahrheit der christl. Religion, applied this principle to the history of dogmas, and sought to show that theology is a fruit of the ill-fated marriage between original Christianity and Greek philosophy.
The accusations which all these directions bring against theology, specifically against dogmatics, come down to this, that it falsifies the purity and simplicity of the Christian religion; religion changes into a doctrine which must be intellectually proved and accepted; it kills the religious life, promotes a cold, dry orthodoxy, and makes implicit faith necessary; and finally also brings religion as doctrine into conflict with science, and alienates the educated classes from the Christian faith. Cf. e.g. Kaftan, Glaube und Dogma.
2. No one will deny that there is earnestness and truth in these plaints against theology. She has oftentimes overshot her goal and fallen into empty prattle. She has all too often forgotten that our knowing on earth is a knowing in part and a seeing in a dark saying. At times she seemed to go forth from the thought that she could answer all sundry questions and solve all matters. Lowliness, tenderness, simplicity have oftentimes been lacking in her. That was all the worse, because theology has to do with the deepest riddles and touches the finest stirrings of the manly heart. More than any other lore, the warning fits her: not to think high things beyond what one ought to think. Better an honest "I know not" than a bold guess. To will not to know what the best Teacher wills not to teach is learned unknowing. But thereby theology is not yet in principle condemned. For if the revelation consisted only in the sharing of life and religion only in moods of the soul, there would be no room for a proper theology. But the revelation is a framework of words and deeds of God; she holds a world of thoughts; she has her midpoint in the flesh-becoming of the Logos. And religion is not feeling and stirring alone, but she is also faith, a witting life, a serving of God with heart and head together. And therefore that revelation of God can be thought into, that she may the better go into the manly wit. Even it cannot be held ill against theology if she bends herself to clearness in thinking, brightness in sundering, sharpness in uttering. In all lores such a sharpness is sought after and prized; in theology she is even so in her place. The peril that she thereby shall fall into quibbles and hair-splitting is in the other lores, for byspell in law, in letters, even so. But no one will therefore gainsay the right of those lores. Theology also has her times of bloom and withering; but it goes not to condemn her own self for the misuse that has been made of her. Misuse takes not away use.
Furthermore, it has already become clear to us earlier that the sundering between the Christly religion on one side and metaphysics and the like on the other is neither purely thought nor workly doable. The tale has already proven this sundry times and shows it anew today. For to make such a sundering somewhat workable, all the foresaid paths are driven to shape for themselves a one-sided and unwhole fore-showing of the gospel of Christ. Almost never do they go back to the whole Writ, but always to a deal; to the New Witness alone, or to the gospels, or to the hill-speech, or even to one single writ. Francis of Assisi, for byspell, set all his life after Matthew 10:9, 10. Tolstoi finds the kernel of the gospel in Matthew 5:38, 39. Drummond seeks in the love of 1 Corinthians 13 the highest good. Ritschl changes the dogmas into religious-moral worth-judgings. Harnack comes in the grasping of the first gospel with Ritschl together. And many ask now, why the Christly churches have not been glad with the hill-speech. What the being of Christendom is, wherein the revelation or the word of God stands, who the person of Christ is, is not settled by the apostles; each sets it for himself after his own insights. Outcome thereof is that all these paths not only the church, the confession, the theology but also the apostles must set against Jesus and against the first gospel. Harnack, for byspell, owns that also the apostolic-catholic teaching in the New Witness no longer yields the gospel of Jesus purely. The inflow is already therein markable of Judaism, Hellenism, and the Greek-Roman lore of godliness. Already the apostles, in sunder Paul and John, have falsed the gospel. Ernst von Bunsen strives that Paul has changed the gospel of Jesus into a beholding theology. And when then a deed such as the uprising of Christ yet cannot be taken away from the first gospel, it is robbed of its godly worth. Yet further flows from this beholding that the tale of the dogma cannot come to her right. She becomes one great straying of the manly, of the Christly ghost. The behest of the Ghost, who would lead into all truth, shows itself idle. The workableness even to know the truth is taken from the church, while already the apostles have led her on a stray path. The teaching of the logos, of the threefoldness, of the first and the second Adam, and so on, all dogmas that must prove the in-mixing of the Greek wisdom-lore, are found not wordly but yet thingly already in the Writ. In one word, the tale of the dogmas is even as with Strauss the tale of their sifting. Not the church has overcome the world, but the world has overcome the church. Lastly threatens with this one-sided grasping of the first gospel yet the peril that one loses the fellowship with the church of all eld and thereby with the tide in which one lives. That has been the doom of all sects. Cut off from the churches and scorning theology, they have lost the inflow on their eld and the bond with the upbringing. Gathering and world, church and school, godliness and lore fall twofold asunder. Thereagainst theology has the lordly calling to hold these both with each other in bond; on one side to keep the Christly life from all sundry ghostly sicknesses of hiddenness and sundering, and on the other side to free the lore-wise thinking from straying and lie through the truth of Christ. The right of theology is grounded in the being of the Christly godliness. The revelation bends itself to the whole man, and has the whole world to her mark. On all fields she binds the strife against the lie. She bids stuff to the deepest thinking and plants on lore-wise field the knowing of God next to and in living bond with that of man and world.
Over the dogma-tale beholdings of Harnack and Hatch can be sought Pfleiderer, Kuenen, Van Rhijn, Dr. W. Schmidt, Henri Bois.
3. The Relation of Christian Dogma to Greek Philosophy. Although the Christian dogma cannot be explained from Greek philosophy, yet it did not arise without it. In Scripture there is as yet no dogma and no theology in the proper sense. As long as the revelation itself was still ongoing, it could not become the object of scientific reflection. The inspiration had to be completed before reflection could have its say. The usage of terms like Mosaic, Pauline, Biblical theology and dogmatics, etc., therefore deserves no recommendation; the word theology, moreover, does not occur in Scripture and only gradually acquired its present meaning. Theology first arose in the church of Christ when the childlike naïveté had passed and the thinking consciousness had awakened. Gradually the need arose to think through the thoughts of revelation, to connect them with the rest of knowledge, and to defend them against all kinds of attacks. For this, philosophy was needed. Scientific theology arose with its help. But this did not happen by chance. The church was not the victim of deception. The church fathers made ample use of philosophy in the formation and development of dogmas. But they did so with full awareness, with a clear insight into the dangers connected with it, with a clear reckoning of the grounds on which they did it, and with explicit acknowledgment of the word of the apostles as the only rule of faith and life. Therefore, they did not make use of the entire Greek philosophy; they made a selection; they used only that philosophy which was most suitable to think through and defend the truth of God; they proceeded eclectically and did not adopt any single philosophical system, whether of Plato or of Aristotle, but with the help of Greek philosophy produced their own Christian philosophy. Furthermore, they used that philosophy only as a means. Just as Hagar was servant to Sarah, just as the treasures of Egypt were used by the Israelites for the adornment of the tabernacle, just as the wise men from the East laid their gifts at the feet of the child in Bethlehem; so, in the judgment of the church fathers, philosophy was subordinate to theology. All this clearly shows that the use of philosophy in theology did not rest on a mistake, but on a firm and clear conviction. The church fathers knew what they were doing. This does not exclude the possibility that the influence of philosophy was too strong on some points. But then a distinction must immediately be made between the theology of the fathers and the dogmas of the church. The church has at all times guarded against the misuse of philosophy; it has not only rejected Gnosticism but also condemned Origenism. And it has not yet succeeded in explaining the dogmas materially from philosophy; however often it has been attempted, in the end the scripturalness of orthodoxy has always been vindicated.
The Reformation at the outset took a hostile stance against scholasticism and philosophy. But it soon retreated therefrom; forasmuch as it was no sect nor wished to be, it could not do without a theology. Luther and Melanchthon therefore already returned to the use of philosophy and acknowledged its usefulness. Calvin from the beginning took this high standpoint, and saw in philosophy a noble gift of God. And so judged all Reformed theologians.
Now the question runs not hereupon, whether theology must make use of a particular philosophical system. Christian theology has never taken over any philosophical system without criticism and stamped it as truth. Neither the philosophy of Plato nor that of Aristotle has been held by any theologian as the true one. That nevertheless preference was given to these two philosophical systems had its cause herein, that these best lent themselves to develop and defend the truth. There lay also the thought therein, that the Greeks and Romans had received a peculiar calling and gift for the life of culture. In fact, all our civilization even today is built upon that of Greece and Rome. And Christianity has not destroyed this but Christianized it and thus hallowed it. But yet not a particular philosophy is needful for theology. What it needs is philosophy in general. In other words, it comes to no scientific theology except through thinking. The proper internal principle of knowledge for theology is therefore not faith as such, but believing thought, the Christian reason. Faith is conscious of itself and certain. It rests in revelation. It includes a knowing, but that knowing is wholly of a practical kind, a ginōskein in the sense of Holy Scripture.
Theology therefore does not arise from believers as such; it is no fruit of the church as instituted church; it has its origin not in the office which Christ has given to his congregation. But believers have yet another, richer life than comes to expression in the instituted church. They live as Christians also in family, state, society, and practice science and art. Yet many more gifts than those that work through the office are given them, gifts of knowledge and wisdom and prophecy. Among them are also those who feel a strong urge to inquiry and knowledge within themselves, who have received gifts to think God's truth and bring it into system.
And so theology arises in the church of Christ; it has as its subject not the instituted church but the church as organism, as the body of Christ; it is a fruit of the thinking of Christendom.
4. Faith and Theology. Faith and theology are thus indeed distinct. More or less, men were aware of this at all times. The sharp opposition which Gnosticism made between pistis and gnosis was rejected; and also the relation assumed by the Alexandrian school between the two was not in all respects approved and sanctioned, cf. above. But yet the distinction was emphatically maintained, and at the same time the intimate connection of both was held fast and acknowledged. Augustine raised the saying: per fidem ad intellectum to be the principle of theology; he assumed a relation between them as between conception and birth, work and reward. Fidei fructus est intellectus , tract. 22 in Ev. Joh. n. 2. Intellectus merces est fidei , tract. 29 in Ev. Joh. n. 6. He urges thereto, that those things which thou holdest already with the firmness of faith, thou mayest also behold with the light of reason. God despiseth not reason. Far be it that God should hate in us that wherein He hath created us more excellent than the other living creatures, Ep. 120 ad Consent, n. 2-4. And this was the principle and the fundamental thought of all the scholasticism. Faith and theology were distinct as habitus and actus , as theologia infusa and acquisita . Faith is assent to, theology is knowledge of the revealed truths. Faith doth also include some knowledge concerning God and divine things, but this knowledge pertaineth more to the existence than to the reasons of those truths; the theologian however penetrateth to the idea, traceth the connection of the truths, and deriveth others from them by thinking, Liebermann, Instit. Theol. ed. 8. Moguntiae 1857 cap. 1 § 1.
That men were conscious of the distinction between religion and theology appeareth also from the doctrine of implicit faith. As faith according to Rome consisted in assent to revealed truths, sooner or later the question must needs arise, which and how many of those truths one must at least know and accept, to become partaker of salvation. That question could arise with regard to the heathen, with regard to the believers of the Old Testament, and also with regard to the ignorant and unlearned believers in the days of the New Testament. Augustine had already said: the multitude is made safest not by liveliness of understanding, but by simplicity of believing, c. Epist. fundamenti cap. 4. But Lombardus first clearly set forth this question in his Sententiae lib. III dist. 25. Since then it was treated at length in theology; in the 17th century it even gave occasion in France to a serious strife, which was not solved but yet ended by Innocentius XI. Commonly the doctrine of implicit faith is presented in the Roman theology in this wise. The fides carbonaria is expressly rejected; all Roman divines hold fast that to saving faith belongeth some, though it be small, knowledge; wholly implicit therefore faith can and may never be. But that knowledge differeth in the different dispensations of grace. In the days of the Old Testament from Adam until the fall of Jerusalem, when the proper mysteries of Christianity, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, were not yet promulgated, necessitate medii only these two articles were needful to believe, that God is and that He is a rewarder, Heb. 11:6. Therewith is not said that many believers under the Old Testament had no further and deeper knowledge of the truth; Adam for example knew also the Trinity and the incarnation, Gen. 1:26, 2:23, 24, 3:15. But the simple believers could suffice with those two articles. For implicitly they believed then also in the proper mysteries of Christianity, the Trinity and the incarnation. In the existence and unity of God lieth implicitly the Trinity, and therein that He is remunerator lieth implicitly the incarnation enclosed. Now others, such as Wiggers, Daelman etc., saw this last not yet so clearly, and said therefore that the Old Testament believers had to accept four articles, namely besides the two aforementioned also the immortality of the soul and the corruption of sin (infectio animarum), in which then the two chief dogmas of Christianity were implicitly comprehended. The most common representation however was that the two named articles were sufficient for the Old Testament believers. But after the fall of Jerusalem those two chief truths of Christianity are clearly revealed and made known; and now it is thus necessitate medii needful for everyone who will be saved, that he accept these four articles: God, and He a rewarder, the most holy Trinity, the Mediator. Others add yet other articles thereto, such as God the Creator, God's grace necessary to salvation, immortality; and some even name the acceptance of the 12 articles, quoad substantiam , needful. But the advocates of the four articles express the most common sentiment. All this doctrine of implicit faith is then supported with an appeal to Job 1:14: the oxen, that is the learned believers, were plowing, and the asses, that is the simple laymen, grazing beside them. This exegesis appeareth already in Gregorius M. Moral. lib. II cap. 25 and is then taken over by Lombardus, Thomas, Bellarminus etc. Cf. Lombardus, Sent. III dist. 25. Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 2 art. 5-8. Bellarminus, de Justific. I cap. 7. Billuart, Summa S. Thomae sive Cursus Theol. VII p. 46 sq. Daelman, Theol. seu Observ. theol. in Summam D. Thomae IV p. 44 sq. Dens, Theologia in usum semin. II 278 sq. M. Becanus, Theol. Scholastica, Tom. II Pars II tract. 1 p. 22 sq. Jansen, Praelect. Theol. I 699 sq. Albr. Ritschl, Fides implicita, Bonn 1890.
The issue itself which lieth at the foundation of this doctrine of implicit faith is serious and important enough; it concerneth nothing less than the essence of Christianity itself, the significance of Israel, the possibility of progression of revelation with the absolute character of truth. But the intellectualistic conception of faith led thereto, to solve this issue purely quantitatively; the acceptance of four articles of faith maketh the Christian; in practice the legend of the fides carbonaria proved to contain but all too much truth. In any case however the doctrine of implicit faith proveth clearly that the Roman theologians make a distinction between faith and theology in content and extent.
5. Also the Reformation remained aware of this difference. Lutheran and Reformed theologians took over the distinction between the habit and act of theology, between infused and acquired theology. The first is the share of all believers; in principle they know the whole of theology, they have the true and pure knowledge of God. But as acquired, it is only the share of those who practice the knowledge of God scientifically. Then indeed it is a knowledge of conclusions gathered from theological principles through theological discourse, and arranged in a certain order, and impressed on the mind by long labor and exercise, Alsted, Methodus sacrosanctae theologiae 1623. Owen, Theologoumena . Calovius, Isagoge ad S. Theol. .
Truly, religion and theology were often interchanged with each other, cf. e.g. Cloppenburg, Op. I 699. Mastricht, Theor.-pract. Theol. I cap. 2 § 3, which could happen all the more easily, because theology and dogmatics were about the same. But even in the bloom of orthodoxy the distinction between faith and theology did not wholly perish, as is proven by the doctrine of the fundamental and non-fundamental articles. The Reformation decidedly rejected the Roman doctrine of implicit faith, Calv., Inst. III. 2 § 2-6. Chamier, Panstr. Cath. T. III lib. 12 cap. 5. Polanus, Synt. Theol. . Maresius, Synt. Theol. loc. 11 § 29, etc. Cf. Ritschl, Fides implicita . They had to do this, because they did not let saving faith consist in holding as true some uncomprehended articles, but in a personal trust in the grace of God in Christ. But for that there soon came in its place the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental articles. Calvin already said that one must not separate from the church on account of less essential points, Instit. IV, 1 § 12, 13. IV, 2 § 1. Non enim unius sunt formae omnia verae doctrinae capita. Sunt quaedam ita necessaria cognitu, ut fixa esse et indubitata omnibus oporteat ceu propria religionis placita, qualia sunt: unum esse Deum, Christum Deum esse ac Dei filium, in Dei misericordia salutem nobis consistere et similia. Sunt alia, quae inter ecclesias controversa, fidei tamen unitatem non dirimant , IV cap. 1 § 12.
The juxtaposition used in the description of faith of a certain knowledge, whereby I hold as true all that God has revealed in his word, and of a trust, that all my sins are forgiven me for Christ's sake, could give occasion to seek the center of gravity either in the general faith or in the special faith. The great number of churches, which successively came forth from the Reformation and deviated from each other in various articles, promoted the distinction between essential and incidental elements in the revelation. The gradually arising syncretism and indifferentism, which went back from the particular to the common, made necessary the indication of what belonged to the foundations of the Christian religion. Thus arose the doctrine of the fundamental articles. Nic. Hunnius seems to have used the expression first in his Diaskepsis de fundamentali dissensu doctrinae Lutheranae et Calvinianae 1626. Quenstedt spoke of primary and secondary articles. Others followed, both in the Lutheran and in the Reformed churches, cf. Voetius, Disp. Sel. II 511-538. H. Alting, Theol. probl. nova I 9. Spanheim fil., Opera III col. 1289 sq. Heidegger, Theol. I § 51 sq. Turret., Theol. El. I qu. 14. Moor, Comm. in Marckii Comp. I 481 sq. Witsius, Exercit. in Symb. II § 2. Bretschneider, System. Entw. aller in der Dogm. vork. Begriffe , 4te Aufl. 1841. Tholuck, Der Geist der luth. Theologen Wittenbergs 1852.
The orthodoxy was naturally not inclined to limit the fundamental articles to a small number; but yet the striving is noticeable to conceive these articles centrally and to group them around the person of Christ. The Romans however rejected this distinction, although it seemingly had so much agreement with the implicit faith. They brought the Reformed and Lutheran divines into no small embarrassment. They asked, where God in his word had made a distinction between essential and incidental truths; where one derived the right to separate in the divine revelation the fundamental from the non-fundamental; which truths then must be reckoned to the fundamental; who must determine that; and how on such a standpoint rationalism and indifferentism was to be avoided? Faith has indeed, as they claimed, not only as object the divine mercy, Conc. Trid. sess. VI can. 12, but all that God has revealed, Bellarmine, de Justif. I c. 8. According to the Jesuits at the religious conference at Regensburg 1601 it was also an article of faith, that Tobias's dog wagged its tail. Cf. Denzinger, Vier Bücher usw. II. Heinrich, Dogm. II. Jansen, Prael. Theol. I 449 sq. Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence I ch. 6, 7, etc.
Over against all these objections the Protestant theologians indeed appealed to Scripture, Mt. 16:16; 1 Cor. 2:2, 3:11 v.; Eph. 2:20; Gal. 6:14; 1 Pet. 2:6, etc. and indeed made all sorts of distinctions, Spanheim. t. a. p. col. 1308 sq. But they did not conceal the difficulties from themselves; they were afraid to err in excess and in defect; and they ended with the declaration, that they could not determine the minimum of knowledge, with which a sincere faith must be accompanied, Voetius, Disp. II 537, 781. Spanheim t. a. p. col. 1291. Witsius, Exerc. in Symb. II § 2 and 15. Hoornbeek, Conf. Socin. I. The orthodoxy ran out into rationalism on the one side and pietism on the other side. Doctrine and life fell further and further apart. Head and heart strove for the preeminence. Theology and religion came to stand over against each other. We have not yet overcome the antithesis. For years there has been cried: religion is no doctrine but life; it does not matter what you believe, but only how you live. Gradually however the eyes are also opening to the one-sidedness of this direction and the value of religious representations for the religious life is better recognized, cf. e.g. Dr. Bruining in various writings, Gids June 1884. Moderne mystiek 1885. Het bestaan van God 1892. Theol. Tijdschr. Nov. 1894.
6. In the searching into the bond between faith and theology, the question must be set forth purely. It reads not, which truths a man must at least know and hold for true, to be saved. Leave that question to Rome; and let the Roman theology make out whether two or four or more articles be needful thereto. The Protestant theology has indeed laden upon itself the seeming, in the teaching of the fundamental articles, as if it would walk a like path. But it ended with the acknowledgment that it knew not the greatness of God's mercy and therefore could not set the measure of knowledge which is needfully own to an upright faith. And besides, there is, amid all seeming agreement, a weighty difference between the teaching of the implicit faith and that of the fundamental articles. At Rome that teaching was unfolded with an eye to the simple lay folk, the asses of Job 1:14. But in the theology of the Reformation it had its spring in the deed that sundry churches stood forth beside each other with a confession differing on many points one from another; it was thus in truth a searching into the being of Christendom. At Rome faith is assent to sundry revealed truths, which can be tallied up article-wise and have grown in number through the course of times. But the Reformation grasped faith as special faith, with a sundry central object, the grace of God in Christ; here a summing up of articles, whose knowing and assent was needful to salvation, was no longer possible. Faith is a personal bond of man to Christ; it is living and has laid aside the adding, the quantity. Rome must therefore set a least measure, without which no salvation can be spoken of; in the Reformation faith is a trust upon the grace of God and thus no more open to reckoning. Every believer, as well in the Old as in the New Testament, owns in seed that same knowledge, which in theology is unfolded deeper and broader. From this standpoint also the bond of faith and theology is to be set in clearer light.
First of all, there is a strong likeness between the two. They have in common the starting point: the Word of God, the object: the knowledge of God, the goal: the glory of God. Theology as a science also stands on the groundwork of faith. The place that in other sciences belongs to beholding is here taken by faith. Faith yields to theology the matter for thinking. In worldly science it is said: sense goes before understanding, nothing is in the understanding that was not first in the sense; in theology the watchword is: faith goes before understanding, nothing is in the understanding that was not first in faith. Leibniz therefore likened faith to trial. Concepts without beholdings are empty, said Kant; and so theology has no filling except from and through faith. As soon as it forsakes faith, it ceases itself to be as theology. And also through thinking it never rises above this standpoint of faith. In sundry ways this has been tried, but it has proven empty. Faith is the beginning and also the end of theology; it never brings it to a knowing in the proper sense, that is, to a knowing on the ground of one's own beholding and insight. Thereby theology is not robbed of its freedom. Faith simply lays and upholds that bond which ought to be on this field between the doer and the thing done. It sets the theologian not outside and over against and above, but under and in the truth which he has to search out. It does nothing other than bind theology to its own object, in no other wise than every other science is bound and abides to beholding and through it stands in bond with its object. Theology is as free and as bound as every other science. It is free from all bonds that war with its kind; but it is wholly set by the object that it seeks to know, and this it has in common with all sciences. The more strictly it binds itself to its object, the less danger it runs of falling into dry school-lore and empty word-craft. Through faith theology abides a science of godliness, a Theology of Deeds, which thinks not over notions but over things and loses not itself in empty high thoughts but stands with both feet in that world of true things which the Scripture opens to us.
But on the other side, there is between faith and theology a noteworthy difference. In former times, the two could easily be swapped with each other, because theology and dogmatics were well-nigh the same as ethics. But theology has now become the name for a whole cycle of fields. The difference therefore now leaps out at once to everyone. Theology nowadays takes in a host of sciences, which the simple believer does not even know by name. But even if theology is taken in the old sense, yet the difference stays great. In every field there is a gap between the common, everyday, hands-on knowing, and the true, higher, learned knowing. Every man has some hands-on knowledge of sun, moon, stars, and so forth, but this knowledge differs heaven-wide from the learned knowledge of the stargazer. The first knows only the facts, the latter the reasons. The man of learning does not scorn the common, hands-on knowing; he does not overthrow the natural sureness; but he has yet the calling to shed light on that common knowing, to widen it, and if need be also to cleanse and better it. Not otherwise is it in theology. Faith stays with the facts, theology seeks to pierce through to the thought. Faith has enough with the "that," theology asks after the "why" and the "how." Faith is always personal, it sets the object always in bond to the man himself, it has straightforward stake in the godly worth of the teachings; theology makes in some wise the object thing-like, it strives to behold the truth as it stands forth in itself, it searches out its oneness and its inward link, and seeks to come to a whole. Faith aims at the midmost object, theology spreads the search to the whole rim of the ring. But however unlike, they cannot do without each other. Faith keeps theology from worldly turning, theology keeps faith from lone-standing. Therefore church and school (seminary, theological faculty) are indeed two, but they belong yet in close bond. By this also the freedom and self-standing of theology is in nothing shortened. Every faculty follows learning not only for its own sake, but also trains men for sundry callings in the folk. Every learning has in truth to reckon with the calls of life. And so too theology stands not high above, but midst in the working life, in the life of the gathering. The ill-fit, which now nearly everywhere stands between church and theology, is a woe for both.
7. If theology in this wise has not her inward principle in faith as such, but in faithful thinking, then the task of reason in the science of theology must be further set forth.
Therein must first of all be cast off in principle that notion which sees in faith and reason two self-standing powers that wrestle with each other unto life and death. In that way one makes an opposition that belongs not on Christian ground. Faith is then always above or even against reason. On the one side looms rationalism and on the other side supranaturalism.
Faith, the fides qua creditur , is no organ or faculty beside and above reason, but a bent, a wont of reason itself. Reason, or if one will rather, thinking is surely no wellspring of theology, no principium quo seu per quod aut ex quo seu cur credamus , Voetius, Disp. I; wellspring is reason for no science or at most only for the formal sciences, logic and mathematics. But reason is yet the subjectum fidei recipiens , fidei capax ; faith is a deed of the mind, of the manly mind; a beast is not able to believe. And further, faith is no force, but a free deed of man. The Christian believes not by command, out of dread, through might. Believing has become the kindly wont of his understanding. Kindly not in that sense, as if there is not oft much in his soul that sets against that believing. But yet so, that he, though oft doing what he wills not, yet has a delight in the law of God after the inward man. Believing is the kindly breathing of the child of God. His yielding to the word of God is no thralldom but freedom. Faith is in this sense no sacrificium intellectus but sanitas mentis . Faith frees not the Christian from searching and pondering; rather it spurs him thereto. Kind is not undone by new birth but set right.
Therefore, beforehand, the believer who wishes to devote himself to theology must prepare his thinking for the task that awaits him. There is no entrance into the temple of theology except through the faculty of arts. Philosophical, historical, and linguistic propaedeutic is indispensable for the practitioner of theological science. Philosophy, said Clement of Alexandria, prepares the way for the most royal teaching . Emperor Julian knew what he was doing when he took away pagan science from the Christians; he feared being defeated with his own weapons. This thus prepared and trained thinking has then in theology principally a threefold task.
First of all, it lends its service in the discovery of the material. The Scripture is the principle of theology. But that Scripture is no lawbook; it is an organic whole. The material for theology, particularly for dogmatics, lies scattered throughout the whole Scripture. Just as gold from the mine, so must the truth of faith be dug up from the Scripture with the exertion of all spiritual power. With a few proof texts nothing is accomplished. Not on a few loose texts but on the Scripture in its entirety must the dogma be built; it must organically arise from the principles that are present everywhere in the Scripture. The doctrine of God, of man, of sin, of Christ, and so forth, is indeed not only to be found in a few statements, but is spread throughout the whole Scripture and is contained not only in some proof places but also in all kinds of images and parables, ceremonies and histories. No part of Scripture may be neglected. The whole Scripture must prove the whole system. Also in theology, separatism must be avoided. It is a mark of many sects that they proceed from a small portion of Scripture and otherwise wholly neglect it. The worst and most widespread is the rejection or disregard of the Old Testament. Marcionism has repeatedly returned in the Christian church and plays a great role also in the newer theology. All this arbitrary use of Holy Scripture leads to one-sidedness and error in theology and to sickness in the religious life. The full rich image of the truth then does not come to light. The person and work of the Father or of the Son or of the Holy Spirit are misunderstood. Christ is shortchanged in his prophetic, or in his priestly, or in his kingly office. The Christian religion loses its catholic character. Head, heart, and hand of the Christian are not harmoniously formed and led by the truth. Only the full, whole Scripture preserves from all these one-sidednesses. But therefore, thinking also has an important task in this searching out of the theological material.
Next, the theologian must also thoughtfully work through this thus obtained material. The dogmas do not stand in so many words, according to the letter but according to the meaning in the Scripture; they are conclusions of faith. The doctrine of the Trinity, of the two natures of Christ, of satisfaction, of the sacraments, and so forth, is not based on one single statement of Scripture, but is built up from many data that lie scattered throughout the whole Scripture. Dogmas are the short summary in our language of all that Scripture teaches about the subjects concerned. Roman and Protestant theologians have therefore defended against all kinds of directions that wished to remain with the literal expressions of Scripture, the right of dogmatic terminology. They did that, not because they wanted to be less, but because they wanted to be more and better Scriptural than these. Then precisely, according to their thought, Scripture came to its full honor, when not one single text was literally cited but when the whole truth, comprehended in many texts, was summed up and rendered in the dogma. Theology is therefore not only a noetic, but also a dianoetic, not an apprehensive but a discursive science. It reflects, compares, judges, sums up, deduces other truths from the obtained ones, and so forth. Jesus and the apostles also did thus, Matthew 22:32, 44 and following; John 10:34 and following; Acts 15:9 and following, 18:28; 1 Corinthians 15, and so forth; and church fathers, scholastics, Roman and Protestant theologians have followed that example. God has not called us to repeat literally but to think after what He has forethought for us in His revelation.
And finally, thinking in theology has the task to sum up all truth in one system. A system is the highest that can be desired in science. Theology also does not rest until it has discovered the unity that lies hidden in the revelation. It may not impose that system from outside, and not force the truth into a philosophical scheme that is foreign to its essence. But it seeks nevertheless until in human consciousness the system is reflected that is present in the object itself. In all this, theology proceeds just as other sciences. It labors in the same manner. It is just as bound to its object as these. In thinking, it is subject to the laws that apply to that thinking; without punishment it also cannot sin against logic. The highest is also for it the unity of truth, the system of the knowledge of God. However much theology may differ from the other sciences in principle, object, and aim; it agrees with them formally and may rightly lay claim to the name of science. And since revelation does not conflict with human reason per se , but only per accidens of corruption and evil disposition, therefore theology can even in a certain sense be called natural and rational. The Christian religion is a reasonable service, Romans 12:1.
The literature on the use of reason and philosophy in theology is amazingly rich. See for the church fathers Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit IV; Denzinger, Vier Bücher usw. II; and further Voetius, Disp. Sel. I; Turretinus, Theol. El. loc. 1 qu. 8-13; Witsius, Misc. Sacra II; and further literature in M. Vitringa’s edition of C. Vitringa, Doctrina christ. relig. I.
8. But though knowledge in theology is within reach, it does not lead to grasping. Between knowing, understanding, and grasping there is a great difference. Indeed, these words are often used one for another; but there is yet a clear and plain difference. Knowing deals with being, the that ; understanding with kind, the what ; grasping with the inner likelihood, the how of a thing. We grasp very little, truly only that which is fully in our might, which we can make and break. A machine I grasp, when I see how it is set together and how it works, when nothing wondrous is left in it. Grasping shuts out wonder and awe. I grasp or think I grasp what, as folk say, speaks for itself and is fully inborn. Often grasping ends, the deeper one searches. What spoke for itself shows itself wholly uncommon and wondrous. The further a lore thrusts into its thing, to that measure it draws near the mystery. Even if it met no other on its way, yet at last it would always strike upon the mystery of being. But where grasping ends, there yet stays room for understanding and awe. So it is also in theology. In the showing-forth is the μυστηριον εὐσεβειας laid bare to us, the mystery of God's goodwill. We see it, it meets us as a true thing in the tale of days and in our own life; but we fathom it not. In this wise the Christly theology ever has to do with mysteries, which it can indeed understand and hold in awe but cannot grasp and fathom.
Oft has the mystery in Christian theology been understood in a wholly other sense. The word mysterion , from mystes , myo , to close, to shut, of eyes, lips, wounds; is in common Greek the name for the religious-political secret teaching which in some societies of Eleusis, Samothrace, and so forth, was shared only with the initiated and kept hidden from all others. Foucart, des associations religieuses chez les Grecs , Paris. Edwin Hatch, Griechentum und Christenthum , German by Preuschen. Gustav Anrich, Das antike Mysterienwesen in seinem Einfluss auf das Christentum , Göttingen. In the New Testament, the word always has religious meaning and points to a matter of the kingdom of God, which either because of the dark, riddle-like form in which it is set forth, Matt. 13:11; Mark 4:11; Luke 8:10; Rev. 1:20, 17:5, 7, or also because of its content, is hidden. Above all, so is called the universal counsel of God concerning redemption in Christ, which also embraces the Gentiles, Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9, 3:3, 6:19; Col. 1:26, 27, 2:2, 4:3, as well as the manner in which this is carried out, Rom. 11:25; 1 Cor. 15:51; 2 Thess. 2:7; Rev. 10:7. But this mystery is so called, not because it is now still hidden, but because it was formerly unknown. Now it is made manifest through the gospel of Christ; it is proclaimed by the apostles as stewards of the mysteries of God, Rom. 16:25, 26; Col. 1:26; 1 Cor. 2:14; Matt. 13:11; 1 Cor. 4:1; and it comes forth more and more into the light in history, 1 Cor. 15:51, 52; 2 Thess. 2:7. The New Testament mysterion thus denotes no truth of faith that is uncomprehended and incomprehensible to the thinking understanding, but a matter that was first hidden with God, then made known in the gospel, and now understood by believers. Cremer, Wörterbuch der neutestamentlichen Gräcität , s.v. But church usage soon understood thereunder a matter that was incomprehensible and far surpassed even the understanding of the believer, such as the incarnation, the mystical union, the sacraments, and so forth, and later all pure articles that could not be proven by reason. Suicerus, Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus , s.v. Also in this way there still remained a great difference between the heathen and the Christian usage. For there it denoted a secret teaching that must be kept hidden from the uninitiated; but in the Christian church there never existed a proper discipline of the secret, though a certain order was observed in sharing the truth. Zezschwitz, art. Arkandisciplin in Herzog. Hatch, Griechenthum und Christentum . Kattenbusch, Vergleichende Konfessionskunde . Suicerus, Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus , s.v. dogma . But yet the dogmas were uncomprehended and incomprehensible truths of faith, not indeed against but yet high above reason. Thomas, Summa Theologica . Summa contra Gentiles . Bellarmine, de Christo . Heinrich. Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der religiösen Erkenntnis . Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit . In the condemnation of Erigena, Raimundus Lullus, Hermes, Günther, Frohschammer, Rome spoke its disapproval over every attempt to prove the mysteries of faith from reason. And the Vatican Council declared: divine mysteries by their own nature so exceed the created intellect that, even when handed down by revelation and received by faith, they remain covered by the veil of faith itself and wrapped as it were in a certain darkness, as long as in this mortal life we are pilgrims from the Lord; for we walk by faith, and not by sight. Session 3, chapter 4.
The Reformation now indeed acknowledged the supernatural character of revelation but yet brought about in fact a great change. With Rome the mysteries are in the first place incomprehensible because they belong to another, higher, supernatural order, which far surpasses the understanding of man as such. It must therefore lay all stress on the incomprehensibility of the mysteries and protect and uphold this. The incomprehensible seems in itself a proof of the truth. It is credible because it is inept.... Certain, because impossible. Tertullian, de carne Christi . But the Reformation replaced this opposition of natural and supernatural order by that of sin and grace. It sought the essence of the mystery not therein that it was incomprehensible to man in himself, but to the understanding of the natural man. Calvin, Institutes . Voetius, Disputationes . Without doubt this view is much more in agreement with New Testament usage. Nowhere there does the abstract-supernatural and the scientifically-incomprehensible of the mystery stand in the foreground. But while it is foolishness in the eyes of the natural man, however wise he be; it is revealed to believers, who see therein divine wisdom and grace. Matt. 11:25, 13:11, 16:17; Rom. 11:33; 1 Cor. 1:30. Of course Scripture does not thereby mean to say that the believer comprehends and understands those mysteries in a scientific sense. For we walk by faith, know in part, and see through a glass darkly. Rom. 11:34; 1 Cor. 13:12; 2 Cor. 5:7. But the believer yet knows those mysteries; they are no longer foolishness and offense to him; he admires God's wisdom and love therein. It therefore does not occur to him that they surpass his reason, that they are above reason; he feels them not as a burdensome load but as a freeing for his thinking. His faith passes over into wonder, his knowledge ends in adoration, and his confession flows out into a song of praise and thanks. Of such kind is also the knowledge of God which is aimed at in theology. It is no mere knowing and much less a comprehending; but it is better and more glorious, it is a knowledge that is life, eternal life. John 17:3. Cf. on the mysteries, besides the literature already named, also Bretschneider, Systematische Entwickelung aller in der Dogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe . J. Boeles, de mysteriis in religione christiana . Scholten, Leerboek der Heilige Kerk . Oosterzee, Dogmatiek . Philippi, Commentary on Rom. 11:25. Gretillat, Exposé de théologie systématique .
1. The mystery is the life-element of dogmatics. Indeed, Scripture understands under mysterion no abstract-supernatural truth in the Roman sense; but it is equally far removed from the thought that the believer would understand and comprehend the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense. Rather, the knowledge which God has revealed of Himself in nature and Scripture far exceeds the imagination and understanding of man. Insofar, everything that dogmatics deals with is mystery. For it does not deal with finite creatures, but from beginning to end it rises above all creatures to the Eternal and Infinite Himself. Already at once as it makes a beginning, it stands before the Incomprehensible. From Him it takes its beginning, for from Him are all things. But also in the further loci, when it descends to the creatures, it considers them no otherwise than in their relation to God, as they are from and through and to Him. So then the knowledge of God is the only dogma, the exclusive content of the entire dogmatics. All doctrines that are treated in it, about the world, about man, about Christ and so on, are but the unfolding of the one central dogma of the knowledge of God. From Him everything is viewed. Under Him everything is subsumed. To Him everything is led back. It is always God and God alone, whose glory in creation and re-creation, in nature and grace, in world and church it has to ponder and to describe. It is His knowledge alone that it must display and exhibit. Thereby dogmatics becomes no dry, scholastic science, without fruit for life. The more it ponders Him, whose knowledge is its only content, the more it will pass over into wonder and worship. If only it never forgets to think and speak about the things instead of about the words ; if only it remains a Theology of Facts and does not fall into a Theology of Rhetoric, it is as scientific description of the knowledge of God also most fruitful for life. For the knowledge of God in Christ is life itself, Ps. 89:16; Isa. 11:9; Jer. 31:34; John 17:3. Therefore Augustine desired to know nothing else and nothing more than God and himself: Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino . Therefore Calvin began his Institutes with the knowledge of God and of ourselves. And therefore the Catechism of Geneva gave on the first question: quis humanae vitae praecipuus est finis? the answer: ut Deum, a quo conditi sunt homines, ipsi noverint , cf. also the Westminster Catechism.
But as soon as we undertake to speak about God, the question arises, how we shall be able to do that. We are men and He is the Lord our God. There seems to be no kinship and no fellowship between Him and us, that we could name Him according to truth. There is between Him and us a distance as between the boundless and the bounded, between everness and time, between being and becoming, between the all and the naught.
How little we know of God; even the weakest notion holds in it that He is a being, boundlessly far lifted up above all creatures. And the Writ not only strengthens that, it sets that majesty and highness of the Lord of lords before us first in the full light. Already the first chapter of Beginning paints His ungraspable highness; He speaks and it is there. And though the Writ then writes of God in His bending-down love, and says that He dwells with him who is of a broken and lowly spirit, yet He is the High and the Lifted Up, who dwells in everness, Isaiah 57:15. God is great and we grasp it not, Job 26:14, 36:26, 37:5. He is without likeness, Isaiah 40:18, 25, 46:5, dwelling in the dark, 1 Kings 8:12; Isaiah 45:15, in a light none can near, 1 Timothy 6:16. None has seen Him or can see Him, Exodus 33:20; John 1:18, 6:46; 1 Timothy 6:16.
The hidden ground, the depth of God, ḥēqer , and the bound, the utmost, the being of the All-mighty, taklît , is not to be reached, Job 11:7; Sirach 43:34, 35. He is spirit, without shape, Deuteronomy 4:12, 15; John 4:24, 5:37, above all the made, above need, Job 22:2, 3; Acts 17:25; change, James 1:17; time, Isaiah 41:4, 44:6, 48:12; Revelation 1:8, 22:13; room, Acts 17:27, 28 and so on, boundlessly far lifted up. He is not to be written of and with no name to be named. He is without name, His name is wondrous, Genesis 32:29; Judges 13:18; Proverbs 30:4.
2. Even outside the field of special revelation, this highness of God is acknowledged. Among the Brahmins, God is the Unknowable, without names and attributes, only known by him who knows not, Hoekstra, Philosophical Religion. Hartmann, Philosophy of Religion. The Koran describes Allah in many ways in a very human-like manner, but among the followers of Mohammed, many arose who interpreted this description spiritually and even denied all attributes to God, Dozy, Islamism. Houtsma, The Struggle over the Dogma in Islam up to El-Ash’ari. Saussaye, Textbook of Religion. Also, Greek philosophy has often clearly acknowledged and expressed this unknowability of God. According to the well-known story, the philosopher Simonides repeatedly requested longer delay for the answer to the question of the tyrant Hiero, who God was, Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. According to Diogenes, Protagoras began his book on the gods thus: peri men theon ouk echo eidenai oud’ hos eisin oud’ hos ouk eisin polla gar ta kolounta eidenai, he t’ adelotes kai brachys on ho bios ton anthropon , Ritter and Preller, History of Greek Philosophy. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. Carneades of Cyrene not only subjected the belief in the gods to sharp criticism, but also contested the possibility of forming a concept of God. Plato rejected all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic representations of the Godhead and declared in the Timaeus: ton men oun poieten kai patera tonde tou pantos heurein te ergon kai heuronta eis pantas adynaton legein , Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks. And in like sense he says in the Republic, that the Godhead or the idea of the good is not only above all that exists, but also above being itself, epekeina pases ousias . Philo connected this Platonic philosophy with the teaching of the Old Testament and found the same thought expressed in the name Yahweh. Not only is God free from all imperfection that is present in finite, changeable, dependent creatures; no, God far surpasses all perfection of the creatures. He is better than virtue, knowledge, beauty, purer than unity, more blessed than blessedness. He is properly without attributes, apoios , and without names, and therefore cannot be comprehended and described. According to his essence, God is unknowable. We can know that He is, but not what He is. Only being can in the proper sense be ascribed to Him; the name Yahweh is the only one that indicates his essence, Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks. Dähne, Historical Presentation of Jewish-Alexandrian Philosophy of Religion. Schürer, New Testament History. Plotinus went the farthest. Plato still ascribed many attributes to God. Philo supplemented his negative theology with a positive one, in which he describes God as a personal, almighty, perfect being. But in Plotinus, nothing can be said of God except negatively. God is absolutely one, exalted above all multiplicity and therefore not to be described by thought, the good, even not by being, for all these determinations still include a multiplicity. God as the pure unity is indeed the cause of thought, being, the good, but He is distinguished from them and stands transcendent above them. He is unlimited, infinite, without form, and so far distinguished from every creature that even activity, life, thought, consciousness, being, cannot be ascribed to Him. He is unreachable for our thought and for our language. We cannot say what He is, but only what He is not. Even the designations of to hen and to agathon , which Plotinus usually employs, are no description of God's essence, but only of his relation to the creatures, and indicate nothing but his absolute causality, Zeller. The distance between God and his creature became even greater in Gnosticism. It made an absolute separation between the highest God and the world. In nature, in Israel, in Christianity, there was no essential revelation of God but only of the aeons. There was therefore no natural theology, neither innate nor acquired, and likewise no revealed theology. The highest God was absolutely unknowable and unapproachable for the creature; He was bythos agnostos, arrhetos , eternal silence, Irenaeus, Against Heresies.
3. But this doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God and of the unknowability of his being has also been the starting point and fundamental thought of Christian theology. God is not exhausted in his revelation, neither in the creation nor in the re-creation. He cannot fully communicate himself to creatures, for then they would have to be God themselves. Therefore there is no adequate knowledge of God. There is no name that makes his being known to us. There is no concept that fully encompasses him. There is no description that completely defines him. What lies behind the revelation is utterly unknowable. We can approach it neither with our thought or imagination, nor with our language. Already the Epistle of Barnabas c. 5 asks: if the Son of God had not come in the flesh, how then would men have seen him and remained saved? Justin Martyr calls God unutterable, immovable, nameless, Apol. I 61; also words like Father, God, Lord are not proper names ἀλλ’ ἐκ τῶν εὐποιϊῶν καὶ τῶν ἔργων προσρήσεις, Apol. II 6. God cannot appear, cannot go, cannot be seen, etc.; if there is mention of this in the Old Testament, it refers to the Son, who is his messenger, Dial. 127. Also in Irenaeus, adv. haer. IV 20, there occurs the in his time very common but yet incorrect and partly Gnostic contrast between the Father, who is hidden, invisible, unknowable, and the Son, who has revealed him. In Clement of Alexandria, God is pure μονας, Strom. V 11. If we think away all that is creaturely, we do not reach what God is, but what he is not. Form, movement, place, number, property, name, etc., cannot be ascribed to him. If we nevertheless call him one, good, Father, Creator, Lord, etc., then we do not express his proper being thereby but only indicate his power, Strom. V 12. He is even exalted above the one, ὑπὲρ αὐτὴν τὴν μονάδα, Paedag. I 8. In one word, God is, as Athanasius, c. gent. 2 says, ἐπέκεινα πάσης οὐσίας καὶ ἀνθρωπίνης ἐννοίας. And similarly speak Origen, de princ. I 1, 5 sq. c. Cels. VI 65. Eusebius, Praep. Evang. V 1. Theophilus, ad Autol. I 3. Tatian, c. Gr. 5. Minucius Felix, Octav. c. 18. Novatian, de trin. 2. Cyprian, de idol. vanit. 5. Lactantius, Instit. div. I 6. Cf. Münscher-v. Coelln, Dogmengesch. I 132 f. Hagenbach, Dogm. § 37. Schwane, Dogmengesch. I² 72 f. The same conception we also find in Augustine and John of Damascus. Augustine proceeds in the description of God from the concept of being. He is the one who is, as his name Yahweh also indicates; this is his proper name, his nomen in se; all other names are ad nos, Serm. 6 n. 4. Serm. 7 n. 7. Therefore, if we want to say what he is, we only say what he is not in distinction from all finite substances. He is ineffable. It is easier to say what he is not than what he is. He is no earth, sea, heaven, angel, etc., nothing of all that the creature is; this alone I could say what he is not, Enarr. in Ps. 85 n. 12. de doctr. chr. I 6, de ord. II 47. He is thought in such a way that the thought strives to attain something than which nothing better or more sublime exists, de doctr. chr. I 7. But he cannot be thought as he is. For he is exalted above all that is bodily, changeable, created, tract. 23 in Ev. Joh. n. 9. Who is there who thinks of God as he is? quaest. in Jos. VI 29. He is incomprehensible and must be so, for if you comprehend him, it is not God, Serm. 117 n. 5. And if we then finally want to say what we think of him, then we struggle with language. For God is more truly thought than said, and he is more truly than he is thought, de trin. VII 4, de doctr. chr. I 6. If we nevertheless utter something concerning him, then it is not adequate, but it serves only to make us say something and to make us think of a being that surpasses everything, de doctr. chr. I 6. Just as God cannot be properly thought by any intellect, so he cannot be properly defined or determined by any definition, de cogn. verae vitae 7. God is better known by not knowing, de ord. II 44. Similarly, John of Damascus says that the divine is ἄρρητον καὶ ἀκατάληπτον, de fide orth. I c. 1. We speak of God in our way and know what God has revealed of himself; but what God's being is and how he is in all, we do not know, ib. c. 2. That God is, is clear; but τί ἐστιν κατ’ οὐσίαν καὶ φύσιν, this is wholly incomprehensible and unknown. That God is unbegotten, unchangeable, without beginning, etc., says only what he is not. To say what he is, is impossible. He is nothing of all that is, not because he is not, but because he is ὑπὲρ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καὶ ὑπὲρ αὐτὸ τὸ εἶναι. What we say positively of God does not indicate his nature, but the relations of his nature, τὰ περὶ τὴν φύσιν, ib. c. 4 cf. c. 9.
4. Even stronger was this unknowableness of God's being taught by Pseudo-Dionysius, on whom Damascene already relies, and by Scotus Eriugena. According to the Areopagite, there is no thought, no saying, no word that sets forth God's being, de div. nom. c. 1 § 1. With unusual, metaphorical names God is therefore marked. He is hyperousios aoristia , suprasubstantial endlessness, he hyper noun henotes , above mind oneness, to hyper dianoian hen , that above reckoning one, hyperousios ousia kai nous anoetos kai logos arrhetos , alogia kai anoesia kai anonumia , after none of the beings being, ibid. We cannot set forth nor think that one, unknown, above being, above good, above all name and word and understanding, above all the finite uplifted being, ibid. c. 1 § 5. Only because He is the cause and the beginning of all, can we, like the Scripture, name Him after His workings, ibid. c. 1 § 4. He is thus on one hand anonymos and on the other polyonymos , ibid. 1 § 6. But also the positive names, which we give to God on ground of His works, do not make us know Him in His being, for they come to Him in wholly other and endlessly fuller way than to the creatures, de myst. theol. c. 1 § 2. Therefore is the negative god-lore better than the positive, for it makes us know God as uplifted above all creature. Yet it too gives us no knowledge of God's being. For at last God overtops both all negation and all affirmation, all thesis and all aphaeresis , de myst. theol. c. 5. Wholly in the same spirit reasons Eriugena. God is above all the creaturely, also above being and knowing uplifted, de div. nat. I 7 sq. II 23. We know only that He is, not what He is, ibid. I 13, II 28, V 26. What we of Him predicate, is He only in unproper way, and He is it thus also again not, I 36. The affirmative god-lore is unproper, metaphorical I 14 sq. 37. It is overtopped by the negative. Verius enim negatur Deus quid eorum, quod de eo praedicatur, quam affirmatur esse , I 76, II 30, III 20. Melius nescientia scitur, cujus ignorantia vera est sapientia I 66. Therefore are His predicates best by super or plusquam filled out. He is superessential, more than truth, more than wisdom etc. I 14. Yea so much goes He all that creature is beyond, that He not wrongly with the name of the nothing, nihilum , can be marked, III 19. Cf. Stöckl, Philos. des M. A. I 45 f. Baur, Die christl. Lehre von der Dreiein. und Menschw. Gottes II 274 f. Doedes, Inl. tot de leer van God 133 v.
5. Although the Scholasticism now expressed itself more carefully on various points and in particular ascribed a higher value to the positive theology than Pseudo-Dionysius and Erigena; yet it also fully agreed with the teaching that the essence of God in itself was unknowable for man. Anselm says that the names of God's essence only indicate by similitude, Monol. c. 63, that the relative properties of his essence cannot be predicated, and the absolute only in a quidditative, not in a qualitative sense, Monol. c. 15-17. According to Albertus Magnus, God is exalted above all being and thinking. He cannot be reached by human thinking, attingitur sed non capitur per comprehensionem. No name expresses his essence. He is incomprehensible and unnameable, cf. Stöckl, Philos. des M. A. II 370. Thomas distinguishes three kinds of knowledge of God, visio Dei per essentiam, cognitio per fidem and cognitio per rationem naturalem. The first far exceeds the natural knowledge of man and is only to be obtained by supernatural grace. It is reserved for heaven, is granted here on earth only a few times, and yet even then never makes a comprehension of God possible, S. Theol. I qu. 12 art. 1-11. Here on earth the knowledge of God is mediate. We cannot know God as He is in Himself, but only secundum quod omnium prima et eminentissima causa is. From the effects we can ascend to the cause, ib. art. 12. And it is the same with the knowledge which we receive of God from his special revelation through faith. We know Him better thereby, in quantum plures et excellentiores effectus ejus nobis demonstrantur, ib. art. 13. But it gives no knowledge of God per essentiam. There is no knowledge of God's essence, of his quidditas, per speciem propriam; but we know only habitudinem ipsius ad creaturas, ib. art. 12. There is no name that adequately expresses his essence. His essentia stands high above that which we understand of God and signify by word, ib. qu. 13 art. 1. The positive names may indicate God's essence, yet they do it in a very imperfect way, just as the creatures from which they are derived represent Him imperfectly. God is knowable only secundum quod repraesentatur in perfectionibus creaturarum, ib. art. 2. But with the further development of Scholasticism, this truth of the incomprehensibility of God was pushed to the background. The doctrine of God was unfolded ever more broadly. Existence, names, essence, persons, attributes were developed so finely and precisely that no place remained for the incomprehensibility of God. It became an ordinary attribute alongside the others, treated just as extensively and dialectically. Duns Scotus argued against Thomas that there was indeed a quidditative, though imperfect, knowledge of God, Sent. I dist. 3 qu. 2. Against this the nominalism already rose in opposition and became more or less skeptical. Durandus said that there was no cognitio abstractiva of the divine essence. And Occam declared: nec divina essentia, nec divina quidditas nec aliquid intrinsecum Deo, nec aliquid, quod est realiter Deus, potest hic cognosci a nobis, ita quod nihil aliud a Deo occurrat in ratione objecti, Stöckl, Philos. des M. A. II 1009. The mysticism sought yet another knowledge of God than by the way of dialectics. And toward the end of the Middle Ages, Nicholas of Cusa argued in his writing de docta ignorantia that no truth was to be obtained by reason, but only by faith, which was mystically conceived as a new organ in man. After the Reformation, the Roman theology returned to Scholasticism and also adopted the doctrine of the unknowability of God's essence in the sense of Thomas, e.g., Sylvius, Comm. in Thomam, ed. 4 Antv. 1693 I p. 96 sq. Billuart, Cursus theol. I 1747 p. 228 sq. Petavius, Theol. dogm. I c. 5 VIII c. 6. Theol. Wirceb. ed. Paris. 1880 III 73 sq. Jansen, Praelect. Theol. II 78 sq. C. Pesch, Praelect. dogm. 1895 II p. 46 sq. etc. At the Lateran Council under Innocent III, this doctrine was even ecclesiastically established by Rome and pronounced: Deus ineffabilis est.
6. The Reformation theology has brought no change in this. Luther made in his work De Servo Arbitrio a distinction between Deus absconditus and revelatus , between Deus ipse and verbum Dei . And he came later more and more to hold only to the latter, that is, to God as He has revealed Himself in Christ; what is above us, nothing to us. But yet in that the full essence of God did not arise for him. And there remained in God a dark, hidden background, namely, Deus ut est in sua natura et majestate , Deus absolutus . And this was according to Luther plainly unknowable, ununderstandable, unapproachable. Later Lutheran theologians did not speak of such a sharp distinction between God's essence and His revelation, but all teach yet that no fitting name and no proper setting forth of God can be given. The Reformed thought at one with this. Their deep loathing of all creature-godmaking made them everywhere sharply sunder between what is God's and what is of the creature. They made more than any other theology earnest with the saying that the finite is not fit to hold the infinite. Zwingli said: what God is, we know not from ourselves, just as much as the beetle knows not what man is. Calvin deemed it an idle guesswork to search out what God is; for us it is enough to know what kind He is and what befits His kind. Later theologians spoke even much stronger of the unknowableness of the godlike essence. Because the finite cannot grasp the infinite, all names of God serve not to make us know His essence, but to mark out in some wise after our grasping that of God which we need to know. The sayings: God cannot be set forth, God has no name, the finite is not fit to hold the infinite, come back with all theologians. They all teach with one mind that God goes endlessly far beyond our understanding, our forethinking, our speech. So says for instance Polanus, the attributes which in Holy Writ are given to God, make plain not His kind and essence. They make us know much more who and how He is not, than who and how He is. Whatever is said of God, is not God, because He is unspeakable. No godlike attributes make plain enough the essence and kind of God, because that is endless. But the endless cannot be made plain worthily, enough, and fully by that which is finite.
7. But also in the Reformed theology, the significance of this incomprehensibility of God was seen less and less. It was still taught but stood entirely by itself and exercised no influence. The framework in which the doctrine of God was treated soon stood almost unchangeably fixed. It was even worse in other directions. Socinianism did not enter at all into the question of the knowability of God. It placed not the least interest in the knowledge of God's essence. To know God was about the same as to know that He is absolute Lord, Fock, Der Socin. Crell wrote a work De Deo ejusque attributis , and in it proved God's existence with all kinds of arguments, but refrained from all questions about God's essence, knowability, and so on. Conrad Vorstius wrote a Tractatus de Deo s. de natura et attributis Dei in 1610, which fell into the same Socinian errors, cf. Acta Syn. Dord. Also the Remonstrants felt no need to enter into metaphysical questions; they rather warned against vain speculation and urged simplicity. That which was strictly needful to know was only the will of God. The worship of God is much more needful than the knowledge of God, Episcopius, Instit. theol. Lib. 4 sect. 2 cap. 1. Limborch, Theol. Chr. Lib. II c. 1. Rationalism thought itself certain of God's existence and attached little value to the knowledge of His essence. It is as if the majesty and the greatness of God is no longer realized at all. Leaving aside all so-called metaphysical questions, one hastens to the will of God, to know and do it. Not in the knowing of God, but in the doing of His will lies eternal life. Bretschneider calls the question entirely needless, whether God can be defined, Dogm. Syst. Entw.
But when this truth of the unknowability of the divine being had been almost wholly forgotten by theology, it was brought to mind again by philosophy. Rationalism thought that with its proofs for God's being and with its teaching of God's attributes it stood on firm, scientific ground. But Kant, although with his teaching of God, virtue, and immortality still wholly caught in rationalism and moralism, yet brought a great change in the foundation on which this teaching rested. Just as sensibility brings with it the forms of space and time a priori, and the understanding the categories, so also reason contains a priori synthetic principles and rules, especially this principle, that it climbs from the conditioned to the unconditioned. Thereby it forms three transcendent ideas: soul, world, God. But these three ideas cannot be proved objectively, but only derived subjectively from the nature of reason. The object of these ideas we cannot perceive; therefore we can also obtain no scientific knowledge of them. Judged scientifically, they are paralogisms, antinomies, ideals. Our knowledge reaches no further than the realm of experience. These ideas therefore do not increase our knowledge, but only regulate it; they bring unity into our concepts and make us view everything as if there were God, the soul, the world. Science can neither prove nor deny the reality of these ideas. Psychology, cosmology (teleology), and theology are therefore no sciences. The critique of pure reason ends with a negative result. Now practical reason does make us accept the reality of these ideas. And indeed Kant ascribes to God understanding and will and other attributes, but yet the being of God remains hidden. Practical reason knows well that these three ideas have objective reality, but no more. It does not increase the content of our scientific knowledge. Speculative reason can do nothing with these ideas but regulate and purify our knowledge, and makes use of the idea of God to counteract and ward off anthropomorphism as the source of superstition and fanaticism. When understanding and will are ascribed to God, then that is only a knowledge of God in practical relation, but in no respect a speculative knowledge. Whoever abstracts the anthropomorphic from it holds nothing but the word. The idea of God does not belong in metaphysics, which does not exist, but in morals.
Fichte at first stood wholly on the same standpoint as Kant. In his Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation , he lets faith in God rest on the postulates of reason, ascribes to God also certain attributes such as holiness, blessedness, almightiness, righteousness, all-knowingness, eternity. But thereby we have still no definite concept of God, and do not know his being as it is in itself; that would not promote but harm pure morality. Religion always represents God humanly, in time and space, and even bodily, and does no harm thereby, as long as it does not come into conflict with morality and as long as this sensible representation is not held to be objectively valid. It must all be understood as condescension to our subjective need. Only such a revelation can be of divine origin that gives an anthropomorphized God, not as objectively but only as subjectively valid.
And also Schleiermacher, although in many respects differing from Kant and Fichte and joining himself more closely to Spinoza, yet agreed with them in the teaching of the unknowability of God. The idea of the unity of being and thinking, of the real and the ideal, that is, the idea of God, is the presupposition of all our knowing, the ground of our thinking; but it is not to be grasped in thought and remains behind the curtain. As soon as we wish to bring the Absolute nearer to us, it becomes finitized in our thinking, and we speak in images. It is in one word unreachable for knowing. In his Christian Faith Schleiermacher presented the same thoughts, though in a more religious and less elaborated form. God is the Whence of our existence; and as such an absolute causality He is no object of our knowing but only content of the feeling of absolute dependence.
8. Since then, the teaching of the unknowability of God has more and more sunk into the awareness of the newer times. Hegel indeed stood on another standpoint. Acknowledging that the godly forethinking is unfitting and only fit for the folk, he yet deemed the wisdom-lore able to strip this forethinking of its sense-like shape, and thus to uplift it to a fitting understanding. The wit, in his deeming, rises little by little through sundry steps to the uttermost being, sees the truth then face to face, and knows as its being the wit, the thinking, the understanding itself. The wisdom-lore, the clean knowledge, or namely the lore of wit is the besetting of God in his being, in himself. It understands the Utter in its fitting, fitting shape, as thinking, in the shape of the understanding, Werke III. In his ghost many tried, such as Strauss, Gl. I, Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. II², Hartmann, Philos. des Unbew. II⁹, Religionsphilos., Scholten, Initia, L. H. K. II, to come ever nearer to the overstepping work-likeness through cleansing and deepening of the understandings. But with others, Hegel's wisdom-lore led to a wholly other outcome; they said that in the God-idea the forethinking could never be overcome, and therefore came to godlessness. Feuerbach said that the personal God was nothing other than the being of man himself, and god-lore nothing but man-lore. All that is said of God is taken from man, not only personhood but all eigens and names. Belief is a god-making of man himself. Man cannot rise above his own being and therefore God is and stays ever a sense-like, man-like being, not only in the Christly dogmatics but also in the wisdom-lore, Wesen des Christ. And many spoke likewise and threw away with the man-shaped forethinking the whole God-idea, for byspell Büchner, Kraft u. Stoff¹⁶, Id. Der Gottesbegriff und dessen Bedeutung in der Gegenwart². Haeckel, Nat. Schöpfungsgesch.⁵. Strauss, Der alte u. d. neue Glaube². Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral. But this godlessness went too far for others. Heeding the boundedness of man's knowing-might, which ever stays moving within the bounded, these deemed that man must bound himself to what is given under beholding (positivism), hold back from all saying about being and kind of the over-sense-like (abstentionism), and thus in this behold only his utter unknowing must acknowledge (agnosticism). In France the task of knowledge was bounded to the setting forth and clearing of the showings by Auguste Comte, who therefore also shut god-lore out of the ring of knowledges, cf. I. In England it was foremost Herbert Spencer, who with sundry proofs fought the knowability of God, First Principles, 5th ed. And in Germany one turned, after being sated with Hegel's all-wit-lore, back to the judging wisdom-lore of Kant. So has agnosticism in the last half of this hundred-year become nearly all-ruling. All over-thinking is mistrusted; from guessing one has a loathing; fast stands only what is set-forth and belongs to the field of the straight knowledges. God-lore is so come under the dread of this agnosticism, that it hardly dares anymore to speak of knowledge of God; it seeks as much as may be to shut out all over-thinking and to bound itself to the belief-like; it shames itself for its own name and has let itself be rebaptized into a knowledge of belief. For, though agnosticism truly is death for god-lore, yet is this still upheld by many under another shape. Kant won back through the workly wit what he had lost through the thoughtly. Spencer leaves room for a belief-like honoring of the Unknowable. Already before him had Sir William Hamilton, in his writing On the philosophy of the unconditioned, Edinb. Rev. Oct., and Dr. Henry Longueville Mansel in his work The limits of religious thought examined in eight lectures, preached before the university of Oxford, said that our thinking, since ever bound to room, time, sundering, withstanding etc., can never break through to the utter, though it be that on belief grounds the forethinking of God as a personal being must be held fast, cf. Dorner, Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. VI. To a like twofoldness came also the New-Kantians in Germany. Thinking may bring us at its best to the understanding of the Utter, in belief we have yet not enough therewith. Here we have need of a God who is like us, whom we forethink as a person, and who cares as a Father for his children. Indeed such a belief-like forethinking is then ever under judging from the side of knowledge; it is not the highest and the true, but there is no more to reach, Lipsius, Dogm. Ritschl, Metaph. u. Rel. Rechtf. u. Vers. III². Rauwenhoff, Wijsb. v. d. godsd. Hoekstra, Wijsg. godsd. II. And likewise have others in mankind-likeness, rightful ideal-making, ideal-shaping, ghost-lore, god-wisdom, buddhism etc. sought a payback for what knowledge had taken from them in the Christly god-lore, cf. I.
9. The grounds on which this agnosticism can rely are of very great weight. First, it can make use of the argument that from of old has been brought forward by the sophists and skeptics against the possibility of all knowledge, namely, that all human knowledge is subjective and relative. Nothing in the world stands alone by itself; object and subject are dependent on each other. Things and their properties exist only then and in such a way as they stand in relation to someone's perception; something becomes something only through the relation to the senses of the subject. We can therefore never say what a thing is in its being, independent of our perception; we can only declare that something at a given moment appears thus to us; man is the measure of all things. This argument is indeed of great meaning; but it proves too much; if it were valid, it would make not only the knowledge of God but all knowledge of man and world impossible; moreover, this idealism has already been discussed and can therefore be left out of consideration here. But agnosticism has various grounds that are specially brought forward against the knowability of God. Philosophy and theology were indeed, as appeared above, at all times convinced of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Negative predicates say only what God is not, and positive ones belong to him in a wholly other way than they are found in creatures. The boundedness, the finiteness, the man-likeness of our knowledge of God was acknowledged by all. But in more recent times the unattainability of the knowledge of God has been argued in other and harsher ways. Subjectively, namely, attention has been drawn to the bounded nature of the human knowing faculty; and objectively to the inner contradiction to which every concept of God is subject. The first was done by Kant, the second by Fichte.
Kant examined the human knowing faculty and came to the conclusion that the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding are brought along by the subject itself, have validity in the world of phenomena, but also make all true knowledge of the noumena impossible for us. The transcendent ideas of God, world, soul are indeed rules for our acting, and a moral man cannot act otherwise than as if an objective reality corresponds to those three ideas; but this cannot be proved. Fichte added to this the objection that the concepts of absolute and personality can never be united with each other. Already Spinoza said that all determination is a negation, that a thing therefore, insofar as it becomes more determined and concrete, is also all the more finite and bounded. Thereby it ceases to be that which other things are: if something is white, it can no longer be red or black. God therefore cannot be something determined alongside and in distinction from the creatures, but he is the substance of all creatures, the one, infinite being, so that all that is, is in him. This philosophical premise was applied by Fichte to the concept of personality; personality and self-consciousness were things that we have found in ourselves and that cannot be thought without boundedness and finiteness. If we transfer them to God, we make him into a finite, bounded, human being. The moral world order is therefore the one essentially needful thing in religion; we need no more; a special, personal existence of God is unnecessary for religion, and it is also unprovable, yes impossible and in conflict with itself; whoever desires such a God is still caught in eudaemonism.
This reasoning has then been spread in wide circles and returns every moment. In the essence of the matter, this opposition between absolute and personal is no other than that which in Christian theology has always been felt and expressed in the negative and positive, the apophatic and the cataphatic theology. However much the proofs against the knowability of God are time and again presented in another form, in fact they are always the same and always come down to this. Man is bound to sensory perception and always draws the stuff of his thought from the visible world; he does not behold the spiritual and cannot lift himself up to the world of invisible things, because he always remains bound to space and time. Also his thinking is material and finite and bounded; just as the eagle remains enclosed within the atmosphere and the fish within the pond, so our thinking always moves within the circle of the finite. Even more, thinking is of such a nature that it of itself assumes a separation between subject and object, which standing over against each other and bounding each other can neither of them be absolute. To think is to condition, Hamilton therefore said; and Mansel expressed the same thus: distinction is necessarily limitation; knowledge of the absolute is therefore a contradiction, for it indicates that one has knowledge concerning something that is absolute, thus stands in no relation, and precisely as known by a subject yet again does stand in relation.
If now the nature of thinking is so arranged, and if we nevertheless still want to think and know God, then we always do one of two things: either we draw the absolute down within the circle of the finite and we make God into a personal, bounded, human being; or we strive in our thinking to rise above all bounds of space and time, strip our thought concerning God of all likeness to the finite creature, but then also hold nothing over in our thinking than an empty, abstract, contentless concept, which has not the least worth for religion. Yes, even that concept escapes us; under our thinking the absolute becomes nothing. Absoluteness and personality, infinity and causality, unchangeableness and communicability, absolute transcendence above and likeness to the creature seem in the concept of God to be irreconcilable. We are in an unsolvable antinomy. It is as if we are left only the choice between a coarse realism and a thin idealism, between a God who is nothing but a man writ large, or a cold abstraction that freezes and kills the religion of the heart.
10. To a noteworthy height this teaching of the unknowability of God can be assented to and wholeheartedly affirmed. Scripture and church both uphold with stress the unsearchable majesty and the sovereign highness of God. There is no knowledge of God as He is in Himself. We are men, and He is the Lord our God. There is no name that fully utters His being; no bound that hems Him in. He is above our shaping, above our thought, above our tongue, endlessly far uplifted. He is like no creature to be matched; all folks are reckoned by Him as less than naught and emptiness. Deo nomen non est. Deus definiri nequit. He can be apprehended, not comprehended. There is some gnōsis but no katalēpsis of God. So it is said throughout all Scripture and through the whole Christian theology. And when a shallow rationalism deemed an adequate knowledge of God possible, Christian theology has always strongly fought against it. According to Socrates, Hist. Eccl. IV 7, Eunomius, a follower of Arius, is said to have taught that he knew God as well as himself. God's being consisted according to him only in the agennēsia , and therein he had a clear, plain, adequate grasp of the divine being; God was no more known to Himself and no less to man than was uttered in this predicate. Later Spinoza said that he had as clear a grasp of God as of a triangle, though he did not thereby claim Deum omnino cognoscere , Epist. 60. And in this age Hegel taught that the absolute in conceptual philosophy came to full self-awareness and thus was fully and adequately known by the thinker; the God-awareness in us is nothing but God's awareness of Himself. God is, so far as He is known by us, that is, so far as He knows Himself in us. This rationalism has been fought and rejected in the Christian church with all might, Basil, Hexaem. hom. 1. Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 28 etc. cf. Schwane, D. G. II 27 f. Even a deep religious stake is bound up with this. Augustine once uttered it in this way: we speak of God, what wonder if you do not grasp Him? Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus. Let there be a godly owning of unknowing rather than a rash claiming of knowing. To touch God somewhat with the mind is great bliss; but to grasp Him is wholly impossible, Serm. 38 in Ev. Joan. Therefore God is the one sole aim of all our love, because He is the Endless and Ungraspable. Though however Scripture and church thus as it were take the premises of agnosticism and are even deeper than Kant or Spencer steeped in man's boundedness and God's matchless greatness, yet they draw therefrom another outcome, an outcome that was uttered by Hilary de trin. II 7 thus: perfect knowledge is to know God so that, though not unknowable, you know Him unutterable. The knowledge we have of God is wholly of its own kind. It can be called positive, insofar as by it we acknowledge a being that is endless and in being set apart from all bounded creatures. It is on the other side negative, because we can give no predicate to God as we think it in creatures. And it is therefore an analogical one, since it is the knowledge of a being that is in itself unknowable, yet can make something of itself known in creatures.
Herein lies indeed something of an antinomy; or rather, agnosticism suffers from a confusion of concepts and thus sees here an irreconcilable contradiction, but Christian theology beholds here an adorable mystery. It is wholly beyond our grasp, that and how God in the creature, eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in the finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all as it were in the nothing, can reveal Himself and in some measure make Himself known. This mystery cannot be understood; it can only be thankfully acknowledged. But mystery is something other than contradiction. That is what pantheistic philosophy has made of it. When it identifies the absolute with the indeterminate and calls every determination a limitation and negation, then it is guilty of a confusion of concepts. There is a heaven-wide difference between infinite and endless, between almighty and the sum of all power, between absolute being and the sum of all being, between eternity and the inclusion of all moments of time, and so also between the absolute and the indeterminate, unbounded, limitless. Pantheism first lays its own concept of God into these words and can then easily accuse theism of being in conflict therewith. That God is the Infinite and nevertheless can reveal Himself in finite creatures and has indeed revealed Himself, is indeed the acknowledgment of an incomprehensible secret, namely of the wonder of creation, but by no means the admission of a palpable absurdity. Finite being cannot detract from God's infinity, if it but has its absolute being in God's being. And so also our knowledge is no limitation of God, because it is grounded in Him Himself, is only possible through Him, and has Him Himself as Infinite for its object and content.
Moreover, if the absolute excludes all limitation and every determination is a negation, then it is not only impermissible to speak of God as personality, but it is equally wrong to call Him still the absolute, the one, the good, the being, the substance, etc. Pantheism is under the delusion that it is done with the concept of God when it has removed personality and self-consciousness as contradictory elements from it. And the theistic philosophers from the first half of this century, such as J. H. Fichte, Carus, Steffens, Weisse, Ulrici, and others, in reaction have clung all too much to this concept of personality, and thought that in the concept of absolute personality they possessed an adequate description of God's essence. Certainly many good observations have been made over against pantheism to prove that personality is not in conflict with God's absolute essence. If absolute is not understood as boundless, as endlessly extended in all directions, then it is not to be seen how personality would be in conflict therewith. Therein is only implied that God's self-consciousness is as rich and deep, as infinite as His being. Personality may indeed awaken in us humans over against a not-I, but in God it is the eternal summation of Himself with Himself, the infinite self-knowledge and self-determination, and therefore not dependent on a not-I. J. H. Fichte, The Idea of Personality and Individual Continuance, 1855. J. W. Hanne, The Idea of Absolute Personality, 2nd ed. 1865. Weisse, Philosophical Dogmatics I. Lotze, Microcosmus III. Rothe, Theological Ethics § 39. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation III. Kaftan, The Essence of Christian Religion. Lipsius, Dogmatics § 229. Martensen, Dogmatics 75. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I. Lange, Dogmatics I II. Bruch, Doctrine of the Divine Attributes. Philippi, Ecclesiastical Faith II. Hodge, Systematic Theology I. Bovon, Christian Dogmatics I. Doedes, Introduction to the Doctrine of God.
But yet it is true, what the elder Fichte said, that personality is a concept borrowed from ourselves and therefore, transferred to God, always contains something imperfect. The concept of personality, used of God, is inadequate and in principle nothing better than all other anthropomorphisms in which we speak of God. The Christian church and theology has also never used this word for God's essence and has only hesitatingly and for lack of better spoken of persons in the three modes of subsistence in that essence. But at the same time it is hereby clear that pantheism has gained nothing yet when it points to the incongruity of this concept. The opposition between absoluteness and personality is essentially the same as that between negative and positive theology. Even if the word personality is wrong, thereby nothing is yet factually decided. The same question therefore returns again and again. If every determination is a negation, then God may not be called the one, the being, the absolute either. Then all thinking and speaking about God is forbidden. If we, who are humans, may not speak of God in an analogous, human way, then nothing remains for us but to be silent. For to think and speak of God in a divine way, we cannot. But then all religion falls away too. If God cannot be known, He cannot be felt either and enjoyed in feeling. Feeling is as finite as understanding, and unites and humanizes God in the same way. There is then no possibility that God reveals Himself objectively in His creatures or that we subjectively perceive Him through any organ. All religion is then sacrilege, and all theology is then blasphemy against God.
11. The question of the knowability of God is thereby brought back to this other one, whether God has willed and been able to reveal himself in the world of creatures. For it is fully true, what Kant says, that our knowledge stretches no further than our experience. If God has not revealed himself, then there is also no knowledge of him. But if he has revealed himself, then there is something, however little, that falls under our observation and thus can lead to knowledge. Then it speaks for itself, that the denial of the knowability of God fully falls together with the denial that God has revealed himself in the works of his hands. Agnosticism falls back into the error of the old Gnosticism. God is the unspeakable Depth, eternal silence; there is no fellowship and no kinship between him and his creatures. The whole world is in the fullest sense godless; there is no trace of God to be noticed in the world; the world is the product of a lower God, of a demiurge, of chance; man is not shaped after God's image but is simply a product of nature without God in the world; there is no religion, no theology possible, neither from the creation nor from the re-creation. God and world are utterly sundered. Yes, even worse, agnosticism cannot escape the outcome that God cannot reveal himself. It shuts him up in himself, it makes him into an unknown, unseen might, that has no awareness and no will, that can in no wise share itself, that is eternal silence. And the world is lifted up, even as in Manichaeism, to a might alongside and over against God, which can in no wise take him into itself, and is fully unfit to shine forth anything of his glory. Agnosticism thus ends in truth in atheism, of which it is only the nineteenth-century shape and name. Yet agnosticism mostly goes not so far, and upholds yet the being of The Unknowable. But then it suffers at once from an inner unevenness, which is unbearable: Augustine already marked that the stance, that we know nothing of God, already takes for granted a great measure of knowledge about God, and that there was thus a strife of words. For if we name God unspeakable, then we say at that same blink something and much of him, so that he is again not unspeakable. "For it is no small part of knowledge.... if before we can know what God is, we can already know what he is not." The not-knowing is itself a positive, a wide-reaching knowing, it is no small beginning of the knowledge of God. It says already so much, to know that he is nothing of all that which is creature. And so it is also with the agnostics. Spencer, for instance, says that we are driven by our thinking to take on the being of an utter being as ground of the all-world, though we because of our finiteness and boundedness can shape no thought of it. But if we are so finite and bounded, how do we come to shape the thought of such an utter being and take on its being. And if we truly must take on the being of such an utter being, why would then any knowledge of that being be fully unworkable? No single agnostic therefore bounds himself to the "it is not clear." Spencer says, for instance, every blink that we know not the absolute, and yet he has an idea of it, proves its being and writes also sundry traits to it. He says that it is not a naysaying but a yaysaying thought, that it is the cause of all, that it is a might, most like to our will, that it is boundless, everlasting, everywhere, and so on. This is truly no agnosticism anymore but a very set knowledge and a fairly well outlined God-thought. Agnosticism, in itself unbearable and fearful of atheism, does in the end service to make right a pantheistic God-thought. Cf. on and against agnosticism: Flint, Antitheistic theories 3 ed. 1885. James Orr, The Christian view of God and the world 1893. A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, Edinburgh Clark 1892. John Caird, An introduction to the philosophy of religion, Glasgow 1880. G. J. Lucas, Agnosticism and religion, being an examination of Spencer's religion of the unknowable preceded by a history of agnosticism. Baltimore, Murphy and Co. 1895. Article Secularism in Herzog².
1. Just as earlier with religion, so it also appears now with the knowledge of God, that it can have its origin only in revelation. If God does not become manifest in his creatures, then there is naturally no knowledge of Him possible. But if He displays his virtues in the world of creatures, then the knowability of God can no longer be contested. Naturally, thereby the nature and the measure of that knowledge is not determined. All who teach the knowability of God gladly agree that this knowledge is entirely unique and of very limited scope. For, although God is to some extent manifest in his creatures, there remains in Him an infinite fullness of power and life, which does not come to light. His knowledge and power do not coincide with the world and do not pour themselves out fully therein. He cannot even reveal himself completely to and in creatures, for the finite does not grasp the infinite; no one knows the Father except the Son, Matthew 11:27 cf. Deuteronomy 29:29. Moreover, that which God reveals of himself in and through creatures is already so rich and so deep that it can never be fully known by any human. We do not understand the world of created things in so many respects and stand every moment on all sides before riddles and mysteries; how then should we understand the revelation of God in all its richness and depth? But thereby the knowability of God is not annulled. The incomprehensibility of God annuls this knowability so little that it rather presupposes and confirms it; the richness of the divine being that surpasses all knowledge forms precisely a necessary and important element of our knowledge of God. It remains firm that God is knowable to us in the same way and to the same degree as He reveals himself to us in creatures.
That there is now a showing forth of God in the world can truly hardly be gainsaid. First of all, the Holy Writ leaves us no moment in doubt about this. It sets up no altar for the unknown God, but proclaims that God who made the world, Acts 17:23, whose might and godhead can be beheld from the made things by the human mind, Rom. 1:19, who above all shaped man after his likeness and image, Gen. 1:26, as his offspring, that lives and stirs in Him, Acts 17:28, through seers and messengers, above all through his Son himself has spoken to him, Heb. 1:1, and now ongoingly shows himself to and in him through Word and Ghost, Matt. 16:17, John 14:23, and so on. According to Holy Writ, the whole world is a shaping and thus also a showing forth of God; there is in utter meaning nothing godless.
And this witness of Writ is upheld from all sides. There is no godless world, there are no godless folks, there are also no godless men. The world cannot be thought of as godless, for then it could not be the work of God but must be the shaping of an antigod. And now dualism, which in belief and wisdom-lore has oft arisen, has indeed beheld a fiendish beginning in stuff, but in the world yet always acknowledged a binding of thought and stuff, a strife of light and darkness. There is no one who in utter meaning and steadfastly can wholly and fully deny the knowableness of God, and thus His showing forth in the world. Agnosticism itself is proof thereof, even as skepticism cannot uphold itself save with help of what it fights. And just therefore, because the world is not to be thought godless, therefore there are also no godless and belief-less folks. Indeed this was claimed by Socinus, Tract. Theol. c. 2, the auctor. Script. c. 2, Locke, Essay on human understanding I ch. 4 § 8, and by many in this hundred-year, for example, Büchner, Kraft u. Stoff 380 f., Darwin, Descent of Man 1884 I 127. But this feeling has been enough gainsaid and now nearly wholly given up, Moor, Comm. I 57. M. Vitringa, Comm. I 16. Flint, Antitheistic theories, 3 ed. p. 250-289, 519-532. Peschel, Völkerkunde S 260. Zöckler, Das Kreuz Christi 1875 S. 417 f. The known saying of Cicero, that there is no folk so wild or it believes in the gods, is hundred-year to hundred-year upheld. This deed is of great meaning. That wherein all men by their inborn kind agree, cannot be false, Cic. de nat. deor. I 17. For the fancies of beliefs the day wipes out, the judgments of kind it strengthens, ib. II 2. And so there are at last also no godless men. There is not so much sundering over the being as well over the beingness of God. Indeed there is a workaday godlessness, a life without God in the world, Ps. 14:1, 53:2, Eph. 2:12. But the aware lore-wise godlessness in utter meaning is seldom, if it ever befalls. The word godlessness is however oft used in kin-wise meaning, not as gainsaying of the Godhead overall, but of a set Godhead. The Greeks blamed Socrates of godlessness, Xenophon, Memor. I 1. Cicero reckoned Protagoras, Prodicus to the godless, because they gainsaid the folk-gods, de nat. deor. I 42. The Christ-folk were therefore many times blamed by the Heathens of godlessness, Suicerus s. v. atheos. And the Christ-folk used on their turn that name for who gainsaid the God of showing forth, ib. The Roman have sometimes reckoned Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin to the godless, Buddeus, de Atheismo 1747 p. 116 sq. In the newer tide J. G. Fichte was openly blamed of godlessness, because he held the upright world-order itself for God. And still the name of godless is well given to them who know no other might than stuff, such as Feuerbach, Strauss, Büchner, Haeckel, Czolbe, Dühring, cf. A. Drews, Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant II 235 f. And indeed, if the stuff-folk acknowledge nothing else than stuff and shifting of stuff, then they are godless and wish themselves to be held therefor. But this befalls nearly never. In utter meaning taken, as gainsaying of an utter might, then godlessness is nearly unthinkable. All acknowledge at last again a might, that as God is worshipped. Strauss asks for his all-world a piety, as the believer for his God, Der alte u. d. neue Glaube 141 f. Godlessness and stuff-lore shifts oft into all-god-lore, Büchner, Kraft u. Stoff 3, 70, 71 f., Haeckel, Nat. Schöpfungsgesch. 20, 32, 64 Id. Der Monismus als Band zw. Rel. u. Wiss. 1893. That comes, because man cannot withdraw himself from the acknowledging of a highest might. At the same eye-blink that he gainsays the true God, he decks himself a false God. Belief sits thereto too deep in man's kind and the showing forth of God speaks too loud. Even when in some tides the belief-wise unheeding and doubt-lore grips deep and far about itself, such as for example in the hundred-year of Pericles, of emperor Augustus, of the Renaissance, and also in this hundred-year, then yet belief always comes above again. Rather man grips the coarsest over-belief, than that he can hold out for long by the bare, cold unbelief. But we can even go further. Not only does godlessness in utter meaning nearly never befall, but even in that meaning it is seldom, that it would gainsay a selfly God, who has claim on our worship. The kind-lore, the stuff-life-lore, the all-god-lore are without doubt steerings, that oft show themselves. But they are steerings, not so much on belief-wise as well on wisdom-lore ground. They have never of themselves, freely arisen, but owe their birth to picking on the belief-wise fore-thoughts by others. They are not teaching but picking; and they serve therefore always but for a tide and in a bounded ring. A folk, a fellowship, a church, a gathering of such kind-lorers and all-god-lorers is unthinkable and unbeing; the all-god-lorers acknowledge this themselves, the belief-wise fore-thought is for the lesser man needful, but only the wisdom-seeker lifts himself to the clean understanding. Therefrom follows, that the belief in a selfly God is kindly and even; it comes everywhere of itself and by all men up. But godlessness, even as gainsaying of a selfly God, is outlier. It is wisdom-yearning, no belief. There lies truth in the sharp word of Schopenhauer: an unselfly God is no God at all, but only a misused word, an unthought, a withstanding in hanging, a shibboleth for wisdom-teachers, who, after they must give up the thing, strive to slip through with the word, Par. u. Paral. I 123. cf. Welt als Wille u. Vorst. II 398, 406, 739. Therefore there is also a set will needful, to not believe in a God, in a selfly God. That God is not, believes not, save he to whom it profits that God is not. There are no godless, who fast and sure, unto the torment-death, are swayed of their unbelief. Because it is un-even and un-kindly, rests not on straightway feelings but on midway proofs and fallible reasonings, therefore it is never sure of its thing. The proofs for the being of a selfly God may be weak, they are always yet stronger than those for the gainsaying. To prove that there is no God is even unmayable; thereto one would must be all-knowing and all-where-being, that is, himself God, cf. Voetius, de atheismo, Disp. I 114-225. G. J. Vossius, de origine et progressu idol. I c. 3. Leydecker, Fax Veritatis III controv. 3. Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 2. Maresius, Syst. Theol. 1673 p. 44. Buddeus, Theses theol. de atheismo et superst., ed. Lulofs L. B. 1747. Hodge, Syst. Theol. I 198, 242. Flint, Antith. theories, lecture I, Hoekstra, Des Christens godsvrucht bl. 6. Doedes, Inl. tot de leer v. God. 57v.
2. This naturalness, universality, and necessity of religion and knowledge of God has early on led to the thought that these were innate and inborn in man. The fact is there, that all men from the earliest youth have awareness not only of a physical but also of a psychical, spiritual, unseen world. True and false, good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly are indeed no weighable or measurable quantities and cannot be perceived with the five senses, but they are a reality which stands much firmer for our awareness than that of matter and force. Materialism may reckon only with gravity and heat and electricity; but faith and hope and love are wholly other powers which have ruled mankind and kept it from sinking into beastliness. Augustine has rightly said that the truth of spiritual things is properly much surer and firmer than that of the visible. Nihil absurdius dici potest, quam ea esse quae oculis videmus, ea vero non esse quae intelligentia cernimus, cum dubitare dementis sit intelligentiam incomparabiliter oculis anteferri , de immort. an. c. 10 n. 17. de civ. XIX c. 18. The truths of mathematics, of logic, the ground principles of ethics, law, religion stand undoubtable for all. They bear a character of naturalness, universality, and necessity which can be denied by no one. They seem as innate ideas enclosed in man's nature, given with his birth.
The doctrine of innate ideas is rooted already in Greek philosophy. There it posed a great problem for thought, how learning is possible at all. For one of two things seemed to be the case: either we already know something and then we cannot learn it anymore, or we do not know it, but how then is it to be explained that we strive to learn it.
Plato solved this problem through his doctrine of recollection; the soul had, before its bond with the body, beheld the ideas in all their beauty and kept the images thereof deep in its memory. He proved this especially with mathematics, which we can build wholly from our mind without the help of bodily sensing, but otherwise believed that all learning took for granted the fore-being of the soul.
Aristotle indeed deemed bodily sensing the way to knowledge, but judged nevertheless that the mind potentially brings along some highest, widespread groundworks, which stand firm by themselves, lie at the bottom of all proofs, and are acknowledged by all.
The Stoics spoke of koinai ennoiai , physikai ennoiai , emphytoi prolēpseis , that is, such ideas which, by strength of the kind of our thinking, are drawn by all from sensing.
Among all these wise men, there is no speech yet of innate ideas in the strict sense. Plato does not bound recollection to a few innate ideas but spreads it to all knowledge; and Aristotle and others do speak of widespread groundworks but teach outspokenly that these are not given as ideas with birth but are setly found through means of sensing and thinking, but in such a way that every normal man must find them.
In the proper sense, the doctrine of innate ideas first comes in Cicero. He speaks of notiones impressae , cogitationes insitae , innatae and takes for granted a knowing of sundry truths before all trial and search. There are according to him semina innata virtutum , notitiae parvae rerum maximarum , which kind without teaching planted in our soul, an innate God-knowing, Deos esse natura opinamur .
3. In the newer philosophy, the doctrine of innate ideas was set forth by Descartes, who also first used this term and thus employed "idea" in a sense uncommon up to that time. With Descartes, this doctrine was linked to his dualism between soul and body. Intellectual knowledge cannot be derived from sense perception; this only gives the occasion whereby our mind, through an innate faculty, forms representations and concepts, René Descartes, Notes. Intellectual knowledge comes from its own principle, that is, from innate ideas. Among these innate ideas, that of God is the foremost, which is as it were a mark of the craftsman impressed on his work, Meditations Third. But he understands the innateness of these ideas in such a way that the soul by nature possesses the power, the faculty, the disposition to bring them forth from itself. The ideas are thus not actual but potential in our mind, Objections and Responses, Notes. Also according to Leibniz, the necessary and general truths do not come to us from without, but they come forth from ourselves, such as those of substance, duration, change, cause, the mathematical truths, and especially also the idea of God. Together these truths form the natural light of reason. But the innateness of these truths is explained by Leibniz more broadly and clearly than by Descartes. The latter only said that these ideas were potential in our mind. Leibniz, however, says that they are virtually innate, like inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural virtualities and not like actions. The human mind does not merely have the susceptibility to know them, for then all knowledge could be called innate, but it is the source of these truths; it can bring them forth from itself, draw them from its own depth. The ideas thus lie as it were preformed in the human soul. And this is possible because there is representation and thinking without consciousness. They come to consciousness when sense perception gives occasion thereto. This brings the ideas virtually present in us also actually into our mind, cf. Spruyt, Essay on the Doctrine of Innate Concepts 144, Stöckl, History of Modern Philosophy I 426. Malebranche thought that learning and knowing in man could not be explained otherwise than by the assumption that we see the ideas in God and that God thus as the general and infinite being is immediately present in our understanding. In his footsteps, the ontologism of Gioberti, Gratry, Ubaghs, and others taught that we immediately behold God in our mind as the absolute being and that there is thus an intuitive knowledge of God present in man, Stöckl, History of Modern Philosophy II 568 f. 620 f. By Kant this doctrine of innate concepts was importantly modified. In connection with the terminology of Wolff, he spoke of knowledge a priori and a posteriori, and taught not innate concepts but indeed innate forms, namely forms of intuition, that is, space and time, forms of understanding, that is, categories, and forms of reason, that is, the ideas God, virtue, and immortality. The idealism of Fichte and Hegel drove this doctrine to such an extreme that they constructed not only the knowledge of necessary and general truths, but all knowledge, and even all being, the whole material world, from thought. The grounds on which this doctrine of innate ideas chiefly rests are these: Learning, the ability to learn, presupposes that what is learned is already present in our mind in some way. Reasoning and proof are built on principles that must stand firm per se and a priori. Experience gives only opinion, contingent truths; general and necessary truths can only come forth from the human mind itself. That there are such general and necessary truths is proven by the consensus of nations. And above all, the opposition between soul and body is of such a nature that representations and concepts cannot have their origin in sense perception; they must either be explained from the human mind or from the Spirit of God, in whom man beholds all ideas. On the other hand, the doctrine of innate concepts was opposed by the Socinians, who rejected natural religion, Fock, The Socinianism 307 f., cf. also Episcopius, Institutes of Theology I c. 3, Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding I ch. 2-4, Hobbes, On the Citizen c. 14 n. 19, etc. They appealed to the following considerations: The doctrine of innate ideas is wholly unnecessary, because the origin of these ideas can also be well explained in another way. History teaches that no single representation and no single concept is the same among all men and peoples. Even innate moral principles do not exist; over good and evil there reigns the greatest possible difference; and the concept of God is so little innate that there even exist atheistic men and peoples. Children, idiots, the insane know nothing of such innate concepts. All knowledge in man stems from sense perception; nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. This opposition to innate ideas made much headway in England and France in the previous century. The materialism of this century joined it. The doctrine of innate concepts has been generally abandoned and replaced by the theory of the inheritance of properties, Darwin, Descent of Man, chapters 3, 4. Spencer, in Spruyt Essay 342. Büchner, Force and Matter¹⁶ p. 344 f.
4. It is important to know what stance Christian theology has taken toward this doctrine of innate ideas. Prof. Spruyt finds it strange that the scholastics with rare unanimity declared themselves against that doctrine, and suspects that there was a theological reason for it, which however he cannot indicate. This is indeed the case and will become clear in what follows. Although Christian theology generally assumed that there were truths known not by revelation but by nature, and not by deliberate investigation and reflection but as it were involuntarily obtained, yet it decidedly rejected the doctrine of innate concepts. Indeed, the advocates of innate ideas in later times, such as Thomassinus, Staudenmaier, Kuhn, Klee, and the ontologists such as Malebranche, Gioberti, Ubaghs, etc., appealed to some church fathers, but wrongly. Justin Martyr speaks of the idea of God as an innate opinion in the nature of men concerning a matter hard to explain, but he does not say further how he means this "innate." Irenaeus argues against the Gnostics that the world was created by God and reveals Him and makes Him known, but he does not mention an innate knowledge. Clement of Alexandria also says that the Father and Creator of all things is known by all naturally and without instruction, but he himself explains several times that this knowledge is obtained from the contemplation of God's works. Tertullian lays very strong emphasis on the natural knowledge of God. All people, in spite of their idolatry, call upon the one God in danger and need. And this they have not learned from Moses or the Prophets, but their own soul taught them therein. For from the beginning the soul has the endowment of the consciousness of God. This is the same among all peoples. The soul is by nature Christian. By this Tertullian means nothing else than that some truths, such as those of the existence and unity of God, are known not first by special revelation but by nature: for some things are known by nature, as the immortality of the soul among many, as our God among all. With more right one appeals to Augustine, who in many respects stood under Plato's influence and acknowledges this himself. Indeed, he attaches much more value to thinking than to sense perception. The senses perceive only changeable things, but reason, although distinct in each person, sees and knows general, necessary, unchangeable truths. And this can only be explained by the fact that the reason of each person sees those general truths in the one general reason, the one unchangeable truth, which is God Himself. And so Augustine repeatedly explains that we, just as we see sensible objects by the light of the sun, so behold intelligible truths in the light of God. He is nearer to us than the creatures and easier to find than these. He is the truth presiding over all things. He even says, God and Lord of all things presides over human minds with no nature interposed. From this it clearly appears that Augustine considers it much better and easier to ascend to God by the indwelling of eternal truths than by the contemplation of outward nature. But it may not be inferred from this that the human soul here on earth would already behold God directly and immediately and in this way come to the knowledge of eternal truths. For he says elsewhere clearly that the vision of God is reserved for heaven, that here on earth evening knowledge is allotted to us, that the eternal truths which man acknowledges are to be distinguished from God as the truth itself, that man gradually ascends from the contemplation of nature, from the knowledge of reason and its laws, to God. The mysticism, however, found in Augustine a powerful support, and it taught that man originally besides an eye of the flesh and an eye of reason also received an eye of contemplation, which, restored by grace, would behold God here already in moments and in glory perfectly. By Bonaventure the proposition is then also contested that all knowledge is from sense; the soul knows God and itself without the help of the senses. Yet mysticism in Bonaventure, though on this point deviating from Thomas, remains within bounds. Although God is present, yet on account of the blindness and darkness of our intellect, in which we are, we know Him as absent. The beholding of God is not given to every man, but is only a gift of grace, which can uplift a Paul thereto. And even as regards the knowledge of the first principles, this is called innate in Bonaventure, but he explains thereby, because that light suffices for knowing them after the reception of species without any added persuasion on account of its evidence.... For I have a natural light, which suffices for knowing that parents are to be honored, and that neighbors are not to be injured, yet I do not have naturally impressed on me the species of father or the species of neighbor. Although Bonaventure thus also assumes that there are truths which we do not obtain by sense perception but by inward beholding and by communion with God, yet even in him there is no question of innate ideas in the proper sense. The whole scholasticism unanimously rejected the doctrine of innate concepts. It taught in distinction therefrom that the essence of things is the proper object of intellectual knowledge. All knowledge begins with sense perception. But when this sees the things, then the understanding has the aptitude to abstract therefrom the general, and indeed first of all the so-called innate concepts. These are thus not brought ready-made by the intellect but abstracted from the perception of sensible things in accordance with its nature. That also applies to the idea of God. God is not the substance of things but their cause, and therefore He can be known to some extent from His works by perception and thinking in His existence and in His virtues. Innate knowledge there is only insofar as a natural habit is created in our understanding to ascend from the finite to the infinite, from the particular to the general. God is not the substance of things but their cause, and therefore He can be known to some extent from His works by perception and thinking in His existence and in His virtues. Innate knowledge there is only insofar as a natural habit is created in our understanding to ascend from the finite to the infinite, from the particular to the general, cf. vol. I, and further Thomas, Summa Theologica. The ontology of Gioberti and Ubaghs was condemned at Rome on September 18, 1861, and September 21, 1866.
5. Among the Lutherans, the good and true element that was enclosed in the doctrine of innate ideas could not come to its right. Natural theology, both innate and acquired, found little favor with them, cf. already volume I. Through the opposition to the scholastic doctrine that natural things are still intact, Luther was led to an opposite extreme. The image of God was wholly lost. Reason without the Holy Spirit is simply without knowledge of God. Man in divine things has nothing but darkness. Properly, only the passive aptitude remains to man, that is, the possibility to be saved. Otherwise, his understanding, will, affection are limited only to civil matters; in spiritual things he is wholly blind and dead. Indeed, Luther acknowledges that God still reveals Himself in His works, creation is a mask of God; but man no longer knows Him from it. Luther even sometimes goes so far as to call sin the essence of man, and that man is nothing but sin; expressions which one certainly should not unjustly press and strain, but which nevertheless are significant for his view of the innate and acquired knowledge of God, Köstlin, Luther's Theology II. The same negative standpoint is taken by the Lutheran symbols; and some theologians such as Flacius and Chemnitz went so far that they rejected the whole natural knowledge of God, Zöckler, Natural Theology 1860. But soon one returned from this one-sidedness. Luther himself often spoke otherwise, and saw and praised in nature a work of God, Zöckler, ibid. Melanchthon taught a knowledge of God both innate and acquired; there are traces of God in all His works, but these would be insufficient, unless also innate in the mind were some notion or preconception of God, Corpus Reformatorum XIII. And this example is followed by the later theologians. Gerhard, Theological Loci Prooemium § 17, Locus II c. 4, Quenstedt, Didactic-Polemical Theology I, Hollaz, Theological Examination p., Calovius, Introduction to Sacred Theology c. 4, Buddeus, On Atheism 1767 p., etc., discuss natural theology and defend it expressly against the Socinians. Later it was even treated separately by some, such as Jaeger and others. The innate knowledge of God was now described variously by the Lutheran theologians, as a faculty or disposition or habit or perfection or innate light analogous to a habit. But on this all agreed, that it did not consist in an impressed species, which would already be present in man before all use of reason, Hollaz, Quenstedt, Calovius. Therefore, Descartes' doctrine of innate ideas was rejected, Hollaz, and likewise the mystical doctrine of the inward light and of contemplation, ibid. And over against this, the innate theology was understood as a natural fitness and inclination implanted in the human intellect, to come without discourse and reasoning of the mind to the knowledge of God and to give to this an undoubted, firm, and sure testimony, Hollaz, Quenstedt. Before sensory perception nothing is in the intellect, as far as the ideal representation of things, yet there is something in the intellect, as far as habitual knowledge, Hollaz, Theological Examination. Quenstedt, Didactic-Polemical Theology I.
The Reformed took from the beginning a friendlier stance towards natural theology. Calvin set apart a general and a special grace, and from the first he made plain all the good that still abides in sinful man; cf. my speech on General Grace. He set forth that in man's mind a sense of divinity was inborn, and that by natural bent. God has inborn in all an understanding of his Godhead, whose memory he ever renews, ever dropping fresh drops therein, Inst. I 3, 1. He calls this also the seed of religion, and therefrom makes plain the widespreadness of religion, ibid. The belief that there is a God is by nature inborn; it can never be rooted out, I 3, 3. Yet hardly one in a hundred is found who fosters the thought in his heart, and none in whom it ripens, I, 4, 1. And to that seed of religion comes now God's showing forth in his works, so that they cannot open their eyes without being driven to behold him, I 5, 1. There is no speck of the world, no worldly bit, in which at least some sparks of his glory are not seen to gleam, I 5, 1. Foremost, man himself as a little world is a workshop noble with countless works of God, I 5, 3, 4, but then besides the whole of nature, which may even rightly be called God, I 5, 5. Cf. II, 2, 18 and comm. on Ps. 8; 19; Acts 17:27, 28. Rom. 1:19. Heb. 11:3. And so speak all Reformed creeds and divines. Ursinus, Tract. Theol. 1584 says that God shows himself to man with notions of himself stamped on men's minds, and with all creatures set forth as mirrors and proofs of his Godhead, p. 35, and among the notions born with us he reckons also the sense that there is a God, as the widespreadness of religion proves, p. 39. Zanchi, Op. III 636 sq. casts off both Plato and Aristotle and teaches with the Stoa and Cicero that the common notions are born with us, not gained by use; children know at once that three is more than two, that there is a setting apart of good and evil, etc. Polanus, Synt. Theol. p. 325 understands by right reason the true knowledge of God's will and works, as also of divine order and judgment, written by God on the human mind; whose author is the Logos, whose form and rule are the natural beginnings, and which is increased by beholding God's works; cf. further P. Martyr, Loci Comm. p. 2 sq. Maresius, Syst. theol. p. 41. H. Alting, Theol. elenctica 1654 p. 2 sq. Leydekker, Fax Verit. Loc. 3 contr. 1. Alsted, Theol. polem. 1620 p. 185-187. Turretin, Theol. El. I qu. 3 n. 2. De Moor, Comm. I 41 etc. And yet, though the inborn theology was so strongly pleaded, Descartes' teaching of inborn ideas was flatly cast off by Voetius, Disp. V 477-525. He blames Descartes chiefly for three things: that he uses the word idea in an unwonted sense and so twists it; that he does not clearly say what is to be understood by that inborn idea of God, whether it belongs to inborn or gained theology, whether it is a power or an act, a real being or an intended being, etc.; and that he robs the knowledge that comes to us through the senses of its worth and sureness. In what sense then the inborn theology is to be understood is clearly set out by Voetius. It is a power or strength or fitness of the reasoning powers, or natural light in this, that the understanding can grasp the truth of beginnings without any toil, beforehand study, or reasoning, and when the needful is set (namely, knowledge of terms) it does so grasp it, from a natural need and inborn weight drawn and bent to this sense and assent of truth; in the same way as the will by a natural makeup seeks the good, and the eye of itself beholds light and the seen, Disp. I 141 cf. V 516, 525. The known saying: nothing is in the understanding that was not first in the senses, is also owned as truth insofar, that the world around us on one side or another, as straightforward object or as offspring or as part or as foil etc., is needful to bring us to aware knowledge, ibid. V 525.
6. From all the foregoing, the reason becomes clear to us why Christian theology so unanimously rejected the doctrine of innate ideas. It was the fear of rationalism and mysticism that guided it therein. If man already at his birth brought with him in his spirit a completely clear and distinct knowledge, whether of all ideas (Plato), or of God (Descartes), or of being (Gioberti), then he would thereby become independent of the world; he could produce the completely pure knowledge from his own spirit and would be sufficient unto himself; he could even dispense with the revelation which God has given in his Word; better and clearer than in nature and Scripture he would find the perfect knowledge in his own spirit. Yes, even more, by the doctrine of innate ideas an unbridgeable chasm would be dug between spirit and matter, between soul and body. The visible world would then not be a creation and revelation of God, no embodiment of divine thoughts; from it the eternal truths, the intellectual knowledge could not be derived; this man would find only, through self-reflection and recollection, as he separated himself from the world and withdrew into his own soul-life. And indeed, hereby the danger is pointed out that always threatens from the side of innate ideas. The dualism of Plato has in Neoplatonism and thereby again in the Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, led to a mysticism which first indeed on the lower steps of meditation made use of God's revelation in nature and Scripture but then, having ascended higher to contemplation, could well dispense with all those outward aids and had complete sufficiency in the inward word, the spiritual light, the beholding and communion with God in the innermost soul-existence. And the dualism that arose again in modern philosophy through Descartes and the doctrine of the innate idea of God connected therewith has first in Leibniz and Wolff, then in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel led to a rationalism that constructed the whole world of being out of the immanent thought of the human spirit. Now it is as clear as day that Scripture wants to know nothing of such a self-sufficiency of man and of such a contempt for body and world. It teaches that man according to soul and body is the image-bearer of God and that through his body he is related and bound to the whole visible world. But this bond is no slave-chain; on the contrary, the world in which man is placed does not lead him away from God but upward to God; it is a creation of God, a mirror of his virtues, a manifestation of his thoughts. There is, according to the beautiful word of Calvin, no particle of the world in which at least some sparks of his glory are not seen to shine forth, Inst. I 5, 1. And because Christian theology has understood that, therefore it has unanimously rejected the doctrine of innate concepts. And to that were added the objections drawn from psychology and history, which against this doctrine were brought forward among others by Locke. Empiricism defended over against mysticism and rationalism a precious truth. For if these directions claimed that the essence, the idea of things could not come to us from sensible perception but only in God (Malebranche), in the soul through recollection (Plato) or through thinking out of man's own spirit (Descartes-Hegel), then they too thereby had a good intention. God is indeed the sun of spirits. In his light we see the light. The Logos enlightens every man coming into the world. But yet it is true that we here on earth do not see face to face, that we walk by faith, and see through a mirror in a dark saying. Only through contemplation of God's revelation in nature and Scripture do we come to knowledge of God, Rom. 1:19, 1 Cor. 13:12, 2 Cor. 3:18. There is here on earth no direct, immediate knowledge of God and of his thoughts to be obtained, but only a mediate one, through a mirror and in a mirror. The sentiment of the mystics, rationalists, and ontologists is therefore not theistic but pantheistic; it confuses the light of reason with the light of God, the general truths in us with the ideas in the consciousness of God, our logos with the Logos of God. And over against that Christian theology set the doctrine of Holy Scripture, that all our knowledge of God, since his essence in itself is unknowable to us, is obtained through mediate revelation and bears an analogical character. In fact, no single man comes to the knowledge of the first principles and to the thought of God apart from the world. The little child, who is born unconscious, gradually receives all kinds of representations and ideas from the environment in which it is brought up. With the first man this may by the nature of the case have been different; all who are born after him have not each on their own occasion and through their own reflection, but through their parents and through their life-circle come to conscious and clear knowledge, both of visible and invisible things. Therefore there is no knowledge of the invisible except under the symbol of the visible. Whoever lacks a sense also gets no representation of the phenomena corresponding to it. A blind person does not know what light is and therefore also does not understand that God is a light, except only negatively and by contrast. Therefore there is also in law and morals, in religion and art so much difference among men and peoples possible. This would be inexplicable if the ideas in the proper sense were innate and immediately implanted in our spirit by God himself. Now, however, we see that all men indeed have the faculty of speech but yet speak very different languages; that all indeed have an idea of God but clothe it in all kinds of representations; that there are men who in their heart say that there is no God; that the distinction of good and evil is known everywhere but the content of both is determined very diversely; that concerning right and wrong, concerning beautiful and ugly the opinions diverge very far from one another. In one word, there is no single religious or ethical truth that is acknowledged everywhere, always, and by all; a natural theology in the actual sense has never existed, any more than a natural law and a natural morality.
7. Yet with this only one side of the truth is shown. There is still another side, which is of no less weight. For it cannot be gainsaid that, just as the light of the sun is needed outwardly, so inwardly the eye is needed to see. That folk in truth learn and gain knowledge from their surroundings stands fast; but it takes for granted that they bring with them an ability, a fitness, and a bent toward learning. Speech is taught us by the folk among whom we are born, but it takes for granted in every man a readiness and a leaning to speak. So it is in every field, in godliness, craft, uprightness, law, wisdom, and so forth. The seeds of knowledge lie by kind in man. All wisdom goes out from broad beginnings that stand fast by themselves and of their own. All knowledge rests in belief. All proof takes for granted at last a first beginning of showing. There are witcraftly, reckoning, wisdomly, upright, and so also godly and godlore beginnings, which are indeed very broad and withdrawn, but which yet are taken up by all men and in all times and bear a mark of kindness and needfulness. The laws of thinking are the same for all; the lore of numbers is everywhere alike; the sundering of good and evil is known to all; there is no folk without godliness and knowledge of God. This cannot be made clear otherwise than by taking up beginnings known by themselves, common thoughts, everlasting truths, which are stamped by kind in the manly ghost. In godliness one must, whether one will or not, always go back to a seed of godliness, a sense of godhood, a godward drive, an inborn knowledge. The Writ itself leads us therein. It binds man as strongly as may be to the outward showing in kind and goodwill, but it owns at the same time that man is God's likeness and offspring, that he owns in the mind an ability to see God in his works and that he bears the work of the law written in his heart, Gen. 1:26, Acts 17:27, Rom. 1:19, 2:15. Yet all hangs on rightly understanding this firstness of the common thoughts. Men have marked them in sundry ways and spoken of inborn, inbegotten, incut, inplanted, born in, shaped in, planted in, and so forth. And no one uses those words in straightforward meaning; as soon as these sayings are thought in, nearly all hasten to make clear that they do not mean that these inborn thoughts are at once with birth fixed and ready brought along and as stamped kinds in the awareness. In that meaning there are then also no born-in thoughts. God lets man come into the world grown in no wise but lets him be born as a helpless and help-needing child. And that child would perish if it were not fed and cared for by its surroundings. Yet in the child already hides the forthcoming man. And so it is in witly, upright, and godly fields. Inborn knowledge of God does not mean that man straightway, by God himself, is fitted with enough knowledge and has no more need of showing. It does not make known that he alone by himself is able to lead out from his own ghost some aware, clear, and true knowledge of God. But it marks that man owns both the might (fitness, strength, ability) and the bending (wont, readiness) to come, in the everyday unfolding path and amid the surroundings wherein God gave him life, of itself and without force, without wisdomly reckoning and proof-leading, inbornly and untaughtly, to some fast, sure, undoubting knowledge of God. The words inborn, inbegotten, born in, and so forth thus do not mean to mark that with which a man is born, but they only wish to make known that the knowledge of God along kindly way, without wisdomly reckoning, is born out of man himself. They are not to be taken as foes to the lore that man is born as a smooth board, without set, stuffly inhold in his awareness; but they are set against the deeming that man first outwardly, by a set showing, by wisdomly proof, as it were craftily and by force is brought to knowledge of God. So those sayings have always been meant in Christly godlore. They therefore switched with untaughtly, by kind, by inplanted strength, without fore study, without toilsome running, and so forth. Knowledge of God is said to be inborn to us, inasmuch as by inborn beginnings we can easily grasp that God is, Thomas in Kleutgen, Philosophy of the Foretime I 348. Therefore the remark of Locke is also wrong, that if under inborn thoughts only the ability of knowledge were understood, then all knowledge could be called born in. For the knowledge of God is called inplanted or inborn because every man in everyday unfolding must come thereto. Just as a man, opening the eyes, of itself beholds the sun and by her light the things, so must man by his kind, as soon as he hears that there is a God, that there is sundering of good and evil, and so forth, give thereto his yes. He cannot do without that. He takes those truths of itself, without force or proof, because they stand fast by themselves. Therefore the knowledge of God is called born in, and the saying of a born-in might or ability was unfulfilling. On one hand over against the lore of inborn thoughts it is marked by that the knowledge of God is not clear and ready brought along by man but throughly, by inworking of the showing in his awareness comes to stand, and on the other hand it is marked over against the from-trial that that showing of God speaks so loud and strong and finds such deep echo in everyone's mood, that it can be called as by kind own and shaped in to man. And herewith godlore has not only to the Writ but also to soulcraft and yore full right let befall. Showing is there from God in all his works, not only outside but above all also in man. Of the kind from which God is known, man himself makes the foremost deal. And from that whole kind, both outside and in him, man receives marks and feelings which in his awareness before all reckoning and proof breed the sense of a Highest Being. It is God himself who leaves no man without witness.
Kleutgen, Theology of the Foretime I² 587-792. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology I 195. Hodge, Systematic Theology I 197. McCosh, The Intuitions of the Mind, Inductively Investigated , 1860. John Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 1880 p. 39. 160. Lotze, Microcosmus III 580 f.
1. Between the innate knowledge of God and the acquired there may be no opposition, yet there is undoubtedly a distinction between the two. Oftentimes this distinction is understood in such a way that the first denotes the knowledge of God which is inborn in man and belongs to him from his own being, and the second that which, for the increase and expansion of the first, comes to man in part from without, from the beholding of the world. But the difference between the two is not clearly and precisely indicated thereby. For in the proper sense there is no knowledge inborn, neither of God nor of the world. All knowledge comes from without into man's consciousness. What is inborn is only the faculty of knowledge; but this faculty comes to action and deed only through the influence of the world in and around us. The seed of religion lies indeed in man, but it sprouts only in the field of the whole human life. Just as the eye is brought by man at his birth but sees objects only by the light of the sun, so the believer beholds God first in all the works of his hands. Furthermore, in the previous section it has become clear to us that Christian theology under the innate and implanted being of the knowledge of God has never understood that man at birth brings with him any conscious knowledge of God; but it thereby only indicated that the knowledge of God need not be brought to man by force or violence, nor by logical reasoning or compelling proofs, but that it is natural to man, spontaneous, of itself his own. A man, developing normally, comes without force or trouble, of himself to some knowledge of God. Therefore the innate knowledge of God stands not in opposition to the acquired, for in a broader sense the first also can be called acquired. To the knowledge of God, both innate and acquired, the revelation of God goes before. He does not leave himself without witness. He works with his eternal power and godhead from all sides upon man, not only from without but also from within; in nature and the world of men, in heart and conscience, in prosperity and adversity God as it were meets man. And this one received as created after God's image the faculty to receive the impressions thereof and thereby to come to some notion and to some knowledge of the Eternal Being. The innate knowledge, as soon as it is knowledge and thus not only potential but actual, is never otherwise than arisen under the influence of the revelation of God in and without man and is thus in so far always acquired. For these reasons the distinction between the innate knowledge of God and the acquired was formerly usually indicated otherwise. It consisted in these two things. First in this, that the innate knowledge of God was obtained of itself, spontaneously, without trouble or force, the acquired knowledge of God on the other hand through reasoning and argument, through reflection and proof along the ways of causality, eminence and negation was acquired; the one was noetic, the other dianoetic. And secondly from this also flowed this difference, that the first consisted only in principles and was general and necessary, but the second was more worked out and developed, furnished more concrete propositions and was therefore also subject to all kinds of doubt and contest. That there is a God, stood and stands nearly for all firm. But the proofs for the existence of God are found by thought and are therefore alternately despised and highly esteemed. And thereby the distinction is rightly indicated. It lies not therein, that the innate knowledge of God would arise from man and the acquired from the world. Also the moral proof is taken from the moral consciousness, which is found within man. In both it is the same and the whole revelation of God, from which the knowledge of God enters into our consciousness. But in the innate knowledge of God that revelation works in upon the consciousness of man and fosters there impressions and notions. In the acquired knowledge of God that revelation of God is thought into by man; his understanding goes to work, his reflection awakens, and with clear, bright consciousness he seeks through reasoning and proof from the creatures to climb up to God. For man has in no field of knowledge enough with impressions and notions. He is not satisfied with consciousness alone. It is not enough for him that he knows. He also wants to know that he knows; he strives to explain the how and why of his knowing. And thence it is that the ordinary, everyday, empirical knowing always seeks to pass over into the proper, scientific knowing; that faith raises itself to theology, and the innate knowledge of God completes itself in the acquired knowledge of God.
2. The division into innate and acquired knowledge of God is commonly applied only to natural theology. And this is then distinguished from and often opposed to revealed theology. Earlier, this view was extensively refuted, I 219-244. There is no separate natural theology that could be obtained by man apart from all revelation through thoughtful contemplation of the world. That knowledge of God, which is summed up in natural theology, is no product of human reason. It presupposes first of all that God himself reveals himself in the works of his hands; it is not man who seeks God, but God who seeks man also through his works in nature. Furthermore, it is not man who with the natural light of reason understands and knows this revelation of God; all religions of the heathens are positive; but on man's side a sanctified understanding and an opened eye are needed to notice God, the true and living God, in his creatures. And even this is not enough. Even the believer, even the Christian, would not understand God's revelation in nature and could not purely represent it, if God himself had not described in his Word how and what he reveals of himself in the whole world. The natural knowledge of God is itself taken up in Scripture and therein extensively unfolded. Therefore, it is also an entirely wrong method that the Christian, in treating natural theology, as it were divests himself of the special revelation in Scripture and of the illumination of the Holy Spirit, discusses it without any Christian presupposition, and then proceeds to revealed theology. The Christian stands also as a dogmatician from the beginning with both feet on the foundation of special revelation; not first in the locus on Christ but also in the locus on God is he a Christian believer. But standing thus, he looks around him, and armed with the spectacles of Holy Scripture he sees in the whole world a revelation of that same God whom he knows and confesses in Christ as his Father in heaven. However, under the innate and acquired knowledge of God is not to be understood that knowledge which we obtain from creation apart from special revelation. From our earliest youth God's special revelation in Christ has worked upon us all; we are born in the covenant of grace and thus born Christian; all sorts of Christian influences have formed the knowledge of God which is now our portion, in much greater measure than the working which has gone out upon our heart from God's revelation in nature; and in the light of that special revelation we have all also learned to view nature and the world around us. We all owe the knowledge of God from nature to God's special revelation in his Word. Nature would let us hear just as confused voices as the heathens, if we had not listened to God's speech in the works of grace and thereby now understood his voice also in the works of nature. But now that revelation of God in nature is also of high value. It is the same God who speaks to us in nature and in grace, in creation and re-creation, in the Logos and in Christ, in the Spirit of God and in the Spirit of Christ. Nature and grace are no opposition; we have one God, from whom and through whom and to whom they both are.
3. This holds true for both the innate and acquired knowledge of God; both we owe to Holy Scripture. It is true that Scripture makes no effort to prove God's existence. It proceeds from that existence and assumes that man knows and acknowledges God. It considers man not yet so deeply fallen that he needs a proof beforehand in order to believe. For he is still the image-bearer of God, God's offspring, and endowed with a mind to perceive in creation God's eternal power and divinity. The denial of God's existence is in the eyes of Scripture a sign of foolishness, of deep moral decay, Ps. 14:1. Such people are the exception, not the rule. As a rule, Scripture counts on those who acknowledge God's existence unforced and by the prompting of their nature. It appeals not to the reasoning intellect, but to the reasonable and moral consciousness. It does not dissect and argue, but shows God in all the works of his hands. But it does do that. Heaven and earth together with all creatures, grass and herb, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, and all things speak to the pious of God. There is no part, no piece of the world, in which his power and divinity is not beheld. Man is referred to heaven and earth, birds and ants, flowers and lilies, to behold and acknowledge God. Scripture does not reason in the abstract and does not make God the conclusion of a syllogism, leaving it to us whether we shall find that proof compelling. But it speaks with authority; it proceeds theologically and religiously from God; it shows his virtues in his works and demands that we acknowledge God. An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its master's crib, but Israel has no knowledge, my people do not understand, Isa. 1:3. For Scripture it is certain that God reveals himself in the creatures and that he leaves no one without witness, Acts 14:17, Rom. 1:19. And thus appealing to the whole creation as a testimony and revelation of God, it contains in germ all that was later broadly developed and dialectically unfolded in the proofs. There is truth in the remark of C. J. Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine , 6th ed., p. 142, that Holy Scripture gives us a beginning and analogy of the cosmological proof in Rom. 1:20, of the teleological in Ps. 8; 19; Acts 14:17, of the moral in Rom. 2:14, and of the ontological in Acts 17:24, Rom. 1:19, 32. But speaking thus, not in dialectical argument but in the language of testimony, not appealing to the reasoning intellect but making an appeal to heart and conscience, to the whole reasonable and moral consciousness of man, Scripture has never been without power and influence. Also in this it is a powerful word, sharp as a two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Even without logical argument and philosophical proof, Scripture is mighty in this its testimony, because it is the word of God and finds support in the reasonable and moral nature of every man. It is God himself who leaves no one without witness. And it is man himself who, because he was created in God's image, must against his will give heed and assent to this testimony. In this light the so-called proofs for God's existence must also be viewed. That will preserve us both from overestimation and from contempt of the proofs.
4. Already among the ancient philosophers, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, we find the proofs that are brought forward for the existence of God. From the beauty, the harmony, the movement, the purposefulness of the world, from reason and the inborn awareness, from the importance of religion for state and society, from the agreement of the peoples, they concluded to the existence of a self-aware, reasonable, divine being, Zeller, Philos. der Gr. The Christian theology took over all these proofs and treated them with preference; Augustine added one from the general concepts, de lib. arb. II c. 3-15. Münscher-v. Coelln, D. G. I. They scorned not the support that was offered to them by heathen science, and, with rejection of the dualistic Gnosticism and Manichaeism, saw in nature a work of God. This standpoint of Christian theology is all the more noteworthy, because Christianity stood in part hostile over against the cosmos and laid all emphasis on the salvation of man. But nature was and remained for Christian theology, in spite of all asceticism that penetrated into the church, a creation of the selfsame God who in Christ had revealed himself as Re-creator and Savior. Indeed, the worth and strength of the proofs were very soon overestimated. Some church fathers do express that the heathens never came to a pure natural religion and that the way of these proofs is very difficult for the sinner, Athanasius, c. Gent. c. 35 sq. But little by little the proofs lose their religious character; they are detached from all moral conditions; the acquired knowledge of God comes to stand loosely beside the inborn; and Christian theology gained more and more the conviction that the truths of natural religion were provable in the same sense as those of mathematics or logic. They were properly no articles of faith but preambles to the articles, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 2 art. 2. c. Gent. I 10-13. The ontological argument of Anselm, in his Proslogium, though taken over by some such as Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Itiner. c. 5, was indeed rejected by most, because we can only climb up to God through the creatures, Thomas, c. Gent. I 10-12. But otherwise great worth was attached to the proofs and much care bestowed; in natural theology one stood on rational, scientific ground before and outside the faith, Schwane, D. G. III. And on that same rationalistic standpoint Rome and Roman theology stand even to the present day, Petavius, Theol. I cap. 2. Sylvius, Comm. in totam pr. p. S. Thomae, ed. 4a I. Theol. Wirceb. III 1-20. Perrone, Prael. Theol. II 3-41. Kleutgen, Philos. der Vorz. Schwetz, Theol. fund. I § 4-8. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. II 1-20. Hettinger, Apol. des Christ. I. Jansen, Prael. I 39-51 etc. The Vatican declared that God can be known from the creation by the natural light of reason with certainty, cf. part I.
The Reformation indeed took over this natural theology with its proofs but did not let it go before but took it up in the teaching of the faith. Calvin went out from the seed of godliness and then indeed saw in every speck of the world, in the starry heaven, in the mankindly body, in the soul, in the upholding of all things and so on, undeniable signs and witnesses of God's majesty, Inst. I 5, 1-10, but then at once owns again, that the seed of godliness, though inborn in all and cannot be rooted out, yet can be choked and bring forth no good fruit; mankind has no eye anymore to behold God, he needs faith for that, I 4, 1. 5, 11-15. This same place takes natural theology in Ursinus, Tract. theol. 1584, Martyr, Loci, Musculus, Loci, Polanus, Synt. theol. II c. 4, cf. Schweizer, Gl. der ev. ref. K. I 156 f. But soon the Protestant theology went the rationalistic way. While natural theology was first a besetting forth, by the hand of Scripture, of what the Christian could know about God from the shaping, it soon became a setting out of what the unbelieving, reasonable man could come to know from kind by his own thinking. Natural theology became rational theology. Descartes found in the inborn idea an unshakable proof for God's being. Voetius still saw the unlikeness between this rationalistic arguing and the Reformed teaching of natural theology, Disp. V 455-525. But this understanding went more and more to loss in Alsted, Theol. nat. 1623, Mastricht, Theol. II c. 2, Marck, Merch I 1, 14, Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 1 e. a. Rationalism made its inroad everywhere. Natural theology became the ownlike, knowledgeable, showable theology, against which revealed theology came more and more to stand in the shadow and at last fully faded away. The proofs were shared into kinds and broadly worked out; one marked out mindly proofs from moving, causehood, happenstance of the world; bodily from harmony, order, goal of the all and of sundry shaped things, such as sun, moon, stars, fire, light, earth, water, beast, growth, man, body, soul, ear, eye, hand, inborn drive and so on; timely from the agreement of folks, the fellowship, crafts, learnings, opening, foretelling, wonder; rightful from inwit, freedom, rightliness, deeming, reward and pain and so on, and at last also reckoning proofs, Buddeus, de atheismo et superst., ed. Lulofs, 1767, and further writings in M. Vitringa I, Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I 676-744, Doedes, Inl. tot de Leer v. God 200-217.
This self-sufficiency of natural theology lasted until Kant. He subjected the proofs to a strict criticism, argued that the theoretical reason must end here with a non liquet, but built the existence of God on the postulate of the practical reason. Since then the proofs have fallen into discredit with many philosophers and theologians. Jacobi deemed it even impossible to prove God's existence, because God would then depend as a conclusion on the grounds of proof, Of the Divine Things . As needless for the believer and as unhelpful for the unbeliever, the proofs were forsaken or scorned by Reinhard, Dogmatics ; Schleiermacher; Twesten; Hofmann, Scripture Proof ; Beck, Lectures on the Doctrine of Faith ; Frank, System of Christian Truth ; Philippi, Church Doctrine ; Bovon, Christian Dogmatics ; Böhl, Dogmatics ; Rauwenhoff, Philosophy of Religion ; and others. Others went not so far, but at least granted to the moral proof in the sense of Kant an important place, such as Köstlin, The Proofs for the Existence of God ; see also Herzog. Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics ; Justification and Reconciliation ; Kaftan, Truth of the Christian Religion . A much greater meaning was given to the proofs in the philosophy of Hegel; he let them stand as the self-proof of God in man's spirit and therefore attached great worth to the ontological proof, On the Proofs for the Existence of God . Biedermann views them as proofs not for the existence of a personal God but indeed for a unified, absolute ground of the world, Dogmatics ; see also Hartmann, Philosophy of Religion ; Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy ; and others. Herbert Spencer deems the being of the Absolute unknowable but its existence yet provable, First Principles ; see Spruyt; Molenaar. Furthermore, from sundry sides the endeavor has been tried to set forth the old proofs in new form and to uphold them either as proofs or as grounds for faith in a personal God, Dorner, Doctrine of Faith ; Kahnis, Lutheran Dogmatics ; Lange, Dogmatics ; Ulrici, God and Nature ; Weisse, Philosophical Dogmatics ; Lotze, Microcosmus ; Pfleiderer, Outline ; Barry, Natural Theology ; Kennedy, Belief in God and Modern Worldview ; Zöckler, Natural Theology ; Fricke, Is God Personal ; Hodge, Systematic Theology ; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology ; Bruce, Apologetics ; Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion ; Flint, Theism ; James Orr, Christian View of God and the World ; Land, Theological Contributions ; Doedes, Introduction to the Doctrine of God ; Doctrine of God ; Bruining, The Existence of God ; Maronier, What We Know of God ; Graswinckel, Faith and Freedom ; and others.
5. The ontological proof comes in three forms. It concludes from the general ideas and forms in the human mind, that is, from the reason, which stands above our individual reason and above the whole world, to the absolute reason, the embodiment of all those ideas and forms, the absolutely true and good and beautiful, that is, to God (Plato, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm in his Monologium). Or it proceeds from the necessary thinking of the highest, absolute idea, that is, of God, and concludes from that to the existence of that idea, because otherwise it would not be the absolute, the highest idea, since an idea that also exists is greater and higher than one that does not really exist (Anselm in his Proslogion). Or it sees in the innate nature of the idea of God a fact that can only be explained by the existence of God, who has implanted this idea in man (Descartes). The forms differ, but the proof is one, insofar as it concludes from thinking to being. Now this does not hold with regard to creatures, as everyone acknowledges. For these exist contingently; they can be thought of as non-existent without any logical contradiction. Thinking and being belong to entirely different categories and are wholly different things. From the thinking of something, for example, a winged horse, it does not at all follow that that something really exists. Being is not a product of thinking. No one has meant this with the ontological proof either. But the question is whether, precisely with the idea of God, one may conclude from thinking to being. To this the answer is first: yes, but under one condition, namely, if God exists. If God exists, then He exists necessarily, and in Him essence and existence are one. But this condition was precisely what needed to be proved; it had to be shown that God exists. Second, it must be answered that from our thinking, even from our necessary thinking, of the idea of God, one cannot conclude to the existence of God, because the being of God is not and cannot be a product of our thinking of the idea of God. The world of ideas and forms, including the idea of God, is not to be identified with God; it is something in us. With those ideas, the existence of God is thus not yet given as a matter of course. At most, one can conclude from the presence of those ideas in us to the existence of God, but then this is really not an ontological but a cosmological proof. But the being itself of the idea of God in us, however necessary this may be, never includes and cannot as such already include the existence of God. The ontological proof is therefore no proof in the strict sense. It only contains: 1º that the world of ideas and forms, and so also the highest idea, is not thought by us arbitrarily, but necessarily, and 2º that that world of ideas and forms, and particularly also the idea of God, as soon as we think them, is also thought by us as really existing and must be thought so. The necessary thinking of the idea of God also brings with it the necessary thinking of that idea as really existing. But it brings us no further. We remain moving within the circle of thinking. It does not bring us across the gulf from thinking to being. It would do that only if from those ideas not as ideas but from the being of those ideas in us one might conclude to a being that created and sustained those ideas in us and itself had to be the highest idea; but then it would be, as has been said, not an ontological but a cosmological proof. Cf. Runze, The Ontological Proof of God , critical presentation of its history from Anselm to the present, Halle 1882. Körber, The Ontological Argument , Bamberg 1884.
6. The Cosmological Proof. The cosmological proof also appears in various forms. It concludes from motion to a first mover that is moved by nothing (Aristotle), from the changeable to the unchangeable (Damascene), from the relative to the absolutely perfect (Boethius, Anselm), from the series of causes, which cannot be infinite, to a first efficient cause (Thomas), from the contingent being of the world to a necessary being (the same), from what does not exist of itself to that which exists through itself (Richard of St. Victor), from the being of the relative to that of the absolute (Spinoza, Hegel, Hartmann, Scholten), and so on. But in all these forms, the cosmological proof still comes down to the same thing, namely, to the conclusion from an effect to a cause. In itself, this is also a fully lawful conclusion, despite the criticism of Hume and Kant; if we may no longer apply the law of causality, all knowledge is impossible. But the cosmological proof starts from various assumptions that do not stand on their own and for all. It assumes not only that the particular things in the world but also that the whole universe is contingent, finite, relative, imperfect; that a series of causes to infinity is unthinkable; that the law of causality also holds for the world as a whole. Only if all these assumptions were true would the cosmological proof have force. Rightly it concludes that, just as all things, so also the world as a whole, composed of those things, must have a cause. But it brings us no further; it says nothing about the nature and character of that cause. Whoever concludes from the world to a cause that itself again needs a cause has satisfied the logical force of this proof. That this cause is infinite, absolute, perfect does not follow directly from the cosmological proof but flows from other considerations. Thus, indeed, an infinite series of causes is unthinkable and impossible; there is no one who accepts it; all acknowledge an absolute ground, a first being, whether it bears the name of God or of the absolute, of substance or power, of matter or will, and so on. If this assumption is now correct, as it is in fact acknowledged by all, then the cosmological proof brings us a step further, namely, to a cause of the world that exists of itself and thus is infinite, eternal, absolute. But whether this cause is now also transcendent or only immanent, whether it is personal or impersonal, conscious or unconscious, is by no means decided hereby. Many, however, have tried to derive something more from the cosmological proof, either directly or indirectly. Directly they tried to do this by reasoning that, since an effect cannot contain more than lies in the cause, from the personal, the conscious, the free, the ideas that are in the world, they concluded to a personal, conscious, free being that was also the highest idea, the absolute reason. This reasoning, however, runs aground on the fact that the relation of cause and effect is then arbitrarily thought of as an emanation and, applied to God, would also require that He be material, bodily, yes even unclean and unholy. Others have therefore taken a side path and reasoned that an infinite, absolute cause, a being that exists of, in, and through itself, cannot exist otherwise than as spirit, person, for example, Dorner, Gl. I 243 f. Kahnis, Luth. Dogm. I² 122. Doederlein, Zeits. f. Philos. u. philos. Kritik 1886 S. 52 f. But against this applies the objection that through the cosmological proof we know nothing of the inner nature of such a first cause, that we have no right to apply the law of causality again to such a first cause and thus can determine nothing about it. And so it remains that the cosmological proof leads us at most, given the recognition that an infinite series of causes is impossible, to a first, self-existing, absolute world-cause, Strauss, Der alte u. d. neue Gl. 1872 S. 214 f. Pesch, Die grossen Welträthsel II² 288 f.
7. The Teleological Proof. The teleological proof goes forth from the order and beauty, the harmony and the end, which in the world, whether in her whole or in sundry creatures, starry heaven, elements, earth, man, beast, plant, hand, eye and so forth, are to be marked and concludes therefrom to an understanding cause. Though the teleological proof never fails to make an impression and also by Kant was named with esteem, yet there are especially in the present time many objections brought against it.
First, from the materialistic side it is claimed that there is no end in things and that the teleological explanation of nature must make room for the mechanical, for example, Haeckel, Nat. Schöpf. 1874; Lange, Gesch. des Mater. 1882; Büchner, Kraft u. Stoff, 16th ed.
Second, pantheism brings in that the presence of order and end in the world yet wholly gives no right to the taking up of a conscious, understanding cause, since the unconscious just as in every man so also in the world-whole works much wiser and surer than conscious after-thinking and purposeful reckoning, Hartmann, Philos. des Unbew. 9th ed. 1882 passim.
And lastly, Kant raised the objection that this proof at most leads to a world-former but not to a world-creator, Kr. d. reinen Vern. ed. Kirchmann.
Now against these objections weigh a good many other weighings. The Scripture acknowledges everywhere an end in the creation, Gen. 1, Prov. 8, Ps. 8, 1 Cor. 3:21-23, Rom. 8:28 and so forth. The teleological world-view is by nearly all wise men, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and so forth, honored and thrusts itself ever again upon every man, in spite of the misuse that is ever especially in the last century made of it.
Ends are to be marked, so in sundry appearances, climate, seasons, warmth of the water, begetting of plants, blood-flow, living bodies, hand, eye and so forth, as in the world-whole. All atoms obey one law; all rests on thought, which can be grasped by man; from a chance the all is no more to be explained than the Iliad from a throw of letters. And even the deed that we many times can show no end proves that we, where we mark it, also rightly do so.
Moreover, the teleological world-view shuts not out the mechanical in the bodily nature; only this last goes beyond her might and right when she will explain all appearances in the world, also the conscious and ghostly, from stuff and stuff-change, Ulrici, Gott u. die Natur 1866; Id. Gott u. d. Mensch 1874; P. Janet, Les causes finales 1882; Ebrard, Apolog. § 74 f.; Pesch, Die grossen Welträthsel I²; Kennedy, Gottesgl. und mod. Weltanschauung 1893; Doedes, de Leer van God bl. 118 v. and so forth.
If now the presence of order and end stood fast for all and in this time had not herself so strong and broad proving needful, then indeed the teleological proof would give us right to conclude from the beauty and harmony of the world to a conscious being, for an unconscious end there is not.
Well has Hartmann sought to prove the other, but his proofs for the end-wise working of the unconscious go therefore not up, since it is something other whether a man does something with consciousness and with a purposeful end, and something other whether in an unconscious handling an end falls to be marked.
The instinct works unconsciously, but nonetheless is there in the unconscious handling of the instinct an end to be spied that points back to a being which with consciousness such an instinct has brought forth. If there is an end in the world, it must also beforehand be thought.
May it now be true that we also so with the teleological proof come not further than to a world-former, then yet that proof would be of no small meaning. Yea even if this proof led not surely to one understanding being but left open the likelihood for the being of many godly beings who together had brought forth the world, then yet the teleological proof would not be bare of all worth.
The understanding would then yet in the first cause or causes through the in-setting of the world be called for, and this proof would have yielded what it could yield. Only would one then, along this way to one or more world-formers come, stand before the hardship how a being that brought not forth the stuff yet could give to that stuff form and shape, or also how more than one being could be first cause of the world.
Logically may these thinkings yet have some worth, in deed they have for our consciousness no meaning more. All hangs here on the presence of an end in the world; if that stands fast, therewith is the consciousness of the highest being given, Pesch, Die grossen Welträthsel II².
8. The Moral Proof. Finally, the moral proof pays heed to the moral happenings that show themselves in man and mankind: conscience, responsibility, remorse, reward and punishment, goodness and happiness, fear of death and judgment, triumph of the good, and so forth. And from these it concludes to a moral being that shaped and upholds that whole moral world order. Some fix their gaze more on the conscience, which speaks in every man, on the moral law to which each feels bound, and conclude from this to a highest, sovereign lawgiver. Others look chiefly at the disharmony between goodness and happiness, between sin and punishment, and postulate from this a being that will bring righteous agreement hereafter. Or one may behold the whole moral world order in its inward ties and in its supremacy over the natural order, and conclude from this to a being that shaped that moral order and set it above the order of nature. Yet this argument is always grounded on the ethical happenings in the world of men and thereby comes to God as the highest moral being. Against this proof also exceptions have been raised. First, materialism brings against it that the moral life, like the conscious life, is no self-standing order but has slowly arisen through unfolding, shows itself thus here and so elsewhere, and at last rests on chance shifts of matter (Darwin, Descent of Man, ch. 4; Hellwald, History of Culture; Büchner, Force and Matter). And second, Fichte taught that the moral world order rests and stands in itself and has no need of a God above and beyond it; and the upholders of self-ruling and free-standing morals have followed him in this (C. Coignet, Independent Morals, Paris 1869). Again, against this materialistic and self-ruling view, all kinds of weighty qualms can be brought in. Indeed, it is more and more widely acknowledged that materialism has not made clear the moral happenings of freedom, responsibility, remorse, and so forth (Du Bois Reymond, The Seven World Riddles, 1882; Carneri, Morals and Darwinism, 1877; Weygoldt, Darwinism, Religion, Morals, 1878; and so on). And the independent morals have also been fought with strong reasons (Caro, Independent Morals, Paris 1876; Cramer, Christian and Human, p. 159 ff.). But this is surely true: the grounds of this proof themselves need so much strong backing that it hardly reaches the outcome. Nevertheless, this proof has found so much goodwill among many, chiefly through Kant's sway, that the other proofs have been nearly wholly overlooked thereby (cf. above p. 52, and further the writings on the moral world order: Zeller, Lectures and Essays III, 1884; Carrière, The Moral World Order, 1880; Hartmann, Moral Awareness, 1886; Christ, The Moral World Order, 1894; Traub, The Moral World Order, 1892; Pierson, Guide, Nov. 1895).
Yet this proof cannot be called stronger than the others. Indeed, it bears a much more personal mark than the former reasons. Though in the world around us there is often little of a moral world order to be seen, in his conscience each feels himself bound, against his will, to a moral order, just as strongly as in his understanding to the laws of thought. This moral order, which each finds in his own soul-life, does not straightway match the God-idea, nor does it force the acknowledgment of God's being, and even leaves for those who wish to flee it all kinds of loopholes; but it stays nevertheless a mighty witness that ever again leads to the acknowledgment of a holy and righteous being.
9. It is a pity that these arguments for the being of God have gotten the name of proofs in theology. Yet not for the reason named by Jacobi. Though proving is the leading out of one stance from another, the proving of God's being is still no gainsaying in terms. The hanging upon in a proof is wholly something other than the hanging upon in the working truth. The cause of knowing is utterly not the same as the cause of being. Though God's being can be the ending in a syllogism, even as in general from the work one can end to the workmaster, therefore that being in the working truth is still the beginning and ground of the being of all things; yes, as such it is rightly set forth in the ending. But the name of proofs is for the above-named arguments therefore less well chosen, because it has brought them over into a kind where they do not belong at home, namely in that of logical, mathematical, exact, forcing showings, and thus has robbed them of their ethical and religious kind.
It now has the seeming, as if the belief in God's being would rest upon those proofs and therewith stand or fall. And that would yet be a wretched belief, which must first prove God to itself before it prays to him, Kahnis, Luth. Dogm. But the other way is rather the case. The being of no single thing stands fast for us first on ground of proofs. Of the being of ourselves, of the outer world, of the think- and worth-laws and so on, we are before all reasoning and showing fast and surely overtaken by the marks which all these things unwithstandably make upon our awareness. We take that being on of itself, freely, without force or might. And so it is also with God's being. The so-called proofs may bring more clearness and brightness, but the sureness about God's being is not in the least strengthened thereby. This is only set by belief, that is, by the freeness with which our awareness gives witness to God's being, which from all sides thrusts itself upon us.
The proofs are then also no grounds, but rather outcomings of belief. Belief namely strives to give reckoning of the religious marks and stirrings which every man receives and bears about in his soul. Belief also works in upon the understanding and this seeks little by little to bring order in that chaos of marks and graspings; it sorts and kinds them and leads them back to single kinds. Marks come to us from the world of thoughts (ontological proof), from that of the endly, hanging, changeable things (cosmological proof), from that of the fairness and togetherness (teleological proof), from that of the worthly order (moral proof).
But though they are thus to be kinded, yet one may never think that these four proofs are the only and lone-standing witnesses which God sends out to us. No, all things speak to the godly of God, the whole world is a looking-glass of his worths, there is no worldly speck in which his everlasting might and godliness is not beheld. From within and from without us God's witness comes to us. He leaves himself not unwitnessed, in kind nor yore, in heart nor inwitting, in life nor lot. And therefore is that witness of God so mighty, that it is hardly gainsaid by anyone. All men and folk have heard something of the Lord's voice. The together-agreeing of the folks, by many still reckoned a fifth proof, is a strengthening thereof that God leaves himself not unwitnessed; it is mankind's answer to God's calling voice.
These witnesses which go out from God and which through all the world turn themselves to man, become in the proofs ordered and ranked. They get through the syllogistic shape in which they are clad no more strength. But as proofs weak, they are strong as witnesses. No showings are they which force the understanding of the unbeliever, but signs and witnesses which never leave off to make a mark upon each one's mood. Broken down, lone-standing, loosed from each other and set beside each other, they can be fought against at each point of the reasoning and hold up the believing which freely and of itself befalls. But taken as witness and preached as opening of that God, of whose being every man by kind, before reasoning and study, in the deepest of his soul is assured, they are of no small worth.
For even if it be that they, thus preached, meet hindrances and thinkings, therewith they are yet not done away. Even as no one believes in God's love because all things uncover his love but despite all that wakes twofoldness, so also is everyone beforehand overtaken of God's being; through the proofs he comes not to his belief and through the hindrances he suffers no shipbreak to his belief. On every field it is so, that with afterthinking first the hardships come up, but no one throws away therefore the worth-law, the think-law, the belief-way, the craft, the witship as foolishness, because his thinking knows not to make clear the showings which it owns and to ward against all thinkings. But nonetheless afterthinking brings, though no sureness about the being, yet clearness and brightness.
The so-called proofs for God's being give the believer reckoning of his own religious and ethical awareness; they give him weapons in hand wherewith the withstander, who in any case is not better weaponed, can be beaten back; they are for the Christian a token that it is the same God who opens himself in kind and grace and that thus shaping and reshapping, kind and worth, stand not manichean and twofold beside each other; God's worths which there shine in the world are the same which also glitter in the kingdom of the heavens. And together are the witnesses which go out from God in the world to us and are together-bound in the so-named proofs nothing other than opening of the Lord's Name, wherewith he marks himself for the ear of his shaped ones, and wherewith he gives us the right to speak to him. In binding with each other they make us know him as the godly being which by us needfully and needfully as being must be thought, which is the only, first, outright cause of all shaped things, which with awareness and goal-wise rules all things, and which above all in the inwitting opens himself as the Holy to each one who believes.
1. All that becomes knowable to us of God in His revelation is marked in Holy Scripture by the Name of God. The first meaning of the word shem is likely that of a sign, mark, sema, signum, just as the Greek onoma and the Latin nomen are drawn from the stem gno and thus point to that by which something is known, a mark. A name is a sign of him who bears it, a naming after one or another trait in which he shows himself and becomes knowable. There is a bond between the name and its bearer, and that bond is not random but grounded in the bearer himself. Even with us, and now still, when names have mostly become sounds without sense, that bond is still felt. A name is something personal and wholly other than a number or a sample of its kind. It always feels somewhat unpleasant when our name is wrongly written or used. To the name hangs our honor, our worth, our person and individuality. But much stronger was that bond in former times, when names still had a clear meaning and were a revealing of the person or thing that received it. So it is also in Scripture. Adam had to give names to the animals after their kind, Gen. 2:19, 20. Of many names in Scripture the meaning is given and also the reason why they are given, e.g., Eve, Gen. 3:20, Cain, 4:1, Seth, 4:25, Noah, 5:29, Babel, 11:9, Ishmael, 16:11, Esau and Jacob, 25:25, Moses, Ex. 2:10, Jesus, Matt. 1:21, etc. Often a name is changed or a byname added when a person steps forth in another quality, Abraham, Gen. 17:5, Sarah, 17:15, Israel, 32:28, Joshua, Num. 13:16, Jedidiah, 2 Sam. 12:25, Mara, Ruth 1:20, Peter, Mark 3:16, etc. After His ascension Christ has received a name above every name, Phil. 2:9, Heb. 1:4, and to the believers a new name is given in the new Jerusalem, Rev. 2:17, 3:12, 22:4. The same holds for the name of God. There is a close bond between God and His name. This bond too, according to Scripture, is not chance or random but laid by God Himself. Men do not name Him: He gives Himself a name. In the foreground stands thus the name as revelation from God's side, in active and objective sense, as nomen editum. Then the name of God is the same as the virtues or perfections which He shows outwardly, with His glory, Ps. 8:2, 72:19, His honor, Lev. 18:21, Ps. 86:11, 102:16, His redeeming might, Ex. 15:3, Isa. 47:4, His service, Isa. 56:6, Jer. 23:27, His holiness, 1 Chron. 16:10, Ps. 105:3, 103:1, etc. The name is God Himself, as He reveals Himself in one or another relation. That name as revelation of God is therefore great, Ezek. 36:23, holy, Ezek. 36:20, dreadful, Ps. 111:9, a high refuge, Ps. 20:1, a strong tower, Prov. 18:10. With proper names, namely with the name YHWH, God has made Himself known to Israel. Through the Angel, in whose midst His name is, Ex. 23:20, He has revealed Himself to Israel. And through Him He has laid His name upon the children of Israel, Num. 6:27, founded the remembrance of His name among them, Ex. 20:24, set His name among them and made it dwell, Deut. 12:11, 14:23, namely in the temple which is built for His name, 2 Sam. 7:13. In that temple His name now dwells, 2 Chron. 20:9, 33:4. Through that name He redeems, Ps. 54:1, and for that name He cannot forsake Israel, 1 Sam. 12:22, Isa. 48:9, 11, Ps. 31:3, 23:3, 143:11, etc. But Israel may not then blaspheme, profane, or vainly use that name, Ex. 20:7, Lev. 18:21, 24:11. On the contrary, that name must be called upon, told, magnified, known, confessed, feared, exalted, waited for, sought, hallowed, Gen. 4:26, 12:8, Ex. 9:16, Deut. 28:58, 1 Kings 8:33, Ps. 5:11, 34:3, 52:9, 83:16, 122:4, Isa. 26:8, Matt. 6:9, John 12:28, etc. In the New Testament there is but one name by which God gives salvation; it is the name of Jesus Christ, Acts 4:12. But in that one name He has also fully revealed Himself; therein is held all that God is and will be for His own; in that name He shares Himself, with all His benefits, to His people, Matt. 28:19, Luke 24:47, John 20:31, Acts 2:38, 1 Cor. 6:11, James 5:14. And a richer revelation the believers have to await in the new Jerusalem, Rev. 3:12, when His name shall be on all their foreheads, Rev. 22:4. The name of God is in Holy Scripture the marking, not of God as He is in Himself, but of God in His revelation, in His many relations to the creatures. This name is however not random, but God reveals Himself so and in that way because He is who He is. To His name therefore hangs His honor, His fame, all His virtues, His whole revelation, His own divine being. But that name therefore gives to him to whom it is revealed special rights and lays on him also peculiar duties. The name of God holds in it that He, revealing Himself therein, is now also named thereafter by creatures. The nomen editum passes over into the nomen inditum. The einai and kaleisthai are in Holy Scripture two sides of the same thing. God is who He is called, and He is called who He is. What He reveals of Himself is expressed and given back in certain names. He gives to His creatures the right, on the ground of and in agreement with His revelation, to name and address Him. The one name of God, as the holding of His whole revelation both in nature and grace, falls for us into many, many names. Only in that way do we get an overview of the richness of His revelation and the deep meaning of His name. We name Him and may name Him after all that of His being becomes open in creation and re-creation. But all those names, as namings of God, lay on us the duty to hallow and glorify them. It is the one name, the full revelation, and insofar the own being of God Himself, with which we have to do in all those names. God sets Himself through His name in a certain relation to us; thereto we ought in our relation to Him to answer.
Schultz, Altt. Theol. Oehler, Theol. des A. T. art. Name in Herzog. Smend, Lehrb. Cremer, s. v. onoma.
2. The names by which God is called and addressed by us are therefore not arbitrary; they are not devised by us according to our own pleasure. It is God himself who in nature and grace consciously and freely reveals himself, who grants us the right on the basis of this revelation to name him, yes, who in his Word has made known to us his own names on the basis of his revelation. All these names without distinction bear this character, that they are derived from the revelation. There is no single name that designates God's essence in itself. The revealed name is the foundation of all innate names. And because God's revelation in nature and Scripture is specifically directed to humans, therefore it is a human language in which God speaks of himself to us; therefore they are human words of which he makes use; therefore they are human forms under which he appears. In Scripture, therefore, anthropomorphisms do not occur here and there; the whole Scripture is anthropomorphic. From the first to the last page it testifies of a coming of God to and a seeking of man. The whole revelation of God concentrates itself in the Logos, who became flesh, and is as it were one humanization, one incarnation of God. If God spoke to us in a divine manner, no creature would understand him, but this is his grace, which already began with the creation, that he bends down to his creatures and speaks to them and appears to them in a human manner. Therefore all the names by which God names himself and allows himself to be named by us are derived from earthly and human relations. Thus he is called in Scripture El, the Strong, El Shaddai the Mighty, Yahweh, the Existing One, further Father, Son, Spirit, good, merciful, gracious, righteous, holy, etc., all concepts that first apply to creatures and then are transferred to God in an eminent sense. Even the so-called incommunicable attributes, such as immutability, independence, simplicity, eternity, omnipresence, are presented in Scripture in forms and expressions derived from the finite and therefore also in a negative sense; eternity can only be represented as a negation of time. Scripture makes not a single attempt to describe these perfections of God positively, according to their own essence, abstracted from their relation to the finite. But the anthropomorphism in Scripture goes much further. All that is proper to humans and even to creatures is also ascribed to God, especially parts of man, members of the body, senses, affections, actions, subjects and human adjuncts. God has a soul, Lev. 26:11, Matt. 12:28, and a Spirit, Gen. 1:2, etc. There is never mention of a body of God, although God in Christ also assumed a true body, John 1:14, Col. 2:17, and the church is called Christ's body, Eph. 1:22. But all bodily organs are nevertheless ascribed to God. There is mention of his face, Ex. 33:20, 23, Isa. 63:9, Ps. 16:11, Matt. 18:10, Rev. 22:4, of his eyes, Ps. 11:4, Heb. 4:13, of his eyelids, Ps. 11:4, of his pupil, Deut. 32:10, Ps. 17:8, Zech. 2:8, of his ears, Ps. 55:2, of his nose, Deut. 33:10, of his mouth, Deut. 8:3, of his lips, Job 11:5, of his tongue, Isa. 30:27, of his neck, Jer. 18:17, of his arm, Ex. 15:16, of his hand, Num. 11:23, of his right hand, Ex. 15:12, of his finger, Ex. 8:19, of his heart, Gen. 6:6, of his bowels, Isa. 63:15, Jer. 31:20, Luke 1:78, of his bosom, Ps. 74:11, of his lap, John 1:18, of his foot, Isa. 66:1. Furthermore, there is no human affection that is not also present in God, such as joy, Isa. 62:5, rejoicing, Isa. 65:19, sorrow, Ps. 78:40, Isa. 63:10, grief, Ps. 95:10, Jer. 7:18, 19, fear, Deut. 32:27, love with all its variations such as mercy, compassion, grace, longsuffering, etc., further zeal and jealousy, Deut. 32:21, repentance, Gen. 6:6, hate, Deut. 16:22, wrath, Ps. 2:5, vengeance, Deut. 32:35. Further, all human actions are also transferred to God, such as taking notice, Gen. 18:21, investigating, Ps. 7:9, knowing, Gen. 3:5, thinking, Gen. 50:20, forgetting, 1 Sam. 1:11, remembering, Gen. 8:1, Ex. 2:24, speaking, Gen. 2:16, calling, Rom. 4:17, commanding, Isa. 5:6, rebuking, Ps. 18:15, 104:7, answering, Ps. 3:4, witnessing, Mal. 2:14; resting, Gen. 2:2, working, John 5:17; seeing, Gen. 1:10, hearing, Ex. 2:24, smelling, Gen. 8:21, tasting, Ps. 11:4, 5; sitting, Ps. 9:7, rising, Ps. 68:1, going, Ex. 34:9, coming, Ex. 25:22, walking, Lev. 26:12, descending, Gen. 11:5, meeting, Ex. 3:18, visiting, Gen. 21:1, passing by, Ex. 12:13, forsaking, Judg. 6:13; writing, Ex. 34:1, sealing, John 6:27, engraving, Isa. 49:16; smiting, Isa. 11:4, chastising, Deut. 8:5, punishing, Job 5:17, binding up, Ps. 147:3, healing, Ps. 103:3, making whole, Deut. 32:39, killing and making alive, Deut. 32:39; wiping away, Isa. 25:8, wiping out, 2 Kings 21:13, washing, Ps. 51:2, cleansing, Ps. 51:2, anointing, Ps. 2:6, adorning, Ezek. 16:11, clothing, Ps. 132:16, crowning, Ps. 8:5, girding, Ps. 18:32; destroying, Gen. 6:7, laying waste, Lev. 26:31, killing, Gen. 38:7, plaguing, Gen. 12:17, judging, Ps. 58:11, condemning, Job 10:2, etc. Furthermore, God is very often designated with names that indicate a certain profession, office, relation, relationship among humans. He is a bridegroom, Isa. 61:10, a husband, Isa. 54:5, a father, Deut. 32:6, a judge, king, lawgiver, Isa. 33:22, a warrior, Ex. 15:3, a hero, Ps. 78:65, Zeph. 3:17, an artist and builder, Heb. 11:10, a husbandman, John 15:1, a shepherd, Ps. 23:1, a physician, Ex. 15:26, etc.; while then in these capacities there is again mention of his seat, throne, footstool, rod, scepter, weapons, bow, arrow, sword, shield, chariot, banner, book, seal, treasure, inheritance, etc. Yes, even to express what God is for his own, all kinds of images are borrowed from the animate and inanimate creation. He is compared to a lion, Isa. 31:4, an eagle, Deut. 32:11, a lamb, Isa. 53:7, a hen, Matt. 23:37, to the sun, Ps. 84:11, the morning star, Rev. 22:16, to a light, Ps. 27:1, a lamp, Rev. 21:23, a fire, Heb. 12:29, a fountain or spring, Ps. 36:9, a well, Jer. 2:13, to food, bread, drink, water, ointment, Isa. 55:1, John 4:10, 6:35, 55, to a rock, Deut. 32:4, a refuge, Ps. 119:114, a tower, Prov. 18:10, a stronghold, Ps. 9:9, a shadow, Ps. 91:1, 121:5, a shield, Ps. 84:11, a way, John 14:6, a temple, Rev. 21:22, etc., Polanus, Synt. Theol. II c. 35, Alsted, Theol. schol. 104 sq. Glassius, Philol. Sacra 1691.
3. The whole creation, all of nature with all its realms, the world of men above all, are in Holy Scripture made serviceable to the description of the knowledge of God. No bound is set to anthropomorphism. All creatures, living and lifeless, ensouled and unsouled, organic and inorganic, offer names to bring the greatness of God somewhat to our awareness. Though anōnymos in himself, God is yet polyōnymos in his revelation. All things can be said of God, and nothing is said worthily of God. Nothing is broader than this poverty. You seek a fitting name, you find none; you seek in whatever way to speak, you find all things, Augustine, tract. 13 in Ev. Joh. n. 5. And for clarification, why God can be named in so many ways, Augustine used a striking image. Our body has many needs, for light and air, food and drink, dwelling and clothing, etc., and all these things are different and lie alongside each other in the creatures. Our spirit also has many and varied needs, but what provides for them is not manifold but is always the one and same divine being. On earth one thing is a fountain, another is light. Thirsty, you seek a fountain, and to reach the fountain, you seek light, and if it is not day, you light a lamp to reach the fountain. That fountain itself is light: to the thirsty it is a fountain, to the blind it is light; let the eyes be opened to see the light, let the jaws of the heart be opened to drink the fountain; what you drink, this you see, this you hear. Let God be all to you, because he is the all of these things which you love. If you attend to visible things, God is not bread, nor is God water, nor is this light God, nor is clothing God, nor is a house God. For all these are visible and singular; what is bread is not water, and what is clothing is not a house, and what these are, this is not God, for they are visible. God is all to you; if you hunger, he is bread to you; if you thirst, he is water to you; if you are in darkness, he is light to you, because he remains incorruptible; if you are naked, he is the clothing of immortality to you, when this corruptible shall put on incorruption and this mortal shall put on immortality, tract. 13 in Ev. Joh. In like manner Pseudo-Dionysius says that God is anōnymos and at the same time polyōnymos , he is at once all things that are and none of the things that are, de div. nom. c. I. § 6. 7. In Thomas we read that God in himself prepossesses all perfections of creatures, as it were simply and universally perfect, S. Theol. I qu. 13 art. 2. And more beautifully still in Bonaventure: that we may extol God with praises, and be advanced to the knowledge of God, translations to the divine are necessary for us. The reason or end of translation is twofold. One in which is the praise of God, the other the guidance of our intellect. For the praise of God translation is necessary. And since God is much to be praised, lest for lack of words it should happen to cease from praise, holy Scripture has taught that names of creatures be transferred to God; and this in an indefinite number, so that just as every creature praises God, so God is praised from every name of a creature, and he who could not be praised by one name, as surpassing every name, might be praised from every name. The other reason is the guidance of our intellect. Because when we come through creatures to know the creator, for the most part, nearly all creatures have noble properties, which are the reason for understanding God, as the lion strength, the lamb meekness, the rock solidity, the serpent prudence and the like; therefore it was fitting that many names be transferred to God, Sent. I dist. 34 art. 1 qu. 4. And Calvin agreed with this, when he said: there is no particle of the world in which at least some sparks of his glory are not seen to shine forth. God is immanent in all that is created. The pure in heart sees God everywhere. All things are full of God. I confess that this can be said piously, if it proceeds from a pious mind, that nature is God, Inst. I 5, 1. 5. But there is an ascent in the creatures. The place and rank which the creatures occupy is determined by their kinship to God. All creatures name a name of God. But among all creatures man stands at the top. He alone bears the high name of image, son, child of God. He alone is called God's offspring. And therefore the most and most exalted names of God are taken from man. Yet man must never be detached from nature. And no creature or any part of the world must ever be placed alongside or over against God. There is nothing outside and without God. Indeed, here there has often been sinned against. The dualism of Plato, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism limited God's revelation and set a matter hostile over against him. And in various forms this exercised influence and worked on in theology. As in modern times under the influence of Kant and Jacobi the revelation of God is limited to the religious and ethical; as Scripture is acknowledged only in its religious-moral content; as the seat of religion is sought only in heart or conscience, in feeling or will, in all this a same dualistic principle is at work. Nature, with its elements and powers, man in his social and political life, art and science come to stand outside the revelation of God and become neutral, that is, God-less territories. Naturally, then the Old Testament and a very great part of the New Testament can no longer be valued; nature and world have nothing more to say to the believer; the revelation, the Word of God loses all influence on public life; religion, driven back to a hidden refuge of heart and inner chamber, forfeits all claim to respect; dogmatics, specifically also the locus de Deo, shrinks from day to day, and theology no longer knows how to maintain its place. Theology no longer knows how to speak of God, because it does not speak from and through him. It has no more names with which it can name God. God becomes the great Unknown and the world becomes first godless, then anti-god.
4. The names by which God in his revelation calls himself, however, bring with them a peculiar difficulty for thought. For earlier it became clear to us that God is incomprehensible and exalted far above all that is finite; but here, in his names, he descends to all that is finite and becomes like the creatures. Here an antinomy presents itself, which seems unsolvable. On the one hand nameless, God is yet on the other hand of many names. After all anthropomorphism has first been banished, it is yet brought in again here. With what right then can these names be used of God? On what ground are they ascribed to him, who stands infinitely high above every creature and cannot be comprehended by the finite? That ground can only lie therein, that the whole creation, though as creature infinitely far removed from God, is yet a creature, a work of God and akin to him. The world is no opposition alongside and over against God, no self-standing power, no second God, but wholly and fully God's work in its being and its so-being: it is from the beginning laid out to reveal God. The whole people of Israel is in all its laws and institutions, offices and ministries, character and customs etc. arranged to proclaim God's virtues, and the human nature of Christ is by the Holy Spirit fitted to declare the Father and to make his name known to men. The apostolic band with its diversity of upbringing, preparation, gift and calling is destined to tell the great things of God. And therefore God can and may be named by us in creaturely wise. The right of anthropomorphism rests thereon, that God himself has descended into and to his creatures and in and through creatures has revealed his name. Anthropomorphism thus sits by no means only, as was already noted, in a single word such as personality. There is no other way to speak of God than in anthropomorphic wise. For we do not see him himself. We can only see him in his works and name him according to the revelation in those works. More yet, we cannot see God, at least here on earth, from face to face. If God yet wills that we shall know him, then he must descend to us, accommodate himself to our limited, finite, human consciousness, speak to us in human tongue. He who therefore fights the right of anthropomorphisms, denies in principle therewith the possibility that God reveals himself in his creatures, must thence proceed to the denial of creation and holds at last nothing over but an eternal dualism between God and world, between the infinite and the finite. If indeed our naming of God with anthropomorphic names includes a finitizing of God, then this holds yet much more of the revelation in creation. God as the Infinite is then powerless to bring forth another being outside his own essence; the world is in no respect a revelation, it is solely and only a hiding of God; man is solely and only opposed to God and not akin to him; and God is eternal depth, nameless silence, as well for himself as for man. Naturally there is then also no knowledge of God possible anymore. If anthropomorphic, creaturely names do short to God's essence, then he can and may not be named by us with any name, then we must wholly keep silence; every name, with which we would wish to denote him, is then a dishonoring of God, an assault on his majesty, a blasphemy of God. One has indeed sought to evade this consequence, which however lies at hand, by making distinction between representation and concept. Plato already began therewith. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism continued this. And Hegel came forward anew therewith. But therewith one comes yet no step further. Even the highest speculation and the deepest philosophy must yet think and speak about God; though they now cast away all representations and hold only pure, abstract concepts over, they come therewith not above the human, creaturely thinking and speaking and approach not to the Infinite himself. Even the most abstract names, such as being, substance, the absolute, the one, the spirit, reason, are and remain anthropomorphisms. There is for man but choice between these two: absolute silence or human thinking and speaking about God, between agnosticism, that is, theoretical atheism or anthropomorphism. Philosophy has therefore also always returned to anthropomorphism, otherwise it would naturally also have ended with a negative critique. Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Damascene, Erigena have yet at last ascribed all sorts of names to God. The cataphatic theology built up what the apophatic had broken down. The substance of Spinoza received many attributes and modes. With Hegel God yet again became life, spirit, thinking, reason, subject. Rauwenhoff lets imagination appear where understanding must end. By many philosophers therefore the right of anthropomorphism is defended, Kant, Jacobi, Paulsen, Hartmann etc. And so naturally the Christian theology has also always judged. God therein walks the way of men, as the Jews expressed it. Incomprehensible are God's works and actions, nor could we attain anything of them, unless Holy Scripture used formulas of speaking about God which are near to human things. Therefore it pleases the Holy Spirit, author of Scriptures, on account of the weakness of our capacity, to babble in our manner and more gently and humbly than befits such majesty, to deal with us through signs and words, Flacius in Glassius, cf. Luther in Oehler. Gerhard, Loci Theol. Ursinus, Tract. theol. Polanus, Synt. Martyr, Loci. Alsted, Theol. schol. Bretschneider, Dogm. Id. Syst. Entw. Hengstenberg, Auth. d. Pent. Philippi. Twesten. Lange. Kahnis, Dogm. Beck, Vorles. Dr. Graue, zur Verständigung über den anal. Char. der Gotteserk., Jahrb. f. prot. Theol.
5. The right of these names may thus be established, but what is their worth? What kind and manner of knowledge do they furnish us concerning the Godly being? There can be no speech of this knowledge being an adequate one. It is in every respect finite and limited, but it is therefore yet not impure and untrue. Adequate knowledge we have very little; everywhere and in every field we at last stumble upon a mystery; the inward being of things, the Thing in itself, escapes our beholding. We behold phenomena and conclude therefrom to the being, we learn to know properties and climb thereby up to the substance, but this itself lies behind the appearance and is unknown to us. The knowledge of nature assumes atoms as the last building-blocks of the worklyhood but has thereof not the least empirical knowledge. A definition is there only to give of the very simplest things; as soon as they are of somewhat higher order, they are in no concept fully to describe. That holds already of the seeable world; but yet more is it of use in the world of the unseeable things. For man is a bodily, senseful being. All his knowledge begins with and comes up out of the senseful beholding. Our thinking is bound to the senses, like our soul to the body. The ghostly things we never behold straightway but only through the medium of the stuffly things. We see all things ἐν αἰνιγματι. Not only God, but also the soul and the whole ghostly world comes to our knowledge only through the senseful world. Hence we mark all the ghostly with names that first hold in the seeable world. The soul of man we name after bodily appearances. Her workings, such as knowing, thinking, understanding, grasping, judging, deciding, feeling etc., we bring ourselves and others to awareness by means of words that at first give to know a bodily handling. All our speaking of unseeable things is thus metaphor, image, likeness, poetry. Τα γαρ νοητα.... προσηγοριας δε πασης ἐκτος, ἐπειδη κυριον ὀνομα των νοητων τε και ἀσωματων οὐδεν, Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. 45. But therefore we speak yet not untrue and incorrect. On the contrary, true poetry is truth, for it rests on the likeness, the agreement, the kinship of the sundry groups of appearances. The whole tongue is built thereon, all figures go out therefrom. If speaking in image were untrue, then all our thinking, and all our knowing would be show, and speaking itself unmightful. This same holds also in religion and theology. Adequate knowledge of God there is not. We cannot name Him as He is in Himself. All His names are taken from the creatures. But therefore they are not untrue, a fruit of human imaging. Like there is likeness and thus comparison mightful between the sundry parts of the world, so is there kinship between God and His creatures, which gives us right to speak of Him in creaturely wise. More yet, timely, in the worklyhood the natural well goes before the ghostly; but logically and ideally the ghostly is first and thereafter the natural. The natural would not be able to lead us to the ghostly, if it not itself were come forth therefrom. Plato saw in the cosmos a realization of the ideas. And the Scripture teaches that all things are made by the Logos and are not become out of things that appear under the eyes, John 1:3, Hebrews 11:3. It is God Himself who has made all the creation, also the stuffly, serviceable to the revelation of His virtues. He could do that, for He is the almighty Creator and has absolute lordship also over the stuff. Though it be then that we name God with names taken from the creatures, in those creatures they are first laid by God Himself. We use the names wherewith we mark God, well first of the creatures, because we know these earlier than God. But in matter they hold first of God and thereafter of the creatures. All virtues are first in Him, then in the creatures. He has them per essentiam, these have them only per participationem. Like the temple is made after the τυπος shown to Moses on the mount, Hebrews 8:5, so is every creature first eternally thought and thereafter shaped in time. Every πατρια that is not every kin but every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named out of the Πατηρ who shaped all things, Ephesians 3:15, cf. Matthew 23:9, John of Damascus, de fide orthod. I 9. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 3 art. 2, qu. 13 art. 3 and 6. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 22 art. 1 qu. 3. Zanchi, Op. II col. 11-14 etc. All heavenly things are in the Scripture painted to us in earthly paints and colors. God Himself comes through all the creation to us and has in the human nature of Christ dwelt among us. This human nature was surely no adequate organ of His Godhead; it was even a hiding of His glory. And yet the fullness of the Godhead has dwelt in Him bodily; who saw Him, beheld the Father. Both let themselves thus very well unite, a knowledge that is inadequate, finite, limited and yet at the same time true, pure, enoughful. God reveals Himself in His works, and after that revelation is He named by us. He allows us to name Him in our weak, human tongue, because He Himself in the creatures has spread out His virtues for us. We are it thus properly not who give God a name; how would we be able and may do that? It is God Himself who through nature and Scripture lays His glorious names on our lips. After an old sundering are the names of God no product of the ratio ratiocinans, the subjective rede of man, but of the ratio ratiocinata, the objective rede in the revelation. God's self-awareness is the archetype, and our knowledge of God, drawn from His Word, is thereof the ectype.
6. Hereby is indicated the character that the knowledge of God always bears among creatures. Two extremes are thereby avoided. On the one side stand those who deem an essential, quidditative, adequate knowledge of God possible, whether by mystical contemplation (Plotinus, Malebranche, the ontologists and the Roman Catholics as teaching the vision of God per essentiam in the state of glory), or by logical thinking (Eunomius, Scotus, Spinoza, Hegel). Against all these, the word remains true: no one has ever seen God; only the Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, has declared Him to us. Moses saw God's glory only when it had passed by. The prophets beheld God only in vision. Both in the creation outside us and in our own soul-life, the created always stands between God and our consciousness; there are no innate ideas. We see in a mirror and walk by faith. An absolute, an adequate knowledge of God is therefore impossible. The transformation of the representation into the concept, of the language of imagination into that of thought, of cataphatic into apophatic theology, of the Semitic-concrete into the Japhetic-abstract always results in the loss of all knowledge of God. But on the other side, by the name of ectypical theology, the sentiment is also rejected of those who indeed deem the creaturely names for designating the essence of God unavoidable but see in them nothing but symbols, products of the poetic imagination. In a certain sense, even John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa I 12, and Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus c. 1, belong here; compare also Moses Maimonides, Moreh Nebuchim I c. 58, Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia I c. 24. They claimed, namely, that all those names make us know God only as the cause of all things, so that, for example, the name of wisdom ascribed to God contains nothing more than that He is the cause of all wisdom. But Thomas already rightly remarked against this that God could then just as well be called gold, silver, sun, moon, body, etc., since He is the cause of all those creatures; and furthermore, we all mean something else and more when we call God good than when we call Him the cause of the good. The virtues of God are not all to be seen in all creatures and in all in the same way, Summa Theologica I qu. 13 art. 2. Zanchi, Opera II col. 11-13. Yet later this sentiment was renewed especially by Schleiermacher. God is only absolute causality; His attributes are subjective designations; the character of theology is not to be called ectypical or analogical but symbolic, Schleiermacher, Reden über die Religion; Bretschneider, Dogmatik I; Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie. The religious representations are then products of the poetic imagination, aesthetically valued ideals (Rauwenhoff, Pierson, F. A. Lange, etc.). In some modern circles, there has lately been a tendency to continue using the biblical and ecclesiastical names as symbols of higher, spiritual truths. This view of the character of theology is, however, not tenable. Symbolic can well be called that theological science which occupies itself with the explanation of the holy emblems occurring in Scripture and in the church, as, for example, Vitringa gives it the name of theologia symbolica, 1726; compare d'Outrein, Proefstukken van heilige Sinnebeelden, 1700. A symbol is always a sensible object or a sensible action for designating a spiritual truth. But theology as such has not to do with such symbols, but with spiritual realities. When consciousness, will, holiness, etc., are ascribed to God, no one understands this in a symbolic sense. No single religious person sees in such representations products of his imagination, as everyone readily acknowledges in works of art. The religious person, on the contrary, holds those religious representations to be objectively true, and his religion withers and dies away as soon as he begins to doubt them. If they are then also products of the imagination, their objective truth cannot be maintained. Aesthetically they may still be valued, but religiously and ethically they have lost their value; religion can no more be transformed into art than into philosophy. Attempts to maintain them then still as symbols always end in disappointment; whoever, like Hegel, distinguishes between representation and concept, is no longer satisfied with the representation; he always strives to come to the pure concept and then later grasps in vain back at the religious representations as symbols. The symbolic character of theology makes the names of God a reflex of one's own inner life, deprives them of all truth, and seeks their ground only in the ever-changing ratio ratiocinans. Man is then the measure of religion; as man is, so is his God. For these reasons, theology is not symbolic, but ectypical or analogical to be called. Herein is contained: 1º. that all our knowledge of God is from and through God, grounded on His revelation, that is, on the ratio ratiocinata; 2º. that God, to communicate His knowledge to creatures, must descend to those creatures and accommodate Himself to their capacity; 3º. that the possibility of this condescension cannot be denied, since it is given with creation, that is, with the existence of a finite being; 4º. that our knowledge of God is therefore always only analogical, that is, formed according to the analogy of what can be perceived of God in His creatures; not God Himself in His unknowable essence but God in His revelation, in His relation to us, in ta peri ten physin, John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa I 4, in His habitudo ad creaturas, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 12 art. 12, has as object; and thus is but a finite image, weak likeness, and creaturely imprint of that perfect knowledge which God possesses of Himself; and 5º. that our knowledge of God is nevertheless true and pure and reliable, since it has the self-consciousness of God as archetype and His self-revelation in the cosmos as foundation, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 13 art. 5; Contra Gentiles I c. 32-34. Zanchi, Opera II col. 23. 24. Junius, De Theologia, Opera 1607 I; ed. Kuyper. Gomarus, Disputationes Theologicae I. Owen, Theologoumena, 1661. Calovius, Isagoge ad Theologiam, 1652. Kuyper, Encyclopaedie II.
1. The Holy Scripture names God with many names, but never proceeds from an abstract concept of God. It never exalts one attribute of God at the cost of another. Indeed, now one attribute, then another comes more to the foreground, but there is full harmony between all attributes. It is the intent of Scripture to bring all God's virtues equally to their honor. Just as the person of Christ does not represent a certain one-sided character or temperament and yet is a person full of life and reality, so also God in his revelation is always unfolding all his virtues in harmonious connection. Nowhere is there speech of God's essence in the abstract. The Hebrew word tushiyyah from the root yashah ; to be, to exist, Arabic III to help, to establish, denotes that which has endurance, is steadfast, provides advantage, in the concrete especially true wisdom and happiness, Job 5:12, 6:13, 12:16, 26:3 (30:22), Prov. 2:7, 3:21, 8:14 and further only still Isa. 28:29, Mic. 6:9, but stands in none of these places for the essence of God, cf. Delitzsch on Job 5:12. No more can the New Testament words theotēs Col. 2:9, theiotēs Rom. 1:20, morphē theou Phil. 2:6, theia physis 2 Pet. 1:4 cf. Gal. 4:8 prove that there is speech of the essence or nature of God in distinction from his attributes, as Polanus wishes, Synt. theol. God's essence becomes knowable for us in his revelation, that is, in his names. The names of God are designations of his aretai , 1 Pet. 2:9. This usage connects with Isa. 42:8, 12; 43:21; 63:5, where the Hebrew tehillah praise, honor, in the LXX is translated by aretē , cf. Hab. 3:3; Zech. 6:13. The church has the calling to proclaim God's virtues, that is, to give him honor for the doxa which is displayed in all his works. Of a description of God's essence, apart from the attributes, there is never speech in Holy Scripture. In the earliest time, something similar was not attempted in Christian theology either. Under the names of God, everything was summed up that one had to say of God. The names of God were indications not only of the proper names but also of the later so-called attributes and even of the persons in the divine essence, Clement of Alexandria Strom. V 12. Augustine, de doctr. chr. I 5. Pseudo-Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 1 sq. John of Damascus, de fide orth. I c. 12. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 13. Roman Catechism I c. 2 qu. 11. 13. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit I² S. 211 f. Gerhard, Loci Theol. loc. 2. Hyperius, Meth. Theol. c. 3. Polanus, Synt. Theol. Lib. 2 c. 6. Zanchi, Op. II col. 9. 10. Walaeus, Op. I. Alsted, Theol. did. schol. The attributes were therefore immediately taken up into the idea of God; so for example in Irenaeus, adv. haer. I c. 14. II c. 13, 35 etc. Augustine speaks indeed of God's essence, but he understands thereunder the fullness of God's being and immediately includes all attributes, simplicity, eternity, goodness, wisdom etc. therein. In the confessions, God is often spoken of in this way, without distinction of essence and attributes, and without classification of the attributes, Council of the Lateran in Denzinger, Enchir. symb. n. 355, Vatican Council de fide c. 1. Augsburg Confession art. 1. French Confession art. 1. Scottish art. 1. Belgic art. 1. Westminster Confession cap. 2. And also later still, various theologians do not enter into these distinctions and treat the attributes without speaking beforehand of God's nature, for example Thomas S. Theol. I qu. 3 sq. Ursinus, Tract. theol.
2. But soon a distinction arose. People were led to this by the question, what was the property that straightway set God apart from all creatures, what was the chief concept and from which one must therefore start in the doctrine of God. Now the Platonic philosophy had already sought that chief concept in being, and Philo had brought this into connection with the name YHWH, the only name that did not indicate a working or power but the essence of God himself, and therefore often called God ὁ ὠν or το ὀν, Zeller, Philos. V. This description of the essence of God was taken over into Christian theology. Irenaeus describes God many times as absolutely simple, adv. haer. II c. 13. 28 IV 11 and even calls Him inexcogitabilis et insubstantivus, I c. 14, but against Gnosticism he yet lays special stress on the fact that God is the creator of all things and that He has revealed Himself in His works, Harnack D. G. I. In contrast, in Origen, de princ. I 1 sq. c. Cels. VI 64. VII 42-51, Athanasius, de decr. nic. syn. c. 11, Damascenus, de fide orth. I c. 2. 4. 9. etc. cf. Harnack D. G. II, Schwane, Dogm. I II, Kattenbusch, Vergl. Confessionskunde I, God is the one, the being, yes the one exalted above all being, ὁ ὠν, ὁ ὠν καθ’ ἑαυτον, το ὀν, who is being itself, who has being from and through Himself. And following in the footsteps of Philo, all this was derived from or tied to the name of YHWH in the Old Testament. In the West these determinations were taken over. Augustine describes God repeatedly as summum esse, summum bonum, verum, pulchrum etc. God is a substantia, for what is no substance does not exist, Enarr. in Ps. 67. But, because the word substance is often used in contrast to accidentia, which belong to the substance and have it as bearer, Augustine prefers to use of God the word essentia, quam Graeci οὐσιαν vocant and for which also the word natura is sometimes used, de trin. V 2 VII 5 sq. de civ. XII, 2. de doctr. chr. I 6. For in God there is no distinction between substance and accidents; His being is no bearer of properties, but these are identical with the being itself. God is the highest, best, fairest, most perfect being, quo esse aut cogitari melius nihil possit, de lib. arb. II 6. de doctr. chr. I 7. He is God, supra quem nihil, extra quem nihil, sine quo nihil est; summa vita, summa veritas, summa beatitudo, summa sapientia, summa essentia, de civ. XII 2. Solil. I 1. And Augustine also appeals for this description of God to the name YHWH, de trin. V 2. VII 5. de doctr. chr. I 32. This same description we then find repeatedly later, in Hilary, de trin. I c. 1 sq. Pseudo-Dionysius, de div. nom. cap. 1. § 6, who however cap. 4 § 1 starts from the idea of the good and c. 5 § 1 says that this extends even further than that of being, Anselm, Monol. c. 28. Prosl. c. 17 sq. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 8. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 2 art. 3 and qu. 3. S. c. Gent. I c. 16 sq. Bonaventure, Brevil. I cap. 2. Sent. I dist. 8. etc. Petavius, Theol. lib. 1 c. 6. Perrone, Prael. theol. II. C. Pesch, Prael. II. Jansen II. Although this now became the common view, there were yet those who chose another starting point. They sought the chief concept in the idea of God not in the absolute being, in the esse a se (aseity), but in infinity; and they therefore preferred to describe the essence of God as an ens infinitum. So did Duns Scotus, who claimed that being could be ascribed univocally, in the same sense, to God and to the creature, but that the distinguishing mark between God and the creature lay in this, that God was an ens infinitum and the creatures were finite, Sent. I dist. 3 qu. 1. and dist. 8 qu. 3. Furthermore, there were still some Thomists who thought that the proper essence of God lay in the intellectual nature and they therefore described God as ens intelligens, as for example Gotti, cf. Perrone, Prael. theol. II. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit I.
3. The Reformation brought no change in this view. Men aligned themselves with one or another definition. The Reformed, at least in the first period, mostly adopted the definition of Augustine and Thomas. They started from the concept of aseity or independence and often defined God as an independent being. Zwingli. Hyperius, Method of Theology. Martyr, Common Places. Polanus, Synthesis of Theology, book II chapter 5. Zanchius. Ursinus, Theological Treatise 1584. Alongside this, definitions of God also appear as uncreated spirit, most simple spirit, spirit existing from itself, sometimes supplemented with the trinitarian formula one in essence, three in persons. Heppe, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Reformed Church. Schweizer, Creed of the Evangelical Reformed Church I. The Lutherans used the definition infinite spiritual essence, spiritual being subsisting from itself, independent spirit. Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Hase, Hutterus Redivivus § 54. In contrast, Socinianism took a different standpoint. Setting aside all metaphysical questions, it laid emphasis only on the will of God. The knowledge of God consists only in knowing his will. Religion loses all mystery and merges into worship. God comes to stand ever further from world and mankind. In Remonstrantism, rationalism, and English deism, this is continued, compare above. Against this cold, moralistic concept of God, there came again a reaction from the side of philosophy. Spinoza returned to the idea of being, conceived God as the one, infinite substance, necessarily existing, absolutely infinite being, absolutely first and immanent cause. Ethics I proposition 7 and following. And he spoke again of a love of God, intellectual love of God, which bestowed the highest blessedness. Ethics V proposition 15 and following. Indeed, rationalism and deism still reigned after Spinoza, but around the middle of the 18th century, people grew ever more weary of it. The great minds, Goethe, Lessing, Herder felt drawn to Spinoza, and soon his pantheism entered philosophy. Kant already undermined the foundations of rationalism, although he still called himself a deist. Drews, German Speculation I. Fichte undertook the battle against the concepts of God and immortality as products of eudaemonism. In his exaggerated moralism, God was to him the same as the pure I, the moral world order; God was no being, no substance, but absolute doing, activity; so in his Science of Knowledge 1794, On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World Government 1798, Appeal to the Public 1799. Later he partially returned from this and aligned more closely with Spinoza. Instruction to the Blessed Life or Doctrine of Religion 1806. Schleiermacher showed even stronger agreement with Spinoza. God and world are correlates. Dialectic. God is the whence of our receptive and self-active existence. The Christian Faith I fifth edition. Schelling distinguished himself from both in that he not only took account of the spiritual, religion, morality, but also of objective nature. It was his aim to lift natural science from the lamentable state in which it found itself. And so he grasps both, nature and spirit together; nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature; he sees in both a continual, organic revelation of the Absolute, which is exalted above all oppositions, one, simple, eternal, without predicates, unity of the infinite and the finite, of God and world, one and all. Drews, German Speculation I. Finally, Hegel reworked this system into a logical idealism. Nature and history are a logically necessary self-unfolding of the idea. All is reasonable, all is embodied thought. Reason is thus the absolute substance, it is God himself. For God is nothing other than the one, living world-idea developing to self-consciousness. God is thus in Hegel indeed reason, thinking, spirit, subject, but not in the sense that he would have his own life before and outside the world. Without the world God is not God; the world is an essential moment in the life of God. Drews, German Speculation I.
4. Also against this pantheism opposition did not fail to arise. A whole row of theistic thinkers stood up to show the untenableness of pantheism and to uphold the right of theism. They sought their strength in the idea of absolute personality, connected this with the idea of becoming, and thus brought into God a theogonic process, either in a unitarian sense (Jacobi, Herbart, Drobisch, Rothe, Lotze, Ulrici, Carrière, and so on), or in a trinitarian sense (Baader, Schelling, J. H. Fichte, Weisse, Dorner, and so on). But this theistic speculation also has had its time. Separation of theology and philosophy, of religion and metaphysics, has become the watchword. On the one hand, science withdraws more and more from the field of religion and theology; it becomes exact, positive. On the other hand, religion also seeks more and more to free itself from science and to banish all metaphysics and philosophy. For the locus de Deo this has the result that the being of the Godhead is sought exclusively in the ethical good. The Groningen theology placed the fatherhood and the love in God in the foreground, Hofstede de Groot, The Groningen Theology . Scholten indeed proceeded from God's absolute sovereignty, but the ethical moderns rose up against his speculative intellectualism and monistic determinism, and conceived God as Father, Hoekstra, The Christian's God-Fearing , Sources and Foundations , as the moral ideal, the power of the good, holy power, Hooykaas, God in History . Hooykaas, H. Herderschee, Oort, Van Hamel, Religion According to the Principles of the Ethical Direction among the Moderns . In Germany, in the same way, the neo-Kantianism of Ritschl has arisen against the speculative mediating theology. Ritschl denies that religion is a legal relationship. According to Duns Scotus, the Socinians, and the Arminians, God is the unlimited ruler, who nevertheless treats people, although they have no rights over against Him, with equity. Arbitrariness, absolute dominion, is the being of God and the law of the world; God can do one thing as well as the other. The relationship between God and man is private-legal, and finds its image in the slaveholder who treats his slave equitably. According to the orthodox Protestants, God's relationship to the world is determined by justice. Man has a right to eternal life if he keeps God's law and otherwise deserves punishment. This theory is public-legal in nature; it is borrowed from the Old Testament, especially from Pharisaism, and was taken over by Paul and thus entered the Christian church. Compare also his studies on God, now newly published in Collected Essays, New Series . But both representations are wrong. Law and religion stand over against each other. No dualism may be brought into God between justice and grace. The whole abstract, Areopagite concept of God must be given up, which places God negatively above the world and assumes no fellowship between God and man. Religion is a moral relationship, and Christianity is the completely spiritual and absolutely moral religion. The relationship of God and man finds its image not in the relation of a lord to his servant or of the government to its subjects but in that of a father to his child. The family is its example. God must therefore be conceived as love; beside it no other concept of equal value comes into consideration. From this one must immediately proceed. The Christian dogmatician should not begin according to the synthetic method with all sorts of metaphysical abstractions about God as the Absolute, nor with a so-called natural theology which does not exist, nor with the concept of personality or with the attribute of holiness, but immediately and wholly with love. From this everything, creation, providence, atonement, justification, and so on, must be derived. Compare Kaftan, The Essence of the Christian Religion . Herrmann, Religion in Relation to World-Knowledge and to Morality . Gottschick, The Churchliness of the So-Called Church Theology . And so every direction is known by its concept of God. Alternately God is described as the being, the absolute being, substance; or as the Sovereign, the Lord, the Supreme Being; or as infinite Spirit, absolute causality, absolute personality; or as the Father, love, goodness, and so on. It is so difficult to proceed from the harmony of all God's virtues and to maintain this to the end. Every man is limited and lays emphasis on one attribute at the expense of the others; Jansenius saw in God especially the truth, François de Sales the love, Vincentius the goodness, Saint Cyran the omnipotence, Quack, Port-Royal , reprint from The Guide . And yet it is the calling of theology, after the example of Holy Scripture, to honor all God's virtues equally.
5. However, by thus describing the being of God and making one attribute the chief concept, theology ran the risk of making a distinction between the being of God and the attributes that were later added to it. Naturally, it could not take the path of polytheism, which made as many divine persons out of the different attributes as they appeared in the creatures. Plato also gave to the ideas, as archetypes of real things, their own independent being beside God. Gnosticism described God as the unknowable and unnameable, but made the Platonic ideas into aeons that emanated from God and in a descending series moved away from God. They were called ennoia, nous, logos, zoe, sophia, and so on, and were the personified attributes of God emanating from Him, presented as divine beings. Philo, under Plato's sway, often set forth the divine powers, especially goodness, might, and the logos, as hypostases. Jewish theology took on various hypostases, such as Metatron, Memra, Shekinah, Ruach, Bath Kol. And in the Kabbalah, the ten sefiroth or attributes of God were often described as emanations from the divine being. Later, this Gnostic and Kabbalistic philosophy often wielded great sway. In Arianism, something of this Gnosticism still lingered, insofar as it assumed a gradation among the divine persons. Monotheism, no longer upheld and maintained by the doctrine of the Trinity, easily passes over into polytheism. We hear daily that state, science, art, fortune, chance, fate, and so on, are regarded and honored by many as independent powers beside and in the place of God.
Although Christian theology did not go so far, it soon made a distinction between God's being and attributes. The church fathers already spoke for a long time of God's being in distinction from the three persons, but gradually the word being was also set against his attributes. Especially through the strife against Eunomius this distinction arose. Eunomius in his Apologetic Book often said that the names were a sign of the being of the thing. Against this, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa claimed that there was no single name that expressed God's being, but that there were yet many names, properties, concepts, thoughts, dignities, through which a certain character of God is imprinted in us. And Gregory of Nyssa spoke of God's being as the underlying and of qualities or differences of properties in relation to that being. As soon as this distinction arose, the question had to be asked what belonged to the being and what to the attributes. Thereby the good path was left. When the church fathers in describing God started from the name Jehovah and defined Him as the being, then they did not have in mind God's being in distinction from his attributes, but the whole being of God as it reveals itself in his attributes. The being that was ascribed to God was thus no abstract thing, but a living, endlessly full, concrete being, a highest being, that at once and in one was identical with highest life, highest truth, highest wisdom, highest love, and so on, as Augustine often said, a sea of boundless and endless being, an endless and boundless sea of substance. The description of God as essence made known that He was the sum of all reality, and by no means that He was the abstract being, in the philosophical sense of that word. Baur and Ritschl in his studies on God have not kept this difference enough in view. Also with Basil and Gregory of Nyssa the distinction of being and attributes served mainly to maintain against Eunomius the incomprehensibility of God's being.
6. But when the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God later came to stand in the background, the distinction between essence and attributes gained another meaning. Just as in creatures there is a difference between their substance and their attributes, so also in God a distinction was made between his essence and his perfections. This led, however, to all kinds of difficulties. First, it came into conflict with its own starting point. It was the unanimous teaching of the whole Christian church and theology that God's essence in itself was unknowable, that no name or definition could be given of it, and that God could only be known from his revelation, by his own light. With that, theology from the beginning took a positive standpoint and cut off all philosophical speculation at the root. Now, however, it unwittingly brought philosophy back in. God's essence was distinguished from his attributes. Of that essence something could and must therefore be said apart from the attributes. The incomprehensibility of God was in fact denied. But there was more. This distinction between God's essence and attributes brought with it that that essence could only be described in very abstract terms, as spiritual being, infinite being, absolute being, without further predicates. That might now be a philosophical definition, but that was no longer the Christian, the biblical concept of God. Thus God never meets us in Scripture. The theological and the philosophical concept of God resembled each other wonderfully. The first chapters of Christian dogmatics gave a scheme of concepts that was all too much borrowed from Plato and Aristotle and that was then later supplemented by Christian ideas. Especially when in this century theology took over the idea of the Absolute from philosophy, the mingling of both came out clearly. It is the merit of Ritschl that he saw that. He was completely right when he demanded that dogmatics should immediately proceed from the Christian concept of God. Only he too was guilty of one-sidedness when on that ground he demanded that God should only be conceived as love. In Scripture, which in its whole and not just in part, for example, the Gospels, the words of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, is the principle of dogmatics, God meets us in a fullness of attributes. And it is the demand of dogmatics to proceed not from one but from all virtues of God equally. Then first there comes harmony in our knowledge of God and thus also in all our doctrine and in all our life. Further, the incorrectness of that distinction between essence and attributes came out in this, that it, once assumed, was immediately revoked again. By the doctrine of the simplicity of God, Christian theology was safeguarded against the error of assuming an essential difference between both. It said in general that there was no distinction. Every attribute is God's essence. God is what he has. In creatures there is a distinction between what they are and what they have; a man is still man, even if he has lost the image of God and has become a sinner. But in God all attributes are his essence itself. God is wholly light, wholly understanding, wholly wisdom, wholly logos, wholly spirit, etc. Irenaeus, Against Heresies II 28, IV 11. In God to be is to be wise, to be good, to be powerful. One and the same thing is said whether God is called eternal or immortal or good or just, etc., Augustine, On the Trinity VI 7. John of Damascus, I 9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I qu. 2 art. 3. Heppe, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Reformed Church 42, 51-53. Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church p. 81. God is all together at once and wholly. God has no properties but is pure essence. The properties of God are really the very essence of God and differ neither from God's essence nor among themselves in reality. This all was well and beautifully said. Only, why make a distinction that was immediately undone again and soon again in the doctrine of the simplicity of God was shown in its incorrectness? Worse was that others, proceeding from the distinction between essence and attributes recognized by all, now also sought an objective and real distinction, and thus more or less independentized the attributes over against the essence. Thus Gilbert of Poitiers distinguished between the essence, the nature of God, the divinity and God; the divinity was the form by which God is God, but not itself God: By divinity God is, but divinity is not God, Petavius, On God I cap. 8, art. Herzog² 5, 168. Duns Scotus indeed denied that there was a real distinction between essence and attributes, but said yet that the attributes were formally distinguished from God's essence and from each other, appealing to John of Damascus and Augustine, Sentences I dist. 8 qu. 4 n. 17 sq. Socinianism spoke of accidents in God and considered a different conception and description of the attributes necessary for the subject, Fock, Socinianism p. 427. Many went even further and even assumed an objective distinction in God, at the cost of the simplicity and immutability of God, Rothe, Theological Ethics § 38. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics § 85. Vilmar, Dogmatics I 190 f. Dorner, Christian Faith I 181 f. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I³ 34 f. Hodge, Systematic Theology I 371-374. Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics § 47. Proceeding on this line, Doedes first treated those determinations which are given with the idea of God itself, such as unity, communicability, incomparability, incomprehensibility, independence, etc., and then the attributes which now in addition come to that divine essence, and are only five in number: omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, love, holiness. The Roman theologian C. Pesch speaks similarly of attributes superadded to the divine substance, Praelectiones Theologicae II 72. The disadvantage of the separation comes out most strongly in F. A. B. Nitzsch, who first treats the essence of God with aseity, holiness, unity, etc., Evangelical Dogmatics pp. 351-367, then the works of creation pp. 367-396, and only then the attributes according to the division of Schleiermacher, pp. 396-423.
For these reasons, the distinction between essence and attributes is not to be approved. Naturally, this does not deny that God is an essence, a substance, nor is the use of the word essence disapproved; in the doctrine of the Trinity, it is even indispensable. But the rejection of the distinction means that the essence of God is in no respect knowable apart from the attributes, and that no division may be given which makes some attributes appear as given with the essence and others as added thereto. Rightly, therefore, has Christian theology at all times taught that the attributes are identical with the essence of God. Every attribute is the divine essence itself. Therefore, it is impossible to describe the whole essence of God with one attribute or one name, as has often been attempted, for example, with the idea of absolute personality or of love. Love is in no greater or lesser degree an attribute of God and a description of his essence than every other virtue or perfection. It stands on equal footing with all attributes, as Nitzsch also rightly remarks, Ev. Dogm. Whether God has still more virtues than those He reveals to us in creation and government may remain an open question. Spinoza said that a substance, insofar as it had more reality, also possessed more attributes, Eth. I prop. 9, and that God as the infinite substance therefore also had infinitely many attributes, ibid. prop. 11, although only two are known to us, thought and extension. And Reinhard, Dogm. , found it very probable that God could possess a multitude of properties of which we have no concept, because infinite perfection cannot possibly unite all similarities with itself in such limited creatures as we are, cf. also L. Meyer, Treatises on the Divine Attributes , Groningen 1783 I. But however this may be, the calling of dogmatics is to show the harmonious unity of all the virtues which God has displayed in his works.
7. If there is thus no distinction to be made between being and attributes, because every attribute is the being of God Himself, then it does not follow from this that the distinction between the attributes among themselves is only nominal and subjective, without any ground in reality. Many, however, have so judged. Aetius and Eunomius reasoned thus: God is simple and without any composition; what is in Him or spoken of Him cannot differ from His being; goodness, wisdom, power etc., especially the unbegottenness, are neither really nor in our thought distinguished from the being; whoever therefore names one attribute, for example, the unbegottenness, expresses thereby the entire divine being; the Son therefore cannot be God like the Father; see Eunomius, Liber apologeticus .
In the Middle Ages many came to a similar thought. The perfections of God are neither virtually nor formally (Duns Scotus) distinguished from the being and from each other, but only in name. The concept of the one is contained in that of the other, involvitur unum in altero . Whoever calls God good, calls Him therein at the same time righteous, mighty etc., Stöckl, Philosophy of the Middle Ages . Also in the Arabic and Jewish philosophy this subjective view of God's attributes occurs, Stöckl, ibid.; Kaufmann, History of the Doctrine of Attributes in the Jewish Religious Philosophy of the Middle Ages from Saadia to Maimonides , 1877.
Spinoza understood by attribute that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence, Ethics I def. 4. Depending on whether the emphasis is laid on the first or second part of this definition, the judgment varies whether Spinoza regarded the attributes as subjective conceptions of the understanding or as objective, real properties of the substance, Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy .
The pantheism that found entrance through him into philosophy has no place anymore for the attributes of God. God has no being distinct from the world, no own life anymore. His attributes are identical with the laws of the world, Strauss, Faith I.
Schleiermacher defined them therefore entirely subjectively, as something particular in the way of relating the absolute feeling of dependence to God; their origin lies in religious poetry, they are without speculative content, they express neither God's being which is unknowable nor His relations to the world, because God would then have to stand in manifold relations to the world; they are simply subjective conceptions, without objective ground. And he treated the doctrine of the attributes therefore not separately but throughout the whole dogmatics, Christian Faith § 50.
Against this view of the names of God, it must now be held firm on the ground of God's revelation that very surely every attribute is the same as the godly being, but that therefore the attributes are yet well to be marked apart. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa taught so in their writings against Eunomius. They said on the one hand that the attributes did not really, in the thing itself, differ, because God is simple and above all putting together lifted up, but on the other side, that they yet were not only in name marked apart. Shunning these two outermosts, they deemed that the names of God differed according to understanding, that we in our mind have sundry notions, understandings, after-thoughts of the one and selfsame godly being, and that we by the sundry attributes, such as goodness, wisdom and so on, thus not but sundry names use, but thereby truly also think something sundry.
The concepts which we lay in the names of God are thus among themselves marked apart. The names of God might thus not with each other be mingled or muddled; they could each on its own be beheld. So was God very surely the same as the attributes divinity, goodness, wisdom, fatherhood, sonhood and so on, but therefore these among themselves are not in conceiving alike. The one attribute is thus not so involved in the other that we cannot think the one without the other; but every attribute utters something by itself, Petavius, I c. 7-10. Schwane, Dogmengesch. II 2 S. 19-31. Augustine speaks yet stronger out, that every attribute is God's being and in so far the same as every other attribute. Whatever indeed according to qualities, namely of God, seems to be said, according to substance or essence is to be understood, de trin. XV 5. But for God this is to be, which is to be strong or just or wise and so on, de trin. VI, 4, cf. Also the attributes are among themselves not sundry, which justice itself goodness and which goodness itself blessedness, de trin. XV 8. The same greatness of his is which wisdom, not indeed in bulk great is he but in strength; and the same goodness which wisdom and greatness and the same truth which all those; and there is not there other blessed to be and other great or wise or true, or good to be or altogether himself to be, de trin. VI 6. Yea, he says outspokenly that these predicaments or qualities of God used, properly affections are of our mind; whatever of these of God you say, neither other and other is understood and nothing worthily is said, because these of souls are, which that light in some way pours over and according to their qualities affects, how when arises to bodies that light visible. If it be taken away, one is to all bodies color, which rather is to be said no color. But when brought in it enlightens bodies, although itself of one mode is, yet according to sundry qualities of bodies with sundry luster sprinkles them. Therefore of souls are these affections, which well are affected by that light which is not affected and formed by that which is not formed, Serm. 341 n. 8.
But how strong Augustine here speaks, he upholds nevertheless to the full that all these predicaments rightly and according to truth of God are used. God is all that which he has and which in the names is ascribed to him. It is to Augustine by this simplicity of God not about to do to take something from God, but on the contrary to grasp him always in the fullness of his being. Therefore he speaks also of the simple manifoldness or manifold simplicity in God, de trin. VI 4 and calls he God's wisdom simply manifold and evenly many-formed, de civ. XII 18. In later time was the marking apart of the reason reasoning and of the reason reasoned used, to bring the hardship which itself by the teaching of the attributes foredid, to some loosening. The mark apart of the attributes might on the one hand nothing short do to the oneness, the simplicity, the unchangeableness of God's being, and could yet on the other hand also not be grasped as a subjective, willful and untrue finding of man. And therefore was rightly said that this mark apart was grounded in God's revelation itself. For we are it not who so name God. We find not out those names. On the contrary, if it hung from us, we would of him be still, him seek to forget and all his names deny. We have to the knowledge of his ways no lust. We come each time against all his names in uprising, against his independence, his sovereignty, his righteousness, his love, and we come in uprising against all his fullnesses. But it is God himself who all his virtues reveals and us his names on the lips lays. He gives himself his names and upholds them despite our withstanding. It is to little use whether we deny his righteousness; he shows it us every day in the history. And so is it with all virtues. Against our will brings he them to revelation. The end goal of all his ways is that his name shine in all his works and on all's forehead stand written, Rev. 22:4. Therefore can we him not otherwise name than with the many names which his revelation itself us at hand does. With the simplicity of God is this mark apart of the attributes also not in witherspeech. For the simplicity marks God not as an withdrawn concept, as the absolute, the being, the idea and so on, but gives just to know that he is an absolute fullness of being. And therefore can God to finite creatures himself not otherwise than under many names reveal. The godly being is so endlessly rich that no creature it at once can oversee. Like a child the worth of a great money piece itself not fore-stell can but there then first some beseeching of gets when it in a number of smaller coins is laid out apart, so also can we of the endless fullness of God's being no think-shape form, unless it each time in another with-holding and under another sight-point itself to us reveals, Augustine, tract. 13 in Ev. Joan. Martyr, Loci p. 39. Moor, Comm. I 582 and so on. God abides ever and unchangeable one and the same, but the with-holding differs in which he to his creatures stands and these stand to him. The light abides the same, even if it breaks in sundry colors, (Augustine). The fire changes not, whether it warms, enlightens or burns, (Moses Maimonides). And corn abides corn, though we name it according to the sundry with-holdings now fruit, then seed, then food, (Basil). God is sundry named for the sundry effects which he through his always one and selfsame being in the creatures brings about. Thereby serves remembered that God in so sundry attributes step forth and with so sundry names named be can because there is kinship between him and his creatures. If this not was, all names were untrue. But now is there in the creatures likeness of what in God himself is at hand. The names mark God not but as cause of the things, yet they give, how weak and lacking also, yet some conceiving of the godly being. So speak we, God with all these names marking, well unwhole, finite, bounded, manly, but yet not false and untrue. For although knowing and willing, righteousness and grace in God one and always the same full whole being are, yet spreads God that one rich being in these many virtues as it were after and next to each other for our eyes out. Though it is ever the same being which in those names us meets, in each name is us a beholding given of what truly that being in endless fullness is. In God may according to the being holiness and mercy the same be, our conceiving of both, from God's own revelation formed, is yet sundry. There is no name which God's being enoughly utter can; so do many names service to us an in-druck to give of his all above going greatness. Cf. besides the named, Damascene, de fide orth. I c. 10. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 3. art. 3 qu. 13 art. 4. c. Gent. I c. 5. Sent. I dist. 2. qu. 1 art. 2. Petavius, de Deo I cap. 7-13. C. Pesch, Praelect. dogm. II 71-76. Zanchius, Op. II 49 sq. Polanus, Synt. theol. lib. 2. c. 7. Voetius, Disp. I 233 sq. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. 51-53. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. § 18.
8. As was already said above, in the earliest time, everything that could be thought and spoken of God was summed up under his names. But the richness of the material made ordering necessary. There came already some limitation, in that the term names gradually came into use for the proper names, God, Lord, etc. Next, the doctrine of the Trinity was soon treated separately, either before or after the so-called attributes, and in an entirely own terminology. Furthermore, the distinction between essence and attributes brought with it that the first was separated from the last, and the doctrine of the attributes thus came to stand alone. The division that now lay most to hand for these attributes and which is also the oldest and first, was that into negative and positive names. As soon as one began to reflect on the way in which one had come to those names, one saw that they were obtained from the creatures either by way of negation or by way of eminence and causality. We find this division or at least this twofold resp. threefold way to know God, already with Philo and Plotinus. Among the church fathers, God was both unknowable and knowable, unknowable according to his essence, knowable according to his revelation; on the one hand, only what he is not could be said of God, but on the other hand, something positive could yet be predicated of him in an imperfect and inadequate way. Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus, Erigena worked this thought out definitely into a division, into a twofold theology, the apophatic and the cataphatic. The first-named designates the three ways with so many words, when he says that we come to knowledge of God by the removal of all and by transcendence and in the cause of all. And the Scholastics began to speak of three ways on which one came to knowledge of God, the way of negation, of eminence, and of causality, especially since Durandus of Saint-Pourçain. These three ways were recognized in dogmatics up to the most recent time. Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed have all adopted them and sometimes treated them at length. But they have also often been sharply criticized. Spinoza rejected the way of eminence with the remark that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular. Kant thought that the way of causality could only be trodden within the circle of phenomena. Schleiermacher disapproved of the way of negation and eminence and retained only the way of causality. Now it is certainly true that the names of God existed long before these three ways were thought out, that these were only later born from reflection on the names, that the way of eminence and causality are properly one and so together as way of position can be set against the way of negation; but it is yet equally certain that there is no knowledge of God except from the creatures, that all names of God are borrowed from the creatures, and that all those names either deny something in God or posit something in God in a perfect way of that which is in creatures. Only may it never be forgotten that the ground of knowing is not identical with the ground of being. In reality, not the creature but God is the first. He is the archetype, the creature is the ectype. In him everything is original, absolute; in the creatures everything is derived, relative. God is therefore properly not named after what is in creatures, but creatures are named after what exists in God. Keeping this in view, one can yet say that also Holy Scripture treads these two ways. And everyone who wants to think and speak about God does so according to the negative or positive relation in which God stands to the world. To this it is certainly also to be ascribed that the division of the names of God into negative and positive arose so soon, found such general acceptance, and in fact underlies all other later arisen divisions. This division is already to be found with Philo, Plotinus, and the church fathers, and is then used by John of Damascus, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Petavius, Perrone, etc. Among the Roman Catholics, this division is the most usual, although some Reformed and Lutherans have also adopted it. In that division, other distinctions are then still made. Augustine already made the remark that some names of God are used properly, others metaphorically, and still others relatively. Accordingly, the negative names were again divided into purely negative and relative, and the positive names into proper and metaphorical. Besides this division into negative and positive attributes, another one arose. Already Plato taught that God is good through himself, but the creatures only through participation. In Christian theology, this thought has borne ripe fruits, especially with Augustine. Over against pantheism, it was held fast that God's essence is incommunicable and the soul no part of God. But it was also taught that all creatures were akin to God and that especially man was his image and likeness. There was analogy between Creator and creature. This led to the division of communicable and incommunicable attributes. These two names were first already in use in the doctrine of the Trinity, for the essence of God, the deity, was communicable, indeed communicated by the Father in generation to the Son, but the persons and the personal attributes, e.g., paternity, were incommunicable. From there, these two names were also adopted in the doctrine of the attributes to maintain both God's transcendence and God's immanence. This division now found especially acceptance among the Reformed theologians, without doubt also because it offered a suitable opportunity to combat the ubiquity doctrine of the Lutherans, and now still with Shedd and Gravemeyer, etc. Yet all admit that the communicable attributes in absolute sense, as they are in God, are just as incommunicable as the others. The Lutherans mostly gave preference to another division, namely that into quiescent and operative attributes, or immanent and exerting themselves outwardly, which was also used for the defense of the doctrine of the communication of idioms. Under the first group (negative, incommunicable, metaphysical, quiescent) were then usually treated the attributes of unity, simplicity, independence, immutability, eternity, omnipresence. The second group (positive, communicable, operative, personal) was mostly again divided into attributes of intellect, will, and power. The division into attributes of being, of intellect, and of will with Bretschneider, Thomasius, Vilmar, Oosterzee, to which Hase still adds that of feeling, deviates from the above-mentioned divisions only little. On the other hand, the division of Schleiermacher proceeds from another standpoint. The attributes are with him only subjective conceptions and grounded only in the reasoning reason. And so he divides them according to the relation of God to world, sin, and redemption, into such as are present in the feeling of dependence, as the opposition of sin therein has not yet arisen (eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience), as that opposition is felt (holiness, righteousness), and as it is overcome (love and wisdom). In agreement with this, many divide the attributes according to the relation of God to the world, and then specifically to the world in general (infinity, eternity, omnipresence), to the ethical world (holiness, righteousness; grace, mercy), and to the ethical-physical world (wisdom, blessedness).
9. All the above-mentioned divisions seem to differ widely from each other and make use of entirely different names. But in substance they agree very closely with one another. Whether one speaks of negative and positive, incommunicable and communicable, quiescent and operative, absolute and relative, of attributes of the substance and of the subject, in relation to the world and to mankind, in fact one still always gives the same order in which the attributes are treated. Against all divisions, therefore, in the main the same objections apply. They all give the appearance that the being of God is divided into two halves, that first the absoluteness, then the personality is treated, that first the being in itself, then in its relation to the creatures is discussed, that the first group of names is obtained apart from the creation and the second group of names from the creatures, and that thus no unity and harmony of all God's virtues comes about, Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrheit. Now, however, it is the indisputable teaching of Scripture that God in his hidden being is unknowable and unnamable and that all names of God presuppose the revelation, that is, the creation. Of the being and life of God outside and without the creation we know nothing, for the simple reason that we ourselves are creatures and thus always bound to the creation. This was clearly seen and expressed earlier with regard to the relative, metaphorical, and positive names of God. The relative names such as Lord, Creator, Sustainer, Savior, etc., belong to God only after and through the creation; no one can be called lord unless he has servants; human beings, the servants of God, came into being in time, and so God then became our Lord in time, Augustine, de trin. V 16, cf. de ord. II 7. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 13 art. 7. Anselm, Monol. 15. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 30. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 30 art. 1. Zanchi, Op. II. Polanus, Synt. Theol. Of the metaphorical names, to which the anthropomorphisms also belong, it is clear that they presuppose the creation. And the positive names of good, holy, wise, etc., have some content for our conception because we perceive ectypes of them in the creatures, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 12 art. 12. But all these names, though relative, metaphorical, and positive, nevertheless on the other hand certainly make known something in God that exists in Him absolutely, properly, and thus also negatively, in another sense than in the creatures. Augustine tried to show that, although God becomes Lord in time, his being is nevertheless unchangeable and all change falls only in the creature. Quod temporaliter dici incipit Deus, quod antea non dicebatur, manifestum est relative dici; non tamen secundum accidens Dei quod ei aliquid acciderit, sed plane secundum accidens ejus, ad quod dici aliquid Deus incipit relative, de trin. V 16. The reverse holds for the second group of names, whether these are called negative, incommunicable, quiescent, absolute, or otherwise. For although they deny to God something that is in creatures, they are all in a certain sense also positive, communicable, transeunt, relative. If they were not, if they were completely incommunicable, they would also be absolutely unknowable and unnamable. That we can think and name them proves that they have been revealed by God in his works in one way or another. The negative names therefore also have a positive content; although we learn to know the eternity of God only from and in time, his omnipresence from and in space, his infinity and immutability only from and amid all the finite and changeable creatures; yet they do give us some, and even important, knowledge of God. Although we cannot comprehend eternity positively, yet it says so much already to know that God is exalted above all time. And therefore it is incorrect to divide the attributes of God in such a way that on one side there is a group that is negative, incommunicable, quiescent, absolute, etc., and on the other side one that is positive, communicable, operative, relative, etc. For all attributes are both at the same time. All attributes are absolute and all are yet first known from the relation of God to his creatures. And again, we can name God only according to what is revealed of Him in his creatures, but we name Him who is the source of all good and the cause of all creatures. Moreover, precisely because the attributes are identical with the being of God and among themselves in God, there is no division to be found that is objectively grounded in the attributes themselves, Doedes, Leer v. God. What can be obtained is only a certain order in the treatment of the many names of God. Among these, those names immediately stand out which were later more specifically designated as names and which as names of address and designation in a broader sense may be called nomina propria. Next there are names that make known the divine being in all its relations to the creatures and which were formerly usually called attributes, virtues, perfections, etc. The word attributes is the least preferable for this, because it always suggests a being to which the attributes are added; the name of virtues, on the other hand, finds support in Scripture itself, 1 Pet. 2:9. This second group can bear the name of nomina essentialia, because they all make known to us the being of God, not in itself, but as it descends to us in the revelation and communicates itself to us. Finally, there is a third group of names, all of which relate to the self-distinctions in the being of God and which therefore can be called nomina personalia. The most difficult now is to bring order into the treatment of the names that belong to the second group. Yet that order is precisely indicated in the relation in which God stands to his creatures. The whole world is a revelation of God. There is no part of the universe in which something of his virtues is not revealed. But there is distinction among the creatures. Not all proclaim all his virtues, and not all with the same clarity. There is rank and ascent; all creatures exhibit vestigia Dei, but only man is the image and likeness of God. He not only shares being with the lower creatures, and life and spirit with the higher; but in this communion with the material and spiritual world he is also related to God himself in a very special way, created as prophet, priest, and king in knowledge, holiness, and righteousness. Thus God, the source of all being and the archetype of man, is himself all that which creatures partake of. In Him all that is in an original, divine way; in every virtue of God both his absolute exaltation above and his kinship to the creature are to be noted; every attribute is in a certain respect incommunicable and in another communicable. But yet there is analogy from the creature, especially from man, in the divine being. Thus there are first names by which God reveals himself to us as the Being in the absolute sense: aseity, immutability, infinity (eternity and immensity). Second, there are names that make us know God as the Living, as Spirit: spirituality, invisibility, simplicity. Third, there are names that describe the divine being as perfectly self-conscious, as Light: knowledge, wisdom, veracity. Fourth, there are names that point us to the ethical nature of that being and designate God as the Holy One: goodness, justice, holiness. And finally, fifth, there are names in which God appears to us as the absolute power, as Lord, King, Sovereign: will, freedom, omnipotence. This division stands on the one hand in connection with the knowledge of God, which is summarized in the so-called proofs for his existence; and on the other hand points forward to the vestigia and the imago Dei, which are impressed in the creatures. No knowledge of God except through revelation, and thus always analogous and ectypical; but through that revelation then yet true and pure knowledge of the incomprehensible and adorable being of God!
1. Among the names of God, those names stand out clearly in the first place by which He is marked, named, and spoken to as a proper personal being in distinction from all creatures. All tongues have such names for the godly Being. Though God has no name in Himself, we have need to mark Him and have no other means for that than a name. For unless you know the name, the knowledge of things perishes, Isidore. The Greek word theos , formerly drawn from tithenai , theein , theasthai , is nowadays by some word-lore men linked with Zeus, Dios, Jupiter, Deus, Diana, Juno, Dio, Dieu; then it is the same as the Sanskrit name deva , bright heaven, and comes from the stem div , to gleam, to shine. The swapping of the naming heaven and God happens in many tongues; the oldest Greek god was called Uranus, surely the same as the Sanskrit name Varuna; Taengri among the Tartars and Turks, Thian among the Chinese marks both the heaven and God; and also in the Writings the name God is swapped by that of heaven, for example in the saying kingdom of the heavens or of God. Another Greek name is daimon , from the work-word daio , and marks God as dealer and disposer of the lot; on the other hand is kyrios , from kyros , the mighty, the lord, the owner, the ruler. Our word God is of unsure spring. It has been linked with the word good; with the Zend khoda , from self-given, existing by Himself; with the Sanskrit gudha or gutha , keudo , that would mark God as the hidden one, or with a stem kodo , kosmos , that would mean to order, to set, or with the Aryan suddhas , clean, good, and so on, but all these drawings are unsure. The name Asura among the Indians, and Ahura among the Persians marks God as the living one.
Kluge, Etymological Wordbook of the German Tongue, s.v. Gott. Cremer, Wordbook of New Testament Greek, s.v. Herzog² 5, 290. Hoekstra, Wise God-service I 309 ff.
2. The Scripture speaks many times of the name of God in a very broad sense. The Jews therefore counted no fewer than seventy of them, Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum; and in Christian theology, under the names of God, his perfections were also first understood. But little by little there came a distinction; already Jerome limited the names of God to ten, namely, El, Elohim, Elohe, Sabaoth, Elyon, Eshur ehye, Adonai, Yah, Yahweh, Shaddai, and was followed in this by many, Alsted, Theol. schol. Moor. The simplest name by which God is marked in Holy Scripture is El. About the derivation there is difference. Lagarde brings the word into connection with the root ali and the preposition al and thinks that the word marks God as the one who is the goal and the object of human longing. But this derivation is as unlikely as that which brings the word into connection with elah, the holy tree. According to by far the most, the word comes from the stem ul, whether then in the meaning of foremost, the first, lord being (Nöldeke), or in that of strong, mighty being (Gesenius), lit. by M. Vitringa. Moor. Schultz, Altt. Theol. Smend, Altt. Theol. The name Eloah, plur. Elohim, is derived from the same stem ul or from alah, to be in dread, and thus makes God known either as the strong one or as the object of dread and fear. The singular is little in use and poetic, e.g., Ps. 18:32, Job 3:4; on the other hand, the plural is the common name for God. This plural is not to be explained as a plural of majesty, since this is nowhere in Scripture customary for God; just as little can an indication of the Trinity be seen in it, as has been done by many since Lombard, Sent., Zanchius, Op. Voetius, Disp. M. Vitringa, for Elohim nearly always has the adjective and the verb in the singular with it, Augustine, de trin. Bellarmine, de Christo. Calvin, Inst. Gomarus, Theses Theol., disp. Moor. The modern critics see in it mostly a remnant of the earlier polytheism, but this explanation not only runs into the same objection as the earlier trinitarian one, but also, according to later investigations, has been customary outside Israel as a name for one single God, Noordtzij, Oost. Lichtstralen over West. Schriftbeschouwing. Therefore this plural is better to be taken as a plural of abstraction (Ewald), or as a plural of quantity, which like mayim and shamayim marks an unbounded greatness (Oehler), or as an intensive plural, which gives knowledge of a fullness of strength (Delitzsch). A few times Elohim is constructed with an adjective or verb in the plural, Gen. 20:13, 28:13 ff., 35:7, Ex. 32:4, 8, Josh. 24:19, 1 Sam. 4:8, 17:26, 2 Sam. 7:23, 1 Kings 12:28, Ps. 58:12, 121:5, Job 35:10, Jer. 10:10; and a similar plural is also to be noted in the personal pronoun, Gen. 1:26, 3:22, 11:7, Isa. 6:8, 41:22, in qedoshim, Prov. 9:10, Hos. 12:1, osim, Job 35:10, Isa. 54:5, bore'im, Eccl. 12:1, Ps. 149:2, and in Adonai. All these plural forms mark God as the fullness of life and of strength. Through Elohim the divine being is marked in its original relation and in its steady basic relation to the world. It is a relation determination, not an immediate inner essence determination, and indeed it is a determination of the absolute sovereignty concept in regard to the whole world, Beck, Gl., cf. lit. by M. Vitringa, Moor, Oehler, Theol., Schultz, Altt. Th. The name Elyon, LXX hypsistos, marks God as the High One, exalted above all; it comes forth in the mouth of Melchizedek, Gen. 14:18, of Balaam, Num. 24:16, of Babel's king, Isa. 14:14, cf. also Mark 5:7, Luke 1:32, 35, Acts 16:17 and further especially in poetry. Adonai, alternating with ha-Adon, which again is strengthened to Adon adonim or Adon kol ha-aretz, makes God known as the Lord, to whom all is subject and over against whom man stands as a servant, Gen. 18:27. In earlier times God was also called Baal in this same sense, Hos. 2:18, but later this name got an idolatrous character and therefore fell out of use, Robertson, Israel's Old Religion. All these names are not yet proper names in a narrower sense; they are also sometimes used of the idols, of men, Gen. 33:10, Ex. 7:1, 4:16, and of the authorities, Ex. 12:12, 21:5, 6, 22:7, Lev. 19:32, Num. 33:4, Judg. 5:8, 1 Sam. 2:25, Ps. 58:2, 82:1, but they are yet the common names by which God is named and addressed. They are also general Semitic names, which make God known in his exaltation above all creatures. The Semites gladly call God Lord, King; they feel themselves deeply dependent on Him and bow humbly, as servants, before Him, but they express in those names no philosophical view about the being of God but place his relation to the creatures, specifically to men, in the foreground.
3. This high, exalted God, however, also comes down from his transcendence to the creature. He shows himself not only in a broad way through the making to all folk, but has also made himself known in a special way to Israel. The first name by which God now steps forth in the special showing is that of Shaddai or El Shaddai. As such, God shows himself to Abraham, when He sets him as a father of many folk and seals his bond with the cutting, Gen. 17:1. In the time of the forefathers this name also comes up oft, Gen. 28:3, 35:11, 43:14, 48:3, 49:25, Ex. 6:3, Num. 24:4, but besides also in Job, in some songs of praise and a few times with the foretellers. In the New Writ it is given by pantokrator , 2 Cor. 6:18, Rev. 4:8 and so on. The spring of the name is still dark. Nöldeke has drawn it from Shad, lord, and marked it as Shedai, but as shown by Gen. 43:14, 49:25, Ezek. 10:5 the name is without doubt an adjectival word. Earlier it was drawn from Sh for Asher and Dai, hikanos , and then turned as qui est sufficiens , all-enough; or from Shaddad in the meaning of being strong, laying waste; or also from Shadah or Ashad to pour out, so that God is thereby marked as the one who shares all things in plenty. Yet everywhere with this name the thought of might and unbeatable strength stands foremost, and Isa. 13:6 brings, though only in a wordplay, this name together with Shaddad, lay waste, cf. Joel 1:15. Therefore this name lets us know God as the one who holds all might and so can break all withstanding and make all things serve his will. While Elohim is the God of the making and of kind, El Shaddai is the God who bends all strengths of that kind under and sets them in the work of grace, cf. side note on Gen. 17:1, Zanchius, Op. M. Vitringa. Moor. Oehler, Theol. Delitzsch on Gen. 17:1 and so on. In this name the theiotes and aidios dynamis of God is no more a thing of dread and fear, but a well of health and of cheer. God gives himself to his folk and stands with his unbeatable strength for the filling of his behests, for the upholding of his bond. Therefore from now on he is also oft called the God of Abraham, Gen. 24:12, of Isaac, Gen. 28:13, of Jacob, Ex. 3:6, the God of the fathers, Ex. 3:13, 15, the God of the Hebrews, Ex. 3:18, the God of Israel, Gen. 33:20, and with Isaiah oft the Holy One of Israel. God is the High One, Maker of heaven and earth, the Almighty, but who at the same time stands in a special, kindly tie to his folk.
However, when God appears as the God of grace, He does so especially in the name YHWH. The Jews called this name the name of excellence, the essential name, the proper name, the glorious name, the name of the four letters, tetragrammaton, and so on, and derived from Leviticus 24:16 and Exodus 3:15, where one read "forever" to hide it, that it was forbidden to pronounce it. It is unknown when this opinion arose among the Jews. But it is certain that the Septuagint already regularly read Adonai and therefore rendered the name by kurios; other translations followed this example and translated the name by Dominus, The Lord, der Herr, HEERE, and so on; the French has l’Éternel. Thereby the original, correct pronunciation has also been lost. The church fathers called the name unutterable, unspeakable, inexpressible, probably not because they held the pronunciation of this name to be unlawful, but because the Jews judged so and the pronunciation was in fact lost. In Greek, the four letters were written as PIPI, or also according to Diodorus Siculus and Origen rendered by Iao or Iae, according to Jerome by Jaho, according to Philo of Byblos by Ieuo, according to Clement of Alexandria by Iaou. Theodoret relates that the Jews pronounced Aia and the Samaritans Iabe. All this points back to an old pronunciation Yahweh. With appeal to the tradition among the Jews, some pronounced the name as Jeve, for example, by Joachim of Fiore in his Eternal Gospel. Indeed, this punctuation is found in Samuel ben Meir, and was later still defended by Hottinger, Reland, and others, Delitzsch. The pronunciation Jehovah is of recent date: it found especial entrance through the Franciscan Petrus Galatinus, who however was opposed by many, among others by Genebrardus. Later men such as Drusius, Amama, Scaliger, Vriemoet, and others also maintained that the pronunciation Jehovah could not be the true one, but had borrowed the vowels from Adonai. Indeed, this punctuation is burdened by very serious objections. First, YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is a perpetual keri and now has the vowels of Adonai, then those of Elohim; further, the form Jehovah is un-Hebrew and inexplicable; and finally, this punctuation dates from a time when the Jews long considered the pronunciation of the name forbidden. If this vocalization is now incorrect, the question arises how then the name is to be explained. The assertion that it is of Egyptian origin (Voltaire, Schiller, Wegscheider, Heeren, Brugsch) is contradicted by Exodus 5:2 and finds scarcely any defense anymore. Also the opinion of Hartmann, Bohlen, Colenso, Dozy, Land, that it is Canaanite or Phoenician and was adopted by the Israelites after their entry into Canaan, has proven untenable and sufficiently refuted. The Israelite origin of the name may thus be regarded as established. Then there is also no doubt possible, or it comes from the stem hwh or hyh, and since the pronunciation Jaho, advocated by von Hartmann, cannot be considered, there remains only difference over whether it is a third person imperfect of qal or of hiphil. The latter explanation has been defended by Gesenius, Schrader, Lagarde, Schultz, Land, Kuenen, actually only on the ground that such an exalted concept of God as would be expressed in the qal form is not yet thinkable in the time of Moses. The name Yahweh would then not mean He who is, but He who causes to be, who gives life, Creator. But Smend says from his standpoint rightly that this name too is much too high for that time; and he calls this explanation also improbable because the hiphil of the verb hwh never occurs. Thus only the derivation remains which is given of the name in Exodus 3. Yet there is also then still difference over the meaning of the name. The church fathers thought especially of the aseity in this name; God was the being, the eternal, unchangeable being over against the non-being of the idols and the not-being of the creatures. Others, such as W. R. Smith, Smend, appeal to Exodus 3:12, and take the name as He who will be with you. Both explanations are improbable; the latter, because the addition "with you" could not then be missing, and the first, because it sounds too philosophical and also finds no support in Exodus 3. For in verses 13-15 the meaning of the name is clearly indicated. In full it reads "I am who I am"; and thereby the Lord says that He who now calls Moses and wants to save his people is the same as He who appeared to their fathers. He is who He is, yesterday and today the same forever. Still more closely this meaning is set in the light in verse 15: YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sends Moses, and that is his name forever. God does not call himself here the being without more and gives no explanation of his aseity, but He says expressly what and how He is. How and what then will He be? That cannot be said in one word, that cannot be described by one single adjective, but He will be who He will be. Therein everything is enclosed; general and indefinite is this adjective but therefore also so rich and deep in meaning. He will be who He has been for the patriarchs, who He now is, who He will remain; He will be everything for his people. It is no new and no strange God who comes to them through Moses, but it is the God of the fathers, the unchangeable, the steadfast, the faithful, the always self-same, who does not forsake or leave his people but always seeks it again and saves it, unchangeable in his grace, in his love, in his help, who will be what He is, because He is always himself; "I am he" He therefore calls himself in Isaiah, the first and the last, chapters 41:4; 43:10, 13, 25; 44:6; 48:12. Naturally the aseity lies here as the foundation, but this does not come to the foreground and is not directly expressed in the name. From this explanation it also appears whether and to what extent the name YHWH was already known before the time of Moses. Exodus 6:3 does not say that the name as name was then communicated to Moses, but that the Lord with or in respect to his name was not known to the fathers. The name is also already found repeatedly before Exodus 6, occurs in many proper names, such as Jochebed, Ahijah, Abijah, 1 Chronicles 2:24, 25, and could also therefore not be an entirely new name, because Moses, to find a hearing with his people, had to appear precisely not with a strange name but in the name of the God of the fathers, Exodus 3:12. The intention of Exodus 6:3 can therefore be no other than that the sense and meaning of this name was first then made known by the Lord himself to Moses. And this is indeed so. Only in Exodus 3 does the Lord himself give an explanation of this name; here He says how He wants this name to be understood. The name already existed earlier, is also then already used several times by the Lord himself, Genesis 15:7, 28:13, and used as a name of address, Genesis 14:22, 24:3, 28:16, 15:2, 8, 32:9. But nowhere is an explanation of that name given. It is in the abstract quite possible that the name YHWH originally, according to its derivation, meant something entirely different than is said in Exodus 3. Exodus 3 gives no etymology, no word explanation, but a thing explanation. Just as God in his special revelation to Israel took over all sorts of religious customs, circumcision, sabbath, sacrifice, priesthood, and so on, and gave them a special meaning, so He has done with this name. Abstracted from origin and original meaning, the Lord says in Exodus 6 how and in what sense He is Yahweh, the I will be who I will be. The name YHWH is from now on the description and the guarantee thereof, that God is and remains the God of his people, unchangeable in his grace and faithfulness. And that could also only now, in Moses' time, come out. Precisely a long time had to pass to prove that God was faithful and unchangeable; someone's faithfulness can only be tested in the long run and especially in times of misery. So it was with Israel. Centuries had passed after the time of the patriarchs; Israel was oppressed and sat in misery. And now God says: I am who I am, Yahweh, the unchangeably faithful, the God of the fathers, the God also now of you and forever. Now God lays in an old name an entirely new meaning, which also only now can be understood by the people. And therefore YHWH is Israel's God from the land of Egypt onward, Hosea 12:10, 13:4.
4. The name YHWH is in the Old Testament the highest revelation of God.
No new names are added. YHWH is God's proper name, Ex. 15:3, Ps. 83:19, Hos. 12:6, Isa. 42:8; therefore it is never used of any other than Israel's God and also never occurs in the construct state, in the plural, or with suffixes. Indeed, this name is often modified in form or strengthened by one or another addition. By shortening arose the form Yah, Yahu, Yah, which is especially used in compounds, and from this again arose the substantive noun Yah. This shortened name is regularly used in the exclamation Hallelujah, but also occurs several times independently, Ex. 15:2, Ps. 68:5, 89:9, 94:7, 12, 118:14, Isa. 12:2, 38:11, sometimes in connection with YHWH, Isa. 26:4. Very common is also the combination Adonai YHWH, for example, Ezek. 23:12. A special strengthening the name YHWH receives also by the addition Zebaoth, YHWH Zebaoth, Ps. 69:7, 84:2, Hag. 2:7-9, once YHWH ha-Zebaoth, Amos 9:5, properly shortened from YHWH Elohe Zebaoth, 1 Sam. 1:3, 4:4, Isa. 1:24, or YHWH Elohim Zebaoth, Ps. 80:5, 84:9. Because Zebaoth was connected with YHWH, which allows no construct state, and sometimes with Elohim in the absolute state, Origen, Jerome, and others inferred from this that Zebaoth was an apposition; and they were further strengthened in this by the fact that the word in the LXX, especially in 1 Sam. and Isa., and also in Rom. 9:29, James 5:4, has remained untranslated, Moor I 512 sq. But this opinion lacks all ground. Elsewhere Zebaoth is rendered by pantokrator or kyrios ton dynameon, and the name YHWH, which Zebaoth, that is, hosts, armies, gives no sense. However, it is difficult to say what should be understood by those Zebaoth. Some have thought thereby of the war hosts of Israel and believe that the name of Lord of hosts denotes God as the God of war. But most places cited for this, such as 1 Sam. 1:3, 11, 4:4, 15:2, 17:45, 2 Sam. 5:10, 6:2, 18, 7:8, 26, 27, 1 Kings 17:1 LXX 18:15, 19:10, 14, 2 Kings 19:31, Ps. 24:10 prove nothing; only three places, 1 Sam. 4:4, 17:45, 2 Sam. 6:2 provide an appearance of proof; and 2 Kings 19:31 is much more in conflict with it. Furthermore, the plural Zebaoth is indeed in use for the people's hosts of Israel, Ex. 6:26, 7:4, 12:17, 41, 51, Num. 1:3, 2:3, 10:14, 33:1, Deut. 20:9, but the war host of Israel is always denoted with the singular zaba, Judg. 8:6, 9:29, 2 Sam. 3:23, 8:16, 10:7, 17:25, 20:23, 1 Kings 2:35. And finally, all agree that the name Lord of hosts among the prophets no longer has this meaning of God of war; but they then leave unexplained how and by what this expression has so changed in meaning. Others think by the word hosts of the stars, appealing to texts like Deut. 4:19, Ps. 33:6, Jer. 19:13, 33:22, Isa. 34:4, 40:26, Neh. 9:6; Smend extends this further and understands thereunder the powers and elements of the cosmos, on the basis of places like Gen. 2:1, Ps. 103:21, Isa. 34:2. And indeed the Scripture speaks several times of the stars as the host of heaven, Deut. 4:19, and of all creatures as the host of heaven and earth, Gen. 2:1, but first of all, then never the plural but only the singular is customary; further, the stars are indeed called the host of heaven but never the host of God; and finally, all creatures are indeed, but never so abstract a concept as powers and elements of the cosmos denoted with the name of host. The improbability of these newer explanations causes the old interpretation, which thought by the hosts of the angels, to rise in value. And this interpretation finds abundant support in Scripture. The name of Lord of hosts is several times connected with the angels, 1 Sam. 4:4, 2 Sam. 6:2, Isa. 37:16, Hos. 12:5, 6, Ps. 80:2, 5 ff., 89:6-9, and the angels are repeatedly presented as a host that surrounds the throne of God, Gen. 28:12, 13, 32:2, Josh. 5:14, 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6, Ps. 68:18, 89:8, 103:21, 148:2, Isa. 6:2. Although it is that zaba usually stands of the host of angels in the singular, this can yet be no objection, because Scripture several times mentions many hosts of angels, Gen. 32:2, Deut. 33:2, Ps. 68:18, 148:2. And with this agrees the meaning of the name. This bears by no means a warlike or martial character; even from 1 Sam. 4:4, 17:45, 2 Sam. 6:2 this is not to be deduced. But in this name is everywhere expressed the glory of God as King, Deut. 33:2, 1 Kings 22:19, Ps. 24:10, Isa. 6:2, 24:23, Zech. 14:16, Mal. 1:14. The angels belong to the glory of God or of Christ, they heighten and spread it, Matt. 25:31, Mark 8:38, 2 Thess. 1:7, Rev. 7:11. YHWH Zebaoth is throughout all Scripture the solemn kingly name of God, full of majesty and glory. Elohim denotes God as Creator and Sustainer of all things; El Shaddai makes Him known as the Strong One, who makes nature subservient to grace; YHWH describes Him as the one who in His grace keeps faith forever; YHWH Zebaoth portrays Him as the King full of glory, who, surrounded by His ordered hosts, receives honor and homage in His temple from all His creatures. Cf. on YHWH Zebaoth, Delitzsch, Luth. Zeits. 1869 and 1874 and on Ps. 24:10, Schrader, Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1875 p. 316-320, Oehler, Theol. § 195 f. Schultz, Theol. 529 f. Smend, Altt. Rel. 185 f. König, Die Hauptprobl. der altisr. Rel. p. 49 f., Kuenen, G. v. I. II 46. Stade, Gesch. Isr. I 437. Valeton, t. a. p. p. 208 ff. art. Zebaoth in Herzog² and Riehm, Handwörterbuch. Borchert, Der Gottesname Jahve Zebaoth, Stud. u. Kr. 1896 p. 619-642.
5. In the New Testament all these names are kept. El and Elohim are given by θεος, Elyon is translated by ὑψιστος θεος, Mk. 5:7, Lk. 1:32, 35, 76, 8:28, Acts 7:48, 16:17, Heb. 7:1, cf. ἐν ὑψιστοις θεος, Lk. 2:14. Also the naming of God as God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or as God of Israel goes over into the New Testament, Mt. 15:31, 22:32, Mk. 12:26, Lk. 1:68, 20:37, Acts 3:13, 7:32, 46, 22:14, 24:14, Heb. 11:16. But most often these additions are replaced by the genitives μου, σου, ἡμων, ὑμων, for in Christ God has become the God and Father of his folk, and of each of his children, Heb. 8:10, Rev. 7:12, 19:5, 21:3. The name Yahweh is in the New Testament a few times explained by το ἀλφα και το ω, ὁ ὠν και ὁ ἠν και ὁ ἐρχομενος, ἡ ἀρχη και το τελος, ὁ πρωτος και ὁ ἐσχατος, Rev. 1:4, 8, 11, 17, 2:8, 21:6, 22:13. Otherwise it is, following the track of the LXX, which already read Adonai, translated by κυριος, from κυρος, might. Κυριος makes God known as the Mighty, the Lord, the Owner, the Ruler, who by right holds might and authority, in distinction from δεσποτης, the lord who in deed wields might, and is in the New Testament now used of God, then of Christ. Also the joinings of Yahweh Elohim, Yahweh Elohim Sabaoth are found back in the New Testament, as κυριος ὁ θεος, Lk. 1:16, Acts 7:37, 1 Pet. 3:15, Rev. 1:8, 22:5, κυριος ὁ θεος παντοκρατωρ, Rev. 4:8, 11:17, 15:3, 16:7, 21:22; while in Rom. 9:29, James 5:4 Sabaoth is left untranslated. One new name seems to come in the New Testament, it is the name of Πατηρ. Yet this name is also already used several times of God in the Old Testament, Deut. 32:6, Ps. 103:13, Isa. 63:16, 64:8, Jer. 3:4, 19, 31:9, Mal. 1:6, 2:10, like also Israel is many times called his son, Ex. 4:22, Deut. 14:1, 32:19, Isa. 1:2, Jer. 31:20, Hos. 1:10, 11:1. The name here shows the special, theocratic bond in which God stands to his folk Israel; He has formed that folk in wondrous wise out of Abraham. In the more general sense of Source and Maker of all things the Father name is used in the New Testament in 1 Cor. 8:6, Eph. 3:15, Heb. 12:9, James 1:18, cf. Lk. 3:38, Acts 17:18. But otherwise the name shows the ethical bond in which God now through Christ stands to all his children. The bond that in the Old Testament was between God and Israel is hereof type and foretaste; it is now deepened and broadened, made ethical and personal. The name of Father now becomes the usual name of God in the New Testament. The naming Yahweh is by κυριος not fully given; it is as it were filled out by the Father name. This is the highest showing of God. God is not only the Maker, the Almighty, the Faithful, the King and Lord; He is also the Father of his folk. The theocratic kingdom under Israel goes over into a kingdom of the Father, who is in the heavens. The subjects are also children; the burghers household kin. Both, right and love, state and household come in the New Testament bond of God to his folk to full filling. Here is the full Kingship, for here is a King who is also Father, who does not subdue his subjects with force but who himself shapes and keeps his subjects. They are as children born out of Him, they bear his likeness, they are his kin. This bond is in the New Testament made possible through Christ, who is the own, only-begotten and beloved Son of the Father. And the believers become sharers in this childhood and become aware thereof through the Holy Ghost, John 3:5, 8, Rom. 8:15 ff. In the name Father, Son and Ghost God has shown himself the richest. The fullness that from the beginning was shut up in Elohim has slowly unfolded itself and in the Trinitarian name of God unfolded itself the most splendid and the fullest.
Jerome, on the ten names. Pseudo-Dionysius, on the divine names. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 13. Petavius, on God VIII c. 8, 9. Gerhard, Loci theologici II c. 1-3. Bretschneider, Systematic Development 345 ff. Zanchius, Works II 26-50. Voetius, Disputations V 48 sq. Buxtorf, on the names of God, philological-theological dissertation, diss. 5. Hottinger, on the eastern names of God, philological dissertation 1660. Mastricht I 505-552. Vitringa I 127-135, and further of the newer, besides those already named above, Hofmann, Scriptural Proof I 76-89. Beck, Christian Belief II 14 ff. Grau, God's People and His Law 1895.
1. In some, the locus on the Trinity goes before that on the virtues of God. Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith I 6 ff., Lombard, Sentences I dist. 2 ff., Bonaventure, Breviloquium I c. 2 ff., Vermigli, Common Places p. 36 ff., etc.; and Frank has even serious objection against the reverse order, System of Christian Truth I 151 f. If by treating the virtues of God before the doctrine of the Trinity it was meant to climb gradually from natural theology to revealed theology and from the natural to the Christian concept of God, it would without doubt deserve disapproval. But this is by no means the case. In the doctrine of God's perfections, the divine nature is treated as it is revealed to us in Scripture, confessed by Christian faith, and will soon appear in the locus on the Trinity to exist in a threefold way. To understand in that locus that Father, Son, and Spirit share the same divine nature, it is needful to know what that divine nature contains and wherein it is distinct from all created nature. Scripture also leads us in this. God's essence is taught to us there earlier and more clearly than his trinitarian existence; the Trinity comes to clear revelation only in the New Testament; the names YHWH, Elohim go before those of Father, Son, and Spirit. The first thing that Scripture makes us know of God is that he has his own being and life, distinct from all creatures, self-standing and independent. He has his own essence, his own nature, substance, being, not in distinction from his virtues, but coming forth and becoming known in all virtues and perfections. He bears his own names, which belong to no creature. Among these, the name YHWH stands at the top, Ex. 3:14. By this name he is marked as the one who is and will be what he was, who eternally remains the same in relation to his people. He exists of himself. He existed before all things, and these exist only through him, Ps. 90:2, 1 Cor. 8:6, Rev. 4:11. He is Adon, Lord, Master in absolute sense, Lord of the whole earth, Ex. 23:17, Deut. 10:17, Josh. 3:13. He is dependent on nothing, all is dependent on him, Rom. 11:36. He kills and makes alive, creates light and darkness, peace and evil, Deut. 32:39, Isa. 45:5-7, 54:16. He does with the host of heaven and the dwellers of the earth according to his will, Dan. 4:35, so that men are in his hand as clay in the hand of the potter, Isa. 64:8, Jer. 18:1 ff., Rom. 9:21. His counsel, his good pleasure is the last ground of all that is and happens, Ps. 33:11, Prov. 19:21, Isa. 46:10, Matt. 11:26, Acts 2:23, 4:28, Eph. 1:5, 9, 11. He does all things for his own sake, for his name's sake, for his glory's sake, Deut. 32:27, Josh. 7:9, 1 Sam. 12:22, Ps. 25:11, 31:4, 79:9, 106:8, 109:21, 143:11, Prov. 16:4, Isa. 48:9, Jer. 14:7, 21, Ezek. 20:9, 14, 22, 44. He also needs nothing, is all-sufficient, Job 22:2, 3, Ps. 50:9 ff., Acts 17:25, and has life in himself, John 5:26. And so he is the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, who is and who was and who is to come, Isa. 41:4, 44:6, 48:12, Rev. 1:8, etc.; utterly independent, not only in his being, but as a result also in all his virtues and perfections, in all his decrees and deeds. Independent is he in his understanding, Rom. 11:34, 35, in his will, Dan. 4:35, Rom. 9:19, Eph. 1:5, Rev. 4:11, in his counsel, Ps. 33:11, Isa. 46:10, in his love, Hos. 14:4, in his might, Ps. 115:3, etc. And thus all-sufficient in himself, and receiving nothing from outside, he is on the contrary the only fount of all being and life, of all light and love, the overflowing well of all good, Ps. 36:9, Acts 17:25. This independence of God is more or less acknowledged by all men. The heathens indeed pull the divine down into the creaturely and teach a theogony, but behind and above their gods they often posit again a power to which all is subject in absolute sense. Many speak of nature, chance, fate, or fortune as a power exalted above all; and philosophers prefer to mark God with the name of the Absolute. In Christian theology, this virtue of God bore the name of self-sufficiency, aseity, all-sufficiency, independence, greatness. In the East, they spoke of God as without beginning, without cause, unbegotten, and preferred to call God self-begotten, self-natured, self-essential, self-God, self-light, self-wisdom, self-virtue, self-good, etc., cf. Suicer, Ecclesiastical Thesaurus s.v. God is all that he is through himself. He is goodness itself, holiness, wisdom, life, light, truth, etc. As was said earlier, the church fathers, following Philo, mostly started from the name YHWH in describing God. That was his essential name par excellence. God was the Being. In this name: I will be who I will be, all is enclosed. All other virtues of God were derived from it. God is the highest being, the highest good, the highest truth, the highest beauty. He is the perfect, the highest best being, than which nothing better can be or be thought. He has the whole being in himself, he is an endless and boundless sea of being. If you say good, great, blessed, wise, or anything such of God, it is summed up in this word that is 'Is.' For to him, to be is to be all these. If you add a hundred such, you have not departed from being; if you say them, you have added nothing; if you do not say them, you have lessened nothing, Bernard, On Consideration I c. 6. The scholastics joined in this, Anselm, Monologion 6. Lombard, Sentences I dist. 8. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 2 art. 3 and qu. 3 and qu. 13 art. 11. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 16 ff. and treated this virtue also under the name of the infinity or spiritual greatness of God, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 7. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 43, or under that of the aseity of God, by which was marked that God as the highest substance is through himself or from himself whatever he is, Anselm, Monologion 6. Later Roman theologians mostly start from this aseity or independence, Petavius, On God I c. 6. Theologia Wirceburgensis III p. 38 ff. Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae II p. 88-90. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae Dogmaticae II 26 ff. The Reformation brought no change in this. Luther also describes God on the ground of the name YHWH as the utterly being; he is pure essence. But yet Luther does not linger long with abstract, metaphysical descriptions and soon passes from the hidden God to the revealed God in Christ, Köstlin, Luther's Theology II 302 f. Melanchthon in his Loci describes God as spiritual essence. The Lutherans mostly took over this description but then often added the further determination infinite, subsisting of himself or independent, Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church § 17. Among the Reformed, this perfection of God stands out even more strongly in the foreground, though the name aseity is later mostly exchanged with that of independence. Aseity expresses only God's independence in his being, but independence has a wider sense and includes that God is independent in everything, in his being, in his virtues, in his decrees, in his works. While earlier ones therefore mostly start from the name YHWH, Hyperius, Method of Theology p. 87, 135. Sohnius, Works II 48. III 261. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae p. 135, etc., later independence mostly appears as the first of the incommunicable attributes, Mastricht, Theology II c. 3, Heidegger, Corpus Theologiae III § 30. Maresius, Systema Theologicum loc. 2 § 17. Marck, Marrow of Divinity IV § 20. L. Meyer, Treatise on the Divine Attributes 1783 I p. 39-110, etc. Now if God in Scripture ascribes this aseity to himself, then he thereby makes himself known as the absolute being, as the being in absolute sense. By this perfection he is at once essentially and utterly distinct from all creatures. For all creatures are not of themselves but from another, and thus are and have nothing of themselves; they are utterly dependent in their origin and thus also in their whole further existence and unfolding. But God, according to this name, is only of himself, of himself, not in the sense as if he had caused himself, but as from eternity to eternity being who he is, not becoming, the absolute being, the fullness of being, and thus also eternal and utterly independent in his being, in his virtues, in all his works, the first and the last, the only cause and end goal of all things. In this aseity of God all other virtues are enclosed; they are given with it and are its rich, all-sided unfolding. And yet, while by this virtue the immeasurable difference between Creator and creature at once clearly and plainly comes to light, there is yet also of this perfection of God a weak likeness in all creatures. Pantheism cannot acknowledge this, but theism confesses that the creature, though utterly dependent, yet has its own, distinct being. And in this being is implanted the perseverance in its being, the striving to persist in its own being, the drive for self-preservation, the longing for self-maintenance. Every creature, insofar as it is, fears death; and even the smallest atom offers resistance to every attempt at destruction. It is a shadow of the independent, unchanging being of our God.
2. From the aseity of God flows of itself His immutability.
Yet this seems to find but little support in the Scripture. For there God stands ever in the liveliest dealings with the world. In the beginning He shaped heaven and earth and thus passed from not-shaping to shaping. And from that beginning He lives, as it were, the life of the world and above all of His folk Israel; He comes and He goes, He shows and hides Himself, He turns His face away and turns it in grace. He repents, Genesis 6:6, 1 Samuel 15:11, Amos 7:3, 6, Joel 2:13, Jonah 3:9, 4:2, and changes His purpose, Exodus 32:10-14, Jonah 3:10. He grows wroth, Numbers 11:1, 10, Psalm 106:40, Zechariah 10:3, and lays aside His wrath, Deuteronomy 13:17, 2 Chronicles 12:12, 30:8, Jeremiah 18:8, 10, 26:3, 19, 36:3. He is other toward the godly than toward the ungodly, Proverbs 11:20, 12:22; with the pure He shows Himself pure but with the crooked He proves Himself a wrestler, Psalm 18:26, 27. In the fullness of time He even becomes man in Christ and dwells through the Holy Ghost in the church; He casts off Israel and takes in the Gentiles. And in the life of God's children there abides a lasting shift of guilt-feeling and awareness of forgiveness, of trials of God's wrath and of His love, of His forsaking and of His nearness. But at the same time that same Scripture bears witness, that God amid all that is the same and abides the same. All things change but He stands firm, He abides who He is, Psalm 102:26-28. He is Yahweh, the being and ever self-same; the first and with the last still the same God, Isaiah 41:4, 43:10, 46:4, 48:12. He is who He is, Deuteronomy 32:39, cf. John 8:58, Hebrews 13:8, aphthartos , ho monos echōn athanasian , ever ho autos , Romans 1:23, 1 Timothy 1:17, 6:16, Hebrews 1:11, 12. And unchanging in His being and essence, He is so also in His thought and will, in all His purposes and decrees. He is no man that He should lie or repent. What He says, He does, Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29. His gifts and calling are without repentance, Romans 11:29. He casts not off His folk, Romans 11:1. He fulfills what He began, Psalm 138:8, Philippians 1:6. In one word, He, Yahweh, changes not, Malachi 3:6; with Him there is no change or shadow of turning, James 1:17. Upon this was built in Christian theology the teaching of the immutabilitas Dei . The mythological theogony could not rise to this height, but philosophy oft named and set forth God as the only, everlasting, unchanging, unmoved, self-equal ruler of all things, Philolaus and others, in Zeller, Phil. d. Gr. I4 425, 488 f. II 928. Aristotle drew from the motion of the world to a primum movens , an everlasting substance unmoved, which was one and everlasting, needful, unchanging, free from all mingling, without any possibility, hylē , dynamis , but sheer energeia , pure eidos , mere essence, utter form, to ti ēn einai to prōton , ib 359-365. Philo named God atreptos , isaitatos heautō , aklinēs , pagios , bebaios , ametablētos , hestōs , Dähne, Gesch. Darst. der jüd.-alex. Rel. Philos. I 118. And with this Christian theology agreed. God is according to Irenaeus, semper idem , sibi aequalis et similis , adv. haer. IV c. 11, cf. Origen c. Cels. I 21. IV 14. With Augustine the unchangingness of God flowed straight from this, that He was the highest, full being. To every reasoning creature it is by nature and truly inborn, that God is wholly unchanging and uncorruptible, de Gen. ad litt. VII 11. Through the senses this thought of an everlasting and unchanging being is not to be gained, for every creature, even man himself, is changeable; but within himself he sees and finds that unchanging, which is better and greater than all that changes, de lib. arb. II 6, de doctr. chr. I 9. If God were not unchanging, He would not be God, Conf. VII 4. His name is being and this name is a name of unchangingness. All that changes ceases to be what it was. But the true being is only the share of Him, who changes not. What truly is, that abides. Quod est, manet . But what changes was something and will be something; yet it is not, because it is changeable, de trin. V 2. God however, who is, cannot change, for every change would be a lessening of His being. And as unchanging as God is in His essence, He is so also in His knowing, willing and decrees. Dei essentia, qua est, nihil mutabile habet, nec in aeternitate, nec in veritate, nec in voluntate , de trin. IV prooem. As He is, so He knows and wills, in unchanging wise. Essentia tua scit et vult incommutabiliter et scientia tua est et vult incommutabiliter et tua voluntas est et scit incommutabiliter , Conf. XIII, 16. Shaping, showing, flesh-becoming, feelings etc. brought in God no change. In God there never came a new counsel, de ord. II 17. There has ever been in God one single, unchanging will. Una eademque sempiterna et immutabili voluntate res quas condidit, et ut prius non essent egit, quamdiu non fuerunt, et ut posterius essent, quando esse coeperunt , de civ. XII, 17. Only there is change in the creature from not-being to being, from good to evil etc. The same thought we find then later oft again, with John Damascene, de fide orthod. I c. 8. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu 9. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 8, 3. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 8 art. 2 qu 1-2. Petavius, de Deo III c. 1-2. and so also with Lutheran and Reformed theologians, Gerhard, Loc. II cap. 8 sect. 5. Zanchi, Op. II col. 77-83. Polanus, Synt. theol. II c. 13, cf. Conf. Gall. art. 1. Conf. Belg. 1 etc.
But this unchangeableness of God found much strife, both from deistic and from pantheistic sides. With Epicurus the gods are wholly like outstanding men, who shift in place, work, thought, and so on, and with the Stoics the Godhead was, even as earlier with Heraclitus, taken up as the indwelling cause of the world in its unending shifting.
Of the same kind was the strife against the unchangeableness of God in Christian theology. On the one side stands Pelagianism, Socinianism, Remonstrantism, rationalism, which chiefly fights the unchangeableness of God's knowing and willing, and makes God's will hanging on and thus shifting after the deeds of man. Above all Vorstius in his work De Deo et ejus attributis fought the unchangeableness of God. He marked off between the being of God, which is straightforward and unchangeable, and the will of God, which as free also does not will all things everlastingly and not always the same. But much weightier is yet the strife against the unchangeableness of God, from the pantheistic side.
Shared in this strife is that the thought of becoming is carried over to God and thereby the border between Maker and made is wholly wiped out. The thought of God as substance, as it comes forth with Spinoza, showed itself an empty thought without filling. To bring life into that thought, wisdom-lore often set becoming in the stead of being. Of course there is yet great unlikeness, after the way one grasps this unfolding, whereby God himself becomes, as onefold or threefold and lets it happen indwelling in God's being or passing over in the world. To this belongs in the first stead Gnosticism, but then further the god-wisdom of the Kabbalah, of Boehme, Baader, Schelling, Rothe, Hamberger, and others, afterworking in the teaching of the kenosis, and at last the pantheistic wisdom-lore of Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and others. However unlike in outworking, the ground-thought is one. God is not but becomes . In himself, in the first twinkling, He is a depth unknown, an empty merely might-be being, kind without more, filling-less thinking, a dark drive, a blind unthinking will, in one word, a being that is nothing but can become all. But out of that might-be being God brings himself in the shape of an unfolding little by little to deedliness. He is his own Maker. He brings forth himself. He comes little by little, whether then in himself or in the world, to personhood, to self-knowing, to ghost. God is his own cause.
Under the sway of this wisdom-lore thought of the outright becoming, the unchangeableness of God is also in the newer theology oftentimes gainsaid or narrowed, and God with fondness named his own cause, self-deed-making might. Martensen says, God is his own deed. Others speak of a self-setting of God.
In his handling Ueber die richtige Fassung des dogmatischen Begriffs der Unveraenderlichkeit Gottes , Dorner seeks to shun both deism and pantheism (world-denying) and to blend the unchangeableness and the liveliness of God with each other. He deems to reach this goal, by setting the unchangeableness of God in the rightwise. Rightwisely God is unchangeable and always himself alike, He abides holy love. But otherwise Dorner deems, that through the making, the man-becoming and fulfilling and so on, shifting is come in God, that He stands in back-and-forth bond to man, that He knows the deedliness only out of the world, that there is also for Him a yore, now, and hereafter, that He waxes wroth, makes right, and has a mood answering to man, and so on. And so weightily also Weisse. F. A. B. Nitzsch, and others. Many also speak not out in the teaching of God over this weighty mark, but let it first be marked by the making or by the flesh-becoming or by the kenosis and so on, that they take shifting in God, such as for byspel Ebrard, Hofmann, Thomasius, and others.
Nevertheless, the teaching of God's unchangeableness is of the highest weight for godliness. The sundering between Maker and made lies in the withstanding of being and becoming. All that is made is becoming. It is changeable, strives ever onward, seeks rest and fulfilling, and finds that rest only in Him who is sheer being without becoming. Therefore God is called in the Writ so often the rock, Deut. 32:4, 15, 18, 30, 31, 37; 1 Sam. 2:2; 2 Sam. 22:3, 32; Ps. 19:15, 31:3, 62:3, 7, 73:26, and so on. On Him can man lean; He changes not in His being, nor in His knowing or willing; He abides who He is forever. Every change is strange to God. There is in Him no change of time, for He is everlasting; nor of place, for He is everywhere; nor yet of being, for He is sheer being. The Christly god-lore oft put this forth by the term purus actus . Aristotle had so grasped God's being, as first form without any might, as utter working. The schoolmen therefore spoke of God as actus purissimus et simplicissimus , to show that He is the full, utter being without any might to not-being or to other-being. So says Boethius, in De Consolatione Philosophiae book III, that God changes not in form, because He is pure act; cf. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 3. Therefore also the saying causa sui was shunned of God. The thought of utter becoming was first clearly spoken by Heraclitus and thereafter oft returned in wisdom-lore. Above all Plotinus makes use of this thought, not only in laying it on stuff, but also on that which he holds for the utter being. He teaches of God that He has brought forth His own being, that He was working ere He was; Thilo, Kurze pragmatische Geschichte der Philosophie I 352 f. Now the Christly god-lore did speak of God that He was a being from Himself, and thus of His from-self-ness. And Lactantius, Synesius, and Jerome also used the saying causa sui ; the last wrote: God who ever is and has no beginning from elsewhere, and is Himself the wellspring of Himself and the ground of His stuff, cannot be thought to have from elsewhere that which abides; Commentary on Ephesians cap. 3:15. But this saying was yet always so understood, that God indeed abides from Himself but not that He has become and brought forth from Himself; Klee, Katholische Dogmatik II 43. When later Descartes gave the fore-rank to God's will over the understanding and let the being of all things hang on that will, yea even let God's being be a yield of His will, so that he said, God truly upholds Himself, God is causa sui and from Himself, not in naysaying but in yaysaying wise, God is the working ground of Himself, He has being from the boundless might of reality; Responses to the First Objections p. 57, 58; then did some followers take over this saying, as for byspel Burman, Synopsis Theologiae I c. 15 § 2, but the Reformed god-lore men would have the saying causa sui , being from Himself, taken no otherwise than in sheer naysaying wise; Ryssenius, De oude rechtzinnige waarheid etc. Middelburg n.d. p. 24; Mastricht, Theologia Theoretica-Practica II c. 3 § 22; Moor, I 590 sq. A causa sui in yaysaying wise is not likely, because one same thing would then be said to abide at the same eye-blink, insofar as it brings forth itself, and not to abide, insofar as it is brought forth. Now it is to be grasped that the one-ish wisdom-lore has taken flight to this thought of utter becoming, to give at least a sheen of unfolding of the soothness. But Herbart has rightly put this thought to a sharp sifting, and his followers Thilo, Die Wissenschaftlichkeit der modernen Theologie S. 25 and Flügel, Die spekulative Theologie in der Gegenwart 1888 S. 201 f., Die Probleme der Philosophie und ihre Lösungen 1888 S. 10 f., have not without ground given their wonder over it, that this thought has made such headway in the guessing god-lore. There is yet in god-lore, with laying on the godly being, nothing to be done therewith. Not only does the Writ witness that there is in God no change nor shadow of turning, but thinking leads to the same end-shot. With becoming must a ground be sought, for there is no becoming without ground. But being, in utter wise, lets the asking after a ground no more. The utter being is, because it is. The God-thought brings unchangeableness of itself with. There is no more-making or less-making in Him thinkable. He cannot change to good or to ill. For He is the stark, full, sooth being. Becoming is own to the made and is a shape of change in room and time. But God is who He is, forever, above room and time, above all made far uplifted. He rests in Himself and is therefore the goal and rest-point of all made things, the rock of welfare, whose work is full. Who lays change on God, of being, knowledge, or will, comes nigh all His worths, the from-hanging-ness, the singleness, the everlastingness, the all-knowing, the all-might. He robs God of His godly kind and godliness of its fast ground and sure troost. Yet this unchangeableness is no one-tone oneness, no stark unmoving being. The Writ itself goes before us, to limn God to us in the manifoldest kinships to all His made things. Unchangeable in Himself, He yet lives as it were the life of His made things with and takes share in their changes. The Writ speaks of God in manly wise and can do no other. But how manly it speak, it forbids us at the same time to set any change in God Himself. There is change around Him and outside Him, there is change in the kinship to Him, but there is no change in God Himself. And herein stands just the ungraspable greatness of God and at the same time the herrliness of the Christly beknowing, that God unchangeable in Himself, yet can call changeable made things into being; that He everlasting in Himself, yet can go into time; that He unmeasurable in Himself yet can through-thring every point of room with His being; that He who is the utter being, yet also can give to the becoming made thing an own stead. In God's everlastingness is no eye-blink of time, in His unmeasurableness no point of room, in His being no limb of becoming to be found. But umb-turned it is God who the made thing, it is everlastingness that time, it is unmeasurableness that room, it is being that becoming, it is unchangeableness that change sets. A through-going between both is there not; there is a deep cleft between God's being and the being of all creature. It is godly greatness that He can down-dale to the made thing; that He, over-standing, yet in-dwelling can dwell in all the shaped; that He, Himself holding, can give Himself and, His unchangeableness starkly upholding, yet can tread into an endless tally of kinships to His made things. With sundry for-bysens men sought to lighten this. The sun abides the same, whether it scorches or warms, hurts or quickens (Augustine). A coin changes not, though it be now called a price and then a pledge (id.). A pillar stands still, whether someone sees it now on his right hand, then on his left (Thomas). An artist changes not when he gives shape to his thought in word or tone, in voice or hue, and a learned man not when he lays down his thoughts in a book. All these likenings limp, but they give yet some thought how something, in being even-abiding, in kinship can change. With God this holds now so much the more, while He, the unchangeable, Himself is the only ground of all that changes. He sets not Himself in kinship to any made thing, as if this would abide even a little without Him, but He Himself sets all things in those kinships to Himself which He everlastingly and unchangeably wills and just so, in that wise and in that eye-blink of time wherein they soothly take stead. Every before and after falls not in God, but in things before not abiding and after abiding; Augustine, De Civitate Dei XII 17. It is the unchangeable being itself that sets the changing becoming with a whole own order and law outside itself and as before itself to the show.
3. The unchangeableness of God is called eternity with respect to time and omnipresence with respect to space. Both were often summed up under the name infinitas Dei . Yet the concept of infinity is in itself unclear. First, it can be taken negatively in the sense of endless. Something is then called infinite because it in fact has no end but yet could have one. Oftentimes in philosophy God has been called infinite in this sense. Neoplatonism conceived God in this sense as without boundary and form, without any determination, ou peperasmenos, horos oik echōn, apeiros , etc., an overflowing fullness from which the world emanated. In the same sense the Kabbalah spoke of God as En Sof , the infinite, without boundary and form, but who in the ten sefirot created a transition from the infinite to the finite. Later the philosophy of Spinoza gave entrance to this concept of God's infinity. The substance, God, in Spinoza is not a proper being distinct from the world; it is that which constitutes the reality in creatures, and therefore of itself infinite, ens absolute infinitum . All determination is therefore negation, a deprivation, a lack of existence; God, however, is free from all limitation and boundary. He is substantia non determinata . Extension is one of his attributes. In Hegel the concept of infinity received yet another meaning, because he conceived Spinoza's substance not as an eternal unchangeable being but as an absolute becoming. God was thus called infinite because He could become everything, approximately in the same way as the apeiron of Anaximander, which itself is undetermined but can bring forth all kinds of things. The error of this view lies in this, that the most general, which the understanding obtains by abstraction from finite being, is identified with the infinite. For it was precisely the striving of the identity philosophy to let the particular come forth from the general, the determined from the undetermined, the finite from the endless through a process. God is an sich infinitus potentiâ ; He becomes finitus , personal, conscious, determined in the creatures as His revelation. But this view is untenable. Infinite is not a negative but a positive concept; it does not indicate that God has no proper being distinct from creatures but that He is limited by nothing finite and creaturely. Now naturally such a creaturely limitation can be denied to God in various ways. If one means that God non tempore finiri potest , then infinitas coincides with aeternitas . If one wishes to indicate that God non loco finiri potest , then infinitas is the same as omnipraesentia . And thus the infinitas Dei is also often described. But infinitas can also be understood in this sense, that God is infinite in His virtues, that every virtue is present in Him in an absolute way; then infinitas is as much as perfectio . But even then the infinity of God must be well understood. The infinity of God is no infinitas magnitudinis , as is sometimes spoken of the infinite or endless greatness of the world, for God is no body and has no extension. It is also no infinitas multitudinis , as mathematics speaks of infinitely small and infinitely great, for God is one and simple. But it is an infinitas essentiae . God is infinite according to His essence, absolutely perfect, infinite in an intensive, qualitative, positive sense. But thus the infinity of God wholly coincides with perfection, and it need not be discussed separately.
Infinity in the sense of not being bounded by time is the eternity of God. In Scripture there is nowhere speech of a beginning or an end of God's being. Though He is often very lively set forth as entering into time, yet He is raised above it. He is the First and the Last, Isaiah 41:4, Revelation 1:8, being before the world, Genesis 1:1, John 1:1, 17:5, 24, and abiding despite all change, Psalm 102:27, 28. He is God from eternity to eternity, Psalm 90:2, 93:2. There is no searching of the number of His years, Job 36:26. A thousand years are to Him as little as yesterday is to us, Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8. He is the eternal God, Isaiah 40:28, Romans 16:26, dwelling in eternity, Isaiah 57:15, living in eternity, Deuteronomy 32:40, Revelation 10:6, 15:7, who swears by His life, Numbers 14:21, 28, the living and abiding God, 1 Peter 1:23, incorruptible, Romans 1:23, immortal, 1 Timothy 6:16, who is and was and is to come, Exodus 3:14, Revelation 1:4, 8. Very surely Scripture speaks also here of God in a human way, and of eternity in the forms of time, but it yet also clearly shows that God is raised above time and not to be measured or bounded by this standard.
The deism of earlier and later times, however, understands by eternity a time endlessly stretched forward and backward; the difference between time and eternity lies only in the quantity, not in the quality; it is gradual, not essential. The distinction lies not therein, that in eternity there is no succession of moments, but that it is without beginning and end. Past, present, and future are there not only for man, but are also for and in God. So taught the Socinians, Socinus, Prael. theol. c. 8. Crell, De Deo et ejus attributis c. 18. Catech. Racov. qu. 60, cf. Fock, Der Socinianismus S. 427 f.; even so Reinhard, Dogm. S. 106. Wegscheider, Instit. theol. § 63. Dorner, Glaub. I 132. Ges. Schriften 322 etc.
From the other side eternity and time are even so mingled by pantheism. God and world stand here as natura naturans and natura naturata , Spinoza, Eth. I prop. 29. Eternity is not essentially distinct from time, but is the substance, the immanent cause of time, and this is the mode, the accident of eternity, like the wave is the appearing form of the ocean; God Himself is drawn down into the stream of time and comes first in time to His full reality, Spinoza, Cog. Metaph. I c. 4. II c. 1. Hegel, Encycl. der philos. Wiss. § 257 f. Hartmann, Philos. des Unbew. I⁹ S. 281 f. 298 f. Biedermann, Dogm. II 518 f. Strauss spoke it out clearly in his Glaub. I 562: Eternity and time stand as the substance and its accidents. And Schleiermacher defined the eternity of God carefully as His absolutely timeless causality which conditions with all temporal things also time itself.
Now the Christian theology has also with this perfection of God to shun both deism and pantheism. Naturally the distinction between eternity and time lies also therein, that this has a beginning and end or at least can have them and that does not. But therein the whole difference does not lie. There are three marks of the concept of eternity, namely that it shuts out beginning, end, and also succession. God is unbegotten, incorruptible but also unchangeable, Petavius, de Deo III c. 3 § 6. There is between eternity and time a distinction not only in quantity and degree, but also in quality and essence. For already Aristotle noted that time is not indeed one but yet stands in the closest bond with motion, with becoming, that is, with the passing from potency to act, though he thought that a motion in the world without beginning was thinkable. Augustine put this in another way thus, that there is only time where the present becomes past, and the future becomes present. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not; yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time, and if nothing were coming, there would be no future time, and if nothing were, there would be no present time, Conf. XI 14. Time is no substance beside others, no real thing, but a form of being of things. If there were no creatures, there would be no time. Time began with the creature, much more than the creature began with time, Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. V 5, de civ. XI, 6.
On the other hand, time is also not merely a subjective form of perception, as Kant thought, Kr. d. r. V. 81 f. Indeed there lies truth herein too and Augustine reasoned that indeed, to measure and reckon time, a thinking mind is needed, which holds the past by memory, stands in the present, and awaits the future, and which in so far measures the times in itself, Conf. XI, 23-28. Yet therewith Augustine did not deny that there would be no measurable and divisible motion of things, if there were no thinking mind that counted and measured it. But there must be distinguished between outer and inner time, tempus extrinsecum and intrinsecum . By outer time we understand the measure by which we measure motion. This is in a certain sense chance and willful. We take it from the motion of the heavenly bodies, which is steady and known to all men, Genesis 1:14 ff. This time shall one day cease, Revelation 10:6, 21:23 ff. But it is otherwise with the inner time. This is that form of being of things, whereby they have a past, present, and future and so parts which, by whatever measure, can be measured or counted.
What now can be measured or counted is under measure and number and thereby bounded; for there is always yet a measure and number greater than the measured or counted. The essence of time lies thus not therein that it is finite or endless before and after, but therein that it holds succession of moments, that there is a before, a now, and an after in it. But therefrom flows forth that time, inner time, is the form of being of all the created, and is essentially own to all the finite. Who says time, says motion, change, measurableness, countableness, boundedness, finiteness, creature. Time is the span of creaturely being; time is the measure of motion in a movable thing. But therefore no time can fall in God. He is who He is from eternity to eternity. There is in Him no change nor shadow of turning. He is no becoming but an eternal being. He has no beginning and no end, but also no before and after. He cannot be measured nor counted in His span. A thousand years are to Him as one day. He is the eternal I AM, John 8:58.
The eternity of God is thus rather to be thought as an eternal now, without past or future. All present is with God. Your today is eternity. Eternity itself is the substance of God, which has nothing changeable, Augustine, Conf. XI 10-13. de vera relig. c. 49. Boethius defined the eternity of God thereby, that He grasps and owns the fullness of endless life all at once and together, de cons. philos. V, and Thomas as the endless life's whole at once and perfect possession, S. Theol. I qu. 10 art. 1. And so speak all theologians, Tertullian adv. Marc. I 8. Gregory of Nyssa adv. Eunomium I. Gregory Nazianzen orat. 38, 11. Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 5 § 4. Anselm, Monol. c. 18-24. Prosl. c. 18. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 8, 2. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 10. Petavius, de Deo III c. 3-6. Gerhard, Loci II c. 8. Zanchi, Op. II 73-77. Alting, Theol. problem. loc. 3 probl. 20 etc.
Yet the eternity of God may not therefore be thought as an eternal standing still, unmoving time-moment. But it is one with God's being, and thus a fullness of being. God is not only eternal, but He is Himself His eternity, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 10 art. 2. It has its likeness not in the empty being of man, for whom through idleness or boredom, through sorrow or fear the minutes stretch to hours and the days do not go but creep, but rather in the rich, full life of that man, for whom through work and joy time as it were does not be, and the hours and days fly by. Therefore there lies truth in the saying, that in hell there is no eternity, but only time, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 10 art. 3 ad 3, and that a creature the more loses the unperfect in time and nears eternity, as it is kin to God and His image, ib. art. 4 and 5.
Therefore the eternity of God stands also not abstract and transcendent above time, but is in every time-moment present and immanent. There is essential distinction between eternity and time, but there is yet also likeness and kinship, so that that can dwell in this and work. Time is created with the things, it has no spring in itself; an eternal time, a time without beginning is unthinkable. God, the eternal, is the only absolute cause of time. But that time has also no stay in itself, it is an ongoing becoming and must rest in an unchangeable being. It is God who with His eternal might bears time in its whole and in every moment. God fills time and every time-moment with His eternity. In every second beats the pulse of eternity. God stands thus in relation to time. He goes with His eternity into time. Time is also objective for Him. He knows in His eternal mind the whole time and the succession of all its moments. He Himself becomes not timely thereby, not under time, measure, number; He abides eternal and dwells in eternity. But He uses time, to bring therein His eternal thoughts and virtues to showing; He makes time serve eternity and so proves Himself to be the King of the ages, 1 Timothy 1:17.
4. The Omnipresence of God. Infinity as not being bounded by space is the omnipresence of God. This too is described in Holy Scripture in a very lively way. God is the Creator, and all that exists is and remains His in an absolute sense. He is the Lord, the Possessor of heaven and earth, Gen. 14:19, 22; Deut. 10:14, and is exalted above all creatures, also above place and space. Heaven and earth do not contain Him, much less an earthly temple, 1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chron. 2:6; Isa. 66:1; Acts 7:48. Yet He is not excluded by space either. He fills heaven and earth; no one can hide from His face; He is a God from afar and from near, Jer. 23:23, 24; Ps. 139:7-10; Acts 17:27. "For in Him we live and move and have our being," Acts 17:28. He is even present in various places of creation in different degrees and ways. The whole Scripture proceeds from the thought that heaven, which is also created, has since its existence been in a special sense God's dwelling and throne, Deut. 26:15; 2 Sam. 22:7; 1 Kings 8:32; Ps. 11:4, 33:13, 115:3, 16; Isa. 63:15; Matt. 5:34, 6:9; John 14:2; Eph. 1:20; Heb. 1:3; Rev. 4:1ff., etc. But from there He descends, Gen. 11:5, 7, 18:21; Exod. 3:8, walks in the garden, Gen. 3:8, appears time and again in definite places, Gen. 12, 15, 18, 19, etc., comes down especially to His people on Mount Sinai, Exod. 19:9, 11, 18, 20; Deut. 33:2; Judg. 5:4. While He lets the Gentiles walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16, He dwells in a special way among His people Israel, Exod. 19:6, 25:8; Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 26:19; Jer. 11:4; Ezek. 11:20, 37:27, in the land of Canaan, Judg. 11:24; 1 Sam. 26:19; 2 Sam. 14:16; 2 Kings 1:3, 16, 5:17, in Jerusalem, Exod. 20:24; Deut. 12:11, 14:23, etc.; 2 Kings 21:7; 1 Chron. 23:25; 2 Chron. 6:6; Ezra 1:3, 5:16, 7:15; Ps. 135:21; Isa. 24:23; Jer. 3:17; Joel 3:16, etc.; Matt. 5:34; Rev. 21:10, in the tabernacle and in the temple on Zion, which is called His house, Exod. 40:34, 35; 1 Kings 8:10, 11; 2 Chron. 5:14; Ps. 9:12; Isa. 8:18; Matt. 23:21, above the ark between the cherubim, 1 Sam. 4:4; 2 Sam. 6:2; 2 Kings 19:15; 1 Chron. 13:6; Ps. 80:2, 99:1; Isa. 37:16. But the prophets repeatedly warn against a fleshly trust in this dwelling of God in the midst of Israel, Isa. 48:1, 2; Jer. 3:16, 7:4, 14, 27:16. For the Lord is far from the wicked, Ps. 11:5, 37:10ff., 50:16ff., 145:20, but His face beholds the upright, Ps. 11:7. He dwells with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, Isa. 57:15; Ps. 51:19. When Israel forsakes Him, He comes again to them in Christ, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, Col. 2:9. Through Him and through the Spirit whom He sends, He dwells in the church as in His temple, John 14:23; Rom. 8:9, 11; 1 Cor. 3:16, 6:19; Eph. 2:21, 3:17, until He shall one day dwell with His people and be all in all, 1 Cor. 15:28; Rev. 21:3. In polytheism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, this omnipresence of God could not be acknowledged. But also in the Christian church there were many who would admit an omnipresence of God's power but not of His essence. The Anthropomorphites could not think of God without a definite form and place. To preserve God from mixture with material substance and the impurity of the world, some church fathers went so far over against the Stoa as to assert that God was far off in essence but very near in power, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. II c. 2, that He dwelt in heaven like the human spirit in the head, Lactantius, de opif. Dei c. 16. Inst. div. VIII 3. But these did not thereby deny the essential presence of God in every place. Only later was this decidedly denied and opposed by Augustinus Steuchus, bishop of Eugubium (died 1550) in his commentary on Ps. 138, and further by Crell, de Deo ejusque attributis c. 27, who admitted an operative but not an essential omnipresence and limited the latter to heaven. The Remonstrants expressed themselves cautiously, called the question of less importance, and preferably refrained from decision, as with the eternity of God, Episcopius, Inst. theol. IV, 2, 13. Limborch, Theol. Christ. II, 6. Cocceius was also accused of understanding by the omnipresence of God only the most efficacious will of God sustaining and governing all things, but he defended himself against this in a couple of letters to Anslar and Alting. The Cartesians said that God was omnipresent not by extension of His essence but by a simple act of His thought or by a powerful act of His will, which were one with His essence, and denied that a "where" could be ascribed to God, Burmannus, Synopsis I, 26, 6. Wittichius, Theol. pacifica c. 14. Rationalism went still further, limiting God's essential presence to heaven and deistically separating it from the world, Reinhard, Vorles. p. 106, 120. Wegscheider, Instit. § 63. Deism came to this limitation of God's omnipresence out of fear of pantheistic mixture of God and world and of the defilement of the divine essence with the moral and material impurity of created things. Indeed, that fear is not imaginary. The Stoa already taught that the Godhead as fire, ether, air, breath permeates all things, even the bad and ugly, Zeller IV 138. Spinoza spoke of the substance as corporeal, Eth. I prop. 15, called God an extended thing, ibid. II prop. 2, and taught a presence of God that coincides with the being of the world, Cog. metaph. II c. 3. In Hegel, Werke XI 268, God's omnipresence is identical with His absolute substantiality. On this line lies also the description of God's omnipresence by Schleiermacher as the absolutely spaceless causality of God that conditions space along with all that is spatial, Gl. § 53. Similarly, Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. § 702, says that the pure in-itself-being of God is the pure opposite of all space and place and is in so far transcendent, but that God as ground of the world is immanent in it and that this ground-being is His being itself, cf. also Scholten, Initia p. 124.
The Christian theology has also here again shunned deism and pantheism. For the Scripture teaches clearly that God is raised above room and stead, and thereby cannot be set or shut in, 1 Kings 8:27, 2 Chron. 2:6, Jer. 23:24. Even where the Scripture speaks in mankind's way and, to give us a thought of God's being, makes the room as it were endlessly great, Isa. 66:1, Ps. 139:7, Amos 9:2, Acts 17:24, yet thereunder lies the thought that God stands outside all bounds of room. There is then also, even as between everlastingness and time, so between the boundlessness of God and room an essential unlikeness. Room or stead was by Aristotle written as the unmoving edge of a surrounding or enclosing thing, το του περιεχονυος περας ἀκινητον, Phys. IV c. 5. This setting forth however goes out from too outward a grasp of room. For very surely is room the stretch from a set thing to other fast points. But also if we think ourselves only one single straightforward thing, yet would room and stead belong thereto because of the bond to thought-up points, which we could take in mind. Room and stead is therefore an ownship of all finite being and is with the finite as such of itself given. A finite being lives of itself in room. Its boundedness brings the thought of a wherewith. It is always somewhere and not at the same time in another stead. Thought away from all measurable stretch to other points (locus extrinsecus), an inner stead (locus intrinsecus) is own to all creatures. Also ghostly beings are not left out thereof. In another ordering can the stretches be wholly other than we know them here on earth, like now steam and electricity therein for our kenning already a great shift have brought. But the bounded, steaded being stays own to all creatures. Room is therefore not a shape of beholding, like Kant upheld, but a way of being of all the shaped. And still much less right is it, that room a shape of the outward, time a shape of the inward beholding would be, and thus the forestelling of room only of the bodily and that of time only of the ghostly world would hold. Both, time and room, are inward ways of being of all finite being. But therefrom follows that even as time, so also room of God, the Boundless, cannot hold. He is overstepping above all room raised. Already Philo and Plotinus spoke in this wise, Zeller, V 354, 483, and the Christian theology said likewise that God was filling all, yet alone unfillable, Hermas, Pastor mand. 1. Irenaeus, adv. haer. II 1. IV 19. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. VII c. 7. Origen, c. Cels. VII 34. Athanasius, de decr. Nic. Syn. c. 11. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. 34. John of Damascus, de fide orthod. I 9. Augustine thought earlier in his Manichaean time that God even as a fine ether through the whole world and through the endless room was spread, Conf. VII 1. But later he saw it otherwise. God is above all room and stead raised. He is not somewhere and yet fills He heaven and earth; He is not through the room spread like the light and the loft, but He is at all steads with his whole being, everywhere whole and nowhere of steads, Conf. VI 3. de civ. VII 30. He is by no room or stead shut in; and therefore were it better to say that all things in Him are than that He in the things is. But yet is also this again not so to understand, as if He the room were, wherein the things were found, for He is no stead. Like the soul whole in the whole body and in whatsoever deal is, like the one and same truth everywhere is known, so by way of likening is God in all things and all things in God, Enarr. in Ps. 74. And these thoughts of Augustine come back later with all theologians, Anselm, Monol. c. 20-23. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 36 and 37. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 8. S. c. Gent. III, 68. Sent. I dist. 37. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 37. And Roman and Protestant theologians have added nothing weighty new thereto. Petavius, de Deo III c. 7-10. Gerhard, Loci I c. 8 sect. 8. Polanus, Synt. II c. 12. Zanchi, Op. II col. 90-138 etc. Indeed can also of God no room and stead be spoken. Room is a being-way of the finite being; the boundlessness is an ownship of God alone and own to no single creature, also not to the mankind's kind of Christ. There lies first therein shut, that God outside all room and stead is, and boundless thereabove raised. God himself his own stead, αὐτος ἑαυτου τοπος, Tertullian, adv. Prax. c. 5. Theophilus, ad Autol. II, 10. John of Damascus, de fide orthod. I 13. He is in himself, in himself everywhere whole. In this wise can God as well be said nowhere as somewhere to be (Philo, Plotinus). For a where, a stead holds of Him not. The everywhere-nearness of God speaks not only and even not in the first stead this being of God in himself out, but marks foremost a set bond of God to the room, which with the world is shaped. Also here can we of God not other than on ground of the shaping speak. The Scripture tells even of a going, coming, walking, downcoming of God. It speaks in mankind's way and also we come not thereabove out. Hard is found where He is, harder where not, Augustine, de quant. an. c. 34. Therefore is it yet not unuseful, cf. e.g. Lipsius Dogm. § 306. Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd. II 121-128, ourselves with every ownship to mind, that we thus in mankind's way of God speak. Just the kenning that God by no time or room is meted, though this sheer naysaying, keeps us therefrom to rob God of his highness above all creature. In the naysaying lies yet again a strong yaysaying. The bond of God to the room can not therein stand, that He in the room is and by her shut in, like Uranus and Cronus mights were above Zeus. For God is no creature. If in some stead He were, not were He God, Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 74. Not only is He no body, that through the room outstretches and by bound in the room is, but He is also no finite, shaped ghost, that always to a where bound is and thus by setting in the room is. Also can the bond not of such kind be, that the room within Him is and by Him as the greater, boundless room shut in, like some earlier called God the stead of all, and Weisse, Philos. Dogm. I § 492 f. of the boundless room speaks as to God inlying. For room is of itself a being-way of the finite creature and holds of God, the Boundless, not. But God is so in the room, that He, as the Boundless being in himself, yet filling every point of the room fills and upholds through his boundlessness. Well is hereby the pantheism to shun, that God's being to the stuff of the things and thereby also the Godly being roomly makes. But even so is the deism to withstand, that God well by might but not by being and kind everywhere-near lets be. There is weighty unlikeness, but no sundering between God and the creature. For every deal of the being and every point of the room has to be nothing less than his boundlessness needful. The deistic forestelling as if God in a set stead dwells and thence out now through his allmight all things rules, is with the being of God at odds. It naysays ownly all his worths, his singleness, his unshiftableness, his unfetteredness; it makes God to a man and the shaping selfstanding. Not like a king in his realm or a captain on his ship, is God in his shaping near. His working is no deed in farness. But He is, like Gregory the Great it outspoke, in all things near, by being, nearness and might; within, nearer God here and everywhere mightily, his everywhere-nearness is without stretch, adessentia. He is in hell as well as in heaven; in the godless as well as in the godly; in the steads of uncleanness and of darkness as well as in the halls of light. For He is by that uncleanness not befouled, because his being, though everywhere-near, yet one other is than that of the creatures. Therefore said Anselm, that it ownly better was to say that God with time and stead was than in time and stead, Monol. c. 22. Yet takes this not away, that God in another wise again in sundry ways in the creatures near is. There is unlikeness between his bodily and his upright inlying. Also men can in kindly wise flat by each other be and yet in fellowfeeling and mind's bent heavenwide from each other sunder, Matt. 24:40, 41. The soul is near in all the body and in all deals, but in each thereof in own wise, in the head other than in the heart, and in the hand other than in the foot. These however does and works one true God; but as the same God, everywhere whole, by no steads shut in, by no bonds bound, in no deals cut, from no deal shiftable, filling heaven and earth with near might, not needy kind. So thus he oversees all which he shaped, that also they own to wield and work shifts lets. Though indeed nothing can be without him, yet not are any what he, Augustine, de civ. VII, 30. God's inlying is no unwitting outflow, but a witting nearness of his being in all creatures. And therefore sunders that nearness of God after the kind of those creatures. Surely every being, also the smallest and meanest, arises and abides only through Godly might. There is nothing less than the being of God needful, to give the meanest creature arising and abiding. God dwells in all creatures but not in all evenly, Augustine, Epist. 187 c. 5 n. 16. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 37 pars 1 art. 3 qu. 1-2. All things are well in him but not with him, Lombard, Sent. I dist. 37. God dwells in heaven other than on earth, in the beasts other than in men, in the soulless creatures other than in the souled, in the godless other than in the godly, in Christ other than in the church. The creatures are other, after God in other wise in them indwells. Kind and being of the creatures is set by their bond to God. Therefore they all show God, but in sundry measure and after sundry sides. With the clean You keep Yourself clean, but with the crooked You show Yourself a wrestler, Ps. 18:27. In all creatures is God near by being, but in no one than alone in Christ dwells the fullness of Godhead bodily. In Christ dwells He in wholly one wise, by oneness. In other creatures dwells He after the measure of their being, in these by kind, in others by rightness, in others by grace, in others by glory. There is endless sundryness, that they all together the glory of God should show. It helps little, if we this everywhere-nearness of God naysay. He makes us feel it in heart and inwitting. He is not far from each one of us. What us from Him sunders, is only the sin. It puts us not steadedly, but ghostly from God, Isa. 59:2. God to leave, from Him to flee, like Cain did, stands not in steaded sundering but in ghostly unlikeness. Not by stead is anyone far from God, but by unlikeness, Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 94. And umbewise, to Him to go, his face to seek stands not in a pilgrimage but in lowmooding and sorrow. And who Him seeks, finds Him, not far away, but in his straight nearness. For in Him we live, we shift ourselves and we are. To draw near to him, is to become like to him; to draw back from him, to become unlike to him, Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 34. Think not therefore God in steads; he with you is such, as you have been. What is such, as you have been? Good, if you have been good; and evil to you seems, if you have been evil; but helper, if you have been good; avenger, if you have been evil. There have you a judge in your hidden. Wishing to do somewhat evil, from the open you take yourself into your house, where no foe may see; from the steads of your house you put and in face set, you take yourself into the chamber; you fear also in the chamber from elsewhere knowing, you go into your heart, there think: he in your heart inner is. Wheresoever therefore you flee, there is he. Yourself whither flee you? Not whithersoever you flee, yourself follow you? When however also yourself inner is he, not is whither you may flee from God wroth but to God pleased. Truly not is whither you may flee. Will you flee from him? Flee to him, Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 74.
5. This being, however, in God is not to be thought of as an abstract being without content, but as a rich, full, divine life. Holy Scripture, to indicate the fullness of God's life, employs not only adjectives but also substantives, and calls God truth, righteousness, life, light, love, wisdom, Jeremiah 10:10, 23:6, John 1:4, 5, 9, 1 Corinthians 1:30, 1 John 1:5, 4:8. And theology treated this doctrine under the name of the simplicity of God. In Irenaeus, Against Heresies I 12. II 13. 28. IV 4, God is called wholly thought, wholly sense, wholly eye, wholly hearing, wholly the fountain of all good things, cf. Clement, Stromata V 12. Origen, On First Principles I 1, 6. Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Nicene Synod c. 22. Against the Arians II 38. The three Cappadocians especially defended against Eunomius the right of the various divine names. But Augustine returned repeatedly to the simplicity of God. God is pure essence, without accident, On the Trinity V 4. Compared with Him, all created being is a non-being, On the Trinity VII, 5 Expositions on the Psalms 134. Confessions VII, 11. XI, 4. In creatures there is a difference between being, living, knowing, willing; there is a gradation among them; there are creatures that only are, others that also live, still others that also think. But in God all that is one, The City of God VIII, 6, On the Trinity XV, 5. God is all that He has, The City of God X, 10. He is His own wisdom, His own life. Being and living are in Him one, cf. above and Gangauf, The Holy Augustine's Speculative Doctrine of God the Three-in-One 1883 pp. 147-157. And further we find it in John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I 9, who adduces various proofs for this doctrine, in Anselm, Monologion c. 15, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 8 n. 4-9, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 3, who in art. 3 expresses it briefly thus, God is Deity, Id. Summa Contra Gentiles I c. 16 sq. Bonaventure, Sentences I dist. 8 art. 3 and further in all Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians, Petavius, On God Book II c. 1-8. Theology of Würzburg III p. 64. Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae II 92 sq. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae Dogmaticae II 60 sq. Kleutgen, Theology of the Past I 183 f. Philosophy of the Past II 742 f. Gerhard, Loci Theologici Loc. 2 cap. 8 sect. 3. Baier, Compendium Theologiae Positivae I c. 1 § 9. Buddeus, Institutiones Theologicae II c. 1 § 17. Hyperius, Methodus Theologica p. 88, 89. Zanchi, Works II 63-73. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae lib. 2 c. 8. Trigland, Antapologia cap. 4. Voetius, Disputationes I 226-246. H. Alting, Theologia Elenctica p. 119 sq. Maresius I p. 604-618. L. Meyer, Treatise on the Divine Attributes IV 517-552 etc. On the other hand, this simplicity of God was attacked from various sides. Eunomius indeed taught the absolute simplicity of God, but concluded from it that all names of God were merely sounds and that the essence of God coincided with unbegottenness. This one attribute made all others superfluous and useless, Schwane, History of Dogma II² 21. The anthropomorphites of earlier and later times opposed the simplicity of God, because they ascribed a body to God. The Arabic philosophers taught the simplicity of God, but opposed therewith the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, because the three persons were denominations added to the substance, Stöckl History of the Philosophy of the Middle Ages II 89. Duns Scotus came into contradiction with the simplicity of God, which he otherwise expressly teaches, Sentences I dist. 8 qu. 1-2, insofar as he assumed that the attributes were formally distinguished from each other and from God's essence, ib. qu. 4. Nominalism went much further and assumed a real distinction of the attributes. In the century of the Reformation, this path was followed by the Socinians. These came to unify the divine essence in the interest of the independence of man and thus knew no way with the simplicity of God. Socinus doubted whether simplicity could be ascribed to God according to Scripture. The Racovian Catechism omits it entirely. Schlichting, Volkelius, and others denied that the attributes were one with God's essence, and claimed that a fullness of attributes was not in conflict with His unity, Hoornbeek, Socinianism Confuted I p. 368-369. Vorstius agreed with this and said, especially on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, that in God a distinction must be made between matter and form, essence and attributes, genus and differentiae. Scripture therefore also says that God swears by His soul, Jeremiah 51:14, that the Spirit is in Him, 1 Corinthians 2:11. There is a distinction between knowing and willing, between the subject that lives and the life by which He lives, cf. Trigland, Church History IV 576, 585 f. Schweizer in Theologische Jahrbücher 1856 p. 435 f. 1857 p. 153 f. Dorner, Collected Writings 1883 p. 278 f. The Remonstrants were of the same opinion. In their Apologia Confessionis cap. 2 they said that there is not a jot about the simplicity of God in Scripture, that it is purely metaphysical doctrine and absolutely not necessary to believe. As an objection, it was especially brought forward that the freedom of His will and the change of His disposition could not be reconciled with the simplicity of God. Episcopius still included the simplicity of God among the attributes, and thought that the relations, volitions, and free decrees could well be reconciled with it, Institutiones Theologicae Book 4 sect. 2 cap. 7, but Limborch no longer named this attribute. In rationalism it receded entirely into the background, or even remained undiscussed, Wegscheider, Institutiones Theologicae § 61. Reinhard Dogmatics § 33. Bretschneider, Handbook of Dogmatics I⁴ 486. The latter says that Scripture does not know these subtleties of philosophy. Pantheism also could not acknowledge or appreciate the doctrine of the simplicity of God. It identified God and world and by the mouth of Spinoza even ascribed to God the attribute of extension. Thus the simplicity of God has almost entirely disappeared from modern theology; its significance is not seen; sometimes it is strongly opposed. Schleiermacher did not place the simplicity of God on the same level with the other attributes and held it only for the undivided and indivisible coexistence of all divine attributes and activities, The Christian Faith § 56. In Lange, Kahnis, Philippi, Ebrard, Lipsius, Biedermann, F. A. B. Nitzsch, Oosterzee, and others, this attribute is no longer mentioned. By Vilmar, Dogmatics I 208 f. Dorner, Doctrine of Faith I 221 f. Id. Collected Writings p. 305. Frank, System of Christian Truth I² 124. Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics p. 12 f. Justification and Reconciliation III² p. 2 f. Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie 1865 p. 275 f. 1868 p. 67 f. p. 251 f. Doedes Dutch Confession of Faith p. 9 it is strongly opposed, especially on these two grounds, that it is a metaphysical abstraction and conflicts with the doctrine of the Trinity, cf. against this Schweizer, Christian Doctrine of Faith I 256-259. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology I 338. Kuyper, Ex Ungue Leonem 1882.
Yet this simplicity of God is of the greatest importance for the knowledge of God. Not only is it taught in Scripture where God is called light, life, love, and so forth, but it also flows forth from the idea of God itself and is necessarily given with the other attributes. Simple here is the opposite of compound. If God is compound of parts, like a body, or also of genus and differentia, substance and accidents, matter and form, potency and act, essence and existence, then his perfection, his unity, his independence, his unchangeableness cannot be upheld. For then he is not the highest love, because something else is in him the subject that loves and something else the love by which he loves, and so with regard to all other attributes. God is then not the one quo melius nihil cogitari potest. But God is of himself and has nothing above himself; he is thus wholly one with wisdom, with grace, with love, and so forth; he is utterly perfect, something higher than God cannot be thought, Augustine, de trin. V 10 VI 1. Hugh of St. Victor, de trin. I 12. With creatures all this is otherwise. Here there is distinction between existence, essence, life, knowing, willing, acting, and so forth, omne quod compositum est creatum est, no creature can be utterly simple, for every creature is finite. But God is the infinite, and all that is in him is infinite. All his attributes are divine and thus infinite, one with his essence. Therefore he is and can alone be self-sufficient, blessed, and glorious in himself, Petavius, de Deo lib. II 2. From this it already appears that this simplicity of God is utterly no metaphysical abstraction. It is essentially distinct from the philosophical idea of to on, to hen, to monachon, to haploun or of substance, of the absolute, and so forth, with which Xenophanes, Plato, Philo, Plotinus and later Spinoza and Hegel denote God. It is not found by abstraction, by going out above all oppositions and distinctions in creatures, and by describing the idea of God as the being exalted above all oppositions. But precisely one has come to this attribute by positing all perfections of creatures in God in a perfect, divine way. The description of God as simplicissima essentia denotes that he is the perfect, infinitely full being, that he is an infinite and boundless pelagos ousias. And far from promoting pantheism, as Baur, chr. Lehre van d. Dreiein. Gottes II 635 thinks, this doctrine of the simplicissima essentia Dei stands directly opposite thereto. For in pantheism God has no own existence and life outside and without the world. With Hegel for example the absolute, the pure being, the thinking, the idea exists not before, but only logically and potentially earlier than the world. All the determinations of the absolute are without content, they are nothing but abstract, logical thought forms, Drews, Die deutsche Spekulation I 249. But the description of God as simplicissima essentia in Christian theology upholds precisely that God has an own, infinite, blessed life in himself, even though it be that we can only denote that essence of God with names borrowed from creatures. The substance, the highest being, the absolute, and so forth, with which pantheistic philosophy by preference names the divine essence, is obtained by abstraction; one went on to think away everything from things until one held over nothing but the last, most general concept, namely the pure being, the naked existence. This being is indeed an abstractum, a concept to which no reality corresponds and which may not be further determined. Every further determination would particularize it, make it into something particular and thus destroy the generality. Omnis determinatio est negatio. But the being that in theology is ascribed to God is an own, particular being distinct from the world. It denotes God not as a being of which we can think absolutely nothing except that it is, but as a being in which all is essence, as the absolute fullness of being. This simple essence thus does not exclude the many names, as Eunomius claimed, but requires them. God is so rich that we can obtain some idea of his richness only with many names. Every name names the same full, divine essence, but each time from another side, according to which it reveals itself to us in his works. God is therefore simple in his multiplicity and multiple in his simplicity (Augustine). Every determination, every name with which we denote God is thus no negation, but an enrichment of the knowledge of his essence. Divinum esse est determinatum in se et ab omnibus aliis divisum per hoc quod sibi nulla additio fieri potest, Thomas, Sent. I dist. 8 qu. 4 art. 1 ad 1. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit I² 204 f. So understood, this simplicity of God is also not in strife with the Trinity. For simple, simplex here stands not over against twofold or threefold, duplex, triplex, but over against compound, compositus. And now the divine essence is not compound of three persons, nor is each person compound of the essence and the proprietas personalis; but the one same simple essence exists in the three persons, each person or personal property is from the essence not re but only ratione distinct, every personal property is indeed a relatio realis but yet adds not aliquid reale to the essentia. The personal properties non componunt sed solum distinguunt, Petavius, lib. 2. cap. 3-4. Zanchius, Op. II col. 68. 69.
6. The Simplicity of God Includes His Spiritual Nature. The simplicity of God includes his spiritual nature, for all that is bodily is made up of parts. Indeed, the Scripture always speaks of God in a human way, and ascribes to him all kinds of bodily organs and works, but even in this it keeps a certain bound. Of the inward organs of the human body, only heart and bowels are ascribed to him. Organs of feeding, digesting, and begetting are never laid upon him. There is in God talk of seeing and hearing, and also of smelling, but not of tasting and touching. A body is nowhere given to him. Though the Old Testament also nowhere says in so many words that God is spirit, yet this thought lies at the ground of all the setting forth of God. God is Jehovah, who comes down to his folk and shows himself in a human way, but he is from the beginning also Elohim, who is far raised above all that is made. He lives from himself, Exodus 3:13, Isaiah 41:4, 44:6, is everlasting, Deuteronomy 32:40, Psalm 90:1 and following, 102:28, everywhere present, Deuteronomy 10:14, Psalm 139:1 and following, Jeremiah 23:23, 24, beyond likeness, Isaiah 40:18, 25, 46:5, Psalm 89:7, 9, unseen, Exodus 33:20, 23, not to be pictured, Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 5:8, for without likeness, temunah, Deuteronomy 4:12, 15. God and men stand over against each other as spirit and flesh, Isaiah 31:3. Though he often shows himself in showings, dreams, sights, and in so far makes himself seen, Genesis 32:30, Exodus 24:10, 33:11, Numbers 12:8, Deuteronomy 5:24, Judges 13:22, 1 Kings 22:19, Isaiah 6:1, yet it is through his Spirit, and thus in a spiritual way, that he is present in the making and shapes and upholds all, Psalm 139:7, Genesis 2:7, Job 33:4, Psalm 33:6, 104:30 and so on, Oehler, Theology of the Old Testament § 46. Schultz, Old Testament Theology 496-504.
Clearer comes forth the spiritual being of God in the New Testament. Not only does it show from this, that God is everlasting, Romans 16:26, 1 Timothy 6:16, 1 Peter 1:23, Revelation 1:8, 10:6, 15:7, and everywhere present, Acts 17:27, 28, Ephesians 4:6, and beyond likeness, Acts 17:29, Romans 1:22, 23, but Jesus speaks it straight out, when he calls God pneuma and therefore asks a spiritual and true worship of God, John 4:24. And though this saying is not word for word said again by the apostles, yet they have the same thought of the being of God, as they call him unseen, John 1:18, see 6:46, Romans 1:20, Colossians 1:15, 1 Timothy 1:17, 6:16, 1 John 4:12, 20; something with which the promise of the beholding of God in the state of glory does not fight, Job 19:26, Psalm 17:15, Matthew 5:8, 1 Corinthians 13:12, 1 John 3:2, Revelation 22:4. This spiritual being of God is misknown and denied in heathenism, Romans 1:23. Even wisdom-seeking has not been able to loose itself from the sense-bound thoughts of God. Stuff-lore holds the stuffly atoms for the last ground of being. God-belief makes God one with men and makes him like men in being; with Epicurus the gods are a gathering of reasoning wise-men, with a fine airy body, and marked by kind, Zeller, IV 433. But also all-god-lore comes too near this spiritual being of God. According to Heraclitus and the Stoa the first cause is to be thought stuffly and bodily; God is at once the first-springing might, which brings forth all in the run of time from itself and so also takes back into itself, Zeller IV 133-146. All these ways worked also in the Christian church and up to this day after. With the real-like end-time thoughts, that in the second half of the second hundred years held sway in wide rings, the thought of a certain bodiliness of God lay not far. Of Tertullian it is not fully sure, if he gave to God a stuffly body. For indeed he says, who will deny that God is a body, though God is spirit? for spirit is a body of its own kind in its own likeness, against Praxeas 7, but he seems to take body in the sense of substance, as he says: all that is, is a body of its own kind, nothing is unbodied but what is not, on the flesh 11, and elsewhere speaks of the soul even so really, on the soul 6. Yet the making one of body and substance is noteworthy; it shows that Tertullian could think no substance but as body. And elsewhere he says also, that God is no more free of feelings than man, though they are in him also in full way present. He even goes so far, that he will take the hands and eyes given to God in Scripture not spiritually but word for word, though in full way, against Marcion II 16. Tertullian can therefore be called the father of Bible realism. The danger of the spiritualism got by likeness-reading of the Alexandrian school drove many in the way of man-shaping. Melito, bishop of Sardis, gave according to Origen a body to God, though it is not to be made out, how far this telling is right, Herzog 9, 539. In the fourth hundred years a like man-shaping was taught by Audius and his followers, and by many Egyptian monks, who were fought mainly in the writing given to Cyril against the man-shapers. Later this man-like setting forth of God was made new by the Socinianism. Here God is only a Lord, who has might over us. Of his simple, endless, free, spiritual being no telling is made, Socinus, Christian Religion Institutes. Racovian Catechism qu. 53. Crell held that the word spirit of God, angel and soul was used not with many meanings and likeness-wise but with one meaning, on God and attributes book 1 chapter 15. And Vorstius said in the sense of Tertullian, truly body is given to God, if by body true and solid substance is understood, Dorner, Collected Writings 279. Further also god-wisdom teaches, that God well in a certain sense has a body and that therefore man also bodily is shaped after God's likeness. In the Kabbalah the ten sefiroth, that is, the attributes or ways, in which God shows himself, together bear the name of Adam Kadmon, the first heavenly man, for the human shape is the highest and fullest showing of God and God is so set forth in Scripture, Franck, The Kabbalah 1843 p. 179. From that grew out with the Christian god-wise, in link with the three-oneness lore, the thought, that God, who is no resting being, but an everlasting becoming life, not only inward from darkness to light, from kind to spirit raises himself, but also outward girds himself with a certain kind, bodiliness, glory, heaven, and therein gives himself shape and glory for himself. So we find it with Boehme, see Joh. Claassen, Jacob Boehme, His Life and his Theosophical Works, 3 vols Stuttgart 1885 I p. XXXII, 157 II 61. Oetinger, The Theology from the Idea of Life etc. 1852 p. 109 and following. Baader, see Joh. Claassen, Franz von Baader's Life and Theosophical Works etc. 2 vols Stuttgart 1887 II 110-112. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology p. 48 and following. Auberlen, The Philosophy of Oetinger 1847 p. 147. Hamberger, Yearbook for German Theology VIII 1863 p. 448 and so on. At last even in all-god-lore the spiritual kind of God comes not to its right. Spinoza gave to the substance the mark of spreading out, Ethics II prop. 1, 2. And in the wisdom-lore of Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hartmann and others the world is a being-like moment in the endless. Without world God is not God, Hegel, Works XI 122. God and world are kin-words, they press out the same being, first as oneness then as wholeness, Schleiermacher, Dialectic p. 162. Indeed this all-god-lore stays, and even with certain fondness, speaking of God as Spirit. But what thereunder is to be understood, is hard to grasp. Hegel uses the name spirit mainly for the last and highest step, which the idea through kind in man, namely in wisdom-lore, reaches. The logical becomes nature and nature becomes spirit, Works VII, 2 p. 468. The being of the spirit seeks Hegel yet in the idealness, in the simple in-itself-being, in the I-hood, ibid. p. 14 and following 18 and following, but God becomes yet first spirit after a long working through and in man. Others have gone to use that word spirit for the last in-dwelling cause of things, without thereby thinking of an own, marked out living and of a person-like, aware life. Hartmann marks the unaware as pure, unaware, unperson-like, full spirit, and calls his wisdom-lore therefore spiritual one-lore and all-spirit-lore, Philosophy of the Unaware II 457. Philosophical Questions of the Now 1885 p. 61.
Against all these directions the Christian church and theology have always held fast to the spirituality of God, Irenaeus, Against Heresies II c. 13. Origen, On First Principles I 1, 6. Against Celsus VII 33 sq. VIII 49. Augustine, On the Trinity XV 5. The City of God VIII 5. Confessions VI 3 etc. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith I c. 11. II c. 3 etc. The spirituality of God is often not treated separately, but brought up under the simplicity of God, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 8, 4 sq. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 3. art. 1-2. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 20. Petavius, On God II c. 1. The spiritual essence is alike upheld and defended by Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians, Theology of Würzburg III 27-34. C. Pesch, Dogmatic Lectures II 68. Gerhard, Theological Topics II c. 8 sect. 1. Forbes of Corse, Historical-Theological Instructions book 1 c. 36. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology II c. 6.
Under this spirituality of God is now understood that God is a proper substance distinct from the being of the world and that this substance is immaterial, imperceptible to bodily senses, without composition or extension. Of the nature of such an immaterial substance man can form only some faint idea from the analogy of the spiritual essence which he finds in himself. But the essence of his own soul is unknown to man in a positive sense; he perceives in himself various psychic phenomena and concludes therefrom to a spiritual substance as bearer thereof, but this essence of the soul itself escapes his observation. And even then the spirituality of God is of an altogether different and unique kind. The name spirit for God, angel, and soul is not to be understood univocally and synonymously, but analogically. This is already evident from the fact that the spirit in angels and men is composite, not indeed from material parts but yet from substance and accidents, from potency and act, and thus subject to change. In God, however, this composition is as little present as that from bodily parts; He is pure being.
But furthermore, it also clearly appears herein that God as pneuma is not only the Father of spirits, Heb. 12:9, but equally the Creator and Father of all visible things. These also have come into being from things that do not appear to the eyes, Heb. 11:3, and have their origin in God as pneuma . God as spiritual essence is the author not only of all that is pneuma and psyche , but also of all that is called soma and sarx among creatures. And so the spirituality denotes that perfection of God whereby He is to be thought both negatively in analogy with the spirit of angels and the soul of man as immaterial and invisible, and also positively as the hidden, simple, absolute ground of all creaturely, somatic, and pneumatic being. This was realized earlier as well, and hence some proposed to call even the spirits of angels and the souls of men bodies, while God then alone was spirit in an altogether unique sense, cf. Augustine, Letter 28, or also, to apply to God neither the predicate of bodiliness nor that of bodilessness, since He is exalted above both, Petavius, On God II c. 1 § 14-16. But this does not deserve recommendation, because it promotes misunderstanding and also forgets that, although all knowledge of God is analogical, that analogy yet comes out more clearly in one group of creatures than in the other, and speaks more strongly in the world of invisible things than in that of visible.
Just as incorrect on the other side is it to posit with Descartes the essence of the spirit in cogitation, Meditations c. 4, and with Cartesian theologians to describe the essence of God as thinking thing, Wittichius, Theology c. 15 § 218, or as most perfect and purest intellection, Burmannus, Synopsis I 17, 4. For thereby the spiritual nature of God is at once identified with personality, as also happened with Reinhard, Dogmatics 111, Wegscheider, Theological Institutes § 64, and others. Pantheism therefore knew not what to do with this spiritual nature of God, and made it into a sound without sense, a word without reality. It is therefore important to maintain the spirituality of God as designation of his incorporeal substance. Personality, self-consciousness, and self-determination are not yet automatically given therewith; naturally so in God, because He is a simple essence; but not in the concept considered in itself. Animal consciousness and the unconscious representations in man sufficiently prove that spirituality and personality are not identical concepts. That which is expressed in personality comes up later in the doctrine of the knowledge and will of God. Here with the spirituality it is a matter of maintaining the spiritual essence of God. And this is of such great importance that thereon rests the whole manner in which we must serve God. Worship in spirit and truth rests on the spirituality of God. Only thereby is all image service cut off in principle and forever.
7. From this spirituality of God follows straightway his invisibility. The Scripture teaches this expressly. And in the Christian church there was then also little difference over whether God could be beheld with bodily eyes. Both for this dispensation and for that in glory this was generally denied; only a few, the Audians, the Socinians, Vorstius, and also some Lutherans, such as Quenstedt, Hollaz, Hulsemann, Majus, Jaeger and others took it up and appealed also to the Reformed Alsted, Bucanus; but Gerhard left it undecided; and Baier, Buddeus limited it to the intellectual knowledge.
Otherwise it was taught by all that God as spirit was invisible to bodily senses, Irenaeus against heresies II 6. IV 20. Origen against Celsus VII 33 sq. Augustine, City of God XXII 29. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 12 art. 3 ad 3. Martyr, Loci, p. 8, 9. Zanchius, Works I 225 and so on. If there can be speech of a seeing of God, this is only possible with eyes of the soul or of the spirit. Thereby however the question could arise whether a beholding of God is possible, straightway, without the medium of creatures, from face to face? Can God, as the scholastics said, be seen, as he is in himself by essence, in his substance or essence? Now it was generally taught that such a beholding of God by essence in any case was only possible in the state of glory. Here on earth such a seeing of God was reachable for no one. At most this was by a special grace and only for a moment granted to Moses, Exodus 34, Isaiah, chapter 6, Paul, 2 Corinthians 12, Augustine Epistle 112, On Genesis literally XII 27. Basil Hexaemeron homily 1. Hilary, On the Trinity V. But by far the most judged also with regard to the beholding of God which had befallen patriarchs, prophets and apostles, that it always happened mediately, through a cloud, in some sign, under some form, Petavius, On God VII chapter 12. In discussion was therefore properly only the question whether in the state of glory there was a vision of God by essence. Now the church fathers do speak oftentimes of a seeing of God which is laid up for the believers in heaven, for example Irenaeus against heresies IV 20. Clement of Alexandria Stromata V chapter 1. Gregory of Nazianzus Oration 34. Augustine, City of God XXII 29, On Genesis literally XII 26, but they make no mention of a seeing of God by essence. They say only with the Scripture that the blessed shall see God, not through a mirror, but from face to face. And they add that God is invisible, but that he can make himself visible and can reveal himself to man, Irenaeus ibid. It is not in our power to see him, but in his power to appear, Ambrose, in Petavius, VII chapter 7. Others denied then also that God by essence would be beheld hereafter, such as Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodoret, Jerome, Isidore and others. The Roman theologians are embarrassed with the sayings of these fathers. Vasquez acknowledged roundly: these fathers, if we will speak sincerely, we can scarcely interpret in a good sense. But others try to weaken these sayings and explain them in the sense that they treat of the bodily beholding of God or of the beholding of God in this life or of the absolute knowledge of God which also in heaven is unreachable and remains, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 12 art. 1 ad 1. Sentences IV dist. 49 qu. 1 art. 1 ad 1. Petavius, On God VII chapter 5. Theology of Würzburg III p. 82-86. Little by little however under the influence of the Neoplatonic mysticism which worked on Pseudo-Dionysius, another conception of the vision of God came. It was now taken up as a beholding of God in his essence, as he is in himself. God no longer descends to man, but man is by a supernatural gift lifted up to God and thus deified. Gregory the Great, Morals book 18 chapter 28 said already that God shall be seen not only in his glory but also in his nature, for his very nature is his brightness, his brightness is his nature. Prosper, On the Contemplative Life 1 chapter 4 spoke of the blessed as contemplating the substance of their creator with clean hearts. Bernard, sermon 4 on the feast of all saints, says that God shall be seen in all his creatures, but that the Trinity also shall be seen in itself. And the council at Florence declared that souls are soon received into heaven and behold clearly God himself three and one as he is, yet according to the diversity of merits one more perfectly than another, cf. Denzinger, Enchiridion of Symbols and Definitions n. 403, 456, 588, 870, 875. The scholastics found here ample stuff for all kinds of speculation and made abundant use of it. In connection with the doctrine of the superadded gifts it was taught that man with his natural gifts was not able for this beholding of God, but that a divine help was needed for it, which supplied, lifted up and completed the natural gifts. That supernatural help was usually denoted with the name of light of glory. But there arose great difference over the nature of this light, whether it was objective or subjective, whether it was the Word or the Spirit, a gift of the Holy Spirit or this himself, although it was also mostly taken that it was something created, given to the intellect in the manner of a habit. Otherwise it was the general teaching that God in his essence was the object of the beholding, and that the blessed thus saw everything in God what cannot be separated from his essence, thus both the attributes and the persons. But the Thomists claimed that the essence could not be beheld without the persons and one attribute not without the other, while the nominalists and Scotists held the opposite. Further according to the opinion of all God himself and all that was formally in him, that is, belonged to his essence, was the object of the beholding; but there was again difference whether thereto also belonged that which was eminently in him, that is, what by God according to his decrees is called into being. Usually this was maintained thereby to justify the invocation of angels and of the blessed, who saw in God everything that would happen and thus knew the needs of the believers on earth. Although it was also added that the vision of God was no comprehension and differed in the blessed according to the measure of their merits, yet this doctrine ran out on the deification of man. The creature lifts itself on the ground of a supernatural gift by his own merits upward and becomes like God, Lombard, Sentences 4 dist. 49. Thomas Summa Theologica I qu. 12, I-II qu. 3, especially art. 12. qu. 4 art. 2. Summa contra Gentiles III chapters 38-63. Sentences IV dist. 49 qu. 1, 2. Bonaventure, Breviloquium VII chapter 7. Hugh of St. Victor On the Sacraments book 2 part 18 chapter 16. Petavius, On God VII chapters 1-14. Becanus, Scholastic Theology I chapter 9. Theology of Würzburg III p. 67-90. Perrone, Theological Lectures III p. 266-276. Jansen, Theological Lectures dogmatic III p. 913-935. C. Pesch, Dogmatic Lectures III p. 23-44. Kleutgen, Theology of the Foretime II p. 122-134. Scheeben, Dogmatics I 562 f. II 294 f.
The Reformation took a different standpoint over against this vision of God. The Lutherans inclined to assume a vision of God by essence, and not only mental but even corporal. God's power was so great that He could grant to the blessed an enlightenment whereby they also with the eyes of the body can see Him in His essence. Also some Reformed thought such a vision of God by essence not impossible, Bullinger on John 1:18. Polanus, Synt. Theol. p. 9, 518. Synopsis pur. theol. LII 11-24. Forbesius a Corse, de visione beatifica, Op. Amst. 1703 I 282-289. etc. But the most, holding to the glory that surpasses all knowledge, which is prepared for believers, set aside the thorny questions of the scholastics or rejected the vision of God by essence altogether, Calvin, Inst. III 25, 11. Pareus on 1 Cor. 13:12. Rivetus on Ps. 16:11, Op. II 68. Danaeus on 1 Tim. 6:16. Gomarus on John 1:18. Maccovius redivivus, Theol. pol. 162. Hoornbeek, Inst. theol. XVI 20 Turretinus, Theol. El. XX qu. 8. Heidegger, Corpus theol. III 37, XXVIII 138. Moor, VI 720. M. Vitringa IV 18-25, especially Voetius, Disp. II 1193-1217 etc.; cf. also Episcopius, Inst. theol. IV sect. 2 c. 4, Limborch, Theol. Chr. VI 13, 6. This modesty is surely in agreement with Scripture, which indeed speaks of a beholding of God by the blessed, but declares nothing further about it and elsewhere expressly calls God invisible. The beholding which awaits believers is called by Paul a knowing even as we are known. If God, as all admit, cannot be known perfectly, in His essence, but is incomprehensible, then He also cannot be seen in His essence. For vision by essence and comprehension are wholly alike. Moreover, God is infinite and man remains finite, even in the state of glory. Therefore God can always be seen by man only in a finite, human way. The object may thus be infinite, the representation in human consciousness is and remains finite. But then the seeing of God is also not by essence. Then from God's side there is always need of a condescension, a revelation, whereby He from His side descends to us and makes Himself known to us; Matt. 11:27 remains in force also in glory. The beholding of God in His essence would bring with it that man is deified and the boundary between Creator and creature is blotted out. That indeed lies in the line of Neoplatonic mysticism, which was taken up by Rome, but not in that of the Reformation, and at least not of the Reformed church and theology. For at Rome man is lifted up by the supernatural gift above his own nature; he thereby becomes in fact another being, a divine and supernatural man, Bellarmine, de justif. V 12; but however high and glorious the Reformed thought of the state of glory, even there man yet remains man, indeed raised above his natural degree, but not above his own kind and the object analogous to it, Turretinus, Th. El. XX qu. 8, 12. Man's blessedness is surely found in the beatific vision of God, but yet always in such a vision as the finite and limited human nature is capable of. A deification, as Rome teaches it, fits in the system of the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy but finds no support in Scripture, cf. later the locus on the image of God, and also Stuckert, Vom Schauen Gottes, Zeits. f. Th. u. K. von Gottschick VI 6 S. 492-544.
8. God's Knowledge. The whole Scripture assumes that consciousness and knowledge belong to God. He is pure light without any darkness, 1 John 1:5, dwelling in unapproachable light, 1 Tim. 6:16, and the source of all light in nature and grace, Ps. 4:7, 27:1, 36:10, 43:3, John 1:4, 9, 8:12, James 1:17, etc. In this naming of light is included that God is fully aware of himself, that he sees through his whole being, and that nothing in that being is hidden from his consciousness. Also the trinitarian life of God is a fully conscious life, Matt. 11:27, John 1:17, 10:15, 1 Cor. 2:10. But furthermore, God has consciousness and knowledge of all that exists outside his being. Nowhere in Scripture is it even hinted that something would be unknown to him. Indeed, the manner in which he takes knowledge is sometimes described very humanly, Gen. 3:9ff., 11:5, 18:21, etc., but he nevertheless knows everything. The thought that something would be unknown to him is rejected as absurd; would he who plants the ear not hear, and he who forms the eye not see, Ps. 94:9? Repeatedly there is mention of his wisdom, might, counsel, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, Job 12:13, 28:12-27, Prov. 8:12ff., Ps. 147:5, Rom. 11:33, 16:27, Eph. 3:10, etc. And this knowledge of God has every creature as its object. It extends to everything and is thus omniscience in the strict sense. His eyes run through the whole earth, 2 Chron. 16:9; everything is known to him and lies naked and exposed before his eye, Heb. 4:13. The smallest and least, Matt. 6:8, 32, 10:30, the most hidden, heart and reins, Jer. 11:20, 17:9, 10, 20:12, Ps. 7:10, 1 Kings 8:39, Luke 16:15, Acts 1:24, Rom. 8:27, thoughts and deliberations, Ps. 139:2, Ezek. 11:5, 1 Cor. 3:20, 1 Thess. 2:4, Rev. 2:23, the human in his origin and being and in all his ways, Ps. 139, night and darkness, Ps. 139:11, 12, hell and destruction, Prov. 15:11, the evil and sinful, Ps. 69:6, Jer. 16:17, 18:23, 32:19, the conditional, 1 Sam. 23:10-13, 2 Sam. 12:8, 2 Kings 13:19, Ps. 81:14, 15, Jer. 26:2, 3, 38:17-20, Ezek. 3:6, Matt. 11:21, and the future, Isa. 41:22ff., 42:9, 43:9-12, 44:7, 46:10, specifically also the end of life, Ps. 31:16, 39:6, 139:6, 16, Job 14:5, Acts 17:26, etc., it is all known to God. He knows everything, 1 John 3:20. And he knows all that not a posteriori, through observation, but a priori, from eternity, 1 Cor. 2:7, Rom. 8:29, Eph. 1:4, 5, 2 Tim. 1:9. His knowledge is not susceptible to increase, Isa. 40:13ff., Rom. 11:34, is certain and definite, Ps. 139:1-3, Heb. 4:13, so that all God's revelations are true, John 8:26, 17:17, Titus 1:2, all works of God make his wisdom known to us, Ps. 104:24, 136:5, Eph. 3:10, Rom. 11:33, and stir us to worship and wonder, Ps. 139:17ff., Isa. 40:28, Job 11:7ff., Rom. 11:33, 1 Cor. 2:11. The knowledge of God both of himself and of the world is taught in Scripture so decidedly and clearly that it has always been recognized within the Christian church.
But pantheism has risen against it. It ascribed to God no own being distinct from the world and therefore could assume in God no own consciousness. Spinoza still spoke of cogitatio as an attribute of God and called God a thinking thing, Eth. II prop. 1. But from that cogitatio he distinguished the intellectus as a certain mode of thinking, and this falls not in the natura naturans but only in the natura naturata, Eth. I prop. 31, and all these modes of thinking together make up God's eternal and infinite understanding, Eth. V prop. 40 schol. This pantheism led through Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer to the Philosophy of the Unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann. In the first part of his work, he extensively points out the significance that belongs to the unconscious everywhere in the world, and then says that this unconscious being is one in all things II 155ff. And this Unconscious, although preferably not called God II 201, yet fills in Hartmann the place of God. Now this Unconscious is sometimes conceived by Hartmann in such a way that it is not blind and alogical, like the will in Schopenhauer, but rather clear-sighted, clairvoyant, just as the instinct in animal and human, and possesses an all-knowing, all-wise, superconscious Intelligence, II 176ff. But he denies that consciousness belongs to the Unconscious. For consciousness consists in a splitting of subject and object, is thus always a limitation and presupposes individualization, yes even the body, II 177ff. As soon as consciousness is taken absolutely, it loses its form and becomes unconscious of itself, II 179. If the absolute still had an own consciousness outside the individual consciousnesses, it would immediately devour them. Monism is incompatible with a conscious divine being. Such a being would not be immanent in but separated from the world. It is indeed the cause of all consciousness but not itself conscious, II 178ff. And especially self-consciousness cannot be ascribed to the absolute, for this presupposes a distinction of subject and object, a reflection on itself, which cannot fall in the absolute, II 187ff. Pantheism thus denies to God both knowledge of the world, world-consciousness, inner-worldly self-consciousness, and knowledge of himself, self-consciousness, extra-worldly or inner-divine self-consciousness. Even where he comes to consciousness in the individual consciousnesses, he knows only the world but not himself, Hartmann II 176.
Now to Hartmann almost everything that he says about the power and significance of the unconscious in the creatures can be conceded. The unconscious indeed plays a great role in animal and human life. But it is remarkable that Hartmann does not even pose the question whether that extensive power of the unconscious does not precisely presuppose and require the intelligence of God. For very certainly there is often an unconscious and yet purposeful action. But the unconscious in animal and human does not itself act with purpose; but the conscious spirit of man sees in that action a purpose, to which it is directed precisely by a higher consciousness standing above it, Thomas, Contra Gentiles I 44, 5. From of old, therefore, the observation of the purposeful in the world has led to the recognition of a divine being. Anaxagoras therefore already assumed a mind that possessed infinite knowledge, to order everything for the best. Socrates describes the deity so that it sees and hears everything and is present everywhere. In Plato, God is the world-former who creates everything according to the ideas. Aristotle reasons that the deity is the prime mover, the absolute being, pure act, and absolutely incorporeal. It is therefore thinking, mind, and has itself as content. God cannot borrow the content of his thought from outside; he can only think the best, and that is himself. God thus thinks himself, he is the thinking of thinking; thinking and its object are one in him, God is the thought of thought, Metaph. XII 9. And even the Stoa concluded teleologically from the purpose in the world to an intelligent cause. Zeno already reasoned thus: No part of something lacking sense can be sentient. But parts of the world are sentient. Therefore the world does not lack sense, Cicero, Nat. Deor. II, 8, 22. cf. III, 9, 22: That which uses reason is better than that which does not use reason. But nothing is better than the world. Therefore the world uses reason. So also Thomas, Contra Gentiles I c. 28 and 44. Whoever recognizes no purpose in the world also has no need of a self-conscious God and has enough with materialism. But whoever with von Hartmann defends the teleological worldview must assume a consciousness in God, and does not explain the conscious by the unconscious. For indeed, in the effect there cannot be more present than lies in the cause. Would he who plants the ear not hear, and he who forms the eye not behold? A perfection in the creature points back to a perfection in God. If the rational being surpasses all others in worth, if thinking elevates man, otherwise weak as a reed, yet above all creatures, God cannot be thought of as unconscious. Religion opposes it, which always and everywhere presupposes a personal, self-conscious God, but also philosophy protests against it. Pantheism may appeal to Spinoza and Hegel; theism has all philosophers of antiquity on its side and also finds support in the newer philosophy in Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Schelling (second period), J. H. Fichte, Herbart, Lotze, Ulrici, Carrière, etc.
That now the divine self-consciousness specifically differs from that of man and has herein only a weak analogy stands certainly above all doubt. Insofar there would be no objection to calling God superconscious. But precisely therefore one cannot conclude from the limitation of human self-consciousness to the divine knowledge. In spite of all reasonings from the pantheistic side about the limitation, the individuality, and the sensory basis as necessarily belonging to self-consciousness, it is not to be seen why the self-knowledge of God would be a limitation of his being. With us self-consciousness is finite and limited, because we ourselves are finite and because it never covers our being. Our being is much richer than our self-consciousness. But God is the eternal, pure being. And his self-knowledge has nothing less than that full, eternal, divine being itself as content. Being and knowing are one in God. He knows himself through his own essence. He also does not gradually come to consciousness, and is not now more than less conscious. For in him there is no becoming, no process, no development. He is pure being, sheer light without darkness, Augustine, De Trinitate XV 14. Thomas, Contra Gentiles I c. 57-58.
From this self-consciousness of God, His world-consciousness is to be distinguished.
The earlier theology therefore divided the knowledge of God into scientia naturalis (necessary, of simple intelligence) and scientia libera (contingent, of vision). Both are not identical, as pantheism teaches, for if the absolute is only logically and potentially to be thought of before the world, it is wholly insufficient for the explanation of the world. God does not need the world to come to personality, to self-consciousness. He has neither, according to Hegel, a logical, nor, according to Schelling, a historical course to run through, to reach His full actuality (von Baader). But yet the self-consciousness and the world-consciousness in God cannot stand so separated beside each other, as it was sometimes presented in the earlier dogmatics.
Rather, there exists between both an organic connection. God has from the infinite fullness of ideas, which are present in His absolute self-consciousness, not arbitrarily chosen some to realize them outside Himself. He has therein let Himself be led by the goal to bring Himself, all His virtues and perfections, to revelation in the world. The cognitio libera thus includes precisely those ideas which in their realization are suitable to unfold the essence of God in a creaturely way. The cognitio naturalis is by nature unfit to be communicated to creatures. As God knows Himself, He can never be known by creatures, neither as to the content and the extent, nor also as to the manner. But the cognitio libera includes all that which is susceptible to realization and suitable to bring the virtues of God to revelation in and for creatures. It stands to the cognitio naturalis as the ectype to the archetype. Yet also with this cognitio libera it must be kept in view that it is in God something wholly other than in the creatures. Even if this cognitio libera is communicable, it is yet not only in extent but also in nature and essence greatly distinguished in God and in the rational creature.
First, Holy Scripture teaches very clearly that this scientia Dei embraces all that exists; nothing is withdrawn from His omniscience, nothing hidden from His all-seeing eye. Past, present, and future; the least and the most hidden; all is naked and revealed before Him, with whom we have to do. At all times this was also acknowledged in Christian theology. The only one who spoke otherwise was Jerome. He called it in his commentary on Habakkuk 1:13 absurd to bring down the divine majesty so far as to know at every moment how many mosquitoes are born, how many die; what is the multitude of bedbugs and fleas and flies on earth, how many fishes swim in the water, and which of the smaller must yield to the prey of the larger. But this limitation of God's omniscience finds no support in Scripture and has been unanimously rejected by Christian theology. And further, God knows all things not through observation from the things, but He knows all from and of Himself. Our knowledge is posterior; it presupposes being and is derived from it. With God it is the reverse; He knows all before it is. Scripture also expresses this clearly when it says that God knows all before it happens, Isaiah 46:10, Amos 3:7, Daniel 2:22, Psalm 139:6, Matthew 6:8, etc. For God is the Creator of all things; He has thought them before they existed. This world could not be known to us unless it existed; but to God, unless it were known, it could not exist, Augustine, City of God XI 10, On Genesis Literally V 18. He exists of Himself and can also in His consciousness and knowledge not depend on or be determined by something that is outside Him. From His aseity flows naturally the absolute independence of His knowledge. He knows all not from the things after their existence, for then these would, as with Schopenhauer and Hartmann, have come forth from the unconscious, cf. Augustine, City of God XI 10, Confessions XIII 16, On Genesis Literally V 15, but He knows all in and through and from Himself. And therefore His knowledge is also one, simple, unchangeable, eternal; He knows all at once, simultaneously, from eternity; and all stands eternally present before His eye, Irenaeus, Against Heresies I 12. Augustine, On the Trinity XI 10. XII 18. XV 7, 13, 14. Lombard, Sentences I dist. 35, 36. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 14. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 44 sq. Zanchi, Works II 195 sq. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 18, etc.
Therefore, there can be no talk of foreknowledge with God in the proper sense. There is with Him no difference of time, Tertullian, adv. Marc. III 5. He calls the things that are not as though they were, and sees what is not as though it already was. For what is foreknowledge, if not knowledge of future things? But what is future to God, who goes beyond all times? For if God's knowledge includes the things themselves, they are not future to Him but present; and for this reason it can no longer be called foreknowledge but only knowledge, Augustine, ad Simpl. II 2. All that was and will be to us is present in His sight, Gregory the Great, Mor. l. 20 c. 23. Whatever times bring forth, He always has present, Marius Victor, in Petavius, de Deo IV 4. The distinction of God's omniscience into foreknowledge, knowledge of vision (of the present), and remembrance is wholly and entirely a human notion, Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. II 67. Yet Scripture often presents it as though God's omniscience goes before the being of things in time. And without this helping notion we also cannot speak of God's omniscience. But from this arose in theology the question how this omniscience of God was to be reconciled with man's freedom. For if God knows all things beforehand, then all things are fixed from eternity, and no room remains for free and contingent deeds. Cicero therefore already came to deny God's omniscience, because he could not reconcile it with free will, de fato c. 14. de div. II 5-7. Marcion denied to God, along with omnipotence and goodness, also omniscience, because He had let the first man fall into sin, Tertullian, adv. Marc. II 5. Later this same was taught by the Socinians. God knows all things but all in keeping with His nature. He knows the possibly future, the contingent, thus not with absolute certainty, for then it would cease to be contingent, but He knows it as possible and contingent, that is, He knows the future, insofar as it depends on men, not certainly and infallibly beforehand. For otherwise free will would be lost, God would become the author of sin, and Himself subjected to necessity, Fock, der Socin. 437-446. But such a limitation of God's omniscience was too much at odds with Holy Scripture for it to find entrance except with a few. Christian theology usually seeks the solution in another direction. Two ways offered themselves for this. On the one hand, Origen made a distinction between foreknowledge and predestination. God does know things beforehand, but this foreknowledge is not the cause and ground of their happening; rather, God knows them certainly beforehand only because they will happen in time through the free decision of men; for it does not happen because it is known, but because it was going to happen it is known, in Gen. I 14. c. Cels. II 20. On the other side stands Augustine, who also wants to maintain both, foreknowledge and free will. The religious mind chooses both, confesses both, and confirms both by the faith of piety, de civ. V 9, 10. But he sees that if God knows something certainly beforehand, this must also necessarily happen; otherwise the whole foreknowledge would fall down. Foreknowledge, if it does not foreknow certainly, is surely none, de lib. arb. III 4. Therefore he says that the will of man, with his whole nature, with all his decisions, is taken up in the foreknowledge and by it not destroyed, but rather posited and maintained. For since He is foreknowing of our will, that of which He is foreknowing will be. Therefore there will be will, because He is foreknowing of will, de lib. arb. III 3. Our wills have as much power as God willed and foreknew them to have; and therefore whatever power they have, they have it most certainly; and what they are going to do, they themselves are altogether going to do; because He whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foreknew that they would have power and would do it, de civ. V 9. The Scholastics, although making all kinds of distinctions, in principle joined Augustine, Anselm, de concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis necnon gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 38. Bonaventure, ib. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 14. Hugh of St. Victor, de Sacram. I 9 etc. But the Jesuits brought change, cf. part I 91 ff. They inserted, in connection with Semipelagianism, between the necessary knowledge and the free knowledge the so-called middle knowledge, in order by this to reconcile God's omniscience with man's freedom. They understood by it a knowledge of God logically preceding the decrees of the conditionally future. The object of this knowledge is not the merely possible, which will never become actual, nor that which as a result of a decree of God will certainly happen, but that possible which under one or another condition can become actual. For God leaves much in His government of the world dependent on conditions, and knows beforehand what He will do in case the conditions are or are not fulfilled by man. God is thus ready in all cases, He foresees and knows all possibilities, and with a view to all those possibilities has taken His measures and made His decrees. He knew beforehand what He would do if Adam fell and also if he stood; if David went to Keilah or did not go there; if Tyre and Sidon converted or not, etc. The knowledge of conditional futures thus precedes the decree of absolute futures; man decides wholly free and independently in every moment but yet can never surprise God by one or another decision or thwart His plans, for on all possibilities God's foreknowledge has reckoned. This doctrine of middle knowledge was supported with many Scripture places which ascribe to God the knowledge of what in a given case would happen if one or another condition were or were not fulfilled, such as Gen. 11:6, Ex. 3:19, 34:16, Deut. 7:3, 4, 1 Sam. 23:10-13, 25:29 ff., 2 Sam. 12:8, 1 Kings 11:2, 2 Kings 2:10, 13:19, Ps. 81:14, 15, Jer. 26:2, 3, 38:17-20, Ezek. 2:5-7, 3:4-6, Matt. 11:21, 23, 24:22, 26:53, Luke 22:66-68, John 4:10, 6:15, Acts 22:18, Rom. 9:29, 1 Cor. 2:8. It was indeed opposed by the Thomists and Augustinians, e.g., Banez, the Salmanticenses, Billuart, Summa S. Thomae 1747 I 464 sq., but also zealously defended by the Molinists and Congruists, Suarez, Bellarmine, Lessius, etc. Fear of Calvinism and Jansenism benefited the doctrine of middle knowledge in the Roman Church, and gradually it found entrance in a more crude or moderate sense with nearly all Roman theologians, cf. part I 93, Karl Werner, Der h. Thomas v. Aq. III 389-442. Id. Gesch. der kath. Theol. 98 ff. G. Schneemann, Die Entstehung der thomistisch-molinistischen Controverse, Ergänzungshefte zu den Stimmen aus Maria Laach, no. 9. 13. 14. Schwane, D. G. der neuern Zeit S. 37-59. Petavius, de Deo IV c. 6. 7 etc. The line of Augustine was thereby abandoned and that of Origen taken up again. So the Greek theology had done from the beginning, Damascene, de fide orth. II c. 30. The Roman theology followed. Also the Lutherans, Gerhard, Loc. II c. 8 sect. 13, Quenstedt, Theol. I 316, Buddeus, Instit. 217, Reinhard, Dogm. 116 etc., and the Remonstrants, Episcopius, Inst. IV sect. 2 c. 19, Limborch, Theol. Chr. II c. 8. § 29 were not averse to the middle knowledge. In modern times many teach, in about the same way, that God also actually gets knowledge from the world as medium scientiae. He knows the contingently future indeed as possible beforehand, but learns first from the world whether it becomes actual or not. For all cases, however, He knows in response to the doing of the creature, however it turns out, fitting doing; He indeed fixed the schema of the world plan but leaves the filling in to the creature, Dorner, Gl. I 319-323. Rothe, Ethik § 42. Martensen, Dogm. § 116. Kahnis, Dogm. I 343. Grétillat, Theol. syst. III 237 ff. Sécretan, La civilisation et la croyance 1887 p. 260 ff. etc. On the other hand, following Augustine, such a bare foreknowledge and middle knowledge was rejected by the Reformed, Voetius, Disp. I 254-258. Twisse, de scientia media, Op. III p. 1 sq. Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 13. De Moor, I 659 sq. Ex. v. h. Ontw. v. Tol. IV 281 ff.
Now the question in the scientia media does not run about this, whether the things among themselves do not oftentimes stand in a conditional bond to each other, which is known to God and willed by Him Himself. If this alone were meant by the scientia media, it could be taken without hindrance, as Gomarus, Disp. theol. X 30 sq. and Walaeus, Loci Comm. Op. I 174-176, cf. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. r. K. 64 took and acknowledged it in that sense.
But the teaching of the scientia media aims at something else; it wants to bring the Pelagian view of the freedom of the will into agreement with the all-knowingness. For the will of the creatures is by its kind indifferent. It can do the one as well as the other. It is determined neither by its own nature nor by the manifold surroundings in which it is placed. These can wield sway on the will, but in the end the will stays free and chooses as it pleases. This freedom of the will is naturally not to be rhymed with a decree of God; it stands in essence in independence from the decree of God. God has not determined that will, but has left it free; He could not determine it without destroying it. God must take a waiting stance toward the will of the reasoning creatures. He looks on what this will do. But now He is all-knowing. He thus knows all possibilities, all chance-future things, and also knows the utterly future things beforehand. Accordingly, He has taken His decrees. If a man in certain surroundings will take the grace, He has chosen him to life; if he will not believe, He has rejected him.
Now it is clear that such a teaching differs in ground from that of Augustine and Thomas. For in these, the foreknowledge goes before the things and nothing can come to being except through the will of God. Non fit aliquid nisi omnipotens fieri velit, Aug. Enchir. 95. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 14 art. 9 ad 3. Not the world but the decrees are the middle through which God knows all things, Thomas, I qu. 14 art. 8. Bonaventura, Sent. II dist. 37 art. 1. qu. 1. And the chance and free can thus in its bond and order be known surely and unfailingly. It is true that the scholastics on this point sometimes spoke otherwise than Augustine. Anselm, for example, said that the praescientia brings no inner and foregoing need but only an outer and following need. Cur Deus homo 16. And Thomas judged that God knows the future contingents everlastingly and surely according to the state in which they are in deed, according to His presentness, but that they in their near causes yet are contingent and undetermined, S. Th. I qu. 14 art. 13. But that does not take away that they yet with an eye to the first cause are fully sure and thus cannot be called chance; and elsewhere Thomas says again, omne quod est, ex eo futurum fuit antequam esset, quia in causa sua erat ut fieret, cf. Billuart I 440 sq.
But in the teaching of the scientia media, the chance and free things are also chance and free toward God and indeed not only toward His predestination but also toward His foreknowledge. For, just as in Origen, the things are not here because God knows them, but God knows them beforehand because they will be. The order is thus not: scientia necessaria, scientia visionis, decretum creandi etc., but scientia necessaria, scientia media, decretum creandi etc., scientia visionis, Jansen, Prael. II 110 sq. God knows the free deeds of men not from His own being, from His decrees, but from the will of the creatures, Schwane, D. G. IV 52. God thus becomes hanging on the world, receives knowledge from the world, which He could not have or get from Himself, and thus in His scientia ceases to be one, simple, unhanging, that is, God. The creature in turn becomes for a great part fully unhanging from God; it has indeed received the being and the power from God in time, but it now has the willing fully in its own hand. It decides fully sovereign and brings something to reality or not, without a decree of God going before. Something can thus come to being without God's will; the creature is creator, self-ruling, sovereign; and the whole world-history is withdrawn from God's steering and laid in the hands of man. This decides and then God comes with His plan answering to that decision. If such a decision now once befell, for example with Adam, then that was still to be thought; but such decisions of more or less earnest kind come thousands of times in each human life; what then is to be thought of a God who always waits through all those decisions and has all possible plans ready for all possibilities; what stays even of the outline of the world-plan, whose filling out is left to man; and what is a ruling worth in which the King is the thrall of his underlings? And that is here in the scientia media the case with God. God looks on and man decides. Not God is it who makes difference between men; these differ themselves. Grace is dealt out according to merits, predestination hangs on good works; what the Scripture everywhere fights and Augustine rejected in Pelagius, is stamped by Jesuitism as right-believing, Roman teaching, Billuart, I 479.
For indeed the upholders of the scientia media call on many places of Holy Scripture, but fully wrongly. For the Scripture surely acknowledges that the things are set by God in all kinds of bond to each other and that this bond often is also of conditional kind, so that the one cannot happen unless something else is fulfilled beforehand. Without faith there is no salvation, without work no food, etc. But all the texts that the Jesuits quoted for the scientia media prove not what had to be proven. They speak indeed of condition and fulfillment, of obedience and promise, of supposition and outcome, of what will happen in the one or in the other case. But they say none of them that God, even if it is that He speaks humanly to men and deals and bargains with them in human wise, did not in each sundry case know and determine what surely had to happen. Between the sheer possible, which is only as idea in God and never will become real, and the surely real, which is set fast by God's decree, there is no realm more that can be ruled by the will of man. Something belongs always either to the one or to the other. If it is only possible and never becomes real, it is object of the scientia necessaria; and if it indeed once becomes real, it is content of the scientia libera. There lies nothing more between, there is no scientia media.
But besides, the scientia media also reaches not what it wants to reach. It wants to bring the freedom of the will in the sense of indifferentia into agreement with the foreknowledge. Now it says that this, taken as scientia media, makes the human deeds not needful but fully free. And that is also so, but then it ceases to be foreknowledge. For if God surely knows beforehand what a man will do in a given case, then He can only foresee this if the motives determine the will in one direction and this thus does not stand in indifferentia. In turn, if this stands in indifferentia, then there is no knowledge, no reckoning beforehand of possible, then there is only scientia post factum. God's foreknowledge and the will as whim shut each other out. Si enim scit, said therefore Cicero already, certe illud eveniet; sin certe eveniet, nulla fortuna est. Therefore the loosing of the riddle must with Augustine be sought in another direction. The freedom of the will stands not, as will later appear, in indifferentia, in whim or chance, but in willing reasonableness. And this is so little in strife with the foreknowledge of God that it rather is set and upheld by this. The will with its nature, its foregoings and motives, its decisions and outcomes is taken up in the order of causes, which is sure to God and held in His foreknowledge, Aug. de civ. V 9. In God's knowledge the things lie among themselves just in that same bond in which they come forth in the reality. Not the foreknowledge is it and not the predestination that now and then falls in from above and forces, but each decision and deed is moved by what goes before it. And so, in that bond, it is taken up in the scientia Dei. The contingent and free is according to its own, by God known and willed kind, linked in the order of causes, which in the world-history is slowly opened to us.
9. The knowledge of God, viewed from another standpoint, bears the name of wisdom. The distinction between the two is widely known. Almost all tongues have different words for these two thoughts. Everyone knows that learning, lore, knowledge, and wisdom are by no means the same and do not always go hand in hand. A plain man often outshines a learned one in wisdom. Both rest on sundry powers in man. Knowledge we gain through study, wisdom through insight. The one comes by reasoning, the other by sight. Knowledge is bookish; wisdom is workaday, goal-seeking; it sets knowledge in service of an end. Knowledge goes around the will; wisdom is indeed a matter of the mind but serves the will. Knowledge often stands wholly outside of life, but wisdom hangs closely together with life; it is right-minded in kind, it is "the craft of good living," the trait, the deed of him who makes right use of his greater skill, and chooses the best means to the best ends. The word-roots already point to this sundering. Wise comes from to point, to show, and is the trait of him who shows the way; sapiens, from sapere, cf. σαφης, to taste, shows that someone through his own trial has gained a right self-standing judgment; σοφος likely also links with σαφης and then has the same ground meaning.
Among the Eastern folk we also find this sundering, but with weighty change. As in the West knowledge stands foremost; so in the East wisdom. The Eastern folk live much more from beholding than from bare thinking; they work not with thoughts but with the likenesses of the things themselves; they live inwardly nearer to their heart and outwardly closer to the straight reality of life. Not in the head, but in the heart, in the root of the selfhood, do inward and outward meet each other, and push each other off in the harshest way or draw each other in the softest way. It is as if the stuffs of things overflow into each other through life-fellowship. That Eastern mark we find strongly and deeply also in Israel. Here too in its time the chokma had to rise, חכמה from חכם to be firm, thick, steadfast, subst. soundness, skill. But here it came in service of the showing-forth. The true, real wisdom is no fruit of man's mind but roots in the fear of the Lord and stands in that right-minded skill, which guides itself by the Lord's law and shows itself in a right-minded life, Deut. 4:6-8, Ps. 19:8, 111:10, Job 28:28, Prov. 1:7, 9:10.
And when later the insight sank deeper into God's showing-forth in kind and in law, it gained a self-standing place, grew its own writings, and gave its thoughts in its own shape, in the shape of sayings, משלות. Beside understanding and knowledge, wisdom is now also given to God in the Writings. He has, speaking through the word, shaped the world, Gen. 1:3, Ps. 33:6, 107:20, 119:105, 147:15, 148:5, Isa. 40:8, 48:13. In the first time, in the shaping especially God's might and loftiness is marked. But bit by bit the Israelite spirit, fed and led by the fear of the Lord, sinks deeper into kind and law, and wonders at therein his worshipful wisdom. Both, the world and God's showing-forth among Israel, are drawn from that wisdom, Job 9:4, 12:13, 17, 37-38, Isa. 40:28, Ps. 104:24, Deut. 4:6-8, Jer. 10:12, Ps. 19:8, and in Prov. 8:22 ff., Job 28:23 ff., that wisdom, through and with which God has brought forth all things, is shown as a person.
The New Testament draws this line further and gives not only wisdom to God in sundry places, Rom. 16:27, 1 Tim. 1:17, Jude 25, Rev. 5:12, 7:12, but also says that the world is shaped through the word of God, John 1:2, Heb. 11:3, and sees God's wisdom chiefly shown in the foolishness of the cross, 1 Cor. 1:18, in Christ, 1 Cor. 1:24, in the church, Eph. 3:10, in all God's leading with Israel and the heathen, Rom. 11:33.
Cf. Hooykaas, Wisdom among Hebrews 1862, J. F. Bruch, The Wisdom Teaching of the Hebrews 1851. Burger art. Wisdom in Herzog². Oehler, The Basic Features of Old Testament Wisdom 1854. Id. Theology of the Old Testament § 235 ff. Schultz, Old Testament Theology⁴ 548 ff. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Solomonic Book of Proverbs, Introduction. Cremer, Dictionary s.v. σοφος. König, The Concept of Revelation in the Old Testament 1882 I 194 ff. Smend, Textbook of Old Testament Religion p. 508 ff. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith § 168, 169. Frank, System of Christian Truth I 254 ff.
This teaching of Scripture about the divine word and the divine wisdom was especially brought into connection by Philo with the ideas. Thereby the foundation was laid for the logos doctrine, which will be discussed further in the locus on the Trinity. But Plato's doctrine of ideas later once more had a mighty influence on Christian theology, and now through Neoplatonism. Thus it came to Augustine, who assigned it a place in theology. But naturally he had to change it on important points. First, the ideas are not a world of their own, an intelligible world, beside and outside God, but they are in God and make up the content of his thinking. Has autem rationes ubi arbitrandum est esse nisi in mente creatoris , 83 qu. qu. 46. Gen. ad litt. IV 6, 24, 29. V 13. They are God's thoughts about all created things, both before and after creation and thus everlasting and unchangeable, for there can be nothing in God except what is everlasting and unchangeable, ib. and de trin. IV 1. de civ. XI 5. In Deo enim novum exstitisse consilium, ne dicam impium, ineptissimum est dicere , de ord. II 17. Yet those ideas in God's understanding are not one with his self-knowledge nor with the Logos or the Son, as was sometimes said by earlier fathers. Augustine upholds the essential distinction between God and the world and avoids pantheism. Aliter ergo in illo sunt, quae per illum facta sunt; aliter autem in illo sunt ea, quae ipse est , de Gen. ad litt. II 6. On the other hand, Augustine cannot think otherwise than that God created all things according to ideas. Therein his wisdom comes forth. Sic ergo sapientia Dei, per quam facta sunt omnia, secundum artem continet omnia, antequam fabricet omnia , tract. 1 in Ev. Joan. Omnia ratione sunt condita , 83 qu. qu. 46 n. 2. Non enim quidquam fecit ignorans. Nota ergo fecit, non facta cognovit , de Gen. ad litt. V 8. de trin. XV 13. de civ. XI 10. The creation is a realization of God's thoughts. Therefore there also exists a close bond between the ideas and the creatures. The ideas are the examples and forms of things, principales formae, rationes rerum, stabiles atque incommutabiles , 83 qu. qu. 46 n. 2; and therefore not only of the kinds but of all individual things. Cum omnia ratione sint condita,.... singula igitur propriis sunt creata rationibus , ib. and de civ. XI 10. de Gen. ad litt. III 12, 14. V 14, 15. But yet this view is not always held fast. Sometimes the ideas appear in Augustine again as types and examples, which little by little realize themselves and only in the new heaven and the new earth are fully brought to pass, de Gen. ad litt. V 11. Also the bond is not clear, in which according to Augustine the ideas and the creatures stand. The ideas are in God not only as examples, but they are also working powers, immanent principles in things. He therefore chose the translation of ideas by rationes above that of Cicero by formae or species , 83 quaest. qu. 46. de Gen. ad litt. I 18, II 16, IX 18. The ideas are as it were laid down in the things themselves. Ideas and creatures do not stand dualistically as patterns and likenesses, as true and untrue, as unchangeable and changeable beside and over against each other, but the ideas are the soul and the principle of things; the movement belongs to the creatures from those implanted reasons, de Gen. ad litt. IV 33. And further the causality of the ideas is yet always mediated by God's will; this is the proper and last cause of the being of things, de civ. XXI, 8, cf. Gangauf, Metaph. Psych. des h. Aug. S. 77 f. Ritter, Gesch. der chr. Philos. II 310 f. Dr. E. Melzer, Des Aug. Lehre vom Kausalitätsverhältniss Gottes zur Welt 1892 S. 5 f. Besides in Augustine, we find this doctrine of ideas also in Clement of Alexandria, Strom. IV c. 25, V c. 3. Tertullian, de an. 18. Eusebius, Praep. evang. l. 14 c. 44. Origen, on John 1:1. Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 5. and later in Anselm, Monol. c. 8 sq. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 35. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 15. qu. 44 art. 3. S. c. G. 54. Sent. I dist. 36. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 35. Petavius, Theol. dogm. IV c. 9-11. Scheeben, Kath. Dogm. I 657 f. Simar, Lehrb. der Dogm. 3e Aufl. Freiburg 1893 S. 147 f., and also in Reformed theologians like Polanus, Synt. theol. p. 267. 268. Zanchi, Op. II col. 201. Voetius, Disp. I 258 sq. Twisse, de scientia media 1639 p. 312 sq. Later this doctrine of ideas has almost wholly vanished from dogmatics. The word idea has also changed in meaning in newer philosophy. Formerly one understood by idea the example of things in the creating mind of God, while concept was the imprint of things in the knowing mind. But in the new philosophy idea has become the name for those concepts which are not obtained from visible observation but by pure thinking (Descartes), of which there is no experience and thus no scientific certainty (Kant), which can only be acknowledged immediately in feeling or reason (Jacobi). Yet usage often recalls, at least in our and in the German language, the old meaning. The word still always includes, especially in the field of art, the thought of an objective example, a pattern, and therefore of an ideal perfection. One speaks then of the idea of God, freedom, art, science, the true, the good, the beautiful, etc.
Applied to God, the idea expresses that God has made all things with wisdom, that wisdom is the firstling of his ways, the beginning of creation, Prov. 8:22, Col. 1:15, Rev. 3:14. God is no less than an artist. Just as this one realizes his idea in the work of art, so God creates all things according to the thoughts which he has formed. The world is a work of art of God. He is artist and master builder of the whole universe. God works not without awareness, but in all his works is led by wisdom, by his ideas. But there is also a difference between God and an earthly artist. God's thoughts are utterly original, taken from his own being, everlasting, unchangeable; yes, they are one with his divine being. The ideas in God are the essence of God himself, insofar as this is the example of created things and can be expressed and followed in finite creatures. Each creature is a revelation of God and partakes in the divine being. The nature of this participation consists not therein that the creatures are modifications of God's being, or that the creatures have received that being of God really in themselves. But each creature has its own being, because in its existence it is an ectype of the divine being. Because of the manifoldness and richness of God's ideas, realized in the created, God's wisdom is to be called manifold, Eph. 3:10. But yet God's wisdom is one and his idea of the world is one, little by little unfolding itself in the course of the ages and leading the real toward the proposed goal. Because of this archetypal character of the ideas in God there is also no proper idea of sin as such. For sin is no proper being, but a lessening of being, a deformation; it is indeed object and content of God's knowledge, it is made serviceable by God's wisdom to his glory; but in itself it is no idea of his wisdom, no ray of his light, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 15 art. 3. Yet that wisdom comes forth in the creation, the ordering, the leading and governing of all things. It is and remains the fosterer, the workman, Prov. 8:30, the artificer of all things, Wisd. 7:21, which creates all things, governs and leads them to their destiny, that is, to the glorification of God's name.
10. Among the virtues of God's understanding belongs finally also the truthfulness of God. The Hebrew word emet , emunah , adjective amen comes from the verb aman to fasten, build, support, intransitively to be firm, hiphil to hold fast to, trust in, be sure of something and denotes, subjectively the holding fast to something, faith, pistis , and objectively the firmness, reliability, truth of the person or thing on which one relies. The Hebrew words are in the LXX sometimes rendered by aletheia , en aletheia , then by pistoō , pisteuō , pistis , pistos , and so in Dutch by true, truthful, faithful; the concept aletheia had in ordinary Greek and so also in LXX and N.T. too definite a meaning, so that it could not sufficiently render the Hebrew words, it therefore had to be supplemented by the words pistos etc. Already the name Yahweh expresses that He remains who He is. He is truth and without iniquity, awel , crookedness, twistedness, Deut. 32:4, Jer. 10:10, Ps. 31:6, 2 Chron. 15:3. There lies herein both that He is the true, essential God over against the idols, which are hebelim , Deut. 32:21 etc., and that He as such at all times keeps His words and promises and makes them true, so that He is wholly reliable. For He is no man, that He should lie or repent, Num. 23:19, 1 Sam. 15:29. All that goes forth from Him bears the stamp of truth. Repeatedly there is mention of His kindness, hesed , and faithfulness, Gen. 24:49, 47:29, Josh. 2:14, 2 Sam. 2:6, 15:20, Ps. 40:11, of His lovingkindness, hesed , and truth, Gen. 24:27, Ex. 34:6, Ps. 57:4, 61:8, 89:15 etc. His words, judgments, paths, works, commandments, laws, are all pure truth, 2 Sam. 7:28, Ps. 19:10, 25:10, 33:4, 111:7, 119:86, 142, 151, Dan. 4:37. His truth and faithfulness reveals itself on earth so richly and gloriously, that it reaches unto the clouds, Ps. 36:6, Ex. 34:6. He confirms His word repeatedly by swearing by Himself, Gen. 22:16 etc., Heb. 6:13. Therefore He is often called a rock, who by His unchangeable firmness offers support to His favored ones, Deut. 32:4, 15, 18, 30, 37 and in many proper names, Num. 1:5, 6, 10, 3:35, 34:28, and further in 2 Sam. 22:3, 32, Ps. 18:3, 32, 19:15, 28:1, 31:3, 71:3, 144:1, Isa. 26:4. And as such a God of truth and faithfulness He keeps the covenant, Deut. 4:31, 7:9, Ps. 40:11, Hos. 12:1 etc. and is He a wholly reliable refuge for all His people, Ps. 31:6, 36:6 ff., 43:3, 54:7, 57:4, 71:22, 96:13, 143:1, 146:6 etc. Likewise He is called in the N.T. the alethinos theos ; that is, only that God is the true, essential God, who has revealed Himself in Christ, John 17:3, 1 John 5:20. And all that He reveals is pure truth. He is a theos alethēs in contrast to all men, John 3:33, Rom. 3:4. His word is the truth, His gospel is truth, Christ is the truth, John 14:6, 17:17, Eph. 1:13. Yes, He is now still who He always was. The N.T. is fulfillment and confirmation of His promises in the days of the O.T. He has remembered His covenant and oath, Luke 1:68-73. He is faithful, pistos , in that He is and remains the God of the covenant and grants salvation completely, 1 Cor. 1:9, 10:13, 1 Thess. 5:24, 2 Thess. 3:3, Heb. 10:23, 11:11, 1 John 1:9. He cannot deny Himself, 2 Tim. 2:13. All His promises are in Christ yes and amen, 2 Cor. 1:18, 20. Christ is ho martys ho pistos , Rev. 1:5, 3:14, 19:11. And therefore He is and can be the unchangeable object of our pistis , cf. Wendt, Der Gebrauch der Wörter aletheia , alethēs und alethinos im N.T., Stud. u. Krit. 1883. Cremer, Wörterbuch 1895.
The Scripture thus employs the word truth in sundry senses. And philosophy also commonly distinguishes three kinds of the concept of truth, namely, truth in being (in things), in signifying (in words), in knowing (in the understanding), or metaphysical, ethical, and logical truth. Schmid, The Concept of the True in Gutberlet's Philosophical Yearbook 1893. Mastricht, Theology II, 14, 5. Moor, Commentary on Marck I.
Metaphysical, ontological truth consists therein, that some object, a person or thing, is all that belongs to its essence. Thus gold, which not only looks like gold but is essentially so, is genuine, true, veritable gold. Truth in this sense stands over against falsehood, spuriousness, vanity, non-being. It is a property of all being as being; it is one with the substance. Especially Augustine spoke often of truth in this meaning. All being is as such true and beautiful and good. There is indeed rich diversity in the measure of being; there is gradation among creatures. But all things have yet in their measure received being from God and partake in the divine being, cf. for example, City of God XI 23, On the Nature of Good against the Manicheans c. 19. But from this being of creatures Augustine ascends to God. In Scripture God is called the true one over against the idols, which are vanity. And so in Augustine God is the true, only, simple, unchangeable, eternal being. Compared with His being, the being of creatures is to be reckoned as non-being. God is the highest being, highest truth, highest good. He is pure essence. He has not, but He is the truth. O truth which truly art, Confessions X 41. VII 10. XII 25. But further, God is also the truth in the second above-mentioned, that is, in the ethical sense. Under ethical truth is to be understood the agreement between someone's essence and his revelation, in word or in deed. He who says otherwise than he thinks is untrue, a liar. Truth in this sense stands over against lying. Now in God there is perfect agreement between His being and His revelation, Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18. It is impossible that God should lie or deny Himself. And finally God is also the truth in the logical sense. This consists in agreement of thinking with reality, conformity or adequacy of understanding and thing. Our concepts are true when they are pure impressions of reality. In this sense truth stands over against error. God is now also therefore the truth, because He knows all things as they really are. His knowing is right, unchangeable, adequate. Yea, He is in His knowing the truth itself, as He in His being is the ontological truth. The knowledge of God is living, absolute, adequate truth. It is not obtained from inquiry and reflection on things, but is essential in God and goes before things. It is one with the essence of God and is thus substantial truth. Therefore also His word, His law, His gospel are pure truth. They are all as they ought to be. Now these three meanings of the concept of truth are indeed distinguished, but they are yet also one again. This unity consists therein, that truth always in all three meanings is agreement of thinking and being, of the ideal and the real being. God is the truth in metaphysical sense, for He is the unity of thinking and being. He is fully conscious of Himself. He is God in true sense, fully answering to the idea of God which is in Himself. He is the truth in ethical sense, for He reveals Himself, speaks, acts, appears as He truly is and thinks. And He is the truth in logical sense, for He thinks things as they are, or rather, things are as He thinks them. He is the truth in full, absolute sense. And therefore He is the first truth, the original truth, the fount of all truth, the truth in all truth; the ground of the truth, of the true being of all things, of their knowability and thinkability; the ideal and archetype of all truth, of all ethical being, of all rules and laws whereby the essence and revelation of all things must be judged and normed; the fount and origin of all knowledge of truth in every field, the light wherein we alone can see the light, the sun of spirits. I invoke Thee, O God truth, in whom and from whom and through whom all things are true that are true, Augustine, Soliloquies I 1. Cf. further Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 16 and 17. I, 2 qu. 3 art. 7. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 59-62. III c. 51. Bonaventure, Sentences I dist. 8 art. 1. Scheeben, Catholic Dogmatics I. Gerhard, Theological Loci II c. 8 sect. 16. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 27. Zanchi, Works II. L. Meyer, Treatise on the Divine Attributes IV.
11. God's Goodness. Among the ethical virtues, the first place belongs to the goodness of God. This is also known from nature. In Plato, the idea of the good was one with the Godhead. But the word good has various meanings. The original and primary meaning of good seems not to indicate an inner quality but a relation to something else. In Socrates, the good was the same as the useful, with what is good, serviceable, useful for another; there is therefore no absolute good, there is only a relative good; use and harm are the measure of good and evil. Greek ethics remained at this standpoint; the question of the highest good coincides with that of happiness; good is that which all desire. Hence the common definition: the good is that which all things seek. The utilitarian morality holds to this meaning of the word good, and bases its teaching thereon. And Friedrich Nietzsche built his whole revolution of morality upon it; good was originally as much as noble, strong, mighty, beautiful, and bad was the name of the plain, common man.
Now the word good indeed often has this meaning, when we speak of a good house, a good friend, etc., and thereby indicate that a person or thing possesses certain properties and is fit for something. Good then has no content of its own, but receives it from the end for which someone or something must serve, and therefore varies in meaning among different peoples. The Greek thinks of beauty therein, the Roman of noble birth and wealth, the German of what is fitting and capable; and in connection therewith the meaning of virtue also differs. This good in a general sense includes the useful, the pleasant, the aesthetic, and the ethical good. In all these meanings, good is still a relative concept and indicates that which all things seek. But yet the word does not exhaust itself in this meaning. We also speak of a good in itself. The meaning of good as moral or honorable forms the transition thereto. The moral good is good in itself, apart from all advantageous or disadvantageous consequences; it has absolute value.
According to Scripture, God is the sum of all perfections. All virtues are present in Him in an absolute sense. Scripture calls Him good in an absolute sense only a few times: No one is good except God alone (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19); He is perfect (Matt. 5:48). But whatever virtue it ascribes to God, it always proceeds from the supposition that this belongs to Him in an absolute sense. Knowledge, wisdom, power, love, righteousness, etc., belong to Him in a wholly unique, that is, divine manner. His goodness is thus one with His absolute perfection. In Him, idea and reality are one. He is pure form, purest act. He needs to become nothing, but is what He is eternally. He has no end outside Himself, but is self-sufficient. He receives nothing but gives only. All things need Him; He needs nothing or no one. He always intends Himself, because He cannot rest in anything less than Himself. Since He Himself is the absolutely good, the perfect, He can and may love nothing else except in and for Himself. He can and may not be satisfied with less than absolute perfection. Where He loves others, He loves Himself in them, His own virtues, works, gifts.
On the goodness of God, in the sense of perfection, cf. Augustine, On the Nature of the Good, against the Manichees, 1; On the Trinity VIII 3. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, c. 4. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 4-6; Summa contra Gentiles I 28. Petavius, On God VI c. 1 sq. Gerhard, Loci II c. 8 sect. 10. 17. Zanchi, Works II 138 sq. 326 sq. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 9, etc.
Therefore He is also absolutely blessed in Himself, as the sum of all good, of all perfection. Aristotle already said that God is therefore the blessed one, because He is the unity of thinking and thought and is exalted above all desire, striving, willing. And at all times those who placed the primacy in the intellect have joined Aristotle and sought blessedness in thinking, knowing, contemplation. There was truth in this, insofar as absolute blessedness is a state of rest, is incompatible with striving toward an end, and also presupposes consciousness. Blessedness belongs only to rational beings. The unconscious in von Hartmann is, like the will in Schopenhauer, absolute unhappiness, which itself needs redemption. Drews therefore also says that the property of perfection cannot be ascribed to God; a perfect God would be a dead abstraction and could not explain the world; a God who had everything, who was perfectly blessed and self-sufficient, needs no change, no world. But precisely this doctrine of the absolute unhappiness of God makes us cautious about ascribing the primacy in God and man to the will, as Duns Scotus and many after him did. Much more correct is therefore the standpoint of Bonaventure, who placed blessedness in both, in intellect and will. Just as man's blessedness will encompass soul and body and all his faculties, so in God it consists not only in His perfect knowledge but equally in His perfect power, goodness, holiness, etc. Blessedness is a state perfect by the aggregation of all goods (Boethius).
On the blessedness of God, Augustine, City of God XII 1. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 26. Gerhard, Loci II c. 8 sect. 19. Zanchi, II 155 sq. Polanus, II c. 17.
But what is good in itself is good also for others. And God as the perfect and blessed is the highest good for His creatures, the supreme good which all things seek; the fountain of all goods; the good of every good; the one necessary and sufficient good, the end of all goods (Ps. 4:7, 8; 73:25, 26). He alone is the good to be enjoyed, but creatures are goods to be used (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine I c. 3 sq.; On the Trinity X 10. Lombard, Sentences I dist. 1. Bonaventure, Sentences I dist. 1). Especially Augustine has often presented God as the supreme good. In Him is everything and in Him alone is what all creatures seek and need. He is the supreme good for all creatures, though for these in different degrees, according as they have more or less part in His goodness, can enjoy Him more or less. He is that toward which all creatures, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, strive, the object of all desire. And the creature finds no rest except in God alone (Augustine, Confessions I 1). Thus the highest good has at all times been placed in God by Christian theology, and it did not occur to seek that highest good in any moral act or virtue of the creature, in duty (Kant), in the kingdom of God (Ritschl), in love (Drummond), or in any other creature.
Furthermore, as the supreme good, God is also the overflowing fountain of all goods (Netherlands Confession, art. 1). God, since He is perfectly good, is perpetually beneficent (Athenagoras). There is no good in any creature except from and through Him. He is the efficient, exemplary, and final cause of all good, however diverse this may be in the creatures. All natural, moral, and spiritual good has its origin in Him. Holy Scripture is a hymn of praise to the goodness of the Lord. From it the creation is derived, and all life and blessing for man and beast (Ps. 8, 19, 36:6-8, 65:12, 147:9; Matt. 5:45; Acts 14:17; James 1:17). It extends over all His works (Ps. 145:9) and endures forever (Ps. 136). Again and again the whole creation is called to praise God's goodness (1 Chron. 16:34; 2 Chron. 5:13; Ps. 34:9, 106:1, 107:1, 118:1, 136:1; Jer. 33:11, etc.).
On the goodness of God, Dionysius, On the Divine Names, c. 4, who portrays the goodness of God in an exalted manner and compares it to the sun, which illumines all. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 6, especially art. 4; Summa contra Gentiles I c. 40, 41. Petavius, On God VI c. 3. Gerhard, Loci II c. 8 sect. 10. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 20. Zanchi, Works II col. 326-342, etc.
This goodness of God appears in different forms, according to the objects toward which it is directed. Closely related to it is kindness , which is sometimes used in a general sense (1 Chron. 16:34), but mostly indicates God's special favor to His people, the affection with which He is bound to His favorites, to Joseph (Gen. 39:21), Israel (Num. 14:19), David (2 Sam. 7:15, 22:51; Ps. 18:51; 1 Chron. 17:13), the pious (Ps. 5:8). It stands in connection with God's covenant (Neh. 1:5), is the principle of forgiveness (Ps. 6:5, 31:17, 44:27, 109:26; Lam. 3:22), of grace (Ps. 51:3), of comfort (Ps. 119:76), endures forever (Isa. 54:8, 10), and is better than life (Ps. 63:4). In all its richness it has been revealed in Christ (Rom. 2:4; 2 Cor. 10:1; Eph. 2:7; Col. 3:12; Titus 3:4) and now shows itself to believers, leading them to repentance (Rom. 2:4, 11:22; Gal. 5:22).
The goodness of God, when shown to the miserable, is called mercy . Scripture speaks of this mercy of God at every moment (Ex. 34:6; Deut. 4:31; 2 Chron. 30:9; Ps. 86:15, 103:8, 111:4, 112:4, 145:8, etc.), in contrast to men (2 Sam. 24:14; Prov. 12:10; Dan. 9:9, 18). It is manifold (2 Sam. 24:14; Ps. 119:156), great (Neh. 9:19; Ps. 51:13), without end (Lam. 3:22), tender as of a father (Ps. 103:13), shown to thousands (Ex. 20:6), and returns after chastisement (Isa. 14:1, 49:13 v., 54:8, 55:7, 60:10; Jer. 12:15, 30:18, 31:20; Hos. 2:22; Mic. 7:19, etc.). In the New Testament, God, the Father of mercies (2 Cor. 1:3), has revealed His mercy in Christ (Luke 1:50 v.), who is a merciful high priest (Matt. 18:27, 20:34, etc.; Heb. 2:17), and He shows the richness of His mercy in the salvation of believers (Rom. 9:23, 11:30; 1 Cor. 7:25; 2 Cor. 4:1; 1 Tim. 1:13; Heb. 4:16, etc.).
The sparing goodness of God toward those deserving punishment is called longsuffering . Scripture often speaks of this virtue of God (Ex. 34:6; Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15, 103:8, 145:8; Jon. 4:2; Joel 2:13; Nah. 1:3). It has shown itself throughout the time before Christ (Rom. 3:25) and is still often shown to sinners now, after the example of Christ (1 Tim. 1:16; 2 Pet. 3:15; Rom. 2:4, 9:22; 1 Pet. 3:20).
Much richer is the goodness of God where it is shown to such as have deserved nothing good but all evil; then it bears the name of grace . This word also indicates the favor which one man finds with or bestows on another (Gen. 30:27, 33:8, 10, 47:29, 50:4, etc.; Luke 2:52). When used of God, however, it never has creatures in general nor the Gentiles but only His people as object. It is shown to Noah (Gen. 6:8), Moses (Ex. 33:12, 17, 34:9), Job (8:5, 9:15), Daniel (1:9), to the meek and miserable (Prov. 3:34; Dan. 4:27), and especially to Israel as a people. Its election and guidance, its deliverance and redemption, and all the benefits it received in distinction from other peoples, are due only to God's grace (Ex. 15:13, 16, 19:4, 33:19, 34:6, 7; Deut. 4:37, 7:8, 8:14, 17, 9:5, 27, 10:14 v., 33:3; Isa. 35:10, 42:21, 43:1, 15, 21, 54:5, 63:9; Jer. 3:4, 19, 31:9, 20; Ezek. 16; Hos. 8:14, 11:1, etc.). In history and law, in psalmody and prophecy, the keynote is always: Not to us, O Lord, but to Your name give glory (Ps. 115:1). He does all for His name's sake (Num. 14:13 v.; Isa. 43:21, 25 v., 48:9, 11; Ezek. 36:22, etc.). And therefore this grace is again and again praised and glorified (Ex. 34:6; 2 Chron. 30:9; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15, 103:8, 111:4, 116:5; Jon. 4:2; Joel 2:13; Zech. 12:10).
In the New Testament, this grace proves to be even richer and deeper in content. Grace means in an objective sense beauty, charm, grace (Luke 4:22; Col. 4:6; Eph. 4:29), and subjectively favor, affection on the part of the giver and thanks, honor on the part of the receiver. In God it indicates His voluntary, uncompelled, unmerited affection, which is shown to guilty sinners and in place of the sentence of death grants them righteousness and life. As such it is a virtue and property of God (Rom. 5:15; 1 Pet. 5:10), which shows itself in the sending of Christ, who is full of grace (John 1:14 v.; 1 Pet. 1:13), and further in the bestowal of all kinds of spiritual and bodily benefits, which are all gifts of grace and themselves grace (Rom. 5:20, 6:1; Eph. 1:7, 2:5, 8; Phil. 1:2; Col. 1:2; Titus 3:7, etc.), and altogether exclude all merits on man's side (John 1:17; Rom. 4:4, 16, 6:14, 23, 11:5 v.; Eph. 2:8; Gal. 5:3, 4).
The doctrine of grace was first developed in the Christian church by Augustine, but one usually thought thereby not of grace as a virtue of God, but of the benefits which God bestows out of grace in Christ upon the church. Among the properties of God, grace is usually not treated. Yet this concept of grace, namely as a virtue of God, is not lacking; Thomas says, for example, sometimes however the grace of God is called the eternal love itself, according as the grace of predestination is also called, inasmuch as God has predestined or elected some gratuitously and not from merits. Cf. Gerhard, Loci II c. 8 sect. 11 qu. 4. Musculus, Common Places p. 317 sq. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 21. Zanchi, Works II 342-358, but immediately grace is taken in a broader sense, as it must come up later in dogmatics, in the locus on salvation.
Furthermore, the goodness of God appears as love , when it gives not only some benefits but itself. In the Old Testament, there is not yet so often mention of this love as a property of God, but yet it is by no means lacking (Deut. 4:37, 7:8, 13, 10:15, 23:5; 2 Chron. 2:11; Isa. 31:3, 43:4, 48:14, 63:9; Jer. 31:3; Hos. 11:1, 4, 14:5; Zeph. 3:17; Mal. 1:2). And not only virtues and properties, such as right and righteousness (Ps. 11:7, 33:5, 37:28, 45:8), but also persons are its object (Ps. 78:68, 146:8; Prov. 3:12; Deut. 4:37, 7:8, 13, 23:5; 2 Chron. 2:11; Jer. 31:3; Mal. 1:2).
Much clearer does this love of God come to light in the New Testament, now that God has given Himself in the Son of His love. The relation of Father and Son is portrayed as a life of love (John 3:35, 5:20, 10:17, 14:31, 15:19, 17:24, 26). But in Christ, who Himself loves and has proved His love in His self-surrender (John 15:13), this love also reveals itself toward men, not only the world or the church in general (John 3:16; Rom. 5:7, 8:37; 1 John 4:9), but also individually and personally (John 14:23, 16:27, 17:23; Rom. 9:13; Gal. 2:20). Yes, God does not love, but He is love (1 John 4:8), and His love is the foundation, source, example of ours (1 John 4:10).
Now one can indeed speak of God's love in general to creatures and to men, but Scripture mostly uses the word goodness for that, and usually speaks of God's love, just as of His grace, only in relation to the people or church which He has chosen. This love is indeed not in that sense the essence of God that it forms the center and heart therein and the other properties are its modes, for all properties are His essence in equal sense; in God there is no higher and lower, no less and more. But yet love is most certainly identical with the divine essence. It is independent, eternal, unchangeable as God Himself. It has its origin in Him and returns also through creatures to Him. Pseudo-Dionysius therefore spoke of the divine love as an eternal circle, on account of the good, from the good, in the good, and to the good, circling in undeviating conversion, in the same and according to the same, and always proceeding and remaining and returning.
Cf. Augustine, On the Trinity VIII 6-12. IX 6. X 1. Confessions IV 12. Soliloquies I 2. On True Religion c. 46. Lombard, Sentences III dist. 32, 1. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 20. Summa contra Gentiles I c. 91. Scheeben, Dogmatics I 692 f. Gerhard, Loci Theologici loc. II c. 8 sect. 11 qu. 2. Zanchi, Works II 359 sq. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 22.
12. God's Holiness. Closely akin to the goodness is the holiness of God. Formerly it was defined as purity free from all wickedness and altogether perfect and in every part spotless, Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, ch. 12 §2, cf. further Suicerus, s.v. ἁγιος. Oftentimes it is not treated separately beside the goodness, perfection, and beauty of God; neither Lombard nor Thomas bring it up. Among the Protestant theologians the description of God's holiness was in essence the same; it consisted in moral perfection, purity, Polanus, Synt. theol. II ch. 28. Synopsis, VI 40. Mastricht, Theor. pract. theol. II ch. 19. L. Meyer, Verh. over de Goddel. eigensch. III 115 ff. and was now more linked with the righteousness, then with the goodness, and also sometimes with the truthfulness and wisdom of God, Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. S. 73, cf. Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. 382 ff. Hase, Hutt. Rediv. §63. However, the study of the biblical concept of holy has gradually brought about another view. All now acknowledge that the concept of holiness in the Old and New Testaments expresses a relation of God to the world. But there is difference over what kind and character that relation is. Menken thought, with an eye to texts like Hos. 11:9, Isa. 57:15, Ezek. 20:9 ff., of God's condescending goodness and grace, Versuch einer Anleitung zum eigenen Unterricht in den Wahrh. der h. S. 3rd ed. 1833 ch. 1 §9. Baudissin however believed that in God's holiness rather his absolute exaltedness and might above all creatures was expressed, Stud. zur semit. Religionsgesch., 2nd part, Leipzig 1878 pp. 3-142, and was supported in this opinion by Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. II² 89 ff., and also by Prof. H. P. Smith, Presb. and Ref. Rev. Jan. 1890 p. 42 etc. with appeal to places like Num. 20:13, Isa. 5:16, Ezek. 20:41, 28:25, 36:20-24, and the linking of glorious, exalted with holy in places like Isa. 63:15, 64:11, Jer. 17:12, Ezek. 20:40 etc. Related to that is the view of Schultz, who in God's holiness thinks of God's consuming majesty, of his unapproachableness and inviolability, of the endless distance that separates him from every creature, and refers for that to Ex. 15:11, 1 Sam. 2:2, 6:20, Isa. 6:3, 8:14, 10:17, Altt. Theol.⁴ 554 ff., cf. also Kuenen, G. v. Isr. I 47 ff. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis I² 83, in the main also Smend, Altt. Religionsgesch. 333 ff. Because there was such great difference over which attribute of God was indeed indicated by the holiness, others have thought that this concept by no means denotes an inner, essential quality, but only a relation, and thus is purely and solely a relational concept. Holiness was first conceived thus by Diestel, Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1859 pp. 3-62, and since then it is accepted by many as the correct one, especially by Otto Schmoller, Die Bedeutung von קדשׁ im A. T., in Festgruss an Rudolf von Todt zum Dr. jubiläum, von seinen Freunden u. Schülern, Stuttgart 1893 pp. 39-43, cf. also Delitzsch art. Heiligkeit in Herzog². Cremer, Wörterbuch s.v. Issel, Der Begriff der Heiligkeit im N. T. Leiden, 1887. R. Schröter, Der Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. u. N. T. Leipzig, Fock 1892. Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd. II 260-280.
The stem qadash , related to hadash , is most often derived from the root qad with the meaning of cutting, separating, and thus expresses: being cut off, set apart. The verb appears in niphal, piel, hiphil, hithpael; the adjective is qadosh and the substantive qodesh ; the opposite is chol , common, from chillel , to make common, Leviticus 10:10, 1 Samuel 21:5, 6, Ezekiel 48:14, 15. It is related to but also clearly distinguished from tahor , clean, which has as opposite tame , Leviticus 10:10. The word holy is now first of all used of sundry persons and things that are set apart from common use and placed in a special relation to God and his service. Thus there is mention of holy ground, Exodus 3:5, holy assembly, Exodus 12:16, holy sabbath, Exodus 16:23, holy people, Exodus 19:6, holy place, Exodus 29:31, holy ointment, Exodus 30:25, holy garment, Leviticus 16:4, holy jubilee year, Leviticus 25:12, holy house, Leviticus 27:14, holy field, Leviticus 27:21, holy tithe, Leviticus 27:30, holy water, Numbers 5:17, holy vessels, Numbers 16:37, holy cow, Numbers 18:17, holy camp, Deuteronomy 23:14, holy gold, Joshua 6:19, holy bread, 1 Samuel 21:4, holy ark, 2 Chronicles 35:3, holy seed, Ezra 9:2, holy city, Nehemiah 11:1, holy covenant, Daniel 11:28, holy word, Psalm 105:42, of the temple as sanctuary, Exodus 15:17 with its holy place and holy of holies, and also of the angels or the children of Israel as the holy ones, Deuteronomy 33:2, 3, Job 5:1, 15:15, Psalm 16:3, 10, 32:6, 89:6, 8, 20, Proverbs 9:10, 30:3, Daniel 4:17, 7:18, 22, 25, 27, 7:21, Hosea 12:1, Zechariah 14:5. In all these cases the concept of holy does not yet express an inward, moral quality, but only indicates that the persons or objects so designated are consecrated to the Lord and stand in a special relation to his service, and thus are set apart from the common realm.
In this peculiar relation to God, however, the persons and things called holy do not stand of themselves. There is rather by nature a distance and removal, a distinction and opposition between God and his creature. In itself the whole world is chol , profane, not standing in fellowship with God and not fit for his service. Neither can the persons and things hallow themselves and place themselves in that special relation to God which is expressed by the word holy. The hallowing comes only from God. He it is who hallows Israel, the priesthood, temple, altar, special places, persons, and objects, brings them over into his service and fellowship, and sets them apart from the unholy. I am the Lord who hallows you, Exodus 31:13, Leviticus 20:8, 21:8, 15, 23, 22:9, 16, 32, Ezekiel 20:12, 37:28.
This hallowing of persons or things by the Lord now takes place in two ways: negatively by choosing a people, person, place, day, object and setting it apart from all others, and positively by consecrating these persons or things according to certain rules and causing them to live. God hallows the sabbath, not only by setting it apart from the other days of the week but also by resting on it and blessing it, Genesis 2:2, 3, Exodus 20:11, Deuteronomy 5:12. He has hallowed the whole people of Israel, by choosing it from all peoples of the earth, by taking it up into his covenant and making known to it his laws, Exodus 19:4-6. The holiness of God is the principle of the whole lawgiving, of the moral and the ceremonial commandments, of the whole revelation of salvation to Israel, for this aims at nothing other than that Israel be holy, Exodus 19:4-6, Leviticus 11:44, 45, 19:2, 20:26. Israel is holy, because God takes it as his own possession, comes to the people, dwells among them and is a God to them, Exodus 19:4-6, 29:43-46. And within this circle he again hallows in particular the firstborn, by claiming them for himself, Exodus 13:2, the people, by having them wash and thus prepare themselves to meet God, Exodus 19:10, 14, the mountain, by setting bounds around it, Exodus 19:23, the priesthood by anointing, offering, sprinkling of blood and special clothing, Exodus 28:3, 41, 29:1 ff. 21, the tabernacle and the altar by anointing, Exodus 29:37, 40:9 ff. Leviticus 8:10, 11, Numbers 7:1, the anointing oil, by having it prepared in a special way, Exodus 30:22 ff., the Nazirites, by having them live according to certain rules, Numbers 6:2 ff. etc. And what is thus holy shares in a life of its own, bears a character of its own, is distinguished from the common life and the common law; it may, for example, not be touched, Exodus 19:23, 24, not eaten, Exodus 29:33, not used, Exodus 30:32 ff., it hallows that which comes into contact with it, Exodus 30:29, Leviticus 10:2 ff., Numbers 1:51, 53, 3:10, 38, Isaiah 8:14.
Now the positive act by which something becomes holy is not always expressed; sometimes the hallowing seems to consist in nothing other than separation, Leviticus 25:10, 27:14, Joshua 7:13, 20:7, Judges 17:3, 1 Samuel 7:1, 2 Samuel 8:11, 1 Chronicles 18:11 etc. But hallowing is yet something more than mere separation; it is by means of washing, anointing, offering, sprinkling of blood etc. to rid something of that character which it has in common with all things, and to impress upon it another, proper stamp, which it must bear and show everywhere. Now the ceremonies that were needful for hallowing clearly indicate that the uncleanness and sinfulness of the creature is also taken into account here, which precisely in that way had to be taken away. Washing, offering, sprinkling of blood, anointing served for purification and consecration, Leviticus 8:15, 16:16, Job 1:5 etc. Holy and clean are therefore synonyms, Exodus 30:35, Leviticus 16:19. But for that reason the concept of holy does not merge into that moral cleanness. Indeed this is not excluded, but it is not the only nor even the first meaning. Holy in the Old Testament, especially in the law, is much broader in sense. The whole distinction and opposition of outward and inward cleanness etc. is carried over from a later standpoint onto that of the Mosaic lawgiving. But holy is that which is chosen and set apart by Jehovah, which by special ceremonies is stripped of the common character and has received a character of its own, and now in this new state lives according to the laws set for it. Israel is a holy people, because it is chosen and set apart by God, taken up into a covenant and now has to live according to all his laws, also the ceremonial etc. Holy is that which in everything answers to the special laws that God has given for it; holiness is perfection, not in moral sense alone, but in that whole sense in which the peculiar lawgiving of Israel conceives it, in religious, ethical, ceremonial, inward and outward sense.
However, this concept of holiness becomes fully clear only when we look at the sense in which it is applied to God. Cremer has rightly pointed out that holiness does not first of all denote a relation from below to above, but from above to below, and that it belongs first to God and then in a derived sense also to creatures. Creatures are not holy in themselves. They cannot make themselves holy either. All hallowing and all holiness comes forth from God. The LORD is holy, and therefore He wills a holy people, a holy priesthood, a holy dwelling, and so on, Ex. 19:6, 29:43, Lev. 11:44, 45, 19:2, 20:26, 21:8, Deut. 28:9, 10.
This title is often given to the LORD, Lev. 11:44, 45, 19:2, 20:26, 21:8, Josh. 24:19, 1 Sam. 2:2, 6:20, Ps. 22:4, 99:5, 9, Isa. 5:16, 6:3, and so on. Isaiah often uses the name Holy One of Israel, ch. 29:23, 40:25, 43:15, 49:7, 62:12; cf. 2 Kings 19:22, Ezek. 39:7, Hab. 1:12, 3:3. And further, there is talk of God’s holy name, Lev. 20:3, 22:32, 1 Chron. 16:35, Ps. 99:3, 103:1, 111:9, and so on; holy arm, Isa. 52:10; holy majesty, 2 Chron. 20:21.
Now the LORD is called thus first of all because He has placed Himself in a special bond to Israel; holiness is also with God first of all a relational concept. Yahweh’s holiness shows itself in that He has taken Israel as His people, given Himself to Israel, and gone to dwell among them, Ex. 29:43–46, Lev. 11:44, 45, 20:26, Ps. 114:1, 2. But this bond is no empty thing, but is rich in content. God Himself has ordered this bond in the laws that He gave to Israel. All the lawgiving of Israel has its beginning in the holiness of the LORD and its goal in the hallowing of the people. What the holiness of the LORD holds within is made known in the whole law; and the people is holy when it answers to that.
As the Holy One, He is the one who gave Himself to Israel and dwells among Israel, but now also holds further to His word, stays true to His covenant, Ps. 89:35ff., and time and again saves and redeems Israel. God is the Holy One of Israel, who belongs to Israel and who is as His law makes Him known. From His holiness flows forth for Israel: salvation, Ps. 22:4, 5, 89:19, 98:1, 103:1, 105:3, 145:21; hearing of prayer, Ps. 3:5, 20:7, 28:2; comfort, Isa. 5:16, Hab. 1:12; trust, Ps. 22:4, 5, 33:21, Isa. 10:20. His holiness does not allow that He destroy Israel. As the Holy One, He is the Maker, Redeemer, and King of Israel, Isa. 43:14, 15, 49:7, 54:5, 62:12. And so He is thanked and praised by His people, who are redeemed, as the Holy One, Ps. 30:5, 71:22, 97:12, 1 Chron. 16:10, 35.
But at the same time, this holiness of God is also the beginning of punishment and chastening. When Israel breaks His covenant, profanes His name, oversteps His laws, then it is just the holiness of God that drives Him to punishment; His holiness demands that Israel be holy and hallow Him, Lev. 11:44, 45, 19:2, 20:7, 26, 21:8. In case of disobedience, He chastens Israel, 1 Kings 9:3–7, 2 Chron. 7:16–20. The same holiness that is the beginning of redemption and the object of praise is for the lawbreakers the beginning of destruction and the object of fear. Holy is then the same as jealous, Josh. 24:19; great and dreadful, Ex. 15:11, Ps. 99:3, 111:9; glorious and high, Isa. 6:3, 57:15. No one is like Him as the Holy One, Ex. 15:11, 1 Sam. 2:2, Isa. 40:25. To hallow Him is to fear Him, Isa. 8:13, 29:23. When men profane His name and His covenant, then He hallows Himself through right and righteousness, Isa. 5:16, Ezek. 28:22.
But even then He does not forget His people. His holiness stays for Israel the cause of redemption, Isa. 6:13, 10:20, 27:13, 29:23, 24, 43:15, 49:7, 52:10, and so on; Jer. 51:5, Hos. 11:8, 9; and will at last show itself in that He will make the Gentiles know that He is the LORD, Jer. 50:29, Ezek. 36:23, 39:7, and redeem and cleanse Israel from all unrighteousness, Ezek. 36:25ff., 39:7.
This last now leads straight to holiness in the New Testament sense. Already the choice of the Greek word is of meaning. Σεμνος from σεβομαι denotes what is worthy of honor, Phil. 4:8, 1 Tim. 3:8, 11, Tit. 2:2; ἱερος expresses only a bond to the Godhead, 1 Cor. 9:31, 2 Tim. 3:15, Heb. 8:2, 9:8, and so on; ἁγνος has the meaning of clean, chaste, 2 Cor. 11:2, Tit. 2:5, and so on. These words are never used of God. God is in the N.T. only called ὁσιος, Rev. 15:4, 16:5; cf. Heb. 7:26; and above all ἁγιος, Luke 1:49, John 17:11, 1 John 2:20, 1 Pet. 1:15, 16, Rev. 4:8, 6:10.
In the Old Testament, God’s holiness is not yet clearly set beside and marked off from all other perfections of God. It denotes there still the whole bond in which the LORD stands to Israel and Israel to the LORD. Therefore the LORD can be called the Holy One of Israel, who has given Himself wholly to Israel and upholds and keeps it as His own along all kinds of ways. Therefore also on the side of the people, the hallowing is not only religious and ethical but also ceremonial, civil, political in kind. Just as holiness in God is not yet bounded beside other virtues, so on Israel’s side it takes in the whole people on all sides.
But when in the N.T. the Holy One of God appears, Mark 1:24, Luke 4:34, Acts 3:14, 4:27, who forms the deepest contrast with the world, John 15:18, and hallows and devotes Himself in an absolute sense to God, John 17:19, then God’s holiness stops being the beginning of punishment and chastening, and becomes in the Holy Spirit, who in the O.T. is called thus only a few times, Ps. 51:13, Isa. 63:10, but now regularly bears that name, the beginning of the hallowing of the church. This is now the holy nation, 1 Pet. 2:5, 9, Eph. 2:19, 5:27, made up of chosen, holy, blameless ones, Eph. 1:1, 4, Col. 1:2, 22, 3:12, 1 Cor. 7:24, wholly freed and cleansed from sin and forever with soul and body devoted to God.
The holiness that the LORD gives Himself to Israel and claims Israel wholly for His service shows itself at last in the highest in that God gives Himself in Christ to the church and redeems and cleanses her from all unrighteousness.
13. The Glory of God. To the holiness of God belongs also His glory. The Scripture uses for it the words kabod and doxa; kabod from the verb kabad, to be heavy, weighty, is the appearance of him who is weighty, notable; besides this, hod is also in use, which denotes the glorious appearance of him whose name is widely spread, and hadar, which denotes that appearance in its luster and beauty, Delitzsch on Ps. 8:6. The Greek word for it in the LXX and N. T. is doxa, the recognition which someone enjoys or to which he has claim, subjectively thus the recognition which is due to someone or is actually bestowed, the fame or honor in which he shares, synonymous with time and eulogia, Rev. 5:12, opposite to atimia, 2 Cor. 6:8; and objectively the appearance, form, aspect, splendor, luster, glory of a person or thing which shows itself, or the person or thing itself in their glorious appearance, and then akin to eidos, eikon, morphe, Isa. 53:2, 1 Cor. 11:7. The kabod Yahweh, doxa tou theou therefore denotes the luster and glory which is inseparable from all God's virtues and from His whole self-revelation in nature and above all in grace, the glorious form in which He everywhere appears over against creatures.
This glory and majesty, with which God is clothed and which marks all His doing, 1 Chron. 16:27, Ps. 29:4, 96:6, 104:1, 111:4, 113:4, etc., reveals itself in the whole creation, Ps. 8, Isa. 6:3, but is yet especially seen in the realm of grace. It appears to Israel, Exod. 16:7, 10, 24:16, 33:18 ff., Lev. 9:6, 23, Num. 14:10, 16:19, etc., Deut. 5:24. It filled the tabernacle and the temple, Exod. 40:34, 1 Kings 8:11, and was imparted to the whole people, Exod. 29:43, Ezek. 16:14, etc. Above all it is beheld in Christ, the Only Begotten, John 1:14, and through Him in the church, Rom. 15:7, 2 Cor. 3:18, which awaits the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and of her Savior Jesus Christ, Titus 2:13. Often it is brought into connection with the holiness of God, Exod. 29:43, Isa. 6:3, and therefore also described as a fire, Exod. 24:17, Lev. 9:24, and as a cloud, 1 Kings 8:10, 11, Isa. 6:4. Without doubt the Scripture thinks with that cloud and that fire of sensibly perceptible, creaturely forms, under which God's presence made itself known, cf. vol. I, 249. It is otherwise, however, with the light, with which the glory of God is often compared and under which it is repeatedly presented. Light is in Scripture the image of truth, holiness, and blessedness, Ps. 43:3, Isa. 10:17, Ps. 97:11. This comparison is so simple and natural that there is truly no need for the supposition that Yahweh was originally a sun-god, Kuenen, G. v. I. I 48 ff. 240 ff. 249, 267, any more than the name rock needs to point to an earlier period of stone-worship, Kuenen, I 392-395. The light of the sun and the fire of heaven furnish the Israelite the material for the description of the virtues of Yahweh, but he is clearly conscious thereby of speaking in image. As the thunder is His voice, Ps. 104:7, Amos 1:2, Isa. 30:30, so the light of nature is His garment, Ps. 104:2. What light is in nature, source of knowledge, of purity, of joy, that is God in the spiritual realm. He is the light of the godly, Ps. 27:1; His face, His word spreads light, Ps. 44:4, 89:16, 119:105; in His light alone do they see light, Ps. 36:10. He Himself is pure light, without darkness, and Father of all that is light, 1 John 1:5, 1 Tim. 6:16, James 1:17, and according to the promise, Isa. 9:1, 60:1, 19, 20, Mic. 7:8, has appeared in Christ as the light, Matt. 4:16, Luke 2:32, John 1:4, 3:19, 8:12, 1 John 2:20, so that now His church is light in Him, Matt. 5:14, Eph. 5:8, 1 Thess. 5:5, and goes to meet the full light, Rev. 21:23 ff., 22:5, Col. 1:12.
The Jews later thought with this kabod Yahweh of a created, visible luster, of a light-body, whereby He made His presence in creation known, and even conceived the Shekinah as a personal subject, Weber, System der altsyn. pal. Theol. 1880, pp. 160, 179-184. From Jewish theology this opinion passed over into theosophy. Boehme describes the glory of God as a body of the Spirit, as a kingdom of the glory of God, the eternal heavenly kingdom, wherein the power of God is essential, tinged by the luster and power of fire and light, as an uncreated heaven, a paradise, Joh. Claassen, Jakob Boehme, sein Leben und seine theos. Werke I 157, II 61, and so also Baader, Joh. Claassen, Fr. v. Baaders Leben u. theos. Werke II 90 ff. Oetinger, Die Theol. aus der Idee des Lebens, herausgeg. von J. Hamberger 1852, pp. 113 ff., 117 ff. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych.², pp. 49 ff. Keerl, Der Mensch das Ebenbild Gottes II 17 ff., 113. Id. Die Lehre des N. T. von der Herrlichkeit Gottes, Basel 1863. Among the Lutheran theologians there was earlier already strife over whether God is called light in a proper (Dannhauer, Chemnitz) or in an improper (Musaeus et al.) sense, M. Vitringa, Doctr. chr. relig. I 139. In the Eastern church even the council of Constantinople in 1431 attached its approval to the doctrine of an uncreated, divine light, which was distinct from the essence of God, Kurtz, Lehrb. der Kirchengesch. § 69, 2. Yet this opinion cannot be approved. Scripture clearly teaches the spirituality and invisibility of God. The assumption of a glory of God as a place, makom, form, temunah, eidos, morphe, as a panim, of a body, a kingdom, a heaven, which though uncreated, would yet be distinct from His essence, is in conflict with the aforesaid attributes and likewise with the simplicity of God. Also when Scripture speaks of God's face, glory, and majesty, it speaks in image. But like all perfections, so this one also comes out in His creatures. It is communicable. There is in the created a faint luster of the unspeakable glory and majesty which God possesses. As the creatures lead us up to speak of God's eternity and omnipresence, of His righteousness and grace, so they make us know something of the glory of God. Yet here too the analogy is no identity. Already in language this comes out. With creatures we speak of beautiful, fair, fine; but Scripture has for the beauty of God its own name, that of glory. Therefore it also deserves no recommendation to speak with the church fathers, scholastics, and Roman theologians of the pulchritudo Dei. Augustine already spoke in that sense. He proceeded from the principle: Everything that is, insofar as it is, is true, good, beautiful. Now there is in being and thus also in the true, good, and beautiful distinction, ranking, ascent. Insofar as something has more being, it also has more truth, goodness, and beauty. Everything is beautiful in its kind. The individual works of God... are found to have praiseworthy measures and numbers and orders established in their respective kinds, de Gen. c. Manich. I 21. There is in all a certain decorum of nature of its own kind, de Gen. ad litt. III 14. All creatures therefore contribute to the beauty of the whole. But all beauty of creatures is perishable and changeable; they are not beautiful through themselves, but through participation in a higher, absolute beauty. Question all creatures: They all answer you: Behold, see, we are beautiful. Their beauty is their confession, Serm. 241. That highest beauty, to which all creatures point, is God. He is the highest being, highest truth, highest good, and also the highest unchangeable beauty. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not the unchangeable beautiful? ibid. God is the highest beauty, because in His essence there is absolute unity and measure and order. Nothing is lacking to Him, and there is nothing superfluous in Him, de ord. I 26. II 51. de beata vita 34. c. Acad. II 9. Ritter, Gesch. der christl. Philos. II 289 ff. Also in this conception of Augustine the influence of Neoplatonism is not to be denied, which likewise regarded the Deity as the highest beauty and the cause of all that is beautiful, Zeller V² 483 ff. But thus this thought of Augustine has found entrance with Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 4 § 7. Bonaventure, Breviloquium Pars I c. 6. Petavius, Theol. dogm. VI c. 8. Scheeben, Kath. Dogm. I 589 ff., etc. On the other hand, the Protestant theologians preferred to speak of the majestas and gloria Dei, Gerhard, Loci theol. I c. 8 sect. 18. Polanus, Synt. theol. II c. 31. Mastricht, Theor. pract. theol. II c. 22. Synopsis pur. theol. VI 43.
In the glory of God His greatness and exaltation comes out, as it is so often painted in the psalms and prophets, Ps. 104, Isa. 40, Hab. 3. It is called greatness and exaltation, insofar as it awakens in the creature reverent admiration and adoration. It is called glory, insofar as it prompts to thanks and praise and honor. It is called majesty, insofar as it stands in connection with His absolute dignity and demands submission from every creature.
14. God's Righteousness. To God as the Holy One there belongs finally the virtue of righteousness. The words tsaddiq , tsedeq , tsedaqah denote the state of someone who agrees with a law. The first meaning seems to be a forensic one; tsaddiq is he who in a trial before the judge is in the right and therefore must be acquitted, hitsdiq opposite hirshia , Deut. 25:1. It is also the word for him who is in the right in a dispute or argument, Job 11:2, 33:12, 32, Isa. 41:26; and the substantive can therefore also denote the correctness or truth of a statement or utterance, Ps. 52:5, Prov. 16:13, Isa. 45:23. Subsequently it then means in general that someone is in the right, even if no trial and no court is involved; that he has the right on his side, is righteous and good and agrees with the law, Gen. 30:33, 38:26, 1 Sam. 24:18, Ps. 15:2. From here it is also transferred to the religious realm and applied to God. In the Pentateuch God is called tsaddiq only twice, Exod. 9:27, Deut. 32:4. God's righteousness comes out first in history, in his government of the world and in his leading of Israel, and is therefore also most developed by the psalmists and prophets. It reveals itself over the whole world, even in the beasts of the field, Ps. 36:7. God is a Judge of the whole earth, Gen. 18:25. It consists in this, that God renders to each according to his works, treats the righteous and the wicked differently, Gen. 18:25. But now it is noteworthy that the one side of this righteousness, namely that according to which God punishes the wicked, the justitia vindicativa , in Scripture comes much less to the fore than that other, according to which he confirms the righteous. Diestel in his article, The Idea of Righteousness Especially in the Old Testament, has rightly drawn attention to this and has found agreement with many, especially with Ritschl. The thing itself, which later in dogmatics was expressed as justitia vindicativa , is not lacking. On the contrary, God by no means holds the guilty innocent, Exod. 20:7, Nah. 1:3. He does not spare, Ezek. 7:4, 9, 27, 8:18, 9:10. He takes no person and no gift, Deut. 10:17, and judges impartially, Job 13:6-12, 22:2-4, 34:10-12, 35:6, 7. He is righteous and all his judgments are right, Ps. 119:137, 129:4; also the punishing of the wicked is more than once connected with his righteousness, Exod. 6:5, 7:4, Ps. 7:12, 9:5-9, 28:4, 62:13, 73, 96:10, 13, 2 Chron. 12:5-7, Neh. 9:33, Lam. 1:18, Isa. 5:16, 10:22, Dan. 9:14, Rom. 2:5, 2 Thess. 1:5-10. But yet it is true that the punishing of the wicked is mostly derived from the wrath of God and that righteousness in Scripture especially appears as the principle of salvation for the people of God. The wrath of God is denoted in Hebrew by many words, aph , charon , ka'as , za'am , rogez , qetseph , mostly translated by wrath, fierceness, chemah mostly rendered by fury, ebrah mostly translated by indignation, Septuagint and New Testament by thumos , the inward, and orge , the outward manifesting wrath, connected together, Rom. 2:8. This wrath, whose root words partly connect with the concept of burning, partly express a violent, uncontrollable movement of the mind, is often compared to a fire, Lev. 10:6, Deut. 32:22, Ps. 21:10, a burning, Deut. 32:22, 2 Kings 23:26, Ps. 2:12, Isa. 30:27, Jer. 15:14, 17:4, and is therefore called hot, fierce, Ps. 58:10, Deut. 13:17, 2 Chron. 28:11, Job 20:23, Isa. 13:9, 13, and smoking, Deut. 29:20, Ps. 74:1. It is aroused and kindled by Israel's theocratic sins against God's covenant, such as oath-breaking, Josh. 9:20, profanation of God's service, Lev. 10:6, Num. 1:53, 16:46, 18:5, idolatry, Deut. 9:19, the sin of Manasseh, 2 Kings 23:26, of David, 1 Chron. 21:27 (likely a typo in original, probably 21:27 or similar), and especially by the sins to which the people made themselves guilty and by which they deserved all kinds of punishments, Isa. 42:24, 25, Jer. 7:20, 21:5, 32:31 etc., Lam. 2:2ff., 3:43, Ezek. 5:13ff., 7:3, 13:13 etc., Zech. 7:12ff. This wrath is terrible, Ps. 76:8, and works terror, Ps. 2:5, 90:7, sorrow, Job 21:17, Ps. 102:11, punishment, Ps. 6:2, 38:2, Jer. 10:24, destruction, Jer. 42:18, 2 Chron. 29:8 etc. cf. Job 9:5, Ps. 21:10, 56:8, 85:5. According to Deut. 6:15, 29:20, 32:21, Job 16:9, Nah. 1:2, with this wrath are related hatred, vengeance, and jealousy. Hatred almost always has sinful deeds as object, Deut. 16:22, Ps. 45:8, Prov. 6:16, Jer. 44:4, Hos. 9:15, Amos 5:21 (likely 5:21), Zech. 8:17, Rev. 2:6, and only a few times sinful persons, Ps. 5:6, Mal. 1:3, Rom. 9:13. Vengeance neqamah , ekdikesis , which is ascribed to God, Nah. 1:2, 1 Thess. 4:6 and is expressly reserved for him, Deut. 32:35, Rom. 12:19, Heb. 10:30, reveals itself also now sometimes in judgment and doom, Num. 31:2, 3, Judg. 5:2 (likely 5:2), 11:36, 16:28, 2 Sam. 4:8, 22:48, Ps. 18:48, 99:8, but will yet first reveal itself in all its power in the future, in the day of vengeance, Deut. 32:41, 42, Ps. 94:1, 149:7, Isa. 34:8, 35:4, 59:17, 61:2, 4, Jer. 46:10, 50:15, 28, 51:11, Ezek. 25:14ff., Mic. 5:15 (likely 5:15). The jealousy of God, qin'ah zelos , which occurs many times, Exod. 20:5, 34:14, Deut. 4:24, 5:9, 6:15, Josh. 24:19, Nah. 1:2 is aroused by this, that Israel, the bride of YHWH, injures his rights as bridegroom and husband by whoring after other gods, Deut. 32:16, 21, 2 Kings 19:31 (likely), Ps. 78:58, Ezek. 8:3, 5 and reveals itself in this, that YHWH now on his part also provokes Israel to jealousy by choosing another people, Deut. 32:21, Ps. 79:5, Ezek. 5:13, 16:38, 23:25, Rom. 10:19. Besides all these virtues, the righteousness of God is mostly taken in a good sense and described according to that side by which it sets the righteous in the right and raises them to honor and salvation. Therein consists especially the tsedaqah of YHWH, that he acknowledges the righteousness of the righteous, sets it in the light and makes it triumph. He is righteous because he ordains salvation for the pious, confirms them, Ps. 7:10, helps them out, 31:2, answers, 65:6, hears, 143:1, delivers, 143:11, makes alive, 119:40, acquits, 34:23 (likely 34:23), does right, 35:23 etc., while the wicked do not come to his righteousness, 69:28, 29. The righteousness of YHWH therefore forms no contrast with his lovingkindness, as wrath does, Ps. 69:25ff., but is related and synonymous with it, Ps. 22:32, 33:5, 35:28, 40:11, 51:16, 89:15, 145:7, Isa. 45:21, Jer. 9:24, Hos. 2:19 (likely 2:19), Zech. 9:9. The manifestation of God's righteousness is at the same time a manifestation of his grace, Ps. 97:11, 12, 112:4, 116:5, 118:15-19 (likely 118:15-19). Even the forgiveness of sins is due to that righteousness of God, Ps. 51:16, 103:17, 1 John 1:9. The revelations of that righteousness, tsidqoth , are therefore saving benefits, acts of salvation and deliverance, Judg. 5:11, 1 Sam. 12:7, Ps. 103:6, Isa. 45:24, 25, Mic. 6:5. Especially in Isaiah this soteriological character of God's righteousness comes out strikingly. Israel is indeed a sinful people and is therefore also heavily punished, 43:26, 48:1, 53:11, 57:12, 59:4, 64:5, but nevertheless Israel is in the right over against the Gentiles; it has despite all its transgressions a righteous cause, it has yet finally the right on its side. When it then has been chastised enough, God's righteousness will awaken and acknowledge Israel in this its right and deliver it from all its misery, 40:1ff., 54:5, 7ff., 57:15ff., 61:1ff. etc. And so it is with all the pious. Personally they are sinners, guilty of all kinds of unrighteousness and are a poor and miserable people. But they stand for a righteous cause, they trust in the Lord, and they count on it that God will do them right, will plead their cause and crown them with his salvation, Ps. 17:1ff. 18:21, 22, 34:16 (likely 34:16), 103:6, 140:13. And also in the New Testament God's dikaiosune consists definitely in this, that it offers in Christ a propitiation, whereby he both himself proves dikaios and can dikaioun ton ek pisteos , and further grants forgiveness to his own, 1 John 1:9 and ordains salvation, John 17:25, 2 Tim. 4:8. Moreover, finally even the wrath and jealousy, hatred and vengeance are made serviceable to the salvation and deliverance of his people. His wrath is accomplished after a little time, Ps. 30:6, 78:38, 85:4, 103:9, Isa. 10:25, 48:9, 51:22, 54:8, Jer. 3:12ff. 32:37, Ezek. 43:7-9, Dan. 9:16, Hos. 14:5, Mic. 7:18 (likely 7:18), and his jealousy against Israel has an end, Ezek. 16:42, 36:6ff. Zech. 8:2ff. Then his wrath and jealousy and vengeance will turn against the enemies of his people in the great day of wrath and vengeance, Deut. 32:41, 42. Isa. 13:2ff., 26:11, 30:27ff., 34:8, 35:4, 42:13 (likely 42:13), 59:17, 61:2, 4, 63:3ff., Jer. 10:25, 46:10, 50:15, 28, 51:11, Lam. 3:66, Ezek. 25:14ff., 38:19, 39:25, Mic. 5:15 (likely 5:15), Nah. 1:2, Hab. 3:12, Zeph. 1:15ff., 2:2 etc., and thereby serve Israel for blessing and deliverance, 2 Kings 19:31, Isa. 9:7 (likely 9:7), 37:32, Joel 2:18, Zech. 1:14, 8:2. And likewise the New Testament says that, although God's wrath now already rests on the wicked, John 3:36, Eph. 2:3, 1 Thess. 2:16, yet that wrath in all its terribleness will first be revealed in the future, Matt. 3:7, Luke 3:7, 21:23, Rom. 5:9, 1 Thess. 1:10, 5:9, Eph. 5:6, Col. 3:6, Rev. 6:16, 17, 11:18, 14:10, 16:19, 19:15. On the righteousness of God in Scripture, cf. besides Diestel and Ritschl in the places mentioned, Ortloph in a treatise on the righteousness of God. Kautzsch, On the Derivatives of the Stem tsdq in Old Testament Usage, Tübingen 1881. Koenig, On the Meaning of the Word tsdaqah in the Books of the Prophets, Paris 1894. Cremer, s.v. Köstlin, in Herzog. Oehler, Theology of the Old Testament § 47. Schultz, Old Testament Theology. Smend, Old Testament Religious History. Kuenen, Religion of Israel. A. Fricke, The Pauline Basic Concept of the Dikaiosune Theou , Discussed on the Basis of Rom. 3:21-26. Leipzig 1888. H. Beck, The Dik. Theou in Paul, and further literature later in the locus on justification. On the wrath of God: Lactantius, De Ira Dei . Tertullian, De Ira Dei . Bartholomäi, On the Wrath of God. Weber, On the Wrath of God 1862. Ritschl. Diestel, in the place mentioned. Lange article in Herzog. Kübel in Herzog. Oehler § 48. Schultz. Smend. Cremer s.v. etc.
In dogmatics, the concept usually received a broader meaning. Sometimes it was taken so broadly that it also included the perfection or holiness of God; righteousness was then the virtue itself and the sum of all virtues; in God consisting in perfect agreement with Himself, justitia divina . But usually it was yet conceived in a narrower sense, following Aristotle. He defined it in his ethics as ἀρετη, δι’ ἡν τα αὑτων ἑκαστοι ἐχουσιν ; it is only possible in a society of beings who can possess a greater or lesser amount of goods; among the gods it does not exist, because there is no measure for their possession, and among irrational creatures likewise not, because among them there is no talk of property. Righteousness thus first presupposes that there are rights which are granted by the lawgiver, justitia dominica, legislativa, dispositiva ; next, that those rights are mutually respected in treaties and contracts, justitia commutativa ; and finally that those rights which exist are upheld, justitia distributiva , and indeed by reward, justitia remunerativa , or by punishment, justitia vindicativa ; in all these parts righteousness was the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due.
All this was transferred to God; and so the concept of righteousness in dogmatics received a much broader meaning than in Scripture. Now against this there is no weighty objection, provided that the distinction in usage is kept in mind, for the things themselves which in dogmatics are treated under the justitia Dei all clearly appear in Holy Scripture. There is even an advantage connected with it, because it offers opportunity to uphold the righteousness of God in its full extent against its opponents. The Gnostics in general and especially Marcion made a sharp contrast between law and gospel, works and faith, flesh and spirit, and so also between the God of wrath, of vengeance, of righteousness, who revealed Himself in the Old Testament, and the God of love and grace, who in the New Testament made Himself known in Christ; and later the righteousness, specifically the punishing righteousness, as being in conflict with His love, has been denied to God by many.
Now with the justitia Dei many difficulties present themselves; with God there is yet no right thinkable that stands above Him and to which He must hold Himself, for His will is the highest law; creatures have no rights over against Him, for they have received everything from Him and render Him nothing in return; they can make no claim to reward, for even when they have done all that they were bound to do, they are unprofitable servants; and also nothing in His nature seems to compel Him to punish; why should He, who is the Almighty, not be able to forgive without satisfaction or punishment? However, in order not to stray too far from the biblical concept of righteousness, it is preferable to bring up all these questions not here but soon with the will and freedom of God.
Righteousness in Holy Scripture is not a property of God's absolute dominion but rests on a moral foundation. Although it is true that a creature by nature can have no rights over against God, Rom. 11:35, 1 Cor. 4:7, and although there is no talk of a justitia commutativa , yet it is God Himself who as it were gives rights to His creatures. Every creature has received its own nature in creation; there are laws and ordinances for all created things; there are rights which are enclosed in the existence and nature of all that is. Above all, such rights are given to rational creatures, and among these again for all areas on which they move, for understanding and heart, soul and body, art and science, family and society, religion and morality. And when those rights are forfeited and sinned away by man, then God establishes with Noah a covenant of nature and with Abraham a covenant of grace, in which He again out of grace grants all sorts of rights to His creatures and binds Himself under oath to uphold those rights.
Thus by God's grace a whole order of rights is established, both in nature and grace, with all kinds of institutions, ordinances, and laws, which He Himself upholds and causes to rule. These institutions and rights are, however, not derived in Scripture from God's righteousness--what righteousness would also oblige Him to that?--but from His holiness and grace. And certainly this is more correct than that they are designated with the name of justitia legislativa . Yet this is not wrong, if only it is not thought thereby that God by virtue of some righteousness gave and had to give all those rights to His creatures. This is precisely in it, that God is the highest Lawgiver, and that the whole order of rights in every area is rooted in Him. All right, whatever it may be, has its ultimate and deepest ground not in a social contract nor in an independent natural right, nor in history, but only in the will of God, and in that will, not thought of as absolute dominion, but as a will of goodness and grace. God's grace is the source of all right.
But furthermore, God also upholds that order of rights in every area of life; He who is righteousness itself and the source of all right is also the judge, the avenger of righteousness. His justitia legislativa includes the justitia judicialis . Right is no right when it is not upheld, if need be with force and punishment. Indeed, this is not automatically given with the order of rights. Without sin the order of rights would yet have existed; but it would have been obeyed voluntarily and out of love by every creature without force. It is sin that necessitates the right, in accordance with its nature, to make itself respected with violence and force. Not the right in itself but indeed the character of force which it now must bear has become necessary through sin. But so little is this character of force accidental or arbitrary that now no right is thinkable without that character, and our own conscience bears witness to it. The moral order is so little in conflict with the order of rights that it rather bears, demands, and supports it. Right is an important part of morality. Righteousness is precisely the way in which the grace and love of God are upheld and raised to triumph. They who with Marcion assume a contrast between righteousness and grace misconceive the connection between moral and order of rights, and do not understand the majesty and glory of right.
The justitia Dei must therefore by its nature be a justitia judicialis and thus on the one hand a justitia remunerativa and on the other a justitia vindicativa . Not as if the creature could ever of itself make claim to any reward or in itself receive forgiveness without punishment; but God is obliged to His covenant, to the right once instituted by Him, to His name and honor, to bring His people to salvation and to punish the ungodly. Thus only can right come to dominion and triumph. There is truth in the fiat justitia, pereat mundus ; but Scripture yet more beautifully puts this thought in the foreground, that right must be done, in order that the world may be saved.
Cf. Irenaeus, adv. haer. III 25 IV 39 sq. Tertullian, adv. Marc. passim. Origen, de princ. II 5, 3. Pseudo-Dionysius, de div. nom. 8 § 7. Anselm, Prosl. c. 9 sq. Lombard, Sent. IV 46 and the comm. of Thomas and Bonaventure, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 21. Gerhard, Loc. II c. 8 Sect. 12. Quenstedt I 292. Hollaz 268. Zanchi, Op. II 394 sq. Polanus, Synt. II c. 26. Voetius, Disp. I 339-402. Owen, on div. justice, Works 1862 X 481-624. Ex. v. h. Ontw. v. Tol. V. Moor I 674 sq. 996 sq. Meijer, De Godd. eigensch. IV 89v.
15. God's Sovereign Will and Justice. To all the virtues treated above are finally added those which are proper to God as Sovereign. God is the Creator, and thus the Owner, Possessor, Lord of all; nothing exists or possesses anything apart from Him; He alone has absolute authority; His will decides always and over all. Of this sovereign will, חֵפֶץ , רָצוֹן , Dan. 4:35, 6:18, θέλημα , βούλημα is therefore often spoken in Holy Scripture. This will is the ultimate cause of all things, of their being and their so-being. From it everything is derived: the creation and preservation, Rev. 4:11, the government, Prov. 21:1, Dan. 4:35, Eph. 1:11, the suffering of Christ, Luke 22:42, the election and rejection, Rom. 9:15ff., the rebirth, James 1:18, the sanctification, Phil. 2:13, the suffering of believers, 1 Pet. 3:17, our life and lot, James 4:15, Acts 18:21, Rom. 15:32, even the smallest and most trifling things, Matt. 10:29, etc. And accordingly, in Christian theology also, and binds himself by oath to the maintenance of those rights. Thus by God's grace a whole order of law is established, both in nature and grace, with all kinds of ordinances, institutions, and laws, which He himself upholds and causes to rule. These ordinances and rights are, however, not derived in Scripture from God's righteousness—what righteousness would oblige Him to that?—but from His holiness and grace. And certainly this is more accurate than designating them with the name of justitia legislativa . Yet this is not wrong, as long as it is not thought that God, by virtue of some righteousness, gave and had to give all those rights to His creatures. This is precisely what it means that God is the Highest Lawgiver, and that the whole order of law in every field is rooted in Him. All law, whatever it may be, has its ultimate and deepest ground not in a social contract nor in an independent natural law, nor in history, but only in the will of God, and in that will, not thought of as absolute dominion, but as a will of goodness and grace. God's grace is the source of all law. But furthermore, God upholds that order of law in every realm of life; He, who is righteousness itself and the source of all law, is also the judge, the avenger of justice. His justitia legislativa includes the justitia judicialis . Law is no law if it is not upheld, if need be with force and punishment. Indeed, this is not automatically given with the order of law. Without sin, the order of law would still have existed; but it would have been obeyed by all creatures voluntarily and out of love without force. It is sin that necessitates the law, in accordance with its nature, to demand respect with violence and force. Not the law itself but rather the character of force that it now must bear has become necessary through sin. But so little is this character of force accidental or arbitrary that no law is now thinkable without that character, and our own conscience bears witness to it. The moral order is so little in conflict with the order of law that it rather bears, demands, and supports it. Law is an important part of morality. Righteousness is precisely the way in which God's grace and love are upheld and elevated to triumph. Those who, with Marcion, assume a contrast between righteousness and grace misunderstand the connection between moral and legal order, leading them to the Kabbalah and Neoplatonism. Here Plotinus had already taught that God is causa sui , a product of His will and power, and thus the will was the ultimate being and preceded the understanding. And likewise, Schelling now made the will the ultimate principle both of the existence of the infinite and of the finite being. Already in his philosophical investigations on the essence of human freedom from the year 1809, he took this standpoint. There is, he said, in the final and highest instance no other being than willing. Willing is primal being, and to this alone apply all its predicates: groundlessness, eternity, independence from time, self-affirmation. The whole philosophy strives only to find this highest expression, Works I 7 p. 350. In God and in creatures, a distinction must be made between the essence insofar as it exists and the essence insofar as it is only the ground of existence, ibid. 357. God has the ground of His existence in Himself, that is, in a nature distinct from God Himself, ibid. 358. This nature is as it were that longing which the eternal One feels to beget itself; it is will, but will in which there is no understanding, and therefore also not an independent and perfect will, since understanding is the will in the will. Nevertheless, it is a will of understanding, namely longing and desire thereof; not a conscious but a prescient will, whose prescience is understanding, ibid. 359. But so it is now with all things. They are something other than God and yet cannot be outside God. This contradiction can only be resolved in such a way that the things have their ground in that which in God Himself is not He Himself, that is, in that which is the ground of His existence, ibid. 359. The things have their ground in this dark nature, in this unconscious will of God. Indeed, in the world, rule, order, and form are to be noticed, just as in God also from the dark nature the light of the spirit and of personality has arisen. But always in the ground lies the unregulated, as if it could once again break through, and nowhere does it seem as if order and form were the original, but as if an initially unregulated were brought to order, ibid. 359. The whole world process is derived by Schelling from the opposition of nature and spirit, of darkness and light, of the real and the ideal principle, which together are present in God Himself from all eternity. By this standpoint, Schelling overcame the rationalism of Hegel and became of the greatest significance for later philosophy. He developed the thoughts which he had already expressed in his investigation on human freedom in his later writings, Stuttgart Private Lectures of 1812, Works I 7 p. 417ff., Memorial of the Writing on Divine Things by Mr. F. H. Jacobi of 1812, Works I 8 p. 19ff., and especially in his Philosophy of Revelation, Works II 3rd and 4th volumes, more closely and in a theistic sense. But he remained faithful to his primacy of the will and was followed in this by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. Now it is true that the will in these philosophers is no will in the proper sense, but nothing but an unconscious desiring, a blind urge, a dark nature. But in part this was acknowledged by them themselves. Schelling says expressly that the will without understanding is no independent and perfect will, since understanding is the will in the will, Works I 7, 359. Schopenhauer indeed reckoned consciousness to the appearance of the will and considered it bound to individuality and brains, The World as Will and Representation II⁶ 370, but still inserted between the will and the world of appearance the ideas, which were the eternal forms and archetypes of things, ibid. I 154. And von Hartmann speaks of the Unconscious also again as subject and as superconscious, Philosophy of the Unconscious II⁹ 186. The existence of things is determined by the will, but the essence by the intellect, Schelling, Works, II 3 p. 57-62. Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious I 100ff. II 435ff. 446ff. Yet even apart from this acknowledgment, their philosophy is of great significance for theism. It has demonstrated the untenability of rationalistic and idealistic pantheism. God is not thinkable without will, freedom, and power. Indeed, it has been objected against this that all willing is a desiring and striving and thus a proof of imperfection, of dissatisfaction, of unrest, which cannot occur in God. And mysticism has therefore sung: We pray, may it happen, my Lord and God, Thy will; And behold, He has no will, He is an eternal silence (Angelus Silesius). But this objection rests on a wrong conception of the will. Certainly, willing is often a striving for something that is not possessed; but when the will has now obtained that desired thing and rests and enjoys in it, then that resting and enjoying is also an act and activity of the will, yes, the highest and strongest activity, cf. later the doctrine of the will. Such a will, which rests and enjoys in what is obtained, exists also in creatures and is nothing but love, which embraces its object and is blessed in it. If such rest and enjoyment is not reckoned to the will, it is either unattainable for the creature, that is, then there is no blessedness possible for the creature; or if that blessedness is still to be granted to the creature, it can consist in nothing else than in the destruction of the will, in the numbing of consciousness, and in the complete suppression of personality. In pantheistic mysticism, therefore, blessedness is thought of as a sinking, an absorption, a being swallowed up of the soul in God, that is, in a nirvana. However, Scripture and Christian theology do not teach thus. Blessedness does not kill the will but brings it to its highest activity; for love is the richest, strongest energy of the will. So now there is also a will in God. His willing is not a striving for a good that He would lack and without which He cannot be blessed. For He is the All-Sufficient and the All-Blessed in Himself. He is Himself the highest good, for His creatures and also for Himself. He can rest in nothing else than in Himself; because He is God, He can be blessed only through and in Himself. His love is self-love and therefore absolute, divine love. And that absolute self-love is nothing else than a willing of Himself, the highest, absolute, divine energy of His will. The object of God's will is thus God Himself. Not in the sense as if He were a product of His will, as if He had caused Himself and were causa sui , cf. above p. 124, for that would again introduce becoming and striving and thus imperfection into God. But indeed in such a way that God eternally wills Himself with a voluntas complacentiae , that He eternally loves Himself with divine love and is perfectly blessed in Himself. His will is His most wise inclination toward Himself as the highest good; it is also no faculty or power in God, but subject, action, and object of that will are one with God's essence; θέλημα θελητικόν , θέλησις , and θέλημα θελητόν coincide with His essence, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 45. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 19 art. 1. Contra Gentiles I 72 sq. Zanchi, Works II 246. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae II c. 19, etc.
However, Scripture also speaks of a will of God in relation to the created things. Just as the knowledge of God is twofold, necessary knowledge and free knowledge, so also the will of God is to be marked off as a bent toward Himself and as a bent toward created things.
But just as the free knowledge does not make God hanging on the created things but is known to Him from His own being, so also the will of God, which aims at the created things, is not to be set dualistically beside the will that has His own being as its mark.
Scripture teaches outspokenly that God wills things other than Himself and speaks time and again of His will in relation to the created things, but it adds as in one breath that God does not will those created things out of need, but only for His own sake, for His name's sake, Proverbs 16:4.
Thus, the shaping is not to be thought of as a mark that stands outside and over against Him, which He lacks and toward which He strives to own it, or through which He hopes to gain something that He does not have. For from Him and through Him and also to Him are all things. He does not find His goal in the created things, but these find their goal in Him.
Quae extra se vult, ea etiam quodam modo sunt in Deo, in quo sunt omnia , Zanchius. He does not will the created things for something that they are or that is in them, but He wills them for Himself. He stays His own goal. He never aims Himself at the created things as such but through these to Himself. Going out from Himself, He turns back to Himself.
It is one bent toward Himself as the highest end and toward created things for His sake as means; His love toward Himself takes in that toward the created things and turns back through these to itself again.
Therefore His willing, even in relation to the created things, is never a striving after any good yet to be gained, and thus also no token of unwholeness and unhappiness; but His willing is always, also in and through the created things, utter self-enjoying, full blessedness, godly rest.
Rest and work are one in God; His self-enoughness is at the same time utter working, Thomas, Summa Theologica I question 19 article 2. Summa Contra Gentiles I 75, 76.
16. Although God wills himself and the creatures with one and the same simple deed, yet God's will must be set apart by us with an eye to the sundry objects. In pantheism this setting apart is unworkable, because the world there is God's own being. But the Scripture grants to the creatures a being that is not standalone but yet their own, set apart from God's being; and therefore the creatures cannot be the object of his will in the same sense and in the same way as he himself is with his being. The will of God, whereby God wills himself, is a leaning toward himself as the end; the will that has the creatures as object is a leaning toward the creatures as means. The former is needful even as the knowledge of simple understanding; God cannot do other than love himself; he delights in himself everlastingly and with godly needfulness. This will of God is therefore raised above all whim, but yet not unfree and forced; freedom and needfulness fall together here. Wholly otherwise it stands however with the will of God that has the creatures as object. The Scripture speaks of this will as utterly as can be. God does all that pleases him, Ps. 115:3, Prov. 21:1, Dan. 4:35. He owes reckoning to no one and answers for none of his deeds, Job 33:13. Men are in his hand as clay in the hand of the potter, Job 10:9, 33:6, Isa. 29:16, 30:14, 64:8, Jer. 18:1ff., peoples are reckoned as a drop, a speck of dust, as nothing, Isa. 40:15ff. It is as foolish that a man lifts himself against God, as that an axe boasts against him who hews with it, or that a saw brags against him who draws it, Isa. 10:15! There is no right of man with God; no one can ask him: What do you? Shall the clay also say to its shaper: What do you make, Job 9:2ff., 11:10, Isa. 45:9? So let man be still and lay his hand on his mouth, Job 40:4. And the New Testament teaches no other. God can do with his own what he will, Matt. 20:15. The being and so-being hangs solely on God's will, Rev. 4:11. This is the last ground of all. Mercy and hardening have their cause therein, Rom. 9:15-18. In the church the Holy Ghost deals out gifts, as he will, 1 Cor. 12:11. And a man has nothing to bring against God's free dealings, Matt. 20:13ff., Rom. 9:20, 21.
On these grounds in Christian theology, even as the knowledge of vision, so also the will of God, which had the creatures as object, was ever called free. Augustine said that the will of God was the last and deepest ground of all things, de civ. Dei XXI 8. de trin. III 2, 7; a deeper ground there is not. To the question, why God made the world, there is but one answer: because he willed; whoever then asks further for a cause of that will, seeks something greater than is the will of God; but nothing greater can be found, de gen. c. Man. I 2. de civ. Dei V 9; and so spoke with him the whole Christian church and theology, e.g. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 19 art. 5. Calvin, Inst. III 23, 2. All taught, indeed not that God could do more and better than he did, for he works always in a godly, full-grown way; but that he yet could have made the things more and greater and better than he has made them, Lombard, Sent. I dist. 44. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 25 art. 5 and 6. Zanchi, Op. II 184-187. Voetius, Disp. I 426. 564. V 151. Burman, Synopsis I 41, § 41. The moral law was by some indeed called everlasting and natural, and deemed as an outflow of God's being; but therein yet again a setting apart was made between the weighty and the chance, and of many commands in sundry settings leave could be given, Voetius, Disp. I 347 sq. de Moor II 614 sq. The flesh-becoming and atoning was according to many not outright needful; God could also well, if he willed, forgive without atoning and need not needfully punish sin, Athanasius c. Ar. III. Gregory of Nazianzus Or. 9. Damascene de fide orth. III 18. Augustine, de trin. XIII 10. Lombard, Sent. III dist. 20. Thomas, S. Th. III qu. 1 art. 2. Petavius, de incarn. II c. 13. Calvin, Inst. II 12, 1. Comm. on John 15:13. Zanchi, VIII 144-146. Vermigli, Loci , cl. 2 c. 17. Pareus on Rom. 5. Twisse, Vindic. gr. 1652 I 153 sq. and others as Vossius, Roell, Vogelsang, B. S. Cremer, cf. M. Vitringa I 170. Schultens, Warnings on the Catechism of Comrie, pp. 198-222. Still stronger came this wisdom of God out in the choosing and casting off, for which no ground at all can be given and which rests only in the kingly good pleasure of God. Of a right of any creature over against God there can be no speech; a changing rightness there is not, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 21 art. 1. Polanus, Synt. II c. 26. Voetius, Disp. II 358. Since a creature can have no earnings with God, there is also no rewarding rightness in the own sense, Thomas, I qu. 21 art. 1. Dutch Confession art. 24. Westminster Conf. c. 16. Exposition of the Draft of Tol. X 288. Some even set that God, although he never makes use of this right, could punish the guiltless timely or everlastingly, Perkins, Works I 772. Twisse, Vind. I 165. 179. 324 sq. Amyraut, Synt. thesium I 237.
So came many theologians, going out from the outright freedom of God, on the line of the middle-age nominalism. Duns Scotus it was who laid the Pelagian thought of will-freedom as outright evenness steadfastly on God. In Sent. I dist. 8 qu. 5 he strives against Aristotle and Avicenna, that besides God nothing is needful. The world is in her whole and in her parts by chance, she is for God needless. To the question, why God has now willed this and willed the one rather than the other, Scotus gives to answer: it is unruly to seek causes and showing of all.... For of a beginning there is no showing; but the straight beginning is the will to will this so that there is no cause in between; even as straight it is, heat to be heating, though this be naturalness, there freedom, and therefore of this, why the will willed this, there is no cause, unless because will is will. Even as of this, why heat is heating, there is no cause, unless because heat is heat, because there is no earlier cause, Sent. I dist. 8 qu. 5 n. 24. One must stay standing by this word: The will of God wills this; there is no cause earlier in reckoning than the will, ib. To this beginning Scotus stays true with all that is in time and befalls. If the whole world is by chance, then can this her mark only thereby be kept, that God, the first cause, causes her by chance. Now God causes the world through understanding and will. The by-chance however cannot lie in God's understanding, insofar as it goes before the will, for this understanding understands merely naturally and with natural needfulness. It must thus lie in the will, Sent. I dist. 39 qu. 5 n. 14. This godly will looks to nothing else needfully for object from his being; to whatsoever else therefore it holds itself by chance, so that it could be of the opposite, ib. n. 22. Now Scotus indeed owns that the knowledge of God goes before the will and that the ideas in God, although set apart from his being, are before his decree, Sent. I dist. 35 qu. unic. n. 7 sq. But the will it is yet that chooses out of all those workable ideas and sets which shall gain reality. The will is the cause of all workliness. And first as an outcome of this will-decision knows also the understanding what shall become workly, ib. dist. 39 qu. 5 n. 23 sq. God has thus made the world with outright freedom, though it be that he took the decree thereto from everlasting, ib. II dist. 1 qu. 2 n. 5. Naturally the human will-freedom was therefore by Scotus also taken as utterly as can be; the will is free to opposite deeds and to opposite objects, ib. I dist. 39 qu. 5 n. 15 sq.; he is set by nothing, he can as well choose a lower as a higher good, he is himself alone the full cause of his handlings; not however some goodness of the object causes needfully the yes of the will but the will freely says yes to whatsoever good and so freely says yes to the greater good as to the lesser, ib. I dist. 1 qu. 4 n. 16. Nothing else from the will is the whole cause of willing in the will, II dist. 25 qu. 1 n. 22. Even the will goes before the understanding, for though it be that the understanding offers to the will the object of his striving, the will yet turns the understanding to the object; and the bliss lies formally not in the understanding but in the will, IV dist. 49 qu. 4. Further owns Scotus indeed that the love to God, set forth in the first table of the law, is needful and natural, but the commands of the second table are set and could also have been otherwise, III dist. 37 qu. unica. In link to the flesh-becoming teaches Scotus that the Logos, if he willed, could also take another kind than the human, e.g. that of a stone, III dist. 2 qu. 1 n. 5 sq. The flesh-becoming would likely also without the sin have taken place and was also in the state of sin not outright needful; God could also in other way have redeemed, III dist. 7 qu. 3 n. 3. III dist. 20 qu. unica. The earnings of Christ were not enough in themselves, but were taken as such by God, III dist. 19 qu. unica. In itself deemed, reckoned to God's power outright, God could also without the earnings of Christ give the sinner bliss, and the sinner could also atone for himself, if God but reckoned his works as enough, IV dist. 15 qu. 1 n. 4 sq. cf. also IV dist. 1 qu. 6 n. 4 sq. The over-stuffing is workable, because one stuff can wholly begin and another wholly end, IV dist. 11 qu. 1 n. 4. Even God can make a person or thing during a time in between stop in his being, without that thereby the sameness is lost, IV dist. 43 qu. 1 n. 4. Yet Scotus went not so far as some Mohammedan theologians, who let all things from blink to blink be made by the will of God without link among, without nature-laws, without stuffs and marks, Ritter, History of Christian Philosophy III 732 f. He owns ideas in God that go before the will; deems the love to God needful and natural; believes in a natural knowledge of God, in a world-order and nature-law, and says also that man-becoming and atoning according to the power of God set were needful. But yet Scotus lifts the freedom and allmight so high that at least the means that must lead to the end become wholly whimsical, Ritter, History of Christian Philosophy IV 388 f. Stöckl, History of Philosophy of the Middle Ages II 832 f. Baur, Trinity and Man-becoming of God II 642 f. Ritschl, Yearbook for German Theology 1865 p. 298 f. Dorner, in Herzog² 3, 735 f. By others this beginning of the freedom and allmight of God was yet further unfolded. Wholly in the ghost of Scotus, claimed e.g. Ockham that God according to his power outright can give bliss without new-birth and damn the new-born; that he can forgive without atoning and mark works of the sinful man as enough; that the Father could have become man instead of the Son, and that the Son could also have taken the kind of a stone or an ass; that God can give leave from all commands of the moral law etc., Stöckl, Philosophy of the Middle Ages II 1018 f. This name-learning standpoint was later taken in the first place by the Jesuits but then further by the Socinians, Fock, The Socinianism 416 f., the Remonstrants, Apol. Conf. c. 24. Episcopius, Instit. theol. V sect. 5 c. 3, by Descartes, Resp. sextae , Amsterdam 1654 p. 160 sq., by Cartesian theologians, such as Burman, Synopsis I c. 20 § 6. c. 21 § 19 sq., and in this hundred-year also e.g. still by Charles Sécrétan, Philosophy of Freedom 1849 I 305 f. On this standpoint the will in God is wholly loosed from his being and from all his worths; he stands in nothing else than formal whim. Making, flesh-becoming, atoning, good and evil, true and untrue, reward and punishment, all could as well have been otherwise than it truly is. There is nothing natural more, all is set. But just this name-learning made the Christian theology on her watch be. Though she said also with Augustine that the will of God was the last ground of all things, she yet warded to strip this will of all nature and let it go up in pure whim. Foremost she took with the lore of God her out-going not in the will but in the being of God. The knowledge of simple understanding went orderly before the knowledge of vision, even as the needful will before the free will. The self-knowledge and the self-love was in God outright needful; and the knowledge and the will that have the creatures as object are not twofoldly sundered therefrom, but stand therewith in the narrowest link. The knowledge of vision is bound to the knowledge of simple understanding and the free will to the needful will. According to the steadfast name-learning not only the being-there but also the being-so of things is solely set and fixed by the formal will in God; ownly there is thus in God no knowledge of simple understanding wherein all workables are grasped, there is only in him a knowledge of vision that follows on the will. But according to Christian theology all workables lay shut in the knowledge of simple understanding, and therefrom draws the knowledge of vision and brings the will them to reality. The being-there of things hangs indeed on the will of God, but the being-so on his understanding. Leibniz built hereon forth and said that God indeed was free to make or not the world, the man, the beasts, the plants, but as he made them he must make them after the idea that his awareness without and before the will thereof had shaped itself. Given the will of God to make, the world must be just as she is. She is therefore the best workable and hangs in all parts so inwardly together that who knows one well, knows all, Theod. I 7. 52 II 169 f. Pichler, The Theology of Leibniz I 239 f. cf. also Schelling, Works II 3 p. 57-62. Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unaware I⁹ 100 f. II 435 f. 446 f. Weisse, Philosophical Dogmatics I § 460 f. Thereafter taught the Scripture all-over that God made and upheld the world through the word, through the Logos. She rested thus on thoughts of God. God worked not whimsical and by chance but with the highest wisdom. Though thus also by us the reasons for his working could not be tracked, they were yet there for him. And after those reasons was then also sought by Christian theology. The making had her cause in his goodness or love; for the letting in of sin sundry reasons were given; flesh-becoming and atoning were maybe not utterly needful but this way of freeing was yet the fittest and outstandingest, Petavius, de incarn. II c. 5 sq.; and though many dared not bound the power outright, all owned yet that he made no use of this utter right and came thus in the power set again wholly with each other together. And at last on set points the name-learning was steadfastly cast off; the moral law can have no other inhold than she has, Thomas, S. Theol. I II qu. 100 art. 8. Becanus, de lege naturae III c. 3 qu. 4. Suarez, de lege I c. 15. Voetius, Disp. I 364-402. Maresius, Syst. theol. VII 4. Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 18 and XI qu. 2. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. III 89, 90; the punishing of sin is needful, Canons of Dort II 1. Voetius, Disp. I 358 sq. II 240 sq. de Moor I 683 sq. 996-1034, and even so the flesh-becoming and atoning, Irenaeus adv. haer. III 20. Anselm, Cur Deus homo . Heidelberg Catechism qu. 11. 40. Supper-form of the Dutch Reformed Churches. Trigland, Antapologia c. 4. Voetius, Disp. II 238 sq. Turretin, de satisf. Christi II § 16 sq. Owen, de justitia divina . Exposition of the Draft of Tol. V etc.; and the might of God was so ringed that she shut out the doing of striving things, see soon at no. 18.
In this way, nominalism in Christian theology is, if not overcome, at least pushed back and limited. When the free will was defined as a bent toward creatures for their own sake as means, there was already enclosed in that a principled resistance against the will of God as absolute whim, for the mark of the means is set by the kind of the end goal. Hence also, that theology, though putting the will of God foremost and ever returning thereto, yet always also sought for motives for that will. Realism strove to grasp the world as one harmonious whole, wherein nothing was by whim and all had its place, even sin, and that as a whole served the glorifying of God's name. If the kind of a knowledge lies in knowing the causes of things, theology also cannot withdraw from such a search. Only, for every worker in knowledge, and above all for the theologian, lowliness and meekness is a first duty. He may not be wise above what one ought to be wise. All knowledge is bound to its object; it may not falsify or deny the showings that it sees, for the sake of any fore-set theory. So also is theology most strictly bound to the facts and witnessings which God makes known to her in kind and Writ. She must let these stand, unweakened and unmangled. If she cannot clear them, she has to own her unknowing. The will of God, which speaks out in those facts, is for her the end of all reasoning. She rests at last in his kingship. In that sense the word of Augustine stays true: the will of God is the kind of each creature. She lets herself not be led astray by pantheism, which makes the world needful, for there is a sundering between God and world, between his needful will and free will; nor also by deism, which makes the world a yield of chance, for all that world is an opening of God's wisdom. And she holds against both, that the world is a deed of God's free, kingly will and that God has had his wise and good grounds for this will. For us something is good only and alone because God wills it; God himself can never will anything, but because it is good in itself or for something else, Voetius, Disp. I. We see almost never why God has willed the one and not the other, and we must therefore set it forth so, that He could have willed the one as well as the other. But in God there falls truly no choice, which ever takes uncertainty, wavering, counselling. He knows everlastingly, steadfastly, unchangingly what He wills. In his will falls no whim, no chance, no uncertainty, but only everlasting setness and unchangingness. The chancy is own to the creature, and with worship said, it is even not possible for God to take this mark from the creature. In God alone are being and beingness one; every creature shuts in as such, by strength of her own kind, the possibility that she did not be. But God has with everlasting and unchanging will willed all creatures as chancy. Therefore it is not possible for us and even not allowed, to climb higher than to the will of God. For all striving thereto runs out to seek for the creature a ground in God's being, thus to make it needful and everlasting and godly, and to rid it of its creaturely, that is, chancy mark. In so far the will of God, which has the made as object, is called free. But this freedom shuts not out the other worths of God, his wisdom, goodness, rightness and so on. For that is also among creatures not the true freedom of will, which needs long time of doubt, counsel and choosing; but that is the highest freedom, which in one, with one insight, both sets the goal and the means and knows no halting. And such a freedom is there also in God; a freedom, which is not to be thought as bound by the other worths of God or therefrom on nominalistic wise unbound, but such a freedom, which therefore in full sense is free because it is the freedom of a wise, righteous, holy, mildhearted and almighty God. When Augustine, Thomas, Calvin and so on then also said, that there was no cause for the will of God, then they meant therewith, that the will of God, as one with his being, has no cause behind or above itself, whereof that will would hang. But they wished therewith by no means to say, that that will was without ground, that he in the sense of Schopenhauer was a blind, unthinking will. On the contrary, the will of God is one with his being, with his wisdom, goodness and all his worths, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 19 art. 5. And therefore can heart and head of man rest in that will, for it is the will, not of a blind doom, of an unreckonable chance, of a dark kind-might, but the will of an almighty God and of a goodhearted Father. His kingship is a kingship of unbound might, but also a kingship of wisdom and grace. He is King and Father at once. Cf. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorz. I. Scheeben I. Dorner I. Id. Gesammelte Schriften. Müller, Lehre v. d. Sünde II. Ebrard, Dogm. Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrh. I. Hodge, I.
17. The creation, however, presents still more and other difficulties for the doctrine of the will of God. Like as God and the world are sundered, and therefore the will of God for us falls into a bent toward himself and toward creatures, so is there also in the world among the creatures again all kinds of sundering. And that sundering rests on a differing kinship, in which God sets himself with his being, his knowing and willing, to the creatures. God wills not all things in the same wise, in the same sense, with the same strength of his being; for then there would be no manifoldness among the creatures, then all would be a shapeless sameness. But while he wills all creatures for himself as means, he wills these more than those, after the measure as they are more straightforward and fitting means to his glory. God is a Father to all his creatures, but he is it in a special sense to his children. His fondness to all that he shaped stands below that to the church, and to this below that to Christ, the Son of his good pleasure. There is sundered a providence general, special, and most special. And so also we make in the will of God, which bends toward the creatures, again as much sundering as there are creatures. For even as rich as that whole world is the free will of God. This is thus not to be thought as an unmoved might, as a blind strength, but as rich, full, living, godly working, wellspring of all that rich life, which the creation gives us to behold. But now there is in that world one thing, that for the doctrine of the will of God breeds special hardship, and that is evil, both as evil of guilt and as evil of pain, in ethical and in bodily sense. Evil may yet so much stand under God's steering, it can yet not in the same sense and in the same wise be object of his will as the good. With an eye on those wholly differing and straightly over against each other standing objects we must in the will of God himself again make sundering. The Scripture goes before us therein. There is a great sundering between the will of God, which writes before us what we have to do, Matt. 7:21, 12:50, John 4:34, 7:17, Rom. 12:2, and the will of God, which says what he does and will do, Ps. 115:3, Dan. 4:17, 25, 32, 35, Rom. 9:18, 19, Eph. 1:5, 9, 11, Rev. 4:11. The plea that God's will may happen, Matt. 6:10, has a wholly other sense than the childlike yielding: Thy will be done, Matt. 26:42, Acts 21:14. And so we see in the story time and again that will of God come forth in twofold sense. God bids Abraham to offer his son and yet lets it not happen, Gen. 22. He wills that Pharaoh let Israel go and yet hardens his heart, that he so not do, Ex. 4:21. He lets Hezekiah be told that he shall die and yet adds fifteen years to his life, Isa. 38:1, 5. He forbids to doom the guiltless and yet is Jesus given over after the set counsel and foreknowledge of God, Acts 2:23, 3:18, 4:28. God wills not sin, he is far from godlessness, he forbids and punishes it sternly, and yet it is, and stands under his steering, Ex. 4:21, Josh. 11:20, 1 Sam. 2:25, 2 Sam. 16:10, Acts 2:23, 4:28, Rom. 1:24, 26, 2 Thess. 2:11 etc. He wills the bliss of all, Ezek. 18:23, 32, 33:11, 1 Tim. 2:4, 2 Pet. 3:9, and yet has mercy on whom he will, and hardens whom he will, Rom. 9:18. Already soon came in theology the sundering up between this twofold will of God. Tertullian speaks already of a hidden, higher and a lower or lesser will, exhort. 2 sq. Augustine points out that God his good will oftentimes brings to fullness through the evil will of men, Enchir. c. 101. Later got this twofold will the name of will of good pleasure, hidden, decreeing, decree-making and will of well-pleasing, of sign, revealed, bidding. The name will of sign is borrowed therefrom, that this will shows us what is pleasing to God and is our duty and is known by us from the five signs: bidding, forbidding, counsel, leave, working. By the schoolmen broadly worked out, Lombard, Sent. I dist. 45. Hugo of St. Victor, de Sacram. Lib. 1 Pars 4. Id. Summa Sent. tract. 1 cap. 13. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 19 art. 11, 12 etc., was it by the Roman theology broadly taken over, Petavius, de Deo lib. V c. 4, 6, Theol. Wirceb. III 160. Perrone, II 199. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. II 156 etc. But with special fondness was it yet handled in the Reformed theology, Calvin, Inst. I c. 18 § 3, 4. Musculus, Loci Comm. p. 978 sq. Vermigli, Loci Comm. p. 63 b. sq. Ursinus, Tract. theol. p. 237 sq. Zanchi, Op. II 251 sq. Polanus, Synt. theol. II c. 19 etc. cf. Schweizer, Gl. der ev. ref. K. I 359-368. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. 68 f. Beside came yet other sunderings of the will of God, chiefly that in will foregoing and following, which already with Tertullian, adv. Marc. II 11, Chrysostom, Ep. ad. Eph. 1:5 and Damascene, de fide orth. II c. 29 comes forth, and that in will outright and conditioned, working and unworking, which already with Augustine is found, Enchir. c. 102 sq. de civ. XXII c. 1 and 2. Also these sunderings can well be understood, in this sense namely that God foregoingly and under condition wills many things, e.g. the bliss of all men, which he yet followingly and outright not wills and therefore not lets happen. Zanchi t. a. p. says then also that all these sunderings come to the same; and even so judge Hyperius, Meth. theol. p. 155-159. Walaeus, Op. I 180. Voetius, Disp. V 88. etc. But though Luther in his book de servo arbitrio very sharply had sundered between the God hidden and revealed, the Lutherans cast off this sundering in will of good pleasure and of sign, at least in Calvinistic sense, Gerhard, loc. 2 c. 8 sect. 15. Baier, Comp. theol. pos. I c. 1 § 22. Buddeus, Instit. theol. dogm. II c. 1 § 29. The Arminians followed that lead, Episcopius, Instit. theol. IV sect. 2 c. 21. Limborch, Theol. Christ. II c. 9 § 9. And the Roman theologians kept the sundering yet well in name by, but cleared it so, that the will of God always was will of good pleasure, sundered in will foregoing and following and that the will of sign nothing was than a sundry showing of that will, Theol. Wirceb. III 160. C. Pesch, Prael. II 156. Kleutgen, Theol. d. Vorz. I 564 f. So it is befallen, that on one side the Romans etc. truly only the sundering in will foregoing and following (outright and conditioned) have kept, and the Reformed only that in will of good pleasure and of sign (decreeing and bidding, hidden and revealed) with casting off of that of will foregoing and following, Maccovius, Collegia theol. disp. 1-8. Nicolaus Gurtler, Instit. theol. 1732 cap. 3 § 105. de Moor I 576. van Mastricht, Theor. pract. theol. II c. 15 § 24 and 27 sq. Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 15, 16. The sundering comes hereon down, that the Romans, Lutherans, Remonstrants etc. go out from the will of sign; this is the own will, therein standing, that God wills not sin but only wills to let it, that he wills the bliss of all, offers grace to all etc.; and as the man then has chosen, God fits himself thereto, sets what he wills, the bliss of who believes, the downfall of who not believes. The will following follows on the choice of the man, and is not the own, beingly will of God but the handling of God after the lead of the man's deed. Thereagainst went the Reformed out from the will of good pleasure and held this for the own, beingly will of God; that will goes always through, reaches ever its goal and is everlasting and unchangeable; the will of sign thereagainst is the bidding of God, in law and gospel, that holds as rule for our deed.
Now it is the ongoing teaching of Scripture, both in the Old and New Testament, that the will of God is everlasting, unchanging, independent, and effective. This is not just stated now and then, for example, Ps. 33:11, 115:3, Dan. 7:25, Isa. 46:10, Matt. 11:26, Rom. 9:18, Eph. 1:4, Rev. 4:11, and so on, but the whole Scripture bears witness to it; all God's virtues demand it; the whole history of church and world provides proof for it. And accordingly, Christian theology, especially since Augustine, taught that the will of God is simple, everlasting, unchanging, because it is one with his being, Aug. Conf. XII 15. The antecedent will is properly no will in God, it may rather be called a wish than an absolute will, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 19 art. 6. The will of sign is called will in God only in a metaphorical sense, just as when someone commands something, it is a sign that he wills it to be done, ibid. art. 11. The proper will in God is the will of good pleasure, and this is one with God's being, is unchanging, and is always fulfilled, ibid. art. 6 and 7. c. Gent. I 72 sq. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 45-48 and the commentaries of Thomas, Bonaventure, and others. Pelagianism has wrongly forsaken this line and elevated a powerless desire, an unfulfilled wish in God, to will. Thereby it has done short to God's whole being, to all his virtues. For if the wish is the proper and essential will of God, then he is robbed of his almightiness, wisdom, goodness, unchangingness, independence, and so on; the whole world government is then withdrawn from his providence; an irreconcilable dualism is created between God's intention and the outcome of world history; the end is then an everlasting disappointment for God; the world plan has failed, and Satan triumphs at the end. Now Pelagianism indeed claims that it acts thus in the interest of God's holiness, and that it upholds this better than Paul and Augustine, than Thomas and Calvin, because in their system God becomes the author of sin. But this is no more than seeming; sin remains as unexplainable on Pelagius's standpoint as on that of Augustine; yes, holiness comes much better to its right here. For it is more in keeping with Scripture and the whole Christian faith to accept that God has in a certain sense willed sin for wise, though to us unknown reasons, than that he, not willing it in any respect, yet suffers and allows it. This last indeed comes too near to his holiness and almightiness, cf. later in the doctrine of sin. Besides, Scripture, though theologically putting the will of good pleasure foremost, yet also upholds the will of sign, in what way and manner he does not will sin. In the signs of prohibition, admonition, warning, chastisement, punishment, and so on, he comes down to us and says what he requires of us. Because man is a reasonable, moral being, God deals with him not as with a stick and a block, but speaks and acts with him according to his nature. Just as a father forbids a child the use of a sharp knife, and yet himself handles it without harm, so God forbids his reasonable creatures sin, which he himself can use and indeed uses to the glorifying of his name. The will of good pleasure and the will of sign therefore do not fight with each other, as the usual objection runs. For first, the will of sign is properly not the will of God, but only his command and precept, which holds as a rule for our conduct. In the will of sign he does not say what he will do; it is no law for his acting; it does not prescribe what God must do; but he says therein what we have to do; it is a rule for our behavior, Deut. 29:29. It is thus called will of God only in a metaphorical sense. Against this it is objected that the will of sign is so called because it is a sign of the will in God, and thus must agree with his will of good pleasure. Secondly, therefore, let it be noted that this is indeed so; the will of sign is an indication of what God wills that we should do. The will of good pleasure and the will of sign do not stand directly opposite each other, so that God according to the first wills sin and according to the second does not will sin, according to the first does not will the salvation of all and according to the second does, and so on. Also according to the will of good pleasure, God takes no pleasure in sin; it is no object of his good pleasure; he does not afflict out of lust for afflicting. And conversely, he no more wills according to the will of sign than according to the will of good pleasure that all people, head for head, be saved; that cannot be taught in earnest by anyone with an eye to history; in fact, the "all" in 1 Tim. 2:4 is limited by everyone to a greater or smaller circle. Both stand so little opposite each other that the will of sign is just the way in which the will of good pleasure is fulfilled. In the way of admonitions and warnings, prohibitions and threats, conditions and demands, God carries out his counsel. And the will of good pleasure only upholds that man, transgressing God's command, becomes not for a single moment independent of God, but in that same moment serves God's counsel and becomes, though unwilling, an instrument of his glory. Not the will of sign alone, but also the will of good pleasure is holy and wise and good, and will just in the way of the law and of righteousness be revealed at the end as such. Therefore, finally, the distinction of both must also be upheld. It is the problem of right and fact, of idea and history, of the moral and the actual, of what ought to happen and of what indeed happens, that meets us here. Whoever denies the will of sign does short to God's holiness, to the majesty of the moral law, to the seriousness of sin. Whoever on the other hand denies the will of good pleasure comes into conflict with the almightiness, the wisdom, the independence, the sovereignty of God. On both standpoints one runs the danger either with a shallow optimism to close the eyes to actuality and call all that is actual reasonable, or with a one-sided pessimism to curse existence and despair of world and fate. Theism, however, seeks no solution in striking out one of the two terms of the problem, but acknowledges and upholds both; it sees the lines of the reasonable and the actual cut and cross each other every moment in history; it leads both back to the sovereignty of God and has of this the high thought that it will bring its holy and wise counsel to execution even through the unreasonable and sinful, to the glory of the Lord's name. Herein indeed his divine sovereignty shines forth brightly, that he glorifies his wisdom in men's foolishness, his strength in their weakness, his righteousness and grace in their sin.
18. God's Sovereignty Revealed in His Omnipotence. The sovereignty of God shows itself at last in His omnipotence, which however after what has already been said needs less lengthy handling. In the Writings, no bound is ever or anywhere set to the might of God. Already in the names El, Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, the thought of might stands foremost. Furthermore, He is called El gadol venora , before whose face no one can stand, Deut. 7:21ff., Avir Yisrael , Isa. 1:24, Ha-El ha-gadol ha-gibbor , whose name is YHWH of hosts, Jer. 32:18, amitz koach , Job 9:4, kabbir , Job 36:5, izzuz vegibbor , Ps. 24:8, Adon , kyrios , Matt. 11:25, Rev. 1:8, 22:5, that is, the Lord, the Owner, the Ruler, who holds authority and highest lordship; the King, who reigns over all things forever, Exod. 15:18, Pss. 29:10, 93-99, 2 Kings 19:15, Jer. 10:7, 10, etc., but above all is King over Israel and as such rules it, shields it, and leads it to blessedness, Num. 23:21, Deut. 33:5, Judg. 8:23, 1 Sam. 8:7, Ps. 10:16, 24:7, 48:3, 74:12, Isa. 33:22, 41:21, 43:15, etc., and likewise in the New Testament the megas basileus , Matt. 5:35, 1 Tim. 1:17, the basileus ton basileuonton kai kyrios ton kyrieuonton , 1 Tim. 6:15, cf. Rev. 19:16; pantokrator , 2 Cor. 6:18, Rev. 1:8, 4:8, 11:17; monos dynastes , 1 Tim. 6:15; who holds both the exousia , arche , potestas , the right, the sway, and the fitness, Matt. 28:18, Rom. 9:21, and the dynamis , kratos , potentia , the skill and the might to work, Matt. 6:13, Rom. 1:20. But furthermore, the omnipotence of God shines out from all His works. The shaping, the upholding, the freeing of Israel from Egypt, the world of nature with her settled ways, the tale of Israel with her wonders, all proclaim loudly and clearly the omnipotence of God. Singers of psalms and seers come back to these great deeds time and again and turn them to the humbling of the proud and to the comfort of the believer. He is strong in skill, Isa. 40:26, shapes earth and heaven, Gen. 1, Isa. 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 18, 48:13, 51:13, Zech. 12:1, upholds their settled ways, Jer. 5:22, 10:10, 14:22, 27:5, 31:35, forms rain and wind, light and darkness, the good and the evil, Amos 3:6, 4:13, 5:8, Isa. 45:5-7, 54:16. He makes dumb and speaking, dead and living, saves and destroys, Exod. 4:11, Deut. 32:39, 1 Sam. 2:6, 2 Kings 5:7, Exod. 15, Deut. 26:8, 29:2, 32:12, 1 Sam. 14:6, Hos. 13:14, Matt. 10:28, Luke 12:20. He has full might over all things, so that nothing can withstand Him, Pss. 8, 18, 19, 24, 29, 33, 104, etc., Job 5:9-27, 9:4ff., 12:14-21, 34:12-15, 36:37. Nothing is too wondrous for Him, all things are doable to Him, Gen. 18:14, Zech. 8:6, Jer. 32:27, Matt. 19:26, Luke 1:37, 18:27; He can raise up children to Abraham from stones, Matt. 3:9. He does all His good pleasure, Ps. 115:3, Isa. 14:24, 27, 46:10, 55:10, and no one can call Him to account, Jer. 49:19, 50:44. And above all, His dynamis shines out in the works of redemption, in the raising of Christ, Rom. 1:4, Eph. 1:20, in the working and strengthening of faith, Rom. 16:25, Eph. 1:19, in the giving out of grace beyond asking and thinking, Eph. 3:20, 2 Cor. 9:8, 2 Pet. 1:3, in the rising up on the last day, John 5:25ff., etc. And this might of God is at last also the wellspring of all might and sway, of all strength and stoutness in the creatures. From Him is the lordship of man, Gen. 1:26, Ps. 8, the sway of rulers, Prov. 8:15, Rom. 13:1-6, the strength of His folk, Deut. 8:17, 18, Ps. 68:35, Isa. 40:26ff., the stoutness of the horse, Job 39:19, the blast of the thunder, Ps. 29:4, 68:34, etc. In one word, His is the strength, Ps. 62:11, and to Him belongs the might and the stoutness, Ps. 96:7, Rev. 4:11, 5:12, 7:12, 19:1.
Entirely in accordance with their teaching on the will and freedom of God, the nominalists now described the almightiness of God in such a way that God by it can not only do all that He wills, but also will all things. Distinguishing between the absolute potency and the ordained, they judged that God according to the former could also sin, err, suffer, die, become a stone or an animal, change bread into the body of Christ, do contradictory things, make undone what has happened, make false what is true and true what is false, and so on. According to His absolute potency, God is thus sheer arbitrariness, pure potency without any content, which is nothing and can become everything.
This is in principle the standpoint of all who uphold the primacy of the will, and therefore this view has repeatedly returned later and occurs not only in Christendom but also among other religions, especially in Islam. On the other side stand those who say that God can only do what He wills and that what He does not will, He also cannot do. The possible coincides with the actual. What does not become actuality is also not possible. God has fully exhausted His might in the world. This was already the opinion of Plato and Plotinus, and further of some church fathers, but was especially taught in the Middle Ages by Abelard: God cannot do anything besides what He does. And so later the Cartesian theologians judged.
Scripture condemns both the one standpoint and the other. On the one side, it expressly says that God cannot do many things; He cannot lie, cannot repent, cannot change, cannot be tempted; His will is indeed one with His being, and the absolute potency, which detaches God's might from His other virtues, is nothing but a vain and unlawful abstraction. On the other hand, Scripture declares just as decidedly that the possible extends much further than the actual. And to this the Christian theology held fast.
Augustine says on the one hand that God's will and might are not distinguished from His being. Man is one thing that he is, another that he can do.... But God, to whom substance to be is not one thing and power to be able another, but whatever is His is consubstantial with Him, and whatever is, because God is, He is not in one way and can in another; but He has being and ability together, because He has willing and doing together. Indeed, God's almightiness consists in this, that He can do whatever He wills. But God cannot will everything; He cannot deny Himself. Because He does not will, He cannot, because He cannot even will. For justice cannot will to do what is unjust, or wisdom what is foolish, or truth what is false. From this we are reminded that the almighty God cannot do not only what the apostle says: He cannot deny Himself, but many things.... The almighty God cannot die, cannot change, cannot be deceived, cannot be unhappy, cannot be conquered.
But then Augustine further argues that this is no lack of might, but rather true, absolute almightiness. It would precisely be weakness if He could err, sin, and so on. Augustine especially clarifies this in relation to the statement often brought against God's almightiness, that God cannot make undone what has been done. This saying can have two meanings. First, one can mean by it that God annihilates the fact that has happened; but this makes no sense, for a fact that has happened is no longer and cannot and need not be annihilated. But second, one can mean by it that God makes the fact that has happened undone in human consciousness, so that it now thinks that it has not happened. But this also makes no sense, for God who is truth would then have to make untrue what is true.
Other theologians have spoken in like manner about God's almightiness and have only repeated what Augustine said. The Reformed theologians in particular acknowledged the distinction in God's absolute and ordained potency only to a certain degree. The nominalists had misused it to assert that God according to the first could do everything, even what was contrary to His nature, and with it they especially argued for the doctrine of transubstantiation. Against this Calvin rose up and rejected such a fiction of absolute potency as profane. The Romanists therefore accused Calvin of limiting and thus denying God's almightiness. But Calvin did not deny that God could do more than He actually did, but he only opposed such an absolute potency that would not be bound to His being and virtues and thus could also do all sorts of contradictory things. So understood, in the sense of Augustine and Thomas, the said distinction was also generally accepted by the Reformed theologians. And so understood, this distinction is also to be approved.
Pantheism indeed says that God and world are correlates, and that God has no own being and life, no own consciousness and will distinct from the world. But it thus hopelessly mixes everything together and also brings boundless confusion into thinking. God and world, eternity and time, infinity and finitude, being and becoming, the possible and the actual, the necessary and the contingent, and so on, are not words of the same content and meaning. The world is of such a nature that our thinking cannot take away from it the character of contingency. The thought of its non-existence contains not the least logical contradiction. There may be motives why God has called the world into being; the cosmos may in its whole and in each of its parts be an embodiment of divine thoughts; but it is impossible to explain the origin of the world logically, without the will of an almighty God. And therefore there remains beside the actual a realm for the possible. God does not exhaust Himself in the world, eternity does not empty itself into time, infinity is not identical with the sum of all the finite, omniscience does not coincide with the thought-content of rational creatures. And so God's almightiness is still infinitely exalted above the boundless might which comes to revelation in the world.
1. Even higher than in the essential names does God's revelation rise in the personal names, which make known to us the distinctions that exist in the unity of his being. This revelation begins already in the Old Testament. Indeed, it does not yet appear there fully, as the church fathers and later theologians often taught with disregard for the historical character of the revelation; but neither is it correct that it would be wholly absent there, as was taught after the Socinians and the Remonstrants, by Semler, Herder, Doederlein, Bretschneider, Hofmann, and others. The Old Testament makes the trinitarian existence of God known only unclearly; it is the charter of the developing doctrine of the Trinity. But it nevertheless contains, not in isolated texts alone but especially in the organism of its revelation, elements that are of the highest significance for the doctrine of the Trinity. First of all, the name Elohim comes into consideration. That this in its plural form is no proof for the Trinity was already noted earlier. But yet it is remarkable that this name, among the proponents of monotheism, never encountered objection because of its form. This can only be explained from the fact that it contains no reminiscence of polytheism, but designates the Godhead in its fullness and richness of life. The God of revelation is no abstract unity, but the living, true God, who in the infinite fullness of his life includes the highest diversity. Already immediately at the creation this comes out. Elohim creates by speaking and by sending forth his Spirit. The word that God speaks is no sound, but a power so great that by it he creates and upholds the world; he speaks and it is there, Genesis 1:3, Psalm 33:6, 9, 147:18, 148:8, Joel 2:11. That word spoken by God, going forth from him and thus distinguished from him, is later hypostatized as wisdom in Job 28:23-27, Proverbs 8:22 ff., cf. Proverbs 3:19, Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15. That wisdom is possessed by God from eternity, prepared, appointed, searched out, as his foster child and master workman, by which he created and upholds all things. But not only by the word and the wisdom, also by the Spirit of God does the work of creation and preservation come to pass, Genesis 1:2, Psalm 33:6, 104:33, 139:7, Job 26:13, 27:3, 32:8, 33:4, Isaiah 40:7, 13, 59:19. While the word is the mediator by which God calls all things into being, it is his Spirit by which he is immanent in all creation, and makes everything living and adorns it. Thus, already according to the teaching of the Old Testament, in the creation it comes out that all things owe their origin and continuance to a threefold cause. Elohim and cosmos do not stand dualistically beside each other, but the world, created by God, has his Word as objective, his Spirit as subjective principle. The world is first thought by God and therefore comes into being by his almighty speaking, and when it has received reality, it does not stand outside and over against him but remains resting in his Spirit.
Even more clearly does this threefold cause come out in the Old Testament in the field of special revelation, in the work of re-creation. Then it is no longer Elohim alone, but Jehovah, who reveals himself, who makes himself known as the God of the covenant and of the oath, of revelation and of history. But even as such he does not reveal himself directly and immediately, Exodus 33:20. It is again by his Word that he makes himself known and saves and preserves his people, Psalm 107:20. And the bearer of that word of salvific revelation is the Malak Jehovah, the Messenger of the Covenant. Not always, where the expression Angel of God or Angel of the Lord occurs in the Old Testament, is the uncreated angel to be thought of, as Hengstenberg supposed. In 2 Samuel 24:16 ff., 1 Kings 19:5-7, 2 Kings 19:35, Daniel 3:25, 28, 6:23, 10:13, we have to think of an ordinary angel, just as also in Matthew 1:20, 28, Luke 1:11, 2:9, Acts 5:19, 8:26, 10:3, 12:7, 23, 27:23, Jude 9, Revelation 12:7. About other places there can be doubt, such as Numbers 22:22 ff., Joshua 5:13, 14, Judges 2:1-14, 6:11-24, 13:2-23. But in the places mentioned in part I, the subject that speaks and acts in the Angel of the Lord goes far above a created angel. The church fathers before Augustine unanimously saw in this Angel of the Lord a theophany of the Logos. Often this view was connected with the opinion that the Father is properly invisible, unapproachable, inexpressible, but that the Son can reveal himself and is the principle of all revelation; so in Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Irenaeus, Tertullian. But this separation and opposition between the Father and the Son was rightly opposed by the later church fathers, Athanasius, the three Cappadocians, etc. The Son was truly God and thus as invisible as the Father. Thus the view of Augustine was prepared, who also thought the theophanies of God in the Old Testament always mediated by created angels. The scholastic and Roman theologians usually adopted this exegesis of Augustine. Luther and Calvin sometimes thought of a created, then of the uncreated angel; but the later Protestant exegetes mostly understood those places of the Logos, especially also in opposition to the Socinians, Remonstrants, and Rationalists, who saw in them nothing but angelophanies. While Hofmann, Baumgarten, Delitzsch join the latter view, the old view is again defended by Stier, Hengstenberg, Keil, Kurtz, Ebrard, etc., also Philippi. The difference between these two explanations is not so great as it seems. The proponents of the ancient church view must indeed acknowledge that the Logos assumed a human form; and Augustine and his followers must admit that in that created angel the Logos revealed himself in a quite special way. And besides, the places where the Angel of the Lord is spoken of cannot all be understood in the same sense. So much is certain, then, that in the Malak Jehovah, who by eminence bears that name, God and specifically the Logos was present in a wholly unique way. That is clearly evident from the fact that he, though distinguished from Jehovah, is yet also one with him in name, in power, in redemption and blessing, in worship and honor. This exegesis is moreover recommended by the whole Old and New Testament Scripture, Job 33:23, Psalm 34:8, 35:5, Proverbs 8:22 ff., 30:4, Isaiah 9:5, Hosea 12:5, 6, Micah 5:6, Zechariah 1:8-14, 3:1 ff., 12:8, Malachi 3:1, John 8:56, 58, cf. John 1:1-5, 1 Corinthians 10:4, 9; and Acts 7:30, 35, 38, Galatians 3:19, Hebrews 2:2 are not in conflict with this. And just as Jehovah now in the re-creation reveals himself objectively by his word, in the Malak Jehovah; so he does this subjectively in and by his Spirit. The Spirit of God is the principle of all life and salvation, of all gifts and powers within the field of revelation; of courage, Judges 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 13:25, 1 Samuel 11:6, of bodily strength, Judges 14:6, 15:14, of artistic skill, Exodus 28:3, 31:3-5, 35:31-35, 1 Chronicles 28:12, of governing policy, Numbers 11:17, 25, 1 Samuel 16:13, of understanding and wisdom, Job 32:8, Isaiah 11:2, of holiness and renewal, Psalm 51:13, Isaiah 63:10, cf. Genesis 6:3, Nehemiah 9:20, 1 Samuel 10:6, 9, of prophecy and prediction, Numbers 11:25, 29, 24:2, 3, Micah 3:8, etc. In a special measure he will rest upon the Messiah, Isaiah 11:2, 42:1, 61:1, but thereafter also be poured out upon all flesh, Joel 3:1, 2, Isaiah 32:15, 44:3, Ezekiel 36:26, 27, 39:29, Zechariah 12:10 and give to all a new heart and a new spirit, Ezekiel 36:26, 27.
This threefold divine principle, which underlies creation and re-creation, and bears the whole economy of the Old Testament revelation, is now several times also mentioned together. The threefold repetitions in Daniel 9:19, Zechariah 1:3, Isaiah 6:3, 33:22 do not come into consideration here; only the high-priestly blessing, Numbers 6:24-26, points in the threefold character of its blessing back to a threefold revelation of God and is thus the Old Testament model of the apostolic blessing, 2 Corinthians 13:13. The plural forms in Genesis 1:26, 27, 3:22, Isaiah 6:8, etc., lack sufficient force, since they are to be explained in the same way as the plural Elohim. Of more significance are places like Genesis 19:24, Psalm 45:8, 110:1, Hosea 1:7, since they point to a self-distinction in the divine being. And the clearest indication of a threefold self-distinction in the divine being is in Psalm 33:6, Isaiah 61:1, 63:9-12, Haggai 2:5, 6. Many formerly also saw in the three men who appeared to Abraham, Genesis 18, a revelation of the Trinity, e.g., Witsius. Others thought that one of the three was the Logos and the other two ordinary angels, e.g., Calvin. Much more acceptable, however, is the exegesis of Augustine, according to whom the three men were three created angels, in whom Jehovah nevertheless revealed himself and was present in a special way.
2. These thoughts of the Old Testament have been fruitful in many directions. First, they were taken over and further worked out in the apocryphal writings. In the Proverbs of Jesus son of Sirach, wisdom takes a broad place. It is from God and created by Him before all things, and it abides with Him forever. It is spread out over all God's works, but has its resting place especially in Zion and is to be found in the law, chapter 1:1-40 and chapter 24; compare also Baruch, chapter 3:9-4:4. But the Book of Wisdom goes further, 6:22-9. Here wisdom is so hypostatized that divine attributes and works are ascribed to it. It is clearly distinct from God, for it is the breath of His power, an emanation of His glory, a reflection of His light, 7:25, 26. But it is also most intimately bound with God, lives with Him, is initiated into His knowledge, and chooses those ideas which shall be carried out, 8:3, 4. It is the paredros on His throne, knows all His works, and was present at the creation of the world, 9:4, 9. Yes, it is itself that creates and governs and renews all things, 7:27, 8:1, 5. It is identical with God's Word, 9:1, 2; compare 16:12, 18:15, 16; and with His Spirit, 1:4-7, 9:17, 12:1. Already in this Book of Wisdom the influence of Greek philosophy is noticeable, especially 7:22 following, but much stronger is this the case with Philo. The relation of God to the world was already searched out by Plato. From the distinction and opposition of doxa and episteme Plato inferred that, just as the former has a sensible object in reality, so the latter must have an eternal and unchangeable being, that is, an idea, as its object. These ideas, although properly nothing other than general concepts, were raised by Plato to metaphysical principles, to proper substances, to a kind of intermediate beings, after which the Demiurge formed the cosmos and which thus are the patterns and causes of things. Although Aristotle subjected this doctrine of ideas to sharp criticism, yet the thought that an intelligent, spiritual principle lay at the ground of all things did not again disappear from Greek philosophy. Especially the Stoa laid stress on it, that a divine reason was the ground of all appearances. It used therefor the name logos spermatikos , because all being and life sprouts from that logos as from a seed, and also spoke in the plural of logoi spermatikoi , to indicate thereby alongside the unity also the diversity of the all-creating natural power, Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks IV. Even the later so significant distinction of logos endiathetos and prophorikos is borrowed from the Stoa. This Greek doctrine of the idea, the nous , and the logos was already before Philo brought into connection with the doctrine of the Old Testament concerning the word and the wisdom, Zeller. But yet it is especially Philo who has fused all these different elements—Platonic doctrine of ideas, Stoic doctrine of logos, Old Testament doctrine of wisdom, and so on—into one system. He proceeds therein from the dualism of God and world. God is without qualities, indescribable; we can only say that He is, not what He is. Therefore He cannot come into immediate contact with matter. Before God created the sensible world, He made a plan and formed in His thinking the kosmos noetos , the ideas, as patterns and powers of all things. These ideas are now presented by Philo as the powers by which God can work in the world, and now once more than less figuratively, now once more than less personally described as servants, governors, ambassadors, mediators, as logoi and powers, as bonds and pillars, which by Moses were called angels and by the Greeks demons, as thoughts which are in the divine thinking and uncreated and infinite as God Himself. These ideas are now also many in number, but they find their unity in the logos, the idea which contains all ideas, the power which contains all powers, the book which contains all thoughts, the kosmos noetos itself. And in the same way as the divine ideas, so also this logos is described, now once more as a property of God and one with His wisdom, and then more as a being distinct from God. He stands as it were between God and world and has part in both; He is not uncreated as God and yet also not created as the finite things; He is deputy, ambassador, interpreter, governor, angel, instrument, image, shadow of God, yes His firstborn son, His eldest son in distinction from the world which is His youngest son; Philo calls Him even God, but a second God. Zeller sets clearly in the light that the logos with Philo, just as the divine ideas, bears this double character and must bear it. He is an intermediate and therefore a double being, a property of God and yet a person, neither identical with God nor a creature as the world, an idea in the thinking of God and a power in the world, hovering back and forth between an impersonal property and a personal substance, but therefore just deemed suitable as mediator between God and the world; compare Zeller, Philosophy of the Greeks V, and literature on Philo there; also Max Heinze, The Doctrine of the Logos in Greek Philosophy , 1872; Schürer, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte ; Meyer-Weiss, Evangelium of John , 6th edition; Jean Réville, The Doctrine of the Logos , Paris 1881; Kuenen, National Religions and World Religions ; Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church , 1890; Hatch, Greeks and Christianity , 1892; Schultz, Old Testament Theology , 4th edition; Kaftan, The Relation of Evangelical Faith to the Doctrine of the Logos (Gottschick, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche VII, 1897); Anathon Aall, History of the Logos Idea in Greek Philosophy , Leipzig 1896; Theological Studies by Dr. Danbanton, XI 1893. In Jewish theology this doctrine of intermediate beings is developed still further. As completely transcendent, God cannot immediately enter into connection with creatures. He needs therefor all sorts of intermediate beings. If He wishes to do nothing other than guide the present powers in nature and humanity, then He makes use of angels. But if He wishes to work creatively or recreatively in the world, hypostases appear which, although being creatures, yet bear divine attributes because they are representatives of God. Such hypostases are Metatron, the metathronos of God; Memra, the word of God; Shekinah, the presence of God's glory; Bath Kol, the voice of God which gives revelations and proclaims oracles; Ruach Hakkodesh, the spirit which goes out from God and imparts higher knowledge, Eisenmenger, Discovered Judaism I, II; Weber, System of Ancient Synagogal Palestinian Theology ; Herzog, second edition 2, 13.
3. Although the Proverbs of Jesus Sirach still cling rather closely to the canonical writings, in the Book of Wisdom, in Philo, and in Jewish theology, an influence of philosophy can be seen, which leads thoughts further and further away from those of the Old Testament. First, there is a difference in principle. The teaching of intermediate beings in Philo and later Jewish theology arose from the Platonic opposition between God and the world, of which no trace is yet to be noticed in the Old Testament books. The Word and Wisdom in the Old Testament are not mediating intermediate beings between God and the world, but they stand wholly on God's side, belong to Him, and are the beginnings of the created world. In Philo, however, the intermediate beings take an impossible place: they are neither God nor creature, neither person nor property, neither substance nor power, but partake of both; they wipe out the boundary line that in the Old Testament always separates the creature from the Creator and prepare for the philosophy of Gnosticism and the Kabbalah. In the second place, there is no less great a difference in the character that the teaching of the Word and Wisdom bears in Scripture and that the teaching of intermediate beings bears in Philo. In Philo, the logos in its first meaning is the same as reason, thinking, thought in God, and thus as such immanent in God, nothing but a property. Only in its second meaning does that logos become word, which goes out from God and takes a mediating place between God and the world. In the Old Testament, however, the word is not first reason and thought of God, much less an ideal world-image, a kosmos noetos , but the spoken word, by which He creates and upholds all things. And Wisdom in Job and Proverbs is also set forth not as a property of God, but personally as possessed and ordered by God from eternity and consulted and searched out in the creation of all things. Thirdly, the intermediate beings in Philo and the Jewish theologians have no saving meaning. They do serve for enlightenment and for sharing knowledge, but there is no talk of a connection between those intermediate beings and the Messiah. They even push the teaching of the Messiah as revelation of truth and as acquirer of salvation into the background. And now it is indeed true that also in the Old Testament the connection between Word and Wisdom, servant of God and Messiah, Angel of the Lord and Davidide, is not yet clearly completed. The lines still run alongside each other. But they do draw near to each other. Elohim and Jehovah is the same God. He who as Elohim creates and upholds the world through Word and Spirit is also He who as Jehovah has led Israel through His Angel, will save His people through the servant of Jehovah, and will rule eternally through the Messiah from David's house and renew and hallow them all through His Spirit. And these lines, which in the Old Testament draw nearer and nearer to each other, run out to Him who is the Logos, the prophet, priest, and king, in whom God comes to His people and dwells among them forever. For Philo, an incarnation of the logos would have been an absurd thought. In the New Testament, this is precisely the highest revelation of God. Finally, it can be added here that the teaching of intermediate beings in Philo and others is not worked out and has no bound. Philo does bring some oneness into the divine ideas by summing them up in the logos, but the same thing that he says of this, he also speaks time and again of all divine ideas. In Jewish theology, the number of intermediate beings increases more and more. It is an emanation, as with the aeons in Gnosticism. The dualism avenges itself to the end. The intermediate beings bring no fellowship between God and the world to pass, because they are in fact neither of both. The world still always remains outside and over against God. The meaning of the Spirit of God is not seen. In the Old Testament, this teaching of the Spirit takes a great place. In the apocryphal writings, in Philo, and in Jewish theology, it is almost wholly overlooked. The Spirit is at most only still a Spirit of foretelling, given to a few, Zeller, V 384, Weber, 184 f., but no more the Spirit of the Old Testament, who closes and completes creation and re-creation. For all these reasons, there is a basic difference between the unfolding that the trinitarian thoughts of the Old Testament have found in the apocryphal writings, in Philo and the Jews, and that which is given to them in the New Testament. The New Testament may have some words in common with Philo and others and also speak of Christ as logos , eikon , apaugasma , huios , theos , etc.; the agreement goes no further. The New Testament is written in Greek, in the koine dialektos , in the tongue that existed and was spoken everywhere. It created no new tongue. The thoughts of God have taken on the flesh of human tongue. But in those words, God has laid a new content. There is agreement in form, the content differs. Philo and John have no more than the name of Logos in common. More and more this is seen and acknowledged, Harnack, Dogmengesch. I² 85, 99. Trip, Die Theophanien des A. T. 126-129. Dorner, Entw. der Lehre v. d. Person Christi I² 30 f. Godet, Comm. sur l’Evang. de Saint Jean I² p. 212-221. Meyer-Weiss, Komm. über das Ev. des Joh. 6e Aufl. S. 50 f. Weiss, Bibl. Theol. des N. T. 3te Aufl. S. 624. Orr, Christian View of God and the world 510-512. Cremer, Wörterbuch der neut. Gräcität s. v. logos . Cf. also Max Müller, Theosophie oder Psychol. Religion, Leipzig Engelmann 1895, 12te Vorlesung.
4. The New Testament holds the pure unfolding of the trinitarian thoughts of the Old Testament. But now these come forth in a much clearer light, not through abstract reasonings about God's being, but through God's self-revealing in appearing, word, and deed. Just as strongly as in the Old, the oneness of God is spoken out in the New Testament. There is but one being that can be called God, theos , Elohim, John 17:3, 1 Corinthians 8:4, but this one true God shows Himself in the household of the New Testament, namely in the deeds of flesh-becoming and outpouring, as Father, Son, and Spirit. In those deeds no wholly new beginnings step out. They are the same that were also at work in the making and in the household of the Old Testament. The Father, who mostly bears this name in kinship to the Son and to His children, is the same who can also be called Father as Maker of all things, Matthew 7:11, Luke 3:38, John 4:21, Acts 17:28, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Hebrews 12:9; all things are from Him, 1 Corinthians 8:6. The Son, who is named so above all in His wholly one-of-a-kind kinship to God, is the same who as Logos made all things with the Father, John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 1:3. And the Holy Spirit, who has gotten His name above all with an eye to His work in the gathering, is the same who with Father and Son in the making adorns and fulfills all things, Matthew 1:18, 4:1, Mark 1:12, Luke 1:35, 4:1, 14, Romans 1:4. Furthermore, it is the overall teaching of the New Testament writers that these three, Father, Son, and Spirit, are none other than those who in the household of the Old Testament showed themselves to the fathers in word and deed, in foretelling and wonder. The Old Testament name Yahweh, poorly given back by kurios , unfolds its fullness in the New Testament name pater . In the flesh-become Son of God is seen the fulfilling of all Old Testament foretelling and shadow, of seer and king, of priest and offering, of God's servant and David-offspring, of Angel of Yahweh and wisdom. And in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit has come to pass what the Old Testament had pledged, Acts 2:16ff. But the New Testament, though linking itself to the Old Testament, does not stay there; it goes far beyond it. Much clearer than in the Old Testament it now comes to light that the God of the Bond is a three-in-one God and must be so, that a threefold beginning steps forth in the work of blessedness. Not single texts, but the whole New Testament is in this sense trinitarian. All welfare and blessing and blessedness has its threefold root in God, Father, Son, and Spirit. We see these three step forth at once at Jesus' birth, Matthew 1:18ff., Luke 1:35, and at His baptism, Matthew 3:16, 17, Mark 1:10, 11, Luke 3:21, 22. Jesus' teaching is wholly trinitarian. He makes known to us the Father and sets Him forth as Spirit, who has life from Himself, John 4:24, 5:26, and in a wholly one-of-a-kind sense is His Father, Matthew 11:27, John 2:16, 5:17. He sets Himself apart from the Father, but is yet His only-begotten, own, much-beloved Son, Matthew 11:27, 21:37-39, John 3:16 etc., one with Him in life, glory, might, John 1:14, 5:26, 10:30. And He speaks of the Holy Spirit, who Himself leads and fits Him, Mark 1:12, Luke 4:1, 14, John 3:34, as of another Helper, whom He will send from the Father, John 15:26, and who will chasten, teach, lead into truth, comfort, and stay forever, John 14:16. And before He goes away, Jesus draws all this together in to onoma tou patros kai tou huiou kai tou hagiou pneumatos , that is, in the one godly name, to onoma in singular, in which yet three set-apart subjects, ho pater , ho huios , and to pneuma , all named on purpose with the marker, show themselves. This teaching is carried on and spread out by the apostles; all know and praise a threefold godly root of welfare. The good pleasure, foreknowing, choosing, might, love, kingship is the Father's, Matthew 6:13, 11:26, John 3:16, Romans 8:29, Ephesians 1:9, 1 Peter 1:2 etc. The go-between-ship, atoning, blessedness, kindness, wisdom, rightness is the Son's, Matthew 1:21, 1 Corinthians 1:30, Ephesians 1:10, 1 Timothy 2:5, 1 Peter 1:2, 1 John 2:2 etc. And the rebirth, renewing, hallowing, fellowship is the Holy Spirit's, John 3:5, John 14-16, Romans 5:5, 8:15, 14:17, 2 Corinthians 1:21, 22, 1 Peter 1:2, 1 John 5:6 etc. And just as Jesus gathers His teaching at last in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, so also the apostles set these three time and again next to each other and on one line, 1 Corinthians 8:6, 12:4-6, 2 Corinthians 13:13, 1 Peter 1:2, 1 John 5:4-6, Revelation 1:4-6. Cf. on the Trinity in the New Testament: Baur, Trinity and Incarnation of God I 80 ff. Hahn, Theology of the New Testament I 106 ff. Philippi, Church Creed II 200 ff. Dorner, Christian Creed I 331 ff. Sartorius, Christ's Person and Work I³ 44 ff. Beck, Christian Creed II 40 ff. etc. Also Biedermann, Christian Dogmatics II 37 acknowledges that the trinitarian teaching of God roots in the Scripture, cf. Strauss I 409-425. Lipsius, Dogmatics § 241, 242. F. A. B. Nitzsch, Evangelical Dogmatics 426. The text 1 John 5:7 is not named above because of its doubtful trueness. It is missing in all Greek codices, except in a few from the 16th century; in all Latin codices before the 8th century; in nearly all renderings. Furthermore, it is never quoted by the Greek fathers, not even in the Arian strife, and likewise not by the Latin fathers, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, etc. If it is quoted or taken for granted by Tertullian, then it was there about 190. If by Cyprian, then it was known about 220. If it was in the Afra, according to a manuscript from the 5th and one from the 7th century, then it can be climbed a bit higher. The Afra arose about 160 in Africa and came about 250 to Italy. Surely the text is found in Vigilius, end of 5th century. In the 16th century it was taken up in the Complutensian edition, Erasmus 3rd ed., Stephanus, Beza, received text. In the linking it is not called for. Outlaying of the leaving out and fading away is very hard. The trueness is however still warded by some, e.g., W. Koelling, The Trueness of 1 John 5:7 . Breslau 1893.
5. The Holy Scripture does not stop at these data; it offers yet more and makes us know something of the relations in which these three distinct subjects, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, stand to each other. For this, the name Father comes first into reckoning. This name marks in the broadest sense God as Maker of all his works, especially of mankind, Num. 16:22, Mt. 7:11, Luk. 3:28, Joh. 4:21, Acts 17:28, 1 Cor. 8:6, Eph. 3:15, Heb. 12:9. In the Old Testament this name gets a theocratic meaning; God is the Father of Israel, because he shaped and kept it by his wondrous might, Deut. 32:6, Isa. 63:16, 64:8, Mal. 1:6, 2:10, Jer. 3:19, 31:9, Ps. 103:13, Rom. 9:4; in the New Testament this meaning passes over into the ethical, in which God is the Father of his children, Mt. 6:4, 8, 9, Rom. 8:15 etc. But in a wholly unique, metaphysical sense God is Father of the Son. Jesus always makes an essential distinction between the bond in which he himself and in which others, the Jews, the disciples, stand to the Father, Mt. 11:25-27, Luk. 22:29, Joh. 2:16, 5:17, 20:17 etc. He called God his own Father, πατερα ἰδιον, Joh. 5:18. And the Scripture clearly shows that the name Father does not hold first for God in bond to Israel and the believers, but on the contrary originally for the bond of the Father to the Son, Joh. 14:6-13, 17:26. God is in the true, first sense Father of the Son, he loves the Son, Joh. 5:19ff., 10:17, 17:24, 26, and this love goes from the Father through the Son upon others, Joh. 16:27, 17:26. This bond of the Father to the Son did not become in time but it is from everlasting, Joh. 1:14, 8:38, 17:5, 24. And therefore God is by the apostles ever named in a special sense the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Rom. 15:6, 1 Cor. 15:24, 2 Cor. 1:3, Gal. 1:1, Eph. 1:3 etc. The Fatherhood toward the Son is his special, personal trait. He alone is of himself, the first in order of being, Joh. 5:26, and therefore also the Father both in shaping and reshaping, from whom all things are, 1 Cor. 8:6. So in Old as in New Testament it is the Father who takes the first place. His is the purpose, Acts 4:28, Eph. 1:11, the good pleasure, Mt. 11:26, Eph. 1:9, the first step in shaping and redeeming, Ps. 33:6, Joh. 3:16, the ἐξουσια and the δυναμις, Mt. 6:13, Rom. 1:20, Eph. 1:19, the righteousness, Gen. 18:25, Deut. 32:4, Joh. 17:25, Rom. 3:26, 2 Tim. 4:8, the goodness, the wisdom, the deathlessness, the unapproachable light, Mt. 19:17, Rom. 16:27, 1 Tim. 6:16. Therefore he also ever bears the name of God in a special sense. He is Elohim, Jehovah Elohim, El Elyon, El Shaddai, μονος ἀληθινος θεος, Joh. 17:3, εἱς θεος, 1 Cor. 8:6, 1 Tim. 2:5, who as God and Father is named beside the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, 1 Cor. 12:6, 2 Cor. 13:13, 1 Thess. 1:3, Rev. 1:6. Even Christ calls him not only his Father but also his God, Mt. 27:46, Joh. 20:17, Heb. 1:9, 2:17, 5:1, 10:7, 9, and he himself is called the Christ of God, Luk. 9:20, 1 Cor. 3:23, Rev. 12:10. Wrongly however from this the Arians of old and later times drew that only the Father is God, and Son and Ghost, though akin to God, yet stand outside the godly being. For first the Scripture, as will soon more clearly appear, gives to Son and Ghost just as much godly names, traits, works and honor as to the Father. And further it deserves note that the Scripture nowhere says that the Father alone is the true God, but indeed that the Father is the alone true God, something which in the churchly teaching of the Trinity is fully owned. Next all those places make no contrast between the Father on one side and the Son and the Ghost on the other, but between the Father, as the one God, and the gods of the heathen. Then from the sayings that the Father is the only true God, alone wise, alone good, alone deathless, follows by no means that not also Son and Ghost are of the same godly being and share the same oneness, wisdom, goodness and deathlessness, even as from 1 Cor. 8:6 follows not that only Christ and not God is our Lord, through whom all things are and we through him. And lastly the Father can therefore be called alone wise, alone good etc., because he has all of himself, is πηγη θεοτητος, Son and Ghost on the other hand have the same being and the same traits by sharing. The name of God, given to the Father in special, marks that he in the godly order is the first; it is as it were an office name, marking of his rank and place, even as among men, who all share the same nature, yet there is also difference of standing and of honor, Augustine, de trin. I c. 6. VI c. 9. Petavius, de trin. II c. 4. III c 1. 2. Mastricht, Theol. theor. pract. II c. 25.
6. Furthermore, light is also shed on the immanent relations of God by the names which the Son bears in Scripture. These names are very many in number, mostly refer to his historical appearance, and therefore come up later in the locus on Christ. But there are also some among them that belong to him before and apart from his incarnation.
First, the name Logos comes into consideration. Various reasons have been given why Christ bears this name. The word has been translated by ratio , sermo , verbum , and then again understood as verbum interius or exterius , Petavius, de trin. VI c. 1. However, the starting point for the naming undoubtedly lies in the ongoing teaching of Scripture that God reveals himself in creation and re-creation through the word. By the word God creates, upholds, and governs all things, and by the word he also renews and re-creates the world. Therefore, the gospel is also called the word of God, logos tou theou .
John calls Christ the Logos because he is the one in and through whom God reveals himself, both in creation and in re-creation, John 1:3, 14. In the Old Testament, however, the word by which God reveals himself first appears at the creation. The hypostasis and eternal existence of that word is not expressed. In Proverbs 8, wisdom is indeed presented personally and eternally but also brought into close connection with creation; with a view to this, it is prepared, appointed, searched out by God, vs. 22, 23. The Arians inferred from the qanani of vs. 22, LXX ektise me , Syr. Trg. berani , cf. Sirach 1:4, 9, 24:8, that the Son was not eternally generated but created before all things. And the church fathers argued against this that qanani should be translated by ektēsato , Aq. Symm., or possedit , Jerome, or that this word did not refer to the essence of the Son but to his office and dignity in creation and re-creation. Without doubt, the latter is the case. There is no mention here of an eternal generation, but it is only said that God prepared wisdom, qanani , and appointed it, nissakti , that it was born, chillalti , before and with a view to creation, Petavius, de trin. II c. 1.
But the New Testament goes far beyond this. John not only says that he, in and through whom God reveals himself, is a person, but he expressly declares that this Logos was in the beginning, en archē ēn ho Logos . He did not become Logos; he was not first prepared and appointed to it at creation; he was as a person and by nature Logos, Logos from eternity. And furthermore, he himself was theos ; he was in communion with God, ēn en archē pros ton theon vs. 2, eis ton kolpon tou patros , vs. 18, the object of his eternal love and self-communication, 5:26, 17:24. Therefore, he could also perfectly reveal the Father, because he partook of his divine nature, his divine life, his divine love, etc., from eternity and was by nature Logos. God communicated himself to him; therefore, he can communicate God to us. The Logos is the absolute revelation of God, for God has communicated himself with all his fullness eternally to him.
Another name is that of Son of God. In the Old Testament this name mostly has a theocratic meaning. Israel is called so, because it was chosen, called, taken up by God, Ex. 4:22, 19:5, Deut. 1:31, 8:5, 14:1, 32:6, 18, Isa. 63:8, Jer. 31:9, 20, Hos. 11:1, Mal. 1:6, 2:10. In the New Testament the church takes its place, which consists of υἱοι θεου through adoption or τεκνα θεου through birth. Specifically, the title Son of God is also many times an official name, for the judges Ps. 82:6, for the angels, Job 38:7, and especially also for the king, 2 Sam. 7:11-14, Ps. 89:27, 28. In Psalm 2:7 Jehovah says to the king anointed over Zion: אֲנִי הַיּוֹם יְלִדְתִּיךָ , בְּנִי אַתָּה , LXX γεγεννηκα σε , Vulgate genui te ; on the day when the Lord anointed Him and set Him as king, He generated Him as Son and gave Him the right to world dominion. With regard to David this refers back to God's decree in 2 Sam. 7, and with regard to the Messiah shadowed forth by David it is explained in Heb. 1:5, 5:5 of eternity, cf. vs. 2, 3, in which Christ as the Son is generated by the Father, that is, in which He is brought forth as the brightness of God's glory and the express image of His person. And that He was this is now, according to Acts 13:33, Rom. 1:3, powerfully proven in the resurrection. In Micah 5:1 a related thought is expressed. The Ruler over Israel, who shall once come forth from little Bethlehem, exists already from of old. His goings forth as Ruler, from God, are already from the days of eternity. He was Ruler from eternity, He has shown this in the history of Israel and so He shall once visibly come forth from Bethlehem. The name Son of God, applied to the Messiah, undoubtedly proceeds from the theocratic meaning of this expression in the Old Testament. It is not likely that the possessed, Mt. 8:29, cf. 4:3, the Jews, Mt. 27:40, the high priest, Mt. 26:63, or even the disciples at least in the first time, Jn. 1:50, 11:27, Mt. 16:16 understood the full content of this name. But in Christ this name nevertheless receives a much deeper meaning. Indeed He is now and then called God's Son as mediator and king in a theocratic sense, Lk. 1:35, although even then the adoptionist view, that He is Son according to His divine nature through generation and according to His human nature through adoption, as was asserted by the Socinians, Remonstrant Confession art. 3. Apology of the Confession art. 3. Limborch, Christian Theology II 17, 10. B. S. Cremer, cf. Archive for Church History of the Netherlands VIII 419-428, Calvin Institutes II 14. 6. Maresius, I 755 sq. etc., finds no support in Scripture. But Christ is not first taken up as a king among Israel in time to be Son of God. He is not called God's Son on account of His supernatural birth, as the Socinians taught and Hofmann, Scriptural Proof I 116 f. still tries to argue. He does not bear that name in an ethical sense, as many think, Weiss, Biblical Theology § 17. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation II² 97. Scholten, Dogmatics II 206 etc. He did not first become it through His mediatorship and His resurrection, for which appeal is made to Jn. 10:34-36, Acts 13:32, 33, Rom. 1:4. But He is Son of God in a metaphysical sense, by nature and from eternity. He is highly exalted above angels and prophets, Mt. 13:32, 21:27, 22:2, and stands in an entirely unique relation to God, Mt. 11:27. He is the beloved Son, in whom the Father has His good pleasure, Mt. 3:17, 17:5, Mk. 1:11, 9:7, Lk. 3:22, 9:35, the only begotten Son, Jn. 1:18, 3:16, 1 Jn. 4:9 f., the own Son, Rom. 8:32, the eternal Son, Jn. 17:5, 24, Heb. 1:5, 5:5, to whom the Father gave to have life in Himself, Jn. 5:26, who is equal to the Father in knowledge, Mt. 11:27, in honor, Jn. 5:23, in power in creation and re-creation, Jn. 1:3, 5:21, 27, in working, Jn. 10:30, in dominion, Mt. 11:27, Lk. 10:22, 22:29, Jn. 16:15, 17:10, and precisely because of this His Sonship He was condemned to death, Jn. 10:33, Mt. 26:63 f.
In the third place, the name Image of God comes into discussion here. Indeed, mankind can be called so by likeness, but Christ is it in the fullest sense. He was before his becoming man as the Logos, as the Son, Romans 1:3, 4, 8:3, Galatians 4:4, en morphē theou , Philippians 2:6, rich, 2 Corinthians 8:9, clothed with glory, John 17:5, and has now returned thereto by his resurrection and ascension. So was He then and is He now still eikōn tou theou tou aoratou , Colossians 1:15, 2 Corinthians 4:4, apaugasma tēs doxēs kai charaktēr tēs hypostaseōs autou , Hebrews 1:3, that is, not the outshining itself, apaugasmos , but the image wrought or arisen by outshining, reflection, apaugasma , of God's glory and the imprint, the stamp of the being, of the essence of the Father.
As such He is prōtotokos pasēs ktiseōs , Colossians 1:15, Revelation 3:14, the firstborn in likeness with all creatures and thus being before all creatures and not like the creatures made or shaped, prōtoktistos , prōtoplastos , but born, prōtotokos , in whom all things were shaped, ektisthē ; and He is also archē , prōtotokos ek tōn nekrōn , en pasin prōteuōn , Colossians 1:18, prōtotokos en pollois adelphois , Romans 8:29, after whose image the believers are renewed, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Philippians 3:21. The saying prōtotokos does not bring Christ in among the creatures but shuts Him out from them. He stood as only-begotten and firstborn, as Son and Logos, as fitting image of God to the Father from everlasting in a wholly one-of-a-kind bond.
And indeed Christ is now set forth as Mediator as hanging on the Father and standing under the Father, so that He is a sent one, a servant, a fulfiller of the Father's work, obedient unto death and once giving over his kingdom to the Father, but never is harm done thereby to his oneness in being. In John 14:28 Jesus says that his going to the Father is for the disciples a ground of joy, hoti ho patēr meizōn mou estin . Thereby He does not say that the Father is greater in might, which is flatly gainsaid by John 10:28-30; but He thinks of the bond in which He now in his lowliness stands to the Father. Now this one is greater. But this lesser greatness of Jesus shall just cease when He goes to the Father, and therefore can his disciples rejoice over his going; He is just in being and kind like to the Father, though now in office and standing lesser than the Father.
He is no creature, but was and is and abides God, above all to be praised into the ages, John 1:1, 20:28, Romans 9:5, Hebrews 1:8, 9, 2 Peter 3:18, 1 John 5:20, Revelation 1:8, 11, see also maybe 2 Thessalonians 1:12, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1. The striving, earlier by the Socinians and now by Ritschl, Schultz, Kaftan, Pfleiderer and others undertaken, to take the name theos , used of Christ, not as a being-name but as an office-name, calls for later in the teaching on Christ broader handling. Now let it only be marked that this naming with Christ is untrue if He is not truly also sharing the Godly kind, Lipsius, Theol. Jahresbericht X 378.
7. Finally, Holy Scripture also gives us some insight into the immanent relations of God through the name of the Holy Spirit. It deserves notice beforehand that the teaching of the Holy Spirit is the same throughout all the writings of the Old and New Testaments. Although much more clearly revealed in the New Testament, it is in principle also present in the Old Testament. The New Testament is aware that it gives no other teaching of the Spirit than that which was found in the Old Testament; it was the same Holy Spirit who once spoke through the prophets, Matt. 22:43, Mark 12:36, Acts 1:16, 28:25, Heb. 3:7, 10:15, 1 Pet. 1:11, 2 Pet. 1:21, who bore witness in Noah's days, 1 Pet. 3:19, who was resisted by Israel, Acts 7:51, who wrought faith, 2 Cor. 4:13, who would come down upon the Messiah and dwell in the church, Matt. 12:18, Luke 4:18, 19, Acts 2:16. Although the divine being is Spirit, John 4:24, and is holy, Isa. 6:3, yet in Scripture the Holy Spirit is a designation of a particular person in the divine being, distinct from the Father and the Son. He bears this name because of his particular mode of subsistence. Spirit means properly wind, breath. The Holy Spirit is the breath of the Almighty, Job 33:4, the Spirit of his mouth, Ps. 33:6, who is likened by Jesus to the wind, John 3:8, and is breathed upon his disciples, John 20:22, cf. 2 Thess. 2:8. The Spirit is God as the immanent life-principle in all creation. And he is called holy because he himself stands in a special relation to God and sets all things in a special relation to God. He is not the spirit of a man, of a creature, but the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, Ps. 51:11, Isa. 63:10, 11. Just as breath goes out from our mouth, so the Spirit goes out from God and keeps all creatures alive. Therefore he is called the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of the Father, Gen. 1:2, Isa. 11:2, Matt. 10:20, and also the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Son, Rom. 8:2, 9, 1 Cor. 2:16, 2 Cor. 3:17, 18, Phil. 1:19, Gal. 3:2, 4:6, 1 Pet. 1:11, standing before the throne of God and of the Lamb, Rev. 1:4, 3:1, 4:5, 5:6. This going forth of the Spirit is indicated in Scripture by various names. Mostly it is expressed in this way, that the Spirit is given by God or by Christ, Num. 11:29, Neh. 9:20, Isa. 42:1, Ezek. 36:27, John 3:34, 1 John 3:24, 4:13, sent or sent out, Ps. 104:30, John 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, Gal. 4:6, Rev. 5:6, poured out or shed forth, Isa. 32:15, 44:3, Joel 2:28, Zech. 12:10, Acts 2:17, 18, come down from God, Matt. 3:16, set in the midst of Israel, Isa. 63:11, Hag. 2:5, laid upon someone, Matt. 12:18, breathed upon someone, John 20:22, and so on. But it is also said that the Spirit proceeds, ἐκπορεύεται παρὰ τοῦ πατρός, John 15:26. This took place particularly on the day of Pentecost. Therefore the personality of the Holy Spirit also now first clearly appears. In the Old Testament there is indeed a distinction between God and his Spirit. But the nature of that distinction remains unclear. For the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified, John 7:39. But now he is spoken of as a person. He is designated as ἐκεῖνος, John 15:26, 16:13, 14, παράκλητος, John 15:26, cf. 1 John 2:1, ἄλλος παράκλητος, John 14:16, who speaks of himself in the first person, Acts 13:2, to whom all kinds of personal powers and works are ascribed, such as searching, 1 Cor. 2:10, 11, judging, Acts 15:28, hearing, John 16:13, speaking, Acts 13:2, Rev. 2:7 etc., 14:13, 22:17, willing, 1 Cor. 12:11, teaching, John 14:26, praying, Rom. 8:27, bearing witness, John 15:26, and so on, and who is coordinated with the Father and the Son and placed on one line, Matt. 28:19, 1 Cor. 12:4-6, 2 Cor. 13:13, Rev. 1:4. Now this cannot be unless he is also truly God. Just as his personality, so also the deity of the Holy Spirit first clearly comes to light in the New Testament. It appears first of all from this, that in spite of the distinction which exists between God and his Spirit, it is yet wholly the same whether God or his Spirit says something, dwells in us, is despised by us, Isa. 6:9 and Acts 28:25, Jer. 31:31 and Heb. 10:15, Ps. 95:7, 8 and Heb. 3:7-9, Acts 5:3 and 4, Rom. 8:9 and 10, 1 Cor. 3:16 and 6:19, Eph. 2:22. This only comes to its full right when with the personal distinction the unity of essence is paired. Furthermore, all kinds of divine attributes are ascribed just as well to God's Spirit as to God himself: for example, eternity, Heb. 9:14, omnipresence, Ps. 139:7, omniscience, 1 Cor. 2:10, 11, omnipotence, 1 Cor. 12:4-6, and again this presupposes that the Spirit is one in essence with God himself. The same is the case with the divine works of creation, Gen. 1:2, Ps. 33:6, Job 33:4, Ps. 104:30, and of re-creation. Yes, in this his deity especially clearly appears. It is he who has equipped Christ for his office by his anointing, Isa. 11:2, 61:1 and Luke 4:18, Isa. 42:1 and Matt. 12:18, Luke 1:35, Matt. 3:16, 4:1, John 3:34, Matt. 12:28, Heb. 9:14, Rom. 1:4, who equips the apostles for their special task, Matt. 10:20, Luke 12:12, 21:15, 24:49, John 14:16 ff., 15:26, 16:13 ff., etc., who distributes all kinds of gifts and powers to believers, 1 Cor. 12:4-11, and who above all causes the fullness of Christ to dwell in the church. The Holy Spirit stands to Christ in the same relation as Christ to the Father. Just as the Son has nothing and does nothing and speaks nothing of himself but receives all from the Father, John 5:26, 16:15, so the Holy Spirit takes all from Christ, John 16:13, 14. Just as the Son bears witness of the Father and glorifies the Father, John 1:18, 17:4, 6, so in his turn the Holy Spirit [bears witness of] the Son, 15:26, 16:14. Just as no one comes to the Father except through the Son, Matt. 11:27, John 14:6, so no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit, 1 Cor. 12:3. There is no fellowship with God except through the Spirit. But that Spirit then also bestows all the benefits which Christ has acquired, regeneration, John 3:3, conviction of sin, John 16:8-11, sonship, Rom. 8:15, renewal, Titus 3:5, the love of God, Rom. 5:5, all kinds of spiritual fruits, Gal. 5:22, sealing, Rom. 8:23, 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5, Eph. 1:13, 4:30, resurrection, Rom. 8:10. Yes, through the Spirit we have fellowship with no one less than with the Son and the Father themselves directly, immediately. The Holy Spirit is God himself in us, John 14:23 ff., 1 Cor. 3:16, 6:19, 2 Cor. 6:16, Gal. 2:20, Col. 3:11, Eph. 3:17, Phil. 1:8, 21. Who can bestow all that upon us, who can cause God himself to dwell in our hearts, except one who is himself God? Therefore divine honor is also due to him. He stands beside the Father and the Son as the cause of all salvation, Matt. 28:19, 1 Cor. 12:4-6, 2 Cor. 13:13, Rev. 1:4. In his name we are baptized, Matt. 28:19. From him is all life and power. He is the author of our prayers, Zech. 12:10, Rom. 8:15, 16. And over against this the church is warned not to grieve him, Isa. 63:10, Eph. 4:30; even blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable, Matt. 12:31, 32.
Older literature on the Holy Spirit is listed by Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I 75 sq. 241, among which especially Owen, Discourse on the Holy Spirit 1674, Dutch 1746, deserves attention, and by Dr. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 1888 in the preface;
Newer literature especially in M. Beversluis, The Holy Spirit and His Works According to the Scriptures of the New Testament 1896 p. VII, among which especially to be considered J. Gloël, The Holy Spirit in the Proclamation of Salvation by Paul 1888. H. Gunkel, The Effects of the Holy Spirit etc. Göttingen 1888. Furthermore, Synopsis of the Dogmatic Moral Theological Doctrine of the Working of the Holy Spirit Primarily According to St. Thomas Aquinas, by Dr. I. E. Pruner, Lyceum Program for the Year 1891 Eichstätt. W. Koelling, Pneumatology or the Doctrine of the Person of the Holy Spirit, Gütersloh 1894. Dr. G. Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit 1882.
8. In all these moments of revelation, Holy Scripture naturally does not yet offer us a fully worked-out dogma of the Trinity. But it does teach that the one name of God first fully unfolds itself in that of Father, Son, and Spirit. It speaks clearly and plainly that all God's works outward, both in creation and re-creation, have a threefold divine cause. It leaves no doubt that this threefold cause consists of three distinct subjects, which stand in personal relation to each other. And with that, it contains all the data from which theology has built up the dogma of the Trinity.
Philosophy had nothing essential to add to it; even the doctrine of the Logos is New Testament. Only everything waited for the time when the Christian reason would be sufficiently developed to think through the holy mystery that lay here. Among the apostolic fathers, there is no mention of this yet. They follow Holy Scripture without yet understanding the deep sense and the mutual connection of the truths, and they use expressions that in later times would no longer be defensible. Yet they are also of the highest importance for the dogma of the Trinity, insofar as they combated both the Ebionite and the Docetic directions and express in stronger or weaker words the high nature of Christ, exalted above the angels.
The dogma of the Trinity, as appears already at the beginning, was not born from a philosophical reasoning about the being of God, but from reflection on the facts of revelation, on the person and work of Christ. In the dogma of the Trinity, from the beginning, it was about the deity of Christ, about the absolute character of Christianity, about the truth of God's revelation, about the true reconciliation of sins, about the absolute certainty of salvation. Among the apostolic fathers, Christ now takes a wholly unique place; predicates are ascribed to Him that belong to no creature. He is called Son, own, only, only-begotten Son of God, Clement, 1 Cor. 36. Ignatius, Rom. 1. Eph. 20. Smyrn. 1. Diognetus 9. 10. Barnabas 7. 12., reflection of God's majesty, scepter of His majesty, Clement, 1 Cor. 16. 36. Lord of the earth, to whom all is subjected, Creator of all things, Judge of living and dead, Barnabas 7. 12. Diognetus 7. Didache 16. Polycarp, Phil. 1. 2. 6. 12, holy, incomprehensible Logos, who as a God, ὡς θεος, was sent to earth, Diognetus 7. and may be called θεος, Clement, 2 Cor. 1. Ignatius, Rom. 3. Smyrn. 1. 10. Eph. 1. 18. 19. And Father (God), Son (Christ), and Spirit are named together, Clement, 1 Cor. 46. Ignatius, Eph. 9. Magn. 13.
Of the Holy Spirit there is little mention among the apostolic fathers, but He is yet distinguished from Father and Son and placed beside them; only with regard to the Shepherd of Hermas, Sim. V 5. 6. is there difference, whether he identifies the Holy Spirit with the Son or distinguishes therefrom, Baur, Dreiein. u. Menschw. I 134 and against Dorner, Entwicklungsgesch. I 191-205. When in the second century Gnosis arises, Christian thinking also awakens. The deity of Christ gains dogmatic importance and is therefore also much more clearly expressed.
Justin Martyr gives to Christ many times the name of God, even of ὁ θεος, Dial. with Trypho 34. 56. 58. 113. 126 etc. and ascribes to Him all sorts of exalted predicates. He is the firstborn of creation, the beginning of another race, equipped not with a single charisma but with all the powers of the Spirit, in possession not of a seed of the Logos, but of the whole Logos, λογικου το ὁλον, mighty to deify the human race and therefore God Himself, Dial. 87. 138. Apol. II 10. 12. Clearly he further teaches the preexistence of Christ, not as power only but as person, Dial. 128. Because the Father is hidden, inexpressible, exalted above time and space, Dial. 127. Apol. II 6., all revelations under the Old Testament and also in the heathen world are revelations of the Logos, Dial. 127. Apol. I 46. 61. 63. Apol. II 10. 13. He even existed at creation; the word Gen. 1:26 is spoken to Him, Dial. 62.
But the immanent relation between Father and Son is not yet clear in Justin. It seems that the Logos, who indeed is another than the Father in number but not in mind, ἀριθμῳ ἀλλ’ οὐ γνωμῃ, was first generated by the Father for and for the sake of creation, and not by division arose, but yet was brought forth by the power and will of the Father, δοναμει και βουλῃ, like one light is kindled from another and like the word goes out from our mouth, Apol. II 6. Dial. 61. 100. 128. Therefore He is called πρωτογονος, πρωτοτοκος του θεου, Apol. I 46. 58. The generation is called προβαλλειν, but mostly γενναν, Dial. 62. 76. 129. Apol. I 23. 2. 6, and the Logos is called in so far a γεννημα or ἐργασια, Dial. 62. 114. 129. The unity of God Justin seeks to maintain thereby, that the Son indeed is another than the Father in number but not in mind, Dial. 56 and is subordinate to the Father. The Son is the first power after the Father, ἡ πρωτη δυναμις μετα τον πατερα, Apol. I 32; He takes the second place, δευτερα χωρα, Apol. I 13; He has received everything from the Father, Dial. 86, is God and Lord, because the Father willed it, Dial. 127, and is ὑπο τῳ πατρι και κυριῳ τεταγμενος, Dial. 126.
Justin thus on various points still has a defective conception. The hidden being of the Father in contrast with the Son, the generation of the Son by the will of the Father and for the sake of creation, the subordination of the Son to the Father were later rejected by the church. Some have therefore called Justin an Arian, but wrongly. For first, this question did not yet exist in Justin's time; and further there are in him various elements that go straight against Arius's view; he teaches decidedly and clearly the deity of the Son, he says that the Son is not created but generated and illustrates this with the later very common images of word and light; he sees the importance of the deity of Christ for the whole work of salvation, for the truth of Christianity clearly. Therefore he also names many times the Father, the Son, and the Spirit together as the object of our worship, Apol. I 6. 13. 60. 61. 65. 67; and although he assigns to the Son the second place, δευτερα χωρα, and to the Spirit the third rank, τριτη ταξις, Justin expresses the personality of the Holy Spirit and His distinctness from the Son clearly in these places.
Indeed, against this one has appealed to Apol. I 33, but this place teaches nothing else than that Justin understood under το πνευμα in Luke 1:35 not the person of the Holy Spirit but the Logos, an exegesis that also occurs in others. Further it also stands firm that Justin does not reckon the Spirit among the angels or in general among creatures. But about the divine nature of the Holy Spirit and about His ontological relation to Father and Son we find in Justin next to nothing. The religious importance of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was not yet felt. The Spirit is still only conceived as Spirit of prophecy, who inspired the prophets and apostles and equipped Christ. But of a continual necessary working of the Holy Spirit in the church Justin has no sense. The objective revelation of God in the Logos seems sufficient; the subjective illumination is not seen in its necessity, cf. Semisch, II 305-333. Schwane, Dogmengesch. I² 79 f.
Finally, in Justin Martyr it comes out very clearly what kind the influence of Greek philosophy has been in Christian theology. That such an influence was exercised and not least in Justin is denied by no one. But that influence is precisely most noticeable in those elements of Justin's doctrine which were later banished by the church, namely in his distinction between the λογος ἐνδιαθετος and προφορικος, in his conception of the Son as δευτερος θεος, in his doctrine of the hidden God, in his placing of the Son outside the divine being. All other elements, the Logos nature of Christ, the preexistence, the generation, the creation of all things through the Logos, the Sonship, the deity of Christ are borrowed by Justin with awareness from Scripture and argued from Scripture, cf. Semisch, Justin der Martyrer II 295 f.
The defects that cling to the doctrine of the Trinity in Justin are not avoided by the following apologists, Theophilus, Tatian, Athenagoras. Tatian, Or. c. Gr. 5, indeed says that, insofar as all things have their ground in God, they all ideally, as Logos, exist in Him, but this Logos is brought forth by the will of God and is ἐργον πρωτοτοκον του πατρος; κατα μερισμον, οὐ κατα ἀποκοπην. In Theophilus the Logos indeed exists before creation as λογος ἐνδιαθετος, because He is θεου νους και φρονησις, but He is yet generated by the Father to λογος προφορικος for the sake of creation, ad Autol. II 10. 22. Athenagoras, Leg. pro Chr. c. 10, teaches likewise that the Logos indeed existed eternally, because God is the eternal νους, but He is yet the first γεννημα of the Father, because He as the idea and energy of things went out from God. As Theophilus first spoke of a τριας in God, ad Autol. II 26, so Athenagoras also connects God Father, God Son, and the Holy Spirit, who was active in the prophets and is an outflow of God, goes out from God and returns into Him, like the ray from the sun, and calls them the object of Christian veneration, ib. c. 10. 12. But in the distinction of the three persons their unity is not sufficiently maintained. The Father is the one, unbegotten, eternal, invisible God, and Son and Spirit are one with Him not in being, but in spirit and power, ib. c. 24.
The next development of the doctrine of the Trinity, chiefly consisting in the banishing of philosophical elements, is owing to three men, each of whom has added his own to the building of the Christian dogma. Irenaeus is the strong fighter against the Gnostic concept of God and against the view of the Logos as world-idea. Now and then he too shows that he has not wholly overcome the old notion; he still calls the Father the unseen, hidden God in contrast with the Son, adv. haer. IV 20, 10. But yet he fights the notion of God as βυθος and the emanation of the aeons as sharply as possible, and upholds the scriptural distinction between Creator and creature. The Logos is as it were stripped of his twofold nature and wholly brought over to the side of God. The Logos is no creature, but a hypostatic word, III 8, pre-existent, II 6. IV 12, true God, IV 10. 14 etc. Also the distinction between λογος ἐνδιαθετος and προφορικος is to be rejected II 17. 18. For besides that this distinction does wrong to the personality of the Logos and links his generation with the creation, the Logos may not be set forth as the understanding and the reason of God. For God is simple, wholly spirit, wholly understanding, wholly thought, wholly logos, II 16. 48, so that both the Son and the Father are true God. The unity of Father, Son, and Spirit is very clearly spoken out by Irenaeus, their divine nature is strongly upheld, they are named together time and again, IV 6. 20, 33. The generation of the Son did not happen in time, the Son had no beginning, He was ever with God II 18. III 22. IV 37. But Irenaeus falls short in showing how in the unity the threeness yet exists and how Father, Son, and Spirit, though sharing one divine nature, are yet distinct. Here he is filled out and bettered by Tertullian. True, this one stands behind Irenaeus in the overcoming of the Gnostic dualism. He makes a distinction between Father and Son as between a Deus invisibilis et invisus and a Deus visibilis et visus, adv. Prax. 14. 15. In all kinds of ways and with all kinds of proofs he shows that distinction, with the name Logos, with the becoming man, with the theophanies etc. Yea, the Logos comes in Tertullian first to the full sonship and to self-standing personality through the three moments of God's speaking, the generation, and the becoming man, adv. Pr. 6. 7, so that there was a time when the Son was not, adv. Hermog. 3. But though it be that he goes too far in the distinction of the persons against the patripassianism, on the other side he strives just so much more in the threeness to hold fast the oneness and in the oneness the threeness. The three persons are of one substance, one state, one power, one God. They are distinct as to the order and the economy, Oeconomiae sacramentum unitatem in trinitatem disponit. They are three not in state, but in degree, and yet the one God, from whom these degrees and forms and kinds are reckoned in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As a ray of the sun is also sun, so there are different kinds, forms, likenesses, ways in the one and undivided substance. The three persons are thus unum, not unus. The Son is another than the Father and the Spirit is again another, but the name God and Lord is common to them. They are one God, they are not to be sundered. As stem and branch, spring and stream, sun and ray cannot be sundered, so also not the Father and the Son. The trinitas thus does not undo the monarchia. The Son is indeed another than the Father but not divided, separated. There is distinction, distribution, no diversity and division. It is a unitas ex semetipsa derivans trinitatem, adv. Prax. 2 sq. So Tertullian kneads the stiff Latin tongue, to uphold both the unitas and the trinitas in God alike; both in form and in matter he has been of the greatest meaning for the dogma of the Trinity. Notwithstanding that he does not always rise above the subordinationism and distinguishes too little the ontological, cosmological, and soteriological in the doctrine of the Trinity, he has given the concepts and the words to hand which the dogma of the Trinity needed to speak out its true meaning. He has replaced the Logos-speculation by the filiatio and thereby for good loosed the ontological Trinity from the cosmological speculation. And he is the first who has tried to lead off the Trinity of the persons not from the person of the Father, but from the being of God. While however Tertullian does not yet free the ontological Trinity from the cosmological and soteriological process, it is Origen who takes it up wholly and fully as an everlasting process in the being of God himself. The generation is an αἰωνιος γεννησις, de princ. I 2, 4. The light cannot be without shining; so the Father cannot be without the Son, ib. I 2. 2. 4. 7. 10. There was no time when the Son was not, ib. I 2. 2. 4. c. Cels. VIII 12. The Father is not Father before the Son but per filium, de princ. I 2. 10. There is no sundering, ἀχωριστος ἐστι του υἱου ὁ πατηρ, c. Cels. IV 14. 16. All divine attributes are common to Father and Son; the Son is one with the Father; not beside but in God we worship the Son, c. Cels. VIII 12. 13. The Son has the same wisdom, truth, reason as the Father, He is αὐτοσοφια, αὐτοαληθεια, αὐτολογος, c. Cels. V 41. But now to hold fast the distinction in this oneness and likeness, Origen calls in subordinationism to help and goes back behind Tertullian in leading off the Trinity not from the being of God but from the person of the Father. And so Origen came to set forth the Father as ὀ θεος, αὐτοθεος, πηγη or ριζα θεοτητος, μεγιστος ἐπι πασι θεος, as better than the Son, as the one whole Godhead, above all exalted, unseen, ungraspable; and the Son as θεος without article, as ἑτερος του πατρος κατ’ οὐσιαν, so much less than the Father as the world is less than the Son, cf. Dorner, Entw. I 652 f.
Compare on the doctrine of the Trinity before Nicea besides the histories of dogma by Münscher, Harnack, Schwane, Thomasius also Dr. C. P. Caspari, Der Glaube an die Trinität Gottes in der Kirche der 3 ersten Jahrh. nachtgewiesen, Leipzig Faber 1894. Scheeben I 796 f. Petavius, de trinitate, appendix 1. Forbesius a Corse, Instit. hist. theol. 1645 Lib I c. 1-5. G. Bull, Defensio fidei Nicaenae, 1703.
9. The church however did not follow Origen. She rejected his subordinationism and at Nicaea declared the true, full Godhead of the Son. This confession bore wholly and fully a religious character. She upheld the soteriological principle of Christendom. But from now on the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity changed. Nicaea declared the distinction in God, and taught that Father, Son (and Spirit) were God; it now came down to upholding the unity in this distinction. Before Nicaea one had trouble coming from the unity of God to a threeness; now it is the other way around. From now on the Trinitarian dogma gets its own, independent worth, a theological meaning. Athanasius with the three Cappadocians and Augustine are those who in this way work out and complete the dogma. Athanasius understood better than anyone in his time that with the Godhead of Christ and the Trinity, Christendom stood or fell. To the defense of this truth he gave his whole life and all his strength. He fought not for a philosophical problem but for the Christian religion itself, for the revelation of God, the teaching of the apostles, the faith of the church. The Trinity is the heart of Christendom. Thereby it is in principle distinguished from Judaism, which denies the distinction in God, and from Heathendom, which denies the unity of God, Athan. ad Serap. I 28. With Athanasius therefore the philosophical mixing of ontology and cosmology is wholly banished. He rejects the Gnostic dualism between God and the world, which was taken over by Arius, and all kinds of beings in between, c. Ar. II 26. The Trinity has, he says, nothing strange mixed with it; it consists not of the Creator and something that has become, but it is wholly and fully godly, ibid. Therefore the Trinity is also an eternal one. There is in God nothing accidental; He becomes nothing, He is all things eternally. As the Trinity always was, so it is and remains, and in it the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, ad Serap. III 7. c. Ar. I 18. The Father was always Father; it belongs, otherwise than with us, to his nature to be Father, de decr. nic. syn. 12. Just as the sun is not to be thought without light and the spring not without water, so the Father is not to be thought without Son; God is not without offspring; He speaks always, c. Ar. II 2. ad Serap. II 2. Whoever denies the Trinity makes God into a lifeless principle or comes to the teaching of the eternity of the world, c. Ar. I 14. And eternal therefore is also the generation and the existence of the Son. There was neither for the Father nor for the Son a time when He was not, c. Ar. I wholly. This Son can be no creature and is not brought forth by the will of God but is generated out of his being, c. Ar. I 25. And the same is said, although less often and extensively, of the Holy Spirit, ad Serap. I 20, 21 etc. These three persons are truly distinguished; they are not three parts of one whole, not three names for one thing. The Father is only Father and the Son is only Son and the Spirit is only Spirit, c. Ar. III 4. IV 1. ad Serap. IV 4, 6, 7. But thereby he upholds the unity so that they all three are of the same substance and one substance (with Athanasius still as much as essence) and have the same properties, c. Ar. III 3, 4, de decr. nic. syn. 19-25; that the Father is the beginning and the source of godhead, c. Ar. IV 1.; that the three persons exist in each other, ad Serap. I 14 III 6, c. Ar. III 6, and are one in their working, ad Serap. I 28. Cf. Fr. Lauchert, Die Lehre des h. Athan. d. Gr. Leipzig 1895. Schwane, Dogmengesch. II². This doctrine of the Trinity of Athanasius we find also in the main, only further clarified by names, images, comparisons, with Basil in his Books V against Eunomius, in his writing on the Holy Spirit and in many of his letters and homilies, with Gregory of Nyssa in his Books XII against Eunomius and in his catechetical oration, and with Gregory of Nazianzus in his 5 Theological Orations. John of Damascus sums up the result and adheres especially to Greg. Naz., de fide orthod. I c. 8. The whole Greek church has accepted this teaching at the councils, of which she acknowledges the first seven, and deviates from the West only in the filioque.
10. In the West, after Tertullian and Cyprian, the teaching of the Trinity was chiefly and strongly defended and proven from Scripture by Hilary in his twelve books De Trinitate , which however contain very little about the Holy Ghost and therefore likely bore the title earlier: De Fide contra Arianos ; and then more speculatively and deeply by Augustine. His fifteen books De Trinitate are the deepest that has been written on this dogma. Therein he not only gathers together what earlier fathers said on this subject, but he also treats it independently and brings important changes to it. First, Augustine starts not from the person of the Father but from the one simple essence (essentia ) of God, which shuts out all compounding, and therefore speaks the utter oneness of the three persons more strongly than ever happened before him. Each person is as great as the whole Trinity, trin. VIII 1. 2 . In each person is the whole, same, godly essence, so that there are not three Gods, three almighties, etc., but only one God, one almighty, etc. V 8 . The distinction of the persons can therefore also not lie in attributes or accidents that the one person would have and the other not, but only in the relations among them. Father is and is called the first person, because He stands in a special relation to Son and Spirit, etc. V 5 , just as also the name Lord, Creator, etc., marks the relation of God to creatures but brings no change in Him, ib. 16. 17 . In the second place, Augustine had now to reject every opposition that was earlier made between the Father and the Son. The Son as true God is not less hidden and unseen than the Father and is fully like the Father. Every subordinationism is banished. Augustine goes further than Athanasius. This one still allowed some under-ranking, c. Ar. I 59 , but Augustine has overcome all thought as if the Father were the proper, first God. He starts from the essentia Dei , which dwells alike in all three. Though he still uses the wording fount or beginning of godhead for the Father, de trin. IV 20 , yet with him it has another sense. It does not mark that the Godhead logically first was in the Father and by Him shared to the Son and the Spirit, but the Father can only be so called because He not as God but as person is Father of the Son. And in this sense he also explains the wording of Nicea Deus de Deo , de trin. VII 2. 3 . Therefore Augustine also came to another view of the theophanies in the Old Testament. Earlier one had always and only seen therein showings of the Logos, because the Father was hidden, but Augustine ascribes them also to the Father and the Spirit, who as well as the Son can show themselves and indeed are not to be sundered from those of the Son, de trin. II and III . And lastly Augustine more than any church father before him sought images, likenesses of the Trinity, vestigia trinitatis , and thus set in light the tie of the teaching of God with that of the whole world-order, de trin. IX-XV . Cf. Schwane, II. Gangauf, Des h. Augustinus specul. Lehre v. Gott dem Dreieinigen , Augsburg 1883. Münscher-v. Coelln, Dogmengesch. I. Harnack, D. G. II, etc. So has Augustine fulfilled what Tertullian began. There is in the West another understanding of the Trinity than in the East and therefore one could later not come to agreement in the filioque . The West joined Augustine and has taken over his teaching of the Trinity and on sundry points, often in cunning wise, worked it out. The symbol that wrongly is named after Athanasius is mostly in his spirit and never taken by the East, Harnack, D. G. II. Karl Müller, Symbolik , Erl. Deichert 1896. The Trinity teaching is later in the Western Church chiefly still handled by Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 2. Erigena, de div. nat. I 62. II 32. 35. Alcuin, de fide sanctae et individuae trinitatis , Migne CI col. 9-64, and further by the schoolmen, Anselm, Monol. , de incarnatione verbi and de processione Sp. S. Hugo of St. Victor, de Sacramentis , lib. I pars 3. Lombard, Sent. lib. I and the comments on that work, Richard of St. Victor, Libri 6 de trinitate . Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 27-43. c. Gent. IV c. 2-26. Bonaventure, Brevil. I c. 2-6, etc. And on the same Augustinian groundwork rests the Trinity teaching in the Roman, Petavius, de trinitate , libri VIII; in the Lutheran, Gerhard, Loci Loc. III, etc., Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. ; and in the Reformed theology, Calvin, Inst. I 13. Zanchi, de tribus Elohim , Op. I 1-564. Polanus, Synt. theol. lib. 3. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. 80-98. In newer times the teaching of the Trinity is well most greatly made simple but in churchly sense taught and defended by Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. II 117-224. Ebrard, Chr. Dogm. § 95-154. Böhl, Dogm. 113-123. Hodge, Syst. Theol. I 462. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 249. Augustus Hopkins Strong, System. Theology , 3 ed. New York Armstrong 1890 p. 144-170, etc.
11. This dogma has however at all times found earnest withstanding. Not only from without, from the side of the Jews, Weber, System der altsyn. pal. Theol., and of the Muslims, for example Averroes, Stöckl, Philos. d. M. A. II, against which then the Christians came forth defending, literature by Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I. But also within the borders of Christendom this dogma was withstood by many both before and after its setting forth. In the confession of the Trinity beats the heart of the Christian religion; every error is drawn from or upon deeper thinking to be led back to a straying in the teaching of the Three-in-Oneness. It is such an essential part of the Christian faith, that it still works after in the confession of the Unitarians. All who are set on the name of Christians keep speaking of Father, Son, and Spirit, Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Des te more is however the teaching of the Trinity in its churchly form withstood and time and again otherwise set forth. But the history of this dogma shows clearly, that the churchly form, in which this truth is held, alone is able to keep the matter, about which it is done, unspoiled. Now the great problem with this dogma lies therein, that the oneness of the being does not undo the threeness of the persons nor also contrariwise the threeness of the persons undo the oneness of the being. And therefore there always threatens danger, to stray either to the right or to the left side and thus to fall into Sabellianism or into Arianism. Arianism was in the 2nd and 3rd century made ready by the Ebionites, the Alogi, Theodotus, Artemon, Paul of Samosata, who in Christ indeed saw a man, born in a way above nature and at the baptism anointed with the Holy Spirit, made able for his work and raised to Lord, but who steadfastly denied his pre-being and Godhead. They were the followers of an adoptionist Christology, Harnack D. G. I. In the fourth century this teaching is set forth by Lucian and his learner Arius and then further by Aetius and Eunomius. Arius taught according to a writing Thaleia, of which Athanasius c. Ar. I has kept fragments for us, that God, because unbegotten and without beginning, is utterly alone. He is unspeakable, ungraspable, cannot rightly have fellowship with the finite, cannot share his being, which just lies in unbegottenness. All outside Him is thus made, become through his will. He is not Father from everlasting, but Father through and of the creatures. But before God went over to the making of the world, He brought forth for go-between, as a kind of between-being, a self-standing hypostasis or ousia, which in the Scripture bears the name of wisdom, son, logos, image of God and so on, and through whom God has made all things, and even so also yet a third, lower hypostasis namely the Holy Spirit. This Logos is not begotten out of the being of God and has not the being in common with the Father, for then there would be two Gods, but is made or born out of things not being, is a creature or work of God, brought forth by will and counsel. There was thus a time, when He was not, there was once when He was not, though He also is made before times and before ages, that is, before the world. This Logos was therefore not of one being with the Father, but wholly cut off from Him, changeable, able to choose both the evil and the good. But He was yet a full creature, He chose the good, became thereby unchangeable, and is as it were become a God. This Logos is also become man, has proclaimed the truth, wrought our redemption and is now worthy of our honor, but not our worship, Harnack, D. G. I. Arianism was strong and found many followers, not the least among those who after the turning of emperor Constantine for sundry reckonings had gone over to Christendom. Besides, the writings of Athanasius teach us what mighty weapons they brought into the strife. They called first upon a row of Scripture places, which speak out the oneness of God, Deut. 6:4, 32:39, John 17:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, the birth or becoming of the Son, Prov. 8:22, Col. 1:15, his under-placing to the Father, John 14:28, 1 Cor. 15:28, Heb. 3:2, his unknowing, Mark 13:32, John 11:34, his bounded might, Matt. 28:18 and goodness, Luke 18:19, his growing in wisdom, Luke 2:52, his suffering, John 12:27, 13:21, Matt. 26:39, 27:46, his raising to Lord and Christ, Acts 2:36, Phil. 2:9, Heb. 1:4 and so on. Further they showed with many drawings, that they had many early church fathers on their side. Then they borrowed sundry proofs from the Aristotelian, nominalistically taken, philosophy, and showed therewith the oneness and the unbegottenness of God. And lastly they pointed out the weaknesses and the strifes against, which clung to the Christology of Nicaea; whereby above all this proof took a great place, that, if the Son was begotten, He thereby from God as the unbegotten, unbegotten, was essentially sundered and thus arose in time.
Sabellianism was made ready in the second and third hundreds of years by Noetus, Praxeas, Epigonus, Cleomenes, who taught that in Christ the Father himself was born, suffered, and died, that Father and Son were thus names for the selfsame person in sundry relations, before and in the taking on of manhood, in himself and in his historical showing forth, or also that the godly nature in Christ was the Father, and the manly nature, the flesh, the Son. This monarchianism, patripassianism, or modalism was upheld and further unfolded in the third hundred of years by Sabellius. Father, Son, and Spirit are the same God; they are three names for one and the same being, which he called huiopator, but not at the same time, but in three following energies or stages. God was first in the prosopon, the showing, the mode of the Father, namely as Maker and Lawgiver; then in the prosopon of the Son as Redeemer from taking on of manhood to going up to heaven; and at last in the prosopon of the Holy Ghost as Life-giver. Sabellius called upon for this chiefly Deuteronomy 6:4, Exodus 20:3, Isaiah 44:6, John 10:38. Sabellius thus also took up the Holy Ghost into the being of God, set Son and Spirit on like line with the Father, and taught besides a historical following one after another in the showings forth of God, a becoming in God himself. Hippolytus, Philos. IX. Epiphanius, Haeres. 62. Origen, de princ. I 2. Athanasius, c. Ar. IV. Harnack D. G. I.
12. Both directions have remained in the Christian church, to the right and left of the church's doctrine of the Trinity, through all ages. The essence of Arianism lies in the denial of the homoousia of Father and Son, in the claim that the Father alone and in the fullest sense is the one true God. Naturally, the Son is then a lesser and lower being, standing outside the nature of God; but there can be difference about the place that belongs to the Son between God and the created world; Arianism allows all kinds of leeway. The distance between God and the world is endless, and at every point of that distance a place can be given to the Son, from the place next to God on his throne down to that next to the creatures, angels, or men. Thus Arianism has also appeared in different forms. First in the form of subordinationism: the Son is then indeed eternal, generated from the being of the Father, no creature and not brought forth from nothing, but he is yet less than and subordinate to the Father. The Father alone is ho theos, pege theotetos, the Son is theos, received his nature through sharing from the Father. So taught Justin, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, etc., also by the Semi-Arians, Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who placed the Son ektos tou patros and called him homoioousios with the Father, later by the Remonstrants, Conf. art. 3. Arminius, Op. theol. 1629 p. 232 sq. Episcopius, Instit. theol. IV sect. 2 c. 32. Limborch, Theol. Christ. II c. 17 § 25; by the supranaturalists, Bretschneider, Dogm. I 612 f. Knapp, Gl. I 260. Muntinghe, Theol. Christ. pars theor. § 134 sq. etc., and by very many theologians in modern times, Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrh. I 207 f. Beck, Chr. Gl. II 123 f. 134 f. Twesten, II 254. Kahnis, I 353, 398. van Oosterzee II § 52. Doedes, Ned. Gel. 71 v. Next it appeared again in its old form, which it had with Arius, among many theologians after the Reformation, especially in England. Milton, for example, taught that Son and Spirit were created by the free will of the Father before the creation, and bore the name of God only because of their office, just as the judges and rulers in the Old Testament, the doctr. christ. ed. Sumner 1827 lib. I c. 5. 6, and likewise with slight changes W. Whiston, whose Arianism called forth many opposing writings, Walch Bibl. theol. sel. I 957 f., S. Clarke, The scripture doctrine of the trinity 1712, P. Maty, Lettre d’un théologien à un autre théologien sur le mystère de la Trinité 1729, Dan. Whitby, Harwood, many Remonstrants in this country, and in this time the Groningen theologians, Hofstede de Groot, De Gron. Godg. 160v. A third form of Arianism arose in Socinianism. The Father is the only true God. The Son is a holy man created by God immediately, through supernatural conception, who did not exist before his conception and was brought forth by God for this purpose, to preach a new law to men. After fulfilling this task, he is exalted in heaven and made partaker of divine grace. The Spirit is nothing other than a power of God, Cat. Racov. qu. 94-190, cf. F. Socinus, in Bibl. patr. Polon. I 789 sq., Crell, de uno Deo Patre libri duo, etc., in Trechsel, Protest. Antitrinitarier II 221 f. 233 f. This Socinianism spread from Poland to Germany, the Netherlands, England, and America, found spokesmen in these last two countries in John Biddle, Nathaniel Lardner, Theophilus Lindsey, Joseph Priestley, founder of the Unitarian Society, etc., and passed into Unitarianism. Socinianism could not maintain the supernaturalism that it first accepted for long; Jesus became an ordinary man, albeit an example of piety and morality, Christianity became wholly loose from his person. So also taught rationalism, Wegscheider, Instit. theol. § 91. Modern theology stands on the same standpoint. And Ritschl has in substance done nothing other than renew Socinianism. Jesus was a man equipped by God to found the kingdom of heaven on earth and was thereafter exalted to the rank of God and Lord of the church. In this whole rationalistic view of the doctrine of the Trinity, there is naturally even less need for divine grace, and therefore the Holy Spirit scarcely comes into discussion here; his deity and mostly also his personality is denied.
13. Sabellianism also can appear in various forms. It shares with Arianism the denial of the threeness in the divine being, but seeks to obtain the oneness of God not by placing Son and Spirit outside God's being, but by taking them up into it in such a way that all distinction between the three persons vanishes. According to the church's doctrine of the Trinity, the distinction between the persons lies in the personal properties, specifically in the eternal generation. If these are denied, then the persons come to stand loosely beside each other, and tritheism arises. In ancient times, the monophysites John Ascusnages and John Philoponus were accused of this, as well as in the Middle Ages Roscelin; compare Anselm, On the Faith of the Trinity and on the Incarnation of the Word. Later a similar charge arose against Thomas Sherlock, because he assumed three infinite spirits in the divine being; further against Roell, because he opposed the generation; subsequently also against Lampe and Sibelius, because they had objections to the formula "by communication of essence." If the being of God is still conceived in a Platonic-realistic sense, then tritheism passes over into tetratheism, which was charged against Damian of Alexandria. Because, however, such a threeness of individual, separated beings—particular substances, individual natures—cannot be reconciled with the oneness of God, this can also be maintained in such a way that Father, Son, and Spirit are the same person and the same being; this Patripassianism was taught in the second century by Praxeas. Or one can also, with Marcellus of Ancyra and Photinus of Sirmium, regard Son and Spirit as properties in God, which only went forth from God for the sake of creation and re-creation and became independent, personal. The Logos was indeed eternal as the indwelling reason; the Father was never without the Logos, he was the Logos-Father; but this Logos first became Son, the spoken Logos, in time; God expands himself in time to Son and Spirit and then returns again into himself. From this, modalistic Monarchianism is naturally born, which sees in the three persons only three modes of revelation of the one divine being. This was the actual teaching of Sabellius, and later this view of the dogma of the Trinity returns repeatedly. Modalism is also present in the speculation on the Trinity in Erigena, On the Division of Nature, and in Abelard, Introduction to Theology. But it appears more clearly in the pantheistic sects in the Middle Ages, in Joachim of Fiore, Amalric of Bena, David of Dinant, who distinguished a period of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit, and considered the last one near. In the Reformation era, Anabaptism came into opposition against the church's doctrine of the Trinity. The true God is the God in us, this is the essential Christ, and the Word, the Spirit in us is the true God, for example, Camillo. David Joris taught that God is one and revealed himself successively as Father, Son, and Spirit in three periods of faith, hope, and love, which began with Moses, Christ, and himself. But especially Servetus devoted all the power of his thinking to this dogma; in three writings he subjected it in its churchly form to sharp criticism and also attempted to build it up positively anew: Seven Books on the Errors of the Trinity (1531), Two Dialogues on the Trinity (1532), and The Restoration of Christianity (1553). Servetus has no words sharp enough to condemn the church's doctrine of the Trinity. In his eyes it is tritheistic, atheistic, a three-headed monster, a three-headed Cerberus, a three-part God. Over against this, he proceeds from the thesis that the divine being cannot be divided, and that therefore, to maintain the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, no persons but only dispositions, appearances, modes of God may be assumed. The Father is the whole being of God, the only God. But he makes use of the Logos, which already existed before Christ, however not as a person but as word, reason, thought, to reveal himself in creation and under the Old Testament and to become man in Christ. The Logos did not assume human nature in Christ but became flesh in him. The man Christ is therefore the true Son of God; God dwells fully in him. And likewise the Holy Spirit, who is not really distinguished from the Logos but is comprehended in him, is the mode of God's self-communication. Through him God dwells in all creatures and imparts his life to all. At the end of the process the Trinity ceases again. The Gnostic and theosophical elements, which here again come to the fore in the doctrine of the Trinity, soon increased in Boehme, Zinzendorf, and Swedenborg. In Boehme the Trinity is the result of a process, of which the dark nature, the light of the idea, and the will in the Godhead are the foundations and factors. Zinzendorf called himself most Trinitarian but actually proceeded from a Gnostic concept of God. God in himself was unreachable, hidden, unfathomable, but he reveals himself in Christ. This one is the actual Creator of all things, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, who became flesh and is the object of our worship. In him the Trinity also becomes manifest, however not with immanent relations of generation, spiration, and so on, but as a holy family. The first person is the Father, the Holy Spirit is the mother, Christ is the Son, and in that family the individual believer and the church are now taken up as the bride of the Son, who just like Eve from Adam's side, in a wholly realistic way is created from the side and blood of Christ. Swedenborg opposed the doctrine of the Trinity even more strongly. He saw in it, like Servetus, nothing but tritheism. God is one, but he has become manifest in Christ as Father, Son, and Spirit, who relate as soul, body, and the activity proceeding from both. This theosophy prepared the way for the doctrine of the Trinity in the new philosophy. In Spinoza's system with its one unchangeable substance there was still no place for it. In Kant the three persons are replaced by three qualities; the true religion consists in faith in God as holy lawgiver, good ruler, and righteous judge. Schleiermacher exercised a strict criticism on the dogma of the Trinity, and recognized only this truth in it, that God is united with humanity, both in the person of Christ and in the common spirit of the church; compare also Lipsius, Schweizer, Scholten. According to Schelling and Hegel, the dogma contained a deep philosophical thought, which they interpreted thus: God is spirit, thinking, idea, and it therefore belongs to his nature to represent himself, to think, to objectify. The content of that thinking, however, cannot be a thought as in man, but must be reality. God therefore in thinking produces himself, objectifies himself, and indeed in the world, which is the actual Son of God, and then from that self-alienation through the consciousness of humanity returns in the Spirit to himself again. The great difference between this speculation and the church's doctrine of the Trinity was indeed seen by Strauss. But nevertheless many still take pleasure in such a philosophical construction, Biedermann, Pfleiderer. Others content themselves with distinguishing in the one personality of God three potencies, moments, powers, Schelling in his later period, Rothe, Nitzsch. And finally many do not go further than a revelation-Trinity of God in nature (creation), history (Christ), and conscience (church), Hase, de Wette, Kaftan.
14. The teaching of the Trinity is in the Christian faith the dogma and thus also the mystery above all others. As soon as the data which Holy Writ offers for it became the object of theological thought, the need arose for all kinds of names and expressions which did not occur in Holy Writ, and which yet proved indispensable to set forth the truth in some measure, even if imperfectly, and to uphold it against misunderstanding and attack. The Arians and many directions in later times, such as the Socinians, the Anabaptists, the Remonstrants, the Biblical theologians, and so forth, condemn the use of such unscriptural names. But Christian theology has always defended their right and their worth, Augustine, De Trinitate VI 10. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 29 art. 3. Calvin, Institutes I 13, 5. Mastricht I 710-712. Vitringa I 191-195. Gerhard, Loci III c. 2. Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre II³ 149 f. For Holy Writ is not given to us merely to be repeated word for word but to be thought upon and rendered in our own tongue; Jesus and the apostles have so used it and by reasoning drawn further conclusions from it; Holy Writ is no lawbook and also no dogmatics but the starting point of theology; as the word of God it binds not only in its literal words but also in what is lawfully drawn from it. Moreover, there is no thinking about the truth of Holy Writ and thus no theological work at all possible without making use of such words which do not occur in Holy Writ. Not only in the teaching of the Trinity, but also with every other dogma and in all theology, expressions and terms are used which are not to be found in Holy Writ. With these names is thus bound up the independence of the Christian, the right of theology. And lastly, these serve not to bring in new dogmas outside of Holy Writ or against it, but just to uphold the truth of Holy Writ against heresy. They have much more a negative than a positive meaning. They point out the lines within which Christian thought must move, so as not to lose the truth of the revelation under its hands. Under the show of being scriptural, Biblical theology has always strayed further from Holy Writ; and with her non-biblical terms church orthodoxy has always been justified again in her scriptural character. So also in the teaching of the Trinity all kinds of uncommon names gradually arose, such as homoousios , ousia , hyparxis , hypostasis , prosōpon , gennan , trias , unitas , trinitas , substantia , personae , nomina , gradus , species , formae , proprietates , and so forth. The meaning of these terms was, however, at first far from fixed. The word ousia was indeed commonly used for the one being of God, but yet served with Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa still often to mark the three persons in that one being. Athanasius defended himself against Sabellianism expressly by calling the Son not monoousios but homoousios with the Father, Expositio Fidei c. 2. In like manner the word hypostasis was now used for the being, now again for the three persons; and so one said now that there was but one and then again that there were three hypostaseis in God. But Sabellianism saw in the persons only forms of revelation of the one being. Over against this the church had to lay stress on it that those persons were truly existing self-subsistences in the godly being. And for that the name hypostasis was used. Basil in his letter Peri Ousias kai Hypostaseōs brought herein more evenness, by marking the being of God with ousia and the three persons with hypostasis or prosōpon ; each hypostasis has thus its own existence, idia hyparxis , is hyphestōsa , and is marked off from the others by idiotētes , idiōmata , idiaizonta , sēmeia , idia gnōrismata , charaktēres , morphai . And hereto the usage of the two Gregories and further of John of Damascus and of the Greek theology and church joins itself. Petavius, De Trinitate V c. 1 sq. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte II² 99. 151 f. Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte I² 914 f. Harnack, II² 252. Hatch, Griechenthum und Christenthum , German by Preuschen 1892 S. 200 f. In the West the confusion was not so great. By Tertullian the term essentia or substantia for the being and the name persona or subsistentia for the persons was fixed. Later church teachers and symbols took over this usage. Hilary in his work De Trinitate speaks constantly of una essentia, substantia, natura, genus and of tres personae , which are marked off from each other by proprietates . Augustine disapproved of rendering the Greek hypostasis by substantia . Substantia and essentia could not be so marked off in Latin as hypostasis and ousia in Greek. One could not speak in Latin of una essentia and tres substantiae . Rather was substantia like the Greek ousia , and essentia still sounded strange and uncommon in Latin ears. Latin therefore kept the expression una substantia and tres personae . Yet the word substantia was by Augustine best wholly shunned, both for the being and for the persons. For substantia marked in Latin, over against accidens , the bearer of the properties as existing in itself. Because that contrast cannot fall in God, since being and properties in Him are one, Augustine deemed it better to mark the godly being as essentia , De Trinitate V 8. VII 4. And as in the East it was needful over against Sabellianism to lay stress on the self-subsistence, the hypostasis , of the three persons, so the Latins held fast over against Arianism that the three persons were no three substantiae , but three personae . The Scholastics spread this terminology still further and gave a fixed outline, which later was generally taken over, also in the theology of the Reformation. In God is one being, una essentia , unitas naturae , and three persons, tres personae , trinitas personarum . These three persons are in that being one, homoousioi , coessentiales , and exist mutually in each other, perichōrēsis , circumincessio personarum . But they are marked off. For there are in God two emanations: per modum naturae and per modum voluntatis ; three hypostases: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; four relations: paternity, filiation, active and passive spiration; five notions: innascibility, paternity, filiation, active and passive spiration; three personal properties: Father, who is unbegotten, Son, who is begotten, Holy Spirit, who is spirated, Bonaventure, Breviloquium I c. 3. 4 cf. Anselm, Monologion c. 29 sq. Lombard, Sententiae I dist. 22 sq. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 27-32 etc.
15. To rightly understand the doctrine of the Trinity, three questions must be answered: what does the word "essence" mean? What is meant by the word "person"? And what is the relation between essence and person, and among the persons themselves? As for the idea of essence, Aristotle defined ousia as a substance which is said neither of a subject nor in a subject, such as a certain man or a certain horse. And so the word was first used in theology and applied to the three persons as well as to the one essence. But little by little, ousia was used in another sense and became the name for the essence, the nature, the essentia of a thing, what Aristotle called to ti ên einai . So it became the same as physis . Some thought this word, since it comes from phynai , just as natura from nasci , less fit to name the essence of God (Gregory of Nazianzus, To Evagrius ; Dionysius, On the Divine Names , ch. 2). But this word still took root in theology, just as the word "nature" did, and found backing in 2 Peter 1:4. Ousia , physis , substantia , essentia , natura became the steady name for the one essence of God, the Godhead in general, thought of apart from its hyparxis , subsistence, and from its tropoi hyparxeôs , ways of subsisting; thus for the godly nature, as it is shared by all three persons. This essence of God is one and simple, in its being set apart from all creatures and having all those traits which were handled before. The setting apart between this essence and the three persons in God finds its likeness in creatures. Among these we set apart between the essence and the single beings. Paul, John, Peter all share the same mankindly nature but as persons are set apart from the essence and from each other (Basil, Letter 43). But here a twofold threat looms at once. Nominalism takes the essence, the overall, only as a name, an idea, and so in the doctrine of the Trinity comes to tritheism; the overdone realism thinks of the essence as a self-standing being behind and above the persons and so comes to tetradism or Sabellianism. Even Gregory of Nyssa did not fully overcome this overdone realism. To show that the Godhead is one and that one may not speak of three Gods, he denied the fitness of number even to finite creatures. It was according to him a misuse to speak of those who share one nature in the many and thus of many men (To Ablabius ; cf. Petavius, On the Trinity IV ch. 9; Schwane II 156 ff.; Dorner, Development I 916 ff.). Yet in this way the setting apart between the essence in God and in creatures is overlooked. There is without doubt a likeness, and because of that likeness we may also speak of his essence in God. But that likeness takes for granted at the same time a very weighty unlikeness. The idea of the essence of man is a kind-idea; the mankindly nature does have real being and is no mere breath of voice; it is there not outside and above men, but yet in every man. But it is in every man in its own, finite way; men are like the gods in polytheism indeed homoiousioi but not homoousioi or monoousioi . The mankindly nature is in the sundry men not whole and not the same in number; and men are therefore not only distinct but also divided. In God all that is otherwise. The godly nature is not to be thought of as an outflow kind-idea and no more as a substance outside, above, behind the persons; it is in the persons and in each of these whole and the same in number. The persons are thus indeed distinct but not divided. They are homoousioi , monoousioi , tautoousioi . They are set apart by no place or time or what else. All share the same godly nature and fullnesses. It is one and the same Godhead which is in the three persons, in all and in each one by one, so that in God there is but one Everlasting, one Almighty, one All-knowing, one God with one understanding, one will, one might (Athanasian Creed, nos. 9-18). The word "essence" upholds thus the truth which in Scripture is always put foremost, is locked in monotheism, and is also upheld by unitarianism. Whatever settings apart there may be in the godly essence, they may and can not fall short of the oneness of the nature. For in God the oneness is not lacking and bounded but full and outright. Among creatures all sundryness by its kind also shuts in less or more setting apart and sharing out. All that is creature must be in the shapes of room and time and thus beside and after each other. But the everlastingness, the all-thereness, the almightiness, the goodness, etc., shut out by their kind all setting apart and sharing. God is outright oneness and simpleness, without together-putting or sharing, and that oneness is itself not rightwise, not by bargain of kind, as among men, but outright, and thus no add-on to the essence, but one with the essence of God itself.
16. But now the glory of the confession of the Trinity lies just herein, that this unity, however absolute, does not shut out but shuts in diversity. The being of God is no bare unity, no drawn-off notion, but a fullness of being, an endless wealth of life, which in diversity just unfolds the highest unity. Those self-distinctions, which Holy Writ now under the name of Father, Son, and Spirit makes known to us in the godly being, are marked in theology with the word person. In the East men first used therefor prosopon , matching the Hebrew panim , face, outward show, role. But this word was open to misunderstanding; Sabellius said that the one godly ousia or hypostasis took on different prosopa . Against this the church fathers showed that the three prosopa in the godly being were not mere shows, forms of showing, but that they were prosopa enypostata , that they stood in hypostasei . So the word prosopon was replaced by hypostasis , which word first means groundwork, underbuild, firmness, and then marks that which truly and not merely in seeming stands, or also that which stands in itself in distinction from accidents, which inhere in something else, cf. also 2 Cor. 9:4, 11:17, Heb. 1:3, 3:14, 11:1 and Cremer s.v. In Latin men used the word persona , which first marked the mask, then the role of an actor, thereafter the condition, quality, standing in which someone treads forth and so in law-speech gave to know the right of standing in judgment. This notion was thus also quite floating, and with Tertullian it yet shifts with all kinds of other words, nomen, species, forma, gradus, res . Yet this word stayed in Latin, even when in the East prosopon was already replaced by hypostasis ; for the word hypostasis could in Latin be given back by no fitting word; substantia one could not use, because this was already in use for the being. But this difference in wording gave oft between the East and the West ground for misunderstanding. The Greeks thought with the Latin persona of their word prosopon , and the Latins understood the Greek hypostasis in the sense of their substantia . Over and again they blamed each other the poverty of the tongue. Yet they taught in matter wholly the same, namely that the three persons were no modes but self-standings. So thus the word prosopon , persona got in the churchly tongue as weighty mark the self-standing, hypostasis , subsistentia , subsistens , suppositum . This sense has the word hypostasis yet with Athanasius and the Cappadocians. But later the word persona got yet another trait thereby. As persona yet marked nothing than hypostasis , the in itself standing, over against accident, then it could also well be used of things. In the Christ-fight one was over against Nestorianism and Monophysitism driven to yet sharper setting of nature and person; and so came then, in the to Boethius ascribed de duabus naturis et una persona Christi , the setting of persona as naturae rationabilis individua substantia . The word now spoke twofold: self-standing and reasonableness or self-awareness. This meaning it has in the school-teaching, Lombard, Sent. I dist. 23 cf. 25, 26. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 29. Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 23 qu. 1 and dist. 25, and further also in the older Roman, Lutheran and Reformed dogmatics, Petavius, de trin. IV c. 9. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. S. 90 f. Beza, Tract. theol. I 646. Zanchius, Op. I 13. Maresius, Syst. theol. III 7. Synopsis pur. theol. VII 8 etc. First since the last age came the setting up, that the being of personhood lies, not in the in itself standing, but in self-awareness and self-setting. This setting may now for the human personhood be right, though it also then yet is under doubt, but it is in each case no right outlining of the word person in the teaching of the Trinity. Here applied, it would lead to tritheism, that is to three personhoods, each with a sundered self-awareness and self-setting. Even the setting of Boethius fits much more in the teaching of Christ than in that of the Trinity. And that is also oft felt. Richard of St. Victor fought it, because it spoke of individua substantia and outlined person therefore as divinae naturae incommunicabilis existentia , de trin. IV 21. Calvin spoke only of subsistentia in Dei essentia , Inst. I 13, 6, cf. Alting, Theol. probl. nova III qu. 31. And all acknowledged the truth of the word of Augustine: we speak of persons, non ut illud diceretur, sed ne taceretur , de trin. V 9. VI 10, cf. Anselm, Monol. c. 37, 38. Calvin, Inst. I 13, 2-4, and further Braun, Der Begriff Person in seiner Anwendung auf Trinität und Incarnation, Mainz 1896. Person marks in the dogma of the Trinity nothing other, than that the three persons in the godly being are no modes but each in own wise stand. Even on the reasonable and self-aware in this notion falls the stress wholly not; for this flows of itself therefrom forth, that they of the same being and all virtues, thus also the knowledge and wisdom partake. What however in the word person is spoken out, is that the unity of the godly being unfolds itself in a threefold standing. It is a unitas, ex semetipsa derivans trinitatem . The persons are no three showing-modes of the one godly personhood, but the godly being stands not otherwise than as three-personed, just because it is absolute, godly personhood. In man we have thereof only a weak likeness. Personhood with men comes only thereby to stand, that there is a subject that sets itself as object over against itself and again gathers itself with itself; three moments make up the being of human personhood, but with us they are only moments; in God they are, while there in Him no time or room, no spreading and no sharing is, three hypostaseis , three standing-wises of the one and same being. This likeness of the human personhood must however yet in another wise be filled up. The human nature is too rich, to be bodied in one single man or person, it spreads therefore in many men itself out and comes first in mankind to its full unfolding. So also unfolds the godly being its fullness in three persons; but these are no three singles next and sundered from each other, but in and within the godly being the threefold self-distinction, which takes up the unfolding of the being in the personhood and this also three-personed makes. The unfolding of the human nature is of twofold kind; in the single man to personhood and in mankind to many singles, who together also again a unity, a personhood form like Christ with the church one full man is, 1 Cor. 12:12, Eph. 4:13. This double unfolding, which in mankind no other can be, is in God one; the unfolding of his being to personhood falls together with that of his being to persons. The three persons are the in and out and through and within the being to full self-unfolding brought one godly personhood.
17. The Relation of Essence and Person. From this we can derive the sense in which the third question mentioned above, about the relation of essence and person and of the persons among themselves, must be answered. With Tertullian, the three persons are of one substance, one status, one power, yet one God; they are three not in status but in degree, one, not a single one; they are one God, from whom these degrees and forms and kinds are reckoned under the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is distinction, distribution, not diversity and division. Athanasius and the Cappadocians defined the hypostases as modes of existence, and thereby indicated that they, one in essence, yet each had their own existence and differed in manner of being. The distinction between essence and person and among the persons thus lay in the mutual relation, the relation to one another, in the Fatherhood, Sonship, and Spirit-being, in the properties of fatherhood (unbegottenness), sonship (generation), and sanctification (procession). This was worked out more broadly by Augustine. He derives the trinity not from the Father but from the unity, from the deity, and considers it not accidental but essential to God. It belongs to his essence to be triune. Insofar, the person-being is identical with the essence itself. For it is not one thing for God to be, and another to be a person, but altogether the same (De Trinitate VII 6). If indeed being belonged to God in an absolute sense and person-being in a relative sense, then the three persons could not be one essence. Each person is therefore equal to the whole essence and as much as the other two or as all three together. Among creatures it is not so. One man is not as much as three men. But in God it is not so; for the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit together are not a greater essence than the Father alone or the Son alone, but these three substances or persons, if they are to be so called, are equal to each singly (De Trinitate VII 6). In the sum of the trinity, one is as much as all three together, nor are two anything more than one, and in themselves they are infinite. So each is in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one (ibid. VI 10). The trinity itself is as great as each person there (ibid. VIII 1). Therefore, the distinction between essence and person and among persons cannot lie in any substance, but only in the mutual relations. Whatever therefore is said of God with reference to himself is said both of each person singly, that is, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and at the same time of the trinity itself, not in the plural but in the singular (De Trinitate V 8). But whatever is said properly of each singly in that trinity is said not of themselves but in relation to one another or to the creature, and therefore it is manifest that they are said relatively, not substantially (ibid. c. 11). And accordingly, later theology said that essence and person differ not in reality but in reason, yet not in reasoning reason, that is, rationally, nominally, as Sabellius thought, but in reasoned reason. The distinction consisted not in any substance but only in relation, but this distinction was nevertheless real, objective, grounded in God's revelation. Essence and person differ not in reality but yet really; the difference consists in a mode of subsisting but is yet a real difference. The person is a mode of existence of the essence; and the persons among themselves differ thus, as one mode of existence from another, or according to the common example, as the open hand differs from the closed hand (Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 28 sq.; Petavius, De Trinitate IV c. 10. 11; Kleutgen, Theology of the Ancients I² 350 f.; Calvin, Institutes I 13, 6. 16-20; Zanchi, Works I 21 sq.; Maresius I 713 sq.; Turretin, Theological Elenctics III qu. 27 etc.). If this distinction of essence and person and among persons must be indicated in a single word, there is indeed not much more to say about it. But this distinction becomes clearer, nevertheless, if we think about the relations themselves, by which it comes to stand in the divine essence. Although Holy Scripture is strictly monotheistic, it yet ascribes to the Son and the Spirit divine nature and perfections and places them with the Father on one line. Father, Son, and Spirit are thus distinct subjects in the one and same divine essence. And as such they also bear different names, have particular personal properties, and always appear in a certain fixed order, both ad intra and ad extra. The distinction of the persons thus lies wholly and solely in the so-called idioms, properties, personal attributes, namely, paternity (unbegottenness, innascibility), active generation, active spiration, filiation (passive generation and active spiration), procession (passive spiration). These, from the nature of the case, add nothing new, no new substance to the essence. A man who becomes a father does not change in essence but only enters into a relation hitherto foreign to him. God's essence is distinguished from Father-being, Son-being, and Spirit-being not substantially but only in reason, in relation. The one and same essence is and is called Father when it is thought in its relation to that same essence in the relation of the Son. And the persons among themselves differ thus only in that one is Father, the other Son, and the third Spirit. Among men we find only a weak likeness of this, but one that can serve for clarification. Among men, fatherhood and sonship is also nothing but a relation, but that relation presupposes a personal, individual subject that is the bearer of that relation, but otherwise exists in all sorts of ways outside that fatherhood and sonship. Fatherhood is but an accidental property of manhood; some men never become fathers; he who becomes one has not been one for a long time and gradually ceases to be one, etc. Manhood thus does not fully consist in fatherhood or sonship. But it is not so in the divine essence. God-being coincides completely with person-being. Just as for him to be is to be God, to be great, to be good, so for him to be is to be a person (Augustine, De Trinitate VII 6). The divine essence thus, so to speak, in each of the three persons fully consists in the Father-, Son-, and Spirit-being. Paternity, filiation, and procession are not additional properties to the essence, but the eternal forms of existence of, the eternal, immanent relations in the essence. Among men, the unfolding of the one human nature falls apart; it happens partly in the single man, in that he becomes a personality; it further takes place in humanity, whose members all represent the human nature in a particular way; it finally also comes about in the generational and kinship relations, which each time make known to us a side of human nature. In men, this threefold unfolding of the nature falls apart in space and time; it is essentially extension. In God, however, there is no separation or division. The unfolding of his essence to personality includes at once, immediately, absolutely, completely the unfolding of his essence to persons and also that of his essence to the immanent relations, which are expressed by the names Father, Son, and Spirit. Thus God is the archetype of man; what in humanity falls apart, lies side by side, is spread out in the forms of space and time, that is in God eternally and simply present. The processions in his essence bring about at the same time in God his absolute personality, his threeness, and his immanent relations. They are the absolute archetypes of all those processions by which in the single man, in the family, and in humanity the human nature comes to its full unfolding. Therefore the three persons are each another, alius, but not other, aliud; the threeness is out of and in and to the oneness; the unfolding of the essence takes place within the essence and thus does no harm to the oneness and simplicity of the essence. Further, the three persons, though not other, are yet others, distinct subjects, hypostases, subsistences, which precisely thereby bring the essence of God in the essence itself to absolute unfolding. And finally, those three persons are mutually related by generation and spiration in an absolute way; their distinctness as subjects coincides completely with their immanent kinship relations. The Father is solely and eternally Father, the Son solely and eternally Son, the Spirit solely and eternally Spirit. And because they each are themselves in a simple, eternal, absolute way, therefore the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is it as Father, the Son as Son, the Holy Spirit as Holy Spirit. And because they all three are God, they partake of one divine nature, and thus there is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is to be praised forever.
18. The Father. After the teaching of the Trinity has thus been set forth in general, the three persons must now be spoken of one by one. The first person is the Father, and his personal mark is fatherhood or also agennesia . In the Arian strife, this word played a great role. It was taken over from common Greek. Plato called the ideas agennētous ; Aristotle so called matter; the Gnostics spoke of God as bythos agennētos , unbegotten, Irenaeus, Against Heresies I 1. From them, Paul of Samosata and the Arians, Aetius and Eunomius, took over this way of speaking, to fight therewith the homoousia of the Son and the Spirit with the Father. The agennesia set forth, over against all creatures, God's own being. The Son, however, is not agennētos ; he is called in Scripture monogenēs , and the right teaching also calls him begotten; thus he cannot be God, but must be a creature; we may not take two agennēta , that is, two gods, Athanasius, Against the Arians I 31 and following, On the Decrees of the Nicene Synod 28 and following, Basil, Against Eunomius II 25 and following, and so on.
Now there are in Greek two words: gennētos from gennan , to beget, generate; and genētos from gignesthai , to become; the latter is much broader than the first and marks all that is brought forth and has a beginning of being, whether by making, begetting, or breeding. These two words were not yet always clearly set apart; men only pointed out that the word agennētos or agenētos could be used in sundry senses, and in one sense could not, but in another sense could, be laid upon the Son. But by and by the use came to make a mark between both words. All three persons could then, over against all creatures, be called agenētos ; none of them was brought forth in the way of creatures; none of them had a beginning of being. The unbegottenness was a mark of the godly being and shared by all three persons. But from that must be set apart the agennesia . This was a mark of the Father alone. The Son could be called gennētos , not because he as a creature was brought forth in time, but because he from everlasting was begotten out of the being of the Father, see Athanasius, Basil, Gregory in the places aforesaid, Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith I chapter 8, Augustine, On the Trinity V chapter 3, Petavius, On the Trinity V chapters 1-3, Suicerus under the word. But the church fathers marked at the same time that this mark, namely the agennesia , belonged in a set way to the person and not to the being. The being is in the three persons one and the same, but the unbegottenness is a kinship in the being. As Adam and Eve and Abel share the same being, though they got it in sundry ways, so also in God the being is one, though it be in the three persons in sundry ways, Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Nicene Synod 8, Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration V.
Thereto comes yet that the name agennesia is naysaying and only says that the Father is lifted above begetting, but it says nothing yaysaying about God's kind; truly it is thus also no marking of the person of the Father, for to be unbegotten and to be Father is wholly not the same, Basil, Against Eunomius I 9, 15, Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration III, Augustine, On the Trinity V 5. Therefore the name of Father is to be chosen over that of agennētos , Basil, Against Eunomius I 5. The Scriptural name of Father marks much better than that of agennētos the personal mark of the first person. In fatherhood lies a yaysaying kinship enclosed to the second person. The name Father is yet more own to God than the name of God, for this last is a broad name, a name of worth, but the Father name in the New Testament is even as that of Jehovah in the Old Testament a name of his own, a marking of a personal mark of God. Who denies God the Father name does him yet greater dishonor than who denies his making. This Father name is then also no overbrought way of speaking from men to God. Rather is the kinship turned about. The fatherhood on earth is a far, weak likeness of the Fatherhood of God, Ephesians 3:15. God is Father in true and full sense. Among men a father is also again son of another and a son in his turn also again father; among men a father alone is not able to bring forth a son; among men fatherhood is timely and in a set sense chance, not truly bound with man-being; it begins first late and it holds soon, in any case at death, again up. But in God that is wholly other. He is only and sheer and wholly Father; he is alone Father, he is Father by kind; he is Father everlasting, without beginning and end, and therefore must also the begetting be an everlasting one and the Son even everlasting as the Father, for if the Son were not everlasting, the Father could also not be everlasting. The everlastingness of the Fatherhood brings the everlastingness of the Sonship with it; who names the Father names of itself therein also the Son, Athanasius, Against the Arians I 23, 28, Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration III 5, 17, Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith I 8, Hilary, On the Trinity XII 24.
For this kinship of the Father to the Son and also to the Holy Spirit, the Father was often called autogenēs , autogenētos , autophyēs , apoiētos , anarchos , without beginning, his own spring, cause of his own stuff, his own beginning; and further archē , aitia , riza , pēgē , beginning, cause, root, well, spring, head, and so on, of the Son and the Spirit or of the whole Godhead, Petavius, On the Trinity V 5, Suicerus under the word.
19. The Special Property of the Second Person in the Trinity. The special property of the second person in the Trinity is filiation. In Scripture He bears sundry names that show His bond to the Father, such as Word, Wisdom, Logos, Son, Firstborn, Only Begotten, Only Son, Image of God, εἰκων, ὑποστασις, χαρακτηρ. On these names and on some texts quoted above, the teaching of the eternal generation, first so named by Origen, αἰωνιος γεννησις, was built. Of course we speak thus in a human and thus unwhole and faulty way; and the thought thereof warns to lowliness, Iren. adv. haer. II 28, 6, Athan., c. Ar. II 36. Basilius, adv. Eun. II 22, 24. Greg. Naz. Orat. XX etc. But yet we may so speak. For even as by likeness mouth and ear and eye are ascribed to God, so is human begetting a likeness and image of that godly deed whereby the Father gives to the Son the life in Himself. But then all that is unwhole and fleshly thereof must also be thought away. The begetting of a man is unwhole and faulty; a man needs a wife to bring forth a son; a man can never in one child and even not in many children share his full image, his whole being; a father first becomes father in time and also ceases to be, and the child soon becomes wholly free and self-standing over against the father. But so it is not with God. There is begetting also in the godly being. It is a fair thought, oft returning among the church fathers, that God is fruitful. He is no bare, stiff oneness, not μοναδικος, solitarius. He is a fullness of life; His nature is a γεννητικη, καρπογονος οὐσια; it is open to spreading, unfolding, sharing. Who denies this and loathes all bringing forth in the godly being, makes no earnest of it that God is boundless, fully blessed life. He keeps nothing but a bare, deistic God-thought or takes in offset on pantheistic wise the life of the world into the godly being. Without the Trinity the making is also not to be understood; if God cannot share Himself, then He is a dark light, a dry spring, and how would He share Himself ad extra, to creatures? Athan., c. Ar. II 2. Damasc. de fide orth. I 8.
But yet that begetting is to be thought in godly wise. Therefore it is in the first stead ghostly. The Arians brought against it chiefly the bar that all begetting must needs bring cutting, sharing, τομη, διαιρεσις and also παθος, ἀπορροια. That would be so if it were bodily, fleshly, creaturely. But it is ghostly and godly, and therefore single, without sharing or cutting, it befalls ἀρρευστως και ἀδιαιρετως, Athan., Expos. fidei 2. It brings distinctio and distributio, but no diversitas and divisio in the godly being. Ὁ δε θεος ἀμερης ὠν ἀμεριστος ἐστι και ἀπαθης του υἱου πατηρ, οὐτε γαρ ἀπορροη του ἀσωματου ἐστιν, οὐτ’ ἐπιρροη τις εἰς αὐτον γινεται, ὡς ἐπ’ ἀνθρωπων, Athan. de decr. nic. syn. 11. c. Ar. I 16. 28 sq. The begetting in God has therefore its most striking likeness in thinking and speaking; and Scripture itself points thereto, as it names the Son the Logos. As the mind of man makes itself outward in the word, so God shares in the Logos His whole being. But also here is there again sundering. Man needs many words to utter his thought; those words are sounds and thus fleshly and stuffly; they are un-self-standing and have no lasting in themselves. But when God speaks, then He speaks in the one Logos His whole being out and gives Him life in Himself. In the second stead therefore the begetting holds in that the Father begets the Son ἐκ της οὐσιας του πατρος, θεον ἐκ θεου, φως ἐκ φωτος, θεον ἀληθινον ἐκ θεου ἀληθινου, γεννηθεντα οἰ ποιηθεντα, ὁμοουσιον τῳ πατρι, as was set at Nicaea. The Arians taught that the Son through the will of the Father was brought forth from nothing. But this was no begetting but making. Making is το ἐξωθεν και οὐκ ἐκ της οὐσιας του κτιζοντος και ποιουντος γινεσθαι το κτιζομενον και ποιουμενον ἀνομοιον παντελως κατ’ οὐσιαν; but begetting is το ἐκ της οὐσιας του γεννωντος προαγεσθαι το γεννωμενον ὁμοιον κατ’ οὐσιαν, Damasc. de fide orthod. I 8, cf. Athan., de decr. nic. syn. 13. 26. c. Ar. I 5. 6. The Son is no creature, but God to be praised in all everlastingness, Rom. 9:5. And therefore He is not brought forth through the will of the Father, from nothing and in time. But He is begotten from the being of the Father, in everlastingness. The begetting is therefore no proper work, no ἐνεργεια of the Father, but to the Father belongs a φυσις γεννητικη. That of course does not say that the begetting is an unwitting unwilling outflow, that it goes beyond the will and might of the Father. It is not a deed of a foregoing, deciding will, of a βουλησις προηγουμενη, as the making; but it is so by nature own to the Father, that His will as voluntas concomitans has therein His whole good pleasure. It is showing of His φυσεως γνησιοτης και οὐσιας ἰδιοτης and thus also of His knowing, will and might and of all His goods, Athan. c. Ar. III 59-67. Greg. Naz. Or. III 6 sq. Cyrillus Alex. de trin. II. Hilarius, de trin. III 4. Augustinus, de trin. XV 20. Lombardus, Sent. I dist. 6. 7. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 41 art. 2.
In the third stead therefore the begetting is also confessed by the Christian church as an eternal one. The Arians said that the Son first was not, ἠν ποτε ὁτε οὐκ ἠν, called chiefly on the ἐκτισε, creavit of Prov. 8:22, cf. above. and pointed to the antinomy that is between the thoughts αἰωνιος and γεννησις. But if Father and Son bear these their names in metaphysical sense, as Scripture without gainsay teaches, then therewith the begetting is also proven as an eternal one. If the Son is not eternal, then God is also not eternal Father; He was then God before He was Father and first later in time became Father. The loathing of the eternal begetting does thus not only short to the Godhead of the Son but also to that of the Father; it makes Him changeable, robs Him of His godly nature, takes from Him the everlastingness of the Fatherhood, and leaves it unlaid how God truly and with right in time can be called Father, if the ground thereof lies not eternally in His nature, Athan., de decr. nic. syn. 26 sq. de sent. Dionysii 14 sq. c. Ar. I 12 sq. Basilius, adv. Eun. II 14 sq. de Spir. S. 14 sq. Greg. Naz. Or. theol. III 3 sq. But that begetting is then also in true sense to be taken as an eternal one. It is not once in everlastingness done and fulfilled, but it is an eternal, unchangeable, and thus at once eternally fulfilled and eternally ongoing deed of God. As the sun sheds forth the light, and the spring streams out the water, so is the begetting own to the nature of the Father. The Father was never and is never without begetting. He begets always. Οὐχι ἐγεννησεν ὁ πατηρ τον υἱον και ἀπελυσεν αὐτον ὁ πατηρ ἀπο της γενεσεως αὐτου, ἀλλ’ ἀει γεννᾳ αὐτον, Orig. in Jerem. hom. IX 4, de princ. I 2, 2. God's begetting is speaking and His speaking is eternal, Θεου αιδιον το γεννημα. Athan. c. Ar. I 14. 20. IV 12. de sent. Dion. 15. 16. Damascenus, de fide orth. I 8. Aug. de trin. VI 1. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 42 art. 2. Polanus, Synt. theol. III c. 4. Voetius, Disp. V 632. Synopsis pur. theol. VIII 11. Scholten, L. H. K. II 207.
20. The Third Person in the Trinity. The third person in the Trinity bears the name of the Holy Spirit, and his personal property is the ἐκπορευσις, πνοη, processio, spiratio. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has always been treated in Christian theology only in the wake of the doctrine of the Son. With the second person, the strife ran almost exclusively over his deity; his personality stood firm in general. But with the Holy Spirit, the strife was mainly waged over his personality; if this was acknowledged, his deity followed of itself; with the deity of the Son, that of the Holy Spirit also had to be accepted. The Pneumatomachians of earlier and later times, however, brought forward all sorts of objections against the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit. They appealed to the fact that the name God is never ascribed to the Holy Spirit in Scripture, that there is no mention anywhere of his worship, and that he is repeatedly presented as a power and a gift of God; the few places that speak of him as a person had to be taken as personifications. Now Gregory of Nazianzus explained the great difference of opinion that existed in his time about the Holy Spirit by saying that the Old Testament had clearly revealed the Father but less clearly the Son, and that the New Testament had set the divine nature of the Son in clear light but had only obscurely indicated the deity of the Holy Spirit. But now the Holy Spirit dwells among us and makes himself clearly known to us, Orat. V. In this there lies an unmistakable truth. The personality and deity of the Holy Spirit do not stand so objectively over against us as those of the Father and the Son. The name he bears does not express that personality, like those of Father and Son. The economy of the Holy Spirit, namely, sanctification, does not mark itself so clearly before our consciousness as those of creation, incarnation, and satisfaction. We ourselves live in that economy; the Holy Spirit dwells in us and among us, and therefore prayer is directed less to him than to the Father and to the Mediator. He is much more the author than the object of prayer. Therefore, the personality or at least the deity of the Holy Spirit was long in dispute in the church. The religious importance of this doctrine was not felt in the first period. The Spirit was usually acknowledged in his personality but only regarded as the Spirit who had done his work in the past, had enlightened the prophets and apostles, and had equipped and qualified Christ for his office. The necessity of the internal grace was not yet seen; there was not yet a conscious, lively need for an almighty, divine working of grace in the heart; the mystical union, the communion between God and man, was not yet plumbed in its depth; the objective revelation of God in Christ seemed sufficient, and a subjective illumination was not yet deemed necessary, cf. above. As soon as the church thought more deeply into her own life and tried to give an account not only of the objective but also of the subjective principles of salvation, she confessed with joy the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit. And so it has continued through all ages. The denial of the personal existence and divine nature of the Holy Spirit always comes, consciously or unconsciously, from a rationalistic, Pelagian, deistic principle; it belongs in the circle of the Arians, Socinians, Remonstrants, and so on. From this it also appears at once that the confession of the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit did not arise from philosophy but from the heart of the Christian religion itself, from the faith of the church. With it, as with the deity of the Son, there is a deep religious interest; with it the Christian religion itself is at stake. For this stands firm on the ground of Scripture without doubt, that the Holy Spirit is the subjective principle of all salvation, of regeneration, faith, conversion, sanctification, and so on; that there is, in other words, no communion with Father and Son except in and through the Holy Spirit. And now one of two things: the Holy Spirit is a creature, whether a power, a gift, a person, or truly God. If he is a creature, then he cannot really and in truth make us partakers of God himself, the Father and the Son with all their benefits; then he cannot be the principle of the new life in the Christian and in the whole church; then there is no true communion of God and man; then God remains above and outside us, and does not dwell in humanity as in his temple. But the Holy Spirit is not a creature and cannot be. For he stands in the same relation to the Son as this one to the Father, and makes us partakers of the Son and the Father, cf. above. He is as closely connected to the Son as this one to the Father. He is in the Son, and this one is in him. He is ἰδιον κατ’ οἰσιαν του υἱου. He is the Spirit of wisdom and of truth, of power and of glory, the Spirit through whom Christ sanctifies the church and in whom he makes her partaker of himself and all his benefits, the θεια φυσις, the υἱοθεσια, the mystical union with God. He who gives us God himself must himself be truly God. To this soteriological interest is added the theological significance of the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit. Without this, there is no true unity of Father and Son; whoever denies the deity of the Holy Spirit cannot maintain that of the Son; only in the divine person of the Holy Spirit does the Trinity close itself off; the unity of the essence in the threeness of the persons and the threeness of the persons in the unity of the essence come into being. With the deity of the Holy Spirit stands and falls the whole dogma of the Trinity, the mystery of Christianity, the heart of religion, the true, essential communion of our souls with God. This was understood by the church fathers, and therefore they defended the deity of the Spirit along with that of the Son, cf. Athanasius in his letters to Serapion, Gregory of Nazianzus in his theological oration on the Holy Spirit, Basil in his third book against Eunomius and in his book On the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Nyssa, especially in his writing to Ablabius, Hilary, On the Trinity books XII, and so on. The Constantinopolitan Creed expressed the faith εἰς το πνευμα το ἁγιον, το κυριον, το ζωοποιον, το ἐκ του πατρος ἐκπορευομενον, το συν πατρι και υἱῳ συμπροσκυνουμενον και συνδοξαζομενον, το λαλησαν δια των προφητων. And since then the whole of Christendom confesses its faith εἰς τριαδα ὁμοουσιον, Basil in Hahn, Library of the Symbols and Rules of Faith of the Ancient Church³ 1897 p. 270.
21. The relation in which the Holy Ghost stands to Father and Son is made known to some extent by his name to pneuma hagion and also by many verbs: given, sent, poured out, blown, go forth, come down, and so on. The Christian theology marked it as probole , ekporeusis , ekphoitēsis , pnoē , proienai , prokuptein , procheisthai , processio , spiratio , and so forth. It was best thought of as a pnoē , spiratio . The Scripture gave ground for this, as it called the Holy Ghost ruach , pneuma and often likened him to breath and wind, Ps. 33:6, Job 33:4, John 3:8, 20:22, Acts 2:2, and so on. But otherwise the theology took care in the marking of the spiration. Just as the begetting must be thought of as an everlasting sharing of the same being; so too it must be set apart from the begetting, since the begetting gave to the Son and the spiration to the Holy Ghost the life in himself, Athanasius ad Serap. I 15 sq. Gregory of Nazianzus Or. theol. V 7 sq. Basil de Spir. S. 46 sq. John of Damascus de fide orthod. I 8; but men felt the hardship of further settings. Augustine said: but what the odds is between being born and going forth, speaking of that most high kind, who can lay it out? Not all that goes forth is born; though all that is born goes forth. Just as not all that is two-footed is a man, though every one who is a man is two-footed. This I know. But to set apart between that begetting and this going forth I know not, I am not able, I am not enough, c. Maxim. III 14. de trin. XV 17. 20. Tract. 99 in Joann. and so on. Yet some odds was sought after. And this was then found therein, that the Son alone went forth from the Father, but the Holy Ghost from both, Augustine de trin. XV 26, or therein that He went forth from Father and Son as given, not as born, Augustine de trin. V 14 Petavius de trin. VIII c. 13. Above all however it was pointed out that the Holy Ghost therefore could not be the Son of the Son, because then the threesome would become an endless throng and there would be no end to the life-movement in the being of God, Basil adv. Eunom. V. The Holy Ghost is di' heautou symplēroun tēn polyymnēton kai makarian triada , Basil de Sp. S. 45. The threesomeness is open to no growth and no shrinking, it is teleia , Athanasius c. Ar. I 18. Indeed Augustine once answers the misgiving of the Arians, that the Father was mightier than the Son, if only the first could beget a Son through whom all was shaped: far be it however that, as you think, therefore the Father is mightier than the Son, because the Father begot a shaper, but the Son did not beget a shaper. For neither could he not but it was not fitting . But how this is to be understood is cleared up in what follows right away. For the godly begetting would be unbridled, if the begotten Son begot a grandson to the Father.... nor would the row of begetting be filled, if ever another was born from another, nor would any fulfill it, if one did not suffice, c. Maxim. Arian. III 12. In that being of the threesomeness however in no way can any other person from the same being stand forth, de trin. VII 6. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 27 art. 5. At last above all by Thomas and his own the odds between begetting and spiration was thus given, that the begetting took place by way of understanding, the spiration by way of will. This odds was already long readied thereby, that the begetting was likened to thinking and speaking, and the Holy Ghost was set forth as the love that binds Father and Son with each other. In the Middle Ages and Roman theology this setting apart became nearly widespread, Thomas S. Theol. I qu. 27. c. Gent. IV 13. 15 sq. Bonaventure Brevil. I c. 3. Thomas, Bonaventure and others in Sent. I dist. 13. Petavius de trin. VII c. 13 and so on. The Protestant theologians took up all a certain odds between begetting and spiration just as between Son and Ghost; they acknowledged in part also the rightness of the above-named settings apart, Melanchthon Loci Comm. , de Filio . Alsted Theol. schol. p. 137. 145. Maresius Syst. Theol. III 28; but many dared not speak so surely here and deemed this setting apart not scriptural and not modest enough, Quenstedt Theol. did. polem. I 387 sq. Hollaz Examen theol. p. 341. Zanchi Op. I 255. Voetius Disp. V 139. Synopsis pur. theol. IX 14. De Moor I 791.
22. Yet gradually in the teaching of the Trinity a noteworthy difference unfolded between the East and the West. The ontological procession of the Son from the Father was taken in the second hundred-year as an everlasting begetting; and so also for the Holy Ghost, who yet could not stand loosely beside Father and Son, a like procession must be taken on. The bond of the Ghost to Father and Son must be set fast. Athanasius taught in this regard, that the Holy Ghost is called both Ghost of the Father and of the Son or of Christ, that He has the same ἰδιοτης, ταξις, φυσις, in bond to the Son as the Son to the Father, Ep. ad Serap. I 21. III 1. He is said to go forth from the Father, ἐκπορευεσθαι, because He is sent and given from the Logos, παρα του λογου, who is from the Father, ib. I 20. As ἐκπορευμα of the Father, the Holy Ghost is always in the hands of the Father, who sends Him, and the Son who bears Him, and cannot be sundered from Them, Expos. fidei 4. de sent. Dionys. 17. He is not the brother or son of the Son, but is the Ghost of the Father, even as the Son is son of the Father, Ep. ad Serap. I 16. IV 3. But though He is not called Son, He is yet not ἐκτος του υἱου, for He is called the Ghost of wisdom and of sonship; as we have the Ghost, we have the Son and the other way round. Why however the one is called Son and the other Ghost, is beyond grasp, but so teaches the Writ, ib. IV 4. 5. He is εἰκων του υἱου, ib. I 24. 26. IV 3, with the Son yoked, ἡνωμενον, even as the Son with the Father, ib. I 31. Athanasius teaches thus very clearly a leaning of the Ghost on the Son but speaks not out that He goes forth from the Father and the Son. The three Cappadocians speak in the selfsame mood; they teach clearly that the Holy Ghost stands to the Son as the Son to the Father, that He follows in order on the Son, that the Ghost gives us the Son and the Father, that He goes forth from the Father and is thought after and with the Son, that He is from the Father through the Son, δια υἱου, and that only ἡ προς ἀλληλα σχεσις gives to the three persons each an own name, Greg. Naz. Or. theol. V 9. Basil, adv. Eun. III 1. sq. de Sp. S. V. etc.; but the going forth of the Ghost from the Son is spoken out by none of them. One cannot also say that this was gainsaid or fought by them, for this ask was then not yet come to the fore. Hence, that in Greg. Nyss., Epiphanius, Didymus, Cyril and others also sayings come forth, which seem to teach the going forth of the Holy Ghost also from the Son. They use the prepositions παρα and ἐκ; say that the Holy Ghost takes all from Christ, and that Christ is the wellspring of the Holy Ghost, John 7:38; they speak out that He is from the being of the Father and of the Son and that He is ἰδιον της οὐσιας υἱου, the likeness, the mouth, the breath of the Son; they acknowledge that He is the third person, being after the Son and taking all from the Father through the Son etc., Petavius, de trin. VII c. 3-7. But the unfolding of the Trinity teaching took in the East yet another path than in the West. Cyril taught against Nestorius, who made Christ leaning on the Holy Ghost and so turned the order of the persons around, wholly in keeping with the Greek fathers, that the Ghost went forth from the Father through the Son, δια του υἱου, by Schwane, D. G. II 204. Damascene says even so, that the Ghost is also Ghost of the Son, while He is made open and shared through Him; that He goes forth from, ἐκ, the Father δια του υἱου; but he casts off outspokenly that He is from the Son and has His being from Him, Son and Ghost are led back to one cause, εἰς μιαν αἰτιαν ἀναφερονται, de fide orthod. I 8. 12. And this is the teaching of the Greek church stayed, Conf. orthod. qu. 9. 71. Schaff, Creeds of Christ. II 282. 350. The East stayed by the god-lore of the fathers. The West however went further. Tertullian had already begun to lead the Trinity not from the Father but from the being of God, and he said also already: spiritum non aliunde puto quam a Patre per filium, adv. Prax. c. 4. 25. Hilary sets the Ghost in the same bond to the Son as the Son to the Father, and says that the Ghost goes forth from the Father and is sent and shared from the Son, yea has the Son as auctor, de trin. II 4. VIII 20. But above all Augustine went beyond the Greek fathers. He takes the three persons as bonds in the one, simple Godhead and must therefore set the Ghost in bond not only to the Father but also to the Son. Clearly teaches Augustine then also that Holy Ghost stands in bond, refertur, to Father and to Son, that He is ineffabilis quaedam patris filique communio. In the names Father and Son lies indeed only the back-and-forth bond outspoken and not that to the Ghost; our tongue is too poor thereto. But the Ghost is yet called a gift of the Father and of the Son. He has both as principium; fatendum est patrem et filium principium esse spiritus sancti. But these are then no two principia, even as little as Father, Son and Ghost are three principia of the shaping. Nay, Father and Son are unum principium of the Ghost. The Son has also this, that He withal lets the Ghost go forth from Himself, taken from the Father; for the Son can in nothing be sundered from the Father than thereby that He is Son, de trin. V 11-15. XV 17. 26. de Symb. II 9. This teaching of the going forth of the Holy Ghost is then after Augustine found in the symbol of the synod of Toledo around 400, in the letter of Leo I to Turribius, in the Athanasianum n. 22, and in the symbol of the third synod of Toledo 589, which inlaid the filioque in the text of the Constantinopolitanum, Denzinger n. 98. 113. 136. The church and the god-lore in the West followed Augustine, and took the filioque time and again against the East in shielding, Denzinger, n. 224. 242. 294. 355. 382. 385. 586. 598. 868. 873. Alcuin, de processione Sp. S. Anselm, de processione Sp. S. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 11. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 36. Petavius, de trin. VII; and the Reformation yoked itself hereto. But the East stayed in spite of all strivings to one-mindedness on the old standpoint, even to the gathering of the Old-Catholics at Bonn in 1875, Harnack, D. G. II 275 f. 285 f. Schwane, Dogm. II 198 f. III 146 f. Schaff, Creeds of Christ. II 545 sq. The fruitlessness of all these strivings is the more noteworthy, because the difference seems so small. The Greeks teach not subordinatianly and acknowledge the full homoousia of the three persons; they set the Holy Ghost also well in a certain bond to Christ, who sends and shares Him; they have also no bar therein to say that He goes forth from the Father through the Son, δια του υἱου, per filium. The other way round the Western church has spoken out that the going forth from Father and Son might not be understood as from two principia going forth and in two spirations being but as ex uno principio and unica spiratione, Denzinger n. 382. 586. Pope Leo acknowledged that the taking up of the saying filioque in the old symbol was formally unright, Schwane II 209; even the shaping ex patre per filium found as such in the West no bar, Denzinger, 586. 868. Schaff, Creeds II 552. And yet no one-mindedness is gotten. The Greeks kept always the one great bar, that, if the Holy Ghost also went forth from the Son, there came in the Godhead two principia, two αἰτιαι. That points back on another teaching of God and on another work of godliness. The fighting of the filioque is in the Greek church yet the last leftover of the subordinatianism. Howsoever the three persons also fully one and even are thought, that oneness and evenness comes to Son and Ghost only from the Father. This is πηγη και ἀρχη της θεοτητος. If the Holy Ghost thus also goes forth from the Son, this comes to stand beside the Father, and the beginning of the oneness is broken and a kind of ditheism hailed. For the Greeks lies the oneness of the being and the root of the Trinity not in the godly kind as such but in the person of the Father. He is the only αἰτια. The three persons are no three bonds in the being, no self-unfolding of the Godhead, but the Father is it, who shares His being to Son and Ghost. But therefrom follows that Son and Ghost now also come to stand beside each other and both in even wise have their αἰτια, their principium in the Father. In both makes Himself open the Father. The Son makes Him known, the Ghost makes Him enjoyed. The Son opens not the Father in and through the Ghost, the Ghost leads not to the Father through the Son. But both are to a certain height self-standing; both open a way to the Father. Orthodoxy and mysticism, understanding and will stand dualistically beside each other. And this own-like bond of orthodoxy and mysticism is the mark of the Greek godliness. The teaching stands outside, above the life; it serves only for the head; it is a fitting thing for god-lore guess-work. Beside it is there another wellspring for the life in the mysticism of the Ghost; this wells not up from the knowledge but has her own uprising, and feeds the mood. Head and heart stand not in the right bond; fore-shaping and stirring are fully sundered; the ethical yoking lacks. Cf. part I 70. Harnack D. G. II 285 f. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Confessionskunde I 318 f. Schmid, Symbolik S. 30 f. K. Müller, Symbolik 220.
23. These immanent relations of the three persons in the Godly being also come forth outwardly in their revelations and works. Indeed, all works toward the outside are common to the three persons. The works of the Godhead toward the outside are undivided, with the order and distinction of the persons preserved. It is always the one and same God who acts in creation and re-creation. But in that oneness, the order of the three persons is kept. The ontological Trinity mirrors itself also in the economical. And therefore, special attributes and works are ascribed to each of the three persons, not excluding the other two persons, as Abelard thought, but in such a way that the order comes out which also exists in the ontological Trinity between the persons. These attributes are thus not proper to them but appropriated, and Holy Scripture leads the way in this.
With appeal to Matthew 28:19 and 1 Corinthians 8:6, Hilary says that the Father is the author, from whom all things are; the Son, the Only-begotten, through whom all things are; and that the Holy Spirit is a gift in all. There is thus one power, one Son, one gift. Nothing is lacking in this perfection. In the Father is eternity, in the Son is the form in the image, in the Spirit is the use in the gift, de trin. II 1 . Hilary ascribes these attributes to the three persons because the Father is the beginning and without beginning; the Son the image of the Father, who reveals Him in His glory; the Holy Spirit a gift from Father and Son, who makes us partakers of fellowship with God. Augustine made some objection to this, de trin. VI 10 , and gave the distinction differently: in the Father unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality; and these three are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, all connected because of the Holy Spirit, de doctr. christ. I 5 . In his work de trinitate , he developed this distinction more broadly. Here he ascribes to the Father power, to the Son wisdom, to the Holy Spirit goodness or love. This may not, however, be understood in such a way that the Father first became wise and good through the wisdom of the Son and the goodness of the Holy Spirit. For Father, Son, and Spirit all share the same Godly nature and the same Godly attributes. But yet it is allowed to ascribe the named attributes in an economical sense to the three persons, de trin. VII 1 sq. XV 7 . Later theologians took over this distinction, Erigena, de div. nat. I 13 . Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 39 art. 7. 8 . Bonaventure, Brevil. I c. 6 . Sent. I dist. 31 art. 1 qu. 3 and art. 2 qu. 3 . Hugh of St. Victor, de Sacr. I pars 3 c. 27 .
This corresponds also to an economic distinction in the works ad extra. These are indeed all essential works, but each of the three persons therein takes that place which corresponds to the order of his existence in the divine being. The Father works of himself through the Son in the Spirit. Holy Scripture clearly indicates this distinction in the so-called prepositions of distinction ἐκ, δια, and ἐν, 1 Cor. 8:6, John 1:3, 14; the text Rom. 11:36, often brought forward for this, cannot be divided in a trinitarian way, and Col. 1:16 is only seemingly in conflict with this use of the prepositions. This distinction, which Scripture makes between the three persons, was seen early on and pointed out with emphasis, Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V 18. Athanasius appeals several times to Eph. 4:6 and says that God as Father is above all, and as Son through all, and as Spirit in all, and that the Father creates and recreates all things through the Son in the Spirit, Ep. ad Serap. I 14. 28. II 6. 7. Basil was accused because in his prayer he sometimes thanked the Father μετα του υἱου συν τῳ πνευματι τῳ ἁγιῳ and at other times δια του υἱου ἐν τῳ ἁγιῳ πνευματι . In his writing De Spiritu Sancto, he defends the first expression, because Son and Spirit are of one essence with the Father and therefore must receive the same honor, and he speaks at length about the distinction of the prepositions, De Sp. S. 3 sq. Against the Arians he argues that the unequal prepositions do not prove the inequality of the persons, but indicate a certain order in their existence and activity. The Father is the αἰτια προκαταρκτικη , the Son the αἰτια δημιουργικη , the Spirit the αἰτια τελειωτικη , De Spir. S. n. 21. 22. 38. This same distinction returns with all later theologians, cf. also Schelling, Werke II 3 p. 341 f. All works of God outward have one principle, namely God, but they come to pass through the cooperation of the three persons, who both in the works of creation and in those of redemption and sanctification take a proper place and fulfill a proper task. All things go out from the Father, are accomplished through the Son, and completed in the Holy Spirit. Yes, to a certain degree the outward works are also divided among the three persons. Gregory of Nazianzus declared, as already said above, the great difference of opinion about the Holy Spirit in his time from this, that he first clearly made himself known through his indwelling in the church, Orat. theol. V 26. Much misuse has been made by pantheism in its various forms of the truth spoken by Gregory. Time and again, from Montanus to Hegel, the opinion has arisen that the three persons represent three successive periods in the history of the church. Thereby the economic trinity was detached from its metaphysical foundation, the being of God was drawn down into the stream of becoming, and cosmogony was transformed into a theogony. It was precisely the struggle of the fathers to banish this pagan, pantheistic element from Christian theology, to detach God as the Being from the evolution of becoming, and thus to understand the trinity as an eternal life-movement in the divine being itself. Gregory of Nazianzus also does not teach in the above words that the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit first became later; he tries as decidedly as possible to prove both from Scripture. But God has in his self-revelation consulted the capacity of men. It was dangerous, says Gregory in that place, to teach the deity of the Son as long as the deity of the Father was not yet acknowledged, and to impose as it were the deity of the Holy Spirit on us, as long as that of the Son was not yet confessed. He did not want to overload us with food and not at once blind our eyes with the full light of the sun. All outward works, creation, preservation, government, incarnation, satisfaction, renewal, sanctification, etc., are works of the whole trinity. But nevertheless, in an economic sense, creation is more particularly ascribed to the Father, redemption to the Son, sanctification to the Holy Spirit. As in the ontological trinity the Father is first in order, the Son second, and the Holy Spirit third; so also in the history of revelation the Father went before the Son and he again before the Holy Spirit. The economy of the Father was especially that of the Old Testament, Heb. 1:1; the economy of the Son began with the incarnation; and the economy of the Holy Spirit entered in with Pentecost, John 7:39, 14:15. The Father comes of himself, but the Son comes not unless sent by the Father, Matt. 10:40, Mark 9:37, Luke 9:48, John 3:16, 5:23, 30, 37, 6:38ff., etc., and again the Holy Spirit comes not, unless sent by both, John 14:26, 16:7, Augustine, Tract. VI in Joann., De Trin. II 5. IV 20. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 14-17. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 43. Petavius, De Trin. VIII c. 1. But this sending in time is a reflection of the immanent relation of the three persons in the being of God, and has its foundation in generation and spiration. The incarnation of the Word has its eternal archetype in the generation of the Son, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is a weak analogy of the procession from Father and Son. Therefore the church fathers concluded from the relations which appear between the three persons in time before the eyes of men, to their eternal immanent relations. And this quite rightly. For Augustine says, the Son cannot be called sent because he became flesh, but he is and is called sent, that he might become flesh. There was not a word spoken by the Father in time that the eternal Son should be sent. Sed utique in ipso Dei verbo quod erat in principio apud Deum et Deus erat, in ipsa scilicet sapientia Dei sine tempore erat, quo tempore illam in carne apparere oporteret. Itaque cum sine ullo initio temporis in principio esset verbum, et verbum esset apud Deum et Deus esset verbum; sine ullo tempore in ipso verbo erat, quo tempore verbum caro fieret et habitaret in nobis. Quae plenitudo temporis cum venisset, misit Deus filium suum, factum ex muliere, id est, factum in tempore, ut incarnatum verbum hominibus appareret, quod in ipso verbo sine tempore erat, in quo tempore fieret. Ordo quippe temporum in aeterna Dei sapientia sine tempore est. Cum itaque hoc a patre et filio factum esset, ut in carne filius appareret, congruenter dictus est missus ille qui in ea carne apparuit, misisse autem ille qui in ea non apparuit. Quoniam illa quae coram corporeis oculis foris geruntur, ab interiore apparatu naturae spiritalis existunt; propterea convenienter missa dicuntur. And the same holds for the sending of the Holy Spirit. Facta est enim quaedam creaturae species ex tempore in qua visibiliter ostenderetur spiritus sanctus.... Haec operatio visibiliter expressa et oculis oblata mortalibus missio Spiritus Sancti dicta est, non ut ita appareret ejus ipsa substantia, qua et ipse invisibilis et incommutabilis est sicut pater et filius, sed ut exterioribus visis hominum corda commota a temporali manifestatione venientis ad occultam aeternitatem semper praesentis converterentur , De Trin. II c. 5 cf. Petavius, De Trin. VIII c. 1 § 7-12. The Holy Spirit was already a gift before he was given to anyone. Quia sic procedebat ut esset donabile, jam donum erat et antequam esset cui daretur. Aliter enim intelligitur cum dicitur donum, aliter cum dicitur donatum. Nam donum potest esse et antequam detur, donatum autem nisi datum fuerit, nullo modo dici potest , ibid. V c. 15. The sending in time thus stands in the closest connection with the eternal procession in the divine being. And while now Son and Spirit have appeared in incarnation and outpouring under visible form, this their sending completes itself in their invisible coming into the hearts of all believers, in the church of the Son, in the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Son and the Spirit have eternally proceeded from the Father, that he himself through and in them might come to his people and God at last might be all in all.
24. The doctrine of the Trinity goes so far beyond the grasp of mankind that from the beginning men set themselves to make it clear by images or to prove it by reasoning. First it was already noteworthy that the number three has such a rich and deep meaning in Scripture. There is mention there of three parts of creation, heaven, earth, and that which is under the earth; three groups of peoples after the three sons of Noah; three dispensations of the covenant of grace, before, under, and after the law; three patriarchs; three parts of the tabernacle; three chief feasts; three parts of the Old Testament; three years of Jesus’ public work; three offices; three days from Jesus’ burial to the resurrection; three crosses on Golgotha; three tongues in the writing above Jesus’ cross; three beloved disciples; three witnesses, 1 John 5:8; three chief Christian virtues; three kinds of lust, 1 John 2:16; three woes, Rev. 8:13, etc.; a threefold blessing; a threefold act in bowing, blessing; a three-day fast, three times of prayer in the day, etc. Yet not only in Scripture does the number three hold such a broad place, but also outside it this number is of great meaning. For the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, likeness was sought not only in the in-between beings that slowly arose in Jewish theology, and the three Sephiroth, Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, of which the Kabbalah spoke. But traces and hints of the Trinity were also found in the Trimurti of the Indians, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; in the three forms of the Chinese Tao; in the three Germanic chief gods, Odin, Thor, and Loki; and in other Chaldean, Egyptian, and Greek ideas of the gods. Above all, men pointed with some fondness to a saying of Hermes Trismegistus and to the three beginnings which Plato took to explain the world, the highest nous (the being, the good), the world of ideas, and the hyle. But all these likenesses are many-godded and can therefore hardly be matched with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Of more worth are then the bodily likenesses that men have sought in nature. Justin Martyr made use, following Philo, of the image of fire, which kindling another yet stays the same. Tertullian said that God brought forth the Logos, as the root the shrub and the spring the river and the sun the ray, and spoke of fount, flood, and stream, of root, trunk, and crown, etc. These images came back time and again with the later church fathers and theologians and were spread out and increased. The more men thought on all things, the more it showed that all things stood in threes. Space with its three measures; time with its three moments; nature with its three kingdoms; the world of stuff, of spirit, and of both bound in mankind; bodies in their solid, flowing, and airy states; the strengths of drawing, of pushing away, and of both in balance; the three works of the human soul, the reasoning, the wrathful, and the desiring, or the three powers, head, heart, and hand; the three factors of the household, man, wife, and child; yet see Augustine, On the Trinity XII 5 sq.; the three ranks in fellowship, teaching, defending, and feeding ranks; the three ideal goods of the true, good, and fair; the three-note chord in music, made of the ground tone with its third and fifth; the rainbow and its many colors; the sun with its strength, brightness, warmth, its life-giving, light-giving, and warming might; the three ground colors, yellow, red, and blue, etc., have in former and later times been used as likenesses of the Christian Trinity. Higher stand the reasoning likenesses that men have tracked down. Augustine points out time and again that each thing must first have a being, a oneness, a measure, esse, unitas, mensura, modus; second, a certain form, species, to be something set and marked off from other things; and lastly, between that broad and this narrow, a certain bond and match, ordo, must be held. Stuff, form or beauty, and harmony between both or love are the ground forms and the moments of all being, On the Trinity VI 10. On True Religion c. 7. On the Blessed Life 34. The Middle Ages theology worked this out in all kinds of ways and sought everywhere a triad to track down. It found likeness of the Trinity in the trivium of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric; in the three wise arts, logic, physics, ethics; in the three persons of grammar; in the active, passive, and middle; in the singular, dual, and plural; in the three ground vowels and in the three-letter roots of the Hebrew tongue; in the laying out, wording, and doing of rhetoric; in the defining, dividing, and arguing of dialectic; in the three forms of poetry, epic, lyric, and drama; in the three steps of mysticism, thinking, brooding, beholding or faith, reason, beholding, or the cleansing way, the lighting way, the uniting way, etc. Dionysius the Areopagite shared his heavenly ordering, and Dante his Divine Comedy after the threefold. In the newer wise-learning the threehood has come to formal lordship. Kant found according to Hegel, as by inborn drive the threefoldness back and schemed after it the tools of knowing, the powers of the soul, the kinds, the ideas of reason, etc. But first in the idealistic wise-learning drawn from Kant by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel did this threefoldness become a back-and-forth method. The idealism wants to grasp things as a yield of awareness, as an unfolding of the idea. That idea must therefore be thought as living, self-moving, and yielding. That can only be if it always stands in a gainsaying between what it is and what it does, and then solves and mends this gainsaying in a third. The law of gainsaying is the being of the spirit. So the idea steps forward in all its unfoldings and growths through the moments of setting, naysaying, bounding; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; in-itself, for-itself, in-and-for-itself. The whole world grows in the “Scheme of Three-unities.” The logic with its teaching of being, the essence, and the grasp, looks at the Spirit in itself; the nature wise-learning in the three forms of mechanics, physics, and organics has to do with the Spirit for itself, the spirit in its other-being, in its self-stranging; the Spirit wise-learning with its inward, outward, and utter spirit handles the Spirit in and for itself, the spirit in its back-turn to itself, in its self-awareness. Through the sway of this wise-learning the threefoldness was laid as groundwork to many wise and god-learned setups. Not enough, though, that in all kinds of ways likenesses for the Trinity were tracked down; there were also tries made to prove it itself outright, and whether from the being of thinking or from that of love to draw it as needful. The Logos teaching both in Scripture and in Greek wise-learning did unwittingly and of itself see in human thinking and speaking an image of the Trinity process in the godly being. Justin Martyr, Tatian, Tertullian, Lactantius, etc., already make use of this matching. Athanasius and the Cappadocians have time and again shown the begetting as a knowing of God of himself in his image, as an everlasting speaking of a word; Father and Son bound themselves as nous and logos. But above all Augustine found in the inward, reasoning man clear traces of the Trinity. And he found them in sundry ways and in sundry paths. First he found them in the threefold of being, knowing, and willing; essence, knowledge, love; mind, knowing, love. Then he found traces of it in the powers of the soul, namely in the sense sighting, which comes to stand through an thing, the thing itself, through an image thereof in the eye, vision, and the intent of the soul, which turns the sense to the thing; and this trinity stays even when the thing fades, for then an image thereof is kept in the memory, the outward beholding makes way for the inner vision, and it stays the will that binds both. The most likeness of the Trinity Augustine finds however in the self-knowing of the human spirit. He names the trinity that he finds here mostly with the names mind, knowing, love (liking), or memory, understanding, will. First is the spirit memory, that is, awareness both of other things and of itself; there is namely an awareness, a knowledge that is not yet true knowing; in the spirit as memory lie many knowings hidden, also of itself; someone can know something even if he thinks not on it at the blink. But from that spirit as memory, from the knowledge which is kept in the memory, now by the thinking, by the deeming, the understanding is brought forth. In that understanding the spirit forms a fitting image of itself, grasps and knows and beholds itself. The mind therefore when it beholds itself by thinking, understands itself and knows again. And this self-knowing and self-beholding is a bringing forth: it begets therefore this understanding and its knowing. And these two now are bound by the will or the love. But these two, the begetter and the begotten, are joined by a third, the liking, which is nothing else than the will seeking or holding something to enjoy. So Augustine is deeply swayed that all creatures, as works of God Three-in-One, in greater or lesser wise also show footprints or signs of the Trinity. Above all he seeks an image of the Trinity in mankind, who is shaped after the image of God Three-in-One. The whole creation was for Augustine a mirror of God. In all kinds of ways he tries then also to show the match between the trinity that he finds in the creatures, above all in mankind, and the trinity in the godly being. The triad stands in both therein that all three are one and alike, that each of the three is in the both others and these again in the one and so all in all. But therewith he hides not from himself that all these matchings are but likenesses and images, and that with the match there is also very great mark-off. So the trinity in mankind is not mankind itself but something in or on mankind, while in God the Trinity is Himself and the three persons the one God. The memory, understanding, and love are in mankind only strengths, but the three persons in the godly being are three bearers. In mankind those three strengths are often unlike and serve to fill each other, but in the godly being there is full oneness and likeness of the persons. Augustine meant then also not with these likenesses and images to prove the Trinity beforehand; he went out from faith, he took it on ground of God’s word; only he tried to show it afterhand in the whole nature and to make it clear by thinking. The first seven books of his work On the Trinity are then also chiefly given to proofs from Scripture; and only in the last eight books does he seek to strengthen them from nature and mankind. And lastly he added thereto that this trinity in the human spirit could well be marked by each one but yet only by the believer as image of the three-in-one being of God could be known. It is well truly own to the spirit of mankind and is not rooted out by sin; but it is darkened and is renewed by faith, as mankind learns again to remember, understand, and love God. And fully we become his image first when we shall see him face to face. There our being shall have no death, there our knowing shall have no error, there our loving shall have no stumbling. This proving for the Trinity from thinking is taken over by many, for example Erigena, Anselm, Lombard, Thomas, Summa Theologica, Summa contra Gentiles, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, Hugo of St. Victor, Luther, Melanchthon, Jacob Schegk, Polanus, Zanchi, Keckermann, Poiret, Mornaeus, Leibniz, Lessing, Schelling, Twesten, Lange, Bilderdijk, Kuyper, Shedd, etc. But in bond with this proving for the Trinity from thinking Augustine makes use of yet another, namely from love. He goes out from the saying of Scripture: God is love, and shows that in love there is always a threefold, lover and what is loved and love. In love there is always a bearer and a goal and a band between both. Indeed you see the trinity if you see love. Also this musing is followed by many, above all by Richard of St. Victor. The fullness of the godly love, even as that of the godly goodness, blessedness, and glory call for a morehood of persons in the godly being, for love yearns for a goal and well one that is like to the lover. But this love is then first full when both, he who loves and he who is loved, take up a third in their both love and by him are loved back. And even so we find this reasoning with Bonaventure, and in the newer time with Julius Müller, Sartorius, Liebner, Schöberlein, Peip, Dorner, etc. Beside these more broad musings from the understanding and the will of God other buildings of the Trinity have been tried. The most mark-worthy is that of the god-wisdom, which under sway of the new-Platonism, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah came forth again shortly before the Reformation in Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Paracelsus; then in Jacob Böhme found her own wise-seer and in this hundred-year again by Schelling and Baader was stood for. Schelling goes out therefrom that the working being is not to be made clear from a pure thinking. The what of things may be drawn from reason; the that of things is therefrom unmaying to make clear. The essence and the being-there of things point back to sundry beginnings. Therefore both deism and pantheism are to be thrown off. God may not be taken Eleatically as an withdrawn oneness. He is an all-oneness, a morehood that binds the oneness of deism and the allhood of pantheism with each other. Already in the grasp of God three moments are to be marked off; first that of the can-being, the bearer, the will, next that of the pure-being, the goal, the idea, and lastly the sameness of both, the bearer-goal. In these three the grasp of the utter is fulfilled; it is thereby spirit, full-come spirit, personly and self-aware, a single-being. But even if it is that we thinking first through these three come to the full-come Spirit, yet He is therefore not come forth from these. On the other hand, the Spirit is the first and bears these three moments as in-dwelling settlings in himself. The full-come, utter Spirit is thus the in-itself, for-itself, and with-itself being Spirit. But in that Spirit lies also hidden that what shall be. He is free Spirit and can show himself outside himself. The three settlings that the Spirit has in himself become the powers of an outside-godly being. Schelling leads the whole creation, the god-tales, and the showing from the sundering and binding of the three powers; they are the forms of all mayings, the beginnings, the archai, of all being. This world-birth is with Schelling however at the same time a god-birth. In the growing of the world the powers in God lift themselves on ever higher step; in the showing of God to his creatures He becomes at the same time shown to himself. The three settlings in the utter spirit, the three powers in the world-creation and god-tales pave the way to grasp the one and same Godhood as three persons. The utter Spirit becomes to Father, Son, and Spirit in the tale-wise run of the showing. God, namely not a sundry shape but the whole God, the utter personhood, can be named Father, not only as first-maker of all things, but also insofar as He through the first power of his being forces the second to make itself working, but He is not working Father at the beginning and the going on of the run, but first at the end. The second shape is the Son, whose begetting is not everlasting but has bearing on the being of the Son outside the Father and therefore begins in the blink of creation; the Son is therefore first fully Son at the end of the run. And this same holds for the third power. At the end the whole Godhood is worked in three from each other marked-off persons, who are neither three marked-off Gods nor also only three marked-off names. Through this musing the newer wise-learning brought the Trinity dogma again in honor. There lacked not tries to build the Trinity by thinking, above all from the being of the spirit, of self-awareness, of personhood, Weisse, Dorner, J. H. Fichte, Deutinger, Rosenkranz, and others. Günther went even so far that he, even as Raymond of Sabunde, Raymond Lull, and some other reason-lovers, threw off the mark-off between pure and mixed articles, reckoned the Three-in-Oneness also to the reason-truths and deemed it provable from the kind of self-awareness.
25. Church and theology for the most part took a very reserved stance towards these philosophical constructions of the doctrine of the Trinity. At most they would allow proofs for the Trinity only a posteriori, in order to clarify the dogma; but even then many warned against the attempt to seek support for this teaching in reason. More than any other, the dogma of the Trinity was a mystery that far surpassed nature and reason and could be known only from special revelation. Like Augustine, Thomas did acknowledge vestigia trinitatis in creation and sought to explain them a posteriori through reasoning. But he expressly declared that the Trinity was not knowable by reason, for creation is a work of the whole Trinity and thus shows the unity of essence but not the distinction of persons. Qui autem probare nititur trinitatem personarum naturali ratione, fidei dupliciter derogat ; first by detracting from the dignity of faith which has only unseen things as its object, and second, by turning others away from faith, as they come to think that our faith rests on such weak grounds, S. Theol. I qu. 32 art. 1, cf. also Lombardus, Sent. I dist. 3 n. 6 and the commentaries on that place. Calvin saw little use in the analogies and proofs that were brought forth from nature and man for the Trinity, Inst. I 13, 18. I 15, 4. Comm. in Gen. 1:26. And many Reformed and Lutheran theologians judged in the same way, Hyperius, Meth. theol. Zanchius, Op. I Walaeus, Op. I 236. Synopsis pur. theol. VII 14. Mastricht, Theol. theor. pract. II 24, 21. Gerhard, Loci theol. III § 23-32. Quenstedt, Theol. I Hollaz, Examen theol. cf. in more recent times Böhl, Dogm. Beck, Glaub. II
Without doubt, it must now be upheld against all who would base the teaching of the Trinity on grounds of reason, that the knowledge of this teaching is owed only to God's special revelation. The Scripture is the one and last ground for the teaching of the three-in-oneness; reason can at most afterward shed some light on this teaching through thought. But still, the reasonings brought forward to explain the Trinity dogma are not without all worth. First, the Scripture itself gives us freedom thereto, when it says that the whole creation and especially man is a work of the three-in-one God. Very surely, all God's works outward are undivided and belong to all three persons: in these works, therefore, the oneness of God stands much more in the forefront than the distinction of the persons. But in that oneness, the manifoldness cannot be lacking. And the Scripture itself points out that all creatures show vestiges, and man the image of the Trinity. However much sin has objectively veiled God's revelation in his works and subjectively darkened our eye, it cannot be denied beforehand that the mind lighted by revelation can find in nature traces of that God whom it learned to know in Scripture as three-in-one in his way of being and working. Added to this is that all these reasonings are without doubt not able to prove the dogma of the Trinity. None of them can or may be the ground of our belief. We would give up the truth to the mockery of our foes if we took it on such weak grounds as our reason can bring forward, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 32 art. 1, qu. 46 art. 2; Summa contra Gentiles I c. 9. But these reasonings are yet able to refute various objections brought against the dogma, Summa contra Gentiles I c. 9; they have the strength to show that what revelation teaches us is neither impossible nor absurd, Summa Theologica II 2 qu. 1 art. 5 ad 2; and they are able to argue that the belief of the foes is lacking and at odds with reason itself, Summa Theologica I qu. 1 art. 8; Voetius, Disputationes I. So absurd is the teaching of the Trinity not, as it seemed to a shallow rationalism of former and later times. With a reckoning that one cannot be three and three cannot be one, it is not overthrown. Rather, philosophy has time and again, and also again in this age, turned back to the teaching of the Trinity and has at least somewhat seen its rich sense and deep meaning. Finally, added to this is that these reasonings seek out and keep the bond between nature and grace, between creation and re-creation. It is one and the same God who shapes and upholds us and who reshapes us after his image. Grace indeed lifts itself above nature, but is not at odds with it. Restoring what was spoiled in it by sin, it also clears and fulfills what is still left in it of God's revelation. The thinking mind places the Trinity teaching in the midst of the rich life of nature and mankind. The confession of the Christian is no island in the ocean, but a high mountaintop, from where the whole creation is overlooked. And it is the task of the Christian theologian to set forth clearly in the light God's revelation in its bond with and meaning for the whole life. Christian thinking stays unfulfilled as long as not all that is has been led back to God three-in-one and the confession of God's three-in-oneness has not been placed in the midst of the center of our thinking and life. The likenesses and proofs brought for the Trinity serve then not to show the dogma, but they serve above all to show the many-sided good and the rich meaning that lies hidden in this confession for the life and knowing of creatures. They are at last born not from a lust for vain guessing and unfit curiosity, but from a deep godly care. If God is three-in-one, then that must be of the highest meaning, for it is only from and through and to God that all things are.
First of all, then, the Trinity makes us know God as the truly Living One. Already by the church fathers it was noted that the error of deism and pantheism, of monism and polytheism, is avoided by the Trinity, and the truth that lay hidden in all those ideas about God was taken up in the Trinity. Deism digs a chasm between God and his creature, lifts away their kinship, and leaves for God nothing but an abstract oneness, a pure being, a monotonous and uniform existence; it satisfies neither the head nor the heart; it is the death of religion. Pantheism brings God nearer to us but makes him like the creature, wipes out the boundary line between Creator and creature, robs him of his own being and life, and undermines religion. But the Christian teaching of the Trinity makes us know God as essentially distinct from the world and yet as sharing in his own blessed life. God is a fullness of being, a sea of essence. He is not barren. He is the absolute being, the Everlasting One, who is and was and is to come, but in that being the eternally living, the eternally bringing forth. Some have tried to derive the Trinity from God's thinking and willing, from his love, goodness, perfection, and so on. Meant as philosophical constructions of the Trinity doctrine, they all leave something to be wished. The construction from thinking brings it to no distinction of persons, makes the procession of the third person unclear, and must, with an eye to this, pass over to and fill itself up with the construction from God's will. The derivation of the Trinity from love stumbles on the same objections and does not know how to set the procession of the Holy Spirit in the light. But yet it is true that these and all other attributes first gain life and reality through the Trinity. Outside and without it they are names, sounds, empty notions. As attributes of a triune God they begin to live for head and for heart. Only through it do we understand that God in himself, even thought apart from the world, is the independent, the eternal, the all-knowing, the all-good, the love, the holiness, and the glory. The Trinity makes us know God as the fullness of being, the true life, the eternal beauty.
Also in God there is oneness in diversity, diversity in oneness. Yes, this order and harmony is present in him in an absolute way. In creatures there is only a weak likeness thereof. Either the oneness or the diversity does not come to its right. Creatures exist in space and time, stand next to each other and do not pierce through each other. There is oneness only through drawing together, through will and fondness, a moral oneness that is breakable and unsteady. And where deeper, bodily oneness exists, for example between the powers of one substance, there is lack of self-standing, and the oneness takes back the distinction into itself. But in God both are present: absolute oneness and absolute diversity. It is one and the same essence that is borne by three supposita. Here there is the highest fellowship, fellowship of the same essence, and at the same time the highest diversity, diversity of persons. Therefore, if God is triune, the three persons cannot be thought of otherwise than as of the same essence. Arianism in its many forms does not think through God's essence and therefore does not satisfy thinking. If there are distinctions, not outside but in and within the divine essence, then these distinctions, that is, these persons must all be alike in essence. In God nothing can exist that would be something else or something less than God. There is no passing over between Creator and creature. Father, Son, and Spirit all share the same essence and are truly God, or they sink down to the creature. On the Christian standpoint there is no third likelihood. But in the same way Sabellianism in its different shapes is condemned hereby. For the same essence of the three persons has meaning and worth only if these are truly and really distinct from each other, as distinct bearers of one and the same substance. The diversity of the subjects that appear next to each other in God's revelation, in creation and re-creation, arises from the diversity that exists in God's essence itself between the three persons. There could be no distinction in oneness outwardly if it did not exist inwardly, within.
In the second place, the Trinity is of the highest importance for the creation. This can only be upheld by the confession of a triune God. Thereby alone is it possible, on the one hand, to maintain against deism the bond, and on the other hand, against pantheism the distinction between God and the world. The creation cannot be thought of as a mere accident, nor as a self-unfolding of the divine being. It must have its foundation in God and yet form no moment in his inner life process. How could both be upheld otherwise than by the Trinity of God? God's life is divinely rich; it is fruitful; there is action, production in it. And the doctrine of the Trinity therefore speaks also of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Both these acts are essentially distinct from the creation; the former are immanent relations, the latter is a work ad extra; the former are sufficient in themselves, God has no need of the creation, He is life, blessedness, glory in Himself.
But yet the creation stands in the closest connection with this fruitfulness of God. For first, Athanasius rightly remarked that if the divine being is unfruitful and cannot communicate itself, there can also be no revelation of God outward, that is, no communication of God in and to his creature. The doctrine of the incommunicability of the divine being through generation and procession to Son and Spirit brings with it that the world stands loose beside, outside, over against God. God is then absolutely hidden, bythos, sige, the unconscious, Ungrund; the world does not reveal Him; no knowledge of God is possible. On the other hand, the dogma of the Trinity teaches that God can communicate Himself, absolutely to Son and Spirit, relatively therefore also to the world. For the communication that takes place in the divine being is, according to the thought of Augustine, the pattern, the archetype of God's work in creation. Scripture points repeatedly to the close connection that exists between Son and Spirit on the one hand, and the creation on the other. The names Father, Son (Word, Wisdom), Spirit certainly denote immanent relations, but they are yet reflected also in the relations that are present in God's works outward between the three persons. From the Father are all things; in the Son lie the ideas of all being; in the Spirit are the principles of all life. The generation and procession in the divine being are the immanent acts of God that make a creation and revelation of God outward possible. From this finally it is to be explained that all God's works outward are then first sufficiently known when their trinitarian existence is discerned. The examples mentioned above are in part very forced and in any case nothing more than analogies. But philosophy from Plato down to von Hartmann has always again, consciously or unconsciously, returned to a triad of principles or archai, from which the creation in its whole and in its parts could be explained. There lies a great truth in this, that the creation shows us everywhere vestigia trinitatis. And because these vestiges appear most clearly in man and he may even be called imago trinitatis, therefore he as it were by an immanent urge tracks these vestiges everywhere. In the triad first comes out the perfection of the creature, the roundedness of the system, the harmony of beauty. The higher something stands in the order of creatures, the more it strives toward the triad. And even in the aberrations of man in the religious realm there is still something of this working to be perceived. Schelling's attempt to interpret mythology also trinitarianly has yet been something more than a brilliant fantasy.
In the third place, the Trinity is of the highest weight for the Christian religion. With the confession of God's threeness stands and falls the whole of Christendom, the entire special revelation. It is the kernel of the Christian faith, the root of all dogmas, the substance of the new covenant. From this religious, Christian interest has the unfolding of the churchly doctrine of the Trinity taken its beginning. It truly did not concern a metaphysical doctrine or philosophical musing, but the heart and essence of the Christian religion itself. So much is this felt, that all who still prize the name of Christian acknowledge and honor a certain Trinity. In every Christian confession and dogmatics, the deepest question is this: how God can be one and yet threefold. And according as this question is answered, the Christian truth comes less or more to its right in all pieces of the doctrine. In the doctrine of the Trinity beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of mankind. Prepared in the Old Covenant, it therefore first clearly comes to light in Christ. Religion can be content with nothing less than God himself. In Christ now God himself comes to us, and in the Holy Spirit he imparts himself to us. The work of re-creation is through and through Trinitarian. From and through and in God are all things. It is one divine work from beginning to end, and yet threefold distinguished; it is sealed by the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And accordingly, the faith-life of the Christian points back to three principles, as the Dutch Confession, article 9, says, that we know the doctrine of the threeness both from the testimonies of Holy Scripture and from the workings of the three persons, especially from those which we feel in ourselves. We know ourselves children of the Father, redeemed by the Son, and in fellowship with both through the Holy Spirit. All salvation and blessing comes to us from the triune God. In that name we are baptized; that name is the sum of our confession; from that name all blessing descends upon us; to that name we bring eternal thanks and honor; in that name we find rest for the heart, peace for our conscience. The Christian has a God above and before and in him. To the doctrine of the Trinity is therefore bound salvation in this and the coming life, even if we cannot determine the measure of knowledge which is also required of this mystery for a sincere faith.
1. Thus far we have handled the divine being, as it is and exists in itself. Not in the sense, as if we thought and spoke of God apart from his revelation in nature and Scripture. For we can speak of God only on the ground of his revelation; when we undertake to take his names upon our lips, we speak of him as Christians, taught by his Word. But yet we handled God as he, according to his revelation, exists in himself. And we came to know him as the eternal being, which is at the same time the highest being and the highest life, as summum esse, pure essence, and also as ipsissima ἐνεργεια, actus purissimus, altogether active; he works always.
Now we descend to his works. Those works are the creatures, opera ad extra. But before we can consider these, the question arises: What is the connection between God, as he exists in himself, and these his works? And that connection is indicated in the counsel of God, which includes the opera essentialia ad intra, that is, the decrees. These are not described to us in the Scripture in the abstract, but are set before our eyes in history itself. God is Lord of the whole earth and shows that from day to day in the creation, preservation, and government of all things. And so it is also with election and reprobation. These are not portrayed in the Old Testament as eternal decrees, but they meet us on every page as facts in history. From the beginning, the human race divides into two, in the holy line of Seth, Gen. 4:25, 26, 5:1-32, and the more and more estranging from God line of Cain, Gen. 4:17-24. When both lines mingle and unrighteousness increases, Noah alone finds grace in the eyes of the Lord, Gen. 6. After the flood, the blessing is pronounced over Shem and Japheth, but the curse over Canaan, Gen. 9:25-27. From Shem's line Abraham is chosen, Gen. 12. Of his sons, not Ishmael but Isaac is the son of promise, Gen. 17:19-21, 21:12, 13. Among Isaac's sons Esau is hated and Jacob loved, Gen. 25:23, Mal. 1:2, Rom. 9:11, 12. Of Jacob's sons each receives his own rank and task, and Judah receives the primacy, Gen. 49. While all other peoples are for a time passed by and walk their own ways, Israel alone is chosen by the Lord to be a people for his possession. This election, bachar , yada , Hos. 13:5, Am. 3:2, did not happen because of Israel's worthiness but only according to God's merciful love, Deut. 4:37, 7:6-8, 8:17, 9:4-6, 10:15, Ezek. 16:1ff., Am. 9:7, and this love is from days of old, Jer. 31:3. It had as its object Israel as a people and nation, although thousands broke the covenant and there is a distinction between Israel after the flesh and after the promise, Rom. 2:28, 29, Rom. 9-11. And it had as its goal that Israel should belong to the Lord, be his people and possession, and walk in holiness before his face, Ex. 19:5, Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 26:18, Ps. 135:4, Mal. 3:17.
Within the circle of Israel there is repeatedly mention of a special election to a dignity or service, as for example of Jerusalem and Zion to be a dwelling of the Lord, Deut. 12:5, 14:23, 1 Kings 11:30, 2 Kings 21:7, Ps. 78:68, 70; of Moses to mediator of the Old Covenant, Ex. 3; of Levi to the priesthood, Deut. 18:5, 21:5; of Saul and David to king, 1 Sam. 10:24, 2 Sam. 6:21; of the prophets to their office, 1 Sam. 3, Isa. 6, Jer. 1, Ezek. 1-3, Am. 3:7, 8, 7:15; above all of the Messiah to Redeemer of his people, who is the Israel, the servant of the Lord par excellence, Isa. 41:8, 42:1, 44:1, 45:4, etc. Yet although this election in the Old Testament mostly appears as a fact in history and thus coincides with the calling itself, yet it rests on a foreknowledge and predetermination of God. In general, the Old Testament teaches that God creates, preserves, and governs all things by the word and with wisdom, Ps. 33:6, 104:24, Job 38, Prov. 8, etc., so that everything rests on the thought of God. But it is also expressly said that God knows the future and declares it beforehand, Isa. 41:22, 23, 42:9, 43:9-12, 44:7, 46:10, 48:3ff., Amos 3:7. In prophecy he makes known beforehand the things which and as they shall happen, Gen. 3:14ff., 6:13, 9:25ff., 12:2ff., 15:13ff., 25:23, 49:8ff., etc. The days of a man's life are all already determined beforehand and written in God's book, before even one has come into being, Ps. 139:16, 31:16, 39:6, Job 14:5. The righteous are written in the book of life, as the citizens of a city or kingdom are registered, and have therein the assurance that they shall have part in the life in communion with God in the theocracy of Israel, Ex. 32:32, Ps. 87:6, Ezek. 13:9, Jer. 17:13, Ps. 69:29; in Isa. 4:3 and Dan. 12:1 this is further developed so that they shall have part in the theocratic salvation in the future who are written unto life. The New Testament thought is here prepared, that the book of life contains the names of the heirs of eternal life.
And all things happen according to the counsel of God. With him is wisdom and might, counsel, etsah , and understanding, Job 12:13, Prov. 8:14, Isa. 9:5, 11:2, 28:29, Jer. 32:19. He thereby always chooses the best ways to reach his goal, needs no one's counsel, and is terrible, far exalted above the counsel of the saints and of all who are around him, Isa. 40:13, Jer. 23:18, 22, Ps. 89:8. God's counsel is his determinate thought, his fixed decree over all things, Isa. 14:24-27, Dan. 4:24. That counsel is indeed hidden, Job 15:8, but comes to reality in history itself. For according to that counsel everything happens; it stands forever, no one can withstand it, Isa. 14:24-27, 46:10, Ps. 33:11, Prov. 19:21; and over against it the counsel of the enemies is destroyed, Neh. 4:15, Ps. 33:10, Prov. 21:30, Jer. 19:7.
2. The New Testament sets this counsel of God in a much clearer light. Not only are all his works known to God from eternity, Acts 15:18 (cf. however the variant readings), but all things happen according to the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God. The New Testament word βουλή denotes the will of God as resting on counsel and deliberation, and is therein distinguished from θέλημα , the will as will, cf. Eph. 1:11 βουλή τοῦ θελήματος . Such a counsel of God precedes all things. It embraces everything, Eph. 1:11, also the sinful deeds of men, Acts 2:23, 4:28, cf. Luke 22:22. God has beforehand determined the dwelling places of the peoples both in time and in extent, ὁρίσας , Acts 17:26. God's will is revealed also in the perdition of Judas, John 17:12, in the giving over of the Gentiles, Rom. 1:24, in the rejection of Esau, Rom. 9:13, in the hardening of the ungodly, Rom. 9:18, in the raising up of Pharaoh, Rom. 9:17, in the bearing with the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, Rom. 9:22, in the being appointed (κεῖμαι ) of Christ not only for a rising up but also εἰς πτῶσιν , Luke 2:34, for a judgment, John 3:19-21, for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, 1 Pet. 2:7, 8, cf. 1 Thess. 5:9, Jude vs. 4. But especially the βουλή τοῦ θεοῦ has reference to the work of redemption, Luke 7:30, Acts 13:36, 20:27, Heb. 6:17. And the New Testament is rich in words to describe this counsel of God more closely. It speaks of εὐδοκία , good pleasure, delight, Matt. 11:26, Luke 2:14, 10:21, Eph. 1:5, 9, Phil. 2:13, 2 Thess. 1:11; πρόθεσις , purpose, Rom. 8:28, 9:11, Eph. 1:11, 3:11, 2 Tim. 1:9; πρόγνωσις , foreknowledge, Rom. 8:29, 11:2, 1 Pet. 1:2; ἐκλογή , election, Mark 13:20, Acts 9:15, 13:17, 15:7, Rom. 9:11, 11:5, 28, 1 Cor. 1:27, 28, Eph. 1:4, 1 Thess. 1:4, 2 Pet. 1:10, James 2:5; προορισμός , Rom. 8:29, 1 Cor. 2:7, Eph. 1:5, 11; cf. also Acts 13:48 where it is said that as many believed as were appointed to eternal life, ὅσοι ἦσαν τεταγμένοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον , that is, not as many as had fitted themselves or were subjectively predisposed but as many as were ordained, appointed to eternal life; and also Eph. 2:10, where of the good works of believers it is said that God prepared them beforehand, προητοίμασεν . The words are thus distinguished: πρόθεσις indicates that God in the work of salvation proceeds not according to whim or chance but according to a fixed plan, according to an unchangeable purpose; ἐκλογή modifies this thus, that this purpose does not embrace all, but that it is a πρόθεσις κατ’ ἐκλογήν , Rom. 9:11, an electing purpose, so that not all but many come to salvation; πρόγνωσις regards the persons who in this electing purpose of God are the object not of his bare foreknowledge but of his practical love; while finally προορισμός looks more to the means which God appoints to bring these known ones to the destiny appointed for them. Πρόθεσις certitudinem eventus indicat, πρόγνωσις personarum singularitatem, προορισμός mediorum ordinem . The election is certain through πρόθεσιν , determined through πρόγνωσιν , ordered through προορισμόν , Turretin, Theol. El. IV qu. 7. The eternity of this purpose is not of itself already implied in the preposition προ with which the words are compounded, but is nevertheless clearly expressed in Eph. 3:11, 2 Tim. 1:9, cf. Matt. 25:34, 1 Cor. 2:7, Eph. 1:4. It has indeed been asserted that Paul in Rom. 9 does not treat of the absolute free power and the eternal decree of God, but only of a conduct of God which in time, in history, has its causes as well as its effects, W. Beyschlag, Die paulin. Theodicee Röm. IX-XI , 2nd ed. Halle 1895. Dr. van Dijk, De leer der verkiezing volgens het N. T. , Studiën ed. by de la Saussaye, Valeton and van Dijk IV 3rd part. Buhl, Der Gedankengang von Röm. 9-11 , Stud. u. Kr. 1887 p. 295-322. Kübel, Herzog² 12, 158. But this assertion is refuted by Rom. 9. For the πρόθεσις κατ’ ἐκλογήν clearly precedes the facts of history; history therefore serves to establish that purpose which already existed, Rom. 9:11. To Sarah a seed of promise is promised long beforehand, v. 9. Before the children of Isaac were born, God had already said that the elder should serve the younger, vs. 11. The verses 15-18 teach that election has its causes not in works but solely and only in the will of him who calls. Very certainly Rom. 9 speaks of a dealing of God in time but the cause of that dealing falls outside of time, lies only in God's will and good pleasure. Added to this is that the cause of election elsewhere is also clearly ascribed solely and exclusively to God's grace, love, good pleasure, Matt. 11:25, Luke 12:32, Eph. 1:5, 9, 11, 2 Tim. 1:9, 10. It is not even correct to think in Rom. 9:21 either exclusively with supralapsarianism of the uncorrupted mass or with Augustine and infralapsarianism only of the corrupted mass. Paul does not think here at all of this distinction. What he wants to say is only this, that God has the absolute right to give to his creatures that destiny which pleases him, cf. Isa. 10:15, Jer. 18, Matt. 20:15. From the standpoint of absolute right a creature has nothing to say against his Creator. Paul refutes all objections against election not by saying that it is just and fair but with an appeal to the sovereignty and absolute right of God. Just as the New Testament expresses the eternity of election more clearly than the Old Testament, so it also conceives that election more individually and personally. While in the Old Testament the people of Israel appears as the object of election, here it is particular persons who are chosen in Christ, who form his body and bear the name of elect, Matt. 24:31, Luke 18:7, Acts 13:48, Rom. 8:33, Eph. 1:4, Titus 1:1, 2 Tim. 2:10, 1 Pet. 1:1, 2, 9 etc. This appears especially also from the book of life, in which the names are written of the heirs of eternal life, Luke 10:20, Heb. 12:23, Phil. 4:3, Rev. 3:5, 13:8, 20:12, 21:27, 22:19. Finally it is the clear teaching of the New Testament that election has its goal not in an earthly life in Canaan, nor yet in an eminent place in the kingdom of God, but specifically in heavenly blessedness. Indeed there is within the church also again an election to one or another office or service, e.g., of the apostles, Luke 6:13, John 6:70 etc., but the proper election has as its goal holiness, Eph. 1:4, sonship, Eph. 1:5, salvation, 2 Thess. 2:13, eternal life, Acts 13:48, conformity to Christ, Rom. 8:29, John 17:24, the glorification of God, Eph. 1:6, 12. Also in Rom. 9 Paul does not treat of a higher or lower place in the kingdom of God, but he distinguishes in Israel itself between children of the flesh and children of the promise. He speaks specifically of vessels unto honor and vessels unto dishonor, κατηρτισμένα εἰς ἀπώλειαν . He sets mercy and hardening over against each other, and in vs. 14 and 19 lets objections come to word, whose seriousness precisely presupposes the doctrine of such a sovereign election.
3. Also outside the Christian religion, much strife has been waged over predestination and free will. Philosophy has alternately come to a pantheistic determinism or to a deistic doctrine of freedom. The Jews ascribe to man, even in the state of sin, free will, Weber, System. In Mohammedanism, a strife has been waged over predestination and free will, which in many respects is analogous to that in the Christian church. In Islam, God is the absolute almighty, the absolute willfulness, over against which man is wholly passive. Against this, in the second century of the Hijra, opposition arose from the side of the Mu'tazilites, who defended free will, opposed predestination, and regarded not almighty power but righteousness as the essence of God, Houtsma, The Strife over the Dogma up to El-Ash'ari, Leiden 1875. Kuenen, National Religions and World Religions 1882 p. 40 ff.; compare also the strife in the school of Ramanuja in India, which is often compared with that of the Gomarists and Arminians, Saussaye, Religious History I 448. In the Christian church, in the first period, over against the heathen fate and Gnostic naturalism, all emphasis was laid on the moral nature, the freedom, and the responsibility of man, and therefore the teaching of Scripture on the counsel of God could not come to its right. Man was indeed corrupted by sin to a greater or lesser degree but still remained free and could accept the offered grace of God. An absolute predestination and an irresistible grace were not taught; the counsel of God consisted in foreknowledge and the determination of reward or punishment dependent thereon. God gives over to unbelief those of whom He foreknows that they will not believe, and He elects those whose merits He has foreseen, Justin, Against Trypho § 141. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV 29. Tertullian, Against Marcion II 23 etc., cf. Münscher-von Coelln I 356 ff. Hagenbach, § 48 and 57. Calvin, Institutes II 2, 4, 9. This has essentially remained the standpoint of the Greek church. Man has been weakened by sin and become mortal. Yet he can still will the natural good and also accept or reject the offered grace (gratia praeveniens). If he accepts it, then he is supported by that grace (gratia cooperans), and must persevere to the end, for he can still fall away. Those who accept the grace and persevere, God has foreknown and destined for salvation. The others, although with antecedent will He wills the salvation of all, He leaves in their fall and destines them to perdition, Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II 29, 30. Orthodox Confession qu. 26-30. In the manner of expression, Pelagius aligned himself with the ancients, but he nevertheless taught, through denial of the doctrine of redemption always maintained by the church fathers, something essentially new, Harnack, Dogmengeschichte III 183. Sin was with him no habit or state, but only an act, which leaves human nature with its free will wholly unharmed. Grace consists in this, that God through creation grants to man the power in nature and further in the law and the doctrine and the example of Christ offers him a divine aid; this grace through Christ is however granted according to merits to such as use their free will well. Predestination finally was nothing but God's foreseeing of the free acts and merits of men and the corresponding predetermination of reward and punishment. Properly speaking, there is thus no predestination on God's side, neither to grace nor to salvation; it depends wholly on the prevision of the good acts of man. Only in infant baptism did Pelagius come into great difficulty, for this was granted without any merits; and he could not extricate himself from it except by various evasions and inconsistencies. The doctrine of Pelagius was somewhat softened in the so-called semi-Pelagianism of the Middle Ages of John Cassian, abbot in Marseille, pupil of Chrysostom and well acquainted with the Greek fathers. He indeed taught that sin had corrupted human nature. But man was not dead, but sick. He was like a sick person who cannot heal himself but yet can take the medicine to himself and desire healing; like someone who has fallen into a pit, cannot save himself but yet can grasp the thrown rope. The sinful man therefore cannot merit grace, but yet can accept it, and, supported by it, persevere. And God grants that grace to those of whom He has foreseen that they would accept it and persevere in it; so also with children and peoples. He withholds it on the other hand from those of whom He foresees the opposite. And herein consists predestination and reprobation; it depends on God's foreknowledge concerning man's attitude toward the offered grace. Ours is to will, God's to perfect. Cf. G. J. Vossius, History of Pelagianism 1618, better edition 1655. Wiggers, Pragmatic Presentation of Augustinianism and Pelagianism 1831-33. Wörter, Pelagianism according to its Origin and Doctrine, Freiburg 1866. Münscher-von Coelln I 371 ff. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte III 151 ff. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte II² 512 ff. Möller, art. Pelagius in Herzog². Already long before the Pelagian strife, Augustine taught predestination. He came to it through his study of the Epistle to the Romans, Reuter, Augustinian Studies 1887 p. 5 ff., and wanted herein to give nothing other than the teaching of Scripture, On the Gift of Perseverance c. 19. He gave it already in his Questions to Simplicianus of the year 397 and developed it more broadly in his writings On Rebuke and Grace 427, On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance 428 or 429. Augustine distinguishes between foreknowledge and predestination. The former is broader than the latter. To predestine is to foreknow that which (God) Himself was going to do, On the Gift of Perseverance 18. On the Predestination of the Saints 10. 19. Predestination is nothing other than foreknowledge, namely, and preparation of the benefits of God, by which most certainly are liberated whosoever are liberated, On the Gift of Perseverance 14. This predestination takes place not according to merit or worthiness but out of sheer grace; not for but to faith, they are not elected because they believed but elected that they may believe, On the Predestination of the Saints 17. All men were indeed equal, a mass of damnation, City of God XIV 26. On the Predestination of the Saints 8. On Nature and Grace 4. 8 etc. This especially appears in the predestination of young children, of whom some are lost without baptism and others are saved through baptism, On the Predestination of the Saints 12. Enchiridion 98. Predestination has its sole cause in the sovereign will of God, in His absolute free power. He owes nothing to anyone, and can justly condemn all, but according to His good pleasure He makes one vessel to honor and another to dishonor, On the Predestination of the Saints 8. Alongside predestination thus stands reprobation. Augustine reckons this many times to predestination. He speaks of predestining to eternal death, On the Soul and its Origin IV 10. City of God XXII 24, of predestined to everlasting destruction, in John Evang. tract. 48, of the world predestined to damnation, ibid. 111, of Judas as predestined to perdition, ibid. 107 etc. The text 1 Tim. 2:4 was therefore explained by Augustine in a limited sense and in various ways, Enchiridion 103. On Rebuke and Grace 14. Usually, however, predestination is understood as predestination to salvation. For the good, predestination is necessary, for the evil, foreknowledge is sufficient, although this too is not purely passive, but actively conceived. For God does not ordain in the same way to perdition and to the means leading thereto, namely, sins, as He ordains to salvation and to the means that tend thereto. Predestination with Augustine is always an adequate predestination, that is, to salvation and therefore also to grace. To the predestined also belong those who now do not yet believe or are not even yet born. But their number is fixed and unchangeable. In time they come to Christ, receive baptism, faith, and above all also the gift of perseverance. For this is granted only to the predestined. Whether someone is predestined, he can know only from this, that he perseveres to the end. For God has taken up some in the church who are not elect and do not persevere, that the predestined may not exalt themselves and seek false rest, On Rebuke and Grace 13. Why God now saves only some and lets others go lost is a mystery. Unjust it is not, for He owes nothing to anyone. Reprobation is an act of justice, as predestination was an act of grace. In both God reveals His virtues, City of God XIV 26, cf. Wiggers, I 290 ff. Schwane II² 557 ff. Baltzer, The Holy Augustine's Doctrine on Predestination and Reprobation. Vienna 1871. Rottmanner, Augustinism. Munich 1892.
4. Pelagianism Was Condemned Together with Nestorianism. Pelagianism was condemned together with Nestorianism at the council of Ephesus in 431. The strife between the followers of Augustine—Prosper, Hilary, the unnamed writer of On the Calling of All Nations , Lucidus, Fulgentius, and others—and the Semi-Pelagians—Cassian, Faustus of Riez, the unnamed writer of the much-discussed book Predestined , which arose in the fifth century and was published by the Jesuit Sirmond in 1643, Gennadius, Vincent of Lerins, and others—came first to a decision at the Synod of Orange in 529. Here on the one side it was clearly taught that the whole man is corrupted by the sin of Adam, can. 1. 2, of himself has nothing but falsehood and sin, can. 22, and that both the beginning and the increase of faith are to be thanked not to ourselves, to our natural powers, to our free will, but to grace, to the infusion, operation, inspiration, illumination of the Holy Ghost in us, who bends (correcting) our will from unbelief to faith, can. 3-8. But on the other side, of the free will it is only said that it is weakened by sin, made infirm, attenuated, can. 8. 13. 25, that all the baptized by the grace received in baptism, with Christ helping and working together, can and ought to fulfill, if they will faithfully labor, that which belongs to salvation, can. 13. 25; and further, of the absolute predestination, the irresistible grace, the particularity of grace, there is complete silence. This undecidedness worked harmfully. This came out clearly in the Gottschalk strife. Many then already stood on a Semi-Pelagian or Pelagian standpoint, Hincmar, Rabanus, Erigena, and gained the victory at the synod of Quierzy in 853. But there were also many learned men who could not at all agree with the condemnation of Gottschalk and the decrees of Quierzy. To these belonged Prudentius, Remigius, Ratramnus, Lupus, and others; they defended a twofold predestination; the predestination to glory is without any merit, happens not on foreseen faith, merits, but is the cause of the predestination to grace, faith, merits, etc.; the predestination to damnation, however, does not in that way include the predestination to sins, but is, at least as positive reprobation, dependent on the foreknowledge and permission of sins. Hence 1 Tim. 2:4 was still understood in a limited way, not of all men head for head but of many or various men, and it was deemed absurd that Christ should have satisfied for all men, thus also for the heathen who never hear of him, and even for the man of sin, the antichrist. On this standpoint also stood the synod of Valence in 855. Cf. H. Schrörs, The Strife over Predestination in the Ninth Century . Freiburg 1884. Niemeijer, The Strife over the Doctrine of Predestination in the Ninth Century , Groningen 1889. Schwane, History of Dogma III 428 f. Denzinger, n. 283 sq. And this is in the main also still the standpoint of Scholasticism. The predestination to death is preferably not called by this name, because it then so easily gets the appearance that it brings with it as a means the predestination to sins, but it is usually treated under the name of reprobation; sometimes this is then distinguished into negative and positive; the first is before foreseen merits and an act of sovereignty, the second is however dependent on and follows upon the foreknowledge and the decree to permit sins. Hence 1 Tim. 2:4 is still understood in a limited sense, and a universal benevolence of God, and a general satisfaction of Christ is not yet taught, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 40 and 41 with the commentaries of Thomas, Bonaventure, Scotus, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 19 and 23. Summa contra Gentiles III 163. But Nominalism, the rejection of the Reformation, and Jesuitism have removed the Roman Church and theology ever further from Augustine and Paul. Rome did not heed the call to reformation without punishment and at Trent established the following dogma: 1. By sin the free will is indeed weakened in powers and inclined, but not lost and extinct, Trent sess. 6 cap. 1 and can. 5; man can before justification still do many natural things, which are absolutely no sin but truly good, ibid. can. 7. 2. To the good in a supernatural sense, to faith, hope, love, to justification, to the acquiring of eternal life, the natural man, robbed by original sin of the superadded gifts, is not able. For that he needs more than the powers of nature and the teaching of the law, namely, divine grace, the preventing inspiration of the Holy Spirit, ibid. can. 1-3. 3. This divine grace is bestowed on the children of believers in baptism, and consists in adults in that God objectively calls them by the gospel and subjectively touches their heart by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. This grace is unmerited, preventing, grace freely given, ibid. cap. 5. 4. This grace is however not irresistible. It indeed arouses man, helps and moves him, and makes him fit to turn himself to his justification, and to free consent to grace; but he can both receive and reject the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, ibid. cap. 5. If he accepts this grace, and aroused and moved by it cooperates with God and makes himself fit and prepares himself by the seven preparations for justification, then he receives it in baptism out of grace and only according to a merit so called by Scholasticism ex congruo, ibid. cap. 6 and 8 and can. 4. 5. The infused grace of justification remains resistible and losable, but accepted and preserved, it enables one to do good works and according to a merit ex condigno to earn eternal life, ibid. c. 9-16. 6. In agreement with this, Rome has decidedly rejected Augustine’s doctrine of absolute predestination. It has however thereby always avoided the name of Augustine, made a caricature of his doctrine among his followers and condemned it. The above-mentioned book Predestined presents it as if in the fifth century in Gaul there had existed a sect of ultra-predestinarians, and reproduces Augustinism in paradoxical theses which no follower of Augustine ever taught, Harnack III 225 f. And in the same way in Gottschalk, Bradwardine, Wycliffe, Hus, Baius, Jansen, Quesnel under a false name the genuine Augustinism has been condemned, Denzinger Enchiridion § 477 sq. 881 sq. 966 sq. 1216 sq. Harnack III 628-640. The Council of Trent expresses itself very cautiously about predestination. On the one hand it seems to teach an election, for it says that no one in this life may establish that he is altogether in the number of the predestined, for only from special revelation can one know whom God has chosen for himself, VI cap. 12 and can. 15. 16. But on the other side it teaches expressly that Christ is sent that all might receive the adoption of sons, that he has satisfied for all, VI cap. 2 and 3, that man can accept or reject grace, preserve or lose it, and condemns the doctrine: the grace of justification happens only to those predestined to life; all the rest who are called are indeed called but do not receive grace as being by divine power predestined to evil, ibid. can. 17, as if this last were taught by someone and in that way! The church leaves these two series of statements unreconciled side by side; but theology has always and in various ways attempted a harmony. First, almost all Roman theologians teach that God with antecedent will wills the salvation of all and therefore also let Christ satisfy for all; this antecedent will extends even to the unbaptized dying children and to the heathen. But according to his consequent will, which takes account of the good or bad use that men make of their freedom and of grace, God does not will the salvation of all. Predestination is here from the beginning made dependent on foreknowledge. Next, there has gradually arisen among them and been generally accepted the distinction between predestination taken completely and incompletely, adequate and inadequate. Under the first is understood predestination both to grace and to glory; under the last that which relates to one of the two. The intention of this distinction is that predestination to grace and that to glory are not inseparably connected; one can partake of predestination to grace and have received the grace of faith and of justification and yet lose it again and so be deprived of predestination to glory. This separation was unknown to the medieval theologians, Anselm, Lombard, Thomas, etc., is still contested by some but penetrates ever further. Now as to predestination to the first grace, this is called by all in opposition to Pelagianism unmerited, Rom. 9:16, John 6:44; it happens not on foreseen merits; also it is in opposition to Semi-Pelagianism preceding the will of man, preventing grace, preceding. Because now predestination to the first grace is the beginning of complete or adequate predestination, it can be said that the whole predestination is grace and unmerited, while it is gratuita in cause, while among the Thomists it is gratuita in itself. But this does not exclude that this predestination to the first grace and to every following grace would not follow a certain order; according to Molina, God by middle knowledge has foreseen that some men would make good use of the grace offered each time and has accordingly decided the distribution of grace. Also he has foreseen that the saints by their prayers or by merits de congruo would acquire grace for others, and accordingly decided to bestow it on them. One cannot merit for himself predestination to the first grace, but the saints can for others, and above all Christ is the cause of our predestination. Predestination to glory is according to the Augustinians and Thomists such as Sylvius, Thomas, Salmanticenses, Gonet, Gotti, Billuart, Alvarez, Lemos, Goudin, etc., and also according to Bellarmine and Suarez indeed absolute; God has first decided to bestow salvation on some before and apart from all merits and then decided to work them by grace so that they could merit that salvation by their works. But the Molinists, Molina, Valentia, Vasquez, Tanner, Lessius, Becanus, Petavius, Lapide, etc., defend predestination to glory after foreseen merits. Finally as to reprobation, the Augustinians and Thomists are divided; some join entirely with Augustine, are infralapsarian and let the decree of reprobation follow upon original sin and upon this alone, so that reprobation is a just dereliction in the same mass (Gonet, Gotti, Gazzaniga); others distinguish between a negative but absolute decree, not to bestow salvation on some, and another decree, to withhold grace, to permit sin, and to punish (Alvarez, Estius, Sylvius, Salmanticenses); still others understand by the decree of reprobation nothing but the will of God to permit that some go lost by their own fault (Billuart, Goudin), cf. C. Pesch, Praelectiones II 217 sq. Jansen, Praelectiones III 171 sq. But against them stand the Molinists, who reject the so-called negative reprobation, that is, an absolute decree preceding sin, sovereign, entirely and teach that God with antecedent will wills the salvation of all, and further accept only a positive reprobation, that is, a decree of God to punish eternally those whose sin and unbelief he has foreseen. Reprobation is thus in every respect after foreseen merits, and then according to some like Hincmar still only a predestination of punishment for the ungodly, but not of the ungodly for punishment. Cf. Bellarmine, De gratia et libero arbitrio II c. 9-15. Becanus, Theologia Scholastica I tract. 1 c. 14-16. Petavius, De Deo , l. X. Theologia Wirceburgensis ed. 3 Paris 1880 III 181-285. Billuart, Summa S. Thomae , whole Tom. II. Daelman, Theologia I p. 199-316. Schwetz, Theologia Dogmatica II § 121. C. Pesch, Praelectiones II 165-226. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae II 135-177. Simar, Dogmatik p. 556-576 etc.
5. The Reformation went back to Paul and Augustine and found in the confession of God's sovereign election the strength to oppose the Pelagianism of the Roman Church. All Reformers were unanimous in this. Luther taught and defended predestination in the early period just as strongly as Zwingli and Calvin. He also never revoked it, although later against the Anabaptists he laid more and more emphasis on the revelation of God in word and sacrament. J. Müller, Lutheri de praedest. et lib. arb. doctrina 1852. Schweizer, Die protest. Centraldogmen I. Köstlin, Luthers Theol. I. II. Weber, Luthers Streitschrift de servo arbitrio, Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1878. Max Staub, Das Verhältniss der menschl. Willensfreiheit zur Gotteslehre bei Luther u. Zwingli, Zurich 1894. Melanchthon taught at first completely the same, Loci Comm. 1521, cap. de hominis viribus adeoque de libero arbitrio, and also in his commentary on Romans 9, but from 1527 and in the later editions of the Loci from 1535 onward and in the Confessio Augustana variata of 1540, he came to an ever further deviation from predestination and to an open confession of synergism. Schweizer I. This synergism was, just like the universalism of Samuel Huber, decidedly rejected by the true Lutherans, such as Flacius, Wigand, Amsdorf, Hesshusius, and others. Frank, Theol. der Concordienformel IV. Art. Synerg. in Herzog². And the Formula of Concord spoke as strongly as possible that man by nature is incapable of any spiritual good and that faith in the absolute sense is a gift of God. This should have led to accepting also the absolute predestination. But in Luther from the beginning there dwelt a somewhat different spirit than in Zwingli and Calvin. The confession of predestination rested with him only on anthropological grounds, on the deep corruption of sin and the impotence of man. If man had no merit and depended solely on grace, it seemed enough was done. Luther therefore avoided more and more the speculative doctrine of predestination, the voluntas beneplaciti, the hidden God, held to the ministry of word and sacrament, to which grace is bound, and placed the universal salvific will of God, voluntas signi, ever more in the foreground. He silently watched Melanchthon's change in this doctrine, and remained with the doctrine of justification by faith. Predestination had no independent theological significance; it was of secondary importance. The synthetic method in this doctrine was opposed; one followed the analytic, from below upward; one did not derive it from the idea of God but only from the condition of man. Schweizer, I. Hence synergism of Melanchthon was still opposed, but gradually predestination itself was set aside. Hesshusius brought against Calvin and Beza already that their doctrine introduced a fate and made God the author of sin 1560-61. Marbach opposed Zanchi in Strasbourg in 1561. Andreae still taught an election whose cause lay only in God's grace, but otherwise held to the preaching of the gospel and remained with the secondary causes, faith and unbelief. Schweizer, I. The Formula of Concord teaches as decidedly as possible the servum arbitrium but lets the absolute and particular predestination rest and holds to the universal and earnest will of God in the gospel. It does not deny election, it also does not call prescience to aid, it agrees still with the ubi et quando visum est Deo of the Confessio Augustana; election is unconditional and has its cause only in God's will. But it identifies election and predestination, it lets reprobation depend on prescience; and after it has taught election, it immediately adds, out of fear of all kinds of danger or abuse, that one should not attempt to speculate about that hidden decree, but that one should consider the counsel of God in Christ, in the gospel, whose preaching is universal and earnest, and that the cause of perdition is only man's unbelief. God wills that all be saved; He wills no one's sin and no one's death. After the Formula of Concord, especially also in the struggle against Huber's universalism, there arose among the Lutherans, such as Gerlach, Hunnius, Lyser, the view that God with antecedent will wills the salvation of all, but with consequent will only the salvation of those whose faith and salvation He had foreseen. Toward the end of the century, there is increasingly decided distinction between prescience and predestination, predestination is equal to election, and is dependent on Christ's merit, the cause of rejection lies in man's sin. The Saxon Visitation Articles of 1592, drawn up by Hunnius, and the writings of Hunnius de providentia dei et aeterna praedestinatione 1597 and de libero arbitrio 1598 teach this clearly. Mediation is sought in the earnestness with which the natural man can make use of the means of grace. Schweizer I. Heppe, Dogm. d. d. Pr. II. But with this doctrine the Lutherans could not remain standing. When at the Synod of Dort the Remonstrants were condemned, they felt more and more drawn to them. Although the Reformed always distinguished between Lutherans and Remonstrants, the former judged more and more that in the Remonstrants their own doctrine was condemned. Schweizer, Centr. II. The Lutheran theologians of the 17th century approached the Remonstrant confession. They teach first a voluntas Dei antecedens, which made Christ die for all, wills the salvation of all and then offers the gospel to all, and then a voluntas consequens, which actually decides to grant salvation to those quos in Christum finaliter credituros esse praevidit, and prepares perdition for those who finally resist grace. Quenstedt, Theol. did. polem. III. Hollaz, Examen theol. Gerhard, Loci theol. loc. VII. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. In 1724 Mosheim declared that the 5 articles of the Remonstrants contained the pure Lutheran doctrine. Schweizer, II. Pietism, rationalism, supranaturalism, and the whole intellectual direction of the eighteenth century were not favorably disposed to the doctrine of predestination; the voluntas antecedens entirely displaced the voluntas consequens; and under predestination nothing else was understood than the general decree of God to save men through faith in Christ. Wegscheider, Inst. theol. Bretschneider, Dogm. III. Reinhard, Dogm. Herder considered it a blessing that the strife over grace was buried in the stream of forgetfulness and exclaimed: May the hand wither that ever draws it forth from there. Vom Geist des Christ. Leibniz still exerted himself to reconcile free will with predestination. Tichler, Theol. des Leibniz I. But Kant spoke openly that man still had a moral disposition and thus could do what he ought. Religion, ed. Rosenkranz.
6. The Reformed Remain Faithful to the Original Standpoint. While the Lutherans more and more gave up the original standpoint of Luther and of the whole Reformation, the Reformed have stayed true to it; the cause of the split is thus not to be sought with them. Zwingli taught predestination as firmly as possible, not only on anthropological grounds but also and especially on theological grounds, drawn from the being of God, Anamnesis de Providentia , Works IV 79 sq. Calvin spoke in the first edition of his Institutes still very softly and modestly, but came through his study of the letter to the Romans, April 1538-1541 in Strasbourg, to an ever firmer confession, both with regard to man's unfreedom, II c. 2, as with regard to election, III c. 21 sq. Although guarding himself against the paradoxes of Luther and Zwingli and sometimes more assuming predestination than teaching it, e.g., in the Catechism of the Church of Geneva with preface to the assembly of East Frisia, in Niemeyer Reformed Confessions 123 sq., yet he stepped forward with strength for it, where it was denied and fought against. He defended it against Albert Pighius of Kampen in his writing: Defense of the Sound and Orthodox Doctrine on the Bondage and Liberation of Human Choice 1543. Against Bolsec he wrote De Aeterna Dei Praedestinatione 1552. Against Rome he directed his Acts of the Synod of Trent with Antidote 1547. And he did not rest until his teaching had found entrance in all the Reformed Switzerland, particularly in Zurich, where Bullinger stood for a tempered, infralapsarian view, Schweizer, Central I 255-292. Through Calvin the doctrine of predestination is taken up in the confession of all Reformed churches. Yet from the beginning there has been great difference in the way of setting it forth, both in the confessions and among the theologians.
Apart from the Repetitio Anhaltina of 1579 in Niemeyer, p. 638, the Confessio Sigismundi of 1613, ibid. 650, the Colloquium Lipsiense of 1631, ibid. 661 sq. 664 sq., which give back the Reformed doctrine only impurely, there is among the confessional writings an unmistakable difference. The Genevan Catechism of Calvin speaks not at all about predestination; the Heidelberg Catechism makes but brief mention of election, q. 52, 54; the Anglican confession speaks only of predestination to life and gives as its object those whom (God) chose in Christ art. 7; the Second Helvetic Confession of Bullinger art. 10 and the First Scottish Confession art. 8 speak in about the same spirit; the Gallican Confession art. 12 and Belgic art. 18 and the Helvetic Consensus Formula 4-6 are firm but sober and infralapsarian; the strictest and most Calvinistic are expressed by the Genevan Consensus, the Canons of Dort, the Lambeth Articles drawn up by Dr. Whitaker 1595, in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom III 523, the Irish Articles of 1615, ibid. 526, the Westminster Confession c. 3. And just so there is great distinction among the theologians. There were always those who treated the doctrine of predestination, out of fear of misuse, "a posteriori, from below upward," Trigland, Church History 79, 84, 85 ff. 92 ff. 99. They held more to the method of climbing up from the effect to the cause, from the fruit to the root, and of concluding from faith and conversion to election and then applying it to comfort and assurance, than of deriving a priori from the idea of God the predestination and election.
To these belonged especially Bullinger, Ursinus, Olevianus, Boquinus, Hyperius, Sohnius, and others, Heppe Dogmatics of German Protestantism II 1-79, Gooszen, in his two works on the Heidelberg Catechism 1890 and 1893. Dr. van 't Hooft, The Theology of H. Bullinger 1888, cf. my article Calvin and Reformed, Free Church, February 1893. But this is no difference in kind and in principle. All the named theologians have many times clearly and plainly testified their agreement with the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, Trigland, Church History 59-79. Schweizer, Central I passim, cf. II 110. Conversely, the Calvinists also at all times wanted sobriety and carefulness in the handling of this doctrine. Calvin did not bring it up in the Genevan Catechism. Dort, Canons I 12, 14 and Westminster, Confession c. 4 § 8 warn against vain and curious inquiries. Many theologians treated in the first time the doctrine of election not in the locus on God but in the locus on salvation, Calvin himself, Institutes III c. 21-24. Martyr, Common Places 1580 p. 229. Sohnius, Works I 256. II 42. Musculus, Common Places cap. 24. Heidelberg Catechism q. 54. Belgic Confession art. 16. Gallican art. 12 etc. They thus first follow the order of the apostle Paul, who from the doctrine of sin and of grace in Romans 9-11 climbs up to election and also in Ephesians 1:3 goes out from the blessings of Christ.
But like Paul, having arrived there, then also a priori derives from election all blessings of salvation, Romans 8:29 ff. Ephesians 1:4 ff., so also among the Reformed the analytic method gradually makes way for the synthetic. The life of faith was indeed the condition under which the confession of election arose, but the fact of election was yet the source of all salvation, the foundation and first cause of all goods. This was the conviction not only of Calvin, but also of Melanchthon, Hemming, Bucer, Olevianus etc., in Heppe, Dogmatics of German Protestantism II 12. 20. 27. 70. Musculus says expressly: we treat election after faith, not as if it would first follow thereon but so that we from there as from the stream might look up to the fountain itself, Common Places p. 534. The systematic order and the theological interest demanded that predestination be treated in the locus on God. So it had already been done by the scholastics, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 40, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 23; so it happened in part also still by the Lutherans, Gerhard locus VII; and so it became the usual order among all Reformed, Hyperius, Method of Theology p. 182. Beza, Theological Treatises I 171 III 402. Polanus, Syntagma IV c. 6-10. Zanchius Works II 476. Junius, Maccovius, Maresius, Mastricht etc., whether it was treated with the doctrine of God's attributes or also in a separate locus after the Trinity.
This difference in order is in itself not fundamental and need not be. But yet it is not accidental that the a priori order is mostly followed by the Reformed, and on the other hand the a posteriori order, which treats predestination at the entrance or in the middle of the locus on salvation, gradually came into use among the Lutherans, the Remonstrants, the Roman Catholics, and most newer dogmaticians. Even then, however, the difference does not consist in this, that the Reformed derive predestination in a speculative way from an a priori, philosophical, deterministic concept of God and the others hold to the revelation of God in Christ. For also the strictest Calvinists want in the locus on God and in that on the decrees to give nothing else than the doctrine of Scripture, the content of God's revelation. But among the Reformed predestination has not only an anthropological and soteriological, but especially also a theological interest. In it it is not first about the salvation of man but about the honor of God. Also with the synthetic, a priori order a deep religious interest is involved. The claim that this order would assume a nominalistic concept of God and offer a dry, lifeless dogma, as some think, e.g., Yearbook for German Theology 1868 pp. 107-110. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation I 55. Doedes, Dutch Confession of Faith 185, 203 ff. de Cock, Is the Doctrine of Absolute Predestination the Starting Point or Result of the Doctrine of the Reformed Church 1868, is therefore devoid of all ground.
Dry and abstract the doctrine of predestination can be treated just as well in the middle as in the beginning of dogmatics. True, saving faith is needed, not only for election, but also for all other dogmas, also those about God, the Trinity, man etc. to confess. If this consideration gave the deciding vote, then all dogmas would have to be moved after the locus on salvation. Dogmatics however describes the truth not as it subjectively comes to the consciousness of believers, but as God has objectively set it forth in his word, cf. volume I 49, 50. The synthetic method alone sufficiently upholds the religious interest of the honor of God, cf. Kübel, Herzog² 12, 145 f.
7. Among the Reformed there soon arose another difference, that of supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. It has its roots in principle already in the strife of Augustine against the Pelagians. Among these, the order of the decrees was thus: 1. the decree to create man, 2. on the ground of the foreseen but not beforehand determined fall, to send Christ, to let Him satisfy for all, to let Him be preached to all, and to grant to all a sufficient grace, and 3. on the ground of foreseen faith and perseverance on the one hand and foreseen unbelief on the other side, to elect some to eternal life and to destine others to eternal punishment.
With Augustine the order was a wholly other. Sometimes he brings reprobation also under predestination, but even when he does not do that, he conceives prescience not negatively and passively but actively. For the will of God is the necessity of things; what happens against God's will does not yet happen outside His will; permission is to be thought positively, not unwillingly does He permit but willingly. The supralapsarian view, that reprobation is an act of God's sovereignty, is already enclosed herein.
Most often, however, Augustine speaks in relation to the fall of God's prescience and permission. The decree of creation and of permission of the fall is then the first; and thereon follows the second decree of election and reprobation. These both presuppose the fallen human race, the corrupt mass. Augustine is in his view thus generally infralapsarian; he does not go back behind the fall; he sees in reprobation an act of God's justice. God is good, God is just. He can deliver some without good merits, because He is good; He cannot damn anyone without merits, because He is just. But Augustine does not place the decree of election and reprobation further forward either. Only original sin precedes it. This is sufficient for reprobation. Actual sins remain outside account in the decree of reprobation, although they come into consideration in the determination of the degree of punishment. Augustine came to this order through what Paul says of Jacob and Esau, Rom. 9:11, and through the lot of early-dying unbaptized children.
Yet, although original sin is a sufficient reason for reprobation, it is not with Augustine the last and deepest cause. To the question, why God has rejected some, elected others; and also, why He has rejected these specifically and elected those, there is no answer but the will and good pleasure of God. He has mercy on whom He will and hardens whom He will.
Finally then follows a third decree with regard to the means that lead to the end. With reprobation Augustine does not draw the line through. Indeed he teaches that God also acts positively and actively in sin; God is the orderer of sins; He judged it good that sin should be; He punishes sin with sin; but he mostly presents reprobation negatively as a passing by and forsaking, and generally does not count it under predestination, but identifies this with election and subsumes both, election and reprobation, under providence. On the other hand, there is a predestination to the means of salvation. For predestination or election is with Augustine always a predestination to glory, and this naturally brings with it predestination to grace. Election is thus not done on account of foreseen faith or foreseen good works; it is also not done on account of Christ. But it is election to the end goal and thus to the means, that is, Christ, who Himself is also predestined, and thus to calling, baptism, faith, the gift of perseverance; predestination is a preparation of grace. Those who are elected thus come along the way of grace in Christ infallibly to heavenly salvation.
Many followers of Augustine therefore later came to the doctrine of the twin predestination. Beside predestination to glory came to stand coordinated a predestination to death. This however could not be taken in the same sense as that; and therefore it was distinguished into negative and positive reprobation. Negative reprobation then precedes the fall and is an act of sovereignty; it is done no more on account of merits than election; it includes the will to permit someone to fall into guilt and is the cause of forsaking. And so many Thomists taught, Alvarez, Salmanticenses, Estius, Sylvius, etc., that negative reprobation preceded the fall and was purely an act of God's free power and good pleasure. Only this supralapsarian reprobation was conceived wholly negatively, as God's decree not to elect some people, to let them fall and thereafter to destine them to eternal punishment (positive reprobation).
In substance now Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and all supralapsarian Reformed have taught nothing else. The Roman Catholics indeed present it otherwise, and charge the Predestinarians in the fifth century, Gottschalk, Bradwardine, Wyclif, and especially the Reformers, that they taught a predestination to sins and made God the author of sin. But this happens only to maintain their own semi-Pelagian standpoint and to bring it into agreement with Augustine and Thomas.
The modifications that the Reformers brought into the doctrine of Augustine and Thomas are, besides the doctrine of the assurance of salvation, subordinate and do not touch the essence of the matter. With them they taught that election did not happen on foreseen merits, but was the source of faith and good works; that predestination to glory infallibly brought with it that to grace; that negative reprobation was not to be explained as an act of justice but must be conceived as an act of sovereignty, preceding sin; that this negative reprobation brought with it the decree to permit sin, and to let some lie in their fall; and that positive reprobation took account of that sin. But to this they often added that the concepts of prescience and permission, though in themselves not wrong, could or might not be conceived purely passively and, if this happened, yet offered not the least solution, and that the distinction of negative and positive reprobation had little value.
Thereby all three Reformers came to the so-called supralapsarian view of the doctrine of predestination, according to which both decrees of election and reprobation are to be considered as acts of God's sovereignty, preceding those concerning the fall, sin, and redemption in Christ. Calvin in particular often purposely stays with the nearest causes of salvation and perdition and then reasons in an infralapsarian way. A reprobate should seek the cause of his punishment not in God's decree but in the corruption of his nature, which is his own fault. Elect and reprobate were both equally guilty, but God is merciful toward those, just toward these. Under the clay, Rom. 9:21, are to be understood the fallen humans, of whom God elects some and leaves others to their own destruction, to which all are subject by nature. The fall in Adam is the nearest cause of reprobation. God hates in us nothing but sin. And of this view, that from the condemned offspring of Adam God elects whom it seems good to Him, rejects whom He will, Calvin says, as it is far more suitable to exercise faith, so it is treated with greater fruit... as it not only conduces more to piety, but seems to me more theological, more suitable to Christianity and also more edifying.
But this does not satisfy Calvin. Sin may be the nearest cause of reprobation, it is not the last. For it cannot be presented so that God decided to create man without a prior plan, then looked on and awaited what man would do and thereafter first, knowing this beforehand, proceeded to election and reprobation. Prescience and permission give no solution, for God, knowing the fall beforehand, could have hindered it; He has thus willingly permitted it because He judged this good. Therefore Adam's fall, sin in general and all evil is not only foreseen by God but also in a certain sense willed and determined by Him. There must therefore, though hidden for us, be a reason why God has willed the fall; there is yet a higher counsel of God that precedes the fall.
When Pighius then objects to Calvin that on his standpoint the distinction between elect and reprobate was prior to man's fall in the divine mind, then Calvin indeed answers that Pighius confuses the nearest and remote causes, that every reprobate must seek the nearest cause in his own sin and that also on the other standpoint like objections remain, but he does not reject the inference of Pighius; there is a secret counsel of God that precedes the fall. Reprobation as well as election has its last and deepest cause in God's will.
With Calvin thus the supralapsarian view alternates with the infralapsarian. Later supralapsarianism was taught by Beza, Piscator, Polanus, Ferrius, Whitaker, Perkins, Twisse, Gomarus, Maccovius, Voetius, Heidanus, Burman, Wittichius, Comrie, Kuyper.
According to the supralapsarian view, there precedes all decrees a knowledge of God of all possibilities, scientia simplicis intelligentiae. According to the rule that what is last in execution is first in intention, God in his first decree fixed the goal to which He would create and govern all things, namely, to reveal in the eternal blessedness and in the eternal punishment of certain possible humans, who are to be created and liable to fall, his virtues, particularly his mercy and his justice. In order that these virtues might be revealed, a second decree had to establish that there would exist a humanity in such a pitiable and wretched condition that it could be the object of that mercy and justice. In order that such humans might come into being, a third decree had to determine that a human would be created, adorned with God's image and head of humanity, and that this human would fall by effective permission and would drag all his descendants into his fall. And finally, God in a fourth decree had to appoint how his mercy would be shown to the elect in the appointment of a Mediator, in the gift of faith, and in preservation to the end, and how on the other hand his justice would be revealed in the reprobate in the free withholding of God's saving grace and in the surrender to sins. In this order of decrees, election and reprobation preceded not only faith and unbelief, renewal and hardening, but also the fall and creation. However, one objection immediately presented itself here. It was established Reformed doctrine that the election of Christ and of the church took place in one decree, in connection with each other, and thus had as its object the mystical Christ. But in the supralapsarian order, the election of the church is detached from that of Christ and separated from it by the decree of creation and fall. Comrie tried to meet this objection, and he taught therefore that the elect before the decree of creation and fall are elected to union with Christ. This union is so intimate and unbreakable that, when those elect shall fall, as is determined afterward in the decree, Christ who was elected as Head will now also be elected as Mediator of reconciliation. Thus Comrie saw that the election of the church as the body of Christ could not be separated from that of Christ as Head of the church. And so he placed the election of both before the decree of creation and of the fall. Election thus now had among possible humans also a possible Christ as object. However, the churches always had objection to this supralapsarian view. It is not included in any confession. At the Synod of Dordrecht there were indeed some adherents of this opinion, especially Gomarus and Maccovius. Also, the delegates from South Holland and Friesland preferred no decision in this matter. But all the judgments of native and foreign theologians, even from Geneva, were infralapsarian. And the synod defined election as that decree of God by which... from the whole human race, which had fallen by its own fault from its original integrity into sin and destruction... he chose, Canon I 7. It did not condemn supralapsarianism, it left the private opinion of Gomarus as it was but did not accept it. Only the Synod of Westminster left this question deliberately undecided in chapter 3 of its confession and chose no side between infra- and supralapsarianism. And furthermore, infralapsarianism found support among theologians with Martyr, Zanchius, who are wrongly reckoned by Vitringa among the supralapsarians, Bogerman, Polyander, Rivetus, Walaeus, H. Alting, Molinaeus, Wendelinus, Spanheim, Francis Turretin, Heidegger, and others, especially also Maresius, who in various writings defended infralapsarianism against Voetius and others.
8. Yet this milder form of the doctrine of predestination also soon met with contradiction. In the age of the Reformation, it was already opposed by Erasmus, Bibliander, Pighius, Bolsec, Trolliet, Castellio, Ochinus, and others. The Socinians denied predestination altogether, teaching only a decree of God to grant eternal life to those who keep his commandments and to punish the others, and they even sacrificed God's omniscience to the free will of man, Socinus, Praelect c. XIII. Crell, de Deo et ejus attrib. c. 32. Fock, Der Socin. Here in this land, it met with objection from many, such as Coolhaes, Duifhuis, Coornhert, Sybrants, Herberts, Wiggerts, and especially from Arminius. He understood predestination as the eternal decree of God to save those whom he foresaw would believe by the power of preventing grace and persevere by the power of subsequent grace, in and for and through Christ, and to punish the others who would not believe or persevere, Arminii Opera. Arminius still intended to hold fast the necessity of grace and faith as a gift; and his followers attempted the same in their Remonstrance of the year 1610, articles 3 and 4, in Scholten L. H. K. II. But this grace was nevertheless always resistible, articles 4, 5, and the general will of God to save all men, the general satisfaction of Christ, the general offer of the sufficient means of grace, and the difficulty of the nevertheless always firm and certain foreknowledge of God concerning who would and would not believe, compelled them to lay the decision more and more in the hands of man, Scholten II. In the later Remonstrant writings, this comes out clearly, in the letter of Episcopius to the Reformed abroad, in the second Remonstrance of the year 1617, in Schweizer, Centr. II, in the confession and apology of the confession in Episcopius, Opera II, in the dogmatic works of Uytenbogaert, Instruction in Christian Doctrine, 2nd ed. 1640, Episcopius, Opera I, Limborch, Theol. Christ. II c. 18 sq. and IV. Remonstrantism prepared the way for rationalism. Indeed, it was condemned at the Synod of Dort, but as a mindset it gained entrance more and more in all churches and lands in the 17th and 18th centuries. It even received support from the Reformed side in the school at Saumur. There Amyraut taught a double decree. God first decreed in general that all without distinction who believed in Christ should be saved; but by his foreknowledge knowing that no one could believe of himself, he added to the first, general and conditional decree a second, particular and absolute decree, to grant to some the grace of faith and to preserve them, Traité de la prédestination 1634. Synt. thesium in acad. Saumur. 1665 pars II. cf. Rivetus, Opera III. Spanhemius, de gratia univers. Examen v. h. Ontwerp v. Toler. Schweizer, Centr. II. Scholten L. H. K. II. Walch, Bibl. II. The first, general decree, if it meant anything, pushed the second entirely aside. In spite of the condemnation in the Formula Consensus of 1675, canons 4-6, it penetrated and led with Pajon to the denial of efficacious grace. In all Reformed churches, an Arminian direction gained ground. All the directions and sects that arose in the 17th and 18th centuries, Neonomianism, Deism, Quakerism, Methodism, etc., showed weaker or stronger kinship with Arminius. Only a few theologians here and there held their ground, such as Comrie, Holtius, and Brahe here in this land, Boston and the Erskines in Scotland, and especially Jonathan Edwards 1703-1758 in America.
Deeper study of nature, history, and man has in this age shown the untenableness of deistic Pelagianism. And in its stead has come a pantheistic or materialistic, a more ethical or more physical-tinged determinism. Of course, there is, despite seeming agreement between this determinism and the teaching of predestination, a principal distinction. In pantheism and materialism there is no room at all for a counsel of God; there remains only space for an unconscious fate, a blind nature, an alogical will. Yet many have understood and explained the churchly teaching of predestination in such a deterministic sense, Biedermann, Strauss, Scholten, Hartmann. On this standpoint it is said: so certainly as every man is not only predisposed to evil but also predetermined, so certainly is every one also to good not only predisposed but predetermined.... so certainly there is no absolutely rejected, so certainly no absolutely elected, for even the most rejected carries grace in a certain degree in himself and even the most graced is not exempt from actual evil, Hartmann.
In the ground, Schleiermacher also agrees with this, for though he starts from the church teaching and holds fast to the revelation in Christ, yet he distinguishes election and reprobation only with respect to time; there are no rejected in the strict sense, each would under other circumstances have been converted here already or comes later to conversion. All thoughts of earlier and later time return in the newer theology. First, many seek to avoid the whole teaching of predestination by the remark that eternity is no time before time, that God's decrees thus cannot be thought of as ready and prepared before many ages, but that the whole predestination with election and reprobation is nothing other than the eternal immanent acting and ruling of God revealing itself in time; the decrees are nothing other than the facts of history itself, Schweizer, Lipsius. In this way, however, the whole distinction between eternity and time, between God and world, is wiped out and theism traded for pantheism. Therefore others do accept an eternal decree of God, but it consists in nothing other than the antecedent will, whereby God heartily wishes and wills the salvation of all. In history, however, this general decree becomes, at least for a time, particular. For God proceeds historically in its execution. The object of election is not individual persons, but the church. God calls peoples, and He does that successively, as they in the course of times under His leading have become receptive and ripe for the higher religion of Christendom. And among those peoples He calls also the particular persons successively and in connection with their people, their disposition, their upbringing. The election of the one people and of the one man is thus not at the cost but for the benefit of others. Not all can be the first. The now temporarily passed by, that is, rejected peoples and persons come later in this or likely after this life to true conversion. In any case there is no decree of reprobation from God's side that would exclude certain persons from salvation; at most there is from man's side a lasting opposition and a positive hardening possible, which causes him to go eternally lost, Martensen, Lipsius, Ritschl, Luthardt, Nitzsch.
Still others go a step further and teach that to that general decree another particular decree is added, wherein God has decreed to save certain ones, whose faith and perseverance He has foreseen and known, and on the other hand to punish the others eternally. But all agree in this, that they ascribe the decision for eternity to the power of man. Yet again in different ways. The strength to accept or reject grace comes according to one to man already from creation or from the pedagogical leading of God's general providence, J. Müller, Nitzsch, Kübel, Ebrard, also Ch. de la Saussaye; according to another from the preparing and antecedent grace, which is given to man in baptism or in the preaching of law and gospel, Kliefoth, Müller, Sartorius, Thomasius, Frank, Dorner, Lipsius; or also the reconciliation is sought therein, that grace is given to those who use the natural powers of the will well and with earnestness examine God's word etc., Philippi, Shedd.
Finally, by some the predestination is taught in Augustinian sense, such as Hodge, Shedd, Strong, Böhl, etc. Remarkable is it that in America the Lutheran churches united in the Missouri Synod have approached Calvinism, Dieckhoff, whereas the Cumberland Presbyterian Church has altered the Westminster Confession in Arminian spirit, Schaff. In the revision of the Westminster Confession, which a few years ago was put on the agenda in Scotland and America, many also brought in objections against the teaching of election and reprobation, the perishing of early-dying children and of heathens, and in general against the one-sided starting of the confession from God's sovereignty with disregard of His universal love.
9. By the counsel of God is to be understood his eternal decree over all that shall be or happen in time. The Scripture everywhere goes forth from this, that all that is and happens is the outworking of God's thought and will, and finds its pattern and groundwork in God's eternal counsel, Genesis 1, Job 28:27, Proverbs 8:22, Psalm 104:24, Proverbs 3:19, Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15, Hebrews 11:3, Psalm 33:11, Isaiah 40:24-27, 46:10, Proverbs 19:21, Acts 2:23, 4:28, Ephesians 1:11, and so forth. It is already the birthright of man to work after forethought and counsel. In a reasoning being, the thought, the forepurpose goes before the deed. Much more is this the case with the Lord our God, without whose knowing and willing nothing can step into being. Among Christians there can therefore be no strife over the being of such a counsel of the Lord. Only pantheism, which owns no own life and awareness in God set apart from the world, can bring forth misgivings against it. But this thereby stands before the choice, either to deny the logos in the world and lead it forth from a blind will, or to own the logos in the world but then also to take up an awareness in God that holds the ideas of all things. The logos in the world underlays the logos in God. There could be no thought in the shaping if it were not shaped with understanding and wisdom. This thought of the Lord which is bodied forth in the shaping is further not to be thought as an unsure mind-picture, whereof the outworking stays in doubt; it is no bare foreknowing, which takes its filling from the shaped ones; no plan, draft, forepurpose, whereof the doing can be thwarted. But it is both together, a deed of God's understanding and of his will. Therefore the Scripture speaks of counsel, of thoughts of his heart, Psalm 33:11, of counsel of his will, Ephesians 1:11, of foreordaining and foredecreeing, Acts 2:23, 4:28, Romans 8:29; God speaks and it is, He bids and it stands. The counsel of God is of such kind that it in its time must bring the doing with it. It is mighty in work, Isaiah 14:27, Psalm 115:3, 135:6, unchangeable, Isaiah 46:10, Psalm 33:11, Hebrews 6:17, James 1:17, self-standing, Matthew 11:26, Ephesians 1:9, Romans 9:11, 20, 21. Yet there is a sundering between the decree and the doing even as between God's being and his works outward. The decree of God is a work inward, dwelling in the godly being, timeless and standing outside time. Indeed against this it has been brought in, that timelessness cannot and may not be thought as a time before time, and that the counsel of God and his choosing thus also may not be understood as a decree that was taken ages before. This marking is also right in itself. Timelessness is in kind set apart from time. The counsel of God is no more than the begetting a deed of God in the bygone; it is a timeless deed of God, timelessly fulfilled and timelessly ongoing, outside and above time, Martyr, Loci Comm. It is no outgrowth of sundry reasoning and weighing, so that God would first have been for a time without decree, without choice, without will, as Scaliger rightly marked, Moor, Comm. in Marck. Vitringa. Heppe. And it is no more to be thought as a plan that lies ready somewhere and now awaits doing. But the counsel of God is the timelessly working will of God, the willing decreeing God himself, not something chance in God but one with his being. God cannot be thought as not willing, as without choice, Maccovius, Loci Comm. Mastricht. Turretinus, Theol. El. Examen v. h. Ontw. v. Tol. But therewith the counsel of God as a work inward is upheld, set by nothing but God himself, set apart from the works of God in time, Acts 15:18, Ephesians 1:4.
The content and object of this counsel of God are all things which are and shall come to pass in time, in one word the world-idea, the kosmos noētos . This world-idea stands in close bond with the being of God, but may not be made one with the being of God and thus also not with the Son, the Logos. It stands to the being of God in the same kinship as the world-awareness to the self-awareness of God. The self-knowledge of God does not spend itself fully in the world, no more than his might or any of his virtues. But indeed the world is a fitting tool to bring all God's virtues to showing forth in a creaturely way. The world-idea is so thought out by God that it can shine forth his glory and bring his perfections to beholding after the measure of the creature. It is a looking-glass in which God shows his likeness. It is the creaturely mirror of his worshipful being; finite, bounded, not fully matching but yet true and faithful imprint of his self-knowledge. In kinship to the world itself this counsel of God is therefore both causa efficiens and causa exemplaris . Causa efficiens , for all creaturely being can of course only come to be through and by after-effect of the decree and the will of God. The decree is the womb of all things, Zeph. 2:2. All that is finds its last, deepest ground in the good pleasure of God, in the eudokia tou theou . Higher we cannot climb. Why all things are and are so finds for us its last answer in the Deus voluit , in his full sovereignty. But the counsel of God is also causa exemplaris of all that is and comes to pass. We think the things after and as they are. For God the things are after and as they are thought by him. As Moses had to make the tabernacle after the pattern shown him on the mount, Heb. 8:5, as every family in heaven and earth is named from the Father, Eph. 3:15, so is all the timely a likeness of the timeless, all that is a shadowing of the thought, and in the deepest ground all that is and comes to pass a mirroring of the godly being. Though remark has been made on it, since the world-idea does not fall together with God's being, yet the word of Thomas can be understood in a good sense, Deus secundum essentiam suam est similitudo omnium rerum , Summa Theologica I qu. 15 art. 1. qu. 44 art. 3, cf. Lombard, Sententiae I dist. 36. Polanus, Syntagma p. 268. Gomarus, Theses Theologicae IX § 28-30. Ames, Medulla Theologica I 7. 13 sq. Heidegger, Corpus Theologiae V 12. Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae IV 1, 7. Mastricht III 1, 28. Moor I 903 sq. Therefore this counsel of God is not to be thought otherwise than as a single, simple decree. At the Westminster assembly there was talk over whether one should speak of decree in the singular or in the plural. The confession uses the word only in the singular. And indeed the world-idea in the godly awareness is one simple thought. As Minerva comes forth fully grown from Jupiter's head, as the gifted one suddenly and at once grasps the idea of a work of art, so in the self-awareness of God the world-idea is timelessly fulfilled. But even as an artist can only carry out his thought little by little, so God spreads out the one thought of his counsel piece by piece in time before the eyes of his creatures. The world-idea is one; but making itself real it unfolds in all its wealth in the shapes of space and time. In creatures and in creaturely way, that is outside himself, God can show forth his love and so all his virtues no otherwise than in the shapes of length and breadth, of depth and height, Eph. 3:18, 19. So only do we learn to know something of God's manifold wisdom and of his unsearchable wealth. But so the one, simple and timeless decree of God lays itself out in time before our eyes also in a manifold of things and happenings, each of which again points back to a moment in the one decree of God and makes us speak in human way of many decrees of God. To blame is this speech-way not, if but the oneness of the decree in God and the unbreakable bond of all sundry decrees is held fast and acknowledged.
10. In God's counsel, that decree is first to be distinguished which was formerly generally called providence. The word προνοια, providence, foreseeing means at first nothing else than looking ahead, caring ahead, planning ahead. So the word was also first understood in theology. God's providence was therefore reckoned among the decrees and brought up with God's will. It was then defined as the plan of ordering things to an end, that is, as that act of God's understanding and will by which He from eternity has ordered all things to a goal set by Him. As such a plan of order it is well to be distinguished from the carrying out in time, that is, from the execution of the order, which more particularly bore the name of government, Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV prose 6. Lombard, Sentences I distinction 35 n. 1. Thomas, Summa Theologica I question 22 article 1. Summa contra Gentiles III 77. And so providence as a decree of God is understood, besides by many Roman theologians, Petavius, On God VIII. Theologia Wirceburgensis III p. 175 sq. Perrone, Praelectiones II 233 c. Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae II 158, also in the first time by many Reformed theologians, Ursinus, Explanation of the Catechism question 27. Zanchi, Works II 324, 436. Maresius, System of Theology IV § 19. Helvetic Confession II article 6, cf. later on God's government. In this sense providence is a counsel or decree, according to which as a pattern God in time upholds and governs all things. But later the name providence has most come into use for the act of upholding and governing itself, as Zwingli, Calvin, Polanus, the Synopsis etc., already treat it in that sense after the creation. The name matters less, but it is important that God's decree embraces all things, not only the setting of the eternal state of rational creatures (predestination), but the ordering and ranking of all things without difference. And this was of old denoted by the name providence. Predestination thus did not stand loose by itself, but hung together with God's decree over all things and was thereof only a special application. As Zwingli expressed it: providence is as it were the parent of predestination; predestination is providence itself, insofar as it is applied to the eternal lot of men and angels. The Reformed expressed this in closer keeping with Scripture, which speaks of no προνοια, by God's counsel. This embraces all things and thus in the first place has regard to the world in its whole. All things, even in the unthinking nature, are and happen according to God's counsel. To all things his ordinances lie at the bottom. Heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night, summer and winter, sowing and harvest etc. are both in their oneness and in their diversity ordered by Him who is wonderful in counsel and great in deed, Genesis 1:14, 26, 28, 8:22, Psalm 104:5, 9, 119:90, 91, 148:6, Job 38:10 ff., Isaiah 28:29, Jeremiah 5:24, 31:25 ff., 33:20, 25. Insofar now as God's counsel has the unreasoning nature as object, it is, besides by the Manicheans etc. almost with one voice acknowledged. And there is also still great oneness when such a counsel and order of God is taken in a more special sense for the reasoning creatures. The creation of the human race, Genesis 1:26, the dividing of the peoples, Genesis 11, the setting of their times and their dwellings, Acts 17:26, the difference between peoples and men in gifts, talents, rank, standing, riches, state etc., Deuteronomy 32:8, Proverbs 22:2, Matthew 25:15; even the unlikeness within the church in all kinds of gifts, 1 Corinthians 4:7, 12:7-11, Romans 12:4 ff. find their deepest cause in God's will. All being and all diversity of being is only to be explained from his good pleasure. The ground of the being and of the so being of all things rests only in God. That something is and that it is just this and not something else; that there is manifold being and life; that there is endless diversity among creatures in kind, sort, length, rank, standing, having etc. is only God's good pleasure. And this good pleasure does not suppose but creates its object. If the beasts could speak and quarrel with their Maker because they are not, as we, men, everyone would think that absurd, says Augustine, On the Words of the Apostle sermon 11, cf. Calvin, Institutes III 22, 1. And indeed nothing else befits any creature than to rest in God's good pleasure. There is really only choice between these two, that the creature either be its own maker and so cease to be creature, or that the creature remain creature from beginning to end and so owe its being and so being only to God. As soon as however that counsel of God was also stretched out to the moral world, opposition has come from all sides. Here God's counsel had its end, this was the special domain of man, here man stepped up as the maker of his own lot. To uphold freedom, responsibility, guilt etc., Pelagius made difference between the natural and the moral world, between the power and the will, and withdrew the last from God's counsel and providence. And all Pelagianism is out to make the moral world for a part or in its whole independent over against God. This attempt however deserves on its own and wholly in general already to be turned away. First it is in strife with Scripture. For indeed Scripture upholds man's moral nature at all times as strongly as may be, but never seeks to do that by making a dualistic parting between natural and moral world and withdrawing the last from God. God's counsel goes over all things, also over the moral, over evil as well as over good. Next such a parting is in fact impossible. The world-idea is one organic whole. Nature and ethics stand in the closest bond and grasp into each other every moment. Difference there is very surely; but parting there is nowhere; there is no point in creation to be pointed out where God's counsel and government ends and the independent will and deed of the creature begins. Above all in this age the historical and organic view has driven out and condemned this Pelagian parting at every point. But further this dualism would take away the greatest and most weighty part of the world from God's counsel and play it into the hands of chance and whim. Yes not only from God's counsel and will, but even from his knowledge the world is then for a great part withdrawn. If God and his creature can only be thought as rivals and the one can only keep his freedom and independence at the cost of the other, then God must be more and more bounded in his knowing and willing; Pelagianism bans God from the world, it leads to deism and atheism, and sets the whim, the foolishness of man on the throne. Therefore the solving of the problem must be sought in another way, namely thus that God, because He is God and the world is his creature, by his endless great knowing and willing does not destroy but just creates and upholds the independence and freedom of the creatures.
11. In the general and special providence, however, Pelagianism does not yet raise itself in its full strength; it acknowledges this to a certain degree. But it especially comes forward in strife when the eternal state of reasonable creatures, the special decree of predestination, comes into discussion. Now predestination is only a further application of the counsel, the providence of God. Just as no separation can be made between the natural and the moral world, so no boundary can be pointed out between what concerns the timely and what concerns the eternal state of reasonable creatures. Yet here Pelagianism has traded predestination for foreknowledge and defined the foreordination as that decree of God whereby He has determined eternal blessedness or punishment for those whose persevering faith or unbelief He had foreseen beforehand.
How general this view now also is accepted in the Christian church—it is indeed shared by the Greek, Roman, Lutheran, Remonstrant, Anabaptist, Methodist church, and so on—yet it is decidedly contradicted both by Scripture, and by religious experience, and by theological thinking. First, Scripture teaches clearly and plainly that faith and unbelief, salvation and destruction are not merely an object of the bare foreknowledge of God, but determined by His will and decree. The προγνωσις in Rom. 8:29, 11:2, 1 Pet. 1:2, cf. Acts 2:23 is no passive foreknowing, no state of consciousness, but just as the Hebrew yada (Hos. 13:5, Amos 3:2, etc.), a self-determination of God preceding the realization in history, to enter into a certain relation to the objects of His foreknowledge; it stands in the closest connection with the προθεσις, προορισμος, and ἐκλογη and is an act of His good pleasure.
Second, it is the teaching of Scripture that faith cannot come forth from the natural man (1 Cor. 2:14), that it is a gift of God (Eph. 2:8, Phil. 1:29, 1 Cor. 4:7), and that it thus does not go before election but presupposes it and is its fruit and working (Rom. 8:29, Eph. 1:4, 5, Acts 13:48).
Third, it is the unanimous witness of all religious, Christian experience that salvation both in objective and in subjective sense is solely and only God's work. In doctrine someone may be Pelagian, in the practice of Christian life, in prayer above all, every Christian is Augustinian. Then he shuts out all boasting and gives God alone the honor. Augustine therefore rightly said that the faith of the ancient church in God's grace expressed itself not so much in the little works as in the prayers (On the Gift of Perseverance, 23; cf. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, 16).
Fourth, the foreknowledge of God is yet of such a nature that its object is foreknown as undoubtedly certain, and then it is the same as predestination; but if the object is totally accidental and arbitrary, then the foreknowledge cannot be maintained. According to the Greek, Roman, and Lutheran churches, and even according to the Remonstrants in their Remonstrance, who all seek to evade predestination by foreknowledge, the number of those who believe and will be saved is just as fixed and certain as according to Augustine and the Reformed. Augustine said: the number of the predestined is certain, which can neither be increased nor diminished (On Reproof and Grace, 13). And so it is taught by Lombard (Sentences I, dist. 40), Thomas (Summa Theologiae I, qu. 23, art. 6, 7; cf. qu. 24), and all Roman theologians, though they differ in that some derive that certainty of outcome more from God's will, and others, such as Molina and others, more from God's knowledge (Perrone, Praelectiones Theologicae, II, 249; Pesch, Praelectiones Theologicae, II, 205; Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae Dogmaticae, III, 143). The Lutheran theologians later indeed made predestination depend on foreknowledge but yet never doubted the certainty and unchangeableness of the outcome (Gerhard, Loci Theologici, loc. VII, §212 sq.; Quenstedt, Theologia Didactico-Polemica, III, p. 20; Hollaz, Examen Theologicum, p. 641). Scripture spoke on many places (Dan. 12:1, Matt. 24:24, 25:34, John 10:28, Rom. 8:29-30, 1 Pet. 1:2-4) too clearly and too strongly for this unchangeableness to be denied. Both formally and materially, both in quantity and quality, the number of those who are saved stands, according to the confession of all Christian churches, unshakeably fixed.
But if this is acknowledged and thought through, foreknowledge is one and the same with providence and predestination. God has foreknown who would believe, and knows that eternally and unchangeably. So these will in time also certainly and infallibly come to faith and to salvation. For freedom in the sense of accident and arbitrariness, no room remains anywhere on this standpoint. Foreknowledge includes predestination. If one says, like Castellio (in Schweizer, Centraldogmen, II, 278), that God has foreknown the accidental just as accidental, then one falls back into the line of thought of Augustine and can thereby just as well bring freedom into agreement with predestination. The question is precisely whether the free, accidental as such can be certainly and infallibly known eternally. If yes, then Augustine is right and the whole doctrine of foreknowledge is unnecessary. If no, then one must go further and also deny foreknowledge; then the outcome of world history must remain utterly accidental and as such uncalculable and unknowable. Cicero already saw this and therefore also denied foreknowledge (cf. above). Later the Socinians followed him (Episcopius, Institutiones Theologicae, IV, sect. 2, c. 18; Vorstius in Scholten, II, 492), and many theologians in modern times, who to maintain creaturely freedom have accepted a self-limitation of God in His knowledge, will, and power (Weisse, Philosophische Dogmatik, §509; Martensen, §§115, 116; Rothe, Ethik, §42; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, I, 319 f.; Hofstede de Groot, Institutiones Theologiae Naturalis, ed. 3, p. 183, and others; cf. Scholten, Leer der Hervormde Kerk, II, 490).
Yet the Christian churches have not dared this consequence. All confess the providence and foreknowledge of God. All happens in time as it is eternally known by God. The end result and the ways and means leading thereto stand fixed in God's foreknowledge. So viewed, the doctrine of predestination is no confession of the Reformed church alone, no private opinion of Augustine and Calvin, but a dogma of the whole of Christendom. There is difference in the name whereby it is called; in the way in which it is presented; but in substance there is agreement, that is, all Christian churches and theologians confess that all is and happens and comes out as God eternally knows it. In that sense Augustine could rightly say: this faith in predestination, which is defended against the new heretics with new care, the church of Christ has never not had (On the Gift of Perseverance, c. 23); and Prosper: no Catholic denies the predestination of God (in Perrone, II, 249). All Christian churches have brought it into the confession in greater or lesser measure. Yes, it can be said, whether one thinks Pelagianly or Augustinianly, the matter about which one thinks yet remains the same. History does not change. The facts and the connection of facts in world history exist as they are, independently of the false or true conception which we form of them (Schweizer, Reformierte Dogmatik, I, 73). The distinction lies only herein, that the Reformed, with Scripture in hand and with Augustine as example, did not remain standing at the second causes, but dared to climb up to the first cause, that is, the will of God, and therein alone could find rest for their thinking and life.
The doctrine of predestination has its unconquerable strength and sternness in the facts of world history, as they are explained by God's word as the execution of His eternal counsel. It itself is not hard and stern, but awe-inspiringly earnest are the facts on which it is built (Hodge, Systematic Theology, II, 349). And Pelagianism therefore does not satisfy, because at every point of life and of the history of mankind it comes into collision with the awesome reality. It is a superficial varnish that indeed deceives man but does not change reality.
12. Yet Pelagianism, though in the main already shown to be untenable, resumes its onslaught on every special point in the teaching of predestination. First, it takes up a will or decree of God that is antecedent and conditional, to offer sufficient grace to all fallen men. For this it calls upon sundry texts of Holy Writ, Isa. 5:3, Jer. 51:9, Ezek. 18:23, 32, 33:11, Matt. 23:37, John 3:16, Rom. 11:32, and above all 1 Tim. 2:4 and 2 Pet. 3:9. Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Remonstrants, among the Reformed the Amyraldians, and all universalists of former and later times take up such a first general decree. But this decree forthwith clashes with the truth of things. Through all ages only a small share of mankind has been made known with the gospel. In sooth, grace in the history of mankind is not worldwide but particular. Indeed, sundry tries have been made to bring this fact in line with the general decree. The Pelagians have wiped out the bound between nature and grace and found also in the law of nature a way to blessedness. Many Roman theologians deem that grace is given or shall be given to all who make good use of the light and strength of nature. The old Lutherans said that grace in the time of Adam, Noah, and the apostles, Rom. 10:18, had been worldwide but only through the sin of men was again narrowed. And newer theologians have come to the teaching that the gospel of grace shall yet after death be preached to all negative unbelievers. But all these guesses go beyond the Writ and cannot undo the fact of the particularity of grace. If however this fact stands fast, the question arises, why is the gospel preached to the one and not to the other? Why is the one born in a Christian land, and the other in a heathen land? The Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians sought also to uphold this with the thought that God even in this predestination to the first grace had reckoned with the natural merits of man and the use which he had made of his natural strengths. But Augustine thoroughly overthrew this predestination to the first grace on foreseen merits from the natural will, by pointing to the children, who had no such merit and of whom some died baptized and others unbaptized. The Roman church has therefore always fought this point in Pelagianism, held fast to the preventing grace, and called the first grace unmerited, cf. in Denzinger, n. 171, 679. In truth, Pelagianism stumbles upon an unbeatable hindrance with the children. The predestination to the first grace, that is, being born in a Christian land or later being made known with the gospel, is wholly unmerited and unconditional. Here at the beginning, at the first decree, predestination can be understood in no other way than as utter and unconditional. Why the one is made known with the gospel and the other stays bereft thereof, so that the one is set in the likelihood to become everlastingly blessed and the other not, cannot be answered from man. Each must here, whether he will or not, rest in the will and good pleasure of God.
Secondly, Pelagianism seeks to maintain itself in the predestination to effectual grace. Experience teaches that not all who hear the gospel take it up with a true faith. Whence this difference? Pelagianism says that the grace which is given to all is in itself enough, and that now the will of man decides whether that grace shall be effectual and remain so or not; in Pelagianism there is thus truly no decree anymore after that of the worldwide offering of grace. From now on everything is left to the decision of man. God has done his part; He gave the power; man holds the will. But no single Christian confession has dared to take this Pelagian standpoint. All have in weaker or stronger sense taught an effectual grace, a gift of faith, and thus also distinguished a second decree in predestination. Only then arose the question, to whom this effectual grace, this habitual grace, infused, that is, the true faith, is given.
On this point there reigns much confusion. But yet in Rome, among the Lutherans, among the Remonstrants, etc., little by little the teaching has arisen that the grace of faith is given to those who make good use of the first grace, that is, the preaching of the gospel, the enlightening of the Holy Ghost, etc., and do what is in their power, quod in se est. Indeed this is no merit of condignity, but yet a merit of congruity. God binds himself in the sharing out of the gift of faith to the earnestness of human striving. The predestination to further graces is a decree, not of God's sovereignty, but of his righteousness or fairness. It is fair that God should give faith and forgiveness to him who has done his best. Yet this view is also at odds both with Scripture and with reality. Indeed man is bound to faith and turning, and he is also warned thereto by the preaching of the gospel. But from the duty no conclusion can be drawn to the power; from the thou shalt by no means follows the thou canst. How would the sinful and corrupt man also hold the power to take up the gospel or not, and to make good use of the first grace or not? Whence would he draw that power, from himself, from the working of the Logos, from the grace of baptism? The upholders of the grace offered to all as enough are themselves at a loss with it. And Scripture teaches as clearly as can be that man is wholly unwilling and unable, that faith is an unearned gift of grace, that salvation is also subjectively God's work. Nature and grace may stand in bond; there is between both an essential difference and no stepwise shift; of a merit of congruity there is speech neither in Scripture nor in reality. Little children go before the wise and understanding, and toll-gatherers and sinners go before the Pharisees into the kingdom of heaven.
Thirdly and lastly, Pelagianism seeks to hold its stance with regard to the predestination to glory. Even if someone truly believes and has thereby received forgiveness and the right to life, it is by no means sure that he will keep that faith and thus win salvation. There is therefore need in God for a third decree, namely, to grant salvation to those whose steadfastness in faith to the end He has eternally foreseen. But in a strengthened sense, all the above-named objections return here. God's decree becomes wholly conditional and loses the mark of a will and a decree; it is nothing but a wish, whose fulfillment is wholly unsure; God looks on idly and takes a waiting stance; man decides, willfulness and chance sit on the throne; even among believers, the end outcome is still wholly unsure; at every moment, the falling away of the saints is possible. Furthermore, the splitting of the predestination to grace from that to glory is wholly at odds with Scripture; it makes the chain of salvation, Rom. 8:29, breakable at every point; it breaks up the one work of re-creation into a string of human deeds and doings, which stand loose, without bond, next to each other and lack all ongoingness. And lastly, in this teaching, the whole work of God in the saving of sinners is misread and denied; Scripture always and everywhere lays the strongest stress on the faithfulness and unchangeableness of God, on the everlastingness of His covenant, on the firmness of His promises; but of all this there is no more speech in Pelagianism. The Lord knows not those who are His; His covenant and His lovingkindness do waver from moment to moment; sheep are indeed snatched from Jesus’ hand; it is not true that God glorifies all whom He has known, called, and justified. Pure, steadfast Pelagianism is the full overthrow of all Christianity and religion. Therefore, it has also not been taken up by any Christian church. However much the teaching of predestination has become unclean in the Roman and Lutheran churches through semi-Pelagian blendings, it is nevertheless avowed by all. Predestination is in truth a dogma of all Christendom.
13. The word predestination, προορισμός, is however used in Christian theology in very different senses; sometimes it has a broader, sometimes a narrower meaning. On the Pelagian standpoint, it is nothing other than the decree to grant eternal blessedness to those whose faith and perseverance God has foreseen, and to destine others, whose sins and unbelief He foresaw, to eternal punishment. Creation, fall, Christ, the preaching of the gospel and the offer of grace to all, persevering faith and unbelief precede predestination, are not included in it but fall outside it; it itself is nothing other than the destining to eternal life or to eternal punishment. Here predestination has the narrowest sense, but it also depends entirely on the bare foreknowledge of God, is uncertain and not worthy of the name predestination; not God but man makes history and determines its outcome. This view has been sufficiently refuted above and needs no further discussion, cf. Perkins, Works; Twiss, Works. But broader treatment deserves the important difference between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism. This consists in fact in nothing other than a narrower or broader definition of the concept of predestination. Augustine namely limited the word in a double sense. First, he let the decree of predestination follow that of creation and the fall; and second, he usually took the word in a good sense, identified foreordination with election and preferred to designate the decree of reprobation with the name of foreknowledge. Predestination says what God does, namely the good, but foreknowledge looks to what man does, namely the evil, On the Gift of Perseverance, ch. 17-19; On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 10. To this usage the scholastics in general adhered, Lombard, Sentences I dist. 40; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I qu. 23; the Roman Catholics, Denzinger, Enchiridion; Trent, Session VI can. 6; and the Lutheran theology, Müller, Symbolic Books. The infralapsarians among the Reformed let the decree of creation and fall precede that of election and reprobation in the same way; but while most here after the fall had no objection to including reprobation also under predestination and thus speaking of a twofold predestination, Turretin, Elenctic Theology IV 9. 6, others judged it better to limit the word predestination to election, and to treat reprobation separately under its own name, Hyperius, Method of Theology; Vermigli, Common Places; Zanchi, Works II; Keckermann, System of Theology; Pareus on Romans 8:29, 30. If now the word foreknowledge is not taken in a Pelagian sense and reprobation is not withdrawn from the will of God, as with the later Roman Catholics and Lutherans, then this is a difference in name but not in the thing itself, Mastricht, Theology III 2, 24; Turretin, Elenctic Theology IV 7, 4; Stapfer, Reformed Theology V. But characteristic of the infralapsarian view is that creation and fall precede election and reprobation in the decree. On the other hand, supralapsarianism extends predestination so far that it also includes creation and the fall as means leading to the final goal, the eternal state of rational creatures.
Both views of predestination, both the supralapsarian and the infralapsarian, have always been acknowledged side by side in the Reformed church and theology. The Dutch confessions are infralapsarian, but no church gathering, not even that of Dordrecht, has ever hindered a supralapsarian. The Lambeth Articles of 1595, taken up in the Irish confession of 1615 chapter 3, and the Westminster confession leave the question undecided on purpose. The Reformed divines have always granted full rights to both views, Voetius, Disp. Twissus, Op. Spanheim, disp. de praedest. Spanheim was wont to say that he was supralapsarian on the teacher's seat, but infralapsarian in teaching the congregation. And indeed both stand on Reformed ground. On the one side the supralapsarians teach just as steadfastly as the infralapsarians that God is no author of sin, but that this has its cause in the will of man. God as the Almighty may have ordained the fall and also wield his rule in and through sin; He abides holy and righteous, man falls and sins willingly, through his own guilt. Cadit homo, providentia Dei sic ordinante, sed suo vitio cadit, Calvin. And the supralapsarians did not come to their view through worldly wisdom, but they held it because they deemed it more in keeping with Holy Writ. Even as Augustine came to his teaching of predestination through the study of Paul, so has the teaching of Writ about sin led Calvin to his supralapsarianism. He set it forth, by his own word, not as wisdom-learning but as the truth after God's Word, Calvin. And on the other side the infralapsarian Reformed acknowledge fully that God has not foreseen the fall and sin and the everlasting woe of many through a bare foreknowledge but has taken them up and ordained them in his decree, Turretinus, Theol. El. Over the decrees themselves and their inhold there is thus no difference at all. Both deny free will, cast off faith as the cause of choosing and sin as the cause of casting off, and thus fight Pelagianism; both rest at last in the kingly good pleasure of God. There is only difference over the order of the decrees. The infralapsarian holds to the historical, cause-wise order; the supralapsarian chooses the thought-wise, end-wise order. The one takes the thought of predestination in narrower wise and lets shaping, fall, fore-ruling go before it; the other takes under predestination all other decrees. There the weight falls on the manifoldness, here on the oneness of the decrees; there all decrees have to some height their own, self-standing meaning, here the fore-going are all underlaid to the last decree.
14. The appeal to Scripture brings this dispute not to settlement. For while infralapsarianism is upheld by all those places where choosing and casting off have bearing on the fallen world and are set forth as deeds of mercy and rightwiseness, Deut. 7:6-8, Matt. 12:25, 26, John 15:19, Rom. 9:15, 16, Eph. 1:4-12, 2 Tim. 1:9, supralapsarianism seeks its strength in all those writings which speak out God's utter overlordship, above all also in bearing to sin, Ps. 115:3, Prov. 16:4, Isa. 10:15, 45:9, Jer. 18:6, Matt. 20:15, Rom. 9:17, 19-21. The deed that each of both outlooks rests on a sundry band of writings and thereby does not let another come enough to its right, proves already the one-sidedness of both. Infralapsarianism earns praise for its lowly-mindedness; it gives no unloosing but stays by the timely, cause-wise order; it seems less harsh and reckons more with the calls of the workaday. Yet it sates not, because casting off no less than choosing is to be grasped as a deed of God's rightwiseness. Belief and good works are not the cause of choosing, and so is sin not the cause of casting off; this lies alone in God's freewilled good liking; the behest of casting off thus ever in some wise goes before the behest to let sin in. Moreover, if God took the behest of casting off first after that of the letting in of sin, the asking ever comes up again: but why has He then let in that sin? Was that letting in in a bare foreknowing, and was the fall truly a thwarting of God's plan? But that can and may a Reformed one, even if he be infralapsarian, never say. He must yet take up the fall in some wise in God's behest and let it be fore-set. But why has God then behested the fall by working letting? Infralapsarianism has hereon no answer but alone God's good liking, but says then the same as supralapsarianism. Casting off is not to be cleared as a deed of God's rightwiseness, for the first sin is in every wise let in by God's overlordship. Infralapsarianism comes, going back, yet again out at supralapsarianism; if it would not will this, it would have to flee to the foreknowing. And there comes then at last yet by, that it sets the behest of casting off after the fall, but where somewhere? Has God behested to cast off many alone after the birth-sin; comes this by the behest of casting off alone in reckoning, and reckons God wholly not by this fearsome behest with the deedsome sins? If casting off must be led back to God's rightwiseness, why then rather not set it, not after the incoming of birth-sin alone but after the fulfilling of deedsome sins by each to cast off man in sunder? That taught now well Arminius, who also took up the sin of the foreseen unbelief thereunder. But that went naturally not for a Reformed godwit. The casting off hung then from the bare foreknowing, that is, from the man; the sinful deeds of the man became then the last and deepest cause of casting off, and therefore one stayed freewilledly by the behest of casting off straightway after the fall. But truly it taught therefore in bearing to all deedsome sins fully the same as supralapsarianism; the casting off goes well not before the birth-sin but yet before all other sins. Infralapsarianism seems softer and fairer to be, but this shows yet by deeper afterthinking not much more than show to be.
Supralapsarianism undoubtedly has this in its favor, that it sets aside all vain attempts to justify God, and in both reprobation and election rests in God's sovereign, unsearchable but yet always wise and holy good pleasure. And yet it is, if not more, then at least as unsatisfying as infralapsarianism. It takes on the appearance of a solution, but in fact gives none on any point and in any respect. First of all, the revelation of all God's virtues is without doubt the end goal of all God's ways, but it is not fitting to include at once in this end goal, as supralapsarianism does, the manner in which hereafter this glory of God will come to revelation in the everlasting state of his reasonable creatures. For that everlasting state, both of blessedness and of destruction, is not the end goal itself, but a means to bring all God's virtues to revelation in a creaturely way. After all, it cannot be said that God could not have revealed his honor in the salvation of all, if this had pleased him. It is also not right that God in the everlasting state of the lost reveals exclusively his righteousness, and in that of the elect exclusively his mercy. Also in the church, which was bought by the blood of the Son, his justice is made known; and also in the place of destruction there are still sparks of his mercy. The end goal of all God's works is and must be his glory; but the manner in which this glory shall shine forth is not thereby given of itself; this is determined by his will, and although God also had wise and holy reasons for that, we cannot say why he willed just this means, why he determined the destruction of many and not the salvation of all.
Moreover, supralapsarianism runs into the objection that it gives to the decree of election and reprobation only possible humans and, as Comrie added, a possible Christ as object. Indeed, this last element has been removed from the supralapsarian view by others, Kuyper, The Incarnation of the Word . But thereby the principle from which this error arose is not taken away. If election has only possible humans as object, it logically brings with it that of a possible Christ, since the election of the church and its Head cannot be separated. But setting this aside, the election and reprobation that has only homines creandi et labiles as object is not yet the proper one, but only a preliminary decree. Supralapsarianism must yet proceed again to the infralapsarian order. For after possible humans are first elected and reprobated, there follows thereafter the decree to create these possible humans actually and to let them fall, and then yet again the decree must follow to elect some and reprobate others of these humans who are no longer merely thought of in idea as possible but now also thought of in the decree as actually existing. The logical order in supralapsarianism thus leaves everything to be desired. Properly speaking, it differs from infralapsarianism only in this, that in the manner of Amyraldism it lets a decree concerning possibilities precede the infralapsarian series of decrees. But what is such a decree concerning possible humans, of whom it is not at all certain whether they will actually be? There are infinitely many homines possibiles in God's consciousness that will never be. The decree of election and of reprobation thus has non-entities as object, and not definite persons known to God by name.
Finally, there is yet this difficulty connected with supralapsarianism, that it makes everlasting punishment in the same way and in the same sense an object of God's will as the everlasting life of the blessed, and that it makes sin, which leads to that everlasting punishment, a means in the same way and in the same sense as redemption in Christ is a means to everlasting blessedness. About this there is no difference among the Reformed, that sin and punishment are willed and determined by God. It is also fully true that words like permissio and praescientia in fact give nothing toward solving the difficulties. The questions remain exactly the same: why did God, foreknowing all, create man so that he could fall and not hinder the fall? Why did he let all fall in one? Why does he not let the gospel be preached to all and grant faith to all? In one word, if God foresees and permits, he does that willingly or unwillingly. The latter is impossible. Thus the permissio is an effective permission, an act of his will. Also, the concept of permissio is without any value or force against the accusation that God is the author of sin, for whoever lets someone sin and be lost, while he could hinder it, is just as guilty as whoever urges him to sin. But on the other hand, there is also no difference about this, that sin, though not existing praeter Dei voluntatem , yet is and remains contra ejus voluntatem ; that it is not only a means to come to the end goal, but that it is a disturbance of God's creation, and that Adam's fall was thus no progress but surely a fall. And this also stands firm, that thought can reject the words permissio , praescientia , praeteritio , derelictio , but that no one can provide other, better words. Even the strictest supralapsarian cannot do without those words, neither on the pulpit nor at the lectern, Frank, Theology of the Formula of Concord IV. For although one may accept that there is a praedestinatio ad mortem ; of a praedestinatio ad peccatum no one among the Reformed has dared to speak. All without distinction, Zwingli, Calvin, Beza, Zanchi, Gomarus, Comrie, etc., have held fast that God is not the author of sin, that man was not created for damnation, that in reprobation also the severity of his justice comes forth, that reprobation is not the cause, the principle, but only the causa per accidens , the removal of the principle of sin, that sin is not the causa efficiens but indeed the causa sufficiens of reprobation, etc. Therefore supralapsarianism is, and happily so, always inconsistent; it begins with a bold start, but soon shrinks back and falls back into the infralapsarianism it first rejected. Among the advocates of supralapsarianism this comes out clearly. Almost all hesitate to let reprobation in its entirety and without any restriction precede sin. The Thomists distinguished between reprobatio negativa and positive ; the first preceded creation and fall, the second followed upon them, cf. above. This distinction returns also repeatedly among the Reformed theologians, though in more or less modified form. Not only is it acknowledged by all that the decree of reprobation is to be distinguished from the condemnation, which is the execution of that decree, takes place in time, and has sin as cause, Beza, Tract. theol. I. Polanus, Syst. theol. But in the decree of reprobation itself, many make a distinction between a preceding, more general decree of God to reveal in some homines creabiles et labiles his virtues, specifically his mercy and justice, and a following, definite decree to create those homines possibiles actually, to let them fall and sin, and to punish their sins, Beza, I. cf. III. Piscator in Twisse, I. Perkins, Works I. Twisse, I. Maccovius, Loci Comm. Voetius, Disp. V. Mastricht, Theol. theor. pract. III 2, 12. Ex. v. h. ontw. v. Tol. VII. Moor II.
15. Thus neither supralapsarianism nor infralapsarianism has succeeded in giving the solution to this problem and in doing justice to the many-sidedness of Scripture. This is partly explained by the one-sidedness to which both are guilty. First, it is not right, as was already said a little while ago, to define the highest end of all things as the showing of God's mercy in the elect and of his righteousness in the lost. Surely the glory of God and the showing forth of his perfections is the end goal of all; but the twofold state of blessedness and wretchedness is not included in that end goal and stands to it as a means. It is utterly not to be proved that with this end goal of God's glory that twofold state had to be given. If He brings forth works outside himself, He can never intend anything else thereby than the honor of his name. But that He seeks that honor in this way and in no other depends only on his free power. Apart from this, however, it is also not true that God's righteousness comes to showing only in the wretched state of the lost and his mercy only in the blessedness of the elect, for also in heaven his righteousness and holiness shine, and also in hell there is still something of his mercy and lovingkindness. In the second place, it is untrue to set forth the wretchedness of the lost as an end of predestination. Indeed, sin is not to be reduced to a bare foreknowledge and permission of God. Fall and sins and eternal punishment are included in God's decree, and in a certain sense willed by God. But yet always only in a certain sense and not in the same way as grace and salvation. In these He has a good pleasure, but sin and punishment are not his delight, his joy. When He makes sin serve his honor, He does that by his almighty power, but it is against its nature. And when He punishes the ungodly, He does not rejoice in their suffering in itself, but celebrates therein the triumph of his virtues, Deut. 28:63, Ps. 2:4, Prov. 1:26, Lam. 3:33. Therefore, on the one hand, with a view to the all-encompassing and unchangeable character of God's counsel, there is no objection to speaking of a twofold predestination, yet predestination in the one case is not of the same kind as in the other. Predestination is the setting of the end and the ordering of means to the end; since eternal damnation is not the end of man, but only the extreme, therefore the kind of reprobation cannot properly be set up as predestination. For these contradict each other, to order to an end and to order to damnation. For every end by its nature is the best thing and the perfection of the matter; but damnation is the extreme evil and the highest imperfection, so that the expression is improper by which it is said that God has predestined some men to damnation, Keckermann, Syst. theol. 1603 p. 296, cf. Twisse I 53 A. However strongly and however often Scripture says that sin and punishment are determined by God; yet it uses the words προθεσις, προγνωσις, προορισμος almost exclusively of predestination to glory. In the third place, it is also for another reason less right to coordinate predestination to eternal death with predestination to eternal life and to set it equally as an end goal. The object of election is not just some men, as of reprobation, but in election the human race under a new Head, namely Christ, is the object, and thus by grace not only some individuals but the human race itself with the whole cosmos is preserved. And in this preservation of the human race and of the world not just some virtues of God come to showing, so that besides that an eternal perdition would still be needful to show his righteousness, but in the completed kingdom of God all virtues and perfections of God come to unfolding, his righteousness and his grace, his holiness and his love, his sovereignty and his mercy. And this state of glory is thus the proper direct, though to his honor subordinate, goal that God aims at with his creation. In the fourth place, supra- and infralapsarianism erred in that they placed all that went before the end goal as means in a subordinated relation to each other. Now the means are of themselves subordinate to the end goal but not therefore to each other. Creation is not just a means for the fall, and this not just a means for grace and hardening, and these again not only a means for salvation and wretchedness. It must be well considered that the decrees are as rich in content as the whole world history, for this is the unfolding of those. Who now would be able to sum up this world history in a logical scheme of a few concepts? Creation, fall, sin, Christ, faith, unbelief, etc., stand utterly not only in relation of means to each other, so that the preceding as it were can fall away when the following is reached. They are not subordinated to each other but also coordinated, as Twisse I 71 already noted. Creation truly did not take place only so that the fall could enter, but it gave being to a world that will remain also in the state of glory. The fall did not happen only so that there would be a miserable creature, but it keeps as fact its meaning with all the consequences that have come forth from it. Christ did not become just a Mediator, which would have been enough for the atonement of sin; but God has also ordained Him to be Head of the church. The whole world history is not a means that falls away when the end is reached, but works through and leaves fruits in eternity. And election and reprobation themselves do not run here on earth as two straight lines next to each other, but in the unbelievers there is much that does not flow from reprobation and in the believers there is much that is not to be thanked to election. On the one hand both presuppose sin and are acts of mercy and righteousness, Rom. 9:15, Eph. 1:4, and yet both are also acts of divine free power and sovereignty, Rom. 9:11, 17, 21. Likewise Adam even before the fall is already a type of Christ, 1 Cor. 15:47 ff., and yet the incarnation is always in Scripture built on the fall of the human race, Heb. 2:14 ff. Sometimes Scripture speaks so strongly that reprobation is fully coordinated with election and eternal punishment is aimed at by God just as much as an end as eternal salvation, Luke 2:34, John 3:19-21, 1 Pet. 2:7, 8, Rom. 9:17, 18, 22, etc., but sometimes eternal death falls away entirely in the description of the future; the end will be the triumph of the kingdom of God, the new heaven and earth, the new Jerusalem, where God will be all in all, 1 Cor. 15, Rev. 21, 22; all is subjected to the church as this to Christ, 1 Cor. 3:21-23; reprobation is wholly subordinated to election. Therefore finally neither the supra- nor the infralapsarian representation of predestination is able to take up in itself the full rich truth of Scripture and to satisfy our theological thinking. What is true in supralapsarianism is that all decrees together form a unity; that there is an end goal to which all is subordinate and serviceable; that sin did not come into the world unthought and unexpected for God but in a certain sense was willed and determined by Him; that creation was immediately laid out for the re-creation and with Adam before the fall already reckoned on Christ. But what is true in infralapsarianism is that the decrees, though one, yet also with a view to their objects are distinguished; that in those decrees not only a teleological but also a causal order can be noticed; that creation and fall do not merge into that they are only means for the end goal; that sin above all and in the first place was a disturbance of creation and in and for itself can never be willed by God. In general the formulation of the end goal of all things, namely that God shows his righteousness in the rejected and his mercy in the elect, is yet all too simple and too sober. The state of glory will be so unspeakably rich and glorious. We expect a new heaven, a new earth, a new humanity, a restored creation, an ever ongoing development never more disturbed by sin. And to that creation and fall, Adam and Christ, nature and grace, faith and unbelief, election and reprobation, all together, each in its way, work, not only after but also next to and with each other. Yes, the present world with her history is also in itself already an ongoing showing of God's virtues. It is not only a means for the higher and richer showing that comes, but also in itself of worth. It therefore remains through and works on also in the future dispensation and will give to the new humanity ongoing stuff for worship and glorification of God. Therefore among the decrees, just as among the facts of world history, there is not only a causal and a teleological, but also an organic order. We in our limitedness can only place ourselves on the one or on the other standpoint; and therefore the advocates of a causal and those of a teleological world- and life-view come every moment into strife with each other. But for God that is wholly otherwise. He oversees the whole. All things are eternally present in his consciousness. His counsel is one single simple conception. And in that counsel all particular decrees stand in that same connection in which the facts of history a posteriori now in part appear to us and one day will fully appear. That connection is so rich and complicated that it cannot be given again in a single word of infra- or supralapsarian. It is both causal and teleological; the preceding works in on the following but the future also already determines the past and the present. There is rich, many-sided interaction. As in an organism all members hang together and mutually determine each other, so the world is a work of art of God, of which all parts are organically connected with each other. And of that world both in her length and breadth God's counsel is the eternal idea.
16. From this it becomes plain, in what sense reprobation is to be reckoned as part of predestination. If one looks only at the fact that God's counsel embraces all things, then there is every right to speak of a twofold predestination. Sin, unbelief, death, and everlasting punishment also stand under God's government. It does no good at all to speak here rather of foreknowledge and permission than of predestination. But Scripture testifies in this matter as decidedly and firmly as possible. It is true that it makes little mention of reprobation as an eternal decree. Yet all the more it lets it appear as an act of God in history. He rejects Cain, Gen. 4:5, curses Canaan, Gen. 9:25, drives out Ishmael, Gen. 21:12, Rom. 9:7, Gal. 4:30, hates Esau, Gen. 25:26, Mal. 1:2, 3, Rom. 9:13, Heb. 12:17, lets the Gentiles walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16; even within the circle of revelation there is often mention of a rejection by the Lord of his people and of particular persons, Deut. 29:28, 1 Sam. 15:23, 26, 16:1, 2 Kings 17:20, 2 Kings 23:27, Ps. 53:6, 78:67, 89:39, Jer. 6:30, 14:19, 31:37, Hos. 4:6, 9:17. But in that negative rejection there also often appears a positive act of God, consisting in hatred, Mal. 1:2, 3, Rom. 9:13, cursing, Gen. 9:25, hardening and obstinacy, Ex. 7:3, 4:21, 9:12, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10, 14:4, Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:20, Ps. 105:25, 1 Sam. 2:25, John 12:40, Rom. 9:18, in delusion, 1 Kings 12:15, 2 Sam. 17:14, Ps. 107:40, Job 12:24, Isa. 44:25, 1 Cor. 1:19, in blinding and deafening, Isa. 6:9, Matt. 13:13, Mark 4:12, Luke 8:10, John 12:40, Acts 28:26, Rom. 11:8. God's government extends over all things, and in the sins of men He also has His hand. He sends a lying spirit, 1 Kings 22:23, 2 Chron. 18:22, incites David through Satan, 2 Sam. 24:1, 1 Chron. 21:1, and tests Job, ch. 1, calls Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus His servants, 2 Chron. 36:22, Ezra 1:1, Isa. 44:28, 45:1, Jer. 27:6, 28:14 etc., and Assyria the rod of His anger, Isa. 10:5ff. He delivers Christ over to His enemies, Acts 2:23, 4:28, appoints Him for a fall and rising again, for a savor of death and of life, for judgment and a stone of stumbling, Luke 2:34, John 3:19, 9:39, 2 Cor. 2:16, 1 Pet. 2:8. He gives men over to their sins, Rom. 1:24, sends a working of error, 2 Thess. 2:11, raises up Shimei to curse David, 2 Sam. 16:10, cf. Ps. 39:10, a Pharaoh to show His power, Rom. 9:17, and the man born blind to manifest His glory, John 9:3. Certainly in all these works of God the man's own sin must not be overlooked. In God's hardening, man hardens himself, Ex. 7:13, 22, 8:15, 9:35, 13:15, 2 Chron. 36:13, Job 9:4, Ps. 95:8, Prov. 28:14, Heb. 3:8, 4:7. Jesus speaks in parables, not only that but also because the unbelievers do not see nor hear, Matt. 13:13. God gives men over to sin and falsehood because they have made themselves worthy of it, Rom. 1:24, 2 Thess. 2:11. And it is after the fact that believers see in the unrighteousness of enemies the government and hand of the Lord, 2 Sam. 16:10, Ps. 39:10. But nevertheless, in all this the will and power of God are also revealed. He shows in all this His free sovereignty. He creates good and evil, light and darkness, Isa. 45:7, Amos 3:6, the wicked for the day of evil, Prov. 16:4, does all that pleases Him, Ps. 115:3, deals with the inhabitants of the earth according to His good pleasure, Dan. 4:35, inclines all hearts as He wills, Prov. 16:9, 21:1, directs all steps, Prov. 20:24, Jer. 10:23, makes from the same lump vessels unto honor and dishonor, Jer. 18, Rom. 9:20, has mercy on whom He will and hardens whom He will, Rom. 9:18, appoints to disobedience, 1 Pet. 2:8, reserves unto judgment, Jude 4, and has not written many names in the book of life, Rev. 13:8, 17:8. These many strong sayings of Scripture are confirmed every day in the history of mankind. The defenders of reprobation have therefore always appealed to those dreadful facts with which history is so rich. There is so much unreason in nature, so much undeserved suffering, so many calamities without cause, such unequal, incomprehensible allotments of fate, such crying contrasts of joy and sorrow, that for everyone who thinks, only the choice remains either with pessimism to explain this world from the blind will of an unhappy God, or on the ground of Holy Scripture in faith to rest in the sovereign and free, but always, however incomprehensible, wise and holy will of Him who will one day cause the full light to shine upon these riddles of life. The acceptance or non-acceptance of a decree of reprobation has its cause, therefore, not in a smaller or greater measure of love and compassion. The difference between Augustine and Pelagius, Calvin and Castellio, Gomarus and Arminius lies not in this, that the latter were so much milder and kinder, more tender and compassionate men. But it lies in this, that the former accepted Scripture in its entirety, also in this its teaching; that they were theistic and always wished to be so, and also in these moving facts of life recognized the will and hand of the Lord; that they dared to look reality in the face in all its dreadfulness. Pelagianism scatters flowers on the graves, makes death an angel, regards sin as a weakness, holds discourses on the usefulness of adversities, and considers this world the best that is possible. Calvinism is not served by such shallow babble and trifling. It tears the blindfold from the eyes, it will not live in an imagined delusion, it accepts the seriousness of life in its full depth, it stands up for the rights of the Lord of lords, and bows in humility and adoration before the incomprehensible, sovereign will of God Almighty. And thereby it proves in the end to be much more merciful than Pelagianism. How deeply Calvin felt the seriousness of what he said is shown by his decretum horribile , Inst. III 23, 7. Entirely wrongly has this word been made a reproach to him. It does not plead against Calvin, it pleads for him. The decree as a doctrine of Calvin is not horrible; but the reality is dreadful, which is the revelation of that decree of God, which is thus taught by Scripture and history, which for every thinking man, whether he follow Pelagius or Augustine, remains entirely the same, and which by no delusions can be in the least done away with. And in the midst of that dreadful reality, Calvinism brings not this solution but this comfort, that in all that happens it recognizes the will and hand of an almighty God, who is at the same time a merciful Father. Calvinism gives no solution but causes man to rest in Him who dwells in unapproachable light, whose judgments are unsearchable, whose ways are past finding out. Therein Calvin rested. Testis enim mihi erit Dominus, cui conscientia mea subscribet, sic me stupenda haec ipsius judicia quotidie meditari, ut nulla me plus aliquid sciendi curiositas sollicitet, nulla mihi de incomparibili ejus justitia obrepat sinistra suspicio, nulla me obmurmurandi libido prorsus titillet . And in that rest of soul he awaited the day when he would see face to face and receive the solution of these riddles.
17. The Rejection However much the rejection may with full right be reckoned to predestination on the one hand, yet it is not in the same sense and in the same way the content of God's decree as the election. The upholders of the twin predestination have also acknowledged this at all times. When it came to God's sovereignty, to the positive and unambiguous testimonies of His Word, to the facts of history that cannot be erased, then they were as unyielding as the apostle Paul and would hear of no yielding or mediating. Then they sometimes came to hard sayings, which can offend the Pelagian-inclined heart of man. Thus Augustine once said that God could not be accused even if He had willed to damn some innocents. Si humanum genus, quod creatum primitus constat ex nihilo, non cum debita mortis et peccati origine nasceretur et tamen ex eis creator omnipotens in aeternum nonnullos damnare vellet interitum; quis omnipotenti creatori diceret: quare fecisti sic? And some theologians, also among the Reformed, have spoken in the same spirit. Whoever has some sense of the incomparable greatness of God and the nothingness of the creature; and who besides considers how we oftentimes can behold the heaviest suffering of man and beast with the most indifferent mind, above all when it serves our own interest, or art, or science; he loses the courage to fall hard upon Augustine or others for such a saying, let alone to call God to account. When it comes to right , solely and only to right , what right can we assert over against Him who called us forth from nothingness and gave us all that we have and are? But nevertheless, although one may speak thus for a moment over against someone who thinks he may accuse God of unrighteousness, almost all Reformed, with Calvin at the head, have yet in the end decidedly and with indignation rejected such an absolute dominion. The cause why God has willed this or that, chosen these and rejected those, may be wholly unknown to us. His will is always wise and holy and good and has had its righteous reasons for all things. His power is not to be separated from His righteousness. As long as the right and honor of God were first acknowledged, all Reformed advised the mo
18. Thus predestination in the end runs out into election; in this it reaches its end and comes to its full reality. In its highest form it is God's decree concerning the revelation of his virtues in the eternal, glorious state of his reasonable creatures, and the ordering of the means leading thereto. Neither may reprobation be forgotten. Only over against this dark reverse side does election itself stand out in the most glorious light. It is of gripping seriousness that also on this highest ground, where it concerns the eternal weal and the eternal woe of the reasonable creatures, the day arises out of the dark night, the light is born out of the darkness. It seems that the law holds everywhere, that many are called and few are chosen. There lies a deep truth in the saying, that the death of the one is the bread of the other. Darwin's teaching of the survival of the fittest has a general validity and is in force throughout the whole creation. Thousands of blossoms fall off, that a few may ripen into fruit. Millions of living beings are born and only a few remain in life. Thousands of men toil in the sweat of their brow, that a few may bathe in luxury. Wealth, luxury, art, science, all the high and noble is built on the foundation of poverty, want, ignorance. Never and nowhere in the world does it go according to the even sharing of the socialists. There is no equality on any field. Everywhere there is election beside and on the foundation of reprobation. The world is not ordered according to the Pharisaic law of work and wage; merit and riches have nothing to do with each other. And also on the highest field it is only divine grace that makes the difference. Like all decrees, so also election has its deepest cause in the good pleasure of God. The Pelagians of every stripe have always wanted to understand these decrees as acts of God's righteousness, in which he proceeded according to the merit of man. God lets himself in his decrees be determined by the foreseen behaviors of the creature. He offers salvation to all. He grants faith to whoever makes a good use of this offer by his natural or also by granted supernatural power. He saves whoever perseveres in faith to the end. Now there is indeed among the decrees a certain order; they include both the end and the means. To the prayer of his children God in his decree has bound the hearing. When he has decreed to give rain in the drought, he has also fixed that his people shall pray to him for it and that he shall give the rain as answer to their prayer. In his decree he has laid a bond between sunshine and warmth, sowing and harvest, laziness and poverty, knowledge and might, and so on, and so also between sin and punishment, unbelief and destruction, faith and salvation. The harmony between the appearances and happenings in the real world is a full imprint of the harmony in the world of God's thoughts and decrees. The Scripture often stays with these secondary causes, and also the Reformed have fully acknowledged their meaning. But these second causes are therefore not yet the last and deepest cause. And one cannot escape the search after it. From all sides the questions press upon us. Why is there such a bond between the appearances and happenings among themselves, as we again and again see in the world? An appeal to the nature of things is no sufficient answer, for also that nature is from God and determined by him. Science can note the that , but it assumes the being and knows not why it is so and must be. Why there is causality between the creatures among themselves, why each creature is what it is, why there is such endless diversity among the creatures, in kind, nature, gender, sort, might, understanding, riches, honor, and so on; within the circle of the created there is no cause to be found for it. And so also among the reasonable creatures; why some angels are destined to eternal glory and of the others the fall and destruction is foreseen and determined; why just that human nature, which Christ took on, was deemed worthy of this honor; why one man is born within, the other outside Christianity; why the one in character, gifts, mind, upbringing has so much advantage over the other; why one child dies early and as a child of the covenant is taken up into heaven and the other outside the covenant without grace goes into death; why the one comes to faith and the other not; they are all questions to which no creature can answer. God's decrees are not to be understood as acts of a righteousness that acts according to work and merit. Above all it appears clearly with the angels, that the last cause of their election and reprobation must lie in the will of God. For even if one takes recourse to foreknowledge, saying that God has foreseen the perseverance of some and the fall of other angels, yet this foreknowledge then precedes their creation. Why then did God create those angels whose fall he foresaw? Why did he give them no sufficient grace to stand fast, like the others? There is here a reprobation that rests solely on God's sovereignty. On the other side election is not in itself always an act of mercy or to be explained as such. In the election of Christ and of the good angels there is no talk of sin and thus of mercy. And the election of men is indeed an act of mercy, but yet not to be explained from mercy alone. For then God would have had to be merciful to all, since all were wretched. And so reprobation has indeed been an act of righteousness but not to be explained from righteousness alone, for then all would have been rejected. Among themselves the decrees may thus be in bond, they themselves as acts of God are not conditional, but absolute, acts of God's utter sovereignty. There is by God a causal bond laid between sin and punishment, and he upholds that in each one's conscience; but the decree of reprobation finds not in sin and unbelief, but in the will of God its deepest cause, Prov. 16:4, Matt. 11:25, 26, Rom. 9:11-22, 1 Pet. 2:8, Rev. 13:8. So also there is a causal bond between faith and salvation, but the decree of election is not caused by foreseen faith; rather election is the cause of faith, Acts 13:48, 1 Cor. 4:7, Eph. 1:4, 5, 2:8, Phil. 1:29. Even Christ cannot be seen as the cause of election. Indeed this saying is open to a good explanation. Thomas says rightly, that Christ is the cause of our predestination, not viewed as act or decree, but with an eye to its end and goal. For so God has from eternity preordained our salvation, that it should be fulfilled through Jesus Christ. And so also some Reformed spoke of Christ as cause or foundation of election, or of our election through and for Christ. Christ is indeed cause or foundation of election, insofar as election is realized in and through him; he is also the meriting cause of the salvation that is the goal of election; he is also the mediator and the head of the elect. The decree of election is also taken with an eye to the Son, out of love to him. The church and Christ are together, in one decree, in fellowship with and for each other, chosen, Eph. 1:4. But therefore Christ as mediator is not yet the impulsive, moving, meriting cause of the decree of election. In that sense Christ has indeed been called the cause of election by many Romanists, by the Remonstrants, by the Lutherans, and by many newer theologians. But the Reformed have rightly fought this. For Christ is himself object of predestination and therefore cannot be its cause. He is a gift of the Father's love and this thus goes before the sending of the Son, John 3:16, Rom. 5:8, 8:29, 2 Tim. 1:9, 1 John 4:9. The Son has not moved the Father to love, but the electing love arose from the Father himself. And so Scripture teaches everywhere, that the cause of all decrees lies not in any creature but only in God himself, in his will and good pleasure, Matt. 11:26, Rom. 9:11ff. Eph. 1:4ff. And just therefore the teaching of election is, both for the unbeliever and for the believer, to such an unspeakable rich comfort. If it went according to right and merit, then all would be lost. But now that it goes according to grace, there is also for the most wretched hope. If work and wage were the measure in the kingdom of heaven, then it would be opened for no one. Or also if according to Pelagius' teaching the virtuous for his virtue and the Pharisee for his righteousness were chosen, then the poor publican would be shut out. Pelagianism is so pitilessly hard. But to confess election, that is, in the most unworthy of men, in the deepest sunk still to acknowledge a creature of God and an object of his eternal love. Election serves not, as it is so often preached, to push many away but to invite all to the riches of God's grace in Christ. No one may believe that he is a reprobate, for each is earnestly and urgently called and is bound to believe in Christ unto salvation. No one can believe it, for his life itself and all that he enjoys is a proof that God has no delight in his death. No one truly believes it either, for then he would have hell already on earth. But election is a well of comfort and strength, of lowliness and meekness, of trust and boldness. Man's salvation lies unshakably fast in the gracious and almighty good pleasure of God.
19. And this glory of election appears even more beautiful when we finally consider its object and goal. In earlier dogmatics, that object was usually specialized. Angels, humans, and Christ were treated as its object. Concerning humans there is no difference; whether before or after faith, whether before or after the fall, all agree that humans are the proper object of predestination and election. This is not to be understood in the sense that humans, peoples, generations, or also the church in general, without further determination and in contrast to individuals and particular persons, would be the object of election, as Schleiermacher, Lipsius, Ritschl, and others assert. For this view is a mere abstraction, since humanity, people, generation, church exist only in particular persons; it is also contradicted by Scripture, for this teaches a personal election, Malachi 1:2, Romans 9:10-12 (Jacob), Acts 13:48 (as many as), Romans 8:29 (whom), Ephesians 1:4 (us), Galatians 1:15 (Paul); the names of the elect are written in the book of life, Isaiah 4:3, Daniel 12:1, Luke 10:20, Philippians 4:3, Revelation 3:5, etc. But yet it is true that those elect in Scripture are not viewed loosely and atomistically, but as one organism. They are the people of God, the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit. They are therefore chosen in Christ, Ephesians 1:4, to be members of his body. Both Christ and the church are thus included in the decree of predestination. Therefore Augustine already said: just as that one was predestined to be our head, so we many are predestined to be his members. The Synod of Toledo in 675 spoke in the same spirit, and the scholastics treated extensively the predestination of Christ, especially in connection with Romans 1:5, Thomas Aquinas, and others. The Lutherans, however, denied this, because they understood predestination as election from sin to salvation through God's mercy. But the Reformed emphasized all the more that Christ also was ordained by God and together with the church was the object of God's election. There was even difference over whether Christ was the object of predestination only or also of election. Some, such as Calvin, Gomarus, Marck, Moor, Kuyper, said that Christ was destined to be mediator, to bring about salvation for his own; the election of humans thus logically preceded the foreordination of Christ to mediator. But others, such as Zanchius, Polanus, and others, regarded Christ also as the object of election, because he was destined not only to mediator but also to head of the church; the election of Christ then logically preceded that of the church. Now it is undoubtedly true that Christ is ordained to mediator, to do all that was needful for man's salvation; and equally certain that Christ is not chosen by God's mercy from sin and misery to glory and salvation. But Scripture nevertheless speaks many times also of God's election in the Messiah, Isaiah 42:1, 43:10, Psalm 89:4, 20, Matthew 12:18, Luke 23:35, 24:26, Acts 2:23, 4:28, 1 Peter 1:20, 2:4. This election rightly bears that name, because the Son from eternity was appointed by the Father to mediator, and above all because the human nature of Christ from pure grace and without any merit was destined to union with the Logos and to the office of mediator. But hereby Christ is only yet the object of predestination, since this in distinction from election precisely includes the arrangement of means to the end. Scripture, however, says on the other hand just as strongly that the church is chosen in and to Christ, to bear his image and behold his glory, John 17:22-24, Romans 8:29; Christ is not only destined to mediator but also to head of the church; all things are through him but also to him created, 1 Corinthians 3:23, Ephesians 1:22, Colossians 1:16ff. Not as if thereby Christ became the ground and foundation of our election. But the election of the church is the very first benefit to the church; and this benefit already takes place in communion with Christ, and has not as ground but precisely as goal that all other benefits, regeneration, faith, etc., are communicated to the church through Christ. In this sense the election of Christ logically precedes ours. But however one conceived this logical order, all Reformed said that Christ and his church together, that the mystical Christ was the proper object of election. By one and undivided decree all, Christ and we, are elected. They did not stop here either. In agreement with Augustine, the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, and in contrast to the Lutherans, they also included the angels in the decree of predestination. Scripture gave occasion for this, 1 Timothy 5:21, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6, Matthew 25:41, and the example of Christ taught that election does not always presuppose a state of sin and misery. However much then election in Scripture is as a separation from the nations, Genesis 12:1, Deuteronomy 7:6, 30:3, Jeremiah 29:14, 51:45, Ezekiel 11:17, Hosea 11:1, Acts 2:40, Philippians 2:15, 1 Peter 2:9, etc., and the number of the elect is often regarded as very small, Matthew 7:14, 22:14, Luke 12:32, 13:23, 24; yet in that church the world is saved. Not some humans from the world, but the world itself is the object of God's love, John 3:16, 17, 4:14, 6:33, 12:47, 2 Corinthians 5:19. In Christ all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled with God; under him they are all gathered into one, Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:20. The world, created through the Son, is also destined for the Son as its heir, Colossians 1:16, 2 Peter 3:13, Revelation 11:15. And so it is not a chance and arbitrary aggregate, but an organic whole, that in election is known by God and in redemption is saved by Christ. The reconciled world shall be freed from the enemy world. The church without spot and wrinkle gathered from all nations and reigning eternally with Christ, that is the land of the blessed, the land of the living, as Augustine says. And precisely because the object of election is a perfect organism, therefore it itself is not to be thought of otherwise than as a fixed and determined decree of God. In an aggregate the number of parts is wholly indifferent. But all that exists organically rests on measure and number. Christ is chosen by God to Head, the church to his body; and together they must grow up to a perfect man, in which each member occupies its own place and fulfills its own task. Election is the divine thought, the eternal plan of that temple which he builds in the course of the ages and of which he himself is the Artist and Builder. To the building of the temple all is subordinate and serviceable. As all God's decrees run out into that of election, so the whole history of world and humanity works together for the coming of the kingdom of God. Even those who are no citizens in that kingdom, says Calvin, are born for the salvation of the elect. Creation and fall, preservation and government, sin and grace, Adam and Christ, each in its way contributes to the bringing about of this building of God. And this building itself is raised up to the honor and glorification of God. For all things are yours, you are Christ's, Christ is God's, 1 Corinthians 3:21-23.
1. The carrying out of God's counsel begins with the creation. This is the beginning and foundation of all God's revelation and therefore also the groundwork of all religious and ethical life. The Old Testament creation story is so exaltedly beautiful that it finds no equal anywhere and has been praised by all, even by natural scientists like Cuvier and von Humboldt. "The first leaf of the Mosaic document has more weight than all the folios of natural researchers and philosophers" (Jean Paul). And thereafter this creation steps forward time and again in the history of revelation. True religion distinguishes itself from the first moment onward from all other religions by viewing the relation of God to the world and mankind as that of the Creator to his creature. The thought of a being outside and independent of God nowhere appears in Scripture. God is the only and absolute cause of all that is. He has created everything through his Word and Spirit, Genesis 1:2, 3; Psalm 33:6, 104:29, 148:5; Job 27:3, 33:4; Isaiah 40:13, 48:13; Zechariah 12:1; John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2; and so on. Nothing stood over against him; no stuff that binds him, no might that limits him. He speaks and it is, Genesis 1:3; Psalm 33:9; Romans 4:17. He is the unbounded owner of heaven and earth, Genesis 14:19, 22; Psalm 24:2, 89:12, 95:4, 5. There is no bound to his power; he does all that pleases him, Isaiah 14:24, 27, 46:10, 55:10; Psalm 115:3, 135:6. All things are from and through and to him, Romans 11:36; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Hebrews 11:3. The world is the outgrowth of his will, Psalm 33:6; Revelation 4:11; it is the showing forth of his virtues, Proverbs 8:22ff.; Job 28:23ff.; Psalm 104:1, 136:5ff.; Jeremiah 10:12; and has its goal in his glory, Isaiah 43:7; Proverbs 16:4; Romans 11:36; 1 Corinthians 8:6. This teaching of creation, which holds such an all-ruling place in Scripture, is not set forth as a wise man's explanation of the world riddle. It surely gives an answer also to the question of the spring of all things; but above all it has a religious-ethical meaning. No right relation to God is thinkable except on its groundwork. It places us in that bond to God in which we ought to stand. And therefore it is of outstanding practical worth. It serves to bring out the greatness, the all-might, the majesty, and also the goodness, the wisdom, the love of God, Psalm 19; Job 37; Isaiah 40; and it strengthens faith thereby, upholds trust in God, comforts in suffering, Psalm 33:6ff., 65:6ff., 89:12, 121:2, 134:3; Isaiah 37:16, 40:28ff., 42:5; and so on; it stirs to praise and thanks, Psalm 136:3ff., 148:5; Revelation 14:7; tunes to lowliness and meekness and makes mankind feel his smallness and nothingness over against God, Job 38:4ff.; Isaiah 29:16, 45:9; Jeremiah 18:6; Romans 9:20.
2. The Doctrine of Creation. The doctrine of creation is known only from revelation; it is understood by faith, Hebrews 11:3. The Roman Catholics teach indeed that it can also be traced from nature by reason, Thomas, Sentences II distinction 1 question 1 article 2. Summa contra Gentiles II 15. 16. Kleutgen, Philosophy of the Ancients II. Scheeben, Dogmatics II 5. 6, and the Vatican Council even elevated this to a dogma, of faith chapter 2 canon 2. But the history of religions and of philosophy does not plead for this. Mohammedanism does teach creation from nothing but has borrowed this from Judaism and Christianity, Zöckler, History of the Relations between Theology and Natural Science 1877 I. The heathen cosmogonies are all polytheistic and at the same time theogonies; they all assume a primal stuff, whether this is thought of as a chaos, as a personal principle, as an egg or something similar; and finally they are either more emanationistic, so that the world is an outflow of God, or more evolutionistic, so that the world more and more deifies itself, or more dualistic, so that the world is a product of two hostile principles, Wuttke, The Cosmogonies of the Heathen Peoples before the Time of Jesus and the Apostles, Haag 1850. Lenormant, The Origins of History according to the Bible and the Traditions of the Oriental Peoples, Paris 1880. Zöckler in Herzog second edition 13. Also the Chaldean Genesis, which otherwise offers remarkable parallels with that of the Old Testament, makes no exception here. It is at the same time a theogony and lets the world be formed from the tiamat, which chaotically hides everything in itself, by Bel, Saussaye, Textbook of Religion I. The Greek philosophy seeks either materialistically the origin of things in a material element (Ionian School, Atomists), or pantheistically in the one, eternal, unchangeable being (Eleatics) or in the eternal becoming (Heraclitus, Stoa). Even Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle did not rise above a dualism of spirit and matter; God is no creator, but at most a former of the world (demiurge). The scholastics claimed indeed that Plato and Aristotle taught a creation from nothing, but this was rightly contested by others, among them Bonaventure, Sentences II distinction 1 part 1 article 1 question 1. The Greeks knew a physis (nature) and kosmos (world) but no ktisis (creature). Christianity gained the victory over this heathen theogony and cosmogony in the struggle against Gnosticism, which to explain sin assumed besides the highest God a lower God or an eternal hyle. But yet the paganistic explanations of the origin of things repeatedly came up again also in the Christian centuries. Already in the book of Wisdom 11:17 it is said that God's almighty hand created the world from amorphous hyle; and the same expression occurs also with Justin Martyr, Apology I 10. 59. But Justin has in mind thereby the later so-called second creation and teaches elsewhere expressly also the creation of matter, Dialogue with Trypho 5. Cohortation to the Greeks 23, compare Semisch, Justin the Martyr II. Just as in the second century Gnosticism, so after Nicaea especially Manichaeism arose, which likewise to explain sin assumed besides the good God an originally evil being, Augustine in many writings, Against the Epistle of Mani, Against Faustus, Against Fortunatus etc. Flügel, Mani, His Doctrine and His Writings, Leipzig 1862. Kessler in Herzog second edition 9. This dualism found wide spread in Christendom, even among the Priscillianists in Spain, and appeared anew in the Middle Ages in many sects, such as the Bogomils and Cathars. But besides dualism, pantheism also got its interpreters. Under the influence of Neoplatonism, Pseudo-Dionysius taught that the ideas and examples of all things existed from eternity in God and that his overflowing goodness moved him to give these ideas reality and to communicate himself to his creatures, On the Divine Names chapter 4 section 10. God has as it were stepped out of his unity into the creatures, has multiplied and poured himself out in them, On the Divine Names chapter 2, 11, so that God is the general being, On the Divine Names chapter 5, 4, the being of things themselves, On the Celestial Hierarchy chapter 4, 1. But yet he adds that God nevertheless maintains himself in his unity, On the Divine Names chapter 2, 11 and that God therefore is all in all, because he is the cause of all, On the Celestial Hierarchy chapter 5, 8. The same thoughts return with Eriugena. He teaches repeatedly expressly a creation from nothing, On the Division of Nature III 15 V 24. 33, but the relation in which he places the four natures to each other makes his system into pantheism. The first nature, which creates and is not created, that is, God, brings forth thinking from nothing, that is from himself, the ideas and forms of all things in the divine Word, ibid. III 14. 17. This is the second nature, which is created and creates. This second nature is natura creata, insofar as it is brought forth by God; it is creatrix, insofar as it itself is the cause and potency of the actual world. For this second nature is not essentially and substantially distinct from the third nature, that is, the world of appearances, which is created and does not create; the one is the cause, the other the effect; it is the same world, now considered in the eternity of the Word of God, then in the temporality of the world, III 8. It is God himself, who first creates himself in the ideas, then descends in the creatures and becomes all in all, to finally in the fourth nature, which does not create and is not created, return to himself, III 4. 20. And the cause of this process of God is the goodness of God, III 2. 4. 9, his striving to become all, the appetite by which he wills to become all things, I 12. Outside the Christian world pantheism was taught by the philosophers Avicenna 1036 and Averroes 1198, by Sufism, which saw in the universe an emanation of God; and among the Jews by the Kabbalah, Stöckl, Philosophy of the Middle Ages II. And toward the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern time all these pantheistic, dualistic, emanationistic ideas crossed among the mystics, theosophists, and Anabaptists, such as Floris, Amalric of Bena, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, the Libertines, Eckhart, Tauler, Servetus, Franck, Schwenckfeld, Bruno, Paracelsus, Fludd, Weigel, Böhme; even Socinianism taught only a creation from an amorphous hyle, materia informis, with Fock, Socinianism. The finite and infinite were placed too abstractly beside and over against each other, so that the first could not have its cause in the second. But yet pantheism as a philosophical system was first again brought into honor by Spinoza. He saw in the one substance the eternal and necessary efficient and immanent cause of the world; the world is the explication of the divine being, and the particular things are the modes, by which the divine attributes of thinking and extension are determined in a certain way, Ethics I. This philosophy found toward the end of the previous century more and more agreement and was elevated by Schelling and Hegel to the system of the nineteenth century. The biblical doctrine of creation was wholly rejected. Fichte said: the assumption of a creation is the basic error of all false metaphysics and doctrine of religion and especially the primal principle of Judaism and heathenism, Instruction to the Blessed Life 1806. Schelling called creation from nothing the cross of the understanding, and decidedly opposed it, Works I 2 8. In his first period he taught the absolute identity of God and world; both relate as essence and form; they are the same, considered under different viewpoints; God is not the cause of the all, but the all itself, and the all is therefore not becoming but an eternal being, one and all, Works I 4 5 6. But in his later period he came through Baader under the influence of Böhme and so of the Kabbalah and Neoplatonism and now seeks the ground of the world in the dark nature of God. Theogony and cosmogony are most closely related. Just as God from his indifference through the opposition of the principles, nature (primal ground, unground, darkness) and understanding (word, light) elevates himself to Spirit, love, personality, so these three are at the same time the potencies of the world. The dark nature in God is the blind, orderless principle, the stuff and ground of the created world, insofar as it is chaos and bears a chaotic character. But in that world also works the potency of the divine understanding, and brings light, order, rule into it. While finally in the spirit of man God himself as Spirit reveals himself and becomes full personality, Works I 7 II 2 3, compare above page 305. And likewise Hegel openly confessed to pantheism, indeed not to that which holds the finite things themselves for God but yet to that pantheism which sees in the finite and accidental the appearance of the absolute, the petrified idea, the frozen intelligence, Works VII. From philosophy this pantheism passed over into theology. Schleiermacher rejected the separation of creation and preservation and held the question of the temporality or eternity of the world for indifferent, if only the absolute dependence of all things on God was maintained, The Christian Faith sections 36. 41. Bovon, Christian Dogmatics I 289. And likewise God is only the eternal immanent cause and ground of the world with Strauss, The Christian Faith I. Biedermann, Christian Dogmatics sections 649. Schweizer, Christian Faith section 71. Pfleiderer, Outline of the Christian Faith and Moral Doctrine section 84. Scholten, Christian Dogmatic Principles, edition 2 page 111. Hoekstra, Philosophical Religion II 174ff. Besides this pantheism, materialism also arose, which seeks the last elements of all being in eternal, uncreated and indestructible material atoms, and from their mechanical and chemical separation and combination taking place according to fixed laws tries to explain all phenomena, the whole world. It had its preparation already in Greek philosophy, was introduced again into modern times by Gassendi and Descartes; it was promoted by the English and French philosophy of the previous century; and it appeared in this century not as fruit of scientific research but as product of philosophical thinking with Feuerbach, who can be called the father of materialism in Germany, to then especially after 1850 find entrance among the practitioners of natural science through all sorts of incidental causes, such as Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, Czolbe, Haeckel, Strauss etc., Lange, History of Materialism, 4th edition 1882.
3. Now it deserves first remark, that both pantheism and materialism are no outcome of exact inquiry but philosophy, worldview, systems of belief, not of knowledge in strict sense. Materialism gladly puts itself forth as exact natural science, but it can easily be shown, that both historically and logically it is fruit of human thinking, and a matter as much of the heart as of the head of man. The beginning and the end of things lie indeed outside the bounds of beholding and inquiry; science takes for granted the being, and rests on the groundwork of the shaped world. In so far pantheism and materialism are in the same plight as theism, which owns a mystery in the beginning of things. The only question is thus this, whether pantheism and materialism are able to put in place of this mystery an understandable unfolding. To both this call may be made, since they just cast off the teaching of shaping for its ungraspableness and see in it a cross of the understanding. Is it indeed so, that pantheism and materialism better than theism fulfill the thinking and therefore earn the forechoice? But both frameworks have in the yore of mankind so often risen and again been forsaken; they have so oft been laid under earnest, settling judgment, that they by no one only for their fulfilling of the thinking can be taken. Other drives give there the sway. If the world has not arisen through shaping, it must yet in some other wise be unfolded. And then show themselves, to speak not of twofoldness, only two ways, namely to unfold either stuff from ghost or ghost from stuff. Pantheism and materialism are no clean witherstands; they are rather two sides of the same thing; they go ever into each other; they grasp the same riddle only from another side; they both strike on like hindrances. Pantheism stands before the overgoing from thinking to being, from thought to trueness, from underlay to ways and has brought forth nothing that looks like an answer. It has indeed taken sundry shapes and named that overgoing under sundry names. It takes the bond of God to the world as that of one and all, nature shaping and shaped, of underlay and ways, of being and showing, of the overall and the sundry, of kind and samplings, of whole and parts, of thought and thing-making, of ocean and waves and so on, but with all these words it says nothing to unfold that bond. From pantheistic standpoint it is not to be grasped, how from thinking the being, from oneness the manifold, from ghost the stuff has come forth. Foremost that has clearly come out in the frameworks of Schelling and Hegel. Of words there was here no lack. The thought takes a shape, a body, it things itself, goes over in its other-being, it sunders and sifts itself, it chooses freely, to let itself loose, to outlay itself, to swing into its wither and so on. But both found herein yet so little a fulfilling answer, that they often spoke of a fall of the boundless, whereby the world had arisen. No wonder, that therefore Schelling in his second time and likewise Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and others gave to the will the foremight and took the boundless foremost as kind, as will, as thrust. The pantheistic sameness of thinking and being has shown to be a wandering; all the more because the underlay, the thought, the one, the all or how pantheism may name the boundless, is not a fullness of being, but a clean might, a witless drawing-off, a bare nothing. And therefrom would the wealth of the world, the manifold of being be unfolded! Believe that, who can! Very rightly says therefore Kleutgen: But therein stands the sundryness of the pantheistic beholding from the theistic, that the former, beginning from as dark as unshown takings about the godly being, ends in open withersays, the latter however going out from sure knowings of endful things, wins ever higher openings, until it stands before the ungraspable, not becoming led astray, that He, whom it knows as the everlasting and unswerving beginner of all things, in his being and working is uplifted above our thinking.
Article by Ulrici in Herzog. Doedes, Introduction to the Doctrine of God with the literature cited there. Opzoomer, Science and Philosophy 1857 chapter 1. Pierson, Speculation, Authority and Experience 1855 chapter 1. Rauwenhoff, Philosophy of Religion. Hoekstra, Philosophical Religion II. Kuyper, Blurring of Boundaries 1892. Is. van Dijk, Aesthetic and Ethical Religion 1895. Hartmann, Collected Studies and Essays 1876. R. Flint, Antitheistic Theories 1885. Hettinger, Apology of Christianity I. Ebrard, Apologetics I and so on; cf. also volume I.
Even unexplained remains the beginning of things in materialism.
While pantheism lets the world come forth from one last principle, which falls together with the world, materialism takes a many of principles. But these last principles of all things are according to materialism nothing other than undivided stuff-particles. If the upholders of this world-view now stayed true to this their ground-standing, they would to those atoms no single beyond-earthly, overstepping fore-saying may ascribe. It is on the standpoint of materialism, well beheld, unallowed, to speak of the everlastingness, the unmade-ness, the undestroyable-ness of the atoms, or also of stuff and might. If one says, that the world from stuffly atoms is arisen, must one thereto also true remain. Atoms yet, while elements of the through-experience world, can only through-experience but no beyond-earthly own-ships bear. The thought of atom shuts fully not in, that it of kind and per se everlasting and undestroyable is. Who the atoms for the last principles of all being holds, cuts himself the way off to thinking-over and beyond-earthly-lore and must then also only out of those through-experience atoms along through-experience way the world make clear. The materialist can only say, that the undergoing teaches, that the atoms not arise and not forgo; but of a beyond-earthly kind and of beyond-earthly own-ships of the atoms may he not speak. The kind-lore, whereupon the materialist himself always calls, has it as such with the endly, the kinly, with the kind and her showings to do; she goes always from the kind out, takes her as given on and can not through-thrust to what behind her lies. As soon as she that does, holds she up to be body-lore and becomes beyond-body-lore. But materialism remains itself not true and writes at once to the atoms all kinds of own-ships to, which in the thought itself not lie in-shut and through the undergoing not become taught. Therefore is materialism no sharp knowing-ship, no fruit of strict knowing-ly search, but a love-of-wisdom, which on the naysaying of all love-of-wisdom is built; it suffers from an inner against-standing; it naysays all the full-come and makes the atoms full-come; it naysays God's being and god-makes the matter.
Even can yet stronger spoken become: if materialism all things out of the stuff make clear will, misses it all right to speak of atoms. Atoms are never where-taken; no one has them ever seen; the through-experience search has them not to the light brought. They bear from house out a beyond-earthly kind and must therefore for materialism already forbidden ware be. And as beyond-earthly under-standings dwell they in an against-nomy, which through no one yet is up-loosed. They are stuffly and yet shall they at once undivided, unchangeable, unending in tale, everlasting and undestroyable be. And as then by that all the matter self, which as clear-making principle of the world becomes on-taken, but known and graspable were! But just the being and the kind of stuff is the all-most-secret-full and draws itself fully from our knowing. We can ourselves yet better in-think and fore-stell what ghost, than what stuff is. Stuff is a name, a word, but we wit not, what thereunder to under-stand. We stand here before a mystery, in his sort even great as the being of ghost, that for his un-graspable-ness through materialism thrown back becomes. But on-taken, that there atoms are and that they everlasting and unchangeable are, then is therewith yet nothing to clear-making of the world reached. How is out of those atoms the world arisen? If the now being world, or also a fore-going, a beginning has had, must there a sake be, wherethrough the atoms in moving come are and well in such a moving, which the now-ward world to out-come had. But out of the stuff is the moving not to make clear, for all stuff is of kind slow and comes only through a push from outside in moving. A first mover outside the stuff can however through materialism not on-taken become. And so remains there nothing other over, than to, even as the atoms, so also the moving, the changing, the time or with Czolbe even this being world full-come and everlasting to make. Materialism winds itself in always greater against-standings; it be-muddles the body-ly and the beyond-body-ly, becoming and being, changing and unchangeable-ness, time and everlastingness, and speaks of unending room, unending time, unending world, as if it nothing were and there not the un-rime-fullest against-speak in lay.
To the last is oft-times and from sundry sides on-shown, that materialism in lack remains, to out of the work-way binding of sheer stuffly and thus un-witting, life-less, un-free, goal-less atoms whole that ghostly world of life, wit-ness, goal, god-service, sithe-ly-ness etc. to make clear, which yet with not less might itself to our inner be-seem thrusts on, as the body-ly world to our senses. And it seems, that this picking on the materialists self slowly-hand some in-druck goes to make. Materialism in this hundred-year, out of pantheism forth-come, turns how longer how more to pantheism back and takes even all kinds of mystery elements in itself up, Knowing Bladen, May 1896. The long thrown-back life-might finds now again up-holders. The atoms become as living, be-souled fore-stelled. Haeckel speaks again of a “Ghost in all Things”, of a “godly Might”, a “moving Ghost”, a “World-soul”, which in all things dwells and seeks in this all-god-ly one-ism the band between god-service and knowing-ship. But therewith has materialism also self openly his un-might be-leaned, to the world make clear; in his arm-ood called it work-way of the atoms the drive-ly principle again to help.
Cf. Ulrici, God and Nature 1866. Fabri, Letters against Materialism 1864. Hartmann, Gathered Studies and Essays 1876. Nathusius, Nature and Love-of-Wisdom Heilbronn 1883. T. Pesch, The Great World-Riddles I 11 143 504 II 118-171. Hettinger, Defense of Christianity I 167. Pfaff, Creation History 1881. Reusch, Bible and Nature 1876 43. P. Janet, Materialism Contemporary in Germany 1864. Pressensé, The Origins 1883 p. 129. Above all also the just out-come work of Raoul Pictet, Critical Study of Materialism and Spiritualism by Trial Body-Lore. Geneva 1897.
4. Over against all these directions, the Christian church unanimously held fast to the confession: I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and it understood by creation that act of God whereby He, according to His sovereign will, brings the whole world out of nothing into a being that is distinct from His own essence. And this is indeed the teaching of Holy Scripture. The word bara originally means: to split, to divide, to cut (Josh. 17:15, 18 in piel of the cutting down of forests), and from there to form, to produce, to create. In itself it does not yet express that something is produced out of nothing, for it is often used also of the works of preservation, Isa. 40:28, 45:7, Jer. 31:22, Amos 4:13. It is synonymous with and alternates with asah , yatsar , chadash , Ps. 104:30. But it differs from these in that it is always used of the divine making and never of man's doing; that it never has an accusative of the material with it, out of which something is made; and that therefore it precisely everywhere expresses the greatness and power of the divine working, Delitzsch, New Commentary on Genesis. And the same is the case with the New Testament words ktizein , Mark 13:19, poiein , Matt. 19:4, themeliein , Heb. 1:10, katartizein , Rom. 9:22, kataskeuazein , Heb. 3:4, plassein , Rom. 9:20, which also do not in themselves express a creation out of nothing.
The term creation out of nothing is also not literally taken from Scripture but appears first in 2 Macc. 7:28, where it is said that God made heaven and earth and man ex ouk onton epoiesen , Vulgate fecit ex nihilo . It has been disputed whether this expression may be taken in a strict sense, and a Platonic interpretation has been given to it. Yet it deserves attention that the writer speaks not of me onta , that is, a nihilum privativum, a quality- and formless matter, but of ouk onta , that is, a nihilum negativum. Furthermore, it is not even certain that the author of the Book of Wisdom in chapter 11:18 taught the eternity of a formless matter; the passage can very well be understood of the secondary creation, just as that is later the case with Justin Martyr. But however this may be, Scripture leaves no doubt in this regard. It does not use the term, but clearly teaches the matter. Indeed, it has been thought that Gen. 1:1-3 actually proceeds from an original, uncreated chaos. Since bereshith in form is a status constructus, verses 1-3 would be translated thus: in the beginning when God created heaven and earth--now the earth was formless and void, etc.--, then God said: let there be light. In verse 2 the formless and void earth would then be presupposed in God's creation; so Ewald, Bunsen, Schrader, and others, cf. Schultz, Old Testament Theology. But this translation is not acceptable. First, the sentence then gets a periodic length that is rare in Hebrew, here immediately at the beginning and according to the style of Gen. 1 is not at all to be expected and also lays much too strong an emphasis on the creation of light; next, the status constructus of bereshith does not require this translation, because it occurs in the same form without suffix or genitive also in Isa. 46:10, cf. Lev. 2:12, Deut. 33:21; and thirdly, it would be strange that while the protasis would say that God still had to create heaven and earth, the parenthesis already stamps the chaos with the name of earth and makes no mention at all of the original state of the heaven. And added to this is that this translation, even if it were correct, would by no means teach the eternity of the formless earth but at most leave this open. However, that conflicts with the whole spirit of the creation narrative. Elohim is presented in Gen. 1 not as a world-former who in a human way makes a work of art out of existing material, but as One who merely by speaking, by a sheer word of power, calls all things into being.
And with this the whole Scripture agrees. God is the Almighty, who stands infinitely far above all creatures, and does with all creatures according to His sovereign good pleasure; the absolute possessor, koneh of heaven and earth, Gen. 14:19, 22, who does all that pleases Him, whose power is nowhere limited. He speaks and it is, He commands and it stands, Gen. 1:3, Ps. 33:9, Isa. 48:13, Rom. 4:17. Furthermore, all things in Scripture are repeatedly described as made by God and absolutely dependent on Him. He has made all things, heaven, earth, sea with all that is on and in them, Ex. 20:11, Neh. 9:6, etc. All things are created by Him, Col. 1:16, 17, exist only by His will, Rev. 4:11, and are from and through and to God, Rom. 11:36. Next, nowhere is there even the slightest mention of an eternal unformed matter. God alone is the Eternal, the Incorruptible; He alone is exalted above becoming and change. On the other hand, things have a beginning and an end, and are subject to change. This is expressed in an anthropomorphic way. God existed before the mountains were born and His years do not cease, Ps. 90:2, Prov. 8:25, 26; He has chosen and loved pro kataboles kosmou , Eph. 1:4, John 17:24, cf. Matt. 13:35, 25:34, Luke 11:50, John 17:5, Heb. 4:3, 9:26, 1 Pet. 1:20, Rev. 13:8, 17:8. And finally, Rom. 4:17 teaches, even if it does not specifically speak of creation there, that God calls ta me onta , that which possibly is not yet, and commands hos onta , as if it were; being or non-being makes no difference for Him. Even clearer does Heb. 11:3 express it, that the world is so made by God that what is seen has not come into being ek phainomenon , out of what appears to the eyes. A formless matter is hereby entirely excluded; the visible world has not come forth from the visible but rests in God, who by His word called all things into being.
5. This teaching of Scripture finds its sharpest expression in the words out of nothing , and has been understood and rendered thus from the beginning by Christian theology, Hermas, Pastor I 1. Theophilus, ad Autol. II 4. Tertullian, de praescr. 13. Irenaeus, adv. haer. II 10 etc. But among Gnostics and Manichaeans, theosophists and naturalists, pantheists and materialists, this teaching has at all times met with contradiction. Especially has the Aristotelian saying been brought against it: ex nihilo nihil fit. Yet this opposition is wholly without ground. First, this rule of Aristotle is by no means as simple as it seems; every moment we stand before phenomena that cannot be reduced to present factors; history is no sum in reckoning; life is no product of chemical compounds; genius is something other and something more than the child of its time, and every personality is something original. But apart from this and taken with a grain of salt, this rule of Aristotle finds no contradiction. Theology has never taught that non-being was the father, the source, the principle of being. Superabundantly it has repeatedly added that the expression ex nihilo was no designation of a beforehand existing matter, out of which the world was formed; but it only made known that what is once was not, and that it was called into being only by God's almighty power; the expression ex nihilo thus stands equal with post nihilum; the particle ex does not designate but excludes matter; the world has its cause not in itself but only in God, Irenaeus, adv. haer. II 14. Augustine, Conf. XI 5. XII 7. De Gen. ad litt. I 1. Anselm, Monol. c. 8. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 45 art. 1 etc. The expression was therefore so gladly retained in Christian theology, because it was especially suitable to cut off all kinds of error at the root. First, it served against the pagan teaching of an amorphos hyle , above which even a Plato and Aristotle could not rise. In heathenism man is bound to matter, subjected to sensuality and nature-worship; he cannot grasp the thought that the spirit stands free over against and above matter, and still less that God is absolutely sovereign, determined by nothing but his own being. And over against this, the creation out of nothing now teaches the absolute sovereignty of God, his utter independence; if even a single speck of matter were not created out of nothing, God would not be God. In the second place, this expression excludes all emanation, all identity of being between God and world. Indeed, the scholastics often spoke of an emanatio or processio totius entis a causa universali, and also of a participation of the creature in the being and life of God. But thereby they meant no emanation in the proper sense, as if the divine being flowed out into the creatures and unfolded itself in them, like the genus in its species. But they wished thereby only to say that God is ens per essentiam, but the creature ens per participationem; the creatures indeed have an own being, but this has in the divine being its causa efficiens and exemplaris, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 45 art. 1. Kleutgen, Philos. der Vorz. II 828 f. 899 f. The creation out of nothing upholds that there is between God and world an essential distinction. The creation consists not in a transition of the world from a being in God to a being outside God, nor yet from a being without God to a being through God, but from non-being to being. The world is surely no antitheos , it exists not independently, it is and remains in God as its abiding causa immanens, as later in the preservation against Manichaeism and deism must be shown. But according to the teaching of Scripture it is no part, no outflow of the being of God. It has an own, an other, a being distinct from the essentia Dei. And that is expressed by the ex nihilo. Yet philosophy has also misused this term. Just as Plato understood under the me on an eternal unformed matter, so Erigena even designated God as nihilum, insofar as he is above all categories and determinations, above all being and essence exalted; dum ergo incomprehensibilis intelligitur, per excellentiam nihilum non immerito vocitatur, de div. nat. III 19. And when he brings forth all out of nothing, then that means that he producit essentias from his superessentiality, vitas from supervitality, etc. de div. nat. III 20. Still stranger did Hegel in his Logic deal with this concept, when he understood under nothing a Nicht-seyn, das zugleich Seyn, und ein Seyn, das zugleich Nicht-seyn ist; a nothing that at the same time is all, namely in potentia and nothing determined in concreto, Werke III 64. 73 f. Over against this philosophical confusion of concepts stands Christian theology squarely; it understands under nothing a pure nihil negativum and wards off all emanation. Yet there lies also in the emanation a true thought, which precisely by the biblical teaching of creation is upheld without violation of the being of God, much better than in philosophy. The teaching of the creation out of nothing namely gives in the end to Christian theology a place between Gnosticism and Arianism, that is, between pantheism and deism. Gnosticism knows no creation but only emanation and therefore makes the world into the Son, the wisdom, the image of God in adequate sense; Arianism knows no emanation but only creation, and therefore makes the Son into a creature; there the world is deified, here God is worldified. But Scripture and accordingly Christian theology knows both, emanation and creation; a twofold communication of God, one within, one without the divine being; one to the Son, who in the beginning was with God and was himself God, and one to the creatures, which arose in time; one from eternity and one in time; one out of the being and one through the will of God. The first is called generation, the second creation. By generation is eternally communicated to the Son the adequate image of God; by creation is communicated to the creature only a weak, faint likeness of God. But yet both stand in connection. Without the generation the creation would not be possible. If God could not communicate himself absolutely to the Son, much less could he communicate himself in relative sense to his creature. If God did not exist trinitarily, the creation would not be possible, Athanasius, c. Ar. I 12. II 56. 78.
6. Accordingly, Holy Writ also teaches that God, as Three-in-One, is the author of the creation. Scripture knows no between-beings. The Jews thought the plural in Genesis 1:26 referred to the angels. The Gnostics let a series of aeons come forth from God, which acted in creating. The Arians made the Son a between-being between Creator and creature, which, though created, yet itself created. In the Middle Ages, many were not unwilling to accept the possibility of a creature's cooperation in the creation. They came to this because in the church the forgiveness of sins and the giving of grace were inherent in the office, and a priest in the Mass could change bread into the body of Christ and thus become a creator of his Creator (Biel). Hence Lombard says in the doctrine of the sacraments that God could also create some things through someone, not through him as author but as minister with whom and in whom He works, Sentences IV dist. 5 n. 3. Though followed by some like Durandus, Suarez, Bellarmine, he was contradicted by others like Thomas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Richard, Victor, etc., Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 45 art. 5. And with this the Reformed agreed, who more than Roman Catholics and Lutherans withstood all mixing of Creator and creature, Voetius, Disputations I 556 sq. Synopsis, X 14. Turretin, Theological Elenctics V qu. 2. Heidegger, Corpus Theologiae VI 14. Mastricht III 5, 20. M. Vitringa II 81-82. Scripture ascribes creation solely to God, Genesis 1:1, Isaiah 40:12ff., 44:24, 45:12, Job 9:5-10, 38:2ff. Thereby He is set apart from the idols, Psalm 96:5, Isaiah 37:16, Jeremiah 10:11,12. Creating is a godly work, a deed of boundless might, and therefore neither in nature nor in grace can it be shared with any creature, whatever it be. But all the more unitedly did Christian theology ascribe the work of creation to all three persons in the Trinity. Scripture left no doubt about this. God created all things through the Son, Psalm 33:6, Proverbs 8:22, John 1:3, 5:17, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 1:3, and through the Spirit, Genesis 1:2, Psalm 33:6, Job 26:13, 33:4, Psalm 104:30, Isaiah 40:13, Luke 1:35. And in this, Son and Spirit are not thought of as first springs of strength but as self-standing beginnings, as authors, who with the Father bring about the work of creation, just as they with Him are the one, true God. In the Christian church this teaching of Scripture did not at once come to its right; the Logos was first too much seen as a between-being that wrought the shift between God and world; and the person and work of the Holy Spirit first stood wholly in the background. But Irenaeus already said that God needed no strange tools in creation and did not use the angels therein, but that He has His own hands, the Logos and the Holy Spirit, through whom and in whom He created all things, Against Heresies IV 20. The teaching of creation as work of the whole Trinity was clearly unfolded by Athanasius and the three Cappadocians in the East and by Augustine in the West. No creature, says Athanasius, can be the making cause of creation; if then the Son creates the world with the Father, He cannot be an outside-godly, created demiurge, as Arius thinks, but must be the own Son of the Father, his own offspring of his being, Against Arians II 21 sq. But where the Logos is, there is also the Spirit, and thus the Father creates all things through the Logos in the Spirit, To Serapion III 5. And even stronger speaks Augustine: from this highest and equally and unchangingly good Trinity all things are created, Enchiridion 10, so that the whole creation is a footprint of the Trinity, On the Trinity VI 10. City of God XI 24. Confessions XIII 11. And so this teaching became the shared good of all Christian theology, John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I 8. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 45 art. 6. Luther, Smalcald Articles I 1. Calvin, Institutes I 14,20, and also of the sundry confessions, Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum n. 202. 227. 231. 232. 355. 367. 598. Müller, The Symbolic Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church 5th ed. p. 38. 299. Niemeyer, Collection of Confessions of the Reformed Church p. 87. 331. 341 etc. This teaching found gainsaying only among those who also reject the church's Trinity dogma and at most only wish to know of a creation by the Father through the Son but in no wise acknowledge in the creation a shared work of the three godly persons, such as the Arians, Socinians, Remonstrants, Rationalists, and in newer times Martensen, Dogmatics § 61. Oosterzee, Dogmatics § 56,5 and especially Doedes, Dutch Faith 121ff. Both dogmas stand and fall together. The confession of the being-oneness of the three persons brings with it of itself that all works outward are shared and undivided; and contrariwise the fighting of the trinitarian work of creation is proof of straying in the teaching of the Trinity. It comes here only to this, to make with Scripture and with the church fathers, such as Athanasius, the strictest sundering between Creator and creature, and to guard against all Gnostic mixing. If Son and Spirit come forth in Scripture as self-standing beginnings, as authors of creation, then they also share in the godly being; and if they are truly God, they also have part in the work of creation. On the other hand, the Arian teaching wraps in unsolvable hardships. It cannot be gainsaid that Scripture teaches creation as a work of the Father through the Son. If the Son now is seen as a person outside the godly being, there is right to the question: no sense can be given to the creating of the Father through the Son; Scripture says it, but what can it mean? Did the Father give the creating to the Son? Then the Son would be the own Creator. Did Father and Son together create all? But then it is no creating through the Son, Doedes loc. cit. 128. The teaching of the Trinity lets the true light dawn here. As God is one in being and sundered in persons, so also is the work of creation one and undivided and yet in that oneness rich in sundryness. It is one God who creates all things, and therefore the world is a oneness, just as contrariwise the oneness of the world proves the oneness of God. But in that one godly being are three persons, who each fulfill an own task in the one work of creation. Not in the sense that creation belongs chiefly to the Father and less chiefly to the Son and the Spirit, or that the three persons work unbound next to each other, filling up each other's work and are three sundered making causes of creation; the saying of three joined causes by some theologians therefore found misgiving among many, Zöckler, History of Relations I 621 f. 679 f. There is indeed working together, but no sharing of work. All things are at once from the Father through the Son in the Spirit. The Father is the first cause; from Him goes forth the first step; creation is therefore in the household sense ascribed chiefly to Him. The Son is not the tool but the personal wisdom, the Logos, through whom all is created; all rests and has order in Him, Colossians 1:17 and is created unto Him, Colossians 1:16, not as end-goal but as Head and Lord of all creatures, Ephesians 1:10. And the Holy Spirit is the personal in-dwelling cause, whereby all things live in God, move and are, receive their shape and form and are led to their goal. Cf. above 417ff. Frank, System of Christian Truth I 328 f. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit I 20ff.
7. However, although the creation is a work of the whole Trinity, it cannot be gainsaid that in Scripture it stands in a special bond to the Son, which earns a separate handling. The Old Testament says many times that God shaped all things through the word, Gen. 1:3, Ps. 33:6, Ps. 148:5, Isa. 48:13, that He grounded the earth through wisdom and readied the heavens through understanding, Ps. 104:24, Prov. 3:19, Jer. 10:12, 51:15. But that wisdom is also shown as a person, as counselor and work-mistress of the creation. God got and owned her, set her in order, searched her out, so that through her, as the firstling of His way, as the beginning of His works, He might shape and order the world. And so she was with Him before the creation, and during the creation she worked along and gladdened in the works of God's hands, above all in the children of men, Prov. 8:22-31, Job 28:23-27. In the New Testament this teaching is further unfolded. We read there not only that God shaped all things through the Son, John 1:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Col. 1:15-17, Heb. 1:3, but Christ is also called there prototokos pasēs ktiseōs , Col. 1:15, archē tēs ktiseōs tou theou , Rev. 3:14, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of all things, Rev. 1:17, 21:6, 22:6, for whom all things are shaped, Col. 1:17, to be gathered together again under Him as the Head, Eph. 1:10. In all these places Christ has not only a saving but also a world-meaning. He is the go-between of the new creation not only but also of the creation. The Apologists did not yet know what to do with these thoughts of Scripture. Standing under Platonic sway, they often saw in the Logos little more than the kosmos noētos ; they brought Him into the closest bond with the world, held His begetting driven by the creation, and made not yet enough sundering between the birth of the Son and the shaping of the world; they still wrestled with the Gnostic thought that the Father is truly the hidden, unseen Godhead and first becomes open through the Logos. Although this Gnostic bit is now banned from theology by the church fathers, above all Athanasius and Augustine; yet it has come back therein time and again. The root from which this thought springs is always a kind of twofoldness, a more or less sharp withstanding between ghost and stuff, between God and world. God is unseen, unnearable, hidden; the world is, if not anti-, yet ungodly, God-less, godless. To make peace with this ground withstanding, a between-being is needed, and that is the Logos. He is, in bond to God, the world-idea, the world-image, the kosmos noētos , and in bond to the world He is the true Shaper, the ground of the may-be, that there comes a world. Among the Herrnhuters this led even to the Father wholly stepping back, and Christ being the true Shaper; the new creation swallows the creation, grace wrecks the kind. Sundry mediating theologians teach that the Logos is the world after her idea, and that it thus belongs to the being of the Son to have His life no more in the Father but also in the world; as the heart of the Father He is at the same time the everlasting world-heart, the everlasting world-Logos, Martensen, Dogm. § 125. Meyer on Col. 1:16. This showing then leads of itself to the teaching of the man-becoming outside the sin. The world is in itself unholy, the creation truly no beingly godly work. If God shall be able to shape, if the world, if mankind shall be able to be pleasing to Him, then He must see them in Christ. It is He in whom and for whom the world alone can be willed by God; in whom as the head and the central one the mankind can alone be well-pleasing to God; the man-becoming is needful for the opening and the sharing of God, and the God-man is the highest goal of the creation, cf. Dorner, Entw. der Lehre van der Person Christi III 1227-1262, Nitzsch, Syst. der chr. Lehre S. 204, Lange, Chr. Dogm. II 215 and above all also Keerl, Der Mensch, das Ebenbild Gottes II 1 f. At last this row of thoughts fulfills itself in the teaching that the creation is needful for God Himself; God in Himself is indeed kind, ground-ground, bythos , sigē , but to become Himself to personhood, ghost, He needs the creation. The creation is the tale of God, the world-birth is God-birth, Schelling, Werke II 2 S. 109.
This Gnosticism can only be overcome in principle when all dualism between God and the world is cut off at the root. Creation is no lower or lesser divine work than re-creation; nature stands not below grace; the world is not profane in itself. And thus there was no need for a lower divine being to enable the Father to create the world. The Christian church believes in the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. The creation is absolutely no more the work of the Son than of the Father. All things are from God. And the Christian church confesses of the Son that He is no less than the Father and stands not closer to the creatures, but that He is of one essence with the Father and with the Spirit, and that they together are the one, eternal, true God, Creator of heaven and earth. But the Son does take a unique place in the work of creation. Especially Augustine brought this to light. Although he did not identify the ideas of things with the Logos, as the Apologists had done, he still had to connect them with the Logos. The world was indeed not eternal, but its idea was eternal in the consciousness of God. The Father speaks all His thoughts, His whole being, in the one personal Word, and therefore the world-idea is also contained in the Logos; the Logos can therefore be called forma quaedam, forma non formata sed forma omnium formatorum , Serm. 117, cf. De Lib. Arb. III 16 and 17. De Trin. XI 10. XV 14, cf. Anselm, Monol. 34. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 34 art. 3, cf. 44 art. 3. By this the significance of the Son for creation can be established. First, it is the Father from whom the initiative of creation proceeds, who thinks the world-idea, but all that the Father is and has and thinks, He imparts to and speaks out in the Son. In Him the Father beholds the idea of the world itself, not as if it were identical with the Son, but so that it stands before Him and meets Him in the Son, in whom His whole fullness dwells. In the divine wisdom there lies also, as a part, as an epitome, that wisdom which shall be realized in the creatures. He is the Logos, through whom the Father creates all things; the whole world is a realized thought of God; a book with great and small letters, from which His wisdom may be known. But not only is He the exemplary cause, He is also the creative beginning (arche demiourgike ). The word that God speaks is no sound without content; it is powerful and living. The word, the world-idea, which the Father speaks in the Son, is a seminal reason (ratio seminalis ), the principal form, of the world itself; therefore the Son is called the beginning (arche ), the firstborn (prototokos ), the beginning of the creation (arche tes ktiseos ), the firstborn who bears the creation, in whom it rests, from whom it arises as its cause and pattern; and therefore that word, which the Father speaks at creation and by which He calls things from nothing into being, is also powerful, for it is spoken in and through the Son. And finally, the Son is also in a certain sense the final cause of the world. Because it has its foundation and pattern in Him, it is also created unto Him, not indeed as the ultimate end, but yet as Head, Lord, and Heir of all things, Col. 1:16. Gathered together in the Son, assembled under Him as Head, all creatures return again to the Father, from whom all things are. And so the world has its eternal idea, its beginning (arche ), and its end (telos ) in the triune being of God. The word that the Father speaks in the Son is the full expression of the divine being and thus also of all that which shall exist as creature outside the divine being by that word. And the spiration, by which Father and Son are the principle of the Spirit, also contains in itself the willing of that world whose idea is comprehended in the divine Wisdom, Kleutgen, Philos. II 870. Therefore creation proceeds from the Father through the Son in the Spirit, that it may return in the Spirit through the Son to the Father.
8. Hereby some light is also shed on the hard problem of the creation and time. The Scripture says simply and in human wise, that the things have had a beginning. It speaks of a time before the birth of the mountains, before the laying of the world's ground, before the times of the ages, Gen. 1:1, Ps. 90:2, Prov. 8:22, John 1:1, Eph. 1:4, 2 Tim. 1:9. And we also in our thinking and speaking can never rid ourselves of that time-form. In truth, from this human boundedness all the hardships are born, which against a creation in time ever rise up again. Going back with our thoughts, we come at last to the first moment, in which all things take a beginning. Before that there is nothing but the deep stillness of eternity. But at once the questions multiply in our heart. Wherewith shall we fill that eternity and what working can there be, if all work of creation and upholding is thought away? The teaching of the Trinity and of the decrees gives us here some answer; but loosed from the world, they offer no more content to our thinking. What did God then do before the creation, He who cannot be thought as a God of idleness, but who always works, John 5:17. Is He then changed, passed over from idleness to working, from rest to labor? How is the creation, the passing over to the deed of creation, to be matched with the unchangeableness of God? And why did He first pass over to that creation, when already an eternity had sped by? How is there in that eternity raised above all time a moment to be found, in which God went over from not-creating to creating? And why chose He just that moment, why did the creation not begin ages before? All these questions have called forth sundry answers. Pantheism tried to give a loosing by teaching, that in God being and working were one, that God has not become a Creator but that the creation itself is an eternal one; the world has had no beginning, it is the eternal self-showing of God; and God goes not in lasting before the world but only in logical wise, insofar as He is the cause of all things; the natura naturans is not to be thought without natura naturata, the substance not without attributes and modes, the idea not without showing, Erigena, de div. nat. I 73. 74. III 8. 9. 17 etc. Spinoza, Cogit. metaph. II c. 10. Hegel, Werke VII 25 f. Kin thereto is the loosing which Origen gave; he cast off indeed the eternity of matter, and taught indeed, that all was shaped by the Logos out of nothing, de princ. II 1; but God is not to be thought idle, his almightiness is eternal as He himself, and therefore He has also from eternity begun to create. Indeed the present world is not eternal, de princ. III 5, but to this world went before untold worlds, like as also many shall follow upon it, de princ. I 2. III 5. This feeling, which in truth comes from the Stoa, Zeller, Philos. der Gr. IV³ 153 f., was doomed by the church at the council at Nicea, but is yet ever again renewed, in this age still by Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 50 f. Ulrici, Gott u. die Natur 1866 S. 671 f. Martensen, Chr. Dogm. § 65, 66. Dorner, Gl. I 466 f. G. Wetzel, Die Zeit der Weltschöpfung. Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. 1875 S. 582-588 etc. Hereby earns also still naming the in the school-lore much handled question, whether the world could not have been eternal. To defend Aristotle, who taught the eternity of the world, Zeller, III³ 357 f., this question was by some answered yes, among others by Thomas, S. Th. I. qu. 46 art. 1, 2. S. c. G. II 31-37, Durandus, Occam, Biel, Cajetanus, cf. Esser, Die Lehre des h. Th. v. Aq. über die Möglichkeit eener anfangslosen Schöpfung, Münster 1895. Rolfes, Philos. Jahrb. X 1897 Heft 1. By others however it was steadfastly gainsaid, such as by Bonaventura, Sent. I. dist. 44 art. 1 qu. 4. Albertus Magnus, Henricus van Gent, Richard, Valentia, Toletus, cf. Petavius, de Deo III c. 5. 6, and even so by the Lutherans, Quenstedt I 421. Hollaz p. 358, and the Reformed, Zanchius, Op. III 22 sq. Voetius, Disp. I 568. Leydecker, Fax Verit. 140. Coccejus, S. Theol. c. 15. Moor II 179 M. Vitringa II 83. Turret. Th. El. V qu. 3; only a single one deemed an eternal creation likely, Burmannus, Synopsis I 41, 24. All these answers however give to the thinking no gladdening. Naturally there is hereover no sundering, that the world at this eyeblink in stead of thousands of years, also well already millions of ages could have been. No one, who denies this in the withdrawn. But wholly something else is it, whether the world could have been eternal in the same wise as God is eternal. This now is unlikely, for eternity and time sunder in being. Kant saw therein an unsolvable antinomy, that the world on one side must have had a beginning, because an endless run-out time was unthinkable, and that it yet on the other side could have no beginning, because an empty time is unthinkable, Kr. d. r. Vern. ed. Kirschmann, 5e Aufl. 360 f. Only the last limb of this antinomy has no right of being; with the world falls also the time away of itself; there stays then no time and thus also no empty time over, Iren. adv. haer. III 8. Athan. c. Ar. I 29. 58. Tert. adv. Marc. II 3. adv. Hermog. 4. August. de civ. XI 6. That we cannot think that in, and always such a help-showing of a time before the time need, does here nothing to the sake and comes only therefrom, that our thinking in the time-form stands; to think away the time, the thinking would have to think away itself, what is unlikely. So stays only over the first limb of Kant's antinomy, namely that the world must have had a beginning. How endless also lengthened, time stays time and becomes never eternity. There is between both an being-wise sundering. The world is not without time to be thought; time is a needful being-form of all the bounded and shaped; never can the mark of eternity in strict wise befall what in the form of time stands. Even so rests the question, whether God then could not have shaped from eternity, on the one-making of eternity and time. There is in eternity no earlier or later. God has eternally shaped the world, that is, also in the moment, when the world received the being, was and stayed God the Eternal and shaped He as the Eternal. The world, even if it had a boundless row of ages been and even if millions of worlds had gone before this, it stays timely, bounded, hemmed and has thus had a beginning. The guess of Origen gives not the least loosing; the business stays fully the same; it is only some millions of years shifted. Still more groundless is the question, what God then did before the creation. It is by Augustine, Conf. XI 12. Luther, Calvin, Inst. I 14, 1 matching Prov. 26:5 answered. It goes out from the under-laying, that God in time stands and that the creation and upholding is his daily straining toil. But God dwells in eternity, He is actus purissimus, an endless fullness of life, blessed in himself, without the creation not idle and by it not wearied. Non itaque in ejus vacatione cogitetur ignavia, desidia, inertia, sicut nec in ejus opere labor, conatus, industria. Novit quiescens agere et agens quiescere, August. de civ. XII 17. And even so it is with pantheism; it is not so shallow as socinianism and materialism, that eternity simply changes into a to fore and to back endless lengthened time and the sundering between endless and boundless not knows; it says not that God all things is and all things God are; it makes sundering between the being and the becoming, natura naturans and naturata, substance and modes, the all and all things, the idea and the showing, that is between eternity and time. But on the question: wherein stands that sundering then? what bond is there between both? how goes eternity over into time? stays pantheism the answer owing. It gives words and shapes enough, but there lets itself nothing thereby think. Theism however holds eternity and time for two unmatched greatnesses. They can and may none of both by us be overlooked; they thrust themselves both on our awareness and thinking. But we are able both's bond not to see through; living and thinking in time, we stand wondering still before the mystery of the eternal, unshaped being. On one side stands fast, that God is the Eternal; in Him is no past or future, no becoming or changing; and all that He is, is eternal, his thought, his will, his decree. Eternal is in Him also the world-idea, which He thinks and speaks out in the Son; eternal is in Him the decree to shape the world; eternal is in Him the will, which has shaped the world in time; eternal is also the deed of shaping, as deed of God, as actio interna et immanens, August. de civ. XII 17. Lombardus, Sent. II dist. 1 n. 2. Bonav. Sent. II dist. 1 art. 1 qu. 2. Thomas, c. Gent. I 82. Petavius, de Deo V 9, 9 en 13, 5. Voetius, Disp. I 565. Turret. Th. El. V qu. 3, 16, for He has not become a Creator, so that He first a time long not and thereafter well would have shaped; He is the eternal Creator, as Creator was He the Eternal and as the Eternal has He shaped. The creation brought therefore no changing in Him; it is not out of Him flowed; it is no deal of his being; He is unchangeably the same eternal God. And on the other side stands fast, also for the thinking, that the world has had a beginning and in time is shaped. Augustine has rightly said: mundus non est factus in tempore sed cum tempore, Conf. XI 10-13, de civ. VII 30. XI 4-6. XII 15-17, like Plato and Philo and Tertullian, adv. Marc. II 3 this already before him had said and all theologians this later have oft said. An empty time is unthinkable. A time before the world there has not been. Time is needful being-form of the bounded. He is not sundered shaped but with the world of itself given, co-shaped even as the room. In certain wise is the world there thus always been, that is, so long as there was time. All changing falls thus not in God but in her. She is to time that is to changing underlaid. She is the ongoing becoming over against God as the eternal and unchangeable being. And these both now, God and world, eternity and time, stand in this holding; that the world in all her deals is borne by God's all-thereness might and the time in all his moments through-drung of the eternal being of our God. Eternity and time are no two lines, whereof the shorter one a time long with the endless lengthened runs even; but eternity is the unchangeable mid-point, that his beams does outgo to the whole round of the time. For the bounded eye of the shaped lays she her boundless content in the breadth of room and the length of time one after other out, that it something would understand of the unsearchable greatness of God. But therefore stays eternity and time yet sundered. This only we confess, that the eternal willing of God, without to leave off eternal to be, workings can forthbring and forthbrings in time, like as his eternal thinking also timely things to content have can. Thomas by Kleutgen, Philos. der Vorz. II 871. The might of God's will, which eternally one is, did arise what not was, without that in Him any changing took stead. God wills eternally, what first after ages stead have shall or before ages stead had has. And at the time, as it befalls, there is in the things changing but in his being not. Una eademque sempiterna et immutabili voluntate res quas condidit et ut prius non essent egit, quamdiu non fuerunt et ut posterius essent, quando esse coeperunt, Aug. de civ. XII 17.
9. If now this world, which arose and exists in time, is essentially distinct from the eternal and unchangeable being of God, the question presses itself upon us with all the more force, what moved God to call this world into being. Scripture leads all the being and such-being of creatures back to the will of God, Ps. 33:6, 115:3, 135:6, Isa. 46:10, Matt. 11:25, Rom. 9:15ff., Eph. 1:4, Rev. 4:11, and so on. That is for us the last ground, the end of all contradiction. Dei voluntas suprema lex. Voluntas conditoris rei cujusque natura est , Augustine, City of God XXI 8. To the question why things are and are as they are, there is no other and deeper answer than because God has willed it. Whoever then asks further: why has God willed it? majus aliquid quaerit quam est voluntas Dei; nihil autem majus inveniri potest , On Genesis against the Manichees I 2. And this has been the standpoint of the whole Christian church and theology. But pantheism is not satisfied with this and seeks a deeper ground. Especially in two ways it tries to explain the world from the essence of God. Either it sets that essence forth as so overflowing rich, that the world flows forth from it as of itself, and, insofar as it removes itself further from Him, approaches the mē on and congeals into sensory matter. This is the doctrine of emanation, which arose in the East, found special spread in India and Persia, and then in the systems of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism also penetrated to the West. Or it attempts to explain the world not from the ploutos but from the penia tou theou . God is so poor, so unhappy, that He needs the world for His own development; He is in Himself sheer potency, which is nothing but can become all; He must objectify Himself, and through the opposition with the world become spirit, become personality in man. An sich God is not yet the absolute, He becomes this first through the world process; first Deus implicitus , He gradually becomes Deus explicitus . The world is thus necessary for God, it is a necessary moment of development in His essence; Ohne Welt ist Gott kein Gott . Over against this pantheism, which does away with the personality of God and deifies the world, theism maintains the doctrine that the creation is an act of God's will. But yet by this no arbitrariness is meant. So the will of God has been understood in Mohammedan theology and also by the Nominalists, the Socinians, the Cartesians. The world is a product of sheer arbitrariness; it is, but could just as well not be or also be entirely different. Christian theology has however usually guarded itself against this extreme, and has taught that, although the will of God in creation was also most free and all compulsion and necessity is excluded, yet that will had its motives and God with His works outward had His high and holy intentions. And so it has been asked what moved God to create this world, that is, what goal He set before Himself with the creation. The answers to this have been different. Many have seen in the goodness and the love of God a sufficient motive for the explanation of the world. Scripture also speaks of it many times, that God is good, that His goodness appears in all His works, and that He loves all His creatures and wills their salvation. God also could not be thought as needing something, He could not have created the world to receive something, but only to give Himself and to communicate. His goodness was therefore the reason of creation. Already Plato, Timaeus p. 29 D, Philo, and Seneca, Epistles 95 spoke in that spirit; and Christian theologians also said many times that God created the world not out of need but out of goodness, not for Himself but for men. Deus mundum non sibi sed homini fecit , Tertullian, Against Marcion I 43. Against Praxeas 5. Bona facere si non posset, nulla esset potentia; si autem posset nec faceret, magna esset invidia , Augustine, On Genesis Literally IV 16. Ho tōn holōn theos agathos kai hyperkalos tēn physin esti, dio kai philanthrōpos estin. Agathō gar peri oudenos an genoito phthonos, hothen oude to einai tini phthonei alla pantas einai bouletai, hina kai philanthrōpeuesthai dynētai , Athanasius, Orations against the Pagans 41; cf. also Damascenus, On the Orthodox Faith II 2. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 19 art. 2. Voetius, Disputations I 558, and so on. These statements however alternated many times with others, in which God Himself and His honor were named the cause and the goal of creation. But humanism placed man in the foreground; Socinianism sought his essence not in fellowship with God but in dominion over the earth; the doctrine of natural law, of natural morality and of natural religion made man autonomous and independent of God; Leibniz taught that God through His goodness, wisdom and power was morally bound to choose out of many possible worlds the best and to bring it into being; Kant called through the practical reason God only to help, to provide man hereafter the salvation to which he had claim according to his virtue. And so in the rationalism of the previous century man became the most interesting creature; all was there for him and serviceable to his perfection; man was Selbstzweck and all else, God Himself included thereunder, was means, Bretschneider, Systematic Development 442 f. Id. Dogmatics I 669. Wegscheider, Dogmatics § 95. And even now many teach that God must give reality to the world-idea which He necessarily thinks, because otherwise He would be selfish and not the highest love. Because He is good, He wills not only to be blessed Himself, but He establishes a kingdom of love and seeks the salvation of His creatures; this is for Him the end-goal, Rothe, Theological Ethics § 40. 41. Dorner, Christian Faith I 448-459. Martensen, Dogmatics § 59. Hofmann, Scriptural Proof I² 205 f. Kahnis, Dogmatics I 428. Müller, Christian Doctrine of Sin II⁵ 187 f. Schoeberlein, Principle and System of Dogmatics 628. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I³ 144. James Orr, Christian View of God 155. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation III² 259 f., and also Hermes and Günther in Kleutgen, Theology I² 642 f. This doctrine of man as Selbstzweck is however on Christian standpoint unacceptable. Naturally in creation God's goodness is also revealed; Scripture expresses this many times. But yet it is not right to say that His goodness requires creation, because otherwise He would be selfish. For God is the All-good, the perfect love, the complete blessedness in Himself and thus also needs not the world to bring His goodness or love to development, just as little as He needs it to come to self-consciousness and personality. Furthermore, it lies in the nature of the matter that God is not there for man but man can only be there for God. For although man in a certain sense may be called Selbstzweck , insofar as he as rational, moral being never can or may be degraded to a will-less instrument; yet he is from God most deeply dependent and has nothing that he has not received. God alone is Creator, man is creature; and already for that reason alone he cannot be the goal of creation. Because he has his origin only in God, he can also have his goal only in Him. And finally the doctrine that creation has its motive in God's goodness and its end-goal in man's salvation is also in conflict with reality. The universe surely does not get absorbed in the service of man and must yet have another goal than to be useful to him. The flat utilism and the selfish teleology of the previous century have been sufficiently refuted. The suffering and the sorrow which is poured out over mankind is not to be explained from God's goodness alone. And the outcome of world history, which speaks not only of the salvation of the elect but also of an eternal triumph over the ungodly, brings quite other virtues of God to revelation than His goodness and love alone.
10. The Scripture also takes another standpoint and gives a higher goal. It says that the whole nature is a revelation of God's virtues and a proclaimer of his praise, Ps. 19:1, Rom. 1:19. God shaped man after his likeness and for his glory, Gen. 1:26, Isa. 43:7. He glorifies himself in Pharaoh, Ex. 14:17 and in the man born blind, John 9:3. He shapes the wicked for the day of evil, Prov. 16:4, Rom. 9:22. Christ came to glorify him, John 17:4. All benefits of grace he bestows for his name's sake, redemption, forgiveness, hallowing, etc., Ps. 105:8, 78:9, Isa. 43:25, 48:11, 60:21, 61:3, Rom. 9:23, Eph. 1:6 ff. He gives his glory to no other, Isa. 42:8. The end goal is that all kingdoms be under him and all creatures bow before him, Dan. 7:27, Isa. 2:3-13, Mal. 1:11, 1 Cor. 15:24 ff. Here already glory is brought to him by all his folk, Ps. 115:1, Matt. 6:13. Once God alone shall be great, Isa. 2:3-13, and receive glory from all his creatures, Rev. 4:11, 19:6. He is the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega, Isa. 44:6, 48:12, Rev. 1:8, 22:13. From and through and to him are all things, Rom. 11:36. Resting on this, Christian theology taught almost with one voice that the glory of God was the end goal of all God's works. Though in the first times God's goodness was named especially as the motive of creation, yet the glory of God as the end goal of all things is not lacking. So Athenagoras says that God for his own sake and the goodness and wisdom shining in all his works was led to make man, de resurr. mort. 12. Tertullian says that God shaped the whole world as an adornment of his majesty, Apolog. 17. Especially in the middle-age theology this glory of God came more to its right, with Anselm, who makes the glory of God the principle of his teaching on the becoming man and satisfaction, Cur Deus homo c. 11, but then further also with Lombard, Sent. II dist. 1. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 44 art. 4. qu. 66 art. 2. qu. 103 art. 2. S. c. Gent. III 17. 18. Sent. II dist. 1 qu. 2 art. 2. Bonaventure II dist. 1 p. 2 etc. And this same teaching we find with the later Romanists, Scheeben, Dogm. II 31 f. Simar, Dogm. S. 234 f. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorz. I² 640-692. Schwetz, Theol. dogm. I 396 sq. Jansen, Prael. dogm. II 319 sq.; then with the Lutherans, Gerhard, Loci theol. loc. V c. 5. Quenstedt, Theol. I 418. Hollaz, Examen p. 360 etc.; and lastly and especially also with the Reformed, cf. above all Edwards, The end in creation, Works II 193-257. The difference between them and the Lutherans and Romanists lies not in that they set the glory of God and these latter the man as end goal, but is found herein, that they have made this glory of God the principle of all teaching and life, of dogmatics and morals, of household, society and state, of knowledge and art. Nowhere is this glory of God so broadly applied as among the confessors of the Reformed religion.
Now however against this end goal of all creatures a twofold objection has been brought in. First, that God thereby becomes selfish, seeks himself and lowers the creatures, namely the men, to means. Already earlier this was brought up and shown, that God as the fully good can rest in nothing but himself and may be content with nothing less than himself. He cannot but seek his own glory. Like a father in his household and a king in his realm must seek and claim the honor due to them as such, so it is also with the Lord our God. Now man can ask this honor due to him only in God's name and for the office laid on him by God; but God asks and seeks that honor in his own name and for his own being. Because he is the highest and the only good, goodness itself, therefore it is the highest rightness that he seeks his own glory in all creatures. And so little has this seeking of own glory anything in common with our selfishness, that God much more claims that glory, where it is wrongly withheld from him, in the way of right and righteousness. Willingly or unwillingly every creature shall once bow the knee before him. Obedience in love or forced submission is the end lot of every creature.
11. The other objection says that God then yet, so seeking his glory, has need of the creature. The world serves for his glorifying; something is thus lacking in his fullness and blessedness; the creation supplies a need of God and adds to his fullness, Strauss, Gl. I 633. This objection seems unanswerable; and yet there is also in different kinds of human work a likeness to be noted, which can make clear to us God's creating. On a lower standpoint man works because he must; need or force drives him on. But the nobler the work becomes, the less room there is for need or force. An artist shapes his artwork not from need or force, but after the free drive of his genius. I pour out my bosom like the finch in the alders; I sing and know no other goal (Bilderdijk). The godly serves God not from force nor through hope of reward, but from free love. So there is also in God a good pleasure, which both above need and force, above poverty and riches is endlessly lifted up, which in the creation embodies the artist's thoughts of God and finds delight therein. Yes, what in men is only weak likeness, is with God in full firstness present. The creature has no self-standing outside and over against God, like the creation of an artist. God thus never seeks the creature, as if this could give him something he lacks, or take from him something he has. He seeks not the creature, but through the creature he seeks himself. He is and stays always his own goal. His willing is always, also in and through the creatures, full self-enjoyment, full blessedness. Therefore the world did not come forth from a need of God, from his poverty and unblessedness, for it is to him in the creature not about that creature but about himself. And no more is its arising to be thanked to an unmasterable fullness in God, for he uses every creature for his own glorifying and makes it serve the proclaiming of his virtues.
12. From this flows also a wholly special worldview.
The word creation can mean both the deed and the work of creating. As the first is understood, so changes also the view of the second. Pantheism seeks to explain the world in a lively way, materialism in a workmanlike way. But both strive to draw all things from one all-ruling first-beginning. There the world may be a living being, of which God is the soul; here a work-tool, that comes to stand through binding and sundering of the motes; in both the unwitting, blind doom is raised to the throne: both overlook the wealth and manifoldness of the world, wipe out the borders between heaven and earth, dust and ghost, soul and body, man and beast, wit and will, everlastingness and time, Maker and made-thing, being and not-being, and loosen all into a deathly sameness; both deny an end and can show neither a cause nor a goal for the being of the world and for her tale.
Wholly otherwise is however the view of the Writ. Heaven and earth are from the outset set apart. All things are made with an own kind and rest on own laws set therefor by God. Sun and moon and stars have their own task; and weed and beast and man have a sundered kind. There is the richest manifoldness. But in that manifoldness there is also the highest oneness. For both lies the ground in God. He it is who made all things after his unsearchable wisdom, who upholds them ever in their sundered kinds, who leads and rules them after the strengths and laws inborn in them, and who as the highest good and as the end-goal of all things is sought and yearned after by all things in their measure and in their way. Here is a oneness that does not kill the manifoldness but upholds it, and a manifoldness that does not fall short of the oneness but unfolds it in her wealth. By strength of that oneness can the world in a carried-over sense be called a living whole, wherein all limbs stand in bond with each other and work back upon each other. Heaven and earth, man and beast, soul and body, truth and life, craft and lore, godliness and uprightness, land and church, kin and fellowship, and so on, they are well set apart but they are not sundered. There are between them all kinds of ties; a living, or if one will, an upright bond holds them all together. The Writ speaks this clearly out, as she gathers not only the all under the name of heaven and earth, but also marks it as עולם , that is, the hidden, the unseen, the unoverseeable, the time in yore or to-come, the age, the everlastingness, the world, Eccl. 1:4, 3:11; and in the New Covenant as κόσμος , John 1:10, τὰ πάντα , 1 Cor. 8:6, 15:25 ff., κτίσις , Mark 10:6, αἰῶνες , Heb. 1:2, span, life-span, age-time, world, cf. seculum from sexus , man's lifespan, world, and our world from waeralti , werolt , men's or folks' lifespan. The names עולם and αἰῶνες go out from the thought that the world has a span, a lifespan, and that a tale takes stead therein, which runs out to a set end. The Greek κόσμος and the Latin mundus however set forth the fairness and togetherness of the world. And the world is indeed both. As Paul likens the gathering at once to a body and a building and speaks of a growing house-of-worship, Eph. 2:21, and Peter calls the believers living stones, 1 Pet. 2:5; so is the world a tale and a craft-work together. She is a body that grows and a building that is raised up. She spreads herself out in the breadth of room and sets herself forth in the length of time.
Neither the workmanlike first-beginning of materialism nor the lively first-beginning of pantheism is enough to her clearing; but what truth is in both is acknowledged in the teaching of the world after the Writs. She is at once flat-wise and up-wise to behold; she strives from the lowest made-things upward, toward above, to meet the light and the life of God, and she moves herself also forward toward a God-glorifying end. So she spreads out God's worths and fullnesses, in firstling already at her outset, at her ongoing unfolding in ever higher measure, and once fully at the end of times. Augustine has been the church-father who also these thoughts deepest understood and broadest worked out. In his work De Civitate Dei he gives a Christly wisdom of the tale; shows how the Christly worldview in the tale finds her truth and her proof; sketches the civitas coelestis in her spring and being, in her unfolding and tie to the civitas terrena , in her end and goal, Biegler, Die Civitas Dei des h. Aug. Paderborn 1894. But at once he takes therein up the bespeaking of the all as a wonder-fair togetherness. The world is with Augustine a oneness, universum ab unitate nomen accepit , De Gen. c. Manich. I 21. Yet that oneness is no sameness but endless rich manifoldness, De Civ. XI 10. God namely is highest being, highest truth, highest good, highest fair. And therefore made He many made-things, that in sundry measures share in his being, in his truth, goodness and fairness. Aliis dedit esse amplius et aliis minus, atque ita naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinavit , De Civ. XII 2. With call upon the word from the book of Wisdom 11:21: πάντα μέτρῳ καὶ ἀριθμῷ καὶ σταθμῷ διέταξας , says Augustine that all things are set apart through way, kind, tally, step, order. And thereby they bring just that world, that allness to stand, wherein God after his good-liking shares out his goods and that thus is an opening of his worths, De Div. Qu. 83 qu. 41. De Ord. I 19. De Gen. ad Litt. I 9 II 13. Conf. XII 9. De Civ. XI 33. For all that manifoldness is only to God, not to the worth of the made-thing to thank. Non est ulla natura etiam in extremis infimisque bestiolis, quam non ille constituit, sine quibus nihil rerum inveniri vel cogitari potest , De Civ. XI 15, cf. Scipio, Des Aur. Aug. Metaphysik , Leipzig 1886 pp. 31-80. And this worldview has been that of all Christly god-lore. The world is one body with many limbs, Athanasius C. Ar. II 28. 48. The oneness, order and togetherness in the world was with the church-fathers a mighty proof for the being and the oneness of God, Athanasius Or. c. Gentes c. 39. God is the mid-point and all made-things gather in ring-wise rounds and in a ladder-wise order themselves about Him, Pseudo-Dionysius De Coel. and De Eccl. Hierarchia . Thomas likens the world to a purely tuned string-play, whose together-sounds tell us the glory and bliss of the godly life, S. Th. I qu. 25 art. 6. Her parts inveniuntur ad invicem ordinatae esse quasi partes animalis in toto, quae sibi invicem deserviunt , Thomas, Sent. II dist. I qu. I art. 1. Nulla est mundi particula , says Calvin, in qua non scintillae saltem aliquae gloriae ejus emicare cernantur , Inst. I 5, 1. Nihil in toto mundo praestantius, nobilius, pulchrius, utilius, divinius ista rerum multarum diversitate, distinctione, ordine, quo una altera nobilior est, et una pendet ab altera, una subest alteri, una obsequium accipit ab altera. Hinc enim totius mundi est ornatus, pulchritudo, praestantia; hinc multiplex usus, utilitas, fructus nobis exoritur. Hinc ipsa Dei bonitas, gloria, sapientia, potentia clarius elucet, illustratur , Zanchius, Op. III 45. And with all the world is a show-stage, a brightest looking-glass of godly glory. Through this worldview has Christendom both the shunning of kind and the god-making of kind overcome. In heathendom stands man not in the right tie to God and therefore also not to the world. And even so is in pantheism and materialism the tie of man to kind in first-beginning falsed. By turns deems he himself endlessly far above kind raised and thinks he that she has no riddles more for him; and then again feels he that kind as an ununderstood, dark, hidden might, whose riddles he not loosen, from whose might he cannot uproot himself. Wit-lore and hidden-lore switch each other; unbelief makes room for over-belief; and materialism strikes over into hidden-craft. But the Christen looks upward and owns God as the Maker of heaven and earth. He sees in kind and tale the unsearchableness of God's ways and the unfathomableness of his deemings, but he despairs not, for all things stand under the steering of an all-mighty God and a gracious Father, and shall therefore work together for good to them that love God. Here is there room for love and wonder of kind, but is also all god-making shut out. Here is man set in the right tie to the world, for he is set in the right tie to God. Therefore is the making also the groundwork teaching; it stands all the Writ through in the forefront; it is the groundwork stone, whereon Old and New Bond rest. And this teaching shuts therefore at last also a self-seeking god-lore and a false best-thinking out. Surely, there lies truth in that all things are there for man, or rather for mankind, for the gathering of Christ, 1 Cor. 3:21-23, Rom. 8:28. But that mankind finds her end-goal with all made-things in the glorifying of God. Thereto is all underlaid. Thereto works all, also sin and woe, together. And with eye thereon is the world end-wise in-set. In the school-lore was also the asking handled, whether God could make something better than he made. Abelard said nay, because God's goodness always must will the best and else were self-seeking, Introd. ad Theol. III c. 5, and Leibniz reasoned later wholly in the same ghost. But in God is no unsureness, no choice to think. He has not from many may-be worlds chosen the best. His will is everlasting set. A made-thing can on itself always better, greater, fairer thought be than it truly is, because a made-thing is by-hap and for unfolding and fullness open. And even is the all as by-hap also otherwise and better for us folks to think. Well said Thomas: universum non potest esse melius propter decentissimum ordinem his rebus attributum a Deo, in quo bonum universi consistit; quorum si unum aliquod esset melius, corrumperetur proportio ordinis, sicut si una chorda plus debito intenderet, corrumperetur citharae melodia . But he added thereto: Posset tamen Deus alias res facere vel alias addere istis rebus factis, et esset aliud universum melius , S. Theol. I qu. 25 art. 6 ad 3, cf. Lombard, Sent. I dist. 44. Bonaventure, Sent. I qu. 44 art. 1 qu. 1-3. Hugo of St. Victor De Sacr. II c. 22. Voetius, Disp. I 553 sq. Mastricht III 6, 11. Heidegger, Corpus Theol. VI 21. The kind of the made-thing brings with that it both in its being and in its so-being not otherwise than as by-hap can be thought. But for God stands this asking not. This world is good, because she answers to the end by Him set. She is neither the best nor the worst, but she is good, because God has so named her. She is good, because she is serving, not to the lone man but to the opening of God's worths. And for who so beholds her, is she also good, because she makes him know God, whom to know is the everlasting life. Therefore said Lactantius in truth: idcirco mundus factus est ut nascamur; ideo nascimur ut agnoscamus factorem mundi ac nostri, Deum; ideo agnoscimus ut colamus; ideo colimus, ut immortalitatem pro laborum mercede capiamus, quoniam maximis laboribus cultus Dei constat; ideo praemio immortalitatis afficimur, ut similes Angelis effecti, summo Patri ac Domino in perpetuum serviamus et simus aeternum Dei regnum. Haec summa rerum est; hoc arcanum Dei; hoc mysterium mundi , Inst. Div. VII 6.
1. According to Holy Scripture, the creation falls into a spiritual and a material world, into heaven and earth, things in the heavens and things on the earth, things unseen and things seen, Col. 1:16. The being of such a spiritual world is acknowledged in all religions. Besides the true gods, there are also sundry half-gods or heroes, demons, genii, spirits, souls, and so forth, which are objects of religious worship. This teaching of angels was strongly unfolded in Parseeism. A whole host of good angels, Yazatas, is there gathered around Ahura Mazda, the God of light, even as the God of darkness, Ahriman, is hemmed in by a number of evil angels, Devas. According to Kuenen and many others, the Jews took their teaching of angels chiefly from the Persians since the Babylonian Exile. But herein is very great overstatement. For first, Kuenen also grants that the belief in the being and working of higher beings is old-Israelite. Secondly, there is a great difference between the angelology in the canonical writings and in the Jewish folk-belief. And lastly, in the mutual bond between Judaism and Parseeism there is still so much unsure, that James Darmesteter in his work on the Zend-Avesta in 1893 just the other way derives the Persian angel-teaching from Judaism, cf. Dr. Geesink in the Heraut, and against Darmesteter, Tiele, Reports and Communications of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature. The being of angels was, however, according to Acts 23:8, gainsaid by the Sadducees, who therefore likely held the angel-appearings in the Pentateuch for short-lived theophanies. Josephus leaves sundry angel-appearings untold and seeks to make some natural, e.g., Ant. VIII 13, 7. According to Justin, Dial. c. Tr. 128, angels were held by some for timely outflows from the Godly being, which after fulfilling their task went back into God. In later times, the being of angels was gainsaid by the followers of David Joris, cf. Hoornbeek, Summa Controv. 1653; by the Libertines, cf. Calvin, Opera ed. Schippers; by Spinoza, Tract. Theol. pol.; and Hobbes, Leviathan III c. 34, who saw in them simply showings and workings of God. Balthasar Bekker went in his Betoverde Wereld not so far, but yet bound the working of angels, held them oftentimes for men, and taught even as Spinoza that Christ and his apostles in the teaching of angels ever fitted themselves to the belief of their time-fellows. Leibniz, Wolff, Bonnet, Euler, and the supranaturalists sought to uphold their being chiefly on moral grounds; from man there could as little upward as downward be a void of forms in the climbing row of creatures, Reinhard, Dogm. Bretschneider, Dogm. Even Kant deemed the being of other thinking beings than men not unfeasible, Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. zw. Theol. u. Naturw. The eighteenth hundred-year wiped out the difference between angels and men, even as the nineteenth that between men and beasts. Swedenborg, for instance, had from the angels themselves heard that they were truly men; the inner being of man is an angel, and man is foreordained to become an angel, Die wahre christl. Religion, 2nd ed. Stuttgart 1873. In the newer theology, however, little is left of the angels. Rationalists like Wegscheider deny not the being of angels but yet their appearing, Inst. theol. Marheineke left out in the second printing of his dogmatics the paragraph on angels. Strauss deemed that the modern world-view had taken from angels their dwelling; they owe their birth only to folk-tales, to the longing to outweigh the mass of stuff in the world by somewhat more spirit, Gl. With Lipsius they are but pictured showings of the living working of godly Foresight and belong only in religious symbol-work, Dogm., cf. Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. And Schleiermacher also deemed their being not unfeasible, but yet judged that Christ and the apostles taught nothing forthright about them, since they fitted themselves to the folk and spoke of angels even as we of fairies and elves, and that they have for us no meaning dogmatically and religiously, Chr. Gl., cf. Bovon, Dogm. Chrét. Lausanne 1895. Also who yet upholds their being, changes oftentimes their kind. Schelling held the good angels for Powers, May-bes, which because of the fall did not step into trueness and now are nothing else than the idea or Power of a single or folk, Werke, cf. Martensen, Dogm. Others have changed angels into dwellers of the wandering stars. Already early we find the thought that the wandering stars were dwelled. It comes already with Xenophanes and some Stoics. After the newer star-lore had given some thought of the awesome room of the all-world, that thought found ingress with Descartes, Wittichius, Allinga, Wilkins, Harvey, Leibniz, Wolff, Bonnet, Kant, Reinhard, Bretschneider, Swedenborg, and others, cf. Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. Lange, Gesch. des Mater. Büchner, Kraft und Stoff. Strauss, Alte u. neue Gl. C. du Prel, Die Planetenbewohner, Leipzig 1879. C. Flammarion, Les terres du ciel. 7th ed. Paris 1881. Id., Are the heavenly bodies dwelled? Dutch trans. by Dr. H. Blink, 1891. And some theologians are so come thereto, to think with those dwellers of angels, Kurtz, Bibel und Astronomie, 3rd ed. Keerl, Der Mensch das Ebenbild Gottes. Splittgerber, Tod, Fortleben und Auferstehung 5th ed. 1879. Lange, Dogm. K. Keerl, Die Fixsterne und die Engel, Bew. d. Gl. June 1896, and so forth. And lastly, over against materialism a backlash has risen in spiritism, which not only grants the being of departed spirits but also deems a fellowship between them and men feasible and therewith has again paved the way for belief in a spiritual world for thousands.
Suarez, de angelis, Lyons 1620. Jac. Ode, Comment. de angelis, Utrecht 1739. Voetius, Disp. V. Kuyper, Heraut nos. 858-915. Oswald, Angelologie, Paderborn 1883.
2. The being of angels is not to be proven by wise learning. The reasoning of Leibniz, that from man downward as well as upward there must be all kinds of creatures, so that there be no empty form and no leap in kind, is not to be taken, for if followed through it would wipe out the difference between Maker and made, and lead to a Gnostic all-godness. Yet wise learning can even less bring in any proof against the likelihood of such a being. As long as we ourselves are soulful beings and cannot explain the soul's life from stuff's change, but must take up a ghostly underlay for it, so long is the being of a ghostly world at odds with no proof of wit or any deed of trial. Not only Leibniz and Wolff, but also Schleiermacher and Kant have fully owned the likelihood. The wideness of belief in such a ghostly world proves besides that in this knowing there hides something other and something more than whim and chance. The clearing of Strauss, that the angel world is a make-up against the bulk of stuff in the making, is not worth a knock-down. And just as little worth has the reasoning of Daub, that man, since set between good and ill, shaped types toward both sides and so came to the thoughts of angel and devil, in Dorner, Chr. Gl. I 536. The belief in a ghostly world is not wise-learned but godly in kind. It hangs most near with showing and wonder together. Godliness is not thinkable without showing, and showing cannot be without there being above and behind this seeable world a ghostly world, which stands in fellowship with this. In all god-faiths the angels are no makers of the godly-upright life itself, but of the showing on which this life is built. With godliness is the belief itself given, that her deepest grounds lie not within the ring of seeable things. The good and the ill, both in godly and upright wit, root in another world than that which shows under our eyes. There the angel belief gives utterance. It makes not the being and midpoint of godliness, but yet stands therewith in bond. God's overness, the belief in showing and wonder, the being of godliness brings the belief in ghostly beings of itself along. The this-side sates man not. He thirsts ever again for another world, which is no less rich than this. Stuff-lore calls up by back-lash the ghost-lore. But while now in all god-faiths and ghosty teachings the lore of angels comes forth falsed and spoiled, wipes out the border-line between God and made, and mis-knows the difference between showing and godliness, this lore comes in the Writ again so that it robs nothing from God's honor and leaves godliness in her cleanness untouched. The showing in the Writ is for the Christian the fast ground also for his belief in the angels. In former times men sought to prove the being of the good and above all of the evil angels by tale, from oracles, showings, ghosts, owned ones, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 50 art. 1. Zanchius, Op. II 2. Vossius, de orig. et progr. idololatriae I c. 6. Voetius, Disp. I 985-1017. V 241 and so on. But these proofs were no more swaying than those from wit. Yet the being of angels is taught very clearly in the Writ. True, Spinoza and Schleiermacher brought against that Christ and the apostles spoke of angels from fitting to the folk-belief and themselves taught nothing sure about them. But Jesus and the apostles speak themselves outspoken and oft their belief in the angels, e.g. Mt. 11:10, 13:39, 16:27, 18:10, 24:36, 26:53, Luk. 20:36, 1 Cor. 6:3, Hebr. 12:22, 1 Petr. 1:12 and so on. When we speak of elves and fairies, each knows that this is meant in likeness wise. But in Jesus’ time the belief in angels was wide; if they spoke of angels, each must think that they themselves believed in them. The last ground for our belief in angels lies therefore also in the showing. The Christian trial as such teaches nothing thereof. Mark of true belief is God's grace in Christ. Angels are no makers of the godly life, no mark of our trust, no goal of our bowing. That they are nowhere in the Writ and may thus not be for us. In the Protestant confessions there is therefore very little speech of the angels, Ned. Gel. art. 12. Heid. Cat. vr. 112. 117. Niemeijer, Coll. Conf. p. 315. 316. 476. The Reformed above all sinned rather in lack than in over. At Rome the angel-lore takes much greater room, but there it also falses godliness and shorts God's honor. Howsoever the angels be no maker and goal of our godliness, they are yet in the showing-tale of great meaning and draw therefrom above all their worth for the godly life.
3. The name angel, under which we commonly gather together the whole class of higher, spiritual beings, is in Scripture no name of nature but a name of office. The Hebrew mal'ak means simply messenger, envoy, and can also denote a man, whether sent by men, Job 1:14, 1 Sam. 11:3 etc., or by God, Hag. 1:13, Mal. 2:7, 3:1; and likewise it is with angelos, which is often used of men, Matt. 11:10, Mark 1:2, Luke 7:24, 27, 9:52, Gal. 4:14, James 2:25; wrongly is it then in our States Translation rendered by angel instead of by envoy, e.g., Mal. 3:1, Rev. 1:20 etc. A common, distinguishing name for all spiritual beings together is not in Scripture, though they are often called sons of God, spirits, holy ones, watchers. There are different kinds and classes of angels, which all bear their own name. The world of angels is as rich as the bodily world; just as in this there are all sorts of creatures, which together yet form one whole, so it is also with the world of spirits. First in Scripture the class of cherubim is named. They appear in Gen. 3:24 as keepers of the garden. In tabernacle and temple they are pictured above the ark with faces turned toward the mercy seat, and with wings that cover the mercy seat, Exod. 25:18ff., 37:8, 1 Chron. 28:18, 2 Chron. 3:14, Heb. 9:5, and between which the Lord dwells, Ps. 80:1, 99:1, Isa. 37:16. When God comes down to the earth, he is pictured as riding, driving on the cherubim, 2 Sam. 22:11, Ps. 18:10, cf. Ps. 104:3, Isa. 66:15, Heb. 1:7. In Ezekiel 1 and 10 they come forth under the name of living creatures, four in number, in human shape, each with four wings and with four faces, namely, of a man, lion, ox, and eagle; while finally in Rev. 4:6ff. as the four living beings, each with one face and each with six wings, they surround the throne of God and sing the thrice holy day and night. The name cherubim is derived variously, now from ke and rub, as many (Hengstenberg), then from rakab wagon, or also from karab Ar. to terrify, thus as it were dreadful beings, but most from a stem that means to grasp, hold fast, cf. gryps, Delitzsch on Gen. 3:24 and Ps. 18:10. There is just as great difference over the nature of the cherubs. Some hold them for mythical beings, others for symbolic figures, still others for powers of God in creation, or also for original designation of thunderclouds or storms, Smend, Old Test. Rel. 21 ff. But in Gen. 3:24, Ezek. 1, Rev. 4 they are yet clearly presented as living and personal beings; even the human form in them is prevailing, Ezek. 1:5. Because they however are beings of extraordinary, superhuman strength and glory, Scripture calls symbolic representation to help, to give us some idea of their spiritual nature. They are drawn as living creatures, in whom the might and the strength of God come much better to expression than in weak man. They have the strength of an ox, the majesty of the lion, the swiftness of the eagle, and therewith the reason of man. On the same properties point the wings which they bear, and the sword, with which they guard the garden. From this representation, which is no image but symbol, it appears that they also among the angels are highly placed beings, who more than any other creatures reveal the strength, the majesty, the glory of God and who therefore also are charged with the task, to watch for his holiness at the garden of Eden, in the tabernacle and temple, and also at God's descent to earth, Dr. Joh. Nikel, The Doctrine of the O. T. on the Cherubim and Seraphim, Breslau 1890. Further in Isa. 6 the seraphim are mentioned, probably from the Arab. stem sarafa, was noble, who there also symbolically are presented in human shape but with six wings, of which two serve to cover the face, two to cover the feet, and two for the swift carrying out of God's commands. In distinction from the cherubim, they stand as servants around the King, who sits on his throne, sing his honor and wait on his commands. Seraphim are the nobles, cherubim are the mighty among the angels. Finally in Daniel yet two angels with proper names come forth, namely, Gabriel, chap. 8:16, 9:21 and Michael chap. 10:13, 21, 12:1, who both in deviation from many earlier and later expositors, such as the van den Honerts, Burman, Witsius, Hengstenberg, Zahn, and others, are to be held for created angels and may not be identified with the Son of God. Also according to the N. T. there are different classes of angels. The angel Gabriel appears in Luke 1:19, 26. Michael comes forth Jude 9, Rev. 12:7, 1 Thess. 4:16. And further there is among the angels mention of principalities, powers, Eph. 3:10, Col. 2:10, dominions, Eph. 1:21, Col. 1:16, thrones, Col. 1:16, mights, Eph. 1:21, 1 Pet. 3:22, which all point to a distinction in rank and dignity among the angels, while finally in the Apocalypse of John again and again seven angels very clearly come to the fore, chap. 8:2, 6, 15:1 etc. Therewith comes yet, that the number of the angels is very great. The name Sabaoth, cf. above, Mahanaim, Gen. 32:1, 2, legions, Matt. 26:53 and host, Luke 2:13, and the numbers of thousand times thousands point this out, Deut. 33:2, Ps. 68:17, Dan. 7:10, Heb. 12:22, Jude 14, Rev. 5:11, 19:14. Such a great number demands of itself already distinction of order and rank, and the more so, because the angels do not stand to each other in family relations as men do and thus in so far are much more like each other. Scripture then also clearly teaches, that there is among the angels all sorts of distinction, of rank and station, of dignity and service, of office and honor, even of class and kind. This fair, rich thought of diversity in unity may not be given up, even though it has been worked out by the Jews and by the Romans in fantastic wise. The Jews made all sorts of distinction between the angels, Weber, System 161 ff. In the Christian church one first stayed with the data of Scripture, Iren. adv. haer. II 54. Orig. de princ. I 5. Augustine said yet not to know, how the society of the angels was ordered, Enchir. 58. But Pseudo-Dionysius gave in his writings on the celestial and the ecclesiastical hierarchy a schematic division. Going out from the thought, that God in creation as it were has stepped out of his unity into multiplicity, de div. nom. II 11, he teaches, that all things go out from God in ever descending series and so again successively return to him. God is the center, the creatures array themselves peripherally around him. There is a hierarchy of things, de coel. hier. III 1. Such hierarchy is twofold, a heavenly and an ecclesiastical. The heavenly is formed by three classes of angels. The first and highest class serves God exclusively; it includes the seraphim, who unceasingly behold the divine being; the cherubim, who ponder his counsels; and the thrones, who adore his judgments. The second class serves the whole visible and invisible creation; it includes the dominions, who order what must happen according to God's will; the mights, who carry out what is decreed, and the powers, who bring it to an end. The third class serves the earth, the individual men and peoples; it includes the principalities, who promote the general welfare of men, the archangels, who lead the particular peoples and the angels, who watch over individual men, de coel. hier. VI sq. Of that heavenly hierarchy the ecclesiastical is an image, in her mysteries (baptism, eucharist, ordination), organs (bishop, priest, deacon) and laity (catechumens, Christians, monks), de eccl. hier. 2 sq. And this whole hierarchy has its origin and head in Christ, the incarnate Son of God, de eccl. hier. I 1, and its goal in deification, ibid. I 3. This division of Pseudo-Dionysius, which makes the hierarchy in heaven and on earth known as the intimate thought of the Roman system, found a fruitful soil. Damascenus, de fide orthod. II chap. 3. Lombard, Sent. II dist. 9. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 108. Petavius, de angelis lib. II. Oswald, Angelology. Paderborn 1883 p. 57 ff. etc. There is now in Scripture also clearly taught a distinction and order of rank of the angels. Wrongly some think, that with the different names always the same angels are meant, only viewed from different standpoint, Hofmann, Schriftbeweis I 301. Even it must be acknowledged, that this order of rank in Protestant theology has not come enough to its right. There is rank and order among those thousands of beings. God is a God of order in all the churches, 1 Cor. 14:33, 40. The world of spirits is no less rich and fair than the world of bodily beings. But the hierarchy of the Roman doctrine goes far beyond the revelation of God in his word. It was therefore unanimously rejected by the Protestants, Calv. on Eph. 1:21. Voetius, Disp. I 882 sq. Rivetus, Op. III 248 sq. Quenstedt, Theol. I 443. 450. Gerhard, Loc. V cap. 4 Sect. 9. And likewise all calculations of the number of the angels were deemed vain and unfruitful; so e.g. that of Augustine, who let the number of the angels after some's fall be filled up by the predestined men, Enchir. 29. de civ. XXII chap. 1. Anselm, Cur Deus homo I 18; or of Gregory, who thought that as many men were saved as there were angels that remained standing, cf. Lombard, Sent. II 9; or of William of Paris, who called the number of the angels infinite; or of Hilary and many others, who on ground of Matt. 18:12 thought, that the number of men to that of angels stood as one to ninety-nine, cf. Petavius, de angelis I chap. 14; or of G. Schott, who set the number of the angels at a thousand times a thousand millions, in Busken Huet, The Land of Rembrandt II 2, 37. And likewise one let oneself little in with the question, whether the angels among themselves also in essence and kind, essentia et specie, differed; Thomas taught this decidedly, S. Theol. I qu. 50 art. 4, but the church fathers are mostly of another opinion, Damasc. de fide orthod. II 3. Petavius, de angelis I chap. 14. Voetius, Disp. V 261. However manifold distinction there may be among the angels, Scripture does not enter into this and offers only some data. In respect to us much more the unity than the diversity comes to the fore; they all have a spiritual nature, are all called ministering spirits, and all find their chief work in the glorifying of God.
4. The unity comes first in this, that they are all created beings. Schelling indeed says that the good angels, as pure potencies, are not created. But the creation of the angels is clearly spoken out in Col. 1:16, and lies enclosed in the creation of all things, Gen. 1:1, Ps. 33:6, John 1:3, Rom. 11:36, Eph. 3:9, Heb. 1:2. However, little can be said with certainty about the time of their creation. Many church fathers thought, with appeal to Job 38:7, that the angels were created before all things, Origen on Gen. 1, Basil, Hexaem. hom. 1, Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. 38 and 42, John of Damascus, de fide orthod. II c. 3, Dionysius, de div. nom. c. 5, and so on, and later so judged the Socinians, Crell, de Deo et attrib. I c. 18, and the Remonstrants, Episcopius, Inst. Theol. IV 3, 1, Limborch, II 20, 4, who in this way weakened the distinction between the Logos and the angels. But this thought finds no support in Scripture. To the creation of heaven and earth, of which Gen. 1:1 speaks, nothing goes before. Job 38:7 indeed teaches that they were present at the creation even as the stars, but not that they already were before the beginning of creation. On the other side it is certain that the angels were created before the seventh day, when heaven and earth and all their host were finished and God rested from his work, Gen. 1:31, 2:1, 2. But for the rest we are in uncertainty. Only may it be deemed likely that, even as the earth in Gen. 1:1 is indeed already created as earth but yet must be made ready and adorned, so also the heaven is not finished in one single eyeblink. The word heaven is in verse 1 proleptic. Only later in the history of revelation does it become clear what lies enclosed therein. Scripture speaks now of the heaven as cloud-heaven, Gen. 1:8, 20, 7:11, Matt. 6:26, then as star-heaven, Deut. 4:19, Ps. 8:4, Matt. 24:29, and at last as the dwelling of God and of the angels, Ps. 115:16, 2:4, 1 Kings 8:27, 2 Chron. 6:18, Matt. 6:19-21, Heb. 4:14, 7:26, 8:1, 2, 9:2ff., and so on. Even as now the heaven as cloud- and star-heaven is first made ready in the course of the six days, so it is possible and even likely that also the third heaven with its dwellers was first step by step shaped. As that ghostly world is thought richer and fuller, in manifoldness far overtopping the stuffly world, it is the more takeable to set also for that readying of the heavens a certain time-span, though it be that the creation tale is wholly silent about this.
5. Furthermore, the unity of angels is evident from the fact that they are all spiritual beings. However, there has always been great difference of opinion about this. The Jews ascribed to them bodies of air or fire-like nature, Weber, System. And likewise judged most church fathers, such as Justin, Against Trypho 57. Origen, On First Principles I 6. Basil, On the Holy Spirit chapter 16. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 6. Augustine, On the Trinity II 7, and so on. At the second council at Nicaea in 787, a dialogue by a certain John of Thessalonica was read aloud by Patriarch Tarasius, in which he argued that angels had fine bodies and therefore could be depicted. Tarasius added that they were limited in space and had appeared in human form, and therefore could be portrayed. And with this the council expressed its agreement, Schwane, Dogmengeschichte II² 235. But gradually the boundary between matter and spirit was drawn more sharply, and many ascribed to angels a purely spiritual nature, such as Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy, Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II chapter 3. Thomas, Summa Theologica I question 50 article 1. question 51 article 1. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 called the nature of angels spiritual, Denzinger, Enchiridion number 355, and most Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians agreed with this. Nevertheless, a certain corporeality of angels was still repeatedly taught later, by Roman Catholics like Cajetan, Eugubinus, Banez, by some Reformed like Zanchi, Works III column 69. Vossius, On Idolatry I 2, 6, further by Episcopius, Institutes of Theology V chapter 2 page 347, Vorstius, Poiret, Boehme, Leibniz, Wolff, Bonnet, Reinhard, and so on, and in modern times among others by Kurtz, Bible and Astronomy, 3rd edition page 152. Beck, Lehrwissenschaft I 176. Lange, Dogmatics II 578. Kahnis, Dogmatics I 443 f. Vilmar, Dogmatics I 306. Keerl in Proof of Faith June 1896 pages 235-247, and so on, compare Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology² 65 f. The main ground for this opinion is that the concept of a purely spiritual, bodiless nature is metaphysically unthinkable and also incompatible with the concept of creature. God is pure Spirit, but He is also simple, omnipresent, eternal. Angels, however, are limited, also with respect to time and place; if they truly move from one place to another, then they must in their way be corporeal. And likewise angels are not simple like God but composed of matter and form, and therefore a certain, not coarse material, but still fine, ethereal corporeality must be ascribed to them. To this consideration was added the exegesis which thought of angels in the sons of God in Genesis 6. This interpretation from Philo, Josephus, the Jews, the Septuagint, was adopted by many church fathers, Justin, Apology I 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV 16, 2 V 29. 2. Clement, Tertullian, Lactantius, Cyprian, Ambrose, and so on, also found acceptance with Luther and was defended again in modern times by Ewald, Baumgarten, Hofmann, Kurtz, Delitzsch, Hengstenberg, Koehler, Kuebel, and others. Further, appeal is made for the corporeality of angels also to their appearances, to some particular texts in Holy Scripture, such as Psalm 104:4, Matthew 22:30, Luke 20:35, 1 Corinthians 11:10, and sometimes also to the fact that as inhabitants of the stars they must be corporeal. Against all these arguments, however, stands the clear statement of Holy Scripture that angels are spirits, Matthew 8:16, 12:45, Luke 7:21, 8:2, 11:26, Acts 19:12, Ephesians 6:12, Hebrews 1:4, who do not marry, Matthew 22:30, immortal, Luke 20:35, 36, and invisible, Colossians 1:16, can be legions in one limited space, Luke 8:30, and as spirits have no flesh and bones, Luke 24:39. Further, the view of the sons of God in Genesis 6:2 as angels and not as humans is untenable, for although this designation is often used for angels, Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, yet it can also very well denote humans, Deuteronomy 32:5, Hosea 2:1, Psalm 80:16, 73:15; and in any case it is not applicable to evil angels, who here must have committed the sin; further, the expression "to take a wife" in Genesis 6:2 is always used of a lawful marriage and never of fornication; next, the punishment for the sin is executed only on humans, for they are the guilty ones and there is no mention of angels, Genesis 6:3, 5-7. Also the other Scripture passages do not prove the corporeality of angels; Psalm 104:4, compare Hebrews 1:7 says only that God uses His angels as servants, just as wind and fire also serve to carry out His commands, but by no means indicates that angels are changed into wind or fire; Matthew 22:30 implies that believers after the resurrection will be like angels in that they no longer marry, but contains nothing about the corporeality of angels; and 1 Corinthians 11:10 says that women as a sign of their subjection to man must also be covered in the congregation, so as not to displease the good angels who are present in the congregation; there is no thought here at all of evil angels who would otherwise be tempted by the women. As for the appearances of angels, it is indeed certain that they always took place in corporeal, visible form, just as symbolism always represents angels in various visible forms. But from this nothing follows for their corporeality. For God is Spirit and yet is beheld by Isaiah in chapter 6 as a King sitting on His throne. Christ appeared in the flesh and is yet truly God. Angels appear both in appearances and in symbolism each time in different forms; the representation of the cherubim in Genesis 3:24, above the ark of the covenant, in Ezekiel and in the Apocalypse differs greatly among themselves; and the forms in which they appear are far from alike, Genesis 18, Judges 6, 13:6, Daniel 10:11, Matthew 28 verse 3, Luke 2:9, Revelation 22:8. How these bodies are to be thought of is another question. Whether they were essential or apparent bodies cannot be said, Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II 3. Thomas, Summa Theologica I question 51 articles 1-3. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VII 6, 5, and so on. The strongest proof for the corporeality of angels is, however, as said above, borrowed from philosophy. But in this there is all sorts of misunderstanding at play. If corporeality only means that angels are limited, both in time and space, and also not simple like God, in whom all attributes are His essence itself, then corporeality would certainly have to be ascribed to angels. But usually corporeality includes a kind of materiality, even if of a finer sort than in humans and animals. And in this sense there can and may be no talk of a body in angels. Matter and spirit exclude each other, Luke 24:39. It is pantheistic identity-philosophy to mingle both and erase the distinction. Scripture, however, always maintains the distinction between heaven and earth, angels and humans, spiritual and material, invisible and visible things, Colossians 1:16. If angels are therefore to be thought of as spirits, they stand in a different, freer relation to time and space than humans. On the one hand, they are not elevated above all time and place like God, for they are creatures and thus finite and limited. They do not have a ubiquitous repletive, omnipresence and eternity. On the other hand, they also do not have a ubiquitous circumscriptive, like our bodies, for angels are spirits and thus have no dimensions of length and breadth, and thus no extension, no diffusion through space. Therefore it was usually said that angels have a ubiquitous definitive; that is, as finite and limited beings they are always somewhere; they cannot be in two places at once; their presence is not extensive but punctual; and they are so free from place that they can move with the greatest speed and cannot be hindered by any material objects; their change of place is momentary. Indeed, such speed of movement and such freedom from time and space, which yet is not timelessness and spacelessness, is unimaginable for us. But Scripture clearly indicates it, and in the speed of thought and imagination, of light and electricity, we have a not to be despised analogy, Augustine, City of God XI 9. Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II 3. Thomas, Summa Theologica I questions 52 and 53. Voetius, Disputations V 252 sq. Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre II 302. Oswald, Angelology pages 23-43.
6. The Oneness of the Angels. The oneness of the angels is further shown in that they all are thinking beings, gifted with understanding and will. Both these strengths are often in the Writings given to the angels, both evil and good, Job 1:6ff., Zechariah 3:1ff., Matthew 24:36, Matthew 8:29, 18:10, 2 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 6:11, and so on. All kinds of personal traits and doings are found in them such as self-awareness, Luke 1:19, speaking, ibid., longing, 1 Peter 1:12, rejoicing, Luke 15:10, praying, Hebrews 1:6, believing, James 2:19, lying, John 8:44, sinning, John 3:8, and so on. Along with this, a great might is given to them; the angels are no timid beings, but an army, a host of strong heroes, Psalm 103:20, Luke 11:21, Colossians 1:16, Ephesians 1:21, 3:10, 2 Thessalonians 1:7, Acts 5:19, Hebrews 1:14. On these grounds it is wrong to hold with Schelling and others the angels for traits or strengths. But yet let one stay in the telling of the angels' personhood by the straightforwardness of the Holy Writings. Augustine set apart two kinds of knowledge of the angels; one, which they as it were in the morning of shaping, beforehand, through the beholding of God gained, morning knowledge, and another, which they as it were in the evening of shaping, afterwards, from the shaped things became partakers of, On Genesis Literally V 18. City of God XI 29. The schoolmen took not only this setting apart over, Thomas, Summa Theologica I question 54, but sought also the kind and measure of the angels' knowledge nearer to set. Their knowledge is not, like with God, the same as their being and essence. But they know not through bodily beholding, the setting apart between understanding possible and acting is with them not there; the understanding is with them never sheer strength and never at rest, but always working; they cannot be without knowing; they know themselves, their own essence, through themselves, fully and unchanging; they know the shaped things not from their showing but through inborn thoughts, not through drawing out and step-by-step, but straightaway and understandingly; and indeed the angels know with their natural strengths not straightway but through stamped forms, through and at the same time with their own being; but in the above-natural order, whereto the good angels are lifted, they know God yet through straight beholding, Thomas, Summa Theologica I questions 54-58. Against the Heathen II chapters 96-101. III chapter 49. Bonaventure, Sentences II distinction 3 article 4 and distinction 4 article 3. Petavius, On Angels I chapters 6-9. Kleutgen, Philosophy of Old Times I second 196 ff. Oswald, Angelology 43-51. Even it was, to uphold the prayer to the angels and also to the saints, taught by some, that they, seeing God who sees all, in Him saw all and thus knew all our needs and wants, Gregory, Morals book 12 chapter 13. Thomas, Summa Theologica II 2 question 83 article 4. III question 10 article 2. Bellarmine, On the Saints' Blessedness I chapter 26. The Protestants were more watchful, they called for mildness. In the way wherein we come to knowledge, is so much hidden; how much more in that of the angels, Zanchius, Works III 108 sq. Voetius, Disputations V 267. Gerhard, Theological Places V chapter 4 section 5. This alone can be said, that they are richer in knowledge than we here on earth, Matthew 18:10, 24:36, that they gain their knowledge from their own kind, John 8:44, from the beholding of God's works, Ephesians 3:10, 1 Timothy 3:16, 1 Peter 1:12 and from showings, which God shares with them, Daniel 8, 9, Revelation 1:1. But they are yet bound to the things, Ephesians 3:10, 1 Peter 1:12. They know not our, nor each other's hidden thoughts of the heart, 1 Kings 8:39, Psalm 139:2, 4, Acts 1:24, so that they also among themselves need a tongue, to share their thoughts 1 Corinthians 13:2, and in whole on their way and after the kind of their kind also speaking and singing can glorify God, Petavius, On Angels I chapter 12. They know not the forthcoming, nor the forthcoming happenings, than only by guess, Isaiah 41:22, 23. They know not the day of judgment, Mark 13:32. And their knowledge is open to growth, Ephesians 3:10. Along with this may surely also be added, that the knowledge and might among the angels is very unlike. Also in this sight there is unlikeness and order. Even may from the few names, that in the Writings come forth, be drawn out, that the angels not only in kinds but also as persons are set apart and that they each bear a special ownness, even if the thinking of some schoolmen is to be thrown away, that each angel shapes a special kind, Bonaventure, Sentences II distinction 3 article 2. Thomas, Against the Heathen II 52.
7. Finally, the angels are also one in this, that they are all moral beings. This appears both from the good angels, who serve God night and day, and from the evil ones, who did not abide in the truth. Concerning the original state of the angels, Scripture says very little. It only witnesses that God, at the end of the creation work, saw all things, and behold, they were very good, Gen. 1:31. Moreover, in John 8:44, Jude 6, 2 Pet. 2:4, a good state of all angels is assumed. And this same is required by the theism of Scripture, which wholly excludes Manichaeism. Precisely because Scripture reveals so little, imagination and reasoning found ample play here. Augustine thought that the angels, in the very moment of their creation, partly fell and partly stood firm; to the latter God gave, together with their nature, the grace of perseverance, simul eis et condens naturam et largiens gratiam , City of God XII 9, cf. On Rebuke and Grace, ch. 11 no. 32. Scholasticism later appealed to this for its doctrine of the superadded gifts also in the angels. According to Bonaventure, Sentences II dist. 4 art. 1 qu. 2, Alexander of Hales, Lombard, Scotus, and others, the angels first existed for a time in puris naturalibus and later received the auxilium gratiae actualis . Thomas, however, thought with others that the distinction between nature and grace was only to be understood logically, and that the grace, to be able to stand firm, was given to the different angels also in different measure, Summa Theologica I qu. 62 art. 3 and 6. Equipped with that grace, the angels could merit the highest, unlosable blessedness, which consists in the vision of God, Petavius, On Angels I 16. Becanus, Scholastic Theology, on angels ch. 2. 3. Theology of Würzburg 1880 III 466 sq. Pesch, Praelections III 204 sq. Oswald, Angelology 81 f. Jansen, Praelections II. 361 sq. In the locus on man, the doctrine of the superadded gifts will demand our special attention. Here let it only be pointed out that in any case it finds not the least ground in Scripture for the angels. Protestant theology therefore rejected it unanimously. It contented itself with the fact that the angels who stood firm were confirmed in the good. And this it held with Augustine and scholasticism against Origen, On First Principles I 5. 3. 4, and the Remonstrants, who held the will of the good angels still changeable. Indeed, the good angels are always presented to us in Holy Scripture as a faithful host, who unchangeably does the will of the Lord. They are called angels of the Lord, Ps. 103:20, 104:4, elect, 1 Tim. 5:21, holy, Deut. 33:3, Matt. 25:31, angels of light, Luke 9:26, Acts 10:22, 2 Cor. 11:14, Rev. 14:10. They see God's face daily, Matt. 18:10, are set before us as an example, Matt. 6:10; and the believers shall one day be like them, Luke 20:36.
8. In all these properties of createdness, spirituality, rationality, and morality, the angels agree with mankind. Precisely because in Scripture the unity of the angels stands in the foreground and their mutual diversity recedes, there is danger of overlooking the difference between angel and man. Their agreement seems far to surpass the distinction. Both man and angel are personal, rational, moral beings; both were originally created in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness; both received dominion, immortality, and blessedness; both are called in Scripture sons of God, Job 1:6, Luke 3:38. And yet their distinction is most strictly maintained in Scripture thereby, that indeed man but never the angel is said to be created after God's image. In theology this distinction has been much neglected. According to Origen, the angels and the souls of men are of the same species; the union of the soul with the body is a punishment for sin and thus properly accidental. Origen came to this because he taught that all inequality arose from the creature. God created all things in the beginning equal, that is, He created only rational beings and those all equal, angels and souls. Inequality came among them through the free will; some stood firm and received reward, others fell and received punishment; the souls were bound to bodies. The whole material world and all the diversity that is present in it, is thus there through sin and through the different degrees of sin; it is not there to reveal God's goodness but to punish sin. This teaching of Origen has indeed been rejected by the church, and theology has held fast to the specific difference of man and angel, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 75 art. 7. But yet the thought has not been wholly overcome, that the angels, because purely spiritual, stand higher than men, and therefore have still more or at least as much right to the name of image-bearers of God, Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa II 3. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 93 art. 3. Commentators on Sentences II dist. 16. Oswald, Angelology 25 etc. In the hierarchy of creatures the angels, as pure spiritual beings, stand closest to God. Thou wast and nothing else, whence thou madest heaven and earth, two things one near thee, the other near nothing; one whereby thou wouldst be superior, the other whereby nothing would be inferior, Augustine, Confessions XII 7. Not only a substance far from himself, namely the corporeal nature, ought (God) to produce, but also one near and this is the intellectual and incorporeal substance, Bonaventure, Breviloquium II 6. But also Lutherans and Reformed have too much lost sight of this distinction between man and angel and called the angels image-bearers of God, Calvin, Institutes I 15, 3. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae V c. 10. Synopsis Purioris Theologiae XII 7. XIII 17. Extract from the Draft of Tol. IX 187. Maresius, II 335. Gerhard, Loci V c. 4 sect. 5. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology 63. Only a few such as Theodoret, Macarius, Methodius, Tertullian against Marcion II 8 and others opposed this, Petavius, De Sex Dierum Opificio II c. 3 § 4-8. Augustine says expressly, God gave to no other creature that it should be after his image except to man, in Thomas, I qu. 93 art. 3, cf. also Maresius, Systema Theologiae V 37. However much agreement there may be between man and angel, there is no less great difference. There are indeed all sorts of traits of the image of God in the angels, but man alone is the image of God. That image of God lies not only in that which man and angel have in common, but equally in that which distinguishes them. The chief points of difference are these: first, the angel is spirit and as spirit complete; man on the other hand is soul and body together; the soul without the body is imperfect. Man is thus a rational but equally a sensible being; through the body he is bound to the earth, belongs to the earth and the earth to him. And of that earth he is head and lord. After the angels were already created, God says that he will create man and give him dominion over the earth, Genesis 1:26. Dominion over the earth is essentially proper to man, a piece of the image of God, and is therefore also given back by Christ to his own, whom he makes not only prophets and priests but also kings. The angel however, however strong and mighty, is servant in God's creation; no lord of the earth, Hebrews 1:14. Secondly, the angels as pure spiritual beings are also not connected among themselves by bonds of blood. Among them there is no father and son, no physical connection, no community of blood, no consanguinity; they stand, however intimately ethically connected, yet loose beside each other, so that many could fall and others yet remain standing. In man there is therefore a shadowing forth of the divine being, in which there are also persons, who are one not only through will and affection but also through essence and nature. Thirdly, there is therefore indeed a humanity, but in this sense no "angelhood." In one man all fell, but also in one the human race is preserved. In humanity an Adam and therefore also a Christ is possible. The angels are witnesses, men are objects of God's most glorious deeds, of the works of his grace. The earth is the theater of God's wonders; here the battle is fought, here the triumph of the kingdom of God is won, and the angels turn their eyes to the earth and desire to look into the mysteries of salvation, Ephesians 3:10, 1 Peter 1:12. Fourthly, the angel may be the mightier spirit, yet man is the richer spirit. In understanding and power the angel far surpasses man. But through the wondrous rich relations in which man stands to God, the world, and humanity, he is deeper of soul and richer of heart. The relations which family and domestic life, life in home, state, and society, life for labor, art, and science bring with them, make every man a world in miniature, which in manifoldness, in depth, in richness far surpasses the personality of the angels. Therefore also the richest and most glorious virtues of God are knowable and enjoyable only for man. Angels experience his power, wisdom, goodness, holiness, majesty; but the depths of God's eternal mercies open themselves only for man. In man or better yet in humanity is therefore alone in creaturely wise the full image of God unfolded. Finally let it be added here, that the angels thus also stand in a wholly other relation to Christ than men. That a relation exists between Christ and the angels is undoubted. First, various Scripture places teach that all things, Psalm 33:6, Proverbs 8:22ff., John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Ephesians 3:9, Hebrews 1:2 and especially also the angels, Colossians 1:16 are created through the Son, and thus he is the Mediator of union of all the created. But in the second place Ephesians 1:10 and Colossians 1:19, 20 contain the deep thought that all things also stand in relation to Christ as Mediator of reconciliation. God has namely reconciled all things to himself through Christ and gathers them all under him as the Head. The relation now does not consist therein, as many have thought, that Christ has acquired for the good angels grace and glory, cf. Voetius, Disputationes II 262 sq. Gerhard, Loci Theologici XXXI c. 4 § 42 and later in the doctrine of satisfaction; nor also, as others judged, therein that the angels could be called members of the church, cf. Gerhard, Loci Theologici XXII c. 6 sect. 9. But it is yet located herein, that all things which through sin are disturbed and scattered, are again in Christ mutually reconciled, restored in their original relation, and gathered together under him as the Head. Christ is thus indeed Lord and Head, not Reconciler and Savior of the angels. All things are created through him, and therefore they are also created unto him, that he may reconcile and restore them and give them back to the Father. But men alone form the church of Christ; they alone are his bride, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling of God.
9. With this nature of the angels their service and working agree.
The Scripture clearly makes a distinction therein between an extraordinary and an ordinary service of the angels. The extraordinary service first begins after the fall, and has become needful through sin. It is an important element in the special revelation. We see the angels first appear to guard the garden, Gen. 3:24, but then they appear and bring over revelations, act blessing or punishing in the history of the patriarchs and of the prophets, and through the whole Old Testament. They appear to Abraham, Gen. 18, Lot, Gen. 19, Jacob, Gen. 28:12, 32:1; they serve at the giving of the law, Heb. 2:2, Gal. 3:19, Acts 7:53; they take part in the fight of Israel, 2 Kings 19:35, Dan. 10:13, 20; they proclaim God's counsel to Elijah and Elisha, to Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah. As if to refute that they are no leftovers from polytheism and do not belong to a prehistorical time, their extraordinary service increases in the days of the New Testament. They come forth at the birth of Jesus, Luke 1:13, 30, 2:10, at his temptation, Matt. 4:11, go with him throughout his earthly life, John 1:52, and appear especially at his suffering, Luke 22:43, resurrection, Matt. 28, and ascension, Acts 1:10. Thereafter they still appear a few times in the history of the apostles, Acts 5:19, 12:7, 13, 8:26, 27:23, Rev. 1:1, to then cease the extraordinary service and first appear again at the return of Christ, Matt. 16:27, 25:31, Mark 8:38, Luke 9:26, 2 Thess. 1:7, Jude 14, Rev. 5:2 etc., wherein they wage war against God's foes, Rev. 12:7, 1 Thess. 4:16, Jude 9, gather the elect, Matt. 24:31, and cast the ungodly into the fire, Matt. 13:41, 49. The extraordinary service of the angels thus consists therein, that they go with the history of salvation in its turning points. They do not themselves bring about that salvation, but they yet take part in the history of that salvation. They bring over revelations, shield God's folk, fight his foes, and do all kinds of service in the kingdom of God. Always therein they are working on the field of the church; even where they get might over the powers of nature, Rev. 14:18, 16:5, or step in in the lots of the folks, this happens in the behoof of the church. Therein they never crowd out the sovereignty of God, nor are they middlemen of the fellowship of God with man. But they are serving spirits in the behoof of them who shall inherit salvation. They serve God in the kingdom of grace, not in that of nature. This extraordinary service is therefore of itself also ceased with the finishing of the revelation. While they formerly time and again had to bring over special revelations and came down to the earth, they are now rather an ensample to us and we climb up to them. As long as the special revelation was not yet finished, heaven drew near the earth and God's Son came down to us. Now Christ has appeared, and the word of God is fully spoken to us. So the angels then look down to the earth, to learn from the church the manifold wisdom of God. What could angels still give us, now that God himself has given us his own Son?
But Scripture also speaks of an ordinary service of the angels.
First, this includes that they praise God day and night, Job 38:7, Isaiah 6, Psalm 103:20, 148:2, Revelation 5:11; and Scripture gives the impression that they do this in audible sounds, although we cannot form a conception of the speaking and singing of the angels.
But to this ordinary service also belongs that they rejoice over the turning of the sinner, Luke 15:10, watch over the believers, Psalm 34:8, 91:11, protect the little ones, Matthew 18:10, are present in the church, 1 Corinthians 11:10, 1 Timothy 5:21, follow her in her paths through history, Ephesians 3:10, are taught by her, Ephesians 3:10, 1 Peter 1:12, and carry the believers into Abraham's bosom, Luke 16:22. They are thus active coram Deo consistendo, hominibus piis assistendo, atque diabolis et hominibus malis resistendo , Hollaz. Scripture usually stays with this general description of the ordinary service of the angels and does not descend into particulars.
But theology has not been content with this; it has specialized it in various ways. This happened especially in the doctrine of guardian angels. The Greeks and Romans had something similar in their daimones and genii ; not only did they ascribe to every man a good and an evil genius, but they also had genii of houses, families, societies, cities, lands, peoples, of earth, sea, world, etc. The Jews accepted seventy angels of the nations with appeal to Deuteronomy 32:8 and Daniel 10:13, and further gave to every Israelite an angel as guide, Weber, System. Christian theology soon took this over. The Shepherd of Hermas, Mand. VI 2 assigns to every man two angels, heis tes dikaiosynes kai heis tes ponérias , and further placed the whole creation and the entire building of the church under the care of the angels, Vis. III 4. This doctrine of guardian angels was developed with fondness by Origen. Sometimes every man has with him a good and an evil angel; sometimes he adds that only the good angels of the baptized Christians see the face of God; or he also says that only the Christians and the virtuous have a guardian angel, and that they receive according to their merit a lower or higher angel as leader. But further he also accepts special angels for churches, lands, peoples, for arts and sciences, for plants and animals; thus Raphael is the angel of healing, Gabriel of war, Michael of prayer, etc., cf. de princ. I 8. III 3. c. Cels. V 29. VIII 31 etc. And thus all the church fathers taught in substance, although there was difference over whether all men or only Christians had a guardian angel; whether every man had only a good or also an evil angel; when the guardian angel was given to man, at birth or at baptism, and when he was taken from him, at the attainment of perfection or only at death. With all it was also fixed that there are not only guardian angels of men but also of lands, peoples, churches, dioceses, provinces, etc., Schwane, D. G. II. Later this protection of the angels was partly limited and partly further extended. Limited, insofar as some on the footsteps of Pseudo-Dionysius, de coel. hier. c. 13 taught that the three main classes of angels, cherubim, seraphim, and thrones, served God alone in heaven, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 112. Extended, insofar as scholasticism thought the whole providence of God in nature and history, especially in the movement of the stars, mediated by angels, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 70 art. 3. qu. 110 art. 1. S. c. Gent. III 78 sq. Bonaventure, Sent. II dist. 14 p. 1 art. 3 qu. 2. Guardian angels of men are generally accepted by Roman theologians and are also recognized in the Roman Catechism IV c. 9 qu. 4 and 5. But otherwise there is among them great difference of opinion over all the above-mentioned points, cf. Petavius, de ang. II c. 6-8. Becanus, Theol. schol. tract. III de angelis c. 6. Theol. Wirceb. Paris. III. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. III. Oswald, Angelologie etc. The same doctrine we find with Luther, cf. Köstlin, Luthers Theol. II; but the Lutheran theologians were mostly more cautious, Gerhard, Loci theol. V cap. 4 sect. 15. Quenstedt, Theol. did. pol. I. Hollaz, Syst. theol. Calvin rejected the angeli tutelares , Inst. I 14, 7. Comm. on Ps. 91, Mt. 18:10, and most Reformed followed him, see especially Voetius, Disp. I; only a few accepted guardian angels of men, Zanchius, Op. III. Bucanus, Inst. theol. VI 28. Maccovius, Loci Comm. Rivetus, Alsted, Vossius, also Hugo Grotius on Mt. 18:10, cf. Heppe, Dogm. der ev. ref. K. M. Vitringa II. In more recent times the doctrine of guardian angels has again found support with Hahn, Weiss, Bibl. Theol. des N. T. Ebrard, Dogm. § 239. Vilmar, Dogm. I. Martensen, Dogm. § 69 and others. Further, the ordinary service of the angels was also more closely determined in that they with their intercession for the believers on earth were active for good in heaven. This was already taught by the Jews, and also by Philo, and then taken over by Origen, c. Cels VIII 64 and the church fathers and established in the Roman symbols, Roman Catechism III c. 2 qu. 5 n. 2. The Lutheran confessions also still speak of this intercession, Apol. Conf. art. 21. Art. Smalc. II 2, and likewise the Lutheran dogmaticians, Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. II. On the other hand, it was unanimously rejected by the Reformed.
For this special service of protection and intercession, appeal is made to several places in Scripture, especially Deuteronomy 32:8, Daniel 10:13, 20, Matthew 18:10, Revelation 1:20, 2:1 and so on, Job 33:23, Zechariah 1:12, Luke 15:7, Revelation 8:3, and especially also Tobit 12:12-15. In itself, this teaching of the protection and intercession of the angels is not to be rejected. That God, just as in the special revelation, so also in the general revelation, often or even regularly makes use of angels, is in itself not impossible; and it is no less unreasonable that the angels send up the prayers of men to God, since they take interest in their lot and follow the course of the kingdom of God in the history of mankind.
But, however little there may be to object against it in itself, Scripture observes a sobriety in regard to the protection and intercession of the angels, which must be our rule. In Deuteronomy 32:8 we read that God, in the division of the nations, already thought of his people Israel and determined their dwelling according to the number of the children of Israel, that is, so that Israel received a sufficient inheritance according to its number. The Septuagint, however, translated these words by "according to the number of the angels" and thereby gave occasion to the teaching of the angels of the nations. The original text, however, teaches nothing of this and thus falls away entirely as a proof text.
It is different with Daniel 10:13, 20. There it is said that the figure appearing to Daniel in verse 5 stood against the prince of Persia and, helped by Michael, who is called one of the chief princes in verse 13, the great prince for the children of Israel in 12:1 and 10:21, drove out that prince of Persia and took his place among the kings of Persia. Calvin and the Reformed usually thought of the Persian kings under that prince of Persia. But it seems that under that prince something else must be understood, namely, the guardian spirit of Persia. For first, there is no doubt that Israel has such a guardian angel in Michael, who is called its prince, 10:13, 21, 12:1; second, the kings of Persia are clearly distinguished from that prince in 10:13; and third, the analogy requires that the spiritual power on one side fights against a spiritual power on the other side.
The book of Daniel thus really gives us the representation that the strife between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world is fought not only here on earth but also in the realm of the spirits among the angels. More may and can not be derived from it. There is absolutely nothing in it that every land and people has its own angel. But in the mighty contest that is fought between Israel and Persia, which is here essentially between the kingdom of God and that of Satan, angels appear on both sides who take part in the contest and support the peoples.
Even less can it be derived from Revelation 1:20 and so on that every church has its angel, for under the angels of the seven churches nothing else is to be understood than their teachers; they are indeed wholly regarded as representatives of the churches; it is their works that are praised or blamed; the letters are written to them.
The teaching of guardian angels finds its strongest support in Matthew 18:10, which text undoubtedly contains that a certain class of angels is charged with the protection of the little ones, but where it is not stated in the least that an angel is assigned to every elect one. This is found only in the apocryphal book of Tobit. But thereby this teaching of guardian angels also betrays its origin. It is essentially of heathen descent. Moreover, it leads to all kinds of subtle questions and vain issues. It does not know, for example, whether to every man, even to the antichrist, as Thomas thought, I qu. 113 art. 4, or only to the elect an angel is assigned, or only a good or also an evil angel accompanies all, when he is given to someone and taken from him, what his service is, and so on. Therefore we may not go further than that to certain classes of angels the care of certain interests on earth is also entrusted.
And so it is with the intercession of the angels; it is taught in Tobit 12:12, but does not occur in Scripture. In Job 33:23 the uncreated Angel is spoken of. Luke 15:7 indeed teaches that the angels rejoice over the conversion of a sinner and thus also presupposes that they desire it, but yet speaks of no intercession in the proper sense. And in Revelation 8:3 an angel indeed receives a censer with incense, to make the in themselves sinful prayers of the saints lovely and acceptable to the Lord; but of intercession no word is mentioned here either. The angel is simply a servant; he does not set up the altar, he does not prepare the incense himself but receives it, and only lets the prayers ascend with that incense to God. He performs a service like that of the seraphim in Isaiah 6:6, 7.
10. This teaching of guardian angels and of their intercession has finally also had this disadvantage, that it in practice soon led to a veneration and adoration of the angels. Col. 2:18 teaches that such a worship of angels already occurred in the apostolic time. Theodoret notes in his commentary on that place, that such a service of the angels still existed in his time in Phrygia and that the synod at Laodicea had forbidden the veneration of the angels, lest God be forsaken, Schwane, D. G. Many church fathers warn against veneration and adoration of the angels, Irenaeus adv. haer. Origen c. Cels. Athanasius, c. Ar. Augustine, de vera relig. Conf. de civ. etc. The conviction is still general, that God alone may be adored, and that to the angels only a civil honor belongs. We honor them with love, not with servitude, Aug. de vera relig. They are rather to be imitated than invoked, de civ. And still Gregory the Great says in his exposition on the Song of Songs cap. 8, that, since Christ came on earth, the church is honored even by the angels themselves; under the Old Testament Joshua indeed adored the angel, Josh. 5:14, but in the New Testament the angel rejects the adoration of John, Rev. 22:9. But yet these warnings prove precisely that in practice the boundaries between the adoration of God and the reverence to the angels were erased.
The invocation of the angels is first clearly expressed by Ambrose, de viduis, cap. 9 § 55, where he among other things says: the angels are to be besought, who are given to us for protection. Already Eusebius made the distinction between the honoring, which befits us toward the angels, and the worshiping, which belongs to God alone, Praep. Ev., and substantially we find this already in Origen c. Cels. Augustine adopted it, precisely to prevent the religious veneration of the angels, de civ. But soon that distinction was used to legitimize the invocation of the angels. So already at the council of Nicaea 787 and then further among the scholastics, Lombard, Sent. Thomas, S. Th. Trent called the invocation good and useful, sess. 25; the Roman Catechism grounded it thereon, that the angels ever see God's face and have taken upon themselves the patronage of our salvation; the Roman Breviary also included prayers on the feast of angels and the Roman dogmatists defend it unanimously, Bellarmine, de sanct. beatit. Petavius, de angelis, although they usually treat it later with the cult of saints.
Lutherans and Reformed and nearly all Protestants however stood strong, as they rejected this religious veneration of the angels, just as also that of the saints, Luther, in Köstlin, L. Theol. Zwingli, Op. etc. Calvin, Inst. cf. Gerhard, Loci theol., on the angels especially. Quenstedt. Turretin, Th. El. Id. De necessaria secessione nostra ab ecclesia Romana, disp. de idololatria Romana. For first there is no single example of it in Scripture; indeed the Romanists appeal to some places of the Old Testament such as Gen. 18:2, 32:24, 48:16, Ex. 23:20, Num. 22:31, Josh. 5:14, Judg. 13:17, but here everywhere it is not of a created angel but of the Angel of the Lord that is spoken, and in the New Testament there is not even a semblance of any proof to be found. But not only that; the angel veneration is not only without precept and without example in Scripture, so that Rome with some semblance of ground could claim that the veneration of angels and saints is not forbidden in Scripture and thus permitted, and therefore also in fact does not impose and command it, but only permits and reckons it useful, Jansen Prael. theol.; it is also positively forbidden therein, Deut. 6:13, 10:20, Matt. 4:10, Col. 2:18, 19, Rev. 19:10, 22:9. Religious honor may according to Scripture be shown to God alone and belongs to no creature.
The Romanists have not wholly dared to deny this, but yet with the distinction of latria and dulia seek to justify the veneration of the angels. Now this in Rome is no distinction between religious and civil honor, which would be reasonable; no, the veneration of angels and saints bears in Rome indeed a religious character, albeit that this is relative. The dulia is a religious cult. But so understood, it is condemned both by Scripture and by practice. Scripture knows no twofold religious veneration, a lower and a higher. The Romanists also admit that latria and dulia are absolutely not distinguished in Scripture as they do, and that they also etymologically give no ground thereto. The Hebrew 'abad is now once translated by douleia, then by latreia, cf. Deut 6:13 and 1 Sam. 7:3, 1 Sam. 12:20 and Deut. 10:12; to Israel both the douleuein and the latreuein of other gods is forbidden, Ex. 20:5, Jer. 22:9. Likewise the Hebrew sharat is rendered by both Greek words, Ezek. 20:32, Isa. 56:6. Often douleuein is used of God, Matt. 6:24, Rom. 7:6, 14:18, 16:18, Gal. 4:9, Eph. 6:7, Col. 3:24, 1 Thess. 1:9 and latreuein is also sometimes used of service toward men. Neither etymologically nor scripturally are the two words so distinguished as Rome teaches. The whole distinction is arbitrary. Moreover, monotheism brings with it that there is and can be but one religious veneration; all veneration of creatures is either only civil or it does injury to monotheism and ascribes to creatures a divine character.
Practice teaches this also most clearly. Though one says repeatedly that angels and saints are only mediators, that they are not themselves directly but God in them is invoked, that God's honor is not diminished but increased by their invocation; it all in fact makes no difference, experience shows but all too clearly that the Roman Christian places his trust on creatures. Moreover, even if the distinction in itself were correct, it yet could not justify the religious veneration of the angels. For if this reasoning were sufficient for defense, no idolatry and no image service would be condemnable anymore. The heathens, adoring animals and images, knew very well that these were not the gods themselves, Rom. 1:23. The Jews did not hold the golden calf for Jehovah himself, Ex. 32:4, 1 Kings 12:28. Satan, tempting Christ, demanded absolutely not that he should hold him for God, Matt. 4:9. And John thought by no means that the angel who appeared to him was God, Rev. 19:10. And yet Jesus answers: the Lord thy God shalt thou adore and him only serve. This only is exclusive, just as the one Mediator Christ Jesus excludes all other angels or men as mediators. But this is precisely what is denied by Rome. Just as Matt. 19:17, 23:8, John 9:5, 1 Tim. 2:5, 6:16 etc. do not exclude that also men can be called good, master, light, mediator, immortal, so according to Rome Matt. 4:10 does not prove that God alone may be adored. The angels and saints are namely according to Rome partakers of the divine nature itself; the supernatural gifts are indeed bestowed, derived but are of the same nature as the divine essence itself. And therein lies in Rome the deepest ground of the adoration of the saints and angels. God communicates in the supernatural justice himself, his own essence to creatures; and therefore these may also be venerated in a religious manner. And the proper thought of Rome is this: there are as many kinds of adoration as there are kinds of excellence, Thomas, S. Theol. Bellarmine, de sanct. beatit. Petavius, de angelis. Jansen, Praet. Theol. Möhler Symb.
By the rejection of the religious worship of the angels, Protestantism has acknowledged that the angels are no needful part in the godly life of Christians. They are not the workers of our salvation, not the ground of our trust, not the aim of our worship; not with them, but with God do we stand in fellowship; even now they appear to us no more, and all special revelation through angels has ceased. The angels can and may not take in the Protestant churches and confessions that place which in the Roman is given to them. But yet with this not all meaning of the world of angels for religion is denied. This lies first in that God wills to make use of the service of angels in his works on the field of grace. The angels are of outstanding meaning for the kingdom of God and its history; at all turning points we meet them; they are go-betweens of the resurrection, witnesses of God's great deeds. Their meaning is much more of an outward than an inward kind. Of fellowship with the world of angels we know nothing in our godly undergoings. Neither on our religious nor on our upright life do the angels have a sway that can be brought under clear words. Their worth lies in the history of revelation, as the Scripture makes us know it.
In the second place, the angels can therefore also be no aim of our reverent homage, as we show that to men. Very surely there is a worldly honor which we have to show them. But this is yet also other than toward men, whom we personally know and meet. The Romans uphold the worship of angels also chiefly with the reasoning that they as messengers of the Most High yet have claim on our homage, even as in the ambassadors of princes these themselves are honored. And this is in itself fully right. If an angel appeared to us, he would have to be greeted by us with reverent homage. And so it happened also, when angels in the days of revelation appeared to men. Only, such appearances there are no more. Of a homage, as the forefathers, prophets, apostles brought to the angels appearing to them, there can be no speech with us. It is not feasible to show such a reverence and homage to them.
In the third place there is therefore yet an honor which the angels must receive from us. But this honor is in no wise religious, but only worldly of kind, in the being of the thing like to that which we give to men, to creatures. And this civil honor stands in that we think of them with reverence and speak of them, that we despise them not in the little ones, Matthew 18:10, that we are mindful of their presence, 1 Corinthians 11:10, that we make known to them the manifold wisdom of God, Ephesians 3:10, that we make them see into the hidden things of salvation, 1 Timothy 5:21, that we by our turning bring them joy, Luke 15:10, follow them in the doing of God's will, Matthew 6:10, that we feel and live one with them in the awaiting of going to them, Hebrews 12:22, that we with them and all creatures form one choir to the magnifying of the Name of the Lord, Psalm 103:20, 21. Herein stands the true worship of the angels.
And if this is well understood, then finally in the fourth place the teaching of the angels can also be to us for comfort and heartening. God has also revealed this teaching to us, that he might strengthen us in our weakness, lift us up in our disheartening. We stand in the ghostly strife not alone. We stand in bond with a whole cloud of witnesses around us. There is yet another, better world than this, where God is served in full wise. It is to us for ensample, for spur and urging, and at the same time for longing and end goal. As the world of angels in revelation has come down to us, so the church in Christ climbs up to it. We shall be like the angels and daily see the face of our Father, who is in heaven, Mastricht, Theol. theor. pr. III 7, 25. Love, Theol. practica p. 205. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. II 320 f. Frank, Chr. Wahrh. I 353. van Oosterzee, Chr. Dogm. § 57, 10.
1. Besides the ghostly world there is also a bodily world. But while the angels in their being and essence are known only from the revelation and are hidden to reason and knowledge, the bodily world is beheld by all and comes up both in wisdom-lore and in god-lore, both in belief and in knowledge. Here therefore at every moment difference and clash are possible. Indeed both, wisdom-lore and god-lore, speak about the bodily world in different senses. The one searches after the spring and the kind of all things, but the other goes out from God, and leads all back to Him; it has to do with the creatures only insofar as they are works of God and show forth something of His goodnesses; even where it handles the creatures, it is and stays thus always god-lore, Thomas, S. c. Gent II c. 2 sq. Polanus, Synt. theol. V c. 7. But though there is such a weighty difference, god-lore and wisdom-lore yet handle the same world. To shun clash between both, oftentimes a sharing of goods has been put forth: knowledge would search the seeable things and leave to belief and god-lore nothing but the belief-like and right-like world; or still stricter, all that is would be for knowledge and only in worth-judgments might belief speak. But such a sharing is both in thought and in deed unworkable. As every knowledge-like framework at last always roots in god-serving beliefs, so there is no single belief that does not bring with it a set beholding of the shaped. All god-beliefs have their world-births, which did not spring from wisdom-like reasoning but rest on handing-down. Also Genesis 1 is by no means a wisdom-like world-beholding, but a handing-down, which in many ways matches the world-births of the other god-beliefs and yet also in noteworthy ways sunders from them. The match lies therein, that in all world-births the world-shaping is laid to God, that the first state was an ungrown and wild one, that the shaping of the world runs in some time-spans, climbs from lower to higher and ends in man, who is kin to God. But the points of sundering are yet much greater. The heathen world-births are all at once also god-births, all take a first-stuff and teach a wildness in its own sense. The tale in Genesis on the other hand is sternly one-godly, it teaches a shaping out of nothing, and knows no own wildness. Therefore it is also unbelievable that the Jews would have taken over this tale in the out-driving from the Babylonians. For first, the shaping was also already before the out-driving known to the Israelites. Next, this was also already the case with the seven-day week, which is grounded on the shaping-days. Then it is unlikely that the Jews would have taken over such a weighty piece of their teaching from their overcomers. And lastly, the heathen world-births were so through and through many-godly, that they must rather drive off than draw the one-godly folk of Israel and also could not be so reworked into a fair, one-godly tale as Gen. 1. Rather all pleads for it, that we in Genesis have a handing-down, which stems from the oldest times, among the other folks stepwise became base, and by Israel was kept in her cleanness, Delitzsch, New Commentary on Genesis.
2. In the narrative of Genesis 1, the first verse must be understood as the description of a distinct act. In verse 2 the earth already exists, though in a waste and empty state. And verse 1 recounts the origin of that earth; it was forthwith created by God as earth. After verse 1 but briefly mentions the heaven alongside the earth, verse 2 forthwith passes over to the earth; the cosmogony becomes geogony. And that earth is from the first moment earth; no hyle in the Aristotelian sense, no materia prima, no chaos either in the sense of the heathen cosmogonies. A created chaos is a thing impossible (Dillmann). Indeed, the earth is now described to us as tohu wabohu, as a tehom, over which darkness spread. But this expresses something wholly other than what is commonly understood by chaos. The word tohu occurs many times, especially in Isaiah, and everywhere brings to mind a space that is empty; a place where there is no path and all is untrodden and unformed. The word bohu is further found in Isaiah 34:10 and Jeremiah 4:23, both times in connection with tohu, and expresses the same thought. The state of the earth in Genesis 1:2 is not that of a positive destruction but of a yet unformed being. There is no light, no life, no organic being, no form and shape of things. It is further explained by the fact that it was a tehom, a surging water-mass, shrouded in darkness. The earth is out of water and through water, 2 Peter 3:5, Psalm 104:5, 6. This unformed, undeveloped state has, according to the intent of Genesis, certainly lasted some time, however short. No mere logical supposition is described therein, but a factual state. Only then arises the question, how long this state lasted. This now depends wholly thereon, whether the creation of heaven and earth, of which Genesis 1:1 speaks, falls before or within the first day. Genesis gives no other impression than that the creation of heaven and earth in verse 1 and the unformed state of the earth in verse 2 precede the first day. For in verse 2 there is yet darkness and no light; the day now does not begin with darkness but with light; only through the creation of the light in verse 3 does the day become possible; God therefore named not the darkness but the light day, and the darkness He named night, verse 5; the alternation of light and dark, of day and night, could only take beginning with the creation of the light; only after the light had been, could it become evening and thereafter morning again, and with this morning the first day ended, for Genesis 1 reckons the day from morning to morning. The work of the first day consisted therefore not in the creation of heaven and earth, not in the letting continue of the unformed state, but in the creation of the light and the separation of light and darkness. Against this exegesis there would now be utterly no objection, if it were not elsewhere stated that God created heaven and earth in six days, Exodus 20:11, 31:17. This however can be understood in no other way than of the creatio secunda. For in these two texts the emphasis falls not thereon, that God brought forth all things out of nothing, but that He was busied with the forming of heaven and earth for six days, and this is set before us as an example. Clearly there is a distinction between what God does "in the beginning," Genesis 1:1, cf. John 1:1, and what He, speaking in the six days, does in Genesis 1:3ff.; the unformed state of Genesis 1:2 separates the two from each other. The creatio prima is immediate, immediata; it is a bringing forth of heaven and earth out of nothing; it presupposes utterly no preexisting stuff; it took place with time. But the creatio secunda, which begins with verse 3, is not direct and immediate; it presupposes the stuff created in verse 1 and joins itself thereto, and it takes place determinately in time and indeed in six days. Hence this creatio secunda already reaches forward into the works of preservation and government; it is already in part preservation and no longer mere creation. Moreover, in the same moment as heaven and earth are created by God in verse 1, they are also preserved by Him. The creatio passes forthwith and immediately into the conservatio and gubernatio. But yet the work of the six days, Genesis 1:3ff., must still be reckoned to the creation. For all the creatures which are brought forth in those six days—light, firmament, sun, moon, stars, plant, animal, man—are according to Genesis not come forth through immanent powers according to fixed laws out of the present stuff in the way of evolution. That stuff was powerless to bring forth all that solely along natural ways, through immanent development. It had not in itself the fitness, the potentia thereto; it had only a potentia obedientialis. God brought forth, speaking, creating, the whole cosmos out of the primal stuff of Genesis 1:1. With each new formation He indeed joined Himself to what already existed, but the higher is yet not come forth from the lower solely through immanent power. There was each time needful a creating word of God's almighty power.
3. The work of creation is by Herder and others divided into two triads, in such wise that the works of the second triad answer to those of the first. There is indeed agreement between the work of the first and of the fourth day; but the second and fifth, and likewise the third and sixth, stand not in such parallelism. For on the fifth day not only the birds in the firmament are created, but also the fishes and water creatures, which much more agrees with the work of the third day. Yet in the works of creation there is clearly a progress noticeable from the lower to the higher, from the general presuppositions for organic life to this organic life itself in its sundry forms. Better therefore is the old division of the whole work of creation into three parts: creatio Gen. 1:1, 2, distinctio on the first three days, between light and darkness, heaven and earth, land and sea, and ornatus on the fourth to the sixth day, the peopling of the prepared earth with all manner of living beings. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 74. Yet this division also is not meant as a strict separation, for the plants, created on the third day, serve also for adornment and so forth. The distinctio and ornatus make an end to the tohuwabohu of the earth. The unformed and undeveloped state of the earth, of which verse 2 speaks, may however not for a moment be thought of as passive. However long or short it may have lasted, there were powers and workings in it. For we read that God's Spirit hovered over the waters. The verb rachaph means: to hover with wings over something, Deut. 32:11, and the use of this word proves that by ruach elohim not the wind but specifically the Spirit of God must be thought of, to whom also elsewhere the work of creation is ascribed, Ps. 33:6, 104:30. The Spirit of God as the principle of creaturely being and life works forming, life-giving upon the water mass of the earth and thus meets the creative word of God, which on the six days, in connection with the existing, calls the sundry formations of the creatures into being. The work of the first day consists now in the creation of the light, in the separation of light and darkness, in the alternation of day and night, thus also in movement, change, becoming. Light is namely according to the now most accepted hypothesis of Huygens no substance, but an immensely swift undulation or vibration of the ether atoms, and thus nothing but movement. It is therefore well to be distinguished from the light-givers, sun, moon, and stars, and according to Genesis precedes them. Light is also the most general presupposition for all life and development. While the alternation of day and night is only yet needful for animal and man, light is already a need for the plant world; it gives moreover form, shape, color to all things. On the second day distinction is made between the firmament, the air and cloud heaven, which according to optical appearance often is called a curtain, Ps. 104:2, a veil, Isa. 40:22, a sapphire, Ex. 24:10, Ezek. 1:22, a mirror, Job 37:18, a roof and vault over the earth, Gen. 7:11, Deut. 11:17, 28:12, Ps. 78:23 and so forth, and the earth with her waters, Ps. 24:2, 136:6. The work of separation and distinction, begun on the first day, is continued on the second; the distinction of light and darkness, of day and night, is now made serviceable to the separation of heaven and earth; of air and clouds above, of earth and water below. At the end of the second day the words are lacking: God saw that it was good. From this it has been inferred that the number two was an ominous number or also that on that day hell was created; but the reason is doubtless this, that the work of the second day hangs closely together with that of the third day, and is first completed in the separation of the waters; thereafter follows also the divine approval. For on the third day the separation is completed between earth and water, land and sea; therewith the earth has become a cosmos, with continents and seas, mountains and valleys, lands and streams. Without doubt all these formations have not taken place except under the mightiest workings of the mechanical and chemical powers lying in nature. These are aroused by the mighty word of God and by the animation of the Spirit and have given to the earth her cosmic shape. From now henceforth other, namely organic, powers come forth. The earth is yet naked and bare. Therefore this day does not end before also in general the green is created, which then especially splits into two kinds, namely herbs and trees, which each have their own seed and thus propagate themselves. This plant world could now not do without light, but could do without the sun. But thus it is not with the animal and human world; before these are created, therefore first on the fourth day sun, moon, and stars must be prepared. There is not enclosed herein that the mass of matter for these planets was then first created, but only that all those thousands of planets now first on this day became what they henceforth would be for the earth; that they together fill the place of the light and for the earth are signs of wind and weather, of events and judgments; for regulation of fixed times for agriculture, navigation, feasts, the life of man and animal; and finally for reckoning of days and months and years. The fourth day thus relates the appearance of the starry heaven for the earth; day and night and so forth are henceforth regulated by the sun; the earth becomes a member, a part of the universe; she is set in harmony with all other planets. Now the earth as dwelling place of the ensouled, living beings, of animals and men is ready. On the fifth day the waters themselves through the mighty word of God bring forth all water animals, and the air is filled with all manner of fowl. Of both kinds of animals a great multitude is created, in all manner of sort and number. And thereupon follows then on the sixth day the creation of the land animals, which at God's command come forth from the earth, specifically in three kinds, wild beasts, cattle, and creeping things; and finally also the creation of man, who after a determinate counsel of God is formed as to his body from the earth and as to his soul directly by God created. Thus was the whole creation completed. God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good. He had a good pleasure in His own work. Therefore He rested on the seventh day. His rest is a consequence of His satisfaction and good pleasure in His works, which now as works of creation are completed, but is at the same time positively a blessing and hallowing of the seventh day, that the creation, continuing in that seventh day, blessed by God with all manner of powers, hallowed by God to His service and honor, may now henceforth itself develop under the providence of the Lord and answer to her destiny.
4. This hexaemeron has been handled by Christian theology with special fondness. The writings are amazingly rich, but are almost fully worked through in the weighty book of Dr. Zöckler, History of the Ties between Theology and Natural Knowledge with Special Heed to the Creation Story , 2 Parts, Gütersloh 1877/79. The oldest Christian unfolding of the hexaemeron is kept in the second book of Theophilus' writing to Autolycus ch. 9-38. More or less fully it is also dealt with by Tertullian, Against Hermogenes ch. 19 and following, by Origen in his homily on the hexaemeron as the beginning of his 17 homilies on Genesis, then especially by Basil, in Hexaemeron Homilies IX , Gregory of Nyssa, Apology in Hexaemeron , John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith book II; in the West especially by Lactantius, Divine Institutions II ch. 8-12, Ambrose, in Hexaemeron Books VI , Augustine, especially On Genesis Literally book XII, The City of God XI 4 and following, Confessions XI-XIII and so on. These works were drawn upon by Isidore, Bede, Alcuin and others and then stay the groundwork of the handling of the hexaemeron in the schoolmen, Lombard, Sentences II dist. 12-18, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 44-102, Bonaventure, Sentences II dist. 12-18, Breviary II ch. 1-5 and so on. Also after the Reformation the same world-view and the same understanding of the hexaemeron hold sway both in the Roman and the Protestant theology. From the Roman side the foremost workings are those of Cajetan, in his commentary on Genesis, Eugubinus in his Cosmopoeia 1535, Catharinus in his clearings on the first 5 chapters of Genesis, Pererius in his four-part work on the first book of Moses, Lapide in his known commentary, Molina in his tract on the work of the six days, Suarez in his commentary on the first part of the Summa , Petavius in his theological dogmas, tract on the work of the six first days of the world, Becanus, Scholastic Theology tract IV on the works of the six days and so on. From the Lutherans the foremost are: Luther's commentary on Genesis, Melanchthon's notes on Gen. 1-6, Chemnitz, Loci Theologici 1610, Quenstedt, Didactic-Polemic Theology I 431 and following, Hollaz, System of Theology . Still richer is the writings among the Reformed. Not only in commentaries on Genesis, of Calvin, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Musculus, Vermigli, Piscator, de Dieu, Cocceius and so on, is this stuff handled. And also not only in dogmatic works as of Polanus, Gomarus, Heidegger, van Mastricht, Maresius, de Moor and so on does it come up; but also many sundry treatises were given to it, such as of Capito, Hexaemeron: God's Work Explained 1539, Daneau, Christian Physics, or Christian Disputation on the Beginning and Use of Created Things 1575, Zanchi, On the Works of God Created within the Span of Six Days , Works III 217-480, Voetius, Disputations I 552-881, V 148-241, Rivet, Theological and Scholastic Exercises on the First Book of Moses , Works 1651 I, Hottinger, Ktisis Hexaemeros , that is, Theological-Philological Examination of the Creation History, Heidelberg 1659, see further, Walch, Selected Theological Library I 242, Martin Vitringa II 93.
All these works stand on the standpoint of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldview. The earth rests unmoving in the middle point of the world-all; all stars and the whole heaven move around her. That those stars moved freely in the air-space, one could not think; one set it forth so, that each star was fastened in a sphere. One must thus take on as many heaven-spheres as one saw stars of unlike moving and round-time. And now it was not the stars but the spheres which moved and bore along the stars fastened therein. The heaven-vault thus stands as a system of eight or more together-centered spheres, which without empty between-spaces are shoved into each other; the highest, outermost sphere is that of the fixed stars, the "first heaven," as Aristotle named her. The earth was thought as a ball or as a disk, by water surrounded. Only a few took on, that there could be antipodes and that there was also land on the other side of the ocean; in the rule this both was thrown back. This Ptolemaic worldview had now naturally also sway on the out-legging of the six-day work. There are therein clearly two directions to set apart. The one throws back the time-like mark of the six days, writes thereto at most visionary meaning, lets all at once and together be shaped, and comes often to all kinds of likeness-wise clearings. She is stood for already by Philo and later in the Christ-like church by Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, Erigena, Abelard, Cajetan, Cano, Gonzalez and so on, also by Moses Maimonides, More Nebuchim II c. 30. The other direction holds the letter-like sense of the shaping-tale, namely also of the six days, fast; she was followed by Tertullian, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem, Damascene, and came thereafter in the school-learning, in Roman and Protestant god-learning nearly to out-shutting lordship, although the other out-legging of Augustine always with esteem was spoken of and never outlawed, Lombard, Sentences II dist. 15, 5. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 74 art. 2. In spite of this weighty unlikeness in the out-legging of Genesis 1 there was yet in the worldview full together-stemming. The Ptolemaic set-up held still in the newer time stand, long after Copernicus with his clearing of the moving of the heaven-bodies had stepped forth. It was utterly not the church and the right-belief as such, which set itself against the newer worldview, as one so gladly sets it forth, for example Draper in his History of the Struggle between Religion and Science. Haarlem 1887. But it was the Aristotelianism, that on each field, as well on that of knowledge as of god-service, of art as of church, against the newer time sought to hand-hold itself. Thence, that Christ-like church and god-learning, although they now overall have switched the Ptolemaic for the Copernican guess-work, yet unto the now-day have stayed being and against the end of this hundred-year show not at all to the death written off. It is a proof, that church and god-learning to these worldviews are not so bound, that they with these would stand and fall. Indeed is not in to see, why the Copernican guess-work, if she otherwise the star-wise showings enough clears, by the Christ-like god-learning as such must be thrown back. For well speaks the Writ always earth-centered and tells she also the uprising of the things from the standpoint of the earth out, but she uses therein that same tongue of day-like undergoing, wherein we yet always speak, even if we of the moving of the heaven-bodies a wholly other fore-setting have, than that overall lorded in the time, when the Bible books were written. Even can without holding back owned, that also the Bible writers no other worldview had, than that then overall was taken on; there is indeed setting apart between authority of history and authority of norm, cf. I 371-373. From this tongue of the Holy Writ is to clear, that the wonder, which is told in Joshua 10:12, 13 and 2 Kings 20:9, Isaiah 38:8, is marked by the still-standing and back-turning of the sun. Therewith is not at all out-made, that the wonder itself stood in an objective still-standing and back-turning of the sun. Without that it rationally is out-legged away, can it and is it also on many-wise cleared, cf. Dilloo, The Wonder at the Steps of Ahaz. Amsterdam 1885. Also we would now the same showings on the same wise out-press; the Writ tells the wonder as deed, she says not, on which wise it to stand came. But yet stronger; even if in star-wise sense the earth for us the middle point no more is, she is it yet well enough in godly and right-wise sense, and that stays she for all men without setting apart; the knowledge can herein nothing change. The man is in certain sense the weakest of all shaped things; the strength of many beasts, the might of kind goes his very far over; and yet is he the king of the earth, the crown of the shaping; he is weak as a reed, but he is a thinking reed. And so may the earth thousands times smaller be than many wandering stars; she is and stays in right-wise sense the middle point of the world-all, she is the only wandering star, fitted to a dwelling-place for higher beings; here is the kingdom of God set up, here becomes the strife between light and darkness striven, here readies God Himself in the gathering an everlasting dwelling. We stay therefore from this earth upward see to above, whence both in body-wise and right-wise sense the rain and the sun-shine and the growth come must, without that we therewith in star-wise sense the place of the heaven set or his lying know in the world-all. This is however surely shallow said, that the knowledge-seeking search to God and the angels their dwelling would have taken away. For though Lalande dared himself to say, that he the whole world-all had through-sought and nowhere God had found; the world-all with his unmeasurable spaces is for our bounded look yet one riddle, and who God not finds in his straight nearness, in in-wit and heart, in word and gathering, that shall Him also not find in the world-all, though he arms himself the eye also with the best far-seer, Ebrard, The Faith in the Holy Writ and the Outcomings of the Search of Kind, Turned by Dr. A. v. d. Linde, Amsterdam 1862. Paul Wigand, The Earth the Middle Point of the World. Booklet 144 of the Time-Questions of the Christ Folk-Life.
5. The Copernican worldview thus meets with no objection from Christian theology. However, it is quite different with the hypotheses that are nowadays accepted by science for the formation of our planetary system and of the earth. Regarding the first, Kant and Laplace proposed the hypothesis that our planetary system, and actually even the whole universe, was originally one gaseous chaos, of very high temperature and rotating from west to east on its own axis. This rotation had the result that pieces flew off, which, since they continued to move in the same direction, gradually took on the form of spheres. Haeckel, Natural History of Creation , 5th ed. Fr. Pfaff, History of Creation with Special Consideration of the Biblical Creation Account , 3rd ed. Büchner, Force and Matter , 16th ed. Now it deserves first of all to be noted that this hypothesis, however deistically conceived, was by no means presented by Kant to set God aside, but he judged that this chaotic state of all matter was the simplest that could follow upon nothing, and that this matter itself was all so formed by God as the first cause, that through immanent forces, according to fixed laws, it could produce the present world system without any miraculous intervention of God. However, this hypothesis is further insufficient for explaining the origin of the universe, of motion, of organic beings. In general, it must be noted that however primitive and chaotic that first state of all matter may be thought, and however many millions of years it may be pushed back, it yet provides no rest for thought. One will then either have to acknowledge with Kant that this very first state of the creature in its entirety immediately depends on God and follows upon nothing, or one will have to see in that chaotic state not only the beginning of the present world system but also the end and destruction of a preceding world, and so on to infinity, and thus eternalize matter and motion. Lange, History of Materialism II. Strauss, The Old and the New Faith . Büchner, ibid. Haeckel ibid. But further, this hypothesis is burdened by many objections and does not explain the phenomena. Not all need to be discussed here, for example, not the fact that there are also heavenly bodies that have a retrograde motion and rotate not from west to east but from east to west. However, they are so weighty that they are acknowledged even by Haeckel. Let it only be recalled that, given the gaseous nebulous mass and given also the mechanical motion, this is by no means sufficient to explain this world system. For motion and matter are not enough. There must also be direction in that motion, and besides matter there must also have existed something else to explain the world of spiritual phenomena. Why did this world system arise from that nebulous mass, which everywhere reveals order and harmony and which would collapse at the slightest deviation? How could the universe come into being through an unconscious, purposeless motion of atoms? The chance of such a world whole from such a chaotic state is highly improbable, and actually entirely impossible. And added to this is that this hypothesis, even if it explained the phenomena, would still remain a hypothesis. For what conclusion can be drawn from possibility to actuality? A posse ad esse non valet consequentia . What proof can be brought forward that the world system could not only arise in that way now, but actually did arise? There is a great difference between a logical supposition and an actual state that once would have existed. When natural science investigates phenomena, it tries to reduce them to their simplest form. Therefore, in the end, it assumes very primitive and simplest data, atoms, ether, chaos, etc. But these are logical suppositions to which it comes. That such atoms once existed purely as atoms, in a most primitive state, in a state that followed upon nothing, is by no means proven thereby. Just as the original elements of things (atoms, dynamides, monads) are, so also the primitive states that one lets precede the formation are nothing but auxiliary conceptions, no reality. It is the same with that religionless state which is nowadays assumed in the investigation of the origin of religion, cf. I, or as with the state of nature of Rousseau, from which the state arose through social contract. Perhaps all such hypotheses as auxiliary conceptions in thought, like the auxiliary lines in mathematics, can render some service, but they are therefore no real explanations, no factual principles of the existing. In the end, what no science can teach, revelation teaches, which is moreover confirmed by the tradition of all peoples, namely, that it pleased God in the formation of the world to proceed from the imperfect to the perfect, from the simple to the composite, from the lower to the higher. There lies a truth in the theory of evolution which is also acknowledged by Scripture. Genesis 1:2 expresses that clearly. But the state of creation there is a real state; no chaos in the proper sense, no hyle in the Aristotelian sense, no prima materia without form, no unthinkable mass of pure atoms, but a state of formlessness of earth and heaven, which existed for a time, in which the Spirit of God was hovering and brooding at work. Therefore, it is not permissible, as with many Christian apologists, to adopt the hypothesis of Kant-Laplace without any form of criticism and then to be thankful that one has been able to insert it so well into Genesis 1:2. Rather, Scripture relates to us a real state, and science speaks of suppositions that are not scientifically tenable. Pfaff, History of Creation . Ulrici, God and Nature , 2nd ed. Reusch, Bible and Nature , 4th ed. T. Pesch, The Great World Riddles , 2nd ed. II. Braun, The Kant-Laplace Theory of World Formation , in New Church Journal III 9th issue. Steudel, Christianity and Natural Science , Gütersloh. Schanz, On New Attempts at Apologetics , Regensburg.
6. A like difference, as in the forming of our world system, shows itself in the unfolding history of the earth. Geology has on the ground of the earth layers and of the fossils found therein of plants, animals, and men built a guess about the unfolding periods of the earth. Thereafter is the oldest period the azoic or that of the prime formation, wherein chiefly the outburst rock kinds are formed and yet no spoor of living life is found.
Thereupon followed the paleozoic period or that of the first formation, wherein besides sundry rock kinds chiefly also the coal is formed and also already plants of the lowest sort and all classes of animals besides birds and suckle-beasts are met with. In the third, mesozoic period or that of the second formation falls among others the chalk formation and sundry plants and animals, also the first egg-laying and suckle-beasts, are found.
The thereon following third or cainozoic formation runs from the chalk formation to the ice time and brings forth besides plants and land- and sweet-water animals chiefly also the robber-beasts and many of the died-out suckle-beasts. According to a few, e.g., Burmeister, History of Creation 7th ed. 1872 p. 612, lived together with these also already man in the third period; but according to the most is man first come forth at the end of this time-span, after the ice time, in the fourth period, Pfaff, Creation History p. 485 ff. Ulrici, God and Nature p. 353 ff. Reusch, Bible and Nature 184 ff. Zittel, From the Prime Time, 2nd ed. 1875 p. 537.
This teaching of the earth-learned periods stands without doubt on much firmer ground than the guess of Kant; it rests on givens, which the search of the earth layers puts in the hand. Here bears the strife between opening and knowledge then also a much earnest character. On many points is there difference and with-saying.
First in the time, and second in the order, wherein the sundry shaped things are arisen. What the time concerns, is the difference very great. The time-reckoning of the LXX turns markedly off from that of the Hebrew text. The church fathers held themselves often to the Greek over-setting and reckoned then the time from the shaping of the world to the in-taking of Rome by the Goths on 5611 years, Eusebius, Augustine City of God XII 10.
In later time, chiefly since the Reforming, gave one overall to the time-reckoning of the Hebrew text the fore-choice and reckoned then, that the shaping of the world had stead had in 3950 before Christ (Scaliger), or 3984 (Kepler, Petavius), 3943 (Bengel), 4004 (Usher); the Jews tell now the year 5658, cf. Zöckler, The Teaching of the Prime State of Man 1879 p. 289 ff. Schanz, The Age of Mankind, Freiburg 1896 p. 1 ff.
But one tried yet narrower reckoning. There was earnest strife over, whether the shaping had stead had in the spring or in the harvest; the first was the feeling of Cyril, Basil, Bede, Cajetan, Molina, Lapide, Luther, Melanchthon, Gerhard, Alsted, Polanus, G. J. Vossius etc.; the second was warded by Petavius, Calvisius, Calov, Danaeus, Zanchius, Voetius, Maresius, Heidegger, Turretin and others. Sometimes was the date yet nearer set, on 25 March or on 26 October, Voetius Disp. I 587. Hagenbach, History of Teachings 630 note.
Against that place the earth-learned and nature-knowers of this time their reckonings, that built are on the turning of the earth in bond with her flat-making at the poles, the to the outer-face ever steadily lessening warmth of the earth, the forming of the deltas at Nile and Mississippi, the formation of the earth layers, of the sundry rock kinds, chiefly of the coal etc.
They are fable-like tallies, even as with some heathen folk, that thus for the eld of the earth are taken on. Cotta speaks of an unbound time-space, Lyell of 560 million, Klein of 2000 million, Helmholtz of 80 million, and even Pfaff of at least 20 million years, Pfaff, Creation 640-666, Id. The Age of the Earth, in the Time Questions of Christian Folk Life VII. Peschel, Folk Lore, 5th ed. p. 42-52. Haeckel, Natural Creation p. 340 ff.
But in the second stead is there also very great difference between the shaping tale in Genesis and the meanings of many learned about the order, wherein the shaped beings are arisen. To name but a few points: according to the Writ is well the light already shaped on the first day, but our sun system is first formed on the fourth day, after on the second and third day the earth already readied and with a lush plant growth over-decked was; according to the earth-learned is the order just turned around.
According to Genesis is on the third day well the plant realm shaped, but animals are first shaped on the fifth day; the earth learning however teaches, that in the first or paleozoic period also already animals of lower sort and fishes fore-come.
Genesis tells, that all water animals and all birds were shaped on the fifth, and all land animals with man on the sixth day, but according to the earth learning belong some suckle-beasts also already to the second or mesozoic period. So shows there thus on many weighty points difference to be.
7. Naturally, various attempts at reconciliation have been tried.
First, let the ideal theory be named, so called because it holds only to the idea, not to the letter of the creation story. It sees in Genesis 1 no historical account but a poetical description of the creating deed of God. The six days are no chronologically ordered time periods of longer or shorter length, but only different viewpoints, from which the one created world is each time beheld, to thus give to the limited sight of man a better overview of the whole. To paleontology it is thus wholly left, to fix the time, the way, and the order of the arising of the different periods. One can say that this theory is prepared by the allegorical exegesis, which from old times in the Christian church was customary regarding Genesis 1. Following the lead of Philo and with appeal to Sirach 18:1, God created all things together , Origen, Augustine, and many others taught that God had created all things at once and together; the six days are no truly following one another time periods but they only mark the causal connection, the logical order of the creatures, and describe how the angels successively gained knowledge of the whole of creation. And also among those who held fast to the literal sense of the creation story, allegory yet each time played a great role; the chaos, the light, the term one day instead of first day; the lacking of the divine approval at the end of the second day, the paradise, the creation of Eve, and so on, gave occasion to clever spiritualizations. Such allegorizing, mythologizing, and rationalizing explanations of the creation story came especially into honor after the awakening of natural science and were applied by Hobbes, Spinoza, Beverland, Burnet, Bekker, Tindal, Edelmann, J. L. Schmidt, Reimarus, and others. Herder, Oldest Document of Mankind , saw in Genesis 1 a fair poem of the oldest mankind, which, going out from the becoming day, sang of the seven-day week. Modern philosophy and theology has gone yet further, has with the creation story even rejected the creation concept itself, and sees in Genesis 1 a myth, which at most yet holds a religious kernel. Christian theologians have not gone so far but yet often, to reconcile religion and science, have returned to the allegorical view of Augustine and give up the literal and historical view of Genesis 1. To these belong very many Roman Catholic theologians, Michelis, Development of the Two First Chapters of Genesis 1845 and different essays in his journal Nature and Revelation 1855 f. Reusch, Bible and Nature . Schanz, Apology of Christianity I. Scheeben, Dogmatics II. H. Lüken, The Foundation Document of Mankind's History 1876. Güttler, Natural Research and Bible 1877. Hummelauer, B. Schäfer, and others, cf. Hettinger, Apology III; but also many Protestant theologians such as Zollmann, Bible and Nature in the Harmony of Their Revelations 1869. Dillmann, Commentary on Genesis . Riehm, Christianity and Natural Science Leipzig, Hinrich 1896. Steudel, Christianity and Natural Science Gütersloh 1895. Vuilleumier, The First Page of the Bible , Review of Theology and Philosophy July 1896. September.
A second attempt at reconciliation is the restitution theory. This seeks agreement between revelation and science by separating Genesis 1:2 and 3, ascribing a long duration of existence to the chaos, and placing therein all those phenomena which geology provides. The hexaemeron, which begins with verse 3, tells only of the restoration and preparation of the earth for man. Such a fairly long time span between Genesis 1:1 and 2 was already assumed by Episcopius, Instit. theol. IV sect. 3 c. 3, Limborch, Theol. Christ. II c. 19-21 and others, in order thus to make room for the fall of the angels. It was taken over in the previous century by the rationalists J. G. Rosenmüller, J. D. Michaelis, Reinhard; found entrance especially in this century among the theosophists Oetinger, Hahn, St. Martin, Baader, Schelling, Fr. v. Meyer, Steffens, Schubert, Keerl, who placed therein the fall of the angels and the destruction of creation caused thereby; and is also taught by Chalmers, Cardinal Wiseman, Zusammenhang zwischen Wissenschaft und Offenbarung , German by Haneberg, 3rd ed. Vigouroux, Les livres saints III. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I and others.
A third theory, the concordistic, seeks to gain harmony between Scripture and science by taking the creation days as periods of longer span. The exegesis of the six days already early brought forth troubles. Sun, moon, and stars were first wrought on the fourth day; the three days going before must therefore in any case be of another kind than the last three. Basil made it out so, that God wrought the three first days through an outflow and drawing in of the light wrought on the first day. But this making out did not fulfill all, for instance not Augustine, who sometimes strays from his own Simultan-theory. Moreover there was still strife over whether the creation work on each day was fulfilled in one twinkling, or only stepwise came to be in the run of each day. Descartes had namely said that from the chaos without any creation deed of God the pure natural things could have come forth. The thought of unfolding was thereby put forth. Some Cartesian theologians, such as Wittichius, Allinga, Braun, therefore taught that each creation work took up a day. And Whiston already said that the days must be taken as years, and was followed therein by others. But the father of the concordistic theory was the abbot Jerusalem. It was taken up by natural knowers like de Luc, Cuvier, Hugh Miller, Pfaff and so on, by theologians like Lange, Delitzsch, Rougemont, Godet, Ebrard. Luthardt. Zöckler among others, Brandt, Hengstenberg, also Roman Catholics like Heinrich, Palmieri, Simar, Pesch and so on. Ofttimes many have bound this theory with the restitution theory, and then still made do with a likeness in head matters. Hugh Miller for instance let the azoic period fall together with Genesis 1:3, the paleozoic with Genesis 1:6-13, the mesozoic with Genesis 1:14-23, the cenozoic with Genesis 1:24.
Finally, the fourth theory, which has been called the anti-geological, holds to the literal and historical understanding of Genesis 1, and seeks to place the results of geology partly within the six days of creation, and partly thereafter in the time from Adam to Noah, especially in the flood. From of old, the flood was deemed of great meaning. Men reasoned about its total or partial nature, which has always been in debate, about the building of the ark, about the height of the flood, and so forth. But the flood gained geological meaning only after Newton; Thomas Burnet put forth his Sacred Theory of the Earth in 1682 and therein took a very great difference between the time before and after the flood; with him, this becomes the downfall of an old world and the birth of a wholly new one. It was a mighty upheaval that changed the whole face of the earth, gave being to oceans and mountains, made an end to the mild spring-like weather, to the lush fruitfulness, to the uncommon lifespan of men before that time, and above all brought it about that the earth's axis, which before stood even with the sun's axis, came to stand slantwise to the earth's path. This wholly new theory was fiercely fought against, among others by Spanheim and Leydecker, but was yet further unfolded by Whiston, Clüver, and many others. Toward the end of the last hundred-year span, this flood-based theory was more and more given up, but it yet stayed in honor with many right-believing theologians, both Roman and Protestant. The upholders of this try at mending keep likening the Bible's flood to the diluvium or ice age of geology and judge in link therewith that the flood was worldwide and stretched over the whole earth. Most geologists and theologians, such as Sedgwick, Greenough, Buckland, Hitchcock, Hugh Miller, Barry, Dawson, Diestel, Dillmann, Pfaff, Kurtz, Michelis, Reusch, Guttler, also Kuyper, are now in the latest time of the mind that the Bible's flood was a wholly other than geology's diluvium and therefore must be understood as partial; worldwide it can only be called insofar as the whole mankind came to ruin by it, though even this last is still gainsaid by some, such as Cuvier. But the strife over this weighty and hard question is yet far from settled in boon of this last thought; the newest study on the flood, by Martin Gander, is a strong plea for the flood-based understanding.
Diestel, The Flood, German Time- and Strife-Questions, no. 137. Kosters, The Biblical Flood-Stories Compared with the Babylonian, Theological Journal 1885. Reusch, Bible and Nature. Schanz, Apology I. Vigouroux, The Holy Books IV. Suess, The Flood, Leipzig 1883. Jürgens, Was the Flood an Earthquake-Wave? Voices from Maria Laach 1884. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood, 1893. Girard, Studies in Biblical Geology. The Deluge before Historical Criticism I, Freiburg 1893. Schwarz, Flood and Folk-Wanderings, Stuttgart 1894. C. Schmidt, The Natural Event of the Flood, Basel 1895. Zöckler, New Yearbook for German Theology 1895, Parts 3 and 4. Martin Gander, The Flood in Its Meaning for Earth-History, Münster 1896.
8. These four attempts to bring Scripture and science into harmony are not in every respect opposed to each other. Even in the first-mentioned ideal theory there lies some truth. For all agree that Scripture does not speak the tongue of science but of daily experience, that it also in the account of creation stands on a geo- or anthropocentric standpoint, and that it thereby does not wish to give lessons in geology or any other science, but also in the account of the origin and becoming of all creatures remains the book of religion, of revelation, of the knowledge of God. Non legitur in Evangelio dominum dixisse: mitto vobis paracletum qui vos doceat de cursu solis et lunae; christianos enim facere volebat, non mathematicos , Augustine, de actis c. Felice Man. Moses, condescending to a rude people, followed what appears to the senses, Thomas, S. Theol. Scripture by profession does not treat those things which we know in philosophy, Alsted, Praecognita , cf. Voetius, Disp. Hettinger, Apol. But when Scripture then from its standpoint, precisely as the book of religion, comes into contact with other sciences and also sheds its light thereon, then it does not suddenly cease to be God's word but remains that. Even when it speaks of the becoming of heaven and earth, it gives no saga or myth or poetic fancy, but even then it gives according to its clear intent history, which deserves faith and trust. And therefore Christian theology, with only a few exceptions, held fast to the literal, historical view of the creation account. Yet it is remarkable that no single confession established anything about the hexaemeron and that also in theology various explanations were tolerated alongside each other. Augustine already admonished to not too hastily deem something contrary to Scripture on this field, to speak on these difficult subjects only after earnest study, and not through ignorance to make oneself ridiculous in the eyes of unbelieving science, de Gen. ad lit. , cf. also Thomas, S. Th. The warning has not always been faithfully taken to heart by theologians. And yet geology can render us excellent service in the explanation of the creation account. Just as the Ptolemaic worldview compelled theology to a different and better explanation of the sun standing still in Joshua 10; just as Assyriology and Egyptology are precious contributions to the explanation of Scripture; just as history often first makes known the prophecy in its true meaning; so also the geological and paleontological investigations in this century serve for a better understanding of the creation account. Let one well consider that the creation and preparation of heaven and earth is a divine work par excellence, a wonder in the absolute sense, full of hidden things and mysteries. And yet in Genesis this work is narrated in such a simple and sober way that there almost seems to be a disharmony between the fact itself and the description thereof. Behind every feature in the creation account lies a world of wonders and mighty deeds of God, which by geology are displayed before our eyes in an endless series of phenomena. From the facts brought to light by geology and paleontology, Scripture and theology have nothing to fear. The world also is a book whose every page is written by God's almighty hand. The conflict arises only because both the text of the book of Scripture and that of nature are often so poorly read and understood. Theologians are not free from blame here, and have often in the name not of Scripture but of their own incorrect view condemned science. And natural researchers have repeatedly explained the facts and phenomena which they discovered in a way and placed them in the service of a worldview which was justified neither by Scripture nor by science. For the time being, it would be advisable that geology, which is relatively still such a young science and has indeed already investigated much but yet has so endlessly much more to investigate, limit itself to the gathering of material and refrain from drawing conclusions and setting up hypotheses. It is absolutely not yet capable thereof and must yet exercise patience for a long time before it is authorized and competent thereto.
9. When these preliminary remarks are now taken to heart, then it is in the first place likely that the creation of heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1 went before the work of the six days in verse 3 and following by a shorter or longer time. The restitution theory has surely gone astray when it places the fall of the angels and the destruction of the earth in Genesis 1:2. Of this there is not a word spoken; it does not say that the earth became waste and void, but that it was so and that it was created thus; and the waste and void does not at all imply that the earth was destroyed, but that it, although already earth, was yet unformed, without shape or form. But otherwise it is correct that the creation of heaven and earth and the waste and void state of the earth cannot be placed within the first day; this began only and could by its nature only begin with the light. The first day is not formed by the original darkness and by the light created thereafter, but it is formed by the first change of evening and morning, which entered after the creation of the light. The darkness of which Genesis 1:2 speaks was not the first evening; but only after the light was created did it become evening and then morning. And with that morning the first day was finished, which had begun with the creation of the light; the day in Genesis begins and ends with the morning, cf. Keil, Delitzsch and others on Genesis. Also Augustine, Confessions XII 8, Lombard, Sentences II dist. 12, 1. 2, Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 74 art. 2, Petavius, de sex dier. opif. I c. 9 n. 2 and others rightly judged therefore that the creation of heaven and earth and the waste state of the earth took place before any day. Thus also only comes to its right that the creation in Genesis 1:1 is simply told as a fact without any further description, but that the preparation of the earth, Genesis 1:3 and following, is told at length. Genesis 1:1 says only that God is the Creator of all things, but makes no mention that God created them by his Word and Spirit. Naturally this is not denied; but it is not stated there; and just as little is stated in how much time and in what way God created heaven and earth, and how long the unformed state of the earth lasted. Only when the six-day work takes a beginning is it said that also that unformed earth was upheld and made fruitful by God's Spirit, Genesis 1:2, and that all things on and in that earth were brought into being by the Word of God, Genesis 1:3 and following; in the distinction and adornment of the earth during the six days God's wisdom comes out, Calvin on Genesis 1:3. But even if one wanted, with a view to Exodus 20:11, 31:17, to bring what is told in Genesis 1:1 and 2 within the first day, then thereby only would be obtained that the first day was a wholly unusual one. It would then have begun in the moment of creation, and would first for a time have been dark, Genesis 1:2. In any case this exegesis acknowledges the truth that lies enclosed in the above-mentioned concordistic theory in the second place. Let it be fully granted that the view of the creation days as periods arose on account of geology. Thereby it is by no means judged; the question is only whether Scripture, without violence being done to its sense, allows this view. Formerly one thought Joshua 10:12 incompatible with the Ptolemaic worldview, now it is rejected by no one on that ground; everyone acknowledges that the words of Scripture allow another view than that which formerly was held for the only true one. The prophetic expectations prove in reality to extend over much longer periods of time than the words in which they are clothed suggest at first reading. The day of the Lord comprises a much longer period than the word itself contains. The apostles spoke of a little time, the end, the last time, the last hour, etc., and yet since their word eighteen centuries have sped by. With a view to this wholly peculiar standard which Holy Scripture repeatedly applies in time determinations, it is a priori not impossible that also the days in Genesis 1 are to be taken as periods. But there are also positive data that make this exegesis not necessary but yet possible. On the expressions often occurring in Scripture: in the days of, at the end of days (after many years), all the day (always), on the day that (when), etc., too much emphasis is often laid; the figurative meaning of the word day in Old and New Testament, e.g., Isaiah 2:2, 11, 13:6 etc., Matthew 24:22, Luke 10:12, John 9:4, Acts 2:20, 17:31, Romans 2:16, 1 Corinthians 3:13, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 4, has likewise not sufficient proof power; and the appeal to Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 also does little to the point. But the following is of importance. First, it is, as was shown above, in conflict with Genesis 1 to bring the primary creation in the unformed state of the earth to the first day. If one nevertheless does that, this first day becomes in any case a wholly unusual one, which begins with darkness and whose duration is not to be calculated. Second, the first three days of the secondary creation are also according to the intention of Genesis calculated by a wholly different standard than the following three. The essence of day and night consists not in a shorter or longer duration but in the alternation of light and darkness. This alternation is for the first three days not wrought by the sun, which was created only on the fourth day, but came about in another way by the light created in verse 3. If however this is the case, the length of those first three days is also not to be determined. Third, from this it follows that also the following three days can be taken in the same way and in agreement with the first three days as periods. For indeed on the fourth day sun, moon, and stars were created and it is in itself thus possible that the second trio of days was determined by the rotation of the earth. But the creation story says indeed that sun, moon, and stars were then made and obtained their destiny for the earth, but it says not a word that that destiny was immediately fully reached on that same day. The creation period itself was in wholly other circumstances than those that entered after the completion of the creation work. Only then was everything finished and determined. Fourth, it is very difficult to place on the sixth day all that Genesis 1 and 2 let happen thereon. On that day must then fall the creation of the animals, Genesis 1:24, 25, the forming of Adam, Genesis 1:26, 2:7, the planting of the garden, Genesis 2:8-14, the proclamation of the probation command, Genesis 2:16, 17, the leading of the animals to and their naming by Adam, Genesis 2:18-20, the sleep of Adam and the creation of Eve, Genesis 2:21-23. This may now not be impossible, yet it is not likely. Yes, if Scripture in Genesis 1:26-31 mentions the creation of Adam and Eve in one breath and makes not the least mention of all that the second creation story inserts between, and yet places all that on the sixth day, Genesis 1:31, thereby the possibility that the days are periods is sufficiently proved. Fifth, it is not the intention of Genesis to show that the creation of all things took place precisely in 6 × 24 hours, no minute shorter or longer. But day denotes in the creation story the time in which God was creatively active. With each morning He gives being to a new world; the evening enters when He has brought it into being. The creation days are workdays of God. By a sixfold renewed labor He has prepared the whole earth and changed the chaos into a cosmos. This is set before us as an example in the Sabbath command. As for God, so also for man after six days' labor the rest enters. For Israel that creation time was also the basis for the division of the church year. And for the whole world it remains a type of the aeons of this dispensation, which once ends in the world Sabbath, in the eternal rest, Hebrews 4. Sixth and finally, on each creation day much more happened than the sober words of Genesis make us suspect. As in the Decalogue one single sin comprehends many others under it, so also in the creation story of each day only the chief thing is named, that which is the best known and most important for man. Scripture itself proves that, for the first creation story contains nothing of the paradise, the naming of the animals, Adam's sleep, etc., which are first mentioned in the second creation story. And further, natural science teaches us to know all sorts of creatures to which the writer of Genesis gave not a moment's thought; all sorts of chemical elements, many minerals and plants, and various kinds of animals, insects, infusoria, bacteria, are not named in Genesis. They must however yet have been created, and thus find a place in the hexaemeron. On each day the creation work was surely much greater and richer than Genesis reports to us in its simple sublime story.
10. Geology and Scripture. With this understanding of the creation story, the findings of geological research can very well be brought into agreement. But one must certainly know what those findings are. As soon as one undertakes a somewhat precise investigation into them, however, one encounters all sorts of difficulties and everything becomes all the more uncertain the deeper one investigates and the further one penetrates. Naturally, no one has or can have any objection to the facts that geology brings to light. Those facts are just as much words of God as the content of Holy Scripture, and thus to be accepted by every believer. But from those facts the exegesis that geologists present must be strictly distinguished. The phenomena that the earth displays are one thing; the combinations, hypotheses, conclusions that the investigators of the earth connect with them are another. Not reckoning now the by no means imaginary possibility that the observation, ascertainment, and description of geological facts and phenomena sometimes stand very much under the influence of an a priori worldview, geology today unanimously teaches that the earth's surface is composed of different layers, all of which clearly bear the marks of having been deposited in water; that these earth layers, where and insofar as they are present somewhere, always occur in a certain order, so that, for example, a lower formation never lies between higher ones; and finally that these earth layers contain a great mass of fossils, which in turn are not scattered haphazardly through all layers, but are of lower kinds the lower they occur in the sediments. Those are the facts; and upon them geologists have built all those lengthy geological periods that were already enumerated earlier. But precisely against these geological periods there are very serious objections.
1º. First, it deserves consideration that geology is still a young science. It is not yet a hundred years old. In the first half of its existence, among men like von Buch, de Saussure, and so on, it was by no means hostile to Scripture; only when Lyell and others placed it in the service of the theory of evolution did it become a weapon for combating the biblical creation story. This consideration alone calls for caution; as geological science becomes older and richer, it will probably revise itself on this point.
2º. Geology can be called the archaeology of the earth. It acquaints us with conditions in which the earth formerly existed. But naturally it tells us next to nothing about the cause, origin, duration, and so on of those conditions. To want to construct a history of the earth from the phenomena of the earth seems a priori as hazardous an undertaking as to want to compose the history of a people from its archaeological remains. As an aid, archaeology may be very useful; it cannot replace history. Geology offers important data, but by its nature it can never provide a history of creation. Whoever attempts that must at every moment resort to conjectures. All birth, said Schelling, is from darkness to light. All origins lie in darkness. If we are not told who our parents and forebears were, then we do not know it. If there is no creation story, the history of the earth remains unknown to us.
3º. Geology can therefore never reach back to the creation story; it stands of itself on the foundation of the created and does not approach Genesis 1; it can ascertain what it observes, but can do no more than surmise the origins thereof. Very aptly and beautifully the geologist Ritter von Holger says: We have the unpleasantness that we have come into the theater only after the curtain has already fallen. We must seek to guess the play that was given from the decorations, props, weapons, and so on left on the stage (these are especially the paleontological discoveries or the fossils), hence it is very excusable if we err.
4º. Although the earth layers, where and insofar as they occur somewhere, lie in a certain order, yet it is equally a fact that they nowhere all occur together and complete, but some are found here, others elsewhere. We nowhere have a complete copy of the book of the earth, but scattered over it a great number of defective copies of the most varied formats and on very different materials.
5º. The series and order of the earth layers and thus also of the geological periods built upon them are therefore not immediately given by the facts, but rest on a combination of facts that is exposed to all sorts of conjecture and error. According to the admission of geologists themselves, much patience and effort are required to establish the correct order of the earth layers.
6º. Of the surface of the earth only a very small portion has been investigated, especially England, Germany, and France. Of the other parts of Europe little is yet known, of the greatest part of Asia, Africa, Australia, and so on, next to nothing is known. Even Haeckel admits that scarcely the thousandth part of the earth's surface has been paleontologically investigated. And this calculation is certainly not estimated too low. Later investigations can thus still bring to light all sorts of other facts. The hypotheses and conclusions of geology are thus in any case built on an insufficient number of data.
7º. It is a fact that is increasingly acknowledged on the side of geology that the time of the formation of the earth layers absolutely cannot be determined from the nature and quality of those layers. The constitution of the layers gives absolutely no clue for obtaining information about the time of their formation. Under the influence of Darwinism, which wanted to explain everything by infinitely small changes in infinitely great periods of time, people have indeed spoken of millions of years. But those are simply mythological numbers, for which all basis is lacking. Geologists still know absolutely nothing about whether the same or different circumstances prevailed earlier. And even under similar circumstances everything grows much faster and stronger in youth than in later years. Moreover, all the grounds on which geologists have thus far built their numbers have proved untenable. Delta formations, uplifts and subsidences of the land, coal formations, and so on have all been abandoned as bases for calculation. Sober natural scientists therefore speak quite differently today. We lack every exact measure for calculating prehistoric events.
8º. The order in which the earth layers occur also cannot be a standard for calculating the time and duration of their formation. Naturally, at a particular place the lower layer is older than the upper, but all right is lacking to join together the different earth layers from different places and thus form a series of formations and periods. Just as now in our seas at one place lime deposits are forming, while at the same time at other places layers of sand or clay are being deposited one upon another, so also in earlier times at different places simultaneously different kinds of layers were formed, and again similar ones at different times. The layers from so-called different periods are not constantly different, and those that are held to be of the same age are not always qualitatively alike. In the same time, similar formations could have taken place in different parts of the earth, just as that still happens many times today.
9º. The time of the formation of the earth layers and the order of their position is therefore today determined almost exclusively by the petrifacts that are found in them. Geology has become dependent on paleontology, and this today stands almost entirely in the service of the theory of evolution. In advance, it is assumed as proven that organic beings have developed from the lower to the higher; and upon that the order and duration of the sediment formations are built. Conversely, the order of the sediments was then used again as a proof for the theory of evolution and thus one was guilty of a vicious circle. Now, however, the theory of evolution is much more refuted than favored by paleontology. For in the different layers, different fossils of plants and animals do not occur in just a few specimens and kinds. But with each layer, geology is suddenly and at once confronted with an inconceivably rich world of organic life, distinguished in kinds and not supplemented by any transitional forms. Even petrifacts of plants and animals are found that have since become extinct, surpassing all later formations in size and strength and making nature known as it were in her first creative power, in her luxuriant fruitfulness.
10º. Now it is indeed true that the fossils are not scattered haphazardly through all layers, but that in certain layers as a rule certain plants and animals occur. But from this neither for the theory of evolution nor for the geological periods can anything be deduced with certainty. For the different kinds of plants and animals were and are distributed over the surface of the earth in accordance with their nature and conditions of life; they lived in different places and zones, and thus they also had to fossilize in the different sediments that were formed in different places. The petrifacts are therefore not representatives of the time of origin of the organic beings, but of the higher or deeper zones in which they lived. Suppose, after all, that the plants and animals now living were suddenly buried in earth layers over the whole earth and fossilized, then neither from the distinct kinds of fossils nor from the different layers in which they occurred could any conclusion be drawn regarding the time of their origin. And in addition there are all sorts of other circumstances that make the division and calculation of the geological periods almost impossible, such as, for example, that the distinct kinds of plants and animals in the first time were not so spread over the whole earth as later; that of hosts of plants and animals no petrifacts are preserved in the different layers; that various causes could have brought some plants and animals to places and zones where they did not naturally live; that the same earth layers usually but by no means always contain the same kinds of fossils, and that therefore earth layers that are qualitatively alike and were first placed in the same time were later assigned elsewhere because new and different petrifacts were found in them, and so on.
11º. Geologists themselves often acknowledge that the geological periods cannot be strictly separated. This comes out especially with the tertiary and quaternary periods. Here almost everything is uncertain. Uncertain is the boundary, the beginning, the end, the duration of those two periods. Uncertain is the cause, the extent, the duration of the so-called ice age; there is difference over whether one or more ice ages must be assumed; and even the whole existence of an ice age is still subject to serious doubt. Uncertain is the cause, the time, and the manner in which the great prehistoric animals perished, whose fossils are sometimes still preserved entirely undamaged. Uncertain is the appearance of man, before or after the ice age, in the tertiary or quaternary period, simultaneously with or after the mammoth, mastodon, and rhinoceros. Uncertain is the cause of the diluvial formations and of their extension over the whole earth. Uncertain is the cause and the time of the mountain and glacier formations, whereby alone the fact that the displacements of the glaciers from the North to the middle of Europe would require for the Scandinavian mountains a height of 44,000 meters presents an almost insuperable difficulty, and so on.
12º. To this comes finally that Scripture and the unanimous tradition of almost all peoples tell of an awesome flood that brought a tremendous upheaval in the whole condition of the earth. According to Scripture, after the flood an entirely different condition sets in for man and earth. Humanity before the flood was distinguished by great understanding, powerful enterprise, titanic courage, long lifespan, strong bodily development, terrible ungodliness. And without doubt nature, the plant and animal kingdoms, corresponded with that. But in the flood almost all people perish, many kinds of plants and animals die out, nature is laid in bonds, a milder dispensation sets in, the dispensation in which we live. These testimonies of Scripture are confirmed from all sides by geology. The man from the tertiary period has not yet been found, and it is not likely that he ever will be found; humanity was then before the flood probably not yet spread over the earth; the flood explains that no fossils of people from before that time remain; the skulls and bones that have been found of people here and there were all from the quaternary time and not different from ours. Furthermore, geology clearly teaches that man still lived contemporaneously with the mammoth, the Hebrew behemoth, Job 40:15, and that the mammoth thus still belongs in historical time. The universality of the diluvial formations proves that the flood must have extended over the whole earth. The mountains arose for a great part in historical time. The causes of the ice age, if it existed at all, are completely unknown and thus could very well have lain in the flood and in the drop in temperature that afterward set in everywhere. Only through and after the diluvium has the earth received its present form. Against the identification of diluvium and flood there is really only one serious objection, and that is the time. Geology usually places the ice age and the diluvium some thousands of years before Christ. But on the one hand it must be remarked against this that the chronology of Scripture is also by no means fixed. One need not go so far as de Sacy, who said: there is no biblical chronology, to yet agree with Voetius when he declared: from Holy Scripture an exact calculation cannot be had. It is not impossible that sometimes generations have been skipped and personal names are meant as names of peoples. And on the other hand the geological calculations, as said above, are much too uncertain for any objection to the above view to be derived from them.
When we sum all this up and take it into account, then Scripture from the moment of creation onward in Genesis 1:1 up to the flood offers more than sufficient time span for the placement of all those facts and phenomena that geology and paleontology have brought to light in this century. It is not to be seen why these all could not find a place in that time. Theology has nothing more to do now; it should not involve itself with the causes of those phenomena; let the explanation of the facts remain to geology! But perhaps Scripture can thereby yet render better service than natural science usually suspects. For it points out to us that creation is a divine work par excellence. In the origin and formation of things, powers have worked, up to the flood conditions have existed, and in that flood a catastrophe has taken place, such as have not occurred since that time. Becoming is always governed by other laws than development. The laws of the creature are not the rule of creation and much less those of the Creator. Furthermore, let theology hold itself only to the indisputable facts that geology makes known, but beware of the hypotheses and conclusions that geologists add to them. Therefore it refrains from every attempt to identify the so-called geological periods with the six creation days. For it is nothing but an unprovable opinion that those periods followed successively and in that order upon one another. Thereby it is not denied that, for example, the azoic formations began already from the moment of creation. Rather, everything points to the fact that they then under the operation of all sorts of mechanical and chemical powers already took a beginning. But geology knows nothing of the fact that they did not also later take place simultaneously with the paleozoic and so on, and conjectures both as to the causes and as to the manner of their origin. And so it is with all other periods. It is very likely that the so-called tertiary period extends still up to the flood, and that diluvium and ice age coincide with this catastrophe. Furthermore, by the simultaneous occurrence of plant and animal fossils in the so-called paleozoic period nothing is decided for the order of their origin. After all, geology knows nothing of the origin of those organic beings; it finds them but does not penetrate to their origin. And it too must assume that the plant kingdom arose before the animal kingdom, for the simple reason that animals live from plants. Insofar as geology can say anything about the order of origin of things, it agrees completely with Scripture. First the inorganic creation; then the organic, beginning with the plant kingdom; then the animal kingdom and this again in the same order, first the water, then the land animals, and among them especially the mammals. Thus we as Christians and as theologians await the certain results of natural science with some confidence. For profound and all-sided investigation theology need not be afraid. Let it only beware of attaching too much value to an investigation that is still entirely new, inaccurate, and incomplete and therefore is repeatedly supplemented by conjectures and suppositions. Let it be on its guard against making concessions too hastily to and seeking agreement with so-called scientific results that every day can be overturned and by deeper investigation can be shown in their untenability. And as science of divine and eternal things, let it have patience until the science that combats it has investigated more deeply and broadly and, as it goes and has gone in most cases, corrects itself.
Cf. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood, 1887. Bosizio, Das Hexaemeron und die Geologie, Mainz 1865. Trissl, Das bibl. Sechstagewerk vom Standp. der kath. Exegese u. v. Standp. der Naturw., 2nd ed., Regensburg 1894. Id., Sündfluth oder Gletscher, 1894. Hahn, Die Entstehung der Weltkörper, Regensburg 1895.
1. Creation culminates in man. In him the spiritual and material worlds unite. According to the first creation account, man, male and female together, was created on the sixth day, Gen. 1:26ff., after the creation of the land animals had gone before. The Scripture also teaches therein a close kinship between man and beast. Both were created on the same day, both were also formed from the dust of the earth. But alongside this kinship there is also a great distinction. The beasts are brought forth by the earth at God's command, Gen. 1:24; man, however, is created after a counsel of God, in his image, to be a lord over all things. These brief indications are explained and expanded in the second creation account. The first creation account gives a general history of creation, which finds its goal and end in man; the second deals especially with the creation of man and the relation in which the other creatures stand to him. In the first account man is the end of nature, in the second the beginning of history. The first account shows how all other creatures prepare for man; the second introduces the history of the temptation and fall of man and therefore describes especially his original state. In the first account the creation of all other things, of heaven, earth, firmament, and so on, is related at length and in orderly sequence, and the creation of man is not discussed in detail; the second presupposes the creation of heaven and earth, gives no chronological but a topical order, and says not when plants and animals were created but describes only in what relation they stand to man according to their nature. Gen. 2:4b-9 does not imply that the plants but only that the garden in Eden was formed after man; the creation of the plants is without doubt thought by the writer to be between verses 6 and 7. Likewise in Gen. 2:18ff. the creation of the beasts is indeed placed after that of man, but not to describe thereby the objective course of creation, but only to indicate that the help for the man is not to be found among the beasts but only in a being like unto him. The description finally of the creation of the woman is in no respect in conflict with that in Gen. 1 but is only a further explanation thereof.
Cf. Hengstenberg, Authenticity of the Pentateuch I 306ff. Oehler, Old Testament Theology § 18. Köhler, Textbook of the Biblical History of the Old Testament I 24. Baumstark, Christian Apologetics II 458ff. H. van Eyck van Heslinga, The Unity of the Creation Account, Leiden, Daamen 1896.
2. This divine origin of man has never been doubted in the Christian church and theology. But outside of revelation, all kinds of guesses have been made about the whence of man. Many tales of the heathens still ascribe the creation of man to the gods or demigods, as for example in Hesiod, Works and Days, Book I. And also philosophy, especially that of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, usually acknowledged in man, formed from the dust of the earth, a higher, reasoning principle that came from the gods. But often both in religion and in philosophy quite other thoughts have been cherished about the origin of man. At times man springs autochthonously from the earth, then he has grown from some animal or other, or he is also held to be the fruit of some tree or other, etc. Cf. Andrew Lang, Research into the Development of Religion, Worship, and Mythology, from the English by Dr. L. Knappert I 1893. With the materialism in the last century in France, this view of the origin of man came into honor again; man was explained wholly and fully, also in his soul-side, from matter. Since that time the idea of evolution has gained ground more and more. Linnaeus 1778 and Blumenbach 1840 still upheld the kind-distinction between man and animal. But Kant already held the passing of man from an earlier animal to a later human state for something that spoke for itself, Critique of Judgment § 77-80, On the Various Races of Men 1775. Lamarck 1744-1829, Saint-Hilaire 1772-1844, Oken 1779-1851, von Baer 1836, H. Spencer 1852, Schaaffhausen 1853, Huxley 1859, Nägeli 1859 were all already supporters of the animal descent of man. Philosophy taught this long before natural science. And Charles Darwin 1809-1882 was thus by no means the first who put forth the teaching linked to his name. His fame has only been that he made a very great host of observations that bore on the life of man and animal and shed light on their kinship; that he knew how to blend these in a unique way and put them in service of the already ruling guess; and that he pointed out a way in which this descent of man from the animal, as it seemed, could be made workable, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection 1859, Dutch translation The Origin of Species, by Dr. T. C. Winkler, 2nd ed. 1883. The Descent of Man 1871, Dutch translation The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, worked by Dr. H. Hartogh Heys van Zouteveen, 3rd printing 1884. A whole host of learned men, Lyell, Owen, Lubbock, Tylor, Hooker, Tyndall, Huxley, Moleschott, Haeckel, Hellwald, Büchner, Vogt etc. deemed thereby the earlier guess as good as proven and gave it out for an unshakeable outcome of natural science. Under Darwinism is now to be understood the teaching that the kinds, in which earlier the living beings were classed, bear no steadfast traits but are changeable; that the higher living beings have come forth from the lower and namely man has slowly grown in the course of the ages from an extinct ape-kind; that the living on its turn arose from the unliving, and that thus evolution is the way in which under the rule of sheer work-wise and mixing-wise laws all that is has come to be. That is the thesis or rather the guess. This evolution Darwin seeks to make clear and workable by the following thoughts: first the wild teaches us everywhere to know a struggle for life, in which each being takes part and by which it is driven to grow and better itself or else go to ground; second the wild chooses out from many plants, animals, men such for ongoing life and breeding (natural selection), which are most favorably shaped, and this natural breeding-choice is upheld by the sexual breeding-choice, whereby each she gives the fore-choice to the best shaped he; third the thus, in the way of struggle and selection gained, favorable traits pass from elders to offspring or also to grandchildren (atavism), and better the shapings more and more. Of course these are no proofs, but only suppositions and clearings, how in Darwin's deeming the evolution could be workable. Proofs for the guess are truly only drawn from the kinship that can be marked between the living beings and that also in body and soul wise between animal and man stands; from the change and handing down of traits, that we ever mark in man- and animal-world; from the leftover limbs, that have stayed to man from his earlier animal state; from the womb-lore, according to which the higher shapings as womb-lings go through the growth-steps of the lower, Romanes, The Proofs for the Theory of Darwin, from the English by Spaink, Amsterdam 1884.
3. However much authority this Darwinism immediately appeared with, it has nevertheless from the beginning met with earnest contradiction, not only from theologians and philosophers, but also from sundry natural scientists, such as Agassiz, Essay on the Classification (1865); Dawson, Nature and the Bible , from the English (Gütersloh, 1877); Nägeli, Origin and Concept of the Natural Historical Species , 2nd ed. (1865); Mechanical-Physical Theory of the Doctrine of Descent (1883); Wigand, Darwinism etc. , 3 vols. (1874-77); and further Dana, Flourens, de Beaumont, Jordan, Blanchard, Quatrefages, Oswald Heer, Oscar Fraas, Ad. Bastian, R. Wagner, Pfaff, Kölliker, and so on. Virchow repeats almost every year at the meeting of natural researchers his protest against those who put forth Darwinism as a dogma. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of seven world riddles that could not be solved by natural science and wrote not long before his death that we might have to return again to supranaturalism. The life force formerly rejected with scorn is again taken under protection by Gustave Bunge; in Max Verworn, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ed. Rindfleisch a bent toward pantheism and mysticism can be seen; even Haeckel praised monism as the oneness of religion and science. Romanes, who was a firm Darwinist, died in 1895 reconciled with the faith of the Anglican church. There is undoubtedly a backlash against materialism and Darwinism on the way. And to that is added the criticism to which Darwinism has been subjected by theologians and philosophers. They too have the right to speak in this matter and have brought forward weighty objections; cf. Ulrici, God and Nature (1866); God and Man I (1874); Zöckler, History of Relations ; Id., The Doctrine of the Original State of Man (1879); Hartmann, Truth and Error in Darwinism (1875); Carneri, Morality and Darwinism (Vienna, 1877); Weygoldt, Darwinism, Religion, Morality (Leiden, 1878); Hamann, Theory of Evolution and Darwinism (Jena, 1892); Dutoit-Haller, Creation and Evolution according to Bible and Natural Science (Basel, 1892); Joh. Ranke, Man , 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1894); Ebrard, Apologetics I; Steude, Christianity and Natural Science (1895); Bettex, Nature Study and Christianity , 2nd ed. (1896); Pesch, The Great World Riddles II; Reusch, Bible and Nature ; Gutberlet, Man, His Origin and His Development (Paderborn, 1896); Hettinger, Apologetics I; Kuenen, Theological Journal X; Lamers, New Contributions III; Serrurier, Guide (May 1895); Times Mirror (April 1896); Scientific Papers (May 1896); Salisbury in his opening speech of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford (Aug. 1894), and so on.
In view of this change, theology has often been too hasty and has too quickly adapted itself to the theory of evolution, for example, Powell, Evidences of Christianity 1860. Temple, Christ and Natural Science, translated by Dr. J. W. Gunning, Haarlem 1887. Drummond, The Ascent of Man, 1895. Carrière, The Moral World Order, and so on. Yet there are far too serious and weighty objections against Darwinism for it to be accepted as a scientific explanation of the phenomena. First of all, it is wholly unable to make the origin of life understandable in any way. At first, men took refuge in spontaneous generation, that is, the arising of organic beings through chance combination of inorganic substances. When the researches of Pasteur proved its untenability, they seized the supposition that protoplasms or life-germs were brought to the earth by meteorites from other heavenly bodies (Helmholtz, Thomson). When this hypothesis also proved to be little more than a fancy, the teaching was proclaimed that cells and life-germs had always existed alongside the inorganic and thus, like matter, force, motion, and so on, were eternal. But thereby the insufficiency of the evolution theory was confessed by its own advocates; whoever makes matter, motion, life eternal does not solve the riddle but despairs of the solution.
In the second place, Darwinism is also unable to explain the further development of organic beings. Scripture acknowledges on the one hand the truth that lies in evolution, as it lets plants and animals come forth from the earth at God's command, Gen. 1:11, 20, 24; but on the other hand, it says that the earth could bring forth these organic beings only through a word of God's almighty power, and that these organic beings from the beginning existed alongside each other, distinguished by kind; they all have their own nature, Gen. 1:11, 21. Thereby it is not excluded that within the kinds all sorts of changes can take place, nor is the right of science curtailed to point out the boundaries of the kinds more precisely. It is not even at all necessary to see original creations in all the kinds which botany and zoology now name; the concept of kind is still far from sharply and clearly defined. But it is equally certain that the essential diversity and inequality of creatures rests on God's creative almighty power. It is He who makes distinction between light and darkness, day and night, heaven and earth, plant and animal, angel and man, Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 47. And this diversity and inequality of creatures, particularly of organic beings, remains a riddle in Darwinism. If man were descended from the animal, precisely the great difference that exists between the two and appears in the whole organism would remain an insoluble riddle. It is now generally acknowledged that the many kinds of plants and animals cannot be derived from one or even from four or five original organisms; those kinds diverge too strongly morphologically and physiologically. Natural and sexual selection are insufficient to make such changes of kind possible, and were already importantly limited and modified by Darwin himself. Moreover, such transitions from one kind to another have never been observed either in the past or in the present time. The same kinds of plants and animals that we now know also existed thousands of years ago and appeared at once in great numbers. The transitional forms which would bring the now existing kinds closer to each other have been found nowhere. Paleontology proves no slow and straight-line ascent of organic beings from the lower to the higher, but shows that all sorts of kinds existed alongside each other from the beginning. Yet such transitional forms ought to be found in great numbers, because the morphological changes took place so slowly, only in thousands of years, and each time were of such slight significance. It is unthinkable that these all by chance perished through catastrophes; the less so, because all the lower organisms, in spite of their imperfection and unfitness for the struggle for life, have continued to exist alongside the higher to the present day. Added to this is that from various sides, especially by August Weismann, the thesis is defended on good grounds that precisely acquired properties are not inherited, Koster, Wet. Bladen, March 1897. Wholly in contradiction to Darwin's theory, the morphological properties are the least and the physiological the most variable. If those morphological changes also proceeded so slowly and each time were of such slight significance, they could also be of no benefit in the struggle for life; in the time of transition they were rather a defect than a perfection. So long as breathing through gills passed over into breathing through lungs, it was rather a hindrance than an advantage in the struggle for existence. For all these reasons, the natural scientist, whose science must rest on facts, would do better to abstain from judgment in this matter. Materialism and Darwinism are both historically and logically not a result of experimental science but of philosophy. Besides, Darwin himself says that many of the considerations which he presented are in high degree speculative, Descent of Man II 365. According to Haeckel, he discovered no new facts, but did combine and utilize them in a peculiar way, Natural Creation 1874 p. 25. The great kinship of man and animal has always been acknowledged and expressed in the term animal rationale. But in former times one did not yet connect with it the monistic philosophy that a pure potency, which is nothing, such as atoms, chaos, cells, and so on, yet can become everything. That was first discovered by pantheism, materialism, and Darwinism!
In the third place, with Darwinism the origin of man is an insoluble problem. Positive proofs for man's animal descent there actually are none. The ontogeny of Haeckel can no longer count as proof after the refutation by Bischoff and others. The arguments drawn from all sorts of human bones and human skulls found in caves, most recently in the Dutch Indies, cf. Prof. Hubrecht in Gids June 1896, have one after another been given up again. The investigation on the one hand of the anthropoid ape species and on the other of all sorts of bones, skulls, abnormal humans, microcephalics, dwarfs, and so on, has ended by ascertaining that the distinction between animal and man is essential and has always existed, Pfaff, Creation 721. It is also generally acknowledged that no ape species, as it now exists or has existed, can be the stem of the human race. The strongest defenders of Darwinism admit that a transitional species must be assumed, of which however the slightest trace has thus far not been found. Virchow said at the meeting of naturalists in 1894: Bis jetzt is noch kein Affe entdeckt worden, der als der eigentliche Urvater des Menschen betrachtet werden konnte, auch kein Halbaffe. Diese Frage steht nicht mehr im Vordergrund der Forschung, in Hettinger, Apol. III 297.
Above all, however, Darwinism remains in the fourth place indebted for the explanation of man on his psychical side. Darwin began with the attempt to derive all spiritual phenomena in man—consciousness, language, religion, morality, and so on—from phenomena that occur in animals, Descent of Man, chapters 3 and 4. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1872, and many others have followed him in this. But these attempts also have thus far not succeeded. Just as the essence of force and matter, the origin of motion, the arising of life, teleology, so also consciousness, language, freedom of will, religion, morality still belong to the world-riddles that await solution. Thought, which is purely spiritual, stands to the brain in an entirely different relation than gall to the liver and urine to the kidneys. Language is and remains, according to the word of Max Müller, the Rubicon between us and the animal. The psychological explanation of religion is untenable, part I 208. And the derivation of reasonableness from the social instincts does no justice to the authority of the moral law, to the categorical of the moral imperative, to the "ought" of the good, to conscience, responsibility, consciousness of guilt, remorse, regret, punishment. Yes, although Darwinism in itself is not yet identical with materialism, yet it moves in that line, finds there its chief support, but thereby also prepares the perversion of religion and morality and kills the human in man. It matters not whether one says that it is better to be a highly developed animal than a fallen man; the doctrine of man's animal descent attacks in man the image of God and degrades him to the image of orangutan and chimpanzee. And that image of God cannot be maintained on the standpoint of evolution. It forces us back to the creation, as Scripture teaches it to us.
4. In connection with this doctrine about the origin of man, evolution also comes into conflict with Scripture regarding the age, the unity, and the original dwelling place of man. A high age was ascribed to the human race by many peoples, such as the Japanese, the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, who spoke of different world ages and of 10 and 100 thousand years. The newer anthropology has often returned to these fable-like numbers, but remains no more consistent than the heathen mythology; it varies between 10 and 250 thousand years and more. About the existence of man in the tertiary period there reigns great difference of opinion; it is denied by most, also by many who are otherwise Darwinists, such as Virchow, Mor, Wagner, Oskar Schmidt, Haeckel, Zittel, and others. The question is therefore also so hard to answer, because the borders between tertiary and quaternary periods cannot be pointed out. But even if man lived in the tertiary period and was a contemporary of the mammoth, then this proves not that man is so old, but that that period is much younger than one originally thought. Much more uncertain are the reckonings which are built on the pile dwellings that one found in Switzerland and elsewhere, on the bones and skulls that were discovered in caves near Liege, Amiens, Dusseldorf, etc., on the delta formations of the Nile and Mississippi, and on the stone, bronze, and iron periods, which according to some followed each other in time order. All the reckonings built hereon are therefore time and again contradicted and refuted by sober natural researchers, such as Fraas, Quenstedt, Pfaff, Dawson, Tylor, Virchow, Schaaffhausen, Kjerulf, even Hellwald. Here even more than with the age of the earth it holds true that one can well name numbers, but that one has no stuff for a history in so long a time. Of much more worth for the fixing of the age of the human race are the time-reckoning data which are given by the history and the monuments of different peoples. The history of India and China yields no firm basis for the time-reckoning and climbs only a few hundreds of years before Christ. But with the history of Egypt and Babylonia it is somewhat otherwise set. Here there is without doubt an old culture; it exists already as far as we can go back in history. Scripture itself teaches that also clearly. But yet the time-reckoning is still so unsure that nothing can be built thereon. This appears fully from this, that the reign of the Egyptian king Menes according to Boeckh begins in 5702, according to Brugsch in 4455, according to Lepsius in 3893, according to Bunsen in 3623, according to Wilkinson in 2691, etc.; and that Bunsen lets the historical time for Babylon begin in 3784, von Gutschmid in 2447, Brandis in 2458, Oppert in 3540, etc. Every student of old history has his own time-reckoning; it is a labyrinth wherein the thread is lacking; only with the people of Israel is there in the proper sense a history and a time-reckoning. Fritz Hommel says therefore rightly that the time-reckoning for the first thousand years before Christ stands fairly firm, sometimes even to details; that in the second thousand years before Christ only a few firm points seem to be given, and that in the third thousand years, that is, before 2000 B.C., all is unsure. Moreover, the human race can also for other reasons not have existed many thousands of years before Christ. The folk of the earth would then at the time of Christ have been much greater and much more spread out. And yet a thousand years B.C. the greatest part of the earth was still uninhabited: North Asia, Middle and North Europe, Africa south of the Sahara, Australia, the South Sea islands, America. Even at the time of Christ, besides in Asia, mankind was chiefly still dwelling around the Mediterranean Sea. If mankind were so old, there would also be found many more ruins of cities and leftovers of men, which now are only scarce in number and limited to a part of the earth. The most trustworthy numbers therefore go no higher than to five to seven thousand years B.C. Upham cites in an article on the time length of the geological epochs different scholars who place the ice age around seven or eight thousand years before Christ. If we think therewith that there is also about the time-reckoning of the Bible everything but agreement, then there is also at this point no weighty difference between Scripture and science. But even if according to the usual reckoning the flood took place in 2348 B.C., there was until the calling of Abraham in 1900 a time span of 450 years, which is enough to let fairly mighty realms arise at the Euphrates and Nile. Noah and his three sons could, each wedlock reckoned at six children, in fourteen generations of 33 years, that is in 462 years, have more than twelve million offspring.
Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. II. Id. Lehre vom Urstand. Id. Herzog 9. Vigouroux, Les livres saints etc. III. Schanz, Apol. des Christ. I. Dessailly, L’antiquité de la race humaine d’après les sciences contemporaines, Paris 1893. P. Schanz, Das Alter des Menschengeschlechts, Freiburg 1896. Reusch, Bibel u. Natur. Hettinger, Apol. der Christ. I 281-310.
5. The oneness of the human kindred stands firm for Holy Writ, Gen. 1:26, 6:3, 7:21, 10:32, Matt. 19:4, Acts 17:26, Rom. 5:12ff., 1 Cor. 15:21ff. 45ff., but was by the folks who lived outside the unveiling hardly ever acknowledged. The Greeks held themselves for earthborn and looked down from on high upon the outlanders. And this withstanding is found almost among all folks. Even in India bit by bit a sharp sundering between the four ranks of the folk was made, and for each an own uprising taken on. First the Stoa spoke out that all mankind formed one political framework, one body, of which each was a limb, and preached therefore also overall rightwiseness and mankind-love, Zeller, Philos. der Gr. IV.
After the rebirth came here and there the thought again up of a sundry uprising of the human kindred. This thought came forth now and then in the shape of true many-birth by Caesalpinus, by Blount and other God-believers; in part as fellow-Adamism, that is, offspring of the sundry breeds from sundry forefathers, by Paracelsus and others, in part as before-Adamism, that is, offspring of the wild and dark-skinned folks from a forefather before Adam, while he then alone was the forefather of the Jews or also of the white mankind, by Zanini and above all by Isaac de la Peyrère. This last brought out in 1655 without name of writer, printer, or stead a little work, titled: Praeadamitae ; and behind it a Systema theologiae ex praeadamitarum hypothesi . Therein it was upheld that there had already long before Adam been mankind, with call upon Gen. 4:14, 16, 17, 6:2-4. These mankind stemmed from that first twain, whose shaping in Gen. 1 is told. In Gen. 2 however is storied the shaping of Adam and Eve, who were the forefathers of the Jews. These overstepped the law which was given them in Eden, and fell into yet greater sins than the folks stemming from the first man, for these sinned not, as Paul sets it forth in Rom. 5:12-14, in likeness of Adam's sin; they overstepped no forthright law; they did sins of kind but no sins against the law. This lore made for a while great stir and called forth withstanders from all sides, Spanheim, Op. III. Turretin, Theol. El. V qu. 8. Marck, Historia Paradisi II 2. Moor, Comm. II. M. Vitringa II, cf. Studien en Bijdragen van de Moll en Scheffer IV. Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. I II. Urstand . But it soon fell into forgetfulness. Only a few, such as Bayle, Arnold, Swedenborg, deemed it not wholly throwaway. Above all when in the last hundredyear the knowledge of the folks was widened and the great unlikeness in hue, hair, build, wont, and so forth between the folks was seen, then many came again upon the thought of sundry forefathers, Sullivan 1795, Crüger 1784, Ballenstedt 1818, Stanhope Smith 1790, Cordonnière 1814, Gobineau 1853-55, and others.
By some this was made helpful to the upholding of thrallhood, such as by Dobbs in Ireland against Wilberforce, by Morton, Nott, Gliddon, Knox, Agassiz, and others. Another kind of many-birth was taught by Schelling, Werke , II 1. He also took many breeds of mankind before Adam, but these had from a low, beastly standpoint so uplifted and unfolded themselves that they at last brought him forth, in whom the human first came to unveiling and who therefore rightly could bear the name of the man, ha-adam. And likewise a kind of before-Adamism was taught by Oken, Carus, Baumgärtner, Perty, Bunsen, cf. also Bilderdijk, Opstellen v. godg. en zedek. inh. II. Strauss, Dogm. I, and so forth.
Thereto came now after 1860 the Darwin-lore, which because of its teaching of changeableness could very well be one-birth but yet by many of its followers became many-birth. The unfolding from beast to man has taken stead at sundry times and steads and given being to sundry breeds, Haeckel, Schaaffhausen, Caspari, Vogt, Büchner, and so forth. On Darwin-lore standpoint however the asking after the eld of man cannot be answered. The overgang from beast to man has taken stead so slowly that there was truly no first man. Against this many-birth is one-birth still upheld by von Humboldt, Blumenbach, St. Hilaire, von Baer, von Meyer, Wagner, Quatrefages, Darwin, Peschel, Ranke; also Virchow deems it not unfeasible, Hettinger, Apol. III.
Now, the being of folks and races in mankind is surely a weighty riddle, whose answer has not yet been found. The unlikeness in hue, hair, skull, tongue, thoughts, worship, ways, wonts, and so forth is so great, and the spreading of the one mankind over the whole earth, for instance to the South Sea islands, to America, and so on, is so unknown, that the thought of a sundry spring of the folks can hardly amaze. The Writ leads the birth of tongues and of folks also from a deed of God, whereby He stepped in on the unfolding of mankind, Gen. 11, cf. Schelling, Werke II 1. Lüken, Die Tradit. des Mensch. Auberlen, De goddel. openbaring I. Kaulen, Die Sprachenverwirrung zu Babel, Mainz 1861. Strodl, Die Entstehung der Völker, Schaffh. 1868. The birth of folks has a deep, godly-moral meaning and bears witness to ghostly downfall. The wilder and rougher mankind becomes, the more the tongues, the thoughts, and so forth drift apart. As far as one lives more shut off, the tongue unlikeness grows. Speech muddle is outcome of muddle in the thoughts, in the awareness, in the life. And yet in that sharing and splitting the oneness is still kept. The tongue lore has found kinship and oneness of spring, where that was formerly not guessed in the farthest way. The being of races and folks is a deed, and yet the showing of their borders is so hard, that the greatest unlikeness about it lives. Kant took 4, Blumenbach 5, Buffon 6, Peschel 7, Agassiz 8, Haeckel 12, Morton even 22 sundry races, Peschel, Völkerkunde. Under all races there are again crossings, which seem to mock all sharing. Genesis 10 holds then also the oneness of mankind by all sundryness fast and Johann von Müller said not wrongly: from this chapter must all history begin. Against this oneness Darwinism can truly bring no bar. The unlikeness between man and beast is yet always much greater than between men among themselves. If man could unfold from a beast, it is not to be seen why the shared spring of mankind in itself would meet bar. Darwinism indeed bids the means at hand, to make all kinds of changes within the same kind under all kinds of inflows of weather, life way, and so forth likely and understandable. In so far it shows outstanding help to the warding of the truth. For, how great the unlikeness between the races also may be, the oneness and the kinship of all men steps by deeper search yet thereby the stronger to the fore. It comes out therein, that elders of the sundry races pair and can bring forth fruitful children; that every class of men can dwell every zone of the earth and live there; that folks, who never have been in touch with each other, yet have sundry traits and wonts in shared, such as gestures, tenfold reckoning, skin painting, tattooing, cutting, couvade, and so forth; that many bodily happenings are alike by all races, such as the upright stance, the skull shape, the middling weight of the brains, tally and length of the teeth, the length of the bearing, the middling tally of pulse beats, the inner build of the body, of hand, foot, and so forth, the middling age, the warmth of the body, the timely flow of the monthly, the openness to sicknesses, and so forth; and that they lastly in mindly, godly, right, fellowship, state wise sight have all kinds of things shared, tongue, understanding, reason, recall, knowledge of God, inwit, sin awareness, rue, offerings, fasting, prayer, handed downs about a golden tide, about the sin flood, and so forth. The oneness of the mankind kin, taught by the Writ, is by all this most strongly strengthened. It is at last no uncaring thing, as sometimes is said. It is on the other hand of the highest weight; it is the underlaying of worship and right. The togetherness of the mankind kin, the birth sin, the atoning in Christ, the allwhereness of the kingdom of God, the all-churchness of the church, the neighbor love, are built thereon. Cf. Zöckler, Die einheitl. Abstammung des Menschengeschlechts, Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1863. Id. Gesch. der Bez. II. Id. Lehre vom Urstand. Rauch, Die Einheit des Menschengeschlechts, Augsburg 1873. Th. Waitz, Ueber die Einheit des Menschengeschlechts und den Naturzustand des Menschen, Leipzig 1859. H. Ulrici, Gott und der Mensch, I 2. Lotze, Mikrokosmos II³. Peschel, Völkerkunde. Reusch, Bibel und Natur. Schanz, Apol. des Christ I. Vigouroux, Les livres saints IV. Delitzsch, Neuer Comm. zu Genesis. Hettinger, Apol. des Christ. I⁷.
6. Lastly, there is also disagreement over the original abode of man. Genesis relates that God, after He had shaped Adam, planted a garden in Eden. Eden, עֵדֶן , delight, land of joy, is thus not the same as the paradise but is a region, in which the garden or yard, גַן , LXX παράδεισος , according to Spiegel from the Zend pairidaêza enclosure, was planted. This paradise is then further called the garden of Eden, Gen. 2:15, 3:23, garden of God, Ezek. 31:8, 9, garden of Jehovah, Isa. 51:3, and is sometimes identified with Eden, Isa. 51:3, Ezek. 28:13, 31:9. Further, God planted that garden in Eden מִקֶּדֶם , from the east, eastward, toward the east, namely from the standpoint of the writer. From the region of Eden a river went out to water the garden; and from there, that is, from that garden, at its outflow from the garden it divided itself into four heads or branches, which bear the names of Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The two last rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates; but over the two first there has always been disagreement. The church fathers thought, like Josephus, usually of the Ganges for the Pishon and of the Nile for the Gihon. But a precise inquiry into the location of paradise was not undertaken by them. The earthly paradise often merged for them with the heavenly and was then explained allegorically. Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. VIII, 1 says that there were three opinions about paradise. Some take it as an earthly, others as a heavenly paradise, and still others unite both views. Those who held it for an earthly paradise thought then that it had been situated very high between heaven and earth, that it even reached to the moon, or that the whole earth had once been paradise, or that it had lain on the other side of the ocean. According to some, paradise was wholly destroyed after the fall, especially by the flood; according to others it still existed but had become inaccessible by mountains and seas; and still others thought that it had been taken up into heaven. The first who tried to indicate the location of paradise geographically was Augustine Steuchus from Gubbio, hence Eugubinus, died 1550. In his work Kosmopoiia published in 1535 at Lyon, he developed the so-called Pasitigris hypothesis, according to which the four rivers are the mouths of one great river, the united Tigris-Euphrates, and paradise thus lay in the neighborhood of the present city of Kurna. This hypothesis found much approval among Roman Catholics like Pererius, Jansen, Lapide, Petavius, Mersenne, among Reformed like Calvin on Gen. 2:10, Marck, Histor. Paradisi 1705 lib. I, among Lutherans and others, and was adopted with modifications by Pressel, art. Paradies in Herzog. About the middle of the 17th century there came alongside it the so-called Armenia hypothesis, which had already been prepared by Rupert of Deutz, Pellicanus, Fournier, and then especially developed by Reland, professor at Utrecht died 1706. This holds Pishon for the Phasis, Gihon for the Araxes, Havilah for Colchis, Cush for the land of the Kossaeans between Media and Susiana, and thus sought paradise much farther north, namely high in Armenia, approximately between Erzurum and Tiflis. It made even more headway than the Pasitigris hypothesis and in the present time is still defended by von Raumer, Kurtz, Baumgarten, Keil, Lange, Delitzsch, Rougemont, and others. On the other hand, Friedrich Delitzsch in his work: Wo lag das Paradies , Leipzig 1881, sought the location of paradise again farther south, namely in the landscape near Babylon, which for its beauty was called by the Babylonians and Assyrians "garden of the god Dunias"; the river from Eden was thus the Euphrates in its upper course, Pishon and Gihon were two canal rivers. Others however have gone much further and see in the paradise narrative a saga which gradually wandered from east to west and in which Pishon and Gihon originally designate the Indus and the Oxus, J. D. Michaelis, Knobel, Bunsen, Ewald, and others. Others see in it a myth, in which Havilah represents the gold land of saga and the Gihon the Ganges or the Nile, Paulus, Eichhorn, Gesenius, Tuch, Bertheau, Schrader, and others. Most anthropologists and linguists no longer reckon at all with Gen. 2 and name quite other lands as the original abode of man. But they are far from unanimous and have ascribed this honor to almost all lands. Romanes, Klaproth, de Gobineau, George Browne named America, Spiller thought of Greenland, because the polar regions after the cooling of the earth were the first inhabitable, Wagner held Europe for the land where the ape first developed into man. Unger named specifically Styria, L. Geiger Germany, Cuno and Spiegel South Russia, Poesche the region between Dnieper and Niemen, Benfey and Whitney Central Europe, Warren the North Pole. Others like Darwin, Huxley, Peschel, and others gave preference to Africa, because there in gorilla and chimpanzee the nearest relatives of man were found. And Link, Haeckel, Hellwald, Schmidt invented a certain land Lemuria, where apes first became men and which had lain between Africa and Australia but by chance at the end of the tertiary period had sunk into the depths of the sea. Many thereby assume not only one original abode of man, but are of the opinion that the evolution from animal to man took place in various parts of the earth, and thus unite Darwinism with polygenism; so for example Haeckel, Vogt, Schaaffhausen, Caspari, Fr. Müller, and others. Already this great disagreement among anthropologists shows that science thus far can establish nothing here with any certainty. It loses itself in conjectures but knows nothing concerning the origin and abode of the first man. There is then also no single fact that compels us to give up the determination of Holy Scripture concerning Eden. Rather, ethnology, linguistics, history, and natural science furnish us data which make Asia probable as the original abode of man. Neither Africa, nor Europe, nor America, and still much less a land like Lemuria can make as much claim to it as Asia. Here we find the oldest peoples, the oldest civilization, the oldest languages; the whole ancient history points us to this part of the world. From this part of the earth Europe and Africa, Australia and also America have been peopled. Indeed many questions arise here, to which no answer can yet be given. And especially it is uncertain how and when America was peopled, Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. Peschel, Völkerkunde . Vigouroux, Les livres saints IV. Dr. E. Schmidt, Die aeltesten Spuren des Menschen in N. Amerika , Nos. 38 and 39 of the Deutsche Zeit- und Streitfragen , Wetenschappelijke Bladen 1895. But these objections by no means overthrow the teaching of Scripture that Asia is the cradle of mankind. Over the location of paradise and of Eden there may be difference of opinion, so that it has been placed alternately in the middle, east, south of Asia; even the geography may no longer be determinable; Scripture and science both witness that in Asia the original abode of man is to be sought, Peschel, Völkerkunde . Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. passim, especially. Id. Lehre vom Urstand . Herzog art. Paradies van Pressel, Herzog² art. Eden van Rütschi. Reusch, Bibel und Natur . Zöckler, Bibl. u. Kirchenhist. Studien , Munich 1893 V. Delitzsch, Neuer Comm. zu Genesis .
1. The essence of man lies therein, that he is God's image. The whole world is a revelation of God, a mirror of his virtues and perfections; every creature is in its way and in its measure an embodiment of a divine thought. But among all creatures only man is the image of God, the highest and richest revelation of God and at the same time thereby the head and crown of the whole creation, imago Dei and compendium naturae, microtheos and microcosmos together. Even heathens have acknowledged this truth and called man God's image. Pythagoras in Cicero, de senect. c. 21. Plato, de Leg. IV 713 C. de Rep. III 415 A. X 517. Ovid, Met. I. Cicero, de Leg. I 8. Seneca, de cons. ad Helv. 6 and others speak it out clearly and plainly, that man or at least his soul is created after God's image, that he is akin to God and of his kindred, cf. Pfanner, Syst. theol. gent. 1679 p. 189 sq. And not only that, but almost all peoples have traditions of a golden age, an aurea aetas. Among Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans etc. one finds stories of an earlier time, in which man lived in innocence and blessedness and stood in communion with the gods. They were sung by the poets, Hesiod, Op. et dies 109 sq. Ovid, Met. I 89 sq. Verg. Georg. I 125 sq. Aen. VIII 315 sq. and acknowledged in their truth by the philosophers, Plato, Pol. 272 A. cf. J. G. Friderici, diss. de aurea aetate quam poetae finxerunt, Lips. 1736. Lüken, Traditionen des Menschengeschl. 1869. Zöckler, Lehre v. Urstand des Menschen 1879 S. 84 f. Oswald, Relig. Urgesch. der Menschheit 1887 S. 37 f. E. L. Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, Mainz 1878. Zöckler, Bibl. u. Kirchenhist. Studien, 1893 V 1 f. Yet Holy Scripture sets this doctrine of man's likeness to God first in the true, full light. The first creation story reports that God after deliberate counsel created man בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ , κατ’ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν , ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, Gen. 1:26, 27. Further it is repeated in Gen. 5:1 and 9:6, that God created man בְּדְמוּת אֱלֹהִים , and בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים ; Psalm 8 sings of man as lord of the created, and Eccl. 7:29 recalls that God made man יָשָׁר . Otherwise the Old Testament speaks little of the status integritatis; Israel was more than any other people a people of hope; its eye was not toward the past but toward the future. Even the New Testament speaks relatively seldom of the image of God after which man was originally created. Directly we find mention thereof only in 1 Cor. 11:7, where the man is called εἰκὼν καὶ δόξα θεοῦ , and James 3:9, where it is said of men that they are καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν θεοῦ γεγονότας ; while Luke 3:38 calls Adam the son of God and Paul with a heathen poet says: τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν , Acts 17:28. Indirectly however Eph. 4:24 and Col. 3:10 are also of great significance here; there is spoken of the καινὸς or νέος ἄνθρωπος , which the believers must put on; and of this it is said that he in accordance with God, κατὰ θεόν , was created, κτισθέντα , in righteousness and holiness of the truth, and is renewed unto knowledge κατ’ εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν . There lies herein 1st that the new man, which the believers put on, was created by God; 2nd that this new man is made in accordance with God and after his image, and 3rd that this accordance comes out particularly in righteousness and holiness as fruit of the known truth. This however refers back to the original creation insofar as the words which Paul uses are clearly borrowed therefrom; as the second creation according to the whole teaching of Scripture is no creatio ex nihilo but a renewal of what existed; and as the ἀνακαινοῦσθαι of the believer describes this creation clearly as a renewal. Eph. 4:24 and Col. 3:10 therefore have as their underlying thought that man was originally created after God's image and now in the recreation is renewed thereto. But Scripture not only relates the fact of man's creation after God's image, it also explains to us the meaning thereof. The two words צֶלֶם and דְּמוּת , εἰκών and ὁμοίωσις , are certainly not identical, but an essential, substantial distinction is yet not to be pointed out between them. They are used promiscuously and alternate with each other without definite reason. In Gen. 1:26, cf. 5:3 both stand; in Gen. 1:27 and 9:6, cf. Col. 3:10 only image; in Gen. 5:1, James 3:9 only likeness. The distinction that exists between both comes down to this: צֶלֶם means image, both archetype and copy, דְּמוּת means likeness, both model and imitation. The concept of צֶלֶם is more rigid, that of דְּמוּת more fluid and so to say more spiritual; in the former the idea of the archetype predominates, in the latter the idea of the ideal, Delitzsch, on Gen. 1:26. The likeness is a further determination, a strengthening and supplement of the image. Likeness in itself is weaker and broader than image; an animal has indeed some traits of likeness and agreement with, but is yet no image of man. Image expresses that God is archetype and man ectype; likeness adds thereto that that image in all parts agrees with the original, Augustine, quaest. 83 qu. 74. Thomas, S. Theol. I. qu. 93 art. 9. Gerhard, Loci theol. VIII § 18. Polanus, Synt. Theol. V 10 etc. Just as little as between these two concepts is there an essential distinction between the prepositions ב and כ , which are used hereby. These also alternate with each other; in Gen. 5:1 ב stands by דְּמוּת , in verse 3 likewise and also כ by צֶלֶם ; in the New Testament κατά stands by εἰκών , Col. 3:10, but also by ὁμοίωσις , James 3:9. Nothing can therefore be built hereupon; only one can say with Delitzsch: with ב one thinks of the archetype as it were as a mold, with כ as a presented pattern. There exists therefore no ground to derive with Böhl, Dogm. 154 f. from that preposition ב that the image of God is a sphere and element in which man was created, cf. against that Kuyper, De Vleeschwording des Woords, 1887 bl. VIII v. Daubanton, Theol. Stud. 1887 bl. 429-444. Besides these words, Scripture offers for the content of the image of God the following data. First it is clear that the words image and likeness do not express something in God but in man, do not denote the imago increata but the imago creata. The intention is not that man is created after something in God that bears the name of image and likeness, so that e.g. thereby the Son would be designated; but man is so created after God that he is his image and likeness. Next this creation after God's image is in no respect limited, neither on the side of the archetype nor on that of the ectype. It is not said that man is created only after some virtues or also after one person in the divine being, nor also that man only in part, after the soul or after the understanding or after holiness alone, bears God's image and likeness. Rather the whole man is image of the whole Godhead. Thirdly the meaning of the image of God is further explained to us by the Son, who in an entirely unique sense is called λόγος, υἱός, εἰκών, χαρακτὴρ τοῦ θεοῦ , John 1:1, 14, 2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3, and to whom we must again become like, Rom. 8:29, 1 Cor. 15:49, Phil. 3:21, Eph. 4:23 f., 1 John 3:2. The Son now bears all these names because He is God from God and light from light, partaker of the same essence and the same virtues with the Father. He is so called not on account of a part or piece of his being, but because He absolutely agrees with the Father. This now applies in its turn also to man. Like the Son, so is man as such, wholly and entirely, image of God. He does not bear but is the image of God. However naturally with this difference that what the Son is in absolute sense, man is in relative sense. The former is the eternal, only-begotten Son; the latter is the created son of God. The former is the image of God within, the latter outside the divine being. The former is the image of God in divine, the latter in creaturely way. But so is man then also in his measure image and likeness of God. Finally fourthly it is also indicated here and there wherein that image reveals itself and comes forth outwardly. Nowhere is the full content of that image of God unfolded. But Gen. 1:26 points out clearly that that image of God comes out in his dominion over all the created, cf. Ps. 8, 1 Cor. 11:7. The depiction of the paradise state in Gen. 1 and 2 shows that that image of God also includes agreement with the will of God, cf. Eccl. 7:29. And the recreation after the image of God or Christ is principally placed in the putting on of the new man, which among other things consists in righteousness and holiness of the truth.
2. Concerning the content of the image of God, there reigned in the Christian church at first all sorts of differences of opinion. It was now placed in man's body, then in his reasonable nature, or in his freedom of will, then again in his dominion or also in other moral virtues such as love, righteousness, etc., cf. places in Suicerus s.v. εἰκων. Petavius, de sex dier. opif. II c. 2. Münscher-v. Coelln I. Hagenbach § 56. But gradually two views come clearly side by side and over against each other, both of which appeal to the distinction between צלם and דמות. Some, namely, such as Clement of Alexandria, Strom. II c. 22. Origen, de princ. III 6 and others, noted that Gen. 1:26 indeed says that God wills to create man after his image and likeness, but that according to verse 27 he actually creates him only after his image, that is, with a reasonable nature, so that man might now acquire the likeness to God himself in the way of obedience and receive it at the end as a reward from God's hand. Others, on the contrary, were of the opinion that man with the image, that is, the reasonable nature, also at once received the likeness as a gift, and that he, having lost this through sin, regains it through Christ, Irenaeus, adv. haer. V 16, 2. Athanasius, c. Ar. II 59 c. Gent. 2. de incarn. 3. The first view, which one might call the naturalistic, found support in the doctrine of freedom of will, whereby one could not think of holiness as a gift at once bestowed on man by God, but only as a good to be acquired by man himself in the way of moral effort, Harnack II. Many taught therefore that the first man was created in a state, not of positive holiness but of childlike innocence, Tertullian, de an. 38. Theophilus, ad Autol. II 24. 27. Iren. adv. haer. IV 38. On such statements Pelagius later appealed, when he placed the essence and original state of man in moral indifference, in nothing but formal freedom of choice. The image of God consists only in the natural possibility of perfection bestowed by God, which is inalienable and therefore now still the portion of every man. God bestows the power, but ours is the will, Augustine, de gratia Christi I 3 sq. Later this view found entrance among the Socinians, who deemed the image of God to lie only in dominion, Fock, Der Socin.; among the Anabaptists, who said that the first man as a finite, earthly creature was not yet the image of God but could become it first through regeneration, Menno Simons, Werken. cf. Erbkam, Gesch. der prot. Sekten. Cloppenburg, Op. II; among the Remonstrants, Conf. V 5. Apol. conf. ib. Episcopius, Inst. theol. IV 3, 7. Limborch, Theol. Chr. II 24, 5; among the Rationalists and Supranaturalists, Wegscheider, Inst. theol. § 99. Bretschneider, Dogm. § 115. 116. Reinhard, Dogm. § 70; and among many newer theologians, Dorner, Gl. I. Lange, Dogm. II. Müller, Sünde II. Beck, Lehrw. I. Chr. Gl. II. Martensen, Dogm. Kahnis, Dogm. I. Zöckler, Lehre v. Urstand des Menschen. Grétillat, Theol. syst. III. Hofstede de Groot, Gron. Godg. Doedes, Leer der Zaligheid § 24. Ned. Geloofsbel. Heid. Catech. etc., who all let the state of integrity consist in a state of childlike innocence. Commonly all these theologians still hold fast to the historical truth of such an original state. But in substance they agree entirely in the view of the image of God in the first man with those who, loosening the idea from the fact, deny the reality of the state of integrity and place the image of God only in the free personality, in the reasonable or moral nature, in the religious-ethical disposition, in man's destiny to fellowship with God, Kant, Relig. ed. Rosenkranz. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Hegel, Werke XI. Schleiermacher, Gl. § 59-61. Strauss, Gl. II. Biedermann, Dogm. II. Lipsius, Dogm. § 420. 440. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Bovon, Dogm. Chrét. I. Scholten, L. H. K. I II. Unnoticed this view then leads over to the doctrine of evolution, according to which the essence of man lies not in what he was or is but in what he can become in endless development through his own exertion of strength. Paradise lies not behind but before us. A developed ape deserves preference over a fallen man. Originally bearing the image of orangutan and chimpanzee, man gradually lifted himself from a state of rude brutality to that of noble humanity, cf. litt. deel I.
3. It needs no proof that Holy Scripture stands squarely against this teaching of evolution. The Christian churches have also almost unanimously rejected the naturalistic, Pelagian view of the image of God and of man's original state. Besides the arguments for the Darwinian hypothesis already refuted earlier, there are actually no direct, historical proofs for the animal state of man as evolution imagines it. The bones and skulls of humans that have been found, upon closer examination, have all proven to come from beings completely like us in nature. As far back as we can go in history, we find a state of fairly high culture in China, India, Babylon, Egypt; and every proof is lacking that the peoples there developed themselves from an animal state. The appeal to the so-called natural peoples, who by the way are not devoid of all culture, has no force. For it is unprovable that they stand closer than the cultured peoples to the original state of man. Rather, there is ground to believe that they, separated from mankind, gradually fell into a state of barbarism. No such people has been able to raise itself from that state by its own means alone. They all bear the mark of degenerates, who, like branches torn from the tree, without new life-force from outside, wither away and vanish. Waitz, Ueber die Einheit des Menschengeschlechts und den Naturzustand des Menschen 1859. Peschel, Völkerkunde , 5th ed. Zöckler, Gesch. der Bez. II. Vigouroux, Les livres saints IV. The question of the primitive state of man is actually not a historical but a philosophical question; for that state precedes all historical testimonies. The answer one gives to that question is determined by the thought one forms of man. The more this being is thought through, the more impossible it becomes to let the history of man begin with an animal, barbaric state. Life, consciousness, language, religion, morals, etc., cannot be explained from evolution, but presuppose their own origin, a creation from nothing. Even in the theology of the moderns this still comes out. Indeed, they deny the creation in God's image and the state of integrity; but when it comes to the critical point, the idea of creation suddenly pops up again. Consciousness is something specifically human; or at least religion has its own, original principle in man; or, if evolution is accepted here too, then one still holds to the ethical and maintains its independence; the moral life or the moral disposition is sui generis and sui originis . Hoekstra, Wijsg. Godsd. I. But this position between creation and evolution is an untenable standpoint. It has repeatedly been taken by all sorts of Pelagian directions in the Christian church, because one had objections to both creation and evolution and thus sought a mediation. The first man was no animal, but also no perfect, holy man; he was an innocent child. He was neither positively good nor positively evil, but he stood between both, was morally indifferent, could do the one and the other. In act he was nothing, potentially he was everything, pious and godless, holy and unholy, good and evil. The disposition, the possibility, arose through creation, but all that is now built on that potential foundation is man's own will and work. Now there is in this representation, as we shall see in the next paragraph, something true, insofar as the first man did not yet have the highest and thus indeed had to develop himself. But apart from this, it is nevertheless for many reasons wholly unacceptable. First, Scripture clearly teaches that man, both psychically and physically, was created adult, in virile age. Augustine, de Gen. ad lit. VI c. 13, 14. Lombard, Sent. II dist. 17. The account in Genesis about the first humans is very simple, but the state of those first humans is not that of simple, innocent children but of adult, conscious, and freely acting beings. The creation in God's image, Gen. 1:27, Eccles. 7:29, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10, the blessing of multiplication, Gen. 1:28, the divine approval, Gen. 1:31, the probationary command, Gen. 2:17, the naming of the animals, Gen. 2:19, the statement about Eve, Gen. 2:23, 24, the manner of the temptation, Gen. 3:1ff., and the attitude of Adam and Eve after the fall, Gen. 3:7 ff., prove abundantly that the first humans were not created indifferent but positively good. The only counterproof could be derived from the fact that the first humans lacked shame. And this has indeed always been brought forward by the opposing party as a very strong argument. However, this cannot hold, because the sexual life before the fall was very well known to the first man, Gen. 1:27, 28, 2:23, 24, and shame is derived not from the awakening of sexual life, but specifically from the fall. Second, this representation suffers from half-heartedness and makes the problem at hand even more complicated. It is half-hearted insofar as on the one hand it honors evolution and yet, at a certain point, again honors creation. It wants no creation of acts, but still assumes creation of potentials. It speaks of ability without skill; and considers the creation of a child, both in physical and psychic sense, simpler and more reasonable than of an adult. This is now in itself already absurd, for whoever lets the potentials arise through creation and not through evolution can no longer have any principled objection to the doctrine of original righteousness and the state of integrity. But it also makes the matter even harder to think besides. A potential does not develop itself into actuality without more. Max Müller rightly said: if we tried to think of the first man as created as a child and gradually unfolding his physical and mental powers, we could not understand how he could live even one day without supernatural help. Vorles. über die Wiss. der Sprache I³ Leipzig 1875. In the same spirit Schelling expressed himself: I hold the state of culture absolutely for the first of the human race, etc. Werke I 5. And J. G. Fichte also said: The question presses, if it should be necessary to assume an origin of the whole human race, who then educated the first human pair? They had to be educated--a human could not educate them. Thus it is necessary that another rational being educated them, which was no human, understood only so far until they could educate each other. A spirit took care of them, just as an old venerable document presents it, which generally contains the deepest, most sublime wisdom and sets up results to which all philosophy must in the end return. Grundlage des Naturrechts 1796. To avoid one miracle, many miracles must be assumed. Third, this representation is based on the error that no innate holiness is possible. Holiness, it is said, is always the fruit of struggle and effort. If Adam was created positively holy, he was necessarily good and his freedom was lost, e.g., Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 480 ff. Thus one comes to fabricate a state between good and evil, holy and unholy, an indifferent state that precedes the moral in a good or bad sense, and from which man must then develop himself by free will decision in one direction or the other. Man is then deprived of all intellectual and ethical content, and the image of God is placed in the pure, naked, merely formal personality. Nitzsch, Syst. der chr. Lehre . Müller, Chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I. Kahnis, Dogm. I. Thomasius, Dogm. I. Beck, Glaub. II. Doedes, Leer der Zaligheid . Such a concept of personality is however a mere abstraction, to which nothing corresponds in reality. No man is thinkable without certain qualities of intellect and will. A complete indifference of the will, without character, without inclination to one side or the other, is simply an impossibility. As in nature only a good tree can bear good fruits, so also in ethical life the good nature precedes the good works. Operari sequitur esse . Scripture also teaches that holiness both in creation and recreation is a gift of God. Whoever has it can further unfold it in word and deed; but whoever lacks it can never acquire it. And finally, this representation does too little to God's justice, which allowed his creature to be tempted beyond ability; to the seriousness of the temptation, which then becomes a cunning deception; to the character of the fall, which ceases to be a tremendous guilt and changes into a non-imputable misfortune and almost unavoidable fate. It wipes out the boundaries that exist between the state of integrity and the state of corruption and lets man retain undisturbed the image of God, which consists in something purely formal, even after the fall. It thinks the relation between the formal (personality, free will) and the material (religious and ethical life) as loose and dualistic as Rome presents it between pura naturalia and donum superadditum , only with this difference that with Rome holiness is a fruit of grace and with Pelagius and his followers a product of arbitrary will.
4. Beside and over against this naturalistic view of the image of God, another conception arose, which we may call the supranaturalistic, above page 512. It did not arise from the distinction between tselem and demut, although this was later connected with it. It is also not built on the explanation of Genesis 1 and 2, for many acknowledge that it does not occur there or at least not literally. But it is derived from the idea of the state of glory that gradually arose in the Christian church, to which believers are raised by Christ and his Spirit, John 1:12, Romans 8:14-17, 1 Corinthians 2:7ff., Ephesians 1:15ff., 2 Peter 1:2ff., 1 John 3:1, 2, etc. cf. Scheeben, Dogm. II 272-281. Gradually this state of glory was conceived under Neoplatonic influence as a condition that far surpassed the state of nature not only in an ethical but also in a physical sense. Since the fourth century, in the Christological controversies, this thought came so much to the fore that the deity of the Son and of the Spirit was especially argued thereby, that they were for men the authors of their deification. The essence of the state of glory increasingly came to lie in the vision of God per essentiam, in deiformity, deification, in the not merely moral but physical participation in the divine nature, in the merging with God, cf. above 152ff. And to this doctrine of the state of glory was added that of the merit of good works. The infused grace, which was bestowed in baptism, was decidedly necessary but also enabled man to do such good works as could merit eternal blessedness, the vision of God per essentiam, ex condigno. From these two thoughts, the mystical conception of man's final destiny and the merit of good works, the Roman doctrine of the donum superadditum was born. Alexander of Hales was the first who brought it into a definite formula. The heavenly blessedness and the beholding of God, which is man's final destiny and was also for Adam, can be merited ex condigno only by such good works as are in accordance with that final destiny, that is, like it, bear a supernatural character and thus flow from a supernatural principle, the infused grace. The righteousness which Adam now naturally possessed as man, as an earthly being, through creation, was by the nature of the case not sufficient for this. And so to Adam also, in order to attain his final destiny, a supernatural grace had to be bestowed, namely, the grace that makes pleasing, the image of God. This elevation of the rational creature is a supernatural complement; and therefore neither consecration nor adoption nor assumption of this kind takes place through any property of nature but through a gift superadded to nature, consecrating nature, that it may be a temple, assimilating to God, that it may be son or daughter, confederating with God or uniting through conformity of will, that it may be a bride; but this is done by God through the grace that makes pleasing, Hales, S. Theol. II qu. 91 membr. 1 art. 3. This doctrine found general acceptance among the scholastics, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 95. Bonaventure, Brevil. II c. 11. 12. V c. 1, and the comm. of Thomas, Bonav. Duns Scotus on Sent. II dist. 29; was incorporated in the Roman Catechism, I 2 qu. 18, 3, later defended and maintained against the Reformers, Baius, Jansenius, Quesnel, Bellarmine, de gratia primi hominis, Denzinger, Enchir. n. 881 sq., and forms one of the most important and characteristic loci in Roman theology, cf. e.g. Becanus, Theol. Schol. I tract. 5. Casini, Controv. de statu purae naturae, printed as appendix to book II de opif. sex dierum of Petavius, Theol. dogm. ed. 1868 IV p. 587-653. Theol. Wirceb. VII p. 145 sq. Perrone, Prael. theol. III 166-182. Kleutgen, Theol. II² 6-151. 507-615. Scheeben, Dogm. II 239-514. Id. Natur u. Gnade 1861. Schäzler, Natur u. Gnade. Oswald, Relig. Urgesch. der Menschheit 1887 S. 1-61. Simar, Dogm.³ S. 326 f. C. Pesch, Prael. III 76-111. Möhler, Symb. § 1 etc. Although there is agreement in the main point, there is nevertheless all sorts of difference on subordinate points. Some, such as Hales, S. Theol. II qu. 96 m. 1. Bonaventure, Sent. II dist. 29 art. 2 qu. 2. Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, Biel, and others, asserted that the supernatural gift of the grace that makes pleasing was distinct from the original righteousness, which man possessed immediately through creation by nature, and was also temporally later bestowed. According to them, man was first created with original righteousness; by this he was enabled to merit the grace that makes pleasing ex congruo; and when he had received this, he could thereby acquire heavenly blessedness ex condigno. But Thomas had objection to this, because the grace that makes pleasing would then also rest on merits, as a personal gift to Adam could not have been lost or acquired by him for all his descendants, and then also could not be bestowed in baptism on little children without merit; therefore Thomas taught that Adam in the moment of creation simultaneously with original righteousness also received grace, S. Theol. I qu. 100 art. 1. Sent. II dist. 20 qu. 2 art. 3. dist. 29 qu. 1 art. 1. Trent avoided decision in this point of dispute between Franciscans and Dominicans and only declared that Adam had lost the righteousness and holiness in which he had been constituted, sess. V 1. Although later theologians mostly followed Thomas and let original righteousness factually and temporally coincide with the grace that makes pleasing; ideally and logically the conception remained the same. Roman theology has a twofold conception of man: man in puris naturalibus, without supernatural grace, is indeed sinless, but has only a natural religion and virtue, and has his destiny on earth; man endowed with the superadded gift of the image of God has a supernatural religion and virtue and has his destiny in heaven. But with this twofold idea of man one was not yet done. As soon as one reflected on what belonged to the one and what to the other idea of man, one became embarrassed with various gifts bestowed on the first man. Immortality and impassibility could not be called natural in the strict sense, for they were no properties of Adam's earthly body as such and could be lost. On the other hand, they could also not be a consequence of the grace that makes pleasing, for then man in puris naturalibus, without the superadded gift, would have been subject to death and suffering, and death would then not be a punishment for sin. Similarly it is with concupiscence. The strife between flesh and spirit is according to Rome natural; the subjection of the flesh to the spirit is thus something supernatural, not given of itself already with creation; but it cannot yet be owing first to the grace that makes pleasing, for then a sinless man without superadded gift would not be possible. Therefore between the two ideas which Rome forms of man, a third had to be inserted. And so according to Rome there is a man thinkable and possible with natural gifts, preternatural, and supernatural. There is a threefold righteousness, a natural righteousness, preternatural, and supernatural. No wonder that some, such as Berti, Norisius, and others, could not conceive such a man who was only endowed with natural and preternatural gifts; according to God's absolute power such a man would indeed be possible, but according to his ordained power not; the beatific vision is factually proper to man by nature, at least as regards inclination and appetite, Perrone, III 167. Oswald, Relig. Urgesch. 52 f. Pesch, Prael. III 109. But even if the conceivability and possibility of a man in puris naturalibus is maintained, there is still all sorts of difference in the doctrine of the image of God. Some distinguish image and likeness so that the first includes the natural gifts, the second the supernatural; others such as the Roman Catechism let both refer to the supernatural gifts. Hales, Bonaventure, Thomas, etc., thought in original righteousness of natural righteousness and designated supernatural righteousness as grace that makes pleasing; but the Roman Catechism and most later theologians speak precisely of the superadded gifts as original righteousness. Immortality, impassibility, free will, the tempering of concupiscence are now derived from a divine benefit, then again from the image or from the likeness, and also reckoned to original righteousness, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 95 art. 1. Sent. II dist. 19 qu. 1 art. 4. Pesch, Prael. III 89 sq. The Roman Catechism places everything side by side and brings it to no unity: Adam was subject to no death and suffering by divine benefit; his soul was created after God's image and likeness; moreover, concupiscence was curbed and subjected to reason; and finally God added thereto original righteousness and dominion, I 2 qu. 18, 3. And to all this is added the difference over the nature of the grace that makes pleasing, over its relation to the Spirit of God, to the soul and its faculties, to the theological virtues, to good works, etc., cf. later the locus on grace. Enough to show that the Roman doctrine of the image of God is also in itself not yet finished and therefore cannot satisfy theological thinking.
5. First of all, this teaching is built upon a wrong understanding of man's final destiny. The state of grace and glory, in which the church of Christ shares here and hereafter, is described in Holy Scripture in the fairest way as sonship of God, as fellowship in the divine nature, as beholding of God, as everlasting life, as heavenly blessedness, and so on. About this there is no difference between Rome and us; no eye has seen it, no ear has heard it, it has not come up into the heart of man, that which God has made ready in the New Testament ordering of the covenant of grace for them that love Him, 1 Cor. 2:9. But Rome takes this final destiny of man, which is brought about by Christ, as a Neoplatonic beholding of and a mystical melting of the soul with God. And this is not the teaching of Holy Scripture. For all those blessings, which Christ has won for His own, are not first given to them in the state of glory but are in beginning already their share here on earth, 1 Cor. 2:9, and yet also, according to Rome, do not include the beholding of God by essence. The sonship of God is a fruit of faith, John 1:12, Rom. 8:14f., Gal. 4:6, 1 John 3:1, 2. The everlasting life is already enjoyed here and lies in a knowing of God in the face of Christ, John 3:16, 36, 17:3. Christ is and stays the way to the Father, to the knowledge and beholding of God, Matt. 11:27, John 1:18, 14:6, 1 John 3:2b. The vision of God is only to be gotten in an ethical sense, Matt. 5:8, 1 John 3:6. Even the sharing in the divine nature is not something only for the time to come, but is an end which the giving of God's promises already seeks here on earth, 2 Pet. 1:4, and again ethically brought about, Heb. 12:10.
Secondly, nowhere in Holy Scripture is it taught that this state of glory, which already takes its beginning in the state of grace on earth, is supernatural and superadded in the Roman sense. Surely this state of grace and glory goes far beyond all thought and imagining of man, 1 Cor. 2:9, 13:12, 1 John 3:2. But let it be thought that according to 1 Cor. 2 it is the wisdom of the world, the spirit of the world, the natural man, vs. 6, 8, 12, 14, for which these blessings of God are a hidden thing; and this natural man is the man who is led only by the animal life, lacking the spirit from God, and therefore darkened in his understanding. Added to this, that which God gives and will give to the believers is also for them an unearned gift of grace, which ever again stirs them to wonder and worship. And then it may not be forgotten that Christ not only won back what Adam lost but also what Adam would have won in the way of obedience. Therefore the good of salvation of the covenant of grace goes far beyond all our thoughts; but there is no word of it being a superadditum, which at first did not belong to our human nature.
Thirdly, the conclusion is wrong which Rome draws from these blessings of grace in Christ for the state of Adam before the fall. Rome reasons thus: if the state of glory for the restored man lies in likeness to God, then it must also have lain therein for the first man. And if that state of glory is now reached by believers only through the state of grace, then this also holds for Adam before the fall. The link between the state of grace and glory lies according to Rome herein, that man in justification receives the infused grace and by its strength does good works, which earn everlasting life ex condigno. All this Rome carries over to the first man. He too had as final destiny the state of glory; this he could not reach except through the state of grace; to Adam was thus given a grace, whereby he could earn everlasting life ex condigno. Just as that state of glory is, so also that grace by its nature supernatural, raised above the natural man, and thus a donum superadditum. This reasoning of Rome is right, insofar as it concludes from the image of God in the restored man to that in the first man. There is indeed no more than one image of God. It is also right, insofar as it takes that the final destiny for Adam was no other than the believer now receives through Christ, namely, everlasting life. There is truly but one ideal for man. But it is wrong, because it lays a link of merit between grace and glory and further also applies this to Adam. The meritorious worth of good works can first be handled later. Here let it only be pointed out that even if the Roman understanding of man's final destiny were right, it yet gives no right to take grace in an adequate, supernatural sense. For there is also such a link possible, that God binds certain promises and gifts to certain works, without these therefore in strict sense, ex condigno, being earned by them. Of such a kind was the promise of everlasting life to Adam in case of obedience, as the Reformed taught in their teaching on the covenant of works. There was a merit ex pacto, not ex condigno. The good works of man are never worth the heavenly glory, they never weigh up against it. But Rome brings in the merit of good works, both for the believer and for Adam, and thereby does short to grace. Grace changes with Rome wholly in character. It stands not in ethical but in physical opposition to nature. It takes not sin and guilt as given, but only a lower nature. It makes on the one hand all things grace and thereby just makes that there is no grace at all. For the grace is with Adam and with the believer indeed grace, but in no other sense than wherein also life, understanding, wisdom, strength, and so on are grace. There is no reason to call only the donum superadditum grace; that Adam was made and received understanding and will was then just as much grace, even if there is also a difference in amount in the gifts of grace. And so truly all becomes grace, what in the first moment by God is given to man in making or remaking. But also only in that first moment. For as soon as he has received those first gifts, man himself according to Rome goes to work by that grace; and all that he now further receives, he receives as reward for his merits. Even everlasting life is no more a grace-gift of God but a worthy, fitting, adequate reward for the work of man. Only can it still be called grace-gift, because the strength which made man able to earn was grace. Just as of old the Pelagians said: the power is from God, the will is from man.
Fourthly, it has been shown that the Roman teaching of the donum superadditum has led and must lead to three kinds of thought of man. For Rome there is not one idea and one moral law and one destiny for man; but as in the other creatures, so also in the world of men the ranking and ordering goes through. There is in the abstract a man with natural righteousness, another with righteousness beyond nature, a third with supernatural righteousness thinkable. The first of these three men is truly yet little raised above the beast; he is under the lust, the natural opposition between flesh and spirit, the openness to bodily suffering and timely death. But in his will he yet has the strength to do the good, to not let the lust pass over into sinful deeds, and so to lead a indeed natural but yet sinless life. To this image man after the fall is fairly like. Although the original sin is still often taken not only negatively but also positively, yet it is more and more weakened, the more the physical opposition of nature and grace took the place of the ethical antithesis of sin and grace. It lies according to many only negatively in a loss of that donum superadditum, which was given to the first man by the good pleasure of God. Man without that donum superadditum thus stays a in his kind complete, full, and however hard it falls, especially in the long run, yet if he will even sinless man. And from there with Rome the mild judgment on the unbaptized dying children and on the heathens, who have made good use of the light and strength of nature. They have no guilt and thus no punishment, receive a punishment of loss, no punishment of sense. As such a natural man however God did not make the first man. He gave him at once a righteousness beyond nature, and therefore Adam was also cut off from the true donum superadditum, that is, the grace that makes pleasing, raised above the lust, the suffering and the death, also as to the body. This is a second idea of man, which is possible and can be; such a man could then have kept God's commands without strife from the side of the flesh (gift of wholeness), but his righteousness would yet have stayed natural and would not have earned the vision of God by essence. This second thought of man is now once more raised a step higher by the adding of the donum superadditum, whereby a man arises with supernatural righteousness. As through all the Roman system, so we meet also here in the teaching of the image of God the opposition between the natural and the supernatural, between the human and the divine, between the earthly and the heavenly and within both fields then again all kinds of steps. There is all kinds of rank and class and stand in the ethical and religious. Not all stand and raise themselves equally high. As God is the center, the creatures group themselves in ever wider rings around Him. Farthest is the natural man from Him removed, then the man beyond nature, thereafter the supernatural man. And in the last class there is again all kinds of difference and degree. There are clergy and lay, monks and common men, commands and counsels, lower and higher morals. Highest stands the mystic, who here on earth already through thinking and self-denial and prayer brings it to beholding. And above men stand again the angels, set in all kinds of rankings. It all rises upward, toward God; it draws ever nearer to Him. The melting of the soul with God is the highest blessedness. Therefore there is in Rome a place for all; it reckons with each one's openness and fitness; it has a differing ideal for the differing men; it sets not to everyone the same moral and religious demands. On this Pierson has rightly laid stress; only he saw for beginning and being what was only outcome and showing.
Fifthly, from this it is clear that the reason why Rome teaches the righteousness beyond and supernatural is not herein, that otherwise the loss of the original righteousness is not to be made clear. Indeed Roman theologians ever bring this thought against the teaching of the Reformation; the original righteousness belongs to the being of man or not; if the first, then it is not to be lost or, if it yet goes lost, then loses the man therein a part of his being and he stops being a full man. But however much this thought is oft repeated; not to get around it has Rome come to the teaching of the donum superadditum. Rome keeps wholly the same hardness. For Adam also had a natural righteousness. And this natural righteousness is indeed natural, flowing from the beginnings and strengths of the natural man, without supernatural help (though also not without the general help of God's upholding), and it is yet to be lost and is by many indeed lost. And nevertheless stays also the deepest sunk sinner, robbed of all natural righteousness, yet still man. The loss and the indeed loss of the original righteousness can thus fully no service do as argument against its natural kind. Were that the case, then also the natural righteousness, which Rome teaches, must bear the name of supernatural. The question between Rome and us is a wholly other. To be lost is the original righteousness, because it is an accident, not a substance. But under the accidents, which all as such are to be lost, Rome makes yet again difference between what is naturally accident and what is supernaturally accident. According to us all the original righteousness is a natural accident; according to Rome the grace that makes pleasing is a supernatural accident. Why? Not, to make the loss possible and clear. But because man without it stayed a lacking creature. Rome teaches outspokenly that to God, given once that He would make a being standing from soul and body, from spirit and stuff, it was not possible, without supernatural help to make these both, soul and body, in full harmony, even as He cannot make a square circle. Flesh and spirit fight per se with each other, and God cannot stop fight between those two beginnings without supernatural grace. Bellarmine says it clear, that man stands from flesh and spirit, and thus in part has leaning to bodily good, in part to spiritual good, and that from these differing or opposing leanings there is in one and the same man a kind of fight. Further he teaches now, divine foresight at the beginning of making as cure brought to this sickness or weakness of human nature, which arose from the state of the stuff, added to man a certain shining gift, namely original righteousness, whereby as with a golden bridle the lower part was easily held under to the higher and the higher part to God, on grace of the first man c. 5. Here is clearly spoken out, that the flesh from its kind stands over against the spirit. The stuff is a might over against God, which indeed not per se sinful is as in Manichaeism, but yet of very low order is, in a wholly own way moves itself and man of itself to fight and to sin draws. Even is that might so great, that the reason alone the stirrings of the soul not or at least not but with great trouble can rule. There is thereto a special, supernatural grace needful. Even as in the wisdom-teaching of Plotinus is the matter a creature, which stands very far from God, by nature to all the spiritual is foe and therefore strongly must be bridled.
Sixthly and lastly, Rome's teaching of the donum superadditum brings a own understanding of Christendom with it. The Christian religion serves with Rome also indeed, to free from sin; but in the first and foremost place it stretches yet, to give back to man that grace, which to Adam as a donum superadditum was given but by him lost. This grace was to man before the fall even so needful as now to us, and was then even as good supernatural as now after the fall. According to Rome grace is thus a donum supernaturale per se and not per accidens, not only for sin's sake. Sin has brought no change in the nature of grace. Maybe it is by sin made more. But it was before and after the fall fully the same, namely an uplifting above nature. That is its kind and being. Christendom may thus also yet be a religion of freeing; in the very first place it is no repairing but uplifting of nature; it serves, to lead the nature above itself out, to make the man godlike. Thereto served with Adam the grace that makes pleasing, thereto serves now Christendom. This grace is thus then and now the same; that is, the own, the being-like in Christendom is fully not by the fall needful become; it was already needful before the fall. Christendom as uplifting of nature was also already with Adam before the fall. The receiving of the infused grace is now bound besides to preparations, namely also to faith in two dogmas, the Trinity and the flesh-becoming. Well now, so was it also with Adam. This knew before the fall already both. The flesh-becoming is therefore also per consequens before the fall and without sin needful been. In other words, that man become like to God, God must become man. This law held as well before as after the fall. Now the man-becoming brings only as something under-set the atoning with it. But the weight-point lies with Rome not in the fulfilling and forgiving of guilt, but in the man-becoming of God and in the god-making of man.
6. By the Reformers this teaching was unanimously rejected, but chiefly because it led to a weakening of original sin. The opposition was directed especially against the thesis of the scholastics: supernaturalia amissa, naturalia adhuc esse integra. And from this they concluded back to the image of God. If man through sin, through loss of the image of God, was wholly and altogether corrupted, then it must also have belonged to his nature. And so Luther said, justitiam non esse quoddam donum, quod ab extra accederet, separatumque a natura hominis sed fuisse vere naturalem, ut naturae Adae esset diligere Deum, credere Deo etc., in Genesis 3. But the Reformers also had to keep making a distinction between what of the image of God remained and what was lost. For that they used the names of substantia, essentia and dotes, dona, even supernaturalia dona. The Apology of the Confession calls the knowledge, the fear of God in Adam dona, and the Formula of Concord speaks of dotes in paradiso naturae concreatae, Müller, Die symb. Bücher der ev. luth. K. The Lutheran dogmaticians called the image of God indeed natural, insofar as the human nature without that image could not be pure and was forthwith created with it. But they denied that the image of God was natural in the sense that it flowed forth from the human nature of itself as such and thus would make up an unlosable, essential part of it; and some, such as Gerhard, Quenstedt and others, also specifically called the supernaturalis Dei favor, the gratiosa s. trinitatis inhabitatio and the suavitas et delectatio flowing therefrom by the name of dona supernaturalia, Gerhard, Loci theol. VIII c. 1-3. Quenstedt, Theol. did. polem. II 1-48. Hollaz, Ex. theol. Even so Calvin distinguishes between the substantia animae and its dotes, Institutes I 15, 2 and says with Augustine, naturalia dona fuisse corrupta in homine per peccatum, supernaturalibus autem exinanitum fuisse; he even calls these last adventitia, praeter naturam, II 2, 12. And many Reformed theologians make in the same sense a distinction between qualitates naturales and dona supernaturalia, Maccovius, Loci Comm. The immortality is derived by many not from Adam's nature but from the gratia Dei, Zanchius, Op. III. Polanus V 29. Junius, Op. I. Bucanus, Theol. XI 12. Maccovius. Even the old distinction of image and likeness was taken over by many and applied in this sense, Zanchius, Op. III. Martyr on Gen. 1:26. Alsted, Theol. schol. Yet it soon became clear that the Protestants, even where they still kept the expression dona supernaturalia, nevertheless took it in another sense than the Roman Catholics. With these last the meaning is this, that a man is very well thinkable and possible without these dona supernaturalia; indeed such a man then as a reasonable moral being also has some knowledge of God, of the moral law, of righteousness. But there is an essential distinction between the knowledge, the love, the righteousness in a natural and in a supernatural sense, between the homo naturalis and supernaturalis, between man and the Christian, between the world and the church, between nature and grace. Grace is not merely a restoration but an elevation, a filling up of nature, an elevatio, sublimatio naturae. This now was principally opposed by the Reformation. And therefore it had to come and did indeed come to the teaching that the image of God was proper to man by nature and that he, without that image, could exist only in natura impura, as a sinner. But now there was among the Reformers also still a difference in the view of the image of God. In the first time some Lutherans still placed the image of God also in the being of man and in the substance of the soul, Luther by Köstlin, Melanchthon, Hemming, Selnecker by Heppe, Dogm. d. d. Prot. But the Lutheran theology nevertheless went out from another thought. Its subjective, soteriological character had to lead to seeking the image of God only in the moral qualities which the first man received and whose loss made man a stock and a block in religious and moral respect. Luther oftentimes laid all the stress on the gifts and let the image of God be absorbed in them, Köstlin. Heppe. The confessional writings speak in the same spirit, Müller, and likewise the theologians, Heerbrand, Hunnius, Gerhard VIII c. 1. Quenstedt II 3-10, 17-23. Hollaz, etc. Indeed the Lutherans do not deny that also the being of man expresses quaedam theia sive divina; but the proper image of God is only in the justitia originalis with the immortality, impassibility, dominion and conditio felicissima connected thereto. For only the Son is essentially and substantially the image of God, Heb. 1:3; in man it is a perfectio accidentalis, losable and lost, Rom. 3:23, and only in the believer renewed and restored, Rom. 8:29, 2 Cor. 3:18, 5:17, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10. The Reformed however from the beginning also took up the being of man in the image of God. Heppe, Dogm. wrongly asserts that Calvin and Zanchius did not so teach. Calvin indeed makes a distinction between the substantia animae and its dotes, but says expressly that the image of God consisted in that tota praestantia, qua eminet hominis natura inter omnes animantium species, and that it further, therefore, also consists in the integritas, Institutes I 15, 2. II 12, 6, cf. in Gen. 1:26, 9:6, James 3:9. And with this all Reformed agree, Zanchius, Op. III. Ursinus, Catech. qu. 7. Martyr, Loci C. Polanus, Synt. Theol. V 34. Synopsis XIII 36. Leydecker, Fax Verit. etc. First Cocceius, S. Theol. XVII § 12-24 put forward another opinion and taught that the soul and its properties were indeed presupposition, but not content of the image of God; they were the canvas as it were, on which the image was painted by God, but this consisted itself only in the gifts as appears from 2 Cor. 3:18, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10, cf. also Heidegger, Corp. Theol. VI. Braun, Doctr. foed. I 2, 15, 5 v. Others expressed it so, that the image of God existed antecedenter in natura spirituali, formaliter in sanctitate, consequenter in dominio, Turretin, Theol. El. V qu. 10 § 6. Ryssenius, Theol. Witsius, Oec. foed. I 2, 11. Brakel, Red. Godsd. X 25. But most kept speaking of the image of God in broader and in narrower sense. Thereby in the Reformed theology the bond was held fast between the physical and the ethical nature of man, and thus further between nature and grace. Therewith now in the Reformed theology soon came yet another distinction, which especially in the teaching of the covenant of works was worked out. This gave answer to the question, not what Adam was, but what Adam was to become. First in these three points, the image of God in broader sense, the image of God in narrower sense, and the unfolding or destiny of the image of God, that is, in the teaching of the covenant of works, is the locus de imagine Dei fully to be treated.
7. Between Rome’s Doctrine and That of the Reformation on the Image of God. There is a deep difference between Rome’s doctrine and that of the Reformation on the image of God, which spreads over the whole of theology. This difference lies not in the expression justitia originalis . For although this term is used by Roman theologians in different senses, yet later ones also denote by it the justitia supernaturalis . Originalis can be called the righteousness in the first man, because his positive agreement with the law of God was his own from his origin, because it is to be distinguished as such from the justitia habitualis and actualis , and because in Adam it was the beginning and the root of his actual righteousness. Even since Thomas there was no difference here, that the justitia originalis would also have been for all mankind, if Adam had stood firm, the source of their actual righteousness, for Adam received it not as a private person but as a public person. All the dispute was about whether that justitia originalis was now natural or, at least in part, supernatural. The Reformers claimed the first. By that they did not mean to say that this original righteousness flowed of itself from human nature, taken in the sense of the union of spirit and matter, nor that it might not be called a gift, even of God’s grace in a broad sense; but only they maintained with that expression that the image of God, the original righteousness, was inseparable from the idea of man; that it was the normal state, the harmony, the health of man; that without it man cannot be a true, complete, normal man. If man loses that image of God, then he loses no substance and remains indeed man, but he becomes an abnormal, sick, spiritually dead man, a sinner; then he lacks something that belonged to his kind and nature, like the blind lacks sight, the deaf hearing, the sick health. With Rome, man can miss the justitia supernaturalis and yet be a good, true, complete sinless man, with a justitia naturalis , which in its kind is without any defect. But according to the Protestants that cannot be. There is no middle state between man as image of God and man as sinner. He is son of God, his offspring, his image, or he is a child of wrath, dead in sins and misdeeds. When man receives back that image of God, this perfect righteousness through faith in Christ, then it is indeed a supernatural gift but supernatural by accident; he receives back what belongs to his being, like the blind who becomes seeing again. This doctrine now is grounded on Holy Scripture, which nowhere speaks at the creation of man of supernatural gifts; Rome therefore does not appeal to Gen. 1:26, 31, Eccles. 7:29, etc., but to the representation of the New Testament of the state of grace and glory, which however can by no means serve as proof. Scripture everywhere assumes that man is akin to God and is his offspring; the service of, the love to, the fellowship with God is no superadded gift but originally, by nature, man’s own. God demands man wholly, with understanding, heart, soul, body, and all powers for his service and for his love. The moral law is one for all men, in all times, and holds the moral ideal equally high for all. There is no lower and higher righteousness, no twofold morality, no double kind of duties. The original righteousness is so natural that it would also, according to most Roman theologians, have been inherited by Adam’s descendants in case of his obedience, and that the Gentiles now still by nature do the things of the law, Rom. 2:15. When then against this reformatory doctrine it is objected that it is in an antinomy, because it calls the justitia originalis on the one hand natural and yet on the other hand losable and accidental, then this objection flows only from misunderstanding. Natural is called the original righteousness, not because it exists in some substance or essence, but because it is a natural property or quality. Just as health belongs to the nature of man but is therefore indeed losable, so it is also with the image of God. Both, Rome and the Reformation, agree herein that the original righteousness is no matter, no spiritual substance, as the Manicheans teach, but an accident, a quality. And the difference is only whether it is naturally accidental or, at least in part, supernaturally accidental. Rome teaches only of the justitia naturalis that it is naturally accidental; the Reformation teaches it of the whole justitia originalis . But therefore also falls away, as was already said above, wholly Rome’s objection against the doctrine that the image of God is natural; for it itself acknowledges that the justitia naturalis is natural and yet losable, and thus can no longer bring this objection against the doctrine of the Protestants. Rome’s doctrine is then also not arisen from the objection that the naturalness of the original righteousness is not to be reconciled with its losability, but it owes its origin to a wholly other series of thoughts, namely, to the Neoplatonic conception of the Christian life-ideal. It is that Neoplatonism which by the Reformation on the ground of Scripture is rejected. And thereby it has guarded itself against all Manicheism. By sin man has lost no substance. In this sense man is still man also after the fall. But by the loss of the original righteousness he has lost the harmony, the health of his nature, has become wholly and altogether a sinner; his nature in the sense of substance, essence has remained, but the moral qualities proper to him by nature have been lost. This fair conception of the image of God and of the original righteousness has now in the Reformed church and theology come even better to its right than in the Lutheran. Here the image of God is limited to the original righteousness, and is thus with this wholly lost. The separation between the spiritual and the worldly, between the heavenly and the earthly is here so sharply drawn and divided into two hemispheres, that the connection of nature and grace, of creation and re-creation is wholly misrecognized. The supranaturalistic representation of the image of God is here not yet wholly overcome; it stands loose beside and above nature, and its loss has indeed the consequence that man in spiritual things is wholly deaf and blind, but in earthly things he is still able to much good and to a certain height independent of the grace of God in Christ. The Reformed however have through their distinction of the image of God in broader and narrower sense maintained the connection of substance and quality, of nature and grace, of creation and re-creation the purest. Indeed this distinction is often still too mechanically conceived, and it ought to be organically further developed. But here it is yet most clearly expressed that the image of God in narrower sense hung together most closely with that in broader sense; that both components made up the full image of God; that not something in man but man himself, the whole man, was image of God; that sin, which caused the loss of the image of God in narrower sense and corrupted and destroyed that in broader sense, has touched the whole man, and that accordingly also the grace in Christ restores the whole man and for his whole life and labor, also in family, society, state, art, science, etc., is of the greatest meaning.
8. In the handling of the teaching of the image of God, therefore, in agreement with Scripture and the Reformed confession, this thought should stand foremost, that man does not bear or have the image of God, but that he is the image of God; as man he is son, likeness, offspring of God, Gen. 1:26, 9:6, Luke 3:38, Acts 17:28, 1 Cor. 11:7, James 3:9. Herein two things are enclosed; first, that not something in God, one or another virtue and fullness with the shutting out of others, that also not one person, for example, the Son with the shutting out of Father and Spirit, but that God himself, that the whole Godhead is the archetype of man. Indeed, it has often been taught that man was made particularly after the Son or after the Christ to be made flesh, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. V 14. Tertullian, de resurr. carnis c. 6. Osiander, in Calvin, Inst. I 15, 2. II 12, 6. Hofmann, Schriftbew. I 290. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I³ 126. Beck, Gl. II 329. Schoeberlein in Herzog² 4, 7. Martensen, Dogm. § 72. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. 70 and so on. But Scripture says that nowhere. It speaks it out time and again, that man is made after God's image, that we are not shaped after Christ but that He became like us, Rom. 8:3, Phil. 2:7, 8, Heb. 2:14, and that we now, reshaped after the image of Christ, become like God again, Rom. 8:29, 1 Cor. 15:49, 2 Cor. 3:18, Phil. 3:21, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10, 1 John 3:2. Much better is it therefore to say that the threefold being of God is the archetype of man, Augustine, de trin. XII 6. Lombard, Sent. II dist. 16. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 13 art. 5, though in the soul-searching tracking of the trinitarian moments in man's being all carefulness is also to be heeded, Calvin, Inst. I 15, 4. Comm. in Gen. 1:26. Synopsis pur. theol. XIII 7. Quenstedt, Theol. did. pol. II 4. Hollaz, Ex. theol. 466. On the other side, from the teaching that man is shaped after God's image flows forth that that image spreads over the whole man. There is in man nothing shut out from the image of God. All creatures show traces of God, man is the image of God. And he is that wholly and fully, in soul and body, in all strengths and mights, in all states and bonds. Man is the image of God, because he and insofar as he is truly man, and he is man, truly, in essence man, because and in that same measure as he is the image of God. But naturally, as the world is a living whole and thus in some creatures more and in others less clearly shows forth God's virtues, so also in man as a living whole the image of God comes out here more clearly than elsewhere, in the soul more than in the body, in the upright virtues more than in the bodily strengths. Yet this does nothing short to the truth that the whole man is God's image. Scripture could not and might not speak of God in a human way and carry over all human traits to God, if God had not first made man wholly and fully after his image. And it is the task of Christian theology to point out this image of God in the whole being of man. Compare herewith my Principles of Psychology, 1897, which handle some subjects from the teaching of man more broadly than the room here allows.
First of all, the image of God is shown in the soul of man.
According to Genesis 2:7, man was formed from the dust of the earth by the inbreathing of the breath of life (neshamah chayyim ), and so he became a living soul (nephesh chayyah , psuche zosa ). The breath of life is the life-beginning; the living soul is the being of man. By both, the Scripture gives to man his own, self-standing place and shuns both pantheism and materialism. The names ruach and nephesh , pneuma and psuche , which in Scripture point to the unseen part of man, set this clearly in the light. The trichotomy, which in beginning roots in the dualism of Plato and in the Christian church ever found entry among Gnostic and theosophic ways, sees therein two sundry substances. But wrongly. Hebrews 4:12 and 1 Thessalonians 5:23 give no more a listing of the truly sundry parts of man than, for example, Luke 10:27, and thus prove nothing. Soul and spirit stand in Scripture ever in parallel and switch with each other. Now body and soul, then body and spirit make up the being of man, Matthew 10:28, 1 Corinthians 7:34, James 2:26. The soul's workings are by turns ascribed to the spirit and to the soul, Psalm 139:14, Proverbs 19:2 and Proverbs 17:27, Psalm 77:7, 1 Corinthians 2:11, Numbers 21:4 and Job 21:4, 1 Samuel 1:10 and Isaiah 54:6, Luke 1:46 and 47, and so on. Dying is called both the giving up of the soul, Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21, Matthew 20:28, Acts 15:26, 20:10, as of the spirit, Psalm 31:6, Matthew 27:50, Luke 8:55, 23:46, Acts 7:59. Sometimes the spirit and sometimes the soul is deathless, Ecclesiastes 12:7, Matthew 10:28; and the dead are called souls, Revelation 6:9, 20:4, and spirits, Hebrews 12:23, 1 Peter 3:19. But though not in being sundered, they are yet in no wise the same. Spirit is man, because he did not come forth from the earth like the beasts, but the breath of life was breathed into him by God, Genesis 2:7; because he has his life-beginning from above, from God, Ecclesiastes 12:7; because he has his own spirit, sundered from the Spirit of God, Genesis 41:8, 45:27, Exodus 35:21, Deuteronomy 2:30, Judges 15:19, Ezekiel 3:14, Zechariah 12:1, Matthew 26:41, Mark 2:8, Luke 1:47, 23:46, John 11:33, Acts 7:59, 17:16, Romans 8:16, 1 Corinthians 2:11, 5:3-5, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Hebrews 4:12, 12:23, and so on; because as such he is kin to the angels, can also think on ghostly, heavenly things, and if need be can also be without a body. But soul is man, because the ghostly part in him from the first blink, in sundering from the angels, is laid out for a body, is ordered for a body; because he through that body is bound to the earth and also for his higher life to the sense-like and outward; because he can only climb to the higher from out the lower; because he thus is a sense-like, stuff-like being and as such kin to the beasts. Man is a reasoning animal, a thinking reed; standing between angels and beasts, kin to both and sundered from both, in himself binding and blending heaven and earth, the unseen and the seen things with each other. And just as such is he image and likeness of God. God is truly spirit, and in so far the angels also are kin to Him. But sometimes there is speech of His soul, and through all Scripture all those sundry soul-like stirrings and workings are ascribed to God, which are in being own to man. In Christ God took not the nature of angels but that of men. And therefore just man, in sundering from the angels, is image, son, offspring of God. The spirituality, unseenness, oneness, simpleness, deathlessness of the human soul are marks of the image of God. This image itself comes out therein, that he has a pneuma , which from the outset is ordered to psuche .
Secondly, to the image of God belong the faculties of man.
While the spirit is the beginning and the soul the subject of life in man, according to Holy Scripture the heart is the organ for his life. It is first the center of bodily life, but then furthermore in a figurative sense the foundation and source of all psychic life, of affections and passions, of desire and will, even of thinking and knowing. Out of the heart are the issues of life, Prov. 4:23. This life, which has its origin in the heart, then splits into two streams. On the one hand, there is that life to be distinguished which includes all impressions, perceptions, sensations, observations, deliberations, thoughts, knowledge, wisdom, which specifically in its higher form has the nous as organ and embodies itself in the word, the language. And on the other hand, from the heart all affections, passions, drives, inclinations, affections, desires, and decisions of the will take their origin, which must be led by the nous and express themselves in the deed. Also in all these psychic faculties and activities of man there are traits to be seen of the image of God. Already the diversity and richness of those powers point back to God. To the degree that a creature stands lower, it is also less richly organized and thus also less akin to and capable of the highest good, which is God. Even the angel stands in this respect below man. Precisely because man is so wonderfully richly organized, he can become like God as the highest good, in the richest way, as it were from all sides, in all His virtues and perfections, and enjoy Him. Even Augustine saw in heart, understanding, and will (memoria, intellectus, voluntas ) an analogy of the trinitarian being of God. Just as the Father gives life to the Son and the Spirit, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, so also in man the heart, the memoria , the deep, hidden soul-life, gives existence to intellectus and voluntas , and specifically also makes the will follow in order upon the understanding.
Rationalism and Pelagianism detach understanding and will from the heart, and seek in both together the whole, full being of man; mysticism, despising the conscious, willing life, withdraws into the depth of the mind; the Greek church and theology places both, head and heart, unmediated next to each other; but the theology of the West has under the leadership of Augustine avoided all these errors; it has seen that the doctrine of God and of man stood in the closest connection; in the Trinity it therefore held fast the essential unity, the distinctness of the three persons, the filioque , and accordingly it also taught in psychology that the deep, hidden soul-life comes to revelation only through the knowing and the desiring faculty, and that among these two the latter is led and governed by the former.
9. Thirdly, the image of God shows itself in the virtues of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with which man was straightway created. For an orderly treatment, the nature and powers of the soul had to be spoken of separately above, but this is meant only as a logical distinction. Man was not created as a neutral being with merely indifferent powers, but he was straightway created physically and ethically full-grown, with knowledge in the understanding, righteousness in the will, holiness in the heart. For man, goodness consists in moral wholeness, in full agreement with the law of God, in a holy and whole being like God himself, Lev. 19:2, Deut. 6:5, Mt. 5:48, 22:37, Eph. 5:1, 1 Pet. 1:15, 16. That law is one and the same for all men; Scripture knows no twofold men, no twofold moral law, no twofold moral wholeness and destiny. If man is created good, then he must be created with the original righteousness. This is on the one hand not to be taken as childlike innocence, but it may also not be overstated, as if the state of wholeness were already like the state of glory. The knowledge of Adam was pure but yet limited and open to growth; he walked not in sight but in faith; he knew not only by insight but also by reasoning; he knew the future not except by special revelation, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 94 art. 1-3. And likewise it was with his righteousness and holiness; they were from the beginning his own, for otherwise he could never have done any good work. Good fruits presuppose a good tree; doing follows being. But that inborn righteousness and holiness had yet to be kept, unfolded, and turned into deeds by man. Not as if Adam, fitted with the needful gifts, now had to go to work in his own strength, without and outside God. The original righteousness was a free gift of God and it was from moment to moment also upheld in him by the providence of God. It is not thinkable for a moment without fellowship with God. As the Son was also already before the fall the Mediator of union, so was the Holy Ghost then already the worker of all knowledge, righteousness, and holiness in man. Some church fathers argued this from Gen. 2:7 and said that man was first formed by the Logos and that thereafter the breath of life, that is, the Holy Ghost was breathed into him, cf. Kleutgen, Theol. II; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk I³. This exegesis was wrong, but it is fully true that also man in the state of wholeness had the virtues of knowledge and righteousness only through and in the Holy Ghost. Indeed there is between the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in man before sin and in the state of sin a great difference. Now that indwelling is above nature, because the Holy Ghost must as it were come to man from outside and stands straight against all his sinful nature. With Adam however that whole opposition did not exist; his nature was holy and thus needed not, as with believers, to be made holy; it was from the outset fit for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Therefore this was with Adam also natural. There is no true good, whole man thinkable without the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. There stands no natural man in the Roman sense, between the fallen, sinful man and the whole, created in God's image man. Whoever is man, man in full, true sense, he is and must be image of God, son of God, offspring of God, living in fellowship with Him through the Holy Ghost. And so was man also before the fall the dwelling of the whole most holy Trinity, the most fair temple of the Holy Ghost.
Fourthly, the body of man also belongs to the image of God. Philosophy, which knows not or rejects the revelation, always falls again into empiricism or rationalism, into materialism or spiritualism. But Scripture reconciles both. Man has a pneuma , but that pneuma is psychically organized, and must by its nature dwell in a body. It is man's essence to be bodily, sensible. Therefore, if not temporally then yet logically, first his body is formed out of the dust of the earth and thereafter the breath of life is breathed into him. He is called Adam after the earth, out of which he is formed. He is and is called dust, Gen. 2:7, Ps. 103:14, Job 10:9, 33:6, Isa. 2:22, 29:16, 45:9, 64:8, ek ges choikos , 1 Cor. 15:47. The body is no prison, but a wondrous work of art of God Almighty and just as much as the soul constituting the essence of man, Job 10:8-12, Ps. 8, 139:13-17, Eccl. 12:2-7, Isa. 64:8; it is our epigeios oikia , 2 Cor. 5:1, our skeuos , that is, our serving organ, our tool, 1 Cor. 12:18-26, 2 Cor. 4:7, 1 Thess. 4:4, and the members of the body are the hopla with which we fight in the service of righteousness or of unrighteousness, Rom. 6:13; it belongs so essentially to man, that it, although violently torn from the soul by sin, yet in the resurrection is again united with her. The nature of the union of soul and body is incomprehensible, but it is much closer than occasionalism or the preestablished harmony or the system of influx thinks it; it is not ethical but physical; it is so intimate, that one nature, one person, one I is the subject of both and of all their activities. It is always the same soul that sees through the eye, thinks through the brain, grasps with the hand, walks with the foot. Although not present in every part of the body secundum totalitatem virtutis , yet it is present in all members secundum totalitatem essentiae . It is one and the same life that flows through the whole body, but in every member works and manifests itself in its own corresponding way. Now this body also, which is so intimately connected with the soul, belongs to the image of God. Indeed this is not so to be thought, that God himself has a material body, as the Audians supposed; nor also, that God, creating man, had assumed a body, as Eugubinus taught; nor also, that God had created man after the Christ to be incarnate, as Osiander judged. For God is pneuma , John 4:24 and has no body. The human body forms not in its material substance, as sarx , but indeed in its organization as instrument of the soul, in its perfectio formalis , part of the image of God, Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. VI 12. Gregory of Nyssa, de hom. opif. c. 8. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 93 art. 6. S. c. Gent IV 26. Petavius, de sex dier. opif. II 4, 7. Gerhard, Loci VIII 3. Calvin, Inst. I 15, 3. Polanus, Synt. Theol. p. 328. Zanchi, Op. III 677. Bucanus, Inst. theol. VIII 13. Synopsis pur. theol. XIII 13. Mastricht, III 9, 30. Just as God, although being pneuma , yet is Creator of a material world, which may be called his revelation and appearance, and this revelation attains its high point in the incarnation, so also the spirit of man as soul is laid out upon the body as its appearance. The incarnation of God is the proof that not the angel but man is created after God's image and that his body forms an essential component thereof. The creation is from the beginning so arranged and the human nature is at once so created, that it was capable and suitable for the highest likeness to and for the most intimate indwelling of God. God could not have become man, if He had not first made man after his image. And precisely because the body as organ of the soul also belongs to the essence of man and to the image of God, therefore it originally also shared in immortality. God is not a God of the dead but of the living, Matt. 22:32. Death is a consequence of sin, Gen. 2:17, 3:19, Rom. 5:12, 6:23. This immortality consisted however in Adam not yet in the non posse mori , in the eternal, incorruptible life, but only in the posse non mori , in not dying in case of obedience. It was not absolute but conditional, it depended on an ethical condition. It is therefore not right, with the Pelagians, Socinians, Remonstrants etc. to say, that man is created mortal and death is given with the material organism automatically and thus the normal, natural state. But yet on the other hand there is an essential difference between the not dying of Adam, as long as he remained obedient, and the not being able to die, which he would have received as reward for his obedience. Just as the knowledge, righteousness and holiness in Adam was still deprived of the donum perseverantiae , so immortality was not yet one with the eternal, unlosable life. The human nature of Adam was so created, that it, in case of transgression of God's command, could die and must die. Adam was yet earthly from the earth, first Christ is the Lord from heaven; the natural is first, thereafter the spiritual. Through this body now man was bound to the earth but could also exercise his dominion over the earth. The dominion over the earth is just as immortality a piece of the image of God. Indeed the Socinians went much too far, when they placed in the dominion the whole essence of man and the entire content of the image of God; but yet Gen. 1:26 teaches clearly, that that dominion hangs together most closely with the creation after God's image and is given directly. It is no outward addition, it rests not on an incidental, special disposition; but man, who is image of God, is thereby at the same time elevated above all other creatures and appointed to lord and king over them all. And finally belongs to the image of God also the dwelling in paradise, Gen. 2:8-15. Holiness and blessedness belong together; our conscience testifies, that there ought to be connection between virtue and happiness; the ethical and the physical, the moral and the natural order in the world, essence and appearance, spirit and matter may form no opposition. To fallen man therefore belongs an earth that lies under the curse; the godless awaits hereafter a place of darkness, the righteous shall once walk in the light of God's countenance; the not yet fallen and yet still earthly man dwells in a paradise.
10. Thus the whole man is the image and likeness of God. He is so in soul and body, in all faculties, powers, and gifts. Nothing in man is excluded from the image of God; it extends as far as the human does; it is the human in man. The human is not the divine itself, but it is nevertheless its finite, creaturely imprint. All that is in God—his spiritual being, his virtues and perfections, his immanent self-distinctions, his communication and revelation in creation—all this finds its, albeit finite and limited, analogy and likeness in man. There lies a deep truth in the view of the Kabbalah, that God, who is the Infinite in himself, reveals himself in the ten sefiroth or attributes and that these together make up the Adam Kadmon, Franck, La Kabbale 1843; the human nature is among creatures the highest and most perfect revelation of God. And it is that absolutely not according to its pneumatic side alone, but just as much according to its somatic side; it is so precisely as human, that is, as psychic nature. God and world, spirit and matter are according to the teaching of Scripture no oppositions. There is in matter nothing contemptible and nothing sinful. The visible world is just as much a beautiful, rich revelation of God as the spiritual. In the first he displays his virtues just as much as in the latter. All creatures are embodiments of his divine thoughts and all show vestigia Dei. But all these vestigia, spread alongside each other in the spiritual and in the material world, are summed up in man and so mutually connected and raised higher, that they clearly form the image and likeness of God. The whole world raises itself upward, closes itself off, completes itself, receives its unity, its goal, its crown in man. To be the image of God, man therefore had to be a summary of the whole nature. The Jews said that the matter for the human body was gathered by God from the different lands of the earth, Weber, System; cf. a Frisian myth in Dr. J. te Winkel, Gesch. der Ned. Lett. I. In this strange form a true, beautiful thought was expressed. Man as spirit is akin to the angels and climbs up to the unseen things; but he is also a citizen of the seen world and connected to all bodily creatures. There is in the human body no single substance which does not occur in the nature around him. Thus man is the unity of the material and the spiritual world, the mirror of the universe, vinculum, compendium, epitome totius naturae, microcosmos, and precisely thereby also image and likeness of God, his son and heir, microtheos. He is the prophet, who explains God and proclaims his virtues; he is the priest, who with all creation consecrates himself as a holy offering to God; he is the king, who in righteousness guides and rules all things. And in all this he points to One, who in a yet higher and richer sense is the revelation and the image of God, to Him, who is the only-begotten of the Father and the firstborn of all creatures. Adam, the son of God, was a type of Christ.
1. Though Adam was made in God's likeness, he was not yet so in the fullest sense, and he was not so by himself alone. Only then does the likeness of God stand before us in its full richness, when we also take in the calling of man, both for this life and for the life to come. In 1 Cor. 15:45-49 Paul sets the two heads of the bond, Adam and Christ, over against each other and weighs them, not so much, as in Rom. 5:12-21 and 1 Cor. 15:22, with regard to what they brought about, as rather with regard to their kind and self. The weighing here goes down deepest and drives to the root of both their unlikeness. The whole Adam, both before and after the fall, is set against the whole Christ, both after and before the uprising. The first man is by the making a living soul, soul-like, of earth earthy; but the second man is by his uprising a life-giving spirit, spirit-like, from heaven, cf. W. Lütgert, Der Mensch aus dem Himmel , Greifswalder Studien, H. Cremer zum 25 j. Prof. dargebracht u. s. w. Gütersloh 1895. Though Adam was made in God's likeness, he was, since earthly from the earth, hanging on the earth; he had need of food and drink, light and air, day and night, and so had not yet a spirit-like, uplifted body, above all those needs; his soul-like body was not yet fully become the tool of the spirit. As such Adam stands below Christ: Adam is the first, Christ is the second and last, who takes Adam for granted and follows after Adam; Adam is the lesser and lower, Christ is the greater and higher; Adam thus pointed toward Christ, he was even before the fall already a type of Christ; in the making of Adam Christ was already reckoned on; the whole making, also that of man, was below-the-fall; the earthly is first, thereafter the ghostly. What Paul here broadly and deeply sets forth is grounded in Gen. 1-2 itself. Man, though a spirit and bearing in himself a breath of life, became, even as the beasts, a living soul. He got fruit of herb and tree for food, Gen. 1:29, a garden for dwelling, Gen. 2:8ff., a wife for help, Gen. 2:18ff., a bidding for guideline, Gen. 2:16, 17, a threat of punishment in case of overstepping, Gen. 2:17. From all this it shows that the first man, though set high, had not yet the highest. There is a very great unlikeness between the soul-like and the spirit-like, between the state of wholeness and the state of glory. After the uprising belly and food will be done away, 1 Cor. 6:13, but with Adam both were there; in heaven the children of God will no more wed but be like the angels, Mt. 22:30, but Adam had need of the help of a wife. Adam stood thus not at the end but at the beginning of the way; his state was a forerunning and timely one, which could not so stay, and must pass over either to higher glory or to a fall in sin and death. For on the overstepping of the bidding stood death, but thus also by keeping thereof stood life, and indeed the everlasting life. For not only does our awareness witness to us all that in keeping God's biddings is great reward and the overstepping thereof brings punishment, but the Holy Writ also speaks this out time and again; it grasps all blessedness, bound to the doing of God's biddings, under the name of life, of everlasting life, and knows for both in work-bond and in grace-bond but one highest ideal for man, and that is the everlasting life, Lev. 18:5, Ezek. 20:11, Ps. 19:11, Mt. 19:17, Lk. 10:28, Gal. 3:12. So Adam stood yet at the incoming; he had this reward, the everlasting life, not yet, but must earn it, he could yet err, sin, fall, die. His standing to God was such that he in his fellowship could grow ever more, but also yet fall out therefrom. This one-of-a-kind standing is in the Writ maybe on one place weighed with a bond. In Hos. 6:7 the Lord says of Israel and Judah, that they, in spite of all the work laid out on them, like Adam have overstepped the bond, LXX ὡς ἀνθρωπος, Vulg., sicut Adam. The rendering: as a man, is pressed by the drawback that just of men in general it is said that they overstepped the bond; and the setting over: as once men (bond), would in any case require that the word כאדם not after the subject המה, but after the word to be set ברית was placed. And so only the rendering: like Adam, stays. There lies then in it shut up, that the bidding given to Adam was in the being of the thing a bond, because it even as that of God with Israel, meant to give Adam in the way of hearkening the everlasting life. This is now yet strengthened by the likeness that Paul in Rom. 5:12-21 draws between Adam and Christ. Like the hearkening of one man, namely Christ, and the grace given in Him brought for mankind acquittal, righteousness, and life, so also is the one overstepping and misdeed of the one man for mankind cause of dooming, sin, and death. It is with Adam as with Christ. We stand truly to him in the same standing. He is a type of Christ, our head, from whom for his overstepping guilt and death come to us. He is the cause of our all death; we all die in Adam, 1 Cor. 15:22. Also here is the standing of Adam to God a bond-standing, but now not so much written from the side of God, as rather from the side of them who under Adam as head are taken in that bond.
2. In Christian theology this rich thought of Scripture has not always come enough to its right. The naturalistic view placed the image of God only in the makeup, the bare potentiality, the freedom of the will, the formal personality, and deemed death even natural. The image of God or at least the likeness consisted much more in that which man must acquire through his own strength's effort, than in that which was straightway given him at the creation. Over against this the supranaturalistic view swung to another extreme and ascribed to the state of integrity a wholly supernatural character. Not only was the original righteousness held for a supernatural gift, immortality deemed as a special boon of the Creator, and all openness to suffering and sorrow denied to Adam, Aug. de civ. XIV 26. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 97 art. 2; but some, such as Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Böhme and others judged that man before the fall, while immortal, had no need of food, Petavius, de sex dier. opif. c. 7; excretion would in any case have taken place without any unseemliness, Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 97 art. 3; man's food would according to most church fathers, scholastics, Roman, Lutheran, Remonstrant, and also according to some Reformed theologians such as Zwingli, Musculus, Martyr, Zanchi, Junius, Piscator and so on have consisted only in plants and not in flesh; generation would have happened without any fleshly lust, and the children would not have been born speechless and help-needing and would have grown up very swiftly, Aug. de pecc. mer. et rem. I 37. 38. Lombard, Sent. II dist. 20. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 98 art. 1; many went even further and thought that procreation would not have happened by coitus at all, Aug. Retract. I 10. Gregory of Nyssa de hom. opif. 16. 17. John of Damascus de fide orthod. II 30; man was first created androgynous, the creation of woman is already a proof of the fall, the Jews in Weber, Syst. 202 f. Erigena, de div. nat. II 6. 10. 23. IV 12. Böhme, Oetinger, Baader, Schelling, Lange, Dogm. II 324 f. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. 102 f. Hofmann, Weiss. u. Erf. I 65 f. Schriftbew. I² 403 f. and so on; the woman was thus truly not the image of God and partaker of human nature, cf. in Aug. de trin. XII 7. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 93 art. 4. qu. 99 art. 2. Bonaventure Sent. II dist. 16 art. 2 qu. 2. dist. 20 art. 1 qu. 6. Gerhard, VIII c. 6. Quenstedt, II. Jansen, Gesch. des deutschen Volkes VI 1888. Even by Origen, c. Cels. I 32. 33. de princ. II 9 bodiliness and all unlikeness among men was derived from a fall of preexistent souls, or also a wholly other body than ours was ascribed to man before the fall, cf. the Ophites in Hagenbach, D. G. § 62, Böhme, Antoinette Bourignon, Baader and so on. And in link with all this paradise was often taken very idealistically or even allegorically; the beasts would not have died, wild and unclean creatures would not have been there, the rose would have bloomed without thorns, the air much purer, the water much softer, the light much brighter, e.g. Luther on Gen. 3, cf. Strauss, gl. I 700 f.
Yet it was acknowledged by all that Adam did not yet possess the highest state. This was inherently implied in the probationary command, the freedom of choice, the possibility of sin and death. Especially Augustine made a clear distinction between the ability not to sin and the ability not to die, which Adam possessed, and the inability to sin and the inability to die, which would have been granted to the first man in case of obedience along with glorification, and is now bestowed by grace upon the elect.
Even Augustine spoke of that relation in which Adam originally stood as a covenant, testament, or pact. And the translation of the words "as Adam" led many to a similar view. In substance, the doctrine of what was later called the covenant of works is already found among the church fathers. In the state of Adam, as it was understood by the scholastics, the Roman Catholic, and the Lutheran theologians, all the elements are contained which were later specifically summarized by the Reformed in the doctrine of the covenant of works; compare Lombard, Sentences.
Of the relation in which believers come to stand to God through Christ, the name covenant is often used in Scripture. Already Zwingli and Bullinger seized upon these thoughts of Scripture to defend the unity of the Old and New Testament against the Anabaptists; compare later in the doctrine of the covenant of grace. Now, following the example of Scripture, when the Christian religion was presented as a covenant, Paul with his parallel between Adam and Christ gave occasion to think also of the state of integrity as a covenant. In distinction from the covenant of grace, this was then called the covenant of nature or of works. It was called the covenant of nature, not as if it flowed automatically and naturally from the nature of God or that of man. But it was so called because the foundation on which the covenant rested, that is, the moral law, was known to man by nature, and because it was established with man in his original state and could be kept by man with the powers given him in creation, without supernatural grace.
When later the name gave occasion for misunderstanding, it was preferably replaced by that of covenant of works; and it bore this name because eternal life in this covenant was obtainable only in the way of works, that is, of the observance of God's commands. This covenant was now, as a parallel to the covenant of grace, taught and developed by the Reformed with special fondness. It already appears in Ursinus, Larger Catechism. Olevianus, On the Substance of the Covenant of Grace. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae. Junius, Theological Theses. Wollebius, Christian Theology, and so on; here in this country first in Trelcatius, Common Places. Gomarus, Oration on the Covenant of God. Trelcatius Jr., Institutes of Theology. Cloppenburg, Disputation on the Covenant of God. Cocceius, Summa of the Doctrine of the Covenant, and further in all theologians, for example, Mastricht, Theology. Marck, History of Paradise. Moor. M. Vitringa. Comrie, Treatise on the Covenant of Works before his edition of Boston, Contemplation of the Covenant of Grace. Brahe, Notes on the Walch Articles. Examination of the Draft of Tolerance, 10th Dialogue. J. van den Honert, Preface to Ursinus' Treasury, and so on.
The confessional writings do not mention it in so many words; but in substance it is nevertheless contained in articles 14 and 15 of the Belgic Confession, where it is taught that by Adam's transgression of the commandment of life the entire human nature is corrupted, in Lord's Days 3 and 4 of the Heidelberg Catechism, where man is said to have been created in God's image so that he might live with God in eternal blessedness, but is also called entirely corrupted by Adam's fall, and in chapter 3, 2 of the Canons of Dort, where it is said that the corruption of Adam passes over to us "according to God's righteous judgment"; formally the covenant of works was included in the Irish Articles, in the Westminster Confession, and in the Walch Articles of 1693.
Furthermore, the doctrine of the covenant of works later also found entrance among some Roman Catholics, Scheeben. Pesch, Praelections, and Lutherans, such as Pufendorf, Jaeger, Buddeus, Institutions, and others; compare Vitringa; on the other hand, it was opposed by Episcopius, Theological Institutes. Limborch, Christian Theology. J. Alting on Hebrews 8:6 and Works. Venema, Short Defense of His Honor and Doctrine. N. Schiere, Doctrine of the Testaments and Divine Covenants of All. and others. Rationalism wanted nothing to do with it, and even van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, saw in it only a juridical artifice. Nevertheless, it was again taken up by Dr. Kuyper, The Herald. Hodge, Systematic Theology. Dr. Vos, The Covenant Doctrine in Reformed Theology.
3. It can certainly be objected against the doctrine of the covenant, as it has been wrought out in Reformed theology, that it has gone down too much into details and has been handled too scholastically. The later theologians still defended the teaching, but they no longer felt its meaning and its theological and religious weight; the soul was out of it, and the fight against it was therefore easy. But the teaching of the covenant of works rests on Scriptural ground and is of outstanding worth. All higher life among reasonable and moral creatures bears the shape of a covenant. Covenant is in general an agreement of persons, whereby they willingly, to ward off some evil or to gain some good, bind themselves over against each other on set terms. Such an agreement, whether tacitly entered or clearly laid down, is the usual shape for the living together and working together of men among themselves. Love, friendship, wedlock, and all social teamwork in trade, craft, learning, art, and so on, rests at last on the ground of a covenant, that is, on mutual troth and all kinds of moral duties commonly acknowledged. It can therefore not be wondered at, that also the highest, richest life of man, that is, religion, bears this mark. In Scripture the covenant is the fixed shape in which the bond of God to his folk is set forth. And even where the name does not come up, we yet always see both as it were in talk with each other, dealing with each other, God calling man to turn, minding him of his duties and binding himself to the giving of all good. Later with the teaching of the covenant of grace, the biblical thought of berith will be set in the light. Here let it be enough to call to mind this general notion. Even if the name covenant for the religious bond of Adam to God never came up in Scripture, not even in Hosea 6:7; yet the religious life of man before the fall bears the mark of a covenant. The Reformed were never so narrow as to stand on the name, if only the thing stood fast; the word may be doubted, the thing safe. But behind the fight against the name was mostly that against the thing hidden. And this neither can nor may be given up, because covenant is the being of the true religion. For first, God is Maker, man creature; and thereby is an endless gap set between both; there seems to be no fellowship, no religion possible between both; there is only difference, gap, endless parting. If God stays in his sovereign height and majesty above man, then there is no worship possible, at least no worship as fellowship with God; then the bond between both is fully given in the names lord and servant; then the likeness of the potter and the clay is still much too weak to mark that bond, for the clay has yet a being and thus rights apart from and over against the potter, but man has nothing that he is or has outside and over against God. If there is to be true religion, if there is to be fellowship between God and man, if the bond of both, also well but yet not only is to be that of a lord to his servant, of a potter to his clay, but also that of a king to his folk, of a father to his son, of a mother to her child, of an eagle to her young, of a hen to her chicks, and so on; that is, if not one single tie, but all and sundry ties of need, yielding, heedfulness, friendship, love, and so on among men have their pattern in religion and gain their fulfilling, then must religion bear the mark of covenant. For then must God come down from his height, bow down to his creature, share himself with man, show himself, give himself away; then must He, who dwells in the high and lifted up and everlasting, also dwell with him who is of a lowly spirit, Isaiah 57:15. This now is nothing other than a covenant. When religion is called a covenant, then it is thereby marked as the true, real religion. That no single worship has ever understood; all folks draw God pantheistically down into the creaturely or lift Him deistically endlessly above it; in neither case does it come to true fellowship, to covenant, to real religion. But Scripture upholds both; God is endlessly great and lowly good; He is Sovereign but also Father; He is Maker but also archetype; He is in one word the God of the covenant.
In the second place it is clear, that a creature over against God can bring and own no single right. That is from the kind of the thing impossible. A creature as such owes all that it is and what it has to its Maker; it has over against God claim on nothing; it can boast itself on nothing; it has by no means any rights or claims; there is of merit with the creature over against God never speech and there can be no speech of it; the bond of Creator and creature cuts all merit of the latter in root and altogether off. This holds not only after but just as well before the fall. Also then was man creature, without claim, without rights, without merit. When we have done all that is bidden us, then we are yet unprofitable servants, Luke 17:10. Now however the religion of Holy Scripture is of such kind, that man therein as it were yet can make rights over against God to count. He has indeed freedom, to come to Him with prayer and thanksgiving, to speak to Him as his Father, to trust on Him in all need and death, to crave all good from Him, even to look for blessedness and everlasting life from Him. This is now only and alone thereby possible, that God in lowly goodness gives rights to his creature. All right of creatures is a given good, a gift of grace, unearned and unbound; all reward is from God's side out of grace; there is no meritum de condigno nor also de congruo possible. The true religion can therefore be nothing other than a covenant, it has its spring in the lowly goodness, in the grace of God. That mark bears religion both before as after the fall. Religion is one even as the moral law and the goal of man. Covenant of works and of grace differ not in the end goal but only in the way that leads to that end goal. In both is one Mediator, then of joining, now of atoning; in both is one faith, then in God now in God through Christ; in both is one hope, one love, and so on. Religion is always in being the same, it differs only in form.
In the third place: man is a reasonable and moral being. So has God made him, and so handles He him also; He upholds what He made. God therefore does not force man, for force is at odds with the kind of a reasonable creature. He handles him not as a witless creature, as a plant or a beast, as a stick and a block, but He goes with him to work as with a reasonable, moral, self-ruling being. He wills that man be free and in freedom, willingly, in love serve Him, Psalm 110:3. Religion is freedom, is love, that lets not itself be forced. And therefore must it from the outset also bear the shape of a covenant, wherein God not forcing but counseling, warning, bidding, calling, praying steps forth, and wherein man serves God not by force or might, but willingly, with own, free assent, by love to counterlove stirred. Worship is at bottom no duty but a boon. It is no work whereby we profit God and bring Him something, and have claim on reward. But it is grace, to may serve Him. God is never bound in us, we are always bound in Him for the good works that we do, art. 24 Netherlandish Confession. From his side always the gift, from our side ever and only the thanks. And therefore is religion not otherwise thinkable than in the shape of a covenant; therein it first comes to its full outworking. Such a covenant has God then also closed with the first man. The splintery working out of this teaching be wholly set aside. But the thing itself stands fast; after man was made toward God's likeness, God showed him his goal and the way wherein he alone could reach this. For the moral law could man know without outre showing, it was written in his heart. But the trial bidding is positive, it is not with the kind of man himself given, it could be known to him only thereby that God shared it with him. Just as little did it speak for itself, that the keeping of that bidding gave everlasting life. In that sense is the covenant of works no covenant of kind. At first this was not yet so clearly seen, cf. Gomarus, on the covenant. But little by little it was clearly taught, that God in no single way was bound, to give to man, who kept his law and thereby did nothing other than what he owed to do, the heavenly blessedness and everlasting life; there is here no kindly link between work and reward, Cocceius, on the covenant II 23 sq. Burman, Synopsis of Theology II 8, 2, 4. Marck, History of Paradise p. 479. Cloppenburg, Theological Exercises VI disp. 5. on the covenant I 8 sq. Witsius, Economy of the Covenants I 4 § 10-23. Leydecker, Torch of Truth p. 399 sq. Ex. from the Outline of Tol. IX 227 v. 261 v. X 288 v. 318 v. Brahe, Notes on the five Walloon articles p. 125 v. And that is the truth that lies in Rome's teaching of the donum superadditum. Everlasting life is and stays an unearned gift of God's grace. But because Rome knows not the teaching of the covenant of works, it leads from this grace gift of everlasting life off, that also the likeness of God in man must be overkindly and lets now through that in the likeness of God given, overkindly strength yet again earn everlasting life ex condigno. Under the show of honoring grace, it thus brings in again the meritoriousness of good works. The Reformed however upheld on one side, that the likeness of God in man was kindly, and that man, who was likeness of God, could know the moral law without overkindly showing, and could keep it without overkindly strength. And on the other side they held fast, that a higher state of blessedness, than that in paradise on earth, from the kind of the thing never earned but only through God's free setting given could be. And these both thoughts they joined in the covenant of works. This rests on a free, special, gracious setting of God; it goes out from Him; He sets all parts thereof fast, term and fulfilling, keeping and reward, breaking and punishment; it is one-sided in spring; it is added to the making toward God's likeness. Man on his side, because made toward God's likeness, rests therein and sees in this covenant a way to higher blessedness unlocked. The covenant of works thus does both to their right: the sovereignty of God, which shuts in the need of the creature, the unmeritoriousness of all his works, and the grace and kindness of God, which nonetheless wills to give to the creature a higher blessedness than the earthly. As the trial bidding stands to the moral law, so holds the covenant of works to the making toward God's likeness. With the trial bidding stands or falls the whole moral law; with the covenant of works stands or falls all the likeness of God in man. The covenant of works is the way for the toward God's likeness made and yet not fallen man to heavenly blessedness.
4. The covenant of works therefore includes yet another beautiful thought. It not only realizes the true, full idea of religion; it also expresses that man before the fall, though created in God's image, did not yet possess the highest. Over this there is mainly difference with the Lutherans. Among them the creation in God's image is the realization of the highest idea of man; the ideal is fully reached in Adam; a higher state is not possible. Adam had nothing to become, but only to remain what he was; he was fully partaker of the gracious indwelling of the Holy Trinity. He therefore stood not under a law that commanded him something positive; the law that held for him had only a negative content; only sin brought him under the dominion of the law. Hence among the Lutherans the original state, as among the church fathers, is often painted in a very exaggerated way; and the state to which believers are raised in Christ is thought in essence equal to that of Adam before the fall. Among the believers everything concentrates for the Lutheran around justification; if someone is partaker of this, then he has enough, is fully satisfied and blessed. Blessedness falls entirely together with forgiveness; there is no need to connect this backward with eternal election and forward with the whole Christian life, good works, and eternal life; neither predestination nor perseverance are here necessary; the Lutheran believer enjoys in the present and has enough thereby.
But otherwise the Reformed, who walked in the footsteps of Augustine. According to them Adam did not have the highest. The highest is namely the material freedom, and consists in no longer being able to err, sin, die; in being absolutely raised above all fear and anxiety, above all possibility of fall. This highest the believers receive at once from grace through Christ. They can no longer sin, 1 John 3:9, they can no longer die, John 3:16; they have at once through faith the eternal, unlosable life; theirs is the perseverance of the saints, they can no longer be lost. Christ therefore brings his own not back to the state of Adam before the fall; He acquired and bestows much more, namely also that which Adam would have received if he had stood firm. He places us not at the beginning but at the end of the way which Adam had to travel; He fulfilled not only the passive, but also the active obedience, frees not only from guilt and punishment but bestows at once from grace the right to eternal life. Adam however did not yet have this highest; he did not yet have eternal life; he received indeed the power to stand, but not the will to stand; indeed the power if he willed but not the will which he could; he had the power not to err, sin, die, but not yet the inability to err, sin, die. He was still in the possibility of sin and death, and thus also still in some fear and anxiety; his was not yet the perfect, unchangeable love, which casts out all fear. And rightly therefore the Reformed said, that this possibility, this changeable good, this still being able to sin and die was no part, no piece, no content of God's image, but the boundary, the limitation, the outline thereof.
Therefore it was necessary that God's image be unfolded, this possibility of sin and death fully overcome and done away, and shine in imperishable glory. As a result of this view of the state of integrity, the Reformed in distinction from others have observed a praiseworthy sobriety in the description of the paradise state. Adam was not Christ, the natural was not the spiritual, paradise was not heaven. However much then also naturalism is to be resisted, which denies the power of sin and deems death natural; on the other side no less is supranaturalism to be avoided, which lets God's image consist in a supernatural addition to nature. Sin has according to the Reformed corrupted and destroyed everything, but, because it is no substance, it has not been able to change the essence, the substance of creation. Man as sinner has still remained man; and so also are all other creatures, earth, heaven, nature, plant, animal, in spite of the curse of sin and the dominion of corruption essentially and substantially the same remained. As we saw above with religion, so it is also with all else: sin has taken away no substance, grace bestows no substance back. The matter of all things is and remains the same, but the form, bestowed in creation, was deformed by sin, to be fully reformed again in grace.
This serious and yet so healthy view of the paradise state by the Reformed comes out on many points. Against the Lutherans and Remonstrants they defended, that Adam, besides the probationary command, was indeed also bound to the moral law. He was not without law, though he fulfilled it also without any compulsion, willingly and from love. That moral law was known to Adam by nature and therefore needed not like the probationary command to be revealed in a special way. It is in essence equal to the ten commandments, but yet bore another form, for the law given on Sinai presupposes sins and therefore speaks almost always negatively: thou shalt not, and the moral law before the fall was much more positive. But precisely because the moral law with Adam by the nature of the case was wholly positive, it did not make the possibility of sin clear to Adam's consciousness. With the commands there had therefore to come a prohibition, with the moral laws a positive law; with the commands, whose naturalness and reasonableness Adam saw, a command that in a certain sense was arbitrary and accidental. In the probationary command the whole moral law was set for Adam on one throw; it embodied for him the dilemma: God or man, his authority or own insight, unconditional obedience or independent inquiry, faith or doubt. It was a tremendous trial, which opened the way to an eternal blessedness or to an eternal destruction. Against the Cocceians the Reformed held firm, that to that moral law also the Sabbath command belonged; man before the fall did not yet enjoy the eternal, heavenly Sabbath; just as to the change of day and night, he was also subject to that of six days' labor and rest on the seventh day; rest day and work days were thus also before the fall distinguished, the religious life required also then its own form and service and day beside the life of culture.
The magical, theosophical opinion, that the two trees in the garden possessed in themselves the power to kill or make alive, whether then by nature, or on a supernatural way, or already at the one-time, or at the repeated use, was by the Reformed, even if some such as Pareus, Rivetus, Zanchius first still assumed an effect of eating the fruit also on the bodily life, with ever greater unanimity and decisiveness rejected. This view indeed is well in agreement with the Roman doctrine of the sacraments but has therefore also for the Reformed great objection; it makes life and death independent of the ethical condition, that is, of whether or not obeying God's command; it assumes, that man after the fall yet would have remained living, if he but ex opere operato had eaten of the tree of life; it holds in, that eternal life, at once or gradually could be wrought in man by eating a physical fruit, and thus denies the distinction between the natural and the spiritual. Therefore the Reformed saw in the tree of life rather a sign and seal of the covenant of works, which in a sacramental way bestowed life. Likewise were by the Reformed all theosophical speculations about a male virgin, about the absence of sexual desire, about a magical generation as contrary to Scripture unanimously rejected. And no more than the creation of woman already assumes a certain fall of Adam, is there after the entry of sin a new species come in the plant or animal kingdom; wild and creeping animals are according to Voetius not first after the fall but already on the sixth day created. And finally judged Calvin on Gen. 1:29, 9:3 and most Reformed, that flesh-eating was permitted to man also before the flood and before the fall. That Gen. 1:29 does not speak thereof on purpose, can as argument from silence do no service; in Gen. 1:30 only the plant world is divided between man and animal; but of man's dominion and right over the animal world there is no mention; these are already in Gen. 1:28 bestowed on man and certainly include, especially also with a view to the fishes, the right to kill and use animals. Immediately after the fall God himself makes animal skins and Abel brings an offering, which certainly also went with an offering meal. Flesh-eating is moreover certainly before the flood in use, and would, if God first in Gen. 9:3 had given the right thereto, before that time have been unlawful and sinful. Gen. 9:1-5 gives no new command but renews the blessing of creation; the new is only the prohibition, to eat the flesh with its soul, that is, with its blood. The ground for the prohibition, Gen. 9:5-7, to kill a man, is with the animals not present; they are indeed not made after God's image. And finally it is not to be seen, why precisely after the fall and after the flood flesh-use would have been allowed by God to man; conversely one would expect, that man's right and dominion after the fall would be limited; that flesh-use, to counteract savagery, would be abolished; that vegetarianism much more would be deemed in agreement with the state of man entered after fall and flood.
The Reformed theology could in all these questions judge so healthily, because it was deeply penetrated with the thought, that Adam did not yet have the highest. Sin has without doubt a cosmic meaning; it works as appears from death also in the physical, and has brought the whole earth under the curse. Without it the development of humanity and the history of the earth would have been wholly other, though it is also, that we can make no representation thereof. But yet on the other hand the state of integrity is not to be identified with the state of glory; from this one may not conclude to that; Isa. 11:6, 65:25 are no more applicable to the state before the fall than Mark 12:25, Luke 20:36, 1 Cor. 6:13 etc. The form is changed, but the matter of man, plant, animal, nature, earth is before and after the fall the same. All essential components that now are, existed also before the fall. The distinction and inequality of man and woman, of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, of relatives and friends; the manifold institutions and relations in social life such as marriage, family, upbringing etc.; the change of day and night, work days and rest day, labor and relaxation, months and years; man's dominion over the earth through science and art etc.; they are undoubtedly modified by sin and changed in shape, but they have nevertheless not in sin but in creation, in God's ordinances their principle and foundation. Socialism and communism, also of many Christian sects, fights rightly against the terrible consequences of sin, especially also in the social realm; but it does not stop there, it also comes into conflict with the nature of things, with the creation ordinances, and thereby always bears not a reformatory but a revolutionary character.
5. There lies finally in the teaching of the covenant of works yet a third thought enclosed, which is of the richest religious and ethical meaning. Adam was not created alone ; as man he was in himself incomplete; something was lacking to him, which no lower creature could make good, Gen. 2:20. As man alone he was therefore also not yet the fully unfolded image of God. The creation of man after God's image is then first completed on the sixth day, when God both, man and woman, in union with each other, cf. 'otam Gen. 1:27, creates after his image. Yet this creation of man and woman together after God's image is not the end but the beginning of God's way with man. It is not good that the man; it is also not good that man and woman be alone. Over them both God straightway speaks the blessing of increase, Gen. 1:28. Not the single man, and not man and woman together, but the whole mankind is first the fully unfolded image of God, his son, his kindred. The image of God is much too rich, than that it in one single child of man, however richly gifted, can be wholly fulfilled. First in a mankind with millions of members can it in some measure in its depth and richness be unfolded. Like as the vestiges of God are spread over many, many works, both in space and time; so is the image of God only fully to be drawn out in a mankind, whose members both after and beside each other exist. But like as the cosmos is a unity and in man receives its head and lord; like as the vestiges of God scattered through the whole world are summed up in and raised to the image of God in man; so is also that mankind on its part to be thought as an organism, which just as such first is the fully unfolded image of God. Not as a heap of souls on a piece of ground, not as an unconnected aggregate of individuals, but as created out of one blood, as one household, as one family is mankind the image and likeness of God. To that mankind belongs also her development, her history, her ever spreading dominion over the earth, her forward going in knowledge and art, her subduing of all creatures. Also this all is unfolding of the image and the likeness of God, after which man was created. Like as God not once at the creation has revealed himself but continues and increases that revelation from day to day and from age to age; so is also the image of God no unchanging greatness, but it lays itself out and unfolds itself in the forms of space and time. It is a gift and task at the same time; it is an unearned gift of grace, which already straightway in the creation was granted to the first man, but it is at the same time beginning and seed of a wholly rich, glorious unfolding. First mankind in her whole, as one complete organism, summed up under one head, spread over the whole earth, as prophetess proclaiming the truth of God, as priestess hallowing herself to God, as queen ruling the earth and all the creation, first she is the fully finished image, the most speaking and striking likeness of God. The Scripture teaches this all clearly, when she says, that the church is the bride of Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost, the dwelling of God, the new Jerusalem, where all glory of the nations is brought together. For indeed thereby is drawn the state of glory, which now through sin shall be reached; but religion, moral law, end goal is in covenant of works and of grace essentially alike. In both it is about a kingdom of God, about a holy mankind, wherein God can be all in all. Only one point in this setting forth demands yet some nearer discussion. Mankind is not as a complete organism to be thought, unless she be bound and summed up in a head. In the covenant of grace Christ holds that rank, He is the head of the church; in the covenant of works that place was taken by Adam. Already Eve was therefore created out of Adam, that this might be the beginning of the whole kind and the unity of the human race root in the unity of her origin. The woman is therefore very surely partaker of the human nature and the image of God and she stands for both in her own way and after her own kind; but she is both partaker not over against but beside others and in bond with the man; she is ek andros, dia ton andra, doxa andros, she is not without the man; and also the man, though head of the woman and eikon kai doxa theou because he in the first place is bearer of the dominion, is yet also without the woman not complete, also he is not without the woman, for she is the mother of all living, 1 Cor. 11:7-12, Eph. 5:22ff. Above all however Paul points us to this unity of mankind, when he sets Adam over against Christ, Rom. 5:12-21, 1 Cor. 15:22, 45-49. Mankind is not only physically out of one blood, Acts 17:26; that were for mankind not enough, it holds indeed also of all those animal kinds, which in the beginning were created. Moreover, Christ, the antitype of Adam, is not our forefather; we are not physically come forth out of Him, but He himself is out of Adam, as much as the flesh concerns. In this respect are Adam and Christ not alike. But the likeness lies therein, that mankind in ethical sense stands to Adam in the same holding as to Christ. In the same way as Christ is cause of our righteousness and our life, is Adam that of our sin and our death. God reckons and judges in one man the whole human race. This now have the Reformed in their teaching of the covenant of works expressed. Therein comes first, not but the physical, yet the ethical unity of mankind to her right. And this is for mankind as organism needful. In general demands the building law everywhere the kingly system. A work of art must be ruled by one thought; a sermon must have one theme; a church is finished in the tower; the man is the head of the household; in a realm is the king bearer of the sway; the human race as one organic whole, as an ethical fellowship, is not thinkable without a head. In the covenant of works Adam held that place. The trial command proves, that he took a wholly outstanding standing; he was forefather not only, but also head, stand-in of the whole human race; his deed was deciding for all. Like as the lot of the whole body rests with the head, which for all members thinks and judges and decides; like as the well-being of a household hangs on the man and father; like as a prince to blessing or to curse can be for thousands and millions of underlings; so is the lot of mankind laid in the hands of Adam. His overstepping is become the fall of his whole race; but his obedience were also the life for all his aftercomers, like as the antitype Christ proves. If we not without our knowing in Adam to damnation could be underlaid, we should also not outside our doing in Christ to grace be taken. Covenant of works and of grace stand and fall with each other. One same law holds for both. On the base of the physical offspring is an ethical unity built, which mankind after her kind as one organism makes to step forth and her members not only through bands of blood but also through fellowship in blessing and curse, in sin and righteousness, in death and life most nearly with each other binds.
6. From here a new light falls on the question of the propagation of the human race. At all times opinions on this were divided. The pre-existence theory of Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Philo, and the later Jews found entrance among Christians only with a few, such as Origen, De Principiis I 6, 2; 8, 3; II 9, 2; Contra Celsum I 32, 33; Henry More, Mysterium Pietatis 1660; Kant, Religion edited by Rosenkranz 44 f.; Schelling, Works I 7 p. 385 f.; Müller, Sin II 99 f. 504 f. Scripture offers not the least ground for it; our soul is utterly unaware of such a pre-existence and sees in the body so little a prison and place of punishment that it shudders at death. Moreover, it roots in a heathen dualism of spirit and matter, destroys the unity of the human race, and wipes out the distinction between man and angel. On the other hand, between traducianism and creationism in Christian theology the plea remained undecided. The first had in ancient times many advocates, such as Tertullian, De Anima 19, 27; Rufinus, Macarius, Eunomius, Apollinaris, Gregory of Nyssa, and according to Jerome even the greatest part of the Westerners, but later it was embraced, with a few exceptions, only by the Lutherans, by Luther himself, who however was first a creationist, Köstlin, Luther's Theology II 365, and then by Melanchthon, Gerhard, Loci VIII c. 8; Quenstedt, I 519; Hollaz, Examen 414; Philippi, Church Doctrine III 103; Vilmar, Dogmatics I 348; Frank, Christian Truth I 400; Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology 106 f.; Cremer in Herzog second edition 14, 27, and so on. Creationism was defended in old times by Clement of Alexandria, Stromata IV 26; Lactantius, Institutes III 18; Hilary, Pelagius, Cassian, Gennadius, Theodoret, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, Ambrose, and others. Jerome already spoke of it as church doctrine. Greek, scholastic, and Roman theologians are all creationists, Lombard, Sentences II 17, 18; Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 90 and 118; Contra Gentiles II 86-89; Bellarmine, De Amissione Gratiae et Statu Peccati IV 2; Scheeben, Dogmatics II 172 f.; Kleutgen, Philosophy II 583 f.; and only a few, such as Klee, Dogmatics II second edition 313 f., show sympathy for traducianism. Also the Reformed, with few exceptions, such as Sohnius, Works II 563; Martyr, Loci p. 81; and in modern times especially Shedd, Dogmatic Theology II 22, 75; III 250, chose sides for creationism, Calvin on Hebrews 12:9; Zanchi, Works III 609; Polanus V 31; Voetius, Disputationes I 798; de Moor II 1064 III 289; Marck, History of Paradise II 4 § 7-9, and so on. Some prefer to leave the question undecided, Augustine, De Anima et Eius Origine; De Genesi ad Litteram X; Epistle 166 to Jerome; Retractations II 45, 46; Gregory the Great, Leo the Great, Isidore, Chemnitz, Buddeus, Musculus, Piscator, Maresius, or seek a mediation, Leibniz, Theodicy I 91; Rothe, Ethics § 136; Ebrard, Dogmatics I 327 f.
Indeed, traducianism and creationism weigh fairly equally against each other in strength of arguments. Traducianism appeals to the creation of Eve, of whose soul no separate mention is made and who is therefore called from man, Genesis 2:21, 1 Corinthians 11:8; to the manner of speaking in Holy Scripture, that the descendants are included in the loins of the fathers and have come forth from their hips, Genesis 46:26, Hebrews 7:9, 10; to the word "know," which would simultaneously indicate a spiritual act; to the completion of creation on the seventh day, Genesis 2:2; to the fact that animals also can bring forth their like, Genesis 1:28, 5:3, 9:4, John 3:6, and especially also to the inheritance of sin and of various psychic properties. Creationism, on the other hand, finds support in the creation of Adam's soul, Genesis 2:7; in many texts such as Ecclesiastes 12:7, Zechariah 12:1, especially Hebrews 12:9, cf. Numbers 16:22, 27:16, of which even Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology 114 says: a more classical proof text for creationism can hardly be given; and then above all on the spiritual, simple, indivisible, immortal nature of the soul. And just as traducianism and creationism stand fairly equal in arguments, so both are equally incapable of solving the difficulties. Traducianism explains neither the origin of the soul nor the inheritance of sin. As to the first, it must either come to the doctrine that the soul of the child already existed beforehand in the parents and ancestors, thus to a kind of pre-existence theory; or that the soul is potentially included in the seed of man or woman or both, that is, to materialism; or that it is brought forth by the parents in one way or another, that is, to creation, now not by God but by man. And as to the second, traducianism can contribute nothing here to the explanation, because sin is not material and no substance but a moral quality, moral guilt, and moral corruption. Creationism stands equally powerless against these problems. Even if it conceives the creation of the soul as organically as possible, and says with Lombard, Sentences II dist. 17: God infuses them by creating and creates by infusing; yet it is embarrassed by the question when the soul is created in the embryo, cf. for example Polanus V 31; Bucanus VIII 26, and how the rational soul replaces the vegetative soul and sensitive soul that already earlier animated the embryo, cf. Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 118 art. 2; Contra Gentiles II 59, 68. And original sin can be explained by creationism only in such a way that the soul, first created pure by God, is contaminated by the body, which however makes sin material, Lombard, Sentences II dist. 31; or that God, at the same moment that He creates it, also declares it guilty and makes it unclean, Voetius, Disputationes I 1097; Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae IX 12; de Moor III 289. No wonder, therefore, that many Pelagians and Roman Catholics, precisely on the ground of creationism, denied original sin in a positive sense. Gangauf, Metaphysical Psychology of St. Augustine 259; Oswald, Religious Prehistory 155 f. 163 f. 189 f. Arguments and objections therefore do not give the deciding factor in the choice between traducianism and creationism; they would rather compel us to end with a non liquet.
7. All the more striking is it, that Greek, Roman, and Reformed theologians almost with one voice declared for creationism, while traducianism found entrance only among the Lutherans. This can be no chance; there must be a reason for it. And that reason lies in the differing views of the being and calling of man. For first of all, Lutheran theology places the image of God only in some moral traits, in the original righteousness. As always, so here too it bounds its sight to the ethical-religious and feels no need to bring this into bond with the whole cosmic being and to grasp it as a link in the whole counsel of God. Thereby the being of man comes to its right neither over against the angels nor over against the beasts. For if man has this image of God, then he is well nigh like the angels; the difference is of no weight compared with what they have in common; the angels also bear the image of God. And if man lacks this image of God, then he sinks down to the beasts, becomes a stock and a block; what then still sets him apart from the beasts has so little worth theologically and religiously, that it hardly comes into reckoning anymore; the great mark lay yet in the image of God and that he has wholly lost. The bounds between man and angel and between man and beast are thus not sharply drawn here; the original righteousness is the one and all, all else in man is underling and theologically well nigh of no worth. But therefore it is now also a matter of no odds for Lutheran theology how man arises; or rather, that which man has in common with the angel, namely the image of God, the original righteousness, that must and can arise only through creation, that is in full sense a gift; but all that man otherwise has is passed on in the same way as with the beasts. But Roman and Reformed theologians sought, even if they sometimes still named the angels image of God, from the outset the image of God in the whole and wholly own being of man. It lay very surely also in the virtues of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, but these bore then even with men yet again another mark than with the angels; and it lay in those virtues not alone but further in all that is manly in man. It lay thus also therein, that the spirit in man from the first was ordered for the binding with a body, and that his body from the outset was laid out for the spirit. Before and after the fall, in the state of wholeness and of spoiling, in the state of grace and glory, always is and stays man in being set apart from angel and beast. If he has the image of God, he becomes no angel; if he loses it, he becomes no beast; he stays always and ever man and in so far also always and ever God's image. And this now is only in creationism fully upheld. Because man as a wholly own kind of being stands, therefore he also arises in wholly sundry wise. He is kin to angel and beast and yet in being set apart from both; in his dying he differs from both and therefore also in his springing; Adam's creation is other than that of the beasts and also other than that of the angels. Creationism alone upholds enough the sundry ownness of man; it wards off both pantheism and materialism and honors the bounds between man and beast.
In the second place, it follows from the Lutheran view of the image of God that the moral oneness of mankind must give way to the bodily descent. Through the fall, men have lost in and with the whole image of God also all ghostly and moral oneness. The natural religion, morals, and so forth, are of scarce any meaning. Only the bodily descent holds them together, and this is at the same time the cause of their moral rottenness. The sin, which has robbed man of all religion and morality and the whole image of God, can therefore not be shared in an ethical way but only through bodily descent. It is indeed no substance, though Luther and others, especially Flacius, came to very strong sayings, but it is yet in the first place a stain, a spoiling, that has tainted the whole man and just kills all the religious and ethical in him. But Roman and Reformed theology said against this, each in its own way, that the oneness of mankind was not only of a bodily but also of an ethical kind. Bodily descent indeed is not enough; then the kinds of beasts would already form a oneness. Likeness in moral virtues without more is also lacking, for then the angels among themselves and these with men would form a oneness. Kinds of beasts are indeed bodily from one blood, but they are no moral body; and angels are indeed a oneness but not kin in the blood. The own-kindness of man thus demands that the oneness of mankind be both bodily and ethical. And because original sin is not bodily but only ethical, therefore it can also only be built on the ethical, federal oneness of mankind. Bodily descent is not enough for its clearing and runs the danger of making it material. The so-called realism, for example, of Shedd does not satisfy, neither for the clearing of sin from Adam, nor for the clearing of righteousness from Christ. There is yet another oneness among men needed, to make them act together as a moral body, organically bound and with each other also in ethical wise solidary. And that is the federal oneness. On the base of the bodily must an ethical oneness be raised. Adam as forefather is not enough, he must also be covenant head of mankind, just as Christ, though in bodily sense not our forefather, yet just as Covenant Head can give to his church righteousness and blessedness. And this moral oneness of mankind is now only to be upheld with creationism. It bears indeed an own mark, is as well from that among beasts as from that of the angels set apart, and comes thus also in an own way, through bodily descent and through a creating deed of God, both in bond with each other, to stand.
In the third place, finally, the Lutheran theology, by virtue of its view of the image of God, concerns itself little with the destiny of man. Adam had all that he needed; he had only to remain what he was; the distinction between the ability not to sin and the inability to sin is of little weight; perseverance is no higher good, given in Christ to his own. And so Adam had nothing higher to gain for his offspring; he had only to hand down what he had; traducianism is enough for that; there is no place for the covenant of works and creationism.
But again, the Roman and Reformed theology started from another thought. The destiny of man lies in heavenly blessedness, the eternal life, the beholding of God. But this he can reach only in the way of obedience. There is no proportion between this obedience and that life. How then can that heavenly blessedness be given to man as a reward for his works? Rome says: because in the image of God a supernatural grace is granted to him, which can make him merit eternal life worthily. The Reformed says: because God sets up a covenant with man and wills to give him eternal life, not according to the worth of his works but according to his own gracious ordering. Yet both agree in this, that the destiny of man lies in eternal life, that this is to be reached only in the way of moral obedience, and that God has laid the decision in this matter for the human race in the hands of Adam. And therefore both came also to creationism.
For this it was needful, both that all men were included in the covenant head Adam and that they at the same time remained persons, individuals, men with independence and responsibility. Physical descent alone would have made the sin that we get from Adam a fate, a natural process, a sickness, which goes on outside our will and thus outside our guilt. But that is not what sin is. And the righteousness too, which Christ, the last Adam, gives us, does not bear that mark. Both suppose a federal bond of mankind to its heads. And so creationism upholds that each man is an organic member of the great whole, and at the same time, that he holds in that great whole his own independent place. It holds fast the oneness of the whole human race and at the same time the independent meaning of each individual. Men are not samples, not numbers of a kind; they are also not loose individuals standing beside each other like the angels. They are both together, parts of the whole and individuals, living stones of God's building. Creationism keeps the organic, both physical and moral, oneness of mankind and at the same time honors the mystery of personhood. Each man a member of the body of mankind and yet his own thought of God, with an eternal meaning and an eternal destiny! Each man himself an image of God and yet that image first fully unfolded in the whole of mankind!
By virtue of this oneness, the whole of mankind indeed fell in Adam, its forefather and head; but this fall is yet no fate, no natural process; it rests rather on a free sovereign ordering of God. And this ordering, however free, is yet so little willful that it rather takes for granted the physical bond of mankind, brings about and upholds its ethical oneness, and can not only show forth the strictness of God but also the riches of his grace in the brightest light. For when Adam falls, Christ stands ready to take his place. The covenant of grace can take the place of the covenant of works, because both rest on the same orderings. If we could not be condemned in Adam, we could not be set free in Christ. Thus however the first man may choose, the creation will not miss its destiny. The making of the world goes straightway in Genesis into the making of the earth and this into the making of mankind. World, earth, mankind are one organic whole. They stand, they fall, they are raised up with each other. The footprints of God in creation and the image of God in man may be wrecked and marred by the sin of the first Adam; they come through the last Adam and through his recreating grace to all the brighter showing. The state of uprightness makes ready, through the fall or apart from the fall, the state of glory, in which God will lay his glory on his creatures and be all in all.
1. When God on the seventh day had fulfilled his work, which he had made, he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had made, Gen. 2:2, Ex. 20:11, 31:17. Thus the Scripture marks the shift from the work of creation to that of upholding. That this resting of God has its cause not in weariness nor yet in an idle watching, is by Holy Scripture time and again clearly and plainly spoken, Isa. 40:28, John 5:17. The creating is for God no toil and the upholding no rest. God's resting only shows that he made an end to the bringing forth of new kinds, Eccl. 1:9, 10; that the work of creation in its own and narrower sense, as the bringing forth of things from nothing, was finished; and that he in this fulfilled work with godly delight took pleasure, Gen. 1:31, Ex. 31:17, Ps. 104:31, cf. Augustine, City of God XI 8. XII 17. On Genesis to the letter IV 8 and following. Lombard, Sentences II dist. 15. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 73. Calvin on Gen. 2:2. Zanchi, Works III 537 and so on. The creating now passes over into upholding. Both are in Scripture so truly set apart, that they as toil and rest can be placed over against each other. And yet they are also so closely kin and bound, that the upholding itself can be called a creating, Ps. 104:30, 148:5, Isa. 45:7, Amos 4:13. The upholding is indeed itself also a godly work, no less great and glorious than the creation. God is no idle God, he works always, John 5:17, and the world has no being in itself. From the moment of its arising it abides only in and through and unto God, Neh. 9:6, Ps. 104:30, Acts 17:28, Rom. 11:36, Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3, Rev. 4:11. Though set apart from his being, it in its abiding is never free-standing; free-standing would be not-being. The whole world with all that is in it and befalls, stands under God's steering; summer and winter, day and night, fruitful and barren years, light and darkness, all is his work and by him shaped, Gen. 8:22, 9:14, Lev. 26:3 and following, Deut. 11:12 and following, Job 38, Ps. 8, 29, 65, 104, 107, 147, Jer. 3:3, 5:24, Matt. 5:45 and so on. The Scripture knows no free-standing creature; it would be a gainsaying in itself. God cares for all creatures, for beasts, Gen. 1:30, 6:19, 7:2, 9:10, Job 38:41, Ps. 36:7, 104:27, 147:9, Joel 1:20, Matt. 6:26 and so on, and in special also for men. He sees them all, Job 34:21, Ps. 33:13, 14, Prov. 15:3, shapes all their hearts and marks all their works, Ps. 33:15, Prov. 5:21; they are all his hands' work, Job 34:19, the poor and the rich, Prov. 22:2. He sets all their dwelling, Deut. 32:8, Acts 17:26, bends all their hearts, Prov. 21:1, steers all their steps, Prov. 5:21, 16:9, 19:21, Jer. 10:23 and so on, does with the host of heaven and the dwellers of the earth after his good pleasure, Dan. 4:35. They are in his hands as clay in the hand of the potter, as a saw in the hand of him that draws it, Isa. 29:16, 45:9, Jer. 18:5, Rom. 9:20, 21. Very specially goes his foreseeing steering yet over his folk. All the history of the forefathers, of Israel, of the church, and of each believer is thereto a witness. What men have thought them to evil, God thinks them to good, Gen. 50:20; every tool readied against them shall not thrive, Isa. 54:17; even the hairs of their head are all numbered, Matt. 10:30; all things work together for good to them, Rom. 8:28. Thus stands all the created in the might and under the steering of God; both, chance and doom, are to Scripture unknown, Ex. 21:13, Prov. 16:33. It is God, who works all things after the counsel of his will, Eph. 1:11, and makes all things serve the showing of his virtues, to the honor of his name, Prov. 16:4, Rom. 11:36. This all gathers the Scripture in fair wise therein together, that it time and again speaks of God as of a King, who rules all things, Ps. 10:16, 24:7, 8, 29:10, 44:5, 47:7, 74:12, 115:3, Isa. 33:22 and so on. God is a King, the King of kings and the Lord of lords; a King, who in Christ is a father to his underlings, and a Father, who also is king over his children. All that among creatures, in beast- and man- and angel-world, in household and fellowship and state is found of care for, of love to, of shielding of the one by the other, is a weak aftershadow of God's foreseeing order over all works of his hands. His utter might and his full love are the own object of the belief in providence in Holy Scripture.
To this testimony of Scripture is added that of all peoples. The doctrine of God's providence is a mixed article, partly known to all men from God's revelation in nature. It is an article of faith in every religion, even in the most corrupt; whoever denies it undermines religion; without it there is no place for prayer and sacrifice, for faith and hope, for trust and love. Why serve God, asks Cicero, Nat. D. I 2, if He cares not at all for us? Therefore all religions agree with the word of Sophocles, Elect. 173: ἐστι μεγας ἐν οὐρανῳ Ζευς, ὁς ἐφορα παντα και κρατυνει. And philosophy too has often acknowledged and defended this providence of God, for example, Socrates in Xenophon, Mem. I 4 IV 3. Plato in Timaeus , Leges X 901, Rep. X 613 A. Aristotle in Eth. Nic. X 9. The Stoa in Cicero, Nat. D. II. Seneca, De providentia and De beneficiis , Cicero, Nat. D. I 2 III 26, Plutarch, De fato , Plotinus, περι εἱμαρμενης and περι προνοιας, cf. also Philo's writing περι προνοιας, Wendland, Philo's Schrift über die Vorsehung , Berlin 1892. Yet for that reason the doctrine of providence in heathen religion and philosophy was not the same as it is in Christianity. Among the heathens the belief in providence was more theory than practice, more philosophical speculation than religious dogma; it did not suffice in need and in death; it swung always to and fro between chance and fate. Because God, for example, in Plato was no creator but only former of the world, His power found its bound in the finite matter, Zeiler, Philos. d. Gr. II⁴. Although Aristotle often speaks his belief in God's providence, yet for him it falls wholly together with the working of natural causes; the Godhead as νοησις νοησεως stands in lonely self-contemplation outside the world, without will, without action, and the creature has no help or love to await from it, ib. III. Among the Stoa the προνοια was identical with the εἱμαρμενη and the φυσις, ib. IV; and according to Epicurus providence was at odds with the blessedness of the gods, ib. And indeed some, such as Plutarch and Plotinus, strove to escape both chance and fate; but in fact fate always rose again behind and above the Godhead, and chance pressed in from below again into the lower creatures and the smaller happenings; magna Dii curant, parva negligunt, Cicero, Nat. D. II 167. Cf. Pfanner, Syst. theol. gent. c. 8. Creutzer, Philosophorum veterum loci de provid. divina ac de fato 1806. Schneider, Christl. Klänge aus den gr. u. röm. Klassikern , 1865 S.
2. Of such a kind, however, is not the Christian faith in God's providence. This is on the contrary a wellspring of comfort and hope, of trust and boldness, of lowliness and resignation, Ps. 23, 33:10ff., 44:5ff., 127:1, 2, 146:2ff., etc. The faith in providence rests in Scripture by no means only on God's revelation in nature but much more on his covenant and promises; it has for its groundwork not only God's righteousness but above all also his tender mercy and grace; it presupposes the knowledge of sin, much deeper than among the heathens, but also the experience of God's forgiving love; it is no cosmological speculation but a glorious confession of faith. And therefore it looks through all sorrow and suffering again gladly into the future; though the riddles are not solved, the faith in God's fatherly hand ever lifts itself up from the depths and even makes one glory in tribulations. In connection herewith it is noteworthy that Scripture knows not the abstract word providence. Men have indeed sought to give this word a Scriptural character by appeal to Gen. 22:8, 1 Sam. 16:1, Ezek. 20:6, Heb. 11:40; a few times the word also occurs of human foresight, Acts 13:14, Rom. 12:17, 13:14, 1 Tim. 5:8. But all that takes not away that Scripture, treating of God's providence, uses quite other words. It sums not up the working of God, expressed by this word, in an abstract concept and holds no theological treatise thereon. But it paints it itself in the richest and liveliest wise and lets us see it in history; Scripture in its whole is the book of God's providence. And so describing providence, it speaks of creating, Ps. 104:30, 148:5, quickening, Job 33:4, Neh. 9:6, renewing, Ps. 104:30, seeing, beholding, heeding, Job 28:24, Ps. 33:13, 15, preserving, guarding, keeping, Num. 6:24, Ps. 36:7, 121:7, leading, teaching, ruling, Ps. 25:5, 9, 93:1 etc., working, John 5:17, upholding, Heb. 1:3, caring, 1 Pet. 5:7. The word providence is borrowed from philosophy. According to Laertius, Plato was the first who used the word πρόνοια in this sense, cf. Zeller, Philos. der Gr. II⁴ 929. The apocryphal books use it already, Wisdom 14:3, 17:2, 3 Macc. 4:21, 5:30, 4 Macc. 9:24, 13:18, 17:22, beside διατηρεῖν, Wisdom 11:25, διακυβερνᾶν, 3 Macc. 6:2, διοικεῖν, Wisdom 8:1 etc. And the church fathers took it over and gave it citizenship in Christian theology, cf. Suicerus s.v. Thereby the word underwent however a not unimportant change. Originally providence means indeed the foreseeing, providentia, or the foreknowing, πρόνοια, of what shall happen in the future. Providentia est, per quam futurum aliquid videtur, Cic. Inv. II 53. So understood, the word was by no means fit to embrace all that the Christian faith confesses in the doctrine of God's providence. As foreknowing of the future, God's providence would indeed belong only to the scientia Dei and be fully treated in the locus on God's attributes. But the Christian faith understands by God's providence not a bare foreknowledge, but confesses that all things are by God not only foreknown but also foreordained and appointed. Therefore providence was soon reckoned not only to God's understanding but also to his will, and defined by Damascene as βούλησις θεοῦ, δι’ ἣν πάντα τὰ ὄντα τὴν προσφόρον διεξαγωγὴν λαμβάνει, de fide orthod. II 29. In this sense taken, God's providence would belong at home in the doctrine of God's decrees and be wholly treated there. But again the Christian faith confesses more than is indicated by the word in this sense. For God's decrees are carried out; and the creatures, which in consequence thereof receive being, exist not a moment of themselves, but they are from moment to moment only upheld by God's almighty hand. The arising and being of all creatures have their source, not in a foreknowledge nor yet in a decree but definitely in an almighty deed of God. And providence is thus according to the teaching of Scripture and the confession of the church that deed of God whereby he upholds and rules all things from moment to moment, not only Fürsehung but also Vorsehung. These different meanings wherein the word providence was understood were however cause that the place and content of this doctrine in Christian dogmatics ever changed and were subject to all sorts of alterations. Now it is reckoned to the attributes, then to the decrees (opera Dei ad intra), then to the opera ad extra. Damascene defines it as ἡ ἐκ θεοῦ εἰς τὰ ὄντα γενομένη ἐπιμέλεια, de fide orthod. II 29, and treats it indeed after creation but yet in close connection with the praescientia and praedestinatio, II 30. Lombard discusses it in the chapter on predestination, but before creation, Sent. I dist. 35. A very clear setting forth gives Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 22 art. 1; he defines it first in general as ratio ordinis rerum in finem and holds it for the principal part of prudence, whose task it is precisely to order others to the end; but then he says more closely that to the care of providence two things belong, namely ratio ordinis, which is called providentia and dispositio, and executio ordinis, which is called gubernatio, cf. also Bonaventure, Sent. I dist. 35 and Hugh of St. Victor, Sent. tr. 1 c. 12. After these and other examples the doctrine of providence in Roman theology was treated either with predestination at God's will, Petavius, de Deo VIII c. 1-5. Becanus, Theol. schol. I c. 13. Theol. Wirceb. Paris 1880 III 175. Perrone, Prael. Theol. II 1838 p. 233. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. II 158; or only as conservatio or gubernatio separately after creation, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 103-105, c. Gent. III 65 and commentators on Sent. II dist. 37. Theol. Wirceb. III 497; or wholly in the broadest sense after the locus de creatione, Schwetz, Theol. dogm. I 405. Jansen, Prael. theol. II 329. Simar, Dogm.³ 252. Scheeben, Dogm. II 12. And likewise in the theology of the Reformation providence was now taken as a counsel whereby God rules all things, Conf. Helv. post. art. 6. Ursinus, Explic. qu. 27. Zanchi, Op. II 425. Maresius, Syst. Theol. IV § 19. Alsted, Theol. schol. 174, then again as a work of God outward, Calvin, Inst. I 16, 3. 4. Polanus, Synt. Theol. VI 1. Junius, Theses Theol. XVII 1. 2. Synopsis pur. theol. XI 3. Heidegger, Corpus Theol. VII 3 etc. The difference concerns naturally more the name than the thing, as Alsted, Theol. schol. 175 and Baier, Comp. theol. I 5, 2, rightly note. If God truly upholds and rules the world, then he must foreknow it (providentia), also will and be able to care for it (prudentia) and in time also so in deed maintain and rule all things that the end proposed by him is reached. So in broad sense taken, providence embraces 1º an actus internus, which then further yet is distinguished into πρόγνωσις, πρόθεσις and διοίκησις, cf. Gerhard, Loc. VI c. 2, and 2º an actus externus, which is defined as executio ordinis, as conservatio, concursus, gubernatio. The actus internus of this providentia is however earlier already fully treated in the doctrine of God's attributes and decrees; here, after the doctrine of creation, providence can thus come to speech only as actus externus, as God's deed outward. Though now providence in this sense may never be loosed nor thought from the actus internus, the πρόγνωσις, πρόθεσις and διοίκησις, it is yet distinguished therefrom, as the executio ordinis from the ordo itself. The word providence has therewith undergone a whole change. And the question may arise whether the word is still fit for denoting the thing. When earlier providence was still treated in the doctrine of attributes or decrees of God, it kept its original meaning; but since it is more and more taken as conservatio and gubernatio and comes to speech after creation, that original meaning is well-nigh wholly lost. Providence in this last, narrower sense is no proper providentia more, no ratio ordinis rerum in finem, for this goes before it and is presupposed by it; itself it is executio ordinis. This last was therefore in dogmatics more closely defined by conservatio or by gubernatio or by both together, Lactantius, de ira Dei c. 10. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 103. 104. Bonaventure, Brevil. ed. Frib. 1881 p. 93. Dutch Confession art. 13. Heid. Cat. X. Zanchi, Op. II 425. Synopsis pur. theol. XI 3 etc. Between these two was later, to ward off pantheism and deism, the concursus or cooperatio inserted, which in substance was indeed always treated at the doctrine of providence, e.g. by Aug. de trin. III 4. de civ. V 8-11. Theodoret, de provid. or. X. Boethius, de cons. IV and V. Damasc., de fide II 29. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 48. 49. 104 art. 2, qu. 105 art. 5 I 2 qu. 19 art. 4 Cat. Rom. I c. 2 qu. 20. Zwingli, de provid. c. 3. Op. IV 86. Calvin, Inst. I 16. 2. Contre la secte des libertins, C. R. 35 p. 186, de aet. Dei praed., C. R. 36 p. 347-366. Zanchi, Op. II 449. Martyr, Loci C. p. 56. 59. Wollebius, Theol. c. 30. Synopsis pur. theol. XI 13. Gerhard Loc. VI c. 9 etc., but which later also formally between conservatio and gubernatio obtained its own place, Mastricht, Theol. III 10, 10. 29. Turretin, Theol. El. VI qu. 4. Ex. v. h. Ontw. v. Tol. VI 270. IX 210. Brakel, Red. Godsd. XI 6. Marck, Godg. X 9. Quenstedt, Theol. I 531. Hollaz, Ex. theol. 421. Buddeus, Inst. 409. Herefrom it appears that the word providence was not deemed sufficient for denoting the executio ordinis and was more closely determined by upholding and ruling. These are also undoubtedly more rightly thought, more lively of conception and more in agreement with the usage of Holy Scripture. Especially when the word providence is taken abstractly and put in the place of God himself, as Plutarch already began therewith, cf. Cremer s.v. πρόνοια, and the rationalism of the last century followed this, it is subject to objection. Yet may the word, which obtained citizenship in the language of theology and religion, be kept, provided the thing denoted thereby be but understood in Scriptural sense.
3. The Christian teaching of providence as an almighty deed of God, whereby He upholds and rules all things, is to be set apart not only from heathen fate and chance but also from the pantheism and deism that ever rise again in Christian times. Indeed, there are but three choices for the whole of being: chance, fate, or Godhead. With chance there would be manifoldness without oneness, with fate oneness without manifoldness, but manifoldness in oneness shows first design and the mark of the making mind. In the world as it is, there is boundless manifoldness and wondrous oneness. James Douglas in U. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology. New York, Armstrong.
Pantheism knows no split between God's being and the world's being, and lets the world go up into God in an idealistic way or God into the world in a stuffly way. On this standpoint there is no room for the making, and thus in the true sense none for upholding and ruling. Providence falls together with the course of kind; the laws of kind are the same as God's choices; and God's ruling is nothing but the fixed and unchanging order of kind or the linking of kindly things, Spinoza, Tract. theol. pol. c. Cf. Strauss Gl. Schleiermacher, Gl. and further.
Of itself, with this falls the wonder, the self-working of second causes, personhood, freedom, prayer, sin, the whole worship. Pantheism may show itself in ever so fair and luring shape, it truly leads into the arms of a heathen fate. There is then no other being than the being of kind; there is no higher might than that which works in the world after fixed law; there is no other, better life than that for which the givens are at hand in this seen making; for a time man may flatter himself with the idealistic hope that the world through in-dwelling unfolding will fulfill itself, soon this cheerfulness turns to gloominess, this idealism to stuffliness.
Against this pantheism Christian godlore had to uphold the split of making and upholding, the self-working of second causes, the freedom of personhood, the mark of sin, the truth of belief. And it did this by throwing off fate and setting forth the owning of God's providence clearly against it. The mark of the teaching of fate lies not in this, that all that is in time and befalls is grounded and set in God's everlasting rede, but it lies herein, that all being and befalling is set by a might that falls together with the world, which without awareness and without will sets all with blind needfulness. According to Cicero the fate of the Stoa was an order and row of causes, since cause begets cause from itself, de divin. Cf. Seneca, de benef. Nat. Qu.
Commonly it was yet set apart into a star-fate or starly, when the happenings on earth were thought set by the stars, and into a kind-fate, when they were thought set by the bond of kind. In the last shape the teaching of fate now steps forth in pantheism and stuffliness; but noteworthy is that also the star-fate in the newest time is renewed and finds warm upholders, cf. Wetensch. Bladen.
Christian godlore now fought not at all that all was ever known and set by God; insofar it even owned a fate and some thought also to be able to use the word in good sense. If we bethink that fate comes from fari, and if we mark therewith the everlasting, unchanging word whereby God bears all things, then the name is to be deemed fair, Augustine, de civ. Boethius spoke of fate as the laying inborn in movable things, through which providence binds each to its orders, de cons. philos.
And even Maresius thought to bind a Christian sense to the word, Syst. Theol. But commonly one was more watchful; belief in fate yet went out from the thought that all befalls from a blind, unwithstandable might without awareness and will, and fatal were called those happenings which befall by need of some order against God's and men's will, Augustine, de civ. In this sense fate was fought most strongly by all Christian godlearners, by Augustine and his not less than by those who upheld free will. We say not that all befalls by fate, nay we say nothing befalls by fate, Augustine, de civ.
The only need of order on Christian standpoint is the wise, almighty, loving will of God. Therewith was not gainsaid, as will later show, that there is in the world of made things a bond of causes and outgrowths and that there are fixed orderings, but the kind-order stands not behind and above nor outside and against God's will, but it is grounded in that will of an almighty and loving God and Father, set by that will, serving that will; and it stands also not as a blind, driving might outside and against our will, for our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is sure to God and held in his foreknowledge, Augustine, ib. and further comment. on Sent. Thomas, S. Theol. c. Gent. Petavius, de Deo. Gerhard, Loc. Calvin, Inst. Beza, Tract. Theol. Alting, Theol. elenct. nova. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. Turretin, Theol. El. M. Vitringa. Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. etc.
On the other side stands deism, which separates God and world; the creatures, after they are once created, it lets exist and work wholly or in part, and then again for a greater or lesser degree, through their own powers received in creation; and thus in essence renews the heathen teaching of chance. In the sense of magna Dei curant, parva negligunt , Jerome once said that God's providential care does not extend over all small insects. Pelagianism, like Cicero in Nat. D. III 36, ascribed virtue to man's own will and power, and semi-Pelagianism divided the labor and ascribed something to both God and man. When later this system entered Roman theology, there arose no small difference over God's cooperation in providence; the Thomists conceived it as a praedeterminatio physica , an applicatio ad operandum , Thomas, S. Theol. I 2 qu. 9 art. 6 ad 3. qu. 79. 109. c. Gent. III 67-70. 162; the Molinists on the other hand understood by it a concursus simultaneus , mere cooperans , whereby God with another concurrent flows into the same act and effect, Daalman, Summa S. Thomae II 286-314. Theol. Wirceb. I c. 2. Dens, Theol. I 66 sq. Liberatore, Instit. philos. III c. 4 a. 1, 2. Scheeben, Dogm. II 22 f. Jansen, Prael. II 334. Socinianism set the infinite and the finite so abstractly and dualistically over against each other, that God could create the world not even from nothing but only from an eternal and finite matter; and accordingly it also withdrew a great part of the world from God's providence and left it to man's own insight and judgment. The will is by nature so free, that God even beforehand cannot surely reckon what a man will do in a given case; only when the decision has fallen, does God shape his action thereby; free causes therefore stand wholly independent beside and outside God. The relation of God to the world is like that of a workmaster to the machine; after he has made it and set it going, he leaves it to itself and grasps in only when something needs repair, Volkelius, de vera relig. II c. 7. Crell, de Deo et ejus attrib. c. 2-6. Fock, Der Socin. 496 f.
The Remonstrants were likewise of the judgment, that in creation powers were given to creatures, on which they now could draw. Preservation was therefore a negative act of God, whereby He wills not to destroy the essences, powers and faculties of created things but leaves them to their own vigor, as far as they can thrive and endure from the power given them in creation, or at least this view was not named untrue. In connection therewith the concursus as a certain natural influence into all things flowing from the perfection of divine nature was rejected; the predestination of the number of men, of marriages, of life's end, of the elect and lost was opposed; free will defended and all effective providence concerning sin replaced by a negative permission or non-hindrance, Conf. Rem. c. 6, Apol. Conf. ib. Episcopius, Inst. Theol. IV sect. 4. Limborch, Theol. Christ. II 25 sq. Arminianism was indeed condemned at Dordrecht and placed outside the Reformed heritage, but as a mindset it found entrance everywhere and pressed into all Christian lands and churches. The period that began with the half of the 17th century marked itself by a mighty striving to free nature, world, man, knowledge etc. from and make independent over against God, Christianity, church, theology; latitudinarianism, deism, rationalism, pietism, Enlightenment etc. agree therein. This world is the best possible, man is with his understanding and will enough to himself; natural law, natural power, natural right, natural religion, natural morality together make a fund of powers, given by God at creation to the world and now fully enough for being and unfolding; revelation, prophecy, wonder, grace are wholly needless.
Deism denied not the being of God, nor creation and providence; on the contrary, it spoke gladly of the Highest Being and held broad speeches on providence. But the strength from this faith was gone. Deism denied in principle, that God works in creation otherwise than by and through natural laws and powers; it was from home anti-supernaturalistic. Preservation was enough; a cooperation or inflow of God with every deed of the creature was needless, Reinhard, Dogm. § 61. Wegscheider, Inst. theol. § 106. In its 18th-century form this deism now belongs to the past. But in truth it still rules today in wide circles, both in teaching and doing. Since especially in this century the knowledge of nature has grown and the firmness of its orders acknowledged, many are bent to withdraw the ruthless, unchangeable nature from God's rule, to let it rest independent in itself and to bound God's providence to the religious-ethical field. But naturally then also here providence cannot be taken absolutely; it finds its border in human freedom, Kreibig, Die Räthsel der göttl. Vorsehung , Berlin 1886. Schmidt, Die göttl. Vorsehung und das Selbstleben der Welt 1887. Beyschlag, Zur Verständigung über den christl. Vorsehungsglauben , Halle 1888. No wonder, that with such a beholding the old teaching of concursus is no more understood and set aside as needless or untrue, Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 54. Müller, Sünde I⁵ 318. Vilmar, Dogm. I 255. Lipsius, Dogm. § 397 f. Oosterzee, § 59, 5. 7, also Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. II³ 266. Even then the drawing out lies near, to place with the ethical moderns here in land natural might and moral might as it were as two gods in Manichaean wise beside and over against each other, at risk that the realm of the latter like that of the Redskins in America ever more shrinks and at last is wholly taken by the blind, reasonless might.
For that is surely the chief bar against deism: by parting God and world, the boundless and the bounded and setting them dualistically beside each other, it makes both into two vying mights, which are wrapped in ongoing strife and each other dispute the lordship. What is given to God, is taken from the world. The more God's providence spreads, the more the creature loses its self-standing and freedom, and contrariwise the creature can only hold its self-working if it thrusts God back and takes from Him the lordship. Peace is thus between both only in full parting. Deism is at bottom ungodly. Not in fellowship with but in parting from God lies man's bliss; the deist feels himself only at rest, when he is loose from God, that is, in deed godless; and because he knows he can never be this, he is a fearful creature, always worried that a piece of his ground will be taken from him. Hence there are in deism all kinds of steps; the borders between God's working and that of the world are each time drawn otherwise. There are whole, half, three-quarter Pelagians etc., as world and man wholly or for a greater or lesser part are withdrawn from God's rule. In ground deism is always the same, it sets God on non-doing, but one walks that path further than the other. A deist is a man, who in his short being has not found the time to become godless, Quack, Port Royal 180. That ground now, which by deism is taken from God's rule, then comes to stand under the might, whether of fate, whether of chance. Also in this sight deism each time touches strife with itself. Especially now, when all are so deeply swayed of the firmness of nature's order, therein is for chance no room and deism falls back into the hands of the old fate; chance stays chiefly only kept for the religious-ethical field. But the teaching of chance is not better than that of fate. Fate could if need be still have a good meaning in the Christian life- and world-view; but chance and fortune are through and through unchristian. Chance is something only in men's eyes, because they at that eyeblink know not the cause. But in truth chance there is nothing and can be nothing. All must have a cause and has it in the last stance in the almighty and all-wise will of God, Augustine, qu. 83 qu 24. c. Acad. I 1. de ord. I 2. de civ. V 3. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 22 art. 2. qu. 103 art. 5. c. Gent. III 72. Gerhard, Loc. VI 3. Calvin, Inst. I 16, 2. 9. Chamier, Panstr. Cathol. II 2, 4 sq. Turretin, Theol. El. III qu. 12. Mastricht, Theol. III 10, 30. J. Müller, Sünde II 34 f. Weisse, Philos. D. I 518. Kirchner, Ueber den Zufall , Halle, Pfeffer 1888. G. Rümelin, Ueber den Zufall , Deutsche Rundschau March 1890 S. 353-364, and further on deism: Lechler, Gesch. des engl. Deismus 1841 and art. in Herzog². Pünjer, Gesch. d. chr. Relig. Philos. I 209 f. Hanne, Die Idee der absol. Persönl. II² 76 f. Pesch, Die grossen Welträthsel II² 534 f. Doedes, Inl. tot de leer v. God 80v.
4. The providence of God, thus set apart from the knowledge and decree of God, and upheld against pantheism and deism, is, according to the fair wording of the Heidelberg Catechism, that almighty and everywhere-present might of God, by which He upholds and governs heaven and earth, together with all creatures, as it were with His hand.
Even so, the teaching of providence is yet of very wide scope. It truly takes in the whole carrying out of all decrees which have to do with that which was once called into being by creation. If the act of creation be left out, it is as rich as the free knowledge, as the decrees of God, as all that is in time and befalls. It stretches out over all that, after creation, is further handled in dogmatics, and takes in both the works of nature and of grace; all works of God outward, which follow upon creation, are works of His providence.
Only, the locus on providence does not go into those works themselves, but sets forth in broad lines the kind of bond wherein God stands to the created world, and which is ever the same notwithstanding the many sundry works which He brings to pass in the world by His providence. Therefore it is not wished, in this locus, to bring up sundry matters, such as the wonder, prayer, the end of life, free will, sin, the theodicy, and so on, for in part these matters have already been handled earlier in the teaching of the virtues and decrees of God, and in part they come later in their own place at length. Not on the locus of providence alone, but on the whole of dogmatics rests the task of the theodicy.
The teaching of providence thus does not take up the stuff for the following loci, but holds itself to the setting forth of the bond, staying ever the same amid all sundry works, wherein God stands to the creatures. That bond is uttered by the words upholding, concurrence, and governing, which by and by were taken as parts of providence. Whatever God does in nature and grace, it is ever He who upholds all things, flows into them with His might, and governs them. Upholding, concurrence, and governing are therefore no parts or pieces wherein the work of providence is split, and which, in thing and time set apart, follow one upon the other. They differ among themselves also not so, that the upholding would have bond only to the being of creatures, the concurrence only to the workings, and the governing solely to the leading toward the end goal. But they ever stand in bond with each other, they grasp into each other every twinkling, the upholding is from the first beginning also governing, and the governing concurrence, and the concurrence upholding.
The upholding tells us that nothing is, not only no substance, but also no strength, no working, no mark, no thought, or it is all out of, through, unto God. The concurrence makes us know that same upholding as such a one which does not lift away the being of creatures but just sets and upholds it. And the governing shows us both as so leading all things that the end goal set by God is reached. And ever, from the beginning to the end, providence is one simple, almighty, and everywhere-present might.
Conceived as such a power and act of God, providence stands in the closest connection with, and yet is essentially distinguished from, the activity of God in creation. Pantheism and deism seek the solution of the problem that presents itself here by denying either creation or providence. Theism upholds both and seeks to set forth their unity and their distinction both for the theory and for the practice of life. To be theist in the full and true sense, that is, to see God's counsel and hand and work in all things, and yet at the same time, yes precisely therefore, to develop all power and gift to the highest activity—that is the glory of the Christian faith, that is the secret of the Christian life.
The Scripture leads us herein. It designates providence on the one hand as a creating, Ps. 104:30, a making alive, Neh. 9:6, a speaking, Ps. 33:9, 105:31, 34, 107:25, Job 37:6, a sending forth of his Word and Spirit, Ps. 104:30, 107:26, a commanding, Ps. 147:15, Lam. 3:37, a working, John 5:17, an upholding, Heb. 1:3, a willing, Rev. 4:11, so that all things without exception are from God and through and to him exist, Acts 17:28, Rom. 11:36, Col. 1:17. God is never idle. He never looks on passively. He works always with divine might in nature and grace. Providence is therefore a positive act, not a letting but a making to exist and work from moment to moment. If it consisted only in a non-destroying, it would not be God who upholds the things, but these would exist in and through themselves, albeit by a power bestowed at creation. And this is absurd to think; a creature is by nature an utterly dependent being; what does not exist of itself cannot for a moment exist through itself. If God does nothing, then there is nothing and nothing happens. Virtus Dei, ab eis quae creata sunt regendis si aliquando cessaret, simul et illorum cessaret species omnisque natura concideret , Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. IV 12. Conf. IV 17, cf. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 104 art. 1-4. c. Gent. III 65 sq. Calvin, Inst. I 16, 4. Leydecker, Fax verit. VIII 2. Alsted, Theol. schol. 304 etc. And just as providence is a power and an act, so it is also an almighty and omnipresent power. God is present with his being immanent in all creatures. His providence extends to all creatures; all things exist in him. The Scripture declares it most firmly that nothing, however small, falls outside God's providence. Not only all things in general, Eph. 1:11, Col. 1:17, Heb. 1:3, but even the hairs of the head, Matt. 10:30, the sparrows, Matt. 10:29, the birds of heaven, Matt. 6:26, the lilies of the field, Matt. 6:28, the young ravens, Ps. 147:9 are the object of his care. What also is small or great to him, who alone is great? In the world-connection the small is just as well in its place as the great, equally indispensable and necessary, and often of richer meaning and weightier consequences. Providence may therefore well be distinguished into general, Ps. 104, 148:1-3, special, Ps. 139:15ff., Job 10:9-12, Matt. 12:12, Luke 12:7, and most special, 1 Tim. 4:10. But as God's power it extends to all and to each creature. Habakkuk complains in chapter 1:14 that God through his chastisement makes men like the fishes of the sea, which are caught in the net, and like crawling things that have no ruler, namely, to protect them against their enemies, but by no means declares thereby that God's providence does not extend over these creatures. With more appearance of right, appeal is made for the limitation of God's providence to 1 Cor. 9:9; yet Paul, who elsewhere conceives God's sovereignty so absolutely, e.g., Acts 17:28, Rom. 11:36, Col. 1:17, here in no wise denies that God also cares for the oxen, but only indicates that the reason why this word is included in God's law does not lie in the oxen but in men. Also this word concerning the oxen God says for our sake , vs. 10, cf. Rom. 4:23, 24, 15:4, 2 Tim. 3:16, that we might learn therefrom that the worker in the gospel is worthy of his wage. Thus providence is as great, almighty, and omnipresent an act of God as creation; it is a continued or continuing creation; they are both one act and differ only in reason, Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. IV 15. Conf. IV 12 de civ. XII 17. Thomas I qu. 104 art. 2. Quenstedt, Theol. I p. 351. Ursinus, Explic. Cat. qu. 27. M. Vitringa II 183. Heppe, Dogm. d. ev. ref. K. 190.
Thus speaking, earlier theologians have by no means wished to do away with the distinction that lies between creation and providence, as for instance Hodge fears. For Scripture on the other hand sets forth providence as a resting from the work of creation, Gen. 2:2, Ex. 20:11, 31:17, and further as a seeing, Ps. 14:2, as a beholding, Ps. 33:13, as an heeding, Ps. 33:15, as a watching, Ps. 130:3, and so forth, all of which takes for granted the being, the self-working, the freedom of the creature.
These givings of Scripture may not be overlooked either. Creation and providence are not the same. If providence were a renewed creation every twinkling, then the creatures would each twinkling also be brought forth out of nothing. The hanging together, the binding, the order of causes would then wholly go to loss, and of unfolding, history there could be no speech. All creatures would then not truly be, but only in seeming, and miss all self-standing, freedom, answerability; God himself would be the cause of sin.
Though many named providence a ongoing creation, yet they meant thereby by no means to wipe out the distinction between both; rather they all took providence at the same time as a making to last in being, as a keeping, which takes creation for granted. Thus says for instance Augustine, that God on the seventh day rested and shaped no new kinds anymore, and he sets forth the work of providence in sundering from that of creation thus: movet itaque occulta potentia universam creaturam suam...... explicat secula, quae illi cum primum condita sunt tanquam implicita indiderat, quae tamen in suos cursus non explicarentur, si ea ille qui condidit provido motu administrare cessaret , de Gen. ad lit. Providence may thus sometimes be called a creation, it is from the first and own creation always sundered therein, that it is an ongoing creation.
Both come thus herein with each other together, that it is the same godly, all-mighty and all-thereness strength that is working in creation and in upholding; this is no lesser deed than yon; to both is might, godly all-might needed. Further are creation and upholding naturally also not sundered in God himself, for in Him, the Everlasting, falls no change nor shadow of turning; He is not gone over from not-creating to creating nor also from creating to upholding; He is unchangeably the same. Creation and upholding are thus not outwardly and thingly, as deeds of God, in God's being, but only by reason sundered. That will however not say, that our thinking so but wilfully between both sunders; nay, that sundering is well grounded in God's opening and therefrom by our thinking drawn. There is sundering between creation and upholding, but that sundering lies not in God's being on itself, but in the tying, wherein God sets himself to the creatures.
Something other is it, what with the things through the creation, and something other, what therewith through the upholding befalls. The tying, wherein through both deeds the creatures to God are set, is a sundry one. This sundering is not so to show, that the creation out of nothing is and the upholding out of the being; but the creation calls the things that not are, that no other being have than that of thoughts and besets in the being of God; through the upholding calls God with the same mightiness those things, that a from his being sundered being have gotten and yet only and alone out of and through and to God are. The creation gives the being; the upholding, the lasting in the being.
The hardship for the thinking, to hold both creation and upholding, lies always again herein, that creatures through the creation an own, from God's being sundered being have gotten, and that yet that being no twinkling can or may be beheld as a from God unhangly, in itself resting being. We stand here before a hiddenness, that our grasp far overgoes, and always are we bent, to do short to the one or to the other. On that bending rests the all-godness and the god-leaving. Both go out from the same wandering and set God and world as two greatnesses over against each other. The first offers the world to God, the creation to the upholding up and thinks, that the being of God then alone a godly endless being is, when the being of the world is gainsaid, in seeming loosed, in the godly being swallowed. And the second offers God to the world, the upholding to the creation up and deems, that the creature the more to its right comes, so much as it less hanging becomes of God and more from Him withdraws.
The Christian however owns, that the world and each creature in her an own being has gotten but yet in that same measure waxes in trueness, in freedom, in truthful being, as it more hanging is of God, and of twinkling to twinkling out of and through and to Him is. A creature stands the higher, so much as God it more indwells and with his being through-thrills. The upholding goes in so far even the creation over; for this gave only the onset of the being, but yon is the ongoing and always waxing with-giving of God to his creatures. The providence is the progressive expression in the universe of his divine perfection, the progressive realization in it of the archetypal ideal of perfect wisdom and love, Samuel Harris, God the Creator and Lord of all, Edinburgh Clark 1897.
5. With this, the manner is also already indicated in which God exercises his providence in the world, and which in old times was expressed by the doctrine of the concursus. This is as rich as the diversity which at the creation was brought into the creatures. Just as the creation has great variety, so also the government, Alsted, Theol. schol. 315. By the creation a world is called into being, which at the same time deserves to be called both a cosmos and an age, and in both space and time is a most clear mirror of the divine glory. Providence now serves to lead the world from its beginning to its end goal; it enters into action immediately at the creation and maintains and brings to development what is given in that creation. Conversely, the creation is designed for providence; the creation gives to the creatures such a being that in and through providence it can be brought to unfolding. For the world was not created in the state of pure potency, as a chaos or nebula, but as a cosmos, and man was placed therein not as a helpless child but as man and woman; only from such a ready world could the development proceed, and thus it was offered by the creation to providence. Furthermore, that world was a harmonious whole, in which unity was paired with the richest diversity; each creature received its own nature and therein its own being, its own life and law of life. Just as in Adam's heart the moral law was ingrained as a rule for his life, so all creatures bore in their own nature the principles and the laws for their development. All things are created by the word. Everything rests on thought. The whole creation is a system of ordinances of God, Gen. 1:26, 28, 8:22, Ps. 104:5, 9, 119:90, 91, Eccl. 1:10, Job 38:10ff., Jer. 5:24, 31:35ff., 33:20, 25. He gave to all creatures an order, a law, which they do not transgress, Ps. 148:6. It rests in all its parts on the counsel of God, and this comes out in the small and in the great; it all comes forth from the Lord of hosts, He is wonderful in counsel, He is great in deed, Isa. 28:23-29. Thus Scripture teaches us to understand the world, and thus Christian theology has also understood it. Augustine said that in the creatures there were hidden seeds, original rules, seminal reasons implanted, which, hidden in the secret womb of nature, are the principles of all development. Whatever comes forth to our eyes by birth, receives from hidden seeds the beginnings of progress, and takes the increments of due magnitude and distinctions of forms from original rules as it were, de trin. III 7. de Gen. ad lit. IV 33. The world is therefore pregnant with the causes of beings; just as mothers are pregnant with fetuses, so the world itself is pregnant with the causes of things being born, which are not created in it, except from that highest essence, where nothing arises or dies, neither begins to be nor ceases, de trin. III 9. It is a tree of things, which brings forth branch and blossom and fruit from itself, de Gen. ad lit. VIII 9. Yet God so sustains the things and so works in them, that they themselves as secondary causes cooperate. That does not mean that one must remain standing at these secondary causes; we must always ascend to the cause of all being and movement, and that is only the will of God; the will of the Creator is the nature of each created thing, de civ. XXI 8, cf. de trin. III 6-9. Insofar providence is not only a positive, but also an immediate act of God. His will, his power, his essence is immediately present in every creature and in every event. All things exist and live together in Him, Acts 17:28, Col. 1:17, Heb. 1:3. Just as He created the world by Himself, so He also sustains and governs it by Himself. Although God also works through secondary causes, this is not to be interpreted with deism as if they stood between God and the workings with their consequences and removed these from Him. Immediately God provides for all, as regards the reason of order, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 22 art. 3. qu. 103 art. 6. qu. 104 art. 2. c. Gent. III 76 sq. Therefore, a miracle is also no breaking of the law of nature and no intervention from outside in the order of nature. It is from God's side an act which has no more immediately and directly God as cause than every ordinary event, and in the counsel of God and in the world idea it takes an equally ordered and harmonious place as every natural phenomenon. In the miracle God only brings a special power into operation, which, like every other power, works according to its own nature and law and thus also has its own product as a result. But at the creation God laid in the things his ordinances, an order of things, whereby the things themselves stand in connection with each other. Not God depends on those causes, but the things do depend on each other. That connection is manifold; although it can in general be called causal, causal in this sense is by no means to be identified with mechanical, as materialism wants. The mechanical connection is but one way in which a part of the things in the world stand in relation to each other. Just as the creatures in creation received their own nature and differ among themselves, so there is also distinction in the laws according to which they work, and in the relations in which they stand to each other. These are distinct in the physical and in the psychical realm, in the intellectual and in the ethical world, in family and society, in science and art, in the kingdoms of the earth and in the kingdom of heaven. It is the providence of God which, in connection with the creation, sustains all these distinct natures, powers, ordinances and brings them to full unfolding. In providence God does not annul but honors and develops what He called into being in the creation. Thus He sustains and governs all creatures according to their nature, the angels differently than men and these again differently than animals and plants. But insofar as God now in his providence sustains the mutual relations of things and makes the creatures serviceable to each other's existence and life, it can be called mediate. Immediately God provides for all, as regards the reason of order, but as regards the execution of the order He provides through some means, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 22 art. 3. Thus He created the angels all at once but lets men come forth from one blood; thus He sustains some creatures individually, others as species and genus; thus He time and again uses all kinds of creatures as means in his hand, to execute his counsel and to reach his goal.
The Christian theology denied this not; on the contrary, it has always, following the lead of Scripture, with emphasis upheld the natural order and the causal connection of phenomena. It is untrue that Christianity with its supranaturalism would be hostile to a natural order and would make science impossible, as Draper's history of the struggle between religion and science, 2nd ed. Haarlem 1887, with evident delight tries to show. Much more right is the judgment of Du Bois Reymond, when he said: the newer natural science, however paradoxical this may sound, owes its origin to Christianity, Kulturgesch. und Naturw. Leipzig 1878 p. 28, cf. also Lange, Gesch. des Mater. 1882 p. 129 f. and others in Martensen Larsen, Die Naturwiss. in ihrem Schuldverhältnis zum Christenthum, Berlin 1897. In any case, Christianity has made science, particularly that of nature, possible and prepared the ground for it. For the more that natural phenomena, as in polytheism, are deified and regarded as visible images and bearers of the Godhead, the more impossible becomes a scientific inquiry, which naturally acquires the character of sacrilege and disturbs the mystery of the Godhead. But Christianity has distinguished God and world and by its confession of God as the Creator of all things has loosed God from the natural context and placed Him high above it; inquiry into nature is no longer an assault on the Godhead. Furthermore, it has thereby at the same time made man free from and placed him independent over against nature, as the beautiful view of nature in the psalmists and prophets, in Jesus and the apostles, so clearly proves; nature is for the believer no longer an object of worship and fear; while he in deep humility bows before God and is utterly dependent on Him, he has just the calling to rule the earth and subdue all things to himself, Gen. 1:26. Dependence on God is quite something else than living in accord with nature and adapting to circumstances. Many reason so that they either ascribe all things and events to God's will and deem resistance unlawful, or limit God's providence and place many things in the hands of man, cf. e.g. Beyschlag, Zur Verständigung über den christl. Vorsehungsglauben 1888 p. 24 f. But Scripture warns us against both this antinomianism and this Pelagianism and cuts off at the root all false, fatalistic resignation and all proud self-confidence. Bowing before natural power is something wholly different from childlike submission to God; and the ruling of the earth is a serving of God. The captain who during a storm went to his cabin to pray and read the Bible submitted indeed to the power of the elements but not to God, Harris, God the Creator and Lord of all I 545. There is much more true piety in Cromwell's word: trust God and keep your powder dry. Next, it is the confession of God as the Creator of heaven and earth which at once brings with it the thought of the one, absolute, never divided against itself truth; of the harmony and beauty of God's counsel; and thus also of the unity of the world plan and of the order of the whole nature. If in a free and grand way to the one God also a unified working from the whole and full is ascribed, then the connection of things according to cause and effect is not only thinkable but it is even a necessary consequence of the assumption, Lange, Gesch. d. Mater. 130. Scripture itself leads the way in the recognition of such a natural order, of all sorts of ordinances and laws for created things. And the miracle makes so little breach in it that it rather presupposes and confirms that fixed natural order. The Christian church and theology have at all times gladly acknowledged such an order of things; Augustine appealed repeatedly to the word in Wis. 11:20, you have ordered all things by measure and number and weight. They have at least in the first period resisted with force the dreadful superstition which in the third and fourth centuries rose to an extraordinary height, and in particular also combated astrology, Aug. de civ. V 1-8. Thomas, S. c. Gent. III 84 sq. Calvin, Contre l’astrologie, C. R. 35 p. 509-544. Turretin, Theol. El. VI qu. 2. Mastricht II 435. M. Vitringa II 180 etc. The strife that often broke out was not waged between Christianity and natural science; the parties were quite differently grouped; it was mostly a strife between old and new worldviews, in which believing Christians stood on both sides, cf. vol. II 465.
This fundamentally correct view of nature, which theology advocates, is nowhere more clearly evident than in its doctrine of concurrence and secondary causes. In pantheism and deism, this doctrine cannot come into its own. There are no causes there, and here no secondary causes anymore. In pantheism, the secondary causes, that is, the causes of things lying next to each other within the circle of the created, are identified with the primary cause, that is God. There is no distinction between the two in substance and operation; God is materially and formally the subject of all that happens, thus also of sin; at most, the so-called secondary causes are occasions and passive instruments for God's operations. Formerly occurring only sporadically, this doctrine came to dominance in the newer philosophy from Descartes and thus led to the idealism of Berkeley and Malebranche and to the pantheism of Spinoza, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and others. Thus, for example, Malebranche says that there is only one true cause because there is only one true God, that the nature or force of each thing is only the will of God, that all natural causes are not true causes, but only occasional causes. God alone can be the true cause, because He alone creates and cannot communicate this power to any creature; if creatures could truly be causes of movements and phenomena, then they would themselves be gods, but all these little divinities of the pagans and all these particular causes of the philosophers are only chimeras, which the evil spirit seeks to establish to ruin the worship of the true God. There are thus only phenomena, representations, and the only reality, power, substance that lies behind them is that of God Himself. Conversely, in deism, the secondary causes are separated from the primary cause and made independent; the primary cause is entirely limited to creation, to giving the possibility, and is entirely excluded from the will and the doing, as in original Pelagianism; or the two causes are thought of as partner causes that work alongside and with each other, like two horses pulling a wagon, though one may be stronger than the other, as in semi-Pelagianism and synergism; here the creature becomes the creator of its own deeds.
However, Scripture says both that God works all things, so that the creature is only an instrument in His hand, for example, Isaiah 44:24, Psalm 29:3, 65:11, 147:16, Matthew 5:45, Acts 17:25, and so on, and that providence is distinct from creation and presupposes the existence and self-activity of creatures, for example, Genesis 1:11, 20, 22, 24, 28, and so on. In agreement with this, Christian theology teaches that the secondary causes are absolutely subordinated to God as the primary cause and yet in that subordination remain true, real causes. A few did indeed deviate sideways here, such as the nominalist Biel in the Middle Ages, Zwingli in the time of the Reformation, who wrongly considered the secondary causes so named and preferred to call them instruments, and the American theologian Emmons in later times. But nevertheless, it was the constant teaching of the Christian church that the secondary causes are wholly and entirely dependent on the first cause but at the same time are also true, essential causes. God flows into every secondary cause with His almighty power and is present with His being in it at its beginning, progress, and end. He it is who posits it and brings it to action (premotion), and further also accompanies and leads it in its operation up to its effect (concurrence); He works the willing and the working according to His good pleasure. But this inworking of the primary cause in the secondary causes is so divinely great that precisely thereby He brings those secondary causes to their own activity. The providence of God does not abolish secondary causes but posits them. The concurrence is precisely the cause of the self-activity of the secondary causes; and these, borne by God's power from beginning to end, work with a proper and innate virtue. So little does God's activity nullify the activity of the creature that the latter becomes all the stronger insofar as the former reveals itself richer and fuller. Thus, the primary cause and secondary cause remain two distinct causes; the first does not destroy the second but precisely grants it reality, and the second exists only through the first. Also, the secondary causes are not merely instruments, not organs, not sticks and blocks, but true, essential causes, with their own nature, power, spontaneity, operation, and law. Satan and the wicked are not so much instruments of God that nevertheless they do not also operate on their own side. For we must not imagine that God works through a wicked man as through a stone or a block of wood, but He uses him as a rational creature, according to the quality of his nature, which He has given him. When therefore we say that God works through the wicked, that does not prevent the wicked from also operating in their own place, Calvin.
In relation to God, the secondary causes can be compared to instruments, Isaiah 10:15, 13:5, Jeremiah 50:25, Acts 9:15, Romans 9:20-23; in regard to their effects and products, they are causes in the proper sense. And precisely because the first and second cause do not stand and work dualistically next to each other, but the first works through the second, therefore the operation that proceeds from both is one, and the product is also one. There is no division of labor between God and His creature, but the same operation is wholly and entirely the operation of the primary cause and likewise wholly and entirely the operation of the proximate cause; and the product is in the same sense wholly the product of the first and wholly the product of the second cause. However, because the primary cause and the secondary cause are not identical but differ in essence, therefore the operation and the product are indeed really wholly and entirely operation and product of both causes; but formally they are only operation and product of the secondary cause. The wood burns, and it is God alone who causes the burning, but formally the burning may not be ascribed to God but must be attributed only to the wood as subject. Man speaks, acts, believes, and it is God alone who causes him to speak, act, believe, yet not God but man is the formal subject of all these deeds. And so it is also God alone who grants the sinner all life and power which he needs for committing a sin; but sin has not God but man as its subject and author. In this way, Holy Scripture draws the lines within which the reconciliation of God's sovereignty and man's freedom must be sought.
6. In the providence, conceived as preservation or as concurrence, the government is already included. In the providence, conceived as preservation or as concurrence, the government is already included. He who so upholds things that he not only bears their being but even their powers and workings by his will and his essence, he is utterly sovereign, king in true sense. The government is therefore no new element that comes added to preservation and concurrence; it is, like each of these two, in itself the whole providence, only now viewed from the standpoint of the end goal, whither God leads all the created through his providence. It is a fair, rich thought, as the Holy Scripture each time calls God King and describes his providence as a government. There are many in this time who cast off every thought of sovereignty in household, state, fellowship, and will know nothing but folk-rule and lawlessness. Under the sway of these views there are also those who in theology find the picture of God as King Old Testamentish and outdated and at most still wish to speak of God as Father. But this judgment is shallow and untrue. First, the Father name for God is not New Testamentish but also already in the Old Testament and even among the heathens in use; the New Testament may have grasped the meaning thereof richer and deeper, it has not first given that name to God. Conversely, the name of King for the godly being comes not only in the Old but also in the New Testament repeatedly, Matthew 6:10, 13, 33, 1 Timothy 1:17, 6:15, Revelation 19:6, and so on. And second, the naming of King is no less worthy for God than that of Father. All patria in heaven and on earth is named from him who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Ephesians 3:15. All bonds that among creatures exist between greater and lesser are a likeness of that one first bond, wherein God stands to the works of his hands. What a father is to his household, what an upbringer is to the youth, what a leader is to the host, what a lord is to his folk, that all and so much more is God in wholly first wise to his creatures. Not one, but all his virtues come to showing in the world and belong thus by us to be honored. And now is above all also the kingship a glorious godly setting. It gives to the folk not only a bodily oneness, but takes as handed-down kingship also the mark of firstness, highness, freedom, and unchangingness. In all this it is a fair, though also weak, likeness of the kingship of God. All sovereignty on earth is borrowed, drawn off, timely, bounded, oftentimes not to blessing but to curse. But God is King in full and in true sense. The government of the world is not folk-ruled and not highborn-ruled, not free-state and not bound-law, but kingly. God's is the one, undivided, law-giving, judging, and doing might; his sovereignty is first, everlasting, unbound, blessing-rich. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, 1 Timothy 6:15, Revelation 19:6. His kingdom is the whole world-all. His is heaven and earth, Exodus 19:5, Psalm 8:2, 103:19, 148:13. He owns all folks, Psalm 82:8, reigns over the heathens, Psalm 22:29, 47:9, 96:10, Jeremiah 10:7, Malachi 1:14, and is the Most High over the whole earth, Psalm 47:3, 8, 83:19, 97:9. He is King in everlastingness, Psalm 29:10, 1 Timothy 1:17; no withstanding has anything over against him to mean, Psalm 93:3, 4. His kingdom comes surely, Matthew 6:10, 1 Corinthians 15:24, Revelation 12:10; his glory shall be shown and his name feared from the uprising to the down-going of the sun, Isaiah 40:5, 59:19; he shall be King over the whole earth, Zechariah 14:9. Also in this government God deals with each thing after its kind. God reigns things, fitting to their own kind, Alsted, Theol. schol. 301. And therefore is that government of God also in the Scripture set forth in sundry ways and named with sundry names. Through his government he holds the world standing and strengthens it, so that it shall not waver, Psalm 93:1; he sets the light and the darkness, Psalm 104:19, 20, bids the rain and holds it in, Genesis 7:4, 8:2, Job 26:8, 38:22ff., gives frost and snow and ice, Psalm 147:16, chides that is rebukes and stills the sea, Nahum 1:4, Psalm 65:8, 107:29, sends curse and downfall, Deuteronomy 28:15ff., all does his word, Psalm 148:8. Even so mighty and sovereign reigns he in the world of thinking creatures, he reigns among the heathens and owns all folks, Psalm 22:29, 82:8, deems the folks less than nothing and emptiness, Isaiah 40:17, does with the dwellers of the earth after his good liking, Daniel 4:35, and leads all hearts and thoughts, Proverbs 21:1.
And this government of God over his rational creatures extends not only to the good, of which He is both in nature and grace the Giver, James 1:17, and also not only to his favorites, whom He elects, calls, preserves, cares for, and leads to eternal blessedness, but it extends also to evil and to those who love and do evil. Indeed, it stands firm throughout the whole Scripture that God hates sin with his whole being, Deuteronomy 32:4, Psalm 5:5-7, Job 34:10, 1 John 1:5, and so on; and his government bears undeniable witness to this through the forbidding of sin in law and conscience, through his judgments and decrees. But nevertheless, the whole Scripture also teaches that sin from beginning to end stands under his divine rule. At its beginning, God sometimes acts to hinder it; He prevents someone from sinning, Genesis 20:6, 31:7, destroys the counsel of the ungodly, Psalm 33:10, gives strength to stand in temptation, 1 Corinthians 10:13, and always holds back sin insofar as He forbids it and restrains the sinner through some fear and dread in the conscience. But this hindering is by no means the only form in which God governs sin. Often He permits it and does not prevent it. He gave Israel over to the lusts of their hearts, Psalm 81:13, allowed the Gentiles to walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16, 17:30, and gave them over to a reprobate mind, Romans 1:24, 28; and so it can be said that God permitted the fall of Adam, the murder of Abel, the wickedness of men before the flood, Genesis 6:3, the sale of Joseph, Genesis 37, the condemnation of Jesus, and so on.
But this permission is so little negative that sin even in its very first beginning stands under God's governing power and sovereignty. He creates and orders the occasions and inducements to sin, to test man and thereby either to strengthen and confirm him or also to punish and harden him, Genesis 2:7, 2 Chronicles 32:31, Job 1, Matthew 4:1, 6:13, 1 Corinthians 10:13. Although sin at first seemed nothing but an arbitrary act of men, it later appears that God had his hand in it and that it happened according to his counsel, Genesis 46:8, 2 Chronicles 11:4, Luke 24:26, Acts 2:23, 3:17, 18, 4:28. Even in its beginning, sin is ascribed to God not formally and subjectively but yet materially. God is the potter and man is the clay, Jeremiah 18:5, Lamentations 3:38, Isaiah 45:7, 9, 64:7, Amos 3:6; He hardens, hardens, blinds, Exodus 4:21, 7:3, 9:12, 10:20, 27, 11:10, 14:4, Deuteronomy 2:30, Joshua 11:20, Isaiah 6:10, 63:17, Matthew 13:13, Mark 4:12, Luke 8:10, John 12:40, Acts 28:26, Romans 9:18, 11:8; He turns the heart so that it hates and is disobedient, 1 Samuel 2:25, 1 Kings 12:25, 2 Chronicles 25:20, Psalm 105:24, Ezekiel 14:9. He sends an evil spirit, a lying spirit, Judges 9:23, 1 Samuel 16:14, 1 Kings 22:23, 2 Chronicles 18:22, incites David through Satan, 2 Samuel 24:1, 1 Chronicles 21:1, makes Shimei curse, 2 Samuel 16:10, gives men over to their sins, lets the measure of their iniquity become full, Genesis 15:16, Romans 1:24, sends a power of error, 2 Thessalonians 2:11, appoints Christ for a fall and rising, for a savor of death and of life, Luke 2:34, John 3:19, 9:39, 2 Corinthians 2:16, 1 Peter 2:8, and so on.
And not only at the beginning but also in the progress, God holds sin under his almighty control; often He binds it, limits it, stops it in its course, and makes an end of it through judgments and decrees, Genesis 7:11, Exodus 15, and so on, Matthew 24:22, 2 Peter 2:9, but also where He lets it continue, He governs it, Proverbs 16:9, 21:1, and makes it in its end, whether He forgives it or punishes it, against its will and intention, serviceable to the execution of his counsel, to the glorification of his name, Genesis 45:7, 8, 50:20, Psalm 51:6, Isaiah 10:5-7, Job 1:20, 22, Proverbs 16:4, Acts 3:13, Romans 8:28, 11:36.
Just as sin, the evil of guilt, so also suffering, the evil of punishment, stands under the dominion of God. He is the Creator of light and darkness, of good and evil, Amos 3:6, Isaiah 45:7, Job 2:10. Death is his punishment and entered at his command, Genesis 2:17, and all calamities and adversities, all sorrow and suffering, all visitations and judgments come to men from God's almighty hand, Genesis 3:14 and following, Deuteronomy 28:15 and following, and so on. Already under Israel, however, the disharmony was noticed that exists in this life between sin and punishment, holiness and blessedness, Psalm 73, Job, Ecclesiastes. Faith wrestled with this tremendous problem, but it lifted its head triumphantly from it, not because it saw the problem solved, but because it clung fast to the kingly power and fatherly love of the Lord. The prosperity of the ungodly is only seeming and in any case only temporary, and the righteous are even in the heaviest suffering partakers of God's love and favor, Psalm 73, Job. The suffering of the pious often has its ground not in their personal sin but in the sin of humanity and its goal in the salvation of humanity and in the honor of God. Suffering serves not only for retribution, Romans 1:18, 27, 2:5, 6, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, but it also serves for testing and chastening, Deuteronomy 8:5, Job 1:12, Psalm 118:18, Proverbs 3:12, Jeremiah 10:24, 30:11, Hebrews 12:6 and following, Revelation 3:19; for strengthening and confirmation, Psalm 119:67, 71, Romans 5:3-5, Hebrews 12:10, James 1:2-4; as testimony to the truth, Psalm 44:23, Acts 5:41, Philippians 1:29, 2 Timothy 4:6; for the glorification of God, John 9:2. In Christ, justice and grace are reconciled with each other; suffering is the way to glory, the cross points to the crown, the wood of the cross is the tree of life.
The end to which all things are led by the providence of God is the establishment of his kingdom, the revelation of his attributes, the honor of his name, Romans 11:32-36, 1 Corinthians 15:28, Revelation 11:15, 21:3, and so on. In this comforting way, Scripture deals with the providence of God. Riddles remain enough, both in individual life and in the history of the world and humanity; from now on, dogmatics occupies itself with nothing else than the mysteries which the providence of God has set before us in sin, freedom, responsibility, punishment, suffering, death, grace, atonement, prayer, and so on, and therefore need not enter into all those subjects here. But over all those riddles and mysteries, God lets the light of his Word shine, not to solve them, but that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope, Romans 15:4. The doctrine of providence is not a philosophical system but a confession of faith, a confession that, despite the appearance of things often speaking against it, no Satan and no man and no creature but God and He alone through his almighty and omnipresent power upholds and governs all things. Such a confession is able to preserve us both from a superficial optimism that denies the riddles of life and from an arrogant pessimism that despairs of the world and fate. For the providence of God extends over all things, over the good not only, but also over sin and suffering, sorrow and death; for if these were withdrawn from his guidance, what would remain in this world for his government? It reveals itself not only and not chiefly in extraordinary events and in miracles, but just as much in the fixed order of nature and in the ordinary occurrences of daily life; for what a poor faith it would be that saw God's hand and counsel from afar in a few weighty events but did not perceive it in one's own life and lot? And it leads all these things, not against but in accordance with their nature, not apart from means but through them; for what power would there be in a faith that praised stoic indifference or fatalistic resignation as true piety? Thus, however, as the almighty and omnipresent power of God, it makes us in prosperity thankful and in adversity patient; it causes us with childlike submission to rest in the guidance of the Lord and yet at the same time arouses us from our sluggishness to the highest activity; and it grants us under all circumstances a good confidence in our faithful God and Father, that He will provide us with all things necessary for body and soul, and that He will turn to our good all the evil that He sends us in this vale of tears, since He can do so as an almighty God and also wills to do so as a faithful Father.
1. The providence of God, as the governing of sin, goes farthest beyond all our thinking and understanding, and at the same time celebrates its highest triumph as such. Hardly had God created the world good and perfect, when sin entered into it. The mystery of being becomes still more incomprehensible through the mystery of evil. Almost at the same moment that the creatures come forth pure and glorious from the hand of their Maker, they are robbed of all their splendor and stand corrupted and unclean before His holy face. Sin has destroyed the whole creation, turning its righteousness into guilt, its holiness into uncleanness, its glory into shame, its blessedness into misery, its harmony into disorder, its life into death, its light into darkness. Whence then that evil, and what is the origin of sin? Scripture justifies God and gives a continuous theodicy, as it declares and upholds that in no case is God the cause of sin. For He is righteous and holy and far from wickedness, Deut. 32:4, Job 34:10, Ps. 92:16, Isa. 6:3, Hab. 1:13, a light without darkness, 1 John 1:5, tempting no one, James 1:13, an abundant fountain of all that is good and pure and clean, Ps. 36:10, James 1:17; He forbids sin in His law, Ex. 20, and in the conscience of every man, Rom. 2:14, 15, has no pleasure in wickedness, Ps. 5:5, but hates it and is wrathful against it, Ps. 45:8, Rom. 1:18; He judges and reconciles it in Christ, Rom. 3:24-26, cleanses His people from it by forgiveness and sanctification, 1 Cor. 1:30, and wills to punish it both temporally and eternally, Rom. 1:18, 2:8. For the origin of sin, Scripture always points us to the creature. But therefore God's governing of sin, even in its origin, is not excluded. It is God Himself who created the possibility of sin. Not only did He form man so that he could fall. But He also planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, set man by the probationary command before the choice between good and evil, and permitted the temptation by the serpent. It was His will to walk with man the dangerous path of freedom, rather than to elevate him at once above the possibility of sin. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is undoubtedly so called because man, eating of it, would obtain a knowledge of good and evil which he did not possess until then, which was forbidden him and which he might not obtain. The question is, what is to be understood by that knowledge of good and evil. The usual explanation is that man by eating of the tree would obtain an experiential knowledge of good and evil; but rightly the objection has been raised against this, that this knowledge of good and evil would make man like God, Gen. 3:5, and yet God has no empirical knowledge of evil nor can He have; further, that man by eating of the tree precisely lost the experiential knowledge of good; and finally, that Gen. 3:22a would then have to be taken as irony, which in itself is already unlikely and is certainly in conflict with vs. 22b. Others have therefore thought that Gen. 3 narrates the development of man from the animal state to self-consciousness and reason, and have therefore seen in the fall the first venture of reason, the beginning of moral life, the origin of culture, the happiest event in the history of mankind; so already in earlier times some Ophites, who held the serpent to be an incarnation of the Logos, and later Kant, Conjectural Beginning of Human History 1786. Schiller, On the First Human Society 1790. Hegel, Works VII 1 p. 14 ff. IX 390 ff. XI 194. Strauss, Faith II 29, cf. Bretschneider, Systematic Development § 89. This view, however, is so much in conflict with the intention of the narrative that it is nowadays almost universally abandoned. For it would assume that God created man in a state of childish, even animal innocence and wished to keep him therein always; but knowledge, even moral knowledge, was already given to man at his creation, as the creation in God's image, the naming of the animals, the receiving and understanding of the probationary command prove; and the knowledge which man acquired by his fall was a wholly different one, which was forbidden by God and made him worthy of all kinds of punishment. Gen. 3 narrates not a giant progress but a fall of man, Wellhausen, History of Israel 1878 p. 344 ff. Ritschl, History and Critique of the Church Doctrine of Original Perfection , Leiden 1881 p. 8. Smend, Old Testament Religion 120. Marti, History of Israelite Religion 1897 p. 179. Clemen, The Christian Doctrine of Sin I 151 ff. These therefore hold the view that by the knowledge of good and evil is not to be understood the very first intellectual or moral knowledge, but rather, appealing to 2 Sam. 19:35, 36, that intellectual world-knowledge, that metaphysical knowledge of things in their connection, their worth or unworth, their benefit or harm for man, in other words, wisdom, the art of world-domination, which in fact would make man independent and like God and take away dominion from Him. This view, however, is pressed by the same objections as the previous one; only the way in which Marti develops it contains a pointer to the right explanation. Namely, in Gen. 3 it is not primarily about the content of the knowledge which man would acquire by disobedience, but about the manner in which he would obtain it, cf. Kuyper, Heraut 950, 951. The nature of the knowledge of good and evil here intended is clearly described by the fact that man thereby would become like God, Gen. 3:5, 22. By eating of the tree, he would detach himself from God, himself judge and determine what was good and what was evil, set his insight and his wisdom against the wisdom of God, and so make himself like God. Instead of living and acting in dependence on God, in submission to His law, man, eating of the tree and transgressing the command, would stand on his own feet, himself choose the path he wanted to go, and himself seek his own happiness. When man fell, he also got what he wished; he made himself like God, independent, knowing good and evil by his own insight and judgment; Gen. 3:22 is dreadful earnest. But this emancipation from God did not lead and cannot lead to true happiness. Therefore God forbids in the probationary command this drive for freedom, this desire for independence. But man succumbed to the test and voluntarily and deliberately struck out on his own path.
He had probably dwelt in the state of innocence for only a short time when he was tempted from without by a serpent, which was more cunning (עָרוּם, LXX φρονιμος, prudens, cf. Mt. 10:16, 2 Cor. 11:3) than all the beasts of the field, and brought to a fall. The serpent does not address the man but the woman, who had not received the command against eating from the tree directly from God but through her husband, and was therefore more open to reasoning and doubt. First of all, the serpent tries to awaken doubt in the woman's heart about God's command, and to that end presents it as given by God out of hardness and selfishness. The woman shows clearly, in the way she repeats and expands the command, that God's command has come to her awareness as a sharp boundary and a limiting rule. After doubt has been awakened and the burden of the command brought to awareness, the serpent goes on to sow both unbelief and pride in the woman's prepared heart; it now firmly denies that transgressing that command will result in death, and suggests that God gave that command only out of selfishness; if man eats from the tree, instead of dying, he will become like God and receive a perfect, divine knowledge. The serpent's assurance and the high expectation it aroused made the woman look at the tree; and the longer she looked, the more she was tempted by its fruit. Lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life made the temptation irresistible; at last she took of the fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.
The speaking of the serpent has led many to the thought that this story is an allegory, or that at least the serpent was no real animal, but a name and image for desire, Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. III 14, 17; or for sexual lust, Schopenhauer, Die Welt als W. u. V.⁶ II 654, 666; or for erring reason, Bunsen in his Bibelwerk; or also for Satan, Cajetan, Eugubinus, Junius, Rivetus, Amyraldus, Vitringa father and son, Venema, and others, cf. Marck, Hist. Parad. III 5, 5. M. Vitringa, II 256, and also J. P. Val d’Eremao, The serpent of Eden, a philol. and crit. essay on the text of Gen. 3 and its various interpretations, London 1888. But this explanation is not acceptable; the serpent is reckoned among the animals in Gen. 3:1; the punishment in vs. 14, 15 presupposes a real serpent, and in 2 Cor. 11:3 Paul is of the same opinion. Also the mythical view, which arose later and found acceptance with many, is at odds with the intent of the story, with the whole setting in which it occurs, and with the ongoing teaching of Scripture; moreover, the mythical explanations differ greatly among themselves, Hengstenberg, Christol. I² 5. Köhler, Bibl. Gesch. I 6. Delitzsch on Gen. 3:1.
The speaking of the serpent is therefore to be explained in another way; however, not with Josephus, Ant. I 1, 4, from the opinion of the narrator that the animals before the fall had the gift of speech, for he has just related that man is essentially distinct from the animals, gave them names, and found no help among them; but undoubtedly from the influence of a spiritual, supernatural power. Of what nature that power was, the story itself says not a word; Gen. 3 keeps to the visible facts, describes but does not explain. Many have indeed been of the opinion that Gen. 3 relates nothing other than the origin of enmity between man and animal. But besides the fact that this explanation does not satisfy because of its flatness, it is at odds with what is related in Gen. 2 about the relation of man and animal, and it does not tell us how and why the serpent acted as a seducing power over against man. Hence many now return to the old exegesis, even if only because it is honored in the apocryphal literature of the Old Testament, Clemen, Chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I 158 f.
Furthermore, it is understandable that Gen. 3 makes no mention of the spiritual background of the events. Only gradually, with the advancing light of revelation, is the depth of the darkness unveiled. Seemingly innocent at the beginning, sin is first known in its essence and power in the course of history. The deviation from the right path is slight and scarcely noticeable at the start, but when continued, it leads in an entirely wrong direction and to a wholly opposite outcome. From this it is also to be explained that Scripture, both in Old and New Testament, looks back relatively so seldom to the story of the fall; the main places that come into consideration here are Job 31:33, Prov. 3:18, Isa. 43:27, Hos. 6:7, Ezek. 28:13-15, Rom. 5:12ff., 8:20, 1 Cor. 15:21ff., 42ff., 2 Cor. 11:3, 1 Tim. 2:14, Rev. 2:7, 22:2, cf. Krabbe, Die Lehre v. d. Sünde und vom Tode, Hamburg 1836 pp. 83-100. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, I 364 f. Kurtz, Gesch. d. A. Bundes I² 1853 p. 69 and for the quotations in the apocryphal literature, Clemen t. a. p. 169 f. 173. Only Paul sets the significance of Adam in the light over against the person of Christ. So also only gradually in the history of revelation is the spiritual power made known that hides behind the appearance and temptation of the serpent. Then it is gradually unveiled that in the struggle with evil here on earth a strife of spirits is also mingled, and that humanity and the world are the prize for which is fought between God and Satan, between heaven and hell.
The whole might of sin here on earth stands in link with a realm of darkness in the world of spirits. There too a fall has taken place. Jesus himself says in John 8:44 that the devil is a manslayer ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, that is, from the beginning of mankind's being, that he stands not in the truth οὐχ ἕστηκεν, has not set himself and thus does not stand, because there is no truth in him, and when he speaks a lie, he speaks ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων.
Likewise, 1 John 3:8 teaches that he sins from the beginning; in 1 Timothy 3:6 Paul warns the new convert against being puffed up, lest he fall εἰς κρίμα τοῦ διαβόλου, into the same judgment that has stricken the devil; and Jude speaks in verse 6 of ἀγγέλους τοὺς μὴ τηρήσαντας τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀρχὴν ἀλλὰ ἀπολιπόντας τὸ ἴδιον οἰκητήριον, that is, of angels who did not keep their own beginning but left their own dwelling, that is, angels who did not guard their first state, origin, or also lordship, and forsook the home assigned to them.
Here it is clearly held within that many angels were not content with the state in which they were placed by God. Pride took hold of them, to strive for another, higher standing. Sin first broke out in the world of spirits; it arose in the heart of beings of whom we have but slight knowledge; under settings that are almost wholly unknown to us.
But this is sure on the ground of Holy Writ, that sin did not first begin on earth but in heaven, at the foot of God's throne, in his straightway nearness, and that the fall of the angels took place before that of man. Writ is silent about whether there is a link between that fall of the angels and the making of man; it also says not what drove the fallen angels to tempt man.
But for whatever ground, Satan is ὁ σατανᾶς, ὁ πειράζων, ὁ διάβολος of the human kindred, ἀνθρωποκτόνος, Matthew 4:3, John 8:44, Ephesians 6:11, 1 Thessalonians 3:5, 2 Timothy 2:26, ὁ δράκων ὁ μέγας, ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἀρχαῖος, Revelation 12:9, 14, 15, 20:2. So he came to Christ, the second Adam; and so he also came to the first man.
That he did not come himself straightway and in person to him, but made use of a serpent, can well be made clear from this, that he hoped to thrive better when the tempting befell through a being that was known to man as good. Without doubt, the speaking of the serpent must have seemed outlandish to the woman, but just this outlandish strengthened the tempting; even a beast, casting off God's behest, came to higher wholeness.
Besides, Writ teaches us that unclean spirits can also do overmanly things and for a time take hold of bodies and speech tools, Matthew 8:28 and following, Mark 5:7 and following, Luke 8:28 and following, Acts 19:15. The tempting by Satan had for man the fall as outcome. Writ seeks the spring of sin only in the will of the thinking creature.
2. The tradition of such a fall is also found among other peoples. The Avesta relates that the first evil deed of Ahriman consisted in bringing forth a great serpent, Dahaka, with three heads, three mouths, six eyes, and a thousand powers, to destroy the world through it. Ahriman, who is also called the serpent, the liar, the deceiver of mortals, has through it destroyed the place of peace, the paradise, sown doubt and unbelief in the hearts of men, brought sickness and suffering upon the earth, for Yima, the noble ruler in the golden age, was disobedient to God; he fell into sin through pride and self-exaltation, Ahura Mazda forsook him, and he was slain. Also the Babylonian-Assyrian tradition stands in unmistakable connection with the biblical account; the serpent there is called Tiamat, brings man to fall through its seduction, but is therefore cursed and fought by Marduk. Moreover, as the essence, so also the origin of sin is unknown to the heathens. Even the Jews, who acknowledged the fall and the temptation by Satan (Wisdom 2:24), and therefore often called him the old serpent, sometimes taught that Satan was created on the sixth day together with Eve, that he, stirred by sensual lust, sought to tempt man, and that man even before the fall received, besides the good inclination, an evil inclination, to overcome it and thus make his works truly meritorious. And so elsewhere in the heathen world the origin of sin was not sought in the will of rational creatures but in the essence of things. The fall is unknown. Confucianism is a shallow rationalism and moralism, which held man to be good by nature and sought the way of salvation in a virtuous life, in harmony with the world order. According to Buddhism, the Atman or Brahman, the divine substance, is the only real; the world of appearances is but a dream, has illusion, Maya, as its principle, and is in continual becoming and change. Therefore suffering and sorrow are universal, for all is subject to transience, to birth, old age, death; and the cause of that suffering is to be sought in the desires, in the desire for being, in the will to be; redemption consists thus in the extinguishing of consciousness or also in the annihilation of being, nirvana. Parseism traced evil back to an original evil spirit, Ahriman, who stands over against the highest God, Ahura Mazda, has his own realm of darkness, corrupts God's creation, but is subordinate to Ahura Mazda and will one day succumb to him. The Greeks and Romans indeed have in their legends of a golden age, of Prometheus and Pandora, something that may recall the biblical stories; but they originally knew no evil spirits that stood over against the good, and ascribed to the gods all kinds of evil desires and wicked deeds. The human race also did not fall at once but degenerated gradually, and man's will still possessed the power to live virtuously, to keep within bounds, and thus to overcome sin, which was essentially hubris. Philosophy usually took the same standpoint. According to Socrates, the cause and essence of sin lie only in ignorance; no one is willingly wicked, that is, unhappy; whoever therefore knows well, is good and acts well; nothing else is needed than development, to bring man, who is good by nature, to the practice of virtue. Plato and Aristotle saw well the inadequacy of this view; reason was by no means always able to master the passions; sin was rooted deeper in human nature than that it could be overcome by knowledge alone; Plato even came to an entirely different doctrine about the origin of sin and sought it in a fall of preexistent souls. But both maintained the free will and remained of the opinion that virtue is in our power; outward fate may be determined, but virtue is masterless and depends only on man's will. The Stoa, on its pantheistic and deterministic standpoint, could not seek the cause of sin in man's will and therefore tried to fit physical and moral evil into the order and beauty of the whole. It was even impossible for the Deity to keep human nature free from all defect; sin is as necessary as diseases and calamities, and is in so far something good, as it serves the good and brings it to manifestation. Yet the Stoa also knew no other way to overcome sin and practice virtue than man's will. And finally, with Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, and others, the thought always returned that sin was an act of the will and could also be undone by the will. Outside the realm of special revelation, sin was therefore always either deistically explained from man's will and conceived as a pure act of will, or pantheistically derived from the essence of things and understood as something necessary in the order of the whole.
3. Both these views returned time and again in the Christian ages. The first was renewed by Pelagius, cf. Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians and Against Julian the Pelagian, and then found more and more entry in the weakened shape of Semipelagianism. After the Reformation it was again taken up by Socinianism, Fock, The Socinianism, won great sway through Remonstrantism, Episcopius, Institutes of Theology IV 3 c. 6. 7 IV 5 c. 1. 2. Limborch, Christian Theology II 24 III 2 sq., gained weighty sway and then became in the deism of Locke, Tindal, Rousseau and others, and in the rationalism of Wegscheider, Institutes, Bretschneider, Dogmatics II 17 f., the ruling outlook of that time. Now it has again gained meaning in the theology of Ritschl and his school, Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation II 241-246 III 304-357. Kaftan, Essence of the Christian Religion 1881 p. 246 f. Dogmatics 1897. Nitzsch, Evangelical Dogmatics 319 f. Siebeck, Textbook of the Philosophy of Religion 436 f. However much put forth in all kinds of changes, the ground thought is yet always this, that sin does not root in a nature, is no habit and no state but always a deed of the will. The image of God in man then mainly or only consisted in lordship; insofar as a state of wholeness is taken, this mainly consisted in childlike guiltlessness, in the freedom of indifference, in the likelihood to choose the good or the evil. The fall itself, if still acknowledged as a historical deed, loses its dreadful meaning and becomes an happening, much like those which every moment take place in human life, when evil is chosen instead of good. And the outcomes of the fall are therefore also small. The children are born in the same state as that in which Adam lived before his disobedience; the freedom of will, that is, the image of God has stayed; at most a certain bent to sin is handed over from man to man, but such a bent is truly not the outcome of Adam's first sin but of all the sins of all our forefathers; it is also no sin in itself but becomes this only when the free will heeds that bent; there is thus a difference between sin (stain, sinful bent) and guilt (evil deed, willful, willing overstepping); only the latter needs atonement and forgiveness, the former, the bent to sin, and the unwitting, unwilling yielding is truly no sin, it is more unknowing, which brings no guilt. And even so as sin and guilt, so also sin and suffering must be set apart; there is manifold suffering that stands apart from sin and would also stand if there were no sin; death is in essence no outcome of sin but by nature belongs to man; the ghostly and everlasting death was not at all a punishment for the first sin; at most that punishment stands in the need to die, which for Adam, if he had stood fast, would have been forecome by a wonder, or in the way of dying, which without sin would have been less painful and less untimely.
It is understandable that this view of sin in the long run can satisfy neither understanding nor heart. It calls forth too many and too weighty misgivings. It reckons not with the earnestness and might of sin, as each one learns to know in his daily walk; it goes out from an atom-like beholding of the mankind and makes not plain, how all without sundering are under sin; it overlooks the priestly and kingly office of Christ and has enough with the teacher and prophet of Nazareth; it bounds the working of sin and therewith the lordship of redemption to the godly-moral ground and sets the whole upbringing loose beside Christendom. Among the upholders themselves there awakens time and again a need for another, deeper beholding; so with the half-Pelagian way over against Pelagius, with Volkelius, De Vera Religione II c. 6 over against Socinianism, with Wegscheider § 116 over against rationalism, and with Kaftan, Nitzsch, Schultz and others over against Ritschl, cf. James Orr, The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith London 1897. G. Ecke, Die Theologische Schule Albrecht Ritschls und die Evangelische Kirche der Gegenwart , Berlin 1897 I.
Howsoever deeper sin is thought in, so much the less becomes it something chance-like and willful, so much the more waxes it in might and meaning, not alone for the godly and moral, but also for the wit-wise and beauty-wise, for the bodily and all the world-wide life. Yet if with this insight toward the spring of sin is asked, there offer themselves again sundry answers. Not all go alike far. Some make it plain from mankind's kind, others from the world-all, yet others from God.
4. To the first belong those who seek the origin of sin in the overruling of man by matter. Greek philosophy generally held the opinion that reason had the task of curbing the sensual drives and passions. The Jews assumed in man by nature a yetzer hara , which with bodily growth continually gained in strength, reached its peak in fleshly lust, and lay at the basis of all disobedience to God's commands. In ascetic trends, this thought returns repeatedly; Roman Catholic theology even acknowledged its relative right, when it spoke of a natural strife in man without the bridle of the donum superadditum between flesh and spirit, of a sickness and weakness of human nature. In modern philosophy and theology, sin is repeatedly drawn from an original opposition between nature and reason, sensuality and understanding, lower and higher self, flesh and spirit, selfish and social leanings. On this standpoint, sensuality is not yet itself held for sin, but still seen as the occasion and spur to sinning. All sin therefore in essence consists in the spirit serving sensuality and letting it rule over itself; and all virtue lies in man ruling over nature through his reason and thus becoming a free, self-standing personhood. This view even gladly calls upon the Pauline teaching of the sarx , and rejoices in this Scriptural backing. Cf. Descartes, Wolff, Fichte, Hegel in Jodl, History of Ethics in Modern Philosophy and von Hartmann, The Moral Consciousness , and further Schleiermacher, Christian Faith . Rothe, Theological Ethics . Biedermann, Christian Dogmatics . Pfleiderer, Outline . Lipsius, Dogmatics . Schultz, Outline of Evangelical Dogmatics . Scholten, The Free Will . L H K etc.
But this explanation of sin suffers from half-heartedness. One of two things: the fleshly nature of man is in itself no sin, but sin arises only when the reason and will of man yield to its demands, then this theory falls back into that of Pelagianism; or the fleshly nature is in itself sinful and then sin belongs to matter as such and the man-centered explanation must go forward to the world-wide. This has indeed been done by many. Plato took an everlasting hyle to stand beside and over against God. The world was indeed a work of reason, but from the beginning there worked in it also another, blind might, which by the demiurge could not be wholly mastered. God could therefore not make the world as good as He would; He was bound to the end-bound, to the hyle. The cause of sin, suffering, and death lies thus in the body-like; the hyle hinders the in- and through-working of the idea; the body is a dungeon for the soul, wellspring of dread and unrest, of longing and lust, Zeller, Philos. d. Gr. II. Like meaning has the hyle in the new Platonism and Gnosticism and in sundry ascetic and theosophic ways, cf. Zeller, ib. V. And to this teaching of Plato are kin all theories that draw sin from a matter indeed shaped by God but yet standing over against Him, Weisse, Philos. Dogm. §§ 541 f. 561 f. Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 55, or from the end-bound and boundedness, the inborn unwholeness of creatures, Leibniz, Theodicée § 156, or in the whole from the bringing to pass of the world-idea.
However, this explanation of sin from the nature of creaturely being cannot escape the outcome of going back to God in one way or another and seeking the spring of sin in his nature or work. With Plato, matter itself had an everlasting and self-standing being beside God. In Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, two personal godly beings as makers of light and darkness stood forever against each other and gave the existing world its twofold mark. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism made making, fall, saving, and so on, into moments in an outflowing that goes out from God as the unknown deep, the full outright, in ever-falling shapes, at last giving being to the stuffly world with its unknowing, darkness, sin, suffering, death, but then leading that outflowed and from God fallen world back to God in the saving work. With these thoughts, theosophy with Boehme and Schelling fed itself, as it sought to explain God's selfhood, threeness, making, fall, saving from God's being. The three powers that are taken in God, so that he becomes self, ghost, are also at the same time the beginnings of another being, namely, the world. As self, God has the freedom and the might to set the powers that are in him but that he everlastingly rules, also outside himself in strain. In that strain lies the likelihood of sin. In the first making, whether only thoughtly or also truly the first, these powers were in rest. Sin, wretchedness, darkness, death, and so on, were there but only in might; they slumbered in the first ground of making. But man, in whom those powers were also there, broke that oneness and unchained the evil mights that were in might in the making. A world like the now one with so much wildness and wretchedness can only be explained from a fall; this is the first deed of history. Hegel saw it even more strongly as a falling away, that the thought of the outright makes itself true in the world as its other-being. However much nature with Hegel was an outcome of rede, he yet could not deny that it was unmighty to make the thought fully true, and so he said that the thought, giving being to such a world, had become untrue to itself and fallen away from itself. So the way was made for gloom-seeing, which in the way of Buddhism holds being itself for the greatest sin, done by the blind, unwordly will, which is the first guilty one.
5. The spring of evil is after that of being the greatest riddle of life and the heaviest cross of the understanding. The asking: ποθεν το κακον, has busied the thoughts of mankind through all ages and still waits in vain for an answer that gladdens better than that of Holy Writ. Insofar as wisdom-lore has taught anything of meaning in this, it is on the whole a mighty proof for the truth of Holy Writ, that this world without a fall is not to be made clear . All great thinkers have, even if they knew not Gen. 3 or cast it off as a tale, against their will brought silent or outspoken worship to this straightforward telling. And insofar as wisdom-lore sought an answer to the riddle in another way, it has gone off the path and woefully wandered astray. That holds first of all for the Pelagian clearing of sin, against which the many barbs were already named above with a single word and will come up more broadly later at the being and spreading of sin. But it holds further also for all those frameworks that lead back the evil, not to a willful deed of the creature but to the being or kind of mankind, world, or God.
In the first place, sin cannot be derived from the fleshly nature of man. For then sin would always and everywhere bear a fleshly, carnal character; but this is by no means always the case; there are also spiritual sins, sins with a demonic character, such as pride, envy, hate, enmity against God, which are more hidden but by no means lesser in degree than the carnal sins; and these are not explained by sensuality, any more than on this standpoint the existence of fallen angels is possible.
If sins arose from man's fleshly nature, one would also expect that they would be strongest and most numerous in the first years of life; that the spirit, as it develops more, would also rule over them more strongly and finally overcome them altogether. But experience teaches quite otherwise. As man grows up, sin, even the fleshly kind, becomes mightier over him; not the child but the youth and the man is often slave to his lusts and passions; and the development of the spirit is oftentimes so little able to curb sin that it rather provides the means to seek satisfaction of desires in a still stronger degree and in a more refined way. And even when the fleshly sins have lost their dominion in later age, they still secretly remain in the heart as desires or make room for others, which, though more spiritual in nature, are yet no less dreadful.
If this explanation of sin from sensuality is meant in earnest, it must lead to seeking redemption in the suppression of the flesh; but precisely the history of asceticism is best able to cure forever from the error that sin can be overcome in that way. Even in the monastery, the heart of men goes along, and from that heart come all kinds of sins and unrighteousnesses. Finally, this theory wrongly tries to maintain itself by an appeal to the notion of basar and sarx in Holy Scripture, particularly in Paul. This word first denotes the stuff, the substance of the human body, 1 Cor. 15:39, then the body itself organized from that stuff in contrast to pneuma , nous , kardia , Rom. 2:25, 2 Cor. 7:5, Col. 2:5, further more in Old Testament sense man as earthly, weak, frail, perishable being, Gen. 6:3, 18:27, Job 4:17-19, 15:14, 15, 25:4-6, Ps. 78:39, 103:14, Isa. 40:6, Jer. 17:5, Rom. 3:20, 1 Cor. 1:29, Gal. 2:16, and finally then in Paul the sinful life direction of man. Thus he speaks of sarkikos , en sarki , kata sarka einai , zen , peripatein , of sarx hamartias , phronema tes sarkos , Rom. 3:7, 7:14, 8:3ff., 1 Cor. 3:3, 2 Cor. 10:2, 3 etc.
In this sense sarx forms a contrast with pneuma , but not with the human pneuma , which indeed is also sinful and needs sanctification, Rom. 12:1, 2, 1 Cor. 7:34, 2 Cor. 7:1, Eph. 4:23, 1 Thess. 5:23, but with the pneuma hagion or theou , Rom. 8:2, 9, 11, which renews the human pneuma , Rom. 7:6, 8:14, Gal. 5:18, also sanctifies the body and places it in the service of righteousness, Rom. 6:13, 19, 12:1, 1 Cor. 6:13, 15, 19, 20, and thus places in man a kainos anthropos over against the old, sinful life direction, the sarx , of the palaios anthropos , Rom. 7:5ff., 8:1ff., Gal. 5:13-25, Eph. 2:3, 11, Col. 2:4.
Some have thought that according to this view the flesh is not only the seat and organ but also the source and origin of sin, Baur, Holsten, Lüdemann, Zeller, Pfleiderer, Der Paulinismus 1890. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. 1897 II. Clemen, Die chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I. Matthes, Theol. Tijdsch. 1890. But this cannot be maintained against nor reconciled with these undeniable data, that Paul clearly derives sin from the temptation of the serpent and the transgression of Adam, Rom. 5:12, 2 Cor. 11:3; that he speaks of a defilement of flesh and spirit and desires cleansing with respect to both, 2 Cor. 7:1; that among the works of the flesh he names all kinds of spiritual sins, such as idolatry, strife, wrath and even heresy, Gal. 5:19ff.; that he designates enmity against God as phronema tes sarkos , Rom. 3:7; that he assumes the existence of evil spirits, who yet have no sarx at all, Eph. 6:12; that he acknowledges Christ, though genomenos ek gunaikos , Gal. 4:4 and from Israel to kata sarka , Rom. 9:5, yet as without any sin, 2 Cor. 5:21; that he calls the body a temple of God and claims all members for the service of righteousness, Rom. 6:13, 19, 12:1, 1 Cor. 6:13-20; that he teaches a resurrection of the dead bodies, 1 Cor. 15, and combats asceticism in principle, Col. 2:16, 1 Thess. 4:4.
The advocates of the view that Paul holds the flesh to be the principle of sin therefore often turn back halfway and say that the flesh is not itself sin and does not automatically bring sin, but does stimulate and tempt to sin, Clemen. Holtzmann II. Others have therefore judged that Paul, when he uses the word sarx in an ethical sense, completely loses sight of its original meaning, Neander, Gesch. der Pflanzung u. Leitung der christl. Kirche 1862. Tholuck, Stud. u. Krit. 1855. Weiss, Bibl. Theol. 1880 § 68. Wendt, Die Begriffe Fleisch u. Geist 1878 cl. Theol. Stud. van de la Saussaye c. s. 1878. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. This is in itself already unlikely and does not do justice to the connection that Scripture repeatedly lays between the earthly, weak, perishable nature of man and his sin.
There is undoubtedly an intimate connection between the two; the fleshly nature of man is not sin itself nor the source or principle of sin, but is yet its dwelling, Rom. 7:17, 18 and organ of its dominion over us, Rom. 6:12. Man is not mere spirit, but he is earthly from the earth, has become a living soul, 1 Cor. 15:45ff., stands thereby in connection with the cosmos and always has the body as his tool and as the organ of his action, Rom. 6:13, 8:13. This fleshly nature gives to sin, as it is proper to men, a character of its own, distinct from that in the angels, both in its origin and in its essence. The temptations come from without through the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life to him. And it is the fleshly nature of man that gives to his sin this character, that he makes his belly his God, that he thinks on the things that are below, that he seeks himself and lives for himself, and that he honors the creature above the Creator, Rom. 1:21ff., Phil. 2:4, 21, 3:19, Col. 3:2, etc. Sarx denotes the sinful life direction of man, who according to soul and body turns away from God and toward the creature. Cf. Hofmann, Schriftbew. I. Müller, Sünde I. Ernesti, Die Ethik des Ap. Paulus 1880. Cremer in Herzog 4. Gloël, Der H. Geist 1888.
6. However, the explanation of sin from the sensual nature of man cannot, as noted above, stop there, but must come to seek its cause in matter or in the finiteness and limitedness of the creature, and thus further in an eternal, independent power alongside God or in a dark nature or blind will in the divine being itself. This view on the origin of sin commends itself above the previous one by its deeper insight into the power and dominion of sin; it has an open eye not only for its ethical and anthropological but also for its cosmic and theological significance; it takes seriously the undeniable truth that a power as tremendous as sin cannot arise accidentally, outside God's will and counsel. It finds support in the whole present state of the world, both physical and ethical. Everywhere, in nature and history, there are sharp, deep oppositions that seem necessary for life and development. Heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night, summer and winter, storm and calm, war and peace, labor and rest, prosperity and adversity, love and hate, joy and sorrow, health and sickness, life and death, truth and lie, sin and virtue—they are the conflicting factors from which all that exists is composed and without which there apparently can be no progress and advancement. What storms are in nature, wars and revolutions in society, peasants and slaves in a drama, solecisms and barbarisms in language, antitheses in a speech, discords in music, shadows on a painting—that is what sin is in the world; see these and similar images already in Plato, the Stoa, Plotinus, and then later also in Augustine, Erigena, Leibniz, and so on. All activity presupposes hindrance; a dove might think that it could fly better in a vacuum, but the resistance of the air is precisely necessary for its flight (Kant); and so a man might think that he could live better without sin, but sin is precisely necessary for his moral perfection. The law of contradiction is the fundamental law of all that is, the source of eternal life. What drives to action, yes compels, is alone the contradiction. Without contradiction, therefore, there would be no movement, no life, no progress, but eternal standstill, a deathly slumber of all powers (Schelling). What would a life without sin be? It would be an existence without content, a vain abstraction, without opportunity for strife and victory, for conflict and reconciliation; without material for drama and song, for science and art. Therefore Dante could paint his hell with colors borrowed from this world; but for the painting of a heaven, this earth offers no data (Schopenhauer). The advocates of this view on the origin of sin even gladly appeal to many places in Holy Scripture that speak of a necessity of sins and evils, Matt. 18:7, Luke 24:26, John 9:3, 1 Cor. 11:19, 2 Tim. 2:20; to the teaching of Augustine and Calvin, which extend God's counsel and providence also over sin; to the well-known words in the Easter Vigil of the Roman Missal: O surely necessary sin of Adam, which is blotted out by the death of Christ! O happy fault, which merited to have such and so great a Redeemer!
There is in this representation so much that is true, that it need not surprise us that it has at all times held the minds in thrall. Sin is not accidental or arbitrary; it is taken up in the counsel of God. It is so interwoven with our whole being, that we can form no idea of a holy life, of a sinless history. Against its will, it is made serviceable by God Almighty to the revelation of his virtues and to the honor of his name. And yet, despite all the truth that is hidden in this representation and will later come to light more clearly, yet it cannot and may not be accepted.
In the first place , it robs sin of its ethical character. Sin is certainly not only and not always an act of the will, as Pelagianism says, but indeed also a state, a nature of the will; yet it never goes wholly outside the will. Omne peccatum est voluntarium , understood in the sense of Augustine, is undoubtedly correct. Here, however, sin is paralleled and identified with the physical phenomena of darkness, sickness, death, and so on, in a Gnostic and theosophical way; it is derived from the flesh, the matter, the being of creatures, the nature of God, and thus made into a substance or a necessary quality of the being of things. Thereby sin is robbed of its ethical character and lowered to a physical phenomenon.
Secondly , according to this representation, sin becomes eternal and unconquerable. For since it is not ethical but physical in nature, it is necessarily proper to all that exists, both God and the world, and is indispensable for the existence of all. The good is not only necessary for the evil, but conversely the evil for the good. Here the evil is not subject to the good and to being, but it is itself a being and itself a good, without which the good also cannot exist. The man who strives for redemption from sin would cherish a godless wish and work toward his own downfall. A world without sin would be impossible; a state of glory nothing but a dream.
Thirdly , hereby sin ceases to be an opposition; it becomes a lower, lesser degree of the good, in its place just as good as the good itself. It becomes an ever-destined-for-disappearance and yet never disappearing moment in life and history; a not-yet-being of what the creature ought to be and yet never becomes or can become; a pure negation, which properly has no reality but exists only in our thought. Bonum et malum quod attinet, nihil etiam positivum in rebus, in se consideratis, indicant, nec aliud sunt praeter cogitandi modos seu notiones, quas formamus ex eo, quod res ad invicem comparamus , Spinoza, Eth. praef . cf. Ep . 32 and 34. Cog. metaph . I 6, 7, and further Hegel, Werke . Strauss, Gl . Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl . Paulsen, Syst. d. Ethik . Scholten, L. H. K .
Fourthly , on this standpoint God must become the author of sin. Parzism and Manichaeism still shrank back from this, set the realm of light and the realm of darkness straight over against each other, and placed at the head of both an eternal, divine being. The God of nature is wholly other than the God of the good, the moral power that makes itself felt in the conscience. But Gnostic philosophy and theosophy took up the oppositions into the one Absolute. God himself must, to become person, spirit, carry a dark nature in himself and eternally overcome it. He himself comes through a struggle, a process, whether before and outside or in and through the world, to his divine being. An sich he is βυθος ἀγνωστος , dark nature, blind will, and as such the Creator of matter. Damit des Böse nicht wäre, müsste Gott selbst nicht seyn , Schelling, Werke .
Against this now testifies not only Holy Scripture, but also the moral sense in all men rises in revolt. Sin may be what it will, but this one thing stands fast, that God is the Righteous and the Holy One, who in his law forbids it, in the conscience witnesses against it, in punishments and judgments visits it. Sin is not reasonable and not lawful; it is ἀνομία ; it is not necessary for the being of creatures, much less for the being of God. The good is necessary, that even the evil might be, but the good does not need the evil, holiness does not need sin, truth does not need the lie, God does not need Satan. If nevertheless sin yet oftentimes serves to bring the good to greater revelation and to glorify God's virtues, then this happens not with and through but against its will, by the wisdom and almighty power of God. Against its nature, sin is then forced to be serviceable to the honor of God and to the coming of his kingdom. Thus oftentimes the evil pays homage to the good, thus the lie is overtaken by the truth, thus Satan, to seduce, must oftentimes appear as an angel of light. But all that is not owing to sin but to the almighty power of God, who can bring forth good from evil, light from darkness, and life from death.
Finally , this whole false representation avenges itself in a dreadful way in the practice of life. If philosophy proclaims it in so many words: God bears the guilt of all, man goes free, then in practice libertinism and pessimism do not long tarry. Libertinism, which holds sin for a delusion and this delusion for the only sin, which wipes out all bounds between good and evil, falsifies all moral concepts or with Nietzsche remelts and newly coins them, which under the slogan of the emancipation of the flesh glorifies bestiality as genius. Pessimism, which, blind to sin, thinks only of suffering, casts the guilt of all that suffering on the alogical act of an absolute will, and seeks in the annihilation of what exists the redemption from suffering. Judged by the outcome, the so-called independent philosophy is also led by the striving proper to every man, to justify himself and to accuse God of unrighteousness. Cf. Müller, Sünde . Weiszäcker, Zu der Lehre v. Wesen der Sünde , Jahrb. f. d. Theol . Kahnis, Dogm . Vilmar, Theol. Moral . Dorner, Chr. Gl . Orr, Chr. view of God and the world .
7. Yet with this, that God is no cause of sin, not everything is said. The Scripture, which keeps God far from all ungodliness, speaks on the other side as decidedly as possible, that his counsel and governance also extends over sin; see the places already named earlier. God is not the author of sin, but it does not go on outside his knowledge, his will, and his might; how then is that relation of God to sin to be thought? Some took away from God, to keep him free from all sin, even the all-knowingness. Others judged that sin indeed does not go on outside God's knowledge but well outside his will, and satisfied themselves with the concept of permission. God knew sin beforehand but did not will it; he only allowed it and did not hinder it. So spoke the church fathers, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. IV c. 12. Origen, de princ. III 2, 7. Damascene, de fide orthod. II 29 etc. With this usage and with this solution the Pelagians laid themselves down. Many Roman theologians, Council of Trent VI c. 6, Bellarmine, de amiss. gr. et stat. pecc. II 16. Petavius, de Deo VI c. 6, 5; the Remonstrants, Arminius. Episcopius, Inst. theol. IV sect. 4 c. 10. Limborch, Theol. Christ. II 29; the Lutherans, Gerhard, Loc. VI c. 9. Quenstedt, Theol. I 533 Hollaz, Ex. theol. 449. Buddeus, Inst. theol. 560, Bretschneider, Dogm. I 506, and many newer theologians, Ebrard, Dogm. § 265. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 419. 444 etc. Now from this side it was often acknowledged that the permission was no lack of knowledge and might in God, that it also did not make him an idle onlooker of sin, but always the permission was described as a negative act, as a suspension of hindrance, as neither a positive willing nor a positive not-willing of sin but as a not willing to hinder. It is clear that this representation not only gives no solution but also is twofold in meaning and evades the real question. The question on which it comes is this: suppose that such a more or less negative deed of divine permission goes before in a certain case, does the sin then follow or not, does it then still stand in the choice of the free will of man or not, can he then still as well leave it as do it? If the decision then still stands with the free will of man, then Pelagius has right and the governance of sin is in fact wholly taken from God and he is at most an idle onlooker of sins. If on the other hand the permission of God is of such kind that man, placed in those circumstances, not by force but by virtue of the ordinances that specially hold for the moral life, must do the sin, then the right is on the side of Augustine, one may judge about the word permission as one will. Thus posing this question, Augustine had already seen that the allowing could not be purely negative but must be a deed of God's will. Non fit aliquid nisi omnipotens fieri velit, vel sinendo ut fiat vel ipse faciendo. God does all that pleases him; he wills not something without doing it, but what he wills, that he does; and what happens, happens never outside his will. Miro et ineffabili modo non fit praeter ejus voluntatem, quod etiam contra ejus fit voluntatem, quia non fieret, si non sineret (nec utique nolens sinit sed volens) nec sinere bonus fieri male nisi omnipotens et de malo facere posset bene, Ench. 95-100. de trin. III 4 sq. de civ. XIV 11, de gr. et lib. arb. 20. 21. Many scholastic and Augustinian theologians spoke still in like spirit; though they also used the word allow, it was yet taken as velle sinere or velle permittere mala fieri, Lombard, Sent. I 46. Thomas, S. Theol. I 19 art. 9. c. Gent. I 95. II 25. Comment. on Sent. I 46. Hugh of St. Victor, S. Sent. I c. 13. de Sacr. I. 4 c. 4-15.
In essence, the Reformed held no other conviction; hence a certain Livinus de Meyer rightly said: an egg is not more like an egg than the Calvinian doctrine is to the Thomistic, in Daelman, Summa S. Thomae II. Only, they had gained the experience that the word permissio was used in a very ambiguous sense and misused to hide Pelagianism. Therefore they were not inclined toward the word. They had so little against it in itself that they all actually used it again, cf. in Ebrard, Dogm. § 265. But the permissio was then, according to their conviction, no pure negation, no mere cessation of the will, flowing from ignorance or impotence or negligence, but a positive act of God, an effective volition, however not efficient or producing but deficient, upon which, according to the nature of the moral life, sin must follow, Zwingli, Op. III IV de provid. c. 5. Calvin, Inst. I 17, 11. 18, 1. 2 II 4, 2-4 III 23, 4. 8. 9. Beza, Tract. Theol. I 315. 387. 399. II 347. III 426. Zanchius, Op. II 269. Martyr, Loci C. Gomarus, de provid. Dei c. 11. Twisse, de permissione Op. I. Maccovius, Loci C. Alting, Theol. El. nova. Ex. v. h. Ontw. v. Tol. VI. M. Vitringa II etc. It is true that in the heat of the strife, harsher sayings were sometimes used by the Reformed, cf. e.g. Calvin, Inst. III 23, 7. Beza, Tract. Theol. I 319. 360. 401 Zanchius Op. V 2. And Romanists, Bellarmine, de amiss. gr. et statu pecc. II c. 3 sq. Petavius, de Deo VI c. 5 X c. 8. Möhler, Symb. § 2-4, Socinians, Cat. Racov. X 16, Remonstrants, Apol. Conf. c. 2 and 6, Episc. Op. I, and Lutherans, Gerhard, Loc. VI c. 10. Quenstedt, Theol. II have not failed to make use of them and always anew accused the Reformed that they made God the author of sin.
But first, those harsher sayings are all still milder than those which sometimes occur in Holy Scripture, e.g. Ex. 7:3, 2 Sam. 16:10, 24:1, Mal. 1:3, Luke 2:34, Rom. 9:17, 18, 2 Thess. 2:11 etc.; further, all such hard expressions have at all times been charged against Paul by the Judaizers, against Augustine by the Pelagians, against Gottschalk by Hincmar, against the Jansenists by the Jesuits; next, they were always avoided by the Reformed in their confessions, Maccovius was admonished about them at the Synod of Dort, Archief v. Kerk. Gesch. III; moreover, they were omitted by most Reformed theologians or also explained and clarified, Voetius, Disp. I, Maresius, Syst. Theol. IV 18. Turretin, Theol. El. VI qu. 7. 8. Trigland, Kerk. Gesch. IV V. Id. Antapologia c. 8-10, Chamier Panstr. Cath. II lib. 3 Moor II etc.; and finally, their meaning and intent becomes completely transparent for everyone who wants to understand them, from the connection with the whole Reformed doctrine. The matter is simply this, that the permissio taken in a negative sense offers not the least solution to the question of God's relation to sin; it does not at all remove the objection that God is its author, and actually withdraws all sin from God's providential government. For whoever can hinder an evil and yet quietly looking on lets it happen, stands just as guilty as he who commits the evil himself, Beza, Tract. Theol. I 315. Moreover, even if God has only and solely permitted sin, there must yet be a reason why He did not want to hinder it. That reason cannot lie in God in a lack of knowledge or power; so it must then lie in His will. Thus the permissio is yet again an act of His will; He has willed to permit it; and this willing to permit can be understood in no other way than that sin now actually also happens, not by God, but by the creature.
Moreover, Christian theology, when it discussed God's government over sin, has nevertheless never remained standing at this permission. If namely both Scripture and Christian thinking forbid placing sin wholly or in part outside the will and providence, then only such a solution could still be attempted, that distinction was made in the manner of God's government over the good and over the evil. And indeed, although in a certain sense it can also be said that God has willed sin, that is, that He has willed that sin should be, He has nevertheless willed the evil in an entirely different manner than the good; in the good He has delight, but the evil He hates with divine hatred. In order that this difference in God's government over the good and over the evil may come to light, it must first be pointed out that God and man are never separated but yet always distinguished, cf. above. Faith is a gift, God causes belief, but yet formally it is not God but man who believes. Much more does this apply to the sinful deed. Materially this is very certainly to be ascribed to God, but formally it remains on the account of man. When a murderer strikes someone dead, all the counsel and the strength which he needs for it are from God, but the deed is, formally considered, his and not that of God. Yes, the fact of the killing is, purely in itself taken, not yet sin, for the same has often taken place in war and on the scaffold. What makes the killing into sin is not the matter, the substrate, but the form, that is, the viciousness, the lawlessness; not the substance but the accident in the deed. Against this it has been objected that this distinction, even if it is correct, yet factually gives nothing, because it places the formal of the deed, that is, precisely the sinful in sin, outside God's government, Episcopius, Op. I. Quenstedt, Theol. II. This remark is only partly correct, it contains truth, not in general but only in this special case, touching sin. For in faith no one will conclude from the fact that man is formally the subject of it, that it goes outside God's providence. But it is true that with faith it stands entirely otherwise than with sin. For faith is an absolute gift and excludes all merit; sin on the other hand is man's deed and brings guilt with it. Therefore sin must here not be set over against faith, which now is given out of grace by God, but over against the good, which man would have done, if he had remained standing. That good would materially have been entirely God's work; formally however it would have had man as subject and brought for him, not out of itself but according to the covenant of works, claim to reward. Just as little as now thereby that good would have been withdrawn from God's government, is sin placed outside His providence, because in formal sense it has not God but man as subject. But there is more. In the good, God's providence is to be thought such that He Himself works inwardly with His Spirit in the subject and positively enables it to the good. In sin it can and may not be represented thus. Sin is lawlessness, deformity and thus has God not as efficient cause but at most as deficient cause. Light cannot of itself bring forth darkness; darkness arises only when the light is taken away. God is thus at most the negative cause, the accidental cause of sin; in man her actual, positive cause is to be sought. However, because sin is only form and no substance, it is thereby, that it is formally deed of man, in no respect placed outside God's providence. He works inwardly in it, but in a manner entirely corresponding to the nature of sin. As He in His government directs all things according to their own nature, so He also upholds on the moral field the ordinances which He has especially established for it. Sin also arises and develops according to fixed law, not according to the laws of nature or of logic, but according to those which are created in the ethical life and even in destruction still work through. Sickness, dissolution, death are the antipodes of health, development, life, but are no less than these from beginning to end governed by fixed laws. And so there is also a law of sin, which determines her whole history in man and mankind. And precisely that lawfulness in sin proves that God reigns kingly also in and over her. A man who sins does not make himself loose and independent of God; on the contrary, while he was a son, he becomes a slave. He who does sin is a servant of sin. Cf. on God's relation to sin: the church fathers Origen, Athanasius, Basil, etc. in Münscher-von Coelln, D. G. I, and further Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 49 art. 2. II 1 qu. 79 art. 2. S. c. Gent. III 3. 71. Comm. on Sent. I dist. 46-48 II dist. 37. Bellarmine, de amiss. gr. et statu pecc. II 18. Petavius, de Deo VI c. 6. Quenstedt, Theol. I 535. Hollaz, 448. Calvin, Inst. I 18. II 4. de provid. C. R. 36 and 37. Beza, Tract. Theol. I 312 sq. 337 sq. Zanchi, Op. II 259. Chamier, Panstr. Cath. II lib. 3. Twisse, Vindic. gratiae I 317 sq. 544 sq. Trigland, Antapol. c. 9. 10. Gomarus, de provid. Op. p. 136. Mastricht, Theol. III 10, 19, sq. Turretin, Theol. El. VI qu. 8. Moor II 492. Vitringa II 196.
8. With the distinction between the material and the formal in sin, however, the question is not yet answered why God has included sin in his decree and in its carrying out. The answer lies hidden in God's foreknowledge, as it also extends over sin. The Scripture says it time and again, that God uses sin as a means to punish the ungodly, Deuteronomy 2:30, Joshua 11:20, Judges 9:23, 24, John 12:40, Romans 1:21-28, 2 Thessalonians 2:11, 12; to save his folk, Genesis 45:5, 50:20; to try and chasten the believers, Job 1:11, 12, 2 Samuel 24:1, 1 Corinthians 10:13, 11:19, 2 Corinthians 12:7; to glorify his name, Exodus 7:3, Proverbs 16:4, Romans 9:17, 11:33, and so on. Just because God is the utterly Holy and Almighty One, he can use sin as a tool in his hand. Creatures cannot do that and become stained and unclean at the slightest touch. But God is so endlessly far from ungodliness that he can make sin serve his glory as nothing but a will-less tool. There are examples enough to prove that in this too the saying holds: when two do the same, it is not the same.
God wills that Shimei curse David, that Satan afflict Job, that Jews and Gentiles hand over his holy child Jesus to death—and yet in all these wrongs the creatures stand guilty and God goes free. For even when he wills that evil be, he never wills it otherwise than in a holy way; he uses it but does not commit it. And therefore he has also allowed sin in his creation. He would not have suffered it if he could not rule it in an utterly holy and sovereign way. He would not have borne it if he were not God, the Holy and the Almighty. But because he is God, he has not feared its being and its might; he has willed it, that he might bring to light his godly virtues in and against it. If he had not granted it being, there would always have been room for the thought that he was not lifted up in all his virtues above a power whose likelihood was given with the creation itself. For every thinking creature, as creature, as finite, bounded, changeable being, holds within it the likelihood of falling away.
But God, because he is God, has not feared the way of freedom, the truth of sin, the outbreak of wrongdoing, the might of Satan. And so he rules ever over sin, at its birth and at its growth. He does not force it; he does not stop it with might; he does not crush it by his power; but he lets it come to its full strength. He stays king and yet gives it free play in his kingdom; he grants it everything, his world, his creatures, even his Christ, for evils cannot be without goods; he allows it to make use of all that is his; he gives it chance to show what it can do, and yet at the end to step forth from the strife as King of kings. For sin is of such kind that it perishes by the freedom given to it, that it dies of its own sickness, that it eats death to itself. At the height of its might it is, by the cross alone, shown openly in its weakness, Colossians 2:15.
Therefore God has willed that sin should be. Although therefore those things which are evil, insofar as they are evil, are not good, yet that not only goods but also evils should be, is good. For unless this were good, that evils should be, they would in no way be allowed by the almighty Good, to whom without doubt it is as easy to do what he wills as it is easy not to allow what he does not will to be. Unless we believe this, the very beginning of our confession is in danger, by which we confess that we believe in God Almighty , Augustine, Enchiridion 96. Because he knew he could utterly master sin, he judged it better to make good out of evils than to permit no evils to be , ibid. 11, 27; City of God XXII 1; Literal Meaning of Genesis II 9; Against the Manicheans II 28. He thinks and leads the evil to good and sets it in service of his glory.
Augustine even uses all kinds of likenesses to give sin a place in the order of the whole. It has there the same meaning as the shadow in a painting, City of God XI 23; the solecisms and barbarisms in speech, On Order II 11; the contrasts in a song, City of God XI 18. God has made the order of the ages as a most beautiful song out of some antitheses, to heighten the beauty and harmony of the whole, City of God XI 18, XIV 11; Against the Manicheans I 16; compare Erigena, On the Division of Nature V 35; Thomas, Summa Theologiae I question 48 article 2 corpus; Contra Gentiles III 71; Leibniz, in Pichler, Theology of Leibniz I 264 ff. and also above. These likenesses hold some truth, but they easily lead to misunderstanding; they make sin seem too needful and just in its place in the whole of things; they offer up the single to the all and thereby give to those who wrestle with sin or go bowed under suffering no peace nor comfort.
But this is true, that also and just in the ruling of sin God's virtues come to shining show. The wealth of God's grace, the depth of his mercy, the unchangeableness of his troth, the unbrokenness of his righteousness, the glory of his wisdom and might have through sin stepped forth all the brighter into the light. When man had broken the covenant of works, he set in its stead the so much better covenant of grace. When Adam had fallen, he gave Christ as the Lord from heaven. That now is godly greatness, so to rule sin that it even against its own kind and striving becomes serviceable to the honor of his name. And therefore sin, which is in the world, can so little take from us the faith in God, in his love and might, that it, well thought on, rather strengthens and upholds us in that faith. If evil is, God is. For there would be no evil if the order of good were taken away, whose lack is evil; but this order would not be if God were not , Thomas, Contra Gentiles III 71.
9. Though sin from its beginning stands under the governance of God, yet it has its spring not in God but in the will of the thinking creature. But here at once a new riddle arises. How is sin ever to be made plain from the will of a being that was shaped after God's likeness in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness? The Pelagian thought, that the first man was in a state of childlike unknowing, of upright unchoosing, we already found unholdable; it does not make plain man's fall but turns it into a meaningless mishap, and makes it unthinkful that from it such dreadful outcomes and such frightful woes have come forth for all mankind. If a spring can bring forth such a stream of unclean water, it must itself be inwardly rotten. It is therefore unallowed to make the gap between the state of wholeness and the state of rottenness so small that the shift becomes easy and stepwise. Man was not shaped uprightly unchoosing but downright holy by God. Yet with this the following must be thought on. First, God has surely willed the mightiness of sin. The possibility of sinning is from God. The thought of sin was first begotten in his knowing. God has forever thought sin as his downright foe, and so, with that kind, taken it up in his decree; otherwise it could never have arisen and been in the world. Not Satan and not Adam and Eve first came upon the thought of sin; this God himself as it were set openly before their eyes. Through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and through the trial bidding God clearly showed man two ways which he could tread. And before his fall God even bore that an evil might from outside broke into paradise, used the snake as its tool, and began to deal with Eve about the meaning of the trial bidding. The mightiness of sin is thus without doubt willed by God. Second: in keeping with that outward mightiness God shaped angels and men so that they could sin and fall. They did not yet have the highest; they were not set at the end but at the beginning of the way; the gift of steadfastness, which is a gift and ever stays so, which can never in true wise be earned and never belong to the kind of a creature, was still withheld from them. It would otherwise have seemed as if God wished to turn sin by might and feared its power. Angels and men thus had the grace whereby they could stand, not that whereby they would forever stand. They did not yet have the highest, unloseable freedom, that is, the freedom of no more being able to will sin. God's likeness was thus in man still bounded; it was not unfolded in all its fullness; it still had a bound in the mightiness of sin. Man stood indeed in the good, but the mightiness of evil lay yet beside it; he walked indeed on the good way but could stray sideways; he was good, but changeable good, mutably good. God alone is the being in all his worths and therefore unchangeable. Every creature however becomes and can therefore also misbecome. If matter and form are sundered, as is ever the case with creatures, then the mightiness always stays open that the matter changes from form. What is formed can be de formed and thus also reformed; what is shaped can be mis shaped and thus also re shaped. Upright freedom, however strong, is in itself truly sundered from logical needfulness and bodily forcing. A creature by kind unsinning is therefore a withstanding, a gainsaying. Third comes in the asking after the spring of sin the might and working of the fancying. Earlier in dogmatics little reckoning was held with this, though one was aware that the tempting in man first and most turns to the fancying and thereby works in on longing and will. In the mystic however the fancying took a great place; according to Boehme Lucifer through the fantasy fancied himself into the deep of sin; he bent himself into the fantasy, so it gripped him also and gave itself to him in his life. And truly in the arising of the sinful deed it ever goes so, as Thomas a Kempis writes: first comes to mind a simple thought, then strong fancying, after delight and wrongful stirring and assent. The knowing takes up the thought of sin in itself, the fancying adorns it and shapes it into a tempting ideal, the longing stretches out to it and the will fulfills it. So also in angel and man the fancying has been the might that made the overstepping of the bidding seem as way to Godlikeness. And lastly heed must be given that Paul in 1 Cor. 15:45ff. speaks of the first man as earthly from the earth, as through shaping become a living soul and so sets him over against Christ, the Lord from heaven, who became a lifemaking ghost. This likening and withstanding between Adam and Christ has also for the fall of the first man a deep meaning. Adam was earthly from the earth, also before the overstepping of God's bidding; through his shaping he became a living soul; the kindly is first, thereafter the ghostly. Herein now is outspoken that the spring and kind of sin in angels and men greatly sunder. Well is it true we know little of the angels' fall; but with eye on 1 Tim. 3:6 and 2 Pet. 2:4 it may yet be highly likely that highmood, the wishing to be like God in might and lordship, was the beginning and groundwork of their fall. The angels were not misled like men; the tempting did not come to them from outside; they fell through themselves. Jesus says that the devil speaks ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων when he speaks lie. He is from himself, through own thinking, unfulfilled with his stand and his might; he has brought forth the lie from himself and as a realm, as a framework set over against God's truth. But in man it is not so. He was no sheer ghost; he was not set so high, though as shaped after God's likeness he stood yet nearer to God than the angels; he could not think so high and not so bold uplift himself; he was earthly from the earth, a living soul, well finer and tenderer but therefore also at once weaker and brittler ordered. As such a one well shaped after God's likeness but yet earthly, senseful being he gave Satan a fit opening for the tempting. This came from outside to him, fitted itself as it were to his kind, woke in him the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the greatness of life, and so brought him to fall. Spring and being of sin bear in man a wholly other mark than in the angels; in both it comes out that man, not as a devil, but as a man sins, as a being that is earthly from the earth and that through shaping is become a living soul. For this reason Scripture and namely Paul lays such a near bond between man's senseful kind and sin. There lies thereunder utterly not the withstanding of sensefulness and rede, and the thought that matter is of lower kind and the groundwork of sin. This withstanding and this thought are not Israelite but Greek of spring. Scripture knows nothing of such a twoness, but it knows well of something else, namely hereof, that man from house out is a senseful, a soully being. He is at once shaped as a living soul, earthly from the earth. That was he thus also already in the state of wholeness; and therefore was he, in spite of the knowledge and righteousness that he had, open to misleading and tempting. Already at the first sin it came out that man was σάρξ; and all following sins have his temptableness, weakness, untrustworthiness only ever clearer brought to light. All man's sin, also the ghostly, bears a mark that fits with his soully kind and sunders from that of sin in the angels. God's likeness was man before the fall not despite, but in his ownlike, soully kind; and thereof also his sin receives its stamp.
With all this, nothing other and nothing more than the possibility of sin has been shown. How that possibility became reality is a mystery and will likely remain so. We can point out that the thought of sin has existed eternally in God's mind, that it was set before man in the probationary command, that man thus carried knowledge not only of the good but also of a forbidden evil, that the imagination is the power which shapes thoughts into ideals. But with that, the transition from possibility to reality, from mere conception to sinful deed, is not yet explained. This explanation escapes us, not only in the origin of the first sin but repeatedly in all sorts of acts and deeds of man. In psychology and biography, we content ourselves with a few data; if we know something of someone's ancestry, parents, upbringing, and so forth, we think we have explained his personality, his life, and his deeds. But this is really quite superficial; every man is a mystery, and every action has another and deeper root than that of the environment. This holds in much stronger measure for sin. Here we enter the mysterious realm of moral freedom and confront a phenomenon that, by its very nature, escapes explanation in its origin. For a moral action is never like a conclusion from premises nor like a physical or chemical result. It is essentially different from both and has its own nature; moral learning is wholly unique, it is always a life of freedom, and this is by its nature a riddle. But this is even more the case with a sinful deed, and especially with the first sinful deed. Sin cannot be deduced from preceding circumstances, reasonings, deliberations, logically or physically; above all, it cannot be derived from a holy nature created in God's image. Whoever understood and explained sin, that is, could show that it must necessarily follow from what went before, would do violence to its nature, erase the boundaries between good and evil, and reduce evil to something good. The sinful deed has as its cause the sinful will, but who points out the cause of this sinful will? To seek the causes of those defects, which are not efficient but deficient, is like wanting to see darkness or hear silence, Aug. de civ. XII 7. Sin began with a lie, John 8:44; it rests on a false imagination, on an untrue conception, on an imagining of a good that was no good; thus in its origin it is foolishness and absurdity; it has no origin in the proper sense, but only a beginning. Not without reason is Satan therefore called an irony of all logic, cf. Tholuck, The Doctrine of Sin, 8th ed. 1862. Philippi, Church Doctrine III 256. H. Schmidt, Herzog² 15, 22. Vilmar, Theological Morals I 37. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology II 156.
This impossibility of explaining the origin of sin is therefore not to be taken as an excuse, as a refuge of ignorance. Rather, it is to be openly and clearly stated; we stand here at the limits of our knowledge. Sin is there, but it can never justify its existence; it is unlawful and unreasonable.
10. Concerning the time of the fall, no precise determination is possible. For Manichaeism and pantheism, the question has no meaning either. Sin is then eternal; it roots in an evil being or in God himself and falls together with the existence of the finite. Between creation and fall there is no distinction; the creation itself is a falling away of God from himself as the pure being. According to the theosophists, the fall of the angels took place in the time that lies between Genesis 1:1 and 2. The waste, emptiness, and darkness of the earth cannot have been created by God, who is the God of life and light; they presuppose already a fall and a curse that followed upon it. The angels first dwelt on this earth; this was their dwelling place (Jude 6); that is also evident from the fact that Satan is still called the prince of the world, that he wants to rob it from man, who later received it from God as an inheritance, that he wanted to give it to Christ in the temptation in exchange for worship, that he still dwells in the air, and that the world lies in the evil one. However, the heaven and earth that were created in Genesis 1:1 and assigned to the angels were of an entirely different nature than those later prepared in the six days (Genesis 1:3ff.). They were a spiritual, immaterial realm of light. The material, corporeal earth that arose in the six days presupposes already the fall of the angels, just as the waste, emptiness, and darkness of Genesis 1:2. Matter is in itself unclean, selfish, and therefore cannot have been brought forth directly by God. "Only an enormous crime, less a fall than a rebellion, could cause this material revelation as a crisis, an institution of hindrance and restoration, and only the continuance of this crime makes the continuance or further production of this matter understandable" (Baader); cf. Joh. Claassen, Jakob Böhme, Sein Leben u. seine theos. Werke; Id. Franz von Baader, Leben u. theos. Werke; Keerl, Der Mensch das Ebenbild Gottes, and many others, Hamberger, Schubert, K. v. Raumer, R. Wagner, Kurtz, Delitzsch, etc., cf. Reusch, Bibel u. Natur. But this theory, however attractive, nevertheless has no sufficient ground in Holy Scripture. In Genesis 1:2 it does not say that the earth became waste and empty, but that it was ; not a single word is said that this waste and emptiness was a destruction that followed upon an ordered state; and much less is there any mention that the fall of the angels took place before that time and was the cause of that waste. Furthermore, it is not to be seen what connection there can exist between the fall of the angels—supposing that it already took place before Genesis 1:2—and the waste of the earth. To establish such a connection, one must take refuge in all sorts of Gnostic ideas; one must then teach that the angels are in a certain sense bodily beings and received the original earth as a dwelling place, just as according to some they still dwell on the fixed stars; that the first earth, which was created in Genesis 1:1, was essentially different from that prepared in the six days and consisted of a finer substance; that the coarse matter of which it now consists, though created by God, nevertheless presupposes the fall, is something ungodly and by nature unclean and selfish—all together opinions that are not derived from Scripture but from Gnosticism.
There is just as little ground for the opinion that the fall of man already took place before Genesis 3, either in the pre-existent state of the souls, or in Genesis 2 at and before the creation of the woman. This was the teaching of Pythagoras and Plato: the souls first existed in the topos hyperouranios, from which they were driven out by a fall and as punishment were shut up in earthly bodies as in prisons. Origen took over this view, to explain the inequality among creatures therewith. Theosophy often linked with it the opinion that man was first created androgynous and that the creation of the woman was already proof of a fall that had taken place before. Related hereto is the teaching of Kant, who speaks of an intelligible deed as cause of the radical bent to evil and of the inborn guilt, and so also Schelling. Müller, Steffens, Renouvier, Secrétan, Dr. Edward Beecher, and others. But these claims all lack theological and also philosophical ground. First, they include the pre-existent being of souls, which for sundry reasons is not acceptable. Furthermore, the fall that is told in Genesis 3 is robbed of its kind and meaning; it ceases to be a fall and becomes merely the showing of something that has already taken place long ago; in linkage therewith the timely, empirical freedom of man loses all her worth; the soul alone is fallen and is placed in the body for punishment. Further, this teaching is also at odds with the organic together-hang of the human kindred. Each man sets his own lot, das Wesen des Menschen ist wesentlich seine eigene That (Schelling). Thereto it breeds wonder that all men singly, without any out-taking, set themselves to evil, and that only the first man, though fallen, yet still got a trial, whether he might yet wish to stand fast and mend his fall. And lastly it is clear that mankind, thus loosed into a heap of single ones, can have neither a common head in Adam nor yet in Christ. There is no common fall, there is thus also no common mending; each falls for himself, each must thus also raise himself; in spite of the radical evil Kant therefore ended from the thou shalt to the thou canst.
We must therefore stay with the data of Scripture, however few these may be. The time of the fall of the angels is not mentioned at all. With regard to the "from the beginning" in John 8:44, many theologians were of the mind that the angels, not in the twinkling of their making itself, in the first blink, but then yet straightway thereafter, in the second blink, by their first deed of will were either strengthened in the good or fallen into sin, Augustine, City of God XI 13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I qu. 62 art. 5. qu. 63 art. 5 and 6. Others took it that a short time passed after their making, and that their fall then either still before the making of heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1, Episcopius, Institutes of Theology IV 3,1; or within the six days of making, Cocceius on John 8:44; or with an eye to Genesis 1:31 first after the end of all the work of making, Voetius, Disputations I. Turretin, Elenctic Theology IX 5. Matthijs Vitringa II. Even as little can be said with sureness of the time of man's fall. Some speak of years after his making; others deem, because Genesis after the tale of the making straightway goes over to that of the fall and also on ground of Genesis 4:1, that the fall of man had room only a few days after or even on the selfsame day as his making, Marck, History of Paradise III 7. Moor, Commentary IV. Matthijs Vitringa II. Zöckler, The Prime State of Man 35 f. These time-reckonings are also of lesser weight. What is of worth, is this, that according to Scripture the fall is in essence sundered from the making itself. Sin is a showing, for which the might was indeed given in the making of finite, changeable beings, but whose workliness could only be called to being by the will of the creature. It is a might that belongs not to the being of the making, that was not at the first there, that came in through unheeding and overstepping, that unlawfully broke into the making and that ought not to be there. It is there, and its being is no mishap; even with an eye to the counsel of God, which took it up and gave it a stead, to a certain measure and in a certain wise it may be said that it must be there. But then it must always be there as something that ought not to be and that has no right of being.
1. The question concerning the essence of sin is not the same as that concerning its beginning, for only in the unfolding does that which lies hidden in a principle become fully manifest. But yet in the first sin, sin itself is already at work and thus also to some degree knowable. However, there is difference regarding the character and nature of the first sin, to which angels and men made themselves guilty. The opinion that the sin of the angels began with lust has already been refuted earlier. Much more likely is it, with a view to the nature of the temptation in Genesis 3:5 and Matthew 4:3, 6, 9, and the admonition in 1 Timothy 3:6, not to be puffed up and thus fall into the same judgment as the devil, that the first sin of the angels consisted in pride; but of their fall too little has been revealed for us to speak here with absolute certainty; others therefore thought of lying (John 8:44), envy (Wisdom 2:24), or some other sin. According to the Roman Catholics, the first sin in man also consisted in pride (Bellarmine, De amissione gratiae et statu peccati III c. 4), who appeals to Sirach 10:13, 14, Tobit 4:13, Romans 5:19, Augustine (De Genesi ad litteram XI 30; Enchiridion 45; De civitate Dei XIV 13), Thomas (Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 163), and so forth. These proofs are not strong; Sirach and Tobit speak only of pride in general, Paul calls the first sin precisely disobedience, and the church fathers and scholastics, when they name the first sin pride, especially combat the view that makes it consist in sensual lust. The Protestants, however, usually let the sin in Eve begin already with doubt and unbelief, which were then followed by pride and covetousness (Luther on Genesis 3; Gerhard, Loci IX c. 2; Calvin, Institutes II 1, 4; Zanchi, Opera IV 30; Synopsis purioris theologiae XIV 9 sq.; Marck, Historia Paradisi III 2; M. Vitringa II 267). Rightly, however, it was noted by Tertullian (Adversus Judaeos 2) and Augustine (Enchiridion 45) that the first sin already included many sins and in principle was a transgression of all the commandments; for it was disobedience to God, doubt, unbelief, self-exaltation, pride, manslaughter, theft, covetousness, and so forth; and accordingly, various thoughts, affections, desires, and motions were aroused in man; understanding and will, soul and body took part in it. It was a conscious and free act, hamartia , parabasis , paraptōma , parakoē in the proper sense (Romans 5:12ff.). Although seduced, the first humans were not brought to the fall as innocent children without knowing better. They transgressed God's commandment knowingly and freely; they knew and willed what they did. Excuses do not apply here. The circumstances under which the first sin was committed by angels and humans do not serve to excuse but increase the guilt. It was committed against God's express and clear commandment; by a man who was created in God's image; in a matter of very small significance, which demanded scarcely any self-denial; and perhaps a short time after the commandment was received. It became the source of all unrighteousness and abominations, of all calamities and evils, of all sickness and death, which since then have been committed and suffered in the world. Hence those tears! Adam's sin cannot be a trifle; it must have been a fundamental reversal of all relations, a revolution whereby the creature detached itself from and set itself against God, a rebellion, a fall in the strictest sense, which was decisive for the whole world and led it in a direction and on a path away from God, toward ungodliness and destruction, an ineffably great sin (Augustine, Opus imperfectum contra Julianum I 165). So seriously was the first sin regarded in the Christian church and theology (Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV 11-15; XXI 12; Enchiridion 26, 27, 45; Thomas, Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 163 art. 3; Council of Trent V 1; Bellarmine, De amissione gratiae et statu peccati III c. 8-10; Scheeben, Dogmatik II 594; Belgic Confession art. 14; Heidelberg Catechism qu. 7, 9; Mastricht, Theologia IV 1, 15; Marck, Historia Paradisi III 2, 10, and so forth).
2. The various names which Holy Scripture uses for sin point out its dreadful character and its many-sided unfolding. Chattat calls sin a deed which misses its mark and consists in straying from the right path; awel or awon marks it as a bending, twisting, wrongness, as a swerving from the good way; pesha makes it known as a crossing of the set bounds, as a breaking of the covenant bond with God, as falling away and uprising; shegagah as a wrong deed which is done unwittingly, out of mistake; resha as a godless, law-swerving, guilty doing and walking. Furthermore, it is marked by asham as guilt, by awel as vanity, by shaw as falsehood, by nebalah as foolishness, by ra as an evil, malum, and so on. The Greek words are chiefly hamartia, hamartema, adikia, apeitheia, apostasia, parabasis, parakoe, paraptoma, opheilema, anomia, paranomia; they speak for themselves and describe sin as swerving, unright, disobedience, overstepping, falling away, unlawfulness, guilt; and besides, the sinful might in man is yet marked by sarx, psychikos, and palaios anthropos, and in the world by kosmos. The Latin peccatum is of unsure coming-from; the Dutch word zonde, which likely hangs together with the Latin sons, that is, nocens, is in Christian speech become a through-and-through religious thought; it marks an overstepping, not of a human but of a godly law; sets man in bond, not to his fellow-men, to fellowship and state, but to God, the heavenly Judge; is therefore also in many rings not loved and is then best replaced by moral evil and so on.
By far most of these names make sin known as a swerving, overstepping of the law. Scripture always takes sin up as anomia, 1 John 3:4; its measure is the law of God. This law had in sundry times also a sundry shape. Adam was in a wholly special case; no one can after him sin in the likeness of his overstepping, Rom. 5:14. From Adam to Moses there was no positive law put forth by God. The withstanding can thus be made, that if there is no law, there can also be no overstepping, sin, and death, Rom. 5:13, 4:15. In Rom. 5:12ff. Paul gives thereon no other answer than that through the one overstepping of Adam sin as might is come into the world and has ruled all and thus death is gone through to all men. The overstepping of Adam has set all to be sinners and put all under death. This inflow of Adam's overstepping shuts not out but shuts in that all men themselves also personally are sinners. For just because through the one overstepping of Adam sin is gone to rule in the world of men and all therefore also themselves personally were sinners, therefore death is also gone through to all. More says Paul in Rom. 5:12ff. not. That was there, in that binding, enough. But from elsewhere this answer can be lighted and filled up. If from Adam to Moses there has been sin and death, Rom. 5:13, 14, then there must also have been a law, indeed no positive one which with hearable voice by God is put forth as in paradise and on Sinai, but yet a law which also then personally bound men and made them guilty. That says Paul also clearly in Rom. 2:12-16. The heathen have not the Mosaic law, but they sin yet and go lost anomos, because they are a law to themselves and their conscience itself blames them. There is an opening of God in nature both of religious and ethical inhold, which is enough to take away all unblame, Rom. 2:18ff., 1 Cor. 1:21. While God however let the heathen walk in their own ways, He made to Israel His laws and rights known in clear wise.
And this law is now for Israel the measure of all moral doing. In the last time this has well been withstood. One thinks that chatta first meant only: to be in the wrong or set over against a mightier, Ex. 5:16, 1 Kings 1:21, 2 Kings 18:14; that it thereafter gave to know a doing in strife with the folk's ways, Gen. 19:7ff., 34:7, Josh. 7:15, Judg. 19:23, 20:6, 2 Sam. 13:12, 21:1-14, and that it first slowly marked an ethical overstepping of the law of God. Through the prophets yet got YHWH first an ethical mark; while His wrath earlier often flamed, without that there was any guilt from the side of man, 2 Sam. 16:10 and one thus could become sinner without knowing or willing it, Num. 22:34, 1 Sam. 14:43 ff., could now YHWH only wrath over sin; this was from now on truly in aberratio a lege divina. This thinking is however withspoken by the deeds. Even if chatta on the first-named three places had the wider meaning of suffering unright in juridical sense, without that there was speech of ethical guilt, then would that yet prove nothing for the setting that this was the oldest and first thought of sin under Israel. The word means ownly miss, Judg. 20:16, and can thus beside the ethical also have had the wider meaning of: suffering unright, being set in the wrong. But also that is in Ex. 5:16, 1 Kings 1:21, 2 Kings 18:14 yet not the case. In Ex. 5:16 say the Israelites simply to Pharaoh: we get no straw and must yet make bricks, and if we make them not, we are yet beaten and get we the guilt, vechatat ammeka. In 1 Kings 1:21 says Bathsheba to David: if you not decide and Adonijah becomes king, then will we, Bathsheba and Solomon, soon be the guilty, who by Adonijah are killed because we acknowledge him not. And truly have we yet right, on ground of your oath vs. 17. In 2 Kings 18:14 does Hezekiah a confessing of guilt, which is pressed from him in the need and which he himself later not acknowledges.
Furthermore it is well a deed that the folk's ways everywhere count as a measure of moral doing, but this is fully not therewith in strife that yet the law of God in last standing is the norm of good and evil. Josh. 7:15 teaches how both, the overstepping of the covenant and the doing of a foolishness in Israel, can fall together. The folk's ways are on themselves even little in strife with God's law, as the conscience, which also a under-set, subjective norm is of the moral life; always is it and stays it, also in the most Christian fellowship, a norma normata; and also in Israel is the folk's ways, e.g., of guest-friendship, by the law not undone but well acknowledged and hallowed. Only where it comes in clash must it yield for the law of God. That now truly the folk's ways in Israel always matched with God's law or were cleansed by it, says no one, even as the conscience of Christians toward God's law is already fully shaped. Many deeds of the holy in Old and New Testament, of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, David, Peter, and so on, are therefore also surely to be doomed and not, because they were believers, with the Rabbis to be forgiven. The being of sin is at last not set by what under Israel, in the church, is or is not wonted, but by the law of God. And this is the standpoint which Holy Scripture always takes. Sin may be great or small, it is always only therefore sin because it goes against God and His law, Gen. 13:13, 20:6, 39:9, Ex. 10:16, 32:33, 1 Sam. 7:6, 14:33, 2 Sam. 12:13, Ps. 51:6, Isa. 42:24, Jer. 14:7, 20, and so on. It always comes to the Lord's will and word and law, to His rights and settings, to His biddings and orderings; to know and serve God is the all-holding calling of Israel, and thereto is it tested by the prophets. And even so is it in the New Testament. Jesus sets no one less than God Himself as ensample, Matt. 5:48, and judges all after His law, Matt. 19:17-19, Mark 10:17-19, Luke 18:18-20. This is for Him the inhold of law and prophets, and He upholds it fully, without taking anything from it, Matt. 5:17-19, 23ff., 6:16ff., 21:12ff., 23:3, 23, 24:20, and judges just from that standpoint the human settings, Matt. 5:20ff., 15:2ff., Mark 2:23ff., 7:8, 13, and so on. In Matt. 7:12 He sets then no new ethical first-rule but gives nothing other than a workly out-legging of the bidding of neighbor-love. The Mosaic law has well in Christ its goal and its end reached, Rom. 10:4, Gal. 3:24, and the believer is free from it and stands in grace, Rom. 6:14, 7:4, 10:4, Gal. 2:19, 3:15ff., 5:18, but this freedom lifts not up the law but strengthens it, Rom. 3:31; its right is just fulfilled in him who walks after the Spirit, Rom. 8:4. That Spirit forsooth renews us and teaches us to search and know and do what God's will is, Rom. 12:2, Eph. 5:10, Phil. 1:10. That will is knowable from the Old Testament, Rom. 13:8-10, 15:4, 1 Cor. 1:31, 10:11, 14:34, 2 Cor. 9:9, 10:17, Gal. 5:14, is open in Christ, 1 Cor. 11:1, 2 Cor. 3:18, 8:9, 10:1, Phil. 2:5, 1 Thess. 1:6, 4:2, 1 Pet. 2:21, and finds also in the own conscience echo, 1 Cor. 8:7, 10:25, 2 Cor. 1:12; it is written in the heart of believers, Heb. 8:10, 10:9. Everywhere in Scripture the being of sin is anomia, 1 John 3:4, swerving from the will of God, opened to Adam or Moses or Christ or to the church through the Holy Spirit.
3. By this doctrine of Scripture, the view of sin in Christian theology was determined. On the one hand, therefore, that opinion could not be accepted which sought the essence of sin in some substance and therefore traced it back to a principle of wrath in God (Boehme), or to an evil power alongside God (Mani), or to some matter, such as hyle, sarx (Plato, the Jews, Flacius, etc.). And on the other hand, the theory was also to be rejected that sin consisted in a not-yet-being, that it belonged to the necessary oppositions in life and was by nature proper to the finite, self-developing human who strives toward perfection (Spinoza, Hegel, etc.). Over against this, Christian theology from the beginning maintained that sin was no substance. There has never been any difference or strife about this. Petavius cites many church fathers who all teach the same in this regard. There was also no doubt or hesitation possible here. If sin were a substance, there would be a being that God did not have as author, or God would also be its cause. Sin must therefore be conceived and described as oute on oute en tois ousin, as an elleipsis, sterēsis, anachōrēsis tou agathou, as astheneia, asummetria, just as blindness is a deprivation of sight, Athanasius, Against the Gentiles 3 sq. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration c. 5. Dionysius, On the Divine Names c. 4. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith II c. 30. In the West, especially Augustine has set forth this privative character of sin and maintained it against the Manicheans, cf. Nirschl, Origin and Essence of Evil according to the Teaching of St. Augustine, Regensburg 1854. All being is in itself good. Every nature, insofar as it is nature, is good. Evil can therefore only be in the good, no evil can exist except in some good, because it can only exist in some nature. It is even no nature, but a loss, privation, corruption of the good, a vice, defect of nature; evil is the diminution of good. City of God XI 17. 22. Enchiridion 11-13. Against Julian I c. 3. etc. It therefore has no efficient cause, but only a deficient one, City of God XII 7. 9. And likewise, by the scholastics, by the Roman, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians, the concept of sin in a metaphysical sense was reduced to that of privation, cf. Lombard, Sentences II dist. 34 and 35 and commentaries of Thomas, Bonaventure, etc., further Thomas, Summa Theologica I qu. 48. 49. Against the Gentiles III 7 sq. Bonaventure, Breviloquium III 1. Bellarmine, On the Loss of Grace and the State of Sin I c. 1. II c. 18. V c. 1. Becanus, Scholastic Theology II 1 tract. 1 cap. 5 qu. 1. Melanchthon, Loci on Sin. Gerhard, Loci X c. 1. Quenstedt, Theology II p. 50. Hollaz, Examination of Theology 501. Buddeus, Institutions of Theology p. 546. Zanchi, Works IV 6 sq. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae p. 335. Ursinus, Theological Tractates 1584 p. 199. Hoornbeeck, Practical Theology IV c. 1. Turretin, Elenctic Theology loc. IX etc.
On the other hand, however, it is clear that sin is not sufficiently described by the concept of privation. It is not a mere lack, not a sheer non-being; but it is a working and corrupting principle, a dissolving, destroying power. Scripture speaks of it mostly in a very positive sense as transgression, wickedness, disobedience, lawlessness, and so forth, and ascribes to it the working of witnessing, ruling, moving, devising, fighting, and the like.
Various theologians have therefore rejected the distinction between matter and form in sin. They appealed, for example, to the fact that blasphemy, idolatry, hatred against God, and such like, as acts, were sinful and could never take on a good form, and they therefore rather described sin as a certain real and positive entity, as a real something. Cajetan in Becanus, Theology of Würzburg. Vitringa Sr., Sacred Observations. M. Vitringa, and further also Arminius, Works. Limborch, Christian Theology. Strauss, Faith. Müller, Sin. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology. For a right understanding, however, the following should be noted here.
1. When most Christian theologians conceived sin as privation, they had in view above all the combating of Manichaeism. Insofar their opinion is also completely correct and to be accepted without reservation. Sin is no substance, neither spiritual nor material, for then it would have God as its cause, or God would not be the Creator of all things.
2. Also the essence of sin itself forbids thinking of it as a substance. For sin is no physical but an ethical phenomenon. It is a state and an act of the will and has its cause in this; it was not given with creation but arose after creation through disobedience. It can thus be no matter, which existed eternally or was created by God in time, but has reality only as a deformation of that which is; insofar it can even be called a non-being, a nothing.
3. Thereby it is by no means meant that sin is a negative nothing. Rather, the pantheistic view of sin as a pure negation, as a not-yet-being, as a necessary moment in the development of a finite and limited being, as an illusion of thought, has been opposed by Christian theology at all times as decidedly as possible. Sin was no mere negation but a privation. The distinction between both consists in this, that negation only indicates lack (to be without), privation on the other hand indicates want (to need); that a stone does not see is a negation, that a man does not see is a privation, because seeing belongs to the qualities of a man. Sin is a robbing of that moral perfection which man ought to possess.
4. The description of sin as privation therefore in no way excludes that it is also, viewed from another side, an action. It is no substance, no thing, but in its robbing of the good it is indeed an energy, just as the limping of the lame is not a not-walking but a wrong walking. Augustine, who repeatedly describes sin as a privation, therefore calls it a transgression of the law, On the Harmony of the Evangelists. A will to retain or obtain what justice forbids, On the Two Souls against the Manichaeans. Retractations. A defecting, which includes a tending, but to defect is not yet nothing but to tend toward nothing, Against Secundinus the Manichaean. An inclination from that which is more to that which is less, ibid. Compare On Free Will. And he gives this definition of sin: Sin is something done or said or desired against the eternal law; but the eternal law is the divine reason or will of God, commanding the natural order to be preserved, forbidding it to be disturbed, Against Faustus the Manichaean. This definition was later adopted by all, Lombard, Sentences. Thomas, Summa Theologica; sin is no mere or pure privation but an act deprived of due order, ibid. A privation with positive quality and action, an active privation, Zanchi, Works. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae. Heidegger, Corpus Theologiae. Bucanus, Institutions of Theology. Synopsis of Pure Theology, and so forth.
4. The Essence of Sin. On the ground of Holy Scripture and in agreement with the confession of the Christian faith, the essence of sin can therefore be further described and explained in the following way. 1º. Because sin is no bodily or over-worldly but an ethical opposition to the good, it has no own, self-standing existence independent of the being of things. He who holds sin for a substance seems indeed deeply penetrated by its might and meaning, but in fact weakens it, brings it from ethical to bodily ground, and makes the strife between good and evil into a wrestling between light and darkness, spirit and stuff, a good and an evil God, which never ends and makes all redemption from sin unworkable. Therefore it is of the highest weight to always behold sin as an ethical appearance. The punishments and outcomes of sin stretch indeed also over the bodily ground, but sin itself is and stays of ethical kind. Then it can also have no own beginning and no self-standing being; it arose after and exists only through and on the good. The evil is indeed hanging on the good, but not the other way round. For the good can become evil, Plato, Protag. The better and more worthy seems to be first in kind, Arist., Categ. c. 9. The good (true) is judge of itself and of evil (false). The good has through free choice been the cause of evil, and stays its underlay. Fallen angels and men are and stay as creatures good, and exist from eye-blink to eye-blink only through and in and to God. And even as in its spring and in its being, sin stays also in its works and strifes hanging on the good. It can only do something with and by means of the strengths and gifts which are bestowed by God. Satan is therefore rightly called the ape of God; as God builds a church, he builds a chapel; over against a true prophet he awakens a false one; over against the Christ he sets the antichrist. Even a robber band can only exist if it honors right in its own ring. A liar adorns himself with the sheen of truth. A sinner chases evil under the reckoning of good. Satan appears as an angel of light. Sin is always doomed to borrow in its working and showing, against its will, from worthiness. It lies under the unbreakable doom, while striving toward the wrecking of all good, at the same time to work also toward its own death. It is a hanger-on of the good. 2º. Although sin thus by its kind strives toward not-being, yet over being itself it has no might. It can not shape, it can also not wreck. Through sin therefore neither the essence of angels, nor that of men, nor that of the world-kind is changed. They are in essence the same creatures before and after the fall, with the same substance, the same strengths, the same mights. Before and after the fall man has soul and body, understanding and will, feelings and yearnings. What is changed is not the substance, the stuff, but the shape in which this shows itself, the steering in which it works. With the same strength of love wherewith man at first loved God, he now loves the creature. The same understanding wherewith he formerly thought on the things that are above, now makes him with wonder-worthy sharpness and deepness hail the lie as truth. With the same freedom wherewith he once served God, he now serves the world. In substance nothing is taken away from man through sin and nothing brought into him. It is the same man, but now walking not toward God but away from God, meeting ruin. Sin is not some essence but a lack and spoiling, whereby namely the way, kind, and order is spoiled, Bonaventura, Brevil. III 1. 3º. Also the loss of God's likeness and the breaking of the work-bond is not at odds with this beholding of sin. For God's likeness, although no gift added above and own to man by kind, was no substance but an add-on; that is, man as he was shaped was so inwrought that his kind of itself, without over-kindly grace, yet not without God's good foreseeing which brought and showed knowledge and holiness and rightness, which were the foremost inhold of God's likeness. But when man fell, he lost nothing in substance, no strength even and no might, but because sin spoiled the shape of his whole kind, of all his strengths and mights, all these now work so that they no more bring forth God's knowledge and rightness but just the opposite. Man has thus through the fall not only lost an unreal add-on to his kind, a gift added above, while otherwise his kind stayed untouched; he has also not become a devil who for reshaping is unreachable and can never more show the marks of God's likeness; but while he in essence and substance stayed the same, that is, man, and has kept all manly parts, strengths, and mights, of all these the shape, the kind and way, the mind-set and steering is so changed that they now, instead of God's will, fulfill the law of the flesh. The likeness is changed into a mockery. And even so the bond of works is broken, insofar as through the works of the law no flesh can more be rightened, Rom. 3:20, Gal. 3:2, but it is so little wrecked and set aside that the law of that bond of works still binds every man to full heedfulness, that it is taken up in the grace-bond by Christ and fully fulfilled, and now for believers stays a rule of thankfulness. 4º. Thought away from the good underlay whereby sin is borne and whereto it clings, this can therefore never otherwise than as lack of good be described. But one should well bethink that then of sin abstractly and over-worldly is spoken. And so described it has no being, is no substance, but a naught, nothing forward but only something lacking; he who would behold it otherwise would thereby in Manichaean wise make evil self-standing and everlasting and set over against the highest good a highest evil. The above-named besware against the setting of sin as lack brought in rests then also truly on misunderstanding. Abstractly and over-worldly sin is a lack and can and may on Christian standpoint not otherwise be beheld. But in the deed it comes not otherwise forth than as wrong shape of a set state or handling and makes that state or that handling itself sinful, even as a sickness, without being a substance, yet makes the body sick. In the deed sin is thus always in and on something which is in substance good. It may be hard to tell in set cases of sin between stuff and shape, and yet much harder to sunder them, even as at a given eye-blink the warmth from the stove is not to be sundered. Yet even as little as therefore the stove is the warmth itself, is the being or the deed whereto sin clings to be one-made with sin. Even in God-blasphemy the strength needed to utter it and the tongue whereof it makes use is in itself good; what makes this and what makes all things wrong and sinful, that is the unshapeliness, the straying from God's law. 5º. For the yardstick of sin is God's law alone. What is sin is in the last stead set not by the church (Rome) or the state (Hobbes), not by the self-standing worth-law (Grotius) or the self-ruling I (Kant), not by mankind (Comte) or the fellowship drives (Darwin), but only and alone by God's law. The thought of sin speaks this clearly out and is therefore shunned by all who know no higher yardstick for worthly evil than a manly one. God is also the only one who has full sway over us and can bind and bind us in the inwit. Now He gave many laws for the sundry creatures, laws for sun and moon, heaven and earth, growth and beast, man and angel; and what touches man, again sundry laws for his bodily, ghostly, understanding, beauty-wise life etc., own laws also for his worthly life. Nearer it is now this worth-law which is the yardstick of all sin. Overstepping of all other laws, wit-wise, beauty-wise, fellowship-wise, state-wise, church-wise etc., is only then and insofar sin as it straight or roundabout holds in an overstepping of the worth-law, of God's bid. This worth-law which was inplanted in man at his shaping, after the fall works after in his inwit, was called out by God on Sinai and also for believers stays rule of life, is the knowledge-spring of sin, Rom. 3:20, 4:14, 5:20, 7:7. Indeed the Christian faith is surely needed to learn to know sin rightly, and indeed in the gospel as by way of withstanding the kind and greatness of sin is opened, Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 112 5. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III² 384 f. Kaftan. Wesen der chr. Relig. 250, but all that yet takes nothing away that not the gospel but the law is the knowledge-ground of sin. In that worth-law God comes to us not only as Father with fatherly warnings and chidings, but, as the binding must-bid witnesses with everyone, also as Lawgiver and Judge with bids and punishments. Although not forcing as the wit-laws and not unbreakable as the world-kind laws, the worth-law goes in greatness above all others; it steers itself to the will, breathes in freedom, yearns fulfillment out of love; and yet it turns itself to all men without sundering, comes to them in all standings, stretches itself out over their words and deeds not only but also over their state, knows of no giving in and of no glossing, speaks unsparingly, bindingly, with kingly sway and wreaks every overstepping of hers in strict punishment. It is a decree of the Godhead, opening of God's will, out-speaking of His essence. 6º. From this mark of the worth-law follows that sin can only dwell in a witful creature. The witless world-kind can suffer under the outcomes of sin, but sin falls only in a being gifted with understanding and will. Nearer set, the will is the true under-lay, the showing of sin. The worth-law is just the law for the will of the creature; the worthly good is of such kind that it can only through the will be made real. What fully and setly goes outside every sway of the will can be no sin. In that wise Augustine rightly said: so is sin willing evil that in no way is it sin if it is not willing, de vera relig. 14. But this word is open to misunderstanding. And when the Pelagians made use of it to prove that sin never otherwise than in a will-deed can be, Augustine later gave such an explaining of it that unknowing-, yearning-, and birth-sin were not shut out by it, Retract. I 13; and elsewhere he says outspokenly that the law also forbids the unwilling stirrings of yearning, de spir. et lit. c. 36. de nupt. I 17. 23. c. Jul. IV c. 2. VI c. 8. de civ. XIV 10. Therewith in agreement many schoolmen yet taught that sin indeed had in the will its last cause and thus in that wise always sat in the will, but then yet not in the will as in the under-lay but as in the cause, Thomas, Sent. II dist. 24 qu. 3 art. 2 ad 2. S. Theol. II 1 qu. 74 art. 2. II 2 qu. 10 art. 2; sin can therefore also sit in the sense-lust, though it be then only a forgivable sin, Lombardus, Sent. II dist. 24, 8. Thomas, S. Theol. II 1 qu. 74 art. 3. Bonaventura, Brevil. III c. 8 Sent. II dist. 24 pars. 2 art. 2 qu. 2. But sundry grounds brought little by little change in this teaching. The yearning was an unclear thought; it could as well in good as in evil part be understood, because many kindly, of themselves uprising yearnings, as e.g. of the hungry toward food, yet are no sin; Augustine therefore spoke of the yearning sometimes so that it was no sin and could not harm if it but was not yielded to against the law, c. Jul. VI 5. de Gen. c. Manich. II 14 etc. Furthermore the school-lore went little by little to sunder between stirrings first-first, second-first, and fully thought-out, that is, between such thoughts and yearnings which before all yielding of the will, fully unwilling rise in us and are in no way sin; such against which the will indeed fights but whereby it is overcome and which are forgivable sins; and such wherein the will aware and fully yields and which are death-sins. And thereto came then yet that birth-sin was ever weaker beheld and as through baptism fully undone deemed; what stayed over, the yearning, was itself no sin but could only become ground to sinning. So Rome also set fast that guilt and spot of birth-sin are fully taken away through baptism, that yearning indeed stays but harms them not who yield not to it, and can only be called sin because it is from sin and bends to sin, Trid. V 5, and further Cat. Rom. II 2, 7. Becanus, Theol. schol. II 1519 p. 145-150. Sylvius, Comm. in totam primam sec. S. Thomae, ed. 4 II p. 336 sq. Bellarminus, de amiss. gr. et statu pecc. I 1. V 520. Daelman, Theol. II 1759 p. 174 sq. Dens, Theol. I 1828 p. 314 sq. Kleutgen, Theol. d. Vorz. II 644. The Reformation stepped against that and held that also unclean thoughts and yearnings which before and without our will rise in us are sin; it meant therewith not that all yearning in mind-wise and wisdom-wise wise was sin, but indeed that the yearning in Scripture-wise and god-lore meaning makes us guilty before God. And herein it had without doubt right. For surely sin began with an aware and free will-deed. But that first sinful deed has not spurless gone by us, it has spoiled the whole manly kind and left a state which in all beholds is at odds with God's law. Though sin thus arose through the will, it now truly is outside the will and has its seat also in all other strengths and mights of man, in soul and body, in lower and higher knowing and yearning strength, Gen. 6:3, 8:21, Ex. 20:17, Ps. 19:13, 51:7, Jer. 17:9, Mt. 5:28, Mk. 7:21, Rom. 7:7, 15-17, 8:7, Gal. 5:7 etc. Without will can there be no sin, because without will it can not be so that it is; without will however it can be, because without will that which is can stay, Aug. bij Dorner, Augustinus 129. Lutheran and Reformed god-lorers therefore commonly fought the setting that all sin was willing. Therewith they meant however by no means that there could also be sin which fully and setly went outside the will-strength. Only it comes thereon to shape a right fore-showing of the kind and working of the will. The will is namely fully not the whole yearning-strength but thereof only a sundry might and working, cf. my Beginselen der Psychologie 1897 bl. 166v. The will in this narrower wise goes only before the deedly sins as James 1:15 speaks thereof, but fully not before the state- and unwilling sins. If the willing in this wise were a needful inhold of sin, not only would all unclean thoughts and yearnings stop to be sin, but with the saying to understand all would be to forgive all also nearly all deedly sins would be to unblame. To the end to be able to uphold the un-guilt of yearning, Bellarminus came then also already to the saying: not all that fights against the law is sin, the unwilling stirrings are indeed at odds with the law but yet no sins, de amiss. gr. et st. pecc. V 10. But though it be that the willing in this narrow wise not always shapes with the thought of sin, yet the state- and unwilling sins go not fully outside the will; there is not only a will beforehand but also a will with-going, after-going, approving; the will later in stronger or weaker step deems good the sinfulness of our kind, of our thoughts and shapes liking therein. And also when later the will, fore-lighted by wit, fights against it, or the reborn can witness with Paul that he wills not the evil that he does, then thereby surely the step of sin is lessened but not the kind of sin set. For this has its yardstick only in God's law; Paul calls that which he wills not but yet truly does indeed sin and yields to the law that it is good. Also then however even the sin which is done without being willed goes not fully outside the will. For surely Paul can say: I do it no more but the sin that dwells in me, and thus make a withstanding between his reborn I and his unreborn flesh, but rightly Augustine has these words already thus cleared: though I yield not to yearning and though after my yearnings I go not, yet still I yearn and surely even in that part I am. For I am not another in mind and another in flesh. But what then am I myself? Because I in mind, I in flesh. For not two kinds against but out of both one man, because one God from whom man is made, de verbis apost. serm. 5. It is yet not another being that does sin in the flesh and another that yet wills it not. But it is both times the same man who on one side in the yearning in unclean wise chases toward the forbidden and yet on the other side in the deepest of his will turns away therefrom and fights against it. And therefore, because man, even the reborn so long as he is in the flesh, always in weaker or stronger way still yearns the forbidden, though it be that he with his will in narrower wise goes against it, therefore it can be said that all sin yet in the deepest ground is willing. There is no one or nothing that forces the sinner to serve sin. Sin sits not outside him but in him and has led his thinking and yearning in its steering. It is his sin insofar as he through his sundry strengths and mights has made it his. Cf. Melanchthon, Apol. Conf. art. 2. Loci C. de peccato. Form. Conc. II 1. Gerhard, Loc. X c. 6 en 11. Quenstedt, Theol. II 60. 92. 139. Hollaz p. 501. 525. Calvin, Inst. II 1. III 3. IV 15, 10. 11. Zanchius, Op. IV 56 sq. Beza, Tract. II 345. Polanus, Synt. p. 336, Martyr, L. C. 70. Turretin, Theol. El. IX qu. 2. XI qu. 21. Mastricht IV 2, 22. Burmannus, Synopsis II 7, 9. C. Vitringa, Observ. Sacr. I 563. M. Vitringa II 293. Moor III 132. Many Comm. on Ex. 20:17, Rom. 7:7, Gal. 5:16, Heid. Cat, Q. 113 etc. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II 131. 202. Müller, Sünde I⁵ 251 f. My Beginselen der Psychol. 145-148. So it shows then lastly 7º sin to be an ungraspable riddle. We know not whence it is nor what it is. It is there and has no right of being. It is and no one clears its spring. It itself without drive came into the world and yet is the drive for all thinking and doing of men. It is beheld abstractly nothing but a lack and is yet in the deed a might which rules all and everything. It has no own self-standing beginning and is yet a beginning which wrecks the whole shaping. It lives from the good and fights it to wrecking. It is nothing and has nothing and can nothing without the beings and mights which God has shaped and yet shapes these all to the uprising against Him. It fights with what is God's all that is God's. It is the will of the weak finite creature in uprising against the Shaper; the hanging in foe-ship against the Unhanging and itself chasing toward unhanging; the partless becoming in wrestling with the everlastingly Being; the greatest withstanding, borne by God in His shaping and used by Him in the way of right and rightness to a tool for His glory.
Cf. Tholuck, Die Lehre v. d. Sünde u. vom Versöhner⁸ 1862. Müller, Sünde⁵ 1867. Weiszäcker, Zu der Lehre v. Wesen der Sünde, Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1856 S. 131-195. Krabbe, Die Lehre v. d. Sünde u. v. Tode 1836. Vilmar, Theol. Moral I 143 f. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. III. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk I³ 181 f. Dorner, Gl. II 4 f. Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrheit I² 417 f. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 287 f. Clemen, Die chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I Die biblische Lehre 1897. Walther, Das Wesen der Sünde, Neue Kirchl. Zeits. April 1898 S. 284-325 etc.
5. Although sin is always one in principle and essence and always consists in lawlessness, there are in its manifestations and workings very different degrees. First of all, there is a great distinction between the devilish and the human sin. In the Old Testament we find as yet no developed demonology. That in Genesis 3 an evil, spiritual power appears, we know first from the New Testament; the seirim , Leviticus 17:7, 2 Chronicles 11:15, Isaiah 13:21, 34:14, shedim , Deuteronomy 32:17, Psalm 106:37, lilith , Isaiah 34:14, and aluqah , Proverbs 30:15 are certainly not to be regarded as elements of the revelation; and that in azazel , Leviticus 16, an evil spirit must be thought of, is unprovable. Of evil spirits there is mention only in 1 Samuel 16:14-23 and 1 Kings 22:19ff., and of Satan in Job 1, 1 Chronicles 21:1, Zechariah 3. The separation between good and evil angels is not yet completed; the evil spirit still goes forth from God, Satan is still found among the sons of God; only gradually does the opposition become sharper. The word satan means adversary and can in itself have a good sense; it occurs of human opponents, 1 Samuel 29:4, 1 Kings 5:4, 11:14, 23, 25, of hindrances in the way, 2 Samuel 19:22, of a human accuser, Psalm 109:6, 20, 29, even of the Angel of the Lord, who opposes Balaam in the way, Numbers 22:22, 32. But nevertheless Satan in the Old Testament is already thought of as a being that stands hostile over against God and his people. And as the revelation is completed and Christ comes to destroy the works of the devil, then also the depths of Satan are revealed. The New Testament makes known to us a kingdom, Matthew 12:26, Mark 3:24, Luke 11:17, 18, of evil spirits, which forms the antithesis of Christ and his kingdom. At the head stands Satan, called by various names, diabolos , satanas , enemy, Matthew 13:39, Luke 10:19, accuser, Revelation 12:10, belial (Syriac for belial , worthlessness), evil one, Matthew 13:19, Ephesians 6:16, 2 Thessalonians 3:3, 1 John 2:13, 14, 3:12, 5:18, beelzebul (literally lord of the dwelling, but probably derived from beelzebub , god of flies, article Herzog³ 2, 514) Matthew 10:25, prince of demons, Matthew 9:34, prince of the power of the air, Ephesians 2:2, prince of the world, John 12:31, the god of this age, 2 Corinthians 4:4, the great dragon, the ancient serpent, Revelation 12:9, 20:2, etc. And under him stand many demons, evil spirits, unclean spirits, spirits of wickedness, who again are distinguished in various classes and ranks, 1 Corinthians 15:24 (?), Ephesians 6:12, Colossians 2:15, Jude 6, also in wickedness one surpassing the other, Matthew 12:45, Luke 11:26, and together are Satan's angels, Matthew 25:41, 2 Corinthians 12:7, Revelation 12:7, 9. Compare Hofmann, Schriftbeweis I² 418ff. Sander, The Doctrine of Holy Scripture concerning the Devil, 1858. Oehler, Theology of the Old Testament § 200. Knenen, Religion of Israel II 256ff. Hahn, Theology of the New Testament § 128ff. Schwartzkopff, The Devil- and Demon-Faith of Jesus, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche von Gottschick, VII 1897 pp. 289-330. Holtzmann, New Testament Theology I 53ff. 167. II 238ff. etc. Weser, The Various Conceptions of the Devil in the New Testament, Studien und Kritiken 1882 pp. 284ff. Everling, The Pauline Angelology and Demonology, Göttingen 1888. Although there is thus among them still some difference in strength and wickedness, all together they are represented as thoroughly corrupt. They are always and everywhere the opponents of God, the disturbers of his kingdom, the fighters against Christ, the seducers of men, the accusers of God's children; they live in sin as in their element. They never appear as objects of God's love, although they are his creatures; Christ has not assumed their nature; they may not be objects of our love, of our intercession; there is for them no hope of restoration and salvation.
There is in the being and notion of the devils something fully ungraspable.
We can think of the absolute evil being only under the condition that we either let something fail in the absolute wickedness or in the true existence, C. J. Nitzsch, Syst. d. chr. Lehr § 116. F. A. B. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Absolute evil can they not be, for they are creatures of God and thus as such good; and yet they are only the object of God's hate and of his everlasting wrath. Because of this ungraspableness of the nature of the devils, many have denied their being, and held them for souls of dead men or for personifications of our evil sins or for unpersonal principles of evil, Bekker, Betov. Werelt II c. Semler, de daemoniacis. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 44. 45. Schelling, Werke II 4. Rothe, Ethik § 503. Martensen, Dogm. § 99. Mallet, art. Teufel in Herzog. Strauss, Chr. Gl. II. Biedermann, Dogm. Lipsius, Dogm. § 521-524 etc. But the reality of Satan and his angels is by Scripture put beyond doubt; to accommodation there is not the least to think; Jesus has in a very weighty point of religion wholly and all erred or it is even so, as He has said. And the teaching of Satan is for the whole Christian teaching also far from indifferent. It is of worth over against Manichaeism, for Satan is no original being but a fallen angel; over against Pelagianism, for Satan is through one will-decision wholly and all corrupted; over against the view of sin as weakness and sensuality, for Satan is a high, lordly, rich spirit; over against the meaning that sin is a passing moment in the unfolding, for Satan stays Satan and becomes never restored; over against the lowering of man to a devil, for Satan is out of himself come to fall, man was by him misled, is not un-guilty but also not ur-guilty; over against the view of atonement as an ethical process, for Christ is come to break the works of the devil. The belief in Satan's being is no element of the saving belief in Christ; but it yet hangs together therewith. There lies truth in the: nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor! If there were no sin, there would be no redeemer, and the earnestness of sin comes just in the teaching of Satan the clearest out. From all that Scripture witnesses of the angels, it yet shows that the moral life with them bears another mark than with men. Men are on every field and so also in the moral, under unfolding; they are born small, in knowledge, strength, virtue or vice, and grow in all these slowly up. But so it is with the angels not. They are all at once with each other and full-grown created; those who stayed standing were at once strengthened in the good, and they who fell were at once hardened and fulfilled in evil. Satan is not misled, but he brought the lie, the sin out of himself forth, John 8:44, and is therein at once stiffened. The kind of his sin is so, that he for no repentance more graspable is; of a moral awareness, of a conscience is with him no speech; he lives from the hate. The truly satanic character consists in a hate of all that which is over him and only because it is over him (Baader). Sin also in the devils is no matter but form; there is no highest evil, like there is a highest good; but the form of sin is with the angel-nature so one become, that there no parting more likely is. It is well indeed all too bold, to claim that the fallen angels also for God's almightiness unredeemable are; and better is it, here in God's good pleasure to rest, Voetius, Disp. I. Turret., Th. El. IX 5, 8. Heidegger, Corp. Th. VIII. Moor II. But yet shows enough that that good pleasure no whim is. Here on earth is there already under men a sin that is unforgivable, namely the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; with death, that is with that own bedding in which we here on earth live, holds the forgiveness of all sins up; the kind of sin cuts with the fallen angels the way of redemption off. Whereby then yet comes, that the angels are not one kindred. Men could fall and are fallen in one; and they can be saved and become saved in one. But the devils are not in one, not in another, but each for himself and head for head fallen; there was under them no bond of works, and therefore is there also for no bond of grace room. The satanic sin is thus with all likeness yet in origin, nature, outcomes a wholly other than the human. It bears an absolute mark, Satan is the highest showing of evil. Therefore becomes he in Scripture with so mighty, high names as prince of the world, god of this age etc. named. But therefore is also the overcoming of Satan the full triumph over sin. God has her in Satan all chance given, to show what she is and can. The highest and best, the noblest and greatest in God's creation has she made herself serviceable. And yet shows she at last in the strife of might against right powerless to be. It is the mark of evil, that it ever with energy begins and with weakness ends (Baader). Sin is not, she wills to be; she has no true reality and comes there never to; she is lie in her origin and lie in her end. And therefore is Satan at last with all his might serviceable to God's glorifying. Lucifer is, one can say, through the test become aware, that nothing true is but God. Therefore is Lucifer as good a proof of God as an angel. If the good proves that God is, so proves the evil that only God is (Baader). Cf. Augustine, de civ. XI and XII. Anselm, de casu diaboli. Lombard, Sent. II dist. 2-7. Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 63. 64. Petavius, de Angelis l. III. Gerhard, Loc. V c. 4. sect. 10 sq. Quenstedt, Theol. I. Zanchius, Op. III. Voetius, Disp. I. Daub, Judas Iscariot, Heidelberg. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. III. Lange, Dogm. II. Dorner II. Oosterzee § 76. Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrh. I².
6. Besides the difference between devilish and human sins, there is also among the latter again a great difference. The Stoa, Novatian, Sebastian Franck, Deurhof, and others have wrongly denied this. Well is in root the sin and the goodness undivided; whoever has one, has them all, and whoever lacks one, lacks them all; between good and evil there is no stepwise shift, someone either matches with God's law or not: and God's law is a living whole, which, broken in one of its commands, is harmed in its whole, for God, who gave the broken command, is the maker of all other commands, James 2:10, cf. Vinet, The Unity of the Law, in his New Evangelical Studies. Rothe, Theological Ethics § 730. 731. But for that reason, not all sins are alike. The sundry names used for sin already point to that. With the offering of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, it comes out that the mindset is of more worth than the gift. The law given to Israel indeed holds sundry ceremonial commands, but through the whole Old Testament, the upright doing yet stands far above the worshipful and liturgical; faith is reckoned as righteousness, Genesis 15:6, obedience is better than offering, 1 Samuel 15:22, Amos 2:6, 5:14, 21ff., Hosea 4:1ff., 12:7, Micah 6:6, 8, Isaiah 1:11ff., 5:8ff., Jeremiah 7:3, 22:3, Ezekiel 16:49, 18:5ff., Zechariah 7:5ff., Malachi 3:5, etc., cf. Clemen, The Christian Teaching of Sin I 70. When after the exile Pharisaism rises and turns this bond around, Jesus and the apostles go back again to law and prophets, Matthew 5-7, 19:18ff., Mark 7:21ff., Romans 1:29ff., 1 Corinthians 5:10ff., 6:9ff., 2 Corinthians 12:20ff., Galatians 5:19ff., etc. The law itself moreover makes a difference between sins done without evil intent, out of unknowledge or weakness, which do not break the bond and can be atoned within the bond, and sins done with awareness and on purpose, which put the doer outside the bond and make him worthy of death, Leviticus 4, 5, 22:14, Numbers 15:22ff., 35:11ff., Joshua 20:3, 9. The Scripture never leaves the outward standpoint, which seeks the measure of sin only in God's law. But nevertheless, the guilt of the breaking is yet smaller or greater, according as the command was harmed with weaker or stronger awareness and will. On one hand, Stade, History of the People of Israel I 512 f., wrongly draws from Genesis 12:17, 20:3, 26:10, Numbers 22:34, 1 Samuel 14:24ff., 36ff., that to the old Israel the difference between aware and unaware breakings was unknown and one could thus become guilty wholly outside his knowing and willing; for all these places hold the unknowledge as self-caused or speak of no guilt. But on the other hand, it is also not true that sin in general only is insofar as there is also an awareness of it, Schleiermacher, Christian Faith 68, 2. Well does sin assume some knowledge of the law; a man without the least upright sense would be unaccountable but also cease to be man, Romans 2:14, 15; and well does sin commonly go with some guilt-sense, but yet the measure of sin is not the guilt-awareness but God's law. There are sins that are hidden not only for others, but also for ourselves, Job 11:4ff., Psalm 19:13, 90:8, or first later acknowledged and confessed as guilt, Psalm 25:7, 51:7. Unknowledge is also often itself sin, and the guilt-awareness weakens, according as the sin is longer served, Amos 2:11, Hosea 4:6, Micah 3:1, 6:8, Proverbs 24:12, Ecclesiastes 4:17. Therefore the inward awareness of guilt cannot set the kind of the sin. Though unknowledge thus can never make good the sin itself, it yet often, when it is not willful, serves as an excuse. Paul says that he before was a blasphemer, persecutor, and oppressor, but adds that mercy was shown him because he did it unknowingly, 1 Timothy 1:13. And so Holy Scripture speaks many times of the sins of the Jews and the Gentiles, as done in unknowledge, Luke 23:34, Acts 3:17-19, 13:27, 17:30, Ephesians 4:18, Hebrews 5:2, 1 Peter 1:14, 2:25. Thereby those sins are indeed not stripped of their guilty kind, as Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation² II 38. 241-246. III 350-354 seems to think; for Romans 1-3, 5:12ff., Ephesians 4:17-19, Colossians 3:5-7, 1 Corinthians 15:9, 1 Timothy 1:13, 15, etc., teach otherwise. But yet these sins, done in unknowledge, are thereby set apart from sins come from hardening; the unknowledge offers a plea for forgiveness. And as the sins differ in degree and measure, according as they are done out of unknowledge and weakness or out of intent and evil, so are they also set apart by the thing against which they are aimed: sins against the first table are heavier than against the second, Matthew 22:37, 38; by the doer who does them: according as someone is richer gifted, the guilt of his breaking grows, Matthew 11:21, Luke 12:47, 48, John 9:41, 15:22, 24; by the settings under which they are done: who steals out of poverty sins less heavily than who does it out of greed, Proverbs 6:30, Isaiah 26:10; by the measure in which someone gives in to the sin: who commits adultery with thought and word stands guilty but weighs down his judgment when he fulfills the sin in the deed, Matthew 5:28. There is also in sin a unfolding, there is a law of sin. A certain sin comes bit by bit to stand through suggestion, delight, consent, working; in suggestion is the seed of sin, in delight it gets nourishment, in consent perfection, Gregory the Great, cf. Lombard, Sentences II 24, 8. Bonaventure, Breviloquium III 8. And so sin also unfolds little by little in a person, in a household and kindred, in a fellowship and folk, and also in the whole mankind. Sin is indeed not in itself so rich that it can take so many shapes, for it is no self-standing root and is in being nothing but lack of good. But as in its spring, so it also lasts in its unfolding only on and through the good. It binds itself with the endless richness of the made, wrecks all that is, fights with the whole world as its tool against God and his holy law, and thereby takes all those sundry forms and shapes, which all together give it the kind of a well-ruled realm, of a living whole breathed by one root, of a world, standing under the leading of the ruler of the world, the god of this age.
While sin in its essence is privation, neither a principle of division nor a division can be derived from it itself. Privation takes its form from the form to which it is opposed. The earlier dogmatics and ethics therefore spoke well about the character of the first sin but otherwise made no effort to search for a so-called principle of sin and to reduce all transgressions of the moral law to it. Only in later times has one tried to establish such a principle, and sought it alternately in sensuality, Schleiermacher, or in selfishness, Müller, Tholuck, Vilmar, Philippi, Lange, and further Thomasius, Kahnis, Frank, Zöckler, etc., or also in both, Rothe, Lipsius.
Indeed, human sins also mostly show the character of sensuality or selfishness, of fleshly desire or spiritual pride, of weakness or wickedness; sometimes sin seems to consist in the dominion of matter over the spirit, sometimes also in a misuse of freedom, in rebellion against God's ordinances. But yet neither has Rothe succeeded in explaining selfishness from sensuality, nor has J. Müller with his pre-existentialism in explaining sensuality from selfishness, cf. Dorner. And that is also well understandable. Metaphysically and abstractly, sin cannot be described otherwise and no further than as privation of the good; then it has no principle of its own, no real existence; it exists only in the good. The forms it assumes, it borrows from the good in which it dwells and which it corrupts. It will therefore differ in appearance according to the creatures in which it resides. Although always privation of the good, it bears a particular character in angels and humans and even in each of these again. And since man by nature is neither solely a sensual nor solely a spiritual being but always both together, therefore all sin in him will also show this character. No single sin of man is exclusively sensuality or exclusively selfishness. Just as with the first sin in Adam, different sides can be noticed in every sin, even though usually one stands out more than the other. Every sin in man is aversion from God, disobedience, rebellion, anarchy, anomie, and at the same time, since he never has enough in himself, conversion to the creature, idolatry, pride, selfishness, sensuality, etc., Bonaventura.
And since the creatures to which man can turn are so many, therefore sin in him can also take on so many forms. There are as many kinds of sins as there are different commandments, duties, virtues, moral goods. Thomas divided sins according to the objects on which they are directed, Scotus according to the virtues to which they are opposed, cf. Liguori. And besides that, there still existed many other divisions, such as that into seven chief sins, pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, gluttony, envy, sloth (memorial word: saligia); according to the norm into sins against the different commandments of the law or into sins against God, the neighbor, and ourselves; according to the instrument with which they occur, into sins with thoughts, words, and works, or into sins of the spirit and of the flesh, or according to 1 John 2:16 into sins of sensing, knowing, and ruling, or into sins of weakness, ignorance, and wickedness; according to the form into sins of omission and of commission, or into sins per se and per accidens; according to the adjuncts into hidden and open, ruling and non-ruling, silent and crying sins, etc., cf. Lombard, Thomas, Gerhard, Ursinus, Mastricht, Heidegger, Vilmar, Zöckler, etc.
Leaving further development to ethics, we discuss here only the Roman distinction of sins into mortal sins and venial sins. This has its origin in the practice of penance, and it appears in substance already in Tertullian, De Pudicitia 2, 3, 19; Adversus Marcionem IV 9, and in Augustine, who spoke of light, brief, minute, minimal, daily sins, which still remain in believers, Enchiridion 44, 71; De Civitate Dei XXI 27; De Natura et Gratia 39; De Spiritu et Littera 36. Developed by the scholastics, Lombard and others on Sentences II dist. 42; Thomas, Summa Theologica I-II qu. 88, 89, it was established by the church, Council of Trent VI c. 11 can. 27 XIV 5; Roman Catechism II 5 qu. 40, and since then defended by all theologians with zeal against all opposition, Bellarmine, De Amissione Gratiae I c. 3 sq.; Becanus, Theologia Scholastica II p. 117; Liguori, Theologia Moralis , de pecc. n. 51 sq.; Busenbaum, Theologia Moralis , de pecc. qu. 31 sq.; Antoine, Theologia Moralis , de pecc. c. 2 etc.
According to this distinction, there are sins that cause the loss of received grace and are worthy of death, and others, such as an idle word, an overly loud laugh, an involuntary rising desire, anger, wrath, a very small theft etc., which do not cause the loss of grace, not so much against as beside the law, and are by nature forgivable. The distinction is grounded on the fact that Scripture speaks of different sins and punishments, Matt. 5:22, 7:3, 23:23, Luke 6:41, 1 Cor. 3:12-15, sometimes connects death to sins, Rom. 1:32, 6:23, 1 Cor. 6:9, Gal. 5:21, 1 John 3:14, and yet often continues to recognize believers as such, even if they stumble in many things, Prov. 24:16, Matt. 1:19, Luke 1:6, James 3:2, and further also on the consideration that there are curable and incurable diseases and that there are small offenses which do not break friendship.
The Reformers rejected this distinction as contrary to God's Word. They did not deny that there were degrees in sins; and they also retained the terms mortal sins and venial sins, but they attached a different meaning to them. The Lutherans had to adopt the distinction to a certain extent, because believers could commit sins whereby grace was preserved, and others whereby it was lost, Luther in Köstlin, Luthers Theologie II; Melanchthon, Loci Communes , de peccato; Gerhard, Loci X c. 20; cf. also Bellarmine, De Amissione Gratiae I c. 4. But the Reformed went further and wanted nothing to do with the whole distinction. If they sometimes still used the words, they understood by them that all sins, except the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, can be forgiven through God's mercy and are in fact forgiven to believers, but that they all in themselves are worthy of death, Calvin, Institutes II 8, 58; III 2, 11; 4, 28; Antidote to the Council of Trent VI 12; Ursinus, Tractatus Theologicus 209; Gomarus, Theses Theologicae disp. 13; de Moor III 308-312; Turretin, Theologia Elenctica IX 4; van Mastricht IV 3, 22; Pictet, Christian Theology VI 11; Heppe, Dogmatics 257. The Scripture passages on which the Romans rely for their distinction are then also all without any proving power. Only Matt. 5:22 offers some appearance of ground, but the intention of Jesus' word there is quite different from distinguishing light from heavy sins. Over against the ancients, namely, who said that first the sinful deed, the actual murder, made one guilty and punishable at the local court, Jesus says that not first the deed but already the first uprising of unrighteous anger, even if it does not yet express itself in a word, makes one guilty and punishable at that court; that when that anger expresses itself in a small, unwilling word, the sin is already so great that it must be handled by the Sanhedrin; and that it, when the anger expresses itself in a reproachful word, at once, without form of process, is worthy of the hellish fire.
There is here thus so little talk of forgivable sins, that Jesus precisely conversely deems the slightest sin most highly punishable, as punishable as the ancients deemed the sinful deed, that is, the murder. Jesus equates the uprising unrighteous anger with murder; he says that the lightest sin is precisely already a very heavy sin, which deserves as great punishment as according to the ancients the murder. What punishment this uprising of anger is worthy of hereafter, Jesus says not a word; but if that anger is paired with a reproachful word, then this sin is so great that it is at that same moment worthy of the hellish punishment; no court is needed anymore to determine a punishment. Well understood, this text is thus rather an argument against than for the distinction of mortal sins and venial sins. And so the whole Scripture stands over against this division. The law is an organic whole, James 2:10, whoever offends in one commandment is in principle guilty of all; it must be fulfilled in its whole, Matt. 5:17-19; it demands us wholly with the whole heart and mind, with soul and body, Matt. 22:37; for it nothing is indifferent and slight, cursed is he who does not continue in all that is written in the book of the law, to do it, Deut. 27:26, Gal. 3:10; even the smallest and slightest transgressions of the law, such as an uprising anger, an unclean desire, a superfluous affirmation, an idle word, Matt. 5:22, 28, 37, 12:36, Eph. 5:4 are sin, in principle equal to sinful deeds, and thus as sin also lawlessness, enmity against God. Considered according to the principle, there are no small and slight sins. No sin is to be despised as small, since in truth none is small, when Paul has pronounced generally about every sin that the sting of death is sin, Basil in Gerhard loc. cit.
When a sin, for example an idle word, is considered by itself and detached from its whole connection with the person, the circumstances etc., the assertion seems exceedingly strict that it deserves eternal death. But it is precisely that abstract, atomistic view, which, as contrary to Scripture and to reality at the same time, was principally rejected by the Reformers. Sin is no quantity that, isolated from the doer, can be counted on the fingers or weighed in the balance. The Roman distinction has in fact also led to all kinds of evil practices. Not only are the theologians not agreed whether the venial sin offends God or not; whether it ought to be confessed or not; whether for its restoration actual repentance is needed or the performance of some meritorious work is sufficient. But all also acknowledge that the distinction both in theory and practice is very difficult and scarcely maintainable. One must therefore take refuge in all kinds of subtle reasonings, which underhand cause the whole character of sin to be lost. Where reasonings fail, one counts up the opinions of the doctors and contents oneself with a smaller or greater degree of probability. Thus one comes to an atomistic, casuistic, mechanical, materialistic estimation of sins and of satisfactions, and keeps the souls continually in fear whether they have perhaps committed a mortal sin, or brings them to lightness and indifference, since the sins are mostly of very light nature and very easily made good.
7. Only of one sin does Holy Scripture make mention, which is unforgivable in this and the coming life, namely, the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. In the Old Testament there is no mention of it, although in the law for the sins beyad ramah no sin-offering was instituted, because they made the law itself of no effect, Heb. 10:28. Jesus speaks of it first, Matt. 12:31, Mark 3:28, Luke 12:10. When He once fully healed a possessed man who was also blind and dumb, the crowds were so amazed by this wonder that they acknowledged Jesus as the Son of David, as the Christ. But the Pharisees were thereby driven to a peak of hatred, which made them say not only that He cast out devils by the devil, but that He Himself was possessed by the devil, Mark 3:22, Beelzeboul echei . This accusation was prompted solely by hatred; it sprang from sheer, conscious, willful enmity. Jesus also shows this, Matt. 12:25-30; a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, Satan does not cast himself out, but the casting out of Satan is proof that the kingdom of God has come to them, Jesus casts out the devil by the Spirit of God. The opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees is here thus at its strongest; they say that Jesus is possessed, does His wonders by the devil, and establishes the kingdom of the devil. And Jesus declares that He is the Christ, that by the Spirit of God He casts out the devil, and that He thereby brings the kingdom of God to them. And in this connection, on this occasion, Jesus speaks of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as the unforgivable sin. Whether one thinks that the Pharisees committed this sin at that moment, or whether one believes this must be denied, among other reasons because the Holy Ghost was not yet poured out, John 7:39, in any case the connection makes clear that the sin against the Holy Ghost must consist in a conscious, willful, deliberate blasphemy of the clearly recognized, and yet out of hatred and enmity attributed to the devil, revelation of God's grace in Christ through the Holy Ghost.
The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost thus does not consist in simple unbelief, nor in generally resisting and grieving the Holy Ghost, nor in the denial of the personality or Godhead of the Holy Ghost, nor in sinning against better knowledge even to the end, without more. It is also not a sin against the law alone, but specifically also against the gospel, and indeed against the gospel in its clearest revelation. Thus much precedes it, objectively a revelation of God's grace in Christ, the nearness of His kingdom, a powerful working of the Holy Ghost, and subjectively an enlightenment and conviction of the understanding, so lively and strong that one cannot deny the truth of God, that one must acknowledge it as divine. And then it itself consists not in a doubting of or simple denying of that truth, but in a denial that goes against the conviction of the understanding, against the enlightenment of the conscience, against the prompting of the heart; in a fully conscious, willful, and deliberate attributing of what is clearly recognized as God's work to the influence and working of Satan, that is, in a decided blasphemy of the Holy Ghost, in a willful declaring that the Holy Ghost is the spirit from the abyss, that the truth is the lie, that Christ is Satan himself. Its root is thus the fully conscious, deliberate hatred against God and what is recognized as divine; its essence is sin in its highest revelation, the completed, the consummated revolution, the setting of God in the place of Satan and of Satan in the place of God; its character is no longer human but demonic. Even if it be that the devils do not commit this sin in this specific form, because God's grace has not appeared to them, Christ has not assumed their nature, the Holy Ghost has not been poured out among them, and the kingdom of God has not come to them; yet the demonic sin bears the same character that the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost displays among men. Therefore it is also unforgivable; God's grace is not too small and powerless for it; but there are also in the kingdom of sin laws and ordinances that are laid in it by God and maintained by Him. And that law exists here with this sin in that it excludes all repentance, sears the conscience, utterly hardens and confirms the sinner, and in this way makes his sin unforgivable. Besides in the gospels, there is nowhere in Scripture direct mention of this sin. But this blasphemy against the Holy Ghost can be committed in various circumstances. And so Heb. 6:4-8, 10:25-29 cf. 12:15-17 says that those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and who then fall back to Judaism, tread under foot and crucify the Son of God and put Him to open shame, count the blood of the New Testament unclean and do despite to the Spirit of grace, that such cannot be brought again to repentance. And likewise 1 John 5:16 testifies that there is a sin which necessarily by its nature leads to death without repentance, and for which John does not say, that is, does not command, that one should pray. The prayer, if not unlawful, is yet fruitless. Probably John thinks here in connection with his whole epistle of the decided and willful denial of Christ as the incarnate Son of God. In both these places we thus have to do with sins that completely harden man, and thus are themselves unforgivable. In fact and in substance these coincide with the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. For the amazingly rich literature on this subject, reference may be made to Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 14 art. 1. Comm. on Sent. II dist. 43. M. Vitringa II 378. Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I 88. 254. Schaff, Die Sünde wider den H. Geist, Halle 1841. Muller, Sünde II 596 f. Clemen, Die chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I 89-100.
1. Sin, already so dreadful in its essence, acquires an even more serious character through the breadth of its dominion. Even outside of special revelation, the absolute universality of sin is acknowledged. The various religions with their priests and altars, their offerings and penances, are all built upon the confession of sin; dogma and worship, prayer and song, religion and philosophy sometimes express in a touching manner the general consciousness of sin. Ἀνθρωποισι γαρ τοις πασι κοινον ἐστι τοὐξαμαρτανειν. Vitiis nemo sine nascitur. Communis hominum labes. Cf. Pfanner, Theol. gent. IX 7. Bretschneider, Dogm. II 16. Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence III. Hettinger, Apol. d. Christ. III 30, 412. Still more clearly is this universality of sin declared in Holy Scripture, Gen. 6:5, 8:21, 1 Kings 8:46, 2 Chron. 6:36, Job 4:17-21, 14:4, 25:4-6, Ps. 14:3, 53:2, 130:3, 143:2, Prov. 20:9, Eccl. 7:20, Isa. 53:6, 58:1, 59:4, 12, etc., cf. Sir. 8:6, 25:26, Wisd. 9:6, 13-18, 12:10, 11, etc. Jesus assumes it when He calls all without distinction to repentance and connects entrance into the kingdom of God with regeneration from water and Spirit, Matt. 4:17, Mark 1:15, 6:12, Luke 12:47, John 3:3, 5. Indeed, He speaks of the healthy and righteous, Matt. 9:12, 13, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:31, 32, but He does so without passing judgment on the nature of that health and righteousness, objectively, according to the opinion of those whom He thus describes. What He Himself thinks of that righteousness is sufficiently clear from other passages; over the Pharisees He pronounces His woe, but the weary and heavy-laden He invites to His rest. In like manner, the apostles teach that all have sinned, that the whole world lies in wickedness and is condemnable before God, that all need the forgiving love of the Father, redemption through Christ, renewal by the Holy Spirit, Rom. 3:9-20, 23, 5:12, 11:32, 2 Cor. 5:19, Gal. 3:22, 1 John 1:8, 5:19. Furthermore, according to Scripture, sin is inherent in man from youth, from birth, even from conception, Gen. 6:5, 8:21, Job 14:4, 15:14, Ps. 25:7, 51:7, 58:4, 103:14, Isa. 43:27, 48:8, 57:3, Ezek. 16:3, Hos. 5:7, John 3:6, Rom. 7:7ff., Eph. 2:3. David in his confession of guilt goes back to the deepest ground of his sinfulness, finds it in the sins of his parents, and explains thereby that he himself from his conception and birth has been unclean before God, Ps. 51:7. In John 3:6, Jesus says that the flesh, that is, man as a sensual being, can only bring forth flesh, that such a man has no entrance into the kingdom of God and needs regeneration from the Spirit for that, that man as such a sensual being, as σαρξ, is unclean and corrupt from his birth. And in Eph. 2:3, Paul declares that Jews and Gentiles are by nature children of wrath; he certainly does not set φυσει here in opposition to actual sins, of which he is just speaking, vv. 1-3, but says that they were by nature children of God's wrath, while now, after they have been made alive and saved by grace, they are objects of His love, and thus indicates that their former state, their being dead through sins and trespasses, was a natural state, a φυσις, which rested in their very being, cf. Rom. 2:14, 11:21, Gal. 2:15, 4:8. For the rest, it is true that Holy Scripture much more assumes the universality of sin and the corruption of man going back even to conception than describes it at length and repeatedly. Men themselves are everywhere portrayed as sinners; not only the generation before the flood and all Gentiles and ungodly, but also the people of Israel; and among that people, many sins are related even of the pious, of the patriarchs, Moses, Job, David, Solomon, etc., yes, it is precisely the pious who, even where they are convinced of the righteousness of their cause, yet fall down in humble confession of guilt before God and plead for mercy and forgiveness, Ps. 6, 25, 32, 38, 51, 130, 143, Isa. 6:5, 53:4-6, etc. It is the heart of man that is corrupt, Gen. 6:5, 8:21, Ps. 14:1, Jer. 17:9, Ezek. 36:26, Matt. 15:19; from it are the issues of life, Prov. 4:23, from it come all iniquities and also folly, Mark 7:22. The understanding of man is darkened, Job 21:14, Isa. 1:3, Jer. 4:22, John 1:5, Rom. 1:21, 22, 1 Cor. 1:18-28, 2:14, Eph. 4:18, 5:8; his soul is guilty and unclean and needs atonement and conversion, Lev. 17:11, Ps. 19:8, 41:5, Prov. 19:2, 15, Matt. 16:26, 1 Pet. 1:22; his spirit is proud, erring, defiled, and therefore must be broken, enlightened, cleansed, Ps. 51:19, Prov. 16:18, 32, Eccl. 7:9, Isa. 57:15, 66:2, 1 Cor. 7:34, 2 Cor. 7:1, 1 Thess. 5:23; his conscience is defiled and needs cleansing, Titus 1:15, Heb. 9:9, 14, 10:22; his desire, affection, and will extend to the forbidden and are powerless for good, Jer. 13:23, John 8:34, 36, Rom. 6:17, 8:7, 2 Cor. 3:5; and the body, with all its members, eyes, Deut. 29:4, Ps. 18:28, Isa. 35:5, 42:7, 2 Pet. 2:14, 1 John 2:16, ears, Deut. 29:4, Ps. 115:6, 135:17, Isa. 6:10, Jer. 5:21, Zech. 7:11, feet, Ps. 38:17, Prov. 1:16, 4:27, 6:18, Isa. 59:7, Rom. 3:15, mouth and tongue, Job 27:4, Ps. 17:10, 12:4, 15:3, Jer. 9:3, 5, Rom. 3:14, James 3:5-8, etc., stands in the service of unrighteousness. In one word, sin does not cling to and around but dwells in man and extends over the whole man and over all mankind, Schultz, Altt. Theol. 670f. Of the passages cited for the opposite view, only Rom. 7:7-26 needs some further discussion. At all times, the Pelagians have appealed to this pericope as proof that the νους or the πνευμα in man has remained free from sin and that it resides only in the σαρξ; in modern times, this exegesis has been almost universally accepted. However, Augustine in his later period and all his followers, both in the Roman and in the Protestant churches, have always contradicted this interpretation and understood verses 14-25 as spoken by Paul as a regenerate man and concerning the present, an explanation that is still advocated today by Delitzsch, Philippi, Luthardt, Harless, Thomasius, Umbreit, Kohlbrugge, and others, cf. Tholuck in his Comm. zum Brief an die Römer, 1856, pp. 333-369, and further Meyer, Philippi, etc. The latter exegesis deserves preference for various reasons. 1. Paul argues in Rom. 7:7-26 that the law, from which the believer, by having died with Christ, is released, is itself not sinful. And he does this by pointing out that it first brought the believer to the knowledge of his sin and his death, 7-13, and that it now still has the approval of his inner man, even though his flesh resists it, 14-26. In this connection, the argument that the law now still has the approval of the believer, even though he is released from it, is necessary. For the thesis that the law itself is holy, it is not enough that the unregenerate, but it is precisely necessary that the regenerate approves it. And so Paul speaks from verse 14 onward in the present tense, not from liveliness of representation, but because he, precisely as a regenerate, loves and approves the law. Because the law indirectly gave him the painful experience of his sin and death, because he in fellowship with Christ, v. 4, Gal. 2:19, 20, has died to the law through the law and is freed from its curse, Gal. 3:13, therefore and thereby he has come to know it as holy and righteous and good, gives testimony to it, and establishes the law through faith, Rom. 3:31. 2. Because Paul, according to the course of his argument, wants to honor the law in its holy character, he casts all guilt upon the sin that dwells in him and makes a sharp distinction between the center and the periphery of his being. Inwardly, according to his will, according to his inner man, he loves God's law, but in his members dwells another power and another law, namely, sin. Such a deep distinction is nowhere assumed in Scripture for the unregenerate. In them there is indeed a knowledge of God and of the law and also a doing by nature of the things of the law, Rom. 1:19, 2:14, 15, that is, thus a conflict between reason and sensuality, conscience and lust, understanding and heart; but a conflict between flesh and spirit, as Paul portrays it here, exists only in the regenerate, Gal. 5:17; only they can say that they love the law of God, approve it, will it with all their heart. 3. Although Paul as a regenerate still calls himself σαρκινος, πεπραμενος ὑπο την ἁμαρτιαν, yet he does not say thereby that he is ἐν σαρκι, 8:8, 9, or walks κατα σαρκα, 8:1, for he calls himself so only because on account of the sin dwelling in his members he cannot do what he wills and is thus held captive by that law of sin in his members. Although wretched, because with the flesh he serves the law of sin, yet with his νους he serves the law of God, v. 25, and it is precisely this latter that is further developed in Rom. 8. In Christ he is righteous and walks according to the Spirit. 4. In addition, if Rom. 7:14ff. were to be understood of the unregenerate, regeneration itself would be unnecessary, a helping grace would be sufficient, and the whole teaching of Scripture on sin and grace, on justification and sanctification, on faith and repentance would be overthrown. Rather, Rom. 7:7-25 is a strong proof for the total corruption of human nature; for if the regenerate still has so to complain of the power of sin that dwells in him, then the unregenerate is wholly and altogether, without knowing it, a servant of sin, being in the flesh and walking according to the flesh, and the mind of that flesh is enmity against God.
This commonness of sin is drawn in Genesis 3 from the fall of the first man. Indeed, it stands not there with even so many words; Genesis 3 heeds much more the change in the settings that comes in because of the fall (the sorrow of the woman, the cursing of the earth, the driving out from the garden), than the upright turnabout that took place with Adam and with his offspring. But yet it tells that right after the evil done, shame and fear take hold of them, that the awareness of guilt wakes, that they flee away from God. The punishments spoken out in Genesis 3:16 and after have bearing not only on Adam and Eve but without doubt also on their offspring, and these punishments take for granted, after the whole outlook of the Old Testament, also shared guilt. The first deed that is told after the fall is Cain's brother-murder; the story itself becomes another, even without that being said nearer, it becomes a story of sin, woe, and death. The man is now by kind wicked, Genesis 6:5, 8:21. In like wise, the further Old Testament writings bring not outspokenly the commonness of sin in link with the fall of the first man. They stay by the deed of the commonness of sin or lead it back also to the fading, fleshly kind of the man, Job 4:17 and after, 14:4, 15:14 and after, 25:4 and after, Psalm 78:38 and after, 103:13 and after, Mark 14:38, John 3:6, Romans 6:7 and after, and so on. It is first Paul who in 1 Corinthians 15:21 and after, Romans 5:12 and after, makes clear the commonness of sin out of Adam's unheeding, see also Wisdom 1:13, 14, 2:23, 24, Apocalypse of Baruch 23:4, 54:15, 56:5, 9, 4 Ezra 7:68. In 1 Corinthians 15:21 and after he says that the death of all men has its spring in the man Adam on the same wise as the uprising out of the dead in the man Christ. There lies herein clearly that the death of all men is not first brought by their own sins, but already spoken out over all men and gone through to all men, only and alone for Adam's unheeding; on the same wise as the uprising is not earned by the own good works, the faith and so on of the believers, but only through the heeding of Christ. Not in and through themselves but in Adam die they; and not in and through themselves stand they up but only in Christ. How and why that death is gone through to all is set out nearer in Romans 5:12 and after. While we through the death of Christ as foes are made at one, we are sure that we with Him also shall live evermore; yes so sure are we that we now already boast through Christ, who gave us the at-oning, verses 10, 11. The goodwill and the life of Christ go therefore (dia touto, verse 12) the sin and death of Adam far beyond. This is the headthought of the cut verses 12-21, and it is worked out and shown on this wise. Through one man is the sin, as mighty and all-ruling beginning, come into the world, and on that wise and in that way is also the death gone through to all men, forasmuch as all sinned. The little words eph' hō are not with Origen, Vulgate, Augustine, and so on through in quo to turn, for they stand too far from anthrōpos off, to be able to go back thereon, and they mean also not in which , though this thought in itself is not unwritly, Hebrews 7:10, 1 Corinthians 15:22, but they are a linking, epi toutō hoti , for that, because, since, Calvin, Martyr and the most newer outreaders; hēmarton shows not a sinning standing, but a deed. Paul says thus in verse 12: Adam overstepped, thereby came the sin and the death into the world and ruled over all. The reason-giving saying eph' hō pantes hēmarton gives not to know that Paul seeks the spring of the death of each man in his own, deedly sins, for in 1 Corinthians 15:22 says he outspokenly that all in Adam die; here in verse 14 makes he clear that the death also ruled over them who sinned not in the likeness of Adam's overstepping, and--so may we add thereto--also over the children; and in verses 15 and 17 speaks he it as strongly as may be out, that through the misdeed of one many are died. Yet on the other side by that reason-giving saying is not stillly to think that all in Adam have sinned. This is in itself unlikely, but it is made unmaying thereby that verses 13 and 14 rightly handle of the sin that the men not in Adam but self ownly did, though they sinned then also not in the likeness of the overstepping of Adam. But Paul will say that through Adam's overstepping both the sin and the death, both in link with each other, in the mankind to ruling are come, that after Adam's overstepping all men self ownly sinners become are and all head for head die. He shows this standing in the following verses thus: the sin that through Adam's overstepping into the world came in, was there also and ruled also in the time of Adam to Moses, when God his law yet not had outcalled; the men sinned also then. But--so throws Paul himself as it were against--the sin becomes yet not toreckoned as there no law is; the law of Moses was there yet not, thus could then the sin also not toreckoned become. And thereon answers he: very surely yes, the death has yet ruled from Adam to Moses to, though it also is that the men then no upholding, through God outspokenly and wordly outcalled law overstepped and thus not sin could in likeness of the overstepping of Adam. They sinned yet well, because they also then a law had that them by kind known was, Romans 1:18 and after, 2:12-15. As the death thus then yet has ruled, then must also then the sin have ruled. And it ruled then, not through that each ownly an upholding bidding overstepped as Adam and thus each for himself and through himself a sinner became; no, but because through the overstepping of Adam the sin in the world was come and over all ruled and in the following thereof also the death. Adam is thus rightly a type of Christ. It goes with the sin and the death that from Adam us to come on the same wise to as with the rightness and the life which Christ has won. There is otherness in strength, the goodwill is overfuller and the life is mightier, but the way how, whereupon both us lot become, is the same. The misdeed of one was the spring of the guilt, the sin and the death of all men, and so is the heeding of one the spring of all rightness, freespeaking and life. In one are all doomed and died; in one become they all rightmade and kept. In both happenings goes there a doom of God, a krima , beforehand; and out of that krima become on one side our sin and death, and on other side our rightness and our life led off. And so comes the thought which Paul in this cut unfolds hereon down: 1º over the one overstepping of Adam has God a doom felled, standing in guiltyspeaking and dooming to the death. 2º that doom is in Adam felled over all men, because they on the one or other wise, which Paul here not nearer makes clear but out of his speechlink lets guess, in Adam taken in were; all are in Adam guilty spoken and to death doomed. 3º kraftens this beforehandgoing doom of God are all men ownly sinners become and die they all also deedly. God thinks and beholds, dooms and dooms all men in one, and therefore come they also all as sinners out of him forth and are they all to the death underthrown. See Moor III. Turretin, Theol. El. IX. Outworking of the Ex. of Tol. X. Dietzsch, Adam and Christ, Bonn 1871. Hünefeld, Romans 5:12-21, Leipzig 1895. Hofmann, Writproof I. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I. Pfleiderer, The Paulinism and so on.
2. Upon these data of Scripture was the doctrine of original sin built in the Christian church. From the beginning, a certain connection was acknowledged between Adam's sin and that of his offspring, cf. many quotations in Vossius, Hist. Pelag. Horn, Comm. de sententiis eorum patrum, quorum auctoritas ante Aug. plurimum valuit, de peccato originali. Wiggers, Aug. u. Pelag. I. Münscher-v. Coelln, D. G. I. Schwane, D. G. II. Harnack, D. G. III. Insofar is the claim that the doctrine of original sin is an invention of Augustine wholly untrue, and he himself could testify: non ego finxi peccatum originale, quod catholica fides credit antiquitus, de nupt. II. But yet it is true that theology in the first time, especially in the East, laid the stress much more over against Gnosticism upon the free will and the personal, actual sin than upon the original sin from Adam; and where it is acknowledged that a malum animae ex originis vitio antecedit, Tert. de an. it is yet not further determined what the essence of that original sin is, and the manner of its spreading is not more deeply thought through. Pelagius could therefore with some show of right appeal to many predecessors, but he went yet much further than they, taught something essentially different, and denied original sin. According to Pelagius, the image of God consisted only in the free personality, not in positive holiness, immortality, etc. Adam's transgression did not take away that image of God and in fact had no harmful consequences at all. There is no original sin. Only insofar has Adam's transgression done harm to his offspring, as it set a bad example, which, followed by others, made sin into a power in mankind. Inheritance of sin is a Manichaean error; sin is no state but a deed, and always bears a personal character; it would be against God's righteousness to impute strange sins to us; also the propagation in marriage would be unlawful, if the inheritance of sin took place in that way; moreover, baptized parents can no longer propagate sin, since it is indeed blotted out in baptism. Sin is therefore not propagated by generation but by imitation. Men, whose souls are created pure by God, are now still born in the same state as that in which Adam found himself before the fall; sickness, suffering, death, etc., are no punishments of sin; man is still fully free and can from himself know and do the good, he needs no grace; it is possible to abstain from all sins, and some men have indeed brought it so far, cf. the anti-Pelagian writings of Augustine and the literature, part II. Pelagius agreed in this denial of original sin with the Jews, who thought that the souls were created pure by God and were able to withstand the evil inclination dwelling in the flesh and to live sinlessly, Weber, System. And later the Socinians agreed with him, Fock, Der Socin., some Anabaptists, Cloppenburg, Op. II, many humanists and rationalists, Wegscheider, Instit. theol. § 117, and nowadays also Ritschl and his school. According to Ritschl we may not assume behind the particular, actual sins a general concept of sin, for such a concept is wholly unintelligible; a passively inherited state cannot be thought of as sin; Scripture does not teach it, Ps. 51:7 is but an individual confession, Eph. 2:3 looks upon the former actual sins of those who are now Christians, and Rom. 5:12 is too unclear to derive anything from it; original sin would take away all responsibility, make education impossible, annul the distinction of degrees in sins; every man would then in original sin already have risen to the highest degree of sin and the personal, actual sins would thereby hardly come into consideration anymore. No, sin is no unity by virtue of one principle but a collective unity as result of all individual acts and inclinations; and the subject of sin is not mankind as race, which is an abstraction and only a memory-image, but mankind as sum of all individuals. Not first the sinful state and then the deed, but contrariwise the self-determination of the will is the ground of all sins. Only the will, which continually does evil, gradually acquires an inclination, a habit, and this then works back upon the acts of will. And so there arises in man a law of sin, a kingdom of sin, a common sin, but this is quite something else than original sin and was wrongly so named by Schleiermacher. A sinless development of life can therefore also a priori not be denied, the will of children is not directed to evil, rather there is in them a general inclination to good, Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III. Unterricht in d. chr. Rel. Clemen, Die chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I.
However, this Pelagian explanation of the commonness of sin meets with too many and too serious objections for it to find entrance for long or with many. In the last century, with its rationalism, individualism, and optimism, there was room for it; Rousseau made public the thoughts from many a heart when he glorified uncorrupted nature and sought the cause of all sin and woe in society. But the historical sense that awoke after the revolution; the insight into the unreckonable worth of fellowship, society, and state; the organic outlook that has broken through everywhere; above all, the teaching of heredity, whose meaning, also in the spiritual and moral realm, has been set in the light more than before—these have made an end to the individualistic and atomistic view of mankind and of the sin that reigns in it. If anything stands fast, it is surely this, that sin is not merely an accidental showing in the life of individuals, but that it is a state and way of life of the whole human kindred, a mark of the species. The sinful deeds, which do not occur now and then but belong to all men in all ages and standings, point back to a sinful bent, just as evil fruits betoken an evil tree and muddy water points back to an unclean spring. From this alone is it made clear that all children from their youth show a lust for the forbidden and a leaning toward all kinds of evil. Indeed, the Pelagians have often spoken of the innocence of children, appealing to Jonah 4:11, Psalm 106:38, Matthew 18:3, 19:14, Luke 18:17, John 9:3, 1 Corinthians 7:14. And in a kin-wise sense that is also right; there is a difference in degree among sins; in bond with age and unfolding, sin in children has not yet come to its full showing and cannot yet appear in such frightful shapes as in later age; but experience also teaches all parents and teachers that with the growth in knowledge and so forth, the sinful leaning also unfolds in children. And when we look back on our own life, we find sin as far back as we can remember; and the deeper our guilt-awareness sinks, the more it goes back to the sins of youth, yes, of birth and begetting, Psalm 25:7, 51:7. The above-named Scripture places thus offer the Pelagians no stay; they speak at most of a kin-wise innocence, but do not teach the sinlessness of children. Furthermore, the claim that there have been or can be men who lived without sin is stripped of all likelihood and of all ground. Xenophon's witness about Socrates, Mem. I 1, 11. IV 8, 11, is understood by no one in an utter sense; of the godly in Old and New Testament, many sinful deeds are told to us; those farthest along the way of hallowing have in that same measure felt their guilt and shortcoming all the deeper. And so strong and common is the belief in the sinfulness of the whole human kindred, that if someone stepped forward with the claim of being sinless, we would all at once ascribe it to lack of self-knowledge, pride, or madness, Müller, Sin II 370. This utter commonness of sin cannot be made clear by following-after. It goes before all aware and willful deeds of the will, and is in us all a state, long before it passes over into deeds. That Ritschl does not acknowledge this hangs together in him also with nominalism; mankind is no living whole but the sum of all individuals; sin is no state but lives only in deeds of the will; things in general are, or at least are only knowable, in their workings. Yet Ritschl himself stays not true to his starting point; for though he denies inborn sin and teaches the wholeness of human nature, yet like Pelagius he gives to evil ensample and the sway of society such a might that thereby the commonness of sin is made clear and even a shared sin arises. Now one of two things: these sways from without work only by chance and then they make nothing clear and the commonness of sin is a riddle; or they truly bring about the common sinfulness, but then they are of a much worse kind than the Scriptural teaching of birth-sin. Furthermore, Ritschl fights this teaching with the claim that it lifts away all degrees in sin, but this rests on misunderstanding; he himself has but two kinds of sins, those of unknowing and of settled evilness, which surely do not take in the many-sidedness of sinful life. And the strivings to cast this teaching out of Holy Scripture bear, with all their sharpness of wit, yet too forceful a mark for them to be deemed thriving. Cf. Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, in Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. 1889. Dorner, Chr. Gl. II. Orr, The Ritschlian Theology, London 1897.
3. Pelagianism was condemned by the Christian church. From the beginning, the church fathers accepted a certain bond between Adam's sin and that of his offspring. Though this bond was not yet fully thought through, Adam's transgression still brought a great moral change for himself and for his descendants. The nature of this moral change, however, was understood in very different ways. According to Semi-Pelagianism, the consequences of Adam's fall for him and his descendants consisted, besides death, chiefly in a weakening of moral strength. There is no proper original sin that would be guilt, but there is yet an inherited evil; through Adam's fall, man has become morally sick; his will is weakened and inclined to evil; a strife has arisen in him between flesh and spirit, which makes it impossible for any man to live without sin; but he can still will the good, and if he wills it, grace comes to his aid in carrying it out. On this standpoint stands the Greek church, and although in the West Augustine had much sway, the church wandered ever further toward Semi-Pelagianism, and taught at Trent that free will is weakened but not destroyed, and that concupiscence in itself is no sin. Wholly in agreement with this is the view of the Anabaptists, of Zwingli, of the Remonstrants, the Herrnhutters, the Supernaturalists, and many newer theologians. All agree in this, that Adam's fall had consequences also for his descendants, because they stand in physical bond with him. But the moral state that has entered the human race as a result of Adam's transgression is not a state of sin and guilt, but of weakness, lack, sickness. In itself, this original sin cannot damn man and at most brings a punishment of loss, without punishment of sense; it is an occasion to sin but not sin itself in the proper sense. For since the will is weakened, it easily gives heed to the temptation that comes from the flesh; and then, when the will consents and yields to the desire, original sin becomes personal sin, which makes guilty and worthy of punishment. In substance, this teaching on original sin wholly agrees with the theory that sin arises from sensuality.
This semi-Pelagian view of original sin is, however, at bottom not much better than that of Pelagius and meets with just as great difficulties. 1. It mistakes the character and the seriousness of sin. For sin is anomia, lawlessness. The state in which men are born either agrees with God's law or departs from it; it is good or evil, not sinful or indeed sinful; there is no third. That this state is good and in all parts agrees with God's law, even the semi-Pelagians dare not assert. Yet they also do not call it sinful in the proper sense. And so they create an in-between state, and speak of original sin as a sickness, defect, infirmity, which is no proper sin but only can be an occasion to sin; or they separate sin and guilt and say, as Rothe and Kaftan do, that original sin indeed is sin but no guilt. 2. This is both impossible. Sin and guilt are inseparably bound to each other, Gal. 3:10, James 2:10, 1 John 5:17; if sin is anomia, then it is punishable, and conversely, where guilt and punishment is, there must sin be. Now however original sin is of such a kind, that death follows upon it, Rom. 5:14, that it makes unworthy of God's fellowship and his heaven (Doedes), that it in itself is unclean, that it is the occasion and the source of many sins, it must therefore itself indeed be sin. Otherwise God would be unrighteous, who with death, the wages of sin, Rom. 6:23, punishes what is no sin and deserves not death; the law would lose its absolute validity, for there would be deviation, which was worthy of no punishment; fellowship with God would be withheld without there being talk of guilt; between heaven and hell, good and evil, light and darkness would come a state, which was neither of both, a poena damni without poena sensus; what brings forth all kinds of sins, would itself be no sin; the tree would be good and yet it bore evil fruits; the spring would be pure but unclean the water, that flows forth from it. 3. That this inborn sinfulness first becomes sin and guilt, when the will consents to it, does not better the theory but makes it yet worse. For one of two: the will then stands as it were above and outside this inborn inclination, and then original sin consists in nothing but the inborn sensual nature and the whole character of sin goes lost, or the will itself is by this original sin in greater or lesser measure tainted and weakened; it roots itself in the sinful nature and comes up therefrom, and then one loses just in that same measure, as one lets the will be weakened, that which one with this theory wished to maintain, namely that there is no sin without free will-decision. But moreover, even if such a will, which wholly or in part stood outside the inborn sinful nature, were thinkable; it would yet in fact not give, what one aims at therewith. The first will-decisions, which consent to the inborn concupiscence, all fall in the first years, when the will is yet weak and powerless. No one is conscious that he with those first will-decisions loaded such a guilt upon himself, that he in fact then first fell and became a child of wrath. Over against who asserts this, each could excuse himself, that he knew no better and could not otherwise, that he for such a weighty decision over his eternal weal or woe already was placed in very unfavorable circumstances; yes, if original sin is no sin, then all other later sins, which so lightly and so necessarily flow forth therefrom, can also be no sin. Schleiermacher also rejected therefore the representation, that original sin cannot earlier be guilt, than before it breaks out in actual sins, since the circumstance that there has yet been lack of opportunity and of external incentive cannot increase the spiritual worth of man, Chr. Gl. I. 4. The semi-Pelagian theory not only does not solve the problem that here lies before us, but it touches it not even with the fingers and purposely closes the eyes to it. The universality of sin is a fact, which also the semi-Pelagians acknowledge; they reject the explanation thereof from imitation; they assume, that an unclean, defective, sick, sinful (though then also not sinful and punishable) state goes before the sinful deeds; they acknowledge, that this unclean, sick state in all without distinction leads to sinful, guilty, punishable deeds, so that the weakened free will in fact has bitterly little to mean. Well then, how is that awful phenomenon to be explained? How is it to be reconciled with God's righteousness, that He, now abstracted from the covenant of grace, lets all men be born in such a state, which for the children dying early in any case brings with it death and banishment from his fellowship and for all others eternal perdition? The semi-Pelagian theory thinks this problem not at all through and contents itself with a superficial and meaningless free-will doctrine. Cf. Müller, Sünde II.
4. On this problem, however, Paul had given an answer through the contrast with Christ, that through the offense of one, sin and death came into the world and passed on to all men. Gradually, in Christian theology, the awareness of this deep teaching opened up. Irenaeus said: in the first Adam we offended God, not doing his precept, but in the second Adam we are reconciled, being made obedient even unto death, Against Heresies V 16, 3. Tertullian spoke of an evil of the soul, which came to us from the fault of origin and is derived from Adam's fall; every soul is reckoned in Adam until it is reckoned anew in Christ, unclean as long as it is not reckoned anew, On the Soul 40. 41; see also Cyprian, On Works and Alms 1. Epistle 64, 5. Ambrose speaks most strongly, who more than others before him lays stress on the guilty character of all sin and on the sinful state in which we are born, and traces this back to Adam's fall; there was Adam and in him we all were, Adam perished and in him all perished. But yet it was especially Augustine who seized upon Paul's thought and developed it further; time and again, especially in his two writings against Julian, he appeals to Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Ephesians 2:3; further, he cites Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, and others, in defense of his view; then he also sees in the practice of infant baptism a strong proof for his doctrine of original sin; and finally he points out that the terrible misery of the human race cannot be explained otherwise than as a punishment for sin. How can God, who is yet good and just, subject all men from their conception to sin and death, if they are wholly innocent? There must rest upon all an original guilt; the heavy yoke that presses upon all children of Adam is otherwise not to be understood; whoever considers the miseries of human life, from the first cry of infants to the last sighs of the dying, must with Paul come to the recognition of an original sin. Since God's judgment is not unjust, therefore in the misery of the human race, which begins with the weeping of little ones, the original sin must be recognized, Unfinished Work against Julian III 77 and so passim, I 25. 49. II 107. III 44. 202. VI 17. 28 etc. Adam's sin must therefore be understood as a deed of him and of all his descendants. Adam was not a private person, not an individual alongside others, but all men were included in him. The manner of this is not wholly clear in Augustine; since in the question of the origin of the soul he refrained from a choice between traducianism and creationism, he also here does not decide definitely whether in the inclusion of the human race in Adam he thinks only realistically or also federally. On the one hand, he says time and again that all were in Adam's loins, as the Israelites in those of Abraham, that Adam could not bring forth better than he himself was, that Adam's sin is propagated by propagation and not by imitation, that Adam's sin becomes our share through birth in the same way as Christ's righteousness and life through regeneration, City of God XIII 3. Unfinished Work against Julian I 48 etc. But on the other hand, it is significant that he does not accept Tertullian's traducianism, and that he time and again expresses as strongly as possible that all were in Adam and sinned in him; all were that one man, we all were in that one, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins I 10. City of God XIII 14 etc. Original sin is distinguished from actual sins in that it was not personally committed by us, but it is yet sin, because in a certain sense it was again our deed. It is both a foreign and our own sin; for original sins are foreign, because each one did not commit them in his own life; but ours, because there was Adam and in him we all were, Unfinished Work against Julian III 25, cf. I 48. 57; it is even a voluntary sin, because contracted from the evil will of the first man, it became in a certain way hereditary, Retractations I 13. Against Julian III 5. On Marriage and Concupiscence II 28 etc. The sinful state in which we are conceived and born is a consequence and punishment of our transgression in Adam, Unfinished Work against Julian I 47 VI 17; God often punishes sin with sin, Against Julian V 3. On Nature and Grace 22. And it consists in fact in concupiscence. Sometimes Augustine takes this word in a broad sense and says that the inherited sinfulness does not only reside in the lust of the flesh but in whatever sense of the body it is known, Unfinished Work against Julian IV 28; that carnal concupiscence also has its seat in the soul, ibid. V 7, that original sin is not a substance but an affectional quality, a vice, languor, disease, accident of substance, On Marriage and Concupiscence I 24. 25 II 34. Unfinished Work against Julian VI 7 Confessions VII 12 etc. But yet he thinks of concupiscence primarily as the lust of the flesh; in the independent motion of the genitals, independent of the will, the corruption of nature especially comes out, and shame serves as proof thereof; through the lust of the flesh, sin also propagates itself and makes the whole human race into a corrupt mass, which is subject to the miserable necessity of not being able not to sin; see especially On Marriage and Concupiscence passim. This concupiscence is better called original sin than natural, because it is not of divine but of human origin, Unfinished Work against Julian V 9; it is sin, because it was made by sin and desires to sin, ibid. I 71, and makes man originally guilty, Against Julian VI 5. Children dying unbaptized are lost because of it; its guilt, however, is taken away in baptism, it itself remains as a spur for the fight, its guilt is loosed by regeneration, its conflict is left for the contest, Unfinished Work I 71. 101. Against Julian VI 5. On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins II 4. Scholastic and Roman theology built upon this foundation but brought a not unimportant change in Augustine's representation. Retained was the thought that Adam's transgression was the cause of all men's sin and death. Original sin consists first in the imputation to all men of that transgression which Adam committed, because they all were included in him; it is in the first place guilt, then punishment. Scripture also spoke this clearly, and the church took it up in her confession, Council of Milevis canon 2. Council of Orange canon 2. Trent V 2. Roman Catechism I 3, 2. Pighius and Catharinus even went so far that they let the whole original sin consist in this imputation of Adam's transgression and regarded all that followed, loss of original righteousness, corruption of nature etc., only as punishment but not as sin. But undoubtedly these theologians thereby expressed a thought that flowed from the development of the doctrine of original sin in Roman theology. Namely, there soon arose difference about the character of that moral state which entered after Adam's disobedience in him and in all his descendants. In Augustine this consisted in concupiscence, which then had its chief seat and organ in the lust of the flesh. Lombard still remained here, Sentences II dist. 30. 31. But gradually the doctrine of the superadded gift came up, which was given to Adam but lost by his fall. The first consequence of Adam's transgression was therefore for him and all men the loss of supernatural grace (original righteousness); this was the first, negative element in original sin, to which then the second, positive, namely concupiscence, was added. Thus Anselm already defined original sin, On the Fall of the Devil 27, and was followed therein by Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus, Thomas. Original sin consisted therefore in privation of original justice and in a certain disordered disposition of nature (concupiscence), Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 qu. 82 art. 1. But upon further reflection, difference must arise again about this latter. For the image of God was gradually conceived as a supernatural gift, there was therefore also a man thinkable and possible without that image and yet without sin, a natural man; in such a man, however, flesh and spirit would yet naturally stand over against each other and fight with each other; that is, concupiscence, the desire of the flesh against the spirit, is by nature, necessarily, by creation proper to man and thus in itself cannot be sin. The image of God was indeed given to Adam as a remedy and bridle, but when he lost it, the fight of flesh and spirit came up again of itself; this lay in his nature, was indeed suppressed but now became free again. Concupiscence is a disease or languor of human nature, which arose from the condition of matter; it cannot in itself be sin and thus also cannot form a part of original sin. The Roman doctrine of the superadded gift avenges itself here in a questionable way in original sin. It is historically demonstrable how therefore gradually in Roman theology the center of gravity in the doctrine of original sin was shifted from concupiscence to the privation of original justice, from the positive to the negative. Augustine defined the whole original sin by concupiscence; the scholastics took up therewith the loss of original righteousness, but still maintained original sin in a positive sense as a disordered disposition, languor of nature, corrupt habit, Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 qu. 82 art. 1. Trent speaks very cautiously; it says that Adam not only lost righteousness but also was changed for the worse in body and soul; that he, after he was defiled, poured out not only death and punishments of the body but also especially sin over his descendants; that Adam's sin is proper to each not by imitation but by propagation, it inheres in each as his own, and can be taken away only by Christ's merit in baptism, session 5. But the Synod purposely refrained from closer determinations; the nature of this sin is not further described; the words "changed for the worse" say little; the concupiscence that remains in the baptized is itself no sin but is only from sin and inclines to sin, ibid. 5; the free will is not lost but weakened, VI canon 5, and can also do good works before faith, ibid. 7. All taken together, it is not to be seen wherein, apart from the imputation of Adam's transgression and the loss of original righteousness, original sin could further consist. Nothing remains for it. After Trent, therefore, the opinion of Lombard, later still embraced by Henry, Gregory of Rimini, Driedo, that original sin formally or materially consists in concupiscence, in a positive quality, is expressly combated. With appeal to Thomas, Bonaventure, Scotus etc., original sin is placed only in the loss of original justice; Bellarmine spoke it openly and clearly: the state of man after Adam's fall differs no more from his state in pure naturals than a despoiled differs from a naked, nor is human nature worse, if you subtract original guilt, nor does it labor more under infirmity and ignorance, than it would be and would labor if created in pure naturals. Therefore corruption of nature flowed not from the lack of some natural gift nor from the access of some evil quality but from the loss alone of a supernatural gift on account of Adam's sin, On the Grace of the First Man 5. The state in which man is born after the fall is wholly like that of Adam before the fall without the superadded gift. Of a corruption or wounding of nature there can be spoken only insofar as this state ought not to be, because Adam received the superadded gift and lost it; the loss thereof is guilt. But objectively that state is not wrong, it is bare naturalness; original sin nothing else than reduction to a merely natural state; supernaturals lost, naturals intact; in baptism this loss is restored by infused grace; after death original sin is punished only with the punishment of damnation. Some still try to hold fast a corruption of nature, but the supranaturalistic conception of Christianity makes this impossible. Only there is still difference about whether the imputation of Adam's sin, which had the loss of the superadded gift for all his descendants as consequence, rests on a physical nexus or on a moral (federal) nexus. Some say that all men were indeed not formally but yet causally, materially, seminally included in Adam; others think the imputation cannot be explained otherwise than by assuming that Adam was not only our forefather but also our head and representative; still others connect both conceptions with each other.
5. Against this Roman weakening of original sin the Reformation rose up. In itself the scholastic definition of original sin as the lack of original righteousness, which ought to be in man, found no objection, if only it was not understood purely negatively. This, however, became more and more the case in Roman theology, and therefore the Reformation laid stress on the fact that original sin was not only a lack but in it also at the same time a total corruption of human nature. Oftentimes in the first time this corruption was still denoted with the name of concupiscence, but then this was not one-sidedly with Augustine and Lombard understood as fleshly lust, but as disorder of all appetites, seated as well in the higher as in the lower powers of man. Calvin says very clearly, they who define original sin as the loss of original righteousness, describe it fully but do not express its power and working enough. Our nature namely is not only bereft of something good, but it is also fertile and fruitful of all evils. If therefore original sin is described as concupiscence, this is good, provided one adds, that whatever is in man, from intellect to will, from soul to flesh, is polluted and filled with this concupiscence, or to sum up briefly, the whole man is of himself nothing else than concupiscence, Inst. II 1, 8. Furthermore the Reformers taught that this lust is also in its first motions sin; it becomes not first sin when the will has consented to it but it is sin in itself, not first when formed thus but also already when unformed. Calvin declares again that he in this point differs from Augustine; the latter calls concupiscence, when in baptism the guilt thereof is taken away, by the name of infirmity; but we hold that very thing for sin, Inst. III 3, 10. And finally this corruption of human nature was so total that man by nature is unable to any spiritual good, inclined to all evil, and for it alone already worthy of eternal punishment. It cannot be denied that sometimes, out of reaction against Rome, especially from the Lutheran side, expressions were used too strongly. Though it was not meant so badly, it was yet surely open to serious misunderstanding when Luther called original sin essential sin and the essence of man, Köstlin, Luthers Theol. II. Still stronger spoke Flacius of original sin as the substance of man. And also the Formula of Concord said in Luther's own words that man's understanding, heart and will in spiritual things was utterly corrupt and dead, able no more than a stone, a stump or clay, ed. Müller. Cf. also Frank, Theol. d. Conc. I. How much the Romans therefore tried to accuse the Lutherans of Manichaeism, Bellarmine, de amiss. gr. et stat. pecc. V c. 1 sq. Becanus, de pecc. orig. qu. 2 sq. Möhler, Symbolik. Yet they in the Form. Conc. expressly confessed that sin was no substance, and all theologians agree therewith. Yes, though the Lutherans in general held to traducianism and were therefore inclined to let original sin be propagated by carnal concupiscence, Luther in Köstlin II. Melanchthon, Loci C. de pecc. orig. C. R. XXI. Cf. Frank, Theol. der Concordienformel I, yet Melanchthon says there also that he has nothing against it that the born are also guilty on account of Adam's fall; the Form. Conc. declares that original sin is guilt or debt, whereby it comes that all on account of the disobedience of Adam and Eve are in hatred with God and by nature children of wrath, Müller, Symb. Bücher, and later various Lutheran theologians say that Adam is not only to be considered as physical head but also as moral or federal head of the human race, and that therefore his transgression is imputed to all, Quenstedt, Theol. II. Hollaz, Ex. theol. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. The Reformed guarded themselves from the beginning against such strong expressions as the Lutherans sometimes used; Calvin by no means approved the above-mentioned images, Schweizer, Centrald. I. But yet they also taught that original sin negatively consisted in the lack of original righteousness but also positively in corruption of nature, and that it had its cause in the imputed transgression of Adam, Calvin, Inst. II 1, comm. on Ps. 51:7, Rom. 5:12 etc. Beza, Tract. Theol. I. Martyr, Loci C. Polanus, Synt. Ursinus, Tract. Theol. Explic. Catech. qu. 7. Zanchius, Op. IV. Junius, Theses Theol. 19 20. Heppe, Dogm. There reigned on this point a very great agreement. Rivetus collected a long series of statements from church confessions and theological works, which all teach the same, Testimonia de imputatione primi peccati omnibus Adami posteris, Op. III, largely translated into English in Princeton Theol. Essays 1846. However, opposition to this doctrine came from the school of Saumur; Placaeus namely taught in his theses de statu hominis lapsi ante gratiam, Synt. thesium theol. in acad. Salm. ed. 2 1665, that the disobedience of Adam was imputed to his descendants only mediately, that is, only insofar and on the ground that they were all born unclean from him. Formerly it was unanimously taught: we are born corrupt because the first sin is imputed to us; Placaeus reversed this and said: the first sin is imputed to us because we are born corrupt, and explained his view further in Disp. bipartita de imputatione primi peccati Adami 1655. The Synod at Charenton condemned his view 1645, Rivetus on commission of the Synod collected his above-mentioned testimonia, various theologians opposed the doctrine of Placaeus, Heidegger, Turretin, Maresius, Driessen, Leydekker, Marck, Comrie, Holtius etc. But the time seemed past for the reformational doctrine of original sin. Placaeus found entrance everywhere, in France, Switzerland, England, America, with theologians like Wyttenbach, Endemann, Stapfer, Whitby, John Taylor, Roell, Vitringa, Venema etc. cf. M. Vitringa II, and also with the Lutherans, Walch, Bibl. theol. I. In America Jonathan Edwards still wrote his famous tractate Original sin defended 1757, Works II, against Whitby, but he himself held therein already the mediate imputation of Adam's sin and brought the New England Theology of Hopkins, Edwards Jr., Dwight, Emmons etc. entirely in the line of Placaeus. Pelagianism made its entry everywhere; Protestantism fell, in the same measure as it became unfaithful to its past, back into Romanism; man was good by nature but succumbed very easily in the strife against sensuality. Even the newer theologians who assume an influence of Adam's sin on his descendants are therewith yet only in part returned to the doctrine of the Reformation, Vilmar, Dogm. I. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. III. Ebrard, Dogm. § 340-344. Dorner, Chr. Gl. § 82. 83. Frank, System d. chr. Wahrh. I. Müller, Sünde II etc. Yet through all kinds of causes the deep sense of the doctrine of original sin has become clear again for many. In 1845 Gervinus wrote: we are freed from the fear of original sin, which like the fear of ghosts was only the fear of a superstitious religious doctrine, in Delitzsch, Christl. Apol. There will not be many who now still agree with this superficial judgment. The philosophy of Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer etc., the doctrine of heredity and of solidarity, the historical and sociological studies have offered to the dogma of original sin an unexpected and important support. When theology had rejected it, philosophy took it up again.
6. The Doctrine of Original Sin. The doctrine of original sin is one of the weightiest but also one of the most difficult subjects in dogmatics. Peccato originali nihil ad praedicandum notius, nihil ad intelligendum secretius , Augustine, de mor. eccl. cath. I 22. Chose étonnante, que le mystère le plus éloigné de notre connaissance, qui est celui de la transmission du péché, soit une chose sans laquelle nous ne pouvons avoir aucune connaissance de nous-mêmes. Car il est sans doute, qu’il n’y a rien qui choque plus notre raison que de dire que le péché du premier homme ait rendu coupables ceux qui, étant si éloignés de cette source, semblent incapables d’y participer.... et cependant, sans ce mystère, le plus incompréhensible de tous, nous sommes incompréhensibles à nous-mêmes. Le noeud de notre condition prend ses replis et ses tours dans cet abîme, de sorte que l’homme est plus inconcevable sans ce mystère que ce mystère n’est inconcevable à l’homme (Pascal). Le péché originel explique tout et sans lui on n’explique rien (de Maistre), and yet it itself needs explanation more than anything else.
From of old it has been denoted in theology as peccatum originale , not as if it belonged to man from his origin by virtue of creation, but because among all men it is the origin and source of all other sins. Much misunderstanding is prevented if this original sin is clearly distinguished into peccatum originans (imputed, guilt) and peccatum originatum (inherent, punishment). Properly speaking, by original sin, peccatum haereditarium , is to be understood only that moral corruption which man brings with him at once at his conception and birth from sinful parents. But this moral corruption, which is native to all men and does not first arise in them later through their own evil deeds, must yet have a cause. And according to Holy Scripture and for Christian thought also, this cause can be no other than the first transgression of the first man, whereby sin and death came into the world. Adam's disobedience is the peccatum originans ; Scripture says that clearly, Rom. 5:12, 1 Cor. 15:22; and experience confirms it every moment, all men are conceived in sins and born in unrighteousness.
This is now not thinkable otherwise than that Adam's transgression concerns us all in one way or another. If there existed absolutely no connection between Adam and us, it would be impossible that we are born in sins, since he transgressed God's commandment. Scripture and history thus together point us back to an original, common guilt of the human race. For the hypothesis of Plato and others, that every soul had already long existed before its coming into the human body and had already fallen there, has earlier proved to us wholly untenable for sufficient reasons; there lies only the undeniable truth at its foundation, that every man is born under guilt. That guilt each has not personally, individually, actually taken upon his own neck; it rests upon every man on account of Adam; διὰ τῆς παρακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἁμαρτωλοὶ κατεστάθησαν οἱ πολλοί , Rom. 5:19. Apart from whether we can make it somewhat understandable that God immediately sets all men as sinners through and on account of Adam's disobedience, the fact itself stands firm, on the ground of Scripture and experience. But yet something can be said about it, if not to explain this way of God's dealing, then yet to free it from the appearance of arbitrariness.
In the first place, namely, mankind is no aggregate of individuals, but an organic unity, one race, one family. The angels all stand independently beside each other; they were all created at once and did not come forth the one from the other; among them a judgment of God, as was pronounced in Adam over all men, would not have been possible; each stood and fell for himself. But so it is not among men. God has created them all from one blood, Acts 17:26; they are no heap of souls on a piece of ground, but all related to each other in blood, bound to each other by all kinds of bands, and therefore in everything determining each other and determined by each other. And particularly the first man takes a wholly unique and incomparable place. As branches in the root, the mass in the firstfruits, members in the head, so all men were comprehended in Adam's loins and have all come forth from his hip. He was no private person, no loose individual beside others, but he was the root, stock, seminal principle of the whole human race, our all's natural head; in a certain sense it can be said that we all were that one man, that what he did was done by us all in him; his choice of will and act of will was that of all his descendants.
Undoubtedly this physical unity of the whole mankind in Adam is already of great significance for the explanation of original sin; it is the necessary presupposition, the prerequisite thereof; if Christ was to be able to bear sin for us and make us partakers of his righteousness, he had first of all to assume our human nature. But yet realism without more is insufficient for the explanation of original sin. For in a certain sense it can well be said that all men were comprehended in Adam, but then also only in a certain definite sense; it is representative but not physically true. In the covenant of grace no one speaks so. We can and may well say that God appropriates to us the righteousness of Christ as if we had fulfilled all the obedience which Christ has fulfilled for us, Heidelberg Catechism Q. 60, but therefore we personally and physically are not yet those who have satisfied God's righteousness; Christ satisfied for us and in our place. And so it is also with Adam; virtually, potentially, seminally we may have been comprehended in him, but personally and actually he transgressed the probationary command and not we. If realism would not wish to acknowledge this distinction, and would wish to be consistent to the uttermost, then it would make all imputation superfluous both with Adam and with Christ; in both cases it was then every man himself who personally with the deed sinned and by his suffering and dying satisfied.
Furthermore, if Adam's transgression in this realistic sense has been ours, then man also stands guilty of all other sins of Adam, of all sins of Eve, yes of all the sins of his forefathers from whom he was born, for he was comprehended in these just as well as in Adam when he transgressed the probationary command; it is then also not to be seen how Christ, who physically, that is, as far as the flesh is concerned, is from the fathers and from Adam and Eve, could then be free from original sin; the physical unity on this standpoint necessarily brings the moral with it. Further, realism comes into no small embarrassment with the covenant of grace; for if there is no covenant of works, then also no covenant of grace; the one stands and falls with the other. If now the righteousness of Christ is not acquired and applied in the way of the covenant, but in a realistic way, then this exists with Christ therein that he assumed our nature, and in that case satisfaction and salvation is the portion of all men, for Christ assumed the nature of them all; or it exists therein that each first acquires this physical, realistic unity with Christ through regeneration or faith, and then it is not to be seen how Christ could satisfy beforehand for those with whom he first becomes one through faith, then regeneration and faith run the danger of losing their ethical character, the center of gravity is shifted from Christ to the Christian, and the benefits of the covenant first come into being after and through faith.
Finally, realism indeed defends an excellent interest, namely, the unity of the human race, but thereby it loses sight of another interest which is of no less weight, namely, the independence of the personality. A man is a member of the whole, very certainly, but he occupies in that whole yet also his own place; he is more than a wave in the ocean, more than a passing appearance of the general human nature. Earlier it was therefore already remarked that the relations in which men stand to each other are distinguished from those which are found among the angels and among the animals; for related to both, he is yet also different from both; he is a creature with his own nature. And therefore physical unity with him is not sufficient; there comes yet another, an ethical, federal one. Cf. against Shedd, who is a strong advocate of realism, Dogm. Theol. II p. 6 etc., also Archibald Alexander Hodge, The Atonement , Philadelphia Presbyterian Board of Publication n.d. p. 99 etc.
As soon as one in the Christian church began to think earnestly about the link between Adam's sin and our own, the bodily oneness was not enough. Shedd claims that Augustine, the schoolmen, and the oldest Reformed theologians were all realists. But this is untrue; the teaching of the covenant was not fully wrought out, but the thought already appears in the church fathers and the Middle Ages theologians. Already the one fact that they nearly all held to creationism speaks enough, for a creationist cannot be a realist. The federal way therefore does not shut out the truth that lies hidden in realism; on the contrary, it takes it fully; it starts from it but does not stay there; it owns a oneness of kind, on which the oneness of covenant is grounded.
In mankind we find all kinds of shapes of fellowship, which are not at all only and not even chiefly based on bodily descent, but on another, higher, right-wise oneness. There are "right-wise bodies," household, kin, fellowship, folk, state, church, and gatherings and fellowships of all sorts and for all goals, which lead their own life, are under special laws, in special also under the law which Paul sets forth when he says: και εἰτε πασχει ἑν μελος, συμπασχει παντα τα μελη, εἰτε δοξαζεται μελος, συγχαιρει παντα τα μελη, 1 Cor. 12:26. All the limbs of such a body can be to each other for blessing or for curse, and that the more, as they themselves are more outstanding and hold a weightier place in the body-work. A father, mother, ward, carer, teacher, learner, master, guide, prince, king, and so on, have the greatest sway over those set under them. Their life and deeds settle the lot of their underlings, lift them up and bring them to honor or cast them down and drag them along to ruin. The household of a drunkard is wrecked and laden with shame because of the father's sin. The kin of a wrongdoer is reckoned with him and doomed in wide rings and for long times. A gathering pines under the faithlessness of its teacher. A folk goes to ground because of the foolishness of its prince. Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.
There is between men a togetherness in the good and in the ill; a sharing in blessings and in dooms. We stand on the shoulders of forefathers and inherit what they have gathered in worldly and ghostly wealth; we go into their work, rest on their wreaths, enjoy what they often got through strife and woe. All that we get unearned, without asking for it, it all lies ready at our birth, it is given us out of grace. No one has qualms against that and rises against this law. But when that same law now also reigns in the ill and makes us sharers in the sin and woe of others, then the heart rises up and blames the law of unright. The son who takes his father's heritage refuses to pay his father's debt. So the Israelites also wailed in the days of Ezekiel. There held in the Old Testament a law of togetherness, Gen. 9:25, Ex. 20:5, Num. 14:33, 16:32, Jos. 7:24, 25, 1 Sam. 15:2, 3, 2 Sam. 12:10, 21:1v., 1 Kon. 21:21, 23, Jes. 6:5, Jer. 32:18, Lam. 3:40v., 5:7 Ezr. 9:6, Mt. 23:35, 27:25. But when Israel in its deemed rightness wails over that, the Lord lets the seer proclaim, not what He can do rightly, but what He will do, if Israel turns and does not walk the way of the fathers. There is a togetherness of sin and woe, but God lets it be and gives the strength often to break that right-wise fellowship and self to be the start of a kin that walks in the fear of the Lord and enjoys His favor. But thereby the togetherness itself is so little lifted, that it is rather strengthened by it. Christ has in another and better way shown the truth of the togetherness of mankind than Adam.
If this togetherness could also be broken, not only all fellow-woe, but also all love, friendship, fore-prayer, and so on, would cease to be; mankind would fall into lifeless bits; there would be no hidden thing, no hiddenness, no mankind life more. Yet it is true, what Shedd claims, that this togetherness of woe does not yet make clear the reckoning of Adam's sin to all his aftercomers; to bear for another's sin is not the same as to be punished for another's sin and thus also self to be deemed as doer of that sin; there is woe without own trespass, Luk. 13:1-5, Joh. 9:3. But this togetherness, which we see daily, knocks from our hand the plea to blame God of unright, when He in Adam's punishment lets all mankind share. So He deals every blink, both in blessings and in dooms. If such a dealing can stand with His rightness, then this must and shall be the case with Adam's trespass.
But there comes yet that there is a special ground why the aforesaid law of togetherness in Adam's case does not fully hold nor even can hold. The law of togetherness does not make clear the work-covenant and the grace-covenant, but is built on them and points back to them. It reigns always within narrower rings than those shaped by mankind itself. How great the blessing or curse of parents and wards, of wise-men and craft-makers, of faith-founders and renewers, of princes and winners, and so on, may have been; there were always "settings" of place, time, land, folk, tongue, and so on, that set bound and bar to them; the ring in which their sway reigned was always hemmed by others and greater. Only two men have there been whose life and work stretched out to the bounds of mankind itself, whose sway and rule works through to the ends of the earth and into everlasting. They are Adam and Christ; the first brought sin and death, the second rightness and life into the world. From this wholly out-of-kind place taken by Adam and Christ follows that they alone are to be likened with each other, and that all other bonds, drawn from rings within mankind, can well serve for clearing and are of great worth, but yet give only likeness and no sameness.
That is to say, that Adam and Christ both are set under a wholly special ordering of God, just with eye to the special place they take in mankind. As a father his household, a prince his folk, a wise-man his learners, a master his workers casts with him into wretchedness, then we can go back behind their persons and in the togetherness that reigns within mankind and her sundry rings, to some height find a clearing and soothing. But so we cannot do with Adam and Christ. They have mankind not behind but before them; they come not forth from her but bring her to stand; they are not borne by her but bear her self; they are no outcome but, each in his way, start and root of mankind, head of the whole kin of man; they are not made clear by the law of togetherness but make it clear only through themselves; they do not take for granted, they set up the body-work of mankind. If mankind truly both in bodily and in right-wise wit would stay a oneness, as it was meant to be; if there thus truly in that mankind not only sharing of blood, as with beasts, but on that ground also sharing of all worldly, right-wise, ghostly goods would be; then that could not otherwise be brought to stand and kept in stand, than by dooming all in one. As it went with him, so it would go with all mankind. If Adam fell, mankind fell; if Christ stood, in him mankind was set up. Work-covenant and grace-covenant are the shapes whereby the body-work of mankind is also upheld in faith-wise and right-wise wit. Because it is to God not about sundry lone ones but about mankind as His likeness and image, therefore it had to fall in one and also in one be set up. So is the ordering, so the doom of God. He deems in one all guilty and therefore mankind is born unclean and dying out of Adam; He deems in one all right, and therefore that same mankind is born anew out of Christ and hallowed to everlasting life. God has shut them all under heedfulness that He might be merciful to them all.
Turretinus, Theol. El. IX 9. A. A. Hodge, The atonement. Ch. Hodge, Syst. Theol. II. Princeton Theol. Essays 1846. Kleutgen, Theol. der Vorzeit II. Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk I. E. Bersier, La solidarité. Paris 1870. Vercueil, Etude sur la solidarité dans le Christianisme d’après St. Paul, Montauban 1894.
7. The consequence of the peccatum originans is the peccatum originatum.
Because all are reckoned as sinners in Adam, they are also all born from him in a sinful state. The inherited stain is a punishment for the inherited guilt. Under this viewpoint, original sin was first considered by Augustine, which provoked a strong protest from the side of the Pelagians, cf. Augustine, Against Julian; just as later from the Remonstrants, Apology of the Confession. But Scripture speaks many times in that spirit and sees in following sins a punishment for the previous ones, 2 Sam. 12:11, 12, 1 Kings 11:11-31, 22:30, Isa. 6:9, 10, 7:17, 10:5-7, 14:3, Jer. 50:6-8, Rom. 1:24-28, 2 Thess. 2:11, 12, and so on. Also the sins stand under God's governance; the laws and ordinances that apply to the life of sin are established by God and upheld by him. And among those laws is also this: That is precisely the curse of the evil deed, that it must continually bring forth evil. Sin has that nature, that it increasingly bewilders and hardens the sinner, ever more tightly entangles him in its snares, and ever more swiftly makes him fall down a sloping plane into the abyss.
It is true that sin considered in itself can never be punishment for sin, for both differ essentially and stand opposed to each other; sin arises from the will, and punishment is undergone against one's will; sin is transgression, punishment is upholding of the law; punishment has God as its author, but sin does not. But yet a following sin may be called a punishment for the previous one, because it removes the sinner still further from God, makes him more miserable, and delivers him over to all kinds of desires and passions, fear and remorse, Lombard, Sentences; Thomas, Summa Theologica. Gerhard, Loci. Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae. Spanheim, Opera. De Moor. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. Müller, Sin. Frank, Christian Truth. Christ, The Moral World Order.
According to this law, in Adam and all his descendants, a sinful state followed upon the sinful deed. The Pelagians represent it so, that one or another act of the will leaves absolutely no consequences; the will, which in one moment did the evil, can immediately thereafter, if it pleases, do the good again; the will has and acquires with them never a certain nature, a definite character; it is and remains neutral, indifferent, without inner inclination, always placed between opposite things and with unpredictable arbitrariness directing itself now to one side, then to the other.
But such a representation finds contradiction from all sides. In Adam and Eve, when they transgressed God's command, a great moral change took place; shame and fear of God took hold of them; the rest, the peace, the innocence was gone; they hid themselves from God in the trees of the garden; they cast the blame on each other; Cain made himself guilty of fratricide; and soon the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was evil from his youth. With Adam's transgression, a dreadful degeneration of the human race takes its beginning. We stand here before a frightful reality, the explanation of which escapes us. How is it possible that one single sinful deed had such dreadful consequences and brought a radical reversal in the whole human nature?
In general, it can be noted that the relation between a deed and its consequences often appears to us very disproportionate in life. One hour of thoughtlessness can make one weep for years. One small mistake, a single misstep, gives to the life of many people an entirely different direction; small insignificant incidents work through into generations; from a so-called accident often hangs our happiness or unhappiness. The one transgression of Adam brought a complete change in the deliberations, dispositions, and inclinations of his nature. After all, experience teaches that whatever a man does reacts in greater or lesser measure upon himself and leaves a trace in his character. At bottom, nothing is indifferent, and nothing passes us by without a trace. Every act of the will, arising from preceding inclinations and desires, reacts upon these and strengthens them. Every sin can in that way become a habit, an inclination, a passion, which rules over the man like a tyrant.
A man is so changeable, so pliable; he adapts himself to all occasions, he adjusts to every environment, he gets used to everything and conforms to all. Whoever does sin immediately becomes a servant of sin. A crime, a lie, a theft, a murder is never over with the moment in which it is committed. The disobedience of Adam changed his whole nature.
Moreover, his transgression had not only an outward but also an inward side. It is not so that the sinful deed of Adam, consisting in eating the forbidden fruit, happened suddenly without any preparation and only afterward had all kinds of moral changes in his nature as consequences. In that way, guilt and stain in Adam do not stand in connection with each other. The act of eating was itself already the revelation of a whole moral change that had taken place in the inward parts. Strictly speaking, it was not the first sin but the first full-grown sin in the sense of James 1:15. Before the sinful deed went sinful deliberations of the understanding (doubt, unbelief) and sinful inclinations of the heart (desire, pride), which had their occasion in the temptation of the serpent and were fostered by the will of man. Both before and during and after the eating from the forbidden tree, man's relation to God and his law was changed. He became, not first one and then the other, but at the same time and in connection with each other, both guilty and unclean before the face of his Maker. Guilt and stain are both simultaneous consequences of the one and same sin, two sides of the same thing.
Finally, the change that entered in Adam did not consist in this, that some sinful principle was implanted in him or some component of his being, of his soul or body, of his faculties or powers was taken from him. But it consisted in this, that man by his doubt and unbelief, by his pride and desire, and finally by the sinful deed itself increasingly detached himself from God and from his law, placed himself outside his favor and fellowship, and began to use all his gifts and powers precisely against God and his commandment. And when this happens, when man places himself outside God's fellowship and outside God's law, then the sinful state enters of itself, just as darkness enters when the light disappears. It cannot be otherwise than that the creature loves itself most intensely, which the love of God has not absorbed (Melanchthon). Man, withdrawing himself from the fellowship of God in which he was created, is not thinkable otherwise than as a sinner, guilty and corrupt before his face.
The same religious and ethical change that befell Adam at and by his fall is also the lot of all his offspring. They are all born in the same moral state into which Adam fell through his trespass.
This fact is hardly open to denial. Scripture not only teaches it, but experience and history prove it day by day. If anything is sure, it is this, that folk are not begotten and born as righteous and holy, but as sinners. This points to the truth that they share one guilt with Adam, for guilt and stain always go together in sin.
Just as it did not happen with Adam that he first did the sinful deed, thereby loading guilt upon himself, and as a result then also became morally unclean and corrupt, so also his offspring do not come into the world with a twofold guilt, first with that of Adam's trespass and then also with that of their moral corruption. For this moral corruption is not a later added, outward addition and not a chance outcome of the first trespass, but an essential part of it and not to be sundered from it.
Just as Adam through his trespass at the same time and in the same measure made himself guilty and became unclean, so also with his offspring, standing guilty in him and being born unclean from him are two sides of the same thing. Edwards, Works II 482. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II 170.
It is wrong to draw from this with Edwards that the stain goes before the guilt. There is here no before and no after. The uncleanness in which all folk are born is the backside of the guilt of that trespass which was done by Adam as federal head. Guilt, stain, death stand among Adam's offspring in the same bond as with himself and have thus, in that mutual tie, passed to all.
8. The way in which this original sin becomes the portion of all men is not that of imitation but of generation. There goes before it a judgment, a judgment of God, and by virtue of that judgment all men are born guilty, unclean, and dying from Adam. They become all this not first at a later age through their actual sins, but they are so from their conception and birth onward. Death is the proof, for it reigns not only over the grown but much more strongly over the little children, even the unborn; and that death is according to Scripture no natural process but a wages of sin.
Now this teaching of original sin, however much it was formerly condemned as unreasonable, in the latest time has again found grace in the eyes of so-called science. It proved after all not so foolish and absurd as former interpreters of science had displayed it. Scientifically now the very opposite is held of what in former century passed for it. The teaching of the inborn goodness of man and of society as cause of all evil has had its day; men teach now just the reverse: man, coming from an animal, remains in his heart an animal; in every man lurks the human beast, the vice of man's nature of the beast; and the "holy" society and the "divine" state are those which happily hold him in bonds and force him to virtue; all vice is inborn, all virtue is acquired, cf. e.g. Brunetière, The Morality of the Evolutionary Doctrine, Paris 1896.
It is not the newly discovered facts which have brought this change in the view. For that every kind brings forth its like, that children take after their parents, that not only bodily but also all sorts of spiritual qualities are inherited, that is no discovery of the 19th century but was, as appears from the teaching of traducianism, also formerly well known. And that yet also not all qualities are inherited, that each individual yet is something other and something more than the sum or the product of his parents, that too was, as appears from the teaching of creationism, not unknown to former generations. Indeed very certainly the knowledge of the facts has been extended and increased, but this was by no means of such a nature that it alone could radically change a whole view. This change is chiefly to be ascribed to the fact that men looked at about the same facts from another viewpoint and with another eye, namely from the standpoint of monism and with the eye of a dogmatist of evolution. In conflict with all sober scientific sense, men have built on a few facts a series of deeply penetrating conclusions and in all sorts of ways brought them to the man in popular writings: man--that had clearly appeared--was by no means an independent being, but nothing but a product of existing factors, a plaything of circumstances; to speak of freedom in him is folly, he is a will-less instrument of fate; criminals are a type of their own, who are already born as such and are incorrigible and unaccountable; every man must of necessity be what he is. An army of partly talented writers, such as Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche etc. have painted this view in novel and drama for the heated imagination. And whoever now does not sing along in that choir and doubts the scientific character of this view, is put under the ban. And yet for the sober observer all that science has brought to light in this field comes down to this little: 1st There is not only heredity but also variation, not only unity but also change, not only memory but also imagination. Many qualities pass over from parents to children, all kinds bring forth their like; but yet not all qualities pass over, for each individual is something new; no single child looks exactly like his parents. Herewith nothing new is said and only an old familiar truth, never denied by anyone, is repeated. 2nd. These two facts are very gladly designated with the name of laws; but how those laws rule is still as good as wholly unknown. Heredity and variation stand continually in connection with each other, they work together and cross each other, and hence the explanation of the facts is so difficult. And this difficulty is yet increased thereby, that the inheritance in all higher beings takes place through the mingling of two individuals (amphimixis, as Weismann called it). 3rd. This appears as soon as one specializes somewhat nearer. That species qualities are inherited, that is, that parents bring forth children of the same species, stands fast but does not bring much further. That race and variety qualities are constantly transplanted is subject to rightful doubt; by selection the race, e.g. of animals or plants, can well be improved; but this improvement is limited and temporary; after four or five generations the height of the improvement is reached; as soon as one ceases with the selection, the descendants return to the old type; the qualities are not taken up in the nature of the creatures, they keep the tendency to fall back into the original form. That finally individual, acquired qualities of parents pass over to children is indeed asserted by Darwin and others, but is as strongly as possible contested by A. Weismann, professor at Freiburg, and his theory finds nowadays ever more agreement. 4th. The attempt to bring together the phenomena which occur here under some laws has not only not succeeded but is for the present to be deemed very premature. The phenomena are much too numerous and too complicated, just as e.g. those of the weather, for us already now to be able to speak of fixed laws. The law of atavism also makes the impression of being only invented to give to the many cases in which the favorable qualities are not inherited and thus the "law" of heredity does not hold, a semblance of regularity. Not understood facts seem finally known as soon as one designates them with a known word, Dr. Kohlbrugge, Atavism, Utrecht 1897, p. 3, who also holds atavism just as Emery for a fable. The hypothesis of Lombroso about the criminal type belongs now already again to the past. And statistics, although it may point out a certain regularity in births, marriages, crimes etc., is thereby yet by no means entitled to the conclusion that every man is forced to his deeds, no more than the fact that the age of a population on average amounts to thirty years forces every thirty-year-old to die, Wundt, Foundations of Physiological Psychology II² 397. A. v. Oettingen, Moral Statistics³ 1882 p. 24 ff. Finally 5th. the different theories for the explanation of heredity and variation have all up to the present day proved insufficient. Already the great number which has been set up proves that none of all satisfies. All natural philosophers and biologists have tried their powers on it, without having unveiled this secret of life. The professor at the Sorbonne, Yves Delage, has in his learned work: The Structure of Protoplasm and the Theories on Heredity and the Great Problems of General Biology, Paris Reinwald et Cie 1895 discussed all theories at length and then comes to the conclusion: after having studied and discussed the numerous theories issued to solve the problems of heredity and evolution, we are obliged to recognize that none presents an acceptable solution. All fail in some points, not accessory but fundamental, and most are besides supported on gratuitous and quite improbable hypotheses, p. 743. He himself ventures then also not to offer a complete theory to the reader; our knowledge is far from being advanced enough for that to be possible, p. 747; cf. also Hugo de Vries, Unity in Variability, Album of Nature 1898 pp. 65-80. Ribot, Psychological Heredity⁵ Paris Alcan 1894. van Bemmelen, The Heredity of Acquired Qualities, 1890. R. Schäfer, Inheritance, Berlin, Reuther u. Reichard 1897. Dr. Jonker, Heredity and Accountability in Theological Studies of Dr. Daubanton 1894 pp. 291-322 etc.
With all this we however do not deny the facts of heredity nor yet its extensive rule. Christian theology has not the least interest in doing short to this even in the least; on the contrary it acknowledges fully and respects the laws which in this field have been established by God; the more fixed laws are traced in heredity, the greater becomes the glory of Him who is the Creator of all ordinances and no God of confusion but of order. Also it is perfectly true that we can almost never with accuracy point out the boundaries which separate personal guilt from common guilt. What Schleiermacher says of original sin is quite something other than what Scripture and church pronounce concerning it, but in itself it is of sin in general yet perfectly true that it is a collective act and collective guilt of the human race, that is: the sinful state and the sinful deeds of every man are on the one hand caused by those of the forefathers and on the other hand also again cause of the sinful states and deeds of the descendants; sin is in each the work of all and in all the work of each, Christian Faith § 71, 1. 2. But however true all this may be, as long as biology beside heredity must also acknowledge variation, all right is lacking to take from man his independence and freedom and to represent him as a will-less instrument of evil powers. Such a representation rests not on healthy science but is a fruit of sick imagination and causes by the killing of all will-power in man incalculable devastations. And further, although the support offered by the science of the day to the church teaching of original sin may to a certain degree be gratefully acknowledged, it itself becomes not stronger thereby no more than it becomes weaker thereby if that same science perhaps tomorrow again may please to display it as foolish and nonsensical. Original sin is yet something other than what nowadays is understood under heredity. For it is no species quality which belongs to the essence of man, for it has come into human nature through transgression of God's command and can be taken out of it again by regeneration and sanctification; and it is on the other side also no individual acquired quality, for it is proper to all men without exception and it is so inherent in human nature that the regenerated even still bring forth children who by nature are children of wrath; the just man generates not whence he himself is regenerated but whence he is generated (Augustine). Original sin therefore takes a special place; the present teaching of heredity may have stripped it of its apparent absurdity, explain it does not. In old times this was attempted by traducianism or creationism. But whatever standpoint one takes in the origin of souls, the propagation of original sin remains always equally difficult. Original sin is yet no substance which seats in the body and can be transplanted by generation; it is a moral quality of man who lacks the communion with God which he according to his original nature ought to possess and has possessed. Adam's corruption entered of itself and at the same moment when he in doubt and unbelief, in pride and covetousness tore himself loose from God. And in the same way the moral corruption enters in his descendants from the first moment of their existence. As God withdrew from Adam on account of his transgression his communion, so He does this also to all his children. And no more than He, yet sustaining Adam after his transgression, by the withdrawing of his communion became the positive cause of his corruption, no more is He this in his descendants, whether one thinks the origin of souls traducianistically or creationistically. Every man is born under guilt and in stain by virtue of the physical and ethical relation in which he stands to Adam. Therefore each is of his individual original sin both the nearest principle and subject and author, Voetius, Disp. I 1104, cf. Martyr, L. C. p. 70. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 3. Zanchius, Op. IV 50. Voetius, Disp. I 1078 sq. Turretinus, Theol. El. IX 12. Moor III 289. M. Vitringa II 358. Edwards, Works II 478.
9. Original sin is a property of human nature and therefore belongs to all creatures who share in this nature. In Adam the person corrupted the nature; in other men the nature corrupts the person, Thomas, Summa Theologica III qu. 8 art. 5 qu. 69 art. 3. The Pelagian claim that there are or at least can be men without any sin is contradicted by Scripture, by experience, by the testimonies of all religions and peoples. On the rule that every man is a sinner there is but one exception, namely, Christ; but He was also the only-begotten Son of God, the second Adam, head of another and better covenant, and in a special way conceived by the Holy Spirit. The Roman Catholics, however, make yet another exception for Mary, the mother of Jesus. The three privileges gradually granted to Mary in Roman theology, namely, freedom from original sin (immaculate conception), freedom from all actual sin (perfection of righteousness), and freedom from death (assumption into heaven) are simply conclusions drawn from the high rank of mediatrix to which she was raised by the church on the ground of her virginity and divine motherhood. With regard to the immaculate conception, Pius IX declared in the bull Ineffabilis that the most blessed Virgin Mary in the first instant of her conception was preserved immune from all stain of original guilt by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race. This does not imply that Mary was not included under Adam and did not fall in him, for Mary was preserved free from original sin only by a special grace of God and with a view to Christ's merits. But neither is it stated that Mary was first conceived in sin and then immediately sanctified, for it is expressly declared that she was preserved free from original sin in the very first moment of her conception. For this dogma, however, there is not the slightest ground in Scripture. Thomas said plainly that concerning the sanctification of the Blessed Mary, namely, that she was sanctified in the womb, nothing is handed down in the canonical Scripture, Summa Theologica III qu. 27 art. 1. The Roman theologians are therefore in no small embarrassment about this, seek all kinds of reasons to explain this "mystery of Mary" in Scripture, and force the strangest texts into a semblance of proof. Thus they appeal to Gen. 3:15, Ps. 45:11ff., Song of Sol. 1:8-16, 2:2, 3:6, 4:1ff., 6:9, Wis. 1:4, Luke 1:28, 41, 48, Rev. 12, and to types such as Noah's ark, the dove with the olive branch, the burning bush, etc.; but all these citations and reasonings serve only to cover their poverty of arguments and need no refutation, cf. e.g., Spencer Northcote, Mary in the Gospels, Mainz 1889. Schaefer, The Mother of God in Holy Scripture, Münster 1867. Scheeben, Dogmatics III 455-472. Rather, Scripture decidedly teaches that all men, except Christ alone, are sinners; no exception is ever made for Mary; although no specific sinful words or deeds of hers are recorded, not even in Mark 3:21, John 2:3, yet she rejoices in God her Savior, Luke 1:47, is pronounced blessed on account of her motherhood of Christ but never on account of her sinlessness, Luke 1:28, 48, is even in this motherhood subordinated to those who are Jesus' mother and brothers and sisters in a spiritual sense, Matt. 12:46ff., Mark 3:31ff., Luke 8:21, and perseveres with the apostles in prayer and supplication, Acts 1:14. The church fathers also teach neither the immaculate conception nor the sinlessness of Mary; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III 16, 7, Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 7, Origen, Homilies on Luke 17, etc., speak of actual transgressions in her; and even Roman theologians cannot deny this. Dr. von Lehner, The Veneration of Mary in the First Centuries, Stuttgart 1881 p. 151, says that this was the then prevailing view; Schwane, History of Dogma I² 382 admits that the tradition of that time furnishes no more stringent proofs than Holy Scripture; and Scheeben, Dogmatics III 474, 476 concedes that the person of Mary in the first four centuries stands in the background and dwells in relative obscurity. At most it was believed, for the honor of the Lord, that Mary by special grace had remained free from actual sins, Augustine, On Nature and Grace 36. Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith IV 14. Even when from the fifth century onward the veneration of Mary increased more and more and later the feast of her conception arose, the principal theologians--as Canus, Loci VII c. 1, Scheeben, Dogmatics III 541 ff., and others also acknowledge--did indeed teach a sanctification of the Blessed Virgin after animation and contraction of sin in the soul but opposed a preservation which a priori kept Mary free from all original sin, Anselm, Why God Became Man II 16. Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure on Sentences III dist. 3. Thomas, Summa Theologica I 2 qu. 81 art. 3. III qu. 27 art. 1. 2. Compendium of Theology c. 224, etc. But Duns Scotus brought about a change in this; he argued that, although Mary was included in Adam, God could nevertheless in the very first moment of her conception grant her the grace that kept her free from all sin. And since this was more worthy of God, Christ, and Mary and not in conflict with the authority of Scripture and the church, he considered it probable that what is more excellent should be attributed to Mary, Sentences III dist. 3 qu. 1. And thereby the ground is also indicated on which this dogma rests at Rome. It has no support in Scripture nor in the tradition of the ancient church, but it is, like the assumption of Mary, simply a conclusion from the mediatorial role that was gradually ascribed to her. It is not fitting, not convenient, that Mary was conceived in sin, committed sin, and died. She must be sinless, and therefore she is, even though it is taught neither by Scripture nor tradition. Cf. Preuss, The Roman Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception 1865. Benrath, On the History of the Veneration of Mary, Studies and Criticisms 1886. Article Mary in Herzog². Bolland, Rome and History, Leiden 1897 pp. 1-53.
10. Even as original sin is widespread in mankind, so it is also in the single man. It rules over the whole man, over understanding and will, heart and conscience, soul and body, over all faculties and powers. His heart is evil from his youth and is the source of all kinds of sins, Gen. 6:5, 8:21; Ps. 51:7; Jer. 17:9; Ezek. 36:26; Mark 7:21. He cannot renew himself, Jer. 13:23; Ezek. 16:6; he cannot understand the things of God, 1 Cor. 2:14; he cannot submit himself to the law of God, John 8:34, 36; Rom. 6:17, 20; 8:7; he is dead in sins and trespasses, Eph. 2:1. Regeneration is therefore needful for entrance into the kingdom of God, John 3:3. The whole salvation, both objective and subjective, is a work of God's grace, John 6:44; 15:5; 1 Cor. 4:7; 15:10; Phil. 2:13; and so forth. Upon these firm sayings of Holy Scripture, Augustine and his followers, and later the Reformers, built the teaching of man's inability to do good. Because in Adam the whole human nature is corrupted, nothing truly good can come forth from it, no more than a bad tree can bring forth good fruits. Rather, man is now under the hard necessity of not being able not to sin; his virtues are vices rather than virtues; he is by nature inclined to all evil, inclined even to hate God and his neighbor. This teaching is without doubt hard, and it is no wonder that it has always met with decided opposition. The heathens did not know this deep corruption of sin; however much they often spoke of its general spread, they still believed in the natural goodness of man and in the possibility of virtue. "In our minds are sown the seeds of virtues, which, if allowed to grow, nature itself would lead us to a blessed life," Cicero, Tusculan Disputations II, 1. "You err if you think that vices are born with us; they have come upon us, they have been thrust upon us," Seneca, Epistle 96. In Pelagianism this pagan teaching was renewed; it denied original sin altogether. By its mechanical view of the image of God, the Roman Church came to the teaching that natural man, after the loss of the superadded gift, can still do truly good works, not indeed in a supernatural but yet in a natural sense, Council of Trent, session VI, canons 5, 7. Socinians, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, Quakers, Rationalists, and so forth, fell back to this Roman standpoint. Coornhert was offended by the 5th and 8th questions of the Heidelberg Catechism. Rousseau preached the natural goodness of man. And Allard Pierson testified of himself that he was by no means inclined to all evil but rather to much good, Gids, November 1895, p. 259. To the natural dislike which unwittingly arises in the heart against the teaching of the total moral corruption of man, her opponents undoubtedly add much misunderstanding. For if this teaching is clearly set in the light, it is confirmed day by day by everyone's experience and justified by the testimonies of her opponents themselves. 1. The teaching of Scripture and the church is not that every man lives in all possible actual sins and stands guilty in act of the transgression of all commandments. It speaks only of the deepest inclination, the innermost disposition, the basic direction of human nature, and confesses that this is not turned toward God but away from him. If man is an organic unity, then one of the two must be the case. Many dismiss it by saying that man by nature is neither one nor the other or both at the same time, Hegel, Works XII, 209f., but this betrays lack of thought, is contrary to the nature of the good, and was therefore very seriously opposed by Kant, Religion, ed. Rosenkranz, 23-26. He who commits one sin stands in principle guilty of the transgression of all commandments, and he who truly possesses one virtue has them all in principle. Man is in the root of his being either good or evil—there is no third. 2. Sin, however, is no substance; it dwells indeed in and with and by man, but it is not and cannot be the essence of man. Man has also after the fall remained man; he has kept a reason, conscience, and will; thereby he can control his lower sensual drives and inclinations and thus force himself to virtue. Augustine, who called the virtues of the heathens "splendid vices," yet fully acknowledged this; many of their deeds are not only not to be reproved but rather deserve our praise and imitation, cf. Wiggers, Augustine and Pelagius I, 119-123. The Lutherans spoke of natural man as a block and a stock in spiritual matters, but ascribed to him in the so-called lower hemisphere of civil life still all kinds of powers for good, Frank, Theology of the Formula of Concord I, 144f. And more than they all, Calvin and the Reformed have honored the virtues of unbelievers and often set them as examples to Christians themselves, cf. my speech on Common Grace, p. 27ff. The teaching of the total corruption of human nature, therefore, by no means implies that the sinful inclination, which lies at the bottom of the heart, always breaks out in such deeds as clearly betray enmity and hatred against God and the neighbor. There are various circumstances that come between and hinder the inclination from fully expressing itself. Not only are many sinful deeds held back by the sword of the government, civil decency, public opinion, fear of shame and punishment, and so forth; but all kinds of factors, such as the natural love still proper to every man, the moral character cultivated by upbringing and struggle, favorable circumstances of constitution, environment, occupation, and so forth, often lead man to the practice of beautiful, praiseworthy virtues. Only, thereby the sinful inclination of the heart is suppressed but not rooted out; in all kinds of evil deliberations, thoughts, desires, it comes up again and again; when the opportunity is favorable and necessity presses, it often breaks through all dams and dikes that held it in; and those who in terrible words and deeds show hatred of God and the neighbor bear no other nature than that which all men share. 3. When it is taught that man through sin is unable to any good and this inability is called a natural one, thereby no physical necessity or fatalistic compulsion is meant. Man has not lost his will and the freedom inborn in him through sin; the will by its nature excludes all compulsion and can will only freely. But man has lost the free inclination of the will to the good; he no longer wills to do the good; he now does the evil willingly, from inclination: the inclination, the direction of the will is changed; there is always in us a free will, but it is not always good, Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 15; cf. also the Reformed in Heppe, Dogmatics, 237, 264. The impotence to good is in this sense not physical but ethical in nature; it is an impotence of the will. Some therefore preferred to speak of moral rather than natural impotence, Amyraut, Testard, Venema in Moor III, 231-233, and especially Jonathan Edwards. Edwards had namely in his days to defend the impotence of man against Whitby and Taylor, who denied original sin and considered man able to keep God's law. They objected to him that if man could not keep God's law, he also did not need to do it and, if he then did not do it, was also not guilty. To defend himself against that, Edwards made a distinction between natural and moral impotence, and said that fallen man indeed had the natural but not the moral power to do good. And he added that only natural impotence was really impotence, but moral impotence could be so called only in an improper sense. Sin is namely no physical defect in the nature or powers of the will; but it is an ethical defect, a lack of affection, love for the good; see his Freedom of the Will, Works II, 1-190 passim. Now Edwards did say that man could not give himself that affection for the good and could not change his will; in this respect he stood entirely on the side of Augustine and Calvin. But by his refusal to call this unwillingness to good natural impotence, he has fostered much misunderstanding and in fact promoted Pelagianism. The Reformed have therefore before and after spoken of natural impotence. This word "natural" can however have different senses. One can thereby have in mind the original human nature created by God in Adam after his image, as the Protestants said that the image of God was natural—then the impotence to good is not natural. One can also mean thereby the physical substance or power of any creature, and then too the impotence, since all substance and power is created by God, is not to be called natural. The inability to good is no physical impossibility, as it is for example impossible for a man to touch the stars with his hand. But one can, speaking of natural impotence, also think of the properties of fallen human nature and thereby indicate that the inability to good now in the fallen state is "by nature" proper to every man, is inborn in him from the first moment of his existence and is not first brought into him from outside by habit, upbringing, imitation. In this sense the name of natural impotence is fully correct, and that of moral impotence is open to misunderstanding. Morally impossible is often called that which on the ground of someone's character, habit, upbringing is held to be impossible for him to do; it is morally impossible that a virtuous man suddenly becomes a thief, a mother hates her child, a murderer strangles an innocent child. That morally impossible nevertheless in some circumstances does indeed take place. So it is not with the inability to good. It is indeed ethical in nature and an impotence of the will, but it is proper to man by nature, it is inborn in him, it is a property of his will itself. And precisely because the will also now in the fallen state by its nature can will only freely, it can will nothing else than what it wills, than that to which it is by nature inclined, cf. Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles IV, 52; Calvin on Eph. 2:3; Ursinus and other commentaries on Heidelberg Catechism, questions 5, 8; Formula of Concord I, 12; Helvetic Consensus, §§ 21, 22; Turretin, Theological Institutes X, 4, 39; Moor III, 232; Hodge, Systematic Theology II, 257-272; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology II, 219-257; III, 364-374. 4. Finally, one must keep in mind that Scripture and the church, teaching the total corruption of man, thereby apply the highest standard, namely, the law of God. The teaching of the inability to good is a religious confession. According to the standard which men usually use in daily life or also in philosophical ethics, it can be fully acknowledged that much good and beautiful is done by men. The follower of Augustine can with this standard in hand be even milder and more generous in the judgment and appreciation of human virtues than the most convinced Pelagian. There is, however, another, higher ideal for man; there is a divine law to which he must conform. Virtues and good works are distinct. Good, truly good, good in the sight of the holy God, is only that which is done from faith, according to God's law, and to God's glory. And tested by this standard, who then dares to say that any work is done by men which is completely pure and needs no forgiveness and renewal? With Rome and in part also with the Lutherans to divide man in two and to say that he can do nothing good in the supernatural and spiritual but can do something completely good in the natural, that is contrary to the unity of human nature, to the unity of the moral law, to the teaching of Scripture that man must always be the image of God, must do all that he does to God's glory, and must love God always and everywhere with all his heart and mind and strength. If this is now so, if the essence of man consists in this that he is the image and likeness of God, then in man as he now lives and works nothing can stand before the face of God. Weighed in the balance of God's sanctuary, all his doing is found too light.
One can differ about this standard, and pull down the law of God from its height and make it fit to men's doings, in order to come to a more favorable outcome. But given this standard, there is no other judgment possible than that of Scripture, that there is none who does good, no, not even one. And this judgment of Scripture is upheld by all kinds of witnesses. Let those who do not believe Scripture listen to the voices of the greatest of our kind. As soon as one does not stop at the words or deeds in oneself or in others, but searches into the hidden drives, the secret aims, the sinful kind of all mankind's striving comes to light. Our virtues are most often only vices in disguise (La Rochefoucauld). Man is nothing but disguise, lie, and hypocrisy, both in himself and toward others (Pascal). Man is a wolf to man ; without the state, mankind's fellowship would be a war of all against all (Hobbes). According to Kant, men are by nature evil; there is in him a natural bent to evil, a radical, inborn evil; the dreadful deeds that the history of mankind makes known to us prove this enough. Every man has his price, for which he sells himself . What the apostle says is a broad truth: there is none who does good, there is not even one. Those who upheld a enslaved will and marked man as a block and log had full right (Fichte). The natural heart, in which man is trapped, is the foe that must be fought (Hegel). Man has from eternity grasped himself in selfishness and self-seeking, and all who are born are born with the clinging dark beginning of evil. This first evil in man, which only he can deny who has learned to know man in himself and outside himself only on the surface, is in its springing forth his own deed (Schelling).
The main and ground driving force in man, as in the beast, is selfishness, that is, the urge to being and well-being. This selfishness is in the beast as in man most tightly knit with the innermost kernel and being of the same, yes, truly the same. This selfishness is indeed curbed by all kinds of bonds of decency, fear, punishment, authority, and so on; but when these are taken away, the unquenchable greed, the base money-hunger, the deeply hidden falseness, the treacherous wickedness spring forth. One must read crime stories and tales of lawless states to know what man truly is in moral sight. These thousands who throng before our eyes in peaceful dealings are to be seen as just so many tigers and wolves, whose fangs one has made safe by a strong muzzle. Even the conscience is mostly made up of 1/5 fear of men, 1/5 dread of gods, 1/5 fore-judgment, 1/5 vanity, and 1/5 habit (Schopenhauer).
The followers of unfolding have gone back to the teaching of Mandeville, Helvetius, Diderot, d’Alembert, and so on, that selfishness is the groundwork of morals and the yardstick of all mankind's deeds; man comes from the beasts and he stays at bottom a beast, led by selfish drives; taming can curb but never make of man anything other than what he first and by makeup is; what we call upright living is a chance outgrowth of the surroundings, of men's life in a set fellowship; under other surroundings and in another fellowship, good and evil would have a wholly other filling (Darwin, Büchner).
In his Ethical Idealism (Amsterdam, 1875), de Bussy makes a great split between the moral man, whose selfish kind is held back by the fellowship in its whim but not wiped out, whose virtues are often shining vices, and the upright man, in whom a new beginning is planted. It is truly not Scripture alone that judges man harshly. It is men who have passed the harshest and strictest judgment on men. And then it is always better to fall into the hand of the Lord than into that of man, for his mercies are many. For when God dooms us, he at the same time offers in Christ his forgiving love, but when men doom men, they often thrust them away and give them over to their scorn. When God dooms us, he lets this judgment come to us through men, prophets and apostles and servants, who do not set themselves high as saints above us but gather with all in shared owning of guilt; but the wise men and upright teachers, scorning men, mostly forget thereby that they themselves are men. When God dooms us, he speaks of sin and guilt, which is indeed great and heavy but which yet can be taken away because it does not belong to the being of man; but the upright teachers often speak of selfish, beastly leanings, which belong to man by his springing forth and to his being; they indeed strike him down but do not lift him up; if we are by birth beasts, why should we then live as children of God?
1. The punishment of sin cannot yet be fully treated in this paragraph. The whole, deserved punishment was indeed threatened by God beforehand upon sin, but after it was committed, it was not executed; it does not fully enter in for anyone in this life, and even at death it is not yet fully applied; only after the judgment on the last day does it strike the guilty in its full weight. In Genesis 2:17 God had expressly said: in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. This firm threat, however, was not carried out. An element came between both, which tempered and delayed this punishment. Adam and Eve remained alive many years after the fall; Eve even became the mother of the living; a human race came forth from them, which is borne and nourished by the earth. The beginnings of history continue after the fall, though in a very changed form. All this is not due to God's righteousness, but, as will become clearer later, to his grace. This grace comes into effect right after the fall. It takes the lead of history, not at the cost of but in connection with God's right. All consequences and punishments that enter after sin therefore bear at once a double character. They are not merely consequences and punishments instituted by God's righteousness, but all without distinction, from another viewpoint, are also means of grace, proofs of God's long-suffering and mercy. There is no objection here that God would then have spoken untruth in Genesis 2:17. For there only the true, full punishment is announced, which sin deserves; sin breaks the fellowship with God, is spiritual death, and deserves death. That this punishment would be tempered, delayed, even forgiven, was by the nature of the matter before the transgression not suitable for communication. God therefore in Genesis 2:17 only mentions the one great punishment of sin, that is, death. With that, everything stops at once: life, joy, development, labor, also the possibility of repentance and forgiveness, of restoration of fellowship with God. Sin deserves nothing other than the whole, full death. All other punishments that actually entered and were pronounced after the fall, such as shame, fear, hiding from God, curse on the serpent, on the earth, and so on, are indeed punishments but at the same time presuppose that God does not carry out his threat right away and in full, that he still has another plan with humanity and the world and therefore lets them exist in his long-suffering and grace. Yet from a certain viewpoint they are very surely also punishments and belong in so far to be discussed here. God's grace speaks itself out in them, but also his righteousness. For punishment, according to the general thought of Scripture, has the intent to restore God's right, which is violated by sin. Under Israel it had the tendency to uphold the laws instituted by God and to remove the evil from the midst of the people, Deuteronomy 13:5, 17:7, 12, 22:21ff., 24:7, and then further, to prevent such transgressions and to make Israel walk in fear in the Lord's statutes, Deuteronomy 13:11, 17:13, 19:20, 21:21. The goal of punishment was thus twofold, related to the past and the future, had to restore committed transgressions and prevent future ones. The measure of punishment was not whim or revenge, Leviticus 19:18, Proverbs 24:29, but the nature of the misdeed, Exodus 21:23-25, Leviticus 24:19, 20, Deuteronomy 19:21, without however the jus talionis always being applied strictly, literally, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for example, Exodus 21:30ff. Pharisaism applied this rule, which holds only for the government, also in private life, against the Old Testament itself, Leviticus 19:18, Deuteronomy 32:35, Proverbs 24:29. Against that Jesus comes, Matthew 5:38; he forbids all desire for revenge, whether one seeks it privately or by public way, and commands patience and mercy. Retribution is however throughout all Scripture the objective measure of punishment, not only for the earthly government but also for God himself. Not only does he threaten punishment on sin, Genesis 2:17, Deuteronomy 27:15ff., Psalm 2:9ff., 5:5, 11:5, 6, 50:21, 94:10, Amos 6:8, Isaiah 10:13-23, Jeremiah 25:12, Matthew 21:42, 23:13, 24:15, Romans 2:3, John 8:24, Romans 6:21, 23, Galatians 6:8, 2 Peter 2:12, 3:7, and so on, but he also determines the measure of punishment according to the nature of the misdeed and repays each one according to his work, Exodus 20:5-7, Deuteronomy 7:9, 10, 32:35, Psalm 62:13, Proverbs 24:12, Isaiah 35:4, Jeremiah 51:56, Matthew 16:27, Romans 2:1-13, Hebrews 10:30, Revelation 22:12.
2. In agreement with this, Christian theology spoke of a judicial righteousness, distinguished into rewarding righteousness and avenging righteousness, and derived from it the right and the essence of punishment. Indeed, there is no other final and deepest principle from which punishment can be deduced than the righteousness of God. All punishment assumes that he who pronounces and imposes the punishment is clothed with authority over him who transgressed the law. This authority, this right, can have its origin not in man, nor in his physical nature, for this creates only the right of the strongest, nor in his ethical nature, for all men are sinners and the right to punish never rests in the fact that someone stands morally higher than the guilty. All so-called relative theories, which apart from the divine righteousness have been devised for the maintenance of penal law, such as the self-defense, the preventive, the deterrence, the improvement theory, are insufficient to vindicate the right of punishment and are also in conflict with the essence of punishment; they may be moments in, but cannot be the principle of punishment; punishment is always in the first place punitive punishment and only thereafter medicinal and exemplary punishment. Usefulness creates no right. All the mentioned theories, which build penal law on the interest of the state, society, the offenders, therefore all fall back into the theory of the right of the strongest; right is exchanged for might. If there is no moral and legal order above and independent of man, and if its maintenance is not entrusted to anyone by a higher authority, then punishment may be useful for some persons, for an accidental majority, but no right to it exists. Atheism is the undermining and destruction of all right and morality; no God, no master. Only then is there a right to punish, if there exists a legal order established by God and to be maintained in his name by the government even at the cost of the life of its transgressors, because it is more costly than any good and far surpasses every creature in worth. Indeed, at first hearing it seems strange that the legal and behind it the moral order is of such incomparable worth and demands the good and life of man for its maintenance and restoration. But this moral world order is no idea of man, no state of affairs produced by him; it is also no self-subsisting power resting in itself, of which no one can say what it is; but it is the revelation and working of the righteousness of God in this world, it rests in the perfect, holy will of him who upholds and governs all things; whoever assails it assails God himself. Therefore it stands high above man and is worth more than all creatures together; when it comes to a conflict, man perishes thereby; let justice be done, though the world perish; if righteousness perishes, then it has no more worth that men live on earth (Kant). For its maintenance, punishment is instituted; it intends restoration of right, maintenance of God's righteousness; if it does not serve thereto, it becomes coercion and overmight.
Lombard, Sentences II dist. 36. Thomas, Summa Theologica I 2 qu. 87. Stöckl, Textbook of Philosophy III 53. 97. Polanus, Syntagma p. 340. Hoornbeek, Practical Theology I 412. Moor III 329. Buddeus, Institutions of Moral Theology I 612-629. Stahl, Philosophy of Law 5 II 1 p. 160 ff. 2 p. 681 ff. Ulrici, God and Man II 391 ff. Dorner, System of Faith I 286 II 324. Kohler, The Essence of Punishment, Würzburg 1888. H. Seuffert, What Does, What Effects, What Should State Punishment? Bonn 1897. Caro, Problems of Social Morality 1887 p. 193. Dale, The Atonement, 18th ed. 1896 p. 373. Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, Edinburgh 1897 II 442. F. C. Domela Nieuwenhuis, The Essence of Punishment I Utrecht 1867. H. L. Lindaal Jacobs, Considerations on Punishment and Punishing, Amsterdam 1884. Kuyper, Our Program 1879 p. 738.
Punishment always consists in a certain suffering, in the bereaving of some good, whether in wealth or freedom, in body or life; it is a malum passionis, quod infligitur ob malum actionis. Why the order of right demands suffering from him who breaks it, and how it is thereby mended and fulfilled, is hard to say. Willfulness and chance it surely is not. Behind that order of right stands the living, true, holy God, who by no means holds the guilty guiltless; and with Him punishment rests not on an utter lordship in the sense of Duns Scotus, but on the call of His righteousness. If He did not punish sin, He would grant equal rights to evil as to good and deny Himself. So that God may stay God, the punishment of sin is needful. As soon as the moral or the order of right is harmed, it rises up and calls for mending. It avenges itself in punishment, both inward and outward, weighs down the wrongdoer, and therein shows its matchless majesty. God cannot bear that the sinner, instead of standing under His law and heeding it, lifts himself above it and in root makes himself equal to God. And therefore He upholds in punishment His godly sovereignty; He weighs down the sinner through suffering to the place where he belongs, and brings him, where he will not freely take it, through punishment to the forced acknowledgment that he is the lesser, that he is not God but a creature. He who will not hear must feel. Punishment is a mighty proof that only righteousness has right to be, that God alone is good and great. In part, punishment flows from sin itself; sin by its kind brings with it parting from God, and thus darkness, unknowledge, straying, lying, fear, unrest, guilt-feeling, sorrow, wretchedness, bondage; the service of sin is so unspeakably hard. But in part, punishment is also added from without by the rightful authority to the wrongdoing. So it happens in the household, in the school, in fellowship and the state, and so it is also with the punishments that God lets follow upon sin. Many have denied this last and on this ground would know only of natural, but in no way of set punishments, Spinoza, Eth. V prop. 42, many rationalists in the last hundred years, cf. in Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. 391 and Dogm. I 527. Strauss, Gl. I 603. Scholten, L. H. K. II 108v. 569v. Free Will 236, cf. also Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 84, Biedermann, Dogm. II 575 f. Lipsius, Dogm. §. 393. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. I² 397 III² 326 f. Kaftan, Dogm. § 36 and so on. On this standpoint there is truly no reward and no punishment; virtue bears its reward, vice its punishment in itself; a heaven or hell exists not except only in the heart of man himself; the world's tale is the world's doom; at most there is a self-felt need for the guilty man to take his suffering as punishment. Now the word of the singer is true: Life is not the greatest of goods, the greatest of evils is guilt. Puniri non est malum, sed fieri poena dignum. Culpam quam poenam plus de ratione mali habere certum est, Thomas, S. Theol. I qu. 48 art. 6. Guilt makes suffering into punishment; if it is taken away, the suffering can stay the same and yet wholly change in kind. Death as a deed is the same for believers and unbelievers, but for the latter it is a punishment, for the former a gateway to endless life. Therefore one may not from the suffering that strikes someone conclude to his own sin, Luke 13:4, John 9:1; for suffering serves in God's hand by His grace and wisdom not only as punishment, but also as trial, chastening, upbringing; He is so mighty that He can make all things work together for good to those who love Him, Romans 8:28. But with all this, the outward bond laid by God between sin and suffering is not broken. The Scripture gives proofs of it on nearly every leaf. The tale of the world is not the , but it is yet a world-doom; it makes us know deeds that even drive the most unbelieving to the avowal: this is the finger of God. Suffering may often not have its root in a personal sin, yet it has it in the sin of kin, folk, or mankind. One's own inwit witnesses in every man that there is and must be a bond between holiness and bliss, between goodness and happiness. Kant was so sure of this that from the disharmony which here on earth exists between both, he concluded to a hereafter. Not for the reward does the godly serve God, but he is no less heedless of it, as the upholders of a love without self claim to be; Paul says that believers would be the most wretched of all men if they hoped in Christ only in this life. God has after the fall laid between ethos and physis, between moral and natural order, between the fallen man and the wrecked earth such a bond that they together serve the honor of His name and the coming of His kingdom. The set punishments which God often already in this life lets follow upon sin are then no willfulness but take, though we see it not, in the tale of mankind's sin and guilt their ordered place. He who denies them or grants them only a self-felt being runs the risk of seeing in sin itself little more than a fancy and a dream; the tale becomes to him a discord that is never loosed in a higher chord. Cf. Stapfer, Wederl. Godg. IV 448v. Bretschneider, Dogm. I 525 f. Van Voorst, Over de Goddelijke straffen, Haagsch Gen. 1798. V. d. Wijnpersse, Over de straffende gerechtigheid, ib. 1798. Dorner, Chr. Gl. I 287 f. II 224 f.
3. The punishments which God has set upon sin in this life are guilt, stain, suffering, death, and the dominion of Satan. Guilt is the first and heaviest punishment. The word, which is connected with "shall," first only denotes that someone is the worker of something, just as αἰτια, causa. Mostly it includes the thought that someone is the cause of something that ought not to be or to happen (it is his fault). In this sense, guilt presupposes that we were bound to do or to forbear something; we are guilty to keep the whole law, Luke 17:10, Gal. 5:3. And if we have not done that, then we stand guilty; because we are the cause of the law's transgression, we are in a state of accusation (αἰτιασθαι, accusare, reus), the deed is imputed to us, we must answer for it and are bound to satisfy the law; we are held to punishment. Guilt is the obligation resting upon someone on account of law transgression, to satisfy the law by a proportionate suffering of punishment. It binds the sinner immediately after his transgression to the law, to its demand for satisfaction and punishment. Man thinks by transgression to become free from the law, but just the opposite takes place; he becomes bound much more firmly to its demand in another way. God, who cannot cease to be God, even though He gives man freedom to oppose Him, never lets man go, and man is never free from God. At the same moment that he places himself outside the law, that is, outside love, it strikes him with its curse and binds him to its punishment. Guilt is obligatio ad poenam justam sustinendam, subjectio peccatoris ad poenam, Polanus, Synt. Moor III. Turret., Theol., El. IX qu. 3. Mastricht, Theol. IV 2, 7. Müller, Sünde I. Vilmar, Moral I. Art. Schuld in Herzog² and Wuttke, Ethik II. Scholten, Vrije wil. Hoekstra, Vrijheid. The Roman theology makes a distinction between reatus culpae and poenae, Lombardus, Sent. II dist. 42. Thomas, I 2 qu. 87 art. 6. Trid. VI c. 14 can. 30 XIV de poenit., c. 8 and can. 12-15. Bellarminus, de amiss. gr. et statu pecc. V 19. Theol. Wirceb. VII. But this distinction clearly betrays its intention to justify the satisfactory punishments for believers here on earth and in purgatory, and is in direct conflict with the nature of guilt and punishment. It is indeed true that the sins of believers, that is, of those who have received full forgiveness, in themselves always remain sins and worthy of punishment; against the Antinomians, who denied this and therefore considered prayer for forgiveness unnecessary for believers, the Reformed have always maintained this and made the distinction between reatus potentialis and reatus actualis, Moor III. But when the guilt of sins is taken away, then all satisfaction and punishment also falls away with it, for guilt is nothing other than obligation to punishment. God is then no longer a Judge but a Father; He chastens the son whom He loves, 2 Sam. 12:13, 14, but does not punish him; and demands no satisfaction from him, for whom the whole righteousness is brought by Christ. So also Augustine says of the baptized: omni peccato caret, non omni malo, quod planius ita dicitur, omni reatu omnium malorum caret, non omnibus malis, c. Jul. VI c. 16, cf. Alting, Theol. el. nova XVII 5. Turret., Theol. El. IX qu. 3. Moor III. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II.
That sin truly brings guilt with it stands firm by the witness of God in Scripture as well as in the conscience. In Scripture, sin, guilt, and punishment are concepts so interconnected that the words for sin, such as עָוֹן, חַטָּאת, unawares gain the meaning of guilt, Gen. 4:13, Ex. 34:7, Lev. 24:15, Num. 9:13, and so on. The proper word that denotes sin as guilt is אָשָׁם, Gen. 26:10, Lev. 4:13, 5:2, Num. 5:7, and so on, and ὀφείλημα, Mt. 6:12, cf. 5:26, Luk. 7:41, 42, 13:4. Schultz, Altt. Theol. 684 f. God by no means holds the guilty guiltless and pronounces the curse over all who do not abide in the book of the law, Deut. 27:26, Gal. 3:10. Curse, עָלָה, מְאֵרָה, קְלָלָה, κατάρα, ἀνάθεμα, maledictum, is the opposite of blessing, בְּרָכָה, εὐλογία, benedictio, Deut. 11:26, 30:19. Just as God's blessing assigns all manner of good and life to someone, so the divine curse is the handing over of someone to ruin, downfall, death, judgment, Satan. Humans can only wish blessing and curse, but God's blessing and cursing is always exhibitive; it sends what it wishes. At first, God's blessing rested on creation, Gen. 1:22, 28, 2:3, but that blessing was turned into a curse, Gen. 3:17. Indeed, later again God's blessing was pronounced over the earth and humanity, but this flows from God's grace. The heathens therefore do not know the concept of the divine blessing. All the more do they know of the divine curse; classical antiquity is ruled by fear of the vengeance of the Erinyes (Moirai, Furies), the goddesses of the curse. In all heathen religions, fear (δεισιδαιμονία, religio) far outweighs trust in the gods; religion passes more and more into superstition; everywhere people deem themselves surrounded and ruled by ruin-bringing gods, whom they seek in vain to appease by offerings and torments. Truly a curse of God rests on humanity and the world. To seek to explain life and history from the love of God alone is impossible. There is a principle of the wrath of God at work in all creation, which only the shallow can deny. There is no fellowship but separation between God and man; the covenant is broken; God has a quarrel with his creature. All stand guilty and punishable before his face, πάντων ἔνοχοι, Mt. 5:21, 22; Mk. 3:29, Jac. 2:10. The whole world is ὑπόδικος τῷ θεῷ, Rom. 3:19; it stands under the judgment of God and has nothing to answer. Art. Segen in Herzog, ἀνάθεμα by Cremer. Subjectively, this is confirmed by the witness of God in the conscience of every man. Guilt and guilt-consciousness are not the same. Whoever seeks to ascend from guilt-consciousness to guilt cuts off the way to understand guilt in its proper meaning and weight. Ignorance can to a certain degree excuse sin, Luk. 23:34, Acts 17:30, just as conscious and deliberate transgression aggravates sin, Luk. 12:47, Joh. 15:22, 9:41, but there are also sins hidden from ourselves and others, Ps. 19:13; and also sins of ignorance are sins, Acts 17:27-29, Rom. 1:19-21, 28, 1 Tim. 1:13-15. Yet the objective guilt reflects itself weaker or stronger in the consciousness of man. Immediately after the fall, the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened, and they became aware that they were naked. Herein lies that they also know and acknowledge having done evil. Shame is fear of disgrace, an unpleasant painful feeling over something wrong or improper. And with that shame comes fear of God and the desire to hide from Him. That is, in man the conscience has awakened. Before the fall, strictly speaking, there was no conscience in man; there was no cleft between what he was and what he knew he ought to be. His being and self-consciousness coincided. But by the fall comes separation. By God's grace, man still retains the consciousness that he ought to be otherwise, that in all parts he ought to agree with God's law. But reality testifies otherwise; he is not what he ought to be. And this testimony is the conscience. The conscience is thus not the consciousness of fellowship of God with man, as Schenkel conceived it, art. Gewissen in Herzog and Die christl. Dogm. vom Standpunkt des Gewissens aus 1858. It is rather the opposite; it is precisely a proof that fellowship with God is disturbed, that there is a distance and cleft between God and man, between his law and our state. This comes out clearly when the conscience acts accusingly, but also where it excuses in a given case, that is, factually keeps silent, that separation from God underlies it, Rom. 2:14, 15. The conscience is the subjective proof of man's fall, the witness of his guilt before the face of God. God does not only accuse man; in the conscience man condemns himself and takes God's side and his sentence against himself. The finer and more scrupulous the conscience judges, the more it justifies God's thought about man in Scripture. The best and noblest of our race have confirmed God's truthfulness and pronounced guilty over their own heads. Cf. on the conscience my Beginselen der Psychologie 1897, 111, 203.
4. Another punishment of sin is the stain. Just as with the first sin, so also with sins in general, the outward transgression is the revelation and proof of the inward. Sin consists not only in the deed but also in the thought, desire, inclination, and so forth. At each of these stages, sin is both guilt and stain at the same time. Adam did not first become guilty when he ate, but he also already loaded guilt upon himself when he desired the fruit of the tree. Guilt and stain are always the two sides of sin; they go inseparably together; where one is, there is the other. Sin is guilt, because it fights against God's righteousness; it is stain, because it is opposed to his holiness. Guilt binds us to punishment; stain defiles us. Through guilt, the objective relation to God is disturbed; through stain, the subjective fellowship with God is disrupted. Sin is at the same time a breaking of the covenant of works and a destruction of the image of God. The first implies that God is no longer man's ally; he cannot turn to the guilty in favor and love, and the sinner no longer stands in that covenant, can no longer love and keep the law, and thus along this way can no longer acquire life. From the works of the law no flesh can be justified, Ps. 143:2, Rom. 3:20, 2 Cor. 3:6ff., Gal. 3:2, 10. Even though the law of the covenant of works, besides restoring the committed evil through suffering punishment, still obliges us to complete obedience to its commands, Mt. 5:48, 22:37; although God himself keeps his promise and continues to connect life to the keeping of the law, Lev. 18:5, Mt. 19:17, Lk. 10:28; yes, even though the covenant of works is unbreakable in the sense that God in the covenant of grace lays the demand for satisfaction and absolute obedience to the law upon Christ, yet it is broken in this respect, that man is unable to enter life along this way. Paradise is closed to him; the tree of life is denied him. Cf. Moor. Marck, Hist. Parad. Witsius, Oec. foed. Mastricht, Theol. And at the same time, through sin the image of God is destroyed. Rome understands under this that the supernatural gifts are lost and the natural ones remain unharmed. The Lutherans originally taught that man had entirely lost the image of God, since it consisted only in the moral qualities, and that man was now like a stock and a block. But the Reformed maintained that the image of God in the narrower sense was indeed lost and in the broader sense entirely marred and corrupted, but yet not annihilated, Belgic Confession art. 14. The image of God is not an outward, mechanical addition to man, but hangs organically together with his being; it is the health of man. The man who transgresses God's law does not cease to be man; he keeps his body, his soul, his faculties, his powers, his understanding, will, and so forth, but they all stand in the service of sin and work in a wrong direction. As deprivation and disturbance of the image of God, the stain of sin is by nature proper to all men, except Christ; qualitatively there is no distinction. But therefore there is still a quantitative difference. All are indeed turned away from God and walk by nature on the path that leads to destruction. But not all have advanced equally far on that wrong way and are not equally far removed in a quantitative sense from the kingdom of heaven. There is an endless variation and transition between the beginning and the highest development of the sinful life. People, households, generations, families, classes, estates, nations also diverge widely in sin. There are those who are not far from the kingdom of God; there are also those who drink in sin like water, are given over to unrighteousness, hardened, obstinate, and insusceptible to every good impression. And this quantitative difference does not first come about among men through their personal deeds and individual actions, but is also already given with conception and birth. The original sin that comes to us from Adam's side is indeed the general presupposition and source of all individual, actual sins, but the sinful deeds of individuals also work back upon that innate moral corruption, strengthen it, and develop it in a certain direction. Just as a sinful deed, repeatedly done, fosters in us a sinful inclination, for example, to drink, sensual pleasure, lust; so also sinful customs and habits in household, family, generation, nation can strengthen the innate corruption and develop it toward a certain side. And also that peculiar modification of the innate corruption often propagates itself from parents to children, from one generation to another. Man is no individual. The individual is a fiction just as much as the atom, Natorp. Man is born out of the community and lives from the first in a certain circle, condition, and time. Household, family, society, nation, climate, way of life, culture, century, and so forth, all exercise influence on the individual man and modify his innate moral corruption. Sin is therefore essentially always the same, but it shows itself in different persons, families, estates, nations, and in different conditions and times always in another way and in another form. Every man bears also as a sinner his own physiognomy. The sins in the East bear a different character than those in the West, in the hot zone a different one than in a cold climate; in the countryside a different one than in the cities, in the state of culture a different one than in a state of savagery, in the nineteenth century a different one than in the eighteenth, and so forth. There are household, generational, family, national, societal sins. Statistics have proven that in certain times and conditions and circles there also reigns a shuddering regularity of crimes, for example, of manslaughter, suicide, illegitimate births, and so forth, A. von Oettingen, Die Moralstatistik. We all stand in every area under the influence of wrong habits, sinful examples, of the spirit of the age and public opinion. There is, besides the properly so-called original sin, also a collective guilt and collective deed of sin. Just as men, so also their sinful inclinations and deeds stand in connection with one another. Penetrating into the endless richness of all creation, sin also forms a kingdom that, animated by one life principle, organizes itself in manifold forms and appearances. Cf. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 71. 72. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. Frank, Syst. der chr. Wahrh. H. Schmidt in Herzog. Dorner, Chr. Gl. and above.
5. Besides guilt and stain, according to Holy Scripture, suffering is also a punishment for sin. Through it man lost not only the true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness but also dominion and glory. This appears right away after the fall and is further confirmed throughout all Scripture. God sets enmity between man and the serpent and thereby in principle takes away from him the dominion which was originally given to him over the animal world, Gen. 1:26, 2:19. Furthermore, God pronounces upon the woman the punishment of sorrowful pregnancy and of a desire toward her husband that nevertheless always torments her. The man himself receives his share of suffering in the curse spoken over the earth, which obliges him to toilsome labor for the bread of his modest portion. With this, the history of suffering is opened for mankind and for the whole earth. And all the suffering that befalls men here on earth—a short life, a sudden violent death, famine, plague, war, defeat, childlessness, grievous losses, robbery of goods, impoverishment, crop failure, death of cattle, and so forth—it all has its cause, not always in personal sins, for there is also a sparing of the ungodly, Gen. 18:26ff., and a chastening for the trial of the righteous, Job 1, Luke 13:21, John 9:1, 11:4, 2 Cor. 12:7, but yet in sin in general; without sin there would also be no suffering, Lev. 26:14ff., Deut. 28:15ff., Ezek. 4:21, Hos. 2:8ff., Rev. 18:8, 21:4. Even the irrational creation is subjected by God on account of man's sin to vanity and corruption, and now sighs together, as if in labor pains, awaiting the revelation of the glory of God's children, in the hope of then also being itself freed from the bondage of corruption, Rom. 8:19-22. Scripture is not pessimistic in the common sense of the word, but it knows and acknowledges suffering and expresses it in the most moving laments, Gen. 47:9, Job 3, 6, 7, 9, 14 etc., Ps. 22, 38, 39, 69, 73, 74, 79, 89, 90 etc., Eccl., Lam., Matt. 6:34, Rom. 7:24, 8:19ff., 1 Cor. 15:19 etc. And such laments continually rise from all mankind. Teachers of religion, moralists, philosophers, poets, artists, the richly gifted and the deprived, all speak in the same spirit. The lighthearted and superficial pass over it, but all serious-minded have always sensed something of the mysterious connection between life and suffering. Greek antiquity also makes no exception; the basic mood there was not as cheerful as one formerly thought; it was rather bitter and sad. To live in sorrow is the lot that the gods have appointed to mortals; only they themselves are free from cares (Homer). Besides God, no one is happy (Euripides). No mortal remains free from misfortune, no one escapes his fate; man is perishable as a shadow, vain as a dream, his happiness is illusion; the best is not to be born, and if one is born, to die as soon as possible (Sophocles). Death is perhaps the greatest good (Socrates). A sudden death is the greatest happiness, a short life the greatest blessing, the longing for death the deepest wish (Pliny), cf. Pfanner, Theol. gent. c. 17 on death. Nägelsbach, Homer. Theol. 310ff. Paulsen, Ethik I 80ff. Weiss, Apol. d. Christ. I³ 475-501 II³ 464-517. The optimism of the previous century already turned with Voltaire, Candide 1759, into pessimism, and Hegel's rationalism gave way to the philosophy of Schelling, which elevated not reason but the will to the principle of the world, part II 204. Reason may be able to explain what and how things are; that they are can only be derived from a will; and this existence of things is the properly positive, is the irrational remainder that finally remains at the bottom of all that exists. After the eternal act of self-revelation, namely, in the world as we now behold it, all is rule, order, and form; but always there still lies at the bottom the unruly, as if it could once again break through, and nowhere does it seem as if order and form were the original, but rather as if an initially unruly had been brought to order. This is in things the ungraspable basis of reality, the never-exhausted remainder, that which with the greatest effort cannot be resolved into understanding, but remains eternally at the bottom..... Without this preceding darkness there is no reality of the creature; darkness is its necessary inheritance..... All birth is birth out of darkness into light, Works I 7 p. 359ff. For this reason Schelling also had an entirely different view of life and world than Hegel; for the latter everything was rational, but Schelling saw in everything the irrational, the unruly, the darkness, the chaotic lying at the foundation and acknowledged the path of suffering of the world process. It is vain effort to explain the manifoldness in nature from a peaceful intermingling of various forces. All that comes into being can only come into being in discontent, and as anxiety is the basic sensation of every living creature, so all that lives is only conceived and born in violent strife. Who would believe that nature could have created so many wondrous products in this terrible external confusion and chaotic internal mixture..... otherwise than in the most violent reluctance of the forces? Are not most products of inorganic nature evidently children of anxiety, of terror, yes of despair? Works I 8 p. 322, cf. 328. 335 II 1 p. 582. There is even in God a source of sadness, which however never comes to actuality, but only serves the eternal joy of overcoming. Hence the veil of melancholy that is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life; joy must have sorrow, sorrow be explained in joy, I 7 p. 399. The present world, in which we live, is only to be understood as one outside of God. Of it man is the cause through his fall, II 3 p. 352ff., this world outside of God is the world of divine unwillingness, all men, Jews and Gentiles, are by nature children of wrath, by nature children of divine unwillingness, ib. 372 etc., cf. von Hartmann, Ges. Stud. u. Aufs. 1876 p. 683ff. All these thoughts return in systematic connection with the philosophers Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, in poetic form with Rückert, Lenau, Byron, Shelley, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Leopardi, and above all also in the newer fin-de-siècle literature; Buddhism, which sees in the will to live, in existence itself, the cause of all suffering, is honored as the highest wisdom. Life is suffering, it swings back and forth between pain and boredom, it is not worth the trouble of living. The world with its hospitals, lazarettos, surgical tortures, prisons, torture chambers, slave stalls, battlefields, courts of justice, dwellings of misery, etc., offers suitable material for the description of hell and is itself a hell, in which one man is a devil to another. If it were a little worse, it could not exist from misery. All that exists is therefore worthy to perish, Schopenhauer, The World etc. I⁶ 366ff. II 657ff. Parerga II⁵ 303ff. von Hartmann, Philos. of the Unconscious II 273-390 etc., and further literature on pessimism in Ueberweg-Heinze, Hist. of Philos.⁸ 1897 p. 183ff. 481. Concerning the origin and purpose of suffering, there have been many views. Philosophy has almost always aimed to cast the guilt of it, just as of sin, directly or indirectly upon God. Suffering is then derived from an independent evil principle (Parzism, Manichaeism), from an originally evil being (Daub), from a dark nature in God (Böhme, Schelling), from the blind, alogical will to be (Buddhism, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann), from the self-objectification and alienation of God (Hegel), from matter (Plato, Aristotle, Philo), from natural necessity (Weisse, Rothe), from the finitude of the creature (Leibniz), from the developmental state of the world (Ulrici), from the sinful consciousness of man, which regards the necessary imperfections of the world in themselves as evils (Schleiermacher, Lipsius, Ritschl), etc. That however suffering is not to be ascribed to God in the sense that it was given with creation itself stands firm on the basis of the teaching of Holy Scripture, of the testimony of our conscience, and the essence of religion, which closely connects holiness and blessedness. Yet an existence and development of world and mankind without suffering seems an impossible thought. We can form no conception of a history without sin and misery; as soon as we think these away, no event remains in the empty frame of time and space. To the physical organism, pain and death seem naturally, necessarily inherent; impassibility is a property that is unthinkable in a sensible creature. This already holds for men, much more for plants and animals; modern natural science has shown us everywhere in the organic and inorganic nature a struggle for life, in which all creatures stand hostile to each other and have aimed at each other's death.
And yet, however natural sorrow and suffering may seem, against the foregoing consideration the following can be brought forward with good reason: 1°. If we could once remove from the world and humanity all suffering that without any doubt is directly or indirectly caused by sin, then by far the most and heaviest suffering would disappear at once, and the problem of suffering would be reduced to very small dimensions. No one can deny that there exists between sin and misery a most intimate connection; many sins drag after them, according to everyone's judgment, all sorts of dreadful consequences, not only spiritual, such as fear, regret, shame, disgrace, remorse, etc., but also material, such as sickness, misery, pain, poverty, savagery, etc. And this is not only the case with fleshly sins, such as gluttony, drunkenness, lust, etc., but also with such sins that bear a more spiritual character, such as idolatry, superstition, unbelief, lying, greed, vanity, pride, hate, envy, anger, etc. They all work in greater or lesser measure also upon the body and bring destructions there. A stream of spiritual and bodily misery in individual persons, in households, families, generations, peoples, in state, church, society, science, art takes its origin in sin. Take this away, and according to everyone's agreement, almost no suffering remains. The world is perfect everywhere, where man does not come with his torment (Schiller). The main source of the most serious evils that afflict man is man himself, homo homini lupus, Schopenhauer, The World II 663. 2°. Yet, however much truth there may be in Schiller's word, it is not entirely true. Even if we think away the suffering that according to everyone's judgment has its cause directly or indirectly in sin, the world would not thereby become perfect at once. There would still remain all those calamities which befall man from outside and do not stand in connection with sin for everyone's consciousness, such as earthquake, storm, thunderstorm, flood, famine, plague, railway accident, etc. Here too, according to the testimony of Scripture, there is connection with sin, but it is different from the suffering mentioned above. Pharisees and Motazelites sought the explanation of these also in personal sins, but Jesus judged otherwise, Luke 13:4, John 9:1. Not in personal sins, but in the sin of humanity does the disharmony and enmity of nature have its cause. God has for man's sin stricken the earth with the curse and subjected all creation to vanity and corruption. Fallen man no longer belongs in a paradise; the earth corresponds to his condition, which stands between heaven and hell. Man has with knowledge and righteousness also lost dominion and glory; the powers and elements of nature often stand hostile over against him; he can now subject them to himself only through toilsome, strenuous labor. In its entirety, humanity is worthy of no better place than this earth; and for its development, education, preservation, there is also no better possible. Of particular calamities we can almost never indicate the intention with which God sent them, though they are certainly never absolutely speechless to the one they strike. But all the more presumptuous is it, with Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, to take the scale in hand, to weigh therein the joy and sorrow of the whole world against each other, in order then to pronounce the judgment that the sorrow far exceeds the joy. For every creature and every man, even the most thorough pessimist, in fact prefers the sorrowful being above the sorrowless non-being and strives to persist in his existence. And humanity in its entirety has found in the struggle with nature a stimulus for its energy, a material for its labor, a spur for its development. The curse upon the earth has been turned by God's grace into a blessing for it. 3°. That the whole nature shares in the fall of man stands firm not only on the ground of Scripture, but flows as a matter of course from the central place which man occupies in creation, and is also more than probable with a view to present-day natural science. There has sometimes been very strange reasoning about the state of the world before the fall and about its change by and after the fall, part II 548. 549, but the Reformed have here in general observed a wise sobriety, ib. 559. 560, and followed the golden rule that indeed the form of things has been changed by sin but the matter has remained the same. For sin is no substance and can neither increase nor decrease the substance of things, which has God alone as author. Just as man after the fall has remained essentially man, so it is with the whole nature. No new species have been added in the plant or animal kingdom; thorns and thistles were not newly created by a word of God like the grass and the herb and the trees on the third day, Gen. 1:11; and creeping and wild animals existed already before the fall, Gen. 1:24. But just as in man the same faculties and powers, corrupted by sin, began to work in another direction, so it is also with the whole creation, after it was stricken by God with the curse. Left to itself, emancipated from the dominion and care of man, burdened with God's curse, nature has gradually become wild and degenerate and has brought forth thorns and thistles, all sorts of vermin and rending beasts. The possibility of such degeneration is elevated by the newer natural science above all doubt. Paleontology furnishes only very few fossils of rending animals; the great animals of the oldest time, rhinoceros, mammoth, mastodon were all plant-eaters. Of the so-called saurians, which are held to be lizards, it is uncertain; but even whales live partly on plants. Insects are all plant-eaters; only there are some that in undeveloped state, such as caterpillars, larvae, ichneumon wasps, feed on the components of animal beings, but beetles, ants, bees, butterflies, etc., all live on vegetable food. Among the birds there are many that use animal food, but they can also live on plants. To the rending animals belong the three genera of felis (lion, tiger, cat, panther, leopard, etc.), canis (dog, wolf, fox) and ursus (bear, etc.). But of all these animals it is at least doubtful whether flesh-eating belongs to their nature. Darwin has in his work, which is also in this respect very instructive for theologians, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, translated by Dr. H. Hartogh Heys van Zouteveen, Arnhem Nijhoff Cohen, proved that animals can accustom themselves to changed nutrition and cites various examples for that, II 344ff. And similarly, through wildness branches can change into thorns, and through cultivation thorns into branches, II 361. Nature has now in many respects become an antithesis of man, 2 Kings 17:25, Job 5:22, 23, Hos. 2:20, Isa. 11:6ff. 7:23, 65:20ff., Ezek. 14:15, 21, Rev. 21, Sir. 39:32ff.; plants and animals have become living images of human sinful inclinations and passions; fear of animals and worship of animals prove the abnormal relation of man to the world around him. But the wonderful power over animals still occurring now and then in men; the many changes that according to paleontology have entered in the plant and animal kingdom; the domestication and the slow variability in plants and animals furnish proofs in abundance that a state such as Isaiah depicts for us in chapters 11 and 65 belongs by no means to the impossibilities. There is nothing absurd in the thought that, just as in man, so also in nature as a result of God's judgment an important change has entered. In any case, Scripture is far more rational than what is sometimes brought to market under the name of science; according to Lindenschmitt men were formerly rending animals, who had to protect themselves against each other by pile dwellings built in the water, but the predatory animals were then most innocent creatures, in Weiss, Apol. II 497. 4°. Finally, let it not be forgotten that, theologically speaking, the creation itself was in a certain sense infralapsarian, Delitzsch, Genesis 1887 p. 67. The fall was for God no surprise and no disappointment. He foresaw it, had included it in his counsel and already reckoned with it at the creation. This therefore took place in such a way that the whole world, in case man as its head fell, could become as it now is. The state of man and of the whole earth before the fall was a provisional one, which could not remain so. It was of such a nature that it could be raised to higher glory but also, in case of man's transgression, could be subjected to vanity and corruption. Through sin and God's curse there came everywhere from below and from behind the harmony the lawless, the chaotic, the demonic to the fore, which confuses and frightens us. Over the whole creation a veil of melancholy is spread. All creation groans and travails in pain together. Cf. Naville, The Problem of Evil, Geneva 1868. Delitzsch, System of Christian Apologetics 1869 p. 141 ff. Ebrard, Apologetics I 275 ff. Pressensé, The Problem of Pain, Evangelical Studies 1867 p. 1-168. Keppler, The Problem of Suffering in Morality, Freiburg Herder 1895. Sterling Berry, The Problem of Human Suffering in the Light of Christianity. From the English. Heilbronn 1895. Holliday, The Effect of the Fall of Man on Nature, Presbyterian and Reformed Review Oct. 1896 p. 611-621. Paul Cadène, Legitimate Pessimism, Montauban 1894. James Orr, Christian View 217. 495. Harnisch, Suffering Judged from the Theistic Standpoint, Halle 1881. Kübel, in Herzog² 15, 702 ff. Lamers, The Problem of Suffering, Theological Studies 1896. Illingworth, The Problem of Pain, 3d essay in Lux Mundi ed. by Ch. Gore, 13 ed. 1892 p. 82-92. Henry Hayman, Why We Suffer and Other Essays, London 1890 p. 1-109.
6. This suffering comes to a full end in that other punishment for sin, which is called death. Many hold that the Scripture, save in a few places, does not see death as an outcome and punishment of sin. Indeed, in Gen. 2:17 a sudden death, coming right away, is threatened as punishment for sin, and this is always deemed a woe and a punishment. But death itself is far more a thing of nature and comes with the bodily makeup of man, Gen. 3:19, 18:27, Job 4:19, Ps. 89:48f., 90:3, 103:14f., 146:4, Eccl. 3:20, 12:7. So judged of old the Pelagians, Socinians, Rationalists, and so judge now many theologians, such as Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 59 Zusatz. Lipsius, Dogm. § 414. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III 308 f. Smend, Altt. Rel. 504. Marti, Gesch. d. israel. Rel. 193. Clemen, Die chr. Lehre v. d. Sünde I 233 f. Matthes, Theol. Tijdschr. 1890 bl. 239-254 etc. There is some truth in this view. In Gen. 2:17 it is indeed not death as a whole, but surely the death coming right away after the wrongdoing that is threatened for sin. Gen. 3:19 thus does not tell of the full carrying out of the threatened punishment; but changes it and puts it off. Hence the Old Testament sees in the sudden death, coming in the bloom of years, just a punishment for sin, Gen. 6:3, Num. 16:29, 27:3, Ps. 90:7-10, like the death penalty is so understood. This view hangs together with the stewardship of the covenant then and with the upbringing of the folk of Israel. God bound to the keeping of his commands in the days of the Old Testament a long and blessed life and set on wrongdoing sundry punishments on this side of the grave. So the eye of the upright was chiefly set on the lot-sharing of this life and kept within the ring of earthly being; only seldom did it break through to the other side of the grave. The mark between upright and godless lay thus not first in death as such, for this was the same for all, but in the sundry sharing of lot that went before death. And when that sharing also often differed so little, then the mark between the upright and the godless was sought in the sundry aim that suffering had for the first and the last, Deut. 8:2f., Hos. 2:5f. Isa. 1:25f., Jer. 5:3, 9:7, 31:18, Lam. 3:27f., Ps. 119:67, 71, 75, Prov. 3:11f., Job 1 etc. The righteousness of God, which visits sins, becomes for the godly Israel again a ground of freeing and weal, part II 197f. But from this it follows not at all that death itself was deemed a thing of nature and needful. For the view that death is an outcome of the bodily makeup of man shuts not out that this death is punishment of sin. Only for this can the punishment of sin for man lie in death, since he is dust and taken from the earth. Paul teaches likewise that Adam is earthly from the earth and that nonetheless death came into the world through sin. And all Christians speak in the same way; man is dust, flesh, fleeting, and yet his death is an outcome of sin. Furthermore, there is no folk that has felt the dreadfulness and unnaturalness of death deeper than Israel; man is dust and must turn back to dust, but this is not a thing of nature, sin has slowly weakened the life-strength of men, Enoch and Elijah escaped death, it is at odds with the inner nature of man, Job 14:1-12, uprightness and life are closely bound, Lev. 18:5, Deut. 4:1, 30:15, Jer. 21:8, Hab. 2:4, Ezek. 33:16, Ps. 36:10, Prov. 3:2, 18, 4:4, 13, 22, 8:35 etc., in the fleetingness of life a judgment of God is shown, Ps. 90:7-12, cf. Krabbe, Die Lehre v. d. Sünde u. v. Tode 1836. Schultz, Altt. Theol. 690 f. Oehler, Theol. d. A. T. § 77. In the apocryphal and Jewish writings, Sir. 25:26, 39:29, 40:9, Enoch 69:11, Wisd. 1:12f., 2:24, 4 Ezra 3:7, Apoc. Bar. 23:4, Weber, System 238 f., and in the New Testament, John 8:44, Rom. 1:32, 5:12, 6:23, 1 Cor. 15:22, 55, 56, Heb. 2:14, 1 Pet. 4:6, James 1:15, 5:20, Rev. 20:14, 21:4 etc., it is then clearly spoken that death is the wages of sin. Least of all is there thus for those who ever lift up the New Testament at the cost of the Old Testament, grounds to deny the link of sin and death. Yet this is often done on grounds of witnesses from history and sayings from natural knowledge. There are namely many who seem to have overcome all dread of death and fall asleep very calmly; others even make an end to life through self-killing; Rousseau claimed that the natural men all die in peace and without dread; Lessing thought that the ancients held death for a brother of sleep and saw nothing frightful in it; the romantic folk often swooned in a feeling way with death. And yet, though some in stoic numbness have brought it so far that they meet death as a lot with calm, dread of death is born in all that lives. We believe at bottom not that we must die. Death plays in human life such a great role that wisdom is rightly called a study of death, Schopenhauer, Die Welt I 324 f. II 528 f. Death has always been for man the last and greatest foe; all acknowledge in him at last an unnatural might and flee him as long as may be. Indeed natural knowledge has often called death a thing of nature and needful; Lauvergne said e.g., la mort de l’homme est une conséquence logique et naturelle de son être. Tout prend fin, dura lex sed lex, with Delitzsch, Apol. 132, cf. also H. Wagner, De dood toegelicht van het standpunt der natuurwet, Utrecht 1856. But so speaking, knowledge has claimed more than it could answer for. Death is a mystery in full sense. According to natural knowledge matter and strength are undying, and according to Weismann and others the one-celled protozoa are also deathless. Why then is the bodily makeup deadly, that is put together from such matters and strengths and cells? That makeup is moreover according to knowledge renewed in a man every seven years; it is fed and strengthened from day to day; why can this not go on and does it stop after a few tens of years already? Let no one speak of old age and waning of strengths, for these are names that mark the showings but do not make them clear, and themselves need making clear. Weshalb die Zellen sich abnutzen und dahinsiechen, weshalb sie im Alter Veränderungen unterliegen, von denen sie in der Jugend bewahrt bleiben, das ist uns bis jetzt noch verborgen, H. de Varigny, Wie stirbt man? Was ist der Tod? Uebers. von S. Wiarda, Minden z. j. 52. Many plants and beasts furthermore outdo the life-span of man sometimes by hundreds of years; why is the life-strength in man so soon spent and does he reach at most seventy or eighty years, if he is very strong? Thereto comes yet that death through waning of strengths comes almost never, neither in men nor in plants and beasts. Nearly always death comes in through a sickness, a woe, a mishap etc.; even when once in a while a man so-called dies of waning of strengths, death yet bears a sick-like mark and is brought by some upsetting of certain cells in the body. What then is the ground that death takes away nearly all men before the time and often even in the strength of years, in the bloom of youth, in the first hours of their being? Knowledge knows not the cause that makes death a needfulness, de Varigny 18. That man dies, says therefore Prof. Pruys van der Hoeven in his Study of Christian Anthropology, is a riddle that lets itself be made clear only through the falling away of his nature, with Delitzsch, Apol. 126. Le mystère de la mort reste aussi intact que celui de la vie, Delage, La structure du protoplasme etc. 1895 p. 354. 771, and cf. furthermore Sabatier, Le problème de la mort, 2 ed. 1896. Bourdeau, Le problème de la mort, ses solutions imaginaires et la science positive, 2 ed. Paris 1896. Newman Smyth, The place of death in evolution, London Unwin 1897.
7. The last punishment of sin to be spoken of here lies in this, that the world in an upright sense has come into the might of Satan and his angels. Since Satan beguiled mankind and brought him to the fall, John 8:44, 2 Cor. 11:3, 1 Tim. 2:14, Rev. 12:9, 14, 15, 20:2, 10, the world is in his might and lies in the evil one, 1 John 5:19; he is the overlord of the world and the god of this age, John 12:31, 16:11, 2 Cor. 4:4. Though it be that the devils after their fall were cast into hell, to be kept unto the judgment, 2 Pet. 2:4, Jude 6; yet they are not yet smitten by that judgment, Matt. 8:29, Luke 8:31, James 2:19. They yet come into the gathering of the angels, Job 1, Luke 10:18, Rev. 12:7, hold themselves in the air, Eph. 2:2, 6:12, roam about, dwell and work on this earth, and have great might here. Above all, the heathen world is the realm of their working, Acts 16:16, 26:18, Eph. 2:2, 6:12, Col. 1:13, 1 Cor. 10:20, 8:5, Rev. 9:20; but when Christ came to earth, they also within the bounds of God's folk bound the strife against Him. Satan ruled and worked in the Christ-foe Jews, John 8:44ff., tempted Jesus, Matt. 4:1-11, sent unclean ghosts, entered into Judas, Luke 22:3, John 6:70, 13:2, 27, and so on; it was then his hour, Luke 22:53, John 14:30. But Christ was the stronger, Luke 11:22, strove against him all his life, Luke 4:13, overcame him and cast him out, Luke 10:18, John 14:30, 12:31, 16:11, Col. 2:15, Heb. 2:14, 1 John 3:8, and in beginning draws the realm of the church from his lordship, Acts 26:18, Col. 1:13, 1 John 2:13, 4:4, Rev. 12:11. Yet he still works always from without in the church; he roams about over the earth, Job 1, tempts the believers and works against them, Luke 22:31, 1 Cor. 12:7, 1 Thess. 2:18, seeks to beguile them and bring them to fall, 1 Cor. 7:5, 2 Cor. 2:10, 11:3, 13-15, 1 Pet. 5:8, 1 Thess. 3:5, Rev. 12:10, so that the church is called to strive ever against him, Matt. 6:13, Eph. 6:12ff., Rom. 16:20, 1 Pet. 5:9, James 4:7, Rev. 12:11. Once at the end of the days he lifts himself yet once in all his strength, Matt. 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, 2 Thess. 2:1-12, Rev. 12ff.; but then shall he also by Christ be overcome and with all his angels cast into the pool of fire, 2 Thess. 2:8, 1 Cor. 15:24, Rev. 20:10.
Belief in evil spirits occurs among all folks and in all faiths. Sometimes the dread of evil spirits has almost wholly thrust out trust in the good ones, Roskoff, History of the Devil. And in nearly all heathen faiths, bodily evil is ascribed to one or more ghostly beings, who in kind and rank stand even with the good gods.
Yet Scripture teaches otherwise, and Christendom in the first times in sundry ways curbed and withstood Jewish and heathen superstition; church and state made sundry rules against witchcraft, soothsaying, and the like, and yet till the thirteenth hundredyear applied to those guilty thereof no other than training punishments. Even when later they took refuge in the death penalty, they therewith truly had in view the rooting out of heathen superstition. It therefore does not do to hold Christian faith and church without more answerable for all the superstition that also among Christians, and chiefly from the 13th to the 18th hundredyear, has reigned. Sundry causes worked thereto, the woeful states in state and fellowship, the fearsome visitings of hungerneed and pest, the gross unknowing of the folk, the lacking knowledge of kind, the magical, kabbalistic bent among the followers of kind-lore, and so forth.
Yet the church in this does not go free. Oftentimes she took over in lore and deed the heathen superstition. Already among the church fathers this comes out. As every man has his warding angel, so he also has his demon. Outside Christendom the devil has nearly boundless sway. The loosing in Christ is in the first stead a freeing from the devil. All bodily evil in the world, sickness, crop-fail, hungerneed, pest, death is ascribed to Satan. He is the unseen cause of all idolatry, magic, star-lore, heresy, unbelief; superstition rests on a demonic reality.
When the oftentimes shallow turnings of the folks of Europe under Christian varnish let sundry heathen teachings and deeds live on, there came in the Middle Ages besides the belief that the devil in sundry shapes, of tomcat, cat, mouse, goat, swine, werewolf, could appear, sundry vermin create, as incubus or succubus make himself guilty of whoredom, draw men to a bond sealed with blood, bewitch them, enter into them, ride with them through the air, change them into beasts, and also in kind work sundry harms.
Rome has ever taken the demonic reality of this superstition under shielding, not only in the Middle Ages (bull of Innocent VIII, Malleus Maleficarum), but also after the Reformation till the present day; in Roman theology, for example of Suarez, Vasquez, Lessius, Liguori, Görres, and others, belief in the might of the devil takes an uncommonly broad place, cf. Graf Paul von Hoensbroech, Religion or Superstition; and how much superstition lives on in deed among Roman Christians has lately in the infamous tale of Leo Taxil been sadly brought to light, cf. H. Gerber, Leo Taxil’s Palladismusroman. For Rome all that is falls asunder into a lower, unhallowed and a higher, hallowed field; on the first Satan reigns with nearly boundless might, the second must by cross-sign, holy water, beswearings, and so forth, be warded from his sway and working, De Harbe’s Explanation of Catholic Faith- and Moral-lore, worked and enlarged by B. Dankelman; the Roman Christian sees himself everywhere threatened by the devil and must take sundry measures to drive him away, Kolde, The Churchly Brotherhoods.
It is true that Protestantism in the first time left this Roman and at bottom heathen superstition nearly untouched; witch-belief and witch-trials were defended by Protestants even as strongly as by Romans and later fought by Romans (Spina, Molitor, Loos, Tanner, von Spee) even as well as by Protestants (Weier, Godelmann, Reginald Scott, van Dale, Bekker, Thomasius); following Luther, the Lutherans granted a very great might to the devil, led all evil from him and upheld the exorcism, Köstlin, Luther’s Theology; Müller, Symbolic Books; cf. Roskoff; Philippi, Churchly Faith. But yet the Reformation, chiefly in its Calvinistic branching, brought in the devil-belief truly an weighty change.
Going back to Scripture and standing by her givings, owning the utter sovereignty of God, she could in Satan and his angels, how mighty also, yet see no other than creatures, who without God’s will can neither stir nor move. Rationalistic was the Reformation not. She held fast that there were evil spirits, who work on men, chiefly on their fancy, and even could lower them to their tool. But this might of Satan over mankind was yet always under God’s foreseeing; it was in the first stead ethical of kind and had in sin its spring; it was besides within narrow bounds limited; not Satan, but God is the Shaper of light and darkness, of good and evil; sickness and death are sent us by Him, Isaiah 45:7. Hebrews 2:14 says only that Satan has the might of death, because he through sin brought death to sway in the world and so is manslayer from the beginning, John 8:44. Our life and life-end is not in Satan’s but in God’s hand. Luke 13:11, 16 and 2 Corinthians 12:7 give no right to ascribe all sickness and ill to Satan. And further Satan cannot shape and bring forth something from naught, he can neither as incubus nor as succubus beget children, he cannot change men into beasts, bring to death or call back to life; he cannot straightway work on understanding and will, he cannot change the substance and quality of things, and so forth, Voetius, Disputations; and further Polanus, Syntagma; Zanchius, Works; Synopsis of Purer Theology; Turretin, Elenctic Theology; Mastricht, Theology; Brahe, Notes on the Five Walloon Articles; Moor; M. Vitringa.
Only through such a faith, which closely clings to the Holy Scripture, can superstition be overcome—a superstition that has struck such deep roots in the human heart and, despite all so-called understanding growth, keeps rising up again and again. Rationalism first fought against the working of evil spirits on men and then against their being; and the outcome has been that while faith in the Scripture has been given up, superstition has not been rooted out. On the contrary, it now enters under all kinds of shapes like magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, spiritism, astrology, and so on, right in the circles of unbelief; occultism, which has flourished through all ages and among all folk, cf. Kiesewetter, History of Occultism, 3 vols., Leipzig 1891, A. Lehmann, Superstition and Sorcery, Stuttgart 1898, counts in the last tens of years of this hundred-year span its followers by millions and is even praised in art and knowledge as the highest wisdom.
Even against this newfangled superstition, the foolishness of God is wiser than men. For not only is there nothing reasonable to bring in against the being of fallen spirits, but also the likelihood that they can lead men astray cannot be gainsaid on any ground. Just as men wield sway over others through word and deed, through likeness and bearing, so there is nothing unseemly in the thought that a leading-astray might goes out from the fallen spirit-world upon men's fancy, understanding, and will. Against this it is brought in that then man can always cast his guilt upon the devil; but this is also the case when someone is led astray by his fellow man; furthermore, the tempting always happens in an upright way and does not lift away one's own guilt; and in the circles where belief in the being of fallen angels is held, the feeling of guilt is usually not weaker than where their being is denied. Belief in the devil upholds at the same time the dreadful earnestness of sin and the redeemability of man; either a devil outside mankind or thousands of devils in human shape, Weiss, Apology of Christianity II 519. There shows itself in men sometimes such a wild, well-thought, on-purpose hatred against God and all that is godly, ibid. 574-587; children of God, and among them not the weakest and smallest, but the furthest along, such as stand foremost in the strife, who live closest in fellowship with God, they often bewail such frightful temptations and assaults, they speak of such godless thoughts and leanings that suddenly rise up in their heart, that it is a boon to be allowed to believe in the being of devils. There are depths of Satan, which in the Scripture, in the history of mankind, in the wrestling of Christ's church, in the undergoing of believers, are sometimes laid bare for a moment.
And with that, let one bethink that the sinful might forms a kingdom and in its fighting against God and his kingdom goes to work in an ordered way. Whoever could oversee it wholly would without doubt find in the history of its wrestling a plan of onset and warding. There is in the sinful life of the single man, but much more still in that of households, kindreds, folks, mankind through all ages, a well-thought, planned fighting against God and all that is God's. And the leading of this strife rests with him who in the Scripture is called the prince of this world and the god of this age. So he already stepped forth right away at the tempting and fall of the first man. In heathendom he has set up a might that stands foe-like over against all true worship, uprightness, upbringing. When Christ appeared on earth, he gathered his might against Him, not only by attacking Him himself and chasing Him without rest, but also by surrounding Him on all sides with demonic strengths and thus hindering and breaking down his work. The demon-possessed in the New Testament were not everyday sick folk, though sickness signs, such as deafness, dumbness, falling-sickness, madness, and so on, also come forth in them. For they are each time clearly set apart from everyday sick, Matt. 4:24, 8:16, 10:1, Mark 1:32, 3:15, Luke 13:32. The special thing with the possessed is that from them another being speaks than they themselves are, that that being knows Jesus as the Son of God, stands wholly foe-like over against Him, and leaves the sufferer only at his bidding, Matt. 1:34, 8:29, 31, Mark 1:26, 3:11, Luke 4:34, 41, 5:41, 8:2, 30, Acts 16:17, 19:15. This obsession now, however dreadful, is so little unlikely that we see a like showing come forth in hypnotism, whereby one man is underlaid to the thought and will of another; that even today such cases of possession take place; and that whoever deems it unlikely must also deny all working of the soul on the body, and of God on man and the world. Satan apes everything; God shows himself through theophany (incarnation), prophecy, wonder; the demonic mock-shape thereof are obsession, soothsaying, and spellcraft, to which the Scripture therefore often grants truth, Gen. 41:8, Ex. 7:12, 22, 8:7, 18, 19, Num. 22, Deut. 33:4, Josh. 24:10, 1 Sam. 6:2, 7, 28, 2 Chron. 33:6, Isa. 47:9-12, Jer. 39:13, Nah. 3:4, Dan. 1:20, 2:10, Acts 8:9, 13:6-10, 16:16, and so on, which it most strongly blames and forbids, Ex. 22:18, Lev. 20:27, Deut. 18:10, Jer. 27:9, 2 Chron. 33:6, Mic. 5:11, Gal. 5:20, but which once more toward the end of the days shall be shown by Satan in all their leading-astray strength, 1 Thess. 2:18, 2 Thess. 2:8-11, Rev. 9:1-11, 13:13-15, 19:20.
Cf. besides the literature already named earlier on demonology, Ebrard, art. Demonic in Herzog. Joh. Weiss, in Herzog. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology 293. Hofmann, Scriptural Proof I 445 f. Philippi, Church Faith III 334 f. Kahnis, Dogmatics I 445 f. Beck, Lectures on Christian Faith II 390 f. Weiss, Life of Jesus I 454 f. Justinus Kerner, Stories of Possessed of Newer Time, with Reflections by C. A. Eschenmayer on Possession and Sorcery 1834, and therewith Strauss, Characteristics and Criticisms 1830 p. 301. Demon Possession and Allied Themes, Being an Inductive Study of Phenomena of Our Own Times, by Rev. John L. Nevius D.D. for Forty Years a Missionary to the Chinese. With an Introduction by Rev. F. F. Ellinwood D.D. 2 ed. New York, Chicago and Toronto, Fleming H. Revell Company 1896. Hafner, The Demonic in the New Testament 1894. Laehr, The Demonic of the New Testament. Leipzig 1894. Zimmer, Sin or Sickness, Leipzig 1894. J. A. H. van Dale, Possession and Madness, Heusden 1896. Florenz Chable, The Wonders of Jesus, Strasbourg Theological Studies II 4. 1897 p. 45 f. Bodelschwingh, The Church's Work in the Care of the Mind-Sick, 1896 p. 13 f.
1. Sin and wretchedness are to some degree acknowledged by all men. And from this acknowledgment a weaker or stronger longing for deliverance is born in all; the need for deliverance is also widespread. Even all men are in greater or lesser measure aware that deliverance must come from above. Παντες δε θεων χατεους’ ἀνθρωποι. But the heathens did not know the grace which alone can deliver man from sin and wretchedness; they had only guesses and wishes. Humana ad deos transferebat Homerus; divina mallem ad nos (Cicero). Only in Holy Scripture does the grace of God meet us in all its richness and glory. Right after the fall it already begins. The punishment threatened in Gen. 2:17 was plainly not fully carried out. Adam and Eve did not die on the day of their transgression. If the righteous punishment for sin had been carried out right away and in full, then in the first human pair the whole human race would have been destroyed, the earth laid waste, the cosmos turned back to chaos, yes, to nothingness. But then Satan would have triumphed and God would have lost. Therefore right after the fall another principle comes into work, which curbs, fights, and overcomes sin. Not only is the punishment not fully applied; but also that punishment which is applied is at the same time a blessing. All that takes place right after the fall is a showing and proof of God's wrath and of God's grace at the same time. The sense of guilt that awakens in Adam and Eve, the conscience that rises up accusing, the shame over their nakedness, the fear and hiding from God, Gen. 3:7ff., are all a proof that they have broken God's law and are worthy of his wrath and punishment; but they also show that man is not hardened or stubborn, that he has not become a devil but has stayed a man. With the angels it is so that, falling, they also fall at once to hell, Jude 6; they are right away hardened in evil and beyond deliverance. But man is so made that, falling, he can yet be raised up again; he stays open to deliverance. God holds back the full working out of the principle and power of sin in man. More than that, after the fall God does not draw back and even then does not let man go for a moment. As right after the transgression feelings of guilt, shame, fear awaken in man, then all this is already a working of God's Spirit in man, a showing of his wrath but also of his grace, a showing which is the groundwork of all religious and ethical life that is still in man after the fall. But God shows himself also in another way. As man hides himself from him, he seeks him out and calls him. It is true, God comes to him from afar and man wants out of fear to hide himself and make the distance between himself and God even greater. There is no more fellowship between God and man but distance and parting; the covenant is broken. And yet, God comes to man and seeks him out; he does not leave him to his own foolishness and fear, which makes him seek safety in hiding from God. But he himself out of his own will calls man back to himself. And in doing so he does not overwhelm and frighten man. He comes as it were from afar; he comes to him not in storm or thunder but in the ruach hayom , that is, in the evening coolness, amid the solemn rustling of the trees in the evening. And by that they knew the voice of God and noticed that he was drawing near. That drawing near was grace. God gives man time to come to himself and think over what he will answer. Even clearer does this showing of God's grace come out in the hearing and in the punishment, Gen. 3:9-13. The Lord calls Adam by name, for he is the head and the one accountable. God does not come at once with his judgment but sets up an inquiry, goes to questioning, and gives man every chance to defend himself. As man makes use of that, and indeed does not deny all guilt but yet does not fall down humbly and repentant before God, but seeks to excuse himself, then God does not break out in wrath, then he lets that excuse count to some degree. And then, while he began the hearing with Adam, now in speaking the punishment he turns first to the serpent, then to Eve, after that to Adam.
And in that punishment, mercy triumphs over judgment. The punishment, Genesis 3:14, 15, first of all concerns the serpent as an ordinary beast. God humbles the serpent and sets enmity between it and mankind; from now on, in place of the former subjection of the beasts to man, there will be a strife between both, in which man will indeed overcome but yet will have much to suffer from the beasts, especially from the serpent. But furthermore, this punishment goes through the serpent back to the evil power, whose tool it was. With it man had made a covenant and for that broken the covenant with God; God graciously undoes this covenant of man, sets enmity between the serpent's seed and the woman's seed, brings the woman's seed, that is, mankind, back to His side, thus declares that from Eve there will yet come forth a mankind, and that this mankind in the strife against the evil power will indeed suffer much but yet in the end triumph. The way for the human race will from now on go through suffering to glory, through strife to victory, through the cross to the crown, through the state of humiliation to that of exaltation. This is the groundwork that God here proclaims for the entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The punishment over the woman, Genesis 3:16, strikes her both as mother and as wife; she will just as woman have much sorrow to bear; the highest that she desires, namely, to be a mother, she will not be able to obtain otherwise than in the way of manifold sufferings, longing for, submission to the man, bearing with pain; but thus she will yet obtain her highest wish and reach her calling; she will be a mother of the living, although by her transgression and lifting up above the man she had earned death, and she will be saved in childbearing, 1 Timothy 2:15. The punishment over the man, Genesis 3:17-19, consists in this, that the earth is cursed for his sake, that he will eat bread in the sweat of his face and after a life of toil and trouble will return to dust. In connection with that, he is then driven out of paradise and sent into the wide world, Genesis 3:22-24. But also this punishment is a blessing. Toil ennobles; it keeps man from moral and bodily downfall, stirs his strength and heightens his work. Although man is banished from paradise, he is yet not sent to hell; he is sent into the world, that he may subdue and rule it through toilsome and earnest toil. Herein lies the beginning and the groundwork of all culture; man's lordship is not wholly lost but is spread through toil, Psalm 8; even in fallen man the image of God, after which he was shaped, is still to be known. Yes, even the timely death is not only a punishment but also a boon; God has set death, that sin might not be deathless, Irenaeus, Against Heresies III 23.6. After the fall, therefore, two kinds of groundwork straightway come into working: wrath and grace, righteousness and mercy. From that alone a world like we know can be made clear. This is a world full of mingled sorrow and mirth, tearful laughter, standing in the sign of the cross, and straightway after the fall given to Christ, the man of sorrows, that He might save and subdue it.
After God has thus spoken out the punishment, Adam and Eve humbly bow their heads; they bring nothing more forward, lay the hand on the mouth, and take God's word without any gainsaying. That word sounds indeed unbelievable, the truth thereof can only become clear in the far future, but yet they believe it, blind to the future and seeing in the bidding. Leaning on God's promise, Adam names his wife Eve, life, wellspring of life, mother of the living. Before the fall he saw in her chiefly the woman who was given him for help, and therefore called her woman. But now he beholds in her first of all the mother and names her Eve. Death and ruin are indeed earned, but God's blessing yet makes the woman fruitful, and brings forth from her a mankind that in her greatest son, the Son of Man, shall overcome all evil might of sin. Adam sees in God's promise the breeding, the being, the unfolding, the keeping of the human kind warranted and takes it as such with a true childlike faith. And this faith was reckoned to him for righteousness. In root, Genesis 3 holds the whole tale of mankind, all God's ways to the saving of the lost and to the overcoming of sin. In matter, here is the whole gospel, the whole bond of grace at hand. All that follows is the unfolding of what is now already planted as a seed.
2. The Concept of Covenant in Scripture. Yet in Genesis 3 the word covenant is not yet named; only with Noah, Abraham, and Israel at Sinai is there talk of it. The new criticism thinks that it is also here antedated, and that Israel's religion at first did not differ from that of other folks. The bond between the LORD and Israel was like that of Chemosh to Moab. The thought of a covenant between the LORD and his folk was wholly strange to the old Israel. This knew nothing of it, that God as the God of heaven and earth chose Israel out of all folks, made it his own, and set it in a covenant with himself. All these thoughts arose only much later. Even with Amos the covenant bond does not yet appear; Hosea says only that one can liken Israel's unfaithfulness to a covenant breach, 6:7. Only Deuteronomy is in truth a covenant book; it was brought in and taken up in covenant wise, 2 Kings 23:3, cf. Jeremiah 34:8ff., Ezra 10:3, Nehemiah 10:1. But now when that covenant first arose, it was yet understood quite otherwise than later. Men then understood under it chiefly the duty of Israel toward the LORD, to be a holy folk and to keep his laws. If thus Israel did not keep the covenant, then it was broken and Israel laden with the curse, Deuteronomy 27 and 28. But though Israel in the reformation of Josiah formally took up the covenant, it did not hold to it, was punished and sent into exile. And then arose little by little the thought, that God's covenant stood in a law which he had given, that God had bound himself to stay true to Israel and also, if it fell away, not to leave it; God could well punish Israel, but not destroy the covenant. The Israel that came back from exile clung fast to this covenant thought and laid it back in the past, in the history of the fathers, cf. Wellhausen, History of Israel; Smend, Old Testament Theology; and chiefly R. Kraetzschmar, The Covenant Idea in the Old Testament in its Historical Development. But this outcome is gained by means of a forceful criticism, which strikes the facts in the face and in the end is nothing but whim. So for example in Genesis 18:21 the words: so shall the Lord be to me a God, which truly make one think of a covenant, are surely a later adding. Exodus 21-23 bears well the name of the covenant book and Exodus 34 holds well the covenant words, but these pieces are not from Moses' time, and though they are pre-Deuteronomic, they yet hold no formal covenant such as is spoken of in the days of Josiah; maybe they are also post-Deuteronomic. Hosea 8:1 is interpolated. In Genesis 15:18 the word covenant is but the solemn name for the oath, whereby God binds himself to give to Abraham's seed the land of Canaan; of mutual duties there is no talk, and so on. A criticism that reasons in this way gets no sureness, save that which it itself wills. First it builds on ground of the claimed untrueness of the writings the history of the religious thoughts, and later it uses this same rebuilt history to show the untrueness of the writings set against it. Cf. G. Vos, Recent Criticism of the Early Prophets, Presbyterian and Reformed Review; also Strack in a review of Kraetzschmar's book, Theological Literature Sheet. Further, the main question in the search for the covenant thought in Holy Writ is by no means this, whether the word berith at first meant covenant or rather setting. Some such as Delitzsch, Gesenius, Dillmann, Schultz, Oehler, Wellhausen, Guthe, Bredenkamp, König, Cremer say the first, take as second meaning covenant term, and so let the sense go over into setting, law, while a law gets rightfulness in the way of the covenant. Others, such as Hofmann, Buhl, Friedrich Delitzsch, Orelli, Strack, Siegfried, Stade, Nowack think that setting, ordinance is the oldest meaning, and that this went over into that of covenant, because a law orders a back-and-forth bond. Likely these readings do not look out; also it is unworkable to show in Writ the shift from the one to the other meaning historically; now this, now that meaning weighs more without one being able to mark older or younger springs thereby. The grasp of berith is then also otherwise to set. The drawing sheds little light hereon. According to most it comes from barah , cut, and so points back to the old Eastern wont, to go between the over against each other laid pieces of slain beasts at a covenant closing, to show that like lot as these beasts might befall the breaker of the covenant, thence karath berith , cut oaths, strike covenant, cf. Genesis 15:8ff., Jeremiah 34:19; according to others it comes from an Assyrian stem that means bind, Kraetzschmar. However this be, from Genesis 21:22ff., 26:26ff., 31:44ff., it shows clearly that to a berith three things belonged, an oath or pledge that held the agreed settings, a curse that called God's punishment on the breaker, and a worship rite that showed the curse in likeness. The closing of a berith was thus always a religious deed. Well was the word first used on worldly ground of settings and pacts between men. Long before God set up his covenant with Noah and Abraham, there were already covenants set up between men. And this had also to be so, if Noah, Abraham, Israel were to grasp and worth the religion as a covenant. Therefore the word comes also not yet in Genesis 3:15. Only when in the sinful, lying mankind's fellowship time and again for warding or getting of some good covenants became needful, could the meaning and worth of a covenant be seen and the religion under this viewpoint be taken up. But though berith is first used of mankind's covenants, it yet always marks a religious deed. The head thing in berith is not whether it marks a covenant or a setting. But it gives in the whole to know such a pledge, agreement, pact, covenant, setting, ordering etc., which by a solemn rite is set under God's ward and so gets a mark of unbreakableness, Kraetzschmar. Whether berith more marks a two-sided covenant or a one-sided ordering hangs not on the word nor on the historical unfolding of the grasp, but well simply on the sides that are therein bound. As one of both sides is under and has less to say, the berith unwitting gets the mark of an ordering that is laid on the other by the one side; berith becomes then like-word with choq , Exodus 34:10, Isaiah 59:21, Jeremiah 33:20, 31:36, 34:13, and karath berith is built not only with im and bein but also with le , Joshua 9:6, Isaiah 55:3, 61:8, Jeremiah 32:40. As the winner with a beaten, or a king with his underlings closes a berith , all the weight falls on the duties that the latter have thereby to fulfill, Joshua 9, 1 Samuel 11, 2 Samuel 5:3, 1 Kings 20:34, Ezekiel 17:13. Yet stronger becomes the meaning of ordering and setting, when there is likeness speech of a berith with the eyes, Job 31:1, with the stones and the beasts, Job 5:22, 40:28, with death, Isaiah 28:15, of God with the world-kind, Genesis 8:22, Jeremiah 33:20, 25, or with the beasts, Genesis 9:12, Hosea 2:17-22, Isaiah 11:6 etc. But also when God and man close a covenant, the one-sided mark comes of itself time and again strong to the fore; they are yet no like sides, but God is the Sovereign who lays his orderings on the made things. As God in Genesis 15:8ff. closes a covenant with Abram, that is no ownlike pact but a pledge; God gives his promise, he binds himself to its fulfilling and goes between the pieces of the offering beast. And elsewhere he swears by himself, Genesis 22:16, by his life, Deuteronomy 32:40, by his soul, Amos 6:8, Jeremiah 51:14, to but show to man the unchangeable of his counsel, Hebrews 6:17. And this one-sided mark of the covenant had in the history ever clearer to come to light. For well laid God's covenant also on those with whom it was closed duties; duties namely, not as terms to the going into the covenant, for the covenant was closed and rests only in God's mercy, but well as way that the out of grace taken up into the covenant now henceforth had to walk, Genesis 17:1, 2, Exodus 19:5, 6, 8, 24:3, 7, Leviticus 26:14ff., Deuteronomy 5:29, 27:10ff., 28:1ff., 30:1ff. etc. But though Israel time and again took up God's covenant anew, Exodus 19:8, 24:3, 7, Deuteronomy 29:10-13, Joshua 24:16, 2 Kings 23:3, 2 Chronicles 15:12, 23:16, 29:10, 34:31, Nehemiah 8 etc., it walked not in the way of the covenant and unhallowed and broke it every eyeblink. So rose the question, whether this covenant of grace was then even shaky as the covenant of works before the fall. And thereon gave the opening answer, and ever stronger and louder, as the falling away grew: no, this covenant shakes not; men may become unfaithful, but God forgets not his promise, the covenant lies solely and only fast in his mercy, Leviticus 26:40-44, Deuteronomy 4:31, 30:1ff., 32:36ff., Judges 2:1, 2 Kings 13:23, Psalm 81:9, 12, 89:1-5, 105:8-10, 106:45, 111:5, Isaiah 1:3, 5:13, 54:10, Jeremiah 18:5-10, Ezekiel 33:10-16, Hosea 6:1-3, 11:7-9, 14:2-9, Joel 2:12-14. God can and may not break his covenant; he has willingly, out of himself, with a dear oath bound himself thereto; his name, his honor, his being itself hangs thereon, Exodus 32, 33, Numbers 14:16, Deuteronomy 32:26, 1 Samuel 12:22, Isaiah 48:8-11, Jeremiah 14:7, 20, 21, Ezekiel 20:9, 14, 22, 43, 44, Joel 2:17-19 etc. And herein shines the glory of the religion which we as Christians confess. Earlier, part II is shown why the true religion must bear the shape of a covenant. In it God comes down to man, and takes him up into his fellowship. But as God so gives himself to man, then is this also bound to give himself wholly to God. The covenant that goes out from God and takes us up warns and binds us to a new hearkening. But if we then sometimes out of weakness fall into sins, so must we yet therefore not despair of God's grace nor lie in the sins, for the covenant of grace lies fast in the unchangeable good pleasure of God. This unbreakableness, that lies shut in the word berith , is likely also the reason why it in the Septuagint is not given by suntheke but by diatheke . The New Testament took this over and laid it both on the Old and on the New Testament bedding of the grace covenant. Worth marking is that our States Translation as also the English over setting, the word diatheke in the first case by covenant Luke 1:72, Acts 3:25, 7:8, Romans 9:4, 11:27, Galatians 3:15, 17, 4:24, Ephesians 2:12, Hebrews 9:4, and in the second by testament translates, Matthew 26:28, Mark 14:24, Luke 22:20, 1 Corinthians 11:25, 2 Corinthians 3:6, Hebrews 9:15, 12:24, 13:20. There lies thereunder the thought that the grasp foedus more fits on the bedding of the Old Testament and the grasp testamentum more on that of the New Testament, cf. Bengel on Matthew 26:28. After the covenant with the fleshly Israel is broken, therefor in the stead is trod the ghostly Israel, that after God's choosing is gathered out of all folks, that the goods of salvation as by testamentary ordering from the Son receives, in childship bond to God stands and the heavenly bliss as an heritage awaits, Luke 22:29, Romans 8:16, Galatians 3:15-17, Hebrews 9:15-17, 1 John 3:1, 2, 1 Peter 1:4. Writings on the teaching of the covenant in Writ by Kraetzschmar.
3. From the Scripture this covenant idea naturally passed over into Christian theology. Among the church fathers it appears, especially in their commentaries, time and again. But the doctrine of the covenant gained dogmatic meaning thereby, that the Christian religion had to be understood in its connection with and at the same time in its distinction from the Israelite. Two directions stood here, already from the days of the apostles, over against each other. The Judaism, which in nearly all congregations opposed Paul's person and teaching, demanded observance of the Mosaic law, particularly of circumcision, also by the Christians from the Gentiles, Acts 15, Rom. 16:17ff., 1 Cor. 7:18, Gal. 5:4, 6:13, Phil. 1:15ff., 3:2ff., Col. 2:16, 21, Tit. 1:10, 14, 2:9, 1 Tim. 1:7ff., and became, after the breach between Jews and Christians was completed, Jerusalem destroyed, the Christian congregation fled to Pella, a Gentile-Christian congregation founded in Jerusalem in 135, etc., more and more a sect (Nazarenes, Ebionites), which became Jewish in its teaching about God and denied the deity of Christ. On the other side stood Gnosticism, which already in the time of the apostles had its origins (Simon Magus, Cerinthus), but especially in the 2nd and 3rd century spread from the East over the West and in the person of Marcion directed its sharp attacks on the Old Testament. Proceeding from an eternal dualism between God and matter, he thought the transition between both mediated by various aeons, and ascribed the creation of the world to a lower god, the demiurge or the God of the Jews. This was not the highest, true God, but a God of lower rank, the God of the law, of righteousness and of vengeance. The Old Testament stood much lower than the New Testament, for the God of the Old Testament is jealous, vengeful, creator of evil; He hardens and stiffens, commands various sins such as the robbing of the Egyptians, the killing of the Canaanites; He gave laws that were not good, and entered into covenant with men like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, etc., who made themselves guilty of various sins of deceit, lying, etc. It is that God of the Jews, the demiurge, who even let Christ be slain on the cross, but was sent to hell by Christ himself. In Christ an entirely different God has revealed himself, the God of grace and of love. The whole legalistic standpoint is therefore past. The Christian is free from the law and from the whole Old Testament. The only one who immediately saw this rightly is Paul; he is the only true apostle.
Opposite these two parties, the Christian church and theology saw itself called to a twofold task. It had to uphold the oneness against Gnosticism and the difference of the two testaments against Judaism, cf. especially Irenaeus, adv. haer. IV. Tertullian, adv. Marc. II and III. To this end, it made use of Paul's teaching about the old and new covenant, 2 Cor. 3, Latin testamentum or instrumentum, which was first applied to the dispensations, then to the Scriptures. Both are one in beginning and content; God or the Logos is the author of both, and in both one faith, one covenant, one way to blessedness is set forth. Difference is only in the form, and this had to be so. For God is indeed one, but men differ and must therefore also be brought up differently; God makes known his grace one after another ever richer and fuller. In the days of the Old Testament there was bondage, but now freedom, then shadow, now truth; then twilight, now light; then grace for one folk, now for all; then the Messiah promised, now come, and so on. This difference, however, does not come short of the inward oneness, for the law was specially given to Israel and only given because of its stubbornness, Amos 5:17, Jer. 7:21, Ezek. 20:19, pointed as a type toward Christ, brought up Israel for Christ and has reached its goal and end in Christ. And therefore: The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, the Old stands open in the New. The Old foreshadows the New and the Old is interpreted by the New, the Old Testament is the hiding of the New, and the New is the unveiling of the Old. The difference is not in the being but in the change of the times.
Even the Old Testament gained great might over the church in hierarchy, priesthood and offering thought, in the law-bound understanding of the gospel, in worship, painting, and so on, which in many ways wished to be an Old Testament theocracy, cf. art. διαθηκη in Suicerus. Diestel, History of the Old Testament in the Christian Church, Jena 1869. Harnack, D. G. I. But yet thereby the church in the new dispensation was set high above the old. In the schoolmen's and Roman theology, the difference of both testaments was marked thus, that the promises in the Old Testament were earthly and now are heavenly; that the commands then were outwardly ruling, but now fuller, not only ruling the hand but also the mind; that the sacraments then were only figures, now bestowing grace, Lombard, Sent. III dist. 40 and other commentaries. Thomas, S. Th. III qu. 60 art. 6 ad 3. qu. 61 art. 4 ad 2. In link therewith, the believers of the Old Testament also did not straightway come into heaven, but into the limbus patrum, from which they were first brought over to heaven by Christ, Thomas, Suppl. S. Theol. qu. 69 art. 4-6. Bellarmine, de Christo IV 10. 11. Catech. Rom. I 3, 4, I 6, 6.
4. The Reformation saw before and beside itself sundry directions, over against which it also on this point had to set its stance. Jewish and Gnostic thoughts had spread in the Middle Ages and also now let their sway hold. Anabaptism was root-deep, wished not only religious-moral but also social and kingly reform, and craved with call upon the Writ the doing away of rent, many-wifedom, fellowship of goods and so forth. The same withstanding of kind and grace, from which it first brought in sundry Old and New Writ laws, did by and by set all the Writ behind the inward word. The Writ was a dead letter; above all the Old Writ lacked all gospel kernel; Israel was as a herd of swine fed only by timely goods; the law has lost all worth and strength for us. Socinianism came through its reason-bound beginning to like outcome. The Old Writ stands much lower than the New; it teaches many-wifedom, bounds neighbor-love, writes many good deeds not at all, sets on small sins much too heavy dooms; it knows only slavish dread and earthly behest; it knows of no full rightness and forgiveness; it is therefore fully done away, and Christ is come forth as a new law-giver. Arminianism spoke not so bold but yet took the Old Writ as a bond that only timely goods behested. Even Luther set Old Writ and New oft as law and gospel over against each other, but became later more wary and taught that there also in the Old Writ were rich, gospel behests. Yet this view worked after in Lutheran god-lore. Well it takes that there in Old and New Writ is but one Messiah, one faith, one way of bliss, but it shuns to say that there is but one writ-bond. The word writ-bond marks with it that lawish bond which on Sinai with Israel was set up; and in this wise it sunders in kernel from, is withstood to and done away by the New Writ. There are in the Old Writ well sundry behests to Israel given which also still hold for us, but the Old Writ as lawish bond of God with Israel was no bond of grace. The behests of the gospel, to Adam, Abraham and so forth given, may well under the name of bond of grace be brought together, but also this bond of grace in the Old Writ sunders then not only in side things but also in stuff from the New Writ, as the behest from the fulfilling, the shadow from the body.
The richest unfolding of the covenant teaching is in Reformed theology. Federal theology did not come from Cocceius, as Ypey thought, in his Brief Literary History of Systematic Theology, and it is also not a peculiarity of that German-Reformed theology which would have Melanchthon as its father, as Heppe set forth in his History and in his Dogmatics of German Protestantism. The wrongness of these views is now acknowledged by all, Sepp, Theological Education; Schweizer, Faith of the Reformed Church; Gass, History of Protestant Dogmatics; Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation of Lutheran and Reformed Doctrinal Concepts; Diestel, Studies on Federal Theology, in Yearbook for German Theology; Van den Bergh, Calvin on the Covenant of Grace; Heppe, History of Pietism and Mysticism in the Reformed Church, and so on. These all go back to Olevianus, Calvin, or Bullinger. Yet the covenant idea was already taken up by Zwingli, who in his Refutation against the Anabaptists, Works, upheld the essential oneness of the Old and New Testament. From Zwingli it was then taken over in Swiss theology, Bullinger, On the Testament or One and Eternal Covenant of God, Compendium of Christian Religion, Decades; Calvin, Institutes, compare Van den Bergh, Calvin on the Covenant of Grace and the review of this dissertation by Dr. van Dijk, Studies; in German Reformed theology by Olevianus, Ursinus, Sohnius, Eglin, Boquinus, Hyperius, and others; in English theology by Rollock, Howie, Cartwright, Preston, Thomas Blake, Perkins, Ames, John Ball, James Ussher, the Westminster Confession, Francis Roberts, Thomas Boston, and others, compare Vos, The Covenant Teaching in Reformed Theology; in the Netherlands by Snecanus, Junius, Gomarus, Trelcatius father and son, Nerdenus, Ravensperger, and others. Long before Cloppenburg and Cocceius, then, the teaching of the covenants was at home in Reformed theology. But these two made the covenant idea the starting point and ruling principle of the whole dogmatics, Cloppenburg, Disputations on the Covenant of God, Works; Cocceius, Sum of the Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament Explained, and so also Burman, Synopsis; Braun, Doctrine of the Covenants; Witsius, On the Economy of the Covenants. The strife against Cocceius did not run directly over the covenant teaching, which was acknowledged by all, but over the Sabbath by Essenius and Hoornbeek, over the state of the church in the twofold dispensation by Maresius, over the paresis in the Old Testament by Voetius. What was fought in Cocceius was not his covenant concept, but his biblical theology and his historical method. Just as Descartes in philosophy, so Cocceius in theology came out against scholasticism and traditionalism; he urged Scripture study and wanted a sum of theology drawn from the Scriptures, as the title of his dogmatics read. To get that, he did not start from God and from his eternal counsel, but took his standpoint in history and God's covenant with mankind. His dogmatics thus became salvation history, a biblical theology in historical form, of which Scripture was not the principle and norm but the object and content. That covenant, that is, the true religion, he traced historically from its first beginnings up to the present time; and he pointed out everywhere the unfolding and the forward step of that covenant, of the true religion. There was thus not only difference, as the Reformed said, in clearness of revelation, that is, in brightness of insight and clearness of awareness. No, there was difference in the objective blessings themselves under the different dispensations of the covenant of grace. Salvation was in the Old Testament objectively lesser than in the New Testament. In the Old Testament the Sabbath consisted in cessation from work, Israel had not yet true and lasting goods, but was a people of hope, longing for a long earthly life, and still held by fear of death. It had no full aphesis but only paresis; justification was imperfect; the animal sacrifice could bring no atonement; the comfort of believers was still weak, their conscience not yet at rest, the circumcision of the heart was indeed promised but became first a good of the New Testament, the law was ministered by angels, that is, in the Old Testament everything was indeed present, but only in type and shadow; the reality of the thing itself was lacking or was at least much lesser. Not subjectively but also objectively, not only in accidents but also in substance was the Old Testament other than the new. Yes, Cocceius even undermined the whole covenant teaching, when he took the covenant of grace solely negatively, as a slow, historical and successive completing abolition of the covenant of works. In the end nothing remained of the covenant; it was but a timely, human, ever-changing form of religion. Compare Gass, History of Protestant Dogmatics; Article Cocceius by Ebrard in Herzog; Heppe, History of Pietism; Diestel, Yearbook for Theology; Van der Flier, On Johannes Cocceius, also volume I and Dr. Geesink, Ethics in Reformed Theology. Cocceius thereby without doubt left the starting point and the line of Reformed theology. This was at once felt by many, and therefore also more or less fought. But it was more an attack on subordinate points than a principled fighting. Cocceianism, soon in league with Cartesianism, gained more and more entrance and led not only to opposition against various dogmas but also helped in the downgrading of the Old Testament. Everywhere the thought crept in unaware, that the Old Testament had only historical worth and was dogmatically of no import anymore. From this changed dogmatic view, the historical criticism of the Old Testament was naturally born in its time, since Spinoza and R. Simon. Rationalism and supranaturalism had not the least sense of the meaning and worth of the Old Testament. According to Kant the Judaism was only a collection of mere statutory laws, on which a state constitution was grounded; the moral additions were but an appendix and not essentially its own; Judaism wanted to be no church at all but only a state and therefore demanded only outward keeping of the commands, no inner bent. Christianity did not come forth from Judaism, but is its full abolition, Religion edited by Rosenkranz. In Schleiermacher Judaism because of its particularism is still akin to fetishism, Christian Faith, and stands in its relation to Christianity like heathenism, compare. Hegel placed Judaism as the religion of sublimity still below the Greek religion of beauty and the Roman religion of usefulness, Works. Vatke and Bruno Bauer, both pupils of Hegel, sought to confirm this philosophical view of the Old Testament by the historical criticism of the Bible books. The Scripture criticism of the last century has not changed the world view, but the changed world view demanded an often very negative judgment on the great facts of Holy Scripture, van den Bergh van Eysinga, Worldview, Zutphen Thieme. In the Old Testament Scripture criticism all views have now returned that formerly were put forth by the Gnostics, Anabaptists, Socinians, Rationalists about the Old Testament. Jehovah is not the one, true God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but a folk god of Israel, originally a sun god. The people of Israel was not chosen by God, but was of old a wild horde of sundry tribes, given to all kinds of polytheism. The tales of creation, fall, flood, patriarchs, judges, and so on are myths and sagas, in part borrowed from other folks. The law stands much lower than the prophets and often bears an outward, sensual, eudaemonistic mark. The saints of the Old Testament, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and especially David are not worthy of that name and either did not exist at all or were idealized by posterity. The difference between true and false prophets is wholly subjective. Christianity is at least as much readied by heathenism as by Judaism.
5. The teaching of the covenant holds the greatest meaning for dogmatics and also for the practice of the Christian life. More than the Roman and Lutheran, the Reformed church and theology have grasped this. On the ground of Holy Scripture, it always viewed the true religion of the Old and New Testaments as a covenant between God and man, whether this was set up with unfallen man (foedus operum), or with creation in general with Noah (foedus naturale), or with the people of the elect (foedus gratiae). And even here it did not stop, but for these covenants in time it sought a firm, eternal foundation in the counsel of God, and viewed this counsel as aiming at the salvation of mankind also again as a covenant of the three persons in the divine being itself (pactum salutis, counsel of peace, covenant of redemption). This last covenant appears briefly and to the point already in Olevianus, Essence of the Covenant of Grace, 2nd art. §1. Junius, Theological Theses ch. 25 th. 21. Arminius, on the priesthood of Christ 1603. Gomarus on Mt. 3:13, Lk. 2:21. Theological Theses XIX 1. Ames, on the death of Christ I 5. Voetius, Disputations II 266. Essenius, on the subjection of Christ to the law X 2; then it is further developed at length by Cloppenburg, on the covenant of God III 4-28 and Cocceius, Summa on the covenant ch. 5; thereafter it gains a definite place in dogmatics with Burman, Braun, Witsius, Vitringa, Turretin, Leydekker, Mastricht, Marck, Moor, Brakel, only to be opposed by Deurhoff, On the natural and scriptural composition of Holy Theology I 12, Wesselius in the preface to Pictet's Theology and others, and gradually to vanish altogether from dogmatics. The unfolding of the teaching of the pactum salutis among the Reformed was also not free from scholastic subtlety. The classic text Zechariah 6:13, which was cited for this teaching, proves nothing and says only that the Messiah, uniting kingship and priesthood in himself, will counsel and promote the peace of his people (Keil). From Job 17:3, Isaiah 38:14, Psalm 119:122, which however none of them refer to the Messiah, and Hebrews 7:22, where it only states that Christ, because he lives forever, is surety that the new covenant will endure forever, it was inferred that Christ from eternity in the pactum salutis had become surety; and indeed not of God with us, as Crell on Hebrews 7:22, Limborch, Christian Theology III 21, 7, claimed, for God as the Truthful needs no surety, but of us with God, Cocceius, on the covenant V §150-162, Owen on Hebrews 7:22, Witsius, Economy of the Covenants II ch. 5, Heidegger, Body of Theology XI 23, van den Honert, The High Priesthood of Christ 1712 p. 403, Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace, 2nd ed. 1868 p. 68 etc. Further, the distinction was borrowed from jurists between fidejussor and expromissor, and the question was treated whether Christ in the pactum salutis had taken upon himself the sins of the Old Testament elect conditionally or absolutely; the former said Cocceius, on the covenant §150-162, Wittichius, Pacific Theology §290, Allinga, van Til, d’Outrein, Perizonius and others cf. Heppe, Dogmatics 270; the latter said Leydekker, Torch of Truth V 7, Light of Truth II 1, The Son of God as Surety 1674, Turretin, Theological Elenctics XII 9, Mastricht V 1, 34, Voetius, Disputations V 346, Moor IV 569-580, M. Vitringa III 12 etc. And finally, the point of dispute was also discussed whether this pactum salutis bore more the character of a testament with appeal to Luke 22:19, John 17:24, Hebrews 6:17, 8:6, 9:15, 13:20, as Cocceius, Burman, Heidegger, Schiere, Doctrine of the Testaments and Covenants I ch. 10 claimed, or rather of a covenant, as Leydekker, Torch of Truth V 6, Wesselius and others maintained. Yet this teaching of the pactum salutis, despite its flawed form, rests on a scriptural thought. For as Mediator, the Son is subordinate to the Father; calls him his God, Psalm 22:3, John 20:17, is he his servant, Isaiah 49ff., to whom a work is entrusted to do, Isaiah 53:10, John 6:38-40, 10:18, 12:49, 14:31, 17:4, and who for the obedience accomplished, Matthew 26:42, John 4:34, 15:10, 17:4, 5, 19:30, receives reward, Psalm 2:8, Isaiah 53:10, John 17:4, 11, 17, 24, Ephesians 1:20ff. Philippians 2:9ff. This relation between Father and Son, though most clearly coming to light during Christ's walk on earth, did not first begin in the moment of the incarnation, for this incarnation already belongs to the carrying out of the work entrusted to the Son; but it falls in eternity and thus existed already during the time of the Old Testament. Scripture also teaches this clearly when it ascribes the leading of Israel to the Angel of the Lord, Exodus 3:2ff., 13:21, 14:19, 23:20-23, 32:34, 33:2, Numbers 20:16, Isaiah 63:8, 9, and lets Christ also be officially active already in the days of the Old Testament, John 8:56, 1 Corinthians 10:4, 9, 1 Peter 1:11, 3:19. For there is but one Mediator between God and men, John 14:6, Acts 4:12, 1 Timothy 2:5, who is the same yesterday and today and forever, Hebrews 13:8, who from eternity is chosen as Mediator, Isaiah 42:1, 43:10, Matthew 12:18, Luke 24:26, Acts 2:23, 4:28, 1 Peter 1:20, Revelation 13:8, and as Logos also existed eternally, John 1:1, 3, 8:58, Romans 8:3, 2 Corinthians 8:9, Galatians 4:4, Philippians 2:6 etc. Through all this, Scripture gives us a rich and glorious view of the work of redemption. The pactum salutis makes us know the relation and life of the three persons in the divine being as a covenant life, as a life of the highest self-awareness and the highest freedom. Here, within the divine being, the covenant has its full reality; while the covenant of God and man, because of their infinite distance, always bears more or less the character of a sovereign disposition, diatheke, it is here between the three persons a syntheke in the full sense. The highest freedom and the most complete agreement coincide here. The work of salvation is a work of the three persons, to which all contribute and in which each performs his particular task. In the decrees, also in those of predestination, the one will of God came to the fore and the trinitarian character did not yet come out so clearly. But here in the pactum salutis, the work of redemption comes forth in its full divine beauty. It is the divine work par excellence. Just as in the creation of man God beforehand deliberately takes counsel with himself, Genesis 1:26, so in the re-creation each of the three persons comes forth even more clearly in his distinct character. The re-creation is just like the creation a work of God alone; from, through, to him are all things; no man has been his counselor or has first given to him that it might be repaid to him. It is God triune alone, Father, Son, and Spirit, who together conceive, determine, carry out, and complete the whole work of salvation. But further, this pactum salutis also lays a bond between God's eternal work for salvation and that which he does for it in time. The covenant of grace, which is revealed in time, does not hang in the air but rests on an eternal, unchangeable foundation. It is fixed in the counsel and in the covenant of God triune, and is the infallible following application and execution thereof. Yes, in the covenant of grace, which is set up in time by God with men, man is not the acting and actively appearing party. But it is again God triune who, after having designed the work of re-creation, also brings it to pass. It is not so that God first sets up his covenant with Adam and Noah, with Abraham and Israel, and finally first with Christ. But the covenant of grace lies ready from eternity in the pactum salutis of the three persons and is from the moment after the fall realized by them. Christ does not first begin to work with and after his incarnation, and the Holy Spirit does not first begin his labor with his outpouring on Pentecost. But just as creation is a trinitarian work, so re-creation from the first moment has been a work of the three persons. All grace that flows to creation after the fall comes to it from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Son immediately after the fall stepped forth as the Mediator, as the second and last Adam, who takes the place of the first and restores and completes what he corrupted and neglected. And the Holy Spirit immediately stepped forth as the Comforter, as the applier of salvation to be acquired by Christ. All change, development, progress in insight and knowledge thus falls on the side of the creature. In God there is no change nor shadow of turning. The Father is eternally Father, and the Son eternally Mediator, and the Holy Spirit eternally Comforter. Therefore the Old Testament is also to be understood as one in essence and substance with the New Testament. For though God imparts his revelation successively and historically and makes it richer and fuller, and mankind thus advances in knowledge, in possession and enjoyment of the revelation, God is the same and remains so. The sun enlightens the earth gradually, but it itself is the same, in the morning and evening, in day and night. Though Christ accomplished his work first on earth in the midst of history and though the Holy Spirit was first poured out on Pentecost, God could yet also fully dispense the benefits to be acquired and applied by them in the days of the Old Testament. The believers of the Old Testament were saved in no other way than we. There is one faith, one Mediator, one way of salvation, one covenant of grace. Cf. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation II 135 ff. Dr. Vos, The Covenant Doctrine in Reformed Theology, Grand Rapids 1891.
6. In the carrying out of the covenant of salvation in time, however, a distinction must be made between the covenant of grace in a broader and in a narrower sense. It is not good, in discussing the covenant of grace in time, to go straightway from Adam to Abraham and to the church of the New Testament. For the Scripture does not pass at once from Adam to Abraham; it does not let go of mankind, but describes in broad lines its unfolding until the time of Abraham. When Abraham and Israel are chosen out of mankind, the bond with that mankind is not cut off; Israel does not float like an oil drop on the nations, but stays in all kinds of ties with those peoples, and holds fast to the hope for those peoples unto the end. In the fullness of time, Jew and Gentile are made one in the one man; mankind gathers around the cross; and the church, chosen out of that mankind, stands in the closest bond with that mankind. Nature and grace, creation and re-creation are to be set in that mutual tie in which the Scripture places them. And then it is worth noting that the first promises of grace, which go forth from God's mouth to Adam and Eve after the fall, are wholly worldwide and touch all mankind. Above it has been pointed out that all punishment, spoken in Gen. 3 over sin, is at the same time to be known as an opening of God's grace. And that grace spreads there without any bound to the whole of mankind. Common and special grace flow yet in one bed. In the punishment which God speaks after the breaking over the snake, the woman, and the man, there is more still the mercy than the wrath at work; it is punishment and promise at once, it is a gracious joyful punishment (Luther). Therefore in it lies the spring and the pledge of the ongoing being, the spreading and unfolding, the strife and the win of mankind. Worship and uprightness, rites and tilling take their beginning there. In the long span from Adam to Noah, all these unfold under the sway of God's common and special grace. The first strengths, laid by God at the making in the sundry creatures, are indeed broken but work also after the fall yet a long time after. This comes out chiefly in the strength and the much greater life-span of men before the flood, Gen. 5:5 ff., and in the much mightier working of the earth's strengths, which first after the flood are laid in bonds, Gen. 8:22. This tale of Scripture is upheld by the lore of the peoples, which in its golden, silver, copper, and iron age speaks of a slow downfall of mankind, and also by earth-lore, according to which before this our span went another, in which over the whole earth a higher warmth held sway, the year-times were not yet bounded, and fire and water played a much greater role than now; at the shift from the middle-old to the new-old span there took place all kinds of weighty changes, a great spreading of the fast land, by lifting of broad pieces of the sea-bottom above the water; the shaping of the hills like the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, Himalayas, Cordilleras, etc.; a strong change in the weather; the dying out of the great, fore-old beasts and plants, etc., Pfaff, Creation History, ch. 11-15. Haeckel, Natural Creation History, 320 ff. Wossidlo, Guide to Mineralogy and Geology, Berlin Weidmann 1889, 196 ff. In tie with all this, the greater strength and the longer life-span of men in the span from Adam to Noah is by no means unlikely; the simpler way of life, the less straining work, the smaller number of evil sicknesses, the after-working of the state before the fall make this fact clear enough; even now by way of outlier there come life-spans of 120 to 150 years; and there is no bodily need to think why the man's life-strength must be spent after 70 or 80 years. Cf. Fürer, The Life-Span of Man, etc., Proof of Faith 1868, 97 ff. 184 ff. Zöckler, The Teaching of the First State of Man 1879, 244-288. Schanz, The Age of Mankind, Freiburg 1896. Büchner, Man's Life-Span, Dutch by Schwencke, Amsterdam 1892. Worship stays also after the fall and gets a fast shape in offerings, Gen. 4:3, prayer and preaching, Gen. 4:26; tilling takes a beginning with field-work, beast-herding, town-building, etc., Gen. 4:2, 17; arts and learnings come to unfolding, Gen. 4:20 ff. But this first span in the tale of mankind marked itself also soon by the most dreadful godlessness; the spoiling of the best is the worst; the outstanding strengths and gifts were misused in the work of sin. With brother-murder this span was led in; the Cainites split off from the Sethites, laid themselves to the ruling of the earth, Gen. 4:20 ff., and sought their strength in the sword, Gen. 4:24. But first when Sethites and Cainites mingled, the godlessness rose to the top; the evil was manifold on the earth; the shaping of the thoughts of man's heart was at all times only evil, Gen. 6:5; it was a span so full of unright, as there later never one has been and only in the forthcoming of the Son of Man will come back, Matt. 24:37. In the mighty flood this whole kin goes under, save Noah's household, which then becomes the spring of a second mankind. The span after the flood stands out in being from the one before. From Adam to Noah, nature, the plant- and beast-world, mankind bore a wholly other mark than after Noah. Strong and rich in gifts, the world was in a way left to itself; but it showed soon that, if God did not strongly step in, the world would perish in its own godlessness. Therefore with Noah begins another span. The grace, which straightway after the fall showed itself, now steps forth stronger in the checking of evil. God makes a formal covenant with all his creatures. This covenant with Noah, Gen. 8:21, 22, 9:1-17, has indeed in God's grace its spring; it also stands in the closest tie with the own covenant of grace, because it bears and readies this; but it is not the same with it. It is rather a covenant of long-bearing, made by God with all men and even with all creatures. The curse over the earth is bounded by it; nature is laid in bonds; its wasting strength is checked; the water is held in its awful might; a steady shift of year-times is brought in; the whole speechless nature is bound to fast orders, which lie fast in God's covenant; and as sign and pledge the rainbow is set in the clouds, Gen. 8:21, 22, 9:9-17. A mankind steps forth, which in likeness with the former, is much softer of kind, much smaller of strength, much shorter of span. The blessing of growing in number is outspokenly spoken again, Gen. 9:1, the fear and dread of man laid on all beasts, vs. 2, the green herb and the flesh is given to man for food, vs. 3. Man's life is pledged by the setting of death-punishment on man-murder, and therewith in root of the overlordship, vs. 5, 6; and as later mankind at Babel's tower-building shapes the plan to stay together and found a world-realm, then God thwarts that plan, makes mankind go apart in peoples and tongues, and in that way also checks the unfolding and the outburst of godlessness. God's grace steps forth thus after the flood much stronger than before that time. To it is owed the being and the life of mankind, the spreading and unfolding of the peoples, the states and fellowships, which little by little have shaped themselves, the worship and uprightness, which even among the wildest peoples have not wholly gone lost, the arts and learnings, which have risen high; all that after the fall in the sinful man is yet good on all fields, the whole civil rightness, is fruit of God's common grace. God let the Gentiles indeed walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16, but He did not withdraw himself from them; He left himself not without witness to them, set their dwelling, was not far from each one of them, showed himself to them in the works of his hands, Acts 14:16, 17, 17:27, 28, Rom. 1:19, James 1:17. The Word lights every man, coming into the world, John 1:9. The Holy Ghost is writer of all life, strength, and worth also among the Gentiles, Gen. 6:17, 7:15, Ps. 33:6, 104:30, 139:2, Job 32:8, Eccl. 3:19. By this grace, and under the dealing of this covenant of nature, mankind before Christ is led and readied for his coming. There is indeed in good sense to speak of an upbringing of mankind by God. The fitness for freeing is upheld, the need for freeing is woken. Compare on the Noahite covenant the older writings at M. Vitringa IV 286; on the worths of the Gentiles the writings, earlier part I 239 given and at M. Vitringa III 333; on the late time of Christ's coming, Bonaventure, Brevil. IV 4. Petavius, on the incarnation II ch. 17. Jansen, Prael. Theol. II 561; on the godly upbringing of mankind the works of Lessing, Herder, van Heusde, Hofstede de Groot, Lotze, Microcosm III 20 ff. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation III² 282 ff.; on the common grace, the meaning of heathendom, the readying of Christ's coming and the fullness of times my Speech on Common Grace, Kampen 1894. Kuyper's articles in the Herald 923 ff. D. Zahn, Natural Morality, Gotha 1881. Schelling, Works II 4, 74-118. A. Wuttke, History of Heathendom, Breslau 1852-53. Tholuck, The Moral Mark of Heathendom, Works VIII 1-91. Uhlhorn, The Fight of Christendom with Heathendom, ch. 1-2. Rocholl, The Fullness of Time, Hanover 1872. Id. Philosophy of History, Göttingen I 1878 II 1893. Kahnis, The Filling of the Times, Leipzig 1877. Dorner, Faith I 672 ff. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work I³ 306. Frank, Christian Truth II² 35. Talbot, The Preparation in History for Christ, 4th essay in Lux Mundi ed. by Charles Gore 1892, 93-131. H. M. van Nes, The Advent Time, Rotterdam 1893.
7. The Preparation of Salvation in Israel. Of an essentially different character was the preparation of salvation in Israel. Yet the connection between the covenant of grace and the covenant of nature, between Israel and the nations, must not be overlooked. Israel was taken from among the nations; it was not different or better than other nations, surpassing them only in stubbornness and rebelliousness, and was chosen solely by grace, Deut. 7:7, 9:13, 32:5ff., Jer. 5:23, Ezek. 16:3ff., Amos 9:7, Matt. 11:21ff. The peculiarity of Israel's religion does not lie in the fact that it contains various elements not found in other religions; on the contrary, there is nothing in Israel of which an analogy cannot be found elsewhere; circumcision, Sabbath, festivals, offerings, prayer, priesthood, temple, altar, ceremonies, customs, habits, political and social laws, etc., are also found among other peoples, and conversely, institutions that arose only after the fall, such as polygamy, slavery, etc., are also found in Israel. Even theophany, prophecy, and miracle have their analogies and caricatures in heathenism, cf. Schelling, Werke II 4 pp. 119-151. It is not only the right but also the duty of Old Testament scholarship to bring all this to light. But nevertheless, on account of the kinship and connection, the essential distinction must not be overlooked. And that lies in the grace, the special grace, which was unknown to the Gentiles. All the religions of the Gentiles are self-willed and legalistic. They are all aftereffects and corruptions of the broken covenant of works. Here man always seeks to bring about his own redemption, through purification, asceticism, penance, offering, law observance, ceremony, etc. But all this is different in Israel.
1º First of all, for Israel, from the beginning, Yahweh is also Elohim, the Creator of heaven and earth. Even the oldest pieces, according to modern criticism, clearly express this faith, Gen. 2:4, Exod. 20:11. In Israel, the relation of God and the world was never conceived otherwise than as that of Creator and creature, Schultz, Altt. Theol.⁴ 565. With this one dogma, all paganism is in principle banished; it is the foundation of the true, pure religion.
2º This Creator of heaven and earth is also the one who upholds and governs it, and who specifically entered into a special relation with Israel voluntarily and graciously. Israel was taken from among the nations; Abraham was from Shem, in whose generations the knowledge and service of God were preserved the longest and purest. The covenant with Abraham is prepared in the history from Adam's days onward. Israel's religion is built on the broad foundation of the original religion of humanity. But nevertheless, the covenant with Abraham is a new and higher revelation, which again proceeds entirely and solely from God. He takes the initiative in this covenant. He establishes it, He chooses Abraham. Through the wondrous birth of Isaac, He shows Himself to be both Israel's Creator and Recreator. In Israel's religion, it is not man who seeks God, but God who seeks man.
3º This covenant with the fathers remains, even when it later assumes another form with Israel at Sinai; it is the foundation and core also of the Sinaitic covenant, Exod. 2:24, Deut. 7:8. The promise is not annulled by the law, which came later, Gal. 3:17. The covenant with Israel was essentially no other than that with Abraham. Just as God first voluntarily and graciously gives Himself to Abraham, without any merit of his, as a shield and reward, as a God for him and his seed, and now on that basis also calls Abraham to an upright walk before His face, so it is also God who chooses the people of Israel, saves them from Egypt, and gives Himself to that people, and now on that basis obliges Israel as a people to be holy and to be His people. The covenant at Sinai is and remains in essence a covenant of grace. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, Exod. 20:2, that is the preface and foundation of the law, that is the essence of the covenant of grace. The LORD is Israel's God before and apart from any worthiness of Israel, and He remains so eternally. It is an everlasting covenant, which cannot be destroyed even by any sins and iniquities on Israel's side, Deut. 4:31, 32:26ff., Judg. 2:1, Ps. 89:1-5, 105:8, 111:5, Isa. 54:10, Rom. 11:1, 2, 2 Cor. 1:20.
4º The benefits bestowed by God in His covenant upon Israel are the same as those to Abraham but further developed and specialized. Already Gen. 3:15 contains in germ the whole covenant and all the benefits of grace. God breaks the covenant that man made with Satan, sets enmity between both, brings man over to His side, and promises him victory over the hostile power. The one great promise to Abraham is: I will be your God, and you and your seed shall be My people, Gen. 17:8. And this is the main content also of God's covenant with Israel. God is Israel's God and Israel is His people, Exod. 19:6, 29:46, etc.; and therefore Israel receives all kinds of blessings, not only temporal, such as the land of Canaan, fruitfulness of marriage, a long life, prosperity and welfare, victory over enemies, but also spiritual and eternal, such as God's dwelling among them, Exod. 29:45, Lev. 26:12; the forgiveness of sins, Exod. 20:6, 34:7, Num. 14:18, Deut. 4:31, Ps. 32, 103, etc.; sonship, Exod. 4:22, 19:5, 6, 20:2, Deut. 14:1, Isa. 63:16, Hos. 11:1, etc.; sanctification, Exod. 19:6, Lev. 11:44, 19:2, etc.
5º However, all these benefits are not set forth as clearly and distinctly in the Old Testament as in the New. They would not have been understood and comprehended in their spiritual nature then. The natural comes first, then the spiritual. All spiritual and eternal benefits are therefore clothed in Israel in sensory forms. The forgiveness of sins is bound to offerings of animals. God's dwelling among Israel is symbolized in the temple on Zion. The sonship of Israel has in the first place a theocratic meaning, and the expression "people of God" not only a religious but also a national significance. Sanctification in an ethical sense is symbolized in Levitical, ceremonial cleanness. Eternal life hides itself from the Israelite consciousness in the forms of a long life on earth. It would be foolish to think that therefore those benefits of forgiveness and sanctification, of regeneration and eternal life, also objectively did not exist in the days of the Old Testament. They were indeed bestowed even then by Christ, who is eternally the same. But the consciousness and enjoyment of those benefits were in the Old Testament far less rich than in the days of the New Testament. And in order that the consciousness of the pious might gradually in the course of time be opened to the richness of God's benefits, to that end the covenant of grace under Israel assumed such a peculiar, symbolic form. The religion under Israel connects with the religious forms found among all peoples, such as offering, altar, temple, priesthood, ceremonies, etc.; the spiritual and eternal clothes itself in the garment of the natural and temporal; God Himself, who is Elohim, Creator of heaven and earth, descends as Yahweh, as the God of the covenant, to the creature, enters into history, assumes human language and affections and forms, in order thus to communicate Himself with all His spiritual blessings to man and to prepare for His incarnation, His lasting and eternal dwelling in humanity. We would not even have had words to name the spiritual, if that spiritual had not first revealed itself in the form of the natural. We, sensory creatures, can never express the spiritual otherwise than analogically. If therefore the eternal had not been brought within our reach in the temporal, if God had not become man, then His thoughts could not have been communicated to us in our language in Holy Scripture. God would then have been eternally unknowable to us, and we would always have had to be silent about Him.
6º Just as Abraham, when God binds Himself to him, is obliged to a walk before His face, so also Israel as a people is admonished by God's covenant to a new obedience. The whole law, which the covenant of grace at Sinai takes into service, intends to make Israel walk in the way of the covenant. It is but an explication of the one word to Abraham: walk before My face and be upright, and therefore no more an overthrow of the covenant of grace and an establishment of the covenant of works than this word spoken to Abraham. The law of Moses is therefore not opposed to grace but subservient to it and is thus repeatedly understood and praised by Israel's pious. But abstracted and detached from the covenant of grace, then it was indeed a letter that killed, a ministration of condemnation. Now the covenant of grace in the days of the Old Testament took the law into service, among other things, in order that it might awaken the consciousness of sin, increase the need for redemption, strengthen the expectation of a still richer revelation of God's grace. From that side Paul especially views the Old Testament dispensation of the covenant of grace. And then he says that Israel, as an immature child placed under the care of the law, had to be led to Christ, Rom. 10:4, Gal. 3:23ff., 4:1ff., and that in connection therewith the sin was increased, the unworthiness of works for justification and the necessity of faith would be seen, Rom. 4:15, 5:20, 7:7ff., 8:3, Gal. 3:19. The law thus stood on the one hand in the service of the covenant of grace; it was not a veiled covenant of works; it did not intend that man should obtain his justification by his own works. But on the other hand, it did intend to prepare for a higher, better dispensation of that same covenant of grace, in whose service it stood, in the fullness of time. The impossibility of keeping the Sinaitic covenant and fulfilling the demands of the law made another, better dispensation of the covenant of grace necessary. The eternal covenant of grace is provoked by the imperfection of the temporal form which it assumed under Israel to a higher revelation. Sin has increased, that grace might abound all the more. Christ could not immediately become man after the fall, and grace could not immediately reveal itself in all its richness. There was need of preparation and education. It was not fitting from the beginning of the human race before sin for God to be incarnate, since medicine is not given except to the sick; nor immediately after sin, so that man, humbled by sin, might recognize his need of a deliverer: but in the fullness of time which He disposed from eternity, Thomas, S. Th. III qu. 1 art. 5. The necessity of this education and preparation lies not objectively in God, as if He were changeable; not in Christ, as if He were not yesterday and today and forever the same; not in the spiritual benefits, as if they did not exist and could not formerly be communicated by God. But it lies subjectively in the condition of the human race, which precisely as a race had to be saved, and therefore gradually prepared and educated for the salvation in Christ, Calvin, Inst. II 11, 13, 14. Therefore Christ is truly the turning point of the ages, the cross the center of world history. First everything is led to the cross, then everything is derived from the cross.
7º When then the fullness of time has come and Christ has accomplished His work on earth, the covenant of grace passes into a higher dispensation. The believers in Israel knew well that the Sinaitic dispensation was only temporary, and therefore looked longingly for the day of the New Covenant. And Jesus and the apostles, who thus read the Old Testament, saw in it the same covenant of grace with the same benefits, which now came fully to light. Old and New Testament are in essence one covenant, Luke 1:68-79, Acts 2:39, 3:25; they have one gospel, Rom. 1:2, Gal. 3:8, Heb. 4:2, 6, 2 Tim. 3:15; one Mediator, namely Christ, who also existed in the days of the Old Testament, John 1:1, 14, 8:58, Rom. 8:3, 2 Cor. 8:9, Gal. 4:4, Phil. 2:6, etc., exercised His mediatorial office, John 8:56, 1 Cor. 10:4, 1 Pet. 1:11, 3:19, Heb. 13:8, and is the only Mediator for all men and in all times, John 14:6, Acts 4:12, 1 Tim. 2:5; one faith as the way to salvation, Matt. 13:17, Acts 10:43, 15:11, Rom. 4:11, Gal. 3:6, 7, Heb. 11; the same promises and benefits of God's fellowship, 2 Cor. 6:16, Rev. 21:3, forgiveness and justification, Acts 10:43, Rom. 4:22, eternal life, Matt. 22:32, Gal. 3:18, Heb. 9:15, 11:10, etc. The way was the same on which the believers in Old and New Testament walked, but the light differed by which they walked, Calvin on Gal. 3:23. Therefore, along with the unity, there is also distinction. Old and New Testament stand as different dispensations of the same covenant of grace over against each other as promise and fulfillment, Acts 13:32, Rom. 1:2, as shadow and substance, Col. 2:17, as letter that kills and as Spirit that gives life, 2 Cor. 3:6ff., as bondage and freedom, Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:1ff., 22ff., Col. 2:20, Heb. 12:18ff., as particular and universal, John 4:21, Acts 10:35, 14:16, Gal. 4:4, 5, 6:15, Eph. 2:14, 3:6.
8º The new thing in the New Testament is thus the falling away of the non-arbitrary but yet temporary, sensory, national forms under which the one and same grace was revealed in the old day. The new dispensation in a certain sense already begins when, with the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus, the Old Testament promises begin to be fulfilled. Yet the old dispensation remained in force until the death of Christ. Jesus Himself was an Israelite, fulfilled all righteousness, and turned only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But at His death the veil is torn, Matt. 27:51, the testator dies, Heb. 9:15-17, the New Testament is founded in His blood, Matt. 26:28, the handwriting of the law which was against us is blotted out, Col. 2:14, the middle wall of partition is broken down, Eph. 2:14, etc. Factually the old dispensation may still linger long, but legally it is abolished. Or better still, nothing is abolished, but the fruit is ripe and breaks through the husk; the church, which was carried as a little child in Israel's womb, is born to its own independent life and receives in the Holy Spirit its own, immanent life principle; the sun of righteousness has risen to the zenith of heaven and shines over all peoples; law and prophets are fulfilled and have in Christ as their end and goal reached their destiny. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, John 1:14; He is the truth, John 14:6, the substance, Col. 2:17, in whom all promises and shadows are realized. In Him all is fulfilled. He is the true prophet, priest, and king; the true servant of the LORD, the true mercy seat, Rom. 3:25, the true offering, Eph. 5:2, the true circumcision, Col. 2:11, the true Passover, 1 Cor. 5:7, and therefore His church is the true seed of Abraham, the true Israel, the true people of God, Matt. 1:21, Luke 1:17, Rom. 9:25, 26, 2 Cor. 6:16-18, Gal. 3:29, Titus 2:14, Heb. 8:8-10, 1 Pet. 2:9, Rev. 21:3, the true temple of God, 1 Cor. 3:16, 2 Cor. 6:16, Eph. 2:22, 2 Thess. 2:4, Heb. 8:2, 9, the true Zion and Jerusalem, Gal. 4:26, Heb. 12:22, her spiritual offering the true religion, John 4:24, Rom. 12:1, Phil. 3:3, 4:18, etc. Nothing of the Old is lost in the New Testament, but all is fulfilled, completed, has reached its maturity, and now, out of the temporary husk, brings forth the eternal core. It is not that in Israel there was a real temple and offering and priesthood, etc., and that these all have now disappeared. No, rather the reverse: in Israel there was only the shadow of all that; now, however, there is the substance itself. The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.
8. This covenant of grace, which through sundry dispensations is now in the New Testament fully brought to pass, was from the first moment of its revealing and is still now from all sides hemmed in and upheld by the covenant of nature, which God has set up with all creatures. The special grace is indeed in essence sundered from the common grace, but stands therewith in the closest bond. For, although the covenant with Noah is called the covenant of nature to set it apart, it is therefore not flowed forth from God's own nature or given with the nature of things; it also rests on grace, has sprung from God's long-suffering, and bestows all natural boons and blessings from God's overall goodness; it is a covenant of grace in a wider sense. Furthermore, it is the Father, who not without the Son but indeed through the Logos and the Spirit works all strengths and gifts in nature and unbegotten mankind, John 1:4, 5, 9, 10, Col. 1:17, Ps. 104:30, 139:7. And this Logos and this Spirit, who dwell and work in all creatures and men, are the same who as Christ and as Spirit of Christ are the getter and applier of all boons in the covenant of grace. Father, Son, and Spirit thus make ready in the covenant of nature the covenant of grace and, as it were, from the covenant of grace ever and anon reach back into the covenant of nature.
The kernel of the covenant of grace lies thus therein, that it flows forth from God's special grace and has nothing but grace, unearned and forfeited blessings, as its content. In so far it is in essence set apart from the covenant of works set up before the fall but broken by the fall. Surely God was not bound to set up the covenant of works either; it is condescending goodness, and thus also grace in a general sense, which led Him to bestow this covenant upon man; He has established it and fixed all its parts; it is His ordering and setting up. But in that covenant of works God yet came to man with the demand of obedience and promised him, only in that way and after that fulfilled obedience, to bestow the blessedness of heaven, the everlasting life, the enjoyment of His beholding. The covenant of works thus reckoned with man's free will, it rested in part upon man, and therefore it was shaky and unsteady. In fact it has also been broken, not by God but by man. God holds to the rule, that whoever keeps the law shall receive everlasting life. He says that in His law, He witnesses it in everyone's conscience, He makes this word stand in Christ. But man has broken the covenant of works; on his side he can now no more gain life through keeping the law; out of the works of the law no flesh can be justified. Therefore God has, in distinction from and in opposition to the covenant of works, set up another, better covenant, no legal, but an evangelical covenant. But this He has set up not with one who was merely man, but with the man Christ Jesus, who was His own, only-begotten, much-beloved Son. And in Him, who shares in the Godly nature and the Godly attributes, it lies unshakably firm. It can no more be broken, it is an everlasting covenant. It rests not in any work of man, but only in God's good pleasure, in the work of the Mediator, in the Holy Ghost, who abides forever. It hangs on no condition of man, it bestows no gift on any merit, it waits not on any law-fulfilling from man's side. It is of and through and unto grace. God Himself is the only and everlasting, the faithful and true One, in whom it rests; who sets it up, upholds, carries out, completes it; the covenant of grace is the Godly work by excellence, His work alone, His work wholly. All boasting is shut out for man here, but all glory belongs to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Yet with this, the full content of the covenant of grace has not yet been brought to light. For that, the covenant of grace must be set forth not only in its distinctness from but also in its kinship with the covenant of works. God, after the breaking of the covenant of works, did not straightway think out a wholly other covenant that has nothing to do with the former and bears a wholly other character. That cannot be the case, because God is unchanging, because the demand laid on man in the covenant of works is no whim and no willfulness, because the image of God, the law, religion in their being can only be one, because grace cannot or may not make void the nature, faith the law. And it is not so either. The covenant of grace is not, as Cocceius taught, the stepwise doing away; it is rather the fulfilling and restoring of the covenant of works. Gratia reparat et perficit naturam . God holds to the demand that everlasting life is to be gotten only in the way of obedience; and when man oversteps his law, then that demand is yet made greater with another, namely, that the overstepping must be paid for by punishment. After the fall, God thus has a twofold demand on man, that of calling for punishment for the evil done and that of full obedience to his law, satisfaction and obedience. Arminius thought in a letter to Uytenbogaert, that man before the fall was indeed bound to obedience but now after the fall only to punishment, because the bond was broken and thus the party was loosed from his binding. But obedience to God's law is indeed shaped in a special form in the covenant of works and used for a special end, namely, to get everlasting life, yet in itself it is grounded in man's nature and therefore a binding from which man can never come loose. Otherwise he could also by one overstepping free himself in what follows from the keeping of all God's behests, and thus from all sins and punishments. The Scripture therefore speaks over the sinner not only God's doom, Deut. 27:26, Gal. 3:10, Rom. 6:23, Heb. 10:27, but also upholds for man after the fall the demand to full obedience as the way to everlasting life, Lev. 18:5, Matt. 19:17, Luke 10:28.
The difference between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace lies therefore herein, that God in the latter comes forth not with one but with a twofold demand, and that He with that twofold demand comes not to mankind in Adam but to mankind in Christ. The covenant of works and the covenant of grace differ chiefly herein, that Adam is exchanged for and replaced by Christ. Paul says in Galatians 3:16-18, that the covenant with Abraham was not made void by the law that came later, but properly had respect to and essentially rested in Christ, who has fulfilled all the promise and bestowed the inheritance. Still further he goes back in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45-49; from Adam flows to mankind sin and death, from Christ flows to it righteousness and life. Christ is the second and last Adam, who restores and takes over what the first has corrupted and left undone, the Mediator of the covenant of grace, the Head of the new mankind. Reformed theology has brought this thought of Scripture to its right in its doctrine of the covenant better than any other. The course of development was briefly this, that first, for the upholding of the essential unity of the Old and New Testaments, the doctrine of the covenant of grace arose; that accordingly the relation of God and man before the fall was also set forth as a covenant, and indeed as a covenant of works; that the thinking through of the agreement and the difference between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace led to the insight that the covenant of grace, insofar as it was established with Christ, was essentially a covenant of works; that therefore in the covenant of grace a distinction had again to be made between the covenant as it was established with Christ from eternity (pactum salutis, council of peace) and the covenant as it, in execution of that council of peace, is established in time with the elect or believers; and that finally this distinction was again done away, covenant of grace and council of peace were conceived as essentially one, and the covenant of grace itself was placed in eternity, as being there established with Christ and in Him with all His own. The last point, the identification of council of peace and covenant of grace, came first to development in England, with Rollock, Preston, Blake, Westminster Larger Catechism, cf. Vos, The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology , 1891; further Thomas Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace , from the English by Alexander Comrie, 1741; and then taken over from the English by Comrie, Brakel, Explanation of Psalm 89 , preface; and others, cf. also Shedd, Dogmatic Theology II 360. Many, however, continued to cherish objection against this identification, such as Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae XII 2, 12; Witsius, De Oeconomia Foederum II 2, 1; Miscellanea Sacra II 820-824; R. Schutte, Two Treatises on God's Testament and Covenant , 1785; Hodge, Systematic Theology II 358.
There is indeed a difference between the covenant of peace and the covenant of grace; in the first, Christ is surety and head, in the second, mediator; the first remains limited to Christ and requires of Him the bearing of the punishment and the fulfilling of the law in the place of the elect, the second extends itself over and through Christ to mankind and requires of them faith and conversion, which Christ has not fulfilled or could fulfill in our place; the first concerns the earning of salvation, is eternal and knows no history, the second deals with the application of salvation, takes a beginning in time and has diverse dispensations. But yet, with this difference, the connection and the unity must not be overlooked. There are in Scripture only two covenants, two ways for man to heaven, namely, the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. The covenant of works is the way to heaven for the unfallen, the covenant of grace that for the fallen man. The covenant of works was made with mankind in Adam, the covenant of grace in Christ; He and He alone is the mankind-replacing and representing Head. When then in Scripture it is said that the covenant of grace was set up with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, etc., then this must not be understood as if they were the proper parties and heads in this covenant. No, Christ was then and now, in Old and New Testament, the head, the party in the covenant of grace, and through His ministry it came to the patriarchs and to Israel. He who existed from eternity and had set Himself as surety, also straightway after the fall actually appeared as prophet, priest, and king, as second Adam, as head and representative of fallen mankind. In the covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, etc., He is the mediator, the surety, who stands in for the realization of the covenant, who by His Spirit makes it real in the hearts, who ministers it to sinners, who bestows its benefits, who takes up His own into the covenant. The whole covenant is from beginning to end entrusted to Him; only in Him it lies firm; as the Father has ordained the kingdom to Him, so He ordains it to those who are given to Him; He shares out the benefits acquired by Him as an inheritance. The covenant is firm as a testament, it is a testamentary covenant and a covenantal testament. It is relatively indifferent and touches no principle, whether one places the twofoldness or the oneness of the covenant of peace and the covenant of grace in the foreground; if only it stands firm that in the covenant of peace Christ is never for one moment to be thought apart from His own, nor also in the covenant of grace can the believers be considered for one single moment outside Christ. It is in both the mystical Christ, Christ as the second Adam, who appears as the acting party. Adam and Abraham and David, etc., may be types, but the antitype is Christ. And since Adam already before the fall was a type of Christ, so the covenant of grace was not first prepared through Noah and Abraham, and not first through the covenant of grace with Adam, but already in and through the covenant of works. God, who knows and determines all things and also took up the breaking of the covenant of works in His counsel, has at the creation of Adam and at the institution of the covenant of works already reckoned on Christ and on His covenant of grace.
9. Thus upholds the doctrine of the covenant in a wondrously fair way God's sovereignty in the whole work of salvation. It goes far beyond the covenant of works, as far as Christ overtops Adam. Much clearer than in the creation comes God's triune being to revelation in the re-creation. It is the Father who plans and wills the redemption; it is the Son who stands for it and truly wins it; it is the Spirit who works it out and applies it. And in that whole work of salvation, from beginning to end, nothing comes in from man. It is God's work wholly and alone; it is sheer grace and unearned salvation.
But all the more is it weighty to mark that this doctrine of the covenant, in spite of or rather just because it upholds God's sovereignty in the work of salvation so purely and fully, at the same time lets the reasoning and upright nature of man come to its right in so fair a way. In the covenant of works this has already been broadly set forth. But in the covenant of grace this stands out yet more strikingly. In this wise it is greatly set apart from election. Indeed both are not so set apart that election is particular and the covenant of grace all-embracing, that the one denies free will and this teaches or takes it for granted, that the latter takes back what the former avows. But they do differ so that in election man is utterly passive, yet in the covenant of grace he also comes forth active.
Election says only without more who are chosen and shall unfailingly gain salvation; the covenant of grace sets forth the path along which these chosen ones shall come to their goal; it is the bed wherein the stream of election flows onward to eternity. Christ steps into the covenant of grace indeed as head and stand-in for his own, but He blots them not out nor undoes them. He stands in for them, but so that they themselves, taught and made able by his Spirit, knowingly and willingly yield to the covenant. The covenant of grace is indeed sealed with Christ, but it spreads out over and through Him also to his own and takes them wholly in, with body and soul.
The pact of salvation spreads out to a bond of grace; the head of the covenant of grace is also the go-between thereof. And therefore it steps forth at once in its proclaiming with the call for faith and turning, Mark 1:15. In the first times the Reformed spoke boldly of terms of the covenant. Calvin, Inst. IV 15, 17, on Gen. 15:6, 17:4, Matt. 3:7, 9, Gomarus, on the covenant, Maresius, Syst. Theol. VIII 5, Trigland, Antapologia c. 18, Foreword of the States Translation before the New Testament, Voetius, Disp. V etc.
But when the nature of the covenant of grace was thought into more deeply and had to be warded against Romanists, Lutherans and Remonstrants, many felt qualms thereto, Olevianus, Essence of the Covenant of Grace I 13, 14. Junius, Disp. Theol. XXV 12, 13, 19. Cocceius, on the covenant § 87, Id. Summa Theol. 41, 5, 12, 13. Cloppenburg, on the covenant § 29. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 1, 8-16. Franken, Kern c. 23. Brakel, Red. Godsd. XVI 17. Comrie, Heid. Catech. I etc., cf. M. Vitringa IV, in England above all also the Antinomians, Tobias Crisp and others against whom R. Baxter, Dan. Williams and others stood up.
Properly speaking, there are in the covenant of grace, that is, in the gospel, which is the proclamation of the covenant of grace, no demands and no conditions. For God gives what He demands; Christ has fulfilled all things and has also acquired for us regeneration, faith, and conversion, though He did not fulfill them in our stead, and the Holy Spirit applies them. But yet the covenant of grace, in its administration through Christ, takes on this demanding, conditional form, to acknowledge man in his rational and moral nature, to treat him even as fallen still as created after God's image, to hold him responsible and without excuse even in this highest realm, where it concerns eternal salvation and eternal perdition, to cause him to enter into this covenant with consciousness and freedom and to break that with sin.
The covenant of grace is therefore indeed unilateral; it proceeds from God; He has designed and established it. He upholds and realizes it; it is a work of the triune God and fully completed within the three persons among themselves. But it is destined to become bilateral, to be consciously and willingly accepted and kept by man in the power of God. This is the will of God, which in the covenant so clearly and so beautifully comes to light, that the work of grace may clearly mirror itself in human consciousness, and awaken man's will to powerful energy.
The covenant of grace does not slay man, nor treat him as a stock or block; but it takes up man wholly and altogether with all his faculties and powers, soul and body, for time and eternity; it encompasses him entirely, destroys not his strength but takes away his weakness; slays not his will but frees him from sin; dulls not his consciousness but delivers it from darkness; it recreates the whole man and then, renewed by grace, freely and independently with all his soul and spirit and body to love God and devote himself to Him.
The covenant of grace declares that God's honor and glory is obtained not at the cost but for the good of man and celebrates its triumphs in the recreation of the whole man, in his enlightened consciousness, and in his restored freedom.
At the same time, therewith is given yet another thought, which in the covenant of grace, in distinction from election, comes to light. In election, the elect appear as so many persons known to God by name; indeed they are chosen in Christ and form an organism with Him as their Head. But yet this does not come clearly and strongly to the fore in election. Wholly otherwise is this in the covenant of grace. Here Christ appears as the substitute for Adam, as the second Head of the human race. Here Christ with His church stands in connection with humanity under Adam. Election pays heed especially to the individuals, and by itself it left open the possibility that the elect, each by himself, individualistically, in leaps, were taken out of the human race, reborn, and carried over into heaven. But the covenant of grace says that this election realizes itself in a wholly other way. It utters the deep, fair truth that Adam is replaced by Christ; that humanity, which fell in the first, is restored in the second; that not single loose individuals are saved but that in the elect under Christ the organism of humanity and of the world itself is redeemed; that not only the persons of the elect but also, so to speak, the structure of the organism which they form in Christ, is borrowed from the original creation in Adam. Therefore the covenant of grace also does not leap from individual to individual, but it continues organically and historically. It runs through a history, and has sundry dispensations. It fits itself to the times and occasions determined by the Father as Creator and Sustainer. It is never made only with a single person but then always therein with his seed also; it is a covenant from generations to generations. It never embraces the person of the believer alone, in the abstract, but that person concretely, as he exists and lives historically, thus not him alone, but also all that is his; him not only for his person but him also as father or mother, as parent or child, with all that is his, with his household, with his goods and his gear, with his sway and might, with his office and standing, with his wit and his heart, with his learning and art, with his life in fellowship and state. The covenant of grace is the organization of the new humanity under Christ as its Head, which joins itself to the order of creation, reaches back into this, and takes up all that creation qualitatively and intensively into itself. It speaks for itself, therefore, that the covenant of grace in time, in this earthly ministry and dispensation, also takes up such into itself who inwardly remain unbelieving and do not partake of the spiritual blessings. The Reformed made, with an eye hereto, distinction between an inward and an outward covenant, Marginal note on 1 Cor. 7:14, 1 Pet. 2:9, Witsius, Oec. foed. III 1, 5, van Mastricht V 1, 28; or between covenant and covenant dispensation, Olevianus, Essence of the Covenant of Grace I 2, Alting, Theol. catech. p. 33, Turretin, Theol. El. XII 6, 5; or between an absolute and a conditional covenant, Maresius, Theol. syst. VIII 7, Koelman, History of the Labadists; even some went, such as Blake in Dr. Vos, The Doctrine of the Covenant, Stoddard at Northampton in Edwards, Works I 34, J. Schuts, The Covenant of Grace Obscured 1713 and Treatise on the Holy Supper 1722, M. Swarte 1740, R. Schutte, Two Treatises 1785 and others, so far that they took up two covenants, the one with the elect and true believers, the other with the not upright believing, outward members of the church, and thereby sought to justify the membership of the latter and their access to the supper. But others, such as Edwards, Works 185-295, Koelman, History of the Labadists, Appelius, The Reformed Doctrine 1769, Vitringa, Obs. Sacr. II c. 6, van den Honert V 470, also Rev. de Herder, cf. Heraut 937 and others, rightly came out against this. The covenant of grace is one; and the outward and inward side thereof, though here on earth never coinciding, can and may not be loosed from each other and laid next to each other. There are surely evil branches on the vine, there is chaff among the wheat, there are in a great house golden and earthen vessels, Matt. 3:12, 13:29, John 15:2, 2 Tim. 2:20. But we lack the right and the might to make separation between both; God Himself shall do that in the day of harvest. As long as they walk in the way of the covenant according to the judgment of love, they are to be deemed and treated as covenant members. Though not of the covenant, they are yet in the covenant and shall so one day be judged. They are here on earth bound in sundry ways with the elect; and the elect can, since they are members of the Adamic humanity, as organism not otherwise be gathered under Christ as their Head into one, than in the way of the covenant.
1. The covenant of grace is also set apart from the covenant of works in this, that it has a middleman, not of binding but of atoning, to mend the broken fellowship between God and man. The Holy Writ stands not alone with this teaching of a middleman's work, but is upheld and strengthened on all sides by the likenesses thereof found in the worships among the folks. For the most part, the words and deeds of great men hold the richest meaning for the tale and life of the folks; but this holds chiefly in the worshipful realm. Almost everywhere there are holy folk who bring about and uphold fellowship with God for others. Foretellers step forth as spokesmen of the Godhead and make known its will; priests stand for men in their drawing near to God, bring their gifts and prayers, and share out God's blessing to them; kings are often deemed sons of the gods, bearers of their wisdom and might. The birth of all these holy folk is not told us by the tale; but their widespreadness shows that we deal here with an outshowing that is not by chance but hangs together with the being of worship itself and with a deep need of mankind. Many tale-bound worships are besides bound to the names of sundry founders, who are later lifted above the rank of everyday men, or even, as in Buddhism, wholly godded; god-making and flesh-becoming are found in nearly all worships. The setting apart that Tiele makes between god-ruled and god-manly worships is, by his own reckoning, not strictly to be held and but a setting apart of more or less. At last, there is even in all worships not only in broad a waiting that evil shall once be overcome by good, but oftentimes that waiting is knit to a sundry person, as for byspel to Krishna in the Indian and Baldur in the Northern worship. The tale of Heracles too, the well-known saying of Plato about the upright in Republic VII, the fourth eclogue of Virgil are noteworthy in this wise. In its fairest and noblest outshowings, Heathendom unwittingly points toward Christendom; and further also Lamennais, Essay on Indifference III. Tholuck, Teaching on Sin, 4th Appendix. R. Ch. Trench, The Hulsean Lectures for 1845. 1846. 4th ed. Christ the Desire of All Nations or the Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion 1896.
But what among the heathens was no more than an unwitting and undefined longing, that became in Israel the object of a firm faith and fervent hope. God gave his promises to that folk. He did not let mankind begin its history without the hope that the seed of the woman would one day triumph over the seed of the serpent. Yes, it was Christ himself who, as the Angel of the Covenant, led the folk of God in the Old Testament day, prepared through Israel his own coming in the flesh, and through his Spirit let his own image be drawn in history and prophecy, John 5:39, 1 Peter 1:11, Revelation 19:10. Therefore, the Old Testament also does not contain single, standalone Messianic texts, which in a Christology of the Old Testament are gathered atomistically; but the whole Old Testament dispensation with its persons and events, its offices and institutions, its laws and ceremonies is a pointing and movement toward the fulfillment in the New Testament. There is a “Symbolism of Creation,” a typology in nature, which, as shown by Jesus’ parables, attains its realization in him and in his kingdom. There is an unwitting expectation and hope in the religion and history of the folks, which in Christendom comes to its truth. There is a direct and intentional preparation and foreshadowing of the logical worship in the institutions and events of the Old Testament. Temple and altar, priest and offering, Zion and Jerusalem, prophet and king, all are examples and shadows of a higher, spiritual, true reality. And especially the kingship gained under Israel such a typical meaning. The theocratic king, who especially in David with his lowly descent, his rich life experience, his noble nature, his deep feeling, his poetic bent, his great gifts, his unyielding courage, his shining victories was embodied, Smend, Old Testament Religious History 58, was a son of God, 2 Samuel 7:14, Psalm 2:6, 7, Psalm 89:27, the anointed one par excellence, Psalm 2:2, 18:51, to whom all kinds of bodily and spiritual blessings were wished, Psalm 2:8ff., 21, 45, 72, who even as Elohim was addressed, Psalm 45:7. The king is the bearer of the highest, the divine dignity on earth. In David, the theocratic king found his purest image; therefore, the kingship will also remain in his house, 2 Samuel 7:8-16. This promise of God to David is then the foundation, the center of all following expectation and prophecy. The prophecy, which joins the typology for explanation, looks from the past and present toward the future and draws the expected Davidide ever more clearly in his person and work. The opinion, for example, of Paul Volz, The Pre-Exilic Yahweh Prophecy and the Messiah, Göttingen 1897, that the Messiah idea is foreign to the pre-exilic prophets, is refuted by the facts and can only be maintained by arbitrary criticism. As the kingship in Israel and Judah answered less to its idea, prophecy took up the promise of 2 Samuel 7 and clung to it, Amos 9:11, Hosea 1:11, 3:5, Micah 5:1, 2, Isaiah 9:5, 6, 11:1, 2, 10, Jeremiah 23:5, 30:9, 33:17, 20-22, 26, Ezekiel 34:23, 24, 37:22-24. This anointed king will come forth from David’s house, when it has fallen to lowliness, cast from the throne, become like a cut-off stump, Isaiah 11:1, 2, Micah 5:1, 2, Ezekiel 17:22; God will cause him to sprout as a branch from David’s house, Jeremiah 23:5, 6, 33:14-17, so that he even bears the name of Branch, Zechariah 3:8, 6:12. But despite his lowly birth, he will yet be the true, real theocratic king. Though coming from the small, despised Bethlehem, where the Davidic royal house has its origin and, driven from rule, withdraws, Micah 5:2, cf. 3:12, 4:9, 14, the Messiah will yet be a Ruler over Israel, whose goings forth and origins as Ruler, from God, are from of old, from the days of eternity. He is given by God, is an eternal king, bears the names of Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, cf. 10:21, Deuteronomy 10:17, Jeremiah 32:18, Everlasting Father (for his folk), Prince of Peace, Isaiah 9:5, 6, is anointed with the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowledge and fear of the Lord, 11:5, is laid as a tested, precious cornerstone in Zion, 28:16, is a righteous, victorious, meek and therefore riding on a donkey king, who is not proud of his power but supported by God, Jeremiah 33:17, 20, 22, 26, Zechariah 9:9ff., whom the folk calls and acknowledges as the Lord our Righteousness, Jeremiah 23:6, cf. 33:16, where Jerusalem is so called as the city in which the Lord makes his righteousness dwell; who will be a hero like David and whose house will be like God, like the Angel of God, who once went before Israel’s host at the exodus, Zechariah 12:8, cf. Malachi 3:1, who will rule eternally, establish a kingdom of righteousness, peace and welfare, and extend his dominion also over the heathens, to the ends of the earth, Psalm 2, 45, 72, Ezekiel 37:25, Zechariah 6:13, 9:10 etc. This glorious Messiah image is then further refined by the fact that this future king is also drawn as prophet and priest. Indeed, these traits do not stand in the foreground, for in the kingdom of God the Spirit of God will be poured out on all, Joel 2:28, Zechariah 12:10, 13:2ff., Jeremiah 31:34, and all the folk will be priestly and holy to the Lord, Isaiah 35:8, Joel 3:17, Zechariah 14:20, 21; but yet the Messiah is also presented as prophet, on whom in special measure the Spirit of the Lord rests, and who will bring a glad message to Israel and the heathens, Deuteronomy 18:15, Isaiah 11:2, Isaiah 40-66, Malachi 4:5; and he will unite the priestly and kingly dignity in himself, Jeremiah 30:21, Zechariah 3, 6:13, Psalm 110. In the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah, all three offices clearly come to light; he is priest, who through his suffering atones for the sins of his folk, he is prophet, who anointed with God’s Spirit proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord, he is king, who is glorified and enjoys the fruit of his labor. How deeply this Messiah expectation entered into Israel is shown to us by the psalms; many proceed from the Davidic kingship and are in a narrower sense messianic, Psalm 2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 61, 72, 89, 132, others speak only of God or Yahweh as King, Psalm 10, 24, 29, 44, 47, 48, 66, 68, 87, 93, 95-100, 145-150. Cf. the works on the Christology of the Old Testament by Hengstenberg, 2nd ed. 1854, by Van Oosterzee, 1859-61, Bade, 2 vols., 2nd ed. Münster 1858, Böhl 1882, R. Gordon, Christ as Made Known to the Ancient Church, 4 vols. Edinburgh 1854; further works on the Old Testament prophecies such as by Riehm, The Messianic Prophecy, Gotha 1875. Hofmann, Prophecy and Fulfillment 1841, ’44. Scriptural Proof, 2nd ed. 1859, Orelli, The Old Testament Prophecy of the Completion of the Kingdom of God in Its Historical Development 1882; then works on the theology of the Old Testament by Schultz, Oehler, Smend, Dillmann, Riehm, Kayser, Kuenen, The Prophets I 234ff., Duhm, The Theology of the Prophets 1875. König, The Theology of the Psalms 1857. Dornstetter, The End-Time Kingdom of God According to Prophecy, Würzburg 1896. Stade, The Messianic Hope in the Psalter, in Gottschick’s Journal for Theology and Church II 1895 p. 369-413. Boehmer, The Kingdom of God in the Psalms, New Church Journal VIII 1897, Issues 8-10; and finally also dogmatic textbooks, such as by Dorner Christian Faith I 702. Grétillat, Exposition IV 95. Runze, Catechism of Dogmatics Leipzig Weber 1898
2. Even after the dying out of prophecy, the hope of the Messiah stayed alive in the heart of Israel's folk. In the apocryphal writings, we find indeed the hope of Israel's future redemption and rule, but without any mention of the Messiah other than a few slight hints, 1 Macc. 2:57, 4:46, 9:27, 14:41. Philo also has nothing about the Messiah. In general, the self-righteousness of Judaism was not favorable to the hope of the Messiah; Israel had the law, was righteous by keeping it, and therefore had no need of a redeemer; at most there was room for an earthly king who would reward the Jews according to their merits and bring them to rule over the folks of the world. The Messiah became solely a political figure. But in the folk, the hope of the Messiah stayed alive and came up again and again, especially in times of distress. It was upheld and fed by the reading of the Old Testament; many places were explained as Messianic, as the Septuagint shows; the Jews found in the Writings even 456 Messianic promises, 75 in the Pentateuch, 243 in the Prophets, and 138 in the Hagiographa; and especially the apocalyptic writings of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, the Sibylline Oracles, 4 Ezra took up the hope of the Messiah again and worked it out. It was generally hoped that He would appear at the end of this age, after fearful times, the so-called Messiah's woes, and Elijah or also another prophet like Moses or Jeremiah had gone before. He was usually named as Messiah, Son of Man, Chosen One, Son of David, a few times also as Son of God, and was seen as a man who already existed beforehand and was hidden with God, who would come forth from Bethlehem, righteous, holy, and fitted with many gifts by God, and who would set up the kingdom of God on earth. In the main, this matches the hope that, according to the witness of the New Testament, Luke 1:38, 74, 2:25 etc., was found in the folk circles, Schürer, Neutest. Zeitgesch. 613. Weber, System 333. Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der Mess. Hoffnungen seiner Zeit, Strassb. 1888, 2e Aufl. 1892. Herzog² 9, 653. Marti, Gesch. d. isr. Rel. 289. Holtzmann, Lehrb. der neut. Theol. I 68. Ludwig Paul, die Vorstellungen vom Messias u. vom Gottesreich bei den Synopt. Bonn 1895.
In the midst of these hopes, Christ himself steps forth, and in his preaching he at once links up with them. The kingdom of God, foretold and awaited by the prophets, wherein God is king and his will the delight of all, which by birth and kind is a heavenly kingdom and now already dwells in the heavens, Matt. 6:10—this kingdom comes also upon earth; it is near, Mark 1:15. But while tying in with these hopes, Jesus at once brings a great change therein; from the Jewish lore he goes back to the Writings, and understands by the kingdom not foremost a worldly rule, but a godly-moral sway. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Mark 12:26, the God of Israel, Matt. 15:30, whom Jesus owns and avows as his God, is surely also and above all King, Matt. 5:35, 18:23, 22:2, the Lord of heaven and earth, Matt. 11:25; but he is also the Father in the heavens, who in his kingdom wills to rule over his children as a Father; his kingdom is also a household, a gathering, Matt. 6:4, 6, 9, 7:11, Mark 3:34, 35; and these two thoughts of God's kingship and fatherhood harm not but help each other.
Furthermore: entry into that kingdom comes not by Pharisee-like law-keeping, but by turning, belief, new birth, Matt. 18:3, Mark 1:15, John 3:3; and therefore it stands open just for the poor, the lost, the toll-takers and sinners, Matt. 5:3, 9:11, 12, 11:5, 28-30, Luke 19:10. That kingdom, which on the one hand must be sought above all and calls for another and better righteousness than that of the Pharisees, Matt. 5:20, 6:33, 13:44-46, and then is set forth as a reward, kept in the heavens, Matt. 5:12, 6:20, 19:21, 20:1-7, 24:45, is yet on the other hand with all its fullness—forgiveness of sins, Matt. 9:2, 26:28, Luke 1:77, 24:47, righteousness, Matt. 6:33, everlasting life, Matt. 19:16, 25:46, Mark 8:43—a gift far beyond all work and worth, Matt. 19:29, 23:12, 24:47, 25:21, 25:34, Luke 6:32ff., 12:32, 37, 17:10, 22:29. Insofar as blessedness is not yet fully enjoyed here, the kingdom is thus still to come; but insofar as it is already begun in the hearts through new birth, forgiveness, renewal, it is now here, Matt. 11:11, 12:28, 23:13, Mark 4:26-29, 10:15, Luke 10:18, 17:21. Schmoller, Die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes in den Schriften des N. T. Leiden 1891, and others such as Joh. Weiss, Gunkel, have wrongly denied this last point.
The kingdom of God with Jesus is not only a good lying ready in heaven, given as reward for righteousness, and thus only a godly thought; but it is also begun on earth in the blessings of turning, belief, new birth, renewal; it grows bit by bit and fills all; it is at the same time a moral thought. That is, Jesus takes over the thought of the kingdom of God as it was unfolded in the Writings and especially later in the end-times writings in an end-of-days sense. But he binds thereto the thought, overlooked later by Judaism, that although the kingdom of God in the end-of-days sense will first be brought about at the end of days by a deed of God breaking into the world, it must yet be gone before and readied by a godly-moral renewal, by the kingdom of God in this sense. With the prophets of the Old Covenant these thoughts go together and are woven into one. They know only one coming of the Messiah. The kingdom of God holds all ghostly and earthly blessings; it brings at once turning and return (restoring of Israel as folk and kingdom); it is at the same time a moral and a godly thought.
But Jesus makes a split between these. The kingdom is here in godly-moral sense; it comes in end-of-days sense. The one thought of the kingdom of God comes to be in two great times. The one coming of the Messiah splits into a twofold one, for saving and for judging, for readying and for fulfilling. The Messiah's work becomes saving work; it breaks free from end-times teaching and flows into saving teaching, Baldensperger, Das Selbstbew. Jesu 114. Setting aside the question how long a time would pass between his now kingdom and his coming kingdom in Jesus' mind and that of the apostles; the fact stands firm that both are also split in time. Cf. Holtzmann I 215-225, and further the writings on the kingdom of God, which can be found in Frédéric Krop, La pensée de Jésus sur le royaume de Dieu d’après les évangiles synoptiques avec un appendice sur la question du fils de l’homme . Paris Fischbacher 1897 p. 7 ff. Cf. also A. Ritschl's Idee des Reiches Gottes im Lichte der Gesch. , critically looked at by Dr. Rich. Wegener, Leipzig Deichert 1898.
Jesus did not come to this distinction because his work, hopefully begun in Galilee, later remained without result, and he could now remain faithful to his calling in no other way than by revealing at the same time his Messiahship and the program of suffering, Holtzmann, I 284. For from the beginning, Jesus' place in that kingdom, whose gospel he preached, was completely clear and plain to him. Besides the indication in the baptism by John, Mt. 3:11ff., Jn. 1:26ff., this is clearly evident from the fact that Jesus immediately appeared with the names of Son of Man and Son of God. The first name Jesus borrowed, as is now fairly generally acknowledged, especially after Baldensperger's important study on The Self-Consciousness of Jesus, Strasbourg 1888, 2nd ed. 1892, with awareness from Dan. 7:13, to indicate both that he was the Messiah, without whom the kingdom of God could not come, and that he was so in a wholly different sense than his contemporaries imagined in their earthly-minded expectations. The name Son of Man is thus no symbol for the future kingdom of God (Hoekstra), nor a designation of Jesus as the true, ideal man (Herder, Schleiermacher, Neander, Lange, Ebrard, Thomasius, Godet, Beyschlag, etc.) or as the humble, weak man (Grotius, de Wette, Ewald, Baur, Strauss, Kuenen, Schenkel, Stier, Nösgen, etc.), but is a specific indication of his exalted, Messianic dignity in the sense as he himself understood it. Now, just as earlier the rationalist Paulus, Commentary on the N.T. on Mt. 8:20 and Uloth in the Theological Contributions 1862, so in recent times Lagarde, Wellhausen, Brandt, Oort, and especially Lietzmann have claimed that Jesus never called himself in Aramaic bar nash or used it only to refer to himself in the third person as the man; that the Aramaic words were later wrongly translated by huios tou anthropou and in Christian apocalyptic, in connection with Dan. 7:13, were understood of the Messiah, and in that meaning were then put in Jesus' mouth. But this hypothesis is very unlikely; it lacks all explanation of when and why the Aramaic expression was rendered thus in Greek, understood in a Messianic sense, and without any reason put in Jesus' mouth, cf. Schulze, The Religion of Jesus and the Faith in Christ, Halle 1897, pp. 7-13. Frédéric Krop, The Thought of Jesus on the Kingdom of God, p. 124ff. Kähler, On the Doctrine of Reconciliation, Leipzig 1898, p. 78. Rather, it is likely that the expression bar nash already designated the Messiah in Jewish apocalyptic, or that Jesus himself deliberately borrowed that title from Daniel, to designate himself clearly and yet in a different sense than his contemporaries thought, as Messiah. In any case, Jesus calls himself so where he, through his humble life, Mt. 8:20, 11:19, through his serving, Mt. 20:28, through his seeking and saving of the lost, Mt. 18:11, through his forgiveness of sins, Mk. 2:10, through his power over the Sabbath, Mk. 2:28, through his suffering, Mk. 8:31, 9:12, 31, 10:33, through his return, Mk. 13:26, 14:62, establishes, extends, and completes the kingdom of heaven on earth. With this claim and this name, Jesus did not first appear toward the end of his life; he was aware of his Messiahship from the first moment of his public activity and began it by virtue of that awareness. Already at twelve years of age, he knew that he must be about the things of his Father, Lk. 2:49. In the baptism by John, he received from his calling the divine sign and seal, Lk. 3:21. And immediately he appeared with the name of Son of Man, long before the incident in Caesarea Philippi, Mk. 2:10, 28. From the beginning, he gives himself a special and wholly unique place in the kingdom of God, performs works that presuppose his Messiahship, and demands an honor that belongs to him only if he is the Messiah, Mt. 5:11, 10:18, 32, 37, 12:6, 41, 19:29. But it is true that he used the name Son of Man sparingly in the first period, and that he employed it more frequently when, after the incident at Caesarea, he could connect with the Messiahship also the program of suffering. Jesus had to educate his disciples so that they recognized him as Messiah and yet did not transfer to him all those earthly political expectations that in Jesus' time were connected with the Messianic idea. Literature on the expression Son of Man by Oort, The Expression ho huios tou anthropou in the N.T., Leiden 1892, pp. 5ff. H. Lietzmann, The Son of Man, Freiburg: Mohr 1896. Holtzmann, New Testament Theology I 246. H. Appel, The Self-Designation of Jesus, The Son of Man, Stavenhagen 1896. Also Theological Journal, Nov. 1894, May 1895. Theological Studies by Dr. Daubanton etc., May 1895. Kähler, On the Doctrine of Reconciliation 1898, pp. 75ff. Frédéric Krop, The Thought of Jesus etc., pp. 118-132. With this it is said that Jesus' self-consciousness as Messiah cannot be explained historically or psychologically. It is present immediately at Jesus' appearance; it cannot be derived from the influence of the apocalyptic literature, which without doubt is overestimated by Baldensperger in general and also in relation to Jesus. He therefore sees himself compelled to go further, namely to the religious consciousness of Jesus, to his God-consciousness, and to say that at the baptism, with his God-consciousness, his Messiahship became immediately conscious to him; then he perceived God's nearness as never before, then he heard inwardly in himself the voice: You are my Son, Baldensperger, The Self-Consciousness of Jesus, p. 160. To a certain extent this is correct. Jesus' consciousness that he was the Messiah flowed from the knowledge that he stood in a wholly unique relation to God. He called himself Son of Man but also Son of God, cf. volume II, p. 243. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, then the king, and especially the Messiah were so designated. This theocratic meaning the name Son of God perhaps still has in the mouth of the possessed, Mt. 8:29, the Jews, Mt. 27:40, the high priest, Mt. 26:63, and even of the disciples in the first period, Jn. 1:49, 11:27, Mt. 16:16. But Jesus lays in this name another and deeper sense. He is Son of God, not because he is Messiah and King, but he is the latter because he is the former, because he is Son of the Father. God is his Father, Lk. 2:49; he is the one Son whom the Father loved and whom he sent at last, Mk. 12:6; at the baptism, Mt. 3:17, and later at the transfiguration, Mt. 17:5, God calls him his beloved Son, in whom he has all his pleasure; and in Mt. 11:27 he says that all things necessary for the execution of God's good pleasure are given to him and that only the Father knows the Son and the Son the Father. This Sonship is the source of all his life, thinking, and acting. In that consciousness he places himself above the ancients, Mt. 5:21ff., above Jonah and Solomon, Lk. 11:31, 32, above the angels even, Mk. 13:32. Knowing that he stands in a wholly unique relation to the Father and is king of the kingdom of God, he pronounces blessings, Mt. 5:3ff., Lk. 10:23, forgives sins, Mk. 2:5, demands that all be forsaken for his sake, Mt. 5:11, 10:18, 22, etc., and connects therewith entrance into eternal life. The Synoptics already contain in germ all that was later taught by the apostles and also by the Christian church about the person of Christ. It is true that the disciples before Jesus' resurrection had no right insight into his person and work. The gospels tell us that themselves. Hence Jesus in his teaching also took account of the capacity of his followers, gradually trained them to the knowledge of his Sonship and his Messiahship, and left much to the teaching of the Spirit, Jn. 16:12. But the resurrection already caused a wonderful light to arise over the person and work of Christ; from then on he was regarded by all disciples as a heavenly being; the teaching of Paul and John about the essence of Christ found no opposition among any of the disciples, Weissacker, The Apostolic Age², pp. 16, 110. What they add to it is nothing new, but only expansion and development. Jesus is truly man, become flesh and come in the flesh, Jn. 1:14, 1 Jn. 4:2, 3, from the fathers as far as the flesh is concerned, Rom. 9:5, Abraham's seed, Gal. 3:16, from Judah's tribe, Heb. 7:14, from David's lineage, Rom. 1:3, born of a woman, Gal. 4:4, Heb. 2:14, man in the full, true sense, Rom. 5:15, 1 Cor. 15:45, 1 Tim. 2:5, who was weary, thirsty, sorrowful, joyful as we are, Jn. 4:6ff., 11:33, 35, 12:27, 13:21, Heb. 4:15, was under the law, Gal. 4:4, learned obedience unto death, Phil. 2:8, Heb. 5:8, 10:7, 9, suffered, died, and was buried, etc. But this same man was at the same time free from all sin, Mt. 7:11, 11:29, 12:50, Jn. 4:34, 8:29, 46, 15:10, Acts 3:14, 2 Cor. 5:21, Heb. 4:15, 7:26, 1 Pet. 1:19, 2:22, 1 Jn. 2:1, 3:5; he also rose, was glorified, seated at God's right hand, Acts 2:34, 5:31, 7:55, etc. He existed already before his incarnation, Jn. 1:1, 17:5, 1 Cor. 10:4, 9, Heb. 11:26, was then in the form of God, Phil. 2:6, firstborn of all creation, Col. 1:15, higher than the angels, Heb. 1:4, through whom God created all things and in whom all things consist, Jn. 1:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Col. 1:16, Eph. 3:9, Son of God in a wholly unique sense, Jn. 1:14, 5:18, Rom. 8:3, 32, Gal. 4:4, and himself God, Jn. 1:1, 20:28, Rom. 9:5, 2 Thess. 1:12, Tit. 2:13, Heb. 1:8, 9 (1 Jn. 5:20), 2 Pet. 1:1. Cf. article Christology, Doctrine of Scripture by Kähler in Herzog³ 4, 4 with the literature cited there.
3. This apostolic witness concerning Jesus the Christ was too comprehensive to be immediately taken up into the Christian consciousness and expressed in a clear formula that cuts off all error. Among the apostolic fathers there is therefore no mention of it yet, although they assign to Christ a wholly unique place and call Him by all sorts of glorious and exalted names, part II 250. By the errors arising on the left and on the right, of Ebionitism and Gnosticism, the Christian thinking was first awakened to appropriate the apostolic witness in its manifoldness and to bring to clarity the relation of Christ both to God and to humanity. Ebionitism indeed held Jesus to be the Messiah, sometimes also believed that He was conceived in a supernatural way and equipped at baptism with a divine power, but otherwise it saw in Jesus nothing but a man, from David's lineage, anointed with God's Spirit and appointed as king over an earthly kingdom to be established at His return. Gnosticism, despising matter and ascribing the creation of the world to a demiurge, also made in Christ a sharp separation between the divine and the human; the highest aeon, namely Christ, had descended from heaven and united Himself for a time with the earthly man Jesus, or brought with Him from heaven a psychic body or temporarily assumed a phantom body, to free humanity from the bonds of matter. Harnack indeed thinks that the recognition of Jesus as a man chosen by God and equipped with the Spirit was not Ebionite but Christian, D. G. I 245, and also says that the doctrine of the two natures of Christ was originally Gnostic, I 220, 516, but he must nevertheless admit that in the oldest tradition Jesus was also confessed as Son of God and never held to be a mere man, I 153-168, cf. Loofs in Herzog³ 4, 18 f. There may have been various conceptions of how one and the same subject could at the same time be Son of God and man; but thus was Christ recognized by all from the beginning. This confession had to lead and did lead under Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, cf. part II 250-256, to the doctrine of the two natures. The expression δυο οὐσιαι χριστου first appears in a fragment of Melito, whose authenticity is however doubted, Harnack, D. G. I 165, according to Loofs, Herzog³ 4, 31 wrongly. Irenaeus does not yet have the formula of the two natures, but clearly teaches that Christ is truly the Son, the Logos, and Himself God, that He as such became man, and that this incarnate Logos is an unbreakable unity. He is vere homo et vere deus, adv. haer. IV 6, 7, it is one and the same Christ who created the world and who was born and died, III 9, 3. 16, 6. 19, 1 etc. Tertullian teaches likewise and speaks even more strongly of two substances in Christ, carnea and spiritalis, of two conditions, divina et humana, de carne Chr. 5, and assumed in Him a duplex status, non confusus sed conjunctus in una persona, Deum et hominem verum, adv. Pr. 27. Soon thereafter in the West the formula was used for this doctrine of Christ, that He was una persona with duo naturae. Augustine expresses himself regularly thus; ita vero inter Deum et homines mediator apparuit, ut in unitate personae copulans utramque naturam, et solita sublimaret insolitis et insolita solitis temperaret, Ep. ad Volus. 3. In the East, however, the terminology, just as in the doctrine of the Trinity, remained unsettled for a long time and therefore susceptible to all sorts of misunderstanding. The words οὐσια, φυσις, ὑποστασις, προσωπον still lacked strict definition and were therefore used interchangeably; even Cyril often designates the human nature of Christ as ὑποστασις instead of as φυσις, and then again speaks of one nature in Christ, μια σεσαρκωμενη φυσις; the union of both natures was designated by Gregory Nazianzen and Nyssen as a μιξις, ἀνακρασις, and by Cyril as a ἑνωσις φυσικη or κατα φυσιν; and that which came into being through the hypostatic union was often called not εἱς but ἑν, Schwane, D. G. II 294 f. 341 f. The dogmatic epistle of Pope Leo the Great to Flavian contributed much, however, to promote also in the East clear insight and precise language in the doctrine of Christ, Halm, Bibl. der Symbole u. Glaubensregeln³ 321-330. And at Chalcedon, after the rejection of Nestorianism, Patripassianism, Eutychianism etc., the confession of Christ was established as of one and the same Son and Lord, τελειον τον αὐτον ἐν θεοτητι και τελειον τον αὐτον εν ανθρωποτητι, θεον αληθως και ἀνθρωπον αληθως τον αυτον,..... ἑνα και τον αὐτον χριστον, υἱον, κυριον, μονογενη, ἐν δυο φυσεσιν (according to the original reading; not ἐκ δυο φυσεων) ἀσυγχυτως, ἀτρεπτως, ἀδιαιρετως, ἀχωριστως γνωριζομενον, Hahn, ib. 166.
4. With that, the borders were sharply and clearly drawn, within which the churchly teaching of Christ could be further unfolded. But it was far from the case that hereby agreement was gained earlier and later. The question: what think you of the Christ? has called forth all kinds of answers in the Christian life and also in theology; it holds all ages through heads and hearts of men divided. Even within those churches which together accept the Chalcedonian, there is with all agreement yet also marked difference. In the theology of the East the ground-thought remained this, that God himself must become man, so that man might become partaker of the godly nature, the immortality, the everlasting life, the theosis. The outcomes of sin are much more bodily than upright of kind, and therefore alongside the rationalism in the Greek church always runs the mysticism. This mysticism must lead thereto, that, although the manly nature of Christ was also acknowledged, the strongest stress yet fell on his Godhead, on the ingoing of the godly nature into the manly, on the oneness of both, on the being of Christ more than on his historical appearing, on his flesh-becoming more than on his satisfaction. With the person of Christ it therefore came chiefly to his godly being, which in manly form was shared and so by man received and enjoyed. To strict sundering of the two natures was therefore least of all need felt; it is missed with Athanasius, the Cappadocians, yes even yet in part with Cyril; the Greek reading of the Chalcedonian is a correction of the first text; the saying en duo physein is by ek duo physeon replaced. The monophysitism was in the East a might; howsoever condemned and oppressed, it yet came time and again above, in the teaching of the theopaschites, the aphthartodocetes, the aktistetes and the monotheletes; it bore thereto to wipe out the border-line between the godly and the manly and to make the churches in the East more and more ripe for the downfall in heathendom.
In contrast, the West strictly distinguished between the divine and human nature of Christ; the terminology of one person and two natures had been fixed since Tertullian; the emphasis lay more on the ethical than on the physical, on the satisfaction, suffering, and death, more than on the incarnation. Yet even here, not all danger of the deification of Christ's human nature was avoided. The East took almost no notice of the West and underwent in particular no influence from Augustine. But conversely, the West did adopt the theology and especially the mysticism of the East. Thereby, the idea of a deification of the human penetrated into the Latin church and theology. Mystical contemplation, the doctrine of the superadded gift, transubstantiation—all rest on the thought that the finite can partake of the infinite. This could not remain without influence on Christology, for the human nature was united more closely than any other creature with the Godhead. As Adam through the superadded gift, as believers through infused grace, as mystics through contemplation already partake of the divine nature and in a certain sense are deified, then this must be the case in a much stronger degree with the man Christ. Entirely in agreement with John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith III 3. 7. 17. 19, the scholastic and Roman theology therefore taught that each nature in Christ indeed remains itself and the communication of divine properties to the human nature is not to be thought of as real, but that yet the divine nature wholly permeates and glows through the human, like heat through iron, and makes it partake of the divine glory and wisdom and power (perichoresis , theosis ). From this it is then deduced that Christ as man already here on earth possessed the blessed knowledge, the vision of God; Jesus was already on earth a comprehensor and a wayfarer, walking by sight and not by faith; of faith and hope there can and may be no mention in Him. Furthermore, all the gifts for which Christ's human nature was capable were bestowed upon Him not gradually, but immediately, all at once at His incarnation. As man He remained finite and limited; also in the state of His humiliation He had various defects (susceptibility to suffering and death) and affections (feelings of sorrow, hunger, cold, etc.). But at His incarnation He received all at once all wisdom for which His human nature was capable. His increase therein, Luke 2:52, is to be understood not objectively but subjectively; it seemed so to others; also He prayed not out of need, but only for our sake, to give us an example. Jesus was actually never a child; He was immediately a man. And because His human nature is so glorified and deified by the divine, therefore it too has a right to and is the object of adoration; yes, every part of Christ's human nature, such as especially the sacred heart, is worthy of divine veneration. Cf. Lombard, Sentences III dist. 9. 13 sq. 23. Thomas, Summa Theologica III qu. 7-15. 25. 33. 34. Bonaventure, Breviloquium IV 6. Bellarmine, De Christo III. IV. Petavius, De Incarnatione X. XI. Theologia Wirceburgensis IV 260 sq. Scheeben, Dogmatik III 1-261. Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit III 213 f. Pesch, Praelectiones IV 86 sq. 111 sq. Jansen, Praelectiones II 669. C. v. Schaezler, Das Dogma von der Menschwerdung Gottes 1870 p. 164 f. Simar, Dogmatik 420 f.
We find the same ground-thought in Lutheran theology. But it is worked out and applied differently here. Greek and Roman theology taught indeed a sharing of godly gifts but not of godly attributes to the manly nature; and they taught also a true and essential sharing of the godly attributes, but then not to the manly nature as such, but to the hypostasis of both natures. Luther however taught that even in the state of humiliation the manhood of Christ was where the Godhead was, and that both natures were united and mingled not only in the person but also both among themselves with their attributes, Köstlin, Luthers Theol. Therefore the Roman theologians could unanimously fight the Lutheran Christology and especially the ubiquity teaching, Bellarmine, de Christo. Petavius, de incarn. and so on. But yet there is, here as in the teaching of the supper, kinship. The Lutherans teach expressly that the two natures in Christ are never mingled or changed into each other, but that each of both remains itself unto eternity and keeps its essential attributes and never receives the attributes of the other nature as its own, Form. Conc. ed. Müller. They also do not say that all godly attributes are shared in the same sense and in the same measure to the manly nature; the resting attributes of infinity and so on were not given to it itself directly, but only through the mediation of the other attributes; the working ones however, such as omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience were directly and immediately the part of the manly nature; and even one often ascribed to it not only the multivolipresence or ubiquity in the sense of Chemnitz but specifically the omnipresence, ib. And in substance Roman and Lutheran theology agree in that they lift the manly nature above the bounds set to it and dissolve in seeming the manly growth of Jesus along with the state of his humiliation. In Lutheran theology that has come out very clearly. At the becoming man, namely, a distinction was made not temporally but yet logically between the incarnation (assumption of flesh) and the exinanition (conception in the womb). Of the first only the Logos is subject; and it consists in that He makes the in itself finite manly nature fit for the indwelling of the fullness of the Godhead and shares with it the above-named godly attributes. But in this way not only the distinction between godly and manly nature but also that between the state of humiliation and of exaltation threatened to be wholly lost. Therefore one assumed that in the second moment, in the exinanition, of which not the Logos but the God-man was the subject, this one had in a certain sense laid aside again the first shared attributes. But about the kind of this exinanition there was great difference and even between the Giessen and Tübingen theologians a long-lasting (1607-1624) strife was waged. According to the Tübingeners Christ laid aside only the public use of those attributes; He kept them indeed and He used them also, for the distinction between potential and actual does not apply to the godly attributes; a potential omnipresence, omniscience and so on is absurd; but Christ used those shared attributes in the state of his humiliation only in a latent, hidden way (krypsis chreseos ); the state of exaltation is nothing else than a visible showing of what invisibly already existed from the hour of conception. In this way however the whole manly growth of Jesus, his increasing in knowledge and wisdom, his hungering and thirsting, his suffering and dying became only seeming. And therefore the Giessen theologians and the later Lutheran theologians rather said that Christ in the moment of exinanition had laid aside all use of the shared attributes (kenosis chreseos ); He kept them indeed, but only potentially, not actually; only at the exaltation did He take them also in use. Cf. Chemnitz, de duabus naturis in Christo. Gerhard, Loc. Quenstedt. Hollaz. Buddeus, Inst. theol. and further Dorner, Entw. Gesch. der prot. Theol. Frank, Theol. der Concordienformel. Schneckenburger, Vergl. Darst. Id. Zur kirchl. Christologie. Die orthodoxe Lehre vom doppelten Stande Christi nach luth. und ref. Fassung. Sartorius, Christi Person und Werk. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. Herzog art. Doppelter Stand Christi. Herzog art. Kenotiker und Kryptiker. Herzog art. Comm. idiom.
The Reformed were from the beginning in a much more favorable state; they have overcome in principle the Greek, Roman, and Lutheran mingling of the divine and human also in the doctrine of Christ. Although strictly upholding the unity of the person, they have also applied to the human nature of Christ the rule: finitum non est capax infiniti and upheld this not only in the state of humiliation but even in that of exaltation. Thus the Reformed theology gained room for a purely human unfolding of Christ, for a successive imparting of gifts, for an essential distinction between humiliation and exaltation. And yet it has thereby earnestly shunned Nestorianism, of which it was always accused. And that came about because in Greek, Roman, and Lutheran theology the stress always fell on the incarnation of the divine being, of the divine nature. If that nature does not become flesh, the work of salvation, the fellowship with God, seems to be in peril. But Reformed theology sets in the forefront that the person of the Son has become flesh; not the substance but the subsistence of the Son took on our nature. In that person lies the unity of both natures, in spite of their strict distinction, unshakeably firm. As in the doctrine of the Trinity, of man as the image of God, and of the covenants, so also here in the doctrine of Christ the Reformed thought of the personal, aware life as the richest and highest life comes very clearly to the fore. Cf. Calvin, Inst. II c. 12-14. Beza, de hypostatica duarum in Christo naturarum unione, Tract. Theol. I II. Ursinus, Tract. theol. Martyr, Loci Comm. loc. 17. Zanchi, de incarnatione Filii Dei, Op. VIII. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 12 sq. Owen, Declaration of the glorious mystery of the person of Christ, God and man, Works, Edinb. I. and more literature in Walch, Bibl. theol. sel. I. M. Vitringa V.
5. All these unfoldings of the teaching about Christ spring from and move within the bounds of the Chalcedonian Creed. But by no means could all Christians find themselves in this confession. At all times there were those who turned aside to the right or to the left and followed in the footsteps of the old Ebionitism or Gnosticism. On one side stand Arianism, Nestorianism, Socinianism, Deism, Rationalism, and so on; and on the other side Patripassianism, Sabellianism, Monophysitism, medieval Pantheism, Anabaptism, Theosophy, and so forth. Especially in newer theology the thought has become widespread that the teaching of the two natures well fitted the Greek theology and church, but now for us has lost all religious worth, that it also under the judgment of Socinianism and Rationalism has fallen beyond recall, and therefore now ought to be changed in a wholly new, religious-ethical sense. This new Christology has its foremost spokesmen in Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl.
Petavius, De incarnatione. Forbesius à Corse, Instructiones historico-theologicae. M. Vitringa. Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung Gottes. Dorner, Entwicklung der Lehre von der Person Christi. Réville, Histoire du dogme de la divinité de Jésus-Christ. Münscher-von Coelln, Dogmengeschichte. Article Christologie in Loofs' Kirchenlehre in Herzog's Realencyklopädie.
Kant could not accept the biblical and churchly teaching of Christ, because he denied the knowability of the supernatural and, concluding from "thou shalt" to "thou canst," had no need of a Redeemer.
Christ could therefore for Kant remain only an example of morality and a teacher of virtue. All that Scripture and church further said of that Christ had only symbolic worth. The churchly Christ is the symbol of the humanity well-pleasing to God; this is the true, only-begotten, much-beloved Son, for whose sake God created the world. The incarnation of Christ symbolizes the arising of the true moral life in man; his substitutionary suffering means that the moral man in us must atone for the evil of the sensual man; faith in Christ points out that man, for his salvation, must believe in the idea of the humanity well-pleasing to God. In one word, the historical man Jesus is no mediator or savior, but all that the church confesses of that person holds fully for the idea of humanity, Religion ed. Rosenkranz. Kant began in the new philosophy by, like the old Gnostics, separating the historical Christ from the ideal; and others have continued that.
Fichte went out from the thought that God and man were absolutely one. But Christ has first recognized this unity in himself and clearly spoken it out; that is his great historical meaning; thousands have through Him come to this recognition, to this fellowship with God. But though this has historically been so, yet it is not thereby said that man cannot from himself, not otherwise than through Christ, come to that fellowship. If Jesus came back, He would be fully content that Christianity reigned in the hearts, even if his person were wholly forgotten. Only the metaphysical, eternal truth, the recognition of unity with God, makes blessed; the historical is a standalone, passing fact, Anweisung zum seligen Leben, especially 6th Lecture.
In Schelling in his first period, the absolute is no unchanging being but an eternal becoming, which thus in the world as its logos and son comes to revelation. Theology thinks that Christ is the only-begotten and flesh-become Son of God. That is untrue; God is eternal and cannot in a certain time-moment have taken on human nature; Christianity as historical fact has passing meaning. But eternal remains the idea; the world is the son of God; the incarnation of God consists therein, that the absolute, to be itself, comes to revelation in a world, in a multitude of individuals, in a rich history, in a historical process. The world is thus God himself in his becoming; the incarnation of God is the principle of all life and history; the finite is the needful form for the revealing of God; all must be understood from the idea of the incarnation. And this is also the esoteric truth of Christianity; the historical clothing is but timely form for this eternal idea, Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, 1803, Works I 5.
Likewise Hegel said that what theology symbolically gave in representations, philosophy turned into concepts; Christ is not the only God-man, but man is essentially one with God and becomes aware of this also at the highest standpoint of his development, Philosophy of Religion, Works XII.
From these philosophical premises, Marheineke, Rosenkranz, Göschel, Daub, Conradi, and others still sought to uphold the incarnation of God in Christ, but Strauss drew the consequences and said in his Life of Jesus, 1835 II, that the idea pours out its fullness not in one example but only in a multitude of individuals; humanity is the man-become God, who is conceived of the Holy Spirit, lives sinless, rises from the dead, ascends to heaven, etc.
In the modern dogmatics, which goes out from this philosophical thought, there therefore remains no place more for Christ, other than a religious genius, a teacher of virtue, a prophet, who has deepest understood religion, clearest revealed God's love, and clearest spoken out the unity and fellowship of God and man; but the person of Christ stands itself factually outside the essence of Christianity, Strauss, Dogm. II. Old and New Faith². Schweizer, Chr. Faith § 116 f. Pfleiderer, Outline § 128. Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. II². Lipsius, Dogm.² § 588. Scholten, Initia ch. 4 p. 171. Kielstra, The Religious Life 1890 p. 39.
Not without right did von Hartmann speak, with an eye on this modern theology, of a crisis and a self-dissolution of Christianity, The Crisis of Christianity and Modern Theology 1880. The Self-Dissolution of Christianity and the Religion of the Future³ 1888. And Dr. Boekenoogen, Christological Considerations, Theological Journal March, May, Sept., Nov. 1892 Nov. 1897, tried in vain to uphold the teaching of Christ in modern dogmatics still as symbolic imaging of religious ideas.
Another path was taken by Schleiermacher. Although decidedly casting off the churchly teaching of Christ, he yet sought to shun the fault of speculative philosophy, namely, to seek the being of Christendom in an abstract thought and to loosen this from the historical person of Christ. Thereto he went out from the undergoing of the gathering, from the Christian awareness, that has as content the atonement and the fellowship with God. The last cause hereof is nowhere else to be found than in the founder of the Christian gathering, in whom therefore the God-awareness must have been present in utter strength. And this strength of his God-awareness was his God in Him, so that He is the religious archetype of mankind, sinless, full-come, highest yield of the human kindred and at the same time brought forth through a shaping deed of God as the full-come subject of religion. Not on his teaching but on his person, not on what He did but on what He was, not on his ethical ensample but on his religious life does it in the first stead come, Chr. Gl. § 91 f. By thus seeking the fulfilling of the religious thought not in mankind but in the person of Christ, Schleiermacher has wielded a mighty sway and again ensured a place for Christology in dogmatics.
Foremost, Schleiermacher’s sway was noticeable therein, that one, in withstanding to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, sought to uphold in Christ a wholly special and fully one-of-a-kind showing of God. If the God-awareness in Christ was utter and never by any sin upset, God must also have dwelt in Him in a fully one-of-a-kind way. Naturally one could try this in sundry ways, according as one thought otherwise about the Trinity. Those who cast off the being-wise Trinity, take in Christ a special showing of God, a full-come indwelling of God, the fulfilling of God’s everlasting world-thought or man-thought, Rothe, Ethik § 533 f. Weisse, Philos. Dogm. I. Schenkel, Dogm. II 2. Ewald, Göschel, Redepenning, Beyschlag etc. Others acknowledge indeed a being-wise Trinity but think the bond of the Son to the Father as under-ordering, and come therefore to an Arian Christology, Thomasius, Kahnis, Gess, Keerl, Hofstede de Groot, Doedes etc. Yet others set the Son alongside the Father and near therefore the churchly teaching, K. I. Nitzsch, Twesten, Müller, Martensen, Sartorius, Liebner, Lange, Voigt, Philippi, Vilmar, Ebrard, Oosterzee and others.
Next, through Schleiermacher there came in the newer Christology a formerly unwonted heed in the human, historical unfolding of the person of Christ. The teaching of the sharing of traits was therefore as good as given up; the human nature of Christ was shoved to the forefront; the teaching of the two states was changed into a life of Jesus, and that life was tracked in its readying, unfolding and sway. Very beloved became therefore the history of Israel, of the classical world and above all of Jesus’ own time (Neutest. Zeitgesch. of Hausrath, Schürer etc); further the man-becoming must be beheld as not chance-wise needful because of sin but as flowing forth from God’s thought and given with the shaping itself (Steffens, Göschel, Baader, Nitzsch, Martensen, Liebner, Lange, Rothe, Ehrenfeuchter etc.); and then the unfolding of Jesus as man must be followed in its historical unfolding, until He became second Adam, head of mankind, central individual (Rothe, Liebner, Schneckenburger, Martensen, Lange, Neander, Kahnis, Beyschlag, Keerl).
Lastly there came in the newer Christology, that yet held fast to the avowal of Christ as God-man, the striving to uphold the oneness of these two in another and better way than in the avowal of Chalcedon and the churchly dogmatics had happened. Thereto was, in part on God himself but then above all on the God-man, the thought of becoming laid. Schelling began therewith in his second time, cf. part II. The Son was in a certain sense indeed everlasting in the Father, but as brought forth by the Father, as Son outside (praeter) the Father, He steps forth first in the shaping. Even then however the Son exists not as working, but as a power, that can and must fulfill itself. Through man’s sin however the world becomes an out-of-God being, and the Son, who is brought forth for that world and stays bound to it, gets a not inward but outward from the Father unleaning being, Werke II 3. He was in a between-state, ἐν μορφῃ θεου, He becomes Christ, stays bound to the fallen world, which the Father leaves over to Him, leads this in the way of self-wiping-out and hearkening back to the Father himself, and becomes so at the end of the world himself Son in full-come sense, II 4.
This thought about the becoming of the God-man had in theosophical rings e.g. on Baader, Steffens, etc. great sway. And even Rothe and Dorner took over the thought, that God or the Logos in that same measure more went to dwell in the historical person of Jesus, as this unfolded himself to religious personhood, to spirit; the man-becoming of God grows with the God-becoming of man. In another and yet kindred way is the clearing of the God-man tried through the teaching of the kenosis, that is, through the under-laying, that the Logos at the flesh-becoming emptied himself of all or of some traits down to the level of the human unfolding and then little by little in the way of unfolding won these back, cf. Gess, Die Lehre v. d. Person Christi . Liebner, Die Chr. Dogm. aus d. christol. Princip , and Jahrb f. d. Theol. . Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk I³. Sartorius, Lehre v. d. heiligen Liebe II². Lange, Dogm. II. Ebrard, Dogm. § 350 f. Schöberlein, Prinzip u. System der Dogm. . Martensen, Dogm. § 133. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis II 1. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. ². Kahnis, Dogm. II. Frank, Chr. Wahrheit II. Kübel, Ueber den Unterschied zw. der posit. u. d. liber. Richtung in der mod. Theol. ². H. Schmidt, Zur Lehre v. d. Person Christi , Neue Kirchl. Zeits. VII. Godet, Comm. on John 1:14. Grétillat, Exposé IV. Recolin, La personne de J. C. et la théorie de la kenosis Paris. Saussaye, cf. my Theol. van Ch. d. l. . Oosterzee, Chr. Dogm. II. Kähler, Herzog ³ 4.
Finally, Schleiermacher's Christology agrees with that of Ritschl; only it, more closely aligning with the philosophy of Kant, lays more stress on the work than on the person of Christ and assigns a greater place in the essence of Christianity to the ethical. Ritschl also rejects in the doctrine of Christ all metaphysics and everything that is condemned by natural science and by historical criticism, for example, the preexistence, the supernatural conception, the resurrection, ascension, second coming. In that respect, Christ is an ordinary man. But his peculiarity lay in his calling, in the work that he did, namely, the founding of a kingdom of God. As an ethical person, Christ stands high above all men; his will was perfectly one with the will of God, with the plan and the goal that God had set before himself in relation to the world and mankind. But therefore Christ also has great religious significance; in him God himself, his grace and faithfulness, his will and intention with mankind have come to revelation; Christ has shown it to us and confirmed it with his death, that the kingdom of God is the destiny of all men, that his will must become the will of the whole of mankind. Therein consists the kingly power, the world dominion of Christ; and therein consists also his Godhead. Christ is not God in a metaphysical sense, but the name God denotes with him his rank and position, is not an essential but an official name; Christ may be called God because he occupies toward us the place of God and the worth of God.
Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers III. Kaftan, Wesen der chr. Rel. Kaftan, Brauchen wir ein neues Dogma. Kaftan, Dogmatik. Schultz, over Rom. Schultz, Die Lehre v. d. Gottheid Christi. Gottschick, Die Kirchlichkeit der s. g. kirchl. Theologie. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Lobstein, Etudes Christologiques, Strassb. Chapuis, La transformation du dogme christol. au sein de la théol. moderne, Lausanne Bridel.
6. The teaching of Christ is not the starting point but indeed the midpoint of the whole dogmatics. All other dogmas ready it or are drawn from it. In it as the heart of dogmatics beats the whole godly-moral life of Christendom. It is the mystery of godliness, 1 Tim. 3:16. From this all teaching of Christ must go out. Yet if Christ is the enfleshed Word, then the enfleshing is also the midmost deed of the whole world-history, then it must be readied from the times of the ages and after-work and through-work unto all everlastingness. Rightly says Schelling, that it must be hard for someone, to a personhood which is known to him not sooner than from the twinkling when it showed in manly shape, which for him is but a historical one, it must be uncommonly heavy for him afterward to ascribe a fore-manly, yea fore-worldly being; he will naturally be bent to see this only as a fore-showing, with which in further going the person of the great belief-founder was ringed and hallowed. Wholly other becomes this, when, like each deed of showing, so also the person of Christ is first godly-wise beheld. Foremost has the enfleshing then its under-setting and groundwork in the three-onely being of God. In god-denying and all-godding, there is no room for a God-enfleshing; there God is sundered from world and man in outdrawn wise, here God loses himself in the shaped things and has no own being and life. It is therefore wholly kindly, as on this standpoint the enfleshing is cast off as unrhymed. The Socinians came here roundly out and made to this saying of wit their out-reading bondservant; they named the enfleshing a manly dream-shape and a monster-like dogma, and deemed it lighter, that a man an ass than that God man became. Likewise said Spinoza, that the God-man-becoming was even unrhymed as that a ring the kind of a four-side took on. Only the god-believing and three-onely owning of God's being opens the may-be for the deed of the enfleshing. Here yet God abides who He is and can He yet to others himself share. If one after the word of Vinet first oneself must have to oneself give, then is the outright love only to think as fullness of a three-onely godly being. Then yet only is there sundering between being and person, and therefore sharing of man through the person to the being of God, without that this being with the man is one-made or in him over-flows. The three-oneness makes in one word may-be, that there be a mid-goer, who himself both the godly and the manly kind shares and thus God and man with each other binds. Howsoever then also the god-wisdom of Böhme and Schelling has gone awandering, as it sought the man-becoming to lead off from the being of God, yet is the three-onely being the under-setting and fore-ward of the God-enfleshing.
It is therefore also important to hold fast that not the godly nature as such, but specifically the Person of the Son has become man. The patripassianism of Praxeas, Hermogenes, Noetus, Beron, Beryllus, Sabellius is by the church at all times, for example at the synod of Aquileia, condemned and comes in this form no more. But according to its ground thought it is proper to all pantheistic systems, especially those of Hegel, Schelling, von Hartmann and others, which conceive the absolute not as being but as becoming and let the godly pour itself out in the world and unite; the world and mankind with all its sorrow and misery is then a moment in the life of God, the history of revelation is then the history of God's suffering, cf. also A. von Oettingen, The Godly Not Yet.
Although herein now also, as will soon appear, an element of truth can be acknowledged, yet the Holy Scripture always ascribes the incarnation to the Son, John 1:14, Philippians 2:6, Hebrews 2:14, 15. Even the Reformed preferred to speak of it that the person of the Son, rather than with the Lutherans, that the godly nature in Christ had become man. They did not wish thereby to deny that the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily, Colossians 2:9, that the Son partakes of the same godly essence with the Father and the Spirit, and thus insofar also the godly nature had taken on our flesh. But yet they laid emphasis against all mixing that the person of the Son, in whom the godly nature existed in its own way, had assumed the human nature. The difference is certainly not of great significance, as Mastricht and Moor observe, but yet it is noteworthy that many Lutherans prefer to express it so that the godly nature in the person of the Son has become man; it undoubtedly stands in connection with their ground thought. But the Reformed gave preference to the saying that the person of the Son immediately and the godly nature in Him mediately was united with the human nature, Zanchius, Polanus, Synopsis, Alting, Maresius, M. Vitringa. So also earlier by the fathers taught and by the church confessed. The 6th Synod of Toledo in 638 declared: although the whole Trinity works together in the incarnation, since all works of the Trinity are inseparable, yet the Son alone took on man in the singularity of the person, not in the unity of the divine nature, in that which is proper to the Son, not common to the Trinity; cf. also Anselm, Lombard, Thomas, Bellarmine, Becanus and others.
Questions, as in the scholastics treated on Sentences III distinction 1, whether also the Father and the Holy Spirit could have become man, need not therefore detain us. The Father could not be sent, for He is the first in order and exists of Himself; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, follows upon Him and is sent by Him. But the Son is the one designated for the incarnation. He takes in the godly essence the place between Father and Spirit, is Son and Image of God by nature, was in the first creation already Mediator and could as Son restore us again to children of God, Lombard, Thomas, Petavius, Kleutgen, Turretin, Shedd, Dorner. Yet, although the incarnation is subjectively and terminatively proper only to the Son, it is yet originally, principally, as to efficiency a work of the whole Trinity; Christ is sent by the Father and conceived by the Holy Spirit. The Reformed theology already gave expression to this in its doctrine of the covenant of redemption. The whole work of re-creation is not merely a decree of God, it rests on the free, conscious counsel of the three persons; it is a personal work, not natural. The Father is eternally in the Son the Father of His children; the Son is eternally their Surety and Mediator; the Holy Spirit is eternally their Comforter. Not first after the fall, even not first at the creation, but in eternity are the foundations of the covenant of grace laid. And the incarnation is no accidental, later arisen decree; it is from eternity foreordained and determined. There was no time that the Son was not. There was also no time that the Son did not know and was not willing to assume the human nature from the fallen race of Adam. The incarnation is prepared from eternity; it rests not in the essence but in the persons; it is no necessity as in pantheism but also no arbitrariness or accident as in Pelagianism.
7. Besides in the Trinity, the incarnation furthermore has its presupposition and preparation in the creation. Creation gives being to finite, limited beings; it is utterly impossible that God should create something which would be equal to Him in essence and be God. God has thus eternally thought finite creatures and also given them being within the necessary bounds of space and time. In those creatures He has thus as it were limited His eternal thoughts, His infinite almighty power. Specifically, the creation of man after God's image is a presupposition and preparation for the incarnation of God. Under the sway of the pantheistic doctrine of identity and also in connection with the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum, modern theology has made much misuse of this. In place of the old finitum non est capax infiniti, it set the rule: homo divinae naturae capax, pointed to the kinship of God and man, wiped out the distinction between both, and proceeded from the thought that for the perfection of both the incarnation was needful. This is forbidden by Christian theism. But yet, man is akin to God, His image, His son, His offspring; and therefore the incarnation of God is possible, as Thomas, Bonaventure, and others on Sent. III dist. I, so that questions whether God could also assume the nature of a stone, a plant, or an animal, Sent. III dist. 2, which Occam answered affirmatively, do not apply. And when God then creates man after His image, and dwells and works in that man with His Spirit, sends influences upon his heart and head, speaks to him and gives Himself to be known and understood by him, then that is a descent of God to, an accommodation to His creature, an anthropomorphizing of God, and thus in a certain sense and insofar a becoming man of God. With and in the creation the possibility of revelation and also of the incarnation is given. He who deems the incarnation impossible must upon reflection also come to the denial of the creation; he who accepts the latter has in principle lost the right to combat the former. Earlier it has been shown that the possibility of creation is given with the generation of the Son; if God were uncommunicable, He could give life neither to the Son nor to any creature. Now it must be added that if God could create and could reveal Himself to beings essentially distinct from Him, then He must also be able to become man. For the incarnation is certainly distinct from all other revelation, but it is yet also akin to it, it is the peak, the crown, the completion thereof; cf. Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa. All revelation works toward and groups itself around the incarnation as the highest, richest, most perfect revelation. Generation, creation, incarnation stand in close connection, even if the following does not necessarily flow forth from the preceding. But there is more. The creation itself is already to be thought infralapsarianly, and Adam was already a type of Christ. This is unacceptable on the standpoint of those who think that God proceeded to creation without counsel and decree and at the creation passively awaited what man would do. But Scripture teaches otherwise. In the creation of Adam, God already reckoned upon Christ. The creation itself in this sense already prepared the incarnation. The world is so shaped that, falling, it could again be raised up; humanity is so organized under one head that, sinning, it could again be gathered together under another head; Adam is so appointed as head that Christ could immediately take his place; and the covenant of works is so ordered that, broken, it could be healed in the covenant of grace. Wrongly therefore has it been thought that the incarnation of God's Son would have taken place even without sin. Among the church fathers this sentiment does not yet clearly appear; cf. only Tertullian. But in scholasticism this question was much discussed; besides the Trinity, the incarnation was a article of faith also before the fall and needful to bring man to his supernatural end. The question was therefore answered affirmatively by Rupert of Deutz, Duns Scotus, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, John Wessel, Catharinus, Pighius, Suarez; cf. also Bellarmine, who does not decide; further by Osiander, Socinus; and then by many modern theologians, Steffens, Göschel, Baader, Nitzsch, Martensen, Liebner, Lange, Rothe, Schöberlein, Ebrard; many English theologians who seek to explain everything by the incarnation, such as Westcott, Illingworth, also Van Oosterzee. It is understandable how, by reasoning, one came to this opinion. A fact like the incarnation of God cannot be accidental, and cannot have its cause in sin as an accidental and arbitrary act of man; sin may modify God's plan, but it could not destroy it; and therefore the incarnation must stand firm apart from sin; sin only caused that this incarnation had to occur for the redemption of the sinner. Added to this is that religion before and after the fall cannot essentially differ; if a mediator is now needful, then such a one was also needful in religion before the fall; Christ's person and work then also does not at all consist in atoning for sins, in acquiring salvation; He is not only mediator but also head; He is no means but also end, self-purpose, 1 Cor. 15:45-47, Eph. 1:10, 21-23, 5:31, 32, Col. 1:15-17. He is not only for the church, the church is also for Him; the predestination of Christ to glory precedes that of man. These considerations contain so much truth that the assent which the hypothesis of God's incarnation apart from sin has found cannot surprise. If the Pelagian freedom of will is taught and sin is thus for God an accident and disappointment, there is no better means to unite free will and God's plan than by saying that the incarnation was yet determined and only modified in something subordinate. On the standpoint of Augustine and still more of Reformed theology, however, there is no need at all for this whole hypothesis. There is but one plan and decree of God; for another reality than the existing one there is no place with a view to God's counsel. However much sin came into the world through the will of the creature, it is yet from eternity taken up in God's counsel and is for Him not contingent or unforeseen. In that eternal counsel the incarnation on account of sin also has a place; it depends not on man but only on God's good pleasure. Yes, even more, the Son was also, apart from sin, mediator unionis for man; many Reformed acknowledged this with Calvin. Because this was not well understood by Quenstedt, he could count Zanchius, Bucanus, Polanus among the advocates of the incarnation apart from sin. The intention was only that religion in the covenant of works and grace was essentially one and the same, and salvation thus must always consist in fellowship with the triune God. Only Comrie came through his strictly maintained supralapsarianism to the doctrine that the predestination of the man Christ preceded that of the fall. But otherwise most theologians held to Scripture, which always and only connects the incarnation of Christ with sin and sees in it the greatest proof of God's mercy, Matt. 1:21, 9:13, 20:28, Luke 1:67, 2:30, John 1:29, 3:16, Rom. 8:3, Gal. 4:4, 5, 1 Tim. 3:16, Heb. 2:14, 1 John 3:8, etc. The opposite opinion also so easily leads to the thought that the incarnation in itself is fitting and needful for God, that is, to the pantheistic doctrine of God's eternal self-revelation in the world. Cf. Irenaeus. Gregory Nazianzen. Augustine. Thomas. But otherwise Sent. Bonaventure. Petavius. Schaezler. Kleutgen. Quenstedt. Calovius. Calvin. Mastricht. Turretin. Moor. M. Vitringa. J. Müller. Philippi. Frank. Heraut. Orr.
8. A third and last preparation for the incarnation is the history of revelation from paradise onward. The incarnation did not take place right after the fall; but many ages passed from the first sin until the coming of Christ in the flesh. Scripture points to this when it speaks of the fullness of time, Eph. 1:10, Gal. 4:4, showing that this was no chance or whim, but so ordained by God in his wisdom. The incarnation had first to be prepared in the foregoing history by all kinds of means and along all kinds of ways. Just as the incarnation assumes generation and creation, so now another assumption and preparation is added, namely, revelation. It is especially John in his prologue who sets this preparation for the incarnation in the foregoing history before us in the light. Not only was the Logos in the beginning with God and himself God; and not only were all things made through him. But this Logos has also from the moment of creation onward shared his life and light with the creatures. For in him was life, and the life was the light of men. Even after the fall this revelation did not cease. On the contrary, the light of that Logos shone in the darkness and enlightened every man coming into the world. Especially he revealed himself in Israel, which he had chosen for himself as an inheritance, and as the Angel of the Covenant he led and blessed it. He came continually to his own, in theophany, prophecy, and miracle. Thus the Son prepared the whole world, of Jews and Gentiles together, for his coming in the flesh. World and mankind, land and people, cradle and stall, Bethlehem and Nazareth, parents and kin, nature and surroundings, society and culture—it is all a moment in the fullness of times, in which God sent his Son in the flesh. It was the Son himself who right after the fall as Logos and as Angel of the Covenant made ready the world of Gentiles and Jews for his coming. He was coming from the beginning of times onward and at last came for good into mankind and through his incarnation made his dwelling in it. Cf. Baldensperger, Der Prolog des vierten Evangeliums , Freiburg: Mohr, 1898. The incarnation connects with the foregoing revelation, both general and special. It stands and falls with this. For if God could reveal himself in the way Scripture witnesses both concerning the Gentile world and Israel, then the possibility of the incarnation is of itself included therein; and if the latter were not possible, the former could not be upheld either. Revelation rests after all on the same thought as the incarnation, that is, on the communicability of God, both in God's essence to the Son (generation) and outside God's essence to the creatures (creation). This whole preparation for the incarnation in the foregoing ages now as it were concentrates and completes itself in the election and gracing of Mary as mother of Jesus. Mary is the blessed among women. She has received an honor which has befallen no other creature. High does she go in unearned grace bestowed on her, above all men and angels. Rome has rightly upheld this; whoever denies it makes no earnest with the incarnation of God. Only, the Roman church has without any ground proceeded from this acknowledgment to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin. What led and brought it thereto is not the authority of Scripture or of tradition; nor is it the attempt thereby to explain and safeguard the sinlessness of Jesus, for this rests causally in his divine nature and instrumentally in the conception by the Holy Spirit. But the driving force for this dogma lies again for Rome in the hierarchical idea. According as a creature stands nearer to God, it must also share the more in his nature and in all his attributes; it must share the more in the theosis , in the deification. Above Mary stands no creature; she is united with God in the closest way, she is theotokos , God-bearer, she has borne God's own Son under her heart, God himself has dwelt in her. Whether there are proofs from Scripture and tradition is not the main thing; but the Roman cannot think of the mother of the Savior otherwise than as above all children of men and above all angels of heaven, well-pleasing to God, pure and spotless. Was she not connected with the God-man, and thus also with the divine Person of the Word, with holiness itself, by the closest and tenderest relations? Has God by the fact itself of her election to such high dignity and such intimate confidence not most clearly shown that he loved that pure virgin above all creatures? And is it therefore, apart from the proofs from Scripture and tradition, not very likely that God has endowed the holy virgin above all creatures with his gifts of grace? The honor of the Savior demanded that his chosen mother remain free from every taint and shadow even of sin. It is fitting that a creature which had to deal so confidentially with God, stood in such intimate and tender relation to him, remained safeguarded from the least spot of sin. It is fitting that the house of the Lord was holy. Thus Bensdorp in de Katholiek , CXII, 1897. In the hierarchical system of the Roman church and theology the doctrine of the immaculate conception, the sinlessness of Mary, fits, and therefore it has gradually been taken up therein; even the doctrine of her assumption is a matter of time. Therefore the predicates ascribed to Mary increase ever more in number and in quality; she is daughter of the Father, bride of the Son, temple and organ of the Holy Spirit, complement, supplement of the Trinity, the instrumental and in part the meritorious cause of our eternal election, the chief reason for the natural and supernatural creation, the wise one working all wonders, equipped with unlimited dominion, almighty ruler of the church as God rules the world, etc. See, e.g., Wörnhart, Maria die wunderbare Mutter Gottes und der Menschen , Innsbruck, 1890; also Petavius, de incarn. XIV; Scheeben, Dogm. ; a Jesuit Salazar in Rivetus, Op. III. The Mariolatry entirely crowds out in Rome the true, Christian worship of God. Prof. Schoeler, Das vatik. Bild , Gütersloh, 1898, sees this superstition typically expressed in a mural painting in the Vatican, which depicts the Madonna placed high in the middle, while Father and Son are seated on the right and left as instruments of her almighty will. It is against this deification of man that the Reformation rose in protest. It would not be surprising if out of fear for such idolatry it had not always rendered to Mary the honor due her. But that is not the case either, though naturally it was careful in its praise. Mary stands also with all Protestants who confess the incarnation of the Word in high honor. She is chosen and prepared by God to be the mother of his Son. She is the graced among women. She is desired by Christ himself as his mother, who received him from the Holy Spirit, who bore him under her heart, who nursed him at her breast, who taught him in the Scriptures, in whom in one word the preparation for the incarnation was completed.
9. Yet, though Christ in his incarnation joins himself to the foregoing revelation and through nature and history has readied his own coming, he is no outgrowth of the past, no fruit of Israel or of mankind. To some degree this holds for every man, that he cannot be fully made clear from his parents and surroundings. Therefore Kuenen could also own, after he had marked out the settings and building-stones for Christendom, that thereby the person of Christ is not yet grasped. But it holds for Christ in yet another and higher way than he meant. For by the Scripture that Word became flesh in Christ, which in the beginning was with God and was God himself. At all times and from sundry sides this godhead of Christ has been gainsaid and fought. But first, the Scripture teaches nothing else. We are, as Ch. de la Saussaye once said, wont to the highest words of Holy Writ and oft no more understand the strength of her sayings. But if a man so spoke of himself as Jesus ever did, if others so honored a man as prophets and apostles do the Christ, then each would hold that for mad zeal or dreadful god-slandering. The Scripture knows, not in one spot but ever, to Christ a personal everlasting fore-being, John 1:1, 8:58, 17:5, Rom. 8:3, 2 Cor. 8:9, Gal. 4:4, Phil. 2:6, a godly sonship in otherworldly wise, Matt. 3:17, 11:27, 28:19, John 1:14, 5:18, Rom. 8:32, the shaping and upholding of all things, John 1:3, 1 Cor. 8:6, Eph. 3:9, Col. 1:16, 17, Heb. 1:3, Rev. 3:14, the winning for all and each of all weal and bliss, Matt. 1:21, 18:11, John 1:4, 16, 14:6, Acts 4:12, 1 Cor. 1:30, the kingship in the church, Matt. 3:2, 5:11, 10:32, 37, John 18:37, 1 Cor. 11:3, Eph. 1:22, Col. 1:18, the lordship over all things, Matt. 11:27, 28:18, John 3:35, 17:2, Acts 2:33, 1 Cor. 15:27, Eph. 1:20-22, Phil. 2:9, Col. 2:10, Heb. 2:8, the dooming of living and dead, John 5:27, Acts 10:42, 17:31, Rom. 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10; she names him straightly and without doubt with the name of God, John 1:1, 20:28, Rom. 9:5, 2 Thess. 1:12, Titus 2:13, 2 Pet. 1:1, Heb. 1:8, 9. Second, indeed all fighting of Christ's godhead begins with a call to the Scripture against the creed. But this false show lasts but a very short while. Fair word-reading soon shows that the teaching of the church has much more ground in the Scripture than one at first thought. So one sees himself driven to go back again from the Christ of the apostolic preaching to the Jesus of the first Gospels and then to sift them so long until all the otherworldly is gone therefrom. The godhead of Christ can then be made out for a fruit of deep godly or wisdom-seeking musing, at first wholly strange to the church. This lasts however ever only so long as one sets worth on it and has gain thereby to set forth one's own belief as the first, clean Christendom. As soon as that standpoint is left, fair-mindedness takes up her voice again and gives the churchly owning right. It cannot be gainsaid that in the sayings of them (the writers) some seeds of the churchly teaching truly are, Wegscheider. It is undeniable that also that which the church teaching teaches over the godly kind of Christ has upholding points in the New Testament, Nitzsch. Third. Even as the study of Scripture, so also the lore-historical search ever again sets on the churchly owning of Christ's godhead the seal of truth. The unfolding of the Christ-teaching lore shows a rightful path which at last by every searcher is marked and owned. Simple was the belief wherewith the church stepped into the world. But one thing she knew, that in Christ God himself was come to her and had taken her up into his fellowship. That stood fast, that she let not be taken from her, that she warded against all kinds of fighting and in her owning shaped clear and bright. In the teaching of Christ's godhead she has upheld the full kind of the Christian belief, the truth of her fellowship with God. In Christendom Christ holds a wholly other stead than Buddha, Zarathustra, Mohammed in their beliefs. Christ is not the teacher, not the founder, he is the inhold of Christendom, Schelling. Therefore are, doomed after the teaching of Scripture and the belief of the church, at last men like Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, ever again over against their fighters set in the right. Each reckons himself in oneness with them to an honor; none is gladly named after Arius, Pelagius or Socinus. Fourth. It is clear that the Christian belief, that is, the true fellowship of God and man, can be upheld no otherwise than through the owning of Christ's godhead. For if Christ is not truly God, then he is only a man. And however high he then be set, he can neither in his person nor in his work be inhold and mark of the Christian belief. Whether Christ then for himself in unbroken fellowship with God has stood (Schleiermacher), has first spoken out the oneness of God and man (Hegel), has fully brought to being God's childship in himself (Lipsius), has opened God's love and set up the God-kingdom (Ritschl); Christendom is now then yet, now it once is, unbound from him; he is the founder thereof, in yore-lore his meaning stays great, and his ensample works after, but he himself stands outside the being of Christendom. The Arian Christ-lore, the right Christ-lore of the mind-worship, the token-wise of Kant, the thought-wise of Hegel, the beauty-wise of de Wette, the man-wise of Feuerbach, they let none of all to Christ in the lore-teaching a stead. If the personhood of Christ as a manly, though yet so much dreamed-up, is held fast, so can not she herself as personhood the loosing might for the believer be, v. Hartmann. Fifth. Ritschl and his try however yet for Jesus, though only man, to uphold the title of God, for he for the church takes the stead of God and holds the worth of God. Earlier this was tried in the same wise by the Socinians. They fought Christ's godhead as strongly as might be and said that Christ, in those few Scripture spots where he was named God, as John 1:1, 20:28, Rom. 9:5, so was called for his rank, worth and lordship, whereto he mainly after his uprising was raised. Christ works through godly might those same things which are of God himself, as God himself. This name God is not a name of some own being or person, but of sway, might, even as also angels and overlords in the Scripture after Jesus' own word, John 10:34, sometimes are named gods, Socinus on John 1:1. This same is now taught by Ritschl and his school; the name of God is used in the Scripture and in the church well for Christ, but is then an office-, no being-name. This fore-setting is however wholly unholdable. Well are angels and overlords in the Scripture sometimes named God, but then is the over-brought, office-wise meaning clear and springs each in the eye. With Christ that is a wholly other happening. To him is owned a personal, everlasting fore-lasting; of him is said that he was God, in his shape lasted, was the off-shine of God's glory, only-begotten Son of God, image of the unseen God, yea God over all to praise in everlastingness--who can this by might understand of a man who only for the office that he bore and the work that he did got the honor-title of God? Furthermore, the Christian church has, naming Jesus God, therewith never an office- but ever a being-name meant. When one goes to use that same word and that same name in wholly other wise, one gives wilfully ground to mishearing and muddling and makes himself over against the church guilty of unrightness. Further, if Christ is not God in being-wise, then may he so also not be named and honored. Whether one says that he has fully opened God's love, that he has wholly taken up God's plan with world and mankind in himself, that he has fully made God's will to his own, this all rights on Scriptural, Christian standpoint and also rightly and wisdom-wise for the man Jesus the naming of God not. In belief-wise and right-wise one with God to be is something wholly other than to be it in being-wise. A worth-doom is untrue if it has not in a being-doom its ground. At last the naming and honoring of Jesus as God, while he is but a man, is a all-godly mingling of Shaper and shaped, a heathenish god-serving, a back-turn to Romish creature-honoring, with the being of Christendom and with the beginning of the Protestantism in straight fight. If Jesus, though only a man, as God may be called upon and honored, then is thereby in beginning also the Romish honoring of Mary, the holy ones and the angels, and all the heathen god-serving righted. Fighting that God can become man, one teaches at the same time that a man well can raise himself to the rank and worth of God.
10. This Son of God became man according to the teaching of Holy Scripture through conception by the Holy Ghost and birth from the maiden Mary. The above-natural conception was of old already denied by the Jews, by Eisenmenger in Entd. Judenthum , by the Ebionites, by Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Celsus (cf. Moor), by deists and rationalists in the former age, such as Morgan, Chubb (cf. Bretschneider in Entw. ), by the newer critics such as Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Renan and others, and in the latest time by Harnack in Das apost. Glaubensbekenntniss (Berlin 1892). His judgment, that the words "conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the maiden Mary" made no part of the first preaching of the gospel, gave rise to an earnest strife, in which many sided with him, such as Achelis in Zur Symbolfrage (Berlin 1892), Herrmann in Worum handelt es sich in dem Streit um das Apostolikum? (Leipzig 1893), Hering in Die dogm. Bedeutung und der relig. Werth der übernat. Geburt Christi , in Zeits. f. Th. u. Kirche (1895), Lobstein in Die Lehre v. der übernat. Geburt Christi (2nd ed. 1896), but others also firmly stood against him, especially Wohlenberg in Empfangen vom h. Geist, geboren von der Jungfrau Maria (1893), Cremer in Zum Kampf um das Apostolikum (Berlin 1892), Th. Zahn in Das apost. Symbolum (Erlangen and Leipzig 1893). This strife gained yet more weight through the find of a Syriac translation of the gospels by Mrs. Lewis and her sister Mrs. Gibson in a palimpsest of the Catherine monastery on Sinai in the summer of 1892, in The four gospels in Syriac, transcribed from the Sinaitic palimpsest by the late Robert L. Bensley and by J. Rendel Harris and by F. Crawford Burkitt, with an introduction by Agnes Smith Lewis (Cambridge 1894). For Matthew 1:16 reads in this Syriac translation thus: Joseph, to whom the maiden Mary was betrothed, begat Jesus, who is called Christ (cf. Theol. Tijdschr. May 1895; Gids , July 1895). But even if this Syriac translator denied the above-natural conception of Christ thereby, this fact would stand all alone in the history of the gospel among the Syrians and would have remained without sway. The Syriac Diatessaron of Tatian, the Syriac gospel fragments issued by Cureton in 1858, and all later Syriac editions of the Gospels teach it clearly. Furthermore, the newfound translation in Matthew 1:16 calls Mary a maiden and betrothed to Joseph; verse 18 reads even as in our Greek text and thus teaches the conception by the Holy Ghost, even so verse 20, and with Luke 3:23 it is the same case. There is not the least proof that the Syriac translator wished to deny the conception by the Holy Ghost through his text of Matthew 1:16 (Th. Zahn, Theol. Lit. Blatt 1895). But further, the above-natural conception by the Holy Ghost was surely a part of the first preaching of the gospel. The old Roman symbol, which surely existed before the middle of the second hundred-year and likely already toward the end of the first hundred-year, already held the words: qui natus est de Spiritu Sancto et Maria virgine (Greek: τον γεννηθεντα ἐκ πνευματος ἁγιου και Μαριας της παρθενου), later somewhat changed for clearing. The foes of the above-natural conception, even Cerinthus, a time-fellow of John, never called upon it that this teaching had arisen later; in their time it must thus have been the content of the general Christian belief; there is no ground at all, and it is besides also strange, to hold the heretics Cerinthus and others, with Harnack, for the pure bearers and keepers of the belief of the first Christian gathering. Yet further, this teaching is found in the letters of Ignatius, ad Smyrn. 1:1-3, ad Eph. 7:1-2, who about the year 117 suffered the martyr's death, and in the for some time found Apology of the wise-man Aristides of Athens, which he handed to emperor Hadrian in the year 125. It must all the more have been content of the apostolic preaching, because the heathen fables of god-sons would otherwise surely have frightened off the Christians from a teaching that seemed so near akin to them. Of a sway of those heathen fables on the arising of the gospel tale of the above-natural conception, as Usener in Religionsgesch. Untersuchungen, I Das Weihnachtsfest (Bonn 1880) and Hillmann in Die Kindheitsgesch. Jesu nach Lukas , Jahrb. f. prot. Theol. (1891) took for granted, there is nowhere any trace; Harnack in Theol. Lit. Z. (1889) thus clears it only from Jewish givings, namely from a wrong exegesis of Isaiah 7:14 (cf. also Weiss, Leben Jesu ). At last it comes, to be sure, in the New Testament straightway only with Matthew and Luke, but that on which it comes in these tales with Matthew and Luke is the teaching of all gospel-writers and apostles. Jesus is namely foremost in lineage a son of David; therefor was He generally held, by the throng that ever ringed Him, and by all His learners, Matthew 1:1, 20; 9:27; 12:23; 15:22; 20:30, 31; 21:9, 15; 22:42-45; Mark 10:47; 11:10; 12:35-37; Luke 1:27, 32, 69; 18:38, 39; 20:41-44; John 7:42; Acts 2:30; 13:23; Romans 1:3; 9:5; 2 Timothy 2:8; Hebrews 7:14; Revelation 3:7; 5:5; 22:16. Furthermore, He is the Holy One, who never did or knew any sin, Matthew 7:11; 11:29; 12:50; Mark 1:24; Luke 1:35; John 4:34; 6:38; 8:29, 46; 15:10; 17:4; Acts 3:14; 22:14; Romans 5:12 and following; 1 Corinthians 15:45; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 7:26; 1 Peter 1:19; 2:21; 3:18; 1 John 2:1; 3:5. And at last He, the one born of Mary, is the Son of God in wholly one-of-a-kind sense, Matthew 1:23; 4:3; 8:29; 14:33; 16:16; 26:63; Mark 1:1; 3:11; 5:7; 14:61; 15:39; Luke 1:32, 35 and so on. That this now might be gotten, that a son of David, born from his kin, yet would be free from all sin and be God's Son, thereto was the above-natural conception needful; thereto is it befallen; and therefore it also has a high godly and upright weight. This is however—to handle this point here even off—not the case with the god-learned saying that Mary in and after the birth stayed a maiden. The maidenhood of Mary in birth and after birth is not yet found with the church fathers before Nicaea; Tertullian in de carne Christi c. 23, Origen in hom. 14 in Luke, Irenaeus in adv. haer. IV 66 do not yet know the maidenhood in birth, and Tertullian in de carne Christi 7 also denies the maidenhood after birth. The maidenhood in birth comes first forth in the apocryphal Gospel of James c. 19 and was also as some's meaning already known to Clement of Alexandria in Strom. VII c. 16. But after Nicaea the maidenhood of Mary both in birth and after birth in link with her God-motherhood (Greek: θεοτοκος, Latin: deipara) is ever more clearly taught, by Epiphanius, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephraim, Ambrose, Augustine and others, and against the Apollinarians, Helvidius, Jovinian, Bonosus warded (cf. Bellarmine in de sacr. euch. III c. 6; Petavius in de incarn. XIV c. 3 and following; Lehner in Die Marienverehrung ). The fifth worldwide gathering canon 6 took over the title "ever-maiden" from Epiphanius for Mary, and the Lateran synod of 649 set in canon 3 her maidenhood also in and after the birth of Jesus fast (cf. Cat. Rom. I 4, 8). The "ever maiden" was also taken up in the Smalcald Articles I 4, Formula of Concord II 7, 100 and 8, 24, Zwingli's Expos. Chr. fidei 5, but Lutherans and Reformed taught yet that the birth of Jesus had befallen in the wonted way and that the maidenhood of Mary after birth, though for piety's sake takeable, yet was no article of belief and in no case by Mary by way of vow taken upon herself. That Mary bore Jesus with womb closed, the Scripture teaches with no single word. That she through vow bound herself to maidenhood is not to be led off from Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 7:14, Luke 1:34 and from so-called types, Judges 6:36; 11:29; Daniel 2:34; Ezekiel 44:2. And that she later brought forth no more children is over against Matthew 1:18, 25; 12:46; 13:55; Mark 3:31; 6:3; Luke 2:7; 8:19; John 2:12; 7:5; Acts 1:14; 1 Corinthians 9:5 hard to hold full. Cf. Calvin on Luke 1:34; Polanus in Synt. VI c. 17; Rivetus in Apol. pro S. Virgine Maria , Works III; Chamier in Panstr. Cath. II 4 c. 3; Turretin in Theol. El. XIII 10; Mastricht in Theol. V 10, 12; Moor; Quenstedt in Theol. III 401.
11. It is wholly otherwise with the supernatural conception. This is of the highest meaning for the person of Christ and therefore also of religious worth. The Scripture ascribes Jesus' conception to the Holy Ghost or to the might of the Most High. The Holy Ghost, who is the author of all bodily, soulful, and spiritual life, is in Matthew 1:18, 20, as shown by the preposition ἐκ, thought of as the efficient cause of that conception, while this in Luke 1:35 is ascribed to the might which shall go forth from God, the Most High, and shall come upon Mary. It is clear from this that the working of the Holy Ghost in this conception did not consist in the outpouring of any heavenly, godly substance into Mary, but in a showing of might which made her womb fruitful, in an overshadowing as with a cloud; compare Exodus 40:34, Numbers 9:15, Luke 9:34, Acts 1:8. If the old strife between spermatists and ovists were decided in favor of the latter, which however is by no means yet the case, then this working of the Holy Ghost would thereby also be bodily explained. But however this may be, that which is begotten in Mary, το ἐν αὐτῃ γεννηθεν, is ἐκ πνευματος ἁγιου, out of the Holy Ghost as efficient cause, has in the working of the Holy Ghost its cause and not in the will of man or of the flesh. Besides this making fruitful of Mary's womb, the Holy Ghost also wrought the hallowing of the little child that should be born out of her. It is a holy thing that is born out of her; it shall be called Son of God, Son of the Most High, Luke 1:35. Of worth it is now to mark that this working of the Holy Ghost with regard to the human nature of Christ stands by no means alone; it did indeed begin at the conception but did not end; it went on through all his life, even unto the state of exaltation. In general the needfulness of this working can already be drawn from this, that the Holy Ghost is author of all life in the creatures and in particular of the religious-ethical life in man. The true man, who bears God's image, is not for a moment thinkable without the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Further, the human nature in Christ had to be readied for union with the person of the Son, that is, for a oneness and fellowship with God such as no other creature has ever been deemed worthy of. As man in general can have no fellowship with God except through the Holy Ghost, so this holds in all the stronger measure for Christ's human nature, which had to be united with the Son in a wholly one-of-a-kind way. This special union, which far outstrips the immanence of God in his creatures, the revelation of God in the prophets, the indwelling of God in his people, and differs from them in being, makes a wholly special working of the Holy Ghost already beforehand likely and even needful. But the Holy Scripture also teaches this expressly. The prophecy already proclaimed that the Messiah should in a special sense be anointed with the Holy Ghost, Isaiah 61:1, and the New Testament tells that Christ received that Ghost without measure, John 3:34. Not only was he conceived by him, but that Ghost comes down upon him at the baptism, Matthew 3:16, fills him wholly and altogether, Luke 4:1, 18, leads him away into the wilderness and into Galilee, Matthew 4:1, Luke 4:14, gives him the might to cast out devils, Matthew 12:18, to offer himself blameless to God, Hebrews 9:14, to be, as he became David's Son in the way of the flesh, so through the resurrection appointed as Son of God in might, as Lord, with a glorified body, Romans 1:4, to justify himself as such before all eyes, 1 Timothy 3:16, to go from the earth and ascend to heaven, 1 Peter 3:19, 22, and to show himself as life-giving Spirit, whose the Spirit is and who works through the Spirit, to his own, 1 Corinthians 15:45, 2 Corinthians 3:17, 18.
Placed in this connection, the conception by the Holy Ghost receives a rich meaning. Jesus had to be shaped according to his human nature from the first moment onward through his whole life up to the state of exaltation into Messiah, Christ, Son of God of the Most High. He could not become this except kata sarka , in the way of the flesh, by birth from a woman, Rom. 1:3, 9:5, Gal. 4:4, but at the same time, to be that, He could not be the fruit of the will of the man or of the flesh. What is born of flesh is flesh. Jesus would then perhaps have been David's son and heir of his earthly kingdom, but not David's Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God, who is appointed king in the kingdom of God. And yet He was that. Paul does say that He was appointed Son of God and Lord through the resurrection, Rom. 1:4, but this does not shut out that He was already Son of God at and before his conception, Rom. 1:3; even as the huiothesia , looked for by believers in the time to come, Rom. 8:23, does not shut out that they already have it now, Rom. 8:15. Son of God was Christ from everlasting; He was in the beginning with God; He is the firstborn of all creatures. So He could not be begotten and brought forth by the will of the man; He was himself the acting subject, who readied for himself a body through the Holy Ghost in Mary's womb. In the Old Testament He is therefore chiefly promised as the seed of the woman, Gen. 3:15, as the one given by God, Isa. 9:6, as the one raised up by the Lord, Jer. 23:5, 6, 33:14-17, as a branch from the hewn-down stump of Jesse, Isa. 11:1, as the son of an almah , in general a young woman, and chiefly an unwed one, Gen. 24:43, Ex. 2:8, Ps. 68:25, Song 1:3, 6:8, Prov. 30:19, who shall bear the name Immanuel, Isa. 7:14. In the Old Testament nothing further is said about the manner of his conception; only that He will be the son of a woman and at the same time a gift and showing forth of God. This is thus fulfilled in Christ. Setting aside the hard question whether Luke gives the genealogy of Mary and Mary herself was also from David's line, cf. Luke 1:30-33, 35, 48; not through Mary but through Joseph was Jesus a son of David. Even though He was not from Joseph, yet through Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph, He was in civil and lawful wise the son of Joseph, Luke 2:27, 41, 48, and inherited from him the rights to David's throne. Therefore Joseph was also warned from God to take Mary as his lawful wife to himself, to stand as head and father of the household, and as such to give the little child the name Jesus, Matt. 1:18-21. Thus Christ became David's son and at the same time stayed David's Lord. This shutting out of the man in his conception also wrought that Christ, as not taken into the covenant of works, also stayed free from birth guilt and therefore also according to his human nature before and after his birth could be kept from all spot of sin. As subject, as I, He was not from Adam, but He was the Son of the Father, who from everlasting was chosen as Head of a new covenant. Not Adam but God was his Father. As person He did not come forth from mankind but came himself from without to it and went into it. And because He thus according to God's righteous doom stayed free from all birth guilt, therefore He could be conceived by the Holy Ghost and by that Ghost stay freed from all spot of sin. The conception by the Holy Ghost was not the deepest ground and last cause of Jesus' sinlessness, as many hold, Ebrard, Dogm. II 4-10. Rothe, Ethik § 533 f. Müller, Sünde II 535, but it was the only way in which He, who as person already was and was set as Head of a new covenant, now also in human wise, in the flesh, could be and stay what He was, the Christ, the Son of God of the Most High. Cf. Polanus, Synt. XI. 13. Frank, Chr. Wahrh. II 109 f.
12. By this conception of the Holy Ghost and birth from Mary, the Son of God became a true and full man. But no less strongly than his Godhead, his manhood has been assailed. The Gnostics, by virtue of their dualism, could not acknowledge it, and therefore said that the aeon Christ had only taken on a seeming body (Saturninus, Marcion), or that he had brought with him a glorious, spiritual body from heaven and had only passed through Mary as water through a pipe (Valentinus, Bardesanes), or that on his descent to earth he had formed for himself a body from the elements and had suffered in it, but on his return to heaven had dissolved it and given it up (Apelles), or that he had only temporarily descended upon the man Jesus at his baptism and had left him before the suffering (Cerinthus), or had exchanged himself before the suffering with Simon of Cyrene and had given him over to the death on the cross (Basilides), or that Christ, the Jesus impassibilis, who already descended to Adam from the world of light and appeared on earth only in a seeming body, is well to be distinguished from the Jesus passibilis, who was the son of a poor widow and an envoy of the devil, and, because he opposed Christ, was nailed to the cross by him (Mani). All these thoughts continued in the medieval sects and came under the influence of pantheistic mysticism, kabbalistic theosophy, and the newer natural philosophy in the age of the Reformation among the Anabaptists to a new, extensive dominion. They also taught that Christ could not take his human nature from Mary, from the Adamic humanity, because he would then necessarily have been a sinner; but he took it from eternity from himself, thus brought his body with him from heaven and passed through Mary as through a channel (Hofmann, Menno Simons; cf. related representation of an eternal bodiliness of God in the Kabbalah with its Adam Kadmon, in Swedenborg, Dippel, Oetinger, Petersen); or he formed this heavenly, invisible bodiliness from eternity from the eternal virgin, the divine Eve, the wisdom of God, dwelt therewith already immediately after the fall in Adam, Abel, etc., and then made it visible and mortal through the conception and birth from Mary (Weigel); or he took that glorious human nature immediately at the creation from Adam before the fall, who then still had a fine, heavenly bodiliness, in order later to clothe it from Mary with a weak, mortal humanity (Antoinette Bourignon, Poiret, Barclay); or he also formed his human nature from Mary, but not from the fleshly, but from the regenerate Mary, who through her union with the divine wisdom had received a holy, divine element in herself and had regained the virginal being of Adam before the fall (Schwenckfeld and others), cf. the works of Dorner, Schwane, Harnack, etc., cited earlier. These thoughts seem very strange to us. Yet they express in other forms nothing other than what the newer philosophy since Kant and Hegel has presented with its separation of the ideal and historical Christ. The ideal Christ is the eternal Logos, the absolute reason, the one substance which realizes itself eternally in the world and cannot pour out its fullness in a single man but takes on the human nature in humanity as the son of God. But the historical Jesus is not the true, essential Christ; he forms in the process of the incarnation indeed an important but yet only a passing moment; he was a weak, mortal, sinful man, who indeed revealed the idea of the true Christ, but by no means coincides with him and is one with him, cf. Runze, Dogm. § 78.
Now it needs no long argument that Holy Scripture stands directly opposite to this. Under the Old Testament promised as the Messiah, who shall come forth from a woman, from Abraham, Judah, David, He is in the fullness of time conceived in Mary, ἐν αὐτη, Matt. 1:20, by the Holy Ghost, and born of her, ἐκ γυναικος, Gal. 4:4. He is her son, Luke 2:7, fruit of her womb, Luke 1:42, according to the flesh from David and Israel, Acts 2:30, Rom. 1:3, 9:5, partaker of our flesh and blood and like us in all things, sin excepted, Heb. 2:14, 17, 18, 4:15, 5:1, a true man, the Son of man, Rom. 5:15, 1 Cor. 15:21, 1 Tim. 2:5, growing up as a little child, Luke 2:40, 52, hungering, Matt. 4:2, thirsting, John 19:28, weeping, Luke 19:41, John 11:35, troubled, John 12:27, sorrowful, Matt. 26:38, angered, John 2:17, suffering, dying, and so on. It stands so firm for Scripture that Christ has come in the flesh, that it calls the denial thereof antichristian, 1 John 2:22. And not only does it teach that Christ took a true, but also that He took a complete human nature. Arius denied this and said that the Logos, who indeed was a creature, could not become man but only appeared in human form and to that end took only a body, but no soul. On the other hand, Apollinaris wanted just to hold that Christ was not merely a man enlightened by the Logos, an ἀνθρωπος ἐνθεος, as Paul of Samosata said, but that He Himself was God and His work divine; and so he came to the teaching that the Logos took a soul-filled human body, without pneuma, and Himself filled the place of that pneuma, cf. art. Apoll. in Herzog. But Scripture says clearly that Jesus was a complete man and ascribes to Him all the parts of human nature, not only a body, Matt. 26:26, John 20:12, Phil. 3:21, 1 Pet. 2:24, flesh and blood, Heb. 2:14, bones and side, John 19:33, 34, head and hands and feet, Matt. 8:20, Luke 24:39, but also a soul, Matt. 26:38, spirit, Matt. 27:50, Luke 23:46, John 13:21, consciousness, Mark 13:32, will, Matt. 26:39, John 5:30, 6:38, and so on. Apollinarianism was therefore condemned by the Christian church and theology at all times; they understood the importance that was involved herein: totus enim Christus totum assumpsit me, ut toti mihi salutem gratificaret; quod enim inassumptibile est, incurabile est , Damascenus, de fide orthod. III 6. Lombard, Sent. III 2. Petavius, de incarn. V c. 11. The denial of the true and the complete human nature always comes forth from a certain dualism. The σαρξ, the matter, is by nature sinful and therefore cannot be a part of the true Christ; He therefore drew His substance not from the sensible, material world, but from the unseen, heavenly essence in God, in Himself, in the divine wisdom, in the unfallen Adam or the reborn Mary. The connection between this ideal Christ and the historical Jesus can therefore only be accidental, mechanical; it comes to no true unity, that is thus also to no true fellowship of God and man. God and world, creation and re-creation, nature and grace, the eternal and the temporal, the heavenly and the earthly remain forever alongside and opposite each other. Among the Gnostics and the Anabaptists this is all clear. But however strange it sounds, this same dualism is also proper to the newer pantheistic philosophy, which so gladly adorns itself with the name of monism. For indeed, it is an axiom of this philosophy that the idea cannot pour itself out fully in one individual; that is, there is no unity, no fellowship of God and man possible. To come to fellowship with God, the individual must lose himself, blot out his personality, sink away as a wave in the ocean of the all. God and man, eternity and time, and namely holiness and finitude stand over against each other; the finite is in its kind faulty, imperfect; sin is needful. Hence, Hegel, by Dorner, Entw. II 1115 f., Strauss, Gl. II 164, Leben Jesu 1835 II 716-718, Baur, Dreieinigkeit III 963 f., and others cannot hold to the sinlessness of Jesus; a finite individual cannot be perfect and enjoy full fellowship with God. Now this pantheism thinks to make up in another way for what it first took away. It ascribes to the whole what it takes from the parts; not one single man, but mankind is the true Christ, the son of God, it enjoys the highest unity and fellowship with God, in it God takes the human nature. But this making up is seeming and gives nothing. Not only does mankind exist only in the individuals and is the all nothing other than the sum of the parts; but it is also not true that the all, that mankind stands nearer to God than the single men. Goethe has well said, if you want to stride into the infinite, then go into the finite on all sides; but the endless is wholly something other than the infinite, eternity something wholly other than the unspeakable sum of all time-moments, and perfection something wholly other than the total of all imperfections. Even if pantheism trades the individual for mankind and the part for the whole, it advances not a step thereby; it leaves the passage from the infinite to the finite, from eternity to time, from God to the world wholly unexplained and gives for explanation nothing but words and images. If God cannot become man in one, then He cannot become it in all. Over against this dualistic and atomistic view Scripture now places the organic. In one God comes to all, not in seeming but in truth. There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. But therefore it comes as much upon His Godhead as upon His true and complete human nature. If there is one essential part in the human nature of Christ shut out from the true unity and fellowship with God, then there is an element in the creation that remains dualistically alongside and opposite God. Then there is an eternal ὑλη. Then God is not the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Then the Christian religion is not truly catholic. Quod enim inassumptibile est, incurabile est .
13. Thus in Christ God and man are united with each other. The Scripture speaks not in the tongue of later theology, but holds in substance that same thing which by the Christian church in her teaching of the two natures is confessed. The Pauline Christology, says Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 75, is indeed a first attempt toward the churchly teaching of the twofold nature. For according to the Scripture the Word, which was with God and was God himself, became flesh, ὁ λογος σαρξ ἐγενετο, John 1:14. He, who was ἀπαυγασμα της δοξης και χαρακτηρ της ὑποστασεως του θεου, became partaker of our flesh and blood and like us in all things, Heb. 1:3, 2:14. God sent his own, only begotten Son into the world, who was born of a woman, Gal. 4:4. He, who was ἐν μορφῃ θεου, ἑαυτον ἐκενωσε μορφην δουλου λαβων, Phil. 2:7. From the fathers according to the flesh, yet He is ὁ ὠν ἐπι παντων θεος εὐλογητος εἰς τους αἰωνας, Rom. 9:5. Though the image of the unseen God, firstborn of all creatures, Creator of all things, yet He is also πρωτοτοκος ἐκ των νεκρων, Col. 1:13-18; David's son, yet at the same time David's Lord, Matt. 22:43; walking on earth, yet He is still εἰς τον κολπον του πατρος, John 1:18, ὁ ὠν ἐν τω οὐρανῳ, John 3:13, being before Abraham, John 8:58; in one word, the fullness of the Godhead dwells σωματικως in Him, Col. 2:9. Every moment in the Scripture divine and human predicates are ascribed to the same personal subject, a divine and a human being, omnipresence and limitedness, eternity and time, creating almighty power and creaturely weakness. What is all this other than the churchly teaching of the two natures, united in one person? The newer theology feels however for a part of this teaching of the two natures a deep aversion, finds it the height of absurdity, and replaces it with the Doppelseitigkeit, Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 65. 94, with the Doppelheit von Gesichtspunkten, Pfleiderer, Grundriss § 129. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 513, with the teaching of two successive states before and after the resurrection, Schultz, Gottheit Christi 417, or with that of idea and appearance, Schweizer, Chr. Gl. II 12 etc. It is clear that in these views the teaching of the Scripture on the person of Christ comes not at all to its right. Though it is true that Christ, especially with Paul, first through his resurrection enters into the full Sonship, Rom. 1:4, becomes Lord from heaven and life-giving Spirit, 1 Cor. 15:45, 2 Cor. 3:17 and receives a name above every name, Phil. 2:9, thereby Paul denies in the least not that Christ also before his incarnation already had a personal, divine existence, 2 Cor. 8:9, Phil. 2:6, Col. 1:15-17 and was God's own Son, Rom. 1:3, 8:32, Gal. 4:4. The teaching of the two natures is something wholly other than the teaching of two sides to or two states in the life of Christ. Jesus bears in the Scripture all those glorious predicates not because He on the one hand as man fully devoted himself to God and therefore was truly man, and because He on the other hand as that same man fully revealed God's love to us, Schultz, Gottheit Christi 338, but because He was truly God and man in one person. A man, however highly standing in religious and ethical sense, can and may yet, just according to the strict monotheism of Holy Scripture, not bear those divine predicates which precisely by her are ascribed to Christ. It appears then convincingly that they who replace the teaching of the two natures with that of the two sides or that of the two states, yet by no means can and dare speak of Christ as the Scripture does. The names of God, God's Son, Logos, Image of God, firstborn of all creatures etc. are therefore all robbed of their Scriptural meaning and taken in a wholly other sense. The modern theology, assuming in Jesus only a human nature, can honor Him neither according to his religious side, as revelation of God's love, nor also in the state of exaltation, in which He would have become Lord, with the names which the Scripture grants Him. Her exegesis, suppose that it were correct, would give her not the least gain for her own Christology. For this is no more, if Jesus is only a man, and not also the eternal and only Son of God.
To maintain all the teachings of Scripture about the person of Christ, theology gradually came to the doctrine of the two natures. It did not set this up as a hypothesis and did not intend thereby an explanation of the mystery of Christ's person; it only gathered therein unmaimed and unweakened the whole teaching of Scripture about Christ and upheld it thereby against the errors that arose on the left and on the right in Ebionitism and Gnosticism, Arianism and Apollinarianism, Nestorianism and Eutychianism, Adoptionism and Monothelitism, and in modern times in the doctrine of Rothe and Dorner about the becoming God-man and in the doctrine of Gess and others about the kenosis. Nestorianism arose from the Antiochene school, had its preparation in Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and was then developed by Nestorius in such a way that the eternal, natural Son of God was distinguished from and was another than the Son of David, who was born of Mary; for there is a distinction between the temple and Him who dwells therein; between Him who was in the form of God, and Him who walked about in the form of a servant; between the God and the man in Christ, who both exist personally. Therefore Mary cannot be called Theotokos, and the man who was born of her is not the eternal Son of God but His adopted Son (Adoptionism). The union of God and man in Christ is not a natural but a moral one, as between man and wife in marriage, not a henosis but a synapheia; the indwelling of God in Christ is not specifically but gradually distinguished from that in believers, and it increases insofar as the man Jesus advances in virtue and more and more becomes organ and instrument, temple and garment of the Godhead, insofar as he is more theophoros, cf. Schwane, D. G. To this is related in recent times the doctrine of Dorner, according to which the Logos gradually communicates Himself more to the man and grows together more intimately with Him, insofar as this one morally develops under His influence, Chr. Gl. This whole conception is condemned by Scripture. It ascribes all kinds of and very different predicates to Christ, but always to one and the same subject, the one, undivided I that dwells in Him and speaks from Him. Specifically it also says that the Logos has not dwelt in a man but has become flesh, John 1:14. What someone has become, that He is. If the Son of God has become man, then He Himself is man. Of a person many things can be predicated, but never another person. Of many people it can be said that they are one, in one respect or another; but never can it be said of the one person that he is the other person. Man and wife are one flesh, but never is the man the wife or vice versa. If therefore in Christ the man was another subject than the Logos, then Scripture could never have said that the Logos has become flesh and thus is. With Nestorius, therefore, the union between God and man in Christ is not a personal and natural one, but a moral one; they always remain two distinct subjects, however much they may morally become more and more one. And even this moral union is not the starting point but the end goal and result; it is not even as with Origen the fruit of the merit of the preexistent soul, which has not fallen but has acquired the union with the Logos in its preexistence, de princ. II 6, 3. c. Cels. VI 47; but it comes about gradually in the earthly life of Jesus and depends on all kinds of conditions, it is distinguished from the union of God with other people only gradually; that is, Christ loses His wholly unique place, He is only a man in whom God reveals Himself more than in others; the idea of the God-man is lost and the work of redemption is undermined. Nestorianism is related to deism and Pelagianism.
Chalcedon therefore rightly declared that the union of the divine and human nature in Christ was without division and without separation. But it equally maintained against the other direction that it was without change and without confusion. Against Nestorius, Cyril defended that the union in Christ was not a moral one, but a union according to nature or according to hypostasis, a natural union; but because he did not yet distinguish the words person, hypostasis, nature as clearly as later, he hesitated to speak of two natures in Christ and also said that Christ has become one out of two natures, that He is one nature, and that divine and human nature in Him are united into one thing, into one essence. This could be misunderstood, and was misunderstood by Eutyches, according to whom both natures through and after the union lose each their particular properties and were changed and melted together into one new divine-human nature. To this monophysitism the doctrine of kenosis in modern times is related. It was prepared by the Lutheran doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, and was further developed by Zinzendorf, and then in this century, under the influence of the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, who took up the idea of becoming in God, defended by many with warmth as the only possible explanation of the person of Christ. It holds that the Logos in His incarnation divested Himself of all His divine attributes, even the immanent ones, or at least of His transcendent attributes, descended to the standpoint of a pure potentiality, and then from there in union with the human nature gradually developed Himself again into a divine-human person. But this theory is just as unacceptable as that of Dorner. Scripture knows only one person, one subject, one Christ, but ascribes to Him nevertheless a double kind of attributes, divine and human. He is Logos and became flesh; He is according to the flesh from Israel and yet God over all to be praised, etc. Whether one now, as formerly, lets the human nature change into the divine, or, as now, lets the divine empty itself to the human, or also lets both natures wholly or in part flow together into a third, into a mixed something; always on a pantheistic wise the boundary between God and man is wiped out and the idea of the God-man falsified. The monophysite and kenotic doctrine is in conflict with the unchangeableness, with all attributes, with the essence of God, and equally also with the nature of the creature and of finite man. A divinity or a divine attribute that is this only in potentiality and not in actuality is unthinkable; and a man who through development can make the divine nature his own ceases to be a creature and passes from time into eternity, from finitude into infinity. Even the whole thought of a God-man, in whom the union of both natures is replaced by their mingling, is a monster at which no one can think anything. Such a one cannot be the Mediator of God and men, because He is neither of both; He does not truly bring about the union, the reconciliation, the fellowship of God and man, because He Himself, through His mingling of both natures, is distinguished from both and is a third kind. Cf. Formula of Concord, ed. Müller. Dorner, History of Development. Id. System of Doctrine. Id. Collected Writings. Vilmar, Dogmatics. Philippi, Church Doctrine. Kähler, Science of Christian Doctrine. Lipsius, Dogmatics. Schultz, Divinity of Christ. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ, Edinburgh 1870. Orr, Christian View. Lobstein, Review of Theology and Philosophy, March 1891. Id. Christological Studies, Paris Fischbacher 1891. Chapuis, Review of Theology and Philosophy, September 1891. Scholten, Dogmatics.
14. For the time being, theology, if it truly wants to be Scriptural and Christian theology, can do no better than to uphold the doctrine of the two natures. It may deeply impress upon itself the shortcomings that cling to its language, especially also in the doctrine of Christ. But all other attempts that have thus far been made to formulate the Christological dogma and bring it nearer to our consciousness fall short of the richness of Scripture and the honor of Christ. And for this, theology must watch above all. Whatever objections have been brought against the doctrine of the two natures in former and later times, it nevertheless has this in its favor, that it neglects no data of Holy Scripture, upholds the name of Christ as the only Mediator of God and men, and finally also gives the clearest and brightest understanding of the mystery of the incarnation. For this incarnation does not stand isolated in history. It is indeed essentially distinct from all facts and holds a wholly unique place, but it nevertheless stands in close connection with all that has taken place before, beside, and after it. As appeared to us earlier, it has as preparation and presupposition the generation, the creation, the revelation, and the inspiration. Finally, it must here be added that it also stands in connection with the essence of religion. Religion is fellowship with God; without it a man cannot be a true, complete man; the image of God is no superadded gift but belongs to his nature. This fellowship with God is a mystical union; it far surpasses our understanding; it is a most intimate union with God through the Holy Spirit; it is a union of persons, an unbreakable and eternal covenant between God and man, which is much too weakly described by the name ethical and therefore is designated as mystical; it is so intimate that it changes man into God's image and makes him partaker of the divine nature, 2 Cor. 3:18, Gal. 2:20, 2 Pet. 1:4. If this fellowship between God and man is now truly understood, not as an imagination but as true reality, then its kinship and analogy with the incarnation springs to the eye. Whoever confesses in truth the generation, the creation, the immanence, the revelation, the inspiration, the religion, that is, whoever confesses the communicability of God, has in principle also acknowledged the incarnation. Not in the sense as if the incarnation would flow forth of itself from the essence of religion, but indeed so, that the acknowledgment of the one takes away all right to deny the other. For if the incarnation is not possible either from God's side or from man's, then religion also cannot truly consist in fellowship of God and man. But religion in this sense is disturbed by sin; there is no true, blessed fellowship of God and man. Therefore the union which was entered into in Christ between divine and human nature had to bear a wholly special character. It could not be identical with the religious relation between God and man, for it had precisely to be the beginning, the principle, the objective realization of true religion again. A covenant cannot be improvised; it must be entered into with a people in its king or representative. And so also God, to make his fellowship with mankind reality again, has united himself with it in Christ as its Head. Therefore Christ is no individual beside others, but Head and Representative of mankind, the second and last Adam, the Mediator of God and men. The union of divine and human nature in Christ is therefore essentially distinct from the indwelling of God in his creatures and in believers. It is not a union of persons but a personal and substantial union; it is no moral union, which finds its image in marriage, no agreement of disposition and will, no fellowship of love alone. But it is a physical union, as Athanasius, against Apollinaris I 8 and Cyril, Anathema 3 called it. Thereby is not indicated that this union was necessary and flowed forth of itself from one or both natures, but it is so called because it is not moral in nature, but a union of the natures in the person of the Son, a union of natures, not natural but personal, Petavius, de incarn. III 4. Turretin, Theol. El. XIII 6, 3. And the result of that union is not a new nature nor also a new personality, but only the person of Christ as Christ. He who was in the form of God, from now on also existed in the form of a man.
By virtue of this its wholly one-of-a-kind kind, the joining is not to be thought of otherwise than as a joining of the person of the Son with an unpersonlike human kind. For if the human kind in Christ had its own personlike being, there would have been no other joining than an upright one. Then Christ would also not be personlike God, but only a man living in near fellowship with God. Then Christ would have been a set man with his own one-of-a-kindness, but not the second Adam, head of the mankind kin. However, He was not to be a single one alongside others; His work did not lie in bringing one lone man, with whom He joined Himself, back to fellowship with God. But He had to take on the seed of Abraham, be Head of a new mankind, and firstborn among many brothers. For this, He had to take on an unpersonlike human kind. This is not to be understood with Anastasius of Sinai and others as if Christ took on the human kind in its broadness, in the mind of the Platonic thought, for this lives indeed in mankind but not by itself, in a tallying oneness. On the contrary, the human kind in Christ was indeed single to the scope that thereby He was set apart from all men, though sharing the same kind, by set marks. Yet Christ is therefore no single one alongside others, for the human kind had in Him no own personlike being alongside the Word but was from the beginning readied by the Holy Ghost for the joining with the Word and for His work in such a way that it could stand for the whole mankind kin in that Word and be the Go-between of God for all men of all kin-lines and standings and ages, of all hundreds-of-years and steads.
Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary, Basil, Ephrem, Apollinaris, and others in Dorner, Entw. John of Damascus, de fide orthod. III. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. art. Petavius, de incarn. V. Moor III. Pictet, Christ. Godg. I. Schneckenburger, Zur kirchl. Christol. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II.
However, it is precisely this distinction between nature and person which meets with the greatest objection both in the Trinity and in the doctrine of Christ, and therefore is also the cause of most errors in both doctrines. Both Nestorius and Eutyches could not allow this distinction to stand, and therefore concluded from the two natures to two persons or from the one person to one nature. Yet Christian theology was led to this weighty distinction in the doctrine of God and of Christ. In God there was one nature and three persons; in Christ one person and two natures. The unity of the three persons in the divine being is in the full sense natural, coessential; the unity of the two natures in Christ is personal. This distinction is also philosophically justified. Nature and person are not related, as in Hegel's philosophy, as essence and appearance, as potential and act, so that the nature, essentially one in all creatures, develops in man by immanent power into a person. But nature is the substrate, the suppositum, that by which something is what it is, the principle whereby; and person is the subject, not of a nature in general, but of a rational nature, an individual substance of a rational nature, the principle which. Person is the being in and for itself, which is the owner, possessor, and lord of the nature, a complement of existence, sustaining and terminating the existence of the nature, the subject which through the nature with its whole rich content lives, thinks, wills, acts, and so on, whereby the nature becomes a being for itself and not an accident of another. Thus now the human nature in Christ is united with the person of the Son. The Son does not first become a person in and through the human nature, for He was this from eternity; He needed neither the creation nor the incarnation to come to Himself and become personality, spirit. But the incarnation does include that the human nature, which was formed in and from Mary, did not exist for a single moment on and for itself but from the very first moment of conception was united with and taken up into the person of the Son. The Son created it in Himself, created it in Himself and in creating assumed it. Therefore this human nature is yet not incomplete, as Nestorius and now still Dorner asserts. For although it did not close itself off in itself by its own personality and selfhood, it was yet from the beginning personal in the Logos, who as subject lived, thought, willed, acted, suffered, died, and so on, in and through it, with all its parts, powers, and strengths. That it did not receive in a self-standing selfhood its own separate complement of existence flowed not from a lack, but precisely from this, that it had to be the human form of existence of the Logos. The assumed nature lacks its own personality not because of some defect that belongs to the perfection of human nature, but because of the addition of something that is above human nature, which is the union to the divine person.
Therefore is the human nature in Christ not by its own personality coordinated with the Logos but subordinate to him. Both natures are and remain allo kai allo , but not allos kai allos . It is always the same person, the same subject, the same I, that through the divine and the human nature lives and thinks, speaks and acts. The human nature is the tabernacle, wherein the Son has gone to dwell; the garment, that he himself has prepared and put on; the morphe , wherein he has appeared to us; the instrument and organ, that he has hallowed to himself and whereof he with divine wisdom for his office and work makes use. In Christ the humanity is reckoned as a certain organ of the divinity, Thomas, Comp. Theol. c. 212, cf. S. Theol. III qu. 19 art. 1. Petavius, de incarn. IV 8, 6. Turretin, Theol. XIII 6, 7. Herein is now nothing that deserves our contradiction. Without that we thereby do anything short to the self-working of the creature, we confess that the whole world is an instrument of the revelation of God, a garment, wherein he at the same time reveals and hides himself to us. The church and every believer desires nothing higher, than with soul and body and all powers to stand in the service of God and to be an instrument in his hand. What then would there be against it, that in yet much richer measure, in absolute sense the human nature in Christ is the glorious, willing organ of his Godhead? High goes the union of divine and human nature in Christ above all our speaking and thinking. All comparison fails us, for it is without any equal. But it is then also the mysterion eusebeias , that the angels are desirous to look into and the church adoringly admires.
15. Yet a weighty objection is always brought forward against the doctrine of the two natures, that it does not do justice to the human nature of Christ and makes a human development in Him impossible. The Roman and Lutheran Christologies indeed give occasion for this concern. The union of the two natures in Christ brought with it, in the earlier dogmatics, three consequences: the communication of idioms, of apostolic works, and of gifts. The first held that in the incarnation the two natures with all their properties were communicated to the one person and the one subject, which therefore can be designated with divine and human names; one may thus say, the Son of God is born, has suffered, is dead, Acts 20:28, 1 John 1:7, and also the man Christ Jesus exists from eternity, has come down from heaven, and so on, John 3:13. By the second was understood that the proper mediatorial or redemptive works all bear a God-human character, that is, that they all have as their effective cause the one undivided, personal subject in Christ; that they are brought about by Christ with the cooperation of his two natures and with a double ἐνεργεια, and that they yet again in the result form an undivided unity, since they are the work of one person. The third indicated that the human nature of Christ from the first moment of its existence was adorned with all kinds of glorious and rich gifts of the Holy Spirit. Over these three effects of the union there arose an important difference.
The Lutherans understood the communication of idioms in such a way that the properties of both natures were communicated not only to the one person, but those of the divine nature also to the human. The human nature was elevated by the union to divine omnipotence and omnipresence; it received singular, most excellent, greatest, supernatural, unsearchable, ineffable, and heavenly prerogatives of majesty, glory, virtue, and power, which are not merely created and finite gifts, but divine and infinite such as to quicken, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. It is clear that this view of the communication of properties takes away all meaning from the communication of gifts; what need is there still for gifts, if divine properties are communicated? The Lutheran Christology still speaks of gifts, but it really knows no way with them, and has even no place anymore for the anointing of Christ with the Holy Spirit. On the other side, the Romans indeed teach a communication of gifts and also oppose the Lutheran doctrine of the communication of idioms, but they say that the human nature of Christ by virtue of the hypostatic union immediately in the first moment of its conception received a most abundant supply of the Spirit of God and all abundance of gifts.
Both Lutheran and Roman Christologies thereby contain in themselves a Docetic element; the purely human development of Christ does not come to its right here; in reaction, in this century one swung to the other extreme and denied the deity of the Lord. The Reformed, however, have understood the communication of gifts in such a way that a human development of Jesus was possible thereby. Although the second Adam, Christ was yet different from Adam. Adam was created as an adult, received a paradise as dwelling place, and was subject to no suffering and death. Christ, however, was conceived in Mary by the Holy Spirit and born as a helpless child; He was not placed in a paradise but came into a world that lies in evil; He was exposed to temptation from all sides; He bore a nature that was susceptible to suffering and death. His was not the human nature of Adam before the fall, but God sent his Son ἐν ὁμοιωματι σαρκος ἁμαρτιας, that is, in such flesh that in form and appearance was like the flesh of sin, Romans 8:3.
Through this fair teaching of the communication of gifts, the Reformed theology was better able than any other to uphold, alongside the Godhead, also the true, real manhood in Christ. It is of uncountable worth for this. 1. Among the Reformed there was still difference over whether the becoming man in itself, thought apart from the state of sin in which it took place, was already an act of humbling. From one side one could appeal to the fact that the distance between God and man is so great that the taking on of human nature without more is already humbling. But from the other side one could bring against it that Christ then now still, while He is glorified at the Father's right hand, would be in the state of humbling. The strife is easily so to end, that the becoming man in itself, without more, always is and stays an act of bending-down goodness, but not in narrower sense a step in the state of humbling. That was it thereby, that it was a becoming flesh, taking on of a weak, human nature. Over this there was indeed no strife, that Christ took on a weak human nature, subject to suffering and death, and that this was an act of humbling for the Son of God. The Scripture sets this also above all doubt, Isa. 53:2, 3, John 1:14, 17:5, 1 Cor. 2:8, 2 Cor. 8:9, Phil. 2:7, 8 etc. 2. As soon as we however try to give ourselves reckoning of what is enclosed in that weak human nature, the question becomes harder. For very surely Jesus had all kinds of needs for food, drink, rest, sleep etc., but these were also own to Adam before the fall. And contrariwise it falls hard to think that Jesus according to His human nature was of Himself open to sickness, illness, death; He yet Himself had the power to lay down the life, John 10:17, but was not of Himself, without His will, subject to death. From old there were then also the thoughts divided over this. Over Jesus' outward shape there was difference; some such as Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome and others wrote Him a fair form with appeal to Ps. 45:3, others such as Justin, Clement, Tertullian etc. thought that He bodily was without form or glory, Ps. 22:7, Isa. 53:2, 3; still others held the middle between these both showings or held back from a judgment. And so stood also with regard to the openness to suffering and dying the aphthartodocetes and the phthartolatri over against each other. There is now no doubt that the Son of God took on a human nature that was open to suffering and dying, otherwise these would have been show and no truth; even Roman Catholics and Lutherans must acknowledge this. Further is on the other side also true, that Christ this human nature wholly willingly took on and in the drawn-off always kept the right to lay off this weak human nature or to change it into a glorious one, raised above all suffering and death. In so far stayed the suffering and dying always His free deed. He had and kept the power to take on the life and lay it off. No one could do Him any sorrow nor take His life, unless He Himself gave the power thereto. He set the hour and the power of darkness. But this His will supposed, was the suffering and dying for Him natural, given with the kind of the human nature which He took on. Hilary and others have often shown it just contrariwise and in the sorrow, the suffering etc. of Christ seen the not-natural, the wonder, and in the wonders of Christ just the natural. Though this can be taken in good sense, it yet reckons not enough with the deed that Christ took on the weak human nature and therein was set apart from Adam. Therefrom may not be drawn that Christ also was open to all kinds of sickness and illness; for He took on Himself the general after-fruits of sin, suffering and death, which now belong to the human nature, but not every special illness that flows forth from special surroundings, weak body-build, unruled or unheeding life-way. Also was the human nature in Christ much richer unfolded than in Adam; for in the state of wholeness there was for many heart-movings, wrath, sorrow, fellow-suffering, mercy etc. no opening. But Christ has not only with the inward movings of God's mercy visited us; He has in His human nature opened to us that rich world of the heart, which in Adam yet not was and could not be. 3. There is in Christ a human knowing, an understanding unfolding, a growing in wisdom and knowledge. The Arians and Apollinarians, according to whom in Christ the Logos takes the place of the spirit, could take on no human knowing in Christ. Also the Monophysites must come up against it, but could as well teach an all-knowing of Christ, when namely the human nature was gone up in the divine, as in the contrariwise case an unknowing (Themistius, head of the Agnoetes), with appeal to texts like Matt. 20:32, 21:19, Mark 5:9, 13:32, Luke 2:52, 8:30, John 11:34. Over against these parties came the church fathers ever longer ever more to set the human knowledge of Christ from the first eye-blink full-made and open to no growing; and from them went this feeling over into the school-wise and Roman and also into the Lutheran Christology. They came hereby with above-named clear sayings of the Scripture in strife, and must take flight to a docetic clearing. The true ground for this teaching is then also only the fittingness, that God to a human nature that so near with Him was united, well must give this gift of knowledge; the Scripture places on which one appeals, such as John 1:14, 2:24, 25, 6:64, 13:3, Col. 2:3, 9 prove the contrariwise not, because they handle of the whole Christ and not set of His human nature, and still much less of this in her historical unfolding. The Reformed said over against it, firstly, that the knowledge poured in and gained in Christ was not at once complete, but little by little grew and more-made, and secondly, that Christ here on earth was not a comprehender but wayfarer, that He walked by faith and hope and not by beholding, that the blessed knowledge here on earth was not yet His share. Naturally was the faith in Christ, not as in us a leaning on the grace and mercy of God, but this own-kind has the faith only gotten through the state of sin in which we are; from kind is the faith in Adam and in Christ nothing but a fast-clinging to the word and promise of God, a fast-holding of the Unseen. And that has also Jesus done, Matt. 27:46, Heb. 2:17, 18, 3:2. That faith and that hope were in Christ also not shaking and wavering, but fast and strong; they held Him, who in us wakes and fulfills the faith, standing in the tempting and made Him for the as wage on His work Him waiting joy bear the cross and scorn the shame, Heb. 12:2. So was there thus a growing in wisdom and knowledge in Christ; the human awareness in Him, though having the same subject as the divine awareness, knew that subject, that I, only very in part, indeed whole but not wholly. Behind our bounded awareness lies in us yet a world of being; so lay behind the human awareness of Christ yet the depth of God, which through that human awareness only little by little and always in bounded way could shine through. From this may however not be drawn that Jesus on sundry fields could err. Well is this nowadays in wide ring taught, to namely get away from Jesus' authority in thing the Old Testament. But one strikes hereby the Christ Himself. For well is it true that Jesus gave no teaching in any human lore and thereto also not come on earth. He came to make known to us the Father and to fulfill His work. But thereto served He that Father in His showing and works also to know, and thus also to wit, whether the Old Testament was God's Word, or not. This was no knowledge of pure lore-wise but of godly kind, and for the faith of the gathering of the highest weight. Who in this behold writes erring to Jesus, comes not only with His divine nature but also with His prophetic office in strife. 4. There is in Christ a moral unfolding. Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius and all who go out from the human nature of Christ, take on that He through all kinds of strife and tempting has full-made Himself. Jesus was not positively holy, He brought not with the non posse peccare; contrariwise such an inborn holiness is unmightful and ethically worthless. But Jesus was a man who the mightfulness of sinning brought with yet through moral straining and strife Himself from all sins factly has free held, Himself ethically to the highest standpoint unfolded and the uniting with God Himself worthy made. This showing rests on a factly not reckoning with the Godhead of Christ; it goes out from the wrong thought that there is no other worth than that through strife won and it brings it at most only to a historical, factly sinlessness, which for Jesus as Middleman is unenough. The proofs to prove Jesus' sinlessness historically such as from Ullmann, The Sinlessness of Jesus, etc., are unenough. To historical sureness, which soon again by others is made unsure, have we not enough. How much it earns worthing that so many, from whom after their beginning otherwise to await were, yet a deep sense have of Jesus' moral full-making, such as Daub, Marheineke, Rosenkranz, Vatke, Schleiermacher, Beyschlag, Hase, Schenkel, Lipsius etc., yet is the faith shaking that rests not on the witness of the Scripture and therefore always through all kinds of wisdom-wise and historical beswares pressed and narrowed. The Scripture makes us however in Christ not only an empirical sinlessness but also a needful unsinfulness acknowledge. He is the Son of God, the Logos, who in the beginning with God and Himself God was; He is one with the Father and fulfills always His will and work etc. For who this of Christ confesses, is the mightfulness of sinning and falling an unthought. Therefore held the Christly theology over against Arians, Pelagians, Nominalists, such as Scotus, Biel, Durandus, Molina etc., standing that Christ could not sin. For then either God Himself would have must can sin--what blasphemy is; or the uniting of divine and human nature is thought breakable and factly denied. But therewith is yet the beingly set-apart not lifted, that there is between the holiness of God and the holiness of Christ as man. Thereon heeding, could Jesus say that no one good, the goodness itself is than God alone, Matt. 19:16, 17, Mark 10:17, 18, Luke 18:18, 19. The goodness or holiness of Christ after His human nature is no divine, spring-kind, but it is a given, poured-in; and therefore must it also in the way of strife and tempting show, stand holding and strengthen. The goodness poured-in shuts not out the goodness gained. The last under-sets the first; no good fruits than from a good tree; but the worthliness of the tree must yet come out in the soundness of the fruits. And so must Christ also His inborn holiness show through tempting and strife heen; these become through the non posse peccare not overmuch or idle. For though ownly tempting could not from within but only from without to Jesus come, He yet had a human nature that against suffering and death up-saw. So became He then whole His life through on all kinds of ways tempted, by Satan, His foes, even by His learners, Matt. 4:1-11, Mark 1:13, Luke 4:1-13, Matt. 12:29, Luke 11:22, Matt. 16:23, Mark 8:33. And in those temptings had He Himself striving standing to hold; the non posse peccare was no force but was ethical of kind and must therefore also on ethical way to showing come. 5. The same holds of the might of Christ. Though as the Son of God all-mighty, was He yet bounded, what touches the might of His human nature. The Monophysites set these both not apart, and let the two natures, the two wills and the sundry might in each other go up. But Scripture and church made between both set-apart and let the two natures so bound be that in the one God-human work each nature does what is its own. And therefore comes the doing of wonders, the forgiving of sins, the giving of everlasting life and all what belongs to the Middleman-work, not only to His Godhead but also to His manhood. Therefore writes Christ just as Son of man, as Messiah, Himself this might of forgiving and of judging to, Matt. 9:2-8, John 5:27. There goes at touching might from Him out, Luke 6:19. His flesh is the bread that gives the world the life, John 6:51. The Father has given Him all things in His hand, John 3:35, 13:3, 17:2. No one can snatch the sheep out of His hand even as out of the hand of the Father, John 10:28-30. As well as the Father hears He the prayer, John 14:13, cf. 16:23, sends He the Spirit, 15:26, cf. 14:26, gives He the everlasting life, 10:28, 17:2. But this all shuts yet not out that His might, as human, is open to growing. He is as a little child, weak and helpless, born; He had need of food and drink, He was wearied from the way and sat down by the well, John 4:6; even in the doing of wonders was He from the faith of men hanging, Matt. 13:58; in the garden became He by an angel strengthened, Luke 22:43. First after the uprising says He that to Him all might is given in heaven and on earth, Matt. 28:18. Then receives He the glory back that He as Son already beforehand with the Father had, John 17:5, and makes therein also His human nature share. Through the uprising is Christ also as man to Lord become over living and dead, has He a name received above all name and might over all creatures, Matt. 28:18, Col. 2:3, 9, Phil. 2:9, Heb. 2:7, 8.
16. The Confession Concerning Christ Finds Its Practical Application in the Worship Which Is Brought to Him. The confession concerning Christ finds its practical application in the worship which is brought to him, in the honor of adoration. Among those who with Arius deny the deity of Christ, or with Nestorius separate it from the human nature, or with Socinus see in Jesus only a man, all ground for the adoration of the Mediator falls away. Yet they try to maintain this in various ways. Nestorius said that also the man Jesus as confessor and defender of the divine honor might be adored: separo naturas, conjungo reverentiam . Socinus defended it thereby, that Christ was exalted to Lord and had received all power and thus in need and misery could help us; many of his party however, such as Davidis, Francken and others, opposed it, because God alone might be adored and the power of Christ in any case was a limited one; Socinus saw himself then also compelled to make a distinction between the worship of God as primary cause and that of Christ as secondary cause of our salvation. Fock, Der Socin. Also the Remonstrants derived the ground for the adoration of Christ especially from that, that he was Mediator, King, Lord and as such had received from the Father an honor of adoration, which indeed was true and divine but yet not supreme, Apol. Conf. Arminius, Op. Limborch, Theol. Christ. Episcopius, Inst. theol. cf. against that Censura in conf. Rem. Trigland, Antapol. Heydanus, Causa Dei . Vitringa. The defense of the adoration of Christ by Ritschl and his school agrees in substance with that of Socinus: Christ, as man in relation to God, may indeed be honored but not adored, but Christ, religiously considered, as revelation of God, as that person in whom the church has God, is indeed to be adored, for then we pray to him not alongside God, but God in him. This adoration of Christ belongs then further indeed in the public worship of the church but not in the prayer of private persons; this last is unhealthy, makes Christ into a subject distinct from God, fosters a sentimental direction and leads to creature-worship, Schultz, Gottheit Christi . Just as among the Socinians, so there are among the followers of Ritschl those who wholly reject the adoration of Christ, and call him indeed an object of faith and an example for imitation but not an object of religious honor, Chapuis, Revue de théol. et de philos. Id. Die Anbetung Christi in Gottschick’s Zeits. f. Theol. u. Kirche . Socinianism and Ritschlianism thus end up at Unitarianism, which deprives Christ of all religious honor. Insofar as they however yet try to maintain an adoration of the man Christ, they are akin and offer support to those who, though acknowledging Christ’s deity, yet also derive a ground of adoration from his human nature. To these belong in the first place the Monophysites, against whom the fifth ecumenical Council determined, that the adoration of Christ does not rest on a confusion of the deity and the humanity but must be directed to God, the incarnate Logos with his flesh. But also the scholastic and Roman theologians have gradually come to religiously honor the human nature of Christ in itself. The starting point was thereby the general teaching of the church fathers, that the person of Christ in the undivided unity of its two natures, as incarnate Word, as God and man together, must be honored with one adoration. From that was derived, that the human nature of Christ itself, in itself, in se, also might and must be object of divine honor (latreia); however not for itself, per se and propter se, but for its hypostatic union with the Son of God. To that was then further added, that, although the human nature in itself is to be adored and thus objectum materiale of the adoratio, it yet always is an objectum partiale and not totale; that is, whoever adores it, adores with it always him who has united himself with that human nature; and so it became thereby permitted and possible, to make not only the human nature of Christ in itself, but even a part of it, such as for example the sacred heart of Jesus, into an object of adoration; the adoration applies yet not to that heart alone but to the whole Christ, who in that heart made his divine love to dwell. And finally many theologians said yet, that the human nature of Christ not only on ground of its hypostatic union with the Logos is object of latreia, but also on ground of the many gifts bestowed on it without measure is object of douleia, and then further object of hyperdouleia, according to the hierarchical rule: adoratio est diversa pro diversitate excellentiae, quae est ejus objectum formale. Cf. Damascenus, de fide orthod. Lombardus and other comm. on Sent. Thomas, S. Theol. Bellarmine, de imag. sanct. Petavius, de incarn. Theol. Wirceb. Perrone, Prael. theol. Scheeben, Dogm. Pesch, Prael. theol. Simar, Dogm. By virtue of their doctrine of the communication of the divine attributes to the human nature, the Lutherans also teach that the human nature of Christ is to be adored, Gerhard, Loc. Quenstedt, Theol. Buddeus, Inst. theol. And finally among the Moravians the man Christ has almost wholly taken the place of God; he is not the mediator but the substitute of God and almost the only object of religious honor, Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theol. Römheld, Theol. sacrosancta .
Wholly in agreement with their teaching on Christ, the Reformed now said that the Mediator was indeed the object of worship, but that the ground for that worship lay in his divine nature.
Yet there was among them still some difference of feeling. All were one herein, that Christ also as Mediator must be prayed to and honored, but some thought that the ground for that worship lay only in the Godhead of Christ, Voetius, Disp. Maccovius, Coll. theol. Macc. Redivivus. Hoornbeek, Socin. confutatus. Mastricht; others judged that the formal object was not only the Godhead but the Mediatorship of Christ, Amesius, de adoratione Christi. Walaeus, Loci Comm. Op. Trigland, Antapol. Alting, Theol. problem. Cloppenburg, Op. Bucanus, Inst. Turretinus, Theol. El. Hottinger, Heidanus, Burman, Heidegger, Moor. Vitringa. Now the Scripture leaves no doubt whether Christ, even as the object of our faith and trust, John 14:1, 17:3, Romans 14:9, 2 Corinthians 5:15, Ephesians 3:12, 5:23, Colossians 1:27, 1 Timothy 1:1 and so on, so also the object of our godly honoring and worship may be, John 5:23, 14:13, Acts 7:59, 9:13, 22:16, Romans 10:12, 13, 1 Corinthians 1:2, 2 Corinthians 12:8, Philippians 2:9, Hebrews 1:6, Revelation 5:12, 13, 22:17, 20, cf. Loofs in Herzog. Th. Zahn, Die Anbetung Jesu im Zeitalter der Apostel, Stuttgart 1885, also in Skizzen aus dem Leben der alten Kirche 1898.
But yet the ground of the worship of Christ according to the Scripture can be drawn from nothing else than from his Godhead. For the word of Scripture stands fast: the Lord your God shall you worship and him alone serve. That is the bidding which in beginning dooms all heathen and Roman creature-worship. If besides that the kingly might of Christ or also his mediatorship is brought forward as ground for godly worship, then this bidding of God is weakened and broken. As mediator, king, priest, prophet, Christ is not utterly highest, but under God; in that standing he has another glory and another might than that which he as Son shares with the Father and the Spirit; in that quality he is not the working cause, which God alone is, but the tool cause of our salvation. If therefore the ground for the worship of the Mediator, besides in his Godhead, lies also in his Mediatorship, then the ground lies also in truth in his human nature, for as Mediator Christ is not to be thought without this; then Father and Spirit, who are no Mediator, have one ground for their worship less than the Son and so this comes above the Father and the Holy Spirit; then there are two grounds for adoration, one which is drawn from the Godhead, another from something else, that is from something creaturely, and then in beginning the Roman sundering of latreia and douleia is brought in and creature-worship made lawful.
Christ is thus very surely to be worshiped as our Mediator, even as God also as Creator and so on is honored and called upon, but the ground therefor lies only in his Godhead. He is not God because he is Mediator, but he is Mediator because he is God, with the Father and the Spirit one only God, above all to be praised in eternity. The mediator-worthiness and the mediator-works can and may be motives of worship, like sundry good deeds drive us to worship of God. They can also in so far be called grounds of worship, as therein the godly being works and shows itself; but the foundation of worship is the God-being alone.
1. In all peoples we find little sense of sin and need for atonement and redemption. Also, in almost all religions there are holy persons who bring about and maintain fellowship with God for others. Kings and prophets often act as such mediators, but especially priests are charged with this service. The word priest comes from presbyter, elder, and thus originally had no hieratic sense at all; the names in other tongues, such as kohen, hiereus, sacerdos, designate priests as such persons who stand before God and perform a holy work, specifically bringing offerings. However much such a priesthood occurs in almost all religions (cf. Julius Lippert, Allgemeine Geschichte des Priesterthums, Berlin 1883-4), yet its origin is unknown to us. According to Scripture, in the oldest times there were no special priests; Abel, Cain, Noah, the patriarchs still bring their own offerings, Gen. 4:3, 4, 8:20, 12:7 etc.; only as among the peoples the sense of sin and the awareness of separation between God and man increases, does the idea of a mediatorship arise everywhere. The chief means which this priesthood uses to obtain fellowship with God is the offering, minchah, olah, zebach, isheh, doron, hiereion, prosphora, thysia, telete, oblatio, sacrificium. Also the origin and essence of the offering is hidden in darkness for us. Some explain the offering from man's disposition to make the Deity favorable by some gift and to obtain all kinds of help from it (do ut des, gift theory), Saussaye, Religionsphilos. I. v. Hartmann, Religionsphil. I. Therewith many think that men first thought the gods like themselves and therefore offered them especially foodstuffs in the offerings (food theory), ib. and Siebeck, Religionsphilos. Others hold to the mystical or sacramental theory and see the essence of the offering not in a gift to but in fellowship with the gods, enjoyed thereby, that one sits together at one table and partakes of one food and drink, Marti, Israel. Relig.³. Smend, Att. Rel. Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos.³. According to another, the symbolic theory, the offerer gives in the gift which he offers to the gods a proof of his reverence and submission, of his denial of all earthly things and of his total devotion to God, Wuttke, Gesch. des Heidenthums I. Finally there are still those who consider the destructive element in the offering essential and therefore give to all offerings an atoning character, Bellarmine, Vasquez and many Roman theologians, cf. Thalhofer, Das Opfer des alten und neuen Bundes, Regensburg 1870. Id. Handbuch der kath. Liturgik, Freiburg 1894 I². The question of the origin and essence of the offering becomes even more difficult when we think of the bloody and then specifically of the human offerings. How did mankind come to this way of worshiping God? Which offerings were the oldest, the bloody or the unbloody? Whence the broad place and the awesome meaning accorded to blood in the cult? History gives no answer here. Only Scripture relates that the offering already exists from the oldest time of mankind. Before the fall it makes no mention of any offering. Yet there is nothing absurd in the thought that even then the offering in a broader sense belonged to the elements of the cult, just as well as prayer. For offering, according to the definition of Augustine, de civ. X 6, is every work which is done that we may cleave to God in holy fellowship. As such it also fitted man in the state of integrity. He was after all created in God's image in true knowledge, righteousness and holiness; he was prophet, priest and king and as such had to glorify God's name, devote himself with all that was his to God, and rule and govern all things according to God's will; he also received in the Sabbath a special day for the service of God and needed certain forms of cult for it; there is nothing strange in it if besides prayer the offering also belonged thereto. Indeed man can properly give nothing to God, for the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. But God yet gave the earth to man and appointed him lord over it. And therefore man can offer something to God in a symbolic sense, as proof of his reverence and dependence. If the offering from the beginning belonged to man's religion, which also before and after the fall cannot be essentially different, then it also explains easily that soon after the fall mention is made of Cain's and Abel's offering, without God specially instituting the offering cult. Protestants and Roman Catholics formerly disputed whether the offering rested on a positive command of God or on an inner religious urge of man, M. Vitringa IV. Herzog² 11. But if the offering already existed before the fall, this dispute is also resolved thereby. Yet sin has brought great change in the offering, not only so that to the existing ones the sin offering was mechanically added, but specifically in the sense that the offering itself has changed in character. Man after the fall fears God and hides himself from his face, and therefore the disposition and intention are also changed with which he offers and with which he prays. The sin offering (sacrificium propitiatorium, on account of offense committed) comes to stand in the center and forms and bears the other offerings (sacr. latreuticum, on account of God's majesty, praise offering; sacr. impetratorium, on account of benefits hoped for, petition offering; sacr. eucharisticum, on account of benefits already received, thank offering), Thomas, S. Theol. II 1 qu. 102 art. 3 ad 10. Among those sin offerings the bloody offerings take a first place, and these bear a destructive and a substituting character; that which is offered to God is destroyed, slain; and since properly man himself had to offer himself thus for his atonement, he takes an animal or also another man in his place. And finally there gradually arises in all religions a separate order of priests; man feels himself removed from God and has need of a mediator who brings him into God's nearness. Thus all offerings of mankind point, directly in Israel, indirectly also among the heathen, to the great perfect offering which was brought by Christ, the Mediator of God and men, on the cross of Golgotha. Cf. Pfanner, Theol. gent. c. 15. Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen u. Römer u. ihr Verh. zu dem Einen auf Golgotha, Würzburg 1841. Nägelsbach, Nachhom. Theol. Bähr, Symb. des mos. Cultus II. Stöckl, Das Opfer nach seinem Wesen u. Geschichte², Mainz 1861. Weiss, Apol. d. Christ. II³. Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. der kath. Kirche I². Gihr, Das heilige Messopfer⁶, Freiburg 1897. Scheeben, Dogm. III. Daniel Dewar, The nature, reality and efficacy of the atonement 1831 ch. 1. Trumbull, The blood covenant. A primitive rite and its bearings on Scripture, 2 ed. Philadelphia 1893. Art. Blut in Herzog³.
2. The change brought about by sin in the offering showed itself only gradually at first. At first the offering was simply minchah , a gift, Gen. 4:3; and the offerings were brought by the offerers themselves. When the sacrificial worship and priesthood had already developed among other peoples, these were also ordered for Israel. Just as the prophetic and kingly, so also the priestly office according to the law rests on election by the LORD, Num. 16:7, Heb. 5:4. The task assigned to the priests is twofold; they must teach the people of Israel, also by means of the Urim and Thummim, concerning the rights and laws of the Lord, Exod. 28:30, Deut. 17:9, 33:8-10, Jer. 18:18, Ezek. 7:26, 44:23, 24, Hag. 2:12, Mal. 2:7, and furthermore approach the LORD with the offerings of the people, Lev. 21:8, Num. 16:5 etc., and then bless the people on his behalf, Lev. 9:23, Num. 6:23. The offerings that Israel had to bring were various. The Passover offering, Exod. 12, takes an independent place, is at once atonement and burnt offering, sacrifice and sacrament; the covenant offering, Exod. 24:3-11, served, just as that with Abraham, Gen. 15:9, Jer. 34:18ff., to confirm the covenant; it therefore consisted of burnt offerings of young bulls, whose blood for the covering of sin and for sanctification was sprinkled by Moses as mediator of the covenant partly on the altar and partly on the people, and was then concluded with thank offerings; the burnt and thank offering, Lev. 1, 3, served to maintain the fellowship with God resting on the foundation of the covenant; the sin and guilt offering, Lev. 4-6, presupposed that the fellowship with God had been disturbed by a sin of weakness and offered in the sprinkling of the blood of the slaughtered offering animal a covering of the sin and restoration of the fellowship with God. The atonement now came about in this way: by the laying on of hands the offerer transferred his sin to the animal; indeed this is often denied, but wrongly; laying on of hands in Scripture always includes some transfer, of blessing, Gen. 48:13, Matt. 19:13, of curse, Lev. 24:14, of office, Num. 27:18, Deut. 34:9, of the Holy Spirit, Acts 8:17 etc., and so in the bloody offerings, also the burnt and thank offerings, Lev. 1:4, 3:2, of acknowledged and confessed sin, Lev. 4:4, 15, 16:21, 2 Chron. 29:23; the offering itself was called chatta'ath or 'asham . Thereby the offering animal was now worthy of death. But since it served not only to undergo the punishment for the offerer but precisely to make atonement for his sin, therefore the killing of the animal is always called a slaughtering. It was not to bring about death as death, but thereby to obtain the blood that should make atonement. God had given precisely that blood of the animal for an atonement on the altar; and indeed because that blood was the seat of the soul, the seat of a life freed from sin after and through the slaughtering, Lev. 17:11. When this blood now came on the altar or on the mercy seat in God's presence, then thereby the offerer or his sin was covered before the holy face of God; or rather, God himself did it, Deut. 21:8, Jer. 18:23, Mic. 7:19, and as his substitute the priest, Lev. 5:13, 10:17, 15:15, who by the offering thought of as kopher , lytron , ransom, covered the persons of the offerers from their sins or also those sins themselves before his face, kipper with the prep. 'al or be'ad .
Herzog; and further Smend, Old Testament Religion; Marti, History of the Israelite Religion.
However, it deserves note that the sin offerings by no means atoned for all sins, but only for some, certain, unwitting sins; for sins with a high hand stood the cutting off from the midst of the people, Num. 15:30. Although the sins by straying were taken very broadly, Lev. 5, 6; yet the atonement which was brought about by the sin offerings remained very limited. Besides, the covenant of grace, set up by God with Israel, rested not on those sin offerings but went before them and had its foundation only in God's promise: I am the Lord your God. The sin and guilt offerings served only to atone for unwitting transgressions, which were no certain breach of the covenant, and to restore the fellowship with God disturbed thereby. This appears also from the fact that they were ordained for cases in which there was only Levitical uncleanness but not subjective guilt, Lev. 5:2, 12:6, 7, 15:14. Thus there remained a host of sins for which the law pointed out no atonement by offerings; not only some sins with a high hand, which were punished with cutting off, but further all kinds of spiritual and fleshly sins, sins in thoughts and words, sins of pride and self-seeking. For all these sins no offerings were prescribed. It is true that by no means only the sin and guilt offerings but that also the burnt and thank offerings bore an atoning character, Lev. 1:3, 4, 9:7, and that on the great day of atonement all the sins of the people were atoned for, Lev. 16:16, 23:26-32, Num. 29:7-11. Yet it remains remarkable that thereby no mention is made of all the above-named sins and that the proper sin and guilt offerings provide only in certain cases. On special occasions, when the people had sinned grievously and made themselves guilty of breach of covenant, atonement is also obtained in an extraordinary way, by Moses' intercession, Ex. 32:30-35, Num. 14, Ps. 106:23, or by unusual offerings, Num. 16:45-50, 2 Sam. 24:25, 2 Chron. 29:8-11. And the godly in Israel knew that also; they knew that the sin offerings opened a way to atonement only in very few cases; and therefore they go back behind those offerings and plead on the mercy of God. And that is what the Old Testament sacrificial worship also meant to teach Israel. Those few offerings which were prescribed did not cover the whole life; they brought no true atonement; they served only to awaken the sense of sin and were types which pointed to another and better offering. The Old Testament sacrificial worship was imperfect; the priests were themselves sinners; the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins; the offerings had to be endlessly repeated. Everything indicated that the ceremonial dispensation of the Old Testament had only a passing, symbolic, typical meaning. And therefore according to the prophecy there comes another covenant, which shall not be broken but kept by all, Jer. 31:31; another prophet, who in a special measure shall be anointed with the Spirit of God and shall bring a glad message to Israel and the Gentiles, Deut. 18:15, Isa. 11:2, Mal. 4:5; another priest, who not after the manner of Aaron but after the order of Melchizedek shall be appointed and therefore unite in himself the priestly and kingly dignity and bear both eternally, Ps. 110, Jer. 30:21, Zech. 6:13; another king, who shall come forth from David's house and shall be a Ruler in Israel, Mic. 5:1, 2. And so there shall also come another, better offering. The offerings of animals are not the true ones, Ps. 40:7, 50:8, 51:18, Am. 4:4, 5:21, Hos. 6:6, 8:11, Isa. 1:11, Jer. 6:19, 7:21 etc.; the true offerings of God are obedience, 1 Sam. 15:22, mercy, Hos. 6:6, a broken spirit, Ps. 51:19, hearkening to God's voice, Jer. 7:23. And that offering shall be brought by that servant of the Lord, who shall take Israel's place, fulfill his work, be for a covenant of the people and for a light of the Gentiles, Isa. 42:6, 49:6, and for the sins of his people shall set his soul as a guilt offering, Isa. 53:10.
In the Old Testament, these promises of the suffering servant of the Lord and that of the anointed king run in part still parallel. Both promises are rooted in the firmness of God's covenant; God cannot forget His covenant, in spite of Israel's unfaithfulness and falling away; He cannot do it for His name's sake; it is an everlasting covenant that knows no shaking. And therefore Israel, though fallen into woe because of its sin, will yet again get a king from David's house. That king shall be of lowly birth, Isaiah 11:1, 2, Micah 5:1, 2, Ezekiel 17:22, He shall be not only king but also priest, Jeremiah 30:21, Zechariah 3:1, 6:13, Psalm 110, bring righteousness for his folk, Jeremiah 23:6, make offerings needless, Isaiah 60:21, Jeremiah 24:7, 31:35, Ezekiel 36:25, 27 and make all into priests, Isaiah 61:6. Alongside runs now the other promise, that this righteousness for Israel shall be won only in the way of suffering. The offering worship betokened the needfulness of the atoning offering; the history showed it in so many ensamples, in Moses, David, Job, the prophets and in that small band of faithful, who bowed not the knee to Baal, that the best suffer the most, that they, who uphold God's cause and are in so far righteous, must through suffering enter into glory; and in the banishment and thereafter as congregation Israel became the servant of the Lord, who being in need and woe and beset from all sides, yet should be redeemed by the Holy One of Israel, Isaiah 41:8ff. Yet Israel also is not the true servant of the Lord; and has itself need of redemption, Isaiah 41:14, 42:19ff.; where could the prophet also in the past or present find the Israel or an individual person, a prophet, a martyr, who was so wondrously fitted out by Jehovah, who stayed so unshakably faithful, who in the preaching of the truth to the Gentiles underwent the heaviest suffering and the most shameful death? The modern exposition strives in vain to find in the few godly among Israel, in the prophets, or also in Jeremiah or another sufferer the figure for Isaiah’s painting of the servant of the Lord. Israel itself with all its godly and prophets sets itself in Isaiah 53 over against that servant of the Lord, owns that it has despised Him for His suffering and confesses, that He just for their transgressions was wounded and for their iniquities bruised. Though it be not straightway said, the servant of the Lord can be no other than the Messiah, who indeed shall also be priest and bring righteousness for his folk. Cf. Delitzsch on Isaiah 42ff. Oehler, in Herzog 9, 649 and the writings there quoted, also Smend, Old Testament Religion 257. It is a hard question, whether the Jewish theology before Jesus’ coming already let these two lines in the prophecy come together and thus awaited a suffering Messiah, cf. Wünsche, Sufferings of the Messiah, Leipzig 1870. Dalman, The Suffering and Dying Messiah of the Synagogue 1888. Weber, System 344f. Schürer, New Testament Time History 597. Baldensperger, Self-Awareness of Jesus 121f. Oehler in Herzog 9, 670. Holtzmann, New Testament Theology I 65f. But though this question be also answered yea; the inhold of the folk's belief was the awaiting of a suffering Messiah yet not; Jesus’ disciples show themselves wholly unable for it, Matthew 16:22, Luke 18:34, 24:21, John 12:34.
3. According to the New Testament, all these different testimonies of law and prophecy run out into Christ; the whole Old Testament is in principle fulfilled in Him; in Him all the promises of God are yea and amen, Rom. 15:8, 2 Cor. 1:20. He is the true Messiah, the king from David's house, Matt. 2:2, 21:5, 27:11, 37, Luke 1:32, and so on; the prophet, who preaches the gospel to the poor, Luke 4:17ff.; the priest, who in his person, his office, his appointment, his offering, his sanctuary far surpasses the Old Testament priesthood, Hebrews; the servant of the Lord, who came as a doulos , Phil. 2:7, 8, to serve, Mark 10:45, submitted himself to the law, Gal. 4:4, fulfilled all righteousness, Matt. 3:15, and was obedient unto the death of the cross, Rom. 5:19, Phil. 2:8, Heb. 5:8. As such, Jesus now makes a distinction between the kingdom of God, as it is now founded by Him in a spiritual sense and as it shall once be revealed in glory; between his first and second coming, which for the Old Testament prophecy still coincided; between his work in the state of humiliation and that in the state of exaltation. The Christ must through suffering enter into his glory, Luke 24:26. The work, which He now accomplishes in the state of humiliation, is described in the New Testament in many ways. It is a work, entrusted to Him by the Father, John 4:34, 5:36, 17:4; it consisted in general in the doing of God's will, Matt. 26:42, John 4:34, 5:30, 6:38, and included more closely the declaration of God, John 1:18, the revelation and glorification of his name, 17:4, 6, 26, the communication of God's words, 17:8, 14, and so on. Christ is a prophet, mighty in words and works, Luke 24:19; He is no new lawgiver, but he explains the law, Matt. 5-7, 22:40, Luke 9:23, 10:28, John 13:34, 1 John 2:7, 8, proclaims the gospel, Matt. 12:16-21, Luke 4:17-21, and preaches in both himself as fulfiller of the law and content of the gospel. He is the law and the gospel in his own person. He is no prophet only through what He speaks, but first of all through what He is. He is the Logos, John 1:1, full of grace and truth, John 1:18, anointed with the Spirit without measure, 3:34, the revelation of the Father, John 14:9, Col. 2:9. The source of his preaching is He himself, is not inspiration but incarnation. God's Spirit came not only upon Him; God spoke not only with Him, as with Moses, face to face, but God was in Him and spoke through Him, Heb. 1:3. He is not a prophet alongside others but the highest, the only prophet; source and center of all prophecy; and all knowledge of God, in the Old Testament before his incarnation, and also now in the New Testament after his resurrection and ascension, is from Him, 1 Pet. 1:11, 3:19, Matt. 11:27. Furthermore, the will of God, which Jesus came to fulfill, also included the wonders which He did; the one work falls into many works, John 5:36, which are his Father's works, 5:20, 9:3, 10:32, 37, 14:10, prove that the Father loves Him and is in Him, 5:20, 10:38, 14:10, witness that the Father has sent Him, 5:36, 10:25, and reveal his divine glory, 2:11, 11:4, 40. Yea, He does not only wonders, but He is himself in his person the absolute wonder; as the man-become, conceived by the Holy Spirit, risen and glorified Son of God, He is himself the greatest wonder, center of all wonders, author of the re-creation of all things, firstborn from the dead, in all things the First, Col. 1:18. Moreover, the will of God especially includes that the only begotten Son of the Father lay down his life for his own, John 10:18. The New Testament sees in Christ an offering, and the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial worship. He is the true covenant offering; just as the old covenant was confirmed by the covenant offering, Exod. 24:3-11, so the blood of Christ is the blood of the new testament, Matt. 26:28, Mark 14:24, Heb. 9:13ff. Christ is a thysia , the victim for our sins, Eph. 5:2, Heb. 9:26, 10:12; a prosphora , dōron , an offering, Eph. 5:2, Heb. 10:10, 14, 18; a lytron , antilytron , Matt. 20:28, Mark 10:45, 1 Tim. 2:6, ransom, redemption price, to buy someone free from prison, and thence means of atonement, to cover another's sin through an offering and so save them from death; a timē , 1 Cor. 6:20, 7:23, 1 Pet. 1:18, 19, a price paid for the redemption; a sin offering, which for us was made sin, 2 Cor. 5:21, 1 John 2:2, 4:10; the Passover offering, which was slain for us, John 19:36, 1 Cor. 5:7, the lamb of God, which bears the sin of the world and was slain for it, John 1:29, 36, Acts 8:32, 1 Pet. 1:19, Rev. 5:6, and so on; the hilastērion , Rom. 3:25, that is, not the mercy seat, although this word is so translated in the LXX because no better equivalent was to be found in Greek, but that which serves for atonement, means of atonement, or namely sacrifice, atonement offering, cf. Deissmann, Die sprachliche Forschung der griechischen Bibel , Giessen 1898, pp. 16, 17; a curse, Gal. 3:13, who took over from us the curse of the law; as the serpent in the wilderness, lifted up on the cross, John 3:14, 8:28, 12:33, and as a grain of wheat, dying in the earth, to thus bear much fruit, John 12:24. The relation in which this offering of Christ stands to us and our sin is likewise expressed in very different ways. He gives or lays down his life, Mark 10:45, John 10:15, sanctifies himself, John 17:19, is made sin and curse, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13, is delivered up, Rom. 4:25, has given himself up, Gal. 2:20, has suffered, 1 Pet. 3:18, is crucified and died, John 11:50, 51, Rom. 5:6, 1 Cor. 15:3, 2 Cor. 5:15, 1 Thess. 5:10, and that as a lytron anti pollōn , Matt. 20:28, Mark 10:45, in the place of many, or hyper with genitive of person, John 10:15, 11:50, 51, Rom. 5:6, 8, 2 Cor. 5:15, 21, Gal. 3:13, Eph. 5:2, Heb. 2:9, for our sake, for his people, cf. Philem. 13, hyper sou , for your sake, so that you need not do it; or hyper with genitive of thing, John 6:51, 1 Cor. 15:3, Heb. 10:12, for the sake of sins, to take them away, or for the sake of the life of the world, that this through Christ's death may obtain life; or peri with genitive of person, Matt. 26:28, 1 John 2:2, for, on account of many or of the whole world; or peri with genitive of thing, Rom. 8:3, Heb. 10:6, 18, 1 Pet. 3:18, 1 John 2:2, 4:10, for, on account of sin; or dia with accusative of thing, Rom. 4:25, because of, on account of sin.
What Christ has won through this his offering is almost too much to name. For himself he won thereby his whole exaltation, the resurrection, Eph. 1:20, the ascension, 1 Pet. 3:22, the sitting at the right hand of God, Eph. 1:20, Heb. 12:2, the lifting up to Head of the church, Eph. 1:22, the name above every name, Phil. 2:9-11, the mediatorial glory, Heb. 2:9, the lordship over all things in heaven and earth, Matt. 28:18, Eph. 1:22, 1 Cor. 15:24ff., the last judgment, John 5:22, 27. And further he won for his own, for mankind, for the world an unseeable row of blessings. He himself in his person is the sum of all those blessings, the light of the world, John 8:12, the true bread, 6:35, the true vine, 15:1, the way, the truth, the resurrection and the life, 11:25, 14:6, our σοφια, δικαιοσυνη, ἁγιασμος, ἀπολυτρωσις, 1 Cor. 1:30, our ειρηνη, Eph. 2:14, the firstborn and the firstfruits, who is followed by many, Rom. 8:29, 1 Cor. 15:23, the second and last Adam, 1 Cor. 15:45, the head of the church, Eph. 1:22, the cornerstone of God's building, Eph. 2:20; and therefore there is no sharing in his benefits but through sharing in his person. But from Him all benefits yet flow forth: the whole σωτηρια, Matt. 1:21, Luke 2:11, John 3:17, 12:47, and then nearer the forgiveness of sins, Matt. 26:28, Eph. 1:7, the taking away, αἰρειν of our sins, John 1:29, 1 John 3:5, the cleansing or freeing from an evil conscience, Heb. 10:22, the justifying, Rom. 4:25, the righteousness, 1 Cor. 1:30, the υἱοθεσια, Gal. 3:26, 4:5, 6, Eph. 1:5, the bold access to God, Eph. 2:18, 3:12, the laying aside by God of his wrath on the ground of Christ's offering, that is, the ἱλασμος, Rom. 3:25, 1 John 2:2, 4:10, Heb. 2:17, the new, reconciled, no longer foe-like but kindly peace-kinship to the world that has stepped in its place with God, καταλλαγη, Rom. 5:10ff., 2 Cor. 5:18-20, and the peace-kinship of man in regard to God, Rom. 5:1; further the gift of the Holy Ghost, John 15:26, Acts 2, Gal. 4:6, the rebirth and the birth from God, John 1:12, 13, the hallowing, 1 Cor. 1:30, the sharing in Christ's death, Rom. 6:3ff., the dying off of sin, Rom. 6:6ff. Gal. 2:20, the crucifying to the world, Gal. 6:14, the cleansing, Eph. 5:26, 1 John 1:7, 9, and the washing away, 1 Cor. 6:11, Rev. 1:5, 7:14, of sins through the sprinkling with the blood of Christ, Heb. 9:22, 12:24, 1 Pet. 1:2, the walking in the Spirit and in the newness of life, Rom. 6:4, the sharing in the resurrection and the ascension of Christ, Rom. 6:5, Eph. 2:6, Phil. 3:20, the following after Christ, Matt. 10:38, 1 Pet. 2:21ff.; all further the freeing from the curse of the law, Rom. 6:14, 7:1-6, Gal. 3:13, Col. 2:14, the fulfilling of the old and the hallowing in of a new covenant, Mark 14:24, Heb. 7:22, 9:15, 12:24, the redeeming from the might of Satan, Luke 11:22, John 14:30, Col. 2:15, 1 John 3:8, Col. 1:13, the overcoming of the world, John 16:33, 1 John 4:4, 5:4, the freeing from death and from the fear of death, Rom. 5:12ff., 1 Cor. 15:55ff., Heb. 2:15, the escaping from the judgment, Heb. 10:27, 28; and at last, the resurrection, on the last day, John 11:25, 1 Cor. 15:21, the ascension, Eph. 2:6, the glorifying, John 17:24, the heavenly heritage, John 14:1, 1 Pet. 1:4, the everlasting life, here already beginning with faith, John 3:15, 36 and once fully showing itself in glory, Mark 10:30, Rom. 6:22, the new heaven and earth, 2 Pet. 3:13, Rev. 21:1, 5, the restoring of all things, Acts 3:21, 1 Cor. 15:24-28.
4. The history of the teaching of Christ's work shows a different character than that of the dogma of the Trinity and of Christ's person. There has been no certain strife waged over it, which has led to a sharp and clear formulation. The Scripture was also so manifold in the description of that work; and in the history of theology all kinds of views of the work of Christ arose, which contain a kernel of truth, cf. Bähr, The Teaching of the Church on the Death of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, 1832. Baur, The Christian Teaching of Reconciliation in its Historical Development, 1838. Dorner, Development of the Teaching of the Person of Christ, 1851. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work II 113 f. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, part I. Article Reconciliation in Herzog by Schoeberlein, in Herzog by H. Schmidt, and further the dogmatic historical works of Hagenbach etc. The apostolic fathers cleave to the speech usage of Holy Scripture and say only that Christ out of love for us suffered and offered himself up, Barnabas 7. Ignatius to Ephesians 1. Polycarp to Philippians 1. Diognetus 9. Soon however one sought to give some further account of the work of Christ. And then different views come forthwith alongside each other; from the beginning Christ was regarded not only as prophet but also as king and priest. Sometimes these three offices are also expressly named alongside each other; Eusebius speaks of Christ as the only high priest of the whole and the only king of all creation and the only archprophet of the prophets of the Father, Church History I 3, and related sayings also occur in Lactantius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, City of God X 6 etc., cf. Krauss, The Mediatorial Work according to the Schema of the Threefold Office, Yearbook for Theology 1872 pp. 595-655. That does not take away that one or another view sometimes one-sidedly steps to the fore. The stress then falls on it, that Christ is the Logos, who appeared on earth, to reveal to men the full truth and to give them an example of virtue, Justin Apology I 10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies V 1. Tertullian, On Prayer 4. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata V 12. Origen, On Principles III 5, 6. Against Celsus I 67. 68. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 16. Or also the sin is felt more as power than as guilt and accordingly the work of Christ is conceived more as redemption than as reconciliation; God became man, that He might redeem men from sensuality, mortality and demonic dominion and make them like God, partakers of eternal life and immortality, Irenaeus, Against Heresies III 16, 6. 20, 2 IV 2 V 1. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 7. Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechism 17-26 etc. Another well-known and, in spite of the contradiction of Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 42, 48, honored by many view was, that Christ in his death gave himself as a ransom, lure or snare to Satan and thus by cunning overcame him and redeemed men from his dominion, Origen, on Matthew 20:28. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 22-26. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith III 1. 27 etc. And finally from the beginning already the thought occurs, that Christ in his suffering and dying offered himself to God for us and in our place, to acquire the reconciliation, the forgiveness, the sanctification and the whole salvation. Very beautifully we find this thought already in the Epistle to Diognetus chapter 9, cf. Clement of Rome, I to Corinthians 7. Barnabas chapters 5. 6. 7. According to Justin Martyr Christ not only became man, to make himself partaker of our suffering and to bring healing, to make an end to the disobedience that had come into the world, to overcome the power of Satan and of death; but his death is also a sacrifice for all sinners who wish to repent, the Passover that is slain for all, the cause of the forgiveness of sins, Dialogue 40. 111, cf. Semisch, Justin the Martyr II 416 f. Much more clearly says Irenaeus, that Christ, who by his incarnation stands in fellowship with us and has entered into our whole condition, V preface cf. III 18. 7. V 16, 2, by his suffering and death reconciled us to God, III 16, 9, restored us to the favor of God, against whom we had sinned, reconciled the Father for us, made good our disobedience by his obedience and granted us the forgiveness of sins in faith, V 17, 1. And such a view of the suffering of Christ as a sacrifice for our sins, which acquired for us righteousness and life, also occurs in Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Thomasius, II 125 f. Also in the West this view was taken over and further developed. Tertullian saw in religion a legal relation, in which man is subject to God's law and for transgressions has to make satisfaction to God by penitence; just as in the Trinity, so Tertullian brought into vogue different terms in the teaching of penance, to satisfy the offended God, to placate the angry God, to reconcile, to merit God etc., which not yet by himself but yet already by Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose and others were applied to Christ and his offering, Harnack, History of Dogma III 15 f., cf. I 524. Augustine enumerated different fruits of Christ's offering, which all come down to this, that on the one hand it has freed us from guilt, stain, death and devil and on the other hand has granted us enlightenment, life and salvation, Kühner, Augustine's View of the Redemptive Significance of Christ, Heidelberg 1899 p. 18. Alongside the ethical, the mystical and the ransom theory also the juridical or satisfaction one occurs in him. Christ is mediator, reconciler, redeemer, savior, physician, shepherd etc., He is priest and sacrifice at the same time; He is the true and only sacrifice for sins, City of God X 6. Enchiridion 33. 41; himself without guilt, He took over our punishment, to pay therewith our guilt and to make an end to our punishment, Against Faustus the Manichean XIV 4. He made our offenses his offenses, that he might make his righteousness our righteousness. His curse is our blessing; Christ took to himself from you flesh, from himself to you salvation, from you to himself death, from himself to you life, from you to himself reproaches, from himself to you honors, Exposition on Psalm 60.
The conceptions that we encounter among the church fathers concerning the suffering of Christ return in scholasticism. But Anselm’s writing Cur Deus homo nevertheless gave the satisfaction view a predominance over all others. The new thing in Anselm did not consist in this, that he regarded Christ’s death as an offering for our sins. But while formerly it was mostly said that the incarnation and satisfaction were not absolutely needful, Anselm sought for a ground to prove the opposite. He found it in this, that upon sin there must always follow either punishment or satisfaction, and that, if God wills to forgive and save mankind, none other than a God-man can bring that satisfaction to God and restore His honor to Him. But because Christ was the God-man, His wholly willing death was of such great worth that He not only freed from punishment but also moreover merited; and that merit He yielded up for mankind, in whose stead He had restored honor to God, since He Himself had no need of it.
None took over this view of Anselm unchanged. The absolute needfulness of Christ’s incarnation and satisfaction was mostly denied; Duns Scotus stood wholly on the other side, denied the infiniteness of guilt and the infiniteness of Christ’s merit, denied that Christ’s offering was in itself enough, taught that it was reckoned enough by God, and reduced incarnation and satisfaction to sheer willfulness, to the absolute lordship in God; but Thomas also deemed them not utterly needful and called them fitting, Summa Theologica III qu. 1 art. 1. 2. qu. 46 art. 1-3. Further, a single one, namely Abelard, fought the whole satisfaction teaching and set over against it that Christ’s incarnation and suffering was not a showing of God’s righteousness but only of His grace and love; that Christ from the beginning to the end of His life taught us by His word and example and thereby awakens a love in us which frees from sin and makes us God’s children, and that herein lies the redeeming and reconciling might of Christ’s person and work, Herzog 1, 16. Various elements in Anselm’s conception were later rejected by all, such as the wholly private-law character that he gives to the satisfaction, the view of sin as insult and of satisfaction as honor-restoring, the one-sided stress that he lays on Christ’s death with neglect of His life, the contrast that he makes between punishment and satisfaction, the mechanical link that he lays between satisfaction and merit, between Christ’s merit and the reason why it comes to mankind’s good. But that does not take away that Anselm’s teaching yet in its weighty parts, as satisfaction for the guilt of sin to God’s righteousness, thereby to win for us righteousness and life, has gained a lasting meaning in later theology. The redemption brought by Christ was first and most clearly grasped by Anselm as a freeing, not in the first place from the outcomes of sin, from death and from Satan’s might, but foremost from sin itself and its guilt; Christ’s redemption became in the first place a reconciling of God and man.
Yet this came much less to its right in scholastic and Roman theology than in the Protestant. Thomas does not limit the satisfaction with Anselm mainly to the death, but spreads it out to all the suffering and the whole obedience of Christ, Summa Theologica III qu. 46; he also explains the handing over of Christ’s merit to His own better than Anselm from this, that Christ is the head and the church His body, ibid. qu. 8; but he brings it in the view of Christ’s suffering yet to no oneness, grasps it one after another as merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption, ibid. qu. 48 and then names as its fruits the freeing from sin, from the devil’s power, from sin’s punishment, reconciliation, entry to paradise, ibid. qu. 49. The reconciliation stands here not yet in the foreground and it comes also first fully thereby to pass, that Christ as a form of virtue and lowliness awakens us to following, by His love and grace moves us to love and in faith frees us from sin; objective and subjective side of reconciliation, forgiveness and renewal are not enough held apart from each other, ibid. 48 art. 1. 49 art. 1 and further Lombard and other commentaries on Sentences III dist. 18. 19. Bonaventure, Breviloquium IV 7. 9. Later this remains also so with many Roman theologians, Petavius, De incarnatione XII. XIII. Theologia Wirceburgensis IV 295 sq. Deharbe’s explanation of Catholic faith and moral teaching, Utrecht 1888 II 267v., but others yet set all Christ’s work under the concept of redemption, or satisfaction (and merit) or treat it also in the schema of the three offices, Catechism of the Council of Trent I c. 3 qu. 7. Perrone, Praelectiones theologicae IV 1839 p. 309. Liebermann, Institutiones theologicae II 264. Dieringer, Katholische Dogmatik 465. Scheeben, Dogmatik III 309-454. Pesch, Praelectiones dogmaticae IV 198 sq. 256 sq. Jansen, Praelectiones theologicae II 708.
The Reformation originally had no other teaching about the work of Christ than Rome, and defended the satisfaction of Christ with hand and tooth against the Socinian attack. Yet it placed this, by strength of its beginning, under a new viewpoint and in another bond.
Because it had first learned to know sin as guilt, in the work of Christ the atonement came to stand in the forefront. Sin was of such kind that it angered God; to still that anger, to fulfill God's righteousness, thereto was in the first place the satisfaction by the God-man needful. He brought this about by setting Himself as the Surety of the Covenant in our stead, taking upon Himself the full guilt and punishment of sin, and bending Himself under the whole demand of God's law.
The work of Christ lies therefore not so much in lowliness, not only in his death, but in his whole, both active and passive obedience. And he fulfilled this work in his threefold office, not only as prophet by teaching us and giving an example and stirring us to love, but also as priest and king. Calvin first in the Geneva Catechism, thereafter in the edition of the Institutes of 1539 and then from him little by little taken over by Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman theologians.
The outward and the inward side of the atonement are thereby clearly set apart. Christ has fulfilled all. All blessings lie outwardly shut up in his person. Because Christ through his offering has fulfilled God's righteousness, he has outwardly changed the bond of God and man and thereby also all other bonds of man to sin, death, Satan, world.
The first blessing is therefore the forgiveness of sins, and as an outcome thereof also the freeing from spot, death, law, Satan. Christ is the only Go-between of God and men, the all-enough Savior, the highest prophet, the only priest, the true king.
Cf. Luther and Melanchthon in Thomasius. Gerhard, Loc. Quenstedt. Hollaz, Ex. Buddeus, Inst. theol. Calvin, Inst. Polanus, Syst. Theol. Maccovius, Coll. theol. Voetius, de merito Christi, Disp. Turretinus, Theol. El. Id. De satisfactione Christi. Owen, various tracts in his Works, Edinburgh Clark. Moor. M. Vitringa.
5. However, the work of Christ, like his person, was understood quite otherwise by others. The Ebionites saw in Christ only a prophet, who by his teaching and example gives man strength for the strife against sin. For the Gnostics, Christ was an aeon of godly wisdom, who appeared on earth in a seeming human shape, to free men from the bonds of matter through enlightenment and knowledge and to make them spiritual. Over against this speculative rationalism, the Montanists upheld the supernatural, transcendent character of Christianity, not only in the person of Christ but also in the revelation continuing through the Holy Ghost, which is now still the lot of believers and brings the Christian religion from the childish to the manly age. In the dualistic, pantheistic, apocalyptic, and libertinistic sects of the Middle Ages, likewise, no other meaning remained for Christ than that he in his time had revealed to men their true being and destiny, whereby they themselves can now in the age of the Spirit become what Christ was; what Scripture teaches of Christ is fulfilled in every Christian; the true dying and rising of Christ takes place in the rebirth of every man. All these thoughts worked on in the age of the Reformation and led to a strong withstanding of the teaching of Luther and Calvin. Not the Christ for us, but the Christ in us, not the Word but the Spirit was the being of religion. Osiander taught that Christ had brought with him into his human nature the eternal, godly righteousness of essence, and pours this into his own through faith and thus justifies them. Carlstadt, Frank, Schwenckfeld, Weigel, and others saw in trust on Christ's reckoned righteousness a dangerous error; our salvation lies not in what Christ does outside and for us but in what he does in and through us, in the mystical fellowship with God. This mystical view of redemption through Christ also found entry later with many. Boehme viewed God's wrath and death as real, physical powers, which Christ overcame through his death and in whose place he pours out a new godly life into mankind. Among the Quakers, redemption has its cause in Christ, but Christ himself is nothing other than the summing up of grace and light in mankind; the true, real redemption is that which happens in us. Antoinette Bourignon and Poiret called the vicarious suffering impossible and unseemly; Christ came not to earth to satisfy for us, but to preach to us God's forgiving love and to cleanse us from sin by his teaching and example. Likewise, J. C. Dippel took Christ's suffering and dying as an example of his spiritual mediatorship, whereby he kills the old man in us and raises the new; redemption happens in us; an objective atonement is not needed, for there is no wrath in God. According to Zinzendorf, Christ is the Creator and Upholder of all things, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, who therein revealed God's love in that he became so small, so poor, so lowly and suffered so much; his suffering is not so much punishment and satisfaction to God as willing and loving martyrdom; his blood, his death is thereby the source of the life of mankind; the martyr wounds of Christ's side are the womb of the human race, the origin of the Spirit, who pours out from Christ into all. Swedenborg held the belief that the suffering on the cross was the redemption to be a ground error, which with the teaching of the Trinity had ruined the church. The suffering on the cross was not the redemption but was for Jesus the last temptation and, since he stood firm, the means of his glorification; then the human in him was united with the godly of his Father, then God truly became man, could he approach the hostile, sensual powers of hell and overcome them; redemption is an ongoing subduing of hell and ordering of heaven brought about by God as man.
But not only from the mystical, also from the rationalistic side came there strife against the churchly teaching on the work of Christ. To this can be reckoned the teaching of Stancaro, that Christ only according to his human nature is our middleman and our righteousness; and also the denial of the active obedience by Karg (Parsimonius), and by John Piscator, who set forth his thoughts first in a letter in the year 1604. Karg took back his feeling in 1570, but Piscator found upholding by Martinius, Crocius, Pierius, Pareus, Wendelinus, H. Alting and others, and later through Camero, Placaeus, Capellus and such, wielded a harmful sway on the Reformed godlore. But the earnestest and deepest strife against the vicarious satisfaction came from the side of the Socinians. Indeed they still name Christ seer, priest and king, but in deed they make the priestly office into an add-on of the kingly office. When Christ was on earth, he was only seer, who before the beginning of his open treading forth was taken up by God into heaven (raptus in coelum, John 3:13, 31, 6:36, 62, 8:28, 10:28), there by God himself made known with the truth, and thus in state to fulfill the law with new biddings, and to the keepers of those biddings the everlasting life, and the hallowing might of the Ghost, to pledge. This his teaching has Christ strengthened through his sinless life, through his wonders and foremost through his death and his uprising. His death was needful, to make his followers in their godliness and holy walk to the end to hold out, and to strengthen God's love to us clear and plain. And his uprising stretched, to make us in his ensample see, that they who are hearsome to God are freed from all death, and to give to Christ himself the might, to give to all who hear him, the everlasting life. The death of Christ had here thus a wholly other meaning than in the teaching of the church; it shaped no standalone moment in the work of Christ but served only, on one side to strengthen his teaching and on the other side to make him come to the uprising, which first made him to King and Lord in heaven. And also this is he truly first become through his heavenfaring. The uprising belongs still to the state of lowmaking, for also thereafter had he still a deathly body. But at the heavenfaring he got a gloryfilled body, and was uplifted to King, Lord and God. As such he took from God the might, to them who follow his ensample, in all need to uphold and them at last with unsterfliness to reward. That he this can do, is his kingly; that he this will do, is his highpriestly office. Priest was he thus on earth not yet; his death was not the ownlike offering, but the leading in and foremaking thereto; the true offering brings he now in heaven, even as the Old Testament highpriest the atoning first in the allholiest brought to stand. And that offering stands therein, that he the atoning fulfills, that is, us from the thralldom and the strife of sin frees. From this standpoint out must the Socinians the teaching of the fulfillment as strongly strive against as that of the threeness and the Godhood of Christ. Foremost is it after their deeming in strife with the Writ; the upholders can bring no single sure stead for their feeling; the Writ says plain, that God the sin out of grace forgives and forgiveness shuts out fulfillment; the wording, that Christ for us suffered and such, has no stead-taking meaning, but says only, that Christ suffered for us, not to fulfill God, but to free us from the sin; the words freeing, atoning and such mark only, that Christ us the way showed, to be freed from the thralldom and the strife of sin, but utterly not, that God through an offering must be atoned, for God was us graciously minded and has this through Christ made known. Forth is the fulfillment also not needful; the righteousness and mildheartedness in God are not with each other in strife, they are also no ownships, God by kind own, but they are outflows of his own will and hang from his will off; whether God the sins punish or forgive will, becomes in the whole not through his kind but through his will set; God can even so good and better than a man the sins without fulfillment forgive; yes his righteousness becomes through the fulfillment nought done, because it the guiltless strives and the guilty free lets outgo, and his mildheartedness loses her worth, as she first after fulfillment herself can show; God has also always to the sorrowhaving pledged and willed forgiveness, that we him therein should afterfollow. Following is the fulfillment also unmightful; the passive obedience is unmightful, because well golddebts but no ownlike sittly debts on another can be overborne; a guiltless to strive for the sin of another, is unrightwise and grim; and though this mightful, that other would then highest for one single man the strife of sin, that is the everlasting death, can undergo, but never for many or for all men; and what the active obedience agoes, this is still much less mightful, for to the keeping of God's law is each ownlike for himself bound, but can the one never for the other overtake; besides are the passive and active obedience with each other in strife, who the one fulfills, is from the other free; Christ has them also not fulfilled, he has the everlasting death not suffered but is on the third day upstood from the dead; how heavy also, his suffering was endly; his Godly kind could it not unending make in worth, because she not suffer and die could, or she would each moment in that suffering unending and thus all the other overneedful make; besides what could us that boot, there the man had sinned, and how could God (the Son) to God self (the Father) fulfill? Lastly is the teaching of the fulfillment also harmful, while she Christ with his mildheartedness above God with his ask of fulfillment uplifts, us to greater thank to Christ than to God binds, and also the door for carelessness and godlessness opens; all sins are indeed fulfilled, we can then sin as much as we will. And the death of Christ meant just, that we from the sin freed should become and in a new godly life should walk!
The criticism of Faustus Socinus on the satisfaction doctrine was so sharp and full, that later opponents could do nothing else than repeat his arguments. The Remonstrants tried to uphold the satisfaction of Christ, but yet in fact took over all the objections brought against it; they taught not only with Roman Catholics and Lutherans, that Christ had satisfied for all men, but also denied that Christ suffered all the punishments which God had laid upon sin, that He underwent the eternal death, that His active obedience was substitutionary. Even His suffering and dying was no full satisfaction for sins, no payment of debts, which indeed would make forgiveness from God's side and faith from our side needless; but an offering, a full one, upheld even unto death, a dedication of Christ to God, which by Him was deemed enough for all sins. On the ground of that offering God now through the gospel offers to all the forgiveness of sins, that each who believes may be saved; but Christ did not win the actual salvation for His own, but only the possibility to be saved, for all; whether someone is truly saved hangs on himself, Conf. and Apol. Conf. c. 8. Limborch, Theol. Christ. III c. 18-23.
Also Hugo Grotius made in his Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi 1617 an attempt to justify the doctrine of satisfaction. He derived it therefrom, not from the will of God nor from His punishing righteousness, but from the justitia Dei rectoria, that is, from the need for God to uphold in the world order and law, right and righteousness, and to reckon with the common good. But by taking that order of right as a world order which stood outside God, he made God's righteousness serve it and under it; changed the satisfaction of Christ into an unearned suffering, into a punishment example to scare others, into a measure of ruler's wisdom; and left unexplained how Christ therefor had to be God, and how God could make an innocent one suffer so and count his suffering as satisfaction for others.
Yet however many objections the Socinian and Remonstrant doctrine could call forth, it little by little gained the upper hand. The supranaturalists, such as Michaelis, Storr, Morus, Knapp, Steudel, Reinhard, Dogm. § 107, Muntinghe, Vinke, Egeling, Weg der zaligheid II 175 etc., though sometimes still thinking to defend the churchly doctrine, in fact put forth no other doctrine than that of the Remonstrants or of Hugo Grotius. The same was the case in the New England Theology. The elder Jonathan Edwards still defended the orthodox doctrine, Works I 582; but Edwards Jr., Smalley, Maxey, Burge, Dwight, Emmons, Spring, put forth the governmental theory of Grotius, cf. E. Park, The atonement, discourses and treatises of Jon. Edwards, Smalley, Maxey, Emmons etc., New-York 1860. A. A. Hodge, The atonement. But many went yet further and cast off the whole doctrine of satisfaction.
Ernesti, de officio Christi triplici, Opusc. theol. 1773 fought the doctrine of the three offices therewith, that the names of prophet, priest and king are unclear, Old Testament figures and each office already holds the other two in itself. Töllner renewed in his de obedientia Christi activa commentatio 1755 all Socinian objections, not only against the active obedience of Christ but against the whole doctrine of satisfaction. And with him Bahrdt, Steinbart, Eberhard, Löffler, Henke, Wegscheider, Inst. § 140-142, Hobbes, Leviathan ch. 41, Locke, Chubb, Coleridge, John Taylor, Priestley etc., argued that Christ was no showing of God's righteousness but of His love and mercy; that God punishes sin not other than with such natural punishments which flow from sin itself and bear a teaching mark; that the doctrine of substitution is a senseless thought of Augustine and Anselm and in Scripture not at all or only from fitting, in Old Testament symbols comes forth; that the active obedience of Christ, if it were substitutionary, would make needless on our side all faith, turning, moral bettering; and above all, that forgiveness of sins, childship of God, rightmaking cannot go before the moral renewal or hallowing but must follow thereon and hang therefrom.
The religion was built on the moral; the weight point shifted from the objective to the subjective; atonement made hanging from redemption; God a servant of man. So could the death of Christ only yet be an example of virtue and upholding of the truth (Eberhard, Löffler), or a sacrifice for the good of men and a proof of God's love (Schwarze), or a factual saying of God, that He will forgive sins to him who turns (Morus, Köppen, Klaiber, Stäudlin), or a means to wake trust in God, to scare from sin (Töllner, Egeling), or also, to free us from the wrong thought that God is wroth and punishes (Steinbart), or a symbolic showing of the willing taking over by the moral man of the punishment which he in his sinful state has earned, Kant, Religion 84 f., cf. v. d. Willigen, Oordeelk. Overzigt over de versch. wijzen, op welke men zich heeft voorgesteld het verband tusschen den dood van J. C. en de zaligheid der menschen, Godg. Bijdr. II 1828. Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. 608 f. Baur, Chr. Lehre v. d. Versöhnung 478 f. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. I cap. 7. 8.
6. In the newer theology, there have been no lack of attempts to alter the doctrine of Christ's office and work in light of the many objections raised against it, and yet to maintain it in a new form. In general, these attempts were guided by the striving to transform the juridical doctrine of satisfaction, whereby Christ in our place fulfilled the demand of God's righteousness, into that of a personal, religious-ethical activity of Christ, by which He brought about a change not in God, who is always love, but in us, whether more in our understanding or in our heart or in our will. Schelling and Hegel, however, ascribed to Christianity as a historical phenomenon only a passing value. That God becomes man in a particular person and then suffers and dies for the sins of others is unthinkable. But symbolically understood, it contains profound truth. The person and work of Christ are the historical clothing of the idea that the world as God's son, going out from Him and returning to Him, must necessarily suffer and thus enter into glory; the world and mankind, subject to time and finitude, are the suffering and dying God, Schelling, Werke I 5 p. 386-305; the reconciliation of God is a necessary, objective moment in the world process, God reconciles Himself with Himself and returns from alienation to Himself, Hegel, Werke XII 249-256. Reasoning further in this way, von Hartmann said, God cannot redeem me, but I can redeem God, only through me can God be redeemed. The real existence is the incarnation of the Godhead, the world process the passion history of the God become flesh and at the same time the way to the redemption of the One crucified in the flesh, Das sittl. Bewustsein, 1886 p. 688. In modern theology, which does not go so far but is still principally controlled by the philosophy of Hegel and Kant, the person of Christ also attains no higher meaning than that of liberator from the legalistic, historical starting point of the Christian religion; archetypal realization of the sonship of God, of the unity of God and man; proclaimer of God's fatherly love and example for the church, Pfleiderer, Grundriss § 128. 133. Schweizer, Chr. Gl. § 115. 125 f. Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. § 802. 815 f. Lipsius, Dogm. § 619 f., cf. v. Hartmann, Die Krisis d. Christ. in der mod. Theol. 1880. Scholten, L. H. K. I 410v. Hoekstra, Godg. Bijdr. 1866 bl. 273v. Id. Grondslag, wezen en openb. van het godsd. geloof bl. 201v.
Higher stands the person and the work of Christ with Schleiermacher; indeed he taught something wholly other than the church confessed, though he also linked himself to her speech usage and to the teaching of the three offices, but it was nevertheless his aim to assure for Christ a lasting place in Christendom. Redemption comes to pass with Schleiermacher through the mystical union of man with Christ. Christ, namely, always shared in fellowship with God, and was thereby holy and blessed. As such He came to us, entered into our fellowship, took part in our suffering, suffered priestly with us, and upheld His holiness and blessedness even in the deepest sorrow, even unto the death of the cross. Thus first entering into our fellowship, He then, not through His word and example alone but through the mystical working that goes out from His whole person, takes us up into His fellowship, and makes us share through His redeeming work in His holiness and through His reconciling work in His blessedness; redemption, that is, rebirth, hallowing goes before, just as with Rome and rationalism, reconciliation, the forgiveness of sins, Chr. Gl. § 101-104.
This mystical substitution theory remained the ground thought in the reconciliation teaching of the mediation theology, Nitzsch, Syst. d. chr. Lehre § 80. Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 541-558. Schoeberlein, art. Versöhnung in Herzog and Princip u. Syst. d. Dogm. Lange, Dogm. II. Martensen, Dogm. § 156-169, also Hofmann in his Schriftbeweis , which was therefore fought against by Philippi, Thomasius, Delitzsch and others, cf. Weiszäcker, Um was handelt es sich in dem Streit über die Versöhnungslehre? Jahrb. f. d. Th. 1858.
Kin is also the teaching of reconciliation with Ritschl. This cannot be brought into link with God as judge, with His avenging righteousness or wrath, with a right order of reward and punishment; for that is a juridical, Pharisaic view of the bond between God and man, which does not belong in religion. God is in essence love, and His righteousness lies therein, that He unchangingly wills to bring men to blessedness and make real a God's kingdom in them. But now mankind because of sin is far from God, it goes bowed under the awareness of guilt, it has the feeling that it is in a state of punishment, it fears and dares not draw near to God, it lives not in fellowship with God. Therefore Christ has come to reveal to us the love of God. The teaching of the three offices meets with hindrance in Ritschl; the word office belongs only in a right community; in a moral community of love it is better to speak of a calling; the three offices in Christ are also not to be held apart and run into each other; if one wills to keep them, the kingly office stands foremost, Christ is set as king, to found a gathering, a kingdom of God on earth, and thereto has He revealed God as prophet, and offered Himself up to God for His own as priest. Christ stood namely in a wholly special bond to God, He made God's aim, namely to unite men into a kingdom of God, His life task; and His whole life, suffering and dying must be grasped under this viewpoint, as a moral calling that He fulfilled, not as a surety or mediatorship, as a place-taking for us. In that moral life task Jesus was taken up, thereto He hallowed Himself wholly, He stayed true to it even unto death. Thus living, He has fulfilled God's will, made real His aim with mankind, revealed His love, grace, faithfulness, and at the same time in this His holding fast to His life task even unto death offered and hallowed Himself to God for the good of His own. Through this His moral obedience Christ has wrought no working on God, as if this One had become from wrathful kindly minded, nor also brought about that the believers are bought free from the might of Satan or of death; but indeed gained that all who like Christ make God's will their own, in His fellowship may lay off the guilt awareness, unbelief, mistrust, the wrong thought as if God were wroth and punished, and in spite of their sins believe in God's love and faithfulness and may boast in the forgiveness of sins (rightwising), and thereafter also themselves rightly can enter into the new bond in which God stands to them, and lay off all enmity against God, Rechtf. u. Vers. III especially ch. 6-8, and further Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott 1886. Schultz, Grundriss d. ev. Dogm. § 44-46. Kaftan, Wesen der chr. Rel. Dogm. Haering, Zu Ritschl’s Versöhnungslehre , Zurich 1888. Id. Zur Versöhnungslehre , Göttingen 1893. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. Ziegler in Gottschick's Zeits. f. Th. u. K. 1895. Riebergall, ib. 1897. Ecklin, Der Heilswert des Todes Jesu , Basel 1888. Kühl, Die Heilsbedeutung des Todes Christi , Berlin 1890.
Also in other countries similar attempts at mystical or ethical rebuilding of the teaching of satisfaction were tried. Here in our land the Groningen theologians opposed the church's teaching and saw in Jesus' death, which was done by men, suffered by Jesus, and allowed by God, especially in connection with his resurrection, a revelation of God's love, of Jesus' perfection, and of the sin of men, which makes them shrink from their wickedness, teaches them to admire Jesus' greatness, and believe God's love. Hofstede de Groot, De Gron. Godg . Chantepie de la Saussaye took over in his teaching of reconciliation the ideas of Schleiermacher and the mediating theology, cf. my Theol. van Ch. d. I. S . In England Thomas Erskine taught, The unconditional freeness of the gospel 1828, and Dr. John McLeod Campbell, The nature of the atonement , 5th ed. 1878, that Christ did not win God's love but revealed it and so was God's representative with us. But he was also our representative with God, in that he, entering into our fellowship, suffered the deepest sorrow over sin as guilt before God and as the source of all misery, spoke the amen to God's judgment over sin, and as it were made confession of it in our place, and thus as our Head won a righteousness and life, which is not juridically imputed to us but is mystically and ethically shared with us. Horace Bushnell, Vicarious sacrifice grounded in principles of universal obligation , ed. New York 1866, sought to explain Christ's suffering wholly from the vicarious character that all love bears. Maurice, Doctrine of sacrifice 1854, Kingsley, F. Robertson, and others saw in the perfect self-surrender of Christ to the Father's will the essence of the reconciliation brought by him; for all salvation flows to man from the offering of himself. Cf. Orr, Chr. view . Pfleiderer, Entw. der prot. Theol . 1891. Clemen, Stud. u. Krit . 1892. In France these mystical or ethical views of the teaching of reconciliation come especially from: Pressensé, Essai sur le dogme de la Rédemption , Bulletin Théol . 1867. Durand, Etude sur la Rédemption , Revue de théol. et de philos . 1889. Ménégoz, Péché et Rédemption . Bovon, Etude sur l’oeuvre de la Rédemption 1893. The church's teaching remained almost unchanged by no one, but yet it was in the main still set forth by Tholuck, Lehre v. d. Sünde u. v. d. Versöhner 1823. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl . IV 2. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk II. Vilmar, Dogm . § 48. Böhl, Dogm . Bula, Die Versöhnung des Menschen mit Gott durch Christum oder die Genugthuung , Basel 1874. Koelling, Die satisfactio vicaria, d. i. die Lehre v. d. stellvertr. Genugthuung des Herrn Jesu , I Gütersloh 1897. Gess, Jahrb. f. d. Theol . 1857. 1858. 1859. Dorner, Chr. Gl . II. Ebrard, Dogm . § 396. Id. Die Lehre v. d. stellvertr. Genugthuung 1857. Frank, Chr. Wahrheit II². Kähler, Wiss. v. d. chr. Lehre . Id. Zur Lehre v. d. Versöhnung , Leipzig 1898. Ch. Hodge, Syst. Theol . II. Shedd, Dogm. Theol . II. Arch. Alex. Hodge, The atonement , Philadelphia 1867. Dale, The atonement , 18th ed. London 1896. Crawford, The doctrine of H. Scr. resp. the atonement , Edinburgh London 1871. Candlish, The atonement, its reality, completeness and extent , London 1861. Hugh Martin, The atonement in its relations to the covenants, the priesthood, the intercession of our Lord , Edinburgh Hunter. George Smeaton, The doctrine of the atonement as taught by Christ Himself , Edinburgh Clark. Lyttelton, The atonement , in Gore’s Lux mundi 1892. John Scott Lidgett, The spiritual principle of the atonement as a satisfaction made to God for the sins of the world ², London 1898. Merle d’Aubigné, L’expiation de la croix , 2nd ed. Paris 1867. Bois, La nécessité de l’expiation , Revue théol. de Montauban 1888. Id. Expiation et solidarité , ib. 1889. Grétillat, Exposé de théol. syst . IV, and so on.
7. The whole confession of Christendom gathers itself in this, that Jesus is the Christ. With this claim, that He was the Christ, Jesus himself came forth; by this faith Christians stood as a special sect both over against the Jews and over against the heathens; after the name of Christ the believers were first called Christians at Antioch. The name Jesus, Yehoshua and Hoshea (3 p. imp. hi. beside Yehoshia, Ps. 116:6 etc. from yasha, to save, help, and thus He, namely Jehovah, will help), later shortened to Yeshua, Iesous, Jesus, was indeed on the clear bidding of the angel given by Joseph to his son, Matt. 1:21, because He was the full Savior, Acts 4:12, Heb. 7:25, but was yet among Israel a common name, Num. 13:16, 1 Sam. 6:14, 18, 2 Kings 15:30, 23:8, Hos. 1:1, Hag. 1:1, Zech. 3:1, Ezra 2:2, 6, Neh. 7:7, 11, 39, 10:24 etc., Acts 7:45, Heb. 4:1, Col. 4:11. In the name Christ, however, his office, his worthiness comes out. The Jesuits name themselves after the name Jesus and take to themselves a name that belongs to no one, for Savior is Christ alone; but they have also often brought upon themselves the judgment, that they become the less Christians as they are more Jesuits. But the believers name themselves after the name Christ, for they are with Him anointed to be prophets, priests, and kings. Of the other names that mark his office and work, especially comes in reckoning that of mesites, 1 Tim. 2:5, Heb. 8:6, 9:15, 12:24, mediator, go-between, intercessor, because He in the covenant of grace through his person and work unites and atones God and man with each other. In the age of the Reformation arose over this mediatorship of Christ a not unimportant strife. Over against Osiander, who held the essential righteousness of God in Christ for the matter of our justification, Stancarus, professor at Königsberg, defended the thesis, that Christ was mediator only according to his human nature and thus also could justify us only on the ground of his humanly acquired righteousness. He could appeal for this to Augustine, de civ. XI 2, Conf. X 43, Lombard, Sent. III dist. 19, Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 26 art. 2, who all said that Christ was mediator only insofar as man, for insofar as God he is not mediator but equal to the Father; and these theologians were by Stancarus valued much higher than the Reformers: one Peter Lombard is worth more than a hundred Luthers, two hundred Melanchthons, three hundred Bullingers, four hundred Peter Martyrs, and five hundred Calvins; who all if pounded in a mortar, not one ounce of true theology would be pressed out. Lutherans and Reformed came strongly against this and claimed that Christ was mediator according to both natures, that He as such was appointed from eternity and that He had already fulfilled the office of mediator in the days of the Old Testament. The symbolic books of the evangelical Lutheran Church ed. Müller 622. 684. Gerhard, Loc. IV 325. Quenstedt III 273. Calvin, in two letters, C. R. XXXVII 337-358, the ministers of the church of Zurich in two letters. Polanus, Synt. theol. p. 430. Turretin, Th. El. XIV qu. 2. The Roman Catholics held firm that Christ was mediator only according to his human nature, but they had yet to acknowledge that Christ, to be mediator, must be both God and man, that both natures made up the suppositum and the substance of the mediator, and could thus only still claim that Christ fulfilled the mediatorial works, offering, suffering, dying in his human nature, that this thus alone was the principium quo, the formal principle of the mediatorial works, Bellarmine, de Christo V c. 1-8. Petavius, de incarn. XII c. 1-4. But this parting between the person and the work of the mediator is not to be upheld; the mediatorial works have just this ownness, that they are wrought by the one person with both natures. That does not mean, as Petavius ascribes to Lutherans and Calvinists, ib. XII 4, 9, that these ascribe to the divine nature of Christ per se and separated from the human, the mediatorial work. Not according to his divine nature as such, as one and like with the Father and the Spirit, is the Son mediator, but indeed according to that divine nature according to the economy, insofar as according to it by that willing dispensation of grace he submitted himself, Polanus p. 430. The Scripture also names Christ many times according to his divine nature the subject of the humiliation, John 1:14, 2 Cor. 8:9, Phil. 2:6; the church fathers speak many times in the same spirit, Petavius XII 1; Augustine, Lombard, and Thomas meant nothing other than that Christ not according to his divine nature as such, separated from the human nature, but only as the Son of God become man was and could be mediator; and at last the Roman theologians had to defend this themselves against Stancarus.
However, there is yet another difference behind this. If Christ is mediator only according to his human nature in the sense of Bellarmine and Petavius, then he was not a mediator before his incarnation but only began to be so at the moment of his conception, and thus the Old Testament was in fact deprived of a mediator. But even though the Son first became flesh in the fullness of time, yet he was chosen and appointed as mediator from eternity. It cannot be objected here that David, Solomon, and others were also chosen from eternity to be kings and in that sense anointed. For there is this great distinction: David, Solomon, and all the elect existed before their conception only in the idea and decree of God, but the Son was in the beginning with God and was himself God. His election as mediator did not occur apart from him; it bears the character of a pactum salutis; the work of redemption is a joint work of Father, Son, and Spirit, and was immediately begun to be carried out by all three persons after the fall. In the same sense that the Father has been from eternity the Father of his children and the Holy Spirit from eternity the Comforter of believers, the Son has been appointed as mediator from eternity and immediately after the fall acted as mediator. Already under the Old Testament he was active as prophet, priest, and king. The fallen world was immediately handed over to the Son as mediator for reconciliation and redemption. And in the fullness of time he who was already mediator was manifested in the flesh, 1 John 1:2, 3:5, 8. From this it can be explained that the kingly office comes to the forefront in Christ; as such he is especially portrayed and foretold in the Old Testament; and with that title he especially appears among his people. But that kingship of Christ is very different from that of earthly rulers; it has its type only in the theocratic, in the Davidic kingship, which is essentially different from that of other kings; it is a kingship in God's name, subject to God's will, leading all things to God's glory; it is not a kingship of force and weapons, but it rules and governs in an entirely different, much better way; it rules through Word and Spirit, through grace and truth, through righteousness and justice. The king is therefore at the same time prophet and priest; his power stands in the service of truth and righteousness. Because the kingship of Christ bears an entirely unique character, many object to speaking of his kingly office or use the title of king for Christ in a metaphorical sense. Indeed, many consider it better not to speak of office in Christ but of personal calling, for office belongs in a legal community and Christ's kingdom is a kingdom of love and not of law. In truth, an office is distinguished from a calling, trade, or position in that it presupposes an authority, rests on an appointment by that authority, and serves that authority with one's person, not for wages. But it is precisely the word office that ought to be used with regard to Christ. For he did not take the mediatorship upon himself, but God chose, called, and appointed him, Ps. 2:7, 89:19-21, 110:1-4, 132:17, Isa. 42:1, Heb. 5:4-6; the name Christ is not a vocational name but an official name, a title, a dignity, to which Jesus has claim because he was chosen by God himself. Under the Old Testament, especially the kings were anointed, Judg. 9:8, 15, 1 Sam. 9:16, 10:1, 16:13, 2 Sam. 2:4, 5:3, 19:10, 1 Kings 1:34, 39, 2 Kings 9:1, 11:12, 23:30, probably with the holy anointing oil, 1 Kings 1:39, Ps. 89:21; "anointed" was the name of the theocratic king, Ps. 20:7, 28:8, 84:10, 89:39, etc. The anointing with oil was a symbol of divine consecration, of equipment with the Spirit of God, 1 Sam. 10:1, 9, 10. And this anointing, not in an outward, symbolic, but in a spiritual, essential sense, Christ received, Isa. 11:2, 42:1, 61:1, Ps. 2:6, 45:8, 89:21, Luke 4:18, John 3:34, Acts 4:27, 10:38, Heb. 1:9, at his conception from the Holy Spirit, Luke 1:35, and at the baptism by John, Matt. 3:16, Mark 1:10, Luke 3:22, John 1:32. And just as real as his anointing, of which that under the Old Testament was only a shadow, so also was his kingship. The theocratic, Davidic kingship was only its weak type, and has received its essential fulfillment in the kingship of Christ. Christ is not king in a lesser but in a greater, in a much truer sense than David and Solomon. For to the idea of the theocratic king belonged that he must be a man after God's heart, bound to God's law, and not exalt himself as a despot above his brothers, Deut. 17:14-20. Israel's kings did not hold to this kingly law, and so prophecy expected another, better king, who, himself the Lord's anointed and servant of God, would rule his people through truth and righteousness and overcome his enemies. As such a king Christ appears; he establishes a kingdom of God that now exists only spiritually and morally but is destined also to be manifested outwardly and bodily one day in the city of God, where all the ungodly are banished and God will be all in all. And because he is such a king, a king in the true, full sense, therefore his kingship also includes the prophetic and priestly office.
8. This threefold office of Christ, however, meets with objection from many, because the one cannot be distinguished from the other. It must indeed be granted that no single work of Christ can be limited exclusively to one office. His words are a proclamation of law and gospel, and thus point to the prophetic office; but He speaks with authority, and all things obey His command, Mark 1:22, 4:41, Luke 4:32, etc.; He Himself calls Himself a king, come into the world to bear witness to the truth, John 18:37. His wonders are signs of His teaching, John 2:11, 10:37, etc., but also a revelation of His priestly mercy, Matthew 8:17, and of His kingly might, Matthew 9:6, 8, 21:23. In His intercession, not only His high-priestly but also His prophetic and kingly office comes forth, John 17:2, 9, 10, 24. His death is a confession and example, 1 Timothy 6:13, 1 Peter 2:21, Revelation 1:5, but also an offering, Ephesians 5:2, and a showing of His might, John 10:18. Dogmatics has therefore been at a loss as to what in particular from Jesus' life and works could be assigned to each office. Under the prophetic office, the teaching, foretelling, and working of wonders were usually treated; under the priestly office, the offering, interceding, and blessing; but for the kingly office in the state of humiliation, there remained nothing more than the homage of the wise men from the east, the entry into Jerusalem, the appointment of the apostles, the institution of the sacraments; isolated facts, which in part could just as well be assigned to the other offices. Still more difficult was the pointing out of the distinction in the state of exaltation; for Jesus' prophetic work continues indeed in the teaching of His church through Word and Spirit, but as king He also rules and protects His church through these both; and His high-priestly intercession is no begging but a kingly willing, John 17:24. It is therefore an atomistic view that detaches certain works from the life of Jesus and assigns some to the prophetic, others to the priestly, and others to the kingly office. Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. He does not merely perform prophetic, priestly, and kingly works, but is Himself in His whole person prophet, priest, and king. And all that He is, speaks, and does brings that threefold dignity to revelation. Indeed, for us in one work His prophetic office may stand out more, and in another His priestly or His kingly office; and indeed His prophetic office comes more to the fore in the days of the Old Testament and in His walk on earth, His priestly office more in His suffering and dying, His kingly office more in His state of exaltation; but in truth He bears all three offices at once and exercises them all three continually at the same time, both before and after His incarnation, both in the state of humiliation and that of exaltation. Therefore, however, the speaking of three offices in Christ is no whim, no eastern figure of speech that can be given up without loss; neither is one office to be reduced to one of the other two. Separation is not possible, but distinction there is most surely. To be mediator, to be full savior, He had to be appointed by the Father to all three offices and equipped by the Spirit for all three. For the idea of man already contains this threefold dignity and work in itself; he has a head to know, a heart to give himself, a hand to rule and to lead; and accordingly he was in the beginning equipped by God with knowledge and understanding, with righteousness and holiness, with dominion and glory (blessedness). Sin, which spoiled man, worked upon all his powers and was not only ignorance, folly, error, lie, blindness, darkness, but also unrighteousness, guilt, moral corruption, and further still misery, death, and ruin. Therefore Christ, both as Son and image of God for Himself and also as mediator and savior for us, had to bear all three offices; He had to be prophet, to know and reveal the truth of God; priest, to devote Himself to God and in our place to offer Himself to God; king, to rule and protect us according to God's will. Teaching, reconciling, and leading; learning, acquiring, and applying salvation; wisdom, righteousness, and redemption; truth, love, and might, all three are needful for our full salvation. He is prophet in His relation from God to us; priest in His relation from us to God; king in His relation as head to mankind. Rationalism acknowledges only His prophetic, mysticism only His priestly, chiliasm only His kingly office. But Scripture sees in Him all three, and these always and at once, our highest prophet, our only priest, our eternal king. He is king, but He rules not by the sword but by His Word and Spirit; He is prophet, but His word is might and comes to pass; He is priest, but He lives by dying, overcomes by suffering, and is almighty through His love. He is always all together, never the one without the other, in His speaking and doing mighty as a king and in His kingly rule full of grace and truth. Witsius, Exerc. 10 in Symbolum. Amesius, Med. Theol. I 19, 11. Leydecker, de verit. relig. ref. IV 9, 3. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 102. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. IV 2 S. 5. 6. Ebrard, Dogm. § 399. Heraut 509v.
9. This Christ is in his whole person and in his entire work a revelation of God's love. The Gnostics and especially Marcion made a sharp contrast between the God of wrath, of vengeance, of righteousness, who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and the God of love and of grace, who in the New Testament made himself known in Christ. But such a contrast is unknown to Scripture. The LORD God in the Old Testament is indeed righteous, holy, jealous for his honor and wrathful against sin, but he is also gracious, merciful, ready to forgive and great in lovingkindness, Ex. 20:5, 6, 34:6, 7, Deut. 4:31, Ps. 86:15, and so on. In the New Testament, God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the God of all grace and mercy, Luke 6:36, 2 Cor. 1:3, 1 Pet. 5:10; there is no contrast between the Father and Christ; as loving, merciful, and ready to forgive as Christ is, so also is the Father; they are his words that Christ speaks, his works that he does. The Father himself is the Savior, σωτηρ, Luke 1:47, 1 Tim. 1:1, Tit. 3:4, 5, the one who in Christ reconciled the world to himself and did not count its sins against it, 2 Cor. 5:18, 19. Christ therefore did not first move the Father to love and grace by his work, but the Father's love goes before and comes to revelation in Christ; Christ is a gift of God's love, John 3:16, Rom. 5:8, 8:32, 1 John 4:9, 10. Indeed, Paul says in Rom. 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ Jesus as a propitiation through faith in his blood, publicly, before all eyes, εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ; and here without doubt we must think of the righteousness as a virtue of God, which on account of the passing over without propitiation of the sins committed earlier by Jews and Gentiles under God's forbearance seemed not to come to revelation and therefore seemed not to exist; it was therefore necessary that God set forth Christ in the present time, in the fullness of time, as a propitiation through his blood, so that he himself might be shown to be righteous and also justify the one who has faith in Jesus. But even here God's righteousness is not thought of as in conflict with his grace and love. For God's righteousness showed itself not in punishing sinners for their transgressions, but in setting forth in Christ a propitiation through his blood, so that God now in the forgiveness of sins nevertheless proved himself righteous and at the same time could justify the believer. That is, God's righteousness in Scripture consists first of all in this, that he judges righteously, does not hold the guilty as innocent nor the innocent as guilty; and then further, that he helps and saves the poor, the wretched, those who are personally guilty but have the right on their side in the matter, and acknowledges them in their right. In this latter sense righteousness is akin to mercy, faithfulness, truth; but it is always distinguished from these in that it especially notes the anomaly that exists between the right that someone has and the state in which he finds himself. Even here in Paul, God's righteousness is not identical with his goodness, mercy, faithfulness, truth, but it is still much less opposed to them. For it is precisely that virtue of God which gave Christ as a propitiation, so that God could forgive sins out of grace. There is therefore no question of a conflict between God's righteousness and love, as the evangelical hymn 125:5 presents it. In our sinful state this may well appear so to us; but in God all virtues are one and in full harmony. On the one hand, therefore, the notion is to be rejected as if Christ were solely a revelation of God's punishing righteousness. The God of revelation, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is no heathen god, whose envy and hatred against men must be averted by all sorts of offerings; the offering in Scripture, also in the Old Testament, has an entirely different character; it presupposes the covenant of grace. There would also come a Gnostic contrast between Father and Son, which would exalt the Son as the God of grace far above the Father as the God of vengeance and tear apart Old and New Testament, creation and re-creation, nature and grace. But on the other hand, Christ is also not to be understood as a showing of God's love alone, at least not of a love as we often think of it and which differs entirely from God's love in Scripture. In that case not only would the suffering and dying of Christ, which Scripture undoubtedly presents as a punishment for our sin, remain wholly unexplained; but Paul's word would also be directly contradicted, that God gave Christ for this as a propitiation, so that he himself might be shown righteous and justify the one who has faith in Jesus. Scripture rather teaches us that in Christ and his offering all God's virtues came to glorious revelation. Grace goes foremost there, but it is followed by all the others. It realizes itself in the way of right and righteousness, Isa. 1:27, 5:16. Behind the wrath is hidden as the last agent the love, as behind thunderclouds the sun (Delitzsch).
Cf. on Rom. 3:25, 26, besides the commentaries of Philippi, Tholuck, Meyer, etc., Pfleiderer, Der Paulinismus² 143 f. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 100. Fricke, Der Paulin. Grundbegriff der δικ. θεου, erörtert auf Grund von Röm. 3:21-26, Leipzig 1888.
10. This leads naturally to the question much discussed in theology, whether this way of righteousness before God was needful, to show forth His grace, or whether He could also forgive without satisfaction. Scotus went out from the absolute lordship of God and deemed the becoming man and satisfaction only set by God's will; Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas, Calvin, Musculus, Zanchius, Twiss, and others judged them not utterly needful but yet in keeping with God's wisdom as most fitting and meet; Irenaeus, Basil, Ambrose, Anselm, Beza, Piscator, Voetius, Turretin, Owen, de Moor, and others leaned toward holding them for utterly needful. It is to be understood that many rather walked the middle way than to lift up willfulness in God to the throne or to bound His almightiness by an absolute needfulness. Yet there is no hindrance to speak here of needfulness, if this be but well understood. The will in God is neither a formal willfulness sundered from all virtues and from all God's being, nor yet a choice bound by all those virtues and by that whole being and therefore unfree. God's will is often for us the last ground of things and we must rest therein, even if we know not why God has dealt thus and not otherwise. But in God that will always has wise and holy reasons for His so dealing and not otherwise, for He deals never but in keeping with all His virtues, with His love, wisdom, righteousness, and so forth. And this keeping of God's will with all His virtues is no force, no bounding for that will, but even the true, highest freedom. So to will and to deal as His holy, wise, almighty, loving nature itself wills, that is for God both the highest freedom and the highest needfulness. So it is also with the becoming flesh and satisfaction; they may be called needful, not as a force laid upon God from without and from which He cannot flee, but indeed as deeds and dealings that are in keeping with His virtues and bring them to the brightest showing forth. First of all, the Scripture teaches that God does all things for His own sake, Prov. 16:4, Rom. 11:36; the last ground and the last goal, also of becoming man and satisfaction, can not lie in the creature, in the blessedness of the sinner but must lie in God Himself. For His own sake has He sent His Son into the world for a reconciliation for our sins, that thereby His virtues might come to showing forth. And indeed there is no deed that sets those perfections of God so in the light as the becoming man and the satisfaction. Not a single virtue steps thereby into the brightest light, but all together, His wisdom, grace, love, mercy, long-suffering, righteousness, holiness, might, and so forth. Though there is commonly speech only of God's grace and righteousness, yet the other virtues may not be forgotten. Christ is in His person, word, and work the highest, fullest, all-sided showing forth of God, His servant, His image, His Son; He has made known to us the Father. If God willed to show Himself forth in the most glorious way, then to that end the creation and the re-creation, the becoming man and the satisfaction were needful. In the creation His virtues were already shown forth, but much richer and higher yet in the re-creation; the sin He knows almighty to use as a means to glorify Himself. Second, it is the teaching of Scripture that God as the utterly righteous and holy hates sin with godly hate, Gen. 18:25, Ex. 20:5, 23:7, Ps. 5:6, 7, Nah. 1:2, Rom. 1:18, 32. There is an absolute withstanding between God and sin, therein needfully coming out, that He with all His virtues reacts against it; He wills not the sin, He has no lust and good pleasure in it, He hates it and is wroth against it. Sin can not be, without that it be hated and punished by God. God can not deny Himself; He can not acknowledge the right of sin; He can give to Satan no like rights with Himself. Even because He is the utterly holy, He must hate sin. In truth everyone grants that; even if one says that God can forgive sin without satisfaction and as the highest love also must forgive; yet each still owns that God forgives the sin, that is, that He out of grace does not punish it, but to that punishment He owns the right and the might. Even the Lord Chavannes found on the gathering of modern theologians little agreement with his saying, that the wording “forgiving love” is a contradiction in terms and means nothing. Third, God is very surely Father of men, but this name gives by far not the whole bond in which God stands to His creatures. He is also Creator, Upholder, Ruler, Sovereign, Lawgiver, Judge, and so forth, and it is one-sided and leads to error, if one beholds in one of these names with passing by of the others the full showing forth of God. So is God with regard to sin no creditor and no wronged party only, who can remit the debt and forget and forgive the wrong. But He is Himself the Giver, Protector, Avenger of the law, the personal righteousness, and as such He can not forgive sin without satisfaction, Heb. 9:22. In that quality He can not make void the right of the law; for here it goes not about a personal, private right, of which one can make waiver, but about the righteousness, that is, about the virtues and the honor of God Himself. Indeed one could here appeal to the right of grace, which the earthly overlord oftentimes wields; but this right of grace is granted to her only therefore, because she is fallible and in many cases lays on a too heavy or even unearned punishment. In God such a thing can not fall; He is righteousness itself, needs not by grace to restore justice, makes it not void by her, but lets them together in the cross of Christ come to showing forth. Fourth, the moral law as such is no willful, positive law, but grounded in the nature of God Himself; it is also no unpersonal, from God unbound, in itself resting might, so that Christ fulfilled not to God but to her claim; but it is outflow of His being. God, upholding the law, upholds Himself and contrariwise. Therefore is it unbreakable and unbreachable. Through all the Scripture it bears that mark; our own conscience gives witness thereto; and all the so-called moral world order with her showings of accountability, duty-sense, guilt, remorse, fear, gnawing, punishment, and so forth, is built upon this unbreachableness of the moral law. Christ is also not come to loose the law but to fulfill it, Matt. 5:17, 18, Rom. 10:4; He has upheld her majesty and glory; and faith makes not the law void but stablishes it, Rom. 3:31. Fifth, the sin bears in Scripture manifold mark; it is folly, foolishness, guilt, spot, uncleanness, shame, and so forth, it is likened to a money debt, and is under another viewpoint also a wronging of God. But so it comes in Scripture also forth as a misdeed, crime, a trespass against righteousness, a breaching of the majesty of God, which brings us under His judgment, Rom. 3:19, and makes us worthy of death, Rom. 1:32. In this mark it calls for punishment and there is without satisfaction no forgiveness; only in the way of righteousness is it, both as to her guilt and spot as to her might and lordship, fully to overcome. Sixth, hereto may yet be added, that sin is so great, that God, rather than He let it stay unpunished, has punished it in His dear Son Jesus Christ with the bitter and shameful death of the cross. If righteousness had been to be gotten in another way, Christ would have died in vain, Gal. 2:21, 3:21, Heb. 2:10. To gather all together, becoming flesh and satisfaction are thereto happened, that God again as God would be owned and honored by His creatures. Sin was misowning of God and of all His virtues, turning away to and worship of the creature. But in Christ God has again shown Himself forth, restored His sovereignty, righted all His virtues, glorified His name, upheld His Godhead. It was God, also in the work of redemption, first of all about Himself, about His own glory to do.
Voetius, Disp. I 372 II 238 sq. Mastricht, Theol. V 18, 34. Turretin, Theol. El. XIV 10. Id. de satisf. Christi, disp. 1 en 2. Heidegger, Corpus Theol. XIX 80 sq. Heppe, Dogm. 341. Ebrard, Dogm. § 427. Martensen, Christl. Ethik II² 155 f. Dorner, Chr. Gl. II 614. Ch. Hodge, Syst. Theol. II 487. A. A. Hodge, The atonement p. 48. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 378. Hugh Martin, The atonement, Edinb. z. j. p. 172 etc.
11. The Socinians and their kindred spirits, however, have very earnestly opposed this necessity of satisfaction; their arguments all come down to this, that justice and grace, satisfaction and forgiveness, and thus further also law and gospel, Old and New Testament, creation and re-creation, etc., are in conflict with each other and exclude each other. The Christian religion is, according to them, the absolutely spiritual and moral religion, freed from all natural and sensual elements. God is not to be thought of as Judge but as Father; punishing justice, holiness, hatred, wrath against sin are no virtues in God but only love. The Old Testament religion still stood on the standpoint of the law, conceived the relation of man to God as a legal relation; Pharisaism drove this to the extreme, and Paul still made use of this Pharisaic language and did not oppose the Pharisaic combination of law-fulfillment, righteousness, and reward. But yet Paul derives the unfulfillability of the law not from man's sinfulness but from the nature of the law itself, which does not serve to give life but to increase sin. The Christian religion he thus conceives purely as a religion of redemption, as grace, forgiveness, faith. And that is what it indeed is. It is solely religious-ethical, has no more cosmic, juridical, metaphysical components; it is solely the doctrine of salvation, and all else, the doctrine of God, man, sin, the world, etc., must be revised and reworked from this standpoint, christologically and soteriologically. The state is the sphere of law, but religion and law stand directly opposed to each other. Cf. Wegscheider, § 142. Hofstede de Groot, De Gron. Godg. 181. Scholten, L. H. K. II 46v., 57v. Schweizer, Gl. der ev. ref. K. § 63 f. Christl. Glaub. § 94 f. Pfleiderer, Paulinismus² 86-110, 150-159. Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. II 108 f. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III² 8-14, 223-265. Kaftan, Dogm. 544 f. v. Hartmann, Religionsphilos. I 546 f. This whole opposition is, however, false and has always been rejected in Christian theology as Marcionite. First, it is untrue that justice and grace (love) in God would be an opposition; not only does the whole Scripture ascribe to God also the virtues of justice, holiness, wrath, and hatred against sin, but grace even presupposes justice in God and cannot be maintained without it. For grace is that virtue in God whereby He for some reason or other waives His right; if He thus as the righteous and holy One has no right to punish, there can be no talk of grace in Him. Likewise, the highest love in God, that is, the forgiving love revealed in Christ, is no longer love if sin according to God's righteous judgment deserves no punishment. He who denies the right denies also the grace. Second, law and religion (morality) are by no means an opposition. Religion and morality are themselves a right that God has upon us; He demands in His law that man love Him above all and the neighbor as himself. Thereby religion and morality are not lowered or externalized, but on the contrary maintained in their true meaning. God wills that man love Him with all his heart and with all his understanding and with all his strength; He demands the whole man for His service of love. Religion and morality could not exist if they did not root in God's right upon His creature. The moral order is in this sense borne by the legal order. Much deeper than the religious and ethical consciousness, the sense of justice still roots in man. Even among those who have shaken off all religion and all morality, it often lives on strongly. And indeed it is true that the perfect man loves God and the neighbor spontaneously and according to the prompting of his holy nature; but this changes nothing in the fact that precisely that service out of love agrees with God's law and is prescribed therein. The moral law is indeed a demand and a right of God, even though it claims the whole man and desires a service in spirit and truth. For just as religion and morality root in a right of God, so conversely that right of God is no abstract, formal arbitrariness, but precisely grounded in God's nature; the legal order itself bears an ethical character and finds in the moral order confirmation and support. Third, therefore, the assertion is incorrect that the moral world order first became a legal one through sin, Kaftan, Dogm. 370. 545. Legal it has indeed become for man through sin, in the sense that the love to God and the neighbor now stands as a commandment outside and over against him, to which he cannot respond, which he has transgressed, and whose punishment he deserves. But legal it has not become through sin, as if it did not rest in a right and a law of God. Lutheran theology has indeed taught this, but Reformed theology has judged otherwise and better. The law is indeed the norm, also apart from sin, grounded in God's being for the whole moral world order. This is even unthinkable without a law. All religion and morality presupposes a law. Where there is no law, there is also no transgression. He who detaches the moral world order from the law makes it objectively and subjectively into arbitrariness and digs away the foundation from under its feet. Fourth, he who thus places law and grace dualistically over against each other comes into conflict with Scripture on all points. The state of integrity, as the life of man created after God's image in agreement with the moral law, can no longer be maintained. Sin is no guilt and deserves no punishment, except in the consciousness of the sinner. The law has no eternal but only a temporal, passing, pedagogical meaning. The Old Testament as the religion of the law no longer concerns us. The doctrine of God's righteousness and of satisfaction in Christ is a Jewish, Pharisaic intrusion into the theology of the New Testament. The forgiveness of sins is a subjective coming to insight that they are no guilt and deserve no punishment. Sanctification is moral, autonomous self-development. The church is only a religious-ethical community and has nothing to do with law and right. Under the appearance of conceiving the Christian religion more purely, it is robbed of its heart and core. Finally, fifth, if however grace, love, forgiveness are wholly undeserved and all presuppose the voluntary waiving of a right, then certainly with Socinus, de Christo Servatore I 1, the question can still be asked whether God cannot waive that right without demanding satisfaction; God is yet slow to anger, longsuffering, and merciful, and in Scripture forgives many times without any satisfaction being spoken of, if only sincere repentance is present, Deut. 30:1-3, Jer. 3:13, 14, 18:8, Mt. 18:24v., Luk. 15:11v. With this question, if it is really seriously meant, there is then no difference de jure but only de facto. God had the right to demand satisfaction; grace and forgiveness presuppose it; there is only difference about whether God has demanded that satisfaction. It will presently appear that the suffering and dying truly bears a satisfactory character. Over against this reality, the question of the possibility whether God could have waived His right to satisfaction is of very subordinate meaning. But in any case it is impermissible to oppose forgiveness to satisfaction, as if the one excluded the other. For not only are they connected with each other in Scripture, Lev. 4:31, Rom. 3:24-26, Hebr. 9:22, but they are also placed in such relation to each other that satisfaction precisely opens the way to forgiveness. In money debts, satisfaction indeed cancels forgiveness, because here it does not at all depend on the person who pays, but only on the sum that is paid. But in moral debts it is wholly otherwise. These are personal and must be punished in the guilty one himself. If here a substitute is allowed, then the allowing of such a substitute and the letting his merits count for those of the guilty is yet always an act of grace. Satisfaction Christ gives to God, but forgiveness God grants to us; forgiveness is not with a view to Christ but with a view to us grace. The satisfaction of Christ opens for God the way to forgive sins out of grace without violation of His right and to justify the ungodly. If sin is of such a nature that right and justice, law and truth suffer not the least damage even if it is not punished, then also the grace of forgiveness is not great. But if sin is so great that God, before He let it remain unpunished, punished it with the bitter and shameful death of the cross in His beloved Son Jesus Christ, then the riches of God's grace, the power of His forgiving love, come to light. Then also man finds in that satisfaction rest and comfort for his accusing conscience and can without any fear rejoice in the forgiveness of his sins; for the perfect satisfaction guarantees the absolute, irrevocable, eternal forgiveness. Cf. Maccovius, Coll. theol. I 274. Mastricht, Theol. V 18, 35. Turretinus, Th. El. XIV qu. 10, 8. Id. De satisfactione p. 44. Hoornbeek, Socin. Confut. II 629. Petrus de Witte, Wederlegginge der Socin. Dwalingen, Amst. 1662 II 90v. Leydecker, Vis verit. p. 82. Moor III 1031. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II 382. Martin, The atonement 183 etc.
12. The work that Christ wrought for his own consisted in general in his utter and full obedience to God's will, Matt. 3:15, 20:28, 26:42, John 4:34, 5:30, 6:38, Rom. 5:19, Gal. 4:4, Phil. 2:7, 8, Heb. 5:8, 10:5-10, and so forth. This rich thought has oftentimes not come to its right in theology. The suffering of Christ has often been loosed from the deed of obedience that spoke itself therein, and thus made into an object of godly musing. In the Christian church, the martyrs, the monks, the beggars, the scourgers have in turn been deemed the true followers of Jesus; self-denial and self-torment in sundry shapes were the Christian virtues above all; the following of Christ stood in a copying and mimicking of deeds and states from his life, namely from his suffering; Christ was the great sufferer, the high martyr, whose suffering must be an object of beholding and copying.
By Anselm, the satisfaction of Christ, since he was already bound to obedience to God's law for himself, consisted only in his suffering and dying, which by him as a work of overdoing was added to his life and as a free gift offered to the Father. The Roman theology speaks itself not with one voice and without double meaning about the active obedience of Christ. Trent does make mention of the most holy passion of Christ, but the theologians cast it off wholly or yet grasp it so that Christ did not fulfill God's law in our stead. Also among Protestants, by Mystics, Anabaptists, Moravians, and so forth, understandings of Christ's suffering as something thing-like come forth, which do short to his active obedience. Even Parsimonius and Piscator denied it, because Christ was already bound to this obedience for himself, and this obedience thus was indeed a needful personal requirement, to our good, but no part of his satisfaction, wrought in our stead; because Holy Writ always binds to Christ's suffering and dying alone our whole blessedness, both the forgiveness of sins and the everlasting life; and because the believers, even though they have forgiveness and everlasting life, yet remain bound to keep the law.
The Lutherans saw herein Nestorianism and said that the person of Christ according to both natures was Lord of the law and thus also not as man of himself under the law for his person. But the Reformed could not speak thus, because Christ as true man was surely bound to keep the law, and to love God above all and the neighbor as himself. Yet they rightly cast off the feeling of Piscator. For first , Holy Writ grasps all the life and work of Christ as one whole and never makes a sundering between an obedience of life, which he wrought for himself, and an obedience of death, which he wrought for us. It is one work that the Father laid upon him and that he brings to an end in his death, John 4:34, 17:4, 19:30. His serving fulfills itself in the giving of his soul as a ransom for many, Matt. 20:28. Even Paul, who lays all weight on the cross of Christ, sees in his death not his whole but the fulfilling of his obedience. He became under the law, Gal. 4:4, in the likeness of sinful flesh, Rom. 8:3, did not live to please himself, Rom. 15:3, in his becoming man already emptied himself and took the shape of a bondservant, humbled himself throughout and became obedient unto death, Phil. 2:7, 8, 2 Cor. 8:9, and so it is one righteousness and one obedience that gives to many the righteousness of life, Rom. 5:18, 19. It is therefore wholly against the Writ to bound the satisfying work of Christ to his suffering, or even as Jacob Alting did, to the suffering during the three hours of darkness on the cross. The call upon places like Zech. 3:9, John 19:30, Rom. 6:10, Heb. 7:27, 1 Pet. 3:18, where it is said that Christ once, on the tree, suffered and cried out: it is fulfilled, proves nothing against this, because in the suffering and dying all the foregoing life of Christ is taken up, summed, and fulfilled.
Rather, all the life and work of Christ from his conceiving onward unto his death is in its kind stead-taking. The taking of human nature itself and on itself bears not yet this mark, because all mediator works take for granted the two natures; but his holy conceiving and birth and all his holy works are grasped in the one work of Christ. Heidelberg Catechism qu. 36 and 60. Belgic Confession art. 22. Acts of Synod of Dort sess. 172. 173.
Second , it is surely true that Christ as man was under the law for himself; only, his becoming man and his being man did not happen for himself but for us. Christ was never and may never be deemed as a private person, an one beside and on even line with others; he was from the outset a public person, the second Adam, surety and head of the chosen. As Adam sinned for himself and thereby laid guilt and death on all, whose stand-in he was; so Christ through his righteousness and obedience won forgiveness and life for all his own. More yet, surely Christ as man was under God's law as rule of life; even the believers are never freed from the law in that wise. But Christ set himself in a wholly other bond to the law, namely to it as law of the work covenant. Adam was not only bound to keep the law, but the law was held before him in the work covenant in another shape, namely as way to the everlasting life, which he did not yet own. Christ however had through his oneness with the godly nature the everlasting and blessed life. Thereof he freely gave up; he set himself under the law of the work covenant as way to everlasting life for himself and his own. The obedience that Christ brought to the law was thus a wholly free one. Not his death alone, as Anselm said, but all his life was a self-denial, one self-offering, brought by him as Head in the stead of his own.
Third , that the believers are still ever bound to keep the law as rule of life proves nothing against it. If this proved something, all the satisfying would fade from Jesus' life and suffering. For the believers have yet sundry sufferings as outcome of sins to bear, they are yet tried by Satan and lured by the world, they sin yet time and again and must yet die, and so forth, and so Christ would have freed them from nothing, neither from sin nor from its outcomes. Jacob Alting reasoned so and said therefore that Christ freed his own only from the everlasting death through his hellish fears during the three hours of darkness on the cross, but not from suffering, bodily death, and so forth. But this beholding of the work of freeing is without doubt wrong. The freeing is full, a freeing of the whole man after soul and body, from all sins and outcomes of sin. And this is wrought in and through Christ's life and dying. But as his kingdom is by him sundered into an unseen, ghostly and a seen, on earth once to set up realm; as he himself once came to suffer and shall come again to deem living and dead; so the freeing brought by Christ is slowly worked out and laid on, first ghostly, then bodily. Now in this sharing the believers are ghostly freed from every guilt and might of sin and its outcomes, from world, Satan, death; they have the forgiveness of sins and the everlasting life; law, Satan, death can no more rob them of these; and once they shall also outwardly, bodily be freed from all sin and might of sin. The whole new-making, as it shall be fulfilled in the new heaven and the new earth, is fruit of the work of Christ. As it is one-sided to see with Alting the fruit of Christ's work only in the freeing from everlasting death; even so one-sided is it to bound with Ritschl that fruit to the ghostly, upright lordship of the Christian over sin and world in this side.
The whole person of Christ, both with his active and passive obedience, is the pledge for the whole freeing.
Calvin, Inst. II 16, 5. III 14, 12. Comm. on Rom. 5:19, Gal. 4:4. Gomarus, Theses theol. disp. 19, 9. Junius, Theses theol. 36, 8. Synopsis pur. theol. 29, 35. Turretin, Th. El. XI 22. XIV 13. Cloppenburg, Op. I 504 sq. Witsius, Oec. foed. II 3, 18 sq. Cocceius, de foedere V 93. Quenstedt, Theol. III 281. Gerhard, XVI 57 sq. Walch, Comm. de obed. Christi activa 1755. Baur, Versöhnung 478v. Philippi, Der thätige Gehorsam Christi 1841. Id., Kirchl. Gl. IV 2 S. 142 f. Frank, Chr. Wahrheit II 172. Id., Neue kirchl. Zeits. 1892 S. 856. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers I² 271 f. A. A. Hodge, The atonement 248-264, and so forth.
13. While Piscator and many others excluded the active obedience from the satisfaction, in newer theology the passive obedience does not come to its right. After Socinianism and Rationalism had subjected the church's satisfaction doctrine to sharp criticism, many in the present time still try to maintain it by reworking it in a mystical or ethical sense. The conception is then in the main this, that Christ's suffering and dying was not needful to satisfy God's righteousness nor required by God as an offering for our sins, but that it was the consequence of his life in obedience to God's will, the proof that he remained faithful to God in his religious-ethical calling even unto death, the historical necessary result of his holy life amid a sinful world. Over against such views which wholly detach the suffering and dying of Christ from the person and set it as something objective in itself, this conception possesses an undeniable right. For Christ is the faithful witness, Rev. 1:5, he witnessed a good confession under Pontius Pilate, 1 Tim. 6:13, his suffering and dying is no fate but a deed, he has power to lay down his life as to take it up, John 10:18. But yet it itself is pressed by no less earnest objections. 1º Already this is of meaning, that the mystical and ethical theories in Jesus speak only of a calling and no more of an office. Herein lies already all the difference. If Christ exercised a calling, then he himself through his bent, upbringing etc. developed himself thereto, stands he not above but beside us, has he only outstripped us in religious and ethical sense, and can and must we as much as possible conform ourselves to his example. If Christ on the other hand is anointed to the office of prophet, priest and king, then is he appointed by God, has from him received a work to do, stands he with authority above us, to teach us, to represent us before God's face, to rule us according to his will. 2º Consequence of this view is, that the suffering and dying of Christ remains wholly unexplained. Schleiermacher derived it therefrom, that Christ as holy entered into our sinful fellowship; he let it consist in fellow-feeling with human guilt and punishworthiness and saw in his death consequence of his zeal for his calling. Ritschl says likewise, that it is the faithfulness to his calling which qualifies Christ to an offering; his death was no offering but an unintended result of the conflict between him, the holy, and the sinful mankind, the accident of his positive faithfulness in the calling. The Groningen theologians saw in the death of Christ a thing done by men, suffered by Jesus and allowed by God, and took the "must" in Matt. 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22 in moral sense. A theory now which declares the suffering and dying of Christ for accidental is therewith already fully judged. 3º For the Scripture says clearly that Jesus' suffering and dying was beforehand determined and needful. Indeed one tries in newer time to show that Jesus first gladly and with great expectations appeared among his people and only saw the needfulness of his death since the day at Caesarea Philippi, Matt. 16:20ff., as result of the enmity which little by little developed against his person. But Kähler rightly calls this a fable. The Messiah-consciousness which Jesus according to his baptism by John possessed from his appearing onward; the name Son of Man which he with clear consciousness and a certain intent ascribed to himself; the applying to himself of Isaiah's prophecy, Luke 4:21; the foretelling that he as the bridegroom would be taken from his disciples, Mark 2:20; the likening of himself to Jonah, Matt. 12:40 and to the serpent in the wilderness, John 3:14; the preaching of the kingdom of heaven in spiritual sense, of self-denial and cross-bearing, of the hate and enmity of the world, Matt. 5, 10, 11:16ff., 12:25ff., prove abundantly that for Jesus' consciousness the death from the beginning stood fast as the goal of his life; so had the prophecy taught him. The day of Caesarea Philippi brought only this change, that Jesus openly declared to his disciples that he was the Messiah, that he would be delivered up and on the third day rise, Mark 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22. And he adds that this must so be, not because he was morally bound to die or so alone could remain faithful to his calling, for a moral duty to be delivered up, killed and even raised exists not, but because it was so determined in God's counsel and foretold in Scripture, Matt. 26:54, Luke 22:22, 24:26, 44, 46, John 3:14, 7:30, 8:20, 10:18, 11:9, 12:23, 17:1, 20:9, Acts 2:23, 4:28, 1 Cor. 15:3. 4º The two texts Matt. 26:39 and Heb. 5:7 are hereby in no wise at odds. According to Heb. 5:7 he prayed not for freeing from death, as if he had not acknowledged this as needful; for it stands clear that his prayer, notwithstanding his death, is heard by God; but Christ prayed that he might not perish in death but be saved therefrom and raised and glorified; he came just to do God's will through his dying and hallowed us through that will, Heb. 10:5-10. This throws light on Matt. 26:39-42; Jesus prays there not according to his will which he just submits to that of the Father, but according to the bent which is inborn in human nature to flee own ruin; he looks against death as death, but prays just that God may strengthen him to do God's will in his dying, that God's will may be done not only to him but through him. 5º The suffering and dying of Christ takes in Scripture such a place that it cannot be taken as the accident of his calling-faithfulness. To the describing thereof is the greatest part of the gospels devoted. And it is not described as a martyrdom but as a judgment of God, as the will of the Father, as the offering of a priest. He dies not for his faith but is rightly condemned because he claims to be the Son of God, the Messiah. He goes not gladly to meet death but is moved, sorrowed, amazed, afraid unto death and is in heavy strife so that his sweat became as drops of blood, Matt. 26:37, 38, Mark 14:33, Luke 22:44, John 12:27. If the life and death of Socrates are of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are of a God (Rousseau). In the preaching of the apostles the cross of Christ is the midpoint and the cause of all saving benefits. Much more than on the life falls the stress on the death of Christ; and that death is always brought in bond with our sins; for the sins' sake is Christ died and thereby has he for his own won righteousness and life. Though that suffering and dying may not be loosed from the person, it is yet determined by God as such willed, by the Son fulfilled; it forms in the life of Christ not an accidental, only through circumstances needful become, but an essential, needful part; thereby in the first place is the atonement of sins, righteousness and salvation won. 6º Indeed against this is brought in that God not on account of but only through Christ grants us the benefits of the covenant of grace; so formerly already Socinus and others and now for example Scholten. The Lutherans even took pleasure in accusing the Reformed that they by force of their predestination doctrine must deny the satisfaction of Christ and could view him only as instrumental cause of salvation; the Reformed said indeed also themselves that Christ was not foundation and cause of election; the elect were already object of God's love before Christ was appointed as their mediator and were chosen not on account of but in and unto Christ. But this accusation is untrue. Christ is very surely proof and revealing of the Father's love; logically our election to salvation goes before his election to mediator; God is thus not first moved by Christ to love sinners. But herein consists just God's love that he that salvation which he wills to grant sinners lets in time be won for them by his own Son and so grants it to them in agreement with his righteousness. God's grace thus does not undo the satisfaction and merit of Christ but is just the last ground for that merit, because by mere good pleasure he set the mediator who should acquire salvation for us. Nay because he first loves, thereafter he reconciles us to himself. Already we loving are reconciled. And these both, God's love and Christ's satisfaction, must and could therefore go together because we at once as creatures the object of his love and as sinners the object of his wrath were. So it is sheer grace from which God forgives sins, he does it for his own sake, for his great name's sake, Isa. 43:23-25, Ezek. 36:21, Eph. 1:17, 1 John 2:12, but this is so little at odds therewith that God forgives us sins for Christ's sake that God's name is first revealed to us in Christ. That God forgives sins and grants life only from grace, for his own sake and not for something in us, that has Christ proclaimed to us, that has he won for us. The forgiveness from grace as bent in God eternally present and going before the election and sending of Christ (love of benevolence) is yet first through Christ's offering in time made possible (love of complacence). The benefits themselves are won by Christ though the bent to grant them to the elect has been present in God from all eternity. Christ is made sin that we might be God's righteousness in him. He is become of a woman and become under the law that he might redeem us from the curse of the law and we might receive the adoption of sons. As Adam is cause of sin and death so is Christ the fount of righteousness and life, Matt. 20:28, 27:28, John 1:18, 15:13, Rom. 5:12ff., 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, 2 Cor. 5:19-21, Gal. 3:13, 4:4, 1 John 4:9. So understood the saying that God forgives us sins and grants eternal life on account of Christ, for Christ's sake, is scriptural and taught by the whole Christendom, also by the Reformed. Finally 7º , the mystical and the moral theory touch on all points with Scripture and with Christian religion at odds. The first-named deems the being of religion to lie in the mystical oneness of God and man. This is disturbed by sin but restored by Christ and indeed not so much by what he does as by what he is, by his person more than by his work, by his birth more than by his cross. How that mystical oneness of God and man is now restored by Christ is on this standpoint hard to say. Hegel said that that oneness objectively exists but by Christ first clearly seen and spoken out. Schleiermacher sets it so that Christ first entering into our sinful fellowship thereafter takes us up into the fellowship of his holiness and blessedness. The mediation theology often speaks so that Christ pours into us a new God-human life. All these ways of conceiving come from pantheism and are without this wise-teaching system simply ununderstandable. The moral theory goes out from the thought that God requires no satisfaction but in his love gave us Christ that this one through his teaching, life and dying might assure us of God's love, change us in our hostile bent and scare us from sin. And also the governmental theory of Grotius sees in God the Rector of the world who personally indeed could and would forgive but in the interest of world order must punish sin exemplary, to a scare for others. In all these theories now one can still speak of Christ as Son of God, of his priesthood and offering but one speaks then in figure sense, uses the words in unwonted meaning and gives occasion to misunderstanding. For it is clear that in pantheism and deism for the Christ of Scriptures no place is. The high priesthood of Christ changes then into a martyrdom, his offering into an example, the Christian religion into a teaching-way and the church into a school. Righteousness is no virtue of God but only in the state in its place. Sin is no guilt and punishment no right-restoring. Man is not so evil or he can through a moral example, through a shock or an impression be changed to good. The objective satisfaction is turned into the subjective atonement; the own, true atonement has then first place when man follows Jesus' example and changes himself. The believers under the Old Testament had Jesus' example not yet, are thus either all lost or become blessed in another way than we, and Christ is not the only name under heaven given to men for salvation. Above all remains in all the named theories the bond unexplained which Scripture lays between Christ's death and the forgiveness of our sins and eternal life. It is not to be seen how Christ's death as an example can be the ground of these benefits why God for Christ's sake forgives us sins and grants life. In fact everything comes down hereto that Christ through his image makes a deep impression on man's understanding or on the will or also on the feeling and so frees him from the deeming that God is wroth with him for his sin or from the self-love which holds him bound or from the feeling of unblessedness which presses him down. But in none of these cases is true peace and rest granted to man. For the conscience is not thereby cleansed and the guilt-feeling not thereby taken away. Peace is there only in the blood of the cross!
14. This active and passive obedience of Christ, which is so clearly taught in Scripture, cannot be upheld except by understanding it as vicarious satisfaction. The opponents of this teaching, however, often present it as if one must distinguish, in the work as well as in the person of Christ, between the pure facts and the theories that have been devised to explain them. First, this distinction is made with regard to the church's doctrine of vicarious satisfaction, but soon afterward also with regard to the teaching of the apostles. In the end, nothing remains but the bare fact of Christ's death itself; the interpretation and appreciation of the fact is left to everyone's whim. But that is not how things stand. Word and fact go together in God's revelation; Christ is priest but also prophet; He has explained His own person and work; He Himself has interpreted His death in His word, and Christian theology is bound to that. There are therefore not many theories—the moral, the governmental, the mystical, the private- and public-legal—which are set up by theology as hypotheses to explain the facts and phenomena, and which as different attempts at solution all have equal right to exist. But the question is, what in all these opinions and teachings agrees with Scripture and is grounded in it. When the question is put this way, there is hardly any doubt possible whether vicarious satisfaction is taught by Scripture. The exegesis that the Socinians and Rationalists applied to remove it from Scripture is no longer accepted by anyone. And the interpretation of Ritschl may have fascinated for a time because of its ingenuity, but its untenability is now doubted by scarcely anyone; cf. Kreibig, Die Versöhnungslehre auf Grund d. chr. Bew. 1878. Frank, Die Theol. Ritschls 1891. Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, Jahrb. f. pr. Theol. 1889. Id. Entw. der prot. Theol. Orr, The Ritschlian theology, London 1897. Impartial reading of Holy Scripture always finds in it again the church's doctrine of vicarious satisfaction; Wegscheider, Instit. theol. § 136. Pfleiderer, Der Paulinismus². Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. enz.
Indeed, Holy Scripture shows us in the entire work of Christ a fulfillment of God's law, a satisfaction of his demand. As prophet, priest, and king, in his birth and death, in his life and suffering, in his words and miracles, in his speaking and acting, he always fulfills God's will; he came to do that will; the law of God was in the inmost parts of his being; his whole life is one perfect offering, to God a sweet-smelling savor.
That will of God is one, and one also is the will of Christ, and one his offering. But yet a twofold side can be very clearly distinguished in it. Twofold indeed was the demand placed by God on fallen man, namely, that he should perfectly keep the law and also restore its transgression by punishment. Twofold are the benefits which Christ has acquired for us, namely, the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Both are not identical; justification does not automatically coincide with heavenly blessedness. Adam before his disobedience was indeed righteous, but still had to acquire eternal life in the way of works. Bearing punishment is in itself not at all one with fulfilling the law; the criminal who is punished but hardens himself under the punishment fulfills justice but by no means answers the entire demand of the law. Moreover, Christ was the second Adam; he came not only to bear the punishment for us but also to acquire for us that righteousness and that life which Adam had to acquire by his obedience; he freed us not from guilt and punishment alone and placed us not at the beginning but at the end of the way which Adam had to walk. He grants us much more than we lost in Adam, not only the forgiveness of sins and the remission of punishment, but also immediately in faith the inability to sin and the inability to die: he who believes in him is not condemned and has eternal life, John 3:16, 18.
Both kinds of benefits are therefore also, although in concreto they are never to be separated, yet often mentioned separately alongside each other, Daniel 9:24, John 3:36, Acts 26:18, Romans 5:17, 18, Galatians 4:5, Revelation 1:5, 6. And so it is also with the active and passive obedience of Christ. They are distinct, but in concreto, in the life and death of Christ, they always coincide. The active obedience is no outward addition to the passive, nor vice versa. No single act and no single event in the life or suffering of Christ is to be brought exclusively to the one or to the other. Just as Christ is always and in everything at the same time prophet, priest, and king, so he is also always active for the reconciliation of the guilt of sins and for the acquisition of eternal life. It is not even good to say that the forgiveness of sins is acquired only by his passive obedience, and eternal life only by his active obedience. For his suffering was not a bearing of punishment alone but also a fulfilling of the law; and his work was not a fulfilling of the law only but also a bearing of its punishment. His doing was suffering and his suffering was doing. It was one work that Christ accomplished, but so rich, so valuable in God's eyes, that the righteousness of God was fully satisfied by it, every demand of the law fully met by it, and the entire, eternal blessedness acquired by it.
The satisfactory nature of Christ's obedience consists not in this, that he satisfied a vengeful Deity by blood, stilled her hatred and envy by a quantity of suffering; but it lies in this, that from the beginning to the end of his life he subjected his will to the entire, perfect, holy, and loving will of God, and consecrated himself with body and soul and all powers to God as a perfect offering. But that will of God embraced according to the teaching of Scripture not only the life but also the suffering of Christ; and that offering consisted not only in his "moral calling" but also in his death on the cross. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder. Cf. Turretin, Theol. El. XIV 13, 11 sq. Mastricht, Theol. V 18, 14. Moor III 960 sq. Heppe, Dogm. d. ev. ref. K. 326. 341. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. 104, 2. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. I² 279 f. III² 61.
However, the obedience of Christ is not only a satisfaction; it is a vicarious satisfaction. Scripture also speaks clearly about this. The idea of substitution is actually contained in all sin offerings; it puts something else in the place of the offerer, who is worthy of God's wrath, something that can make Him favorable again. In Israel's history, we find the idea of substitution already with Abraham, when on the command of the Angel of the Lord he does not stretch out his hand toward his son, but offers a ram as a burnt offering in his son's place, Gen. 22:12, 13. In the Old Testament worship, in the sin offerings, the laying on of hands transferred the sins of the offerer to the sacrificial animal, Lev. 16:21; the atonement itself comes about not in one but in three acts, namely, slaughtering, sprinkling of blood, and burning; though laden with the sins of the offerer and thus worthy of death, the sacrificial animal is not simply killed but slaughtered. It is not about death as such, without more, for the sacrificial animal is meant to make atonement and restore the offerer to God's favor. That favor is not to be gained by the death of the sacrificial animal without more, but by the blood, the soul, the life of the animal—laden with the sins of the offerer and therefore killed, but yet in itself completely innocent—being brought and dedicated to God. Thus that blood, as the self-offering of a living being that is not killed but slaughtered for that reason, makes atonement for the sins of the offerer; it makes the whole animal in the burning a sweet savor to God; the offerer himself then fully shares in His favor, the animal has from beginning to end taken his place and thus reconciled him and restored him to fellowship with God. Isaiah drew the features for his portrayal of the Servant of the Lord from this worship; the vicarious punishment cannot be expressed more strongly than in Isa. 53; the Servant of the Lord has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. For the transgression of the people He was stricken. He made His soul a guilt offering. Himself a righteous one, without violence or deceit, He bears the iniquities of His own. This becomes even clearer in the New Testament. First, the expression λύτρον comes into consideration here, Matt. 20:28, Mark 10:45, 1 Tim. 2:6; it comes from λύειν, to loose, the means to loose someone, to free from prison, and hence often ransom. In the LXX it is the translation of גְּאֻלָּה, Lev. 25:51, 52 or פִּדְיוֹן, Num. 3:46 or כֹּפֶר, Ex. 21:30, 30:12, Num. 35:31, 32, Prov. 6:35, 13:8, which however elsewhere is translated by ἐξίλασμα, 1 Sam. 12:3, Ps. 49:8 or ἀλλάγμα, Amos 5:12, Isa. 43:3, or δῶρον, Job 36:18. Now it is true that in the word λύτρον the substitutionary and equivalent is not automatically included. But yet it is incorrect, with Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. II 69, to understand the words in Mark 10:45 so that Jesus' voluntary death is a gift, a covering, a means of protection, by which many are preserved, not from death as the lot of all creatures, but from full destruction and the meaninglessness of life and thus freed from the fear of death. For the word λύτρον may on its own not express that the ransom equals what is redeemed by it; yet the thought lies at hand that someone who has a right to something will in general not give it up except for proper compensation; in Isa. 43:3, Prov. 21:18 it therefore alternates with תַּחַת, in place of. And then especially, the ransom that Christ brought is elsewhere called a τιμή, a costly price, 1 Cor. 6:20, 7:23, 1 Pet. 1:18, 19; it is specifically said that a man cannot give an ἀντάλλαγμα, ransom, compensation, equivalent for his soul, Matt. 16:26, Mark 8:37, cf. Ps. 49:8; and the word λύτρον is in the New Testament further strengthened by the preposition ἀντί, Jesus gives His life as a ransom in place of many, who should but could not do it, cf. Cremer s.v. But besides the expression λύτρον, here in the second place the whole New Testament teaching of the offering of Christ comes into discussion. The prepositions that indicate the connection of that offering to us and our sins, ὑπέρ, περί, διά, mean in themselves not: in place of, but for the benefit of, for the sake of, because of, for, on account of; but they lay such a connection between Christ's offering and our sins that the mystical, moral, and symbolic interpretation does not at all exhaust the sense of Scripture. Naturally it is quite true that Christ also suffered and died as an example to us, and that all are crucified, died, and buried in Him. But therein the sense of Scripture is not absorbed; yes, the mystical and moral view of Christ's suffering and dying cannot be maintained unless it is first acknowledged that He suffered and died in a legal sense substitutionarily for us. And Scripture teaches that as clearly as possible, even if it does not use the expression satisfactio vicaria any more than that of trinity, incarnation, God-man, etc. For when it says that Christ, though personally without any sin, according to the will of God took upon Himself and bore our sin, was made sin and became a curse for us, according to that same will of God was punished for it with the accursed death on the cross, and thereby as causa meritoria acquired for us reconciliation, forgiveness, righteousness, life, the whole salvation, then that cannot be thought otherwise than that He placed Himself in our stead and bore our punishment. Cf. Weiss, Lehrb. der bibl. Theol. § 49 b. 80 etc. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. I 64 f. II 97 f. etc. On the prep. ὑπέρ, Holwerda, Jaarb. v. wet. Theol. 1862 p. 521ff.
15. However, from old times very weighty objections have been brought against this vicarious satisfaction. Money debts one can take over from another and pay for him; but sins are moral debts and cleave to the person. By their very nature they cannot be taken over by another. It fights against God's righteousness, which holds not the guilty guiltless nor the guiltless guilty. It fights against the nature of sin, for whoever would wish to bear them for another could yet never take over the most dreadful thing in sin, that is, the self-accusation, the sorrow, the remorse, but only the outward suffering and dying, and this would then be for him no punishment of sin but a chastening, a trial, a martyrdom. It fights against reality, for Christ bore not the wrath of God but ever shared in his love and favor; he bore not the whole punishment of sin, for he died neither the spiritual nor the eternal death; and if he had borne it, yet only for one single man, never for many, for he bore that punishment yet but once; though he were also God, this cannot increase the worth of his offering, since his Godhead yet could not suffer.
Many of these misgivings flow forth from misunderstanding, which therefore must beforehand be cleared out of the way. First then it is fully true that Christ never personally, for and on behalf of himself, was the object of God's wrath; he was never in his own person a sinner. Gnostics and Anabaptists did often make a distinction between a divine, heavenly, deathless, holy and a human, earthly, unclean, deathly bodiliness in Christ. And the Antinomians understood the substitution so that on Christ not only the guilt and punishment but also the spot and uncleanness of sin was laid over; the exchange between Christ and the elect was so utter that he himself is sin and they are righteousness; in Christ they have been sorrowful over their sins, justified, born again; the sins which they themselves do are no more sins, torment them no more in the conscience, have no more need of forgiveness and are but deeds of the flesh, of the old man. Hulsius, The Present Antinomianism , 2nd ed. 1738. Hoornbeek, Summa Controversiarum 1653 p. 704. Witsius, Miscellanea Sacra II 758-780. And in later times these feelings have sometimes been renewed by the Methodists, Schneckenburger, Lectures on the Smaller Protestant Parties 146, by the Irvingians, Herzog² 7, 154, by some followers of Kohlbrugge, Bula, The Reconciliation of Man with God through Christ 1874. Böhl, On the Incarnation of the Divine Word 1884. Id. Dogmatics 299 f., cf. Kuyper, The Incarnation of the Word Amsterdam 1887, Introduction and p. 155v. But the Scripture teaches as firmly and clearly as may be that Christ personally was free from all sins, and the few places on which one appeals for the contrary, John 1:14, Rom. 8:3, Heb. 2:14 speak only that the Son of God took a weak nature, subject to suffering and death, but not that he himself in subjective sense was a sinner. Some theologians such as Chrysostom, Oecumenius, Luther, Marlorat, also Calvin on Gal. 3:13, have indeed called Christ a sinner, but meant that only in objective sense, as Paul says that Christ was made sin and became a curse, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13, cf. Isa. 53:12. Therewith the apostle gives not to know that Christ in himself was a sinner and a cursed one, but that he by God was beheld and handled as one who was guilty of the breaking of the law and had laden its curse on himself. Self-accusation, sorrow, remorse, confession of personal sins could therefore in Christ not fall; the spiritual death, as unfitness for good and bent to all evil, was by him not suffered. Just to bear the sins of others and to satisfy for these, he could and might himself be no sinner. The exchange of persons which took place between Christ and his own is not to be understood in pantheistic physical or mystical sense, but bears a legal character; Christ willingly went into that standing to the law and its demands in which we stood to it through our breaking. Secondly, the substitutionary of Christ's obedience brings with itself also that it is equivalent, fully answering to the demand of the law. But this likeness of worth was yet understood otherwise by the Reformation than by Rome. Duns Scotus judged that also a holy man or an angel could have satisfied for our sins if God had deemed it good, for every creature offered is worth as much as God accepts it and no more, Sententiae III dist. 20 qu. un. n. 9 cf. dist. 19 qu. un. n. 7. And even so later the Remonstrants taught that not the justice of God but only equity demanded some satisfaction and that the merit which Christ paid was paid according to the estimation of God the Father, Limborch, Theologia Christiana III 21, 6. 8. 9. 22, 2. Episcopius, Institutiones Theologicae IV sect. 5 c. 3. Flat against that Thomas, Summa Theologiae III qu. 48 art. 2 called the passion of Christ not only sufficient but superabundant satisfaction for the sins of the human race, cf. Roman Catechism I 5 qu. 13, 2. Theologia Wirceburgensis IV 317. Billuart, Summa Sancti Thomae Pars III tom. 2 p. 206-226. Scheeben III 206. 343 etc. Even the question was handled whether not one drop of Christ's blood would have been enough for atonement, cf. Quenstedt, Theologia III 327. Dorner, Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ II 843. All this beholding both in Thomas and in Duns Scotus rests on a fleshly, quantitative reckoning of the suffering of Christ. In principle the Reformation has broken with this reckoning system. That shows itself therein that it rejected both the acceptilation (from acceptum ferre) of Scotus and the superabundance of Thomas, Voetius, Disputationes II. 247. Mastricht V 18, 38. Moor III 1084. Alting, Theologia problematica pr. 41; that it took up in the work of Christ beside the passive also the active obedience; that it called his offering equivalent but not identical with what we were bound to; that it held it for fully sufficient, so that neither in Roman nor in Remonstrant wise a filling up by our faith and our good works was needful; and that namely the Reformed said that Christ's work in itself was fully enough for atonement of the sins of the whole world, that it, if he had willed to save a smaller number, could not be less, and if he had willed to save a greater number or all men, had not need to be greater. Sins are also indeed no money debts, and the satisfaction is no reckoning sum. The laying over of our sins on Christ went not so mechanically that these first of all elect were carefully added up together, so laid on Christ and each singly by him satisfied. Christ has also not passed through all human ages nor therein singly satisfied for the sins of each age, as Irenaeus, Against Heresies II 22, 4 and others set it forth. He has also not suffered precisely the same, idem , as we nor in the same wise; for guilt-awareness etc., could in him not fall, the spiritual death as bent to evil he knew not, and the eternal death he suffered not in form and length but only intensively and qualitatively, as forsakenness by God, Thomas, Summa Theologiae III qu. 46 art. 5. qu. 48 art. 2. Calvin, Institutes II 16, 12. Mastricht, Theologia V 12, 9. 21. Moor IV 122-133. Witsius, Miscellanea Sacra II 770. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology II 454. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation II 239. Phillippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre IV 2, 29. Sartorius, Doctrine of Holy Love II 75. van Oosterzee, Dogmatics II 586. Even there lies in the acceptilation some truth, for the strict right of God demanded that each man personally for himself should satisfy; and it has been his grace which gave Christ as a mediator of the covenant and reckoned his righteousness to the covenant fellows. With a quantitative reckoning we thus come not out in the vicarious satisfaction. They are other than measurable and weighable greatnesses with which we have to do in the doctrine of satisfaction. Sin is a whole creation ruling and spoiling principle, a might, a realm, which spreads itself out and organizes in many actual sins. The wrath of God is an anger which directs itself against the sin of the whole human race, Heidelberg Catechism 37. His righteousness is that virtue whereby he cannot bear that he by his creatures as God is misknown or dishonored. Therefore the vicarious satisfaction consists therein that Christ as surety and head went into that standing to God, to his wrath, his righteousness, his law in which the human race stood over against it. He is for that mankind which is given him for atonement made sin, become a curse and has taken its guilt and punishment on himself. When the Socinians say that Christ yet in any case could satisfy but for one man and not for many, since he bore the punishment of sin yet but once, then this reasoning goes out from the same quantitative reckoning as the acceptilation of Duns Scotus and the superabundance of Thomas. For though the sin which came into the world through Adam shows itself in a countless row of sinful thoughts, words and deeds; though the wrath of God is felt by each guilty child of man singly; it is and remains yet always the one, undivided law which is broken, the one undivided wrath of God which is kindled against the sin of the whole human race, the one, undivided righteousness of God which is hurt by sin, the one, unchanging, eternal God who is scorned by sin. And therefore the punishment of Christ is also one, but one which intensively and qualitatively weighs up against the sin and guilt of the whole human race, atones the wrath of God against that whole human race, fulfills the whole law, fully restores God's righteousness and brings God himself in all his virtues of truth and righteousness, of love and grace again to acknowledgment in the human race. For that punishment was also laid on him who was not but an individual beside others, but the second Adam, head of the human race, the Son of man and the Son of God as well.
16. Thus understood, the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction is still to be defended against the objection that on the moral plane such a substitution is not possible. First, however, it must be noted against this that the idea of substitution is also deeply grounded in human nature on the moral plane, and among all peoples has embodied itself in priesthood and sacrifice, and has also been expressed in various ways in poetry and mythology. Origen already compared Christ in his death with those who, according to classical traditions, died for their fatherland to free it from plague or other calamities, for it seems, according to hidden laws in the nature of things, that the willing death of a righteous man for the common good breaks the power of evil spirits, c. Cels. I 31. Christian theology, therefore, often cited the examples of Codrus, Curtius, Cratinus, Zaleucus, Damon and Phintias, and the hostages, to thereby clarify the vicarious suffering of Christ. Naturally, these examples have no other value than to show that the idea of substitution occupied a great place in the world of thought of Greeks and Romans. The same is the case with tragedy, whose basic thought certainly is not always rendered by guilt and atonement but indeed by passion and suffering. The death of the hero in many tragedies is not a proper reconciliation for committed sin, but yet always a deliverance, made necessary by some mistake, error, etc., and therefore in the end reconciling us and granting satisfaction. But even so understood, tragedy proclaims a great truth: all human greatness walks along abysses of guilt, and satisfaction is there only when the noble and great perishes in death. The downfall of Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, Max and Thekla, Iphigenia, etc., reconciles us with them and with their kin; all human failings are atoned by pure humanity (Goethe). And so it is often in history: the last, noble Constantine, fighting and dying for his people and land, is an atonement for the horrors of the Byzantine emperors, and the in comparison with his predecessors innocent Louis XVI atones in his death for the sins of his house. If the history of families and lineages were known to us, it would provide us with many such examples. In the saying de mortuis nil nisi bene we all honor the reconciling power of suffering and death. Yes, all life and joy here on earth is the fruit of sorrow and death. All things live from each other's death. The grain of wheat must die to bear fruit. What one has sown is reaped by another. The mother gives life to her child in birth pangs and sometimes dying. All birth, also in the realm of thought and art, is from darkness to light. Some work, strive, suffer, and others enjoy their labor. We all live from the treasures acquired with effort by previous generations. All noble goods of humanity have been conquered by some for all under strife and suffering. Especially, love bears a vicarious character; here on earth it is hardly thinkable otherwise than as co-suffering, sympatheia ; whoever loves most, suffers most. The mother suffers for, in, with her child; the father bears mourning in his heart for the straying of his son. Nature and humanity teach that there are vicarious powers. Cf. above and further still Maresius, Syst. Theol. X 24. Turretin, de satisf. 51. Petrus de Witte, Wederl. der Soc. dwal. II 221v. Bushnell, Vicarious sacrifice 1866. Dorner, Chr. Gl. II 622. de Maistre, Soirées de St. Petersburg , éclairc. sur les sacrifices .
All these examples and reasonings are without doubt fit to shed some light on the vicarious suffering of Christ. Over against the individualism and atomism that tears mankind asunder and knows nothing of the mystery of love, they are of excellent worth. But yet they are not able to explain the suffering of Christ. Many indeed stop at these examples and seek to understand the suffering of Christ as a natural outcome of his entering into our sinful fellowship, e.g., Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 104, 4. Weisse, Philos. Dogm. § 876. Lange, Dogm. II. H. Schultz, Der Begriff des stellvertr. Leidens, Basel 1864, etc. But in this way the offering of Christ does not come into its own. Indeed, human fellow-feeling for Christ, and above all for him as the holy and merciful High Priest, was a cause of deep, grievous suffering, Mt. 8:17, 9:36, 14:14, etc., but it is not the only and chief cause, no more than hunger and thirst, persecution by his foes, tempting by Satan, forsaking by his disciples. For then the suffering would be for Christ only suffering and no punishment, and he himself no more than a witness, a martyr, a sufferer, differing only in degree from others. But Christ himself saw his suffering as a punishment laid on him by God for our sins, Mt. 20:28, 26:28, 27:46, and all Scripture teaches that he was made sin for us and became a curse, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13. A step further go those who explain the suffering of Christ in a realistic way from the place he holds in the human race. He is namely not an individual alongside others, but the central individual; he took not a human person but the human nature; that nature bore the sin and lay under the curse; and so Christ with that nature also took upon himself its guilt and punishment. Just as Adam could be our representative because he was the forefather of all the human race, so Christ is the substitute of the church, which as his body is born from him as the head and is one with him. And just as we, for example, are punished on our back for what we have done wrong with our hand, so Christ is punished for our sins because he is one with us, Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 48 art. 1. 2. Suppl. qu. 13 art. 2. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II. Dale, The atonement, lect. 10. Scott Lidgett, The spiritual principle of the atonement, ch. 7. Sartorius, Lehre v. d. h. Liebe II. Bilderdijk, Opst. v. godg. en zedek. inhoud, I, etc. This realistic-mystical view of Christ's substitution is in itself fully right and is also clearly taught by Scripture; for the believers themselves are crucified, died, buried, raised, and seated in heaven with Christ, Rom. 6-8, Gal. 2:20, Eph. 2:6, Col. 2:11, 3:3, etc., cf. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II. Because Christ is not only reconciler but also redeemer, not only must he objectively take away the guilt of sin but also subjectively break the power of sin, this mystical union of Christ and the believers forms an essential and indispensable part in the work of salvation. But yet it is not the only and first bond that exists between Christ and his own. In Scripture it is built on the federal; Rom. 6-8 follows on Rom. 3-5. When it is loosed from that, it loses the groundwork on which it must rest; it goes to seek its stay in pantheism, which changes the new creation into a process; and shifts the objective reconciliation more and more into the subjective redemption; Shedd, for example, makes the reckoning of Christ's righteousness already hang on rebirth and faith, ibid., cf. Dale, etc. Only then is this mystical union in its scriptural meaning to be upheld together with the objective reconciliation of Christ's offering, when Christ is first seen as Head of the covenant and in a federal, legal sense has stepped into the place of his own. The covenant of grace goes before the person and offering of Christ. For that covenant begins not after Christ has fulfilled his work, with the Holy Spirit, with the blessings of rebirth and faith; but Christ himself also stands in that covenant, he is its surety and mediator, Heb. 7:22, 8:6, 12:24; his blood is covenant blood and therefore reconciling, Mt. 26:28. Yes, even more, the covenant of grace is not first set up in time, but it has its groundwork in eternity, it rests in the pactum salutis, it is in the first place a covenant of the three persons in the divine being itself. Father and Son and Spirit are all three at work in that covenant; and so little does it begin first in time with the working of the Holy Spirit, that it rather has its being and firmness from eternity in the counsel of the triune God. And from this the vicarious satisfaction of Christ is also explained. It rests on an ordinance, on a free, almighty, gracious disposal of God. That by no means says that it is willful and unreasonable. All kinds of bonds in nature and mankind offer likeness to the substitution in Christ. But likeness is here and can here, no more than in Adam, be sameness. Both take a special place in mankind; they alone are heads of all the human race; their sway and working spreads to all places and times. And above Adam stands Christ yet again. For Adam was representative, Christ is substitute of mankind. Adam acted in our name but took nothing from us; Christ came to us, set himself in our place, bore our guilt and punishment and won our righteousness. Adam was head of a covenant of works, which was unsteady; Christ is head of a better covenant, which knows no unsteadiness. Adam was a man, though without sin, earthly from the earth; Christ was the Word become flesh, the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, the Lord from heaven. Adam spoiled what was good, Christ restored and fulfilled what was spoiled. As far as the covenant of grace goes beyond the covenant of works, and the gospel the law, so high stands Christ above Adam. His vicarious satisfaction is not even to be understood after the covenant of works with its law; it is indeed not against the law, for it upholds the law, but it is yet above the law and goes far beyond all our thoughts. It cannot be brought back to any general rule nor explained by any general law, for it is no showing alongside others, but it is a concrete fact, wholly one of a kind in the history of mankind, explained by nothing and itself explaining all, resting in a special ordinance of God. And this ordinance of God is no lone will-decree, but bears a covenant-like mark. The vicarious satisfaction has its groundwork in the counsel of the triune God, in the life of the highest, the full and everlasting love, in the unshakable covenant of redemption. After the ordinances of that covenant Christ takes the place of his own and trades their sin for his righteousness, their death for his life. Ὠ της γλυκειας ἀνταλλαγης, ὠ της ἀνεξιχνιαστου δημιουργιας, ὠ των ἀπροσδοκητων εἰεργεσιων, ἱνα ἀνομια μεν πολλων ἐν δικαιῳ ἑνι κρυβῃ, δικαιοσυνη δε ἑνος πολλους ἀνομους δικαιωσῃ , Ep. ad Diogn. 9. Cf. A. A. Hodge, The atonement, etc. Hugh Martin, The atonement, etc.
17. This obedience Christ fulfilled in the whole state of his humiliation. The formal treatment of the teaching of the two states arose among the Lutherans, to bring the communication of attributes into agreement with Jesus' humiliation, but was soon also taken over by the Reformed, Olevianus, Subst. foed. II 5. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 13. Junius, Theses Theol. c. 29. Synopsis pur. theol. c. 27. 28 and so on. Since Schleiermacher's critique, Chr. Gl. § 105, it has however either been wholly given up or weightily changed. They who deny the pre-existence and resurrection of Christ have no more interest in this teaching, Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. § 824 f. Lipsius, Dogm. § 567 f. Others, who accept these witnesses of Scripture, have often turned it into a description of the step by step fulfilling manhood of the Logos, or of the God-manly unfolding and perfecting of Christ; his humiliation is then understood as a steady heightening of his inner life, which had the exaltation of itself as a result, Martensen § 139 f. Dorner § 104. Lange II 635. Rothe, Ethik § 533 f. The teaching of the two states is replaced by a life-story of Jesus, which however with an eye to the sources is impossible, with an eye to the person unlawful and therefore always runs out into a false opposition between the historical Jesus and the apostolic Christ, Strauss, Leben Jesu 1864 § 1. Weiss, Leben Jesu I 180. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III 3. 63. Kähler, Der sogen. histor. Jezus und der geschichtliche, bibl. Christus 1892. Id. Zur Lehre v. d. Versöhnung 68 f. Kuyper, Enc. III 158. There is no parting to be made between a life of Christ and an office of Christ, as Ebrard wills, Dogm. § 408. His whole life stood in service of the office, whereto He by the Father was set and into the world sent. The dogma of the apostolic preaching is the only key, to unlock the gospel tradition of Christ; the only means, to give us a picture full of life of the Savior of the world, Kähler, Versöhnung 69. Christ has no moment lived for himself, Rom. 15:3, but always for his church, to give her an example, Mt. 11:29, Joh. 13:14-16 and so on, to serve her and give his life as a ransom for many, Mt. 20:28, to share with her his grace and truth, his light and his life, Joh. 1:16, 6:33v., Col. 3:4. The manhood itself was already an emptying, therein standing, that He, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God, that is, who in the shape of God, in the same wise as God was, and held this not for something robbed or taken by force, yet gave up this godly way of being and took the form of a servant, so that He truly became like a man and in shape as a man was found, Phil. 2:7, 8, 2 Cor. 8:9, cf. Weiffenbach, Zur Auslegung der Stelle Phil. 2:5-11, Karlsruhe u. Leipzig 1884. In the swapping of the form of God with the form of a servant, of the godly way of being with the manly stood his emptying, self-emptying. And as soon as this had taken place, began his lowliness, humiliation, therein standing, that He was and stayed obedient to God unto death. The whole life of Christ from the begetting onward unto death was thus a humiliation as a fruit of his obedience, a ever deeper going into the fellowship of our sin and an ever further withdrawing from the heavenly joy. His cutting around, Luk. 2:21, served as proof, that He was truly man and Abraham's seed, that He as such stood in the fellowship of our sin and must receive the token of the cutting off of that sin, and that God was his God and He God's Son. His baptism, which He as the Holy no more than the cutting around had need of for himself, Mt. 3:14, happened, because it befitted Him as mediator, to fulfill all righteousness, to satisfy all the right of the law and to bring in the whole, full righteousness, which the law from Him asked; because He as such standing in the fellowship of sinners, must receive the token and seal of his fellowship with God, as the Son, in whom the Father had all his pleasure; and because He with the Holy Ghost anointed and made able and thus hallowed must be to his open stepping forth as the Christ who himself alone can baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire, Mt. 3:11-17, cf. parall., Acts 10:38, Bornemann, Die Taufe Christi durch Joh. in der dogm. Beurteilang der christl. Theologen der vier ersten Jahrh., Leipzig 1896. The tempting, which straightway after the baptism took place and further oft times unto in Gethsemane repeated itself, cf. until a time, Luk. 4:13, Joh. 12:27, Mt. 26:39, Hebr. 4:15, 5:7, 1 Petr. 2:23, had as goal, that Christ, who so lately had received the token and seal of his fellowship with God and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, this fellowship also over against all tempting of Satan and world would uphold, as the second Adam the bond with God not break but for himself and his own uphold and strengthen would, and as the merciful High Priest, in all things tempted as we, us in our weaknesses and temptings would come to help. All the words and works, which Christ during his life spoke and did, are a carrying out of God's will, Joh. 5:19v., 6:38 and have as goal, to make known the name, the virtues, the counsel and the pleasure of God both in law and gospel, Mt. 11:27, Joh. 1:18; to show his priestly mercy to all poor, sick and lost, Mt. 8:17, 11:5; to prove his kingly might over Satan, world, sin and all their workings. Luk. 10:18, Joh. 12:31, 14:30, 16:33, 18:37. The suffering of Christ, that with his manhood begins but in the great suffering fulfills itself, is the will and the bidding of the Father, Mt. 26:39, 42, Joh. 10:17, 18, proof of his full obedience, Phil. 2:8, Hebr. 5:8, and for his own as an example for their life, 1 Petr. 2:21, as a ransom for their sins, Mt. 20:28, 26:28, as a overcoming of the world, Joh. 16:33, Col. 2:15. His dooming, not only by the Sanhedrin but also by the worldly Roman judge Pontius Pilate happened thereto, that He not secretly by a stealth-killing or in an uproar would die, but after the saying of the then best and worthiest right, after fitting search, openly, in the way of right killed would be, and that thereby both his own guiltlessness, Mt. 27:18-24, and the ground of his dooming, namely his owning, to be the Son of God and the Messiah of Israel, Mt. 26:63, 27:11, and the will of God, Acts 2:23, 4:27, 28, and the kind of his death as a dying for others, Mt. 20:28, clearly and beyond gainsaying for all eyes in the light would step. The death of the cross, most cruel and foulest torment, and commonly only on slaves and grave wrongdoers laid, had this meaning, that Christ, in name of the law doomed to the most dreadful and shameful punishment, has satisfied the strictest ask of the law, as a hanged one become a curse to God, but thereby also the cursing of the law from us has taken away, Deut. 21:23, Gal. 3:13, and from all evil, whereto the law us for our sins dooms, fully has freed; the cross is therefore the midpoint and kernel of the gospel, 1 Cor. 1:23, 2:2, Gal. 6:14. The blood that Christ shed--not in weakness, but in might he died, Aug., de nat. et gr. 26--proves, that He his life willingly hallowed to God, that He brought it as an offering, and thereby the atonement and the peace brought to stand, Mt. 26:27, Acts 20:28, Rom. 3:25, 5:9, Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:20, Hebr. 9:12, 22. At last also the burying of Christ has a special meaning; it is oft times named, Isa. 53:9, Mt. 12:40, 27:59, 60, Luk. 11:29, 23:53, Joh. 19:40-42, Acts 13:29, 1 Cor. 15:3, 4. It is not only proof thereof, that He truly died and thus also from the dead arose, but its meaning lies foremost herein, that Christ, though giving his spirit into the hands of his Father, who took Him up into paradise, Luk. 23:43, 46, yet three days stayed in the state of death, to the realm of the dead belonged, and thus the punishment of sin, Gen. 3:19, fully bore. To that state of death, the Hades, He is not left, his flesh saw no rotting, He is indeed on the third day raised; but He has yet in the Hades stayed, Mt. 12:40, Acts 2:27, 31.
There are no other places in Scripture that speak of the burial of Christ or of his abode in the state of death, for the descent εἰς τὰ κατώτερα τῆς γῆς, Eph. 4:9, according to the contrast, points to his descent to the earth through his incarnation, cf. Meyer; and 1 Pet. 3:19-22 in no case speaks of what Christ did between his death and resurrection, but either of what he did after his resurrection or before his incarnation; the words ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι indicate that Christ, who, while partaking of a fleshly body, was put to death, yet because the πνεῦμα was his own, was raised again, so that his life after the resurrection was not a fleshly but a spiritual life. The descensus ad inferos, τὰ κατώτατα, Hades, not hell, Gehenna, in the Greek, Roman, Lutheran sense therefore finds no support in this text. But soon in the Christian church the thought arose that Christ in the time between his death and resurrection had gone to Hades. The Gospel of Peter, discovered some time ago, vs. 41-42, has a voice from heaven say to Jesus: ἐκήρυξας τοῖς κοιμωμένοις, to which the answer is: γυμναί, the hellish powers are stripped bare. According to Hermas, Sim. IX 16, 5-7, the apostles after their death continued their preaching, and indeed to those who had previously fallen asleep in righteousness, cf. also Clement of Alexandria, Strom. VI 6, 45-46. And Tertullian, de an. 55, Irenaeus, adv. haer. I 27, 3, IV 27, 2 and V 31, 1-2, teach that Christ descended apud inferos or in ea quae sunt sub terra, to make the believers of the Old Testament share in the benefits of his work. According to Rufinus (d. 410), the creed of the church at Aquileia also had this article: crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato et sepultus descendit in inferno; probably from here this article passed into various confessions, into that of the synod at Sirmium 359, Nice 359, Constantinople 360, Toledo 633, into the Quicumque creed and so also into various later forms of the so-called apostolic creed, cf. besides the many dogmatics historical works of Harnack, Hagenbach, etc., the works on the apostolic creed of Caspari, Harnack art. Apost S. in Herzog², Zahn, Das ap. Symbol, Erlangen 1893, Kattenbusch, Das apost. Symbol I 1894 p. 103 f., Id. Christl. Welt 1889 no. 27-28, Id. Zur Würdigung des Apostolikums, Hefte zur Chr. Welt no. 2, Leipzig 1892 p. 29, Hahn, Bibl. der Symb. u. Glaubensregeln der alten Kirche³ 1897. The Greek church, Conf. Orthod. qu. 49, understands by the descensus ad inferos that Christ with his divine nature and with his soul went to Hades and freed the souls of the holy forefathers and, with the thief on the cross, brought them to paradise. The Roman church, Cat. Rom. I c. 6, cf. Bellarmine, de Christo IV 6-16, Petavius, de incarn. XII 19-20 XIII 15-18, Scheeben III 298 f., etc., teaches that Christ, truly, with his soul, after his death, descended ad inferos and remained there as long as his body rested in the grave, to free the souls of the pious, who there sine ullo doloris sensu, beata redemptionis spe sustentati, quieta habitatione fruebantur, but yet lacked the vision of God, to conquer as victor the demons and to rob them of the spoil of souls. The Lutheran church, Symb. B. ed. Müller 550, 696 confesses that Christ according to both natures, with soul and body after the burial went to hell, overcame the devil, destroyed the power of hell and took from the devil all power and might; the theologians expanded this so that Christ on the morning of the third day, after the vivificatio, resurrectio interna and before the resurrectio externa, with soul and body went to hell, and there to Satan and all damned spirits, through a praedicatio non evangelica sed legalis, elenctica, terribilis, made known his victory over death and Satan, Frank, Theologie der Concordienformel III 397-454, Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. 277, 288 f. The Reformed confessions are not unanimous and understand by the descent into hell the hellish sufferings that Christ endured on the cross, Calvin, Inst. II 16, 8-12, Cat. Genev. 1, Cat. Heid. qu. 44, and so Beza, Danaeus, Pareus, etc., or the actual going of Christ only with his soul to hell, to make known his power there, Repet. Anh. 9, and likewise Zanchius, Aretius, Alsted; or the going of Christ to hell with soul and body both with the same purpose, Coll. Lips. 9; or the state of death, in which Christ abode three days, Cat. Westm. in Niemeyer 55, and so Olevianus, Perkins, Amesius, Molinaeus, Broughton, Vossius, Bochart, Pearson, Schultens, Vriemoet, etc.; while some tried to unite these different opinions, Sohnius, Op. III 311, Witsius, Verkl. van het apost. symbool, 18 § 9v, Burmannus, Synopsis theol. V 21 § 13-14, Mastricht V 13, 5, Synopsis pur. theol. 27, 32, Heidegger, Corpus theol. 18, 32, etc. The great diversity of opinions explains why many could attach no good sense to the article and rejected it entirely, Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 99, 1, or also seized this article to give their doctrine of a continuing gospel preaching and of a mission institute in the intermediate state a churchly stamp, cf. especially Güder, Die Lehre v. d. Erscheinung Jesu Chr. unter den Todten 1853, Spitta, Christi Predigt an die Geister, Göttingen 1890. Indeed, the matter with this article stands thus, that 1º the expression descended into hell, insofar as it may be derived from texts like Acts 2:27, 31, Eph. 4:9, has historically acquired a wholly different meaning than that contained in those texts; 2º that the Greek and Roman explanation of this article, as if Christ went to Hades to free the pious of the Old Testament, finds not the least support in Scripture; 3º that the Lutheran view, that Christ made known his power to Satan, is indeed, as will appear later, grounded on definite statements of Scripture, but cannot be regarded as a correct explanation of the words: descended into hell, because in that case they would not belong to the state of humiliation but to that of exaltation, which begins only with the resurrection; 4º that the newer opinion, as if Christ went to hell to preach the gospel to all who have not heard it here on earth, likewise for the same reason cannot be considered as a correct explanation of this article of faith; 5º that 1 Pet. 3:19 at most says, although it will be shown later that this is not the correct opinion either, that Christ after his resurrection preached the gospel to the contemporaries of Noah but gives absolutely no right to an extension of the gospel preaching to all or to other lost ones; and 6º that the words descended into hell, in agreement also with what Rufinus says, that they are an expansion of Jesus' burial, are best understood as the state of death, in which Christ as mediator abode three days, to bear the punishment of sin to the end and to deliver us therefrom. Thus the whole life of Christ culminated in his death as the perfect satisfaction to the righteousness of God. And by that one offering he has forever perfected all those who are sanctified.
18. The fruit of this obedience of Christ is nothing less than the whole salvation. Under this thought are summed up all the blessings which Christ has won for his own. God is called in Scripture σωτηρ, Luke 1:47 etc., but Christ also bears that name, because he saves his folk from their sins, Matt. 1:21, Luke 2:11. He is the ἀρχηγος της σωτηριας, Heb. 2:10, αἰτιος σωτηριας αἰωνιου, Heb. 5:9, and his gospel is the gospel της σωτηριας, Eph. 1:13. This σωτηρια is a freeing from sin and all its outcomes and a sharing in the highest bliss; it stands therefore over against θανατος, 2 Cor. 7:10, ἀπωλεια, Phil. 1:28, ὀργη, 1 Thess. 5:9, and lasts unto eternity, Heb. 5:9. Therefore it takes in many sundry blessings under itself, which all in Scripture are also named apart. At the head stands the καταλλαγη, reconciliation, atonement. The offering of Christ has namely according to Scripture objective meaning, also valid for God. In the Old Testament the offerings had the aim to cover the sins of the offerer before God's face, כפר, LXX ἐξιλασκεσθαι. This atonement has indeed nowhere God as direct object, but it yet takes place with regard to him, happens before his face, Lev. 1:3, 6:7, 10:17, 15:15, 30, 19:22, Num. 15:28, 31:50, and aims, by the covering of sin, to turn away his wrath, Num. 8:19, 16:46, and to make him gracious, ἱλασκεσθαι, ἱλαον ποιειν, to render propitious, to appease. Even so is Christ in the New Testament ἱλαστηριον, Rom. 3:25, ἱλασμος, 1 John 2:2, 4:10, a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, εἰς το ἱλασκεσθαι τας ἁμαρτιας του λαου, Heb. 2:17; as high priest he has with the offering of his full obedience covered the sins of his folk and thereby turned away God's wrath and won his grace. Indeed by Socinians, Remonstrants, Rationalists and also most newer theologians, cf. e.g. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. 104, 4. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. II 230 f. Kaftan, Dogm. 460, it is claimed that God is love, needs not to be atoned but himself is the author of the atonement. But this rests in part on misunderstanding and is otherwise gainsaid by Scripture. This teaches yet clearly, also in the New Testament, that God is wroth over sins, Rom. 1:18, Gal. 3:10, Eph. 2:3, that also he on his side must be atoned, Rom. 5:9, 10, 2 Cor. 5:18, 19, Gal. 3:13, and that Christ thereto has been a ἱλασμος, Rom. 3:25, Heb. 2:17, 1 John 2:2, 4:10. This strives however not at all therewith, that God is love and himself has given Christ to an atonement for our sins. His wrath is indeed no evil passion of hate or envy, his righteousness is no thirst for revenge, but both are compatible with the highest love. As a mother has the more sorrow over the straying of her son, according as she loves him more; as a judge sometimes must condemn a kinsman or friend, to whom he as person feels closely bound, so also in God the wrath against sin can go together with love toward his creatures. Odium in unoquoque nostrum quod feceramus, amavit quod fecerat , Beda in Turretin, de satisf. 86. Diligit omnes homines quantum ad naturam quam ipse fecit, odit tamen eos quantum ad culpam, quam contra eum homines contraxerunt , Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 49 art. 4. For our sins we are indeed objects of God's wrath, verum quia Dominus quod suum est in nobis perdere non vult, adhuc aliquid invenit, quod pro sua benignitate amet , Calvin, Inst. II 16, 3. And this is again not so to think, as if God at the moment of Christ's offering suddenly changed in mind and mood. For in God there is no change nor shadow of turning; all his attributes are one with his being; in eternity there is no before and no after. When Scripture speaks of God's wrath and of his atonement with us, then it speaks not untrue but yet after our human grasping. Change there is not in God's being, but indeed in the bond wherein he stands to his creatures. He sets himself also not in bond to the creature, as if this somewhat would be outside him, but he sets all things and all men himself in those bonds to himself, which he eternally and unchangeably wills and just so, in that way and in that moment of time, wherein they in reality take place. Therefore it is also God himself who in Christ brings the atonement, 2 Cor. 5:19; he atones himself through the offering of the cross; he brings in the obedience of Christ himself and all his virtues to acknowledgment and upholds himself as God before the eye of all his creatures; it is, because Christ is truly God and for this godly work also must be truly God, it is God himself who through the cross atones all things with himself. He places in Christ the church in that bond to himself, that she beholds him, the unchangeable, no more in his wrath but in his grace. Jam diligenti nos sibi reconciliavit. Quia prius diligit, postea nos sibi reconciliat . Cf. Augustine, de trin. V 16. Enchir. 33. Lombard and others on Sent. III dist. 19, 6. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 49 art. 4. Calvin, Inst. II 16, 2-4. Turretin, de satisf. p. 49. 86. 87. Maresius III 448-450. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. IV 2, 263. Dorner, Chr. Gl. II 612. Frank, Chr. Wahrh. II 181 f. 194 f. Kähler, Zur Lehre v. d. Vers. 362 f. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II 401 etc. A. A. Hodge, The atonement ch. 9 etc.
Through the offering of Christ, therefore, a relation of atonement and peace has come into being between God and mankind. Christ has as hilasmos atoned for sin and thereby reconciled God. The distinction between hilasmos and katallage does not consist in the fact that the former is objective and the latter subjective. Also the katallage is an objective relation, brought about by God Himself between Him and the world, 2 Cor. 5:18, 19. But in the hilaskesthai , Christ as mediator is the subject, who, by His offering covering the sins, turns away God's wrath and acquires His grace. But in the katallassein , God Himself is the subject, 2 Cor. 5:19; by giving Christ as hilasterion , He brings about between Himself and the world a relation of peace. He is no longer wrathful; what made Him our adversary, namely, sin, is covered by Christ's offering; He established in Christ such a relation in which we no longer have Him against us; He laid aside His enmity, because its cause, sin, is taken away by the death of Christ, and now stands to the world in a relation of friendship and peace; katallage is thus the reconciliation brought about by expiation, placation, atonement. This katallage is the content of the gospel; all is accomplished, God is reconciled, there is nothing more for us to do; and the whole ministry of reconciliation consists in the invitation to mankind: be reconciled to God, lay aside your enmity also, enter into that relation of peace in which God through the offering of Christ has placed Himself toward sinners, believe the gospel, Rom. 5:9, 10, 2 Cor. 5:18-21, cf. Eph. 2:16, Col. 1:20-22, Cremer s.v. hil. and katall. , Philippi on Rom. 5:10, Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 99 f. Already with this, that whole conception is judged which separates satisfaction and reconciliation and brings the latter into being only when mankind believes and repents. Mankind does not reconcile itself with God, as if they with and alongside God were the subject of reconciliation; but God has reconciled the world with Himself, without its doing, apart from it, without it having contributed the least to it or needing to contribute to it; mankind only receives reconciliation as a gift, Rom. 5:11, and accepts it by faith, 2 Cor. 5:20. But from this one benefit of reconciliation, acquired by Christ, various benefits flow forth. That cannot be otherwise. When the relation between God and the world is set right, then in due time everything comes into order, also the relation between heaven and earth, angels and mankind, mankind among themselves, and also the relation of mankind to sin, death, world, Satan, and so forth. In the sphere of justice, the case is decided. God is in the right and therefore He is sooner or later acknowledged in the right everywhere, in all areas, and by all creatures. Justice is on His side and it will one day be acknowledged by all, willingly or unwillingly. In the katallage , the peace relation of God in Christ to the world, various other benefits are thus enclosed. The fruits of Christ's offering are not limited to any area; they do not confine themselves, as so many think nowadays, to the religious-ethical life, to the heart, the inner chamber, the church, but they extend to the whole world. For however mighty sin may be, the gift of grace is not like the trespass; the grace of God and the gift by grace abound exceedingly, Rom. 5:15. The benefits that come to us from the katallage of God in Christ are too many to name. They can be divided into: juridical , namely, forgiveness of sins, Mark 14:24, Heb. 9:22, justification, Rom. 3:24, 4:25, 5:9, 8:34, 1 Cor. 1:30, 2 Cor. 5:21, adoption as children, Gal. 3:26, 4:5, 6, right to eternal life and the heavenly inheritance, Rom. 8:17, 1 Pet. 1:4, also redemption, apolutrosis , Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, Heb. 9:15, which however sometimes has a broader meaning, Rom. 3:24, 8:21, 23, 1 Cor. 1:30, Eph. 1:14, 4:30, 1 Pet. 1:18, 19; mystical , consisting in being crucified, buried, raised, and seated in heaven with Christ, Rom. 6-8, Gal. 2:20, Col. 3:1-13; ethical , namely, regeneration, John 1:12, 13, quickening, Eph. 2:1, 5, sanctification, 1 Cor. 1:30, 6:11, washing, 1 Cor. 6:11, cleansing, 1 John 1:9, sprinkling, 1 Pet. 1:2, of body, soul, and spirit, 2 Cor. 5:17, 1 Thess. 5:23; moral , consisting in the imitation of Christ, who left us His example, Matt. 10:38, 16:24, Luke 9:23, John 8:12, 12:26, 2 Cor. 8:9, Phil. 2:5, Eph. 2:10, 1 Pet. 2:21, 4:1; economical , namely, the fulfillment of the Old Testament covenant, the inauguration of a new covenant, Mark 14:24, Heb. 7:22, 9:15, 12:24, freedom from the law, Rom. 7:1ff., Gal. 2:19, 3:13, 25, 4:5, 5:1 etc., the blotting out of the handwriting of the law, the breaking down of the dividing wall, the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile and of all other oppositions existing in humanity to unity in Christ, Gal. 3:28, Eph. 2:11-22, Col. 2:14; physical , namely, the conquest of the world, John 16:33, of death, 2 Tim. 1:10, Heb. 2:15, of hell, 1 Cor. 15:55, Rev. 1:18, 20:14, of Satan, Luke 10:18, 11:22, John 14:30, Heb. 2:14, 1 Cor. 15:55, 56, Col. 2:15, 1 Pet. 3:22, 1 John 3:8, Rev. 12:10, 20:2 etc. In one word: the whole re-creation, the complete restoration of the world and humanity laden with guilt by sin, corrupted and torn asunder, is the fruit of Christ's work. Objectively, in principle, in the sphere of justice, He has brought about that re-creation by His cross. Then the katallage was established between God and the world. And therefore Christ will in His time—for all goes in fixed order—present the church without spot or wrinkle to the Father, deliver the kingdom to God, and God will be all in all, 1 Cor. 15:22-28.
In theology, this richness of Christ's benefits has always been acknowledged. Through Christ, said Clement of Alexandria, the earth has become a sea of good things. People spoke of Christ as mediator, redeemer, reconciliator, liberator, dispenser, savior, healer, lord, shepherd, king, and so on, and described the work He accomplished as deification, divinization, making divine, life-giving, salvation, liberation, redemption, restoration, cleansing, regeneration, enlightenment, resurrection, and so on, and sometimes tried to classify all these benefits to some extent, as in the well-known verse lines: Propitiating, purging, redeeming, as victim, sponsor, He saved, thus the laws of God and truth require, or under the heads of expiation, remission, consummation, and so on; compare Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2. Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel IV 21. Augustine, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins I 26. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III question 48. 49. Bonaventure, Breviloquium IV 1. Petavius, On the Incarnation XII chapters 6. 7. Polanus, Syntagma VI chapter 18. Voetius, Disputationes II 229 and following. Van Mastricht, V 18, 22. Turretin, On Satisfaction 317. Marten Vitringa VI 121. But it usually did not come to a logical order and regular treatment. The view of Christ's work as satisfaction and merit, which arose since Anselm, could not compensate for this lack; both are only logically distinguished, for the same work of Christ is satisfaction, insofar as He brought His offering to God and fulfilled His demand, and it is merit, insofar as Christ thereby acquired salvation for us from God; Thomas, III question 48 articles 1 and 2. Petavius, On the Incarnation XII 9. Perrone, Praelectiones IV 311. Calvin, Institutes II 17 1. Voetius, Disputationes II 228. Van Mastricht, Theology V 18, 14. 20. Quenstedt III 225. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation I second edition 283 and so on. Both concepts place Christ's work too one-sidedly under the category of work and merit; the question is much more what Christ "merited" and how this relates to His offering. In modern times, therefore, these terms have almost entirely been dropped, and in their place, the fruit of Christ's work has been designated as redemption or reconciliation. The first description especially came into honor through Schleiermacher; indeed, he also speaks of a new creation brought about by Christ, but this coincides with redemption for him, Christian Faith § 89, 1. 2; and by it he understands the imparting of His sinless perfection, § 88, the reception of believers into the power of His God-consciousness, § 100, which occurs not magically, nor empirically, but mystically through creative divine activity, through Christ's self-revelation in His church, § 100, 2, 3. In addition, Schleiermacher assumes a reconciling activity of Christ, consisting in His receiving believers into the fellowship of His undisturbed blessedness and making them share in the forgiveness of sins through the fellowship of life with Him, § 101. Ritschl, on the other hand, sums up Christ's work under justification and reconciliation; the fruits of His life do not consist in a change of mood in God from an angry judge to a gracious Father, II 208 following. 217 following. III 439, not in actual redemption, II 221, not in deliverance from death, II 86, also not in the mystical dying and rising with Christ, for Romans 6 is strong symbolism and provides no material for a dogma, II 226 following; but Christ assures and guarantees us through His whole person and life that God is love; He admits us despite our sins to fellowship with God, III 506 following. The justification which Christ grants us is not remission of guilt and punishment, not imputation of His righteousness, but removal of the consciousness of guilt, and thereby of the separation between us and God, III 51, 61, the removal of the thought that sin hinders fellowship with God, III 60. The consequence and effect of this justification is reconciliation; for this consists in the fact that he who accepts justification, which is actually a good of the church, in faith, now also subjectively enters into that new relationship to God, lays aside enmity on his side, and places himself in a relationship of peace to God; it is an ethical change in us, II 230 following. 342 following. III 74-76. Instruction § 37. There is a great difference between Schleiermacher and Ritschl: in the former, the person, in the latter, the work of Christ stands in the foreground; in the first, the subjective change in man comes about in a mystical way, through impartation of life, in the second in an ethical way, through teaching and example; the first benefit is redemption in Schleiermacher, the imparting of Christ's sinless perfection, and in Ritschl the objective, synthetic justification, which is first of all a good of the church. But despite this difference, the agreement is even greater: Christ is in both the sinless man who stands in special fellowship with God; the passive obedience is denied in Christ's work by both; His suffering and death is only the necessary consequence of His faithfulness to God maintained to the end; the connection between Christ's work and its fruits in the believer, in the church, remains unclear in both; both shift the center of gravity of redemption and reconciliation from the objective work of Christ to the subjective change in believers; and even, although Ritschl seems to let justification as an objective benefit of the church and as a synthetic judgment precede faith, in fact, also in him, not for the church as a whole but for each individual, justification depends on subjective reconciliation; compare Yearbook for German Theology 1888 pages 21. 22. Kübel, On the Difference between the Positive and Liberal Directions in Modern Theology second edition 1893 page 150. Kähler, On the Doctrine of Reconciliation 32 following. Above all, however, both agree in limiting the effect of Christ's life and suffering to the religious and ethical realm. Now it is true that even with this limitation, neither of them clearly brings to light how the person and work of Christ can bring about this change in the religious and ethical realm. But yet, on the other hand, it is to some extent understandable that, if the fruit of Christ's work is limited to this area, His work and His person are conceived as done by Schleiermacher and Ritschl; for it is true what the former says: the peculiar activity and the exclusive dignity of the Redeemer refer back to each other and are inseparably one in the self-consciousness of believers, Christian Faith § 92. With this conception, it is understandable that passive obedience is denied, that the deity of Christ is only a being of God in Him, that resurrection, ascension, and so on, are unnecessary; a pantheistic-mystical or a deistic-moral working of Christ's person and work is then sufficient for salvation.
But that is truly not in agreement with the teaching of Holy Scripture; it is a misprizing of the person of Christ and a lessening of his work. Christ is not merely a man indwelt by God, but the eternal and only-begotten Son of God, the brightness of his glory and the express image of his substance, himself God, blessed above all forever. And the fruit of his life and death is not merely some magical or moral influence that goes forth from him into the world, but nothing less than the restoration of all things, Acts 3:21, the gathering up of all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, Eph. 1:10. This work of re-creation has its beginning and source in the perfect offering of Christ, or rather in the reconciliation which God has brought about in Christ between himself and the world. God wills not to conquer by overwhelming might. It would have been easy for him to destroy the whole world in his wrath and to give being to another world and mankind, Num. 14:12. But God exalts himself in judgment and hallows himself in righteousness, Isa. 5:16. Sin is no physical, but an ethical power. Satan has in sin his ungodly might over the world, and sin has its strength in the law, 1 Cor. 15:56. Thus it has pleased God to overcome this power in a moral way, in the path of right and righteousness. Not by force or might, but by the cross, which blotted out the handwriting of the law, has God triumphed over the principalities and powers, stripped them of their armor, and openly displayed them in their shame, Col. 2:15. And therefore now, because God in the way of right has overcome sin and all its power, therefore he is free, even as judge of his adversaries, to justify the ungodly, Rom. 4:5; no one can bring a charge against God's elect, Rom. 8:33. It is God who justifies, and who in the justification of him who believes in Jesus, himself proves to be the righteous one, Rom. 3:26. God can do this, upholding, yes, to the glory of his righteousness, because Christ has died and risen, Rom. 8:34. On the ground of that offering he can wrest world and mankind from sin, spread his kingdom, gather all things under Christ as head, and one day be all in all. No one, not even Satan, can bring anything against it; in the end all must confess that God is righteous and that Christ is the lawful, the rightful Lord, Phil. 2:11.
Between the benefits which Christ has acquired and his person and offering, there exists then no physical or magical connection, as if some substance of God-manly life, divine nature, etc., were poured out from him into us, as theosophists imagine it. But God has in Christ cleared for himself the kingly way of right, to glorify to his fallen creature the riches of his grace. From the objective reconciliation founded by him himself, apart from the world, all the aforesaid benefits flow to mankind for Christ's sake, justification, sanctification, complete redemption, the whole re-creation. And because this work of re-creation is so great, greater even than that of creation and preservation, therefore he to whom this work was entrusted had to be not only true and righteous man, but also stronger than all creatures, that is, at the same time true God. The same one through whom God created the world could alone also be the mediator of re-creation, Bonaventure, Breviloquium IV c. 1.
19. The Extent of Christ's Satisfaction. Intensively, the work of Christ is of infinite worth, but extensively it also spreads out to the whole world. As the world has been the object of God's love, John 3:16, so Christ came not to condemn that world but to save it, John 3:17, 4:42, 6:33, 51, 12:47; in Him God has reconciled the world, all things in heaven and on earth, to Himself, John 1:29, 2 Cor. 5:19, Col. 1:20, and gathers them in this dispensation into one, Eph. 1:10; the world, created by the Son, is also destined for the Son as its heir, Col. 1:16, Heb. 1:2, Rev. 11:15. From this, Origen concluded that Christ through His suffering and death has redeemed the whole world, not only all men but also all other reasonable beings, namely, the fallen angels, and furthermore all creatures, de Principiis I 6; Christ died not only for men but also for the other rational beings, in Joannem I 40. He indeed died only once, at the end of the ages, Heb. 9:26, but the power of His death is sufficient for the redemption not only of the present world but also of that which has existed before or will exist later, and not only of men but also of the heavenly spirits, de Principiis II 3, 5. Homiliae in Leviticum I 3, cf. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte I² 254. This universalism, however, has always been rejected by the Christian churches, for example, Constantinople 543 can. 7, 12; and in fact they have always been particularistic to this extent, that they limit ta panta in Col. 1:20 and do not extend it to the fallen angels.
But nevertheless, from these and other passages, where the word "world" or "all" is connected with the offering of Christ, Isa. 53:6, Rom. 5:18, 8:32, 1 Cor. 15:22, 2 Cor. 5:15, Heb. 2:9, 1 Tim. 2:4, 6, 2 Pet. 3:9, 1 John 2:2, the conclusion has been drawn that Christ has satisfied for all men, head for head, and that the vicarious satisfaction must therefore be understood as universal. The church fathers before Augustine commonly speak very universalistically about God's will of salvation and about the reconciliation of Christ, cf. Petavius, de Incarnatione XIII c. I. 2; but the actual question did not yet exist in that time and could not yet arise, because on God's side they assumed only a foreknowledge and on man's side laid stress on his free will, though weakened by sin.
In the Pelagian controversy, however, it had to come to the fore; and Augustine was the first who clearly taught the particular satisfaction. Indeed, Augustine says many times with Scripture that God wills the salvation of all, that if one died for all, then all died, that those who perish did not want to believe, that whoever believes does so voluntarily, Petavius, ibid. c. 3, that Christ is a propitiation for the whole world and has reconciled all things, heavenly and earthly, with one another, Kühner, Augustins Anschauung von der Erlösungsbedeutung Christi 1890 p. 62. But this proves nothing at all against this other thing, equally clearly and plainly expressed by Augustine, that God's will of salvation and the reconciliation in Christ is limited to the predestined. First, this already follows in general from Augustine's doctrine of predestination and of grace; since the number of those who will be saved is eternally and unchangeably determined by God and to them alone the grace of faith and perseverance is granted, then in between the proposition can no longer be maintained that Christ has satisfied for all men head for head. Second, Augustine always understands 1 Tim. 2:4 in a limited sense; indeed, he gives different explanations of that text, now that all who are saved are not saved except by His will, Epistula 107, de Civitate Dei XIII 23, and then that by all men are to be understood all the predestined, who are chosen from all peoples and classes of the human race, Enchiridion 103. de Correptione et Gratia 14. contra Julianum IV 8, but everywhere, where he deliberately explains the text, he understands it in a limited sense, cf. Petavius, de Deo XI 7, 10. de Incarnatione XII 4. And third, he repeatedly connects the person and work of Christ only with the elect; God called through Christ the people of believers to adoption, Confessiones IX 1; Christ through His resurrection called us who are predestined to a new life, through His blood redeemed those sinners who are to be justified, de Trinitate IV c. 13. Everyone who is redeemed by Christ's blood is a man, but not everyone who is a man is also redeemed by Christ's blood, de Conjugiis Adulterinis I 15. None perishes of those for whom Christ died, Epistula 102 to Evodius, cf. Wiggers, Augustinismus und Pelagianismus I 313. Vitringa VI 147. Although Semipelagianism soon gained the upper hand, yet many also remained faithful to Augustine on this point. Appealing to 1 Tim. 2:4, the Semipelagians said that God embraces all men with equal love and grants to all an equal measure of grace. To this Prosper replied that God cares for all, and there is no one whom either the evangelical preaching or the testimony of the law or even nature itself does not reach; but we ascribe the unbelief of men to the men themselves; however, we confess that the faith of men is a gift of God, without whose grace no one runs to grace. And concerning the particularity of the satisfaction, Christ was indeed crucified for the redemption of the whole world, on account of the true assumption of human nature and on account of the common perdition of all in the first man; yet He can be said to have been crucified only for those to whom His death was profitable, Responsio ad Capitula Calumniarum Gallorum 8. 9. However moderately this is expressed, all followers of Augustine, Prosper, Lucidus, Fulgentius, etc., agreed in this, that, however much God cares for all men and grants them various benefits, yet He does not will the salvation of all in the same way; that He does not grant to all the same measure of grace; and that Christ, though in a certain sense died for all, yet efficaciously died only for those to whom His death actually benefits. But the Synod of Arles 475 forced Lucidus to retract his doctrine that Christ died only for those who are actually saved. And the Synod of Orange 529 said only that all the baptized can fulfill what is necessary for salvation, cf. Petavius, de Incarnatione XIII c. 5-7. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte II² 571-582.
In the ninth century the question came up again; Gottschalk taught that Christ washes the reprobate in the sacrament of baptism, but did not undergo the cross for them nor suffer death nor shed blood. Lupus said that Christ did not die for all men, but indeed for all believers, even for those who later lose the faith. Remigius made a similar distinction. And the Synod of Valence 855 spoke in the same spirit; it rejected that Christ shed His blood also for those ungodly who from the beginning of the world until the passion of the Lord died in their ungodliness and were punished with eternal damnation, and confessed that that price was paid only for those of whom our Lord Himself says: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life, can. 4. The Scholastics also remained in the main faithful to Augustine; 1 Tim. 2:4 must not be understood as if God willed what does not happen, as if He willed that those also be saved who in fact are not, but this text means that no man is saved except him whom He Himself wills to be saved, or that various men from all peoples and classes will be saved, or also, more in the sense of Damascene, that God wills the salvation of all, namely, with an antecedent, conditional will, that is, if they themselves will and come to Him, but then this will was more a wish than an absolute will, Lombard, Sententiae I dist. 46, 2 and also on 1 Tim. 2:4. Bonaventure, ibid. art. 1 qu. 1. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I qu. 19 art. 7 qu. 23 art. 4 ad 3. And as regards the satisfaction, the Scholastics indeed taught that it was superabundant and was made for the sin of the human race, of the whole human nature, etc., Thomas, Summa Theologiae III qu. 46 art 1, but they argued the possibility of the satisfaction especially therewith, that Christ was the head and the believers the members of His body, and therefore repeatedly connected the satisfaction only with the believers; thus Thomas says, the head and members are as it were one mystical person and therefore the satisfaction of Christ pertains to all the faithful as to members, III qu. 48 art. 2; because He is our head, through His passion He delivered us as His members from sins, as if by the price of His passion, just as if a man by some meritorious work which he performed with his hand, redeemed himself from a sin which he committed with his feet, III qu. 49 art. 1. And III qu. 79 art. 7. he says: the passion of Christ profits indeed all as to sufficiency, but has effect only in those who are joined to Christ through faith and charity. That this efficacy does not depend on man's free will, but on God's election and Christ's offering itself, appears in general from Thomas's doctrine of grace and specifically also from the fact that he says III qu. 48 art. 6: the passion of Christ efficiently causes human salvation; cf. also Lombard: Christ loved the elect only as Himself and desired their salvation, Sententiae III dist. 31, 4. Christ offered Himself to the Trinity for all, as to the sufficiency of the price, but for the elect only as to efficacy, because He effected salvation only for the predestined, ibid. III dist. 20, 3. Later this same view was still defended in the Roman church by Baius, Jansenius, Quesnel, and even also by Tapper, Estius, Sonnius, and others, cf. Rivetus, Opera III 438. M. Vitringa VI 155-159. But Semipelagianism penetrated ever deeper into Rome's church, and thereby it became especially after Trent almost the general doctrine, that God with antecedent will wills the salvation of all, that Christ has satisfied for all, and that the consequent will reckons with the good or bad use that men make of their freedom and of grace, and further Trent VI c. 2 and 3. Catechismus Romanus I 3, 7. Innocent X in damn. 5 propos. Jans. Bellarmine, de Sacrificio Missae I 25. de Poenitentia I 2. de Amissione Gratiae IV 4. Becanus, Manuale Controversiarum III 1 qu. 1. Petavius, de Incarnatione XIII c. 14. Theologia Wirceburgensis IV 322. Scheeben, Dogmatik III 356. Jansen, Praelectiones Theologicae II 748 etc. And with this in essence agree the Greek church, Damascene, de Fide Orthodoxa II c. 29. Confessio Orthodoxa qu. 34. 47; the Lutherans, Symbola ed. Müller p. 781. Gerhard, Loci VII c. 6. Quenstedt, III 311-324. Hollaz, Examen 745. Buddeus, Institutiones Theologicae 824; the Remonstrants, Confessio and Apologia Confessionis VIII 10. Arminius, Opera 153. Episcopius on 1 John 2:2. Limborch, Theologia Christiana IV c. 3-5; and further the Mennonites, Quakers, Moravians, Methodists, etc.
The Reformed stand quite alone with their teaching of particular satisfaction. And besides that, they were by no means unanimous among themselves and gradually diverged more and more from one another. Various confessions speak moderately and generally, for example, the Anhalt Confession, the March Confession, the Leipzig Confession, the Thorn Confession; the Anglican Confession is silent about it; the Heidelberg Catechism does not express it directly, although question 37 has been wrongly cited as proof for general satisfaction; the French, Dutch, and Scottish confessions teach it only by implication. In the Canons of Dort it is clearly taught, but it is also said that the offering of Christ was of infinite value and price, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world, II 3, and further it appears in the Westminster Confession VIII 1. 5. 8, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, the Helvetic Consensus 13. Also among the theologians there was no unanimity. Some thought it good to say that Christ's offering would have been sufficient for all men if God had willed to make it efficacious for all; but one could not really say that it was sufficient for all; for if Christ had not died efficaciously for all, then He had not died sufficiently either; and if one spoke thus, it gave occasion for misunderstanding and prepared the dangerous distinction between antecedent and consequent will, between sufficient and efficacious grace, Beza, Piscator, Twisse, Voetius. Others, however, spoke with Augustine and the scholastics that Christ died sufficiently for all, efficaciously only for the elect, Calvin on 1 John 2:2, Heinrich Alting, Turretin, Mastricht, Moor, and so on. At the Synod of Dort, the foreign delegates spoke as broadly as possible about the worth and sufficiency of Christ's offering; the English theologians even said that Christ in a certain sense died for all; thus Christ died for all, so that all and each, through faith, might obtain by the power of this ransom the forgiveness of sins and eternal life, thesis 3. In England there was, over against the strict Reformed school of Twisse, Rutherford, and others, a more moderate direction, represented by Davenant, Calamy, Reynolds, Arrowsmith, Seaman, and so on, and especially by Richard Baxter. Their view essentially agreed with that of the French theologians, Cameron, Testard, Amyraut, and so on; there was a preceding decree according to which Christ satisfied conditionally for all, under the condition of faith, and another following particular decree according to which He satisfied for the elect in such a way that He also grants them faith in due time and infallibly leads them to salvation. In the Scottish church, the doctrine of particular satisfaction repeatedly came up for discussion in connection with the general offer of grace; it was even one of the causes for the separation of the Erskines in 1733. To avoid the Neonomian direction, which made faith a legal condition and therefore destined the gospel only for certain qualified persons, the so-called Marrow Men (James Hog, Thomas Boston, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, Alexander Moncrieff, and so on) taught that Christ's offering possessed a legal, federal sufficiency for all men and based thereon the general offer of grace. Some went even further, distinguishing between a general and particular grace, an external and internal covenant (Thomas Mair 1754), or taught a general satisfaction (James Fraser, died 1698, but his treatise on justifying faith was first published in two parts in 1722 and 1749), or even entirely denied the satisfaction (Dr. M. Gill, Practical essay on the death of Christ, 1786). In this century, particular satisfaction became the subject of a prolonged controversy in Scotland. In 1820 the United Associate Synod of the Secession Church issued a declaration in which it condemned general satisfaction but still taught that Christ's offering was sufficient for all and brought all into a salvable state. This declaration met with objection from both the right and the left; some denied that all had a right to Christ and opposed general satisfaction in every sense, Palaemon in his Letters upon Theron and Aspasio, Symington, Haldane, and especially Dr. Marshall; others decidedly taught general satisfaction, William Pringle, John McLeod Campbell, James Morison, Robert Morison, A. C. Rutherford, John Guthrie; the two professors Balmer (died 1844) and Brown were even accused by Marshall but acquitted by the synod in 1845. Similarly, in other countries the doctrine of particular satisfaction was weakened in the spirit of Grotius or Amyraut or decidedly rejected, in England by Daniel Whitby, against whom Jonathan Edwards opposed; in America by the Edwardean or New England theologians, Emmons, Taylor, Park, Fiske, and so on; in Germany by P. Volckmann and others; here in this country especially by Venema. Nowadays the doctrine of particular satisfaction is almost universally abandoned, even by Van Oosterzee. On the other hand, it is still defended by Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, Shedd, W. Cunningham, Robert S. Candlish, Hugh Martin, Kuyper, That Grace Is Particular. And it has recently found support again in Ritschl, according to whom the correlate of Christ's offering is not the individual person nor all persons but specifically the church; it alone possesses justification and is full of forgiveness of sins, it is always presented in Scripture as the object of the workings that proceed from Christ.
20. In this weighty strife over the worth of Christ's offering there is full oneness, on the one hand, that not all but only some men truly share in Christ's blessings, and on the other hand, that Christ's offering in itself would be fully enough to let not only some but all men share in the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. The universalists are thus in deed all bound to the particularity of grace; and the particularists all without bar own the universality of Christ's offering, as to its inner worth. Even those who have qualms with the words that Christ died sufficiently for all and effectually for the elect, yet fully grant that the matter of Christ's merit is fully enough for the atonement of the sins of all men, and what they wish is only this, that the form of merit, that is, Christ's deserving, not in itself but in order to the reprobate considered, can be called not only not effectual but also not sufficient, Voetius, Disp. The strife thus runs only over the ask, whether it was God's will and aim that Christ brought his offering for the sins of all men without bar, or only for the sins of those given him by the Father. So set, the ask seems hardly open to twofold answer. For first, the Writ throughout brings Christ's offering only in bond with the gathering, whether this is marked by many, Isa. 53:11, 12, Matt. 20:28, 26:28, Rom. 5:15, 19, Heb. 2:10, 9:28, by his folk, Matt. 1:21, Titus 2:14, Heb. 2:17, 7:27, 13:12, by his sheep, John 10:11, 15, 25ff., Heb. 13:20, by his brothers, Heb. 2:11, by children of God, John 11:52, Heb. 2:13-15; by those given him by the Father, John 6:37, 39, 44, 17:2, 9, 24, by his gathering, Acts 20:28, Eph. 5:25, by his body, Eph. 5:23, or also by us as believers, Rom. 5:9, 8:32, 1 Cor. 5:7, Eph. 1:7, 2:18, 3:12, Col. 1:14, Titus 2:14, Heb. 4:14-16, 7:26, 8:1, 9:14, 10:15, 1 John 4:10, 1 Pet. 3:18, 2 Pet. 1:3, Rev. 1:5, 6, 5:9, 10 and so on. Ritschl has here rightly again drawn heed; for, though he came to this through wholly other weighings, the deed itself stands fast: in the Writ not all men head for head, but the gathering is the match of all workings bound to Christ's offering death, Justification and Reconciliation. The weighings with Ritschl are however other than with the Reformed; these last said: not all but the gathering of the elect. Ritschl says: not the single but the gathering and seeks thus to put away the mystical oneness, the fellowship of believers one by one with Christ from the Writ. But in the thing itself there is yet oneness. Against this clear, ongoing lore of the Writ the few texts on which the universalists lean have little weight. The wording all in Isa. 53:6, Rom. 5:18, 1 Cor. 15:22, 2 Cor. 5:15, Heb. 2:9, cf. 10 proves nothing, or it proves much more than the universalists claim and would help the lore of Origen on the again-bringing of all things. The universalists are therefore themselves driven to narrow the word all in these steads. Of more weight are texts like Ezek. 18:23, 33:11, John 1:29, 3:16, 4:42, 6:33, 1 Tim. 2:4, 6, Titus 2:11, Heb. 2:9, 2 Pet. 3:9, 1 John 2:2, 4:14, where God's will or Christ's offering is brought in bond with the saving of all or of the world. But these texts are none of them at odds with the foresaid sayings that narrow Christ's blessings to the gathering. For the New Testament is a wholly other sharing out than the Old Covenant; the gospel is not set to one folk but must be preached to all beings, Matt. 28:19; there is no taking of faces with God, there is no more sundering of Heathen and Jew, Acts 10:34, 35, Rom. 3:29, 10:11-13. Yes even, as in Isa. 53:11, 12, Matt. 20:28, 26:28, Rom. 5:15, 19, Heb. 2:10, 9:28 many are spoken of, for whom Christ died, then thereunder lies not the withstanding that was later often shoved under, that not all but only many shall be saved. But the thought from which this speaking of many springs is a wholly other, namely not for few is Christ died, but for many, for very many. He gives his life for many, He sheds his blood for many, He shall make many righteous; not few are they, but many, who through the hearkening of one are set as righteous. The Writ is not afraid that there will be too many saved. And therefore, from that same weighing, it says that God has no liking in the death of the godless, that He wills that all come to turning and be saved, that Christ is an atonement and has given his life for the world and that to all beings the gospel must be preached. If the universalists draw from this that the fulfilling is wholly broad, then they come both with the Writ and with the truth in strife; for these both teach as if in strife that not all but only many become known with the gospel and come to true turning. In all those steads there is therefore speech, not of the will of good liking which is unknown to us and can or may not be a rule of our deed; also not of a foregoing will, which goes before our will's choice and bends thereto; but of the will of sign, which tells us whereto we in the New Covenant have to bear ourselves. It gives us the right and lays on us the plight to bring the gospel to all men without bar. Another ground than this clearly opened will of God we need not for the broad offer of grace. For whom Christ set died we need no more beforehand to know, than who by God are chosen to everlasting life. The calling rests well on particular ground, for it belongs to and goes out from the covenant, yet it bends itself, in oneness with God's opened will and with the in itself all-enough worth of Christ's offering, also to those who are outside the covenant, so that they too may be taken up in that covenant and in their belief themselves receive the proof of their choosing, cf. part II. In the second stead the Writ holds in that the offering and the forepraying of Christ, and so also the winning and the laying on of saving unbreakable hang together. The offering is the ground of Christ's forebidding; the last stretches therefore even as far as the first. Limborch, Christian Theology owns then also, intercession not to be an act in deed from the offering, as far as it is done in heaven, sundered. If the intercession thus is particular, as it is, John 17:9, 24, Rom. 8:34, Heb. 7:25, 1 John 2:1, 2, then is also the offering. Well Limborch leans against this on Luke 23:34, but here Jesus prays not for the saving of his foes but only for the not reckoning of that dreadful misdeed, whereto they in their unknowing made themselves guilty, as they crucified the Messiah. And even so is there an unbreakable bond between the winning and the laying on of saving. All blessings of the grace covenant hang together, Rom. 8:28-34, and find their ground in Christ's death, Rom. 5:8-11. The atonement in Christ brings the keeping and saving with it. Christ is forsooth the head and the believers are his body, which from him gets its growth, Eph. 4:16, Col. 2:19; He is the cornerstone and they are the building, Eph. 2:20, 21. He is the firstborn and they are his brothers, Rom. 8:29. The believers are then also objectively with and in him died, crucified, buried, raised, set in heaven. That is: the gathering is no chance willful heap of singles, that even well smaller as greater can be, but it shapes with Christ an organic whole, that in him as second Adam is shut in, as the whole mankind comes forth from the first Adam, cf. Rothe, Theological Ethics. The laying on must therefore even as far stretch as the winning of saving; it is in this grasped and thereof the needful outflow. Besides lies that also in the kind of the thing. If Jesus truly is Savior, then must he also truly save his folk, not in maybe but in deed. The universalists are however driven to take saving itself wholly otherwise and to short the name of Jesus. In logic holds the rule: the greater the stretch, the lesser the grasping. And this rule is also on manifold other fields, it is also here of holding. Under the sheen of honoring Christ's work, it is by the lore of broad fulfilling weakened and narrowed. If Christ yet has fulfilled for all, the winning shuts not needfully the laying on of saving in. This last is then something that maybe chance-wise comes by but that is not of itself therewith given and does not of kind flow forth therefrom. The laying on of saving is then not and can not be Christ's work, but hangs at last always on man's will. This must fill up Christ's work, lay it on, bring it over to deed. That is, for Christ stays only over the winning, not of the deed but only of the maybe of saving, not of the deedly reconciliation but of the potential reconcilability. Christ won for God only the maybe to go into a covenant of grace with us, to gift us forgiveness of sins and everlasting life, if namely we believe. The foremost of the work of saving, that which truly makes us saved, that stays for us yet to do over. Christ made not fast the covenant of grace itself in his blood, he made not that the sins of his folk are forgiven, but he spoke only out that from God's side there is no qualm to go into a covenant with us and forgive us the sins, if we and after we from our side believe. For us has Christ thus ownly nothing won, but only for God the maybe to forgive us, if we fulfill the behests of the gospel. The universalists come therefore all thereto to lessen the worth and strength of Christ's work. What they, and then yet only in sheen, win at bulk, they lose at kind. Rome teaches that the sins done before baptism, that is in the rule the birth-sin, are forgiven in baptism. But after baptism stays over the lusting, which well itself is no sin but becomes ground to sinning. The then done sins are well forgiven in the sacrament of penance, what the guilt and the everlasting strafing concerns; but the timely strafing must by man himself here or in purgatory be borne, Trent. The Remonstrants said that God in Christ's death has so atoned all sinners with himself, that through and for this ransom and offering he willed to come back in grace with them and open to them the door of everlasting saving and the way of undyingness, Confession. The Quakers let Christ's work lie therein that he has offered us the atonement and made God bent to forgiveness, Barclay, Apology. And to like end must all come who teach a broad fulfilling. The weight-point is laid out of Christ into the Christian; belief is the true atonement with God, cf. Kübel, Difference. The Reformed were however of another thought. The vicarious satisfaction is no ready greatness, but shuts in ground the whole again-shaping in itself. Christ's work is then first done when he gives over the kingdom to the Father. He opened not the maybe of being saved, but makes saved always through, on ground of his offering fulfilled at the cross. Savior is he who not only died for our sins but therefore also was raised and went to heaven and now as the heightened Savior prays for his gathering. He hallowed himself, that also his own be hallowed in truth, John 17:19, he gave himself over for the gathering, that he hallow it and set it glorious to himself, Eph. 5:25-27. Both are from one, namely God, Heb. 2:11, and are as it were one Christ, 1 Cor. 12:12. In and with Christ God gifts to the believers all that they need, Rom. 8:32ff., Eph. 1:3, 4, 2 Pet. 1:3; the choosing in Christ brings all blessings in Christ with it, the taking to children, the loosing through his blood, Eph. 1:3ff., the gift of the Holy Ghost, 1 Cor. 12:3, the belief, Phil. 1:29, the turning, Acts 5:31, 11:18, 2 Tim. 2:25, a new heart and a new ghost, Jer. 31:33, 34, Ezek. 36:25-27, Heb. 8:8-12, 10:16. Cf. Canons of Dort. Leiden Professors in Censure of Remonstrant Confession. Trigland, Antapology. Mastricht. Voetius, Disp. Witsius, Economy of the Covenants. Miscellanea Sacra. Vitringa. Moor. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation. In the third stead is hereto yet to add that the universalism leads to sundry false settings. It brings sundering between the three persons of the Godly being, for the Father wills all's saving, the Son fulfills for all, but the Holy Ghost narrows the gift of belief and of saving to few. It brings twofold strife between God's aim, who wishes all's keeping, and God's will or might, who wills or can not truly make saving share to all. It lets Christ's person and work go before the choosing and the covenant, so that Christ comes wholly outside it and can not fulfill stead-taking, while there is no fellowship between him and us. It shorts God's righteousness, which lets win forgiveness and life for all and yet deals them not out. It sets up the free will, which has the might to believe, can make Christ's work done or undone and has the choice, yes the whole outcome of world-history in hands. It leads to the lore, as the Quakers rightly marked, Barclay, Apology of the True Christian Divinity, that if Christ died for all, also all here or hereafter must be set in the stead to take or forsake him; for it were wholly unrighteous to doom and strafe those whose sins all are atoned, only because they were outside the stead to take Christ through belief. And it comes to the setting, in clear withstanding with all the Holy Writ, that the only sin why someone can go lost and be strafed is unbelief; all other sins are forsooth atoned; even to that of the man of sin, the antichrist.
21. Although therefore the vicarious satisfaction as the earning of full salvation is not to be extended to all men head for head, it is not thereby asserted that it has not the least meaning for those who are lost. There is here between the church and the world not only separation and opposition. It does not stand so that Christ has earned all for the first and nothing for the second. In the rejection of universalism it must not be forgotten that the merit of Christ also with the first has its bounds and with the second its worth and meaning.
In the first place, it must indeed be well considered that Christ as such is indeed the Re-Creator but not the Creator of all things. As the Son follows upon the Father, so creation is presupposed by re-creation, nature by grace, birth by rebirth. Among the merits of Christ is therefore not in strict sense included that the elect are born and live, that they receive food, covering, clothing, and all kinds of natural blessings. It can well be said that God would no longer have let world and mankind exist after the fall if He had no other higher purpose with it. There is indeed the common grace for the sake of special grace; and God also gives to the elect with salvation in Christ many other natural blessings, Matt. 6:33, Rom. 8:28, 32, 1 Tim. 4:8, 2 Pet. 1:3. But yet it is wrong, with the Moravians and Pietists, to wipe out the bounds between nature and grace, creation and redemption, and to set Christ in the Father's place on the throne of the whole world. Even the election and the covenant of grace, which both presuppose the objects and partakers, are not earned by Christ but go before His merits. The Father with His creation prepares the work of re-creation and leads toward it; the Son with His work goes deep, as far as sin reaches, back into the work of creation. But yet both works are distinct and not to be mingled, Voetius, Disp. II.
In the second place, Christ has not earned the same for each of His own. There is difference between believers before they come to faith, in kindred, age, estate, rank, character, gift, etc., difference also in measure and degree of wickedness and corruption. And when they come to faith, there is difference in the grace that is given them; to each is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ, Rom. 12:3, 1 Cor. 12:11, Eph. 3:7, 4:7. The natural difference between men is indeed cleansed by grace but not wiped out; it is even increased by difference of spiritual gifts, for the body of Christ consists of many members, that it may be one organism, one creation and a work of art of God.
Thirdly, the church is not of, but yet in the world; it lives and moves in the midst of that world and hangs together with it in all kinds of ways. Believers are brought from the human kindred, and conversely there is much chaff among the wheat, there are branches on the vine that bear no fruit and are rooted out. When therefore Christ took the place of His own, He had to take on the flesh and blood that all men share. By His becoming flesh He has honored the whole human kindred; according to the flesh He is brother of all men. And even His work has worth for all, also for those who never believe in Him. For although it is true that Christ has not in the proper sense earned the natural life by His suffering and dying, the human kindred is yet spared for that reason, because Christ would come to preserve it. Christ is not the head of all men, not prophet, priest, and king of all, for He is head of the church and anointed as king over Zion. But all men do owe much to Christ. The light shines in the darkness and enlightens every man coming into the world; the world is made by Him and remains so, though it has not known Him; even as Christ He gives to unbelievers many blessings, calling through the gospel, admonition to repentance, historical faith, an honorable life, all kinds of gifts and powers, offices and ministries in the midst of the church, as for example even the apostolic office to a Judas. Sans Jésus-Christ le monde ne subsisterait pas, car il faudrait, ou qu’il fut détruit ou qu’il fut comme un enfer (Pascal). Even as He hangs on the cross, He prays for forgiveness for that dreadful sin to which the Jews at that moment make themselves guilty. Cf. Voetius, Disp. II.
Fourthly, the work extends to the unreasoning creatures. One cannot say with Origen that He suffered something for them and earned something for them. But as Christ was made sin and bore the sin of the world, then He has also undone sin with all its consequences. The freeing of the creature from the bondage of corruption, the glorifying of creation, the renewing of heaven and earth is a fruit of the cross of Christ, Rom. 8:19ff. Voetius, Disp. II.
Fifthly, the angels in heaven also have benefit and gain from the work of Christ. There is no sufficient ground for the assertion that Christ earned for them perseverance and glory, although many have so taught with appeal to Job 4:18, 15:15, Eph. 1:10, Col. 1:20, 1 Tim. 5:21, Heb. 12:22, 23, Augustine, de cons. evang. 35. Cyril, de ador. 9. Gregory, Bernard, Diez, Valentia, Suarez and also Calvin on Eph. 1:10 and Col. 1:20. Polanus, Synt. Theol. VI 27. Zanchi, Op. III. Bucanus, Inst. theol. VI qu. 30. Davenant on Col. 1:20. Walaeus, Synopsis pur. theol. XII 33 and Loci Comm. Op. I, etc. For angels do not need Christ for themselves as Reconciler or Preserver; they are essentially distinct from men, who alone are made after God's image. If Christ had to earn grace and glory for them, this would lead to the thought that the Son of God would yet have had to take on human nature, or, better still, the nature of angels, even if man had not fallen, cf. part II, and further Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure, Scotus on Sent. II dist. 5. III dist. 13. Thomas, S. Th. I qu. 62 III qu. 8 art. 4. Petavius, de incarn. XII 10. Becanus, Theol. schol. I. Quenstedt, Theol. I. Gerhard, Loc. XXXI § 42. Gomarus on Col. 1:20. Voetius, Disp. II. Alting, Theol. probl. nova XII 24. Turretin, Theol. El. XIV qu. 3. de Moor II. Vitringa III VI. Yet simple denial that Christ has earned something for the angels does not do justice to Eph. 1:10 and Col. 1:20. It stands there clearly that God has reconciled all things, τὰ πάντα, that is, not men or angels alone but in general all that is created, the whole creation, the world, the universe, further described by εἴτε τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς εἴτε τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, that God has reconciled that whole creation through Christ, not among themselves but to Himself, εἰς αὐτόν, and in Him brings together again and to unity for Himself. The teaching of the restoration of all things finds no support in these texts; it is rejected by the whole Scripture and has found defense in the Christian church only now and then. If this is thus excluded, then these two texts cannot be understood otherwise than that according to Paul's view the devils and the godless are once consigned to hell and that then in the new heaven and the new earth with their inhabitants the whole creation is restored. This creation now, thought in organic sense, was as a whole set in enmity against God by sin and scattered and destroyed among themselves. There does not lie herein that the good angels personally and individually needed reconciliation, nor also that Christ had to suffer and die for the unreasoning creatures. But there does lie at the bottom the supposition that sin has changed and disturbed the relation of all creatures both to God and to each other. And that is indeed so. Sin has made the world of men an object of God's wrath and divided and destroyed it in itself. The relation of the angels to God is changed, not only insofar as many have become apostate, but also because the good angels formed only a part of the whole of spirits that God had served. Augustine, Enchir. 61, 62 and others were of the opinion that this breach struck in the world of angels was healed by the elect from mankind and that therein consisted the meaning of Christ's reconciliation for mankind. This view is not acceptable; men are specifically different from angels and an equating of the number of elect men with that of fallen angels lacks all ground in Scripture. But yet it is true that the fall of so many angels must have disturbed the whole organism of the world of angels; just as an army is wholly thrown into disorder and made unfit for battle when many officers and men from the ranks go over to the enemy. So also the world of angels as God's host for His service is scattered. It has lost its head, its organization. And this it now receives back in the Son, and indeed in the Son not only according to His divine nature but also according to His human nature. For not only the relation to God, also that to the world of men was disturbed by sin. And now it is Christ who as Lord of angels and as Head of the church places both angels and men in the right relation to God and likewise to each other. By His cross He restores the organism of creation, in heaven and on earth, and these both again together. The inanimate and unreasoning in creation, that is, heaven and earth themselves, are thereby not excluded. That cannot be, because the relation of angels to heaven and that of men to earth is not mechanical but organic. Heaven and earth themselves have sunk with the fall of angels and of men below their original state; the whole creation, πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις, sighs together and is together in birth pangs. Die gesammte Creatur führt gleichsam eine grosse Seufzersymphonie aus (Philippi); all members of that creation sigh and have pain, jointly, in connection with each other, Rom. 8:22. As then also in the old covenant the tabernacle and all utensils for the service were sprinkled with blood, Exod. 24:3-8, Heb. 9:21, so also Christ through His cross has reconciled all things and earned a new heaven and a new earth. The whole creation, as it once shall stand perfect, without spot or wrinkle, before God's face, is the work of Christ, the Lord of lords and the King of kings, Heb. 12:22-28.
22. If this now be the great work laid upon Christ by the Father, to wit, to be Saviour in the full sense and to bring to pass the whole new creation, then it springs forthwith into the eye that the state of exaltation is even as needful thereto as the state of humiliation. A poor showing of Christ's person and work must they well have who think they can give up the resurrection, the ascension, and the sitting at God's right hand without harm to faith and life, and have enough with the historical picture of Jesus, which lives on and works sway in the same wise as that of other great men in history. On the other hand, it is to be understood that those who see in Jesus no more than a specially godly man and in his work nothing other than a religious-ethical reform, deem the whole state of exaltation worthless for Christian life and deny and fight the facts of the resurrection and the ascension. Yet Scripture goes out from a wholly other thought. It is the crucified but also the risen and exalted Christ whom the apostles preach. From that standpoint of exaltation they behold and set forth his earthly life, his suffering and dying. Of the work which He now carries out as the exalted Mediator, He laid the groundwork in his cross. The cross was in the strife against sin, world, Satan his only weapon. Through the cross He triumphed in the sphere of right over all powers foe to God. But therefore He has in the state of exaltation also received the godly right, the godly setting, the kingly might and fitness to carry out the work of new creation to the full, to overcome all his foes, to save all those given to Him, and to fulfill the whole kingdom of God. On ground of the one, full-offered offering done on the cross, He shares out, in keeping with the Father's will, all his good gifts. Those good gifts are no bodily or magical after-working of his earthly life and dying; the history of God's kingdom is no growth-wise unfolding. It is the living Christ, exalted at God's right hand, who with awareness, with free might shares out all these good gifts, gathers his chosen ones, overcomes his foes, and leads world-history onward to the day of his coming. He is still at work in heaven as Mediator; He was not only but is still our highest prophet, our only high priest, and our everlasting king. Yesterday and today He is the same unto everlasting. In the state of humiliation He fulfilled through his life and dying the forerunning, to now in the state of exaltation on ground of his full-offered offering free God's creation from the bondage of sin and of spoiling, and gather all things together under himself as the head. The new creation is the ongoing deed of the Mediator. Christ is the one exalted at God's right hand, but yet always on earth, in his church, in office, word, sacrament, in forgiveness, new birth, faith and so on, present and working Lord from heaven. In this light the state of exaltation gets a meaning, well often misknown but yet for teaching and life highly weighty; resurrection and ascension are for the work of new creation even as needful as flesh-becoming and cross-death. In Scripture these facts are then also not only told but ever set in the forefront and made clear in their rich meaning. Christ's resurrection took place according to the whole New Testament on the third day; in Mt. 12:40, Mk. 8:31 and so on, for the sake of likeness with Jonah the parts of the days and nights are reckoned as full, or only meant as a broad setting forth of a very short time. It stood in the uprising of that same body which was taken down from the cross and buried in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea; it was well changed and made glorious, so that it became no body of the soul but a body of the spirit, Luk. 24:16, 36, Joh. 12:14, 19, 1 Cor. 15:44 ff., Phil. 3:21, but it stayed yet a human body, Mt. 28:5, 9, Luk. 24:39, 40, 43, Joh. 20:27, 21:25, Acts 1:11, 1 Cor. 15:37 ff., Rev. 1:7. The sundry tries to make clear this resurrection in other wise (Reimarus), as seeming death (Rationalists, Schleiermacher, Hase, Herder, Gfrörer), vision, whether then wholly inward (Strauss, Lang, Holsten, Hausrath, Renan), or as outward, wrought by God (Keim, Schweizer, Schenkel) have to this day shown vain. After the resurrection Christ stayed yet a time long on earth, both to sway his followers through sundry showings of the truth of his resurrection, and also to ready them for their office and to give them the proof that He, though He would no more open the former dealings with them, since He after the resurrection belonged no more to the earth but to heaven, Joh. 20:17, yet would stay unchangeably the same in love toward them, 13:1, and everlastingly with them unto the fulfilling of the world, Mt. 28:20. The showings took place the first eight days at Jerusalem, Joh. 20:26, where the disciples must yet stay for the Passover feast, and ended therewith that Jesus gave his followers the Holy Ghost and granted the apostolic full might, Joh. 20:22, 23. Later followed his showings in Galilee, whither the disciples went back and where most followers of Jesus dwelt, Joh. 21, Mt. 28:16, 1 Cor. 15:6. Matthew and John end with these showings of Jesus in Galilee their gospel and tell not the ascension. According to Luk. 24:49, Acts 1:4 the disciples must stay in Jerusalem until they were clothed with might from on high; Luk. 24 speaks of no showings in Galilee, Acts 1:3 takes them for granted. Surely Jesus at one of the showings in Galilee also again bade his disciples to go to Jerusalem and there to await the promise of the Father. When He then in Jerusalem again for the last time shows himself to them, He says that they must stay in Jerusalem until that promise is fulfilled. Then He leads them out as far as Bethany, Luk. 24:50, to the Mount of Olives, Acts 1:12. And there He parted from them, and was taken up from them into heaven, wrongly left out by Tischendorf in Luk. 24:51. Though not told by Joh., Mt., and Mk., whose gospel according to many ends with 16:8, yet the ascension stands fast on ground of many clear witnessings of Scripture. John takes it for granted, 6:62, 14:2, 20:17, Paul points thereto, Rom. 10:6, Eph. 2:6, 4:9, 10, Col. 3:1 and names it in 1 Tim. 3:16. Peter makes telling of it, 1 Pet. 3:22, cf. Acts 2:33, 3:21, 7:56; the letter to the Hebrews knows it, 6:20, 9:24. Furthermore it lies at the ground of the New Testament teaching of Jesus' sitting at God's right hand, Acts 2:33, 5:31, 7:56, Rom. 8:34, Eph. 1:20, Col. 3:1, Heb. 1:3, 8:1, 12:2, 1 Pet. 3:21, of his pleading in heaven, Rom. 8:34, Heb. 7:25, 9:24-28, 1 Joh. 1:1, 2, of all the workings which He from heaven on earth, mainly in his church carries out, and of the awaiting of his coming back, Mt. 24:3 and so on.
This exaltation has first of all the greatest meaning for Christ Himself. In former times, in dogmatics, the question was commonly treated whether Christ by His perfect obedience had also merited something for Himself. Anselm said that Christ for His uncompelled dying had indeed merited a reward but had bestowed it upon His own, Cur Deus homo II 19. Most scholastics, Lombard, Sent. III dist. 18. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 19 art. 3 qu. 48 art. 1 qu. 49 art. 6. Bonaventure, Brevil. IV c. 7; further most Roman Catholics, Bellarmine, de Christo V c. 9. 10, Becanus, Theol. schol. III tr. 1 c. 14 qu. 5. Id., Manuale Controv. III 2 qu. 4; and very many Reformed theologians, Zanchi, Op. VI 121, VIII 477, 502. Piscator on Phil. 2:9. Gomarus on Phil. 2, Op. I 530 sq., Cloppenburg, Op. I 305. 888, Rivet, Op. II 836. Voetius, Disp. II 265-267. Mastricht, Theol. V 14, 7. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. XVIII 39. Moor III 600 and others, gave to the above-mentioned question an affirmative answer, and judged then that the hearing of prayer, John 11:42, Heb. 5:7 and especially the whole state of exaltation, the resurrection, ascension, sitting at the right hand of God and return to judgment must be regarded as reward for His merits, Isa. 53:11, Luke 24:26, John 17:4, 5, Phil. 2:9, Heb. 2:10, 12:2. Others however said that Christ merited nothing for Himself but all for us, John 17:19, 1 Cor. 1:30, 1 Tim. 1:15 etc., and that therefore the exaltation was indeed a consequence but no reward for His humiliation, Calvin, Inst. II 17, 6. Comm. on Phil. 2:9. Polanus, Syst. VI 26. Junius, Theses theol. 29, 11. Chamier, Panstr. Cath. II 7, 8, Maresius, Syst. Theol. 45. Kant. Stat. V. at Phil. 2:9 etc., and likewise the Lutheran theologians, Gerhard Loc. IV 329. Quenstedt, Theol. III 324. Buddeus, Inst. p. 787. Hollaz, Examen p. 748 etc. With Scripture in hand, however, the above-stated question cannot be answered otherwise than affirmatively. For it repeatedly sets forth the state of humiliation as the way and the means for Christ to obtain the state of exaltation, Isa. 53:10-12, Matt. 23:12, Luke 24:26, John 10:17. The dio in Phil. 2:9 indicates not merely the order and consequence but specifically the meritorious cause; because Christ so deeply humbled Himself, vs. 5-8, therefore God has also so exceedingly exalted Him. Especially the Epistle to the Hebrews lays strong emphasis repeatedly on this meritorious connection between Christ's humiliation and exaltation, 1:3, 2:9, 10, 5:7-10, 10:12, 12:2; Christ is Himself through suffering sanctified, that is, not consecrated to God or morally perfected, but completed, brought to full growth and ripeness, become teleios , consisting therein that He is now crowned with glory and honor, 2:9, and has become an archegos , a cause of eternal salvation, 2:10, 5:9. The reason why many had objection to speaking of a merit of Christ for Himself lay in the opposition against the Socinians, who let Christ first in the state of exaltation come to the rank of Deity. But although this representation is also incorrect, Scripture says clearly that the exaltation has also been of great meaning for Christ and stands in meritorious connection with His state of humiliation. The Reformed theology has precisely the privilege that it can much better let this doctrine of Scripture come to its right than the Lutheran. For on the Lutheran standpoint there remains no place open for a merit of Christ for Himself and even for a state of exaltation. For the Logos, in the first moment of the incarnation assuming the human nature, made this susceptible for the indwelling of the fullness of the Godhead and for the communication of the divine attributes. Although the God-man in a second moment also again laid aside these attributes, with respect to the use or at least of the public use, He yet retained them. And the state of exaltation can among the Lutherans therefore be nothing else than a taking again into use or into public use of the divine attributes laid aside in that sense. Christ thus received in His exaltation nothing which He did not already have; non data est Christo in exaltatione nova potentia, virtus aut majestas, quam antea non habuit, sed collata ei tantum fuit plena facultas administrandi ejus regni, quod per ipsam unionem acceperat , Quenstedt III 368, cf. Gerhard Loc. IV § 306 sq. 329. Hollaz, Ex. 774. Buddeus, Inst. 788. Schneckenburger, Zur kirchl. Christol. 93-114. This resumption of the use of the divine attributes took place according to the Lutherans in the moment of the reviviscence or vivification, and this is thus properly the first step of the exaltation. Indeed, by Gerhard, Quenstedt and others, the descent to hell is called the first step; but since this descent specifically occurred according to the human nature of Christ, according to both soul and body, the vivification must precede it; and Buddeus, Inst. p. 789 and others, cf. Vitringa V 573, therefore rightly give it the first place in the state of exaltation. Of this vivification the Lutherans further teach that it occurred not only through Christ's divine but also through His human nature; this did not of itself have the power thereto, but it yet possessed from the moment of the incarnation the divine attributes, specifically also the vis vivificans ; and thus anima Christi, virtute divinitatis personaliter sibi communicata, corpus utpote proprium suum templum vivificavit , Quenstedt III 435. Further, Christ according to His human nature in that same moment of the vivification took again into use all those divine attributes which it had received in the incarnation but in the exinanition, at least as regards the use or the public use, had laid aside; that is, it had at that same moment again the use of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and vis vivificans , Quenstedt III 154-198. From this it follows that the steps of exaltation among the Lutherans properly cannot be different, successive steps in the exaltation. In the moment of the vivification the human nature of Christ was immediately, through its union with the Logos, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. The descent to hell, which is reckoned by the Lutherans to the exaltation, is a revelation of Christ's majestas divina in hell; the resurrection is merely a manifestation of the resurrection to men, Buddeus p. 789; both also took place with the sepulcher closed, even as the appearance of Jesus to the disciples, John 20:19 took place with doors shut, Quenstedt III 441; the ascension is indeed called a true and real change of place, insofar as Christ visibly for the eyes of His disciples ascended, but is yet only a visible and local, by no means an invisible absence of the body of Christ on earth, for also according to His human nature Christ is and remains omnipresent, even if in an invisible manner, Gerhard, Loc. IV § 219. XXVIII § 24. Quenstedt, III 380. Buddeus, Inst. 796. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. IV² 1 S. 185, cf. Vitringa V 601. Moor IV 246; and the session at the right hand of God finally consists therein that Christ, specifically according to His human nature, partakes in the divine, infinite and immense power and majesty of God, especially also in His omnipresence, and exercises this in His kingdom of grace and of power, Quenstedt, III 383-388, 443-450. Gerhard, Loc. IV § 218. Buddeus p. 797. If one now considers that all these attributes were already communicated to the human nature of Christ in the moment of the incarnation and that He indeed laid aside the use but never the possession thereof; then it appears that according to the Lutheran representation nothing is communicated to Christ in the state of exaltation which He did not already possess from His conception onward. Christ is immediately at His incarnation that which He can become; He is at once also according to His human nature completed, teleios ; there is no development possible with Him; the exaltation was already there at His conception and thus cannot be conceived as a reward. The Lutheran doctrine is on this point akin to the Roman, which lets Christ already on earth be a comprehensor and communicates all gifts, for which the human nature is susceptible, already at the incarnation to Christ; and it serves for the defense of the same religious interest, namely, the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper.
However, Reformed theology had a different view. Indeed, it holds against the Socinians and also against many newer theologians that Christ did not first become prophet, priest, and king through his resurrection and was not raised to the rank of Godhead. For Scripture witnesses repeatedly that he was in the beginning with God and was himself God, John 1:1, 17:5, Romans 8:3, 2 Corinthians 8:9, Galatians 4:4, Philippians 2:9, Hebrews 1:3, etc., and that he was already from eternity anointed by the Father as prophet, priest, and king and as such was active in the days of the Old Testament and during his walk on earth, 2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 3:4, Hebrews 13:8, 1 Peter 1:11, 20. What Christ thus received for himself in the state of exaltation cannot have consisted in the divine nature or the rank of Godhead, nor in the office of prophet, priest, and king, which rests on divine election and appointment; but it consisted in the exaltation itself, in the resurrection, ascension, sitting at God's right hand, and return in judgment, in the mediatorial glory to which he was raised according to both natures, Isaiah 53:10-12, Luke 24:26, John 17:5, Philippians 2:9, Hebrews 2:10, 12:2, cf. Voetius, Disp. II 277. According to Romans 1:3, Christ is kata sarka, that is, in the way of the flesh, through birth from a woman, Galatians 4:4, become of David; but kata pneuma hagiosynes, by virtue of the Spirit of holiness that dwelt in him and guided him throughout his life, he was ordained and appointed by God through and from the resurrection, horistheis, cf. Acts 17:31, as Son of God in power.
Birth and resurrection stand here over against each other. Through birth Christ became the seed of David, Romans 9:5, took on homoioma sarkos hamartias, Romans 8:3, became weak, 2 Corinthians 13:4; but through the resurrection he was openly appointed as Son of God. That does not mean and cannot mean that he then first received the divine nature or the rank and name of God, for the opposite is clear from Romans 1:3, 8:3, 32, Galatians 4:4, etc.; but while at his incarnation he exchanged the morphe theou for the morphe doulou, Philippians 2:9, he now at the resurrection receives back the glory that he had before with the Father, John 17:2, becomes now kyrios tes doxes, 1 Corinthians 2:8, theou dynamis, 1 Corinthians 1:24, receives a name above every name, that is, the name of kyrios, John 20:28, Acts 2:36, 1 Corinthians 12:3, Philippians 2:9, 10, and therein the kyriotes, the right, the authority, and the power to rule as mediator, as prophet, priest, and king over all creatures, to subdue his enemies, to gather his people, and to win back the fallen creation for God, Psalm 2, 72, 110, Matthew 28:18, 1 Corinthians 15:21ff., Ephesians 1:20-23, Philippians 2:9-11, Hebrews 1:3ff., 1 Peter 3:22, Revelation 1:5, etc. In the resurrection God has openly appointed him as Son of God, Lord, King, Mediator, and said to him: Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee, Acts 2:36, 13:33, 17:31, Hebrews 1:5. Indeed, through his resurrection Christ has entered into a new state; as mediator he is exalted above all creatures at God's right hand.
In this exaltation his divine nature also shares in a certain sense. Just as not only the human nature of Christ but the person of the Son was the subject of the humiliation, so also that same person according to both natures is the subject of the exaltation. For he had laid aside his morphe theou and hidden his divine nature behind the veil of a weak human nature; no one saw in him or could see in him the only begotten of the Father, except with the eye of faith, John 1:14. But now, in the state of exaltation, his divine glory shines in everyone's eyes; whoever sees him now must confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. But furthermore, his human nature also shares in this exaltation. The pneuma hagiosynes also dwelt in Christ before his resurrection, from his conception onward, for he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Luke 1:35, was full of the Holy Spirit, Luke 4:1, received him without measure, John 3:34, etc., cf. Matthew 12:18, 28, Luke 4:14, Acts 1:2, 4:27, Acts 10:38. But this glory, which Christ possessed inwardly, could not yet manifest itself outwardly; he was flesh, and by virtue of the weakness of the flesh he was also put to death on the cross, 2 Corinthians 13:4. But in death he laid aside that weakness and broke all connection with sin and death. God, who gave his own Son for us into death and therein executed judgment on sin, raised him from the dead by his Spirit, who as pneuma hagiosynes dwells in Christ himself and also in all believers, Romans 8:11, so that he now would live no longer in weakness of the flesh but in power of the Spirit. He was indeed put to death in the flesh, but he was made alive in the Spirit, 1 Peter 3:18. For the Spirit of God dwelt in Christ, even when he was flesh, as the ruling power of his life, as pneuma hagiosynes, so that Christ always let himself be led by that Spirit and remained obedient to the Father even unto death; and therefore that Spirit must now also manifest itself in Christ at the resurrection as pneuma zoes, which completely overcomes death in Christ and also one day in believers, Romans 8:11.
So far is Christ now exalted above all weakness of the flesh that through the resurrection he has become a pneuma zoopoion, 1 Corinthians 15:45; he still has a soma even after the resurrection, he is the same Jesus, Acts 9:5, Romans 4:24, 8:11, 1 Corinthians 12:3, 2 Corinthians 1:14, 4:5ff. He is the second and last Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:45; he has that same soma with which he arose, but it is a soma pneumatikon, instead of the phthora, atimia, and astheneia which belong to the soma psychikon, the sarx, partaking of entirely different properties, namely aphtharsia, doxa, dynamis, 1 Corinthians 15:42ff., Philippians 3:21. Yes, in 2 Corinthians 3:17 Paul says: ho de kyrios to pneuma estin; the apostle does not want to give a description of the substantial being of Christ with this; but he comes to this statement because he wants to argue that Christians are free from the law. For that freedom finds its ground therein that the Lord, that is, the exalted Christ, is the Spirit, that is, that the Spirit of God now dwells in Christ so absolutely and is so intimately one with him that thereby an end is made to all bondage, hou de to pneuma kyriou, eleutheria. The expression pneuma kyriou proves that Paul at the beginning of the verse is not thinking of an identification of Christ and the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, because he dwells in Christ himself and because Christ communicates himself through him to his own, vs. 18. And so Christ is now the one in whom pan to pleroma tes theotetos somatikos dwells, Colossians 2:9, cf. 1:19. He is the visible eikon tou aoratou theou, Colossians 1:15. Divine glory is manifested in his human nature and shines from his face, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 4:4, 6.
23. But just as in the state of lowliness, so is Christ all that He has become in the state of uplifting, for the good of His church. What He received for Himself and for His own as reward for His toil, is not to be sundered. He is all and in all, Col. 3:11. The fullness that dwells in Christ must also dwell in the church; she is filled unto all the fullness of God, Eph. 3:19, Col. 2:2, 10. It is God who fills Christ, Col. 1:19; it is Christ who fills the church, Eph. 1:23. The church is therefore His fullness, that which He, being full and of Himself (plēroumenos ), little by little, Eph. 4:10, fills with Himself, and which therefore step by step becomes full and filled and so in her turn fills Christ, Eph. 1:23; the complete becomes a complement. For the church is not without Christ, but Christ is also not without the church; He is her head over all things, Eph. 1:22, Col. 1:18, and she is His body, which is shaped from Him and gets its growth, Eph. 4:16, Col. 2:19, and thus grows up unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, Eph. 4:13. The oneness between Christ and the church is as near as between vine and branches, bridegroom and bride, husband and wife, cornerstone and building. She can with Him be called the one Christ, 1 Cor. 12:12. To make her whole, He is uplifted at the Father's right hand and carries on His prophetic, priestly, and kingly work in heaven.
Just as in the days of the Old Testament and during his walk on earth, Christ is even now the only prophet and teacher of his church. There is no other master, Matt. 23:8, 10; there is no soothsaying, no oracle, no enthusiasm, no spiritism, no infallible papacy needed beside, above, or in the place of Christ for the church. For Christ is the wisdom; all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him, 1 Cor. 1:24, 30; Col. 2:3; and it is Christ himself who through his Word and Spirit teaches his church, so that they all, taught by God, might be prophets and proclaim the great deeds of God, Num. 11:29; Jer. 31:33, 34; Matt. 11:25-27; John 6:45; Heb. 8:10, 11; 1 John 2:20. And so he remains even in the state of exaltation still active as priest. After he has completed his offering on Golgotha, he as high priest, not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood, Heb. 9:12-14, through the tabernacle of his body, 9:11, and through the veil of his flesh, 10:20, has entered into the heavenly sanctuary, which had its pattern in the holy of holies on Zion, 6:20; 9:12, 24, to make intercession there for his own and to appear before the face of God, 7:25; 9:24.
The Socinians tried to derive from this that Christ was not yet priest in the proper sense on earth, that his offering on the cross was not the true sacrifice but only the introduction and preparation for it; just as under the Old Testament the atoning act consisted not in the slaughtering of the sacrificial animal but in the sprinkling of the blood on the altar or on the mercy seat, Lev. 16:11-16, so Christ brings about the atonement not on earth but in heaven, cf. Socinus, De J. Christo Servatore , Bibl. Fr. Pol.; Volkelius, De Verit. Relig. ; Fock, Der Socin. ; and now still W. Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of Our Lord , London 1892; Doedes, Jaarb. v. Wet Theol. 1846; Seeberg, Der Tod Christi in s. Bedeutung für die Erlösung 1895; etc. Rightly this has been contested by others, for in the Old Testament sacrifice the various atoning actions are indeed temporally separated but they form one whole; it is the blood of a slaughtered animal that through its outpouring and sprinkling restored the offerer to God's favor and freed him from sin and its punishment. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, therefore, just as in the whole New Testament, the atoning power is ascribed to the offering brought once by Christ on the cross, 2:17; 7:27; 8:3; 9:12, 26, 28; 10:10, 14, 18; 13:12; thereby all benefits, forgiveness, cleansing, sanctification, perfection are acquired. Because Christ has once offered himself on the cross and died, he cannot even do it a second time, for every man dies but once; his offering in death is not susceptible of repetition, 9:26-28.
The entering of Christ with his blood into the heavenly sanctuary cannot therefore, according to the view of the Epistle to the Hebrews, be regarded as an offering. Indeed, it is said once, in 9:7, that the high priest offered, prospherei , the blood with which he entered into the most holy place, for himself and the people's sins; but this offering of the blood is then essentially distinct from that which took place outside, in the forecourt; and so in the Old Testament it is called only the bringing of the blood. But of Christ's entering with his blood into heaven it is nowhere said that it is an offering; it is not and cannot be; by the one offering he has accomplished everything, 9:26-28; 10:12, 14. The entering of Christ with his blood into the inner sanctuary has therefore only the purpose of making the salvation acquired by his death apply to us before the face of God. Precisely because by the shedding of blood, that is, by the offering on the cross, the atonement is accomplished, Christ as high priest can enter into heaven with his blood and appear before the face of God, 9:12-14, 26. His priestly activity in heaven consists therefore not in any offering, but in his intercession and appearance before the face of God in favor of his people, 7:25; 9:24; cf. Rom. 8:34; 1 John 2:2.
Yet there is truth in the representation derived by Thalhofer, Handbuch der Kath. Liturgik I² 1894, from Heb. 8:1-4, that Christ, though having accomplished everything with one offering, yet in heaven continues that offering in a heavenly manner and continually renews his act of obedience on Golgotha at the right hand of the Father. For the offering of Christ, once made on the cross, lives on not merely in memory, but in the disposition from which it sprang. There is in heaven no repetition, no renewal, no reproduction of the offering on the cross; but that offering, once accomplished, continues to work in the appearance before the face of God and in the intercession for us, 7:25; 9:24. Therefore it can be said on the one hand that Christ by one offering has perfected all, 10:14, and on the other hand that he perfectly saves all who come to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them, 7:25. Cf. Cloppenburg, Op. ; Nic. Arnoldus, Religio Socin. Fran. 1654; de Witte, Wederl. der Soc. Dwal. ; Mastricht, Theol. ; Maccovius, Coll. Theol. ; Jaarb. v. Wet. Theol. ; Weiss, Bibl. Theol. d. N. T. § 121; Scheeben, Dogm. ; Martin, Atonement .
Therefore also, because Christ was and is and remains priest forever, the church on earth needs no priest anymore; all believers are priests, Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 2:5; Rev. 1:6. No offering for sin needs to be brought anymore, not even an unbloody one in the mass, for from the one offering accomplished on the cross there goes forth in the intercession of Christ a continual plea to God, not for vengeance as from the blood of Abel, but for grace and forgiveness, Heb. 12:24. The intercession of Christ is no longer a supplication as in the days of his flesh, Calvin, Inst. III 20, 20, but is the steadfast and gracious will of Christ, John 17:24, to lead all his people to heavenly blessedness on the ground of his offering. So Christ is our only priest, who according to the order of Melchizedek remains forever, with his offering continually covers our sins, always acts at the Father as our Advocate, takes our part against all accusations of Satan, world, and our own heart, makes our prayers and thanksgivings acceptable to the Father, always assures us a bold access to the throne of grace, and causes all blessings of grace to come to us out of his fullness, Luke 22:32; John 14:16; 17:9ff.; Rom. 1:7; 8:32ff.; 1 Cor. 1:3; 2 Cor. 1:2; Eph. 1:3; 1 Tim. 4:8; Heb. 7:25; 9:24; 1 John 2:2.
And thus is and remains Christ also our eternal King. Though anointed to this office from eternity, He yet according to His human nature first appeared as King at His exaltation. Then He received the name of Lord, was ordained as Son of God, and received all power in heaven and on earth. Christ is King in the first place over His people, in the kingdom of grace, Ps. 2:6, Isa. 9:5, 11:1-5, Luke 1:33, 19:21-23, 23:42, 43, John 18:33, 19:19; and He shows this kingship in that He gathers His church, protects it, rules it, and leads it to eternal salvation, Matt. 16:18, 28:20, John 10:28. But because His kingship bears a wholly other character than that of the princes of the earth, He is in the New Testament much more called the head of the church, 1 Cor. 11:3, Eph. 1:22, 4:15, 5:23, Col. 1:18, 2:19; He rules not by force, but by right and righteousness, by grace and love, by Word and Spirit. Then He is also in the New Testament especially described as King when there is speech of the overcoming of His enemies. For that He may truly gather, protect, and lead His church to eternal salvation, He must also as Mediator have power over all creatures, Ps. 2:9, 72:8, 110:1-3, Matt. 28:18, 1 Cor. 15:24, 27, Eph. 1:22, Phil. 2:9-11, 1 Pet. 3:22, Rev. 1:5, 17:14. There lies herein not that the world is positively ruled by Christ, but indeed that it stands under His power, is subject to Him, and once, though unwillingly, shall acknowledge and homage Him as Lord.
Especially belongs hereto His power over the kingdom of Satan. The notion of many church fathers, that Christ brought His offering to Satan and by cunning took from him his spoil, is unscriptural. But yet Christ through His cross has also won the triumph over the world of fallen spirits. He came on earth to destroy the works of the devil, 1 John 3:8, and fought against him all His life, Luke 4:13, especially in the last time, when it was the hour and the power of darkness, Luke 22:53. He was the stronger, Luke 11:22, and the devil had nothing in Him, John 14:30. He saw him already fall as lightning from heaven and took from him his armor, Luke 10:18, 11:22. Especially through the cross has He triumphed over the principalities and powers, Col. 2:15, took from him the weapons of sin, death, and world, John 16:33, 1 John 4:4, 1 Cor. 15:55, 56, Heb. 2:14, and cast him out of the realm of His kingdom, John 12:31. And His triumph He celebrated over the evil spirits especially in the resurrection. In 1 Pet. 3:19-22 this is clearly taught. There is no speech there of a descent of Christ to hell, to preach the gospel to the lost. It says yet that Christ first was made alive, that is, risen, and then went forth to preach. All ground is lacking to make with the Lutherans a temporal distinction between the vivification and the resurrection and in that interval to place the descent to hell. Also there is nowhere in Scripture any hint that Christ after His resurrection, before He ascended to heaven, first went to hell. On the other side, the exegesis is untenable that Christ in the Spirit went to the contemporaries of Noah and preached to them; "en hō" clearly refers to the Christ made alive; "poreutheis," cf. vs. 22, allows no other view; the preaching of Christ in the Spirit to Noah's contemporaries before many ages does nothing to the matter here. The pericope contains then quite something else. Peter exhorts the believers to suffer while doing good and therein to follow Christ. For He suffered while doing good, for He suffered for sins, as a righteous for the unrighteous, and indeed with this aim, that He might bring us, the unrighteous, to God. That is suffering while doing good! And now Christ was indeed killed in the flesh, but He was made alive and risen in Spirit, that is, while the Spirit of holiness was the beginning of all His life, as Spirit. And as such, as made alive, risen Spirit, as Lord and King, going forth, "poreutheis," that is, not to hell, but as appears from vs. 22 going forth to heaven , He preached to the spirits in prison. That is: His going forth to heaven as risen Lord, Acts 2:36, was a "kērygma" to the spirits in prison. What the content of that "kērygma" was is not said and needs not be said. The rising and ascending to heaven was itself the rich, mighty, triumphant "kērygma" of Christ to the spirits in prison. That Peter has that "kērygma" of Christ through His ascension now especially brought to those spirits in prison who in Noah's days, despite God's long-suffering and notwithstanding they saw the building of the ark, were disobedient, has a double reason. First, those contemporaries of Noah have in Scripture always been the most godless of all men; and second, they perished and Noah with his own were saved by the same water. Even so the water of baptism through the resurrection of Christ is destruction for the godless and salvation for the believers. For Christ who is risen and has instituted that baptism and grants power to it, sits at God's right hand, after through the ascension all angels and authorities and powers have been made subject to Him. Christ suffered while doing good and overcame; let the believers press His footsteps! And just as over all fallen spirits, so has Christ as Mediator also power in His kingdom of power over all His enemies. And He shall not rest until they all are laid under His feet.
When Christ at the end of the days shall have overcome his church and all his enemies, then will he deliver up the kingdom, the kingship, the kingly office, to the Father. His mediatorial work is then finished. The work that the Father gave him is fully done. God himself is then king forever and always. Concerning the nature of this subjection of Christ to the Father, difference arose early. Marcellus of Ancyra wrote a treatise on the subjection of the Lord Christ, and was accused of the teaching that the kingdom of Christ and also the union of the human nature with the Logos would come to an end, Schwane, D. G. II. Marcellus was opposed by Eusebius and later by Basil; the Niceno-Constantinopolitanum added to the confession that Christ would come again to judge the living and the dead, the words: of whose kingdom there shall be no end, Hahn, Bibl. d. Symbole u. s. w., cf. Petavius, de incarn. XII. Pesch, Prael. IV. Later the Socinians taught that Christ, whom the Father had temporarily appointed as governor, would one day step down, just as a general, after gaining the victory, gives back his power and rule to the prince, and they inferred from this that the Son of God, because he would one day be subjected to the Father, could not be the highest God, cf. against this Petavius, de trin. III. Bisterfeldius, de uno Deo, Patre, Filio ac Spiritu S. I. Vitringa V. Among the Reformed there was also difference; some said that the kingship of Christ was economical and temporary, Calvin, Inst. II. comm. on 1 Cor. 15:28. Alting, Theol. probl. nova XII. Pareus on 1 Cor. 15, Kuyper, Enc. II; others were of the opinion that there would indeed be a change in the manner of ruling but that his kingship is nevertheless eternal, Mastricht, V. Moor III. Vitringa V. The difference is easily resolved in this sense, that the mediatorship of reconciliation, and thus insofar also the prophetic, priestly, and kingly office of Christ comes to an end; God shall be king and all in all; but what remains is the mediatorship of union, Christ remains prophet, priest, and king, as this is naturally given with the human nature, enclosed in the image of God, highest and richest realized in Christ as the Image of God. Christ is and remains the head of the church, from whom all life and blessedness eternally flows to her. Whoever would deny this would also have to come to the teaching that the Son would one day lay aside and destroy his human nature; and for that there is lacking in Scripture all ground.
1. Our heart is shaped for God, and it rests not, before it finds rest in Him. Insofar as every man knowingly or unknowingly strives for an unchanging good and a lasting happiness, it can be said that every man also seeks after God, who alone is the highest good and the everlasting blessedness, Acts 17:27. But they seek Him yet not in the right way and not there, where He is to be found. The heathen religions know of no covenant of grace, they know not the person of Christ, and all hold the way of works for the way of salvation. The groundwork of Heathendom is, in the nay-saying, the denial of the true God and of the gift of His grace, and in the yea-saying, the vain thought to win blessedness for oneself by one's own strength and wisdom. Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name, Gen. 11:4. Whether the works whereby Heathendom seeks the way to blessedness bear a more ceremonial or a more ethical mark, whether they be more yea-saying or more nay-saying in kind, always yet is man his own savior; all religions, outside the Christian, are self-saving. In the lowest religions the awareness of sin is nearly wholly lost, and peace, atonement, happiness are gained by magical deeds and formal ceremonies; higher religions add sundry moral duties thereto and make blessedness hang on their fulfillment. The Islamic faith also knows no true redemption but binds entry into paradise to orthodox belief and to the keeping of the prescribed prayers and good works. In Buddhism redemption lies in the killing of the longing for being, wrought by sundry means, Falke, Buddha, Mohammed, Christ II 1897. And wisdom-lore has brought it no further; the only way to blessedness is the path of worthiness, the moral self-fulfilling; even Kant and Schopenhauer, who with an eye to inborn sinfulness deemed a new birth needful, yet ended again by calling upon the will, the wisdom, and the strength of man.
Altogether different is the opinion of Scripture. Already in the Old Testament, it is God who immediately after the fall, out of grace, sets enmity between man and serpent and brings man over to His side, Gen. 3:15; who chooses Abraham and the people of Israel born from him as His own possession, Gen. 12:1, Ex. 15:13, 16, 19:4, 20:2, Deut. 7:6ff.; who establishes the covenant with them and gives them His laws, Gen. 15:1, 17:2, Ex. 2:24, 25, Deut. 4:5-13; who gives the blood on the altar for atonement, Lev. 17:11; and lays out everything for His vineyard, Isa. 5, Jer. 2:21.
But by virtue of that election and on the foundation of that covenant, the people are now also bound, on pain of the curse of the law, Deut. 27:6, to walk before God's face in uprightness and to keep His commandments, Gen. 17:1, Ex. 20, Deut. 10:15, 16, etc. The covenant relation did not depend on that keeping of the law as a prior condition; it was no covenant of works but rested solely on God's electing love. But it must yet receive its proof and seal in the walk according to the Lord's law. For indeed, from Israel's side, it could not be accepted with a perfect heart and thus become true reality in Israel except through such a faith that also had love and delight to walk in the way of the covenant. The covenant includes, if it is no mere idea but reality, the duty and the bent to live according to the demand of the covenant. But therefore it also goes without saying that the people could take a very different stance toward the covenant and its law.
There were antinomian godless ones, forerunners of the Sadducees, who cared neither for God nor His commandment, and mocked the godly, Ps. 14:2, 36:2, 42:4, 11, 94:2, Mal. 2:17, 3:14; there were Pharisaic-minded ones, who laid stress on outward keeping of the law and bound righteousness and salvation to it, Amos 6:1, Jer. 7:4. But between these two stood the few faithful, the upright godly, who were by no means indifferent to the Lord's law, on the contrary pondered it the whole day and loved it with all their soul, but who yet did not make their righteousness and salvation depend on its keeping. For although it is that they often appeal very strongly to their righteousness and call upon God to do them justice, Ps. 7:9, 17:1ff., 18:21, 26:1ff., 35:34, 41:13, 44:18, 21, 71:2, 119:121, 2 Kings 20:3, Job 16:17, Neh. 5:19, 13:14, etc., yet those same persons at the same time humbly confess their sins, call upon God's forgiveness, and plead His grace, Ps. 31:10, 11, 32:1ff., 38:2ff., 40:13, 41:5, 130:3, 5, Isa. 6:5, 53:4, 64:6, Jer. 3:25, Mic. 7:9, Neh. 1:6, 9:33, Dan. 9:5, 7, 18, etc.
The righteousness of these godly ones is no personal quality, but a property of the cause they uphold; they have right on their side, because they trust in God. This trust in God is the essential thing that in the Old Testament makes the righteous righteous; they believe in God, he'emin , Gen. 15:6, Ex. 14:31, 2 Chron. 20:20, Isa. 28:16, Hab. 2:4; trust in Him, batach , Ps. 4:6, 9:11; take refuge in Him, chasah , Ps. 7:2, 18:3; fear Him, yare , Ps. 22:24, 25:12; hope in Him, yachal , hochil , Ps. 31:25, 33:18; wait for Him, qavah , Ps. 25:21; look for Him, chikkah , Ps. 33:20; lean on Him, samak , Ps. 112:8, nakon , Ps. 57:8; cleave to Him, dabaq , chashaq , Ps. 91:14, 2 Kings 18:6, etc. This faith is reckoned as righteousness, Gen. 15:6, just as elsewhere the keeping of God's commandments is called righteousness, Deut. 6:25, 24:13.
That now this inward righteousness, which essentially consists in trust in God, is also a fruit of God's grace and a working of His Spirit, does not yet come to light so clearly in the Old Testament from the nature of the case. But yet the data for this are not lacking. Of a righteousness of their own there is never speak in Israel; it is chosen notwithstanding its stubbornness, Deut. 9:4-6. God is the fount of all life and light, of all wisdom, strength, salvation, Deut. 8:17, 18, Ps. 36:10, 68:20, 21, 36, 73:25, 26, Jer. 2:13, 31. Not to us, but to Thy name give glory, is the prayer of Israel's godly, Ps. 115:1; lowliness is the temper of their soul, Gen. 32:10, Ps. 116:12; a broken and contrite heart is pleasing to God, Ps. 51:19, Isa. 57:15. Not to man but to God is always all gift ascribed and thanks brought for all; all is called upon to praise Him; all is besought from Him in prayer, not only deliverance from dangers but also knowledge of God's law, enlightening of the eyes, etc.
God is it who has mercy on whom He will, Ex. 33:19, and writes in His book who shall live, Ex. 32:33. He promises, without any condition, that He will be their God and they His people, Ex. 19:6, Lev. 26:12, and that He will always again, after unfaithfulness and falling away on Israel's side, have mercy on them, give repentance and life, Ex. 32:30-35, Num. 14, 16:45-50, Lev. 26:40-44, Deut. 4:31, 8:5, 30:1-7, 32:36-43, Neh. 9:31. He forgives sins for His name's sake, Ex. 34:7, etc., and sends His Holy Spirit, who is the worker of all spiritual life, Num. 11:25, 29, Neh. 9:20, Ps. 51:13, 143:10, Isa. 63:10.
And when history then teaches that Israel time and again profanes, forsakes, destroys the covenant, Deut. 31:20, 1 Kings 11:11, 19:10, 14, Jer. 22:9, 32:32, etc., then prophecy declares that God on His side will never break the covenant and never forsake His people. He cannot do it for His name's and His glory's sake before the heathen, Num. 14:16, Deut. 32:26, 27, 1 Sam. 12:22, Joel 2:17-19, Isa. 43:21, 25, 48:8-11, Jer. 14:7, 20, 21, Ezek. 20:43, 44, 36:32. It is an everlasting covenant that cannot waver, because it is grounded in God's lovingkindness, 2 Kings 13:23, 1 Chron. 16:17, Ps. 89:1-5, 105:20, 106:45, 111:5, Isa. 54:10. He stands as it were for both parties, not only for Himself but also for His people, and He will thus establish a new covenant, not let His Word and Spirit depart from them, forgive their sins for His name's sake, pour out His Spirit on all, give them a heart of flesh, write the law in their inward parts, and cause them to walk in His statutes, Deut. 30:6, Isa. 44:3, 59:21, Jer. 24:7, 31:31ff., Ezek. 11:19, 16:60, 18:31, 36:26, 39:29, Joel 2:28, Mic. 7:19, etc.
2. Preceded by John the Baptist, Jesus steps forth in the New Testament with the preaching of the kingdom of heaven. That kingdom is on the one hand set forth as a treasure, which is kept in heaven and given out as a reward to the righteous, Matt. 6:20, 13:43, 19:21, 25:46. To become a partaker of it, a different, better righteousness is needful than that of the Pharisees, Matt. 5:20; it must be sought before all things, Matt. 6:33, bought at the cost of all things, 13:44-46, 19:21, Mark 9:43-47, 10:28, 29. But this setting forth passes over into another; the eschatological meaning of the kingdom of God makes way for the religious-ethical. For work and reward stand here in no proportion; the kingdom of God in the eschatological sense is indeed called a reward, but it so far outstrips all work in worth, that all thought of reward falls away, Matt. 19:29, 20:13-15, 25:21, Mark 10:30, especially Luke 17:10. The righteousness, which is required to enter into the kingdom, is itself a good of that kingdom, Matt. 6:33, even as also the forgiveness of sins, Matt. 26:28, Luke 1:77, 24:47, etc. And this kingdom with all its goods, forgiveness, righteousness, everlasting life, is near and comes by God's will, Mark 1:15, 9:1; it is a gift, which He bestows out of grace, Matt. 25:34, Luke 12:32; and He bestows it, not to the righteous but to the publicans and sinners, Matt. 9:13, to the lost, Matt. 18:11, to the poor, etc., Matt. 5, to the little children, Matt. 18:3, Mark 10:15; and theirs is already here on earth the kingdom of heaven, Matt. 9:15, 11:11, 13:16, 17, 23:13, Mark 10:15, Luke 17:21. To become a partaker of that kingdom there is thus no need of one's own righteousness, but only conversion, metanoia, resipiscentia, mentis mutatio, change of mind, and faith, pistis, that is, the receiving of and trust in the gospel of the kingdom as a gift of God to the lost, Mark 1:15, and thus trust in God, Mark 11:22, in Jesus' word and power, Matt. 8:10, 9:2, Mark 4:40, in Jesus' person as Messiah, Matt. 27:42, Mark 9:42, John 1:12, 2:11, 6:29, 17:8, 20:30, Acts 9:22, 17:3, 18:5, etc. But also this metanoia and pistis are themselves again grace-gifts of God, Matt. 11:25, 27, 15:13, 16:17, Luke 10:22, John 6:44, 65, 12:32, so that only those who are of the truth, John 8:43, 47, 12:39, 18:37, who are given by the Father to the Son, 6:37ff., 17:2, 6, 9, 10:26, 11:52, who are already reborn, 1:12, 13, 8:47, come to faith.
In the apostolic preaching, all this is worked out much more broadly. The relation between the objective gaining and the subjective applying of salvation then comes clearer into the light. When Jesus has died and been raised, it becomes clear to his disciples that the kingdom, which he preached, with all its goods of forgiveness, righteousness, and eternal life, has been gained through his suffering and dying; and that he was raised and glorified by the Father precisely for this, that he might apply these blessings to his own. The applying is inseparable from the gaining. It is one work that is laid upon the mediator; and he will not rest until he can deliver the whole kingdom finished to the Father. But yet, however unbreakable the gaining and applying of salvation hang together, there is a difference. The one Christ brought to pass on earth, in the state of lowliness, through his suffering and dying; the other he fulfills from heaven, in the state of uplifting, through his prophetic, priestly, and kingly working at the right hand of the Father. Therefore he also works this applying of salvation through the Holy Spirit. He himself through his uplifting has become the Lord from heaven, the life-giving Spirit, 1 Cor. 15:45, 47, 2 Cor. 3:17. The Spirit, who from his conception had fitted him and was poured out more and more upon him, has now become the beginning of all his glorified life; he has laid off all the natural, earthly life; he is now the Lord from heaven, the life-giving Spirit; the Spirit of God has become his Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. With this stands in bond the word in John 7:39, that the Spirit was not yet, because Christ was not yet glorified. Here it cannot be meant that the Holy Spirit before the glorifying of Christ did not yet be or did not work, for already in the Old Testament there was no strength and no gift but through the Holy Spirit; Christ himself was anointed with that Spirit without measure, John 3:34; and also Elizabeth and John the Baptist are called filled with that Spirit, Luke 1:15, 41. The meaning can be no other than that the Spirit, although he earlier also gave many gifts and worked many strengths, yet first after the glorifying of Christ personally in the church of believers as in his temple has stayed to dwell. It is with the Holy Spirit as with Christ himself. The Son of God was from eternity anointed to mediator; he worked as prophet, priest, and king also already in the days of the Old Testament; but flesh he yet first became in the fullness of time. So there is also a fullness of time for the Holy Spirit. When Christ has fulfilled his work, he has not only himself become the life-giving Spirit, but the Spirit of God, of Father and Son, has also fully become the Spirit of Christ, whom he sends out, through whom he as Lord from heaven carries out his work on earth, who takes his place, takes all from his own, glorifies him, and makes him himself in ghostly wise dwell in the church. The Holy Spirit brings namely no sundering, but the innermost fellowship between Christ and his church to stand. Indeed he is from Father and Son set apart, ἀλλος παρακλητος, John 14:16, named specially beside both, Matt. 28:19, 1 Cor. 12:4, 2 Cor. 13:13, Rev. 1:4. But he is also one with them in being and can therefore fully make their fellowship share to the believers. His working stands yet utterly not only in the sharing of the blessings of Christ. If Christ through his suffering and dying had only gained the forgiveness of sins, then it would be enough that the Holy Spirit strengthened the preaching of this gospel, John 15:26, 27, Acts 5:32, 1 Cor. 2:4, 2 Cor. 4:13, 1 Thess. 1:5, 6, 1 Pet. 1:12, convinced the world of unright, John 16:8-11, worked faith in the hearts, 1 Cor. 2:5, 12:3, Eph. 1:19, 20, 2:8, Col. 2:12, Phil. 1:29, 1 Thess. 2:13, and assured the believers of their childship, Rom. 8:15, 16. But this objective, right-wise blessing of forgiveness is not the only one; it is filled up by the ethical and mystical blessing of hallowing. Christ takes away not only the guilt of sin but also breaks its might. He is, one for all, died, that the living no more themselves but Christ might live, 2 Cor. 5:15. In the fulfilling to the law, which is the strength of sin, that is, in the forgiveness, is also in beginning the might of sin broken; where righteousness is, there is also life; Rom. 3-5 is followed by Rom. 6-8. Christ is not only died, but he is also risen and glorified; he is and stays the Lord from heaven, the life-giving Spirit, who not only for the church died but also in her dwells and works. This fellowship now between Christ and the church is brought to stand and kept by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is therefore not only the one who works faith and assures of childship, but he is also author of a new life; and faith is not but taking of a witness of God but also beginning and beginning of a holy walk, 2 Cor. 5:17, Eph. 2:10, 4:24, Col. 3:9, 10. In and through the Spirit comes Christ himself to his own, John 14:18, lives in them, Rom. 8:9-11, 2 Cor. 13:5, Gal. 2:20, Eph. 3:17, Col. 3:11, like contrariwise the believers through that Spirit in Christ are, live, think, do, John 17:21, Rom. 8:1, 9, 10, 12:5, 1 Cor. 1:30, 2 Cor. 5:17, Gal. 3:28, 6:25, Eph. 1:13, Col. 2:6, 10; παντα και ἐν πασιν Χριστος Col. 3:11, cf. Deissmann, Die neut. Formel ἐν Χρ. Ιησου 1892, who however wrongly takes the formula always in local sense. And not only Christ, but also God himself comes through that Spirit to make dwelling in them and fills them with his fullness, that he at last all in all may be, John 14:23, 1 Cor. 3:16, 17, 6:19, 15:28, 2 Cor. 6:16, Eph. 2:22. And through the fellowship to the person of Christ, the Holy Spirit also works the fellowship to all his blessings, to his σοφια, 1 Cor. 2:6-10, δικαιοσυνη, 1 Cor. 6:11, ἁγιασμος, ib., Rom. 15:16, 2 Thess. 2:13, ἀπολυτρωσις, Rom. 8:2, 23. He assures the believers of their childship, Rom. 8:14-17, Gal. 4:6 and of the love of God, Rom. 5:5; he makes them free from the law and lets them together as one church step forth in the world, living through an own beginning, standing under an own head, Acts 2, 2 Cor. 3, Gal. 4:21-6:10. He binds the believers to one body, 1 Cor. 12:13, leads them to one Father, Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:6, Eph. 2:18, brings all to the confessing of Christ as Lord, 1 Cor. 12:3, makes them one of heart and soul, Acts 4:31, 32, Gal. 5:22, Phil. 2:1, 2, and makes them together grow up to a full man in Christ, 1 Cor. 3:10-15, Eph. 4:1-16, Col. 2:19. He is the author of rebirth, John 3:5, 6, Tit. 3:5, life, John 6:63, 7:38, 39, Rom. 8:2, 2 Cor. 3:6, enlightening, John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13, 1 Cor. 2:6-16, 2 Cor. 3:12, 4:6, Eph. 1:17, 1 John 2:20, 4:6, 5:6, gifts, Rom. 12:3-8, 1 Cor. 12:4v., renewing and hallowing, Rom. 8, Gal. 5:16, 22, Eph. 3:16, sealing and glorifying, Rom. 8:11, 23, 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5, Eph. 1:13, 14, 4:30.
3. That faith in Christ was the way to salvation naturally stood firm in the Christian church from the beginning. Whoever does not believe in the blood of Christ is condemned, Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 6. We are not justified by ourselves, by our wisdom or piety or good works, but by faith, Clement, 1 Corinthians 32. Justin says that no one is saved except by the merits of Christ, who took the curse upon himself and satisfied for all, Dialogue 95, who redeems all who do penance and believe, ibid. 100, and he speaks repeatedly of a grace that precedes our works, enlightens us and leads us to faith, Dialogue 119. Apology I 10. Irenaeus binds salvation not only to faith in Christ, for example, Against Heresies IV 2, 7. V 19, 1, but also says that the Holy Spirit is sent to work out the will of the Father in men and to renew them, and that this Spirit is necessary as the rain and the dew to make the land fruitful, III 17, cf. V 10, 2. Even Origen testifies that the will of man by itself is unable to convert, unless it is aided or strengthened by divine help. God is the first and chief cause of the work, On First Principles III 1, 18 cf. 2, 5. The moral corruption of man and the necessity of the grace of the Holy Spirit are expressed even more strongly by the Latin fathers, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, on whose statements Augustine also appeals, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians IV 8-10. Thus the first-named says: this will be the power of divine grace, surely more potent than nature, having in us the free power of the will subjected to itself, On the Soul 21. From Cyprian, Testimonies III 4 are the words repeatedly cited by Augustine: we should glory in nothing, since nothing is ours. Ambrose already knows an inward grace that works upon the will and prepares it: the will of men is prepared by God; that God is honored by the saints is God's grace, On Luke I 10. Yet the doctrine of the application of salvation was very little developed in the first ages and in part also soon led into wrong paths. Although there are here and there some testimonies of evangelical truth, on the whole the gospel was soon understood as a new law. Faith and conversion were indeed generally regarded as the necessary way to salvation; but these ultimately stood in the freedom of man. Salvation was indeed objectively acquired by Christ, but to partake of it, the free cooperation of man was needed. Faith was as a rule nothing more than the conviction of the truth of Christianity, and conversion soon acquired the character of a penance that satisfied for sins. The sins committed before baptism were indeed forgiven in baptism; but those after baptism had to be made good by penance. Indeed, penitence was still often regarded as a heartfelt sorrow over sin, but the emphasis fell more and more on the outward acts in which it had to manifest itself, such as praying, fasting, almsgiving, etc., and these good works were understood as a satisfaction of works. The whole soteriology was externalized. As the way of salvation, what counted was not the application of salvation by the Holy Spirit to the heart of the sinner, but the performance of so-called good, often quite arbitrary works. The imitation of Christ consisted in copying and reproducing the life and suffering of Christ, which was vividly painted before the eyes; martyrs, ascetics, monks were the best Christians. Cf. besides the dogmatics historical works of Münscher-von Coelln, Hagenbach, Schwane, Harnack, etc., Vossius, History of Pelagianism 1. 3. Wiggers, Augustine and Pelagius I 440 ff. Suicerus, s.v. πίστις, ἀναγέννησις, μετάνοια. Landerer, The Relation of Grace and Freedom in the Appropriation of Salvation, Yearbook for German Theology 1857 p. 500-603. Wörter, The Christian Doctrine on the Relation of Grace and Freedom from the Apostolic Times to Augustine. Freiburg 1856. Dr. H. Wirth, The Concept of Merit in the Christian Church. I The Concept of Merit in Tertullian. Leipzig 1892.
Much further than any of his forerunners did Pelagius stray from the teaching of grace; he forsook the Christian groundwork on which they all yet stood and renewed the self-enough principle of heathendom, namely that of the Stoa. Not only did he cut every tie between Adam's sin and ours, so that neither guilt nor stain nor even death was an outcome of the first trespass; but also Christianity lost its outright meaning; blessedness was not bound to Christ but could also be gained through the law of nature and the law given. Of an inward grace, of a begetting-again grace of the Holy Ghost, which not only lights the understanding but also bends the will, there could therefore be no speech with Pelagius. Indeed he spoke of grace, but he understood thereunder only: a) the power in nature, the gift of being able to will, which God gave to every man, grace creating, b) the outward grace of the preaching of the law or of the gospel, and of the example of Christ, which turned to man's understanding and taught him about the way of blessedness, grace enlightening, and c) the forgiveness of sins and the coming blessedness, which would be given to the man who believed and did good works. The grace in the first-named sense was thus owned by all men; the grace in the second sense was not utterly needful, but served only to make easier for man the gaining of blessedness, it was no grace working but only a help for man; it was also not given to all but only to such as had made themselves worthy by the good use of their inborn strengths; it was no grace preparing (rousing), nor yet a grace that cannot be withstood, which rather is a doom under the name of grace; and lastly it was not needful and was not given by God for every good deed, to single acts, but only for some; many good works were done by man without any grace. Semipelagianism softened this framework and taught that man through Adam's sin had not become ghostly dead but yet sick, that his will's freedom was not lost but yet weakened, and that man thus, to do the good and gain blessedness, had need of the help of godly grace. But that grace, which lights the understanding and upholds the will, may never be loosed from but must always be seen in bond with the will's freedom left to man. Grace and will work together, and indeed so that grace after God's meaning is worldwide and meant for all, but in deed only comes to good for those who make good use of their will's freedom. Ours is to will, God's to fulfill. Sometimes now, as with Paul, grace may go before; in the rule yet the will is first; the beginning of faith and the holding on in it is the will's business; grace is only needful for the increasing of faith; God helps him who helps himself. A grace working, that cannot be withstood, there is not; and even a grace coming before is in the rule denied.
4. Starting from man's utter moral corruption through Adam's sin and from his total inability to any spiritual good, Augustine also came to an entirely different teaching on grace. Oftentimes he also denotes the objective benefits, the gospel, baptism, the forgiveness of sins, etc., with the name of grace. But this grace is not enough; another is needed, an internal, spiritual grace, which enlightens the understanding and bends the will. At first Augustine taught otherwise, namely, that God calls us but that believing is our affair, as in his writing On Various Questions from the year 386 and On Free Choice 388-395. But later, about 396, he came especially through 1 Cor. 4:7 to another insight, On Various Questions to Simplicianus around 397. And now he says that grace does not only consist in an outward preaching of law and gospel, which teaches and admonishes us, and in that sense offers us help, but it is above all a hidden inspiration of God, an inspiration of faith and fear of God, a help for good doing added to nature and teaching through an inspiration of most fervent and luminous love, On the Grace of Christ 35, a supply of virtue, ibid. 2, an inspiration of love through the Holy Spirit, ibid. 39. Itself a fruit of election, the effect of predestination itself, On the Predestination of the Saints 10, it is distributed not according to merit but according to God's mercy, On the Gift of Perseverance 12. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians I 24. Therefore it is by nature gratuitous; it would not be grace if it were not given freely, On Original Sin 24. The Holy Spirit blows where He wills, not following merits but making merits, ibid. Grace precedes all merits; it is a preventing, preparing, antecedent, and operating grace; it prevents the unwilling so that he wills, Enchiridion 32. It inwardly enlightens the understanding, removes blindness from it, On the Forgiveness of Sins and Baptism I 9; it works faith, which is a gift of God, and creates in man the good will, the love for the good, and the ability to do the good, and removes weakness from it; let us confess that God works in the hearts of men inwardly and secretly, with wonderful and ineffable power, not only true revelations but also good wills, On the Grace of Christ 24. This grace is moreover irresistible; it works unswervingly and unconquerably in man's will, On Rebuke and Grace 12; it is rejected by no heart so hard, for God removes the heart of stone through grace and gives a heart of flesh in its place, On the Predestination of the Saints 8. The elect who receive it can not only come to Christ through it but also actually come to Him. But this is not to be understood as if God suppresses or destroys man's free will through grace; on the contrary, grace precisely makes the will free from the bondage of sin. Do we then abolish free choice through grace? Far be it, but rather we establish free choice. For as the law is not abolished but established through faith, so free choice is not abolished but established through grace, because grace heals the will, On the Spirit and the Letter 30 cf. 33. 34. On Grace and Free Choice. City of God XIV 11. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians I 2. Therefore Augustine could also say, to consent to the calling of God or to dissent from it is of one's own will, On the Spirit and the Letter 34, for both, he who believes and he who does not believe, do it willingly, no one believes unless willing. Yet he was so far from laying the decision finally in man's hands through this statement that he immediately continues: this word does not weaken but confirms the word of the apostle: what do you have that you did not receive. For the soul cannot receive and have the gifts about which this is heard except by consenting; and through this, what it has and what it receives is of God; but to receive and to have is surely of the one receiving and having. Even if someone forces us to examine that depth, why is one persuaded so that he is convinced, but the other not , two things only occur to me meanwhile which I may answer: O depth of the riches, and: is there unrighteousness with God? On the Spirit and the Letter 34. And as the beginning, so also the progress of faith and love is to be thanked only to God's grace; the operating grace passes into cooperating, consequent, subsequent grace; it works not only the willing but also the doing and the completing. Without Christ we can do nothing; and therefore, that we may begin, it is said: his mercy shall prevent me, that we may finish, it is said: his mercy shall follow me, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians II 9. It is God who prepares the will and by cooperating perfects what he begins by operating.... Therefore, that we may will, he operates without us; but when we will, and so will that we do, he cooperates with us; yet without him either operating that we will or cooperating when we will, we are able to do nothing for the good works of piety, On Grace and Free Choice 17. It follows the willing lest he will in vain, Enchiridion 32. And that grace is needed not for single but for all good deeds; man's will is helped by God's grace for every good action, word, thought, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians II 5. Objectively and subjectively the work of salvation from beginning to end is a work of God's grace and of his grace alone. Cf. Wiggers. Luthardt, Die Lehre vom freien Willen 1863.
Pelagianism was condemned at the Synod of Carthage in 418, whose canons were approved by Pope Zosimus and later by Celestine I, further at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and at the Synod of Orange in 529; at this last synod, Semi-Pelagianism was also rejected, and its canons were confirmed by Boniface II. By this, the church's teaching was established, that the whole man is corrupted by Adam's sin, and that both the beginning and the increase of faith are to be thanked not to ourselves, to our natural strengths, but to the grace of God, which not only teaches us what we ought to do and to leave undone, but also grants us, that what we know we ought to do, we may also love and be able to do; to the pouring in, working, breathing in, lighting up of the Holy Ghost in us, who goes before our will, makes it ready, restores it from unbelief to faith (righting it), and makes us will and work. The needfulness of the inner grace, that goes before, has since been taught by all. Also the Synod of Quierzy in 853, which condemned Gottschalk, confessed: we have free will for good, gone before and helped by grace,.... grace freed and healed from corruption. Even as Rabanus said, that God by the Holy Ghost inwardly rules and outwardly strengthens with ghostly zeal. The schoolmen walked in this same track. Lombard says, that man by sin has lost the freedom of will, and that he cannot rise to good, to will it with might or fulfill it in deed, unless he be freed and helped by grace; he is freed indeed that he may will, and helped that he may fulfill. According to Thomas, man without grace can do sundry natural good things, but he needs grace, that he may be healed and work the good of otherworldly worthiness, to love God, to keep the law, to gain everlasting life, to ready himself for the grace of rightwising, to rise from sins, to be able not to sin, and he needs ever new grace, to know and do the good, and to hold fast therein. And even so Trent set fast, that grown folk, to ready themselves for the grace of rightwising, need the grace that goes before, so that they, who through sins were turned away from God, through his stirring and helping grace to turn themselves to their own rightwising.... are made ready. Rome thus teaches with certainty the needfulness of the grace that goes before (working, stirring) and thereby rejects Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, which ascribed the beginning and increase of faith to the strengths of the natural man. Now it may well be asked, whether Rome understands by that grace that goes before something more than the outward calling of the gospel, which works morally on understanding and will, and which was also acknowledged by Pelagius and his fellows. Sometimes indeed the marking out of that grace is very weak; Trent makes it one with the calling, whereby they are called with no merits of theirs being there. But yet Rome seems to understand by that grace that goes before a working of the Holy Ghost on understanding and will. The Synod of Orange spoke of a pouring in and working of the Holy Ghost in us; Trent called it stirring and marked it out by the words: God touching the heart of man through the lighting up of the Holy Ghost. Thomas says, that that grace, whereby a grown person readies himself for rightwising, consists not in some abiding grace but indeed in a working of God turning the soul to himself, a help of God inwardly moving or breathing in a good purpose. Bonaventure also calls it grace freely given and says, that man needs it for readying for rightwising and that it stirs his free will. Bellarmine marks it out as a grace of special help, as a moving or doing, whereby God moves man to work, and sets it as special help, grace outwardly stirring and helping, over against the grace dwelling within, the infused grace, the Holy Ghost dwelling in us. Also there was among the theologians great difference about the being of that readying grace; the Thomists held it for a bodily worth supernaturally poured in, some bodily being; Molina, Lessius, Ripalda took it as a lighting of the mind and breathing into the will; Suarez, Tanner and others thought, that it was not something made, but that the Holy Ghost himself straightway moved the will. But yet it is widely taken as a free help, an inward and otherworldly gift of God, as a lighting of the mind and straightway moving of the will, which adds not only moral strengths but also bodily strengths to man and sets him in state to ready himself for rightwising.
5. But with that, the rejection of Semi-Pelagianism by Rome also ended; by a detour it is nevertheless brought back in. First, Rome teaches that free will is weakened by sin but not lost, Synod of Orange can. 8. 13. 25. Trent VI c. 1 and can. 5; man can do many natural and civil good works without grace, which are utterly no sins; he can know and love God as Creator, lead an honorable life; and though it is hard to keep the whole law in the long run and withstand all temptations, in itself it is not impossible. The natural man is in himself a complete man, cf. Pesch. Secondly, Rome strays from Augustine in that it takes prevenient grace as a grace that indeed grants the power to believe but not the believing itself. On the contrary, to every grown man who lives under the gospel, prevenient grace (actual) is given, but it stands in the might of man to take it or cast it off. This also we believe according to the Catholic faith, said the synod of Orange c. 25, that after grace received through baptism, all the baptized, with Christ helping and working with them, can and ought to fulfill what belongs to salvation, if they will faithfully toil. And Trent declared that man can assent to prevenient grace and work with it, but also cast it off, VI c. 5 and can. 4. Among the theologians there was however great difference herein. The Augustinians, among whom Berti is the foremost, teach that prevenient grace (actual, sufficient) indeed gives the power but not the will. That man not only can but also will believe and truly believe, and sufficient grace thus indeed becomes efficacious, thereto is needful a victorious delight, which overcomes the opposing fleshly delight and turns the power into will. The will must thus be turned by a victorious delight that is stronger than lust. The Thomists, Bañez, Gonet, Lemos, Billuart and others say likewise, that sufficient grace indeed gives the power but not the will and, to work this last, must be filled up by a bodily deed of God, furtherance or bodily fore-setting. Augustinians and Thomists thus agree that the working of grace hangs not on man's will but on grace itself, and that on the victorious delight or victorious fore-setting the deed of faith unfailingly follows; they differ however herein, that the latter take a truly outward distinction between sufficient grace and efficacious grace, while the former deem that these two differ not in being, but that there are steps in grace, whereby a grace that in one is only sufficient, in another because of lesser hardness can be efficacious. But one cannot say that this setting forth gives full right to the Tridentine assent or rejection. The Molinists therefore let the working of grace hang on man's will, and the Congruists, such as Bellarmine, de gratia et lib. arb. I 12 IV 14-16, let it be set by the foreseen fitting or unfitting of grace with the state and surroundings of those to whom grace comes at a set time, cf. part I and further Theol. Wirceb. VII. Perrone, V. Liebermann, Instit. theol. II. Jansen III. Dens, Theol. II. Schäzler, Neue Unters. über das Dogma v. d. Gnade, Mainz 1867. Simar, Dogm. Pesch, Prael. V. Scheeben, Dogm. IV 1, 1898.
The Roman teaching therefore comes down to this: the children born in the church receive rebirth in baptism (justification, infused grace), but those who hear the gospel at a later age receive sufficient grace, which consists in an enlightening of the understanding and a strengthening of the will by the Holy Ghost. Man can reject this grace, but he can also assent to it. If he assents to it, the exciting grace passes over into helping or cooperating grace; man works with it to prepare himself for justification (infused, habitual grace). This preparation includes these seven moments: that man, helped by God's grace, begins to believe God's Word, begins to see that he is a sinner, gets hope in God's mercy, begins to love Him, begins to hate sin, resolves to be baptized and to lead a new life, Trent VI c. 6. Faith takes no central place here but is coordinated with the six other preparations for justifying grace; it is therefore nothing other than an assent to the truth of Christianity, that is, of the teaching of the church (unformed faith) and receives its justifying power only through love (faith formed by love), which is imparted in the infused grace; by itself and taken alone, it cannot justify, but is called justifying faith only because it is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification, that is, the first of the above-mentioned preparations. When man has thus prepared himself and done what is in him—whether this consists in the good use of his powers supported by grace, Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 qu. 109 art. 6 ad 2. qu. 112 art. 3, or also of his natural powers, Thomas, II 1 qu. 98 art. 6. cf. Theol. Wirceb. VII 288. Dens, Theol. II 209. Pesch, Prael. V 114-120—God cannot refuse him the infused grace. Indeed, man has not merited this grace by that preparation, for it far exceeds it in value; but it is yet fitting that God reward him who does his best with the infused grace according to a merit of congruity. This is bestowed on him in baptism and consists in the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the infusion of supernatural virtues, communion with the divine nature, and is followed by the forgiveness of sins, which with it makes up the two parts of justification, Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 qu. 113. The forgiveness of sins is thus with Rome the negative reverse side of the positive renewal of man; sin is forgiven because and insofar as it is blotted out. When man has now become partaker of this infused grace in baptism, he can indeed lose it again through mortal sins, and other sins he has to atone for, not only with contrition of heart but also with confession of mouth and satisfaction of works; but in the infused grace he has yet received the supernatural power to do good works and thereby to merit all following grace, yes even eternal life according to a merit of condignity. For the good works that he does flow forth from a supernatural principle and are therefore worthy of a supernatural reward. And from this it becomes clear what this Roman teaching of grace is ultimately about. Grace serves only to make it possible again for man to merit heavenly blessedness. That was fundamentally the case even with Augustine. Grace, though bestowed without merit, consisted with him not first in the forgiveness of sins but in rebirth, in the infusion of love, which enables the doing of good works and thus the acquiring of eternal life. He received justice, for the sake of which he might merit to receive blessedness, On the Trinity XIV 15. Merits do not precede grace and faith, but they yet follow upon them, To Simplicianus I qu. 2. By believing merit is acquired, 83 qu. qu. 68. Grace prevents merit, not grace from merit but merit from grace; grace precedes all merits, that my merits may follow as gifts of God, Augustine in Lombard on Eph. 2:4-10. Grace itself merits to be increased, that increased it may merit to be perfected, with the will accompanying, not leading, following not preceding, Ambrose in Lombard on Rom. 5:1, 2. Later, when the teaching of the image of God as a superadded gift arose, this became even worse. The concept of grace then underwent an important change. Grace became something that was not only needful for fallen man; but Adam too had to be raised by it from an ordinary, natural man to the image of God. After the fall, grace thus gets a twofold task, first to deliver man from sin (healing, medicinal grace), and second, to lift him up to the supernatural order (elevating grace), Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 qu. 109 art. 2. For the first, grace is only accidental, only in a moral sense necessary; for the second, it is absolutely and physically necessary. The latter therefore pushes the former more and more into the background; the ethical opposition of sin and grace gives way to the physical one of natural and supernatural. Grace with Rome is a supernatural, created, physical power infused in a natural man in a magical way, through the mediation of priest and sacrament, which lifts him up to the supernatural order and enables him, through good works, to merit all following grace and along this way at the end also heavenly blessedness ex condigno.
6. The Roman system of penance brought Luther to his reformatory action. A wholly new light dawned upon him when he learned the Scriptural meaning of metanoia . In the first seven of his 95 theses, and further in his Sermo de Poenitentia and Sermon on the Sacrament of Penance , he set forth this meaning of penance, and taught that the chief part of penance consists not in private confession, of which Scripture knows nothing, nor in satisfaction, for God forgives sins freely, but in a true sorrow over sins, in an earnest purpose to bear Christ's cross, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, of grace in Christ. The penitent comes to the forgiveness of sins not by satisfaction and priestly absolution, but by trust in the word of God, by faith in God's grace. Not the sacrament, but faith justifies. Thus Luther came to place sin and grace at the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins depends not on a penance which always remains imperfect, but rests in God's promise and becomes ours only by faith; cf. also Köstlin, Luther's Theology .
But concerning the relation in which Luther placed penance and faith to each other, there is great difference of opinion. According to Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation , Luther at first indeed thought that true penance was the fruit of faith in the gospel and of love to God; but later, especially after Melanchthon's Instructions for Visitors of 1528, to avoid fostering false security, he placed the contrition wrought by the law before faith, just the opposite of Calvin, who in the first edition of the Institutes subordinated repentance to faith but later, in the Geneva Catechism of 1538 and in the second and following editions of the Institutes , made faith precede true repentance; cf. also Harnack, History of Dogma ; Herrmann in Gottschick's Journal for Theology and Church 1891. However, the historical investigation of Lipsius, Luther's Doctrine of Penance , Yearbook for Protestant Theology 1892, has brought to light that there is no question of such a reversal in Luther's doctrine of penance. Penance consists with him always in two parts: contrition, knowledge of and sorrow over sins, wrought by the law, and faith, belief in God's grace in the gospel of Christ. God first breaks the hard heart of the sinner by the preaching of the law and then leads him by faith to the comfort of the gospel. But when the sinner thus learns to know God's grace, then he first receives true love for the good, and from that is born that genuine penance which continues through all of life and consists in a mortification of the old man and resurrection of the new man. Indeed, Luther now, over against Roman works-righteousness, lays more emphasis on the fact that true penance flows from faith and embraces the whole life; and then again, over against antinomianism, more on the fact that true faith is preceded by a breaking of the heart; but in substance Luther's doctrine always remained the same: contrition (penance in the narrower sense), faith, and good works are the three parts of the way of salvation; cf. Köstlin, and in Herzog, article "Penance." Sieffert, The Latest Theological Researches on Penance and Faith , Berlin 1896. This representation is also that of the Lutheran confessional writings; and of the first dogmaticians, Brenz, Strigel, Chytraeus, and others up to Gerhard; the order of salvation was treated in these three loci.
Now Luther in this order of salvation in the first period always proceeded from absolute predestination; but later, without revoking it, he laid the emphasis on God's revelation in Christ, on the universal offer of salvation, in word and sacrament. Melanchthon from 1527 onward came to synergism and taught that in conversion the will also cooperates, assenting and not resisting the word of God, because it still retains the faculty of applying itself to grace, Loci , chapter on free will. The Formula of Concord indeed expressly rejected the doctrine that the will out of its own natural powers can conform itself to grace; cf. But nevertheless it taught side by side predestination and man's inability, and the universality and resistibility of grace, and found the reconciliation in this, that man still retains a capacity not active but passive, can still go to church, etc., and especially in this, that he still suffers (and can suffer) that God works in him.
Later this was usually developed in Lutheran theology in such a way that God grants to all who live under the gospel, in baptism or by the preaching of the Word, a sufficient grace (inevitable, irresistible good motions), by which the will of man is so freed and renewed that it either only does not resist, lets God's grace work in itself to regeneration and conversion and remains wholly passive under it, or also can positively cooperate with it; Gerhard, Loci ; Quenstedt, Theology ; Hollaz, Examination ; Buddeus, Institutes of Theology ; Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church ; Luthardt, Compendium . Under the influence of this covert or open synergism, the order of salvation, when it was later expanded and as with Hollaz with reference to Acts 26:17, 18 treated in the loci on calling grace, illuminating, converting, regenerating, justifying, renewing, and glorifying, took with the Lutherans this form: Christian children, because they cannot yet resist, are regenerated in baptism and receive the gift of faith; others at a later age are first called with a sufficient calling, which is the same for all and provides all with that illumination in the understanding and that power in the will which enables them not to resist the working of God's grace; in case they do not resist, they are brought by the preaching of the law to contrition (penance, conversion in the narrower sense) and further regenerated and endowed with faith, which is a fruit of regeneration; by faith they are then justified, receive forgiveness of sins, and further successively adoption, mystical union, renovation, and glorification.
But the Christian life in reality does not run so regularly; just as grace in its beginning depends on the will strengthened by supernatural power, so it remains so in its progress and to the end. Grace is always resistible and therefore also losable even to the hour of death and also regainable, not once but even repeatedly. The emphasis therefore in this order of salvation lies on man; although it is still so strongly expressed that God alone regenerates and converts, yet it depends on man's resisting or not whether God will do that; man has the decision in his hands, he can by resisting nullify the whole work of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; and he keeps that decision in his hands until his death. Still more precisely, the emphasis in this order of salvation lies on faith and justification. Calling, repentance, regeneration namely bear only a preparatory character; they are properly not yet benefits of the covenant of grace, they go as it were still outside of Christ and serve to lead the sinner to Christ. Only when man believes and by that faith accepts the righteousness of Christ does God see him in Christ, forgive him his sins, make him free from the law, adopt him as his child, incorporate him into fellowship with Christ, etc. Everything depends on faith, and specifically on the act of faith. If man exercises this, then he has everything and all at once, peace, comfort, life, salvation; but if he neglects this, then everything becomes shaky, uncertain, losable. Thus everything is directed to preserving that faith, but just as the Lutheran believer does not let the work of grace arise from eternal election, from the covenant, so he also does not connect it with nature and world and humanity; he is blessed in his faith but does not let it work into family and school, society and state. It is enough for him to live in fellowship with Christ, but he feels no urge to fight under Christ as King. Cf. especially Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation of the Lutheran and Reformed Doctrinal Concepts , 2 vols. 1855 passim.
7. Despite all agreement, the order of salvation in Reformed theology from the outset bore a wholly other character. Indeed, Calvin handles justification in Institutes III 12-18, and election in the same, 21-24, after faith, rebirth, turning, Christian life; but by this he in no wise means to say that they only then come into being in an outward way. The groundwork from which Calvin sets out is wholly other; election is an everlasting decree, though man first becomes aware of it through faith, and forgiveness of sins rests in Christ alone, though it is first bestowed on us in faith. For in Calvin the thought keeps coming back that there is no sharing in the blessings of Christ except through sharing in his person, Institutes III 1,1. 3,2,24. 3,9. 11,10 and so on. Herein lies in seed all the difference that exists in the order of salvation between Reformed and Lutheran, compare Heppe, Dogmatics of German Protestantism II 311-316. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation I 195 II 22. Philippi, Church Doctrine V 115. If it is indeed true that the very first blessing of grace already takes for granted sharing in the person of Christ, then the reckoning and bestowal of Christ to the church comes before all else. And this is also the Reformed teaching. Already in eternity, in election, and nearer still in the covenant of redemption, a bond is laid between the Mediator and those given to him by the Father. Even then, in God's decree, a mystical union is laid between both, and an exchange of places is brought about. By strength of that covenant, Christ became man and won salvation for his folk; he could do that just because he already stood in fellowship with them, was their surety and mediator, their head and stand-in; and the whole church, grasped in him as her head, is outwardly with him crucified and dead, risen and glorified. All blessings of grace thus lie ready in the person of Christ for the church; all is fulfilled; God is atoned; nothing comes from man. Atonement, forgiveness, justification, mystical union, hallowing, glorifying and so on, they do not come about after and through faith, but in an outward, working sense they are present in Christ; they are fruits of his suffering and dying alone; and on our side they are only taken up by faith. God bestows them and reckons them to the church in the decree, in Christ's rising, in the calling through the gospel. In God's time they also come into the believers' own holding. For though it is that man has nothing to add to Christ's work, Christ himself has by no means fully ended the work laid on him with the winning of salvation. He has taken it on himself to truly and fully save his folk. He steps not down as Mediator before he has set his church before the Father without spot or wrinkle. The applying of salvation is as weighty a part of redemption as the winning. Without applying, redemption is no redemption. Christ therefore carries on in heaven his prophetic, priestly, and kingly work. The applying of salvation is his work; he is the doer; he shares himself and his blessings through a grace that cannot be withstood or lost to his own. Soteriology too is to be seen as godly, as a work of Father, Son, and Spirit. And as the winning of salvation by Christ took place in the way of the covenant, so does its applying. First, the bringing in of the chosen is not to be thought of as lone-wise and bit-wise, for they are all given to Christ, are grasped in the covenant, are in their time born from Christ, as the body with its limbs from the head, and share all his blessings. The church is a living whole, no heap; the whole goes before the parts. Some Reformed, Wollebius, Theology chapters 21-27, Keckermann, System of Theology 1603 p. 370, Brakel, Reasonable Service I chapters 24-29 and others, therefore even handled the teaching of the church before that of salvation. This is not needful, because Reformed theology holds in the covenant of grace what these theologians meant by their order; it also mixes the church as body of Christ with the church as setup, as Ritschl also does when he claims that Calvin sets the church above the order of salvation, Justification and Reconciliation I² 216. But it yet voices a true thought; the covenant of grace does not come about through the order of salvation but goes before it. Second, rebirth, faith, turning are no readyings that go on outside Christ and the covenant of grace and first lead man to Christ. But they are blessings that already flow forth from the covenant of grace, from the mystical union, from the bestowal of Christ's person. The Holy Spirit, who is the worker of these blessings, is won by Christ for his own; the reckoning of Christ thus goes before the gift of the Spirit. Rebirth, turning, faith do not first lead to Christ, but stem from him. Third, faith and justification in the Reformed order of salvation take not that midmost place which is given them by the Lutherans. For faith in no way brings about the blessing of forgiveness, but only takes it from Christ. The weight falls not on the self and its undergoings, but on the outward work of Christ. Faith itself is but a link in the long chain of salvation. It roots in election, it is a blessing of the grace-covenant, it is a gift from Christ, it is a fruit of rebirth, it is even as a lasting bent in the children of the covenant and stays in seed even in believers in their falls and stumblings, it is even in those brought in at later age not wrought by spell but rather readied through all kinds of leadings of life; special grace links to common grace in nature. Fourth, this faith brings with it the sureness of salvation, for this lies unshakable in God's counsel, in Christ's person, in the covenant of grace. And since hallowing is as much a blessing of Christ as justification, since the good works in which believers must walk are readied by God in Christ, faith cannot stay standing at forgiveness of sins, but stretches also to the fullness that is in Christ, seeks to strengthen and uphold itself from good works as its fruits, girds itself with boldness and strength not only to live in hidden fellowship with Christ, but also under him as king to fight against sin, world, and flesh on all fields and make all things serve the honor of God's name.
8. But alongside these views of the order of salvation, many others arose. Mysticism, which always and everywhere—in India and Arabia, among Jews and Greeks, among Catholics and Protestants—shows the same character, lets all that is objective and outward recede before the inward process of salvation. It therefore reckons little in Christianity with Holy Scripture, the Christ for us, satisfaction, imputed righteousness, justification, church, sacraments, and so forth, but lays all weight on inward grace, enlightenment, rebirth, Christ in us, infused righteousness, renewal by the Holy Spirit, and so forth. Along three steps it seeks to reach perfection: katharsis (via purgativa, ascesis), photismos (via illuminativa, meditation), and epopteia (via contemplativa, ecstasy). For when the soul, namely, through ascesis has withdrawn itself from the whole world and through meditation has gathered itself wholly to one point, then it becomes partaker of the beholding of God, deification, transformation into Christ, and so forth; then it loses itself and sinks away in God. Compare Zeller, Philos. d. Gr. ; Voetius, Exerc. pietatis ; Hollaz, Ex. theol. ; Erbkam, Gesch. d. prot. Sekten , and further literature in Herzog².
Directly opposite to this stands rationalism, which was prepared by Socinianism and Remonstrantism and in the eighteenth century ruled the minds. It sees in Christ no more than a prophet and teacher, who proclaimed the truth of God and sealed it with his life and death; by following Him, the human being, weakened indeed by sin but not powerless, becomes partaker of salvation. The calling, which comes to him in the gospel, therefore exercises on his understanding and will only a moral influence. If the human being out of his own free choice obeys that calling, assents to the truth, trusts in God's grace, and fulfills Christ's commands—for in assent, trust, and obedience consists the essence of faith—then he is justified for this faith, which in principle includes the whole obedience and is already reckoned by God out of grace, for Christ's sake, as perfect obedience, and upon perseverance becomes partaker of eternal salvation. Compare Fock, der Socin. ; Conf. Rem. and Apol. Conf. VII; Limborch, Theol. Chr. IV; V; VI; Wegscheider, Inst. theol. ; Bretschneider, Dogm. ; Knapp, Glaub. II; Reinhard, Dogm. .
In the same way as mysticism and rationalism, antinomianism and neonomianism stand over against each other in the order of salvation. Antinomianism is in general that direction which in the first place brings back the whole application of salvation entirely to and identifies it with the procurement of salvation. Christ, namely, has fulfilled all things; He has not only taken over our guilt but even the stain of sin from us; He has not only procured righteousness but also rebirth and sanctification for us. For man, therefore, nothing remains to be done; repentance, conversion, penance, prayer for forgiveness, the doing of good works—all this is needless, bears a legalistic character, and does short to the perfection of Christ's offering. Man needs only to believe, that is, to come to the insight that he is justified, reborn, sanctified, that he is perfect in Christ. The sins which he then still commits are no longer sins; they are works of the old man, which no longer concern the believer as such, for he is perfect in Christ, is freed from the law, and glories in grace. Commonly, however, antinomianism does not stop here but takes a step further back; it first reduces the application of salvation to the procurement and then this again to God's decree. Even Christ has not procured salvation, for this lay ready eternally in God's decree, but He has only revealed God's love; to believe is therefore nothing else than to lay aside the delusion that God is wroth with us; sin exists only in that delusion. Such sentiments were proclaimed of old by the Gnostics, in the Middle Ages by many libertine sects, and found entrance in the Reformed Church among the Hattemists and Hebrews; compare Hulsius, The Present-Day Antinomianism , second edition 1738. Fruytier, Clear and Short Display of the Falsehood and Deformity of the Sentiment of the So-Called Hebrews 1697. Melchior Leydekker, Historical and Theological Exercises on the Origin, Progress, and Sentiments of the Old and New Antinomians 1700. Ypey, History of the Christian Church in the Eighteenth Century VII. J. van Leeuwen in Netherlands Archive for Church History VIII 1848. van Manen in The Guide , September October 1885. It is understandable that this antinomianism found so much entrance precisely in the Reformed Church; the Reformed order of salvation shows unmistakable kinship with it. Already from the Reformation onward, many, because the remission of sins is not effected by faith but received, placed justification or the forgiveness of sins before faith and defined the essence of faith as knowledge, certainty; Luther in Köstlin, Luther's Theology I. Melanchthon in Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation I second edition. Calvin, Institutes III 2, 7. 14. Hyperius, Method of Theology 1574. Ursinus on question 21 Heidelberg Catechism. Olevianus, Explanation of the Apostles' Creed , second edition Doesburg 1868. And so further Pareus, Tossanus, Piscator, Twisse, and others. Especially was this sentiment developed with clarity in England over against the field-winning neonomianism by the so-called antinomians, but who are better designated as antineonomians: John Eaton, The Honeycomb of Free Justification by Christ Alone , London 1642. William Eyre, Vindication of Free Justification 1654. Tobias Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted 1643. John Saltmarsh, Free Grace 1645. Samuel Crisp, Christ Made Sin 1691. Thomas Tully, Pauline Justification without Works 1674. Isaac Chauncy, Neonomianism Unmasked 1692. Idem, Alexipharmacon, a Fresh Antidote against Neonomian Bane 1700; compare Witsius, Miscellanea Sacra II. Hoornbeek, Summa of Controversies 1653. Pfaff, History of Theological Literature . Walch, Bibliotheca Theologica Selecta II. Idem, Introduction to the Religious Controversies outside the Lutheran Church III. Here in this land, this view of justification as preceding faith, whether then in God's decree or in Christ's resurrection or in the promise of the gospel or in the inward calling, and accordingly also the view of faith as knowledge and certainty, was defended by Trigland, Antapology . Maccovius, Loci Communes chapters 69-72. Collegium Theologicum . Loci Communes Disputationes 1641. Voetius, Disputationes II V. Hoornbeek, Summa of Controversies , and especially in the eighteenth century by Holtius, Justification by Faith 1750. Comrie, Heidelberg Catechism question 21. Idem, Letter on the Justification of the Sinner by the Immediate Imputation of Christ's Righteousness , new edition Utrecht 1889. Examination of the Draft of Tolerance , preface to the seventh Dialogue. Walch article 3. Brahe, Remarks on the Five Walch Articles 1758. Theological Theses on the Doctrine of the Justification of the Sinner before God , composed by J. J. Brahe, new edition by A. Capadose, Amsterdam 1833; compare also Hartmann, House Bible on Romans 4:5. van Thuynen, Short Explanation of the Reformed Faith 1722. Vrolikhert, Two Theological Treatises on the Covenant of Works and the Imputation of Christ's Active Obedience and on the Nature and Essence of Faith 1732. B. S. Cremer, Summa Theologiae Supranaturalis 1730. Idem, Evangelical Chain of Truth of Faith 1740. But by no means could all find themselves in this representation. Over against it stood another description of the order of salvation, which can be designated as neonomian and again is to be distinguished into a more rationalistic and a more pietistic one. The first-named direction roots principally already in the doctrine of Piscator, that Christ's active obedience does not belong to the satisfaction, and soon became of great significance and influence through the school of Saumur. Camero taught there that the will always follows the understanding and that therefore for conversion the enlightenment of the understanding is sufficient. Amyraut made objective grace universal. Pajon deemed an inward grace needless and let the efficacy of the calling, after the manner of Bellarmine, depend on its congruity with the circumstances in which it comes to someone. The consequence thereof was that natural inability, covenant of works, immediate imputation of Adam's sin and of Christ's righteousness, etc., were denied; faith was joined with works and so conceived as means or ground of justification. This happened, among others, in England by George Bull, Harmonia Apostolica 1670, who indeed was opposed by many but defended by More, Glanville, Whitby, Tillotson, Cave, and others, M. Vitringa III; in Scotland by the Anti-Marrow men Simson, Hadow, and others; in America by the followers of Jonathan Edwards; and here in this land by Vlak, who in his Eternal Gospel 1684 taught a justification from the works of faith, by van den Os 1740, who defined faith as trust in Christ and obedience to His commands, by J. van den Honert, Treatise on the Justification of the Sinner out of and by Faith , and J. J. Schultens, Detailed Warning on Various Pieces of the Catechism Explanation of Alexander Comrie 1755 and (Petrus Boddaert), Cloud of Witnesses for the Doctrine of Justification by and out of Faith , collected on the occasion of the publication of the Remarks on the Five Walch Articles by J. J. Brahe, who all denied the immediate imputation and placed faith before justification, by Kleman, who in his Order of Salvation 1774 assumed such a connection laid by God's wisdom and goodness between man's moral actions and the supernatural communication of faith, that all who make a proper use of their natural powers can certainly count on the acquisition of supernatural grace, etc.
9. But the neo-nomianism also appeared in a pietistic form and then made not faith and obedience but yet faith and experience the condition of justification. From the beginning, there was in the Reformed church and theology a practical direction that was averse to all scholasticism and laid all emphasis on the life. It was especially supported and promoted by the philosopher Peter Ramus, who was a strong opponent of Aristotle, demanded more simplicity in philosophy, and defined theology as the doctrine of living well, whose goal is not knowledge of things but use and practice, cf. Tideman, in Stud. en Bijdr. op het gebied der hist. Theol. door Moll en de Hoop Scheffer III 1876. This view found entrance among many Reformed theologians, in Strasbourg by Sturm, in Heidelberg by Tremellius, in Herborn by Piscator, in the Netherlands by Snellius, Scaliger, Jacob Alting, in Cambridge by Perkins, whose pupil Amesius, later professor in Franeker alongside Maccovius, also defined theology as the doctrine of living to God, the study of piety, seated in the will, cf. Dr. H. Visscher, Guil. Amesius, Haarlem 1894. Thus there arose a practical, pietistic direction, in England for example represented by R. Baxter, A Call to the Unconverted 1669, Daniel Williams, Gospel Truth Stated and Vindicated 1692, B. Woodbridge, The Method of Grace in the Justification of Sinners 1656, and many practical writers, and here in this land advocated by many theologians and preachers, Witsius, Vitringa, Lampe, Mel, d’Outrein, Brakel, Hellenbroek, Smytegelt, Francken, Groenewegen, Borstius, van der Groe, Eswijler, Schortinghuis, etc., cf. Heppe, Gesch. d. Piet. u. d. Mystik in der ref. K. Leiden 1879. Göbel, Gesch. d. chr. Lebens in der rh.-westph. ev. K. 3 Bde 1849-1860. Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus, I in der ref. K. 1880.
As the conditions in the church became sadder and a dead orthodoxy gained the upper hand, these writers laid all emphasis on the necessity of a true conversion. Birth from believing parents, membership in the church, baptism, Lord's Supper, orthodox faith was not enough. One must partake of the true, saving faith, which bore an entirely different character than the temporary, miraculous, and historical faith. True faith does not arise until terror of the law, fear of judgment, anguish over sin have preceded it. The essence of faith is also not assent or conviction but consists much more in trust than in knowledge; it is seated more in the heart and the will than in the understanding. And it is not immediately certainty; no, as Gomarus had already said, distinction must be made between a refuge-taking and an assured trust; the first alone constitutes the essence of faith, the second belongs to its well-being and can be added much later. That faith as refuge-taking trust, consisting in a hungering and thirsting after Christ and his righteousness, is a condition that precedes justification; it entrusts itself to Christ in order to be justified; when it has accepted the righteousness of Christ, then it goes therewith to God the Father, points Him to His promises, and is justified by Him. It does not go so simply and so easily as many think; the gospel is not for all people, the offer of salvation is not general, the law is for all, but the gospel is only for certain "qualified" sinners, for those initially graced. No one may believe except those who have first received boldness from the Holy Spirit; one must guard against an imagined and a stolen faith! Therefore, continual self-examination remains necessary; one can so easily deceive oneself; the distinction is so fine between the regenerate at his worst and the unregenerate at his best; there is so much likeness between false and true grace. Thus the believer always has to examine and test himself again by the marks of the spiritual life; the way of salvation is a narrow, strait way, along which even the righteous are scarcely saved. It is also a long way. From refuge-taking to assured trust there is a great distance; between them move many classes and groups of people, the discovered, convicted, troubled, those desirous of salvation, the little and weak believers, etc. The sealing and assurance follows as a rule only after a long time of doubt and struggle, and then often comes about in an extraordinary way, through a voice, a vision, a suddenly occurring word of comfort from Scripture, etc. To this pietism in the Reformed church is related the Lutheran pietism, which was prepared by Musaeus, Arnd, etc., and also by Reformed writers like Baxter, Dyke, Bayle, and others, and then became a powerful movement through Spener 1635-1705 and obtained a great expansion. Through preaching, discipline, collegia pietatis, and many writings such as Pia Desideria oder herzliches Verlangen nach gottgefälliger Besserung der wahren christlichen Kirche 1675, Spener opposed the dead orthodoxy. He wanted a return to the grace of regeneration received in baptism but later lost. Historical faith is insufficient; a living, active faith is necessary for salvation. And this faith one obtains only when one learns to know one's sins through the preaching of the law, and has had a long, anxious struggle with devil, world, and flesh, even to despair (Busskampf); then from that the true faith breaks through. This faith therefore consists not only in assent, but in trust; it is an experience, a feeling of the heart, a life of the soul. And as such it is first a means to justification, in order then to reveal itself in a holy life, distinct from the world, even abstaining from indifferent things. Cf. Walch, Hist. u. theol. Einl. in die Religionsstreit. der ev. luth. K. II. Ritschl, Gesch. d. Pietismus II 1884. Riggenbach, Herzog² 11, and the literature cited there.
In this pietism Zinzendorf 1700-1760 was raised, and he remained in agreement with it in aversion to dead orthodoxy; but pietism was too legalistic for him. Terror of the law and anguish over sin, though not wrong and sometimes having a preparatory power, are yet not the true thing. True repentance, though the word repentance is less accurate because it suggests punishment, arises from the gospel, from the preaching of the suffering Christ. It consists not so much in anxiety and struggle, in complaining and weeping, but in trust in God's grace. It is a matter of the heart, of the feeling. Therefore the heart must be made sensitive, and that happens best through the lively depiction of Christ's suffering form, of his blood and wounds. Thereby as through immediate beholding, through a deep, lively impression, through a wound-glance, faith is born in the heart, without one having gone through a Busskampf or knowing precisely the hour of one's regeneration. That faith brings about a union, a betrothal, a marriage between Christ and the soul, makes the heart swim in grace, that is, in Jesus' blood as in its element, and makes the believer always live in the loving nearness of the Savior. It justifies and regenerates at the same time; faith and love coincide; more than objective justification, the dynamic impartation of the Spirit, the birth from Jesus' side, is of value. Born from Him, believers live without pietistic anxiety in his nearness, do everything in his name, place everything, even domestic and social life, under his rule, and lead a cheerful, Christian life, cf. Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theol. I-II-III. Spangenberg, Idea Fidei Fratrum 1778. Becker in Herzog² 17. Ritschl, Gesch. d. Pietismus III 1886.
What pietism was for the Lutheran church, later the Methodism of Wesley 1703-1791 and Whitefield 1714-1771 became for the Reformed church. It originally wanted nothing other than to shake awake the sleeping church and to infuse orthodox Christendom with a new life. To that end, first through a gripping preaching of righteousness, sin, judgment, damnation, people must be suddenly brought to a deep sense of their lost condition; then in the same moment, without delay, led to Christ through faith and assured of their salvation; and thereafter spurred to a new life, active in the service of the kingdom of God, devoted to mission and philanthropy, abstaining from all mediocre things, a sinless life. Methodism betrays, in distinction from pietism, clearly its English origin and Reformed descent. It is indeed also a reaction against dead orthodoxy; but it wants no preparation, no gradual progress of conversion; it has no long Busskampf, no finally entering breakthrough, no later following sealing; it draws everything together to one point, places conversion in the full light of consciousness, and keeps account of the saved souls. And when it has converted people, it does not gather them in quiet, withdrawn circles, in societies and conventicles, to cultivate piety there; but it organizes them into an army that proceeds offensively, full of fire enters the wide world and conquers it by storm for Christ, cf. Schaff, Creeds I-III. Schoell in Herzog² 9. Schneckenburger, Vorl. über die Lehrbegriffe der kleineren prot. Kirchenparteien 1863. Lecky, Entstehungsgesch. u. Charakt. der Methodismus, aus d. Engl. Leipzig 1880. Kolde, Der Methodismus und seine Bekämpfung, Erl. 1886. Id. Die Heilsarmee, Erl. 1885.
10. Also in the newer theology, the descriptions of the order of salvation run far apart. Kant came through his teaching of the radical evil to the recognition that in man a new creation must take place. Nevertheless, he sees in conversion a work of man; concludes, even as Pelagius with his "if he ought, he can," from the "thou shalt" to the "thou canst"; and calls each one to do what is in his power to become a better man and then further to hope for higher cooperation. Although now this conversion remains imperfect on earth, God reckons the disposition for the deed and justifies us out of grace. Also, after his conversion, man still always atones for the sins which he formerly committed, willingly takes upon himself the sorrow and punishment therefor, and thus also makes himself worthy of forgiveness.
Even stronger than by Kant was the corruption of human nature taught by Schopenhauer; he therefore also said that, to improve man radically, enlightenment of the head, development of the understanding was wholly insufficient, that a rebirth must take place of the kernel of his being, because to do follows to be. But he himself bends again from this line of his thoughts and seeks the redemption from suffering in part in art and philosophy but especially therein, that man in the light of knowledge lets the whole wretched life work as a quietive for the will, denies the will and thus enters into nirvana, where the will is fully extinguished.
Herein Schopenhauer agreed with Schelling, whose negative philosophy ended therewith, that blessedness is attainable, not along the path of virtue and the keeping of the law, but only in the way of the contemplative life; but who yet in his positive philosophy expressed that man becomes partaker of justification and blessedness only through religion, through fellowship with the risen Christ, for person seeks person.
And so also von Hartmann seeks blessedness not in art, philosophy, religion but in the decision once to be taken by mankind, to destroy the willing, in the universal denial of the will.
In Hegel, reconciliation is a process in the divine being itself. Man is essentially one with God, but he knows it not. Being and consciousness are divided, man is to himself a stranger. But Christ was the first who became conscious of his divine being, his oneness with God. And whoever, even as Christ, in his fellowship, sees and acknowledges that unity, he is reconciled. Herein it comes to the disposition; the deed remains yet long behind that disposition, but this imperfection is a vanishing moment and therefore counts not at all in reconciliation.
In agreement with this philosophy of Hegel, the theology of the moderns teaches that God and man, grace and will form no opposition in the work of conversion, but that conversion is at the same time and wholly a deed of both. For grace falls factually together with the providence of God, works only ethically and pedagogically, fosters and strengthens itself in the religious community the susceptibility for salvation (faculty of applying oneself to grace). In the long run, it will also bring all men to salvation and overcome all resistance. Man also in the proper sense has no need of a rebirth; only can conversion so be called, as it is viewed from God's side. That conversion consists itself in penance, that is, remorse over past sins, disposition to bear the punishment therefor willingly and henceforth to better the life, and in faith, that is, trust in the grace of God in Christ. When man so converts himself, then he is therein also at once justified. For justification is no transcendent deed of God but nothing other than the removal of the consciousness of guilt, change in the consciousness of the relation to God, lifting of the discord between the natural I and its destiny. For in conversion man is initially renewed and bears as such the warrant of perfection in himself, even as in the seed the plant is hid and in the child the man.
More in appearance than in truth does this order of salvation differ from the representation which Schleiermacher gives of it. After Christ, so he says, has entered into our fellowship of sin and misery, He has the power and the calling to take us up into His fellowship of holiness and blessedness. That happens through regeneration and sanctification. Regeneration consists in conversion and justification, which both are one and the same, the one time viewed from our side, the other time from God's side. In conversion, which again has two parts: repentance and faith, man is not cooperating and also not wholly passive but receptive (in the sense of Melanchthon's facultas se applicandi ad gratiam), so that then also the whole of mankind once becomes ripe for grace and partakes of salvation. Justification is that act of God whereby man is placed in fellowship with Christ; it consists negatively in forgiveness, that is, condemnation of the old, and positively in adoption, that is, awakening of a new life; and leaves, as the reverse side of conversion, forgiveness actually separated, because and insofar as man in the fellowship of Christ partakes of a new life. The mediating theologians have indeed granted a broader place in dogmatics to the person of Christ and to the working of the Holy Spirit; but in the order of salvation they have not wholly risen above the thoughts of Schleiermacher. Firstly, they almost all ascribe to man the power to accept or reject grace, whether that power comes from God's creation or providence, or from the gratia praeparans given in baptism or calling, cf. part II. And secondly, they correct Schleiermacher insofar as they hold justification to be an objective act of God, but they nevertheless let it all happen on the ground, not of the imputed but of the infused righteousness of Christ, so that they teach not only a judicial but also a communicating, sanctifying act of God and a προληψις upon the future, cf. for example Neander, History of the Planting and Leading of the Christian Church; Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics; Lange, Christian Dogmatics II; Ebrard, Dogmatics; Schöberlein, Principle and System of Dogmatics; also Beck, Christian Doctrine of Faith I; Christian Faith II, cf. The Doctrine of Justification of Prof. of Theology Joh. Tob. Beck, O. F. Myrberg and A. W. Ingman, examined and illuminated by several evangelical theologians and by E. T. Gestrin, Berlin 1892; and even Hengstenberg in the Evangelical Church Newspaper of 1866 and 1867, who appealed for his view to the Epistle of James and also to Luke 7:36ff., cf. Proof of Faith 1868; Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation I².
In contrast to this justification built upon the subject, Ritschl went back to the person of Christ and sought in his work the ground of forgiveness. Not indeed in the sense that it was won by Christ and consisted in a change of God's disposition, for God is everlasting love and punishing righteousness is not in him. But Christ has by his perfect calling-faithfulness, by his unbroken fellowship with God, by his full surrender to God's will, yet proclaimed and proved that God is love, that he does not wrath or punish but forgives. This now was needful, not because God is far from mankind, but because mankind, through its sin, which is truly unawareness, no outward guilt but inward guilt-feeling, is far from God. Therefore Christ has proclaimed God's love even unto death and, making God's aim with mankind his own, founded a kingdom of God, a church, in which he has planted that awareness, that God is love and forgives sin, and that it, without its sin needing to hinder it, can live in fellowship with God.
Justification is therefore in Ritschl a joining judgment, not spoken on ground of good works but going before those good works; first must yet in man the fear for God as the judge give way to the awareness of his fellowship, before he can do good works and fulfill his moral calling. Furthermore, that justification is also no utterance over, no undergoing of the single believer, but it is a good of the church, which knows despite its sin to stand in fellowship with God; it falls together with the founding of the church itself. The sundry persons become partakers of this boon of justification only by joining the church and making it their own in faith. That faith is free; the choosing has also not single men but the church as object. That faith is also not worked by magic, but upbringing is the wonted shape in which someone comes to faith. It consists truly in trust, is unbound from historical searching and its outcomes and rests on a deep mark, which by the moral greatness of Jesus is made on the open heart, cf. part I 453. By that faith man gets another judgment over God, himself, the world; he learns to know God as love, knows that his sin is no hindrance more for fellowship with God, deems woes and ills no punishments more but rules ghostly over all things; in one word, his guilt-feeling is taken away and therein stands his justification. Outcome of this justification is the at-one-ment, the laying off of enmity toward God on ground of that justification. And with that justification and at-one-ment is truly the new birth the same, for this stands not in an over-natural change, but in a change of mood and mind.
11. By the order of salvation, ordo or way of salvation, is to be understood the manner in which, or the path along which, the sinner comes into possession of the benefits of grace that have been won by Christ. In dogmatics it first received an independent place and a somewhat ordered treatment rather late. Among the scholastics the material for this locus is still scattered; the main things that come up for discussion here are to be found in the commentaries on Sentences II dist. 26-29, III dist. 25-27 and Summa II 1 qu. 109-114. The Council of Trent treats all the subjects relating to grace under the title de justificatione, sess. VI. The Roman theologians usually gather the material together in a locus de gratia and in it successively discuss the gratia actualis (nature, necessity, gratuitousness; sufficiency, efficacy etc.), the gratia habitualis (justification) and the fructus gratiae (merit). The Reformation caused this locus to be treated much more broadly than before; it itself at first spoke in it only of repentance, faith and good works, but gradually extended the number of subjects and treated successively the vocation, illumination, regeneration, conversion, faith, justification etc. Naturally the need was soon felt to bring this extensive, rich material together again under one head. Calvin already led the way in this and gave to the third book of his Institutes the title: the manner of receiving the grace of Christ, and what fruits come to us from it and what effects follow. Others speak of the grace of the Holy Spirit as applying (Quenstedt), making salvific or the mode of attaining salvation (Calovius), the application of redemption (Mastricht), the order of salvation or the mode of obtaining salvation (Reinhard) etc. This order of salvation now has to wrestle with a peculiar difficulty. On the one hand, everything has been accomplished by Christ, sin atoned for, the law fulfilled, death overcome, Satan subdued, forgiveness acquired, life in incorruptibility brought to light. One would expect that those for whom Christ died would immediately and fully be freed from sin, suffering, death and become partakers of holiness and blessedness. This is however not the case; on the contrary, in time they are exhorted to faith and repentance, must be born again, justified, sanctified and glorified, remain in this life subject to sin, suffering and death and enter the kingdom of heaven only through many tribulations. How is the one to be reconciled with the other? On the one hand everything accomplished, so that nothing remains for man to do; and on the other hand it seems that the main thing must still happen to man if he is to become a partaker of the acquired salvation. The Christian religion seems to take two irreconcilable standpoints, the heterosoteric and the autosoteric, when it ascribes the acquisition of salvation wholly to Christ and yet urges us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, cf. v. Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie I 569 f. There are therefore two rocks on which the Christian order of salvation always ran the risk of foundering, on antinomianism on the one side and on Pelagianism on the other.
Pelagianism not only conflicts with the decrees of God, but it also falls short in regard to the person and the work of Christ. Insofar as it broadens the working of man in the gaining of salvation, it shrinks that of Christ. For it is clear that if faith, conversion, perseverance, wholly or in part lie in man's power and are his work, if the decision about actually becoming saved at last, when it comes to it, lies in the hands of man, then Christ at most can only have won the possibility of becoming saved. He has then indeed opened the opportunity, but whether someone or few or many or all will make use of that opportunity and continue to do so, depends at last on men themselves. God left them free and laid the decision in their hands. Then it follows that Christ indeed has not fulfilled all things by far, but that the chief thing, that is, that which decides about actually becoming saved, must still be done by man. Thus Christ descends from the unique place which He holds in the work of salvation; He comes to stand on one line with all those prophets and teachers through whom God has taught and trained men; His work becomes akin to and inserted into all those preparatory and pedagogical works which God has bestowed on the human race; the gospel of grace is only gradually distinguished from the law of nature. And man himself, though helped and upheld by all that training work of God, is called to self-working. From him it depends whether he will grasp the opportunities which God offers him and thus become partaker of salvation. The Pelagian view of the order of salvation wipes out the specific difference between Christianity and the heathen religions, grasps them all together in one process, and can honor the Christian religion at most as the first among its equals. It falls back into paganism and lets salvation be won by man's own wisdom and strength. And thereby it also undermines the certainty of faith. Of the Gentiles Paul testifies that they are without Christ and therefore also without God and without hope in the world, Eph. 2:12. From the works of the law there is no justification, there is also no certainty of salvation; insofar as someone more closely searches himself and his good works, he comes to the sorrowful discovery that even his best works are unwhole and stained with sin; he must therefore content himself with an appeal to God's love, which overlooks the lacking through the fingers and takes the will for the deed, or with an authority of church and priest, and give himself over to a false rest; certainty he has and gets for himself never. Yes, because grace, insofar as given to him and needful, not only remains resistible but also always losable, he is every moment exposed to the danger of losing again what he has and falling out of the hope of salvation. On this standpoint there is no steady course, no unfolding of the Christian life possible. Even the whole outcome of world history is uncertain, whether there will be a church, a kingdom of God; the rule of the world rests for the chief part, that is, for the eternal end-destination, in the hands of man. The errors of this rationalistic Pelagianism spring clearly into the eye; but they are also present where it cloaks itself in pietistic or methodistic garb. Pietism and Methodism were, like so many other attempts at reformation of life in Protestant churches, in their right over against the dead orthodoxy. They meant originally nothing other than to shake awake the sleeping Christendom, wanted to bring no change in the confession of the Reformation but only to apply it in life. But from understandable reaction they have in this their striving often gone too far and swung over to another extreme. They too have little by little shifted the weight-point from the objective to the subjective work of salvation. Thereby it is in the essence of the matter indifferent whether one makes salvation dependent on faith and obedience or on faith and experience. In both cases man himself steps into the foreground. Even if pietism and Methodism did not deny the gaining of salvation by Christ, they yet left it unused and brought it into no organic bond with the application. It was, so to speak, a dead capital. The official working of the exalted Christ, the Lord from heaven, stepped into the shadow behind the experiences and findings of the subject. In pietism man was referred, instead of to Christ, to himself; he had to travel a long way, fulfill all kinds of demands and conditions, test himself by many and manifold marks, before he might believe, appropriate Christ to himself, and be assured of his salvation. Methodism sought to draw all this, conversion, faith, assurance, together into one undivided moment, but it systematized this method, though very shortened, in the same way as pietism. In both there is a mis-knowing of the working of the Holy Spirit, of the preparation of grace, of the bond of creation and re-creation. And therefore it comes in neither of them to a truly Christian life. Whether this pietistically withdraws from the world or after the Methodistic manner aggressively steps into the world, it is always something apart, something that stands dualistically next to the natural life, and that therefore does not work organically into family and society and state, into science and art. With or without the uniform of the army of salvation, Christians are a special kind of men who live not in but outside the world. The reformational opposition of sin and grace has more or less made place for the Roman opposition of natural and supernatural. Puritanism is exchanged for asceticism. The essence of sanctification lies in abstinence from middling things.
On the other hand stands antinomianism. Over against Pelagianism it defends an important truth, which we, precisely to overcome antinomianism, must acknowledge not halfway but wholly and fully. It is true that Christ has fulfilled all things and that man has nothing to add to his offering for salvation, nor can he add anything. But antinomianism (not to be confused with the proper antineonomianism in England and in this land) uses this truth only to gain entrance for a wholly different teaching. For certainly, Christ has fulfilled all things. But does that mean that not we, but also Christ has nothing more to do after he has suffered and died? Indeed no, for Christ is also raised and glorified; he is, through and after his resurrection, appointed as Son of God in power, as Lord from heaven, as life-giving Spirit. For Christ there remains in the state of exaltation still much to do; he must also apply and distribute the salvation which he acquired to his church, and for that purpose he has sent forth his Spirit, that he might regenerate the whole church and lead it into all truth. Antinomianism now denies this application of the work of salvation; it denies in principle the personality and activity of the Holy Spirit. In the depths of the matter it agrees with Pelagianism, according to the law that two extremes touch each other. But precisely because it is inwardly driven by a different interest than that of the perfect offering of Christ, it proceeds still further and also denies and fights against the objective satisfaction. Christ has, namely, through his suffering and dying not acquired eternal salvation, but he has only made known God's love; reconciliation and justification are already from eternity. Just as in Pelagianism, Christ here descends to the rank of a prophet and teacher. But while Pelagianism comes to these errors through its deistic principle, antinomianism principally arises from pantheism. It resembles like two drops of water the philosophy of Gnosticism, of Spinoza and Hegel. God is essentially one with man; he is from all eternity reconciled; wrath and righteousness are human conceptions. Only man feels himself through his finitude and limitation far from God; he thinks that God is far from him, that he is wrathful over sin and demands satisfaction. And that is a wrong thought which man forms of God. God is eternal love, eternally reconciled, eternally one with man. And the whole redemption consists therefore in this, that man through the preaching of the prophets is better informed and enlightened, that he lays aside the delusion of God's wrath and punishment-demanding righteousness, that he acknowledges God as his Father, himself as his child. Nothing else is needed for redemption than this enlightenment; therein it consists; it includes nothing else than faith. There is no conversion, no repentance, no sorrow over sins, no fear of hell, no dread of judgment, no plea for forgiveness, no sanctification, no good works necessary; those are all Pelagian errors which fall short of the objective facts of God's grace and reconciliation. On a low, legalistic standpoint one still feels need of them, just as one then lets the satisfaction come about through Christ's offering and speaks of God's wrath and righteousness. But those are religious conceptions, symbolic garments, which have their value for the common folk, but which on the standpoint of the spiritual ones, of the philosophers, give way to the pure idea and the adequate concept. Just as Pelagianism, so also antinomianism ends with total denial of the essence of Christianity, sinks back to paganism, and places the redemption from sin in rationalistic enlightenment or moralistic improvement of man. Both deny, in Arian or in Sabellian form, the confession of the Trinity.
12. Only on the groundwork of the trinitarian confession is there room for an order of salvation in a scriptural, Christian, Reformed sense. From that confession flows forth, in the first place, that the application of salvation is distinct from its acquirement. For the Holy Ghost is indeed in being one with, but yet as a person another than the Father and the Son. He has His own way of being, His own order of working. Though it be that all God's works outward are undivided and unshared, there is yet in creation and re-creation an economy to be noted, which gives us right to speak of the Father and our creation, of the Son and our redemption, of the Ghost and our hallowing. Why could Christ witness that the Holy Ghost was not yet, since He was not yet glorified, and why must the Holy Ghost be poured out on Pentecost, if hallowing were not a work distinct from creation and redemption, even as the Ghost is distinct from Father and Son? The work that was laid upon the Mediator was also not ended with His suffering and dying. Christ is not in that sense a historical person like others, that He, after living and laboring a while on earth, now only works after through His spirit and wields sway through His word and ensample. Though He has fulfilled on earth all the work that the Father gave Him to do, in heaven He carries on His prophetic, priestly, and kingly working. Thereto is He just raised up and glorified at God's right hand. He is the living Lord from heaven. That working is another than what He wrought on earth, though it stands also in the closest bond therewith. By His earthly offering He has fulfilled all that was to be done in the sphere of right; He has met God's demand, fulfilled the law, won all blessings of grace. That work is done and is open to no increase or decrease; there is nothing to add to it and nothing to take from it; it is full-come. The Father rests therein and has sealed it with the raising of His Son. All blessings that God bestows in the covenant of grace, He bestows per et propter Christum. But there is a distinction between ownership and possession. Even as a child, even before its birth, already has right to all the goods of its father but comes into possession thereof only at a much later age, so also all who shall later believe have, long before their faith, a right of ownership in Christ to all blessings that He has won; but they enter into possession thereof first through faith. The acquirement of salvation thus calls for its application; it enfolds it and brings it forth. Even as the exaltation of Christ with His humiliation, even as His working in heaven with that on earth, so stands the application of salvation in bond with its acquirement. And that application is twofold. For the redemption through Christ is a redemption from sin and all its aftermaths. He took over not only the guilt and punishment from us, but fulfilled the law also in our stead. The application of Christ's blessings must accordingly consist in justification, that is, in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins and the right to everlasting life, but also in hallowing, that is, the renewal after the image of Christ. Not only the guilt, but also the stain and the might of sin must be taken away. It must be a full redemption, a whole re-creation. To work this out and bring it to stand on the ground of His fulfilled offering, thereto is Christ exalted at the Father's right hand. Thereto has He sent out the Holy Ghost, who not only witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God, but who also rebirths us and re-creates us after the likeness of God. This work of application is therefore a godly work, even as good as the creation of the Father and the redemption of the Son; and the Holy Ghost, who brings it to stand, is therefore with the Father and the Son, one only God, to be praised and lauded in eternity.
In the second place, the confession of the Trinity encloses that the work of hallowing, in the economic sense entrusted to the Holy Ghost, though set apart, is yet not for a moment sundered from the work of redemption and of creation, which are wrought by the Son and the Father. This is already clear from the fact that the Ghost goes forth in the Godly being from the Father and the Son and shares with them the same being. And as He is, so He works, in creation and also in re-creation. From this it follows first of all that the work of the Ghost holds bond with the work of the Father and agrees therewith. There is between both no withstanding and no gainsaying. It is not so that the Father wills the salvation of all and the Holy Ghost applies it only to a few, or the other way round, but both work together, because they are one in being. From this it also follows that nature and grace, howsoever set apart, do not shut out each other. The Roman teaching system is wholly ruled by the withstanding of nature and supernatural grace; and sundry Protestant leanings and sects have fallen back into that error; pietism and methodism misdeem the right and worth of nature both before and after the turning. But the Reformation knew in principle no other withstanding than that of sin and grace. Also nature was a creation of God and stood under His foreseeing; it is in itself of no lesser worth than grace. And therefore it could grant to nature, that is, to God's leading in the natural life both among the folk and among sundry persons, a teaching meaning. It is God Himself who already readies the gracious working of the Holy Ghost in the kindreds, and the Holy Ghost joins in His working to God's leadings in the natural life and strives through His grace to restore the whole natural life, to free it from the might of sin and to hallow it to God. But from the being-oneness of Father, Son, and Ghost it also follows that the Holy Ghost holds bond with the work of the Son. Also Son and Ghost do not work against each other, so that the Ghost would apply salvation to a few, while the Son yet won it for all, or the other way round. One in being, they work in their sundry workings together with each other. Through His lowing the Son Himself is become a life-making Ghost. He lives wholly and altogether through the Ghost. What He died, that He died once for sin; what He now lives, He lives to God. He has become fully sharing in undyingness, the everlasting, ghostly life. There is nothing natural, soul-like more in Him that can suffer and die. He has, through the Ghost already on earth fitted for His work and anointed with Him without measure, fully won that Ghost, received all gifts of that Ghost, lives, rules, and reigns now through that Ghost. The Ghost of the Father and of the Son is become His Ghost, the Ghost of Christ. So He was not yet, before Christ was glorified. But now He is the Ghost of Christ, His own, His holding. And therefore He sends that Ghost on Pentecost day, to apply through Him all His good deeds to His church. The Holy Ghost wins not those good deeds, He adds not a single one thereto, for Christ has fulfilled all. He is in no wise a earning cause of our salvation; this is Christ alone, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, and whose work therefore needs not to be filled up or bettered. The Holy Ghost takes rather all from Christ; as the Son came to glorify the Father, so the Holy Ghost on His turn came down to glorify the Son. Of that Son He bears witness, from His fullness He shares grace for grace, to that Son He leads, and through the Son to the Father. And all good deeds of Christ He applies, to each in his measure, at his time, after his order. And He ends not His working before He has made the fullness of Christ to dwell in His church, and this has become a full-grown man and come to the measure of the greatness of the fullness of Christ. Therefore the working of the Holy Ghost is none other than an applying one; the order of salvation an application of salvation. The question therein is wholly not: what must man do to become sharing in salvation, but only: what does God do in His grace to make the church sharing in the full salvation won by Christ. Also the application of salvation is a work of God, which must be beheld godly, not manwardly.
Against this view of the order of salvation, however, from the side of Pelagianism the objection is always brought in, that in this way the right of man is misprized, his self-working suppressed, and an ungodly life furthered. Insofar as this objection in principle would overthrow the witness of Scripture, that by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified, it is not receivable on a Christian standpoint; whoever would wish to meet it, would at that same moment and in that same measure leave the ground of Scripture. Insofar as it is truly an objection and deserves weighing, it is untrue and rests on misunderstanding. For the view of the application of salvation as God's work shuts not out, but shuts in the full owning of all those moral factors, which under the leading of God's foreseeing work in on the understanding and heart of the unturned man. Insufficient may they be to salvation, as Scripture and knowing clearly speak out; but of misprizing their worth, even for the work of grace itself, there is on a pure Reformatory standpoint no speech; it is God himself indeed, who thus leads his children of men, bears witness to them, and does good over them from heaven, if haply they might seek and find him. Furthermore, it is not to be seen why the Holy Ghost, calling through the Word to faith and turning, cannot undo that moral working of the Word on heart and conscience, which Pelagianism writes to it. The Reformatory teaching holds not less, it holds only more, than is owned by Pelagius and his followers. These think to suffice with that moral working; Augustine however and his fellow-standers deemed it unenough but yet took it fully up in the grace-working of the Holy Ghost. Further is and remains the applying of salvation always a work of the Spirit, a work of the Holy Spirit, of the Spirit of Christ, and therefore never forcing and violent, but always ghostly, lovely and soft, treating man not as a stock or block, but as a reasonable being, enlightening, convincing, drawing, bending; making his darkness yield to light and replacing his ghostly powerlessness by ghostly strength. Grace and sin form an over-againstness; the latter is overcome only by the might of the former; but as soon as and in the same measure as the might of sin is broken, the over-againstness between God and man falls away. It is God's Spirit, who with our spirit bears witness that we are children of God. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. It is God who works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure, and who himself works out our salvation with fear and trembling. So far is it from this theological beholding breeding an ungodly life, that it alone warrants the reality of a new, Christian life, assures the believers of the fastness of their salvation, unfailingly promises the triumph of the kingdom of God, and lets the work of the Father and of the Son attain completion in the work of God the Holy Ghost. Pelagianism makes all things shaky and unfixed, even the triumph of the good and the victory of God's kingdom, because it hangs all on the unreckonable willfulness of man. Rising up for the rights of man, it treads underfoot the rights of God and keeps for man only the right of willfulness. But the Reformation, rising up for the rights of God, has therein also brought the right of man to owning; for here too holds the word of Scripture: them that honor me I will honor, but they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. The theological beholding of the order of salvation takes up in itself all the good that lies hidden in the anthropological; but the other way round takes not place. God encompasses man, but whoever begins with man shuts out God.
13. All the benefits of the covenant, which Christ has won and the Holy Spirit applies, can be summed up under the name of grace. Yet grace can be spoken of in different senses. First, it can denote the undeserved favor of God toward his creatures, especially toward sinners; as such it comes up in the teaching on God's virtues. Furthermore, it can be the name for all sorts of bodily and spiritual benefits, which God bestows on his creatures out of grace, and all are gifts of grace, yes, grace itself, Rom. 5:20, Eph. 1:7, 2:5, 8, Phil. 1:2, Col. 1:2, Titus 3:7, and so on. Still further, grace can mean the charm which someone shows through the gifts with which he is adorned in soul or body. And lastly, charis and gratia also have the meaning of thanks, shown by someone to another for a favor received (gratias agere ). Here we have to do only with grace in the second sense. But even so the idea is still much too broad. For in this locus there come up not the objective benefits of grace, which God has given to men in his law, in the gospel, in Christ, church, sacraments, and so on, and which are treated separately elsewhere in dogmatics. Here belong only those gifts of grace which are shared subjectively and inwardly to man by the Holy Spirit and which stand in bond with his salvation. These gifts of grace are again to be set apart into gifts of God's common grace, which are bestowed on all and sundry men in greater or lesser measure; into gifts of God's special grace, which are the share only of believers; and into uncommon gifts (charismata ), which the Holy Spirit deals out in the church to each as he wills, 1 Cor. 12:4-11. It is clear that especially the second group of gifts of grace has claim to treatment in this part of dogmatics. About this grace there is between Rome and the Reformation, set in its Reformed unfolding, an weighty difference.
First, Rome does indeed teach clearly the needfulness of actual grace (prevenient, antecedent, exciting, also called operating) and so casts off Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism; it also understands by that grace not the outward calling through the gospel alone with the moral working bound to it on understanding and will; it thinks thereby of an enlightening of the understanding and an inspiring of the will, which adds to man not only moral strengths but also bodily strengths. But it takes this grace at the beginning and in the going on as resistible and losable; the deciding, whether man shall take that grace, shall ready himself with it for his rightwising, receive the grace of rightwising (infused grace) and keep it to the end, hangs on himself.
Second, the nature of grace is set forth by Rome otherwise than by the Reformation. Indeed, the Roman theologians say outspokenly that actual and infused grace is no substance but a quality, but already of exciting grace it is said that it lifts up our faculties not morally but bodily, so that they can work above-naturally, and thus is being-wise above-natural, going beyond the whole natural order. And still stronger it is said of infused grace that it is a gift of God whereby man is lifted up into an above-natural order and in some way becomes a sharer of the godly nature. This stands third in bond therewith, that the aim of grace with Rome is another than with the Reformation. It has there a twofold task, to lift up and to heal. The first crowds the last wholly into the shade; the task of lifting up is the main one and befits grace in every above-natural order. But the task of healing is secondary and came to grace in the order of fallen nature; in the first sense it is utterly needful, in the second only by chance needful, and so all the writers quoted above. Grace is with Rome in the first place a quality added to man above the natural order, whereby he is taken up in beginning into an above-natural order, becomes sharer of the godly nature, the holiness, the childship, the fellowship of God, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the beholding of God, and can do such above-natural works which out of worthiness earn everlasting life. The forgiveness of sins is here underlaid, faith has only a readying worth; the main thing is the uplifting of man above his nature, the god-making, he pros theon aphomoiosis te kai henosis , Dionysius, cf. also.
The Reformation rejected this Neoplatonic mysticism, returned to the simplicity of Holy Scripture, and therefore gained a wholly different view of grace. This grace serves not to take up man into a supernatural order, but to free him from sin. Grace stands not over against nature, but only over against sin. It was not needful in the proper sense for Adam before the fall, but became needful only through sin; it is therefore not absolutely, but only accidentally needful. The physical opposition of natural and supernatural gives way to the ethical one of sin and grace. When grace wholly takes away sin with its guilt and stain and punishment, then it has done its work. Then man is of himself again the image of God, for the image of God is no donum superadditum but belongs to the essence of man. There is thus no need beside the grace that redeems from sin for another grace that then yet lifts man above his nature. Indeed, according to the Reformed, grace has given us back more than we lost through Adam. For Christ won not only the ability not to sin and die, as the Lutherans set it forth, but He bestows on believers at once the inability to sin and die; He brings us not back to that point on the way where Adam stood, but He has trodden the whole way for us to the end. He fulfilled not only the passive but also the active obedience; He won the unlosable blessedness, the eternal life, which for Adam yet lay in the future. Just because Adam's destiny lay in eternal blessedness, Christ could win this in his stead for us. But grace yet gives nothing more than what, if Adam had stood fast, would have been gained by him in the way of obedience. The covenant of grace differs from the covenant of works in the way, but not in the end goal. It is the same good that was promised in the covenant of works and is bestowed in the covenant of grace. Grace restores nature and leads it up to its highest height, but it adds no new, foreign part to it. From this it follows that grace in Reformation theology can in no wise bear the mark of a substance. Indeed, the Reformation confessed of grace that it is not only outward but also inward, that it bestows not only moral but also hyperphysical powers, that it is a quality, a habitus. But even if it sometimes spoke in the same words as Rome, yet it laid therein another meaning. With Rome, grace is a physical power, because it must lift nature to the supernatural order; if it served only to free man from sin, then with a view to the Roman teaching on sin, a moral power of grace would likely be enough. But the Reformation thought otherwise about sin; this was guilt and at the same time a total corruption of human nature; man was by nature dead in sins and misdeeds; his inability can in a certain sense be called a natural one. And therefore grace must also be such as enlightens the understanding and bends the will, which thus works not only morally but also hyperphysically and restores the powers. But with Rome this physical working of grace is an opposition to the ethical, in any case one far surpassing the ethical; with the Reformation it is and remains ethical. The natural inability is after all in its kind a spiritual, moral inability, an inability for good, caused solely and only by sin; it is called natural only because it is "by nature," that is, by force of the fallen, sinful nature, proper to man, not brought into him by habit, upbringing, and so on, and thus also cannot be taken away by such moral powers. Grace works hyperphysically only because it takes away that fallen-natural inability and restores the original-natural fitness for good. With Rome grace gives in strict sense a physical power which the natural man without the donum superadditum, even if he is fully sinless, does not have and which must be bestowed on him separately. It is physically impossible for that man to do supernatural good works, just as it is physically impossible for him to reach the stars with his hand. But of that kind is the inability not in the Protestant confession; and therefore grace here is also no physical quality in the Roman sense, even if it restores the original power for good lost through sin. And since now sin is no substance and has taken nothing substantial from man, grace also can never be thought of as a substance. It is a restoration of the form which was originally impressed on man and the creatures in general at creation. The re-creation is no second, new creation. It adds no new creatures to what exists, it brings no new substance into it, but it is essentially reformation. But therewith the working of grace stretches intensively as far as the might of sin reaches. Sin has touched everything, spoiled the whole organism of creation, the very nature of the creatures; and therefore grace is a power of God which frees mankind also inwardly, in the core of its being, from sin and one day sets it without spot or wrinkle before God's face. Therefore a morally working grace is not enough. Rome seems to honor grace when it calls it absolutely needful and lets it bestow physical powers that far surpass nature. But in the end it makes that whole grace so powerless again that this in its working hangs on man's will. It works nothing out when the will withstands it. And if the will consents to it, it serves only to bestow on man the powers that are needful for earning each following grace and eternal life. It is a help for man to his deification. But with the Reformation grace is the beginning, middle, and end of the whole work of salvation; nothing comes in from man's merit. As creation and redemption, so also sanctification is a work of God. From Him and through Him it is, and therefore it leads also to Him. To Him be the glory forever.
Zanchius, Op. II 342 VII 266. 354. Polanus, Synt. II c. 21. Martyr, Loci Comm. 248. Perkins, Works I 799v. Twissus, Op. I 685 sq. Junius, de natura et gratia, Op. I 302-305. Gomarus, de gratia conversionis, Op. I 85-126. Moor I 670. M. Vitringa III 173 etc.
14. Under the general name of grace are comprehended many particular benefits. The Scripture is inexhaustible in enumerating the blessings which Christ has acquired. Theology has at all times been at a loss to treat them fully and in orderly fashion. When the Reformation again placed the work of the Holy Ghost in the foreground, it did indeed first discuss this in the three loci of repentance, faith, and good works, but it soon saw itself compelled to a more detailed treatment. And not only was the number of loci extended, but in their content and mutual relation there gradually came, especially in Reformed theology, all sorts of important changes. Thus regeneration was first taken in a very broad sense, as the renewal of man, and therefore treated after faith, Calvin, Institutes III chapters 2 and 3; Beza, Theological Tractates I; Junius, Theological Theses 34, 1; Dutch Confession article 22; or even taken for the whole recreation, so that it also included justification or forgiveness, Formula of Concord in Müller; but soon it was seen, also with a view to the children of the covenant, whose baptism had to be defended against Anabaptism, that the grace of regeneration is prior in us to faith, which is its effect, Polanus, Syntagma; and thus they came to limit regeneration to the infusion of the first principle of life and so to let it precede faith. Concerning the time of this regeneration there was and remained great difference; while Roman Catholics and Lutherans let it take place in all children at baptism, the Reformed said that the grace of regeneration was granted to the elect children of the covenant either already before or during or after or also without further determination before, during or after baptism, Voetius, Disputations II; Witsius, Miscellanea Sacra II; M. Vitringa III; and that it was granted to those who were brought in at a later age, during and after or also before the calling, Voetius, Disputations II. From this it followed again that regeneration in dogmatics came to stand not only before faith but also before calling; an order which was defended by the argument that no one can hear the Word of God savingly unless he is regenerated, Maccovius, Common Loci; Colloquia Theologica; Theological Theses per Common Loci 1641. Voetius, Disputations II. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Ghost II. A further consequence of this order was that repentance, which in the Reformers preceded faith and was wrought by the law, came to fall away almost entirely; indeed, Luther and Calvin had already distinguished between the sorrow which comes from the law and can also occur in the unconverted, and that other which already presupposed faith and was a true sorrow over sin. The Reformed therefore, following the example of Calvin, Institutes III 3, 1 and 2, included repentance in the Christian life, and soon, since repentance as well as penance had acquired a Roman tinge and unwittingly suggested punishment, used another word, namely, conversion, Beza, Theological Tractates I; Musculus, Common Loci 1567. This conversion thus acquired an entirely different meaning. If regeneration as a rule preceded everything and took place in the children of the covenant in youth, then conversion did not always need, as pietism and methodism later demanded, to be accompanied with notable concussion and violent traction, but it could occur assiduously, successively, and gently; then it was also not necessary that one should have clear knowledge and be able to give an account of the manner and time of his conversion, Voetius, Disputations II, as for example Wesley knew that it took place on May 24, 1738, in the evening at 8:45. Then it was no longer contracted to one point, but spread itself through the whole Christian life; then it could also no longer, like repentance formerly, have as parts contrition and faith, but consisted in a continual dying of the old and rising of the new man, Ursinus in his explanation of Lord's Day 23; Beza ibidem; Polanus, Syntagma, etc. And finally, to mention no more and not to speak further here of the distinction of calling into outward and inward, of faith into habit and act--in the order of salvation yet this change was brought about, that justification was placed even before regeneration and calling. To this they came especially in the strife against neonomism. Faith and conversion could and might not be legal conditions, to be fulfilled by man, in order to become partaker of forgiveness and so to bring it about. They were indeed gifts of the Holy Ghost, benefits of the covenant of grace, fruits of the work of Christ. But then there was also no communion in those benefits possible except after communion in the person of Christ. The imputation of his person with all his benefits thus preceded the bestowal of those benefits: justification received the first place in the order of salvation. Nevertheless this schema has only seldom been followed through to the end and fully applied in Reformed dogmatics; only a few, such as Maccovius, have the order: active justification, regeneration, faith, passive justification, good works. The conditions which gradually entered the church did not allow the application of the schema. In a pure church state it is possible to believe that the children of the covenant are regenerated in their youth and come successively and gently to faith and conversion. But when the world intrudes into the church and many grow up and live for years without showing any fruit worthy of faith and conversion, then the earnestly minded see themselves called to warn against trust in a regeneration in youth and historical faith in the forgiveness of sins, and to urge true conversion, saving faith, in order thus in truth to become partaker of the forgiveness of sins. Over against a dead orthodoxy, pietism and methodism with their revivals always have a right to exist.
However, the order of salvation has been changed by these two directions into a history of the sinner's conversion, which served as a model for everyone without distinction. In this, weighty truths were overlooked and the order of salvation itself falsified. For this order does not have to set forth how man must come to conversion and assurance; for thus the law is prescribed to the Holy Ghost, one method is chosen for all, and the anthropological standpoint is shifted into the place of the theological. But the order of salvation has to indicate what the benefits are that Christ has acquired and applies through the Holy Ghost, and in what order they lie in the Word and in the thought of God. So considered, there is now 1º no doubt that all benefits of Christ are benefits of the covenant of grace. That covenant has its foundation in eternity; it rests in the counsel and good pleasure of God. Christ is the mediator of that covenant and therefore could in time satisfy vicariously for his own. There has been an imputation of Christ to his church and of the church to Christ; there has been an exchange between both; a mystical union has been laid, which does not first come into being in time but roots in eternity. If one wants to call all this justification, there is no other objection against it than that one uses the word in an unusual sense, deviates from the usage of Scripture, treats the same matter twice under different names (once as the pactum salutis, then as justification), and yet cannot remain faithful to his starting point. For also those who in the Reformed church teach an eternal justification have nevertheless never said that this exchange of Christ and his church in the pactum salutis was already the whole, full justification. But they have held it for the first moment and expressly declared that it had to be continued and completed in the resurrection of Christ, in the gospel, in the calling, in the testimony of the Holy Ghost through faith and from works and in the last judgment. None of them has therefore treated or handled justification in the locus on the counsel of God or the covenant of redemption; but all have brought it up in the order of salvation, and even not only before but also then again after faith as justificatio passiva.
2º Just as little may there be doubt on the Christian standpoint that all benefits of grace have been acquired by Christ, are present in him, and lie ready for his church. Nothing needs to be added from man's side; all is accomplished. And since these benefits are all benefits of the covenant, acquired in the way of the covenant and distributed in the same way, therefore there is no communion in those benefits except through communion in his person. The covenant, the mystical union, the imputation of Christ precedes; how else could we receive the Holy Ghost, the grace of regeneration, the gift of faith, which indeed are all acquired by Christ and are his property? It is therefore not so that we first, apart from Christ, are regenerated by the Holy Ghost and receive faith, in order then with that to go to Christ, to accept his righteousness, and thus to be justified by God. But from the good pleasure of the Father, from the fullness of Christ, from the covenant of grace, these benefits also flow to us. If one now wants to call this imputation of the person of Christ, which precedes the bestowal of his benefits, thus also regeneration and faith, justification, then against this the same objections can be brought in the main as mentioned above. But then one forgets moreover that this imputation of Christ is not identical with justification or forgiveness; that all benefits, also regeneration, faith, sanctification, etc., lie ready objectively in Christ just as much as the forgiveness of sins, and thus as such no order is to be derived from them; and that the justificatio passiva through and from faith is an action of God, a testimony of the Holy Ghost in and with our spirit, which is not temporally separable from the justificatio activa.
3º The way in which these benefits, to be described more closely shortly, come into the possession of believers is that of calling through Word and through Spirit. Thereby God brought the creation, thereby he also brings the re-creation into being. Many have placed this calling after regeneration. And without doubt, for all children of the covenant who are regenerated in their youth, this benefit precedes the calling. Yet to set these cases as a general rule is just as dangerous as the reverse. For first, among the Reformed there has always been difference and freedom of opinion about the time of regeneration, before or during or after baptism. Scripture does not speak clearly enough to make a decision in this. Second, in many cases it is very difficult to assume that people who are regenerated in their youth live for years in all kinds of sins and only later come to conversion, cf. also Voetius; Scripture gives no single proof for this. Third, it does not work to assume regeneration already in the calling through the gospel in the field of missions, since Word and Spirit are thereby separated in an objectionable way. Fourth, the order of existence among the persons in the divine being and the order of their works in creation and re-creation indicate that the Word precedes the Spirit, Christmas and Easter precede Pentecost; the Holy Ghost is the witness of Christ. And finally, calling is to be taken much more broadly than can happen when it is placed after regeneration. There is a vocatio universalis, a vocatio generalis, a vocatio specialis. Calling in general absolutely does not intend only to bring the regenerated to faith and conversion, but has significance for all men. It is by no means outward only but also inward and is already understood early by children. That the deaf cannot hear it is absolutely no objection, because God himself is the caller, and, as he in creation called all things out of nothing into being by his word, so in re-creation he calls the things that are not as though they were.
4º The benefits themselves that become the portion of believers through calling fall into two groups. Sin is guilt and stain, breaking of the covenant of works and loss of the image of God. Christ satisfied through his passive and active obedience. And so the benefits of Christ consist in that he restores us in our relation to God and all creatures (justification, adoption as children, Christian freedom), and further renews us after God's image (regeneration in broader sense, sanctification, perseverance). The first series of benefits is bestowed on us through the illumination of the Holy Ghost, is received by us in faith as cognitio, assensus, certitudo, and transforms our consciousness. The second group of benefits becomes our portion through the regenerating activity of the Holy Ghost, in faith as fiducia cordis, and changes our being. In the first, our eye is directed to the past, to the historical Christ, to the cross and to the gospel that witnesses thereof; in the second, our gaze is lifted upward, to the living Lord in heaven, the king of the church, the bridegroom of the congregation. These benefits are distinct, but not separated. It is Christ himself, the glorified Savior, who through his Word and Spirit directs our faith to his sacrifice and takes up our persons into his fellowship. It is the same faith through which he assures us in our consciousness and renews us in our being, justifies us and dwells in our hearts.
5º Accordingly, the order of salvation is to be treated in three loci: calling and regeneration (in narrower sense), faith and justification, sanctification and perseverance, cf. Voetius. In the first locus, Christ appears principally as prophet, who through his word instructs us to salvation; the Holy Ghost is thereby the witness of Christ, who exercises his officium elencticum, and through gratia praeparans, praeveniens, and operans bestows on us the beginning of the new life. In the second, Christ is principally the priest, who through faith bestows on us his righteousness and frees us from the guilt of sins; the Holy Ghost thereby exercises his munus paracleticum and makes us certain of our salvation through gratia illuminans. In the third, Christ appears principally as our king, who through faith rules and protects us; the Holy Ghost thereby accomplishes his munus sanctificans and re-creates us through gratia cooperans, conservans, perficiens after the likeness of Christ. In Rom. 8:30, Paul likewise names three benefits in which the προγνωσις realizes itself, namely, calling, justification, and glorification. All these benefits fall in time; also the ἐδοξασεν does not refer to the glorification after death or the day of judgment, but as appears from the aorist to the glorification that believers in Paul's days already received on earth through the indwelling of the Spirit, cf. 2 Cor. 3:18, and which is completed in the glorification at the resurrection on the last day, 1 Cor. 15:53, Phil. 3:21. They are all at once bestowed on the elect in faith, cf. also 1 Cor. 6:11, but therefore there still exists a logical order among them; and this is presented in the ordo salutis, cf. Gennrich.
1. By Word and Spirit, God brings forth the creation, and also the re-creation. By speaking, He calls all things out of nothing into being. Gen. 1, Ps. 33:6, John 1:3, Heb. 1:3, 11:3; by the word of His almighty power, He raises up the fallen world again. He calls Adam, Gen. 3:9, Abraham, Gen. 12:1, Isa. 51:2, Israel, Isa. 41:9, 42:6, 43:1, 45:4, 49:1, Hos. 11:1, Jer. 31:3, Ezek. 16:6, and through His servants invites to repentance and life, Deut. 30, 2 Kings 17:13, Isa. 1:16ff., Jer. 3, Ezek. 18, 33 etc., Rom. 8:28, 29, 2 Cor. 5:20, 1 Thess. 2:12, 5:24, 2 Thess. 2:14, 1 Pet. 2:9, 5:10 etc. Since this calling of God comes to men in and through the Son, and Christ is the acquirer of salvation, it is also specially ascribed to Him; just as the Father created all things through Him and yet He Himself is the Creator of all things, so He is also Himself the caller, Matt. 11:28, Mark 1:15, 2:17, Luke 5:32, 19:10, who sends out workers into His vineyard, Matt. 20:1-7, invites to the wedding, Matt. 22:2, gathers the children as a hen her chicks, Matt. 23:37, appoints apostles and teachers, Matt. 10, 28:19, Luke 10, Eph. 4:11, whose sound has gone out over the whole earth, Rom. 10:18. Although the calling thus essentially goes out from God or from Christ, yet He makes use of men in it, not only in the narrower sense of prophets and apostles, shepherds and teachers, but also in general of parents and kin, of teachers and friends. Even a voice comes to us from all the works of God's hands, from the courses of history, from the leadings and experiences of our life. All things speak to the pious of God. Although the calling in the narrower sense also takes place through the word of the gospel, this may not be separated from that which comes to us through nature and history. The covenant of grace is borne by the general covenant of nature. Christ, who is the mediator of the covenant, is the same who as Logos has created all things, who as light shines in the darkness and enlightens every man coming into the world. God leaves Himself unattested to no one, but does good from heaven and fills also the hearts of the Gentiles with food and gladness, Ps. 19:2-4, Matt. 5:45, John 1:5, 9, 10, Rom. 1:19-21, 2:14, 15, Acts 14:16, 17, 17:27. There is therefore first a real calling to be distinguished, which comes to man not so much in clear words as rather in things (res), through nature, history, surroundings, leadings, and experiences, which has not the gospel as means but the law and through the law in family, society, and state, in religion and morality, in heart and conscience calls man to obedience and submission, cf. Synopsis pur. theol. 30, 2. 3. Mastricht, Theol. VI 2, 15. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 5, 7-15. Marck, Theol. 17, 10. Moor III 386. 387. This calling is indeed insufficient for salvation, because it knows nothing of Christ and His grace and thus can lead no one to the Father, John 14:6, Acts 4:12, Rom. 1:16; the world has with it yet in its foolishness and darkness not known God, John 1:5, 10, Rom. 1:21ff., 1 Cor. 1:21, Eph. 2:12. But it is yet a rich concern of God with His creature, a testimony of the Logos, a working of the Spirit of God, which is of great meaning for mankind. To it is owing that mankind, in spite of sin, has been able to continue to exist, that it has organized itself in families, societies, and states, that there is still a sense of religion and morality left in it, and that it has not sunk away into bestiality. All things hold together in Christ, who bears all things by the word of His power, Col. 1:16, Heb. 1:3. Specifically, it also serves to pave the way, both in the life of the peoples and in that of particular persons, for the higher and better calling through the gospel. Christ as Logos prepares through all kinds of means and ways His own work of grace. He therefore Himself appeared in the fullness of the times. When the world by its wisdom has not known God, it has pleased God, through the foolishness of preaching, to save those who believe, 1 Cor. 1:21. The gospel does not come at once to all peoples, but continues its course through the world in the way of history; it also comes to particular persons in that moment which is prepared and determined by God Himself in His providence.
However important this real calling may also be, higher stands the verbal calling, which comes to men not only through the revealed law but especially through the gospel. This calling does not annul that through nature and history, but takes it up into itself and confirms it; only it far surpasses it. For it is a calling that proceeds not from the Logos but specifically from Christ; that makes use not so much of the law as rather of the gospel as its proper means; that invites not to obedience to God's law but to faith in God's grace; and that is always accompanied by a certain working and witness of that Spirit whom Christ has poured out in the church as his Spirit, John 16:8-11, Matthew 12:31, Acts 5:3, 7:51, Hebrews 6:4. This calling is not universal in the sense of the old Lutherans, who, appealing to Matthew 28:19, John 3:16, Romans 10:18, Colossians 1:23, 1 Timothy 2:4, asserted that in the time of Adam, Noah, and Christ the gospel had in fact been made known to all peoples and through their own fault had been lost again, Form. Conc. by Müller; Gerhard, Loc. VII c. 7; Quenstedt, Theol. III; cf. also the Remonstrants and others by M. Vitringa III; but it may and must yet be brought to all men without distinction. Scripture expressly commands this, Matthew 28:19, and says moreover that many who do not come were yet called, Matthew 22:14, Luke 14:16-18, but rejected the gospel, John 3:36, Acts 13:46, 2 Thessalonians 1:8, and therefore precisely stand guilty of the dreadful sin of unbelief, Matthew 10:15, 11:22, 24, John 3:36, 16:8, 9, 2 Thessalonians 1:8, 1 John 5:10. The universalists, however, bring against the Reformed that these, on their standpoint, cannot accept such a general calling through the gospel; for according to them Christ died not for all but only for the elect; and the preaching thus cannot sound: Christ has made satisfaction for you, your sins are atoned for, only believe; but for the unconverted it can only contain the demand of the law; if we maintain the general offer of grace, this is yet not seriously meant on God's side and moreover useless and vain, cf. for example Arminius, Op.; Conf. and Apol. Conf. Rem. c. 7; Episcopius, Antidotum c. 9, Op. II 2 p.; Limborch, Theol. Chr. IV 3, 12-18. These objections are undoubtedly of great weight, and have elicited various answers from the side of the Reformed. Some came to preach to sinners only the law and to offer the gospel only to those who had already come to know themselves and felt a need for redemption; others maintained the general offer of grace and justified it thereby that Christ's offering was sufficient for all or that Christ had yet acquired many and manifold blessings for those who would not believe in him, or that the gospel was offered to them only on condition of faith and conversion; still others approached universalism and taught that Christ according to a first, general decree of God had made satisfaction for all, or that he had acquired for all the legal possibility to be saved and had brought all into a "salvable state," or even that the acquisition of salvation was universal and the application particular, cf. above. However much it might seem that the confession of election and particular satisfaction demanded something else, yet the Reformed in general maintained the general offer of grace.
2. And this is wholly right. For 1º the Scripture leaves no doubt that the gospel may and must be preached to all creatures. Whether we can match this with the particular outcome is another question. But the command of Christ is the end of all gainsaying. The rule for our bearing is only the shown will of God. The outcome of that preaching is firm and sure, not only according to those who confess predestination, but also on the standpoint of those who only acknowledge foreknowledge. God cannot be deceived; for Him the result of world history can be no letdown. And with worship said, it is not our task, but lies on God's reckoning, to bring this outcome into match with the general offering of salvation. This alone we know, that that outcome is just bound to and gotten by all those means and ways which are set before us. And thereunder belongs also the preaching of the gospel to all creatures. With the decree of choosing and casting off we have nothing to do therein. The gospel is proclaimed to men, not as chosen and cast off, but as sinners, who all have need of freeing. Served by men who know not the hidden counsel of God, the gospel can be no other than general in its offering. Like a net cast into the sea catches good and bad fish, like the sun shines on both weeds and wheat, like the seed of the sower falls not only in good earth but also in stony and dry places, so the gospel in its serving comes to all men without sundering. 2º The preaching of that gospel calls not to each man, head for head: Christ died in your stead, all your sins are atoned and forgiven. For, though the universalists think they can and may say this to every man without any further setting, yet it shows on some thinking that even on the standpoint of the universalists this is by no means the case. For Christ according to them got only the likelihood of forgiveness and salvation; truly that forgiveness and salvation comes first when the man believes and keeps believing. They too can thus only preach as the kernel of the gospel: believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall receive forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. This now the Reformed say even so; they too offer the gospel to all men and can, may, and must do so. The forgiveness of sins and everlasting salvation are there, but they become our share only in the way of faith. But therein is there between the universalists and the Reformed yet an weighty sundering, that wholly is in the good of the latter. With those Christ got only the likelihood of salvation; whether this truly becomes someone's share hangs on himself; faith is a condition, a work, that makes the likely salvation first to true, and always, till death, leaves it in the unsure. But with the Reformed Christ got the whole, full, true salvation; faith is therefore no work, no condition, no understanding assent to the saying: Christ died for you, but a leaning on Christ himself, a trust in his offering alone, a living faith, much simpler than it can be with the universalists, and that much surer brings salvation, than they on their standpoint can ever promise. The fault lies only with man, who is always bent to turn the order set by God: he wants to be sure of the outcome before he makes use of the means, and just to be freed from the use. But God wants that we shall tread the way of faith, and assures us then in Christ unfailingly the full salvation. 3º Therefore that offering of salvation from God's side is also earnestly meant and upright. For He says in that offering not what He will do, whether He will give faith or not. That He has kept for Himself and not shown to us. He declares only what He wants that we shall do, that we shall humble ourselves and seek our salvation in Christ alone. If against this it is brought in that God then yet offers salvation to such to whom He has settled not to give faith and salvation, then this is a burden that even so stays of strength on the standpoint of the foes. For surely God then also offers salvation to such of whom He surely, firmly, unfailingly knows that they will not believe. Not only according to the Reformed but according to all confessors of Christ the outcome of world history stands everlasting and unchangeable, part II 352. The sundering is only that the Reformed have dared to say: that outcome is in match with God's will and meaning. What is and happens, God must, though we grasp it not, have been able to will, saving all His worths and fullnesses; else God would be no God more. History can and may be no foe against God. All further is therefore 4º that preaching of the gospel also not idle or unhelpful. If God from unknowing or unmight through the general offering truly meant all's salvation, then it would indeed become unhelpful and idle. For how few are they in whom this goal is reached! Then it shuts in itself an antinomy, that to solving leads to ever further straying from Scripture. For if the will and meaning of God, if the satisfying of Christ is utterly general, then the offering of salvation must also without any binding be general. And since it is clearly not so, one comes then to, with the old Lutherans, gainsay history in the face and claim that by the apostles the gospel was brought to all folks, or with many newer theologians take a gospel preaching also yet on the other side of the grave, cf. e.g. W. Schmidt, Stud. u. Krit 1887 p. 1-44, or worse yet with rationalism and mysticism believe that the law of kind or the inward light is enough to salvation. The further however one on this wise, in strife with history, spreads the calling, the weaker, mightlesser and idler it becomes. In quality and strength is lost what one seemingly wins in quantity and spreading; the clash between God's meaning and the outcome becomes ever greater. 5º Though then also through the calling salvation becomes the share of few, as each must acknowledge, it holds therefore yet also for them who cast it off, its great worth and meaning. It is for all without sundering the proof of God's endless love and seals the word that He has no lust in the death of the sinner but therein that he turn and live; it proclaims to all that the offering of Christ is enough for the atoning of all sins; that no one is lost because it is not rich and mighty enough; that no right of the law, no might of sin, no lordship of Satan stands in the way of its applying; for not like the misdeed, so is the gift of grace. Even it is often also for them who harden in their unbelief, the spring of sundry blessings; enlightening of the understanding, heavenly gift, sharing of the Holy Ghost, enjoying of God's word, powers of the coming age have sometimes even been the share of them who later fall away and scorn Christ, Heb. 6:4-6. And this not only, but 6º the outward calling through law and gospel also reaches the goal that God aims therewith. Idle and unhelpful is never what God does. His word turns not empty back, it does all that pleases Him, it thrives in all whereto He sends it. But this is not only and not in the first stead the everlasting salvation of men but the honor of His own name. In the calling through law and gospel God upholds the right on His creature. The sinner thinks through sin to become free from God and freed from His service. But it is not so. God's right on man, even on the deepest sunk, is unstealable and unbroken. Man can, saying off service to God, become deeply wretched, but he stays a creature, and thus hanging. He becomes through sin not less but much more hanging; for he stops to be a son, and becomes a serving lad, a thrall, a mightless tool that is used by God after His will. God never lets man go and gives His rights on him, on his service, on his full hallowing with understanding and will and all strengths never price. And therefore He calls him through kind and history, through heart and conscience, through blessings and strikings, through law and gospel. The calling in the widest wit is the preaching of God's right on His fallen creature. 7º As such it upholds in man and in mankind all those godly and upright beseechings of hanging, worship, awe, duty, answerability etc., without which the mankindly kin could not be. Godliness, uprightness, right, art, knowledge, household, fellowship, state, they all have their root and ground in that calling which goes out from God to all men. Take it away, and there arises a war of all against all, the one man becomes a wolf to the other. The calling through law and gospel holds back sin, lessens guilt, and stops the rot and wretchedness of man; it is a grace holding back. It is a proof that God is God and for nothing uncaring, that not only the yonder but also the hither has worth for Him. However much man is also bent to hide behind his unmight, or with Pelagius and Kant from his duty to his might decide; also therein he acknowledges that God's right and our duty stay unweakened, and that he himself is without shrift. But lastly 8º the calling is not only a grace holding back but also a grace making ready. Christ came to a judgment, to a fall but also to a rising in the world, Mk. 4:12, Lk. 2:34, 8:10, Jn. 9:39, 15:22, 2 Cor. 2:16, 1 Pet. 2:7, 8. And the calling through law and gospel means also to make ready through all that it gives and works, in mankind and in the single man the coming of Christ. In Remonstrant wit, Conf. and Apol. XI 4 such a grace making ready was by the Reformed steadfastly denied, Can. Dordr. I rej. 4. Trigland, Antapol. c. 25 sq. Mastricht, Theol. VI 3, 19. 28. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 6, 9. The ghostly life that is planted in in rebirth is beingly sundered from the kindly and upright life that goes before it; it comes not through mankindly working or unfolding but through a shaping deed of God. Some therefore named the workings that go before rebirth rather acts going before than acts making ready. But yet there can in good wit be spoken of grace making ready; over against all methodistic leanings that misown the kindly life, it is even of outstanding worth. For the confessing of the making ready grace holds not in that man, by doing what in him is, by busily going to church, with earnest hearing God's word, acknowledging his sin, longing for freeing etc., according to a merit of the fitting, can earn the grace of rebirth or also make himself takeable and graspable for it. But it holds in that God is Shaper, Upholder and Ruler of all things and that He even far beforehand in the kinships shapes the life of them whom He in His time will gift with faith. Man arose on the sixth day not through unfolding from lower creatures but shaped by God's hand; yet his shaping may be called made ready by the beforehand deeds of God. Christ himself came from above, but his coming was made ready for ages. Kind and grace are sundered and may not be muddled or mingled, but God lays bond between both. Shaping, freeing and hallowing are householdly ascribed to Father, Son and Ghost, but these three are the one and true God and together bring the whole work of freeing to stand. No one can come to Christ unless the Father draw him; and no one receives the Holy Ghost but whom the Son sends Him. And therefore there is a grace making ready. God Himself makes ready on sundry wise His work of grace in the hearts. He wakes in Zacchaeus the wish to see Jesus, Lk. 19:3, works brokenness among the throng that hears Peter, Acts 2:37, makes a Paul fall to earth, Acts 9:4, brings the jailer to straits, Acts 16:27 and so leads the life of all His children also before and to the hour of their rebirth. Even though they are not yet from their side sharing the atoning and rightmaking, though they have not yet rebirth and faith, they are yet already things of His everlasting love, and He leads them Himself through His grace to that Ghost who alone can rebirth and comfort. All stands then after God's ordering in bond with their later bringing to and calling in the gathering. Begetting and birth, household and kin, folk and land, upbringing and teaching, unfolding of understanding and heart, keeping from dreadful sins, from the slandering against the Holy Ghost above all, or also giving over to sundry badness and unright, wrecks and judgings, blessings and well deeds, preaching of law and gospel, brokenness and fear for judgment, waking of conscience and need for saving, it is all a grace making ready to the rebirth out of the Holy Ghost and to the stead which the believer later shall take in the gathering. One is well the way to heaven, but many are God's leadings, both before and on that way, and rich and free is the grace of the Holy Ghost. Jeremiah and John the Baptist and Timothy are brought to on other wise than Manasseh or Paul, and fulfill in God's service each a sundered task. Pietism and methodism misown those leadings, bind God's grace, want to turn and shape all after one type. But the Reformed theology worships God's free might and wonders at the richness of His grace. Cf. over being and fruit of the outward calling, besides the earlier p. 211 named writings over the general grace: Twissus, Op. I 660 sq. Trigland, Opuscula I 430v. II 809v. Gomarus, Op. I 97 sq. Synopsis pur. theol. 30, 40-46. Voetius, Disp. II 256. Mastricht, Theol. VI 2, 16. Turretinus, Theol. El. XV qu. 2 and also XIV 14, 51. Witsius, Oec. foed. II 9, 4. III 5. 20. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. XXI § 9-11. Alting, Theol. probl. 187. Moor III 1071. Hodge, Syst. Theol. II 641v. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 451. II 482v. Candlish, The atonement 1861, p. 169v. A. Robertson, Hist. of the atonement controversy in conn. with the secession Church 1846. Over the grace making ready is to ask: Musculus, Loci C. §24. Martyr, L. C. 312. Ursinus on qu. 88-90. Olevianus e.a. with Heppe, Dogm. d.d. Pr. II 372. Perkins, Works III 127v. Amesius, Casus Consc. II 4 and disp. theol. de praepar. peccatoris ad conversionem, with Dr. H. Visscher, G. Amesius 1894 p. 125. British theologians on the Dordt synod over the 3rd and 4th art. Synopsis 32, 6. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 6, 11-15. Voetius, Disp. II 402-424. Moor IV 482. Vitringa, Ghostly Life c. 4. Eenhoorn, Well living I 220. Van Aalst, Ghostly Mixtures, 298. 369. Comrie Catech. on qu. 20-23. Owen, Righting out of faith c. 1 p. 83v. Kuyper, The work of the H. G. II 111.
3. Scripture and experience witness, however, that all these workings of the external calling do not always and in all lead to upright faith and salvation. Thus, the question arises of itself, what is the deepest and last cause of this different outcome. To this, in the Christian church, mainly three kinds of answers were given. Some said that this different outcome was owing to the will of man, whether that will by nature or through the grace of the Logos or through that in baptism or also through that in the calling had received the power to accept or reject the gospel. On this standpoint there is no distinction between external and internal calling, between sufficient and effectual calling. Inwardly and essentially the calling is always and in all the same; it is only called effectual according to the outcome, when someone gives heed to it. After all that was said earlier, especially about Pelagianism, this answer needs no lengthy refutation. It is clear that it offers no solution. One can well in practice stay with the nearest cause and specifically ascribe unbelief to the will of man. One then also speaks according to truth, Deut. 30:19, Josh. 24:15, Isa. 65:12, Matt. 22:2, 23:37, John 7:17, Rom. 9:32, etc.; the sinful will of man is the cause of his unbelief. But already in practice all the pious at all times and under all directions ascribe their faith and salvation only to God's grace. There is nothing that distinguishes them but that grace alone, 1 Cor. 4:7. And therefore this distinction in the last instance cannot lie in the human will. If one yet stays with it as the last cause, then at once all the psychological, ethical, historical, and theological objections arise that at all times have been brought against Pelagianism. An unaccountable arbitrariness is introduced, sin is weakened, the decision over the outcome of world history is laid in the hands of man, the government of all things is taken from God, his grace is made of none effect. Even if one ascribes the power to choose for or against the gospel to restoration through grace, the matter is not thereby improved. One then introduces a grace that consists solely in the restoration of the choice of will, of which Scripture makes no mention, which actually presupposes regeneration and yet must first bring it about after a good choice of the will, cf. Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahrh. II 325. Also, on this standpoint one is embarrassed with all those millions of people who never heard the gospel or also died as little children and who therefore were never placed in the opportunity to accept or reject Christ. The free will of man cannot therefore be the last cause of faith and unbelief. Another answer was therefore given to the above-stated question by Bellarmine; he rejected both the teaching of Pelagius and of Augustine, sought to walk a middle way, and said that the efficacy of the calling depended on whether it came to someone at a fitting time, when his will was inclined to follow it (congruitas), de grat. et lib. arb. I 12. IV 11, and so further the congruists, and in the Reformed church Pajon, Kleman, and also Shedd, Syst. Theol. II 511-528, who calls salvation in the highest degree probable for everyone who earnestly and diligently makes use of the means of grace. But this answer too is unsatisfactory. There lies in the congruitas indeed an important truth, which is misjudged by Methodism, but in the Reformed doctrine of preparatory grace comes to its right. But it is wholly insufficient to explain the efficacy of the calling. For it is in itself nothing other than a moral persuasion, which by nature is powerless to create that spiritual life which according to Scripture arises in man through regeneration; further, it presupposes that man in one moment is not, in another is fit to accept grace, and thus seeks sin in circumstances and weakens it in man; further, it lays the decision in the will of man and thereby calls up again all the objections that were named above and brought by Bellarmine himself against Pelagianism; and finally, it lays between calling and conversion only a connection of congruitas, which as moral in nature can always be broken by the will and therefore cannot guarantee the efficacy of the calling. Therefore, by the Augustinians, the Thomists, and the Reformed, the cause by which the calling bears fruit in one and not in another was sought in the nature of the calling itself. The first said that, in case the calling is powerful, a conquering delight is added, which gives not only the power but also the will; the Thomists spoke of a physical predetermination or physical action of God, which turns the power to act, given by the sufficient calling, into acting; but the Reformed had objections to these terms, especially to the description of God's act in conversion as a physical one, and preferred to speak of an external and internal calling. This distinction already occurs in Augustine, de praed. sanct. c. 8, was taken over from him by Calvin, on Rom. 10:16, Acta Syn. Trid. c. antidoto sess. 6, C. R. 35, 480. Inst. III 24, 8, etc., and then became established in Reformed theology. At first this twofold calling was also named otherwise, namely, material and formal calling, of the sign and of the good pleasure, common and singular, universal and special, etc., Polanus, Synt. VI c. 32, but the name of outward and inward calling gained the upper hand and has gradually displaced the others.
Although this distinction does not appear in Scripture with literal words, it is nevertheless grounded upon it. It flows, 1. already from this, that all men by nature are alike, condemnable before God's face, Rom. 3:9-19, 5:12, 9:21, 11:32, dead in sins and trespasses, Eph. 2:2, 3, darkened in understanding, 1 Cor. 2:14, Eph. 4:18, 5:8, not able to see the kingdom of God, John 3:3, slaves of sin, John 8:34, Rom. 6:20, enemies of God, Rom. 8:7, Col. 1:21, who cannot submit themselves to the law, Rom. 8:7, out of themselves unable to think or do anything good, John 15:5, 2 Cor. 3:5, and, although the gospel is for man, yet stand hostile toward it and despise it as a stumbling block or foolishness, 1 Cor. 1:23, 2:14. From man, therefore, the distinction cannot be explained, which after the calling is to be observed. Only God and his grace makes the distinction, 1 Cor. 4:7. 2. The preaching of the Word without more is not sufficient, Isa. 6:9, 10, 53:1, Matt. 13:13ff., Mark 4:12, John 12:38-40, etc.; already in the Old Testament, therefore, the Holy Spirit was promised, who would teach all and give a new heart, Isa. 32:15, Jer. 31:33, 32:39, Ezek. 11:19, 36:26, Joel 2:28; and to that end he was poured out on the day of Pentecost, to witness with and through the apostles of Christ, John 15:26, 27, to convince the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, John 16:8-11, to regenerate, John 3:5ff., 6:63, 16:13, and to lead to the confession of Jesus as Lord, 1 Cor. 12:3. Therefore, 3. the work of redemption is ascribed both subjectively and objectively wholly to God, and that not in a general sense, as he brings forth all things by his providence, but specifically also in that narrower sense, that he by special divine power works regeneration and conversion. It is not of him that wills nor of him that runs, but of God who shows mercy, Rom. 9:16; the calling is the realization of election, Rom. 8:28, 11:29. It is God who renews the heart and writes his law in it, Ps. 51:12, Jer. 31:33, Ezek. 36:26, who gives enlightened eyes of understanding, Ps. 119:18, Eph. 1:18, Col. 1:9-11, and opens the heart, Acts 16:14, who makes his Son known as Christ, Matt. 11:25, 16:17, Gal. 1:16, and leads to him with spiritual power, John 6:44, Col. 1:12, 13, who causes the gospel to be preached, not only in words, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit, 1 Cor. 2:4, 1 Thess. 1:5, 6, and himself gives the increase, 1 Cor. 3:6-9, who in one word works in us both to will and to work for his good pleasure, Phil. 2:13, and to that end uses a power which is like the working of the strength of his might, as he raised Christ from the dead and set him at his right hand, Eph. 1:18-20. 4. The act itself, by which God brings about this change in man, is often called regeneration, John 1:13, 3:3ff., Titus 3:5, etc., and the fruit thereof is designated as a new heart, Jer. 31:33, καινη κτισις , 2 Cor. 5:17, θεου ποιημα, κτισθεντες ἐν Χριστῳ Ιησου , Eph. 2:10, το ἐργον του θεου , Rom. 14:20, his οἰκοδομη , 1 Cor. 3:9, Eph. 2:21, etc., that is, what is brought to pass in man by grace is much too rich and too great, than that it could be explained from a moral suasion of the word of preaching. Finally, 5. Scripture itself speaks of the calling in a twofold sense. Often it mentions a calling and invitation which is not followed, Isa. 65:12, Matt. 22:3, 14, 23:37, Mark 16:15, 16, etc., and then it can say that God has done all on his side, Isa. 5:4, and that men through their unwillingness have not believed and have resisted God's counsel, the Holy Spirit, the calling, Matt. 11:20ff., 23:37, Luke 7:30, Acts 7:51. But it also knows a calling which has God as author, is the realization of election, and is always effectual; so specifically in Paul, Rom. 4:17, 8:30, 9:11, 24, 1 Cor. 1:9, 7:15ff., Gal. 1:6, 15, 5:8, Eph. 4:1, 4, 1 Thess. 2:12, 2 Tim. 1:9, cf. also 1 Pet. 1:15, 2:9, 5:10, 2 Pet. 1:3; believers can therefore simply be designated as κλητοι , Rom. 1:7, 1 Cor. 1:2, 24, κλητοι Χριστου , or κλητοι ἐν κυριῳ , 1 Cor. 7:22, that is, called by God, who belong to Christ and live in his fellowship. Besides this, Paul indeed knows a preaching of the gospel to such as reject it, but to them the gospel is foolishness, 1 Cor. 1:18, 23, a savor of death unto death, 2 Cor. 2:15, 16, they do not understand it, 1 Cor. 2:14. As a power of God, 1 Cor. 1:18, 24, it proves itself to those who are called by God according to his purpose, Rom. 8:28, 9:11, 11:28, Eph. 1:4, 5.
4. This calling, understood in the sense of Paul, thereby comes of itself into the closest bond with what elsewhere is called new birth. That appears already from this, that Paul, always taking the calling as mighty, speaks almost not of new birth. Only once does he make use of this word, when he in Titus 3:5 says, that God has not saved us out of our works, but according to his mercy dia loutrou palingenesias kai anakainōseōs pneumatos hagiou , that is, through the bath of the new birth and renewal wrought by the Holy Ghost. New birth is here bound with renewal, because it is the beginning and the first principle thereof; together they are ascribed to the Holy Ghost; and both are thought as a bath, wherein the Holy Ghost has dipped the believers and out of which He has made them rise as new men. According to Romans 6 this happens in baptism as sign and seal of the covenant of grace. When namely the chosen are called, then they receive at once through faith the justification and the adoption as children in a lawful sense, Romans 3:22, 24, 4:5, 5:1, Galatians 3:26, 4:5, and so on, but at the same time therewith also the fellowship with Christ, Romans 6:3 and following, the glorying after his image, Romans 8:29, 30, 1 Corinthians 4:15, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 4:19, and thus, because Christ himself is life-giving Spirit, 1 Corinthians 15:45, 2 Corinthians 3:17, the Spirit of Christ as first principle of a new life, Galatians 3:2, 4:6, so that the believers now are ghostly, new men, 1 Corinthians 2:15, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15, Ephesians 2:15, 4:24, Colossians 3:10, walking in, led by and temples being of the Holy Ghost, Romans 8:14, 1 Corinthians 6:19, Galatians 5:25 and so on. The word new birth may therefore with Paul only once come forth; in matter it lies with him yet at the ground of the new life, that the called becomes partaker in the fellowship with Christ. Akin is the showing with Peter, who in 1 Peter 1:23 warns the believers to love each other, because they are anagegennēmenoi ouk ek sporas phthartēs alla aphthartou, dia logou zōntos theou kai menontos , that is, by God, see 1:3, born anew, not out of fleeting seed, as with the first birth, but out of unfleeting seed, that is, the word of God, as it through the calling of God in man implanted, a logos emphytos , James 1:21 and becomes the first principle of a new life, and that through the to them preached, living and abiding word of God see verse 25. Even so says James 1:18, that God us according to his will has borne, brought forth, apekuēsen , through the word of truth, that we, Christians, the firstfruits of God's creatures should be, that is, the true Israel, the special own of God, the rightful heirs of the promise. Everywhere here the new birth is thought as beginning, first principle, ground of hallowing, inwardly wrought by God or his Spirit, and taking place through the calling by the word. But John beholds the new birth from another viewpoint. What is born out of flesh, that is flesh, 3:6 and stands foe-like against God. Such as are only in kindly wise born, 1:13, are out of, 8:23, 15:19 and belong to the world, 14:17, 19, 22 and so on, are from below, 8:23, out of the devil, 8:44, grasp not the light of the Logos, 1:5, take Him not on, 1:11, have the darkness rather than the light, 3:19, 20, hear not, 8:47, know God not, 8:19, 15:21, see the kingdom of God not, 3:3, walk in the darkness, 12:35, hate the light, 3:20, and are bondservants of sin, 8:34. They can also the kingdom of God not see, 3:3, not believe, 5:44, 12:39, not the word of God hear, 8:43, not to Christ come, 6:44, the Holy Ghost not receive, 14:17. And therefore is there new birth needful. This is a gennēthēnai anōthen , that is, from above, 3:3, see 3:31, 8:23, 19:11, 23, ek theou , 1:13, 1 John 2:29, 3:9 and so on, out of water and Spirit, 3:5, that is, out of the Spirit, 3:6, 8, whose cleansing working in the water has its likeness, see Ezekiel 36:25-27, Matthew 3:11, hidden and wondrous, so that no one knows origin and being thereof, 3:8. This new birth is therefore with John also not with the word or with the calling bound, but goes rather before it. For Christ worked as Logos also already before his flesh-becoming, 1:1-13; He shone as light in the world, but this knew Him not, 1:5, 9, 10. He came to his own, to Israel, and his own took Him not on, 1:11; but yet was also then his coming not wholly fruitless, for as many as took Him on, got then already the might to become children of God. And that were such as were born out of God, 1:12, 13 see 1 John 5:1. Before the men to Christ come and in Him believe, they are already out of God, 8:47, out of the truth, 18:37; they become by the Father given to the Son, 6:37, 39, 17:2, 9; He draws them to Christ, 6:44; and all who so to Christ come, casts He not out and loses He not, but keeps He to the everlasting life, 6:39, 10:28, 17:12. Christ comes, to them, who as by the Father to Him given his sheep already are, 10:27, to bring, to make them his voice hear and follow and to one flock gather, 10:16, 11:52; to them, who already in certain wise children of God are, 11:52, the exousia , the right and the fitness to give, to become it, to show themselves as such, as born out of God, as tekna tou theou , and this chiefly to show in the brotherly love, that is, in the love to them, who likewise out of God are born, 1 John 5:1. Out of all this appears, that John the new birth not in the first place as an ethical, but as a beyond-nature deed of God thinks, through his Spirit in wondrous wise, straightway wrought, that the so new-born just in Christ believe and as children of God in brotherly love open would become.
Wrongly is this teaching of John brought back by some to a Gnostic dualism. For it is no dualism that exists by nature, since all things were first made by the Logos, 1:3; the world as a whole is the object of God's love, 3:16; God gave his Son, not to doom the world but to save it, 3:17, 12:47. By nature, however, all men belong to the world, which hates the light, because its works are evil, 3:19, 20. Thus it hangs on faith, whether someone receives everlasting life, 3:15, 16, 36. That faith is a work, 6:29, it is a coming, 5:40, 6:35, 37, 44, 7:37, a receiving, 1:11, 12, 3:11ff., 5:43, a thirsting and drinking, a hungering and eating, 4:13-15, 6:35, 50ff., 7:37, it does not go outside understanding and will but has its root therein, 7:17. Unbelief is therefore also laid to the ill will of man, 5:40, 8:44; man stays answerable for it, 3:19, 9:41, 12:43, 15:22, 24. And though it be that the believers can no more be lost, 10:28, 29, they are yet warned to abide in Christ and in his word, lest they bear no fruit, 15:4-10. Though John thus brings back the contrast of faith and unbelief to a deed of God, whereby He gives to the one what He withholds from the other, he by no means wishes thereby to do away with the self-working and the answerability of man; rather he lets both stand side by side. Amid all difference in setting forth, there is therefore agreement between Paul and John in the matter. The difference is therein, that Paul looks upon rebirth as the ethical beginning of a new, holy life and lets it come to pass through the mighty calling of God; John grasps it from its metaphysical side and makes clear from it the fact that many hear and receive Jesus' word, go to Him through faith and receive everlasting life. In a like way, in the first time of the Reformation, rebirth was taken in a broader sense for the whole renewing of man, while in later time it was narrowed to the inpouring of the beginning of the new life, which went before the deed of faith. If we now add hereto the word of Jesus in Matthew 19:28, then it shows that the Scripture speaks of rebirth in a threefold sense: as the beginning of the new life, which is planted by the Spirit of God before faith in man, as the moral renewing of man through the word and the Spirit of Christ, and lastly, as the restoring of the whole world in its first wholeness. Thus rebirth takes in the whole work of the remaking from its very first beginning in man unto its finishing in the new heaven and the new earth. This whole remaking has in Christ, namely in his uprising, its ground, 1 Peter 1:3, its beginning in the word and the Spirit of Christ, its maker in Christ himself, who is the reformer of the making.
From this, the link also becomes clear that exists between new birth and calling. 1º There is no new birth without calling. Just as God in the beginning shaped all things by speaking and still bears all things by the word of his might, so also Christ brings about the new shaping through the power of his word. 2º This calling has as its content not a word of God in general, but specifically the word of Christ. He has through his suffering and dying won the right to the new shaping of all things. He has in his uprising from the dead brought it about in principle; when Christ as go-between speaks, all things obey his word and out of death life comes forth; He makes alive whom He will, John 5:21, 25, 28ff. The content of the calling is therefore the gospel, the glad tidings of Christ; through that alone all things are made new. 3º This word of Christ, for a moment leaving aside whether it is outward, hearable brought by men or not, must in any case become a logos emphytos, James 1:21. Only when it is implanted in man, in the creatures, does the new life come forth from it as ek sporas aphthartou, 1 Peter 1:23. 4º The Holy Ghost alone can proclaim the gospel, the word of Christ, in such a way that it is not only brought to the creatures but implanted in them. Just as the shaping happened through Word and Spirit, so also Christ fulfills the new shaping through his word and his Spirit. He himself has become a life-giving Spirit, 1 Corinthians 15:47, 2 Corinthians 3:17, and new-shapes all things speaking through the Spirit, Romans 8:9ff. 5º This new birth in no way assumes the aware life and the active willing. It has, as restoration of the shaping in Matthew 19:28, even the unreasoning creature as object; it falls, as shown by some examples in Scripture, in children before they have come to years of understanding; indeed, child baptism is also built on the assumption that children without their knowing can be taken into grace in Christ; it goes according to John's gospel before the coming to and believing in Christ. In all these cases there is a new birth only through inward, without outward calling. 6º Also when it timely falls together with or takes place after the outward calling, dia logou zontos theou kai menontos, 1 Peter 1:23, it itself is yet always unmiddled, because it does not come forth from the preached word, but ek pneumatos, John 3:5, 6, 8, ek sporas aphthartou, 1 Peter 1:23. The Holy Ghost works indeed with and through, but his working is not shut within the preached word; He makes it itself through the inward calling into a logos emphytos and brings forth from it the new life. 7º Because however the new life never comes forth nor can come forth except from the implanted word and the Spirit of Christ, it is, as soon as it wakes to awareness, bound to the outward, hearable word of Christ, which has the same gospel as content with that inward one. Rule of teaching and life is only the Holy Writ. 8º Inward calling and new birth stand in relation as seed and plant, 1 Peter 1:23, as a speaking through and a hearing and learning from the Father, John 6:45, as drawing and following, 6:44, as giving and taking, 6:65, as offering and (passive) acceptance of salvation, Ames, Med. Theol. I 26, 7ff. Voetius, Disp. II 452. 463 sq. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. 21, 61. While thus to the new birth always a speaking of God, a logos emphytos goes before, neither the Writ nor experience offers us enough data to determine whether the new birth in grown-ups as a rule also takes place after and through the outward calling, or rather goes before it, Voetius Disp. II 461. From the gospel and the letters of John it can be drawn that it logically, but yet not that it also timely goes before it; and Paul, Peter, and James always hold out- and inward calling with each other in the closest link.
5. Against this inward calling and rebirth, however, from the Pelagian side, the objection is always brought in, that it brings in a bodily force in the ghostly realm, is at odds with the nature of a thinking being, makes man wholly passive, undermines moral freedom and responsibility. The Pelagian way of thinking is therefore always out to uphold the withstandability of the calling and to let rebirth, turning, hallowing, steadfastness, and so forth, hang upon a choice of the will. He is reborn and rightwised only who beforehand willingly fulfills one or another condition, believes, turns himself, is minded to keep God's behests, and so on. It thereby at once wraps itself in a host of unsolvable hardships. If man is by nature able to fulfill those conditions, he is so good that no rebirth in the sense of the Writ is needed at all; some moral upbringing and bettering is then more than enough. If man must beforehand receive the strength to take or not take the gospel through the grace that goes before in baptism or calling, then here too an unwithstandable grace goes before believing, for the preparing grace is given to all without their will or knowing; then in truth the rebirth already takes place before man's choice, for working follows being, the deed follows the power, the will that makes able to take the gospel is, as shown by the gospel of John, already a renewed and reborn will. Only then it is not to be seen how after all that a free choice of will is still possible; the will is indeed by the good strength given to him without his doing already set toward the good, and just in that same measure set toward the good as it received strength for a good choice; the more one lets the will be weakened by sin and the more strength one lets it be given in the grace that goes before, the more and in that same measure its unswayed freedom also ceases. Besides, it is riddling why such a free choice of will is still needed; if God must beforehand and unwithstandably renew man so far that he can choose before the gospel, what does the upholding of the unswayed freedom of will serve for then, other than only to thwart God's grace again, to make his grace covenant as shaky and unsteady as that of works before the fall, and to set forth Christ as more powerless and loveless than Adam? For He has fulfilled all and won all, but when He wills to apply it, his might and his love strike against the will of man, which is yet fitted with new strengths! Only to save a seeming freedom of man, God is robbed of his overlordship, the grace covenant of its steadfastness, Christ of his kingly might.
And if one thereby gained something; but indeed, one loses everything by it. Not only is the indifferent freedom of the will among adults saved only in appearance. But among children, the whole teaching proves insufficient and the very essence of unmercifulness. For one of two things: the grace given to children is enough for salvation and opens to them, if they die young, the gate of heaven—and then they are saved without their doing and without having chosen and decided themselves; or it is not enough, but then all little children are also lost who die young, before they could choose; and of the children who grow up, thousands upon thousands fall away through free choice of will. Pelagianism in its different forms seems to be merciful; but it is nothing other than the mercy of the Pharisee, who cares not for the tax collectors. To save the freedom of will among a few thousand adults, and then only in appearance, it gives, in proportion, millions of little children over to damnation. In the end, it remains a riddle what Pelagianism can have against it that God glorifies His effectual grace to sinners. If it raised the question why God gives that grace only to many and not to all, it would find a willing ear with everyone. Who has not felt that question rise up in himself and who has not been moved by it to the depths of his soul? But that question returns on every standpoint and is answered by Pelagius no more than by Augustine; all without distinction must rest in the good pleasure of God. The confessors of God's sovereignty are in this case in no way in a less favorable condition than the defenders of the free will. For, as shown above, according to the Reformed, the external grace grants to all who live under the gospel at least as much grace as, according to the Pelagians, is granted in the so-called sufficient grace and is deemed by them enough for a free choice for or against the gospel.
The teaching of the internal calling takes away from the external calling no single blessing and benefit which, according to Pelagianism or Semipelagianism, according to Roman Catholics, Lutherans, or Remonstrants, is granted by God. On the Reformed standpoint, all externally called remain objectively in the same condition as they are in according to other confessions. The assertion of the Reformed is only that all that rich grace to and in man, if it is not specifically the grace of regeneration, is insufficient to bring man to a free, decided acceptance of the gospel. To believe in Christ, according to the clear teaching of the Gospel of John, requires no less than regeneration, a working of God's power as in the raising of Christ, Eph. 1:19, 20. All lesser grace, however rich and glorious, is insufficient; a grace that without regenerating yet restores the will so far that it can choose for the gospel is nowhere taught in Scripture and is also a psychological absurdity. Even if this their confession were incorrect (which it is not), it brings absolutely no change to the disadvantage in the condition of those who, according to the confessions of all Christians, in the end are lost because of their unbelief.
But above the advocates of the free choice of will, those of the Reformed religion have this in any case in their favor: that God's counsel will stand, that His covenant of grace does not waver, that Christ is truly and fully Savior, that the good, that is, the work once infallibly will triumph over the evil. What serious objection can be brought against that? If we can partake of damnation in Adam without our knowledge—a fact that no one can deny—why then could we not much more be accepted by God in Christ to grace without our knowledge? Of compulsion there is yet no question in this grace. To speak strongly for a moment, if this grace did not by its nature exclude compulsion and God actually used compulsion; who would then yet at the end have the right or even the desire to complain, if he were thus snatched from eternal destruction and brought over into eternal life? Who would agree with the man who complained that one had saved him from life-threatening danger without respecting his freedom of will? But it is not so; there is in the internal calling and regeneration no compulsion with God; violence is not attributed to God, Epistle to Diognetus 7. No single pious person, of whatever confession, has spoken of compulsion in the work of grace, even if he was snatched as a brand from the fire. Rather, his wish would be that God with more power broke the sin in him and without the long way of struggle made him partaker of salvation. But so God does not in grace; all compulsion is contrary to its essence.
For indeed grace is no bodily might. The Thomists spoke of a bodily predetermination, the Roman Catholics increasingly viewed the image of God as a substantial addition to man's nature. But the Reformed did not speak thus. Not only did they hold the image of God to be essentially proper to man, but they even refused to describe God's grace in the inner calling as bodily; it was indeed not merely ethical or moral, but it was also not of a bodily kind, and therefore best defined as supernatural and divine. For it brings in no wise any new substance into the existing creation, as the Manicheans and Anabaptists teach. It does not do so objectively, insofar as grace can denote the person and work of Christ, for Christ, though conceived by the Holy Ghost, took his human nature from Mary and did not bring it from heaven. But it also does not do so in a subjective sense. Grace never creates; it recreates. The regeneration which it brings about means neither in its first, nor in its second, nor in its third sense that any substance is added from without to man or world or carried into them. They are the same people who formerly were darkness (Ephesians 5:8), dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1), thieves, covetous, and so on (1 Corinthians 6:11), and who now are washed, sanctified, and justified. The continuity of the self remains upheld. And so it is the same heaven and the same earth that shall be renewed at the end of the days. Christ is no new, second Creator, but the Recreator, the Reformer of all things. Since sin is not a substance but has attacked and destroyed the form of things, therefore recreation cannot consist in creating any substance, but must consist in a restoration of the form, in reformation. Already by this, all thought of bodily compulsion in grace is excluded. But there is more. Not only does it bring no new substance into creation, but it also takes nothing essential from it, nothing that is (though indeed "by nature") essentially proper to it. Sin does not belong to the essence of creation. And grace takes nothing else from us than sin alone. It does not suppress; it restores nature; it does not take away but restores and perfects the will. It takes from our understanding the darkness, from our will the weakness, the powerlessness. It gives us back what we ought to have according to our essence, according to the idea, but lost through sin. It recreates us after the likeness of him who created us. It is true that, as on the one hand it does not consist in implanting a new substance, so on the other hand it does not consist in an outward, moral improvement of disposition and deeds. It is not merely a reformation of life, as the Socinians described it; Scripture speaks of regeneration in terms far too strong for that; already the Old Testament denotes it as a circumcision of the heart (Deuteronomy 30:6), a creating of a clean heart and renewing of a steadfast spirit (Psalm 51:10), a taking away of the heart of stone and giving of a heart of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26), and the New Testament uses the words: birth from above (John 3:3), from God (1:13), from the Spirit (3:5, 6, 8), regeneration (Titus 3:5), and says that those who receive this benefit thereby are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17), God's workmanship (Ephesians 2:10), new men (Ephesians 4:24), become one planting with Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:5), live and walk in Christ or in the Holy Spirit, and so on. The benefit of regeneration is thus far too great to be brought about by a moral persuasion of the word of preaching; it rather presupposes a divine almighty power (Ephesians 1:19, 20); and it is also too rich to consist only in a change of the deeds or expressions of human faculties. For sin, though begun with a deed, has penetrated into man's very nature; it is no substance but also no mere act; it is an inward corruption of the whole man, not only of his thoughts and words and deeds, but also of his understanding and will, and again not only of these but also of his heart, from which all iniquities proceed, of the innermost, the core, the root of his being, of man's very self. And therefore regeneration is such an entirely supernatural, most powerful, hidden, and inexpressible working of God, whereby he penetrates to the innermost parts of man, opens the closed heart, softens the hard, circumcises the uncircumcised, infuses new qualities into the will and makes it from dead living, from evil good, from unwilling willing, from refractory obedient (Canons of Dort III/IV, 11, 12). New qualities they indeed are which regeneration implants in man, but they are none other than those that belong to his essence, habits, dispositions, inclinations that were originally included in the image of God and agreed with God's law, and that free the fallen, sinful human nature from its darkness and slavery, from its death and misery. Though it be that the grace which works regeneration is rightly called irresistible or better insuperable, because it overcomes all resistance of the sinful man; though it be an operating grace that works in man without any cooperation of his will; yet it is and remains a most powerful yet sweetest operation, which works in men not as in stocks and blocks, does not take away the will and its properties nor compel it with violence, but makes it spiritually living, heals, improves, and bends it in a way that is lovely and at the same time powerful. Cf. Canons of Dort III/IV and the judgments of the delegates on the 3rd and 4th articles of the Remonstrants, further the works on grace cited above and further still Trigland, Antapologia c. 23-33. Voetius, on the state of the elect before conversion, Disp. II 402-432, on regeneration, ibid. 432-468, whether Christ merited for the elect and those to be saved a special grace of regeneration and faith, ibid. V 270-277. Turretin, Theologia Elenctica XV qu. 3-6. Spanheim, Elenchus controversiarum de religione, Opera III 875 sq. Id. Disputationes theologicae de quinquarticulanis controversiis, Opera III 1167-1188. Hoornbeeck, Theologia practica lib. 6. De Moor IV 442-534 etc.
1. The spiritual life, which is implanted in regeneration, agrees with the natural life in that it must be nourished and strengthened to increase and grow. There is indeed a great difference between the two, for the spiritual life has its origin in God, not as Creator but as Savior; it is acquired through the resurrection of Christ; it is an eternal life that cannot sin and cannot die. But nevertheless, the regenerate continually needs to be strengthened with power by the Spirit in the inner man. This strengthening of the spiritual life is just as much as its origin from God and the riches of his grace. The life of the spiritual man is also after its origin not for a moment to be thought of apart from God and his fellowship. It is in the same strict and special sense in which it is from God, also through and to God. He it is who nourishes and maintains it, who never lets it go, who makes it pass over into deeds and works, who not only grants the ability but also works the willing and the working according to his good pleasure, Phil. 2:13, 2 Cor. 3:5. It is a life in fellowship with Christ; the believers have in baptism become one plant with him in his death and also in his resurrection, Rom. 6:5; they are in Christ and Christ lives in them, 2 Cor. 13:5, Gal. 2:20; they can do nothing without him, if they do not abide in him as branches in the vine, John 15:4, 5; they can only be strong ἐν κυριῳ και ἐν τῳ κρατει της ἰσχυος αὐτου, Eph. 6:10, through the Spirit of Christ and in his fellowship, Rom. 8:13, 26, 2 Cor. 13:13, Eph. 3:16.
But that Spirit works in the regenerate in different directions. That can and ought to be so, because the new man is not at once perfect in "degrees," but indeed in "parts." In regeneration, the whole man is principally recreated; the self of man itself dies and lives again out of and in Christ, Gal. 2:20; it is at once a καινος ἀνθρωπος, which is created in Christ, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10, indeed small and tender but yet complete in all its parts. And therefore the Holy Spirit works in different directions, to let the new man grow up evenly and proportionately in all his parts. He works as the Spirit of wisdom, of holiness, and of glory, and adorns the believers with all kinds of powers and gifts and virtues, Rom. 15:13, 1 Cor. 12:3ff., Gal. 5:22. Specifically, he works toward the side of the understanding the virtues of faith, knowledge, wisdom, etc. Though implanted in man in a mysterious, untraceable way by the Spirit, John 3:8, the spiritual life is yet, as soon as it becomes conscious in man, from the first moment bound to the Word of God. It is awakened by the Holy Spirit from a λογος ἐμφυτος, from the inward, evangelical calling of Christ; it remains in its growth bound to that word, and thus, as soon as it becomes conscious, also dependent on the Holy Scripture, which is the word of Christ. The spiritual life stands by its nature in relation to the Scripture, like the plant to the soil in which it roots and from which it draws its juices. Not with the Scripture only as outwardly written in letters, but also as continually borne, animated, and spoken in the heart by the Holy Spirit. The internal calling is necessary not only at the origin but also at the growth of the spiritual life. It does not happen once and is not finished with the creation of the life, but it continues always; just as God first created all things by the Word and thereafter maintains all things by that same Word, so the internal calling is also active in the maintenance and development of the spiritual life. The believers are called, Rom. 1:6, who share in the heavenly calling, Heb. 3:1, who are continually called by God to his kingdom, until they shall actually inherit it, 1 Thess. 2:12, 5:24.
The act now, by which the Holy Spirit makes the Word of Christ understood in its spiritual sense and content and opens the consciousness to the truth, bears in Scripture the special name of illumination. Because sin has darkened the understanding, Rom. 1:21, 1 Cor. 1:21, 2:14, Eph. 4:18, 5:8, there is also need of an ἀποκαλυψις του νοος, Rom. 12:2, Eph. 4:23. This comes about through God, who by ἀποκαλυψις, in man, ἐν ἐμοι, Gal. 1:16, removes the hindrance which until now prevented the right knowledge of things, Matt. 11:25, 16:17, Gal. 1:16. He does this by giving the Holy Spirit, who is a πνευμα σοφιας και ἀποκαλυψεως, Eph. 1:17, leads into the truth, John 16:13, teaches all things, John 14:26, 1 John 2:20, and makes the things of God understood, 1 Cor. 2:10-16. Just as he at creation by his mighty word let the light shine out of the darkness, so he also through the Son, Matt. 11:27, and through the Spirit lets light become in the hearts of men, 2 Cor. 4:6, and makes the eyes of the heart enlightened, Eph. 1:18. Thereby they know the things which were given them by God in the gospel, 1 Cor. 2:12, have a γνωσις and ἐπιγνωσις, that is, a knowledge concerning them personally and working in them, of the Father, Matt. 11:27, 2 Cor. 4:6, Eph. 1:17, of Christ, Matt. 16:17, of the things of the Spirit of God, 1 Cor. 2:14, etc., and they are children of light, Luke 16:8, Eph. 5:8, 1 Thess. 5:5, citizens of the kingdom of light, 1 Pet. 2:9, Col. 1:12, and walk in the light, Eph. 5:8, 1 John 1:7, 2:9, 10. Through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, a whole new light dawns for man over all things, over God, Christ, sin, grace, Scripture, church, world, death, judgment, etc. In God's light he now sees light.
This knowledge is now further described in Scripture as a knowledge of faith. It is entirely in accordance with Scripture to say that the knowledge of God in the face of Christ saves, justifies, grants forgiveness of sins and eternal life, 1 Kings 8:43, 1 Chronicles 28:9, Psalm 89:16, Isaiah 1:3, 11:9, 53:11, Jeremiah 4:22, 31:34, Hosea 2:19, 4:1, 6, Matthew 11:27, Luke 1:77, John 8:32, 10:4, 14, 17:3, Romans 10:3, 2 Corinthians 2:14, Galatians 4:9, Ephesians 4:13, Hebrews 8:11, 1 John 5:20, 2 Peter 1:2, 3:18. But because by its origin, essence, and object it bears a wholly special character, it is called a knowledge of faith. Thus defined, however, it is by no means thereby indicated as something that is foreign to human nature as such and added to it in the sense of a donum superadditum. Darkness, error, falsehood, and the like are unnatural, properties of the fallen nature, but the light of knowledge belongs to the image of God, which was originally and essentially proper to man. And even the knowledge of faith is no absolutely supernatural addition to man. Believing in general each man does always and in every field, especially also in that of science. There is no knowledge without some faith; the dualism between faith and science is theoretically and practically impossible. Even in dogmatics one speaks, besides of saving faith, also of historical faith, Matthew 7:26, John 12:42, 43, 13:17, Acts 26:27, 28, James 2:19; temporary faith, Matthew 13:21; and miracle faith, Matthew 9:2, 17:20, Acts 14:9, 1 Corinthians 13:2, which are indeed essentially distinguished from the first and can also occur in the unregenerate, but yet must have so much agreement with it that they can bear the same name of faith. But even faith in the narrower sense, the fides justificans or salvifica, is no donum superadditum according to the Roman view. Indeed, faith is a gift of God, Acts 5:31, Ephesians 2:8, Philippians 1:29, fruit of his power, 1 Corinthians 2:4, 5, Ephesians 1:19, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, and specifically bestowed by the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:3, 2 Corinthians 4:13. But it is yet a gift that is not necessary in an absolute sense, but only accidentally, for the sake of sin. For regeneration never brings a new substance into the world or humanity; even in faith it does not bestow on man such a new faculty, power, or activity which the original human nature created after God's image did not possess. On the contrary, the Reformed rightly maintained against the Remonstrants, for example, Arminius, Op. 160, that Adam before the fall possessed in his nature the power to believe in Christ, although naturally he did not know Christ and did not then need Him as Savior, Gomarus, Op. I 93. Mastricht IV 461. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 454. II 482f. And they likewise held against the Romans that Christ as man on earth had lived by faith, above 294. Since now regeneration is in principle a re-creation of the whole man after the likeness of him who created him, the faculty of faith (fides potentialis, seminalis, habitualis, seed or root of faith) is of itself given with and in it. Just as little children are rational beings before actual reason, so they are, if they are children of the covenant, also believers before actual faith. Indeed, it is incorrect to let regeneration, with older Lutheran theologians, be absorbed in the donation of faith, cf. M. Vitringa III 222, for in regeneration the seeds of hope, love, and the like are implanted just as well; but yet in it, as all faculties and powers, so also the faculty of faith is restored. Believing in God, in Christ, and the like, is for the regenerate man as such just as natural as it is for every man to believe in the visible world. Indeed, just as every potentiality first passes over into act through a certain influence from without, and a grain of wheat only germinates in the bosom of the earth, so also the faculty of faith, implanted by regeneration, passes over into the act of faith only through the continuing internal calling. But in regeneration God yet restores the life-relation that originally existed between Him and man; re-created after God's image, man is again akin to God himself and to all that is God's, to his Christ, to the things of the Spirit, to his Word, to his church, to his heaven, to the things that are above. Crucified to the world and dead to sin, he lives unto God. And therefore, being enlightened by the Holy Spirit, he also knows God and in that knowledge is blessed, John 17:3.
But this may not be understood as if the regenerate draws this knowledge of God in Christ from his own heart, from the inward teaching of the Holy Ghost. Mysticism has at all times set Word and Spirit over against each other, despised the letter, exalted the inward word at the cost of the outward, and even appealed for this to Holy Scripture, Isaiah 54:13, Jeremiah 31:34, Matthew 11:25, 27, 16:17, John 6:45, 1 Corinthians 2:10, 2 Corinthians 3:6, Hebrews 8:10, 1 John 2:20, 27. Against this it may be remarked: 1º that very surely all knowledge, in the natural and spiritual realm, presupposes a relation, a kinship between object and subject. To see, an eye is needful; and object and subject must be shone upon by the same light. To know, understanding is needful, and it is the same Logos who created the known object and the knowing subject for each other. So also in the spiritual realm, to the Word must be added the Spirit, to the external calling the internal calling, to the revelation the illumination, to make us know God in the face of Christ. 2º Scripture speaks this out decidedly and clearly in the above-mentioned and other places. In God's light alone do we see light. But it nowhere says that the regenerate can or must draw the matter of this knowledge from himself. In 1 John 2:20-27 the apostle binds the anointing of the Spirit, which believers have received from the Holy One, that is, from Christ, very closely with the truth which they have heard, verses 21-24; if they abide therein, they also abide in the Son and in the Father and have no need of further teaching. Everywhere Scripture refers the believer outside himself, to the revelation of God in nature, law, and gospel, Deuteronomy 4:1, Isaiah 8:20, John 5:39, Romans 1:20, 15:4, 2 Timothy 3:15, 1 Peter 1:25, 2 Peter 1:19, etc. 3º In the natural it is so, that man indeed brings with him a consciousness, understanding, reason, but yet he must get all the content of knowledge from without. Much more is this the case in the spiritual. For although all believers are taught by the Lord, yet they still live in the flesh, and remain inclined to error. Time and again thoughts arise in them which they have to lead captive to the obedience of Christ. Left to themselves, they would straightway fall into error and falsehood. And therefore here an objective revelation is needful, which serves as a rule for teaching and life. 4º Added to this is that not visible but invisible, spiritual, eternal things are the object of this religious knowledge. That which no eye has seen and no ear has heard and has not arisen in man's heart, that has God prepared in the gospel for them that love Him. How shall we know these things surely and certainly, unless they are set before our eyes in a faithful image, pure and unmixed? We walk here not by sight; so we ought then to behold the glory of the Lord in a mirror, to be changed into the same image from glory to glory. 5º And finally, as in the natural every creature seeks food after its kind, so also in the believer the new life ever draws again to the gospel, to the word of Christ, to the Scriptures as to the ground on which it rests, as to the food by which it is strengthened. Not dispensable but ever more indispensable and glorious does Scripture become to him who grows in faith. The testimony of the Holy Ghost in his heart binds him in the same measure and strength to Scripture as to the person of Christ Himself. From all this it now also becomes clear why religious knowledge in Scripture is described as a knowledge of faith and faith is so strongly placed in the foreground in the subjective work of salvation. Properly speaking, faith or knowledge does not save, but God saves in Christ through the Holy Ghost. He saves by the benefits of the covenant, by Christ, by giving Himself to the sinner. But what would that salvation profit if it were not conscious to us and we had no knowledge of it? Then it would not even exist. Unconscious salvation is indeed for the Buddhist the highest, and many nowadays give preference to non-being above being. But the highest being for the Christian is to know God and through that knowledge to have eternal life. Knowledge is therefore not an accidental addition to salvation coming from without, but forms therein an indispensable element. There is no salvation that is not known, not enjoyed. What would we have from the forgiveness of sins, from regeneration and complete renewal by the Holy Ghost, from heavenly glory, if we had no consciousness and no knowledge of them? They could not exist; they presuppose and require consciousness, knowledge, enjoyment, and therein give salvation. God saves by making Himself known and enjoyed in Christ. But because the benefits of the covenant of grace are here on earth still only given in part, because fellowship with God, regeneration, sanctification are still imperfect, because knowledge is imperfect, has invisible things as object and is bound to Scripture, therefore the knowledge of God here on earth is a knowledge of faith. Faith is the only way by which it is obtained, the only form in which it can appear. Yes, all benefits, forgiveness, regeneration, sanctification, perseverance, heavenly salvation are for us only through faith; only in faith do we enjoy them; we are saved in hope only.
2. In the Old Testament, there is still lacking a technical term for faith. The thing itself is not lacking, for oftentimes salvation appears in the form of a promise, which can be accepted in no other way than by faith. Deeds and workings of faith are therefore related to us on nearly every page. But the religious relation of man to God is usually expressed by other words, such as: to fear God, to serve, to love, to cleave to, to trust, to lean upon Him, to hope, to wait, and so on. To believing, the most akin is the word he'emin with b or l from 'aman, to make fast, to fasten oneself, to hold fast to something, to lean upon, to trust, Genesis 15:6, Exodus 4:31, 14:31, Deuteronomy 9:23, especially Isaiah 7:9, Ahaz, who seeks help from Assyria and leans upon it, shall not be established, if he does not turn from it and lean only upon God, and Habakkuk 2:4, the Chaldeans make their might their god and their soul is puffed up, but the righteous shall live by his trust in God and His promise. In later Judaism, faith consisted not only in accepting the law as God's gift but also in the opinion that God's goodness would supply what might be lacking in the righteousness of the law. Over against this, John the Baptist comes forth with the preaching that such faith and such righteousness have no worth, that for all metanoia and baptism are needful, to enter into the kingdom of the Messiah. Jesus joins Himself to this, but adds thereto that that kingdom has come in Him, the Son of man; He brings the glad tidings thereof and says: repent and believe the gospel.
So long as Jesus was on earth and Himself preached, faith consisted by the nature of the case first of all herein, that one personally placed unbounded trust in Jesus and thereby was assured that God spoke and did wonders in and through Him, for example, Matthew 8:10, 9:28, 15:28, 17:20, 21:21,22, and so on. Jesus' person had its correlate in the words which He spoke, and the works which He did, and conversely these words and deeds were again verified by His person. But when Jesus had gone away, herein came this change, that one could no longer personally meet Him but, to learn to know Him, was bound to the word of the apostles. Now faith gained as it were two sides; 1. the accepting as true of the apostolic witness concerning Christ, and 2. the personal trust in that Christ, as now still living in heaven, and mighty to forgive sins, and so on. Although both sides occur side by side in the writings of the apostles, yet John lays stress especially on the first moment, pisteuein with accusative or with an object clause or with hoti of the thing, John 2:22, 4:50, 5:47, 6:69, 8:24, 11:42, 13:19, 17:8,21, 1 John 5:1,5; Paul on the other hand on the second, and then speaks of pistis with genitive, of Jesus, Romans 3:22, Galatians 2:16, 20, 3:22, Ephesians 3:12, Philippians 3:9, of the truth, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, of the gospel Philippians 1:27, pros theon, 1 Thessalonians 1:8, eis Christon, Colossians 2:5, Philippians 1:5, en Christo, Galatians 3:26, Ephesians 1:15, 2 Timothy 3:15, and of pisteuein tini, Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:6, 2 Timothy 1:12, Titus 3:8, epi tina, Romans 4:5, 24, epi tini, Romans 9:33, 1 Timothy 1:16 and especially eis tina, Romans 10:11, Galatians 2:16, Philippians 1:29, and so on. But this is no absolute opposition, for John speaks oftentimes of pisteuein eis tina , 2:11, 3:16, 18, 36, 4:39, 6:29, and so on, eis to onoma , 1:12, 2:23, 1 John 5:13 and also tini , 3:15, 5:24, 38, 46, 6:30 and to onomati , 1 John 3:23; and Paul constructs pisteuein also with ti and hoti , Romans 10:9, 1 Corinthians 13:7, compare 15:14,17, 1 Thessalonians 4:14. Especially is it wrong to identify the later distinction of Deo credere and in Deum credere or also that of historical and saving faith with the above-mentioned. For oftentimes the construction of pisteuein with hoti , for example, that Jesus is the Christ, does indeed include the saving faith, John 6:69, 8:24, 11:27, 17:8, 1 John 4:15, Romans 10:9; and pisteuein tini or eis tina is often no more than a historical faith, John 7:31, 40 and following, 8:30 and following, 10:42, 11:45, 48, 12:11, 42; in 1 John 5:10 there even stands pisteuein eis ten marturian . And this is also understandable. Truly to believe the witness which God has witnessed of His Son, only he can and does who places unbounded trust in the person of Christ; and conversely, he who trusts in Christ as Son of God also accepts unconditionally the witness of God concerning Christ through the mouth of the apostles. Faith therefore in the New Testament includes two elements: trust in the person of Christ and acceptance of the apostolic witness. These two hang inseparably together; they make up in subjective sense the essence of Christianity. If Christ were only a historical person, who by His teaching and life had left us an example, then a historical faith in the handed-down witness would be sufficient, but then it would also not come to true religion, to essential fellowship with God, and deism would be right. If Christ conversely, according to the opinion of pantheism, were not the historical but only the ideal Christ, then faith in a witness would be wholly needless, Christ would be nothing other than the being of God in us, but then again it would not come to true fellowship of God and man, since this presupposes the essential distinction of both. But now Christ is both: a historical person, the Christ of the Scriptures, and at the same time the glorified Lord in heaven, who still lives and reigns as the head of His church. He acquired salvation in the past, but applies it Himself in the present. And these benefits of the covenant embrace the recreation of the being and of the consciousness; they consist in justification and in redemption, in light and in life, in truth and in grace. They change man in the world of thought, make him free from lie, error, darkness, cause him to know God as the gracious One who forgives sins, place him in the right relation to God and all things, cause him to consider the things that are above, and give him in faith a sure ground of the things hoped for, and a proof of the things not seen. And they change man also in his being, make him free from the spot of sin, cause him in the hidden part of his heart to live in fellowship with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit, make him a citizen of the heavens, born from above, out of God, recreated after the likeness to the image of the Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. And these two stand in indissoluble connection. For Christ, who descended, is the same who also ascended far above all heavens, that He might fill all things, Ephesians 4:10. The Holy Spirit, who regenerates, is the same who also witnesses in us of Christ. The Scripture leads us up to Christ, who is above, seated at God's right hand, and Christ, who through the Spirit dwells in our hearts, leads us back to the Scripture. With the heart man believes unto righteousness, but with the mouth he confesses unto salvation, Romans 10:10. Faith according to Scripture excludes both: a faith of the heart that does not confess and a confession that does not root in the faith of the heart. It is mystical and noetic at the same time, an unbounded, unshakable trust in Christ, as He who according to the witness of Scripture has accomplished all for me and on that ground now and eternally is my Lord and my God.
Cf. on faith in Holy Scripture, besides the handbooks for Biblical Theology of Weiss, Holtzmann, and so on, Schlatter, Der Glaube im N. T. Second Edition. Calw and Stuttgart 1896. C. Boetticher, Das Wesen des relig. Glaubens im N. T. Berlin: Gaertner 1896. Haussleiter, Was versteht Paulus unter Chr. Glauben? Greifswald Studies, H. Cremer..... presented, Gütersloh 1895 p. 159-182. Huther, Die Bedeutung der Begriffe zoe and pisteuein in d. Joh. Schriften , Yearbook for Theology 1872 p. 1-34. Cremer s. v.
3. What thus undivided and in organic oneness comes forth in the Scripture, is in theology and in the Christian life oftentimes torn asunder or only mechanically bound together. Rome grasps faith as a firm and sure assent to all those things which God sets forth for belief, and rejects the Protestant definition, that it would be a special trust, that my sins are forgiven; trust is a fruit of faith in the will and can first follow upon justification, because otherwise the Protestants themselves could not hold that faith alone justifies; for trust also holds hope and love within it. This faith as assent is therefore with Rome not enough for justification; it is with other works indeed a preparation for it, but is in itself unformed and must through love become a formed faith. With Rome faith is still in no wise a personal, religious bond to God; it bears an introductory mark and is for a great part implicit faith, a taking for true of all that the holy mother church believes. The personal bond to God comes first into being in love, and this is it then that justifies and saves. In the heart of the matter, therewith agrees the grasping of faith in the Greek church, with Socinians, Remonstrants, Rationalists, and so forth; it is in itself nothing but a historical holding for true, truly no religious but a knowledge-theoretical notion, not drawn from Scripture but brought into theology from the common, daily speech. The Reformation however did not ask: what is believing in general? and thereby set the religious notion of faith, but it went back to Scripture, searched what meaning and place this gave to faith, came thereby to a wholly other grasping of the saving faith and said over against Rome: it is not only a firm assent but also a sure trust; faith is the central, personal, religious bond of man to God. But it cannot be gainsaid, that this setting of faith brought with it its own hardships and gave rise to all kinds of differing views. First, soon the question must arise, in what bond these two parts of faith stand to each other. From the outset some set the seat of faith in the understanding, defined it best by sure knowledge, certainty, and deemed the trust as an outcome and fruit of faith in the will; others sought the being of faith in the trust and set it in the heart. Later this difference grew into the withstanding of orthodoxy and pietism; orthodoxy wished through the understanding to the heart, through teaching to life to come and became oftentimes uncaring for life; pietism walked the other way and deemed oftentimes the teaching of small meaning. Second, soon there came difference over the bond of faith and justification. The Reformation had grasped faith as sure knowledge or trust, that Christ is my Savior and that my sins are forgiven. But it seemed that this certainty could not go before justification but must follow thereon; thus since Gomarus there was set apart between a direct and reflex act of faith, between fleeing for refuge and assured trust, between being and well-being of faith. This difference led later to the withstanding of nomism and antinomism; nomism thought that all kinds of conditions and findings must go before the certainty of the forgiveness of sins and thus set the being of faith in a seeking, hungering, thirsting for Christ and so forth; antinomism deemed all this needless, a making vain of the work of Christ and defined faith as firm belief that the sins are forgiven. Third, lastly, the bond of faith and works was hard to set forth. It was a living faith, faith alone yet not lonely, that according to the Reformation justifies. Standing over against all works, faith might thus on one side utterly be no work. There must, says Comrie, in the inner kind of faith be something whereby it is set apart from all works, however named. On the other side it was yet a living faith and thus indeed a work and a deed, for the power or habit of faith, which is planted in the new birth, is formally yet no faith, even as an egg is not yet a hen. This difference over the bond of faith and work led in the doing to the withstanding of the idle and the working Christians; the former stay with justification and come not to sanctification; the latter run the risk to misdeem the first and to make it hang on the last.
All these objections and dangers, however, which are bound to the Reformation view of faith, plead not against but for it. Rome has a very simple and understandable definition of faith, but thereby does too little to the richness of this concept in Scripture. Faith is yet no mere taking of the witness of the apostles concerning Christ, but a bond of the soul to Christ himself, who is above, seated at the right hand of God. It is the work of God by excellence, John 6:29, the one and all in the Christian life, the means whereby we become partakers of Christ and all his benefits, the inward spring of all salvation and blessing. While it binds us through Scripture to the historical Christ, it at the same time lifts us up to the unseen world, and makes us live in fellowship with the Lord from heaven. Wherever it may dwell in man, it works in upon all his powers and strengths, gives them direction and leading, rules his understanding and his heart, his thinking and doing, his life and working; Christians are believers, pistoi . It is mystical and noetic, receptive and spontaneous, passive and active, a contrast to all works and itself the work of God by excellence, means to justification and beginning of sanctification, going with all our life and only at death passing over into sight. It is no more than natural that theology wrestles with it, to give of this faith a somewhat right description. And even if it should succeed in this, it is yet never able to rule life and prevent all one-sidedness and errors in practice. Yet it is possible, in the order of salvation to give to faith that place and meaning which according to Scripture belongs to it.
1º To this end it serves to put in the foreground, that all benefits of salvation are won by Christ and are present in Him, and that He himself thereof, as the Lord from heaven, through his Spirit is the sharer and applier. Neither faith nor conversion are conditions which in any way earn salvation; they are only the way wherein the benefits of the covenant come into the inward possession of those for whom they are won.
2º In so far it is fully right to say that justification as well as the other benefits of the covenant goes before faith. In the covenant of grace the Son has already stood forth as surety and mediator for his own. According to 2 Cor. 5:19 God has reconciled the world with himself in Christ and not reckoned their sins to them, and Rom. 4:25 says clearly that Christ, as He was delivered up for our sins, so also was raised dia ten dikaiosin hemon , that is, for, on account of our justification, because we objectively in Him through his suffering and dying in our stead were justified. The katallage is not distinguished from the hilasmos in that this is objective and that subjective. Also the first is objective; the content of the gospel reads: God is reconciled, take this reconciliation, believe the gospel. Reconciliation, forgiveness, sanctification etc., do not come about through our faith or our conversion, but they are fully won by Christ; and He shares them out according to his will.
3º All the more this must be held fast, because there is no fellowship in the benefits of Christ than through fellowship in his person. The benefits of the covenant are no bodily goods which can be owned and enjoyed without and outside the mediator of that covenant. But they are shut up in Him and never and nowhere exist apart from Him. When it is said that Christ has won them, this makes known that God all those benefits, without harm to his righteousness, can give out of grace in the fellowship of Christ.
4º Namely, among those benefits which Christ has won belongs also the gift of the Holy Spirit. He himself has become Spirit, He has through his suffering and dying made the Spirit of the Father and of the Son also to his Spirit, to the Spirit of Christ, and therefore shares him out as He will, while that Spirit himself takes all from Christ. The gift of the Holy Spirit thus supposes that God has already shared and given his Christ and that Christ has shared and given himself. Also the very first benefit of salvation is a benefit of the covenant, which supposes the mystical union. There is not only no rising but also no being crucified and buried, no dying off of the old man than in the fellowship of Christ.
5º This reckoning and giving of Christ and his benefits may now ideally, in the decree, already have taken place from eternity; it may be objectively realized in Christ as head and mediator, when He became man, died and was raised; it may also in substance be the content of the word of the gospel; yet it is first individually applied and shared out in the inner calling, and passively from man's side accepted in regeneration.
6º This real giving of Christ and his benefits in the inner calling is of such great meaning, that there is in the decree and in the satisfaction no objective reckoning of Christ, unless it also, even if before birth, realizes itself individually in the inner calling and that there conversely without regeneration is no part in Christ and his benefits. Antinomianism makes the time unreal; for God however what happens in time has meaning for eternity, because it itself has in eternity its ground and beginning.
7º For those who grow up, however, regeneration also is not enough. Because man is a reasonable being and the covenant of grace does not kill his independence and freedom but just restores and strengthens it, regeneration must pass over into acts of faith. It is Christ himself who through the Holy Spirit brings man into his fellowship to the free exercise of faith and conversion. And so much is antinomianism also here again with its pantheistic making unreal of time in error, that Scripture just binds salvation to faith, which only here on this earth can be exercised.
8º This faith itself has no conditions which man must first fulfill to be allowed to believe, for the freedom of faith is for each overflowing in Scripture and the offer of grace present. Also sorrow over sin is no condition, because it as poenitentia may only in a certain sense be called gratia praeparans , and as resipiscentia is just fruit and proof of faith. Also faith itself is no condition to the other benefits, at least not in that sense that these would in any way come about through it, but at most only so that faith is inwardly needful to receive and enjoy the benefits at hand in Christ.
9º Because the giving of Christ and his benefits goes before faith and is in no way caused or worked by it, faith can be nothing else and is nothing else than the inward, conscious and active acceptance of the given benefits. The description of faith by taking refuge, hungering, thirsting etc., does not hit the essence, because these all are outgoings and workings of faith, and thus already suppose it. The distinction of faith into taking refuge and assured trust may as distinction, and with eye to practice wherein the believer is again and again brought to doubting, have some right to exist; as separation it is to be rejected and works very harmfully for the growth of the spiritual life.
10º Faith as acceptance of the benefits won and given by Christ is not in time separated from the assurance of faith, but falls at once together with it. As knowing as knowing brings with it of itself the consciousness of knowing, so faith also by its nature shuts in immediate certainty. It stands over against care, Mt. 6:31, 8:26, 10:31, fear, Mk. 4:40, 5:36, doubt, Mt. 14:31, 21:21, Rom. 4:20, James 1:6, trouble, John 14:1, it is unbounded trust, Mt. 17:20, hypostasis and elenchos of the unseen things, Heb. 11:1. Out of this assurance of faith speak and glory the godly of the Old and New Covenant, Gen. 49:18, Ps. 16:8-10, 23:4-6, 31:2, 56:5, 10, 57:3 etc., Rom. 4:18, 21, 8:38, 2 Tim. 4:7, 8, Heb. 11 etc. And when Rome rejected this certainty, Trent VI c. 9 and can. 13-15, the Reformation, especially Calvin, Inst. III 2, 14ff. etc. has again pointed out this certainty in faith according to Scripture. Fides numquam se ipsam ignorat , Sohnius, Op. I 976.
11º The error of antinomianism consisted then also not therein that it described faith as certainty, but it was herein, that it wiped out the distinction of earning and applying of salvation, of the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, deemed regeneration, conversion etc. needless and unallowed, understood under faith nothing else than an understanding taking of the sentence: your sins are forgiven you, and at last deemed all forgiveness as well as sin itself a fancy without objective reality.
12º As conscious and free taking of Christ with all his benefits faith can here on earth be nothing else than at the same time firm assent and certain trust. Christ namely is glorified and we know Him and his benefits only from his Word. Yet He works not as other historical persons only after through his example, word and spirit, but as He is the only earner of the benefits, so is He also the only owner and sharer of them. He himself through his suffering and dying has become life-giving Spirit and shares himself with his benefits to the believers. Through his Spirit He gives himself to them as He is and as He, because He is taken up into heaven and can no more be seen, has let himself be described through the same Spirit in his Word. Thereby He recreates our being and our consciousness, our doing and our thinking, our heart and understanding; He regenerates and He justifies us and frees us thus from all sin, as well from its stain as from its guilt and from all its followings. Himself prophet and priest and king, He makes us to prophets who proclaim God's thoughts, to priests who devote ourselves to God, to kings who rule over world and death. And faith accepts Christ as He gives himself, Christum evangelio suo vestitum , Calvin, Inst. III 2, 6.
13º Whether one thereby describes faith by knowledge or by trust is not the main thing; both form no contrast. Calvin calls it, Inst. II 6, 7 a firm and certain knowledge of the divine goodwill toward us, but says at the same time that it is more of the heart than of the brain, of the affection than of the understanding, ib. § 8, and speaks of it at Rom. 10:10 as a firm and effective trust. Strictly spoken, there goes in logical sense before faith a trust. We believe someone's witness because we put trust in his person. Believing as act of the understanding rests indeed already on a bending of the will; nemo credit nisi volens , Voetius, Disp. II 499. And there follows also a trust upon it; if I firmly believe something, then I trust thereon and rest therein; faith goes before, faith begets trust; Calvin says that the apostle Eph. 3:12 deduces trust from faith, Inst. III 2, 15, cf. Piscator, in Heppe, Dogm. 387. Voetius, Disp. V 288-300. Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III² 95 f. But however one may set it, faith is in its essence always certainty, shutting out all doubt, fear, despair. In the believer indeed again and again all kinds of care and doubt come up, and all his life he has to fight therewith; but faith is in itself utter certainty, Calvin, Inst. III 2, 17ff. Zanchius, Op. VIII 712 sq. The assurance comes not later from outside to faith, but sits at once in it; the different acts of faith (actus fidei , such as knowledge, assent, trust, rest, peace etc., Voetius, Disp. II 499-512. Witsius, Oec. foed. III c. 7. Turretin, Theol. El. XIV qu. 8, well to be distinguished from fruits of faith or good works) are no steps which in time follow upon each other, but indeed there are in those acts themselves all kinds of degrees: there is small and great, weak and strong faith, there are children and young men, men and fathers in faith. But faith remains by its nature firm certainty, unbounded trust; it is today still the same what it was in Jesus' time, namely, that with God all things are possible, Mk. 10:27, 11:23, 24, that He who raised Christ from the dead, Rom. 4:24, 10:9, still makes dead alive, makes sinners saved and calls the things which are not as if they were, Rom. 4:17.
4. This character of faith comes out clearly where it appears as fides justificans. Justification is not the only fruit of faith, for faith receives Christ and all his benefits; also conversion, sanctification, good works, perseverance, etc., become our portion only through faith; but yet justification is one of the most glorious fruits of faith. Some disapproved of the word justification, justificatio, because through its composition with "to make," facere, it gave occasion to an ethical conception; but just as little as in the expression Deum glorificare, magnificare, to make God great, is there enclosed in the word "to justify" as such a moral change. If this were so, the word would be incorrect here and to be exchanged for righteousness. For Scripture establishes the forensic, judicial meaning of justification beyond all doubt. The Hebrew hitsdiq denotes that act of the judge by which he declares a man innocent, and stands over against hirshia , to condemn, Deuteronomy 25:1, Job 32:2, 33:32; of God it is so used, Exodus 23:7, 1 Kings 8:32, 2 Chronicles 6:23, Isaiah 50:8. The forgiveness of sins is not yet expressed in the Old Testament by this word; this is indicated by or is in any case contained under the words to deliver, Psalm 39:9, 51:16, not to impute, Psalm 32:2, to forget, not to remember, Isaiah 43:25, Jeremiah 31:34, to cast behind the back, Isaiah 38:17, to blot out or wipe away, Psalm 51:3, 11, Isaiah 43:25, to forgive, Exodus 34:9, Psalm 32:1. The Greek word dikaioun means in general: to deem right and just, to judge what is right, and can thus as well in a bad sense, to do justice to the ungodly, that is, to punish, as in a good sense, to do justice to the righteous, to acknowledge him as such, be employed. In the New Testament, under the influence of the Old Testament, it has always acquired a judicial and a favorable meaning. So it occurs in general, Matthew 11:19, where Wisdom, naturally not in an ethical but in a judicial sense, is justified with respect to, apo , her children; likewise Luke 7:29, where the tax collectors justify God, and further Matthew 12:37, Luke 10:29, 16:15, 18:14. Also with Paul the forensic meaning stands firm; in Romans 3:4 it can have no ethical meaning, because God is the subject, who is justified in his words; furthermore, it alternates with logizesthai eis dikaiosunen , 4:3, 5, stands over against krinein , enkalein and katakrinein , 8:33, 34, just as dikaioma over against katakrima , 5:16. It means to acquit someone after judicial investigation from guilt, to declare righteous, dikaion kathistanai , Romans 5:19.
Now, the word הצדיק, δικαιοῦν, to justify, in itself can indeed have an ethical meaning. Thus it is used several times by the church fathers, Suicerus s.v.; by Luther and Melanchthon and in the older symbols of the Lutheran church, especially the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, justificari is used in a twofold sense, as being pronounced or reputed just and being made just from unjust or regenerated, Symbol Books ed. Müller. Wrongly, from this some have deduced, Loofs, The Meaning of the Doctrine of Justification in the Apology for the Symbolism of the Lutheran Church, Studies and Critiques 1884, Eichhorn, The Doctrine of Justification in the Apology, ibid. 1887, and Zitzlaff, The True Meaning of Justification by Faith, ibid. 1898, that the Lutheran Reformation originally conceived justification not in a judicial but in an ethical sense and regarded faith as the very righteousness itself; but on the other hand, the assertion of the Formula of Concord, in Müller, is not correct, that regeneration in the Apology of the Confession is the same as justification. The contrast between Rome and the Reformation in justification was in the first time not formulated in the words ethical or judicial, but in justification by works (love) or by faith, on account of our own works or on account of the righteousness of Christ accepted in faith. Yet this justification on the ground of Christ's righteousness by faith alone, which from the beginning was also conceived by Luther and Melanchthon and in the oldest Lutheran symbols as a declaration of righteousness, was not formally separated from but thought together with a regeneration of man, consisting in that he through that same faith is comforted and uplifted and becomes pleasing to God; which the Formula of Concord again acknowledges, when it says: for when a man is justified, that itself is truly a certain regeneration, because from a son of wrath he becomes a son of God and in this way is transferred from death to life, ibid., cf. further Heppe, Dogmatics of German Protestantism II, Köstlin, Luther's Theology II, Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation III, Nitzsch, Evangelical Dogmatics. Also the Reformed sometimes said that the word justification could have a broader sense and in Isaiah 53:11, Daniel 12:3, 1 Corinthians 6:11, Titus 3:7, Revelation 22:11 must be understood so, e.g. Synopsis of Pure Theology 33, 3; while others also in all those places held to the narrower meaning of declaration of righteousness, Witsius, Economy of the Covenants III 8, 6 sq. 12, 14. Mastricht, Theology VI 6, 19. Moor IV. Owen, Justification by Faith, Amsterdam 1797. Indeed, the word in itself allows us to understand under it the whole work of redemption. The recreation is, as it in its entirety can be called a rebirth, also from beginning to end a justification, a restoration of the state and the standing of the fallen world and mankind before God and with respect to itself. But although this meaning of the word is not impossible, although there is in itself nothing against supposing that Scripture sometimes uses the word in the sense of sanctification or at least includes it thereunder, exegetically this is nevertheless not probable. Isaiah 53:11 says that the servant of the Lord by his knowledge, that is, by knowledge of him or also by his knowledge, will justify many; the judicial meaning is here not only possible but is made probable by the addition: and he will bear their iniquities. Likewise in Daniel 12:3 it is said of the leaders and teachers of God's people that they justify many, that is, by their righteousness, their faithfulness to the law, they are an example to many, to follow them and thus also to be reckoned among the righteous. In 1 Corinthians 6:11 the judicial meaning of δικαιοῦν is now almost universally recognized; Paul there reminds the Corinthians that they, formerly unjust, have been washed, sanctified, justified; from the first word it appears that Paul thinks of baptism, and the three concepts do not indicate that the Corinthians received these benefits successively, in time after each other, but from the repeated but they contain a climax; then, in baptism, they were not only negatively washed from the sins of their former walk and positively sanctified, but they were also placed in an entirely different state, in the state of the righteous, by a judicial judgment of God; and all those benefits became their portion in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of our God; these last words also apply to justification, which has its objective foundation in Christ and realizes itself to the believers in the Spirit, Gloël, The Holy Spirit, Gennrich, Studies and Critiques 1898. Titus 3:7 contains no single reason to deviate from the usual, judicial meaning of δικαιοῦν. In Revelation 22:11 the reading δικαιωθήτω deserves preference because of the parallel forms and means that he who is righteous, by acting righteously, may be recognized even more as righteous. Thus all stringent proof is lacking that the word δικαιοῦν in Scripture is ever used in an ethical sense; but even if this were the case a single time, when there is talk of the justification of the sinner before God, it always has a judicial meaning. The Roman Catholics try in vain to overthrow this exegetical result, cf. e.g. B. Bartmann, St. Paul and St. James on Justification, Freiburg 1897.
5. Now God says in his law that the righteous must be justified and the unrighteous condemned, Deut. 25:1, and all consciences and senses of justice agree with this. God himself acts according to this rule; he by no means holds the guilty innocent and does not condemn the innocent, Ex. 20:5ff., 34:7, Num. 14:18. Whoever justifies the wicked and condemns the righteous is an abomination to the Lord, yes both of them, Prov. 17:15, cf. Ex. 23:7, Prov. 24:24, Isa. 5:23. And yet, seemingly in contradiction to this and as if contradicting himself, Rom. 1:18, 2:13, Paul says that God justifies the ungodly, 4:5. For man has no righteousness in himself on the ground of which he could be acquitted by God. The Pelagian-minded, who find the ground of acquittal in faith, that is, in the good disposition, virtues, and good works of man, and regard these as perfect because they carry the pledge of perfection in themselves or are also reckoned as perfect by God for Christ's sake, come into conflict on all points with the teaching of Scripture and the Christian confession. For Scripture testifies that by the works of the law no flesh can or shall be justified, Isa. 64:6, Rom. 3:19, 20, 8:7, Eph. 2:2, etc. The works performed after justification out of faith cannot be taken into account for justification, because then the order of salvation would be reversed and justification would be made dependent on sanctification, and also those good works are still always imperfect and stained with sin, not answering to the full demand of the divine law, Matt. 22:37, Gal. 3:10, James 2:10. God as the true one cannot hold as perfect what is not; as the righteous and holy one he cannot waive the demand of the law nor content himself with a half-righteousness, which at bottom is none. Scripture therefore sets one's own righteousness and the righteousness of faith or the righteousness of God over against each other, Rom. 10:3, Phil. 3:9; they exclude each other as works and faith, Rom. 3:28, Gal. 2:16, as wage and grace, Rom. 4:4, 11:6. While the law thus condemns man on account of his sin and must condemn him, it has pleased God to reveal another righteousness that can be the ground of his acquittal.
This righteousness is called by Paul dikaiosynē theou . The expression occurs, besides James 1:20 and 2 Pet. 1:1, in Paul in Rom. 1:17, 3:5, 21, 22, 25, 26, 10:3, 2 Cor. 5:21, Phil. 3:9, and has a peculiar meaning in him. In the Old Testament the righteousness of God is that virtue by which he judges righteously, does not hold the guilty as innocent nor the innocent as guilty, and then especially helps and saves the poor, the wretched, who personally are indeed guilty but objectively have right on their side, and acknowledges them in their right. But this righteousness of God seemed at the end of the Old Testament economy to have wholly vanished and gone to ruin; for the whole world was condemnable before God, Rom. 3:19, by the works of the law no one was justified before God, 3:20, the sins committed before had been passed over unpunished in God's forbearance, 3:25. It was therefore necessary that his righteousness be revealed again. God did this now, not by condemning the whole world, but by giving in Christ a hilastērion , a means of propitiation or propitiatory sacrifice, for sins. Thereby it became evident that God himself was righteous, but thereby it also became possible that he, while preserving, yes in agreement with his righteousness, could justify him who is of the faith of Jesus, 3:25, 26. For, and thus Paul comes to his own modification of the concept of dikaiosynē theou --in Christ, in the gospel, God has, apart from the law, revealed a "righteousness of God" standing over against the idia dikaiosynē . His righteousness as virtue has shown itself most gloriously therein, that in the gospel he has bestowed another righteousness, bypassing the works of the law, on the ground of which he can justify him who is of the faith of Jesus. This is called righteousness of God, not because it is a righteousness of man which is indeed outside him but is accepted by him in faith and actually counts "before God" (gen. obj., appealing e.g. to Rom. 2:13, Gal. 3:11, para tō theō , 3:20, enōpion autou ) as such, Luther, Calvin, Kant, Philippi, Umbreit, Fritzsche; nor because it is a righteousness of man which is infused into him and by which he can stand before God, Osiander, Schleiermacher, Rothe, Martensen, Nitzsch, Beck, etc.; but because it is a righteousness which is not of men but of God, which he possesses, which therefore he alone gives and can give, which is not from man but ek theou , Rom. 10:3, 5, Phil. 3:9; so most recent exegetes, whether they take the genitive more as a gen. subjecti (Haussleiter), possessivus (Fricke) or originis, auctoris, causae efficientis (Bengel, Rückert, van Hengel, Winer, Baur, Hofmann, Godet, Weiss, Pfleiderer, Holtzmann, etc.); cf. besides the literature already mentioned earlier: Rauwenhoff, Disq. de loco Paulino, qui est de dikaiōsei , Leiden 1852. Lipsius, Die Paulin. Rechtfertigungslehre, Leipzig 1853. Ortloph, Zeits. f. luth. Theol. u. Kirche 1860. Schultz, Die Lehre v. d. Gerecht. aus d. Glauben im A. u. N. B., Jahrb. f. d. Th. 1862 p. 510-572. Cremer s. v. dik . Weiss, Bibl. Theol. §82. Pfleiderer, Der Paulin.² 183. Weiszäcker, Das apost. Zeitalter² 143. H. Beck, Die dik. theou bei Paulus, Neue Jahrb. f. d. Th. 1894 p. 249-261. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 127. Häring, Dik. theou bei Paulus, Tübingen 1896 (takes dik. theou as act, justification of God, just as Kölbing, Stud. u. Krit. 1895 p. 7-17).
Although this righteousness is now a righteousness of God, it is yet imparted to man, and the connection between it and man is laid by Paul in faith. This righteousness of God is there; it is no more wrought by man, by faith, than the reconciliation, 2 Cor. 5:19, but lies objectively in Christ, Rom. 4:25, 1 Cor. 1:30; it is revealed in the gospel, 1:17, 3:21; it is a gift, a gift of grace, 3:24, 5:15, 16, 17; nevertheless, or rather just therefore, 4:16, it is through faith in Jesus Christ, 3:22, Phil. 3:9, from faith, 9:30, 10:6, a righteousness of faith, 4:11, 13, in the possession of man upon faith, Phil. 3:9; it is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith, 1:17, unto all that believe, 3:22, cf. 10:4, 10; God justifies him that is of the faith of Jesus, 3:26, from or through faith, 3:30, Gal. 3:8, and man is justified by faith, 3:28, from faith, 5:1, Gal. 3:24, through faith, Gal. 2:16; faith is reckoned unto righteousness, Rom. 4:3, 5, 9, 11, 22, and the righteous lives from faith, 1:17, Gal. 3:11. What place, then, according to these expressions, comes to faith in justification? Apart from those who modernize Paul, take faith as a good disposition, and let God take the will for the deed, there are only two opinions possible. The first is that of Romanists, Remonstrants, Mystics, Ethicists, and many newer Protestant theologians, who say that faith is indeed specially faith in Christ but yet take it as the whole or as a piece of that righteousness on the ground of which God acquits the sinner; that faith is indeed imperfect and not answering to the demand of the law; but God yet holds it for a perfect righteousness and is satisfied therewith, whether for the sake of Christ, or because it is yet an obedience to God's will in the gospel and makes man acceptable to God, or because it is in principle perfect and carries in itself the pledge of future perfection. But this opinion is for various reasons in conflict with Scripture.
1. The righteousness which is the ground of justification is a righteousness of God and not of man; it is imparted to man only through a gift of grace; it thus lies ready before his faith in Christ and needs no supplement at all. For God has set forth Christ as a propitiation, 3:24, and this Christ is delivered up for our sins, 4:25, died for us, 5:6-11, became a curse, Gal. 3:13, was made sin, 2 Cor. 5:21, and is thus also raised for our justification, Rom. 4:25, that is, because we were justified in Him; He is our righteousness, 1 Cor. 1:30, and we are justified through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 3:24, in His blood, 5:9, in Christ, Gal. 2:16. In Rom. 5:12ff. Paul argues that with Christ it goes as with Adam. On the ground of one transgression all men are condemned and subjected to death; but so also the gracious gift of righteousness in Christ is unto justification, that is, unto an acquitting judgment for many, 5:16. For through one justification, that is, the acquitting judgment over Christ in His resurrection, 4:25, it comes with all men unto justification of life, that is, the act of justification which brings life, 5:18. Through the obedience of one the many are constituted righteous, 5:19. Beside the righteousness which God gave in Christ, and on the ground of which He justified Christ as Mediator of the covenant for all His own in His resurrection, there is no place for a righteousness consisting in faith or love. The latter would annul the former.
2. Nowhere, therefore, is faith presented as the ground of justification. Righteousness, justification is from or through faith, but never on account of faith. Indeed, Phil. 3:9 stands that Paul possessed the righteousness through Christ, from God, upon faith, on the ground of his faith, but the righteousness which Paul possessed is clearly described as through faith, from God; he only says that he possessed that righteousness of God for himself on the foundation of faith. Never does faith appear as the righteousness itself or as a part thereof; on the contrary, just because it is according to grace, it is from faith. Grace and faith do not stand over against each other, but indeed faith and works, righteousness of faith and righteousness from works, Rom. 3:20-28, 4:4-6, 13, 14, 9:32, 10:5, 6, Gal. 2:16, 3:11, 12, 23, 25, 5:4, 5, Eph. 2:8, 9. Faith justifies not by its essence or act, because it itself is righteousness, but by its content, because it is faith in Christ, our righteousness. If faith justified on account of itself, the object of that faith, namely Christ, would wholly lose His value. But the faith that justifies is just that which has Christ as object and content. If therefore righteousness were from the law, and faith a work that had merit and value and made man acceptable to God, then Christ would have died in vain, Gal. 2:21. So little does faith come into consideration as ground in justification that Paul can say that God justifies the ungodly, Rom. 4:5. Even when his doctrine provokes the accusation that it leads to carelessness and ungodliness, he never defends himself therewith that faith is wholly or in part the ground of justification, Rom. 3:5-8, 6:1, but he maintains that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, because Christ died and rose for them, Rom. 8:33, 34.
3. Because faith is thus no work but a renouncing of all work, an unbounded trust in God, who makes the dead alive, Rom. 4:17, who raised Christ, 4:24, who in Christ has given a righteousness of God, 3:22-26, therefore the expression that faith is reckoned unto righteousness cannot mean that it itself as a work of righteousness is accepted by God in the place of or beside the righteousness of God in Christ. For the word "reckon" can indeed mean: to hold or count someone for what he is, 1 Cor. 4:1, 2 Cor. 12:6, but it can also have the sense of: to impute to someone something which he personally does not have. Thus sins are not imputed to him who believes, although he has them, Rom. 4:8, 2 Cor. 5:19, cf. 2 Tim. 4:16; thus they were imputed to Christ, although He was without any sin, Isa. 53:4, 5, 6, Matt. 20:28, Rom. 3:25, 8:3, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13, 1 Tim. 2:6; and thus in the same way righteousness is imputed to him who believes, which he does not have, Rom. 4:5, and therefore that imputing is according to grace, 4:4, it is a reckoning of righteousness without works, 4:6. The words: faith is reckoned unto righteousness, are a shortened expression for that God imputes to someone His righteousness revealed in Christ in faith and on that ground acquits him. This is confirmed by that other expression: the righteous shall live from faith. Faith is properly not the principle and source of life, for Christ is the life and gives the life, Rom. 5:17, 18, 6:4ff., 2 Cor. 4:10, 11, Gal. 2:20, Col. 3:3, 4, 2 Tim. 1:10, cf. John 1:4, 6:33ff., 11:25, 1 John 1:2, 5:11 etc. He who believes has the life, just because he receives it from Christ; and so also he who believes has the righteousness of God, which God gives him in Christ.
4. To this comes finally yet that, if faith itself is the ground of justification, God is satisfied with a lesser righteousness than that which He demands in His law. The gospel then does not confirm, as Rom. 3:31 says, but annuls the law. God renounces His own righteousness and denies Himself. Or else He reckons faith for something that it is not, for a complete and sufficient righteousness, and does injury to His truthfulness. The accusation which the advocates of infused righteousness bring against imputed righteousness, that God holds someone for what He is not, returns to themselves; they precisely let God reckon something for righteousness which it is not. And besides, they take away the comfort of believers. If our faith, which is often so small and so weak and often wholly hides under doubt and fear, which according to the defenders of infused righteousness can even be wholly lost, if that faith is the ground of our justification, the Christian life is a life of continual fear and uncertainty; instead of to Christ, the eye of faith is ever turned inward, to itself; a true Christian life in the service of God becomes impossible, for first the fear of God as Judge must be changed into the consciousness of His fatherly love, before there can be speech of truly good works.
6. Yet the objection brought against the imputed righteousness must be seriously considered. First, Bellarmine, in De Justificatione II c. 7, developed it in this way: the righteousness of Christ, if only imputed to us and thus remaining outside us, cannot be the form in which we are justified before God. For God's judgment is according to truth. He cannot declare someone righteous who is not; as long as the righteousness of Christ is only imputed and remains outside the person, he is not righteous and cannot be declared righteous. One will say: but the sinner is yet clothed with Christ's righteousness through faith! But, even if that be so, if someone appears in twofold form, in an extrinsic form and an inherent form, then he is named not after the first but after the latter. Let an Ethiopian don a white garment, he yet remains black and is so called, even though he is white according to the extrinsic form. Yes, even stronger: Christ also can be considered in twofold form; according to the intrinsic form He was holy, according to the extrinsic form He was laden with our sins; yet He is named not after this but after that. And so in justification the imputed righteousness cannot be our form; we can only be justified on the ground of a righteousness dwelling in us. This objection of Bellarmine returns with all opponents of the Reformed doctrine; all that one has against the doctrine of imputed righteousness comes down to this.
To begin with the last, Christ is indeed in Scripture named and treated according to the extrinsic form; He is even called made sin for us and become a curse for us. In a legal, juridical sense Christ can be called a sinner, although to avoid antinomian misunderstanding the expression deserves no recommendation. And so it is said in Romans 4:5 and 5:6 that God justifies the ungodly. Stronger expressions than these cannot be used. The opponents of imputed righteousness must bring their objection not against Luther and Calvin but against Paul.
Second, the image of the Moor is unhappily chosen. The twofold form in which the person appears in justification stands in a wholly different relation than that of the black skin and the white garment with the Ethiopian. The person is ungodly in an ethical sense, but he becomes righteous in a juridical sense on account of Christ's righteousness; the donning of a white garment, however, brings absolutely no legal change to the Ethiopian. More accurate is the image of the child who, adopted in grace by a rich man, may already be called rich as future heir, even though at the moment he has nothing in his possession. God declares the sinner righteous, adopts him as His child, promises him Christ and all His benefits, and therefore he is righteous and will one day be placed in possession of all the treasures of grace.
Third, the imputation of Christ's righteousness is, however, wholly misunderstood by Bellarmine and his fellows. They represent it as a fiction that conflicts with reality; imputed righteousness is according to them a righteousness that exists only in the imagination, and infused righteousness alone is true, essential righteousness. That is, however, a wholly wrong representation. Justification is just as true as sanctification, imputation just as real as infusion. This is only the difference: in justification righteousness is bestowed on us in a juridical sense, in sanctification it becomes our portion in an ethical sense. Both are equally essential and both equally necessary. First the judge must pronounce someone's right to a certain pledge before he can come into possession of it; the first is no fiction, no imagination that matters nothing and conflicts with reality; no, first the imputation of righteousness is necessary, the recognition of the right, and only then can the infusion of righteousness follow, the taking possession of that to which there is a right. If this is already true with the earthly judge, how much more with the heavenly? When God justifies the ungodly, that is no fiction, no putative imputation, but then it is and becomes so. As God pronounces judgment, so it is and so it remains eternally, and so it will one day be acknowledged by all in the day of judgment. For God, when He justifies the ungodly, does that on the ground of a righteousness which He Himself has provided in Christ; by Christ's offering He has acquired over against all hostile power the right to acquit the ungodly; and when He pronounces judgment, He will also execute it. The ungodly is righteous in a legal sense, he will therefore certainly also become so in an ethical sense. For God is He who makes the dead alive and calls the things that are not as though they were. And justifying faith consists precisely in unshakable trust in that God of wonders, with whom all things are possible.
Fourth, the righteousness on the ground of which the ungodly is justified is indeed not his own; it is a righteousness of God, standing over against one's own righteousness. But it is yet not a foreign one standing outside him in such a sense that it concerns him not at all and stands in no relation to him. On the contrary, already in the covenant of grace Christ has placed Himself in relation to His own and as Mediator taken their place. In the state of humiliation He died for their sins, and He was raised for their justification. There exists a covenant of grace, a mystical union between Christ and His church, long before believers are personally incorporated into it; otherwise Christ could not have satisfied for them. There takes place an imputation and bestowal of Christ and all His benefits from God's side before particular persons come to faith. Specifically, that imputation and bestowal takes place in the internal call, and regeneration is the passive acceptance of this gift of grace. God must also first give, that we may receive. The very first grace bestowed on us already presupposes the imputation of Christ, for He is the only source of grace, the acquirer and distributor of the Spirit, who is His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Foreign, therefore, is the righteousness that is the ground of justification only in a certain sense. It is the righteousness of the Head but therefore also of all the members, of the Mediator but thus also of all the covenant partners.
7. Yet even with this, the Reformed doctrine of justification has not been set forth in its full light. Although it may be true that there is already an imputation and bestowal of Christ to His own in the covenant of redemption, in the incarnation and satisfaction, in the outward and inward calling; this is still not enough, it is not yet the proper justification. It is true that Reformed theology soon began to distinguish between the active justification, which takes place before, and the passive justification, which occurs after faith, and to set the former as the proper justification over against the latter as a coming to consciousness of the justification that has already taken place. Scripture gives some ground for this in Romans 4:25 and 2 Corinthians 5:19, and also in more recent theology this Reformed idea has often been acknowledged as correct, albeit for other reasons and with other intentions, cf. for example Schelling, Works II 4 p. 217 ff. Dorner, Christian Faith II 754 ff. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation III² 76 ff. Kaftan, Dogmatics 493 ff. etc. There is such an important truth in this that its denial inevitably leads to Remonstrant views. God does not wait with the acquittal of the sinner until he, as it were, outside of Him, has taken up the righteousness of Christ by faith; the imputation and bestowal of Christ and His benefits precede faith, they have taken place in the decree of the Father, in the satisfaction of Christ, in the internal calling of the Holy Spirit. But however true all this may be, it is nevertheless noteworthy that Scripture never designates this imputation with the name of justification but always understands thereunder that acquittal of God which takes place from and through faith. At the very least, this implies that justification from faith occupies a more weighty place in the order of salvation than those who lay the emphasis on the active justification can grant it.
Besides the fact that this presentation of the doctrine of justification deviates from the consistent usage of Holy Scripture, it also gives occasion for misunderstanding, necessitates exegetical violences, and does not allow justification from faith to come into its own sufficiently as God's acquitting act. One can indeed speak of eternal justification and mean and understand it in a good sense; but the expression is not without objection; the Reformed rejected it almost without exception, also Maccovius, L. C. 676, Voetius, Disp. V 281, Westminster Synod XI 4, and even Comrie, Brahe, and others accepted it only in a limited and well-defined sense, Comrie, Letter on Justification, Sneek 1858 p. 91ff. Brahe, Theological Theses on the Doctrine of Justification, Amsterdam 1833 p. 26ff. For in God not only justification, but all that He thinks and does is eternal. In that sense, as an immanent act, creation is also eternal, but whoever would therefore speak of eternal creation would cause confusion and introduce a pantheistic terminology. And so it is also with preservation, government, regeneration, calling, sanctification, and glorification, and no less with justification. One can also speak in a good sense of a justification in the resurrection of Christ and in the gospel; but yet there is a great difference between this and that which takes place from faith and which more specifically in Scripture bears the name of justification. The former concerns Christ as surety for His own, but the latter concerns the believers themselves, and not only those believers as a whole, as a church conceived, as Ritschl claims, Justification and Reconciliation III 103 ff., but also all of them personally, as is indisputably proven from Romans 3:26, 4:3, 24, 5:19, 8:1, 30, 10:4, 10, 1 Corinthians 6:11, Galatians 2:16, Philippians 3:9, etc.
This latter justification is no accidental element that is added to the proper and essential justification in God's decree, in Christ's resurrection, or in the calling through the gospel; but it forms in justification, which as it were begins in eternity and only receives its full completion in the last judgment, an indispensable and most important moment. The application of salvation by the Holy Spirit may in no respect be made into an acquisition of salvation, for the Holy Spirit takes all from Christ; but the application is nevertheless in its domain just as necessary and of just as great significance as the acquisition. Therefore, entrance into the kingdom of heaven is made dependent in Scripture on regeneration, faith, and conversion. And acquisition and application stand in such close connection that the first is not thinkable or possible without the second, and conversely the second not without the first. The acquisition necessarily brings with it the application; by His suffering and dying, Christ has also acquired that all His benefits, thus also the forgiveness of sins, would be applied personally and individually to all His own. It is not only about objective satisfaction for Christ as Savior, but also about subjective deliverance of His own from sin. This now does not come about through an objective justification in God's decree or in Christ's resurrection, but it only receives its completion when man is freed both in being and in consciousness from sin, and thus is regenerated and justified. It is on this justification that Scripture usually has its eye when it uses this word or also speaks of forgiveness of sins, etc. Paul in particular, when speaking of justification, does not think of an eternal act in God, for he speaks of it as from, through faith. Nor does he indicate with a single word that it consists in God at a given moment, for example when man believes, silently to Himself, in the heavenly court, acquitting him of guilt and punishment and giving him right to eternal life. For only God's counsel is an immanent act, but all other works of God, creation, preservation, government, redemption, justification, etc., belong to the transient acts; they are not the order of reason but the execution of the order, above p. 6. Nor does Paul think of the so-called passive justification in justification from faith, at least not when this is temporally separated from the active justification and conceived as a coming to consciousness of the justification that took place long before; for he lays all emphasis precisely on the fact that God justifies from and through faith.
We stand here, as so often, before the mystery of the relation of eternity and time. As Christians we confess that God's eternal will, without ceasing to be eternal, can produce effects in time, just as His eternal thinking can also have temporal things as content. In justification from faith, it is not a acquittal spoken by God centuries ago that finally comes to man's consciousness; but God, who is unchangeable, is Himself the acting one when He acquits the sinner through faith. From Him proceeds, without His ceasing to be the Eternal One, that activity which is received and enjoyed by man as justification from faith. The application is just as much as the acquisition of salvation a work of God from moment to moment, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Also in justification from faith all three persons are involved. It is the Father who through the Son and in the Spirit justifies the sinner, Romans 8:33, 34, 1 Corinthians 6:11. Paul does not think of making a separation here and transferring the justification by the Father to eternity, that of the Son to the resurrection, and that of the Holy Spirit to man's consciousness. But just as all three worked together in the acquisition, so they also work together in the application of salvation. In the former, guilt and punishment were taken away and life acquired; in the latter, man is also placed by God on his side and subjectively in that relation in which he already stood objectively in Christ as his surety and mediator. Just as regeneration in the subjective sense frees from the stain of sin, so justification takes away the guilt of sin. Both are equally necessary, equally real, equally grounded in Christ's sacrifice, but also in the application of the same high significance.
This justification therefore does not bypass man but takes place from and through faith. Scripture undoubtedly most often thinks of faith as an act. But naturally, faith as a habit is not thereby excluded; regenerated little children and adult believers have and hold in this habit of faith God's acquittal, the testimony of the Holy Spirit that they are children of God, even if their spirit does not always testify along with it. But further, Scripture sets this justification from faith sharply and strictly against that from works. However, this opposition does not mean that faith is no work and no beginning of good works. It does not force us to search so long until we find in the inner nature of faith something that is no work, no deed, but only passivity. The opposition that Scripture, and especially Paul, makes is this: that justification does not come about through the works of the law, that is, it does not have in such works its ground, its meritorious cause. For God has given in Christ another, better righteousness than sinful works can offer; and that righteousness, that is Christ, is the only and sufficient ground of our justification. In the opposition "not from works but from faith," the preposition "from" thus has a different meaning in both parts. In the first part, it indicates that works of the law cannot be the righteousness on the ground of which God can acquit us; but in the second part, it points out, not that faith itself can well be that righteousness, but that it seeks that righteousness, which is needed to be justified, precisely not in man in his works, but outside him in Christ. The opposition thus reads purely as follows: not the own righteousness of works, but the righteousness of God in Christ.
Although this righteousness is now fully acquired by Christ and lies ready in Him, although it is imputed and bestowed in the internal calling and thus in a logical sense before regeneration and faith, yet from man's side it is first accepted in faith (habit or act of faith) and then first becomes the ground on which he himself personally is justified by God in the above-mentioned sense. Faith is therefore no material or formal cause, it is not even a condition or instrument (instrumental cause) of justification; for it stands to it not as, for example, the eye to seeing or the ear to hearing; it is no condition on which and no instrument through which we receive justification, but it is the act of accepting Christ Himself and indeed of Christ as He gives Himself inwardly through the Spirit and outwardly through the Word to us, and thus the firm, certain awareness that He is my Lord and I am His property. Faith is no instrument with which man accepts Christ, but much more a means of the Holy Spirit, through which He makes man accept Christ and makes his spirit testify with Himself that he is a child of God. Calvin, Institutes III 11, 5. Heidelberg Catechism, question 61. Belgic Confession, article 22. Witsius, Miscellanea Sacra II 792. 797 sq. Trigland, Antapologia p. 515. Mastricht, VI 6, 28. Owen, On Justification by Faith c. 3. Moor IV 695. M. Vitringa III 295. Jonathan Edwards in Dorner II 752. Therefore, faith does not stand in every respect against all work. It stands against the works of the law in a double sense, namely, in that they can be neither the material cause nor the instrumental cause of justification. It also stands against the works of faith (infused righteousness, obedience, love) as soon as these are considered even in the slightest degree as ground of justification, as forming wholly or in part that righteousness on the ground of which God justifies us; for that is Christ and Christ alone; faith itself is no ground of justification and thus also not the good works that flow from it. But faith does not stand against the works of faith insofar as these, as fruits of faith, are used by the Holy Spirit as means to assure the believer of the uprightness of his faith, and thus of his salvation. Heidelberg Catechism, question 86. In this sense, faith itself is a work, John 6:29, the best work and beginning of all good works, the only work through which God can free us here on earth from our guilt and assure us of our righteousness in Christ. Therefore the Reformed also said that it is indeed faith alone which justifies, yet the faith which justifies is not alone. Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum 7, 477. Institutes III 11, 20, and they spoke after the justification of the sinner also of a justification of the righteous. In this sense, Paul and James are not in contradiction with each other. Indeed, it is not correct to say that Paul speaks only of the justification of the sinner and James of the justification of the righteous. But both deny that the ground of justification lies in the works of the law, and both acknowledge that faith, living faith, faith that includes and brings forth good works, is the means through which the Holy Spirit assures us of our righteousness in Christ. Besides, there is only this difference, that Paul fights against dead works and James contends against a dead faith. The faith that justifies is the certainty worked in our heart by the Holy Spirit of our righteousness in Christ. And therefore, not the more passive, but the more living and the more powerful it is, the more it justifies us. Faith works together with works and is perfected from the works, James 2:22. Cf. on James and Paul: Calvin, Institutes III 17, 11 sq. Commentary on James 2. Turretin, on the concord of Paul and James, de satisfactione 384 sq. Trigland, Antapologia c. 21. Witsius, Oeconomia Foederum III 8, 21-26. M. Vitringa III 317. James Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification, Edinburgh 1867 p. 491. Usteri, Studien und Kritiken 1889, 2nd issue. Schwarz ibid. 1891, 4th issue. Böhmer, Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift 1898 pp. 251-256.
8. Concerning the parts of justification, there was from the beginning some disagreement in the churches of the Reformation. Those who with Piscator denied the active obedience had to limit justification to the forgiveness of sins and thus sooner or later come to the conclusion that believers, after being freed by Christ from the guilt and punishment of sin, themselves had to fulfill the law in order to gain eternal life. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation . Therefore this view was also quite generally rejected; although the forgiveness of sins could also be taken synecdochically, as part for the whole, for the whole of justification, yet this included more than forgiveness alone. For Christ has not merely restored us to the state of Adam before the fall, but has also kept the law for us and gained eternal life, cf. Gomarus on Luke 1:77, Works . Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology . Moor. Hodge. But although it was quite generally acknowledged that justification embraced more than the forgiveness of sins, yet there was again disagreement about wherein that more consisted. Older theologians often named as the second part of justification the imputation of Christ's righteousness, Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, Quenstedt, Polanus, Wollebius, Junius, Trelcatius, Rivetus, Dutch Confession art. 23 etc., cf. M. Vitringa. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation . Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation . Although this is not exactly untrue, if by the imputed righteousness of Christ his active obedience is understood, yet the parts are not purely coordinated and they also make too strong a separation between Christ's passive and active obedience, cf. Mastricht. Therefore it is better to describe justification by the imputation of Christ's whole obedience, as in Paul the word dikaioun alternates with logizesthai eis dikaiosynēn , cf. Heidelberg Catechism qu. 60. Synopsis of Pure Theology 33, 8; and it is even more accurate to let the two parts of justification consist in the forgiveness of sins and in the granting of the right to eternal life, since these benefits are built on the imputation of Christ's whole obedience, Voetius, Disputations . Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology . As the second part, adoption as children was sometimes named, Turretin, ibid. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation . Pfleiderer, Paulinism . Holtzmann, New Testament Theology ; but others, such as Martyr, Loci Communes , regarded this rather as a fruit of justification.
Now as regards the forgiveness of sins, this consists not in the taking away of the stain of sin, as Rome claims, insofar as it makes justification consist in the infusion of grace and makes forgiveness hang on sanctification. Nor does it consist only in the taking away of the guilt of sin, that is, in truth in the freeing from the everlasting punishment, while the punishment for venial sins, committed after the infusion of grace, must be atoned for by man himself here or hereafter in purgatory, for guilt and punishment are kindred thoughts. But the forgiveness, which is a part of justification, is nothing less than the full pardoning of all guilt and of all punishment of sin, and not only of the past and present but also of the future sins.
Some had, out of fear for antinomianism, qualms against this rich and broad understanding of forgiveness, and therefore narrowed it to the pardoning of the guilt of past and each time confessed sins, with appeal also to Matthew 6:12, 1 John 1:9, 2:1, and so on. Over against antinomianism they upheld an weighty truth. It is a fact that believers after receiving forgiveness still stumble in many things, sometimes even fall into gross sins, and keep on undergoing all kinds of hardships in life as punishment. Rome thinks from this to be able to infer that believers must still atone for their venial sins themselves, and thus does harm to the richness and grace of forgiveness; antinomianism wants to honor the latter and therefore thinks that the sins which believers commit do not count against the new man but only against the old man, and that believers even have no need to pray for forgiveness of sins anymore. Over against this, all Reformed held fast that forgiveness indeed takes away the actual guilt but not the potential guilt of sin; that is, forgiveness takes away the punishment but not the punishworthiness of sin. This last remains as long as the sin remains. Sin brings, also and especially with believers, guilt-feeling, sorrow, regret, estrangement from God, humbling, and so on; it takes away the rest of the conscience, the boldness and assurance of faith. That cannot be otherwise; the nature of sin is such that it necessarily includes guilt-feeling and punishworthiness. Even when believers, after having already long received forgiveness, later learn to look deeper into the corruption of their own heart, they have need to make confession even of the sins of their youth and to trace back their guilt to their conception and birth, Psalm 25:6, 51:6, 7. This confession is then no condition of forgiveness; but whoever truly knows his sin confesses it of himself and feels all the stronger need for the comfort of forgiveness. Therefore the prayer for forgiveness remains needful for the believer daily. But he prays then not in doubt and despair, he prays not as if he were now no longer a child of God and had to await everlasting damnation again, but he prays out of and in faith, as a child, to his Father who is in heaven, and says amen to his prayer. And this praying is not only a need, but it is also needful; for justification consists not in a transcendent acquittal of the sinner with God in the court of heaven, but it is a passing act, which is brought into the consciousness of the believer by the Holy Ghost, and in this oneness in Scripture bears the name of justification. Confession and prayer is therefore the way along which God awakens and strengthens this consciousness of forgiveness in the believer again. Under sin it goes hidden; faith as a habit remains indeed, but it can no longer utter itself in deeds. That this faith may live again, that the Spirit of God may again loudly and strongly witness with our spirit that we are children of God; for this after sin humbling, confession, plea for forgiveness is needful. If we stood fully in faith, we would never doubt the forgiveness of our sins, our childship, the future inheritance, and we would also never take or feel any mishap in this life as a punishment but only as a chastening of the Lord. But to stand fully in faith would only be possible if we were also raised above sin. Since this is not so and sin always brings doubt with it, therefore conversion and confession remains the means by which God brings us again to his fellowship and assures us of his favor. From this however it may not be inferred that God each time forgives only the past and confessed sins. For all sins of the church have been laid on Christ and he has atoned for them all in his blood. In the reckoning of Christ to the elect in the covenant of redemption, incarnation and resurrection, in outward and inward calling he is given to them with all his benefits. As soon as they accept this gift of God, they also from their side are at once put in a new bond to God, which is unchanging and unbreakable. And the workings of faith may be lacking for a time, yet the gift of faith is unloseable, by which they are grafted into Christ and accept all his benefits, John 3:36, Romans 8:30, Galatians 3:27, Hebrews 9:12, 10:12, 14, and so on. Therefore believers have the boldness, after every stumbling and after every fall, to go with trust to the throne of grace and to plead on the faithfulness of him whose gifts of grace and calling are without repentance, Romans 11:29, Hebrews 4:12, 1 John 1:9.
This benefit of the forgiveness of sins is so great that it is unbelievable to the natural man. Heathens knew it not and thought they must earn the favor of the gods through all kinds of works; Celsus mocked it and deemed it a foolishness, cf. Witsius, de theol. gentilium circa justificationem, Misc. Sacr. II. Even most Christians make it dependent on faith and good works. Everything pleads against it: sin itself, which demands punishment; the conscience, which accuses; the law, which condemns; the world, which knows no mercy; Satan, who is an accuser of the whole human race; God himself, whose righteousness and holiness cannot tolerate sin. The forgiveness of sins is a gift that can only be received and enjoyed through faith. It is not an object of sight but of faith. To confess it in truth requires the same faith that alone enables one to accept the divine authority of Holy Scripture, the deity of Christ, his satisfaction, and resurrection. The objections brought against all these dogmas are in essence no different from those against the forgiveness of sins. Appearance is against it. But faith is also a sure ground of the things hoped for and a proof of the things not seen. It is faith in a God who works wonders, who makes the dead alive, who calls the things that are not as though they were, and who justifies the ungodly. So much does this forgiveness of sins stand in the foreground in Scripture that it is sometimes identified with justification. Yet another benefit is connected with it, equally rich and glorious, which may not be separated from it but yet distinguished. It is the granting of the right to eternal life, or adoption as children, immediately named by Paul alongside redemption from the law, Gal. 4:5, cf. Dan. 9:24, Acts 26:18, Rev. 1:5, 6. Already in the Old Testament, God is called the Father of his people and Israel his son, part II. But in the New Testament, this fatherhood and sonship gain a much deeper meaning. God is now, not in a theocratic but in an ethical sense, the Father of believers, and they are his children, tekna , born of him, and therefore through faith in Christ receiving the exousia to become such, genesthai , until they shall one day be perfect, when they shall see God as he is, 1 John 3:2. This ethical childhood, which especially appears in John, belongs not here but to regeneration and sanctification. On the other hand, Paul speaks of huiothesia in a juridical sense. Just as believers receive forgiveness of sins on the ground of Christ's righteousness, so they are also adopted as children, huioi theou (not tekna ). This huiothesia , which thus rests on a declaration of God, is acquired by Christ, Gal. 4:5, and becomes our portion through faith, 3:26. Whoever is acquitted of the guilt and punishment of sin is thereby at the same time adopted as a son and made an object of God's fatherly love. Believers are thereby placed in the same standing as Christ, who is the firstborn among many brethren, Rom. 8:29. He was the Son of God by nature, 8:32, and was so declared at his resurrection, 1:3; believers become huioi theou by adoption. And just as Christ was declared Son of God in power at his resurrection kata pneuma hagiōsynēs , 1:3, and believers are justified en tō pneumati tou theou hēmōn , 1 Cor. 6:11, so they are also made sons of God by the pneuma huiothesias , Rom. 8:14-16, and then assured of this sonship by the same Spirit, ibid. Gal. 4:6. As sons, they are then also heirs kat' epangelian , Gal. 3:29, 4:7, Rom. 8:17; and since this inheritance still lies in the future, the huiothesia in its full realization is also an object of hope, Rom. 8:23. Justification, which has its beginning in eternity, realizes itself in Christ's resurrection and the calling of believers, and receives its completion only when God in the last judgment repeats his sentence of acquittal in the hearing of the whole world and every tongue must confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. But though the "legal consequence of adoption" still awaits, believers are already adopted as children here on earth; they are sealed by the Holy Spirit as a pledge and earnest until the day of their redemption, 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5, Eph. 1:13, 14, 4:30, and kept for the heavenly inheritance, as it is for them, 1 Pet. 1:4, 5. By that Spirit they are continually led (agontai , not pherontai as in 2 Pet. 1:21), Rom. 8:14, assured of the love that God has for them, 5:5, cf. vs. 8, and of their childhood, 8:15, 16, Gal. 4:6, and even now partake of peace, Rom. 5:1, Phil. 4:7, 9, 1 Thess. 5:23, and joy, Rom. 14:17, 15:13, 1 Thess. 1:6.
1. With justification is connected sanctification, which is different from it in kind but not in time. About the relation of both there has always been difference and strife in the Christian church, even as in all religions the bond of religion and morality is laid in different ways, and among men there is a great difference between the religious and the ethical natures. Nomism, arising for the interests of the moral life, makes justification dependent on sanctification, religion on morality, the relation to God on that to the neighbor. Conversely, antinomism pays attention in the first place to the demands of the religious life, puts justification in the foreground, and often does not reach sanctification; the relation to God stands wholly loose from that to the neighbor. In truth, it brings forth, both in doctrine and in life, great difficulty to set religion and morality, justification and sanctification, to each other in the right connection. Both are different; whoever mingles them undermines the religious life, takes away the comfort of believers, and makes God subordinate to man. The difference of both lies herein, that in justification the religious relation of man to God is restored, and in sanctification his nature is renewed and freed from the uncleanness of sin. It rests in its deepest being thereon, that God is both righteous and holy. As Righteous, He wills that all creatures shall stand in that relation to Him in which He originally placed them, free from guilt and punishment. As Holy, He demands that they all shall appear pure and unspotted by sin before His face. The first man was therefore created after God's image in righteousness and holiness and had no need of justification nor sanctification, though he also had to obey the law and be justified out of its works and receive eternal life (justificatio legalis). But sin has laden man with guilt and made him unclean before God's face. To be fully delivered from sin, he must therefore be freed from its guilt and cleansed from its stain. And that happens in justification and sanctification. Both are thus equally needful and are preached in Scripture with equal stress. Justification goes thereby in logical order foremost, Rom. 8:30, 1 Cor. 1:30, for it is a justificatio evangelica, a acquittal on the ground of a righteousness of God given to us in faith, and not out of works of the law; it is a judicial act and completed in one moment. But sanctification is ethical, continues through all of life, and makes the righteousness of Christ by the renewing work of the Holy Ghost little by little our personal, ethical possession. Rome's doctrine of gratia or justitia infusa is in itself not untrue, only it is wrong that it makes the infused righteousness the ground of forgiveness, and thus builds religion on the foundation of morality. But believers truly become partakers of the righteousness of Christ also by infusion. Justification and sanctification thus bestow the same benefits, or better still, the whole, full Christ; only they differ in the way in which they bestow Him. In justification He is given to us in a judicial sense, in sanctification in an ethical sense; by the former we become the righteousness of God in Him, by the latter He Himself by His Spirit makes dwelling in us and renews us after His image.
Although justification and sanctification are thus distinct in nature, it is of no less importance not to lose sight for a moment of the close connection between the two; whoever separates them undermines the moral life and makes grace subservient to sin. In God, righteousness and holiness are not separable; He hates sin wholly and entirely, not only as it makes guilty but also as it makes unclean. God's acts in justification and sanctification are inseparably connected; whom He justified, them He also glorified, Rom. 8:30; justification brings life, 5:18; whoever is justified by God and adopted as His child immediately shares in His favor and begins at once to live. Furthermore, Christ not only bore the sins of His own and fulfilled the law for them, but He could do this only because He had already entered into covenant relation with them and thus was their head and mediator. In Him all His own were included; and with and in Him they themselves died, were buried, raised, and seated in heaven, Rom. 6:2-11, 2 Cor. 5:15, Gal. 2:20, Eph. 2:5, 6, Col. 2:12, 3:1, etc. Christ is their righteousness but in the same sense also their sanctification, 1 Cor. 1:30, that is, not their holiness, but their sanctification. For Christ, by His suffering and death, not only procured the righteousness on the basis of which believers are acquitted by God. But in this way He also acquired that holiness by which He can consecrate them to God and cleanse them from all stain of sin, John 17:19. His obedience unto death aimed at redemption in its full extent, not only as redemption from the legal power of sin, Rom. 3:24, Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, but also as deliverance from its moral dominion, Rom. 8:23, 1 Cor. 1:30, Eph. 1:14, 4:30. To this end, Christ gives Himself to them not only objectively in justification, but He also imparts Himself subjectively in sanctification, and unites Himself with them in a spiritual, mystical manner. This mystical union is always viewed by the Lutherans from the anthropological side, and then naturally comes into being only after justification and regeneration in the act of faith, Schneckenburger, Vergl. Darst. I. But the theological treatment of the Reformed led to another conception. The mystical union has its beginning already in the covenant of grace; incarnation and satisfaction presuppose that Christ is head and mediator of the covenant; the covenant does not come into being only after Christ or also after the convincing and regenerating work of the Holy Spirit; but Christ Himself stood in the covenant, and all the work of the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ takes place from and in the covenant. For there is no participation in the benefits of Christ except through participation in His person. The imputation and bestowal of Christ to His own comes first, and our incorporation into Christ again precedes the active acceptance of Christ and His benefits by the act of faith. Sincere sorrow for sin, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, taking refuge in Christ, etc., are acts and works which presuppose life and thus the mystical union and flow from it. This union of believers with Christ is on the one hand not a pantheistic mingling of both, no substantial union, as it has been conceived by mysticism of earlier and later times; but on the other hand it is also not a mere agreement in disposition, will, and purpose, as rationalism understood it and as Ritschl has again explained it, Theol. u. Metaph. Rechtf. u. Vers. III. Gesch. d. Pietismus, 3 Bde. Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott. Gottschick, Luthers Lehre v. d. Gem. des Gläubigen mit Christus, Zeits. f. Th. u. K. What Scripture says of this mystical union goes much deeper than a moral agreement in will and disposition; it expressly declares that Christ dwells and lives in believers, John 14:23, 17:23, 26, Rom. 8:10, 2 Cor. 13:5, Gal. 2:20, Eph. 3:17, and that they are in Him, John 15:1-7, Rom. 8:1, 1 Cor. 1:30, 2 Cor. 5:17, Eph. 1:10v.; they are united as branch and vine, John 15, head and members, Rom. 12:4, 1 Cor. 12:12, Eph. 1:23, 4:15, husband and wife, 1 Cor. 6:16, 17, Eph. 5:32, cornerstone and building, 1 Cor. 3:11, 16, 6:19, Eph. 2:21, 1 Pet. 2:4, 5, cf. on the mystical union Calvin, Inst. III 11, 5. Boquinus, Zanchius, Olevianus, Eglin in Heppe, Dogm. d. d. Pr. II. Martyr, L. C. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 35. Amesius, Med. Theol. 1 c. 26. Voetius, Disp. II. Mastricht VI c. 5. Witsius, Misc. S. II. M. Vitringa III. Comrie, Catech. on questions 20-23. Kuyper, Het werk v. d. H. G. II. Pfleiderer, Paulinismus. Krebs, Ueber die unio mystica, Marburg. Weiss, Das Wesen des pers. Christenstandes, Stud. u. Krit. Deismann, Die neutest. Formel ἐν Χρ. I. Marburg. This mystical union, however, is not immediate but comes about through the Holy Spirit. And in Him also the connection between justification and sanctification is firmly established. The Spirit whom Jesus promised to His disciples and poured out in the church is not only a Spirit of adoption who assures believers of their sonship, but also the Spirit of renewal and sanctification. This Spirit equipped Christ Himself for His work and led Him from His conception to His ascension. Through His humiliation Christ is exalted to the Father's right hand, glorified as life-giving Spirit, acquirer and distributor of the Spirit, who is now His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Through this Spirit He also forms and equips His church. The very first gift which believers receive is already imparted to them by the Spirit who takes all things from Christ, John 16:14. It is He who regenerates them, John 3:5, 6, 8, Tit. 3:5, gives life, Rom. 8:10, incorporates into fellowship with Christ, 1 Cor. 6:15, 17, 19, brings to faith, 1 Cor. 2:9v. 12:3, washes, sanctifies, justifies, 1 Cor. 6:11, 12:13, Tit. 3:5, leads, Rom. 8:14, pours out God's love in their hearts, Rom. 5:5, prays in them, Rom. 8:26, imparts all kinds of virtues, Gal. 5:22, Eph. 5:9, and gifts, Rom. 12:6, 1 Cor. 12:4, especially love, 1 Cor. 13, makes them live according to a new law, the law of the Spirit, Rom. 8:2, 4, 1 Cor. 7:9, Gal. 5:6, 6:2, renews them in mind and will, in soul and body, Rom. 6:19, 1 Cor. 2:10, 2 Cor. 5:17, 1 Thess. 5:23; in one word, the Holy Spirit dwells in them, and they live and walk in the Holy Spirit, Rom. 8:1, 4, 9-11, 1 Cor. 6:19, Gal. 4:6, etc. Cf. further Pfleiderer, Der Paulinismus. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II.
2. In this sense is sanctification, even as justification, a gift and a work of God, ascribed by turns to the Father, John 17:17, 1 Thess. 5:23, Heb. 13:20, 21, to the Son as the pneuma zoopoion , 1 Cor. 15:45, Eph. 5:26, Titus 2:14, and above all also, as appeared above, to the Holy Ghost, Titus 3:5, 1 Pet. 1:2. The believers are therein passive; they are sanctified, John 17:19, 1 Cor. 6:11; they are with Christ dead and raised, Rom. 6:4ff.; they are hegiasmenoi en Christo Iesou , 1 Cor. 1:2, God's workmanship, Eph. 2:10, creation, 2 Cor. 5:17, Gal. 6:15, work, Rom. 14:20; but all things are of God, 2 Cor. 5:18. This sanctification consists first herein, that the believers are set apart from the world and placed in a special bond to God. In the Old Testament, holiness marked that bond of God to his folk and of the folk to God, which was set forth and ordered in the sundry laws. Also in the New Testament has the thought of holy kept this meaning of a bond. There is speech of a holy city, Matt. 4:5, holy place, 24:15, holy covenant, Luke 1:72, holy ground, Acts 7:33, holy Scripture, Rom. 1:2, holy mountain, 2 Pet. 1:18, holy prophets, Luke 1:70, holy offering, Rom. 12:1; of Christ it is said, though He was without sin, that He sanctified himself, that is, in his death offered himself to God as a holy offering for his own, John 17:19; and so the believers are called with a standing name hagioi , because they through the calling, cf. Rom. 1:7, 1 Cor. 1:2, kletoi hagioi , stand in a special bond to God and, in the stead of the old Israel, are a chosen kindred, a kingly priesthood, a holy folk, a people for a holding, 1 Pet. 2:9. But this bond is no mere outward one; that it was not even under the Old Testament, for by strength of that holiness God had bound himself to give Israel his covenant and law, to save it or also to chasten it, and Israel was bound to walk in God's ordinances. Now in the New Testament the law is fulfilled in Christ; it thus orders the holiness bond no more, which is between God and his folk. For the law is Christ come in the stead; in and through Him God orders the bond between himself and his folk; the believers are hegiasmenoi en Christo Iesou , 1 Cor. 1:2; and He sanctifies his folk through the Holy Ghost, en pneumati , 1 Cor. 6:11, who now as such is called pneuma hagion and is the beginning of sanctification. This sanctification lies not only therein, as many now set it forth, e.g., Paul Wernle, Der Christ und die Sünde bei Paulus , 1897, pp. 31, 39, 62, that Christians are set apart from the world and given to God in an outward, worship sense; but it has a deep, right-wise meaning. For the Holy Ghost rebirths, cleanses, renews, John 3:3, 1 Cor. 6:11, Titus 3:5; with the indwelling of the Holy Ghost begins for the believers a newness of life, Rom. 6:4, which shapes a withstanding to the former walk in sundry sins and unrighteousness, 1 Cor. 6:10, Eph. 2:1; they are now new men, 2 Cor. 5:17, Eph. 2:10, 15, 4:24, Gal. 6:15, Col. 3:10, who live to God and set their limbs as weapons of righteousness unto sanctification, Rom. 6. The bond to God in Christ through the Holy Ghost brings with it that the believers are freed from all guilt and also from all stain of sin. And therefore sanctification in the New Testament consists fully therein, that the believers are made like to the image of the Son, Rom. 8:29, Gal. 4:19. In so far sanctification falls together with glorification; this begins not first after this life, but takes forthwith with the calling a beginning; whom He called, them He justified, and whom He justified, them He glorified in that same twinkling, Rom. 8:30; and this glorification goes on in this life, 2 Cor. 3:18, until it is fulfilled at the again-coming of Christ, 1 Cor. 15:49, 51ff., Col. 3:4, Phil. 3:21.
From this glorious description of the Christian state in the New Testament, many in earlier and later times have drawn the conclusion that Scripture teaches the perfectibility of believers already in this life; thus by the Pelagians, Roman Catholics, Socinians, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, Schwenckfeld, Weigel, Böhme, Poiret, Labadie, Quietists, Pietists, Quakers, Moravians, Wesleyan Methodists, and so on.
There is from another side support given to this claim. Ritschl first noted that Paul himself, after he was converted, had no consciousness of imperfection, and also does not reflect at all on that of believers, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung II. Others developed this thought and even accused the apostle of an impractical idealism, which under the impression of Jesus' soon return thought of no sins among believers. There lies in this claim a truth that should not be contested but fully acknowledged. Scripture can scarcely find words enough to describe the glory of God's folk. It calls Israel in the Old Testament a priestly kingdom, chosen by God, the object of his love, his portion and inheritance, his son and servant, perfect in beauty through God's glory, Exod. 19:5, 6; Deut. 7:7ff., 32:6, 8, 9, 18; Isa. 41:8; Ezek. 16:14; and so on; and believers in the New Testament are the salt of the earth, Matt. 5:13, the light of the world, v. 14, born of God and his children, John 1:12, 13, his chosen race and royal priesthood, 1 Pet. 2:9, 10, partakers of the divine nature, 2 Pet. 1:4, anointed with the Holy Spirit, 1 John 2:20, made kings and priests through Christ, Rev. 1:5, not able to sin, 1 John 3:9, 5:18ff., and so on. Whoever rejects Scripture's teaching on sin and grace can see in all this only exaggeration; a radical change like rebirth and sanctification is then neither needful nor understandable. But Scripture judges otherwise; it gives the church a high place, calls her by the fairest names, and ascribes to her a divine holiness and glory. In Roman Catholic dogmatics, for example, Heinrich-Gutberlet, Dogmatische Theologie VIII, the virtues and gifts which the Holy Spirit bestows on the church usually come better to their right than in Protestant dogmatics, which often thinks that in justification by faith and the expectation of heavenly blessedness it has exhausted Scripture's teaching on the Christian state. However, the glorification of the church, which begins with rebirth, is just as much an object of faith as justification. That the church stands guiltless before God's face in Christ is just as hard to believe as that she is in principle sanctified, glorified, and made like the image of the Son by the Holy Spirit. Both are equally at odds with the appearance of things; both belong to those things which one does not see and which are certain only for faith.
Scripture knows this itself. For in spite of the glorious description it gives of the state of believers, it nevertheless regards them as sinners and does not keep silent about their transgressions and their confession of guilt, for example, with Abraham, Gen. 12:11; Isaac, 26:7; Jacob, 26:35; Moses, Num. 20:7-12; Ps. 106:33; David, Ps. 51; and so on; Solomon, 1 Kings 8:46; Prov. 20:9; Isaiah, ch. 64:6; Daniel, ch. 9:4; and so on. And Paul also knows that when he wants to do good, evil lies close at hand. It is true that Paul is always clearly aware of the great change that has taken place in him. He is crucified to the world with Christ, and he no longer lives himself, Christ lives in him. He is free from the law, stands righteous before God, is assured of his sonship, boasts in the grace by which he can do all things, sets himself as an example, glories in his apostolic labor, and is aware of his faithful fulfillment of office, for example, Rom. 15:17; 1 Cor. 4:3, 9:15, 15:30, 31; 2 Cor. 1:12, 6:3, 11:10; Phil. 2:16; 1 Thess. 2:10, 19. But nevertheless he confesses that he lives in the flesh, Gal. 2:20, that the flesh always desires against the Spirit, Gal. 5:17, that no good dwells in his flesh, Rom. 7:18, and that he has not yet attained perfection, Phil. 3:12. Especially Rom. 7:7-26 is of great meaning in this regard; however much the Reformation exegesis of this passage is mostly given up in modern times, in so doing one has not known what one did. Wernle exaggerates but does not say entirely without reason: in fact, going back to the old (Greek) tradition on Rom. 7 means a much heavier blow to our dogmatics than is usually felt by it. Usually one admits that Rom. 7 does not refer to the reborn, without noticing that by this concession Paulinism becomes unusable for us. Yet this is not the strongest ground for maintaining the Reformation interpretation of Rom. 7. This lies in the text itself. The present tense in which Paul speaks can only be understood of the present. In truth, one makes the apostle into a comedian if one trusts him to have spoken thus only in memory of a long past state. Yet Clemen sees no way to bring Rom. 7 into agreement with Paul's other statements and therefore says: it probably stems from a particularly gloomy mood of the apostle, not from his otherwise prevailing consciousness!
But to this sin and this sense of sin in the saints of the Old and New Covenants is added that Scripture everywhere proceeds from the assumption that sin remains in believers until the end of their lives; they continually need the prayer for forgiveness, Matt. 6:12, 13, and the confession of sins, 1 John 1:9. All the admonitions and warnings in Scripture assume that believers have only a small beginning of perfect obedience; they stumble daily in many things, James 3:2; if they say they have no sin, they deceive themselves, 1 John 1:8. Paul also judges believers no differently. He places them very high, calls them elect, called, saints, notes with joy the Christian virtues that become manifest in them, and gladly and repeatedly gives them a glorious testimony. In this the apostle certainly does not exaggerate; the change must have been great if he could testify of believers from the Gentiles that they formerly lived in all kinds of dreadful sins but now were washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God, 1 Cor. 6:11. Nevertheless, he has an open eye for the sins that still cling to believers. The Corinthians are still fleshly, 1 Cor. 3:1-4; the Galatians are disobedient, Gal. 5:7ff.; in the Colossians the good work is well begun but not completed, Col. 1:6; yes, their life is still hidden with Christ in God, 3:3. In Rom. 6 Paul does not say that believers are sinless, but he argues that faith in Christ does not comport with a life in sin; and therefore he precisely admonishes them to present their members to God as weapons of righteousness, Rom. 6:13. Without repeatedly returning to justification, which has taken place once for all by faith, he urges that believers should manifest and prove this their new state in a walk according to the Spirit. And in addition, it deserves our attention that Scripture, though always assuming the imperfection of the believer, yet never weakens the demand of the law or adapts it to practice. The advocates of perfectibility can never maintain it, pull down the moral law, and make a distinction between mortal sins and venial sins or between doing sin and having sin. But Scripture does not do so and upholds the full, unblemished demand of the law: be holy, for I am holy, 1 Pet. 1:16; be perfect, as your Father in heaven, Matt. 5:48; James 1:4; believers must follow Christ, who has done no sin, 1 Pet. 2:21ff.; Eph. 5:1; and in the day of Christ be anegklētoi, eilikrineis, aproskopoi, amemptoi, amōmoi , 1 Cor. 1:8; Phil. 1:10, 2:15; Col. 1:22; 1 Thess. 3:13, 5:23. With all earnestness and without ceasing, they are therefore called to a holy walk. Above with justification it became clear to us that the Christian is sure of his salvation only through faith, without and independent of works. But in sanctification, in life, salvation seems to be made dependent on it again, whether believers do God's will and walk blamelessly before his face.
Sanctification, which at first was only passive, Phil. 1:5, 1 Thess. 5:23, in one stroke gets an active meaning, Rom. 12:1, 2 Cor. 7:1, 1 Thess. 4:3, Heb. 12:14. Just as in the preaching of the gospel faith is a gift of God and yet man is accountable for his stance toward God's calling, e.g., Rom. 9:1-29 and 9:30-10:21, so here the possession of all the blessings of the covenant, forgiveness, sonship, life, salvation, is secured before all works, and yet good works are urged with so much earnestness, as if they must first be obtained thereby. The kingdom of God is a gift, bestowed by God according to his good pleasure, Matt. 11:26, 16:17, 22:14, 24:22, Luke 10:20, 12:32, 22:29, and yet it is a reward, a treasure in heaven, which must be sought with effort and acquired through labor in God's service, Matt. 5:12, 20, 6:20, 19:21, 20:1ff., etc.
Believers are branches on the vine, who can do nothing without Christ, and yet they are exhorted to abide in him, in his word, in his love, John 15; they are elect, and yet they must strive to make their calling and election sure, 2 Pet. 1:10; they are sanctified and perfected through the one offering of Christ, Heb. 10:10, 14, in whom God works what is pleasing to him, 13:21, and yet they must hold fast in faith to the end, 3:6, 14, 4:14, 6:11, 12; they have put on the new man and must continually put him on, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10; they have crucified the flesh with its desires and yet must mortify their members that are on the earth, Gal. 5:24, Col. 3:5; or, to sum up all these contrasts: on the one hand, it is a fact that Scripture not once but repeatedly speaks of reward, connects reward to the least work done in Jesus' name, at the end repays each according to his works, and often urges good works with an eye to that reward, Matt. 5:12, 6:4, 16:27, 25:34, Rom. 2:6, 1 Tim. 4:7, 8, Rev. 22:12, etc.; and on the other hand, it stands equally firm that there is no relation of merit and reward between what the believer does and what he will receive, Matt. 20:9, Mark 10:30, Luke 12:37, 43, 44; that if he does all that he was bound to do, he is still an unprofitable servant, Luke 17:10, that there is no reward except from grace, Rom. 4:3, 4, and that all the blessings of the covenant, sanctification and glorification, just as justification, are acquired by Christ, lie ready in him, and thus need not and cannot be earned by believers but can only be received childlike in faith.
Many have seen a contradiction between this all-working of God in grace and the self-working of man that is nevertheless maintained alongside it, accusing Jesus, Paul, John of inner contradiction and sacrificing one to the other for themselves. Thus it was taught that grace at most only serves to restore the willpower for good in man and set him to work and earning himself, or on the other side asserted that good works are not necessary or even harmful for salvation. But high above all these one-sidednesses stands Holy Scripture, as heaven above earth, as God's thoughts above men's thoughts. It holds fast to both, preaches both with equal emphasis, and sees between them no contradiction nor strife. Precisely because God works in believers both to will and to work, they must work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, Phil. 2:12, 13. They are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that they should walk in them, Eph. 2:10. God and man, religion and morality, faith and love, justification and sanctification, praying and working, are by nature no opposition. They became so through sin; and through it man again and again brings strife between them. But they are originally most closely united; they are restored in their unity by Christ, who is our peace; they are in principle reconciled in the Christian life. Dependence here coincides with freedom; those born of God become God's children because they are; for them the law holds: become what you are! Good works are therefore on the one hand without any merit; they are indeed not ours, but prepared for us by God in Christ and worked in us by his Spirit; through our weakness they are always imperfect and stained with sin; they are wholly disproportionate to the salvation that is given; man's good merits themselves are God's gifts, Augustine, Enchiridion 107. And nevertheless they are urgently necessary, for God's commandment, Rom. 6:18, 7:4, 8:12, 13, 1 Thess. 4:3, for the goal of redemption, Eph. 1:4; as fruits of faith, James 2:14, out of thankfulness, 1 Cor. 6:20, Col. 1:10, 1 Thess. 2:12, for God's glory, John 15:8, as the way to salvation, Heb. 12:14; good works are the way of the kingdom, not the cause of reigning (Bernard). Cf. later the locus on the Christian life.
3. In the same way as about sanctification, the Scripture speaks about the perseverance of the saints. It exhorts the believers to persevere unto the end, Matt. 24:13, Rom. 2:7, 8, to abide in Christ, in his word, in his love, John 15:1-10, 12:6, 24, 27, 3:6, 24, 4:12ff., not to depart but to keep the faith, Col. 1:23, Heb. 2:1, 3:14, 6:11, to be faithful unto death, Rev. 2:10, 26. Sometimes it speaks as if falling away were possible; let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall, 1 Cor. 10:12; it warns against presumption and threatens in case of unfaithfulness with heavy punishment, Ezek. 18:24, Matt. 13:20, 21, John 15:2, Rom. 11:20, 22, 2 Tim. 2:12, Heb. 4:1, 6:4-8, 10:26-31, 2 Pet. 2:18-22. It even seems to mention various examples in which falling away has taken place, David in his adultery, Solomon in his idolatry, Hymenaeus and Alexander, 1 Tim. 1:19, 20, 2 Tim. 2:17, 18, Demas, 2 Tim. 4:10, false prophets and teachers who deny the Lord who bought them, 2 Pet. 2:1, believers who fall away from grace and faith, Gal. 5:4, 1 Tim. 4:1. Relying on these texts, Pelagians, Roman Catholics, Socinians, Remonstrants, Mennonites, Quakers, Methodists, etc., and even the Lutherans have taught the possibility of a total loss of the received grace, M. Vitringa. Over against this, Augustine came to the confession of the perseverance of the saints; but because he deemed the uncertainty and fear regarding salvation wholesome in believers, he taught that those reborn through baptism could lose the grace they had received, but if they belonged to the number of the predestined, they would in any case receive it back before death; believers could thus totally but the elect could not finally lose the grace. In the Catholic and Roman Church, many agreed with him formerly and later; but yet this doctrine has been maintained only by the Reformed and connected with the certainty of faith, Zwingli, Op. Calvin, Inst. Polanus, Synt. Heidelberg Catechism qu. 1. 53. 54. Canons of Dort ch. 5. Trigland, Antapologia. Gomarus, Op. Chamier, Panstratia Catholica. Mastricht. M. Vitringa, and in more recent times Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube. Schweizer, Christliche Glaubenslehre. Scholten, Leer der Hervormde Kerk. Van Oosterzee.
Now in this doctrine of perseverance, the question is not whether those who partake of the true, saving faith, if left to themselves, could not lose it again through their own fault and sin; nor whether in them sometimes all activity, boldness, and comfort of faith ceases, and faith itself withdraws into hiding under the cares of life and the enjoyments of the world. But the question is whether God upholds, continues, and completes the work of grace that He began, or whether He sometimes lets it be wholly undone by the power of sin. Perseverance is not an act of man but a gift of God. Augustine saw this well; only he made a distinction between two kinds of grace, and deemed a grace of regeneration and faith possible which in itself was losable, and to which, in order to endure, a second grace, that of perseverance, had to be added from without. The second grace is then a donum superadditum , holds no connection with the first, and stands in fact without any influence outside the Christian life. Among the Reformed, the doctrine of perseverance was wholly different; it was a gift of God; He watches and cares that the work of grace has progress and completion; but He does this not apart from the believers but through them. He gives in regeneration and faith a grace which also in itself bears an unloseable character; He bestows a life that is by nature eternal; He grants benefits of calling, justification, glorification, which hang together unbreakable. All the above-mentioned admonitions and threats which Scripture directs to believers prove nothing against the doctrine of perseverance. They are precisely the way in which God Himself through the believers confirms His promise and gift; they are the means by which perseverance is realized in life. Perseverance too is no compulsion but works as a gift of God in a spiritual way upon man. God wills precisely in a moral way, through admonition and warning, to lead the believer to heavenly salvation and makes him himself willing, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, to persevere in faith and in love. It is wholly wrong, therefore, to conclude from the admonitions of Holy Scripture to the possibility of the total loss of grace. This conclusion is as unlawful as if from Christ's temptation and struggle one concluded to His posse peccare . The certainty of the outcome makes the means not superfluous, but in God's order is unbreakable bound to them. Paul knew surely that no one in the shipwreck would lose his life; yet he says: unless these remain in the ship, you cannot be saved, Acts 27:22, 31. As for the examples which Scripture would cite for actual apostasy, it is impossible to prove that all those persons either had the actual grace of regeneration (Hymenaeus, Alexander, Demas, persons in 1 Tim. 4:1, 2 Pet. 2:1) or actually lost it in their fall and then later received it back (David, Solomon) or also actually had it but never received it back (Heb. 6:4-8, 10:26-31, 2 Pet. 2:18-22). These last texts seem to lay the greatest objection in the way of the confession of the perseverance of the saints. Yet this is but seeming. For even those who teach the possibility of apostasy must admit that here a wholly special sin is spoken of. For according to them, grace is indeed losable but also after total loss regainable. The opinion of the Montanists and Novatians, who deduced from these places that the fallen should never more be received into the church, has been generally rejected by the Christian churches. When Scripture then expressly says that it is impossible to renew again to repentance such as are spoken of in those texts, Heb. 6:4, 10:26, 2 Pet. 2:20, 1 John 5:16, then it is undeniable that here a sin is meant which brings with it the judgment of hardening and makes repentance impossible. And such a sin there is, also according to the confession of those who accept the possibility of apostasy, only one, namely, the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. If this now is so, the doctrine of the apostasy of the saints leads to the conclusion that the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can also or even only be committed by the regenerate, or the above-mentioned texts lose all proof-power against the perseverance of the saints. But besides this comes more. Those who deem total apostasy possible must make a distinction between such sins by which the grace of regeneration is not lost, and others by which it is; they are in other words compelled to take refuge in the Roman doctrine of peccata mortalia and venialia , unless they would have that grace lost by every, even the slightest, sin. By this, however, the whole moral is falsified, the nature of sin misknown, a conscience-entangling and distressing casuistry introduced. Further, on this standpoint there comes no certainty of faith, no quiet labor, no still development and growth of the Christian life. The continuity can be broken every moment; Hollaz tries to argue that regeneration can be lost and regained three, four, and more times. Finally, the doctrine of the apostasy of the saints escapes so little the difficulties which it wishes to avoid that it increases and multiplies them. For if it holds fast thereby the unchangeableness of God's foreknowledge, yet in the end only those are saved of whom God has eternally surely known this; and the human will cannot undo this certainty of the outcome. Or it must proceed to denial of predestination and foreknowledge in every sense, and then it makes all things shaky and unsteady, the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God may have revealed His love, Christ may have died for sinners, the Holy Spirit may have planted regeneration and faith in the heart, the believer may with Paul be able to say: I have a delight in the law of God after the inward man; in the end, up to the hour of death, and why not yet beyond the grave, the will of man is the deciding and all-ruling power. It will all be as he determines.
However, Scripture teaches entirely otherwise. Already the Old Testament speaks it out clearly, that the covenant of grace does not depend on the obedience of man. Indeed, it brings with it the duty to walk in the way of the covenant, but itself it rests only in God's mercy. When nevertheless the Israelites time and again make themselves guilty of unfaithfulness and adultery, the prophets do not conclude from that, that God changes, that his covenant wavers and his promise fails. On the contrary, God can and may not break his covenant; He has voluntarily bound himself to Israel with a solemn oath; his glory, his name, his honor hangs upon it; He cannot forsake his people; it is an everlasting covenant, that knows no wavering; He will himself give to his people a new heart and a new spirit, write the law in their inward parts and make them walk in his statutes. And when later Paul stands before that same fact of Israel's unfaithfulness, his heart filled with sorrow, then he does not conclude from it that the word of God has fallen out, but he continues to believe that God has mercy on whom He will, that his gifts of grace and calling are without repentance, and that not all are Israel who are of Israel, Rom. 9-11. And in like manner John testifies of those who become apostate: they were not of us, otherwise they would have remained with us, 1 John 2:19. Whatever apostasy therefore may take place among Christendom, it may never make us doubt the unchangeableness of God, the firmness of his counsel, the unbreakable nature of his covenant, the faithfulness of his promises. Rather must one let all creatures go than not trust in his word. And that word is one rich promise for the heirs of the kingdom. There are not single texts that teach perseverance; the whole gospel bears and confirms it. The Father has chosen them before the foundation of the world, Eph. 1:4, ordained them to eternal life, Acts 13:48, to conformity to the image of his Son, Rom. 8:29; and this election is unchangeable, Rom. 9:11, Heb. 6:17 and in its time brings calling and justification and glorification, Rom. 8:30. Christ, in whom all the promises of God are yea and amen, 2 Cor. 1:20, died for those who are given him by the Father, John 17:6, 12, that he might give them eternal life and lose none of them, John 6:40, 17:2; and therefore he gives them eternal life and they shall not perish eternally, no one shall pluck them out of his hand, John 6:39, 10:28. The Holy Spirit, who regenerates them, abides with them forever, John 14:16, and seals them unto the day of redemption, Eph. 1:13, 4:30. The covenant of grace is firm and confirmed with an oath, Heb. 6:16-18, 13:20, unbreakable like a marriage, Eph. 5:31, 32, like a testament, Heb. 9:17, and by virtue of that covenant God calls his elect, writes the law in their inward parts, puts his fear in their heart, Heb. 8:10, 10:14ff., does not suffer them to be tempted above that they are able, 1 Cor. 10:13, confirms and completes the good work which he began in them, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6 and keeps them for the future of Christ, to be made partakers of the heavenly inheritance, 1 Thess. 5:23, 2 Thess. 3:3, 1 Pet. 1:4, 5. By his intercession with the Father, Christ is thus active, that their faith fail not, Luke 22:32, that they be kept in the world from the evil one, John 17:11, 20, that they be saved to the uttermost, Heb. 7:25, that their sins be forgiven them, 1 John 2:1 and that they all may be with him and behold his glory, John 17:24. The benefits of Christ, which the Holy Spirit makes them partakers of, are all without repentance, Rom. 11:29; he who is called is glorified, Rom. 8:30; he who is adopted as a child is an heir of eternal life, Rom. 8:17, Gal. 4:7; he who believes has here already eternal life, John 3:16. And that life itself, being eternal, is also unlosable; it cannot die, because it cannot sin, 1 John 3:9. Faith is a sure foundation, Heb. 11:1, hope is an anchor, Heb. 6:19 and disappoints not, Rom. 5:5, and love never fails, 1 Cor. 13:8.
From this perseverance flows forth a rich comfort for the believers and an abundant blessing for the Christian life. Because God also completes the good work that He began, according to His promise, therefore the believers can and may at all times be assured of their eternal salvation. Those who fight against justification by faith alone or nevertheless, like the Lutherans, reject the perseverance of the saints, cannot accept this certainty of faith.
Even Augustine did not dare to accept this teaching and said: God judged it better to mix some who will not persevere with the certain number of His saints, so that those for whom security is not expedient in the temptation of this life... Rome therefore determined that no one can know with certainty that he has obtained God's grace, unless by special revelation, Council of Trent VI chapter 9 and canons 13-15, and the Roman theologians therefore speak only of a moral, conjectural certainty, Thomas, Summa Theologica II 1 question 112 article 5. Bellarmine, de justificatione III chapter 2 sq. Möhler said that it would be in the highest degree uncanny to him in the presence of someone who was always certain of his salvation, and that he could not ward off the thought that something diabolical was involved, Symbolik page 197.
Also the Remonstrants and in later times the Lutherans opposed the certainty of faith, at least for the future; but the Reformed confessed the election and ascribed to faith the firm assurance of salvation, which could be obtained not from curious investigations into the hidden counsel of God, but yet from the nature and fruits of faith through the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
For faith is by its nature opposed to all doubt; certainty is not added to it later from outside, but lies in it from the beginning, and comes forth from it in due time; it is indeed a gift of God, a working of the Holy Spirit. He testifies therein with our spirit that we are children of God, Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6, makes the believers boast that nothing shall separate them from the love of God in Christ, Romans 8:38, and assures them of their future salvation, Romans 8:23, 2 Corinthians 1:22, Ephesians 1:13, 14, 4:30.
And this certainty of faith gives strength and support to the Christian life. For this Ritschl has clearly set in the light: among the Romans, justification is an enabling for the moral destiny, among the Protestants it is the restoration of the religious relation to God. The latter must precede before there can be any truly Christian life. As long as we still stand before God as Judge, seek life through the law, and are seized with the fear of death, love is not in us, which is the fruit of faith, the fulfillment of the law, the bond of perfection, and casts out all fear.
But when in justification peace with God, sonship, bold access to the throne of grace, freedom from the law, independence from the world are given to us, then good works flow forth from that faith of themselves. They do not serve to acquire eternal life, but are the revelation, seal, and proof of the eternal life that every believer already possesses. The faith that includes the certainty that with God all things are possible, that He makes the dead alive and calls the things that are not as though they were, always enables great things. It says to the mountain: Be lifted up and cast into the sea; and it happens so, Matthew 21:21.
Calvin, Institutes III 2, 14 etc. Acts of the Synod of Trent with antidote, Corpus Reformatorum 35, 455. Zanchi, Works VIII 227. Chamier, Panstratia Catholica III 13 chapter 8 sq. Canons of Dort I 12. V 9-12. Rivet, Works III 470-478. Trigland, Antapologia chapter 41. Keckermann and others in Heppe, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Reformed Church 129-131. Hoornbeek, Theologia practica II 64 sq. Love, Theological Works 126 etc. Erskine, The Assurance of Faith, Works, Amsterdam 1856 VI. Marshall, Evangelical Sanctification page 195 etc. M. Vitringa III 89.
1. The fellowship of those who share in Christ and his benefits bears the name of the church. In a strict sense, therefore, it is only spoken of within the bounds of Christendom. But that does not hinder that there are, just as of priesthood and offering and altar and sundry other elements in dogma and worship, so also of the church likenesses in the religions of the folks.
By inborn kind, man is already a fellowshiply being, a zoon politikon; he is born from and in and to the fellowship and cannot live a twinkling without it. Household, fellowship, state, gatherings of sundry kinds and for sundry ends bind folks together and make them live and work in fellowship with each other. Stronger yet than all these settlings and bodies is the bond that in godliness unites folks. There lies in godliness a mighty fellowshiply element. Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 6. A. Dorner, Kirche und Reich Gottes, Gotha 1883.
The ground thereof is not far to seek; deeper than anything else roots godliness in the heart of man. It is straightway given with his shaping after God's likeness and therefore unrootable own to his inborn kind. In that godliness man orders his standing to God, and this is midmost and groundworkly. As our standing to God is, so is that to our fellow men and to all shaped things. At the bottom of all askings lies that of godliness. Whoever stems with us in godliness, is one with us in the deepest, holiest and all-ruling beliefs and comes sooner or later also on offshot points to the same insight; but unlikeness of belief belief makes upon earnest afterthinking in all underlaid askings ever further asunder.
What in godliness binds folks is stronger than stuffly behoof, inborn love, or fire for lore and for craft; for godliness has man all things, has he also his life at stake. For if he loses this, then he loses himself; in godliness stands according to each one's belief man's soul and bliss at stake. Therefore seeks every godliness also to spread itself and to step forth as errand-bearing. Godliness is never a lone affair, a selfly deeming, a matter of smack; it always shuts in the claim to be the true and bliss-making one, and seeks therefore ingang with others, spreading if feasible over all mankind.
It is never a thing of the single alone, but always also of the household, the kin, the folk and the state. It brings therefore always a fellowshiply dogma and a fellowshiply worship forth, as it were borne by the knowing that not the single man but mankind is the fulfilled likeness of God, his temple and body. Outside the field of sunder showing, however, is overall the knowing lost of the oneness of God as well as of the oneness of mankind. The oneness of godliness bounds itself to the stem- or folk-fellows; burgherly and godly fellowship fall together; the state is itself also a worship fellowship.
Truly shows godliness itself in deal also in self-standing ordering of priesthood, offerings, rites, godly gatherings and hidden fellowships; the Buddhist godliness in Tibet shows so much likeness with that of Rome, that the Jesuit fathers, when they first learned to know it, saw in it a play of the evil one. But yet brought none of the heathen godlinesses it to such a self-standing ordering, as that which we meet under Christendom in the church. Mohammedanism founded nothing other than a kind of god-ruled state, wherein the Arabs are the lords of the bowed folks and the Koran is the lawbook also for burgher right. And Buddhism shaped only gatherings of world-fleeing monks, who worked a laming thrust on burgher fellowship and over against the state never became self-standing.
Cf. Saussaye, Religionsgesch. Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos. Rauwenhoff, Wijsb. v. d. godsd. Tiele, Inl. tot de godsdienstwet. Tweede reeks 1899. Falke, Buddha, Mohammed, Christus.
However, the Christian church was made ready in the days of the Old Testament. In the patriarchal times, the households of the believers were the religious gatherings, and the heads of households were the priests; a regular, shared worship did not yet exist, though in Genesis 4:26 it is already implied that the Sethites, in contrast to the Cainites, began to call upon and preach the name of God, and though after the flood a parting came about between Semites, Japhethites, and Hamites. With Abraham, this parting even took firm shape for ages. From then on, God let the Gentiles walk in their own ways and set up a covenant with Abraham and his seed, which also outwardly set the church apart from the world by the sign of circumcision, and which was strengthened at the foot of Sinai and raised to a national covenant. In Israel, church and state were not one and the same; there was a difference between priest and king, temple and palace, religious and civil laws. But both were yet so closely joined that citizen and believer, nation and people of God, went together, and there was one godly law that ruled all the life of Israel. Israel as a people was an ʿēdāh YHWH or a qāhāl YHWH . Both these words are used in the Old Testament for the gathering or the congregation of Israel, without difference in meaning. But after the exile, Israel's life as a people underwent a noteworthy change; the Jews ceased to be a people like the other peoples of the earth and became a religious congregation. In all places in and outside Palestine, gatherings of the believers arose on the Sabbath, Psalm 74:8, Acts 15:21, to read the law and be taught in it; teaching was the chief part of the worship carried out there, Mark 1:21, 6:2, and so on. These gatherings, kənēset , synagōgē , became for the Jews more and more the midpoint of their religious life and gained in places with mixed or mostly Greek dwellers a self-standing ordering. The temple in Jerusalem did indeed remain and was still honored as the place of God's special nearness. But the Jews outside Jerusalem yet little by little gained a worship that went without temple and altar, without priesthood and offering, and stood wholly in preaching and in prayer. Thereby the Christian congregation was already made ready in the days of the Old Testament. Just as the two Hebrew words, so the Greek words synagōgē and ekklēsia were at first used alike for these religious gatherings of the Jews; the Septuagint mostly renders ʿēdāh by synagōgē , and qāhāl by ekklēsia , except in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, where qāhāl is also commonly translated by synagōgē . But little by little there came among the Jews yet this difference, that synagōgē more marks the seen, factual gathering (congregatio , assembly), and ekklēsia becomes the word for the ideal congregation, as it holds those called by God to his salvation (convocatio , congregation). Cf. Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ .
2. This explains why Christian speech kept using the word synagogue only for the religious gatherings of the Jews and for the buildings in which they took place, Matt. 4:23, Acts 13:43, Rev. 2:9, 3:9, but otherwise began to make use of the word ecclesia. Indeed, this word still appears a few times in the New Testament for folk gatherings, Acts 7:38, 19:32, 39, 41; but mostly it has a religious character and points to the New Testament church. In the writings of the church fathers and especially among the Ebionites, the Christian church is still sometimes marked by synagogue, but soon this word fully gives way to ecclesia. It was Christ himself who first applied the word qahal, ecclesia, to the church which He gathered around Himself, Matt. 16:18, 18:17. Many newer critics think that this word was later put in Jesus' mouth. But there is no ground for this, and there is nothing strange in Jesus using that word in that sense. For indeed Jesus came forth with the preaching of the kingdom of heaven. But He at once put forward a wholly other understanding of it than His fellow folk and did not at first live in the hope that the whole folk would turn and follow Him. John already set apart the true Israelites from the mass of the folk by the baptism of turning. And Jesus was aware from the beginning of His sonship, His messiahship, and His coming suffering; but He also chose a number of young men and gathered them around Himself; He sent them out to preach and win followers; He gave to His followers other laws than those that held in the circles of the Jewish folk, Matt. 5-7, 18:15-35, 20, 28, and so on. So bit by bit a band of followers came to stand around Him, who set themselves apart and sundered from the folk of the Jews. And to this band Jesus now applied the word qahal, ecclesia. They were the true ecclesia, the real folk of God, as Israel ought to have been but now showed itself not to be in the casting off of the Messiah. For Jesus came not to make something wholly new, but to bring the law and prophets to fulfillment and to restore the true, heartfelt qahal. When Jesus then uses this word in Matt. 16:18 and 18:17 for His church, He uses it still in a fully broad sense. He does not say that this qahal, ecclesia, will be local or spread over all the earth; the later marking off of local and broad church is not yet found here. But Jesus says quite broadly that He will build His ecclesia, in setting against that of the Jews, not on the law, but on Peter's owning of His messiahship, and that He will therefore set it up on its own and have it live by its own laws. In the followers whom Jesus Himself gathered around Him, the beginnings of the New Testament church are already there. But as long as Jesus was on earth, He Himself stayed the personal midpoint and the fellowship of the young men still stepped back. They were not yet on their own and had to be taught and led by Him daily. And the Holy Ghost was not yet, since Christ was not yet glorified. But after Jesus' going away, they at once bind themselves more closely together, Acts 1:14, and on Pentecost Day receive in the Holy Ghost their own life-spring, which makes them on their own over against the folk of the Jews and binds them most closely among themselves. Then the church of Christ is in beginning loosened from Israel's folk being, from priest and law, from temple and altar; it becomes its own, on-its-own, religious gathering; it steps into the stead of the old Israel as the folk, as the church of God.
This ekklesia existed first only in Jerusalem. But soon there came believers also in Samaria, in Antioch, and in many other places among Jews and Gentiles; and their assemblies were also denoted by the name of ekklesia ; they too were there on the spot the folk, the congregation of God. Thus the word gradually acquired distinct meanings. Jesus uses the word still in a general sense, without thinking of the later distinctions. But after his departure it is applied to the circle of believers in a certain place, because these there make up the folk of God. And then it is applied to them, whether they have come together in a certain assembly or not. In Acts 5:11, 11:26, 1 Cor. 11:18, 14:19, 28, 35 the word ekklesia clearly refers to the assembly or gathering of the congregation; but elsewhere it occurs many times for the congregation itself, even if it is not gathered, and thus there can be spoken of ekklesiai in the plural, Rom. 16:4, 1 Cor. 16:1, Gal. 1:2, 1 Thess. 2:14, etc. A still narrower meaning the word receives when it is used for a portion of the believers who gather in a certain place in a private dwelling. In cities, namely, where the number of Christians became very great, one had to come to so-called house congregations. The Jews had in various places, for example in Rome, more than one synagogue; and the Christians were all the more compelled to divide themselves at the gathering, because in the first time they had no church buildings but gathered in the dwelling of one of the congregation members. According to Acts 19:9, the Christians in Ephesus came together for a time in the perhaps rented hall of a certain Tyrannus, but as a rule they had their meeting place in a private dwelling. With a somewhat considerable expansion of the congregation, they therefore had to come together in different dwellings and form a kind of house congregations. This was the case in Jerusalem, where the congregation soon was thousands of souls strong, Acts 2:41, 46, 47, 4:4, 5:14, 8:3, 11:21, 12:12, 17, 21:8, and so also in Rome, Rom. 16:23, Corinth, 1 Cor. 16:19, Colossae, Philem. 2, Laodicea, Col. 4:15. These house congregations were each for themselves called an ekklesia . But thereby the unity is not for a moment lost sight of. For although the believers in the same city sometimes come together in different dwellings because of their great number, they yet form there on the spot with each other the one ekklesia , Acts 5:11, 8:1, etc. If the reading of Tischendorf in Acts 9:31 is correct, there all the congregations of Judea, Galilee, and Samaria are summed up under the one name of ekklesia in the singular. And in Rom. 12:5, 1 Cor. 12:12-28, 15:9, Gal. 1:13, Phil. 3:6, Eph. 1:22, 5:32, Col. 1:18, 24, 25, all congregations are in the same way taken together as one ekklesia and described as the body, the bride, the fullness of Christ. This unity of all congregations does not come into being only a posteriori through confession, church order, and synodal connection; the church is no association of persons who first came to faith outside of her and then united themselves. But she is an organism, in which the whole precedes the parts; her unity precedes the multiplicity of the local congregations and lies in Christ. He it is who, continuing his mediatorial work in the state of exaltation, joins together and builds up his congregations from himself as the head, Eph. 1:23, 4:16, 5:23, Col. 1:18, 2:19, who gathers and rules her, John 10:16, 11:52, 17:20, 21, Acts 2:33, 47, 9:3ff., always abides with her, Matt. 18:20, 28:20, is most closely united with her, John 15:1ff., 17:21, 23, 1 Cor. 6:15, 12:12-27, Gal. 2:20, and dwells in her by his Spirit, Rom. 6:5, 8:9-11, 1 Cor. 6:15ff., Eph. 3:17, etc. Insofar the assertion of Sohm, Kirchenrecht p. 20 is correct, that the general ekklesia precedes the local congregations; she is indeed not the historical, but yet the logical prius, Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. II 177; every local congregation is the folk of God, the body of Christ, built on the foundation of Christ, 1 Cor. 3:11, 16, 12:27, because she is there on the spot the same as what the congregation in her whole is, and Christ is for her what he is for the whole congregation, Zahn, Einl. in das Neue Test. I 355 f. In the different local assemblies of the believers, the one congregation of Christ comes to manifestation. Her essence lies, as much for the whole as for each of the parts in particular, therein that she is the folk of God, Rom. 9:25, 2 Cor. 6:16, 18, Tit. 2:14, Heb. 8:10, 13:12, 1 Pet. 2:9, 10, consisting of men who are devoted to the Lord and converted to him, Acts 5:14, 14:15, who bear the name of disciples, brothers, elect, called, saints, believers, Acts 1:15, 6:1, 9:1, 32, Rom. 1:7, 1 Cor. 1:2, etc. In the widest sense ekklesia is the assembly of all the folk of God, not only on earth but also in heaven, Heb. 12:23, not only in the past and present but also in the future, John 10:16, 17:20.
3. This spiritual oneness of the church of Christ also continually stands out in the post-apostolic age. The Christians are the saints, the elect; they have one God, one Christ, one Spirit of grace, one calling, Clement, 1 Corinthians 46. The church is a tower that forms one stone with the rock Christ, Hermas, Similitudes IX 13, 18, from which the stones that are unclean and black and do not fit are cast out, ibid. 6, 7; the kindred of the righteous, from which the ungodly are set apart, ibid. 17, 18. The Christians are the soul of the world, Epistle to Diognetus 6, the true Israel, the blessed folk of God, Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 116, 123, 135; they are all priests, Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV 8, 3. Tertullian, On the Exhortation to Chastity 7; they have all received the Holy Spirit, Irenaeus, ibid. IV 36, 2, and together form a fellowship of peace and a calling of brotherhood and a bond of guest-friendship, Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics 20, and so on. Thereby, just as Hermas, one makes a distinction between true and false members of the church. With an eye on those excommunicated, Origen said: thus it happens that sometimes he who is sent out is inside, and he is outside who seems to be kept inside. And elsewhere he speaks many times that many are called and few are chosen, that there are spiritual and fleshly members, that there is tares among the wheat, and the walk of many fights with their confession, Seeberg, The Concept of the Christian Church, Erlangen 1885. But soon there came in this view of the church as communion of saints a great change. When in the second century all kinds of sects and heresies arose, the question naturally arose, which was the true church. And to that the answer was given: that which stays with the whole and keeps fellowship with the catholic church. Catholic was the church already called by Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 8, cf. Muratorian and Martyrdom of Polycarp 5, 16, 19, because it embraces over the whole earth, in all times and places, all believers, and outside her there is no salvation, Clement, 1 Corinthians 57. Ignatius, Ephesians 16. Trallians 7. Philadelphians 3. Hermas IX 16. This catholicity of the church was however, over against heresy, no longer understood spiritually, but made outward and embodied in a visible body. The bishop, coming in straight line from the apostles and in ownership of the pure tradition, became the mark of the true church. The general church stopped being a logical first and was thought of as a historical first before all local churches. Thus there came in the church concept a full turnaround. It is not the local churches that together form a oneness, but the catholic church with the bishopric goes before, and the local churches are parts of the whole and only so long true churches as they hold to that whole and yield to it. The unfolding of this catholic church concept was helped by the withstanding that it met from the heretical side. Gnosticism made of the church a school, in which the spiritual ones were far raised above the folkish views of historical Christianity. Montanism wished to set the church on the ground of claimed inspiration and prophecy, with denial of all office and might; the church properly and chiefly is the Spirit himself, Tertullian, On Modesty 21. Novatianism and Donatism strove for the holiness of the church at the cost of her catholicity. Against all these errors the church fathers stood up and laid more and more stress on the bishoply church body. The church, which is led by the bishops, is the only keeper and preacher of the truth, Irenaeus, Against Heresies I 10, 2. Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics 28, and therefore the needful body of salvation, the mother of all believers, the giver of grace, the go-between of salvation, the ladder of ascent to God. For where the church is, there is also the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and all grace, but the Spirit is grace, Irenaeus, ibid. III 24, 1. Tertullian, On Prayer 2. Clement, Paedagogus I 6. Stromata VIII 17. As there is but one God and one Lord, so there is also but one church, one flock, one mother, from which all believers are born and outside which there is no salvation. The light-beam cannot be sundered from the sun, the branch not from the tree, the brook not from the spring, Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 5, 7. Augustine also moves in the same ring of thoughts. Though the church through her oneness, catholicity, and majesty had already earlier made a deep mark on him, yet he was first through his fight against Donatism 393-411 driven to think more fully about her being. Even then, however, it is not the teaching of the church, but the teaching of grace stays the midpoint of his thinking and life, and the teaching of the church comes to a certain height loose, self-standing, and unatoned next to it. For if God is the only and full cause of grace, as Augustine teaches, then the church cannot be this. Therefore he sets apart at once between the church as the true body and the church as the mixed body, On Christian Doctrine III 32. There are members of the true church outside the visible church, such as the angels, Enchiridion 29, the thief on the cross, who only received the blood-baptism, On Baptism IV 22, and all non-Israelites who before Christ's coming became blessed, City of God XVIII 23, 47, for the Christian faith is as old as the world, Epistle 102. To the true church belong also those who now still live ungodly or are tangled in superstition and heresy and yet are known by God. For in that unspeakable foreknowledge of God many who seem outside are inside, and many who seem inside are outside. From those therefore all, who so to say inwardly and in hiddenness are inside, is made up that enclosed garden, sealed fountain, well of living water, paradise with the fruit of apples, On Baptism V 27. On the other hand, there are many within the visible church who do not belong to the elect. There is chaff among the corn, there are evil fishes among the good, there are many sheep outside, many wolves inside, Homilies on John 45. Against the Letters of Petilian III 3. On Baptism I 10. Many are in the fellowship of the sacraments with the church, who yet are not in the church, On the Unity of the Church 74. Because of this setting apart Augustine was blamed by the Donatists that he taught two churches; but he gave thereon the answer that he did not sunder both, no more than he who sets apart in man soul and body, and that according to the word of Christ tares and wheat must grow up together. The church is for Augustine not the giver of grace, but yet the ring within which God as a rule deals out his grace. And so he upholds her against the Donatists. The church is the go-between of salvation, because in her alone the Spirit, the love, the steadfastness is there. Outside her there is no salvation. For heretics and schismatics can indeed take along the word and sacrament, but not the new birth and the love, which by the Holy Spirit alone within the church are given; this Spirit, that those do not have it who are sundered from the church, the apostle Jude 1:10 most openly shows. They have the shape but lack the being, just as cut-off body parts are still a hand, finger, ear, and so on, but have no life. Who has not the church as mother, has not God as father, On Baptism VII 44. On the Unity of the Church 1. Against the Letters of Petilian III 9. The church is the godly mother, bride without spot and wrinkle, only dove, holy church; and the church stays holy, even if the ungodly have the greater number in her, for her holiness lies, just as her oneness and catholicity, for Augustine much more in the outward body of teaching, means of grace, and worship, than in the members of the church; sundering is therefore always unallowed, a proof of pride and unyielding, trading the general church for a particular or even a national one, Against Cresconius II 37. On the Unity of the Church 12, 14. And just through this strong stress that Augustine against the Donatists lays on the body of the church, he has in no small way helped to the unfolding of the Roman church concept. Cf. besides the dogmatics history works of Harnack, Schwane, and so on, Seeberg, The Concept of the Christian Church 1-56. Köstlin, The Catholic View of the Church in its First Unfolding, German Journal for Christian Knowledge and Christian Life 1856. H. Schmidt, Augustine's Teaching on the Church, Yearbook for German Theology 1861. Reuter, Augustinian Studies 1887. Dorner, Augustine. Specht, The Teaching on the Church according to the Holy Augustine, Paderborn 1892.
In the Middle Ages, this concept of the church was practically worked out in the development of the hierarchy, in the mighty organization of the churchly institute, in the strife of the church with and her uplifting above the state. All the more noteworthy is it that theoretically it was hardly treated at all. Not theology but jurisprudence then led the development, Harnack, D. G. III. On the doctrine of the church we find only something in Hugo of St. Victor, de sacr. II 2. Alexander of Hales, Summa IV qu. 4. Thomas, c. Gent. IV 76. S. Theol. I 2 qu. 101 art. 2. II 2 qu. 10 art. 10. qu. 88 art. 12. III qu. 8 art. 3. 4. qu. 68 art. 9. Only after the opposition by Wycliffe, Hus, the Reformers, etc., is the concept of the church more broadly developed and defended from the Roman side, especially by Torquemada 1468, Catech. Rom. I c. 10. Cano, Loci theol. IV-VI, Bellarmine, Disp. de controv. Tom. I and II. Becanus, de ecclesia Christi itemque de ecclesia Romana 1615. Id. Manuale controv. I 1-5. Bossuet, Exposition de la doctrine de l’église cath. sur les matières de controverse 1671, etc. In this concept of the church, the visible institute stands in the foreground. Christ has namely founded a church on earth, to which the visible and the invisible side are inseparably bound. Just as in Christ a godly and a human nature, in every man a soul and body, in the sacrament a sign and a signified thing are united, so there are in the church a visible and an invisible side. The visibility of the church rests on the flesh-becoming of the Word. Christ is the efficient, exemplary, and final cause of the church; He Himself lives on as prophet, priest, and king through the Holy Ghost in her, and pours out all the gifts of His grace in her. He imparts these exclusively through the means of office and sacrament; the institute thus goes before the organism; the church is a mother of the believers before she is a gathering; the teaching church with her hierarchical ordering and her grace-working sacraments goes before the hearing church and stands high above her. On this teaching church are then also in the first place all those properties applicable which the Roman Christian ascribes to his church. She is the one, only, solely Christian, catholic, by regular succession descending from the apostles, imperishable, infallible church, which disputes the right of existence to all other so-called churches, is intolerant by her nature, suffers no other churches beside herself or recognizes them, from which to deviate in doctrine or to separate in life is always sin and never allowed. For because Christ imparts all grace only through office and sacrament, therefore the teaching church, the Roman church institute, is the only mediatrix of salvation, the keeper and dispenser of all grace for all men, the only ark of salvation for the whole human race. She alone leads man to the Scripture, to the person of Christ, to fellowship with God. The order of salvation is not this, that God through His Word leads man to the church, but contrariwise it goes out from the church and then leads to the Scripture and to Christ. Therefore the church ought to be knowable, pointable, and even provable for all; by her properties and marks she must so clearly strike the eye that no doubt is possible concerning her, and only willful and guilty unbelief can misknow and reject her. She is the very first and foremost source of knowledge of the truth and is for this reason treated by many Roman theologians in the doctrine of the principles. Of this teaching church the hearing church is fully dependent; she has only passive part in all the glorious properties of the church; her only task is to receive the supernatural grace from the hand of the priest in the sacrament; faith in what the church believes, obedience to the hierarchy, submission to the pope is her greatest virtue and necessary to salvation. Where the pope is, there is the church. From the quality of this hearing church therefore the essence of the church does not depend. Well is it good and useful that the members of the church be believers; the adornment of the church consists principally in inward things, Thomas, Sent. IV dist. 15 qu. 3 ad 1. But the teaching church, the objective institute of salvation, remains just as well the true church for it, even if her members be unbelievers and godless. No members of the church of Christ are all those who find themselves outside the Roman church, such as the catechumens, the excommunicated, the schismatics, etc. Their Christian faith, their pious walk avails them not; they are outside the only saving church. But members of the church are indeed all who remain in communion with Rome, even if they be open unbelievers and godless. These are not actually but potentially of the church; they belong not to the soul but to the body of the church; they are not so perfectly of the church as those who believe and live in the Roman church; but they are yet members of the church and belong to it just as well as the body belongs to man's being. To belong to the church in any way, more or less perfectly, no inward virtue of faith or love is needful, but only outward profession of faith and communion of sacraments. For the church is as visible and palpable as is the assembly of the Roman people or the kingdom of France or the republic of Venice. She is in one word the assembly of men bound together by the same profession of the Christian faith and communion of the same sacraments, under the rule of legitimate pastors and especially of Christ's vicar on earth, the Roman pontiff, Bellarmine, de eccl. mil. III 2. cf. Heinrich, Dogm. Theol. II 163 f. Perrone, Prael. theol. I 1838 p. 207 sq. Möhler, Symbolik § 36 f. Simar, Dogm. 576-592. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 279-377. Jansen, Prael. I 325 sq. Concil. Vatic. ed. Lacensis VII Frib. p. 269 sq. 567 sq. etc.
4. In the same measure as this Roman church concept was practically realized in the Middle Ages, it met with opposition and resistance from various sides. The catholicizing of the church idea in the first centuries did not take place without strong and persistent protest. The Greek Christianity, though otherwise agreeing with Rome in the doctrine of the church, never acknowledged the primacy of the pope and thereby withstood the striving for absolute unity and catholicity. And so also in the Middle Ages various sects rose up against the development of the Roman church idea. The opposition sprang from different principles. Among the Cathars, Albigenses, Bogomils, the followers of Amalric of Bena, the sects of the new and of the free spirit, it was the fruit of dualistic-Manichaean or gnostic-pantheistic errors. Among others such as the Waldensians, Bradwardine, Wycliffe, Huss, and so forth, the view of Augustine worked on, according to which the church was a gathering of the predestined. But the knowability of this true church was then not sought objectively in the ministry of word and sacrament, but in the holy life, in the life according to the law of Christ, in love, poverty, and so forth; hence the transition from the idea of the church to reality was lacking, and the attempt at reformation could not work through or also ended in disappointment. First in the sixteenth century was a principally different church concept placed over against that of Rome by the Reformation. Luther found peace for his soul, not in the sacrament working ex opere operato nor also in good works, but in the forgiveness of sins through faith alone. And from this standpoint he attacked the Roman church, rejected priest, sacrifice, monasticism, infallible church institution, and magically working sacrament, proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man, and conceived the church as a gathering of believers, as a communio sanctorum , as it was confessed as an object of faith in the twelve articles.
It cost Luther fierce struggle to break with the Roman church and its church concept; he had no program of reformation; at first it was only his aim to oppose the abuses. But he found and kept his firmness in the justification of the sinner through faith alone and from there came much further than he had originally thought or intended. This principle also led him to another view of the church, to that which he found in Scripture. The church was no gathering of the predestined without more, nor also of such as walk according to some precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. But it was a gathering of believers, of people who through faith had received forgiveness of sins and thus were all children of God, prophets, and priests. Naturally, therefore, it had an invisible and a visible side. This distinction was first made not by Zwingli but by Luther. But he understood thereby no two churches, but two sides to one and the same church. The church is for Luther no Platonic ideal, no idea without reality, but it exists for him concretely in people who live and through faith partake of the forgiveness of sins. On the one side it is invisible, an object of faith, for what one believes, one does not see; on the other side it is visible, for it becomes manifest and is knowable, not by papacy, bishops, mass vestments, and other outward things, but by the pure ministry of word and sacrament. Where this is, one can be sure that there is a church; there are true believers, even if only among the children in the cradle; God's Word cannot be without God's people. For there can be unbelievers in a church, just as there can be foreign elements in a body, but the essence of the church is determined by the believers; the whole is named after the chief part.
Accordingly, in the Lutheran symbols the church was defined as a communio or congregatio sanctorum et vere credentium , in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments rightly administered. It is indeed visible, has offices and institutions, but ecclesia non est tantum societas externarum rerum ac rituum sed principaliter est societas fidei et Spiritus Sancti in cordibus . The distinction of visible and invisible church originally served only to express over against Rome that the essence of the church lay in the invisible, in faith, in fellowship with Christ and his benefits through the Holy Spirit, but by no means to detract in any way from the visibility, from the reality of the church. Soon, however, it was used in another sense. For one could not close one's eyes to the fact that in the church in this life many evil and hypocrites are mixed in, who indeed are fellows of the true church according to external rites but yet do not form the church and rather belong to the kingdom of the devil. The church could thus be taken more narrowly or more broadly as ecclesia stricte et large dicta . Luther sometimes spoke of two churches, and Melanchthon called this a distinction of two bodies of the church, and later theologians, such as Heerbrand, Chemnitz, Hutter, Gerhard, and so forth, applied thereto the distinction of invisible and visible church. Invisible was the church now called, not because it had a spiritual side and therefore was an object of faith, but because the circle of believers could not be known by us; and visible church became the name, not for the manifestation of the believers in confession and walk, but for the unbelievers, who formerly by Luther and the confessional writings were not reckoned to the church but to the kingdom of the devil. Idea and reality, essence and appearance were thereby placed loosely beside each other. The believers formed an invisible little church in the visible church.
The Reformed doctrine of the church agrees in the main with the Lutheran, but it shows some not unimportant peculiarities. First, the institute of the church takes a somewhat different place in it. Luther understood by the church indeed the communion of saints, but yet sought her unity and holiness more in the objective institutions of office, word, and sacrament than in the subjective fellowship of believers, which often left so much to be desired. Thus the church became more and more a divine institute, which had to realize the unity and holiness of believers. In the same spirit Melanchthon defined in the Loci of 1543 the church as the assembly of the called and said that we should dream of no elect anywhere else than in this visible assembly itself. And later Lutheran dogmaticians found a point of difference in it, that according to their doctrine the elect are not to be sought outside the assembly of the called and according to the Reformed could also occur outside it. And indeed it is the Reformed doctrine that God ordinarily bestows the benefits of Christ by means of word and sacrament, but yet is not bound to them and, though very rarely, grants salvation outside the institute of the church, Calvin, Inst. IV 16, 19. Ursinus, Expl. catech. qu. 21. Bucanus, Inst. theol. 400. Gomarus, Theses 30, 29.
Second, the Reformed brought the church into close connection with election and therefore often conceived her invisibility differently than the Lutherans. Zwingli at first let invisibility apply to the ecclesia universalis, which was spread over the whole earth and therefore could not be empirically observed by anyone, in contrast to the ecclesia particularis, which is present and visible in a certain place. But later he understood by the ecclesia invisibilis the whole body of the elect, as she is the object of faith in the twelve articles and will first become visible at the parousia. And in distinction from that he called the ecclesia universalis and the ecclesia particularis a visible (visibilis, sensibilis) gathering of believers, in which hypocrites can also be, Fidei ratio, Op. IV 8. In his Christianae fidei expositio of the year 1531 he speaks again somewhat differently and says that the church of believers on earth is invisible, insofar as she includes only the true believers, and visible, insofar as all belong to her who throughout the whole world have given their name to Christ, Op. IV 58. Calvin follows this usage. When he first takes up the expression ecclesia invisibilis in the Institutes of 1543, he understands by it the whole body of the elect, who are known to God alone, and then distinguishes the church as the universal multitude of men spread over the world, which is visible and also contains hypocrites in itself, but yet is also invisible and an object of faith insofar as we cannot know who in it are the true believers, Inst. IV 1, 1-9.
The church could thus already be called invisible in a threefold respect: 1º as ecclesia universalis, because a certain person cannot observe the church in other places and in other times; 2º as coetus electorum, which will first be completed and visible at the parousia; 3º as coetus electorum vocatorum, because we cannot distinguish the true believers in the church on earth. To this were added later other viewpoints under which the church could be called invisible, because she is not of this world, because her head Christ and thus she herself as his body is invisible, because her greatest part is in heaven, because she can be temporarily and locally deprived of the ministry of the means of grace, because in times of persecution she hides in deserts and caves, because she is observable indeed in her outward confession but not in the inward faith of the heart, because the church is never present in one place and in one time but extends through the ages and peoples, Polanus, Synt. theol. 531. And over against this the church was then called visible, because she becomes manifest in confession and walk, or appears as an institute with offices and ministries, or contains not only true believers but also hypocrites.
Confession and dogmatics among the Reformed now proceeded sometimes from this and sometimes from that conception. Some placed the church as the fellowship of all the elect in the foreground and called this the ecclesia invisibilis, Cat. Genev. in Niemeyer 135. Scot. I 16. Westm. Conf. 25. Alsted, Theol. did. schol. 590. But since the elect who do not yet live or are not yet called can only potentially be called members of the church, others let this idea of the church rest and proceeded from the church as the gathering of all electi et vocati, Basil. I 5. Helv. I 15. Heid. Catech. 54. Belg. 27. Helv. II 17. Gomarus, Theses theol. disp. 30. Polanus, Synt. 530. Martyr, Loci 390. But then one had at once to distinguish between true believers and hypocrites and therefore began to speak of ecclesia stricte and latius dicta, of the esse de ecclesia and the esse in ecclesia, or also of ecclesia invisibilis and visibilis, Ursinus on qu. 54. Alsted, Theol. did. schol. 598. Heidegger, Corpus theol. XXVI 29 etc.
This led in connection with the corruption that entered the church to the distinction of two circles or groups of people in the one church, Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII 3, 3. 24. and brought Janssonius, van der Eerde and others in the previous century to posit an outward and an inward covenant beside each other, to separate the forma externa and interna of the church, and to proclaim the doctrine that also the unregenerate, if they lived inoffensively, could be true members of the church and have rightful claim to her goods and benefits, cf. volume III 227. In vain others tried over against this to maintain the unity of the church by saying that invisible and visible church were two sides of the same thing, Synopsis pur. theol. 40, 34. Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII 7, 4. Mastricht, Theol. VII 1, 11. 13. Appelius, De Herformde Leer 1769 p. 300ff.; the doctrine corresponded less and less to life. And this was the worse for the Reformed doctrine of the church, because they much less than the Lutherans saw the essence of the church in the institute. For, and that is a third distinction which will later come more clearly to light, the Reformed indeed also sought the mark of the true church in the pure ministry of word and sacrament, but they usually added to it church discipline and Christian walk; election was the foundation of the church but became manifest first in faith and good works.
Beza, Tract. theol. 1582 I 32. Hyperius, Meth. theol. 529. Bullinger, Huysboeck 1612 fol. 204. Bucanus, Inst. theol. 455. Gomarus, Op. II 97. 202. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. I p. 1 sq. Moor, Comm. VI 1-179. M. Vitringa, Doctr. chr. relig. IX etc., cf. Seeberg t. a. p. 159 f.
5. The change which the Reformation brought into the Roman church concept. The change which the Reformation brought into the Roman church concept also had practical outcomes. Uniformity forever gave way to manifoldness; different churches came forth one after another and side by side, and gave to religion and church a wholly other shape. The Reformation sought to keep the unseen and seen church still in good bond; but history proved how hard that went. And with other churches outside the Reformed and Lutheran, the bond was often wholly broken, and the unseen church sacrificed to the seen or this to that. Socinianism still took up the distinction, but yet spoke nearly only of the seen church, since it took up the Christian religion as a teaching fairly well acceptable to all. Remonstrantism not only walked in the same track, but also took from the church all self-standingness and left nothing to her but the right of preaching and warning. In Rationalism the church became a gathering of folk for the working out of religion and for the bettering of morals. Kant marked with the names unseen and seen church the folk of God after its idea and after its worldly showing; the latter, that is, the church with her set belief is meant to go over more and more into the reasonable and moral religion, into a kingdom of God on earth. With Hegel the church likewise had only a timely, passing meaning, for the state is the true fulfilling of the moral idea, the reasonable-moral substance. The church has right of being only so long as the state does not yet fully answer to its idea. For the church as an setting up of Christ no room is left on the standpoint of rationalism. And from another ground the mysticism came to like outcome. Anabaptism went out from the utter withstanding of shaping and reshaping, kind and grace, world and God's kingdom, and beheld the believers therefore as folk who in the rebirth had become something wholly other and therefore must live sundered from the world. Its plan was: not reformation but sundering; it wanted a sundered church. For hundreds of years there had been no church, but only Babel, and Babel must be left and shunned. In Munster it was said that in 1400 years there had been no true Christian. The true church was a church of saints, who after personal owning were baptized and through holding back from oath, war, ruling office and all kinds of other worldly doings in food and drink, in clothing and dealings set themselves apart from others. The same twofold ground lies at the bottom of all kinds of sects which later arose within the ring of Protestantism. Labadie called to life in Middelburg in 1666, even as earlier in Geneva and in Amiens, little gatherings which he gave the name of prophecies, and set up in 1669 an "evangelical gathering" which might be only of true believers, and later in Herford set itself apart through a household family life, through a doubtful wedlock doing and through sharing of goods. Pietism, both here and in Germany, drew all of life together into the narrow ring of religion, became uncaring for church and office, sacrament and form, gathered the believers in sundered fellowships and furthered the sundering. Zinzendorf set up on the 12th of August 1729 an apostolic gathering, which in all kinds of marks agreed with the gathering of Labadie. In England under Anabaptist sway with Robert Browne and John Robinson the Independency arose, which lets the church wholly and all come up from the joining together of single believers. After Cromwell's uprising tempered in its eagerness, it went over, like Anabaptism in Mennonitism, into the religion of the Quakers, who shaped a gathering sundered from the world and set apart in all kinds of outward things. Loosed from all the historical and outward, the church with them became the fellowship of all who had share in the enlightening of the Holy Ghost, and further the name for them who gathered together in one place, as it were shaped one household and through the inner light also outwardly in owning and life agreed. Methodism also is ruled by the same withstanding. Indeed Wesley first sought to reform the church herself, but in 1784 he yet went over to sundering from the state church; he set preachers in order, put them under shielding of the Tolerance Act and joined the turned ones in fellowships which came together daily for prayer, from time to time held love meals, fasting days, watch nights, prayer meetings and so on, and got as foremost task to work at the turning of others. The salvation army of General Booth is the outcome of this Methodism; the turned ones shape no church more but a standing army of Christ, a body of gospel bringers under an officer, sundered from the world by sundry clothing and way of life. No wonder that under all such showings John Darby came to openly and boldly cast off all church and church shape. After his thinking the New Testament giving out of the bond of grace was indeed by God gifted with church and office, but these already in the apostles' time through folks' unfaithfulness grew bad and from God's side were cast off. Therefore all churches since that time are nothing but Babel, readyings of the antichrist, wholly and all spoiled, by the believers fully to be cast off. These must now do nothing other than draw back from the world, build each other in their gatherings with their sundry gifts and in stillness await the coming back of Christ.
Thus everything seems to point to a breaking up of the church and to a root-deep change in the church concept. Yet over against this there is no lack of a mighty backlash. The Russian church, whose highest board rests with the Holy Synod and is bound to the emperor by means of the procurator, upholds her claim to the name of the only true, orthodox church and strives with the putting down of sects toward oneness of faith in the whole realm; Pobedonostsev, the current procurator, is a backer of the utter kingship and of the state church and upholds the teaching that the mass finds in might the yardstick of truth, see his Streitfragen, authorized translation, Berlin Deubner 1897. The Roman church is still the same as she was before, when she let heretics and schism-makers be hunted and put to death and in groundwork can acknowledge and bear no churches beside herself; when Romans speak in behalf of freedom of worship and parting of church and state, they are to be seen as friends of both from reckoning, but as foes of both from groundwork, cf. for example Stöckl, Lehrb. d. Philos. Cathrein, Moralphilos. Hettinger, Apol. des Christ. In England first Irvingism arose, which wanted to reform the church by bringing back the apostleship, J. N. Köhler, Het Irvingisme, The Hague 1876, and now in the Anglican church ritualism is spreading, which shapes offices, sacraments, worship, ceremonies more and more after Roman teaching and practice, art. Tractarianismus in Herzog¹. Mr. Walter Walsh, Secret History of the Oxford movement 1897. Williams, The crisis in the church of England. Presb. and Ref. Rev. July 1899 p. 389-412. Even among the Lutherans many confessional folk went back to the outward setup of church, office, and sacrament and bound thereto all sharing of grace, Löhe, Drei Bücher von der Kirche 1845. Kliefoth, Acht Bücher v. d. Kirche 1854. Münchmeyer, Das Dogma v. d. uns. u. sichtb. Kirche 1854. Vilmar, Theol. der Thatsachen 1876. Id. Dogmatik. Stahl, Die Kirchenverfassung nach Lehre u. Recht der Prot. 2nd ed. 1862. But despite all this the church loses more and more her even shape. Not only in the Protestant lands, foremost in England and America, but also in Russia the tally of sects spreads out, J. Gehring, Die Sekten der Russischen Kirche 1003-1897. Nach ihrem Ursprunge und inneren Zusammenhange dargestellt. Leipzig Richter 1898. Even in the Roman church, which so gladly feasts on the splitting of Protestantism, in many ways the oneness is more show than being. Believers and unbelievers stand within her walls even as far from each other as in many churches of the Reformation. The sundry orders often stand with each other on anything but friendly footing. The same motives of special godliness, which on Catholic ground lead to new order-foundings, work on Protestant ground to the shaping of sects, Ritschl, Gesch. des Piet. And Reform-Catholicism and "Away-from-Rome" movement show how much unrest there is in many a heart under the outward shine of oneness. The belief in the one, unerring, only-saving church can no longer be upheld over against the being and blooming of so many other churches; the teaching is withstood as strongly as may be by life and by history.
While Rome closes its eyes to this unfolding of Christendom and church, Protestant theology runs the risk of overlooking the godly setting up of the church for the sake of history. According to Schleiermacher, the church arose through the coming together of the single reborn ones to an ordered upbuilding and working with one another, Christian Faith.
Because however rebirth is no magical change but an ethical renewal, there remains in the reborn still always a piece of the world, and thus in the church a distinction must be made between the abiding and the changing and vanishing.
To this distinction Schleiermacher applies the former names of unseen and seen church. Their former use was wrong, for of the unseen church the most is not unseen, because rebirth becomes open outwardly in confession and life, and of the seen church the most is not church, because it belongs to the world. Unseen church denotes not so much persons, as well the workings of the Spirit in the persons, and seen church makes known that these workings of the Spirit in all believers still go together with afterworkings of sin. Both stand thus to each other in kinship as being and showing, as thought and truth, and are in the same sense also taken up by many other theologians, Nitzsch, System of Christian Teaching. Lange, Dogmatics. Martensen, Dogmatics. Müller, Dogmatic Treatises. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work. Frank, Christian Truth. Kaftan, Dogmatics. Some let go of the old names thereby and speak rather of God's kingdom and church, A. Dorner, Church and Kingdom of God, Gotha 1883. Krauss, The Protestant Dogma of the Unseen Church, 1876, or also of gathering and church, Stahl, Church Order 67. De la Saussaye in my Theology of Ch. de la Saussaye 61. Van Oosterzee. One can then still with Stahl hold this seen church for a founding of Christ; but most think it yet as an outcome, a needful being-form of the gathering, Lipsius, Dogmatics. Tiele, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1899, or even deem that the set-up church has had its time, and must pass over into the state, Strauss, Dogmatics. Rothe, Ethics, or into the confessing gathering, Rauwenhoff, Wisdom of Religion 843. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion 1896. Sohm, Church Law throughout. Chavannes, What is a Church, Paris Fischbacher 1897.
6. The name qahal , ekklesia , by its very derivation from verbs meaning to call together, points to a gathering of folk who have come together for some end, especially political or religious, or, even if they are not gathered at a certain time, are yet bound together for such an end. Under the Old Testament, Israel was the folk that God had called together and gathered for his service; and in the New Testament this folk of Israel is replaced by the church of Christ, which is now the holy folk, the chosen kindred, the kingly priesthood of God. The word church, from which come church, kirk, kirche, chiesa, with which ekklesia is rendered, does not so clearly as the first word show forth this mark of the church of Christ. It is likely drawn from kyriake , that is, oikia , or kyriakon , that is, oikon , and so at first meant not the church itself, but the place of its gathering, the church building. Now we use this word in the same way for the church building, or for the worship gathering (as, the church begins at ten o'clock), or for the set group of churches (the Roman, the Anglican church, and so on). The meaning of the New Testament word ekklesia stands in the background with the word church; in some times the awareness that church is the name of God's folk was almost wholly worn away. This is also the reason why the word ekklesia in the States Translation is not rendered by church, but by congregation; this word did again bring out that the being of the church lies in the fellowship of the saints. If there were no hindrances against it, it would be worth thinking about to replace the word church with that of congregation. But fellowship and state have taken this word for worldly use, speaking of municipality, town council, town school, town hall, and have thereby made this word in many ways unfit for church life. Congregation can and may well be used in church matters, but then has a set meaning and is not so bendable as the word church, which can take many meanings. For though this word at first meant the church building and then also the worship and the church setup, yet the meaning of God's folk, of the gathering of Christ-believers, is not strange to it. In that way it comes in the twelve articles, in the Dutch Confession art. 27-29, in the Dordrecht church order throughout. It comes only to this, to quicken this meaning in the awareness. The words congregation and church can then be used side by side but they are never so to be set apart that the word congregation means the gathering of believers in a certain place, and the word church the joining of congregations into one whole. For church and congregation are both renderings of the same word ekklesia and therefore have the same meaning. Both words are names for the gathering of believers, whether in a certain place, or in a land, or over the whole earth. Wholly wrong it is therefore to think with congregation of the true believers, with church of the seeming believers, to make both thoughts the same as those of unseen and seen church, or also under congregation the gathering of believers and under church the setup. At most they differ in this, that congregation more makes one think of the fellowship of believers among themselves, and church more of those same believers, as they are setup-wise, under office and ministry of the word, ordered. Both times it is yet the same gathering of believers that is thereby marked; only the viewpoint differs, from which it is beheld. While these two words thus have rights on church ground, it is wholly otherwise with the word church society. This name has a collegialist aftertaste. It came into use in this land in 1773 through the first rhyming of the twelve articles of faith, was then taken up in the meaning of local or general church in the state ordering of 1798, 1801 and 1805, was in the groundwork of 1814 and 1815 replaced by the word religions and religious leanings and thereafter in the groundwork of 1848 and 1887 and also again in the law on church societies of 10 Sept. 1853 next to the name of religious leanings brought in. The joining of church and society is a mismatch and mother of many errors. A church is just no society, for it arises not through willing joining of grown persons but from the new birth through the Holy Ghost. Lastly it earns no praise to replace the word church in the meaning of God's folk with that of God's kingdom. For between both there is no small difference. The kingdom of God, with which Jesus' preaching begins, is in the first place an end-time thought for the nearing Messianic kingdom with all its goods. And also, insofar as this kingdom through new birth, forgiveness and renewal is already here on earth in the hearts, it stands much more in ghostly goods than in fellowship of persons. The kingdom of the heavens is or becomes just a holding of the poor in spirit, the clean in heart, the little children and stands itself in peace, joy, gladness through the Holy Ghost. Therefore it is, at least here on earth, not ordered; it is in beginning everywhere, where the ghostly blessings of Christ are given, and is nowhere on earth rounded and fulfilled. But the church is above all a this-side thought, a fellowship of persons, fitted with offices and ministries and stepping forth in the seen as the gathered folk of God. The church is thus the means through which Christ shares out the blessings of God's kingdom and readies the fulfilling thereof. And on her way to make God's kingdom come, she takes up all kinds of things that are unclean and truly do not belong to her (hypocrites and also the old man in the believers), while God's kingdom, standing in goods, is clean and unmixed and only holds the new-born. Christ is given to the church as a head, just so that God at the end as King of his folk may step forth and be all in all.
Now there is no doubt that, according to Holy Scripture, the essence of the church lies in this, that it is the people of God. For the church is a realization of the election, and this is an election in Christ unto calling, justification, glorification, Rom. 8:28, unto likeness to the Son of God, Rom. 8:29, unto holiness and blessedness, Eph. 1:4ff. The blessings which are bestowed upon the church are in the first place inward and spiritual in kind and consist in calling and regeneration, in faith and justification, in sanctification and glorification. They are goods of the kingdom of heaven, benefits of the covenant of grace, promises for this but above all for the life to come. On this ground the church is called the body of Christ, 1 Cor. 12:27, Eph. 5:23, Col. 1:18, the bride of Christ, 2 Cor. 11:2, Eph. 5:32, Rev. 19:7, 21:2, the sheepfold of Christ, who lays down his life for the sheep and is known by them, John 10, the building, the temple, the house of God, Matt. 16:18, Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:5, built up from living stones, 1 Pet. 2:5, upon the cornerstone Christ and upon the foundation of apostles and prophets, 1 Cor. 3:17, 2 Cor. 6:16, 17, Eph. 2:22, Rev. 21:2-4, the people, the possession, the Israel of God, Rom. 9:25, 2 Cor. 6:16, Heb. 8:10, 1 Pet. 2:9, 10. The members of the church are called branches on the vine, John 15, living stones, 1 Pet. 2:5, elect, called, believers, beloved, brothers and sisters, children of God, and so on, and those who are not this in truth are regarded in Scripture as chaff to the wheat, Matt. 3:12, as weeds among the wheat, Matt. 13:25, as bad fish in the net, Matt. 13:47, as a man without wedding garment at the feast, Matt. 22:11, as called but not chosen, Matt. 22:14, as evil branches on the vine, John 15:2, as not Israel, though being from Israel, Rom. 2:28, 9:6, as evil ones who must be put away, 1 Cor. 5:13, as vessels unto dishonor, 2 Tim. 2:20, as such who have gone out from us but were not of us, 1 John 2:19, and so on. All this raises it above all doubt that the church according to its essence is a gathering of true believers. Those who do not partake of upright faith may outwardly belong to the church; yet they do not make up its essence, its form; they are in, but not of the church.
This is confirmed further by the way in which Scripture speaks of the fellowship of the saints. The believers have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, and so also they have one Spirit, Eph. 4:4-6, in whose fellowship they live, by whom they are reborn, baptized into one body and united with Christ, John 3:5, 14:17, Rom. 8:9, 14, 16, 1 Cor. 12:3, 13, 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5, Eph. 1:13, 4:30, 1 John 2:20. And this Spirit does not do away with the diversity which exists among the believers in the oneness, but He upholds and strengthens it. Just as He in the making and upholding of all things adorned and fulfilled them each in their own way, and among Israel bestowed sundry natural and ghostly gifts; so on Pentecost He shared Himself with all His gifts to the church of Christ. These gifts embrace in a broader sense also the boons of grace, which are the share of all believers, Rom. 5:15, 16, 6:23; but mark in a narrower sense those special gifts which are given to believers in sundry measures and degrees for the good of one another, Rom. 1:11, 1 Cor. 1:7, 2 Cor. 1:11, 1 Tim. 4:14, 2 Tim. 1:6 and chiefly Rom. 12:6-9 and 1 Cor. 12:12 ff. Of all these gifts the Holy Spirit, who takes them all from Christ, John 16:13, 14, Eph. 4:7, is the dealer; He deals them to each one, even as He wills, yet not at random, but in link with the measure of faith, with the place which someone holds in the church, and with the task to which he is called, Rom. 12:3, 6, 2 Cor. 10:13, Eph. 4:7, 1 Pet. 4:10, so that each gift is a phanerōsis tou pneumatos , 1 Cor. 12:7. These gifts are very many in tally. Paul names sundry ones, and by no means means to give a full list. The Roman Catholics speak, even as of seven chief sins, seven virtues, seven blessings, so also gladly with call upon Isa. 11:2, 3 of seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, Lombard, Sent. III dist. 34. Thomas, S. Theol. I 2 qu. 68. II 2 qu. 8. Bonaventure, Brevil. V 5. Meschler, The Gift of the Holy Pentecost, 3rd ed. Freiburg 1896. Simar, Dogm. 554. Heinrich-Gutberlet, Dogm. VIII 631. But this sevenfold takes not in the proper gifts which are tallied by Paul and which in Roman theology rather come to speech under the name of gratiae gratis datae , Simar ibid. 486. And these are not to be bound to a sevenfold. To those tallied by Paul can also be added those of prayer and thanksgiving, of warning and comforting, of sharing and hosting, and so forth. A sorting is therefore also hard to give. Some clearly bear an above-natural mark or are first given in or after the turning, others show more the kind of natural gifts which are lifted and hallowed by the Holy Spirit. The former stood forth chiefly in the first time, the latter are more own to the church in her historical, normal unfolding. But whatever those gifts may be, they all serve for the good of the church. The communio sanctorum is a sanctorum communicatio , Calvin, Inst. IV 1, 3. The Holy Spirit deals the gifts not to the limbs of the church for their own sake, but for the sake of others. They must not be buried or overlooked, but must be willingly and with joy laid on for the good and saving of the other limbs, Heidelberg Catechism 55; they serve for building up, 1 Cor. 14:12, Eph. 4:12, and are underlaid to love, which is the most outstanding gift. This love yet is another than the general love of neighbor; it is the love to the brothers, to the household of faith. Jesus calls this love a new bidding, John 13:34, 35, 15:12, 17:26, because the love among Israel bore not a purely ghostly mark but was entwined with the bonds of blood, and the love which He now brings to stand among His own is first fully clean, unmixed and free of earthly ties. The limbs of Jesus' church are brothers and sisters among each other, Matt. 12:48, 18:15, 23:8, 25:40, 28:10, John 15:14, 15, 20:17, Rom. 8:29, Heb. 2:11 and so forth. They are children of one household; God is their Father, Eph. 4:6, Christ their firstborn brother, Rom. 8:29, Jerusalem which is above their mother, Gal. 4:26. And so they have to serve one another with all their ghostly and natural gifts. The church is a fellowship of saints. See on these ghostly gifts the unfoldings on the belief article of the fellowship of saints and further, Ames, Med. Theol. II 2 § 19-23. Voetius, Disp. II 1086-1100. Neander, Planting and Leading of the Christian Church 5th ed. Pfleiderer, Paulinism 242. Holtzmann, New Testament Theology II 143, 175. Article "Gifts of the Spirit" by Cremer in Herzog 3rd ed. Lauterburg, The Concept of Charisma and its Meaning for Practical Theology. Gütersloh 1898.
7. As long as we hold fast to this being of the church, her notion brings no overgreat hardship. The church is then always in broader or in narrower wise the gathering of the faithful. In the broadest wise it holds all who through faith in Christ have become blessed or will yet become so. Adam and Eve before the fall belong thereto not yet, for they had then no need of a go-between. And the angels also cannot be reckoned to her, though this was done by many; for Christ is indeed the Lord of the angels and has through his cross set all things, angels and men also, in the right bond to God and to each other; but angels are yet not shaped after God's likeness, are not fallen and not freed by Christ and are thus also no limbs of the church which Christ gathers to endless life. The faithful come according to Hebrews 12:22 indeed to fellowship with the thousands of angels, but these are clearly set apart from the πανηγυρις και ἐκκλησια πρωτοτοκων, vs. 23. Limbs of the church are only men who through faith in Christ are kept safe. Thereto belong thus all faithful who from the Eden pledge onward up to this eyeblink have lived on earth and not in the limbus patrum or in the fire of cleansing but in heaven are taken up, Hebrews 12:23. Thereto belong all faithful who now yet on earth live. And thereto belong in a certain wise also all those who later yet to the end of the ages in Christ will believe. For the church, even as she in this broadest wise is taken, is no Platonic realm that lives only in the mind's eye and never becomes truly, but she has the pledge of her being now or in the time to come in God's behest, in the steadfastness of the bond of kindness, in the go-betweenship of Christ, in the pledge of the Holy Ghost. The greatest deal of the limbs of this church is then however at a given eyeblink not on earth; for from Eden onward up to now already many thousands and millions in heaven are taken up and their tally is daily, from eyeblink to eyeblink made greater (ecclesia triumphans), and many are there who now yet believe not or even are not yet born and yet unfailingly surely to faith will come. The church, as gathering of the faithful who at a given eyeblink on earth live (ecclesia militans), is thus but a small deal of the church in her broadest wise taken. Yet it is good and needful to hold fast the tie of the church on earth with that in the yore and in the time to come. For it is one gathering, one ἐκκλησια of those who in the heavens are written and who once as a bride without spot or wrinkle before God's face will stand. And the upholding of this oneness of the whole church heightens the fellowship feeling, steels the boldness and pricks to the strife. If we further bound ourselves to that deal of the church that on earth finds itself (ecclesia militans), then this can yet again broader or narrower be taken. We can think therewith of all the faithful together who now in all churches, among all folks, in all lands are at hand (ecclesia universalis), of the faithful in one land or in one shire, Acts 9:31 (ecclesia nationalis, provincialis) or also of the faithful on a sundry stead, be it town or thorp (ecclesia particularis, localis). Thereby it earns heed that the ecclesia universalis (nationalis) goes before the ecclesia particularis. The church of Christ is a living whole wherein the whole goes before the deals; she has her spring in Eden, Genesis 3:15, or also before the days of the New Witness in Jerusalem, Acts 1:8; the church at Jerusalem was, so long as she alone was, the ecclesia universalis, the church of Christ on earth, and the churches that soon beside her arose came not of their own soil but from out Jerusalem through the preaching of the apostles and gospel bearers to stand.
Thus far the concept of the church is clear and plain. But now there comes a double difficulty. The first consists in this, that this concept of church in Scripture is applied to concrete, historically existing, closed groups of persons, among which there are always unbelievers. In the Old Testament, the whole folk was called the folk of God, although not all that was of Israel was truly Israel. In the churches of the New Testament, there was also, though in much lesser measure, chaff among the wheat and weeds among the tares. And after the apostolic time, the churches have time and again become worldly, corrupted, divided, and yet we still call them all by the name of churches. Theology, like Scripture, has at all times acknowledged this fact and, following its lead, has always declared that the essence of the church is not determined by the unbelievers but by the believers. Augustine clarified this presence of unbelievers in the church by the scriptural image of chaff and corn, or also by that of body and soul, outward and inward man, evil humors in the body; the unbelievers are in the body of Christ like evil humors. And so spoke also the scholastic and Roman theologians. Bellarmine, for example, tries to show that unbelievers are also members of the church, but he brings it no further than the assertion that they are so in some way; they are only of the body, not of the soul of the church; the good are the inner part, the evil are the outer part of the church; the unbelievers are dead members, dry, which are connected to the church only by an external bond; they belong not to the kingdom of Christ, as regards the profession of faith, but to the kingdom of the devil, as regards the perversity of morals; they are sons on account of the form of piety, strangers on account of the loss of virtues; there may not be two churches, yet there are two parts in the church. And the Roman Catechism says that in the church militant there are two kinds of men and that according to Scripture there are evil fishes in the net and weeds in the field and chaff on the threshing floor, foolish among the wise virgins and unclean animals in the ark. In theory this does not differ much from the teaching of the Reformation; but in practice the church looked quite different toward the end of the Middle Ages, and Rome also always fosters the idea that outward membership, historical faith, observance of the church's commands, and submission to the pope constitute the essence of the church. Against this the Reformation rose up and set over against it the distinction between visible and invisible church. Augustine had already said of the nominal Christians, that though they seem inwardly, they are separated from that invisible bond of charity; and properly Rome can have no objection to this distinction and accepts it itself, insofar as it distinguishes in the one church two kinds of men, two parts. Bellarmine treats of the hidden unbelievers, and Möhler praises Luther when he conceives the church as a communion of saints and says that the believers, the invisible ones, are the bearers of the visible church. But the distinction between visible and invisible church can be understood in different ways. Most of these understandings are, however, to be rejected or at least do not come up for discussion in dogmatics. The church is not to be called invisible because Christ, because the church triumphant, because the church completed at the end of the ages is now not observable by us; nor because the church on earth in many places and lands is not seen by us or in times of persecution is hidden or sometimes deprived of the ministry of word and sacrament. The distinction between visible and invisible church applies only to the church militant and then indicates that the church in its spiritual side or in its true members is invisible. Both these meanings have flowed together among Lutherans and Reformed and also cannot be kept apart from each other. The church is an object of faith. The inward faith of the heart, regeneration, true conversion, the hidden communion with Christ, and so on, are spiritual goods that are not observable with the natural eye, and which yet give to the church its proper form. And to no single man has God given the infallible standard by which he can judge the spiritual life of others. The church does not judge the innermost things. The Lord alone knows them that are his. Thus it is possible and has always been a fact in the Christian church that there was chaff among the corn and hypocrites hidden among the true believers. The name church, used of the church militant, of the gathering of believers on earth, therefore has among all Christians, both Roman and Protestant, always a transferred sense. It is so called, not after the unbelievers who are found in it, but after the believers, who form its essential part and give it its essence. The whole is named after the part. A church is and remains a gathering of true Christ-believers.
8. So understood, the distinction between visible and invisible church can be reproved by no one and must rather be acknowledged by all. But there is yet another difficulty bound to the concept of the church. The gathering of believers on earth is not only charismatically but also institutionally arranged. It is not only itself the property of Christ, but also serves to win others for Christ. It is a gathering, yet also the mother of the faithful; organism yet also institute; goal and means at the same time. The relation of the church as organism to the church as institute comes first in the next paragraph, with the government of the church, to speech. For just as the concept of state is hard to define and then first becomes clear when therein folk and government are distinguished and separately treated, so there is of the concept church then only a good definition to give, as against identifying the gathering of believers with her organization in the institute is guarded, Turretin, Theol. El. XVIII 3, 10. Stahl, Kirchenverfassung 46. Many however bring the distinction of the church as organism and as institute with that in invisible and visible in connection and give thereby to this last unnoticed a sense that does not belong to her. On the one side stand they who not only the church according to her idea or the ecclesia triumphans but also the ecclesia militans on earth define as gathering of the predestined or elect (Wycliffe), or of the perfect (Pelagius according to Augustine, de haer. 88, the Anabaptists according to Calvin, Inst. IV 1, 8 and many others), or of those who never fell (Novatian), or also of those members of the church who go to the supper (communicants, as many in America view the church). On the other side are the Romans, who shift the weight of the church from the gathering of believers to the hierarchical institute, to the external and supreme monarchy of the whole world, and seek her being much more in the ecclesia docens than in the ecclesia audiens. And that way also go all who, to hold the unbelievers and hypocrites at least in some measure as true members, define the church as gathering of the called (Melanchthon, Löhe, Kliefoth etc.) or of the baptized (Münchmeyer, Delitzsch, Vilmar etc.). Both these views are one-sided and do short to the being of the church. On the first standpoint the church becomes wholly invisible, remains she an idea and steps not into reality. The election without more makes someone not yet a member of the church on earth. Indeed the elect who have not yet come to faith belong to the church, as she exists in the thought and decree of God; they can even be said potentially to belong to the church, but they are yet actually no members of her. And also the church cannot be defined as gathering of the perfect, of the unfallen or of communicants, for believers reach not perfection in this life, are not by the promises of God safeguarded against every fall, and are not limited to the number of supper-goers. Just as little is the second, above-named definition in agreement with the being of the church. For outward membership, calling and baptism are no proof of true faith; many are called who are not chosen; many are baptized who do not believe; not all are Israel who are of Israel. While the first-named thus come to no visible church, the last-named neglect the invisible church. Then only do these both come to their right, when the church is understood as gathering of believers. For it is the upright, true faith that saves, receives forgiveness of sins and eternal life. That faith is a matter of the heart, yet it stays not shut within the man but shows itself outward in confession and walk, Rom. 10:10, and confession and walk are signs of the inward faith of the heart, Mt. 7:17, 10:32, 1 John 4:2. Indeed faith and confession are far from always in agreement; there is faith, for example in the children of believers, that does not become open in deeds, and there is a confession that consists in calling Lord, Lord and is not born of true faith. But yet the view of the church as gathering of believers has this above her definition as gathering of the called and baptized, that she upholds that which matters for every man and for the whole church. Not the called and the baptized decide, but whoever shall have believed and shall have been baptized shall be saved, on the other hand whoever shall not have believed, even if he was called and baptized, shall be damned, Mk. 16:16.
From this it follows, that the distinction of the church as institute and organism is a wholly other than that in visible and invisible church, and may not be identified with this. For institute and organism are both names of the church according to her visible side. One may not forget herewith, that also institute and organism of the church, appearing in the visible, have an invisible, spiritual background. For office and gift, ministry of word and sacrament, brotherly love and fellowship of the saints all rest on workings, which go out from the glorified Head of the congregation through the Holy Ghost. Disapproval deserves therefore the representation, as if the institute as something accidental and outward were added in a mechanical way to the church as gathering of the believers. But yet we think with the church as institute and as organism in the first place of the church according to her visible side, that is, of the offices and ministries, wherewith she is equipped and of the fellowship of the saints, like that which becomes manifest in brotherly love. And just in these two the church steps outward visibly. Incorrect is therefore also the opinion, that the church only becomes visible in the institute, in office and ministry, in word and sacrament, in some form of church government. Also when all this is thought away, nevertheless the church is visible. For each believer manifests his faith in confession and walk on every field of life and all believers together stand with their faith and life over against the world. In heaven there is no office and ministry, no word and sacrament more and yet the church shall be fully visible. Visibility and invisibility distinguish the church thus from a wholly other viewpoint than institute and organism. The latter distinction tells us, wherein the church for us becomes visible and knowable; the former teaches, that that visible appearance has an invisible, spiritual side, which is known to God alone.
Therewith is now of itself also given, that visible and invisible church are no two churches. This objection was already brought by the Donatists against Augustine and is later by the Romans repeated against the Protestants. But the accusation rests on misunderstanding. Rome itself acknowledges, as shown above, that there are two kinds of men in the church, that she has two parts, and seeks now indeed to show, that the unbelievers in some way belong to the church but dares yet not say, that they make up the essence of the church. In fact she stands thus before the same difficulty as the Reformation. For that the hypocrites in some way belong to the church, is no point of difference. Also the Protestants acknowledge, that they are in the church and belong to the church, like the evil branches to the vine and the chaff to the wheat. Only they deny, that these give to the church her form, for upright faith is it and nothing else, that saves and ingrafts into Christ. The unbelievers are thus not the essence of the church, they are not the church. Invisible and visible church are thus also absolutely no names for the group of unbelievers and of believers, which there are in a church. In the church over doctrine and life the discipline is to be maintained according to the Lord's command; but every attempt, to separate the believers and the unbelievers, and to set up a little church in the church, is just as much in strife with the Lord's command; Matthew 13:30 forbids this not, for the field, there meant, is not the church but the world, verse 38, but it follows therefrom, that we are bound to confession and walk and over the heart cannot or may judge. Unbelievers make thus just as little the essence of the visible as of the invisible church; they belong to the church in neither of both respects, though we lack the right and the authority, to separate them from the believers and to cast them out.
Even stronger can yet be said, that also the old man, who remains in the believers, does not belong to the church. Therewith Schleiermacher has yet no right, when he places the essence of the church in workings of the Holy Ghost, for the church is no gathering of workings but of persons; it is men, who by the Holy Ghost are reborn and brought to faith and who as such, as new men, form the essence of the church. But yet, the church is a gathering of believers, and all that not from faith, from the new but from the old man arises, belongs not to the church and is therefore once cast out. Visible and invisible church are for this reason two sides of one and the same church; it is the same believers, who one time are considered from the side of faith, that dwells in the heart and is certainly known to God alone, and the other time from the side of confession and of life, which is turned toward us and is observable for us. Because the church here on earth is becoming, these two sides are never, even not in the purest church, equal to each other. There are always unbelievers within, and believers without the church; many wolves inside, many sheep outside. The latter was for example under the Old Testament the case with Naaman the Syrian and holds now still of all, who for one or another reason live outside the fellowship of the instituted churches and yet partake of the true faith. But all this does yet nothing off from the fact, that the essence of the church lies only in the believers.
9. If the church in her essence is a gathering of true Christ-believers and these are known to God alone, the question gains weight: by what can the church be known to us? The Roman Christian has therefore chief misgiving against the Reformation church-concept, because it undermines the certainty of the church and thus of the salvation of his soul, and opens the door to doubt, division, and indifference. Bellarmine says it as clearly as may be: it is needful that we have infallible certainty about which gathering of men is the true church of Christ, for since the Scriptures, traditions, and all dogmas wholly hang on the witness of the church, if we are not most certain which is the true church, all things will be utterly unsure. This now is unfeasible if upright faith alone makes someone truly a member of the church, for this can never be surely known by us, and a conjectural knowledge is lacking, we need here an infallible certainty, in De Ecclesia Militante III c. 10, for we are all bound under peril of endless death to join ourselves to the true church and abide in her, ibid. c. 12. The true church must therefore be as visible and palpable as is the gathering of the Roman folk, or the kingdom of France or the commonwealth of Venice, ibid. c. 2. Hence Bellarmine strains all strengths to prove the truth of the Roman church. He lists no less than 15 marks, namely, the very name of the Catholic church, antiquity, long-lasting duration, multitude and variety of believers, succession of bishops, agreement in teaching with the ancient church, union of members among themselves and with the head, holiness of teaching, efficacy of teaching, holiness of life of the first fathers, glory of wonders, light of prophecy, confession of foes, unhappy end of those who fight the church, worldly happiness, in De Ecclesia Militante IV c. 4-18. The Roman theologians follow this pattern, but commonly lead back the fifteen marks to the four which are named in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, namely, unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, Perrone, Prael. I 248. Liebermann, Instit. theol. I 255. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 372. Jansen, Prael. I 659. Hettinger, Apol. 7th ed. IV 411, V 106. Besides, it earns heed that Rome in the strict sense has no marks or criteria by which the true church can be known. These indeed suppose a measure that lies above the church and by which she may be judged by each. And such a measure Rome has not, for the Scripture hangs on the church, and the church herself is the highest measure for teaching and life. Marks of the church are with Rome thus nothing else than signs, traits in which the church comes forth and shows herself. Proofs for the church are the same as those for Christendom, for both are with Rome one. And these proofs make the claim that the Roman church is the true church not evidently true but yet evidently believable, ibid. IV c. 3. Likewise speaks the Vatican Council, III c. 3: God through his only-begotten Son set up the Church, and fitted her with clear marks of his setting up, that she might be known by all as the keeper and teacher of the revealed word. For to the Catholic Church alone belong all those things which have been so many and so wondrously set by God for the clear believability of the Christian faith. Nay, the Church by herself, because of her wondrous spreading, outstanding holiness, and unwearying fruitfulness in all goods, because of her catholic unity and unbeaten steadfastness, is a great and lasting motive of believability and an unanswerable witness of her godly sending. Utterly provable is thus the truth of the church for each not; then yet the church would be no article of faith and faith not free and worthy. There must according to the Vatican Council with the witness that goes out from the church come an effective help from heavenly strength. In deed Rome takes therewith the same inward standpoint as the Reformation. The motives, however strong, cannot in truth move to faith. It is God's Spirit alone that can inwardly firmly and surely convince someone of the truth of the godly unveiling. The deepest ground for faith is also with Rome not the Scripture or the church, but the inner light. Rome with her infallible church and her infallible pope has in principle nothing ahead over the churches of the Reformation, for church and pope are, however seeable, yet articles of faith.
The marks which Rome assigns to the true church are therefore in no respect clearer and stronger than the pure ministration of the word, which was acknowledged by the Reformation as a mark of the church. Some of the marks named by Bellarmine are of very underling worth. The gift of wonders is by no means a decisive proof for the truth of the teaching which someone proclaims, Deut. 13:1, 2, Mt. 7:22, 23, 24:24 etc. The unhappy end of the foes and persecutors of the church is most often merely a legend, as even Roman Catholics now acknowledge, Nik. Paulus, Luthers Lebensende, Freiburg 1898; and the earthly thriving of the church is always timely, shifts with persecution and oppression, and can just as well be brought forward as a proof against the truth of the church, Mt. 5:10, 16:24, Joh. 16:33, Acts 14:22, 2 Tim. 3:12. With other marks, everything hangs on the sense in which they are understood; the name catholic is also taken by Protestant churches and is in itself no more a proof for the truth of the Roman church than the name Christ, which the false Christs take for themselves, Mt. 24:24, or the name Israel or Abraham's seed, on which the Jews prided themselves, Joh. 8:33, Rom. 9:6; the oldness, the historical ongoingness and the unbroken following are not only Rome's own, but also belong to other churches, for example the Greek, and prove in themselves nothing for the truth of the Roman church any more than they did for that of the Jewish gathering in Jesus' days; the oneness and the catholicity are claims of Rome, which cannot undo the fact that there are millions of Christians living outside her; there is not but one church, there are many churches, and there is no single one that embraces all believers. The remaining marks, agreement with the teaching of the apostles, holiness of the teaching, renewing might which goes out from her, holy life of many of her confessors, belong by no means only to Rome but also to many other churches, and are subject to the same misgivings as those which are brought by the Roman Catholics against the Protestant marks and will be spoken of shortly. Cf. Beza, de eccl. cath. notis, Tract. theol. III 132. Polanus, Synt. p. 532 sq. Amesius, Bellarminus enervatus II 56-72. Maresius, Syst. theol. XVI 23 sq. Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII qu. 13. Mastricht, Theol. VII 1, 34. Moor VI 50. M. Vitringa IX 1 p. 98. Gerhard, Loc. XXII c. 10. 11. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 503. Besides, the Roman church rejoices in her oneness and points with self-pleasure to the sundering of Protestantism. But she pays for this joy with a dear price. First, it is driven to shift the being of the church more and more from the gathering of believers to the setup of the hierarchy, that is, in the end to the pope. With more right than Louis XIV could say: l’état c’est moi, can the pope declare: the church am I. Where the pope is, there is the church. So when with the church, as befits, not even the setup but the gathering of believers is thought of, the sundering in the Roman church is not so much less than in the Protestant churches. The unlikeness is only that Rome, seeking her strength in the unwedded hierarchy, lets all directions and minds live quietly side by side in the church and takes from her members, even the most unbelieving, the drive, the freedom-sense and the truth-sense, to break with the church and their own untrue standing. Second, Rome pays that joy with the dear price of the extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The teaching of Scripture, that salvation is bound to faith in Christ, was soon understood over against schism and heresy in such a way that everyone who wanted to share in salvation in Christ had to be bound to the bishop, Ign. ad Eph. 4. 5. Phil. 3. Trall. 7. Those who want to be saved must flee into the holy churches of God, Theoph. ad Autol. II 14. Sola catholica ecclesia est, quae verum cultum retinet. Hic est fons veritatis, hoc domicilium fidei, hoc templum Dei; quo si quis non intraverit vel a quo si quis exiverit, a spe vitae ac salutis aeternae alienus est, Lact., Inst. div. IV 30. Oftentimes the church fathers used for the church the likeness of the ark, and especially Cyprian made use of it, to lift the extra ecclesiam nulla salus above all doubt, for example de unit. eccl. 6 Ep. 69, 2. 74, 11. Augustine had no other mind: it is clear that he who is not in the members of Christ cannot have Christian salvation, de unit. eccl. 2. Outside the church someone can take everything with him, but never except in the catholic church can he find salvation, Super gestis e. Emerito. Councils and popes have strengthened this teaching. The fourth Lateran council declared in c. 1, that there is one catholic church of believers, outside which no one at all is saved. Trent said that without the catholic faith it is impossible to please God, Sess. 5. Boniface VIII spoke out that underlaying to the pope is of the need of salvation. Eugene IV taught that no one outside the catholic church can share in eternal life. And Pius IX declared in the allocution of 9 Dec. 1854: it must be held from faith that no one can be saved outside the apostolic Roman church. Rome must therefore be unyielding, she can acknowledge no churches beside herself; she is herself the only church, the bride of Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost. Yet the facts have become too mighty even for Rome. Thousands and millions have in the run of the ages broken fellowship with the Roman church, Novatians, Donatists, Greek Christians, Arians, Monophysites, Monothelites, many sects in the Middle Ages and then in the sixteenth hundred-year more than half of Christendom. And though Rome has won back much through the counter-reformation, yet now of the 500 million Christians it scarcely counts half and in tally-strength rather goes backward than forward. Over against these facts it cannot be upheld that there is no salvation outside the Roman church. It falls hard even for Roman Catholics themselves to stay true to this teaching; many are bent to yieldings. They make a sundering between those who knowingly, on purpose, stubbornly and therefore blameworthily leave the church, and those who are dragged along and misled, in good faith are outside the church and by wish, longing, mind still belong to the church, to the soul of the church. In the same ghost was the stance of Baius rejected by the Roman seat; infidelitas pure negative in his, quibus Christus non est praedicatus, peccatum est, and Pius IX spoke out in the allocution of 9 Dec. 1854: it must be held for sure that those who suffer from unknowing of the true religion, if that is unbeatable, can be bound by no guilt of this thing. Bellarmine, de eccl. mil. III c. 3. 6. Perrone, Prael. I 331. Klee, Dogm. I 141. Jansen, Prael. I 344. Schanz, Apol. III 188. Dublanchy, De axiomate: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, dissertatio theologica. Bar-le-Duc, Contant-Laguerre 1895.
10. For Protestantism, the doctrine of the marks of the true church had an entirely different meaning. By the Reformation, the unity of Western Christendom was forever broken, and different churches came to stand side by side and over against each other. The Reformers had to prove that the church of Rome was not the true one, and that the churches of the Reformation answered to the essence of the church, as the Scripture described it. Their reforming deed presupposed that the church was not autopistos, that it could err and depart, and that there was a higher authority to which it also had to submit. And that could be nothing other than the Holy Scripture, the Word of God. Therefore, all the Reformers unanimously went back to the Scripture, saw in it also the measure of the church, and accordingly determined the marks by which the true church was to be distinguished from the false. In the listing of these notae there was some difference. In his writing On Councils and Churches , Luther enumerated seven: pure administration of the word, of baptism, of the supper, of the keys, lawful choice of the ministers, public prayer and teaching, and the cross; but elsewhere he named only two, pure administration of word and sacrament. And so did Melanchthon in the Confessio Augustana art. 8 and in the Loci , and later Lutheran theologians, Gerhard, Loc. XXII § 131. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 503; only Melanchthon added in the Examen ordinandorum to these two a third rather hierarchical mark: obedience due to the ministry according to the gospel. Of the Reformed, some, such as Beza, Sohnius, Alsted, Ames, Heidanus, Maresius, gave one mark, the pure administration of the word; others, such as Calvin, Bullinger, Zanchi, Junius, Gomarus, Mastricht, Marck, and others, two, namely, pure administration of word and sacrament; many, such as the Confessio Gallicana , Belgica , Scotica I, Hyperius, Martyr, Ursinus, Trelcatius, Walaeus, Amyraut, Heidegger, Wendelin, added as a third the right administration of discipline or the holiness of life.
But rightly Alsted, Alting, Maresius, Hottinger, Heidanus, Turretin, Mastricht, and others remarked that this was more a difference in name than in the thing, and that there is properly but one mark, namely, the one and same word, which is then administered and confessed in different ways, in preaching, teaching, confession, sacrament, life, etc., M. Vitringa IX 1. That the Reformation rightly sought the mark of the church in the Word of God is, with the Scripture in hand, subject to no doubt. For without the Word of God there is no church, Prov. 29:18, Isa. 8:20, Jer. 8:9, Hos. 4:6; by word and sacrament Christ gathers his church, Matt. 28:19, which is built on the doctrine of apostles and prophets, Matt. 16:18, Eph. 2:20; by the word he regenerates, 1 Pet. 1:23, James 1:18, works faith, Rom. 10:14, 1 Cor. 4:15, cleanses and sanctifies, John 15:3, Eph. 5:26. And they who are thus reborn and renewed by the Word of God have the calling to confess Christ, Matt. 10:32, Rom. 10:9, hear his voice, John 10:27, keep his word, John 8:31, 32, 14:23, test the spirits, 1 John 4:1, avoid those who do not bring this doctrine, Gal. 1:8, Titus 3:10, 2 John 9. The word is indeed the soul of the church, Calvin, Inst. IV 12, 1. All service in the church is a service of the word. God gives his word to the church, and she receives it, keeps it, administers it, teaches it, confesses it before God, before each other, before the world in word and in deed. In the one mark of the word the others are included as further applications. Where God's word is rightly preached, there also the sacrament is purely administered, the truth of God confessed according to the mind of the Spirit, the conduct and walk ordered according to God's testimony. Even Rome cannot deny that God's word is the mark of the church. Gerhard, Loc. XXII § 138 cites many church fathers who clearly and plainly express this. Thus Tertullian says: those are the true churches which hold what they received from the apostles, De praescr. 21. Formerly, says Chrysostom on Matt. 24:15, it could be shown in various ways which was the church of Christ, but since the heresies have crept in, this cannot be pointed out otherwise than by the Scriptures; for those Scriptures, he declares, hom. 33 in Acts, are simple and true, so that it is easy to judge according to them which doctrine is the true one. Repeatedly Augustine speaks in this spirit: between us and the Donatists the question is, where is the church. What then shall we do? Shall we seek it in the words of Donatus or in the words of his head, the Lord Jesus Christ? I think that we ought to seek it in his words, who is the truth and best knows his own body, for he knows who are his, De unit. eccl. 2. Bellarmine himself defines the church as a company of men bound together by the profession of the same Christian faith and by communion in the same sacraments, etc., includes the sanctity of doctrine among the marks of the church, ibid. IV 11, and admits that in some cases, if the Scripture is accepted as God's word, the Scripture is better known than the church and proves her truth, ibid. IV 2. In answering the question, what are the distinguishing marks of the church, Rome also must use the Scripture as proof, if she does not wish to remain standing at a sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas , cf. others still in Gerhard ibid. § 139. Turretin, Theol. El. XVIII 12, 16. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 375.
Yet Rome rejects the marks which the Reformation gave for the true church. Bellarmine brings forward against them first, that the pure ministry of the word at most only points out where , but not which the true church is, that is, who the true believers are, who yet alone according to the Protestant definition make up the being of the church. This objection is to some degree right, but in fact also without trouble. For it is by no means needful for us, to know with unfailing sureness who the true believers are; to seek for that, for example with J. Müller, unfailing marks, leads onto the wrong path of the Donatists. The pure ministry of the word is no mark of the upright faith of the single members but of the church as gathering of the believers. God's promise namely, Isaiah 55:11, 2 Corinthians 2:15, 16 and so on, stands as pledge to us, that God's word everywhere, where it is preached, shall do its work and not return empty. God's Word cannot be without God's folk, again God's folk cannot be without God's Word (Luther).
Therefore the Reformers named as first and foremost mark of the church not the confession and life of the believers, but the ministry of word and sacrament. The believers yet, who make up the being of the church, become open in twofold wise, in the ministry of word and sacrament, which takes place among them and in confession and walk, whereby they set themselves apart from the world and also from other churches, that is, in the church as institute and in the church as living body. The kind of the thing brings with it, that the mark, which is taken from the ministry of word and sacrament, from the church as institute, bears a more undeceivable, firmer, more lasting, more enduring kind, than that, which is found in confession and life of the believers. To the latter much can be lacking, without therefore the former ceasing to be. The Roman church proves this in very strong measure, but it holds also for the Protestant churches. Of how much weight a pure confession and a holy walk of the believers also be, the main thing for each one remains the pure ministry of word and sacrament. Therefore this ought to hold as first and foremost mark of the church. But the Reformed laid stress thereon rightly, that the church as gathering of the believers becomes open not only in the institute, but also in the faith, in the fleeing of sins, in the chasing after righteousness, in the love to God and the neighbor, in the crucifying of the flesh. Dutch Confession 29. The pure ministry of the word shuts in also the applying of church discipline.
Another misgiving of Bellarmine is that the pure handling of the word is a much too broad and too unclear mark, so that the true church can be judged by it. For on the one hand, the handling of the word in true churches, such as for example in Corinth and in Galatia, often leaves much to be wished in purity, and on the other hand, it has not wholly gone lost in heretical and sectarian churches. Socinians and Remonstrants reasoned in the same way and fought against the need and the gain of marks by which the true church could be known, Cat. Rac. qu. 489. Episcopius, Disp. III 28 Op. II 2 p. 459. And although Lutherans and Reformed in the first time very strongly held that they were the true church, the growing impurity of their own churches and the rise of other churches beside theirs made it ever harder to uphold this claim in all its strictness. Yes, from the beginning the stance which the Protestant churches took toward the Roman church was wholly other than the other way around. Rome can acknowledge sects but no churches beside itself, Hettinger, Apol. d. Christ. V 118. But the Protestants, though decidedly casting off the churchly hierarchy of Rome, still fully acknowledged the Christian in Rome’s church. However corrupt Rome may be, there are yet remnants of the church, ruins of the scattered church in it, there is still some church, though half-broken, left in the papacy, Calvin, Inst. IV 2, 11. Beza, Tract. theol. III 145. 192. Bullinger, Housebook 1612 p. 206. 207. Zanchi, Op. II in the preface before de natura Dei. Polanus, Synt. 535. cf. 496. Polanus a Polansdorf. Part. Theol. p. 196. Junius, Op. II 1018-1023. Alsted, Theol. schol. 696. Voetius, Desp. causa papatus 699-703. Mastricht, Theol. VII 1, 25. Turretin XVIII 14, 24. 27. The Reformation was a parting from the Roman and Papal church, but not from the true church, Turretin, XVIII 15, 8. Id. de necessaria secessione nostra ab ecclesia Romana, et impossibili cum ea syncretismo, behind his Disp. de satisf. Christi 1691 and other anti-Roman writings by Vitringa IX 1 p. 116. Moor VI 58. Furthermore, the Reformers were or at least soon became aware that the pure handling of word and sacrament could not serve as an utter mark. Calvin warns very strongly against all willful parting. Though something is lacking in the purity of the teaching or of the sacraments, though the holiness of life and the faithfulness of the servants leave much to be wished, one may not therefore at once leave the church. Only when the sum of needful teaching, the chief teaching of religion, is traded for the lie, is parting a duty, Inst. IV 2, 12-16. 2, 1. Comm. on Mt. 13:40, 41. 2 Thess. 3:6. When later the decay in the state churches grew and many felt driven to parting, most teachers on the same grounds rose against separatism, Voetius, Pol. Eccl. IV 488. Brakel, Red. Godsd. c. 25. Van der Waeyen and Witsius, Earnest Witness of the Reformed Church to Her Wandering Children 1670. Koelman, Historical Account concerning the Labadists’ Schism and Their Many Errors with the Refutation Thereof, 2 parts, Amsterdam 1683-84. cf. How Judges the Holy Scripture and How Judge the Reformed Fathers on Separation and Doleance by J. Campen at Sneek. All saw themselves driven to acknowledge with Calvin that in the true church much impurity in teaching and life can occur, without this giving right to parting, and that in the parted churches often much good is found. So the notion of true and false church underwent an important change. On the one side one had to grant that a true church in utter sense is impossible here on earth; there is no single church that utterly and in all parts, in teaching and life, in handling of word and sacrament, answers to God’s demand. And on the other side it became clear that a false church in utter sense cannot exist either, for then it would no more be a church; though Rome was a false church insofar as it was papal, yet there were still many remnants of the true church in it. There was thus a difference between true and pure church, Polanus, Synt. p. 532. Alsted, Theol. schol. 601 sq. Synopsis 40, 37. Maresius XVI 20, Vitringa IX 1. 79. True church became the name, not for one church shutting out all others, but for many kinds of churches that still held the head truths of Christendom, the foundational articles, cf. part I 520v. but otherwise in degrees of purity strayed very far from each other; and false church became the name of the hierarchical might of superstition or unbelief, which rose up in the local churches and gave itself and its ordinances more might and authority than to God’s Word, Dutch Confession 29.
11. This development of the concept of the church, which can be observed in history itself, has its undeniable dark side; the idea of a single church institution encompassing all believers is thereby forever disturbed. It is also undeniable that the endless division among the confessors of Christ gives the world a cause for joy and mockery, and provides it with a reason for its unbelief in the One sent by the Father, because it does not see the unity of believers in Christ, John 17:21. As Christians, we cannot humble ourselves deeply enough over the schism and discord that has existed in the church of Christ throughout all ages; it is a sin against God, contrary to the prayer of Christ, and caused by the darkness of our understanding and the lovelessness of our heart, cf. Gunning, The Unity of the Church 1896. Higher than the Church 1897. Reckoning 1898. And it is understandable that many Christians have repeatedly allowed themselves to be tempted into the attempt to bring about or maintain that ardently desired unity of the church of Christ, whether by violent means, especially through the strong arm of the government, or in an artificial way, through syncretism and fusion, cf. for example J. von Döllinger, On the Reunion of the Christian Churches, Leipzig Mohr 1897. But on the other hand, we must not forget that the failure of all these attempts has something to teach us. History, like nature, is a work of God; it does not go beyond his providence; Christ, through his resurrection and ascension, has been exalted to King at the Father's right hand and will remain so until all his enemies are laid under his feet. He reigns, even over the divisions and schisms of his church on earth. And his prayer for her unity did not flow from ignorance of her history nor from powerlessness to govern her; in and through the division, it is daily heard and led toward its perfect fulfillment. The deep, spiritual sense in which the unity of his disciples is conceived by Jesus precisely excludes all violent or artificial attempts to introduce it. Christ, who prayed for it, can alone bring it about; his prayer is a guarantee that it already exists in him and will in due time be revealed in all believers from him. Therefore, for a right understanding of the division of the church of Christ, we must consider the following:
1º All separation and schism that now exists in the church of Christ dates back in principle to the apostolic age. Despite the fact that the churches then felt much more spiritually one for various reasons than is now the case even between churches of the same confession, they were distinguished in many respects. The apostles in Jerusalem and Paul, the congregations from the Jews and from the Gentiles, diverged on many and even important points; there came a serious difference between Peter and Paul, Gal. 2:11, between Paul and Barnabas, Acts 15:39; heresies and schisms of all kinds occurred even then, 1 Cor. 1:10, 11:18, 19 etc.; the church at Corinth was divided into parties, silently tolerated the shameful life of one of the brothers, and for a part did not even believe in such a significant fact as the bodily resurrection of Christ and the believers; and the churches of Asia Minor, a few decades after they were founded by Paul, had sunk far below the standpoint they first took in doctrine and life.
2º These separations and schisms in the apostolic age do not make such a deep impression, because in the New Testament we always deal in the first place with local churches. There was still nothing but a spiritual bond that connected all congregations. But when the hierarchy developed in the church of Christ and considered itself the essence of the church, then it was this false, unchristian idea of the church that throughout the ages provoked schisms and heresies and alienated many true believers from itself. Wherever and to the same degree that the hierarchy has developed, in the Roman, the Greek, the Anglican church, sects have repeatedly arisen there and, if not violently suppressed and exterminated, have pushed back the official church and often grown above its head. The hierarchical idea of the church, which is first of all concerned with the unity of Christendom, has precisely throughout the ages promoted division and caused schism. And Protestantism denies its principle if it seeks to maintain the unity of Christendom by any hierarchical coercion.
3º Precisely because the word is the mark of the church and there is no infallible interpretation of that word, freedom is given to every person by Christ himself to understand that word for himself as he sees it. Morally, he is of course bound to Christ in this, and each will have to answer for himself how he has understood and practiced the word of Christ. But toward his fellow men and fellow Christians, he stands completely free. Rome fears this freedom and throws at Protestantism its individualism, subjectivism, and sectarianism. But what is the weakness of Rome, because it must maintain itself by hierarchical means, that is the strength of Protestantism, because no creature but Christ himself governs his church. It is entirely true that if the word is the mark of the church and is placed in the hands of all people, each thereby receives the right to judge the church and, if he deems it good, to separate from it. But this freedom is to be fully respected and not hindered by any state or church. Even the dreadful abuse that can be and has been made of it must not for a moment tempt us to abolish its use.
4º The division of the church of Christ undoubtedly has its cause in sin; in heaven there is no more room for it. But with that, not everything is said. God loves variety in unity. Variety existed among all creatures, even when there was no sin yet. Through sin it has degenerated and become corrupted, but in itself it is good and also of significance for the church of Christ. Difference of sex and age, of character and disposition, of understanding and heart, of gifts and goods, of place and of age also benefits the truth that is in Christ. He takes them all into his service and adorns his church with them. Yes, although the division of people into nations and languages had its occasion in sin, it contains something good that is brought into the congregation and thus preserved for eternity. From many generations and languages and peoples and nations, Christ gathers his church on earth.
5º If we therefore, in accordance with New Testament usage, understand by churches the local churches throughout Christendom, then there are no true and no false churches in an absolute sense. A church is a gathering of true Christian believers in a certain place. If somewhere there is no single believer anymore, neither actually nor potentially, then the word of God is also unknown there, and there is no church anymore. And conversely, if the word of God is still known to some extent in a certain place, it will certainly do its work and there is a church of Christ, however impure and mixed. By this, no indifferentism and syncretism is meant. Nothing is indifferent, least of all in the truth that is according to godliness. It is not the case that we can safely give up and deny the so-called non-fundamental articles if we but accept the fundamental articles. While we must apply to others the word of Jesus: whoever is not against me is for me, we must hold for ourselves to that other word: whoever is not for me is against me. There is great difference in the purity of the confessions and the churches. And we must stand and strive for the purest. Therefore, whoever comes to the conviction that the Protestant church is better than the Roman, and the Reformed purer than the Lutheran or Remonstrant or Baptist, has, without thereby judging his church as false, to leave it and join the other. And to remain in one's own church, despite much impurity in doctrine and life, is a duty as long as it does not hinder us from being faithful to our own confession and does not indirectly force us to obey men more than God. For a church that forces its members to do so would in that same moment reveal itself to the conscience of its members, insofar as it did so, as a false one, which attributes more power and authority to itself and its ordinances than to the word of God.
6º With the names schism and heresy, one must therefore be careful. Without doubt, both are great sins; those are guilty of schism who, although leaving the foundation of the doctrine intact, yet separate from the church over subordinate points of worship or church government; heretics are those who err in the substance of the truth; the former break the communion of the church, the latter the communion of the doctrine. Yet it is difficult in practice to indicate the boundary that separates legitimate and dutiful breaking of communion with any church or doctrine from unlawful breach. For Rome this is easy, because it recognizes only one church and one confession and pronounces anathema over all that is outside it. But Protestantism can at most give some general rules and must leave the application thereof in each concrete case to the conscience of the believers. The concept of heresy and schism has thereby acquired an elasticity that calls for caution in use. Since the Reformation, the church has passed into the period of pluriformity; and this fact forces us to seek the unity of the church much more in the spiritual bond of faith than in the outward form of government. Cf. Gladstone, The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church, Nineteenth Century Aug. 1894. Kuyper, Encycl. II.
12. In agreement herewith, the so-called attributes (attributa, proprietates, adjuncta, affectiones, epitheta, elogia) of the church also receive on the Protestant standpoint an altogether other meaning than with Rome. Rome has an absolute and exclusive church concept; it cannot acknowledge the ministry of word and sacrament as a mark of the church, because this also occurs outside the Roman church, be it in an impure form; it therefore also cannot make a distinction between marks and attributes of the church, for the attributes are precisely the indicia which point out the one true church; and it must finally conceive those attributes so sensibly, tangibly, and outwardly that they apply only to the Roman church and make it stand out to all as the only saving one. The first attribute, the unity of the church, then indeed indicates that the congregation has one Lord, one faith, one baptism, but yet according to Rome it comes out especially therein that the church founded by Christ has one visible head in the pope (unitas hierarchica, regiminis) and can never have another church beside it (unitas simultanea) or after it (unitas successiva); properly speaking, the pope is the one sufficient mark of the true church. By this unity of the church thus conceived, Rome is obliged nowadays to pronounce the anathema over half of the whole of Christendom. Even the thought of Pusey in his Eirenicon and of Palmer that the Roman, Eastern, and Anglican church together make up the one church cannot be allowed. Outside communion with the pope there is no salvation. But Protestantism thinks with the unity of the church first of all of the unity of the Head of the congregation, Eph. 1:10, 5:22, of the fellowship of all believers through one and the same Spirit, 1 Cor. 6:17, 12:13, 2 Cor. 12:11, Eph. 4:4, with Christ and with each other, John 10:16, 15:1, Rom. 12:5, 1 Cor. 12:12, 13, Eph. 1:22, and then further of the unity of faith, of love, of hope, of baptism, etc., Eph. 4:3-5. This unity is indeed in the first place spiritual in kind, but it exists yet objectively and really and remains also not wholly unseen. It shows itself, be it also in a very imperfect way, outwardly and comes to light in that which all Christian churches have in common with each other, at least to some degree. There is no Christendom above or below, but there is indeed a Christendom present in the divisions of faith. Because our eye is most fixed on the differences and schisms in Christendom, we always run the danger of misjudging this yet truly existing unity. What binds all true Christians is always still more than what sunders them. Under the holiness of the church, Rome understands in the first place the liturgical, ceremonial holiness, consisting therein that the church as institute possesses the rightful offering service and the wholesome use of the sacraments, whereby God, as through mighty tools of divine grace, works in the believers the true holiness, and then secondly the personal holiness, which in the church is indeed not the share of all or also of the most, or needs to be, but yet is always found in some and then again in very differing degrees. Because the Reformation again made known the church as fellowship of saints, it sought the holiness not first of all in the supernatural character of the institute of salvation but in the spiritual renewal of the members of the church. Holy is the church because it is a fellowship of saints. But therewith the Reformation yet did not fall into the error of Donatism, and has rather in practice all too much overlooked this attribute of the church. But that does not take away that according to the principle of the Reformation the church is holy because it is a fellowship of saints. And holy the believers are called, first of all because they objectively in Christ by virtue of the reckoning of his righteousness are counted by God as saints, and secondly because they, born again from water and Spirit and renewed after the inward man, have a delight and longing to walk not only after some but after all God's behests in uprightness, John 17:19, Eph. 5:25-27, Titus 2:14, 1 Thess. 4:3, Heb. 12:14, 1 Pet. 2:9. Also this attribute of the church is spiritual yet not wholly and altogether unseen; though the holiest, as long as they are in this life, have yet only a small beginning of the full obedience, they yet walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh.
The third property is the catholicity . Among the Romans, the church bears this name firstly, because she, although forming one whole and a full unity, yet spreads herself over the whole earth, while the sects always stay bound to some land or part of the world. Secondly, she is catholic, because she, although living earlier in a less full form, yet has always been on earth from the beginning of the world and has taken in all believers from Adam's days onward, while the sects always come and go. And thirdly, she is so called, because she fully shares in, keeps, and hands out all truth and grace set by God for sharing with mankind, and therefore is for all men the only and needful body for blessedness, while the sects always hold but a share of the truth. Because catholicity among the Romans must be a clear seen mark of the church, it is mainly to be understood in the sense that the church among all folk, where she lives, counts a striking throng of members. In the first times this was not yet the case, but soon the church came to great spreading. And now it is the call of catholicity that the member tally of the true church be not greater than that of all men living outside her, but yet greater than the member tally of each sect alone and likely also of all sects together. Cf. Cat. Rom. I 10, 13. Bellarmine, de notis eccl. c. 4. 7. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 351. Schanz, Apol. d. Chr. III § 7. Söder, Der Begriff der Katholicität der Kirche und des Glaubens nach seiner gesch. Entw. Würzburg 1881. In outward shine and glory, in breadth of spreading and in strength of member tally, the Roman Christian thus seeks a weighty mark of the true church. Church fathers, such as Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, already began to overdrive the spreading of Christendom among the folks. And still their lead is followed by many Romans, for example in mission tallies. Yet nowadays one could not, as before, shut the eyes to the deed that there are still nearly a thousand million non-Christians and hardly five hundred million Christians, that these last are again split into about 112 million Greek, 225 million Roman, and 160 million Protestant Christians, and that the Roman Christians in this age nearly everywhere steadily fall back in tally strength and are outstripped by the Protestant Christians. By this mark of catholicity, which the Roman church herself gives, it stands with her truth ever more sorrowfully shaped. The name catholic fits the Roman church ever less. Roman and catholic are also at odds with each other; just as under the Old Covenant the sharing of grace had Jerusalem as midpoint and bound all believers to that place, so the Roman church in the days of the New Covenant makes the belief and blessedness of men hang on a set place and a set person and thereby does short to the catholicity of Christendom. The name of Roman or Papal church therefore speaks her being much better than that of catholic. A catholic church is believed and confessed in the apostolic creed and sometimes also in their own confessions by all Protestants, Dutch Confession 27. Apol. Conf. Aug. art. 7. 8. Men commonly understood thereunder the ecclesia universalis, which took in all true believers and came to showing in the sundry churches more or less purely, or also the church of the New Covenant, which in setting apart from that of the Old Covenant, was set for all folks and places of the earth. The word catholic comes not in the Scripture. But the texts on which the church fathers lean for the catholicity of the church, such as Gen. 12:3, Ps. 2:8, Isa. 2:2, Jer. 3:17, Mal. 1:11, Matt. 8:11, 28:19, John 10:16, Rom. 1:8, 10:18, Eph. 2:14, Col. 1:6, Rev. 7:9 etc., show that her meaning lies mainly herein that Christendom is a world faith, for all folk and age, for every stand and rank, for each place and time set and fit. The most catholic is that church which has most clearly spoken this worldwide and world-folkish mark of the Christian belief in her confession and put it to work in deed. The Reformed have had an eye for it, as they in the sundry lands and churches confessed the truth in their own, free, self-standing way and at the Synod of Dordrecht called delegates from the whole Reformed Christendom, cf. my speech on the Catholicity of Christendom and Church, Kampen 1888.
The fourth property of the church is her apostolicity . According to Rome this fits her, because she was founded by the apostles, matches that of the apostles in teaching, setup, and service, but mainly because her office-bearers in unbroken line are followers of the apostles and have gotten their might and sway from such as themselves in rightful following from the apostles had gotten it. The first meaning is thereby fully underlaid to the second. The word of the apostles, that is, the Holy Scripture, makes not out which church is apostolic, that is, matches the teaching of the apostles; but contrariwise the church stemming in unbroken following from the apostles settles what is apostolic, what the teaching of the apostles is. Yes, even after the outing of the dogma of unfailingness the apostolic following of the office-bearers is fully and wholly set by their fellowship with the pope. Though a bishop share in the apostolic following, this yet straightway becomes idle if he breaks fellowship with the pope. Contrariwise the pope can by his churchly full might heal every lack that may cling to the formal apostolicity of any church head. So unity with the pope is needful, that a head may become or be rightful follower of the apostles, but that unity is also forthwith enough to know the true apostolicity of the latter, Scheeben-Atzberger IV 1 p. 356. The pope makes all good. Where the pope is, there is the true church, the pure teaching, the apostolic following. Now such an apostolic following is found with no word in the Scripture and in itself no more a pledge for the pureness of teaching than the handed-down high priestly worth at Caiaphas was a show for the right of his sayings and deeds. And therefore the Protestants rightly said that not the following of places and persons but the following of teaching was a marking property of the true church. If this last was lacking, the first could make no church into a true church; and if she was there, the first was of very underlaid meaning.
Among the attributes of the church belong finally also the indefectibility and the infallibility. Jesus has promised to his church that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it and that he will keep it until the end of the world, Matt. 16:18, 28:20, Eph. 4:11-13, 1 Tim. 3:15. The Roman Catholics deduce from this that their church, the papal one, will remain until the end of the world, and not only that, but also that this papal church will always remain the catholic one, which by the multitude of its members and by its outward splendor will be visible and knowable to everyone, Bellarmine, de eccl. milit. c. 11. 13. 16. De notis eccl. c. 5. 6. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 1 p. 359. But for this claim there lacks sufficient ground. Not only has the church in various times, for example, of Noah, Abraham, Elijah, Christ, etc., been limited to a few persons, but also certain churches in certain lands, for example, in Asia Minor, have gone to ruin. Yes, the New Testament says clearly that in the last days corruption will increase and the church will be exposed to all kinds of seduction and persecution, Matt. 24:21, 22, Luke 18:8, 2 Tim. 3:1. Jesus’ promise therefore warrants indeed that there will always be a gathering of believers on earth, which Socinians and Remonstrants wrongly deny, Moor IV 122, but it in no way implies that a certain church in a certain land will always remain and by its greatness and glory be knowable to everyone. And likewise it is with the infallibility of the church. The Roman church has long hesitated to give an answer to the question, in whom finally the infallibility rests, and has at last decided it at the Vatican Council in favor of the pope. The pope warrants that the teaching church cannot err in teaching. But Holy Scripture binds infallibility nowhere to a certain person or to a certain local church. There is indeed an infallibility of the church, which Protestants also gladly acknowledge, but this infallibility belongs to the church as the gathering of true believers and consists therein, that Christ as King of his church will take care that there will always be on earth a gathering of believers, however small and lowly, that will confess his name.
Martyr, Loci Comm. p. 226. Turretin, Theol. El. XVIII qu. 5 sq. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. XXVI 16 sq. Maresius, Exeg. conf. Belg. art. 27. Witsius, Exerc. in Symb. 24. Vitringa IX 1 p. 81. Mastricht, Theol. VII 1, 9. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 482. 497. Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk II 543. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. V 3 p. 16 f. Hase, Handb. d. prot. Polemik I c. 1. Van Oosterzee, Dogm. § 130.
1. In the church as the gathering of believers, a government is needful. Just as in the temple a builder, in the field a sower, in the vineyard a husbandman, in the net a fisher, in the flock a shepherd, in the body a head, in the household a father, in the kingdom a king belongs, so also the church is not to be thought of without an authority that bears and leads her, cares for and shields her. In a yet more special sense than in the realm of statecraft, this authority rests with God, who is not only the Maker of all things but also the Savior of the church; the church as the folk of God, both under the New and under the Old Covenant, is a theocracy, the Lord is her judge, lawgiver, and king, Isaiah 33:22. But just as God in the worldly realm has handed over sovereignty to the government, so in the church He has set Christ as king. From everlasting already marked out as mediator, He has wielded His prophetic, priestly, and kingly office from paradise onward, carried it on in the days of the Old Testament and during His walking on earth, and now brings it to fullness in heaven, where He sits at the Father's right hand. And this working of Christ does not take the church for granted, unless as thought and willed in God's everlasting counsel, but goes before her and has her as its fruit; the church is built as a temple upon Christ as the rock, born as a body from Him as the head; the king is here before his folk. But also in another sense the church is not thinkable without government. It is true that Christ could have wielded His office without any service of men; if it pleased Him, He could share out His ghostly and heavenly blessings without help of setups and persons. But this did not seem good to Him. It has been His good pleasure, without handing over His sovereignty in the least to men, yet to make use of their service in wielding it and through them to preach the gospel to all creatures. And also in this sense the church has never been without government; she was always in one way or another ordered and set up as an institution. That was needful by a needful guess, because the church here on earth is a becoming church. In heaven all office and all means of grace fall away, because the kingdom of God is fulfilled and God is all in all. But on earth it is otherwise; the church as the gathering of believers is herself used by Christ as a tool to bring others into His church; through her Christ wields His mediator's office in the midst of the world. So from the outset the church appears in twofold shape; she is a gathering of the folk of God in passive and active sense, is at once a gathering and a mother of believers, or by another naming at the same time living body and setup. As was already said above, this marking off is wholly other than that between unseen and seen church. It is a marking off in the seen church and says that the church as gathering of believers becomes open to us in twofold way, in offices and means of grace as setup, and in fellowship of faith and life as living body. With this marking off the question is always raised about which comes first. Some put it so that the setup of the church with office and ministry always goes before the church as gathering of believers and thus lay stress on the mother of believers. Others deem that the church as gathering of believers takes the first place and then herself under the drive of happenings sets herself up in one way or another as an institution. Even in this is sought the root difference between Protestantism and Romanism. Mixing up the marking off of the church as setup and living body with that in seen and unseen church, Schleiermacher says that Protestantism makes the tie of the single one to the church hang on his tie to Christ, while Romanism the other way around makes the tie of the single one to Christ hang on his tie to the church, Christian Faith § 24. And according to Möhler, in Rome the seen church goes before the unseen, but among the Lutherans this before that, Symbolik § 48. But this whole showing is far from full and right to deem. For 1st, from Tertullian's days onward, orat. 2. de monog. 7. adv. Marc. V 4 the church by all Christians has been named not only a gathering but also a mother of believers. The Protestants are at one with the Romans in this, and Calvin lays very strong stress on it, Institutes IV 1, 4. And that was the church according to their mind, not because she freely and on her own ordered herself into a setup and gave herself her own government, but because Christ had so set her up. The setup of the church is by no means, at least not according to the Reformed confession, a fruit of the church, but a setting up of Christ. And that this mind rests on good, scriptural grounds, will become clear in what follows. 2nd The church as gathering of believers does not come about, as Schleiermacher says, Christian Faith § 115, through the coming together of the single reborn ones. For the question stays unanswered hereby, whence those reborn are. These do not come about through the Holy Ghost working atom-like and without means rebirth in men and then joining them together. But the Holy Ghost is in all His workings, also in that of rebirth, bound to Christ, from whom He takes all. And Christ is on earth only where His word is. God's word and God's folk belong together. It is true that little children are often reborn without having been able personally to hear the preaching of the word. But these are then little children who are born in the covenant of grace, who live in the fellowship of the church and receive the inward calling which goes out from Christ through the Holy Ghost. 3rd The difference between Rome and the Reformation on this point lies not in the firstness of seen or unseen church, of setup or living body, of fellowship with the church or fellowship with Christ; at least it does not lie therein without sharper setting; but it is herein, that Rome binds salvation to priest and sacrament and the Reformation to the preaching of the word. According to Rome the infused grace is shared only through baptism and this is thus utterly needful. According to the Reformation the word is the first and foremost means of grace and faith thus enough for salvation. And that word works as means of grace by no means only when it is wielded in office in the gathering of believers, but also when it is brought to us in household and school, through upbringing and teaching. God's folk is where God's word is, but that folk and that word can well be and often is also where no priest and no pope, no pastor and no presbyter is. 4th Also according to the Reformation the church as gathering of believers does not come about without means, out of a working of the Ghost loosed from the word. Between Christ and the single man stands surely not, as in Rome, the priest and the sacrament, the teaching church, but yet well the word of Christ, for fellowship with Christ is according to the witness of Scripture bound to fellowship with the word of the apostles, John 17:3, 1 John 1:3. Just as it is in the earthly, so it is in the ghostly. Every man is a fruit of fellowship and the single believer is born from the womb of the church. The church throughout goes before the church in part and the single believers, just as in every living body the whole goes before the parts. A mother is therefore truly the church of Christ, but she is this by no means only as setup but also as living body. The believers together are at once bringer forth and brought forth; in the seen church the unseen is gathered and shaped; the unseen clings in the seen and is held therein, Synopsis of Pure Theology 40, 34; through the church Christ gathers His church. 5th By taking this standpoint, the Reformation shunned both the ladder-rule of the Romans and the wild fire of the Anabaptists, and let the truth that is in both come to its right. On one side no binding of the working of the Holy Ghost to priest and sacrament and on the other side no working of the Holy Ghost outside of Christ and His word! The church as gathering becomes open in both, setup and living body; she has as mark the pure wielding of the word and the confession and walk of the believers; she is set up in office and in gifts. The office does not crush the gifts but orders them and keeps them in the right track, and the gifts do not set the office aside but make it mighty and fruitful. Irvingism and Darbyism both hold a truth that needs to be owned. Offices and gifts are together given by Christ to His church for the full making of the saints and for the building up of His body, Romans 12:5-8, 1 Corinthians 12:25, 28, Ephesians 4:11, 12. Therefore 6th the question about the firstness of the setup or the living body of the church itself already witnesses to one-sidedness. Both are given with each other and work ongoingly upon each other. In the state folk and government are always most closely bound with each other; one can well look into the arising among any folk of one or another form of government; one can well show that the worldly government was first set up for sin's sake, but everywhere where men are, there is also some form of government; Adam was straightway made as head of mankind. And so also the form of government of the church has by no means always been the same, but a government has never been lacking to her, neither in the unseen, wherein Christ is her head, nor also in the seen, wherein she always had some ordering.
2. The Holy Scripture sets this in clear light. When Adam has fallen and hides himself from the Lord's face, it is God himself who seeks out the man and calls him, preaches to him the promise of the gospel, and thereby founds his church. With Noah he sets up his covenant, shares in it a treasure of blessings, and seals it with the bow in the clouds. Abraham he calls out of Ur of the Chaldees, makes him his covenant partner, and gives him the sign of circumcision. In the patriarchal time, the households were the congregations of the believers; the household fathers were the priests who shared the promises with their children and brought to God offerings of worship and thanks. The people of Israel received at Sinai not only a civil but also a religious organization and was revealed in priesthood and offering, in tabernacle and altar, in all kinds of laws and institutions as the people of God. When at the beginning of the New Testament John the Baptist appears, he preaches the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and thereby sets apart the people of God from sinful Israel. Jesus takes over this preaching and this baptism from John, later adds the supper to it, gathers an ἐκκλησία around himself, rules it himself directly as long as he is on earth, and appoints a twelve apostles who soon will act as his witnesses. The institution of the apostolate is especially a strong proof for the institutional character that Christ gave to his church on earth. Christ is himself the ἀπόστολος, Heb. 3:1, and continues this ἀποστολή in the twelve, John 20:21. This twelve did not form itself gradually by itself, but was expressly called and appointed by Jesus himself. There is among them, although Jesus from the beginning knew whom he would choose as apostles and therefore could immediately say to them that he would make them fishers of men, Mark 1:17, yet a clear distinction to be made between their first calling to discipleship, and their second calling to the apostolate, Matt. 4:18-22 and 10:1, Mark 1:16 and 3:14, Luke 6:1 and 13-16. By many, such as Schleiermacher, Volkmar, Harnack, Seufert, Holtzmann, etc., this special calling to the apostolic office by Jesus is indeed denied. But the facts are in conflict with this claim. The twelve apostles stood yet already long before the appearance of Paul fixed in the Christian congregations, Matt. 26:33, 28:18, Luke 24:47, John 20:19, 21, 1 Cor. 15:5, 7, Rev. 21:14. Also the name of apostle, שלוח, was given to them by Jesus, Luke 6:13, cf. 11:49, Matt. 23:34, 10:2, Mark 6:30, Luke 9:10, 17:5, 22:14, 24:10, because they were sent out by him to preach, Mark 3:14. Jesus was himself the sent one of the Father, John 3:34, Heb. 3:1, and needed witnesses for the execution of his work, who made known the gospel that appeared in him among all the people of Israel, Matt. 10:6. This naming by Jesus is confirmed by the fact that the word apostle from the beginning has been an official name, so much so that the word ψευδαπόστολος could be formed, 2 Cor. 11:13. The word שלוח occurs moreover in the LXX only once, 1 Kings 14:6, and the word ἀπόστολος rarely in profane Greek. Yet these facts of Scripture about the apostolate seem to be contradicted by other data. First, it is uncertain who must be reckoned to this twelve apostles. Even if the difference between the four apostle lists, Matt. 10:2, Mark 3:16, Luke 6:14, Acts 1:13 is resolved in the sense that Lebbaeus Thaddaeus and Judas of James are identified, then there still remains that Judas fell out and was replaced by Matthias, Acts 1:15-26, and later Paul was added to the twelve. The relation of Paul to the twelve is far from clear. Indeed, Paul makes several times this distinction, that the apostles in Jerusalem among Israel and he himself among the Gentiles would proclaim the gospel, Acts 9:15, 13:47, 22:21, Rom. 11:13, Gal. 1:16, 2:7-9, Eph. 3:8, 1 Tim. 2:7, 2 Tim. 1:11. But this distinction is yet very relative; for Paul always turned in his gospel proclamation first to the Jews, Acts 13:5, 14, 46, etc., and the twelve apostles received from Christ after his resurrection the express command to preach the gospel to all nations, Matt. 28:19, Acts 10:42, and have also fulfilled that command in greater or lesser measure. Not only the congregation from the Jews, but the entire New Testament congregation rests on the foundation of apostles and prophets, Eph. 2:20, Rev. 21:14, and has through their word fellowship with Christ, John 17:20, 1 John 1:3. The apostolate of Paul bears however a character very distinct from that of the twelve. Indeed, Paul maintains with all might the divine origin, the independence, and the truthfulness of his apostolic office against all opponents, Gal. 1-2, 1 Cor. 1:10-4:21, 2 Cor. 10:13. But nevertheless, he did not associate with Jesus during his walk on earth, he persecuted the church of God, he was called by the exalted Christ in an extraordinary way and at an unusual time, he was the chief of sinners and the least of the apostles, 1 Cor. 15:9, Eph. 3:8, 1 Tim. 1:15. His apostolate, however independent and excellent, was a means to lay the apostolate of the twelve as the foundation of the whole church. Paul through his apostolate did not limit or undermine the apostolate of the twelve but on the contrary confirmed and extended it. He paved the way in the Gentile world for the apostolate of the twelve, on the one hand freed it from all the Jewish that still clung to its bearers, and on the other hand grafted the Gentiles as wild branches onto the tame olive tree of Israel, Rom. 11:24. On Christ as cornerstone and the apostles as foundation, Paul built the one church, the one people of God, the spiritual Israel. With that, in principle, a second objection is also already resolved, which is brought against the appointment and naming of the twelve apostles by Jesus. It is namely a fact that the word apostle, probably already in Jerusalem, Acts 14:4, 14, 2 Cor. 11:13, Rev. 2:2, but then especially by Paul, is used in a broader sense and applied also to others than the twelve. Paul had to do that because he knew himself to be a called servant of Jesus Christ, equal in office and honor to the other apostles. He was apostle in a different sense than the apostles in Jerusalem, called in a different way and at a later time and charged with a special task. But one thing he had in common with the apostles in Jerusalem; he was a called apostle of Jesus Christ, who owed his calling, his gospel, even specifically the peculiar content of his gospel, namely that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, to a special revelation of Christ and not to men, 1 Cor. 9:1, 15:8, Gal. 1:1, 12, 15, 2:2, Eph. 3:3. But for his missionary work he needed help. Besides the apostles, Jesus had already sent out another seventy to prepare his coming in the cities and places where he would come, Luke 10. When the congregation in Jerusalem was scattered by the persecution, Philip, one of the seven men chosen in Acts 6, went to preach the gospel among the Samaritans, Acts 8:5, to the eunuch of Queen Candace, 8:26, cf. 11:20, and further to Caesarea, 8:40, 21:8. And so Paul made use in his missionary work of men like Barnabas, Mark, Luke, Silas, Tychicus, Aristarchus, Epaphras, Apollos, Timothy, Titus, and others, who as his fellow workers, 1 Thess. 3:2, stood by his side. These helper missionaries of the apostles were now sometimes also called apostles by Paul, because they were not directly by Jesus Christ, but yet under the guidance of the Holy Spirit sent by the congregation to proclaim the gospel in other places, Acts 13:2, 3, cf. 2 Cor. 8:23, ἀπόστολοι ἐκκλησιῶν. The word apostle thus acquired besides the narrower also a broader sense, Acts 14:4, 14, Rom. 16:7, 1 Cor. 4:6, 9, 9:5, 15:7, 2 Cor. 11:5, 13, 12:11, Gal. 1:19, 1 Thess. 2:6, Rev. 2:2, and lived on so also later in the post-apostolic time, for example in the Didache c. 11. Elsewhere these apostolic helpers bear the name of evangelists, Acts 21:8, Eph. 4:11, 2 Tim. 4:5, because they, just as Christ by the Father, Luke 4:18, and the apostles by Christ, Luke 9:1, 6, so in their turn under the guidance of the Spirit were set apart by the congregation for the proclamation of the gospel, Acts 8:5, 12, 40, 11:19, 20, 22, 13:2, 2 Cor. 8:18, 19, 23, Phil. 2:25, 1 Tim. 4:14. They thus agree in three respects with the apostles in the narrower sense, 1° in that they also are servants of God or of Christ, 1 Thess. 3:2, 1 Tim. 4:6, 6:11, 2 Tim. 2:24, and not only have received a charisma, 1 Tim. 4:14, 2 Tim. 1:6, but actually by virtue of a special calling and appointment bear an office, under a definite name, Acts 21:8, with its own rank and place, Eph. 4:11, and with a special task, 2 Tim. 4:5; 2° that their office is not limited to a local church, but extends to all churches, to the ecclesia universalis, Acts 13:4ff., so that according to the ancient church explanation they went everywhere preaching and had power and authority over all churches, Titus 1:5; and 3° that they participate in the foundational and church-planting work of the apostles; they are their fellow workers, 1 Thess. 3:2, fellow travelers, Acts 19:29, fellow soldiers, Phil. 2:25, fellow servants, Col. 1:7, 4:7, who water what the apostles have planted, 1 Cor. 3:6, and with relative independence yet were subject to the apostles, Acts 19:22, 1 Cor. 4:17, 1 Tim. 1:3, Titus 1:5, etc., and partly alone, partly also in company with the apostles worked, ibid. and Acts 11:30, 12:25, 13:2, etc. In the post-apostolic time the office disappears entirely and the name since Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius becomes customary for the writers of the four gospels, who as it were make the persons of the evangelists superfluous.
Cf. on the evangelists: Suicerus s. v. Witsius, Misc. Sacra I 315 II 564. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III 364-369. Mastricht, Theol. VII 2, 18. Lechler, Die neut. Lehre v. h. Amte 1857 p. 220 f. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. V 3, 277. Sohm, Kirchenrecht 42. Zöckler, Diakonen und Evangelisten, Munich Beck 1893.
Beside the evangelists, prophets also appear in the New Testament, who are even named before them, Rom. 12:6, 1 Cor. 12:28, 29, Eph. 4:11, sometimes connected with the apostles, Eph. 2:20, 3:5, and thus stand above them in rank and honor. They were promised by Jesus, Matt. 23:34, Luke 11:49, were raised up by the Holy Ghost, who was poured out on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2:17, 18, 1 Cor. 12:10, Rev. 1:10, and then appear in great numbers and in nearly all churches, in Jerusalem, Acts 6:5, 8, 11:27, Antioch, 11:27, 13:1, Caesarea 21:9, 10, Corinth, 1 Cor. 12, and everywhere, as is clear from their mention in Rom. 12:6, 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 2:20, 3:5, 4:11, 1 Thess. 5:20. They conclude with John, the apostle, Rev. 1:1, and then wholly vanish as an order from the church. Indeed, the apostolic fathers still speak of prophets, Hermas, Mand. 11 Vis. 3. Didache 11. 15, but they think thereby of such men who traveled about and spoke in various churches about the Christian truth but thereby had to be carefully examined and distinguished from false prophets; the time for prophecy was past. Montanism and other enthusiastic movements of earlier and later times did seek to revive prophecy; Rome claims that the prophetic gift still endures, Bellarmine, de notis eccl. c. 15; Zwingli and many after him introduced so-called prophecies, whereby the Scripture was explained for the people, art. Prophezei in Herzog and Dr. H. H. Kuyper, De opleiding tot den dienst des Woords bij de Gereformeerden 1891. But all that is in essence distinct from the prophecy as it existed in the first Christian churches. This is marked by the following: 1. The New Testament prophets can indeed be called office-bearers, but their office is much more charismatic than that of prophets and apostles. They are not directly called and appointed by Christ nor yet by his church, but receive a special gift from the Holy Ghost, and are therefore called to fulfill a special task in the church of Christ. 2. With the apostles and evangelists they have in common that they hold an office which applies to the whole church of Christ on earth and thus also work together in the foundation of the church, Eph. 2:20, but while the evangelists especially help the apostles in their missionary and organizing work, the prophets stand by them in their upbuilding, edifying, teaching activity. 3. The New Testament prophecy is indeed conscious and therefore to be esteemed highly above glossolalia, 1 Cor. 14:5, 32, but it is yet momentary and extraordinary, the fruit of revelation, 1 Cor. 14:30; it extends the natural measure of knowing and understanding, includes both the form and the content of the speech, Matt. 10:19, 20, proves itself as truth by its inner, convincing power, 2 Cor. 2:14-17, and served especially to give entrance to the gospel, which was proclaimed by the apostles, which was to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, and was not yet accessible in the written Word for the whole church, among believers and unbelievers, and thus to build up the church by teaching, exhortation, consolation, 1 Cor. 14:3, in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Cf. on the New Testament prophets: Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III 369 cf. Disp. Sel. II 1036 sq. Witsius, Misc. Sacra I 282 sq. Neander, Gesch. d. Pflanzung u. Leitung der chr. K. 182 f. Bonwetsch, Die Prophetie im ap. u. nachap. Zeitalter, Zeits. f. k. Wiss. u. k. Leben 1884 S. 408 f. Burger, art. in Herzog 12, 265. Zöckler, t. a. p. 71 f. Weiszäcker, Das apost. Zeitalter, 584 f. etc.
But however closely prophets and evangelists are also akin to the proper apostles, they are yet in essence distinct from them. The apostles form their own circle, their office bears a wholly special character, and is known by the following marks. 1. The apostles are given to Christ by the Father, John 17:6, chosen and called by Him Himself, John 6:70, 13:18, 15:16, 19, 1 Cor. 1:17, 2 Cor. 5:20, Gal. 1:1, chosen by God for their office, Acts 10:41. 2. They are trained and fitted for their task by Jesus Himself, have been ear- and eye-witnesses of His words and deeds, have beheld the Word of life with their eyes and handled it with their hands, and received their gospel not from any man but from Christ Himself, Luke 24:48, John 1:4, 15:27, Acts 1:21, 22, 26:16, 1 Cor. 9:1, 15:8, 2 Cor. 12:1ff., Gal. 1:12, Eph. 3:2-8, 1 Tim. 1:12, 1 John 1:1-3 etc. 3. They partake in a special measure of the Holy Ghost, who teaches them and leads them into all truth, Matt. 10:20, John 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, 13, 14, 20:22, 1 Cor. 2:10-13, 7:40, 1 Pet. 1:12. 4. Equipped with that Ghost, John 20:22, Acts 1:8, Eph. 3:5, they come forth openly as witnesses of Jesus, especially of His resurrection, Acts 1:8, 21, 22, 2:14, 32, 3:15, 4:8 etc., they are trustworthy witnesses, Luke 1:2, John 19:35, 21:24, 1 Cor. 7:25, 1 Pet. 5:1, 2 Pet. 1:16, Heb. 2:3, Rev. 1:3, 22:18, 19, and proclaim God's Word, John 1:14, 20:31, 1 Cor. 2:13, 2 Cor. 2:17, Gal. 1:7, 1 Thess. 2:13, 1 John 1:1-4, Rev. 22:18, 19. 5. Their witness is sealed by God with signs and wonders and rich spiritual blessing, Matt. 10:1, 9, Mark 16:15ff., Acts 2:43, 3:2, 5:12-16, 6:8 etc., Rom. 12:4-8, 15:18, 19, 1 Cor. 12:10, 28, 15:10, 2 Cor. 11:5, 23, Gal. 3:5, Heb. 2:4. 6. To this their witness the church of all ages is bound. There is no fellowship with Christ except through fellowship with the word and the persons of the apostles, John 17:20, Gal. 1:7-9, 1 John 1:3; they are the foundation of the church, Matt. 16:18, 1 Cor. 3:10, Eph. 2:20, Rev. 21:14; their word, kept for us in the Writings of the New Testament, is the means of grace, John 20:31, 1 Cor. 1:18ff., 15:2, 1 John 1:1-4. 7. Their office is thus not for a time and not limited to a local congregation, but it abides and stretches out to the whole church. It is the only one that is straightway set up by Christ and holds in itself all powers and works that in later offices are divided, the pastoral, presbyteral, diaconal, even also the evangelizing and prophetic work. From the outset the apostles enjoy in the church of Christ a widely acknowledged authority. They are not only the overseers of the congregation at Jerusalem, but they are the founders, the fathers, 1 Cor. 4:15 and leaders of the whole church, have oversight over the believers at Samaria, Acts 8:14, visit the congregations, Acts 9:32, 11:22, set up offices, Acts 6:2, take decisions in the Holy Ghost, Acts 15:22, 28, come forth with apostolic might, 1 Cor. 4:21, 5:2, 2 Cor. 2:9, give binding commands, 1 Cor. 7:40, 1 Thess. 4:2, 11, 2 Thess. 2:15, 3:6, 14 etc. and are still with their word of authority for the whole Christendom; apostolicity is a property and mark of the church of Christ.
Voetius, Pol. Eccl. Burmannus, Exerc. Acad. Spanheim, Op. Moor. Philippi, Kirchl. Cl. Gloël, Der H. Geist in der Heilsverkündigung des Paulus. W. Seufert, Der Ursprung u. die Bedeutung des Apostolates in de chr. K. der ersten 2 Jahrh. Köppel, Der Ursprung des Apost., Stud. u. Krit. Erich Haupt, Zum Verständniss des Apost. Art. Apostel van Schmidt in Herzog.
Among the apostles, Peter stands foremost. Simon or Simeon, son of John or Jonah, brother of Andrew, from Bethsaida, John 1:45, but likely since his wedding dwelling in Capernaum, Mark 1:29, received already at his first meeting with Jesus the pledge that he would later be called Cephas, Greek form for the Hebrew word kep with the Aramaic article, the rock, hē petra , as masculine proper name Peter, John 1:43. Without doubt, Jesus hinted thereby at his steadfast temper, which was his own despite his sanguine, lively nature, and which shone clearest at Caesarea Philippi, when he, over against the folk who with their earthbound hopes saw themselves let down in Jesus and forsook Him, held fast the confession of Jesus' Messiahship and openly spoke it in the name of his fellow disciples, Matthew 16:13-20, Mark 8:27-29, Luke 9:18-20, John 6:66-69. At this time, Jesus also called to mind the name which He had given him earlier, Matthew 16:18. By his bold and steadfast confession of Jesus as the Christ, Peter showed himself to be the rock on which Christ would build His church so firm and strong that the gates of Hades would not overpower it. According to Launoi, 17 church fathers thought of the rock as Peter, 8 as the apostles, 44 as Peter's faith, and 16 as Christ, in Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 411; later the Roman Catholics have mostly taken the rock to mean Peter and the Protestants his confession. But there is no either-or here. The words "this rock" can refer to nothing else than the person of Peter, but a rock he is and has proven himself to be through his confession of Jesus as the Christ, a confession which he owes not to himself but to the Father's revelation. Just for this reason, Jesus pledges to him that He will build His church upon him as the confessor of His Sonship and Messiahship. Christ thus sets Himself forth as the master builder of His church and Peter the confessor as the rock on which His church shall rest. In Matthew 21:42, Acts 4:11, 1 Corinthians 3:10, Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14, compare 1 Peter 2:4-6, the same likeness is used but applied in another way. There namely the apostles are thought of as the builders who through their preaching founded the church on Christ as the groundwork. But here in Matthew 16:18, Christ is the builder who builds His church on the confessing Peter. And this pledge Christ has kept; Peter is the first among the apostles, the chief founder of the church, the forerunner and leader of all confessors of Christ through the ages. Therefore he is always named first in the lists of apostles, Matthew 10:2, Mark 3:16, Luke 6:14, Acts 1:13, he belongs with John and James to the close circle of Jesus' friends who may follow Him when the others must stay behind, Matthew 17:1, Mark 5:37, 13:3, 14:33, he is the spokesman and stand-in for the disciples, Matthew 16:17, 17:24, 18:21, 26:40, after Jesus' ascent to heaven he steps forward as the first witness among the apostles, Acts 1:15, 2:14, 3:1ff., 4:8, 5:3, 29, 8:14, 10:5ff., 12:3ff., 15:7ff., and as first among equals he is also honored by Paul, Galatians 1:18, 2:7-9. Compare article Peter in Herzog's encyclopedia and the writings cited there.
3. The church has thus never lacked a government; and she has not provided this for herself but has received it from God. The institute and organism of the church have ever been called into being at the same time and in connection with each other by God. Of the apostolate it can even be said that it went before the church of the New Testament; the apostles were the founders of the congregation, as it were the patriarchs of the people of God in the days of the New Testament. But this apostolate has not been continued and was as an office for the founding of the church by its very nature not open to continuation; it lives on for us only in the apostolic word, which remains the foundation of the church and brings us into fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, 1 John 1:3. As soon as the apostles had founded congregations in various places, they set up offices in those congregations which differed in essence from their own and did not come about without the cooperation of the congregations themselves. There is a great difference between the extraordinary offices of apostles, evangelists, and prophets, which were set up temporarily for the foundation of the church, and the ordinary offices of presbyters and deacons, which arose from the churches themselves under apostolic guidance. These latter offices presuppose the churches, in the same way as the government presupposes the people. They could therefore not be instituted directly and immediately by Christ, like the apostolic office, but could only arise when the congregations had been founded and needed a regular leadership. This took place quite soon in the church at Jerusalem. This church, through the extraordinary blessing of Pentecost, soon gained a very great expansion and numbered thousands of souls, Acts 2:41, 47, 4:4, 21, 32, 5:14, 6:1. This naturally made organization urgently necessary, which also came about under the leadership of the apostles. First, this congregation of thousands of souls, despite its unity, was divided in one way or another. For it could not meet in one building but had to gather in parts in private houses. Without doubt, the first house churches arose in Jerusalem, as we also find them elsewhere in the apostolic age. For we read that the believers met not only in the temple but also kata oikon (not: from house to house, but: at home, in various houses), Acts 2:46, 5:42, among others in the house of Mary and of James, Acts 12:12, 17. In order that all things might be done decently and in order, all kinds of regulations were needed for these meetings; and perhaps the example of the Jewish synagogues with their elders, officers, and servants, and also with their Scripture reading, preaching, prayer, and blessing had some, though certainly not very strong, influence, Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, 3rd ed. II 437-459. Such a regulation is already indicated by the name hoi neōteroi , which occurs in Acts 5:6, 10; the article shows that the younger members of the congregation, like the hazzanim , hypēretai , Luke 4:20 in the synagogues, were the natural ones to perform some subordinate services. It is not unlikely that they as such stood over against the older members of the congregation, hoi presbyteroi . Among Israel, the elders were honored for their grayness and wisdom. From their midst were appointed the governing persons of the civil community and in later times also the caretakers and overseers of the synagogues. So there were also elders in the Christian congregation from the beginning, that is, men and women who were not only older in age but who had personally known or met Jesus, who had heard his words and been witnesses of his miracles, who had already confessed him as the Messiah before the day of Pentecost or perhaps even belonged to the seventy sent out by Jesus to the cities and villages of Palestine, Luke 10:1, and who for all this naturally stood in high esteem among those who were later added to the congregations. They held no office but nevertheless occupied a notable place in the congregation of Christ through their knowledge and godliness. Therefore, a distinction must be made between presbyteroi and episkopoi . Proofs for this are: 1st, that the name presbyteros , to designate the office of overseer, is gradually more precisely defined and replaced by that of episkopos , Acts 20:28, Phil. 1:1, 1 Tim. 3:2, Titus 1:7, 1 Pet. 2:25; 2nd, that Paul, after speaking about the offices in 1 Tim. 3, still in 1 Tim. 5 indicates the attitude that Timothy should take toward various congregation members, elders and younger, men and women, cf. 1 Pet. 5:5; 3rd, that the apostolic fathers, Clement, 1 Cor. 1, 3; 3, 3; 21, 6; 47, 6; 57, 1; 63, 3, 4 and Hermas, Vis. II 4; III 1 clearly speak of a class of elders who continue to exist in the congregation alongside the actual office-bearers and have a claim to respectful obedience; and 4th, that the well-known text, 1 Tim. 5:17, without assuming this distinction, as will soon appear, yields no good sense. We probably have to imagine it thus, that the twelve apostles could not by far accomplish the work in the large congregation at Jerusalem, and therefore quite soon, just as from the neōteroi for lower services, so from some of the presbyteroi for higher services in the congregation made use. When and how this happened is not reported to us in the Acts. We first find the presbyteroi mentioned in Acts 11:30, 14:23, 15:2, 6, 22, 16:4, 20:17, 28, 21:18, James 5:14, without anything being told of their origin. It is not impossible that such an employment of the presbyteroi by the apostles already took place before Acts 6, that is, before the institution of the diaconal office; hoi neōteroi in Acts 5:6, 10 points to a distinction from hoi presbyteroi . But in any case, the book of Acts teaches us that soon in various congregations, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, men were appointed who had to keep oversight over the congregation, and who at first, because they were usually chosen from the elders, bore the name of hoi presbyteroi but later, with a view to their sphere of work, received that of episkopoi . Episcopi are thus such presbyteri who were designated for a specific service in the congregation; all episcopi are thus presbyteri, but by no means all presbyteri were episcopi; presbyteri formed a class, episcopi bore an office. However, when, as often happened at first, the episcopi were called presbyteri, then there was no difference in the name; presbyteri and episcopi were then the same persons and bearers of the same office, Acts 20:17, 28, 1 Tim. 3:1, 4:14, 5:17, 19, Titus 1:5, 7, 1 Pet. 5:1, 2. This presbyteral or episcopal office was first instituted in Jerusalem and in the congregations from the Jews, Heb. 13:7, 17, 24, James 5:14, but then also in those from the Gentiles. According to Acts 14:23, Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in every congregation. Now, in the letters to Rome and Corinth, Paul does not mention this office in so many words. But various places, Acts 20:17, 28, Rom. 12:8, 16:5, 10, 11, 14, 15, 1 Cor. 14-16, 16:15, 16, Phil. 1:1, 1 Thess. 5:12-14, 1 Tim. 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9, 1 Pet. 5:1, Rev. 4:4, 10, 5:6, 8ff. prove that the office of elders was a known, generally occurring, apostolic institution. And to strengthen this comes the testimony of Clement of Rome, 1 Cor. 42, that the apostles, preaching in the country and in the cities, appointed the first converts as overseers and deacons over those who would thereafter become believers.
The task that was laid upon these elders becomes clear from the description of their office. The name of presbyters sheds no light thereon, and therefore gives way to other names, especially to that of overseers, Acts 20:28, Phil. 1:1, 1 Tim. 3:2, Titus 1:7, even as Christ himself bears that name, 1 Pet. 2:25. And furthermore they are called rulers, Rom. 12:8, 1 Thess. 5:12, steersmen, 1 Cor. 12:28, leaders, Heb. 13:7, 17, 24, shepherds, Eph. 4:11, who are to care for the church not for filthy gain nor with lordship but with a willing mind, to rule her as the flock of the Lord, and therefore must meet sundry requirements, namely also the demand that they rule their own house well, Acts 20:28, 1 Tim. 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9, 1 Pet. 5:1-3. From this description it appears that the elders' office was in the first place charged with the oversight, the rule, and the leading of the church. Of course, some knowledge of the truth was needful for that; according to Acts 15:4, 22, 23, they even had to judge and decide with the apostles at the meeting in Jerusalem about the weighty question that was raised by the turning of the Gentiles concerning the standing toward the Mosaic law. But the overseers' office was at first not a teaching office but a ruling office. Besides, in the first time there was yet no pressing need for a separate teaching office.
Apostles, evangelists, and prophets first stepped forward as teachers, Acts 13:1, 1 Cor. 14:3, 1 Tim. 2:7, 2 Tim. 1:11, and furthermore the gift of teaching was given to many who held no office in the church of Christ, Rom. 12:7, 1 Cor. 12:8, 28, 29, 14:26. The teaching was at first free, even as in the synagogue it was allowed to everyone to shed light on a part of the Scripture, Luke 4:16. But little by little it was brought into closer bond with the bishop's office. When the churches spread out, the need for word and sacrament could no longer be met by apostles, evangelists, and prophets; there was need for a local and lasting office that was charged with the care thereof. Also, in the long run it would not do to leave the teaching wholly free, for this freedom gave rise to all kinds of misuses. So everything pressed toward laying the teaching upon the overseers' office and thus to make sure a lasting place in the church. From Heb. 13:7 we learn that leaders are at the same time the preachers of the word of God. When Paul says in Eph. 4:11 that Christ has given some as apostles and some as evangelists and then furthermore some as shepherds and teachers, he thereby teaches clearly that these two last-named persons hold no truly sundered office but carry out works in the church that are closely bound and yet differ from each other. Likely in the first time more than one or even all elders were able to serve word and sacrament. But even therein change had to come soon.
Indeed the demand stayed for all overseers that they be apt to teach, 1 Tim. 3:2. But above all two things brought it about that among the overseers a sundering came between those who were charged only with the rule, and others who were also charged with the teaching. In the first place the demands became ever weightier for those who had to preach the word of truth in the church; the apostles and evangelists died away; the out-of-the-way gifts ended; all kinds of errors and heresies sprang up in and outside the church; the skill to teach lay not only in teaching and warning, but also in refuting the gainsayers, 2 Tim. 3:16, Titus 1:9; training, readying, study became needful for the carrying out of this office in the church. Besides, the Jewish scribes already had their schools; Jesus himself had trained his followers and made them fit for their service; Paul had taught Timothy and laid upon him to hand over this teaching as a costly jewel to trustworthy folk, who in their turn would be able to teach others, 2 Tim. 2:2. And to that came now in the second place the bidding of Jesus, that the worker in the service of the word is worthy of his wage, Matt. 10:10, Luke 10:7; a bidding that was widely known and followed in the Christian churches, Rom. 15:27, 1 Cor. 9:6, 11, 14, 2 Cor. 11:7-9, Gal. 6:6, 1 Thess. 2:6, 1 Tim. 5:17, 18, 2 Tim. 2:6.
Indeed this had first to do with the apostles and evangelists, but it held yet further also for those who worked in the word and teaching and gave their life thereto. The need for training and upkeep in livelihood were the cause that the service of the word was laid not upon all but only upon some overseers. The well-known place, 1 Tim. 5:17, 18, lifts this above all doubt. The presbyters there, cf. verse 1, are not overseers, for then Paul would make a setting against between such overseers who rule badly and others who rule well and deem the first some honor but the last a double honor worthy. But presbyters are older members of the church in general, who as such have claim to honor. From them Paul sunders the well-ruling presbyters, such elders who at the same time rule well, who are rulers, Rom. 12:8, 1 Thess. 5:12, that is, who hold the office of overseers; and these are now, because they belong to the older members of the church and at the same time are overseers, worthy of a double honor. And from them are yet again sundered those who labor in word and teaching, those overseers who namely work in the word and teaching and therefor according to the Scripture have claim to wage. So there is thus according to this place a clear sundering between overseers to whom only the rule, and others to whom also the teaching and in the wake thereof the serving of the sacrament is laid upon. And yet within the bounds of the New Testament we meet in the Asia Minor churches this state, that among the overseers only one single is charged with the service of the word; he is the angel, the messenger, who on Christ's behalf has to teach and lead the church and is answerable for her ghostly and moral state, Rev. 1:20ff.
Beside this office of overseer, distinguished into that of ruling and teaching elder, a second was soon instituted. In Jerusalem, namely, according to Acts 6, dissatisfaction arose among the Christians converted from Greek proselytes, that their widows were set back and neglected in the private charity then already practiced by the Christians brought from the Jews. The apostles thereupon called together the whole congregation and declared that they did not think it good to devote themselves to the care of the poor with diminution of the labor in the word. The congregation must therefore look out for seven men and choose them, and the apostles would then appoint them to this service of mercy and after prayer lay hands on them. It is clear from this that the apostles, although they indicate the number and requirements of the deacons, grant to the congregation the right and competence to choose these men. The apostles themselves were indeed expressly appointed by Christ; but Matthias was yet designated as the twelfth apostle by lot from a pair that had been selected by the 120 gathered believers. According to Acts 13:1-3, Paul and Barnabas were set apart by the prophets and teachers present in the congregation at Antioch for the work of evangelists. Timothy was chosen for this same service by prophetic indication, in the presence of many witnesses and with laying on of hands by Paul and the presbytery, 1 Tim. 1:18, 4:14, 6:12, 2 Tim. 1:6, 2:2. In 2 Cor. 8:19 cf. vs. 23 there is mention of an evangelist who is appointed by the congregations. The prophets and teachers were naturally not chosen by the congregations, because they appeared freely and had more a gift than an office; but they were judged by the congregations quite differently from the apostles and were subject to them, 1 Cor. 2:15, 12:10, 14:29, 1 Thess. 5:19-21, 1 John 2:20, 27, Rev. 2:2, 6, 14, 15, 20, 3:1ff. The supposition is therefore not bold that the election of the overseers, even less than that of the evangelists, bypassed the congregation. The words in Acts 14:23, "And when they had ordained them elders in every church," say only that the apostles appointed some persons in each congregation as elders, but do not indicate how they did this; and Titus 1:5 cf. 2 Tim. 2:2 sheds no light on it either. But from post-apostolic writings we know that in the choice of a bishop the congregation was consulted directly or indirectly, Didache 15. Clement, 1 Cor. 44. Polycarp, Phil. 11. cf. Ignatius, Philad. 10. Apostolic Constitutions VIII 4. And of the deacons the New Testament informs us in Acts 6 very clearly that they were designated by the congregation. There is, however, great difference about the nature of the office that was here instituted by the apostles. Some think that it was an extraordinary office which soon ceased to exist; others judge that it included the later elder and deacon offices, and still others hold that in Acts 6 the institution of the presbyter office is related. All these opinions are based on the fact that some of those chosen in Acts 6, such as Philip, also appear as preachers of the gospel, Acts 8:5, 26ff., 21:8, and that the presbyters in Jerusalem also receive gifts from the congregation at Antioch for the service of the brothers in Judea, Acts 11:30. This last proof has little force, however; in Acts 11:30 there is mention of an entirely exceptional case, namely, not of the distribution of natural goods which were laid on the tables by the congregation at Jerusalem itself for its poor, but of the transfer of monies which were collected in Antioch on a special occasion for the brothers in Judea and now delivered by the hand of Barnabas and Saul to the presbyters. But according to Gal. 2:1, nothing came of this journey; we therefore do not know how and where those monies were transferred, nor by whom they were actually received and distributed. And as for Philip, he was in Jerusalem one of the seven, but after the persecution broke out and the congregation was scattered, he appeared in Samaria and elsewhere as an evangelist and remained so; he did not later return to Jerusalem but settled in Caesarea, Acts 21:8. On the other hand, everything pleads for the view that in Acts 6 we have the institution of what was later called the diaconate.
First, the name comes into consideration; "diakonia" in the New Testament designates every office and gift which, bestowed by the Lord, is employed in the service and for the benefit of the congregation; every member of the congregation is a servant of Christ and with all that he is and has a deacon of the brothers; there are therefore various diaconias, 1 Cor. 12:5, especially ministry of the word, Acts 6:4, 20:24, 1 Tim. 1:12, and ministry of mercy to the poor, sick, strangers, etc., Rom. 12:7, 1 Cor. 12:28, 1 Pet. 4:11. Without doubt there was now in the congregation at Jerusalem from the beginning such a service of mercy; there was a daily diakonia, Acts 6:1, which perhaps stood under the oversight of the apostles but was yet left to private persons. But the apostles brought order here by the institution of a special office. There must now be a reason why the later diaconate was particularly designated with the name of diakonia. That reason is to be found nowhere else than in Acts 6. There it is explained that the service of mercy is in a special sense a diakonia, because it is a service of the tables, to serve tables. Second, to the seven men is entrusted precisely that which elsewhere in the New Testament is more specifically designated with the name of diakonia. For in the diakonia in Acts 11:29, Rom. 12:7, 1 Cor. 12:5, 2 Cor. 8:4, 9:1, 12, 13, Rev. 2:19 and further everywhere where mention is made of the office of deacons and deaconesses, we have especially to think of the service of mercy. And this is entrusted in Acts 6 to the seven men. They must see to it that the widows of the Greek Christians are no longer overlooked, and to that end they are in general charged with the service of the tables. By these tables are not to be understood the tables in the houses of the widows nor the money-changers' tables, Matt. 21:12, but simply the tables of the Lord. In every meeting place of the congregation there was one or there were more tables, at which one sat down together as members of the congregation to partake of the love feast, agape, and the Lord's Supper. On those tables the richer members of the congregation laid down their gifts, mostly consisting of natural goods, so that the poorer members might also partake thereof and later still be served. Those tables were tables of the Lord; what was laid on them belonged to the Lord; what one used at those tables was the Lord's food and drink; and what remained thereof and was distributed was the Lord's gift. The seven men in Jerusalem were now designated to serve those tables, that is, to be helpful at the meals and further to distribute the Lord's gifts honestly among the saints according to their needs. Third, the position that Acts 6 relates the origin of the diaconate is supported by the fact that the requirements set for it are so high and in this respect agree with those in 1 Tim. 3:8-10, 12. Why precisely seven men were chosen in Jerusalem, we do not know; perhaps because the large congregation met in seven meeting places and needed a deacon in each of these. But in any case they had to be men who had the testimony in the congregation that they were full of the Spirit and wisdom; and therefore the congregation had first to look out for them inquiringly and choosingly. So Paul also wants the deacons first to be tested and to satisfy the many requirements which largely agree with those for the overseers. Hatch and Sohm go too far when they infer from this that the requirements for presbyter and deacon are scarcely distinguishable. For while, for example, emphasis falls on the teaching ability for the elder, purity of conscience in relation to the content of the faith is required of the deacon, 1 Tim. 3:9. But otherwise the religious and moral requirements for elder and deacon are fairly alike. Presbyterate and diaconate stand in close connection according to Acts 6 and 1 Tim. 3. Fourth, there is little ground for the assertion that the diaconate arose only later, approximately simultaneously with the episcopal office. From the diakonia, Rom. 12:7 and the helps, 1 Cor. 12:28 little may be inferred. But everything pleads for the view that with the presbyterate the diaconate was also transplanted by the apostles from the Jerusalem congregation into other congregations. Just as with elders, so also elsewhere there must soon have arisen a need for deacons for the service of the tables. In Phil. 1:1 they are also mentioned in passing as something quite ordinary beside and after the elders; in 1 Tim. 3 Paul lists their requirements, and in Rom. 16:1, 2, 1 Tim. 3:11, 5:9, 10 there is mention of deaconesses. The apostolate may thus as an extraordinary office precede the church as the gathering of believers; the offices of teacher, elder, and deacon presuppose the congregation, which has the right to designate and choose the bearers thereof.
Cf. on the organization of the church in the days of the New Testament: Rothe, The Beginnings of the Christian Church 1837. Lechler, The New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Office 1857. Neander, History of the Planting and Leading of the Christian Church by the Apostles, Gotha 1862. Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, from the English by A. Harnack, Giessen 1883. Harnack, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Texts and Investigations II 1. 2. 1884. Sohm, Church Law, Leipzig 1892. Loening, The Congregational Constitution of Primitive Christianity, Halle 1888. Loofs, The Primitive Christian Congregational Constitution with Special Reference to Loening and Harnack, Studies and Criticisms 1890 p. 619. Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. 1890. Lechler, The Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Age, 3rd ed. 1885. Zöckler, Deacons and Evangelists, Munich 1893. Moeller-v. Schubert, Textbook of Church History I, 2nd ed. 1897 p. 88. Kurtz, Textbook of Church History, 13th ed. 1899 § 31.
4. This aristocratic-presbyteral church order did not last long but soon passed into a monarchical-episcopal one. How this came about, we do not know; there is thus a wide field here for guesses and suppositions, cf. Karl Sell, Forschungen der Gegenwart über Begriff und Entstehung der Kirche, Zeits. f. Theol. u. Kirche v. Gottschick, 1894. But surely sundry circumstances steered the church in this path. First, it lay to hand that the churches in the beginning could not yet sharply mark between the out-of-the-ordinary (apostles, evangelists, prophets) and the everyday (bishops, deacons) offices. The offices resting on a gift of grace, of apostle (in the broader sense of evangelist), prophet, and teacher lasted, even after the twelve apostles and Paul had died, in the gatherings still, Did. 11 sq. Hermas, Mand. 11. Euseb. H. E. III 37. But when these ceased and more and more fell away, so that between true and false it grew ever harder to tell apart, then the evangelizing, prophetic, and teaching work was bound to the office of the bishops; they became the true evangelists, prophets, and teachers, Did. 15. As ever, so also then step by step the stream of free life was led into the bed of a fixed ordering.
Second, the states that, according to the New Testament and the apostolic fathers, were in the gatherings, teach us clearly that the first Christians were far from able to take in the truth of the gospel in all its richness and pureness. Above all, the thoughts of Paul were mingled with all kinds of outlandish, Jewish and heathen parts. The right-making by faith was nowhere taught purely. The belief in God's showing forth in Christ kept meaning only as a ground for a moral, often already ascetic-tinged, life; the gospel became a new law, whose keeping gave everlasting life, the incorruption. All this moral, law-bound path came to the uplifting of the office as organ of the godly showing forth for good, stamped hearkening and under-throwing to the churchly overlord (learn to submit, Clem. 1 Cor. 57) as the first Christian duty, and heresy and split as the most frightful of all sins.
Third, the uprising of sundry heretical and sect-like paths made ordering and binding together of the Christian gatherings urgently needful. The ask after the true church got practical weight. And the answer thereto rang: the true church is that which holds to the whole, to the catholic church, and this is where the bishop is, Ign. Smyrn. 8. This change in the ruling came not in all churches at once to stand. The Didache knows it not yet; it speaks not of presbyters, but only of bishops and deacons, who must be men worthy of the Lord and must fulfill the service of the prophets and teachers, c. 15. Hermas names apostles, bishops, teachers, and deacons next to each other, without making word of presbyters, Vis. III 5, but seems to set at the head of each gathering a college that is made up of presbyters, II 4, and thus makes yet no office mark between presbyters and bishops. About the time wherein the Shepherd of Hermas was written, that is in any case in the first half of the second hundred-year, the monarchical bishopric thus in Rome yet not stood. It is besides not in Rome, as Sohm claims, and also not in the West but in the East arisen. The first letter of Clement, written from Rome at the end of the first hundred-year, says indeed that the apostles set the first-turned to bishops and deacons and that it is sin to put them out when they fulfill their service in blameless wise, but knows the mark of bishops and presbyters not yet and uses both names through one another, c. 42. 44. 47.
On the other hand, the monarchical bishopric grew itself in the East very speedily; the letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, under Trajan about 110-115 as martyr died in Rome, are therefor an unassailable witness, and would stay that even in case of untrueness, while they then yet cannot be younger than the years 130-140. Ignatius speaks oft, up to 13 times, of bishops, presbyters, and deacons as of three marked office-bearers; he sees in the bishop a sent one of Christ, Eph. 6, a grace of God, Magn. 2, a likeness of God or of Christ, Magn. 7. Trall. 2. 3. Smyrn. 8; and drives without cease in the good of the oneness of the church thereon, that the limbs of the gathering unite themselves after God's bid with the bishop, do nothing churchly outside him, and all heresy and splitting most strictly shun. Yet stands the bishoply thought with Ignatius yet but at the beginning of her unfolding; the bishop is no bearer of the handing down, no priest of the New Testament, no after-follower of the apostles, he is ever ringed by the rede of presbyters and deacons, like Christ by his apostles, he bears an office in a place-bound church and has outside there no sway. In the gatherings of Asia Minor stood in Paul's days, Acts 14:23, 20:17, Phil. 1:1, Tit. 1:5 and also later still, Clement, 1 Cor. 42, 4. 44, 2. 4. 6 not one but sundry bishops at the head. According to 1 Tim. 4:14 they shaped together already a college, a presbytery. And one under them trod according to Rev. 1:20 sq. so on the fore-ground, that he as angel marked and as stand-in of the whole gathering could be beheld. Likely the unfolding of the monarchical bishopric shut itself thereby. The presbyter, who with the leading of the meetings and maybe also in mark from all office-mates alone with the service of the word was burdened, became step by step as bearer of a sunder office beheld. He alone was bishop, while all others were but presbyters. In this wise would also to make clear be, that Ignatius the monarchical bishopric already as long standing under-sets, that Clement of Alexandria with Eusebius, Hist. eccl. III 23, 6 of John speaks as setting up bishops here and there, and that this bishopric all speedily, about the middle of the second hundred-year, everywhere brought in was. If one therein not thought to lean on an apostolic handing down, the speedy spreading would nigh unmake-clear be. The new that with Ignatius us meets, stands then therein, that he the name bishop alone uses for him who first but first among equals was, that he this bishop indeed yet ever in bond holds with but yet also already far uplifts above the presbyters and deacons, that he him oft likens with God or with Christ, and that he for him from the limbs of the gathering a nigh boundless hearkening asks.
In this path has the unfolding of that bishopric itself forth-set. As in a gathering but one bishop might be, then spoke it self-same, that in a great gathering, with many church-buildings, that church a sunder fore-rank got, whereto the bishop bound was; that the from out the towns set up land gatherings daughters became of the mother-gathering and a diocese (first since 9th hundred-year; before that time parochia), of the bishop; that this alone the own churchly handlings, e.g. the eucharist, the ordering, the loosing do could etc. Therewith became in beginning all the early bond turned around; in the apostolic time were there first gatherings, meetings of believers, in which by the apostles bishops and deacons were set, who with leave of the gatherings chosen were and to her deem under-thrown were. But now became it turned around; the true church, teaching, baptism, eucharist, fellowship with God is there where the bishop is, like Ignatius each time says and Irenaeus, Cyprian, and others after him work out. The strife against the gnosis, which on the handing down itself leaned and therewith her right and truth sought to prove, made it thereby needful, to set the true, apostolic handing down against her. And this one found in the bishops as after-followers of the apostles and bearers of the handing down. They were by the apostles in the gatherings set, in rule-like after-following each other followed and therefore bearers of the sure gift of truth, Iren. adv. haer. III 2, 2. 3, 1, 2. IV 26, 2, cf. 1 Clem. 42, 2. 44, 2. Cypr. Ep. 66, 4. 75, 16. de unit. 4. This whole new up-taking of the bishopric as forth-setting of the apostleship and of his un-touchable sway in the church became therein fulfilled, that since the second half of the second hundred-year the mark of clergy and laymen brought in was. Clergy, lot, heritage, ownership, marked at first the gathering of Christ as the heritage or ownership of God, Deut. 4:20, 9:29, 1 Pet. 2:5, Ignat. Eph. 11, 2. Trall. 12, 3. Phil. 5, 1. But step by step became the use of this word narrowed, and first alone laid on the presbyters, Tert. de monog. 12. de exhort. cast. 7. Cypr. Ep. 15, 1, then also on the deacons, Clem. Alex. Quis dives 42, Tert. de fuga 11. 12. Hippol. Philos. IX 12 and at last yet on all the lesser orders (acolytes, exorcists, readers, door-keepers), that in the beginning of the third hundred-year up-came, Cypr. Ep. 29. 34, 4. 59, 9. All these servers of the church became yet step by step more and more from the gathering un-hanging and to beamten of the bishop made and then with these as clergy, as teaching church set against the laymen, the hearing church, that nothing more to say but only yet to listen and to hearken had, cf. Cremer s. v. Harnack D. G. I 383 Sohm, Kirchenrecht I 157-247. So arose the episcopal setup of church ruling, that in the bishop the lawful after-follower of the apostles and the ghostly lord of the believers sees.
After that setup are sundry Christian churches ordered, the Greek church and many other Eastern churches and sects, Hofmann, Symboliek § 44. 55. 62 sq.; further the Roman church, that however from the episcopal setup to the papal is forth-stepped and therefore ever by the hangers-on of the pure episcopal setup, such as the men of the reforming councils, the Gallicans, the Jansenists, the Febronianists, the Old Catholics fought was, Conc. Trid. sess. 23 c. 4 and can. 6. Bellarmine, de membris ecclesiae militantis, Controv. II 2. Petavius, de eccl. hierarchia, in 5 books, Theol. dogm. Paris. 1870 VIII 97-406. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. I prop. 33. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 1 S. 480. Simar, Dogm. 624. Conc. Vatic. sess. 4 prooem.; and at last the Anglican church, that in the first time by mouth of Cranmer, Parkington, Whitgift, Usher and others the episcopal setup yet but as a allowed and useful church right, but later, above all after the archbishops Bancroft and Laud as a divine right defended, Richard Hooker, The laws of ecclesiastical polity 1593 etc., many times reprinted, best ed. of Keble, Oxford 1845. Joseph Hall, Episcopacy by divine right asserted 1640. Makower, Die Verfassung der Kirche von England, Berlin 1894. Art. Anglican Church in Herzog³.
Yet the Roman church did not stay with the episcopal system but further unfolded it into the papal system. Rome was already for ages the world-city and also at once took a weighty place in the Christian church. Paul was indeed not the founder of the gathering there, but yet greatly yearned to see her, and sent to her his greatest and weightiest letter, Rom. 1:9ff., 15:22ff. Later he stayed there a while as did Peter, and both found there the martyr's death. For her bountifulness and helpfulness toward other weak gatherings she soon became renowned, Ign. Rom. Euseb. H. E. IV 23, 10. VII 5, 2. As shown by the first letter of Clement, she bore a motherly care for the gathering at Corinth. In all the great questions which in the second and third hundred-years were brought up by Gnosticism and Montanism, she was drawn in and laid the greatest weight in the scale. There around the middle of the second hundred-year the first bishop-list was made; there arose the thought of the succession of the bishops and of their apostolic worthiness. Roman and catholic from the outset stood in bond with each other and unfolded hand in hand, Harnack, D. G. I. The gathering of the world-city became the midpoint of the Christian church. The central meaning which Rome had in the heathen emperor-realm was passed over to the gathering and raised her to head of the whole Christendom. This headship of the gathering at Rome bore however in the first time yet no church-lawful, but only a moral-godly mark. Rome was first among equals; all other gatherings stood even with her; all bishops had with that of Rome even rank. Irenaeus indeed says in the renowned place, adv. haer. III 3, that every church and all believers must agree with the church of Rome on account of her mightier headship, because in her the apostolic handing-down is purely kept, but he brings up the church of Rome yet by way of ensample, writes to all churches founded by the apostles headship, and says only that Rome owns a mightier headship, because she is the greatest, the oldest, the best-known, the church founded by the apostles Paul and Peter. Also he speaks with no word of the headship of Peter nor yet of the bishop of Rome; all stress he lays on the church of Rome. Later he then withstood the out-banning which Victor I had spoken over the Little-Asian Quartodecimans, with the outcome that he had to call it back, Euseb. H. E. V 24. This withstanding may have held for a matter of upbringing, it yet proves the boldness and self-standing of Irenaeus and others over against the bishop of Rome. Even so Tertullian sets all churches founded by the apostles, Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi etc. on one line, though he also says that Carthage has her sway in Rome and that the apostles in Rome poured out all teaching with their blood, de praescr. 36, cf. 20. de virg. vel. 2; in his Montanist time he withstood the edict of Callistus over the taking-back of the fallen, named him mocking pontifex maximus, bishop of bishops, and saw therein a far-going over-reaching, de pudic. 1. 13. 21. Also Cyprian stands yet on the same standpoint; all bishops are even, share one and the same bishoply worthiness, are as it were one bishop, stand at the head of the church and must among themselves keep love of soul, honor of fellowship, bond of faith and oneness of priesthood, Ep. 43, 5. 49, 2. 55, 24. 73, 26. de unit. eccl. 5. Therefore he came in the strife over the heretic baptism against the bishop of Rome, Stephen, yet in uprising, Ep. 71-74; keeping the oneness, each bishop is yet in some wise self-standing and answerable only to God, Ep. 72, 3.
But the above-named new understanding of the bishopdom must from the kind of the thing come to good for Rome. The weight-point was shifted from the gathering into the bishop. This was beheld as follower of the apostles, as bearer of the hoard of truth and of the apostolic might. If this was so, which bishop could then make more claims and put forth more rights than the bishop of Rome? No church stood in might and esteem even with that of Rome; she left them all behind and strove past them all, the churches of Palestine and Little-Asia, soon also those of Antioch and Alexandria. And the bishops of Rome knew to make use of their standing and went what first was moral sway little by little to claim as a right. Yet it came not so swiftly to acknowledging of this right. Tertullian yet denied that Mt. 16:18 gave to the bishop of Rome any might over other churches, because it held only a promise to Peter, de pudic. 21. Cyprian indeed laid strong stress on the oneness of the church and made her also rest on the sameness of the bishoply might, but saw of that might in the chair of Peter at Rome yet not more than a token oneness, de unit. 4. The Synod at Nicaea set in canon 6 the bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch yet even, knew to the both latter in their shires the same ἐξουσια as the bishop of Rome already owned in Italy, ἐπειδη και τῳ ἐν τῃ Ῥωμῃ ἐπισκοπῳ τουτο συνηθες ἐστιν and held for these and also yet for other churches the headship belonging to her, τα πρεσβεια or τα πρωτεια fast. After the unfolding of the bishoply might in the third hundred-year followed that of the archbishoply or metropolitan worthiness in the fourth hundred-year; not Rome alone, but many churches beside her had a certain fore-rank or headship in her shires; the bishops were in the course of the fourth hundred-year underlaid to the archbishops. The East stayed ever withstanding against the all-overruling headship of the bishop of Rome. Beside Alexandria and Antioch rose since the middle of the fourth hundred-year Constantinople ever higher in churchly might. The council of Constantinople in 381 can. 2 says that the bishop of Alexandria owns only in Egypt churchly might, that Antioch keeps the rights which according to Nicaea belong to her and that the bishops of the East shall steer only the East. And after it thus has bounded the might of the bishop of Alexandria to Egypt, it adds in can. 3, τον Κονσταντινου πολεως ἐχειν τα πρεσβεια της τιμης μετα τον της Ῥωμης ἐπισκοπον, δια το εἰναι αὐτην νεαν Ῥωμην. After the bishop of Rome shall not that of Alexandria, though he also has the oldest rights and the oldest letters, but that of Constantinople have the fore-rank of honor, not on ground of any churchly or ghostly fore-right, but only for the worldly weighing, that Constantinople is the new Rome. The West was left over to the bishop of Rome, but the East withheld to bow for him and came more and more under the law-realm of Constantinople. The council of Chalcedon 451 can. 28 acknowledged the fore-rank, τα πρεσβεια, of the older Rome, because it was the emperor-city, δια το βασιλευειν την πολιν ἐκεινην, but wrote even fore-rank, τα ἰσα πρεσβεια, to the holy seat of the new Rome. In spite of the protests of Rome, Constantinople upheld her rights. The papal might of the bishop of Rome rested for a great deal on the worldly esteem of the city; this same claims could therefore Constantinople as second Rome make good. The bishop of Rome is therefore never been shepherd of the whole Christendom; he became the head only of the Western, Latin Christendom. And this became he by right first in the fourth hundred-year. Already the later by the church not acknowledged synod of Sardica 343 bore to the bishop of Rome the settling, whether, in case a bishop was set off by a synod, a new synod should or not be called together. In the year 380 emperor Theodosius put forth the renowned edict, whereby he bade, cunctos populos, quos clementiae nostrae regit temperamentum, in tali volumus religione versari, quam divinum Petrum apostolum tradidisse Romanis religio usque nunc ab ipso insinuata declarat. Among the church fathers of the fourth and fifth hundred-year there is no doubt more, that they deem the fellowship with and the underlaying to Rome needful for the being of the church. From the church at Rome go out all rights of churchly fellowship, inde enim in omnes venerandae communionis jura dimanant, Ambros. Ep. cl. 2 ep 2. Ecclesiae salus in summi sacerdotis dignitate pendet, Hier. c. Lucif. 9. With him rests the unfalsed handing-down of the fathers, he is lux mundi, sal terrae, aurea vasa et argentea, Hier. Ep. 15 ad Dam. Roman is the yardstick of the catholic; if Rufinus holds to the faith of Rome, he is catholic; si Romanam responderit, ergo catholici sumus, Hier. c. Ruf. 1, 4. As Innocent I has strengthened the settlings of the synod of Carthage and Mileve against the Pelagianism and doomed Pelagius and Caelestius, says Augustine: causa finita est, utinam aliquando finiatur et error! Ep. 132 de script. Clear and well-thought unfolds then Leo I 440-461 this headship of the Roman seat in sundry letters and raises it to the rank and worth of a godly dogma, which in Mt. 16:18 owned its writly ground, cf. Heinrich, Dogm. Theol. II.
When the development had advanced this far, the question naturally arose as to what the pope owed his eminent place and such high authority. In the old Catholic time, even after the bringing in of the monarchic episcopate, the stress always fell on the local church; the church at Rome was founded by Peter and Paul, and therefore had the purest tradition; all churches had to agree in faith with her to be Christian and Catholic, Irenaeus adv. haer. III 3. The bishop was therefore dependent on his congregation; he was chosen by it and consulted with it in all weighty matters, especially in excommunication. Cyprian says expressly in his letters to the Carthaginian presbytery that he wishes to do nothing without your counsel and without the consent of the people, Ep. 14, 4. 17, 1. 3. 19, 2 etc. In difficult cases, the counsel and help of delegates from neighboring congregations were called upon, Acts 15:2, Apostolic Constitutions c. 1, Clement, 1 Cor. 63. Cyprian Ep. 17, 3; the oldest church gatherings were congregational meetings, at most attended by delegates from neighboring congregations. But when the bishop was regarded as successor of the apostles and thereby distinguished from all others, then he could no longer be chosen by the congregation nor be dependent on it; he had to receive his office from above in the way of succession, and thus be appointed and ordained by a synod of bishops or by a chapter; he no longer had to consult with the congregation but was sovereign and determined everything alone, at most after counsel with the chapter gradually developing from the presbytery. And what thus happened since the fourth century in the local or diocesan churches repeated itself on a larger scale in the general church. From the episcopate arose in the course of time the papal system, and the old congregational gatherings expanded into synods and councils, which at first also included presbyters, deacons, lectors but then subsequently only bishops as representatives of the congregations. These synods did not regard themselves as infallible; in the fourth century, one synod after another undoes what the previous one had established; and from that time until the ninth century, they also bore a political character, were imperial synods and were called together by the emperor, officially or unofficially led and confirmed. But the pope rose in power; as bishop of Rome and archbishop of Italy, he already had power to call together and lead provincial and national synods, just as other bishops possessed that right elsewhere; since the twelfth century, he knew how to expand these provincial and national synods, just as the bishop of Constantinople had already done with his resident synods for the Greek church, into ecumenical synods of the whole Western church. The ecumenical councils of Western Christendom thus developed from the Roman synods, and were therefore called together, led, and confirmed by the pope. Indeed, the reformatory councils in the fifteenth century, under the influence of the humanistic theory of popular superiority, tried to make themselves independent of the pope as gatherings of delegates of the whole church and to place themselves as infallible above him. But the pope knew how to maintain himself also over against and above the ecumenical synods and therefore had to partake of a prerogative that was granted to no other bishop. After from the days of Irenaeus onward agreement in faith with the church at Rome was already long deemed necessary for the essence of the Christian churches, because there with the rightful succession rested the certain gift of truth, it was gradually more and more clearly expressed that this indefectibility of the church of Rome had its ground in a special gift which was granted by the Holy Spirit to the bishop of Rome as successor of Peter. At first, the stress was still laid on the church at Rome; this could not fall away because it was founded by the apostles Peter and Paul and continually led by their lawful successors. Thus Irenaeus says of the presbyters that they with the succession of the episcopate have received the certain gift of truth according to the good pleasure of the Father, adv. haer. IV 26. But this gave no sufficient warrant, especially when many churches despite their apostolic founding with their rightfully succeeding bishops fell away and wholly disappeared. Therefore, more and more the ground for the indefectibility of the church at Rome was sought in the fact that at its head stood a bishop who as successor of Peter, who even among the apostles held a wholly special place, partook of a special gift and leading of the Holy Spirit. Augustine derived the unshakability of Peter's faith from the intercession of Christ, Luke 22:32, de corr. et gr. 8. Ephrem the Syrian said in his praise of Peter, Paul, and Andrew: the lamp is Christ, the candlestick is Peter, but the oil is the ministration of the Holy Spirit. Leo the Great spoke in his letter to the bishops of the church province of Vienne of a wonderful gift of grace, by which the building of the eternal temple is confirmed on the firmness of Peter, and declared elsewhere that the chair of Peter is fortified with such divine solidity that neither heretical depravity could ever break through it, nor could pagan perfidy overcome it. Pope Hormisdas testified in his libellus of the year 516 that the truth of Christ's promise to Peter is confirmed by the facts, because in the apostolic see the Catholic religion has always been kept immaculate. Likewise, Pope Agatho declared in a writing to the emperors of the year 680 that the church at Rome through the grace of God and the protection of Christ has never deviated from the way of truth and also by virtue of the Lord's promise will never deviate from it. It was thus no novelty when Gregory VII declared in his Dictatus Papae: the Roman church has never erred, nor will it err to all eternity, Scripture bearing witness, and Boniface VIII in the bull Unam Sanctam 1302 decreed: we declare, define, and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff, cf. Heinrich, Dogm. Theol. II 357 f. With this practice and theory of the popes the theologians agreed. Some, such as Bede, Alcuin, Paschasius Radbertus, Damiani, Anselm, Lombard, Sent. IV dist. 24 etc., speak only in passing and with a few words about the authority of the pope; this is even still the case with Thomas, C. Gent. IV 76. S. Theol. II 2 qu. 1 art. 10. qu. 11 art. 2. Sent. IV dist. 7 qu. 3 art. 1. dist. 20 qu. 1 art. 4 etc. (cf. Leitner, Der h. Thomas v. Aq. über das unfehlbare Lehramt des Papstes 1872) and Bonaventure, Breviloquium adjectis illustrationibus ex aliis operibus ejusdem S. Doct. depromptis opera et studio Ant. Mar. de Vicetia, Frib. 1881 VI c. 12. But the various attempts from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century to reform the church brought Rome to self-consciousness. The proper papalism or curialism arose, clearly expressed the plenitude of power and the infallibility of the pope and developed it often to its utmost consequences. Canus, Loci theol. lib. 6. Bellarmine, de summo pontifice, in Tom. I of his Controv. p. 188-255. Becanus, Manuale Controv. I c. 4. Theol. Wirceb. ed. 3 Paris. 1880 I 267 sq. Joseph de Maistre, Du pape 1819. Perrone, Prael. Theol. 1843 VIII 295-536. Heinrich, Dogm. Theol. II 163-476. Scheeben, I 220 f. IV 397-458. Simar, Dogm. 598 f. Jansen, Prael. Theol. I 512-658. Ermann, De Paus, Utrecht 1899 etc. On July 18, 1870, at the Vatican Council the dogmatic constitution on the church of Christ was adopted, and thereby determined:
1º that the primacy of jurisdiction over the whole church of God was immediately and directly promised and conferred upon Peter by Christ;
2º that this primacy of Peter endures in the bishop of Rome as his successor;
3º that this primacy of the pope consists in the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in those that pertain to the discipline and government of the church spread throughout the whole world, so that he is the supreme judge of the faithful, has the highest decision in all matters that concern the churches, is exalted above all judgment and subject to no council;
4º that in this primacy is also included the supreme power of teaching, so that the pope indeed receives no new revelations and only under the leading of the Holy Spirit purely preserves and explains the handed-down revelation, but yet does this in such a way that when he speaks ex cathedra and as shepherd and teacher of all Christians defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals, by divine assistance he partakes of infallibility, of himself and not first as a result of the consent of the church. Cf. Acta et decreta sacr. conc. rec. Collectio Lacensis VII Freiburg 1890 p. 262-498.
5. Though this hierarchical church government in its beginning is much older than former Protestants were wont to acknowledge, and even goes back to the start of the second hundred years; though it by the logical path of its unfolding and by the grandness of its showing never fails to make an mark; yet it is nonetheless in ground and being at straight odds with the government which Christ has given to his church. First , then, the sundering of clergy and laymen, which lies at the ground of this hierarchy, is nowhere taught in the New Testament and is most strongly gainsaid by the setup of the church of the first hundred years. Rome does call upon, besides the fittingness, the Old Testament priesthood, the offices which Christ has set up in his church, and the might which he has entrusted to it. But this proves not what must be proven. The Scripture makes very sure sundering between shepherds and flock, builders and temple, planters and field-work, teachers and learners, leaders and followers, and so on; if with the names clergy and laymen no other than this sundering were meant, they could be used without harm. But use has bound a wholly other meaning to them. Clergy is in the Roman church become the name of a special class of churchly folk, who by tonsure and hallowing are set apart from all others, form their own rank of "ghostly" ones, are in a wholly special way the ownhood of God, are fitted with an utter kingly might over the folk, and serve for the laymen as needful and unmissable middlemen of wholeness, Cat. Rom. II 7, 13. Such a rank now the Scripture knows not. Even on the Old Testament the withstanding of clergy and laymen is not fitting; the whole folk was clergy, ownhood and heritage of the Lord, a priestly kingdom, a holy folk, Ex. 19:5, 6, Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 26:18, 32:9, 1 Kings 8:51, 53, Ps. 135:4, Isa. 19:25, 41:8, Jer. 12:7, 8, Joel 2:17, and so on; the priesthood, which was not named but by birth from Aaron called to this service, was yet most strictly bound to the law of God, Lev. 10:11, and under the doom of the prophets, Isa. 28:7, Jer. 1:18, 2:26, 6:13, Ezek. 22:26, Hos. 4:9, and so on. Israel was a god-rule but no rank-rule. Much less is there in the New Testament speech of a clergy: the Holy Ghost is poured out on all, Acts 2:17, and now all are πνευματικοι, Rom. 8:14, 1 Cor. 2:15, 3:1, Gal. 5:25, 6:1, sharing the anointing, 1 John 2:27, a kingly priesthood, 1 Pet. 2:5, 9, a gathering of holy ones and called, Rom. 1:7, a folk and ownhood of God, 2 Cor. 6:16, 1 Pet. 2:10, Heb. 12:22-24. Nowhere does the New Testament make word of a special priest-office, to be taken by the servers of the church, or of a special offering, by them to offer; the office in the church of Christ is no mastership but a servership, no ἱεραρχια but a ἱεροδουλεια, a διακονια, οἰκονομια, which utterly shuts out all lordship over the heritage of the Lord (των κληρων, 1 Pet. 5:3, that is, the gatherings entrusted to the elders for care), Matt. 20:25, 26, 1 Cor. 3:5, 4:1, 2 Cor. 4:1, 2, Eph. 4:12. Cf. Luther's teaching on the overall priesthood of believers by Köstlin, Luthers Theol. Gerhard, Loci Theol. Loc. 23 § 37. Calvin, Inst. IV 4, 9. 12, 1. Comm. on 1 Pet. 5:3. Junius, Op. II. Amesius, Bellarminus enervatus III c. 1. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III. Cappellus, Synt. thesium theol. in Acad. Salmur. III. M. Vitringa IX 1. Art. Geistliche by Caspari in Herzog³.
Secondly , nevertheless, Holy Scripture teaches very clearly that Christ in his church not only deals out gifts, but also has set up certain offices, extraordinary such as those of apostle, prophet, and evangelist, and ordinary such as those of elder and deacon. Over the bishopric there is the greatest difference. Greeks, Romans (also Gallicans and Old Catholics) and Anglicans hold this for an office that is essentially and by divine right set apart from the eldership, stemming from lawful and unbroken following from the apostleship, and particularly owning the power of teaching, oversight, and ordering; the bishops properly alone have the teaching office, the might to preach and to handle the sacraments, they make use therein of the priests (pastors) as their stand-ins, and have the sole right of sending and ordaining; patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops bear no other office but are set apart from the bishops only by a chance power, by oversight over a greater area, and so forth. Proofs from Holy Scripture for this setting apart are only to be drawn from the offices that were held by Timothy, Titus, and others, and from the angel in the seven churches of Asia Minor, Rev. 1:20. But Timothy and many others were in that first time called by the apostles to the extraordinary office of evangelist; and the angels of the churches were none other than the first among their equals, as the pastors now, so that the singular in Rev. 2:10, 23, 24 also shifts with the plural. Bellarmine, on the members of the warring church I c. 14, Petavius, on the church hierarchy I c. 2, and others speak then also not of Scriptural arguments, but call upon the handed-down lore by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, and so forth, who say that the apostles set up a bishop in sundry churches and give the bishop lists of some churches. But even if the one-ruler bishopric also arose very soon in the church, there is therein yet clearly a straying from the orderings of the apostles. For the New Testament yet knows nothing of an office setting apart between bishop and elder. Though the name elders in the first time likely had a broader meaning, and sometimes also marked the old and worthy members of the church, as office name it was yet the same as that of the bishops. For there were in the churches many bishops, Acts 20:17, 28, Phil. 1:1; and this bishoping was just laid upon elders, Acts 20:17, 28, 1 Tim. 3:1-7, 5:17, Tit. 1:5, 7, 1 Pet. 5:1-3; Peter calls himself therefore also an elder, 1 Pet. 5:1; of a special setting up of the bishopric beside the eldership the New Testament knows nothing; besides the extraordinary offices of apostle, prophet, and evangelist, there are but two ordinary offices, that of deacons and that of elders, Phil. 1:1, 1 Tim. 3:1, 8, shepherds and teachers, Eph. 4:11, 1 Tim. 5:17, steerings, 1 Cor. 12:28, forestanders, Rom. 12:8, 1 Thess. 5:12, leaders, Heb. 13:7, 17. These witnesses of Scripture are so strong, that not only Aerius in the 4th century, the Waldensians, Wycliffe, the Reformers, and so forth, called the elder and bishop office the same, but also many church fathers, such as Theodoret, Chrysostom, Epiphanius, and others felt driven to the owning that in the New Testament the names of elder and bishop were used through each other; and Jerome, Ep. 65 to Evagrius and Comm. on Tit. 1:5 says even that elders and bishops were at first alike, but that later one out of them was set over the others, as a heal for schism, by Petavius, Church Dissertations I c. 1-3, cf. also Lombard, Sentences IV dist. 24, 9. The Romans cannot come to terms with Scripture on this point. According to Acts 20:17, 28, Phil. 1:1 there were without doubt sundry bishops in one church; but the Romans cannot own this and say therefore that the apostles sometimes gave to the elders at the same time the bishoply hallowing (Petavius) or that thereunder at the same time the bishops of nearby churches are understood (Franzelin), or that the names of elders and bishops were not yet set apart, Scheeben, Dogm. IV 395. Ermann, the Pope, 2nd ed. 96. In the last case however the claimed difference between the elder and bishop office is not to be upheld. To this witness of Scripture comes then yet the lesson of history, that the Roman bishopric is the root of the ladder-rule, opens the way to the papacy, brings with it the unlikeness of the churches, and makes the believers slavishly hanging on the offices. Also all this is wholly at odds with Scripture. A ladder-rule there is not in the church of Christ, Luke 22:25, 26, 2 Cor. 1:24, 1 Pet. 5:3; a diocesan, cathedral, patriarchal or metropolitan church there is not, for all churches are in the New Testament alike and each has its own bishops; and nowhere are the believers bidden to look into the lawful following of their servants but to search the Scripture, to stay in the teaching, and so forth, John 5:39, Acts 17:11, 1 Tim. 4:13-16, 2 Tim. 1:13, 14, 3:14-17; lawful following warrants not the cleanness of the teaching, John 8:39, Rom. 2:28, 9:6, and would make blessedness hanging on sundry persons and on an unworkable, fallible, and often even un doable historical searching. For these reasons the bishopric was by the Reformers one-mindedly cast off. Well were the Lutherans willing to own the right that it had gotten according to churchly ordering, if but the weighty in the bishoply office stayed the ministry of word and sacraments resting on godly right, Symbolical Books ed. Müller. Also the name of bishop was sometimes kept and handed over to the land-lord, or also in some both Reformed and Lutheran churches one out of a ring of servants was under the name of bishop or overseer burdened with the looking over a group of churches. Calvin and many others, Knox, a Lasco, Saravia, Tilenus, Scultetus, Bochart, Spanheim, and so forth had thereagainst no outweighing bar, M. Vitringa IX. But this was yet something weightily other than the bishoply office in the Roman church, that according to the council at Trent differs essentially from the eldership, rests on godly right, and in the 17th century was also brought in and warded in the Anglican church.
Cf. Calvin, Inst. IV 3, 8. 4, 2 sq. 5, 1 sq. Beza, Response to the treatise on the degrees of gospel ministers edited by Hadrian Saravia, 1592. Thomas Cartwright, † 1603, A directory for church government 1644. William Bradshaw, † 1618, English Puritanism, containing the main opinions of the rigidest sort of those called Puritans in the realm of England 1604. David Calderwood, Damascus Altar or the churchly ordering thrust upon the Scottish church 1621. Robert Parker, On the churchly ordering of Christ 1616. Smectymnuus, an answer to Hall’s Episcopacy by Stephen Marshal, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow 1641. Blondel, Apology for the judgment of Jerome on bishops and elders, 1646. Voetius, Church Ordering III 832-869. Maresius, Examination of the question on the origin of bishops 1657. Cappellus, Synthesis of theological theses in the academy of Saumur III 296. Buddeus, on the origin and power of bishops, Sacred Miscellanies I 131. M. Vitringa IX 1 141-229.
Thirdly , according to Holy Writ, it is fixed that the apostolate was an extraordinary, timely, and unrenewable office in the church of the New Testament. Even if the bishopric were another office than the eldership, it would by no means follow that it is the same as the apostolate and its ongoing. Of course, it can well be said in a good sense that the bishops or elders are followers of the apostles, for these set them in all the churches which they founded, and laid upon them the care of those churches. But that takes not away the great and weighty difference between both. Even from the Roman side this difference cannot be wiped out. For the apostles shared in a wholly special leading of the Holy Ghost, and bore an office that stretched to the whole church, yea to the whole world, Matt. 28:20. But their followers, even if they were bishops in the Roman sense, have no such office at all; they are also according to Rome not unerring and they have the care only over a small part of the church, over a bishop's see. Yet the difference is still stronger; the apostles were ear- and eye-witnesses of Jesus' words and deeds, they were straightway called by Christ himself to their office, received the Holy Ghost in special measure, had a wholly one-of-a-kind task, namely, to lay the groundwork of the church and in their word to give the lasting means of fellowship between Christ and his church. In all this they are set apart from all others, stand high above all their aftercomers, and hold an office that is unhandoverable and unrenewable. The out-of-the-way gifts, wherein they might share, are bestowed on no other servants in the church. As apostles in the proper sense they have no followers, though it be also that the leading of the church, whereto they were called, is also entrusted to others after them in another wise and in narrower round.
Fourthly , there is in Scripture no proof to be found that the primacy of Peter was again essentially set apart from the apostleship which he held in common with the others. Even Roman theologians acknowledge that all that Scripture tells of the foremost rank of Peter above the other apostles is not yet enough to prove his primacy of oversight over the other apostles. The seats of teaching for this belief are only Matthew 16:18, Luke 22:32, and John 21:15-17. But these also do not hold what Rome draws from them. Matthew 16:18 teaches that Peter, through his confession, is the rock on which Christ builds his church. This is a natural likeness and gives, without the likeness, no less but also no other meaning than that Christ would make use of the person of Peter as the faithful confessor to gather his church. In the church as the building of God, the believers are the living stones which are built up on the apostles as the foundation stones. That place Peter takes in the building of God, and he not alone, but all the apostles with him. For Peter laid the confession of Jesus’ Messiahship in the name of all, Matthew 16:15, 16; though he spoke it first and clearest, he yet gave utterance to what lived unknowingly in all hearts; and not Peter alone but all apostles laid, through this confession which they soon proclaimed in the midst of the world, the groundwork of the church of Christ; in likeness spoken, they were thus all with Peter the rock on which Christ built his church, or also, with another use of the same likeness, Christ is the rock which the apostles together through their preaching laid as groundwork of the church, Acts 4:11, Romans 9:33, 1 Corinthians 3:10, 11, Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:5, 6, Revelation 21:14. The key-power which Peter receives for his bold confession already in Matthew 16:19 is granted in 18:18, John 20:23 to all apostles. The special fitting and leading of the Holy Ghost was not Peter’s share alone but alike that of all apostles, Matthew 10:20, John 14:26, 15:26, 16:13, 20:22, Acts 1:8, Ephesians 3:5. Through the upholding of the apostleship as an outstanding and unhandoverable office, the Reformation does much more right to all these texts, even to Matthew 16:18, than Rome. The apostles are and remain the groundwork-layers of the church; they are through their confession the rock of the church; no fellowship with Christ but through fellowship with their witness! As for the other place, Luke 22:32, Jesus says there to his followers that Satan will try to bring them all, you in the many, to denial of their Master, but that He will pray specially for Peter, for you in the one, that his faith not cease. Peter would need this before all, because he would deny his Master first and strongest. That his faith then does not cease, he will owe only to a wholly special foreprayer of Jesus. And when he then shall be kept by that prayer of Jesus and rise again from his fall, then he, taught by the trial and strengthened in his faith, will be able just to strengthen his brothers, when these later maybe waver in their faith. As it is said of Paul with the same word, strengthen , that he strengthened the followers, Acts 18:23, cf. Romans 1:11, 16:25, 1 Thessalonians 3:2, 13, 2 Thessalonians 3:3, 1 Peter 5:10, so here it is promised to Peter that he later shall serve his brothers for cheer, steadfastness, strengthening. From this wonderful, ghostly support the law-bound Rome makes a primacy of oversight! In John 21:15-17 at last Peter is set back in the rank which he earlier held with and among the apostles. He receives no new office going beyond that which he earlier had. For the calling by the name of Simon, Jonah’s son, the threefold asking and the settings wherein this happening took place prove beyond gainsay that Peter is only set back in the rank which he had forfeited through his denial of Jesus, thus in the apostleship and in the primacy of honor which had been given him earlier. And so also is laid on him, as Jesus trusts to him again the care and leading of his flock in the whole and of the sheep in the special, no other working than that which lay shut up in the apostleship as such and thus belonged also to all other apostles, Matthew 28:19, Mark 16:15, 2 Corinthians 11:28. The foremost rank which Peter enjoyed among the apostles took wholly not away that he is thrust back by Jesus, whom he wanted to hold off from his coming suffering, as a satan and stumbling-block, Matthew 16:23, is humbled for his self-lifting above the other apostles, John 21:15, is chided by Paul for his unuprightness in Antioch, Galatians 2:11, is sent with John by the other apostles to Samaria, Acts 8:14, had over Paul no oversight at all, Galatians 2:6, 9, is never in Scripture named apart as head and prince of the apostles, 1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 2:20, 4:11, Revelation 21:14, and himself writes the keeping of the believers only to the might of God, calls himself a fellow-elder and warns against lording it over the churches, 1 Peter 1:5, 5:1, 3.
Fifthly. But even if Scripture ascribed to Peter a primacy in the Roman sense, which however is by no means the case, then nothing would yet be gained thereby for the primacy of the bishop of Rome. For to this end much more must still be proven, namely, 1° that Peter was in Rome, 2° that he held there the office of bishop and primate, and 3° that he with awareness and intent handed over these two offices to one certain successor. Now it is, in recent times by Baur and Lipsius, wrongly contested that Peter was in Rome. If 1 Pet. 5:13 does not decide it, where according to many by Babylon Rome must be thought of, then the witness of tradition, from the first time onward, by Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Marcion, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, the Muratorian Canon, Gaius, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Lactantius, etc., is so firm and unanimous that its truth cannot reasonably be doubted. It may also be deemed certain that Peter died as a martyr in the year 64 under Nero, whether in the same year with or a couple of years before Paul. Rev. 18:20, cf. 17:6, 19:2 points to it that Rome shed the blood of apostles, and the named old Christian writers all say unanimously that Peter and Paul underwent martyrdom in Rome, sometimes with the further time specification, under Nero. But utterly unprovable is that Peter sojourned 20 to 25 years in Rome, that he was bishop of the church there and primate of the whole church, and that Linus followed him in the episcopate and primacy. For, 1° Acts 12:17 reports that Peter left Jerusalem, not long before the death of Herod, vs. 23, who died in the year 44. That he then went to Rome is nothing but a guess and lacks all ground. But even if this were so, then thereby nothing else than a short visit to Rome could be thought of, just as he then according to Harnack perhaps also was in Corinth, 1 Cor. 1-3, 9:5; in any case Peter was back in Jerusalem at the council in Acts 15, that is in the year 47. 2° In the letter which Paul wrote from Corinth about the year 54-58 to the church in Rome, no single word is made of Peter's stay and work in Rome; neither does this happen in the letters to Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians, which Paul probably, nor in that to the Philippians, which he certainly wrote from Rome in the years 57-58 or 61-63; and Peter also in his first letter, which he wrote from Babylon, 1 Pet. 5:13, that is perhaps Rome, makes no mention of Paul, so that Zahn surmises that Peter was precisely in Rome between the first and second imprisonment of Paul, when this one was on journey to Spain, and there in the year 64 under Nero and a couple of years before Paul underwent martyrdom. Not longer than half a year or a year did Peter thus sojourn in Rome. 3° In agreement with these facts the oldest tradition names Peter and Paul always alongside each other and says that not Peter alone, but Peter and Paul founded and established the church in Rome, Clement 1 Cor. 5. Gaius and Dionysius of Corinth in Eusebius Hist. eccl. II 25, 7. 8. Ignatius, ad Rom. 4. Irenaeus adv. haer. III 1, 1. 3, 1-3. Tertullian de praescr. 36. Of a years-long stay and of an episcopate of Peter in Rome these old histories know nothing. On the contrary, according to the letter of Clement from the years 93-95, the Shepherd of Hermas written in Rome about 100 or 135-145, and the letter of Ignatius to the Romans there existed at that time, that is in any case about the end of the first century, in Rome the monarchical episcopate not yet, but the church was led by a college of presbyters or bishops. From the bishop lists in Hegesippus, Irenaeus, the Muratorian fragment, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Epiphanius it appears that one at the end of the second and even in the beginning of the third century did not yet regard Peter as bishop of Rome. The usual representation was then still this, that Peter and Paul had founded the church and entrusted to Linus the service of the episcopate, Irenaeus adv. haer. III 3. And from Linus as first bishop the following are then designated as second, third, etc., so that the apostles Peter and Paul as evangelizing and founding the church, ibid. III 1, 1 went before them all, and the bishops came after them and followed one another from the apostles, that is from the time of the apostles onward, Irenaeus I 27, 1. Eusebius Hist. Eccl. V praef., 28, 3. Epiphanius haer. 42, 1. 4° First in the time of Victor or Zephyrinus, 180-217 is this old tradition so altered that Paul more and more lost his share in the founding and establishing of the church in Rome and Peter exclusively was presented as the institutor of the episcopate and thereafter also as the first bishop of Rome. According to Tertullian, de pudic. 21 Calixtus already called himself bishop on the chair of Peter. Stephen claimed, through succession to have the chair of Peter, Cyprian Ep. 71, 3. 75, 17. And Cyprian designated the chair of the bishop in Rome throughout as the cathedra Petri, Ep. 55, 8. 59, 14. About the same time also first arose the legend that Peter had labored 20 or 25 years long in Rome and had been bishop there so long. Eusebius in his church history speaks not yet of Peter as bishop and names Peter and Paul still alongside each other, III 2, but names III 4, 9 Peter alone and says II 14, 6, that Peter already under emperor Claudius came to Rome, to combat Simon Magus. Here at the same time the origin of the legend is discovered. Already before the middle of the second century it was held in Rome as a fact that Simon Magus under Claudius had come to Rome. The Acts of Peter arisen about 160 taught in connection with Acts 8, that Peter and Simon Magus had striven much with each other. These traditions were combined and so gave birth to the legend that Peter under Claudius came to Rome and there until his death in 64, thus a score of years had lived. And Eusebius and Jerome made it a component of the Roman tradition. Cf. Herzog² 11, 375 f. Hase, Protest. Polemik⁵ p. 150 f. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Conf. 90 f. Harnack, Die Chronologie der altchristl. Litteratur bis Eusebius I 1897 passim, especially p. 171 f. 240 f. 703 f. Th. Zahn, Einl. in das N. T. I 1897 II 1899 passim, especially II 17-27. Erbes, Die Todestage der Apostel Paulus und Petrus und ihre röm. Denkmäler, Leipzig Hinrichs 1899, who thinks that Paul was put to death on 22 Feb. 63, that Peter, having heard thereof, came to Rome and in the following year died there as martyr.
Sixthly , the Roman Catholics, although finding support in the tradition after Irenaeus, are in no small embarrassment over against the oldest testimonies, coming from the first and second centuries. But even if these testimonies were more favorable and more in their favor, they must yet all acknowledge that the primacy of the bishop of Rome is built on a historical supposition, namely, on this, that Peter was in Rome, that he there held the office of bishop and primate and handed this over to his successor. Now this tradition, suppose even that it confirmed all this, is yet only a historical testimony, which also according to Rome can make claim not to infallible certainty but only to high likelihood. The primacy of the bishop of Rome, the churchly dignity of the pope, and thus the truth of the Roman church and the salvation of the Roman church members is built on a historical likelihood, which every moment can be undone by new testimonies. Eternity hangs here on a spider's web. But besides this, another difficulty presents itself for Rome. The tradition in Julius Africanus, Origen, Eusebius, etc., relates that Peter before his journey to Rome in the second year of Emperor Claudius was in Antioch and there instituted the episcopate. Let this tradition now in itself be unreliable, for the Roman Catholics it is yet hard to deny its truth, because they then take on the appearance of measuring with two measures. But also apart from this tradition, it is most likely that just as the other apostles, so also Peter in various congregations instituted the episcopate. Why then is specifically the bishop of Rome the successor of Peter and the heir of the primacy? Peter was according to Rome yet also primate when he stayed in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and elsewhere. With him there thus in any case existed no unbreakable bond between his primacy and the episcopate of the congregation in Rome. He could thus just as well have handed over that primacy to another bishop than that of Rome. Did he, if he, what is very likely, also elsewhere appointed bishops in congregations, hand over the episcopate but expressly reserve the primacy, until he could transfer this to the bishop of Rome? And why did he then do so? On what authority did he act thus? What proof is there that Linus is the successor of Peter, not only in the apostolate but also in the primacy? A historical, churchly right, which has always been so understood, is not sufficient for this, for it concerns precisely the foundation on which the whole Roman church rests. There must exist a divine right for it. But this there is not; Christ has with no word spoken of Peter's episcopate in Rome nor of his successor there; Peter himself has neither according to Scripture nor according to tradition even in the remotest way indicated that the bishop in Rome was his only, true successor. The connection of the primacy with the Roman episcopate thus rests only on the fact that Peter was in Rome and on the unhistorical supposition that he there held the office of bishop and primate. Even if this last were historically correct, then it still would not give what it must give. For then there would still lack the strictly necessary proof that Peter knowingly, with purpose, by virtue of apostolic authority and divine command, willed to hand over this episcopate and this primacy to his successor in Rome and actually did hand it over. That is, the primacy of the Roman bishop over the whole church hangs in the air; it can point to no divine right on which it rests; and it has even no reliable, historical foundation. The Roman theologians must then also against their will acknowledge that the primacy of the Roman bishop, besides an immediate divine foundation, namely the institution of the primacy as a lasting institution (which however is also unprovable), also possesses a humanly mediated foundation of historical nature, Scheeben-Atzberger, Kath. Dogm. Therefore finally the Roman theologians among themselves are also not unanimous about the nature of the connection of primacy and Roman episcopate. Some, such as Dominicus Soto, Banner, Mendoza, and others, are of the opinion that that connection is only from churchly law and that the primacy of the Roman bishop's seat can be handed over to another. Ballerini, Veith, and others leave the question undecided and consider it most hard to answer. But Cajetan, Canus, Suarez, etc., are of the judgment that Peter, after he had instituted the episcopate in Antioch, received a special divine revelation and by virtue of this inseparably bound the primacy with the episcopate in Rome, Schwane, D. G.; and further Bellarmine, de Rom. pontif.; Theol. Wirceb.; Perrone, Prael. theol.; Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm.; Jansen, Prael.; Hettinger, Apol. des Christ.; W. Esser, Des h. Petrus Aufenthalt, Episkopat und Tod zu Rom.; Joseph Hollweck, Der apost. Stuhl und Rom. Although this dispute has not yet formally been brought to decision, popes, councils, theologians mostly speak in favor of the last opinion; unwittingly they always proceed from the indissoluble connection of both. By the Syllabus of Pius IX prop. 35 it is determined that the electors may not hand over the primacy from the city of Rome and her bishop to another city and bishop. Only the question remains whether the pope himself might do this; and this naturally only the infallible one himself can decide. The Roman Christian is thus bound to believe that communion with the local church in Rome is necessary to salvation. The so-called Catholic church is in truth Roman church; that is her name and her essence.
6. The Roman hierarchy, as it developed further, provoked ever more serious resistance and opposition. In the Middle Ages, various sects arose that rejected Rome as Babylon and the pope as the antichrist. And in the age of the Reformation, this opposition spread over the whole of Western Christendom. From an understandable reaction, many came to reject all church institutions, or to see in them only a free, arbitrary creation of the congregation, or even to silently grant all government of the church to the Christian magistrate. Even among the Lutherans, the independent government of the church did not come into its own. Indeed, Luther originally proceeded from the general priesthood of believers and from the church as the community of saints. But his standpoint was also here too anthropological, so that he could not derive from the confession of the kingship of Christ an own government for his church. He considered the form of church government to a certain degree an outward, indifferent matter; if need be, a papal or episcopal government was fine with him, as long as it laid no hindrance in the way for the preaching of the gospel, Art. Smalc. II 4. The church becomes visible only in word and sacrament but by no means in any mode of organization or form of government; Christ rules in his church only through the preaching office. This conviction, joined with his view of the magistrate as the chief member of the church, brought Luther to call upon the magistrate for the work of reformation already in his writing To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in 1520. In 1526, he himself requested the Elector of Saxony to take up the work of visitation. On August 27, 1526, at Speyer, the reformation was placed under the protection of the princes and estates. And from 1527 onward, the government of the church rested in the hands of the territorial magistrate. The ecclesiastical order (the pastors) indeed retained the ministry of word and sacrament, the economic order (the congregation) received the right of consensus and approbation; but the political order (the magistrate) got the whole external government, that is, the right to appointment, maintenance, dismissal of pastors, to building of churches and schools, to regulation of worship services, to reformation of doctrine, etc., and exercised this power under Melanchthon's inspiration since 1529 through consistories. The grounds on which the Lutherans granted this extensive right over the church to the magistrate were various. But whether the magistrate was regarded as the substitute of the bishops, or it was assumed that it had silently received this power from the church, or it was honored as the chief member of the church, it always came down to this, that the church was almost deprived of all its own government. But all these systems of church government, which arose during and after the Reformation in many Protestant churches, do not correspond to what Scripture teaches concerning it.
1° For however closely the religious and civil life were connected under Israel, there was yet also distinction then; alongside the kings existed the priests, who held an independent position and were called to their own task. Much more independent has the congregation as the people of God become in the days of the New Testament. For not only was it then detached from the national relations of Israel, but on Pentecost it also received in the Holy Spirit an independent principle of life, which grants it over against state and society its own nature and an independent existence.
2° The essence of the church consists in this, that it is a gathering of Christ-believers. As such, it is not and cannot be a foundation of men. It arises not by the will of the flesh nor by the will of man, but by birth from God. It is no product of human association nor of the goodwill of the state, but is in its origin and essence a wonder, fruit of a special, gracious working of God and therefore also by its nature independent, free over against all favor or disfavor of men.
3° From this already flows forth that the congregation must have its own government. It has its own life, bears in that life a special law of life which God has laid in it, and demands for that naturally also a free, independent expression. It is not right to say that the mode of organization and the form of government for the church of Christ is an indifferent matter. So loosely and indifferently do essence and form, the invisible and the visible, the inward and outward never stand beside or over against each other. Indeed, the church comes forth first of all in the ministry of word and sacrament, in the purity of doctrine and of life, but the government of the church does not go around this all, but stands in very close connection with it. Precisely so that word and sacrament may be purely administered and doctrine and life arranged accordingly, a good government is needful. The confession is the main thing, but the church order is the means to maintain the confession. And just as an impure confession also falsifies the government, so from a bad government a corrupting influence goes out upon the confession.
4° Christ has therefore granted to his congregation its own government. He himself called, equipped, and ordained the apostles, who are the foundation of the church. And these apostles in turn under his guidance instituted the ordinary offices of overseers and deacons, so that the congregations of Christ in their absence and after their death would not be deprived of government. These ordinary offices also have their origin in God, Acts 20:28, 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 4:11, and did not end in the apostolic time but were instituted thereto that they should remain until the end of this dispensation, Acts 14:23, 1 Tim. 3, Titus 1:5. Scripture is no church order, but it yet contains principles of church government, which cannot be neglected without harm to the spiritual life.
5° Therefore it is also not good to say that the congregation of Christ itself can give itself a government according to the demand of circumstances or can silently or purposely entrust this to the Christian magistrate. For although in a certain sense it can be said that the congregation itself gives itself its government and establishes the institution of the church, since the apostles in instituting the ordinary offices consulted the congregations and had them point out the persons for those offices, yet that is only in a certain sense the case. It is always Christ who calls and equips to the offices; the congregations can and may point out the persons, but in that they are not independent and autonomous but bound to the ordinances of the Lord; they may not in the establishment of the institution proceed arbitrarily and according to their own insight, but have also therein to ask what the Lord wills that they should do. Therefore it also does not stand free to the congregations to abolish the offices or to entrust the government to the Christian magistrate. For although it is true that under a Christian magistrate and in a Christian society there will come ever more agreement and cooperation with the church in the standard, in the judgment, and in the maintenance of doctrine and life, yet even then the task of church and state remains essentially distinct. The same sin is punished differently in the church than in the state; the discipline which the one exercises differs heaven-wide from the punishment which the other imposes. The care of the poor, the oversight of the flock, the ministry of word and sacrament, the calling and election of servants remains the inalienable right and the solemn duty of the congregation.
This have the Reformed seen, thanks to their deep sense of the sovereignty of God. Whoever one-sidedly proceeds from the goodness or the love or the fatherhood of God, does not reach there. But whoever not one of God's virtues but all those virtues together places in the foreground and proceeds from God as God, he cannot but place every creature in dependence and lowliness under Him. God is sovereign, always and everywhere, in nature and grace, in creation and re-creation, in world and church. His laws and rights are the rule of our life, for man is His creature, subjected to Him and bound to utter obedience. In the church this led of itself to the glorious confession of the kingship of Christ. For even as God in civil life for sin's sake had set up the government, so has He anointed His Son to be king over Zion, the hill of His holiness, and has given Him to the church as a Head over all things, Ps. 2:6, Eph. 1:20, Phil. 2:9-11. Christ is not only prophet, who by His word and ensample teaches; not only priest, who by His offering atones, but He is also king, who keeps and shields His own, who thereto is clothed with might in heaven and earth, and in much truer wise is king than any worldly prince. He is that not only after His Godly but even so after His manly nature; the man Christ Jesus is lifted up at the Father's right hand. And He was this all not merely from everlasting and in the days of the Old Testament, and during His stay on earth, but He is this all yet today and to the end of the ages; He is yesterday and today the same and forever. Yea, He is it now in the state of uplifting in yet much richer wise, than He was it in the state of lowering and in the time that went before it. For indeed was He from everlasting anointed to king and wielded He this office with that of prophet and priest straightway after the fall and unto the death of the cross. But for His lowering has God Him utterly uplifted and given a name above every name. By the uprising is He ordained and set as Son of God in might, is He become Lord, has He received all might in heaven and on earth, and reigns now, until He shall fulfill the kingdom and have laid all foes under His feet. This kingship of Christ falls into twain. It is on one side a reign of power, Ps. 2:8, 9, 72:8, 110:1-3, Matt. 28:18, 1 Cor. 15:27, Eph. 1:21, Phil. 2:9-11, Heb. 1:6, 1 Pet. 3:22, Rev. 17:14. That Christ in truth may be king over His folk, who redeems it, shields and keeps it, must He have might in heaven and earth, over Satan and world. It is a kingship of might, underlaid to and means for His kingship of grace. There lies not in it, that the Father has given up the rule of the world, and that all sway in creation now comes down from Christ and is wielded in His name. But God has to the Mediator Christ on ground of His full obedience gifted the right and the might, to gather together His folk out of the world, to shield against all foes and those foes themselves fully to underlay to Himself. God rules the world so, that Christ may claim the heathen to His heritage and the ends of the earth to His holding. In the uplifting has the Father His Son acknowledged and set as an heir of all things, Heb. 1:2. But on the other side is the kingship of Christ a reign of grace, Ps. 2:6, Isa. 9:5, 6, Jer. 30:9, Ezek. 37:24, Luke 1:33, John 18:33, Eph. 1:22, 4:15, 5:23, Col. 1:18, 2:19. And because this kingship bears a wholly other mark than that of the princes of the earth, is Christ in the New Testament much more called head than king of the church. It is indeed a kingdom of grace, wherein Christ rules by His Word and Spirit. His Word comes out of the past to us, binds us to the historical person and the work of Christ fulfilled in time, and asks of us faith in the sense of assent, knowledge. But He who came down is the same also who went up far above all heavens, who sits at God's right hand and with His Godhead, majesty, grace and Spirit dwells in us and nevermore leaves us. It is the living, the at God's right hand uplifted Christ, who with awareness and free might gathers His church, overcomes His foes and leads the world-history onward to the day of His coming. He is yet always in heaven as mediator at work, and by His Spirit on earth in church and office, in word and sacrament present. Also the applying of salvation is His work. He is the doer, and offices and servings are nothing but means in His almighty hand. Unfitting is it therefore to think, that He would have handed over the rule of His church to any man, to a bishop or pope, to an institute or sacrament. He is and stays the Lord from heaven, who just thereto is uplifted to head of the church, that He Himself may rule and fulfill all things. This kingship of Christ was the material principle of the Reformed church rule. It was already spoken out by Zwingli, and unfolded and upheld by Calvin; it found a place in nearly all confession writings and was from the 16th century onward to the present day the driving might to fight all manly lordship in the church of Christ and to win back and keep her freedom and self-standing. Cf. Helv. I 18. Helv. II 17. Gall. 30. Belg. 31. Scot. 16. Westm. 25. 30. Calvin, Inst. II 15, 3-5. Martyr, Loci 403. Bucanus, Inst. theol. 464. Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 41. M. Vitringa IX 125 etc. cf. Rieker, Grundsätze ref. Kirchenverf. Leipzig 1899 S. 105 f.
7. The kingship of Christ over his church consists in that He gathers and rules his own through Word and Spirit, and shields and keeps them in the redemption He has won, Heidelberg Catechism 31, 54. The church has its groundwork and oneness in the counsel of God, in the covenant of grace, in the person of Christ; but she must, as made up of men, be gathered and brought in by Word and by Spirit. This gathering is wrought by Christ and goes forth from Him. Though He makes use therein of offices and means of grace, yet it is He who deals out the blessings of the covenant and thereby founds his church. He himself builds the church upon the rock of the confessing apostles, Matt. 16:19; and these are they who, as tools in his hand, build the church upon Him as the foundation, 1 Cor. 3:11. Christ is the vine, and the believers are the branches that spring forth from Him, draw sap, and bear fruit, John 15. Christ is the head, and the church is the body that is knit together from Him and gains its growth, Eph. 4:16, Col. 2:19. Christ is the Shepherd, and the believers are the sheep that are brought in by Him and knit into one flock, John 10:16. Christ is the Lord who adds to the church those that are being saved, Acts 2:47. Since the church is a living body, the head goes before the members, and the church universal before the church particular. The church in her wholeness comes not to being by the piecemeal joining of sundry parts. But the church catholic is first; she has her being in Christ, came first to light in the days of the New Testament in the church at Jerusalem, and spread thence to other places. Every church particular (local) is, in the place where she arises, a showing forth of the church catholic, of the folk of God. Already by her birth she stands in unbreakable bond with this. For no single local church springs up of itself from the hidden depths, but was planted by the seed of the word which another church sowed there. True, by the teaching of Holy Writ every local church is self-ruling, a full church, however small and lowly she may be. There are no mother churches in the sense that one church may lord it over another; neither Jerusalem nor Rome has any claim to such rule. All churches stand alike, because all, though one be founded through another, in the same wise—that is, straightway and wholly—hang upon Christ and are bound to his word. Therefore the Reformed have not only broken the bond of their churches with those at Rome but also made an end of the diocese and the parish. For a diocese is the churchly realm of a bishop who, bound to the head church, rules thence the whole ring of believers. And a parish marks the band of believers in a set place only as the field of the parson's work. Both thoughts show that bishop and parson are sent to the believers from without, and stand high as rulers over them. But this is not so. Every church is self-ruling, chooses and calls her servants, and stands in the church bond wherein she was taken up, fully alike with all other churches. At times, as with the churches of the Huguenots in France, it seems as if the bond arose wholly freely by league. But that is not the Reformed outlook, which on this point stands firmly against that of the Independents. In setting forth the being of the church, all Reformed divines went out from the church universal and came down thus to the churches particular, M. Vitringa IX 60. These last are local showings of the one hidden body of Christ; they are therefore ghostly one, stand by their birth in bond with each other, and are bound from the Lord's side to keep fellowship with all who share the same faith. Every local church is therefore at once a self-standing showing of the body of Christ and a share in a greater whole; a church particular that arises from and stands in ghostly and timely bond with the church catholic, cf. Rieker, Principles of Reformed Church Order 80 f. And what holds for every local church holds also for each of her members in sunder. No single church and no single living member owes his birth to his own will or to the work of men. Christ has called and gathered him, though by the serving of the word, and not him alone but all who are members of the church. So it is not we, but Christ alone, who sets who are members of the church and with whom we must live in fellowship. It lies not in our whim to join or not this or that church; but it is the bounden duty of all believers to join that church which most purely shows herself as the church of Christ, Dutch Confession 28. Here too the Reformed stand against the Independents. The believers divide not themselves at will into little meetings and gatherings, nor choose themselves with whom they will meet. But in a set place all believers belong together and are there together the folk of God and the church of Christ. As it is God who sets the times and the bounds of each one's dwelling, Acts 17:26, so too is it Christ who, linking to this ordering of the Father, gathers the believers in places and makes them stand forth as a self-ruling church. Kindred and grace were on this point not rent asunder by the Reformed, nor set in foehood against each other, for grace mends kindred and the gospel is the fulfilling of the law. Yet with this oneness of the local church the so-called parish shaping clashes not. Sundry churches in the New Testament—Jerusalem, Rome, Corinth, and the like—were each in themselves a oneness; that at Jerusalem stood under the same band of apostles and chose as a whole a seven deacons, and those at Rome, Corinth, Colossae got letters from Paul wherein all believers in the same place are knit by him as a oneness. But that hindered not those churches from meeting in sundry buildings at their gatherings and thus shaping sundry house churches. And to this must every church come that spreads to a membership of thousands of souls. As it is allowed and dutiful to meet in sundry buildings, so too is it for the ghostly weal, rule, and care of the believers bidden to bind to each band of believers that gathers in a set building a set tally of preachers, elders, and deacons. This need break not the oneness of the church, since she can speak it forth in the church council, in the handling, in the calling of preachers, and the like. And at times, with the great spreading of many cities in these days, city parts differ more in kind from each other than nearby thorps or spots and the churches shaped there.
In these local churches, Christ bestows all kinds of gifts, not only saving gifts of regeneration, conversion, faith, and the like, but also spiritual gifts, which are known under the name of charismata, as mentioned above. In the apostolic time there was a rich outpouring of them; but although they have partly changed in nature and working, they are still bestowed by the Holy Spirit upon believers today, so that with them they may serve one another and show themselves as one body. The congregation is not immature; it is not an ecclesia audiens or ordo oeconomicus, which has only to listen and be silent. But it shares in the anointing of the Holy One, consists of many members, all of whom need one another, and may not neglect the gifts bestowed upon it. Every congregation is and must be an army of salvation, which under Christ wages war against the devil, the world, and the flesh, and knows no soldiers at rest or on inactive duty; a fellowship of saints, in which all suffer and rejoice with one another and willingly and with joy employ their special gifts for the good and salvation of the other members. And just as all believers have a gift, so they all stand in the office. They have not only in the church as organism but also in the church as institute a calling and task laid upon them from the Lord's side. The apostles indeed go before the church, are its founders, and bind it to themselves, that is, to God's word. But they do not appoint office-bearers beforehand or arbitrarily, but first establish congregations and then let those congregations themselves elect elders and deacons. Therefore, the general office of believers precedes the special office of overseer and caregiver of the poor. For Christ is in the midst, where two or three are gathered in his name, Matt. 18:19, 20. He has obtained the Holy Spirit for all, who dwells in all believers as his temple, Acts 2:17, 1 Cor. 6:19, Eph. 2:22, and so on, so that they, anointed with that Spirit, are a holy, royal priesthood, 1 Pet. 2:5, 9; prophets, who proclaim the excellencies of God, confess his name, and know all things, Matt. 8:38, 10:32, 1 John 2:20, 27; priests, who present their bodies as a living, holy sacrifice acceptable to God, Rom. 12:1, 1 Pet. 2:5, 9, Heb. 13:16, Rev. 1:6, 5:10; kings, who fight the good fight, overcome sin and the world and death, and shall one day reign with Christ, Rom. 6:12, 13, 1 Tim. 1:18, 19, 2 Tim. 2:12, 4:7, 1 John 2:13, 14, Rev. 1:6, 2:26, 3:21, 20:6, and therefore bear the name of Christians, anointed ones, Acts 11:26, 26:28, 1 Pet. 4:16; compare Heidelberg Catechism, question 32. This prophetic, priestly, and kingly activity of believers may be called the exercise of an office. For already in general, man is not for himself, but for God's will. God created him after his image, that he might know, love, and glorify him, and thus as prophet, priest, and king serve him. But particularly, Christ was appointed by the Father as mediator, as servant of the Lord, as prophet, priest, and king, to restore and complete this work, which man had neglected and disturbed. And to this the believers are now also called. As anointed ones, who share in fellowship with Christ, they are called to the same work, service, and strife, John 12:26, 14:12. From the moment of their calling, believers are no longer their own but belong to Christ; they are his servants, have to do his will and complete his work. They are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and have in and with respect to the church particularly a threefold task. First, they are obliged to join themselves to the church. They do not stand alone, but are members of the body of Christ and thus have to seek and maintain fellowship with it. Second, they are called in that congregation to all kinds of activity, to the employment of gifts for the good of others, to suffering and rejoicing with the brethren, to attending the assemblies of believers, to proclaiming the Lord's death, to having oversight over one another, to serving and distributing in mercy, and so on. And finally, they are each in their own way and measure also obliged to the formation and reformation of the church. If there are believers anywhere in the world, and there is no opportunity for ministers from elsewhere to lead the election to the offices instituted by Christ and to lay hands on the elected, then they themselves have the right to come together in the name of the Lord to elect and ordain office-bearers. So it actually happened at Mainz and at Paris in 1555; compare Lechler, History of the Synodal and Presbyterian Constitution, 1854; Doumergue, Jean Calvin, 1899, I; so judged the Reformed, Voetius, Desperata Causa Papatus, and so was also the opinion of Luther, Köstlin, Luther's Theology, I. The office does not depend on any succession; it does not arise by transmission; it rests on the gift and calling of Christ and on the designation of his congregation. And that congregation is itself mature and shares in the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the gifts needed for the office are not essentially different from those bestowed on all believers; therefore it can designate from its midst those who are especially adorned with official gifts and call and elect them in Christ's name to the office. But from this it also follows that the believers themselves, if necessary, may proceed to the reformation of the church. If a church in its offices and ministries shows that it ascribes more authority to itself and its ordinances than to the word of God and clearly reveals itself as a false church, then believers have the holy office and the guilty duty to separate themselves and again to live churchly according to the Lord's word, Dutch Confession, articles 28, 29.
8. On the basis of these gifts and this office of all believers, Christ has also set up special offices in the church. The apostles did ministerial service in this, but it is still Christ who gives these offices, and fits and chooses the persons for them. In the Roman church, however, Richer claimed, in De ecclesiastica et politica potestate 1611, that Christ had given all power primarily, properly, and essentially to the church and then instrumentally, ministerially, and as to execution to the pope and bishops, Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV. Luther in the early time drew from the general priesthood of believers that the ministry of word and sacrament was properly given to all but for order's sake was carried out by one of them, Köstlin, Luthers Theol. I. Reformed folk sometimes speak as if the power of the ministers properly belongs to the church and is carried out by them in her name, Amesius, Med. I 35, 6. Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII qu. 24, 7. 8. 19. 26. Ofttimes the likeness is used that, just as man sees through the eye and hears through the ear, so the church does the institutional works through the offices. And in newer times the view is common that the office is an organ of the church. All this is only partly right. In Matt. 18:17 Jesus gives the key power to the whole church, but He uses this word there still in a very general sense, without speaking of the ordering that would later be brought in. As soon as this is there, we see that the key power rests with the apostles and then with the overseers. Also the power can in general be said to be given to the church, since it serves her good and welfare, and so, if not formally, yet finally is given to her. It is indeed destined to the whole church for her building up, but properly to be handled by her ministers alone, Maresius, Syst. Theol. XVI 70, cf. against Richer Petavius, de eccl. hier. III c. 14-16. The offices in the church of Christ are not ruling but serving power; they are there for the sake of the church, 1 Cor. 3:22, Eph. 4:12; Paul calls himself with his fellow servants even douloi hymōn dia Iēsoun , 2 Cor. 4:5. The goal of the church as institute lies in the gathering of the elect, in the building up of the body of Christ, in the perfecting of the saints and so in the glorifying of God, Eph. 4:11. God could surely also without any means of church or office, word or sacrament lead His folk to salvation. But His good pleasure has been to gather His elect through the service of men; the church has the salvation of the elect as goal; the offices are needful by hypothetical need, Gall. 25. Belg. 30. Helv. II 18. Voetius, Pol. I 17. III 213. Vitringa, IX 131 sq. Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII qu. 22. But yet, though the offices in that sense are for the church, they are yet not her organ, and have not received their power from her. For in the Old Testament Moses and Aaron, priests and prophets were called and set up by the Lord; in the New Testament the apostles, Paul included, are chosen and fitted straightway by Christ Himself. False prophets and apostles have just no sending from God and come only in their own name, Jer. 23:21, 32, John 5:43, but the true servants call upon their sending from God and draw from it their power and authority, Isa. 6:8, Jer. 1:4, Hos. 1:1, Rom. 1:1, Gal. 1:1 etc. Therefore, though they are also in service to the church, they are yet called diakonoi Christou , Col. 1:7, Acts 20:24, 1 Tim. 1:12, douloi Christou , Rom. 1:1, Gal. 1:10, 2 Pet. 1:1, hypēretai Christou , Acts 26:16, 1 Cor. 4:1, douloi theou , Acts 16:17, synergoi theou , 1 Cor. 3:9, who, being the mouth of God and ambassadors for Christ, pray from Christ's side that one let himself be reconciled with God, 2 Cor. 5:20, and without pleasing men, preach the gospel that is entrusted to them, 1 Thess. 2:4 and share out the hidden things of Christ, 1 Cor. 4:1. Therefore they stand as overseers and carers also above the church, are her episkopoi , proistamenoi , hēgoumenoi , are answerable for her spiritual welfare, and have claim on her esteem and obedience. And this holds not only of the extraordinary but also of the ordinary offices. These too are given by Christ, Matt. 9:38, 23:34, Acts 20:28, 1 Cor. 12:5, 28, Eph. 4:11. There is no preaching without sending, Rom. 10:15. No one may take this honor to himself, but he who is called by God, John 10:1, 2, Heb. 5:4. Though it is that all believers are called to proclaim the gospel, Acts 8:4, 13:15, 1 Cor. 14:26; to do this with power and authority in the Lord's name, to a savor of life unto life or a savor of death unto death, needs a special sending and charge.
The way along which Christ sets his servants in the office runs over calling, examination, and ordination. Since the calling no longer comes to someone in an extraordinary manner, as it did to prophets and apostles, it is only knowable by the agreement of the inward and outward calling. The inward calling, which is thus to be distinguished from the supernatural and extraordinary, consists 1. in the granting of the gifts that are required for the office, 2. in the pure, upright, and steadfast desire that drives someone toward the office, and 3. in the opening of the ways that lead to the office, Gerhard, Loc. XXIII cap. 3. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III. Mastricht VI. Alting, Theol. probl. nova I. Van den Honert, Red. Godsd. XVII. Vitringa IX. This inward, subjective calling must receive its mark and seal in the outward calling by the congregation, because also in this field error and deception are not excluded, Dutch Confession art. 31. Therefore this outward calling does not stand over against the inward but it goes forth just as much as this from Christ. He alone can call and calls in truth. But this outward calling is mediate and takes place through the congregation in Jesus' name. The Scripture leaves no doubt about this, Acts 1:23, 6:2-6, 2 Cor. 8:19. In the first centuries the congregation also factually exercised this right; even the bishop was chosen by the congregation, Sohm, Kirchenrecht. Achelis, Lehrb. d. prakt. Theol. and older literature with Vitringa IX. The election of the pope, the bishop of Rome, by the cardinals, that is, originally the presbytery of the local congregation there, is still a remnant of the former custom. But gradually the right of the congregation was limited and finally in the Roman hierarchy assigned to the pope, and under the influence of a humanistic state law by Erastians and Remonstrants to the government. Even in the Reformed churches there was great difference about this. Although in theory it was maintained that the right to call ministers of the word rested with the congregation, in practice this was often very limited and handed over to the church council or to patrons or to the government or to mixed colleges, Calvin, Inst. IV 3. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III. Turretin, Theol. El. XVIII qu. 24. M. Vitringa IX. Mastricht VI. On the other side, however, the error of Grotius, Pufendorf, and others is also to be avoided, as if the choice of church servants were a natural right of the believers, just as the right to choose a board rests with the members of an association, M. Vitringa IX. For the church is no association that comes into being by the will of men, but a foundation of Christ. All power that belongs to the congregation is therefore given to her by Christ; it is no right but a gift. The congregation is no democracy, in which the folk governs itself. But Christ rules in her, and the choice of the congregation has no other meaning than that she notices the gifts and points out the persons whom Christ has destined for the office. Hence the congregation indeed chooses, but that choice stands under the leadership of those who are already in their office, of apostles, evangelists, etc., Acts 1:15, 6:2, 14:23, Titus 1:5, and later of neighboring bishops, Sohm. Furthermore, the choice is not absolutely free, but bound to conditions and requirements that are indicated by Christ for the office, Acts 1:21, 6:3, 1 Tim. 3. And finally, someone is not yet in the office when he is chosen by the congregation, but hands must be laid on him afterward, Acts 6:6, etc. Choice by the congregation and leadership by the church council thus belong together in the calling to an office in the congregation of Christ, whether the church council binds itself in the calling to a nomination of the congregation or to a choice of the congregation from a nomination of the church council.
But with the choice of the congregation and the calling by the church council (vocatio stricte sic dicta), the outward calling is not yet ended. It goes on in the trial, the searching or examination. Of course, this is not utterly needful; if the congregation surely knows that he whom she calls holds the required gifts, further searching is needless. But the congregation is not unerring and can go astray; she does not deal out the gifts herself but can only mark to whom Christ has given gifts for his work. To go therein as safely as may be, she sets up after the calling yet a trial, serving to give the congregation the sureness that the called one holds the required gifts. Already Paul called for this in 1 Tim. 3:10, that the deacons—and the kai houtoi de shows that this was already wont with the elders—should be tried in some way unknown to us and thereafter, if they showed blameless in teaching and life, should serve. Thereon rested the right, which the church later began to wield, to set a trial time before the taking of the office or also to hold an examination, Bingham, Origines eccles. or the Antiq. of the Christ. Church .
Here in this land, the Reformed churches, after the university at Leiden was set up, gave over the right to hold the (peremptory) examination to the professors and were content with their school witness, Synod of Middelburg question 3. 's Gravenhage art. 18. But by and by they wrought everywhere, save in Groningen, to take away the right to hold the peremptory and preparatory examination from the professors with great toil and not without much withstanding, even from Voetius and Maccovius, and to keep it for themselves. Setting aside the asking whether the churches do not do well if they make use of the help of the professors in holding the examinations in the classes, the right to set up such a searching belongs after Holy Writ, the Reformed avowal, and also after the kind of the thing, to the churches. The school may hold her examinations, but the churches keep the right to call, to try, to send, to give might for the handling of word and sacrament.
The own, churchly examination is therefore the peremptory examination; the preparatory is, though already named in 's Gravenhage art. 18, of under meaning, was first by and by brought in mainly from the Remonstrant wrangles, and was after Voetius' witness, Pol. Eccl. , first widely in use in 1669. It served only to let the beforehand examined for a time train in holding propositions under the leading of a preacher and church council.
To the calling and examination comes at last the ordination, which happens chiefly through the laying on of hands. This was in use among Israel for blessing, Gen. 48:14, Lev. 9:22, for offering, Ex. 29:10, Lev. 1:4, for accusation, Lev. 24:14, for the dedication of Levites, Num. 8:10, for appointment to an office, Num. 27:18-23, later also for the installation of judges and promotion of teachers, Schürer, History of the Jewish People II 199. Jesus laid on hands to heal, Matt. 8:15, 9:18, Mark 5:23 cf. 2 Kings 4:34, 5:11 and to bless, Matt. 19:15, (Luke 24:50), and the people set great worth on it, Matt. 9:18, Mark 5:23, 7:32, but nowhere do we read that He did so also for appointment to an office. His apostles He appointed only with the word, without any ceremony, Matt. 10:1ff., 28:19. For the appointment of Matthias, Paul, Barnabas, Silas, Luke etc. no laying on of hands is mentioned; a general use for introduction to a church office it surely was not. But the laying on of hands took place for healing, Acts 9:12, 17, for sharing the gift of the Spirit, Acts 8:17-19, for the appointment of deacons, 1 Tim. 4:14, 2 Tim. 1:6; according to 1 Tim. 5:22 it was in general use for ordination to a church office and according to Heb. 6:2 it belongs to the first beginnings of the teaching of Christ. Yet a real sharing of the spiritual office gifts it was not. For Acts 6:3 teaches that the deacons who were chosen must beforehand already be full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom. In Acts 13:3 the laying on of hands happens not at the ordination, but at the sending out of Barnabas and Paul, who beforehand already stood in the office. According to 1 Tim. 1:18, 4:14 the appointment of Timothy to evangelist was strengthened by prophetic witnesses and by laying on of hands of the presbytery. And indeed in 2 Tim. 1:6 the office gift is thought of as given through laying on, but 1 Tim. 4:14 says that it was bestowed through prophecy and with laying on; a proof thereof, that prophecy and laying on of hands were not the source of the gifts, but the means whereby they were led over into the service of the congregation and set apart for it. From the apostles this use of laying on of hands passed over into the Christian church, which applied it at baptism, at healing, at the readmission of the fallen and heretics, at marriage, at penance and at ordination. In the last case the right to apply it was in later times granted only to the bishop and understood as bestowing a special office gift.
Over against Gnosticism and Montanism indeed the truth of the church was thereby shown, that the bishops in the congregations which were founded by the apostles were the keepers of the pure tradition. They had received this themselves from the apostles and handed it on unharmed to their followers. The succession running from the beginning, shown with 2 Tim. 2:2, gave the warrant therefor, for the office included the sharing of a special office spirit, which the office-bearer keeps even if he is personally ever so godless. The laying on of hands was in the old church surely in use at ordination to presbyter, deacon and the lower offices, always went with prayer and was for a long time understood as a symbolic sign of the sharing of the office gift. Laying on of hands, what is it other than prayer over a man? Augustine, On Baptism 3, 16. But little by little it was seen as a sacrament, which ex opere operato brought an indelible character, Council of Trent 23 c. 7. on the reform c. 3. 10. Roman Catechism II 7, 29. Bellarmine, On Clerics I 14.
The Lutherans rejected it at first, but took it up again later and sometimes set great worth on it, Apology of the Confession art. 13, cf. Herzog 11, 80. The Reformed judged with one mind that the laying on of hands was no command of Christ and thus not utterly needful. But while some deemed it useful, honorable and worthy of following, Calvin, Institutes IV 3, 16. 14, 20. 19, 31, Aretius, Spanheim, Koelman, Duty of Elders and Deacons 1889 p. 53ff., others held it for an indifferent thing and advised against its use out of fear for superstition, Synod of Emden art. 16. Dordrecht 1574 art. 24 Middelburg 1581 art. 4. Dordrecht 1578 art. 5. Voetius, Church Polity III 452. 579. De Moor V 352-356. VI 327-331. M. Vitringa IX 209. 353-357. An essential element of ordination it is not, for neither with Jesus himself, nor with the apostles, nor also with the elders, Acts 14:23, 20:28, is any mention made of it. Also it can and may not be understood as a mechanical sharing of a special office spirit. For it bestows not but presupposes according to Scripture the charismata required for the office. It is also not the same as the election or calling to the office but follows thereon and can therefore be nothing other than a public pointing out of him who is called to an office, and a solemn leading in and setting apart for that office. Even as the wedding before the authorities is not the essence of marriage and the crowning does not make the king, so also the ordination, with or without laying on of hands, is no sharing of the office or of an office spirit. It is only the solemn, open declaration before God and his congregation, that the called one is sent by lawful way and thus from God's side, that he has the required gifts and as such must be received, acknowledged and honored by the congregation. Cf. Sohm, Church Law 56 ff. Articles Hand Laying and Ordination in Herzog. Zahn, Introduction to the New Testament I 465. Achelis, Textbook of Practical Theology Leipzig 1898 I 139-173.
9. Concerning the number of offices that Christ has instituted in his church, there is great disagreement in the Christian church. In the apostolic age, by the nature of things, the boundary between extraordinary and ordinary offices, and thus also between offices and gifts, was not yet sharply drawn. But the hierarchical development, which began with the rise of the episcopate, robbed the congregation of all freedom and independence and separated the offices from it by a wide gulf. The members of the congregation became the laity, who, excluded from all government and utterly dependent on priest and sacrament for their salvation, have nothing to do but to listen and obey. And separated from them by a special character and a particular official spirit, the clergy stand high above them, forming a separate estate, propagating themselves by succession, and able even without a definite service in the congregation to belong to the class of the clergy. These clergy are divided into two ranks, lesser orders (non-sacred) and greater orders (sacred). The lesser orders, to which belong the acolytes, exorcists, readers, and doorkeepers, were at first voluntary services of congregation members but were organized in the first half of the third century in Rome into lower offices, because they stood in relation to the holy and shared in it to a lesser or greater degree; although often in name only, they are even now preparation for the higher offices. Sohm, Kirchenrecht. Moeller-von Schubert, Kirchengesch. I. Wieland, Die genet. Entw. der sogen. ordines minores in den 3 ersten Jahrh., Freiburg Herder 1897 and thereto Schürer’s Theol. Lit. Z. 1898 n. 1. Already in the lesser orders the striving appears to detach them from the congregation and incorporate them into the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But much stronger is this the case with the greater orders. These include the three offices of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, but of these three, properly speaking, only the episcopal office has remained. In this episcopate various distinctions of jurisdiction and dignity have indeed been introduced, so that one speaks of archbishops, patriarchs, metropolitans, etc., but these distinctions make no inroad upon the unity and essence of the episcopal office. Even the papal office is essentially a bishop's office, only extended to the whole church and equipped thereto with special gifts, differing from the ordinary bishop's office not hieratically but only hierarchically. This episcopal office is in the Roman church properly the one true office. After it developed in the second century out of the presbyterate, it drew to itself the teaching, the tradition, the jurisdiction, separated itself from the congregation by succession, tonsure, celibacy, and gradually made presbyters and deacons into its organs. Still within the circle of the New Testament we find at the head of the congregation a council of presbyters, a presbytery, 1 Tim. 4:14, and such a council remained, even after one of them had raised himself to bishop, for a long time around him. But this council lost more and more every bond with the congregation, became a chapter of the bishop, and served to act under him by virtue of a power granted by him as ministers of the holy, especially of the sacrament. Likewise, the diaconate soon changed entirely in character. When the priest and sacrifice idea gained entrance, the "serving at tables," Acts 6:2, was understood no longer of the care of the needy but of assistant service at the Eucharist. The bishop became high priest, the presbyters became priests, and the deacons became Levites, who, leaving the care of the poor to individuals and monastic orders, stood by the bishop in the administration of the Mass. While in this way presbyters and deacons were entirely separated from the congregation and made into organs of the bishop, this one himself is definitely distinguished from all others by one power. The episcopal office is a priestly office, but connected with the power to propagate it, with the generative power of the priesthood; it guarantees the continuance of the priesthood and thus the propagation of the church. The bishop is the salient point in the church; laymen, deacons, presbyters can temporarily be lacking, but not the bishop; where he is, there is the church, for he is the bearer of the teaching, the propagator of the priesthood. The presbyters are also priests, authorized to administer the sacraments, but they may not ordain, they lack the generative power of the priesthood, their priesthood is unfruitful, they are servants and helpers of the bishop, because he cannot be everywhere and cannot do everything. Presbyterate and diaconate are in Rome extensions of the episcopate; they are three degrees in the one priesthood, not coordinated but subordinated. The presbyter is also deacon, the bishop is also presbyter; each time the official gift rises a step higher, until it culminates in the bishop, or, as the following paragraph will show, in the pope.
Cf. Thomas, S. Theol. suppl. qu. 34-40. Lombardus e. a. op Sent. IV dist. 24. Bonav., Brevil. VI 12. Conc. Trid. sess. 23. Cat. Rom. II c. 7. Bellarminus, de clericis I c. 11 sq. Dens, Theol. VII 50 sq. Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. II² 315-335. Seydl, Der Diakonat, Regensburg 1884. Vering, Lehrb. des kath. orient. und prot. Kirchenrechts³, Freiburg 1893 S. 558 f., etc.
Over against this hierarchy, Luther contented himself with the restoration of the original preaching office. Indeed, he deemed a council of elders necessary for the exercise of discipline and a council of deacons for the care of the poor. But these offices were not restored on account of the inconvenience of the times; they were also not so needful as the episcopal, spiritual preaching office, the pastorate, which is the chief office and through which Christ in particular rules his church. The office of elders and deacons were therefore in the Lutheran church replaced by consistory and church guardianship; the Roman orders made way for the ecclesiastical, political, and economic order.
Cf. Köstlin, Luthers Theol. Conf. Aug. en Apol. art. 5. Gerhard, Loc. XXIII especially. Sohm, Kirchenrecht . Achelis, Lehrb. d. prakt. Theol. Thereagainst, the presbyteral church government is owing to Calvin. Indeed, before him, among others by Oecolampadius at Basel in 1530, attempts were made to institute the office of elders for the sake of church discipline, but Calvin first carried this out and made the office of elders a mark of Reformed church government, Lechler, Gesch. der Presb. u. Syn. Verfassung , Leiden and art. Presbyter in Herzog. He proceeded therein from the word of God. For although it is true that Calvin's character and circumstances opened his eyes to the meaning of the offices in Holy Scripture, yet the presbyteral church government was not derived by him from any abstract principle but from the word of God and introduced into the church on its authority. In more recent times, men have spoken of a community principle and have built thereon a kind of presbyteral and diaconal offices; a community had the right to govern itself, just as in the political realm the folk gains more and more influence on the government, so Stahl and many younger church orders with Rieker, Grundsätze ref. Kirchenverf. , and likewise a community needed organs, that is, deacons and deaconesses for the exercise of the work of inner mission, Paul Wurster, Die Lehre v. d. inneren Mission , Berlin. But this is a wholly other conception than that which one finds with Calvin and the Reformed. Although it is true that they urge the government of the church therewith, that otherwise it can no more exist than a folk or a society, Calvin, Inst. IV. a Lasco, Op. ; yet they derive the offices not from the community but from the institution of Christ. The church as community of saints is not autonomous; it is not free to order itself thus or otherwise, or not at all, but it is also in this point bound to the word of God and finds therein the principles pointed out and the lines drawn which it has to follow in the government of the church. It was the general conviction that the government of the church in substance must rest on a divine right, Calvin, Inst. IV. Conf. Gall. Belg. Helv. II, especially the Westminster synod with Neal, Historie der Purit. But therewith they did not lose sight that Scripture is no lawbook, nor descends into all kinds of particulars and leaves very much to the freedom of the churches, Syn. Wezel. Emden. Westm. Even concerning the offices which Christ instituted in his church, there was no small difference. First, there were those who had no objection to an episcopate in the sense of a superintendency, a Lasco, Op. Knox, First Book of Discipline , cf. Saravia, Scultetus, Bochartus, Spanheim Jr., Tilenus, Forbesius a Corse and others with M. Vitringa. Then there was difference over whether the doctors' office, taken as professorship in theology, formed a separate church office or, since of no apostolic institution, could only in a broader sense be so called, cf. my address on the Doctors' Office, Kampen. Further, apart from the doctorate, some spoke rather of three offices: pastor, presbyter, and deacon, Calvin, Ordonn. eccl. Syn. Wezel. Emden. Dordr. Midd. ’s Grav. Dordr.; others named two offices, presbyter and deacon, and divided the first into teaching and ruling eldership, a Lasco Op. and many Scottish and American church orders, with Rieker, Grundsätze ref. Kirchenverf. ; there were even those who found the presbyteral church government useful but not necessary by divine right and rejected the distinction of teaching and ruling elders, Cappellus, Theses Salm. Burmannus, Synopsis and others with M. Vitringa. Furthermore, the distinction of deacons into those for the poor and for the sick was indeed introduced by Calvin, Inst. IV but only seldom adopted, Zanchius, Op. Syn. Wezel.; and by others the office of deaconesses restored, Junius, Op. Walaeus, Op. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. ; and also according to some in Acts 6 not the institution of the diaconate is reported and this office therefore not of divine origin, Cappellus and others with M. Vitringa. And finally there was still difference over the manner of election, over holding an office without a definite service in the community, Heidegger, Corpus Theol. over the usefulness of the laying on of hands, both in general and especially at the confirmation of elders and deacons, Voetius, Pol. Eccl. over the repetition of confirmation at reappointment of elders and deacons, Moor, M. Vitringa, over the duration of eldership, Rutgers in de Heraut etc. The treatment of all these subjects belongs in church law. But so much may safely be said, that the Reformed, by the restoration of the office of elders and deacons alongside that of the minister of the word, have most purely grasped the thought of Scripture and most strongly acknowledged the rights of the community. Over the church Christ alone is king; its government in the invisible is strictly monarchical. And he was king not only in the past, but he is it still. From heaven he rules his community on earth through his Word and his Spirit, through his prophetic, priestly, and kingly activity. These three offices he continues on earth, not exclusively but yet also by means of the offices which he has instituted. In the visible its government is not democratic nor monarchical nor oligarchic, but aristocratic-presbyteral. It is the best, the aristoi, not in gold and goods but in spiritual gifts, whom he himself equips and lets the community appoint for his service. Through them he cares for the spiritual and material interests of his community. Through the teaching office he instructs, through the eldership he leads, through the diaconate he cares for his flock; and through all three he proves himself to be our highest prophet, our eternal king, and our merciful high priest.
1. The church belongs no more than the state to the original institutions of mankind. The oldest form of society was the family, in which civil and religious life were still intertwined and under the leadership of the father or patriarch, who was prophet, priest, and king in his household. Sin, however, made the institution of church and state necessary for the preservation of mankind. In the command of the death penalty for murder, Gen. 9:6, God in principle institutes the government; and this soon emerges after the building of the tower under the guidance of God's providence among all peoples into which humanity is divided. As soon as a government arises, there naturally comes a certain distinction and separation between civil and religious life; alongside the princes, priests appear. Thereby the possibility of conflict is given; the boundaries are drawn differently among the peoples each time, and the bonds are laid in various ways. While in the East generally the power of the princes is subject to the priesthood, in the West, among Greeks and Romans, religion is a political interest, and the priests are officials of the state. A complete separation occurred nowhere in antiquity; a neutral state is entirely unknown there. The state maintains and protects religion, if necessary with banishment and death penalty (Socrates), for it is the foundation and guarantee of its own existence. Israel also was from the beginning patriarchally organized and divided into households, families, clans, and tribes. Under the kings, the genealogical division remained and gave the state organization a democratic stamp, so that the heads of the tribes, etc., had to decide on important matters in the people's assemblies. Already under this patriarchal form of government, there was a distinction between civil and religious interests, between Moses and Aaron, between officers (shotrim) and judges (shoftim) on the one hand, and priests and Levites on the other side. Only in the supreme court, which was established in Jerusalem and had to judge very difficult cases, did priests also have a seat, Deut. 17:8-13, 19:17, 18. It is therefore incorrect to say that under Israel church and state were one. Both were clearly distinguished from each other in laws, institutions, offices, office-bearers, and in part even in members; cf. Hoedemaker, Church and State in Israel, in the periodical Trowel and Sword 1898 pp. 208-237. The priests had to serve in the temple, approach God with the offerings of the people, distribute to the people God's grace and blessing, and instruct them in the law, Lev. 9:22, 10:11, 21:8, Num. 6:22, 16:5, Ezek. 44:23, but they also had to offer for themselves, Lev. 9:7, 16:6, were bound to the law, Deut. 33:10, Jer. 18:18, and for their livelihood were dependent on the people, Lev. 23:10, Num. 18:8-32, etc. They also had no secret doctrine or art, no political or civil power, no hierarchical dominion; Israel was never a priestly state; the freedom of the people was in every way safeguarded against the priestly class. The prophets appeared freely, had to proclaim the word of God, had to make known to Israel its sins without sparing, and announce to people and government God's judgments, but they had no other power than the power of the word. Strangers could be incorporated into Israel by circumcision, Ex. 12:48, and the unclean and lepers remained citizens, even if they were temporarily separated. Despite the schism, the religious unity of the people could very well have remained in itself. But the peculiarity of Israel's organization consisted now in this, that all these laws, offices, and institutions were given and maintained by God; Israel was a theocracy; God was its lawgiver, judge, and king, Isa. 33:22. There was therefore in Israel no place on any level for an independent sovereignty; even the king might not be a despot, but had to be chosen by God, taken from among the brethren, and bound to God's law, Deut. 17:14-20, 1 Sam. 10:25. Above all offices, institutions, and persons stood the law of God, which regulated the whole life of Israel and had to be kept by all without distinction; Israel had to be a holy people and a priestly kingdom, Ex. 19:3, Deut. 7:6. From this it follows that, without the distinction between civil and religious life being erased, the government nevertheless had to uphold the law of God in its own sphere. Idolatry, image worship, sorcery, blasphemy, Sabbath violation, etc., all sins against the first table, were therefore often punished with death, Ex. 22:18, 20, Lev. 20:2, 6, 27, 24:11-16, Num. 25:5, 7, Deut. 13:1-5, 17:2-7, 18:9-12, 20, 1 Kings 15:12, 18:40, 2 Kings 9:7, 24, 33, 10:6, 11, 17, 18ff., 11:15, 12:2, 18:4, 2 Chron. 15:13, 17:6, 29:10, 31:1, 34:5, 33. Religion was a national matter, sin was crime, transgression of the first table of the law was breaking of the covenant. But it must be remembered that the law gave only very few general rules, and often left the execution of the punishment to God himself; that the killing of the Canaanites, of Agag, of Ahab's house were isolated cases, that Jehu's zeal went much further than God's command, that the reformation of the kings mostly limited itself to rooting out the idols and restoring the public service of Jehovah, that unbelief and heresy among Israel were not tracked down by any inquisition and occurred frequently, that coercion of conscience was entirely unknown, that strangers, on condition of abstaining from public violation of Israel's religion, were not only tolerated but treated with courtesy, that priests and prophets never incited to persecution of the wicked but only admonished them to conversion, e.g., also in Ps. 2:10, and expected from God himself the political and religious victory of Israel over all its enemies. Therefore, also, when Israel more and more lost its political independence, the religious community could remain and organize itself in its own way. Although the power of priests and high priest gradually expanded after the exile, soon they got dangerous competitors in Pharisees and scribes; in the synagogue, religious life became independent, not only over against the state, but also over against temple and priesthood; and all that life became more and more concentrated around the law, whose instruction was the main purpose of the synagogue, Matt. 4:23, Mark 1:21, etc. Acts 15:21, 2 Tim. 3:15. That law, or more broadly, the Old Testament Scripture was foundation, center, source of Israel's religious life; it possessed no other power than that which lay in that Word. Hence it clung to it with anxious scrupulosity and removed from its midst all who would not live according to it by the ban (gidduy, cherem, shammata), and shut them out of the community for a time or permanently, with or without anathemas, Luke 6:22, John 9:22, 12:42, 16:2. Cf. Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ II³ passim, especially 428 ff.
2. When Jesus, coming to his own, was not received by his own, he gathered his learners into a church, which, hoping and suffering, had to await his second coming and the overcoming of all his foes. This gathering shows in setup and worship some likeness to the synagogue, but is yet a freer and more self-standing ordering of the new life that Christ had brought to light. For there can be no doubt that Christ founded such a gathering and entrusted to it a certain might. He himself speaks of it as so firmly built on a rock that the gates of hell shall have no strength against it, Matt. 16:18, and further he gives to that gathering offices, services, setups, gifts, Rom. 12:6ff., 1 Cor. 12-14, Eph. 4:11, all of which point to it having its own free, unbound being and a self-standing order. But this might, which Christ grants to his gathering, bears a special mark. It consists in nothing else but also in nothing less than the might of the keys, which by Christ was first allotted to Peter, Matt. 16:19.
After Peter first for his avowal of Jesus’ Messiahship was called a rock, on which Christ would build his gathering, he then in verse 19 set him as steward of the kingdom of heaven and handed over the keys of that kingdom to him. Keys are a sign of lordship, Isa. 22:22, Luke 11:52, Rev. 1:18, 3:7, 9:1, 20:1, and here mark Peter’s might to open and shut the kingdom of heaven, that is, to set who shall come in and who not. For his judgment shall also hold in heaven; what he binds or looses (frees, sets free) shall also by God be so reckoned. In these words no law-giving might is given to Peter, but indeed a judging or ruling one; because he is an avower of Jesus as the Christ, he has in that avowal a measure to set what belongs to the gathering or not and thus what shall or shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. In Matt. 18:18 the gathering in general gets the might to view an unrepentant one as a heathen and tax-gatherer, for its judgment is in force in heaven. And in John 20:23 all the apostles, on ground of the Spirit-gift given them in verse 22, receive the might to loose or hold men’s sins.
From this it is clear that the might of the gathering and namely of Peter and the apostles consists in speaking out a judge-like judgment over men’s standing to the kingdom of heaven by the measure of the avowal of Jesus as the Christ and the gift of the Holy Ghost. This might is in the New Testament often further set forth. It is no high-handed, unbound, kingly lordship, Matt. 20:25, 26, 23:8, 10, 2 Cor. 10:4, 5, 1 Pet. 5:3, but a service, a ministry, Acts 4:29, 20:24, Rom. 1:1 etc., bound to Christ, who has all might in heaven and on earth, Matt. 28:18, who is the only head of the gathering, Eph. 1:22, and who as such deals out all gifts and offices, Eph. 4:11; bound to his Word and Spirit, by which Christ himself rules his gathering, Rom. 10:14, 15, Eph. 5:26, and wielded in his name and strength, 1 Cor. 5:4. It is therefore indeed a might, a weighty all-embracing might, consisting in the serving of word and sacrament, Matt. 28:19, in the opening and shutting of the kingdom of heaven, Matt. 16:19, in the forgiving or holding of sins, John 20:23, in the wielding of training over the members of the gathering, Matt. 18:18, Rom. 16:17, 1 Cor. 5:4, 2 Thess. 3:6, Titus 3:10, 2 John 10, 2 Tim. 2:17, Heb. 12:15-17, Rev. 2:14, in the sifting of all things, 1 Cor. 2:15, in the teaching, comforting, warning etc. of the brothers, Col. 3:16, in the laying on of gifts for the good of others, Rom. 12:4-8, 1 Cor. 12:12ff., in the doing of wonders, Mark 16:17, 18 etc.
But all this might is ghostly, upright in kind, weightily set apart from all other might which God has given to men over men or over other creatures in household, fellowship, state, art, knowledge. For Jesus came forth as nothing else than as Christ, as seer, priest, and king; no other office did he hold, no other tie did he take. He was no house-father, no learned one, no artist, no statesman; he honored all orders and works of the Father and came only to break the works of the devil, 1 John 3:8. His kingdom had not its spring in this world, John 18:36. And therefore he owns all overlordship, high priest, Sanhedrin, Herod, Pilate etc., pays the tax, Matt. 17:24, refuses to be judge between two brothers who strive over an heirship, Luke 12:14, bids to give the emperor his own, Matt. 22:21, chides John who would call down fire from heaven, Luke 9:55, and Peter who cut off Malchus’ ear, John 18:10, forbids his followers to fight with the sword for his name and sake, Matt. 26:52.
The gospel of Christ never binds the strife against kind as such, it came not to doom the world but to save it, John 3:16, 17; it leaves household, wedlock, ties of fathers and children, of lords and servants, of overlord and folk untouched; it finds nothing blameworthy in itself and all creatures good, if taken with thanksgiving and hallowed by the word of God and by prayer, 1 Tim. 4:4; it lets each stay in the calling in which he was called, 1 Cor. 7:17-24, 1 Thess. 4:11, teaches to honor the overlord, Rom. 13:1, 1 Tim. 2:2, 1 Pet. 2:13, and even lets bond-service be, 1 Cor. 7:22, Philem. 11. Even when it bids to obey God more than men, it preaches only suffering withstanding, Acts 4:19, 5:29. But nonetheless, though shunning all uprising, it is all the more set on reshaping. It never binds against kind as such, but everywhere and always, on every field and into the hiddenmost nooks, it binds the strife against sin and the lie. And so it preaches beginnings that not by uprising but by upright and ghostly ways work through everywhere and reshape and renew all. While it by Jesus’ bidding must be preached to all creatures, Mark 16:15, it is a strength of God to wholeness for each who believes, Rom. 1:16; a two-edged sharp sword that pierces to the sundering of soul and ghost, Heb. 4:12; a leaven that leavens all, Matt. 13:33; a beginning that reshapes all; a might that overcomes the world, 1 John 5:4.
3. This apostolic teaching of the churchly might stayed acknowledged for a long time in the Christly church. It did not first come into thought that the poor, small gathering would one day become a world-church, which laid down laws to kings and folk. All that was wished was to lead a quiet and still life under the heathen rulers in all godliness and honesty. But when the church came to honor and lordship, her might was also understood wholly otherwise. The unfolding of the bishopric and handed-down lore, of priest- and offering-thought brought with it that the ordaining as a sacrament-like handling was beheld, which, done by the bishop, shared the office-spirit and gave right and fitness to fulfill the churchly rites. And though the key-might, given to Peter in Mt. 16:18, by linking with Mt. 18:18 and John 20:23 was in the first time understood of the forgiving of sins, Cyprian de unit. eccl. 4. Ep. 75, 16, it got above all through the sacrament of penance bit by bit a law-like kind. The might of the church is therefore according to Rome twofold: potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis, of which the latter is again set apart in jurisdictio fori interni (sacramentalis) and fori externi (legifera, judiciaria et coactiva), Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 39 art. 3. Catech. Rom. II 7, 6. Conc. Vat. ed. Lacensis col. 570. Klee, Kath. Dogm. I² 162. Dieringer, Kath. Dogm.⁴ 619. 715. Liebermann, Inst. Theol. I⁸ 290. Simar, Dogm. 593. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 1 S. 317 f. Schell, Kath. Dogm. III 1 S. 396. Jansen, Prael. theol. I 380 sq. etc. For right understanding of this might given by Rome to the church, the following must be heeded.
1º The potestas docendi is sometimes handled apart by later god-learned men and comes naturally according to Rome also to the church. But truly it is a share of the potestas jurisdictionis. The Catech. Rom. II 7, 7 could make one think that the potestas docendi belongs under the potestas ordinis, because it says that this not only holds the might to serve the Eucharist, but prepares men's souls to take it and makes them fit; but the Conc. Vatic. IV c. 3. 4 brings the magisterium outspokenly under the potestas jurisdictionis. The serving of the word is with Rome law-speaking, peaking in the unfailing choices of the pope; it is no preaching but an out-calling of dogmas, which as such bind the inwit, bind to belief, that is to assent, and if need be can be laid on with force, Richter-Dove-Kahl, Kirchenrecht 305. Achelis, Prakt. Theol. I² 79.
2º The potestas ordinis, the might to serve the sacraments, is only to be gotten through the sacramentum ordinis given by the bishop, which shares the office-spirit and stamps an undying mark, and is therefore unloseable, Thomas, S. Theol. II 2 qu. 39 art. 3; even heretics and split-makers, who once in Rome were ordained by the bishop, keep this might, it stands therefore loose on itself, and is wholly unfettered from the serving of the word. The priesthood can with Rome also be without preaching of the gospel. Si quis dixerit..., sacerdotium... non esse potestatem aliquam consecrandi et offerendi verum corpus et sanguinem Domini et peccata remittendi et retinendi, sed officium tantum et nudum ministerium praedicandi evangelium, vel eos, qui non praedicant, prorsus non esse sacerdotes, anathema sit, Conc. Trid. sess. 23 de sacr. ordinis can. 1.
3º In keeping herewith is with Rome the forgiving of sins not given in the preaching of the word, which has only readying meaning, but in the sacrament, which holds the grace in itself and from the work worked pours it into the taker. Namely is it shared in baptism and for the sins done after baptism in the sacrament of penance. The upbringing was namely in the first Christly church very strict. When lore taught that far from all who had become Christians walked worthily of their calling and often fell into fleshly sins and during the chasings above all also into denying of the gospel, the warnings grew, to, above all before the use of the evening meal, in the midst of the gathering make owning of sins, Did. 4:14, Clement, 1 and 2 Cor. passim. Over the back-coming of such fallen and out-shut in the bosom of the church arose a long-lasting strife. Montanism, Novatianism and Donatism wanted for such fallen, namely for them who had made themselves guilty of denying, murder or unchastity, to shut the door of the church and leave them to God's grace, cf. Hebr. 6:4-6, 10:26, 1 John 5:16. But Hermas, Mand. IV 1, said already in case of wed-break, that one turning was likely. In Tertullian's time was already set apart between forgiveable and death-sins; the doers of the first underwent, even if they were for a time out-shut from the gathering, only a chastising, no damning, Tert. de pudic. 7; those who made themselves guilty of the latter, above all of idol-worship, wed-break or murder, were with sorrow yet as it were let in again in the fore-yard of the church. The unfolding of the catholic church-thought (as healing-house), the gathering of all churchly might in the bishop, the teaching of the worthiness of good works (satisfactio, meritum) came to the good of the again-taking of fallen and banned through means of penance. The bishop of Rome, Callistus out-called in 217, that he also forgave the sins of unchastity with sorrow-having. A gathering at Carthage 252 gave to all fallen, in case of penance, the making-one or freeing, Cyprian ep. 57, though the back-coming must also go through sundry steps, before he was taken into the full fellowship of the church (προσκλαυσις, ἀκροασις, ὑποπτωσις, συστασις). And in 316 were the Donatists doomed, who said that no out-banned or worth of out-banning could serve the sacrament, Moeller-v. Schubert, Kirchengesch. I 96. 133. 278. 298. 358. 415 and the there named writings. In the penance, which bit by bit was taken as a sacrament and stood in three shares (confessio oris, contritio cordis and satisfactio operis), the church shaped itself the likelihood, to take all who after baptism had fallen into smaller or greater sins, again into her full fellowship. It was a second plank after shipwreck after baptism, Trid. IV c. 2. All the upbringing went under with Rome in this ordered penance, and this penance became an actus judicialis, a law-bench, in which the priests sit as heads and judges, hear the owning of the death-crimes, after the yardstick of the books of penance in case-wise way set the punishment, and in the name of Christ not if-wise and telling but full, kind-wise and ending the forgiving of sins (freeing) give. This law-like kind of the penance comes also out in that, that this sacrament may only be served to them who are baptized, while the church owns no law-might over anyone but who through baptism stand under her might; that the believers may take this sacrament only from the hand of that priest, whose underlings they are after churchly, that is papal setting; and that higher ghostly ones, bishops etc. and above all the pope, keep for themselves set, shocking cases, in which they alone can deem and choose, such as e.g. with the laying of ban and forbid over kings and lands in the Middle Ages by the popes, Conc. Trid. XIV. Cat. Rom. II 5, 32 sq.
4º To wield this law-might in foro interno, the Roman church further says to own the potestas jurisdictionis in foro externo (potestas regiminis), set apart in potestas legislativa, judiciaria and coactiva. Christ gave yet to the church, that she could be true to her calling, foremost a law-giving might; she may bind and loose, forbid or allow, lay moral bindings or undo; and all that she sets is in heaven of strength; it is even good as if God himself bids it; it binds therefore the inwits and binds to un-if-wise harkening, Mt. 16:19, 18:18, John 20:21, 23, Acts 15:27-29, 41, 1 Cor. 11:4-7, 14:26, 2 Cor. 8, 10:6, 8, 1 Tim. 3, Tit. 1:5, Hebr. 13:7, 17. This law-giving might shuts in itself the judging, while that without this could not be; Christ gave this might to the gathering in Mt. 18:15-17 and the apostles wielded her, Acts 5:1-10, 1 Cor. 5:3, 11-13, 1 Tim. 5:19, 20. And lastly has the church also a doing and forcing might, and can not only lay ghostly punishments, like Donatists, Waldensians, Albigensians etc. said, but also timely and bodily, and that not only on worth or through means of the state, but also herself from own full-might and straight. Rome grounds this might on Mt. 16:19, 18:18, 28:19, 1 Cor. 4:18-21, 5:4-5, 2 Cor. 10:6, 8, 13:2, 3, 1 Tim. 1:20, has it many times outspokenly taught, Denzinger, Enchir. symb. et defin. n. 1367. 1546. 1572. Conc. Vatic. coll. Lac. VII 570. 577, and also muchly laid on, cf. Perrone, Prael. Theol. Lov. 1843 VII 275. Scheeben-Atzberger, Dogm. IV 1 S. 322. Jansen, Prael. theol. I 390 etc.
5º Lastly teaches Rome, that this churchly might, from all earthly might truly set apart, is fully unfettered and self-ruling. Well says she, that this might towards Christ is a serving, a ministerium; but over against all earthly sway and might is she fully self-standing. With this teaching of the unfetteredness of the churchly might she struck a wholly other way than the church of the East. There was by Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian I the church ever more a tool in the state; the emperor could therefore with the church yet not do what he wished, for he was bound to the dogma, and no high-priest but only godly, shield of the right-belief, yet he was yet even good as of the state the ruling head of the church. In the Russian church this beholding rules still now. In 1721 laid Peter the Great the over-ruling over the church in hands of a standing Holy Synod, which through the between of the procurator is bound to the Czar. How much the might of the Czar in likening with that of the Byzantine emperors muchly bounded and weakened is, it is yet he, who through the Synod rules the church, sets the godly things of his folk, sets the measure of freedom for his Roman and Protestant underlings; the right-belief dogma is in Russia still always in formal wit state-law and heresy state-misdeed, cf. Pobedonoszew, Streitfragen der Gegenwart. Autor. Uebersetzung. Berlin 1897. Herzog² 5, 425 f. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Confessionskunde I 374-393. While thus in the East the Caesaropapism came to unfolding, knew the church in the West, shaped in the pope, not only her self-standing to hold against but many times also her over-might to spread over the state. The emperorship became in Charlemagne a Christly, a Roman house, and was from that time off many times under the pope. And this was not only deed but became ever more lore. State, (household, fellowship, craft, witship, all the earthly) and church stand according to Rome as kind and grace, flesh and ghost, natural good and over-natural good, the timely and the everlasting, the earthly and the heavenly. Like the moon takes her light from the sun, so have the kings their worldly might to thank to the pope, who yet as stead-holder of Christ has all might in heaven and on earth, (Alvarus, Pelagius e. a.); or in each case has the pope as head of Christendom also summa potestas disponendi de rebus temporalibus omnium Christianorum, Bellarmine, de Rom. Pontif. V 6. 7. Even is a worldly realm to wield his self-ruling might for him surely needful. Though the state then also within his own field free and self-standing, he is yet less than the church, bound to her out-saying and everywhere where the ghostly grips into the natural, under the church. The state must be Christly, that is Roman, may know no other as the true than the Roman, and is bound, if the church wishes and itself not does, to chase and punish heretics. Cf. Augustine's letter to Vincentius contra Donat. et Rogat. de vi corrigendis haereticis, id. to Bonifacius de moderate coercendis haereticis, further c. Epist. Parmeniani I 16. Contra literas Petiliani, above all lib. II. Contra Gaudentii Denatistarum episcopi epistolam I 20 II 17. Thomas, de regimine principum. Bellarmine, de Rom. Pontif. V. de membris eccl. III. Hergenröther, Kath. Kirche und Christl. Staat in ihrer geschichtl. Entw. 1872. Hammerstein, Kirche und Staat, Freiburg 1883. Stöckl, Lehrb. d. Philos. III⁶ 451-480. Cathrein, Moralphilosophie II³ 529 f. Hansjakob, Die Toleranz und die Intoleranz der Kath. Kirche 2e Aufl. Freiburg 1899 etc.
4. This might, granted by Rome to the church, reaches its height and also finds the warrant for its being and lasting in the might of the pope. For according to the Vatican Council IV, chapters 3 and 4, he bears the following traits: 1° It is not merely a primacy of honor nor only an office of oversight and leading, but a full might of lawmaking, ruling, and judging, free from the bishops, a potestas jurisdictionis. 2° It is not an out-of-the-way, timely, but an everyday, lasting might, which God gives him and which he can wield always and not only in some out-of-the-way happenings. 3° It is a straightway one, both in its spring, since Christ gives it, and in its use, since the pope can wield it not only through the bishops but also by himself or his legates, without asking leave or full might from anyone, and thus can deal straightway and freely with all bishops and believers. 4° It is not a bounded, but a plena et suprema potestas, stretching widely over the whole church, deeply holding all might needed for the leading and ruling of the church, and wholly kingly, under no laymen, bishops, council, but only God. 5° All members of the church, whether alone or together, all bishops, each for himself or gathered in synod and council, owe the pope full obedience, not only in matters of belief and ways, but also in those of training and ruling of the church. Haec est catholicae veritatis doctrina, a qua deviare, salva fide atque salute, nemo potest. 6° A share of this might is the teaching office, about which it is set that the pope, when he speaks ex cathedra, is unerring by godly help.
After all that has been said earlier about the teaching of Scripture and the oldest church witnesses, it needs no further proof that this whole papal system rests on an unscriptural groundwork. The agreement of the fathers, that is, after Irenaeus, the teaching and practice of popes and councils, the harmony of the later theologians, as they are set forth more broadly in Roman dogmatics, for example in Heinrich, can not make up for this lack. However much this papal building by its strict oneness often charms many Protestants, yet it is in the same measure weak in faith and morals, as it impresses in politics and law. For 1. the kind and mark of infallibility are not fully set. Rome has not dared to go so far as to give to the pope the same infallibility as to the apostles. This lay and lies in the line. One would look for the apostles to have shared the apostolic might with the bishops whom they set up, and Peter in sooth with the bishop at Rome. But this is not so. The pope is infallible yet not by inbreathing, but by the help of the Holy Ghost, by a special care of God, whereby the church is kept from error and held by the truth. And his infallibility lies not therein, that he receives new openings and can bring forth a new teaching, but it lies only herein, that he can truly keep and unfold the opening handed down by the apostles. And also it is not to be understood in that wise, that the words spoken by the pope ex cathedra are in letterly wise God's Word, but only that they hold this in matter, Heinrich, Jansen. 2. Though infallibility is a special gift, yet it is not always the pope's own, and not in his person, nor also as writer, as speaker, as judge, as lawgiver, as ruler nor also as worldly prince, bishop of Rome, head bishop of the church shire of Rome or as father of the West but only as pope, as head of the whole church. There is however no oneness herein. Above all with eye on the case of pope Honorius earlier theologians and even Innocent III gave in, that the pope in private could fall into heresy, and then by God's law from the deed itself was set off as pope (Paludanus, Turrecremata, Alphonsus de Castro, Sylvester and others) or by a judge's doom of a council could be set off (Cajetan, Canus and others). This however had its doubtful side and brought the boundless overlordship and untouchability of the pope in danger. Therefore others, such as Pighius, Bellarmine, Suarez and others could better find themselves in the likely and godly thought, that the godly foreseeing will keep the pope also personally from heresy, Heinrich, Scheeben-Atzberger. 3. The Vatican says with a wording maybe first used by Melchior Canus, that the pope is infallible, when he speaks ex cathedra. This seems to draw a bound, but is in deed a very unuseful yardstick. For the system asks, that no one can make out, whether a pope has spoken ex cathedra, than only the pope himself. And so a pope has it always in his hand, to cast off own sayings or those of other popes, by saying that they are not, or also to make them binding, by saying that they are spoken ex cathedra. And even he can later say, that he or a foregoer, thinking to have spoken ex cathedra, yet in deed has not done it. 4. The infallible teaching office is a share of the full and highest might of oversight in the whole church. Indeed the Vatican, session IV chapter 3, does not outspokenly say, that the pope in the wielding of this whole might at all times is infallible. But it yet says, that in her behalf pastors and faithful of whatsoever rite and worth, as well each alone as all together, are bound by the duty of ranked underness and true obedience, not only in things which belong to faith and morals, but also in those which belong to the training and steering of the church. Whether the pope in all this thus is fallible or infallible, all have without sundering, without any right of finding fault, (nor is it allowed to anyone to judge his judgment) unwithholdenly to obey the pope, and that by no less than their souls' wholeness. 5. The infallibility is in the Vatican Council session IV chapter 4 indeed outspokenly given only to the pope, when he speaks ex cathedra and as shepherd and teacher of all Christians sets the teaching of faith or morals to be held by the whole church. But there is utterly not to be drawn therefrom, that he otherwise is not. How would otherwise in chapter 3 also in matters of training, steering, right speaking, utter and unwithholden obedience to the pope be asked? But however this be, in matters of faith and morals the pope is surely infallible. And what belongs hereto, the Roman theologians work out further. Infallible is the pope, when he deals with the truths of the opening in Scripture, with the truths of the handing down, with the truths of the godly settings, sacraments, church, church setting and steering, with the truths of the kindly opening. But also herewith the bound of his infallibility is yet far from reached. To be infallible in all this, he must also be it, say the theologians, in the judging over the wells of the faith truths and in the unfolding thereof, that is in the setting of the sway of Scripture, of the handing down, of councils, of popes, of fathers, of theologians; in the use making and wielding of kindly truths, showings, thoughts and sayings; in the judging and casting off of errors and heresies, in the marking even of the deedly truths; in the forbidding of books, in matters of training, in the upholding of orders, in the hallowing of saints and so on. Faith and morals take in nearly all, and all that the pope says thereon, is infallible. The term ex cathedra draws in deed hardly any bound. For this saying gives not to know, that only those sayings are infallible, whereby the ex cathedra is letterly named, for then all earlier papal settings would be shut out therefrom. It marks thus only something in matter. But who then makes out, whether the pope speaks ex cathedra? In deed and by the folk his saying will always be taken as infallible, if only from fear, that one might sometime cast off an infallible saying. And in thought only the pope can infallibly say, when he ex cathedra, infallibly speaks, Heinrich. Besides, why is the pope infallible? Because he himself says it? But that is a faulty ring. Because the council says it? But the council is fallible, also in this saying. Where is thus for the Roman Christian the so highly praised sureness? 6. The Vatican has made up the outcome of a long historical working. In the first Christian time all apostles, all gatherings and also all bishops were each other alike in rank; at most there was a firstness of honor but in no wise a firstness of oversight. But little by little the church and the bishop at Rome knew to underlay all other churches and bishops to itself. Yet the selfstanding of the latter within own ring stayed long to a certain height kept. Against the end of the 13th hundredyear comes the strife up over the holding of the bishoply and the papal might. Some then yet seek to uphold the selfstanding of the first in that wise, that the bishop, though underlaid to the pope, yet the might coming to him within his ring from God, by God's law, has received and by the pope is only shown as bearer of that might; so Henry of Ghent, Alphonsus de Castro, bishop of Bruges died 1558, Vitoria, 1480-1544, father of the new schoolcraft at the high school at Salamanca, Peter Guerrero, bishop of Granada and many other Spanish and French bishops at the council at Trent, who in the 7th canon of the 23rd sitting wanted the words taken up: bishops by God's law set are higher than priests. There arose at the council over this asking the hottest talks, which lasted the whole winter of the year 1562 and to over the middle of the next year. The 15th July 1563 was in canon 6-8 the bishoply might indeed nearer marked out, but the asking, whether it was by God's law or by church law, was with forethought left undecided. There stood then also on the other side a strong side, with Lainez, the Jesuit head, at the head, who said, that the bishop the might of order indeed straightway from God received, but the might of oversight only got by free handing over from the side of the pope; this last was thus insofar by church law, and could by the pope at will be bound, changed or taken away, for the pope had his full might over the whole church alone and straightway from God. This feeling won after Trent through the sway of the Jesuits ever more field, it got the win over the Gallicanism and was at the Vatican council lifted to a dogma. Indeed it is said in session IV chapter 3, that the might of the pope utterly makes no break in on the ordinary and straightway might of oversight of the bishops but rather upholds, strengthens and upholds this; yet the pope has the full, whole lawgiving, steering and right speaking might over all the church, he can without anyone's betweencoming or middling freely deal with all the shepherds and flocks of the whole church, and all are without sundering and unwithholdenly underlaid to him. Bishops, councils, all the church, all believers are fallible from themselves and only infallible with and through him. The pope is the root, the fastness, the groundwork of the oneness, sway and infallibility of bishops, councils, church fathers, theologians, of all believers and of all the church. He alone receives all might and sway and infallibility straightway from God. A single saying yet calls to mind the old, catholic upholding; so for example as in the Vatican Council IV chapter 4 it is said, that the pope has that infallibility, whereby the godly Redeemer willed his church to be fitted in setting teaching of faith or morals, but straightway is therefrom just drawn, that the settings of the pope from themselves and not from the agreement of the church are infallible. 7. Yet further goes this might of the pope. Though the popes to the 8th hundredyear were underlings of the Roman emperor's realm and their ghostly office hardly took in the having of worldly might, yet soon in the Roman church the thought came up, that the pope, to be selfstanding in ghostly field, must also in the worldly be overlord. And after the lifting off of the church state in 1870 this thought has yet more come to the fore and with stronger stress spoken out. Pius IX and Leo XIII have not left off, ever to say, that the pope as worldwide bishop can not be underling of a sundry prince nor bear a sundry folkhood, Jansen, Hase; and their sayings bind the Roman believers. Though the thought of a churchly, of a priest state, is wholly out of the time; though the being of such a state does short to the oneness of Italy; though the pope can not be churchly head and worldly overlord at once, without that church or state or both thereby suffer harm; though the ghostly might has the worldly overlordship utterly not need; though the pope has for hundredyears had no worldly realm and though he after the otherwise in itself unrightful theft of the church state in 1870 has not lost in sway, even as the German bishops, since they have left off to be realm princes; though the selfstanding of the pope over against the king of Italy by the warrant of 13 May 1871 and by the might of the Roman princes and folks is more than enough warranted; all this does little thereto, Rome lets not the ask fall, that the pope again become worldly prince. This is however yet but a small share of the whole ask. With call on Matthew 28:18 and Luke 22:38 and in following of Boniface VIII in the bull Unam Sanctam many Romans have yet gone much further and said, that the pope is the own overlord of all the world and hands over the worldly might at his will to princes and kings as his servers and stand-ins. This was to many however all too sharp. They fought the thought, that the pope is overlord over the unbelieving share of the world, for Christ trusted to Peter only the care over the sheep, and those who are without, God judges; also the pope was not worldly prince over the Christian folks, for nowhere was such a worldly might laid on the pope, and Christ gave to Peter only the keys of the heaven realm; the pope has even no worldly oversight nor worldly might straight or by God's law, for Christ is a ghostly king and has a ghostly realm. But though these thus cast off the straight worldly might, they yet stayed speaking of an understraight might and gave to the pope not bare a steering might in worldly things, but also in the good of the God's realm a highest might of setting about the timely things of all Christians; for the feeding of the sheep asks also might over the wolves. The worldly might is indeed underlaid to the church as the body to the ghost; unbelieving princes, who lead their underlings to heresy, may be withstood and set off; Christian princes are as such underlaid to Christ, must further the faith and shield the church; as also many kings in the days of the Old Witness and in the tale of the church have done, Bellarmine. But also by this lore of the understraight might the pope keeps the right, to ask of all princes unbound obedience in the good of the kingdom of God, in case of un obedience to set them off and loose the underlings from their oath of obedience, not-Roman folks and lands to lay to Roman princes, worldly laws and rights to say strengthless and so on. Also though many Romans nowadays give the show thereto, as if all these rights came to the popes only timely and by happen in the Middle Ages, the Syllabus of 1864 says in number 23 outspokenly, that the popes and councils never overstepped the bounds of their might nor took to themselves rights of princes nor ever in setting in things of faith and morals erred. The wielding of the rights may by the happenings be hung up, there is no doubt, that the rights themselves are unlooseable. Rome changes not. Cf. Fr. von Schulte, The Might of the Roman Popes over Princes, Lands, Folks and Eachones 3rd Outlay Giessen 1896. 8. From all this shows the all steering stead, which the pope takes in in the life of the Roman Christian. The Roman church is a kingship, a realm, a state with a ghostly prince at the head. From the days of Augustine onward the church is by choice shown as a state and a realm, wherein all dogmas hold as laws and rights, which bind the men by the wholeness of their soul. Boniface VIII said therefore of the pope, that he is deemed to have all rights in the chest of his breast. The steering in this state is utterly one-kingly; after the council of 1870 it is even no more, as one earlier said, tempered by the highbornness of the bishops; for the bishops are fallible, and draw from him their might; yea, by the outspoken setting of the Vatican the pope can with all shepherds and flocks straightway deal and thus, with whole forebygoing of the bishop, straightway set any priest, any chaplain or loose, settle any lawsuit, straightway chasten any layman and so on, the bishops are in ground from the overlordship in own ring utterly bereft. Also this one-kingly steering of the pope is in ground no more groundlawly, for Scripture and handing down are underlaid to his infallible unfolding; the handing down am I, said therefore Pius IX to the cardinal Guidi; the pope sets, if need, what teaching of Scripture and handing down is. By his infallibility the pope is in the Roman church the only, utter overlord, well of all churchly and even straight or understraight of all worldly might. Therefore he is called since the 9th hundredyear in sundering from all other bishops Papa, not but aftercomer and stead filler of Peter but stand-in of Christ, stand-in of God, father ghostly of all fathers, yea of all faithful, head ranked, only groom, undivided head, highest bridge builder, well and uprising, rule of all churchly headships. The pope is the church, is the Christendom, is the God's realm itself. The pope and the church, it is all one, said Francis de Sales. Where the pope, there the church. The firstness of the pope is the sum of the Christian thing, Bellarmine, in the foreword. Without pope no church, no Christendom. Underlaying to the pope is for all men needful to wholeness, (Boniface VIII). The pope is middler of wholeness, the way, the truth and the life. There lacks yet but, that he be prayed to, but also that is an asking of time. Indeed, Scheeben-Atzberger says it rightly, if the firstness of the pope is not God's work, then it is a blasphemous and devilish taking. Cf. Luther, Of the Papacy at Rome. 1520. Articles of Smalcald 4 and Tractate of the Might and Firstness of the Pope. Calvin, Institutes IV chapters 4-11. Ames, Bellarmine Enervated, I book 3. Chamier, Panstratia Catholica II book 2. Voetius, Church Polity III 775 and following. Id. Disputes II 684-882. Id. Hopeless Cause of the Papacy, Amsterdam 1635. Heidegger, Body of Theology Locus 72, 2. Turretin, Theological Elenctics XVIII questions 16-20. Id. of the Needful Secession of Ours from the Roman Church above all dispute 5: of the Roman Tyranny. Moor, Commentary VI 195 and following. J. von Döllinger, The Papacy. New Working of Janus, The Pope and the Council, by J. Friedrich, Munich Beck 1894. Langen, The Vatican Dogma of the Worldwide Bishop and the Infallibility of the Pope, 3 Parts, Bonn 1871-73. Dr. W. Joos, The Bull Unam Sanctam and the Vatican Authority Ground, 2nd Outlay Schaffhausen 1897. Bungener, Pope and Council in the 19th Hundredyear, Paris 1870. Gladstone, Rome and the Newest Fashion in Religion 1875. Hase, Handbook of Protestant Polemic 5th, Leipzig 1891. Tschackert, Evangelical Polemic Against the Roman Church, Gotha 1885. D. Snijder, Rome's Foremost Teachings and Meanings Lighted for the Protestant. Gorinchem 1890. The Dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope and so on, from the German by D. Snijder, Rotterdam 1899.
5. Against this degeneration of ecclesiastical power the Reformation rose in protest. It confessed anew that the church is a communion of saints, and that it has received from Christ a power which is essentially distinct from that in the state. Christ's kingdom is not a bodily or worldly, earthly government, as other lords and kings rule on earth, but a spiritual, heavenly government, which does not concern temporal goods, nor what pertains to this life, but hearts and consciences, how one should live before God, obtain his grace, Luther in Sohm, Kirchenrecht, cf. further Köstlin, Luthers Theol. II. So too Calvin distinguished between church and state as between soul and body, the future and the present life, and ascribed to the church its own offices, power, and jurisdiction, Inst. IV 1-11. 20, cf. Lobstein, Die Ethik Calvins. The power of the church therefore consisted not in any corpus juris canonici, which Luther publicly burned at Wittenberg on December 10, 1520, but solely in the ministry of God's word. Since Christ is the only head of the church, in the church only the word of God can and may rule, not by force but only by love and free obedience, Luther in Sohm, Kirchenrecht; the ministry of word and sacrament is the only form of church government, the sum of all ecclesiastical power, the whole power of the keys, which however also according to the Lutherans included lawful calling, obedience to overseers, judgment of doctrine and life, exercise of discipline, exclusion of the ungodly from the congregation, etc., Conf. and Apol. Aug. art. 14. 20. 28 Smalc. art. de potestate et primatu papae.
Sohm has clearly set forth this distinction in the power which Rome and Luther ascribe to the church. It is true that he goes too far when he, in the opinion that all law is force, human rule, and earthly power, considers all church law to be in conflict with the essence of the church, cf. Rutgers, Het kerkrecht, insofar as it connects the church with law, Amst. But yet he clearly shows that the great difference concerning the power of the church between Rome and Protestantism is connected with the political, juridical or the spiritual, ethical conception of Christianity. And he himself acknowledges many times that the congregation of Christ, although a community of saints, yet requires order, already in the earliest time possessed a certain order, and also according to Luther and the Lutherans cannot exist without office, lawful calling, soul care, discipline, ban, government.
All power in the church is directly or indirectly ministry of the word; all regulation which it makes is subordinate and serviceable to it. So too the Reformed understood it; all power in the church rests originally with Christ, who is anointed by God as king over Zion, and therefore bears a spiritual character, for his kingdom is not of this world. Insofar as Christ in the exercise of that power makes use of organs, these are not independent, autonomous, sovereign, but bound to him, that is, to his word. All office in the congregation of Christ is a diakonia, ministry, without legislative, judicial, and executive power in itself, but only able to administer what is contained and enclosed in the word of Christ. In fact there is therefore in the church no other power than the power of the keys, the ministry of word and sacrament, which however is usually distinguished again into potestas doctrinae, potestas disciplinae, and potestas ordinis or regiminis, Calvin, Inst. IV c. 8-12. Martyr, Loci Comm. Polanus, Synt. Theol. VII. Junius, theses theol. Turretinus, Theol. El. XVIII, etc.
Although there was agreement in the fundamental thoughts, yet in the outworking and application, an important difference soon came to light between Lutherans and Reformed. First, Luther took over from the Roman church the official ministry of the word to the individual and was thus set on maintaining the confession. Although he understood the preaching of the gospel as forgiveness of sins, so that a Christian preacher can never open his mouth without speaking an absolution, yet this was not enough for him; the absolution must also be applied by the pastor individually in the confession, which is not necessary but yet highly useful. But this private confession met with insurmountable difficulties, such as the insufficient number of pastors, the confession fee, the uncertain meaning of the absolution, and so on, and gradually fell into disuse. Although the Reformed found it useful for one another to confess misdeeds, they allowed the official ministry of the word and thus also the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, that is, the absolution, to take place only in the public gathering of believers, retained from the confession as a church institution only the regular or sometimes at the preparation for the Lord's Supper used confession of sins, and otherwise replaced the private confession with personal house visitation.
Second, discipline in the Lutheran church took a different course than in the Reformed. Luther himself earnestly desired the application of discipline in the congregation of Christ; although he rejected the Roman ban and removed all civil punishment from church discipline, yet such a congregation was his ideal, which after repeated admonition removed the evil from its midst. The lack of the presbyter office and the exercise of church discipline only by the pastor led to such abuses that it soon entirely ceased, and insofar as it remained, was left to the mixed consistories. Practically, this gave the same result as the teaching of Zwingli, Erastus, the Remonstrants, the Rationalists, and many newer theologians, according to which the congregation, since the government has become Christian, has handed over its power to exercise discipline to it. On the other hand, for Calvin, church discipline was a life question; for the right of the church to remove the evil from its midst, he fought in Geneva for twenty years; he acquired it first in the year 1555. Discipline might not be the soul of the church, yet it was its nerve. And this view of the duty, necessity, and usefulness of church discipline became the property of the Reformed, and distinguished them from Romans and Lutherans on one side, but on the other side also from Anabaptists and Mennonites, who through their opposition of nature and grace sometimes applied the ban excessively strictly and deprived it of its spiritual character.
Third, the relation of Christianity to the natural life was determined by Luther differently than by Calvin. All Reformers agreed in this, that they freed the natural life from the pressure and power of the church, which in Rome coincides with Christianity, comes as a supernatural addition to nature but otherwise grants that natural life great freedom. Protestantism set against this the confession that the whole world, although lying in evil, yet in itself is holy and good, a work of God, the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth; it exchanged the quantitative opposition of natural and supernatural for the qualitative, ethical opposition of sin and grace. But in this there was yet a great difference between the Reformers. Zwingli never fully overcame the medieval dualism of flesh and spirit, of human and divine justice. Luther often limited the work of Christ so much to the religious-ethical realm that the natural stood loosely beside it; the gospel changed only the outward, the mind, the heart, but did not work renewing and reforming on the whole natural life. Hence the contempt with which Luther often spoke of reason, philosophy, jurisprudence; hence the harsh judgment that the Formula of Concord passed on the natural man as stone, trunk, or mud; hence the Lutheran distinction and separation between the sensual and the spiritual as two hemispheres, one lower, the other upper. From this it is also explained that the Lutheran church, provided it had the pure ministry of word and sacrament, was quite indifferent to all other power given by Christ to the church. It knew better and confessed that the church must have its own overseers and deacons, its own government and discipline. But in practice, it immediately and almost without struggle handed all that over to the government. If necessary, it could concede a monarchical (papal) and episcopal government, recognize many ceremonies as adiaphora, leave discipline to the consistories, and entrust the whole outward government of the church to the government. The church kept for itself only the preaching office, the ministry of word and sacrament, but otherwise became a national and state church, in which the government as substitute for the Roman episcopate, or as chief member of the church, or as authorized by the church, had almost everything to say. In substance, this again entirely agreed with the power that Zwingli, Erastus, the Remonstrants, and so on, granted to the government in relation to the church. But the Reformed placed themselves here in principle against it. As God had appointed the government in the state as sovereign, so He anointed Christ as King of His church. Both, state and church, were thus in origin, nature, government, essentially distinct from each other; to hand over the power of the church to the government was an assault on the kingship of Christ. But this distinction was never intended by the Reformed as separation. On the contrary, as the church distributes its spiritual goods for the blessing of the whole natural life in family and society, in art and science, so also the government in a Christian land has the solemn calling to protect the true church, to support it in its expansion and propagation, to ward off and root out all idolatry and false religion, and to destroy the kingdom of the antichrist. They could teach no other, because they believed that the government was instituted by God Himself for the sake of sin, for its restraint; that as such it was bound to God's law and word; that not only the second but also the first table of the law must be maintained on its territory and in its way; that Holy Scripture was a book not exclusively with religious-ethical content, valid only for the church, but a word of God, going out to all people and spreading light over all creatures and life; that the government under the Old Testament was specially charged by God with such a task; that the Christian truth was universal and catholic, clear and plain, and thus also knowable to the government.
But life proved stronger than the teaching; the absolute standpoint was slowly weakened. Already in the 16th century, some Anabaptists and Socinians demanded that the government keep itself from all meddling in matters of religion and especially from punishing heretics.
The Reformed teaching also met with many practical hindrances. In theory, indeed, state and church were set apart, but in fact the state was often under the rulings of the church, and bound to her confession. By the close union with the church and the duty which it had taken upon itself, the government came to deeds of force and compulsion, from which it itself mostly had an aversion, which gave it an ill name among many noble-minded folk, loaded upon it the seeming of Roman tyranny, and were at odds with the Protestant demand for freedom of conscience and worship.
As long as in a land one confession bound all burghers or at least the great bulk, the union of church and state could still be upheld; but when slowly the Roman church came back to life and in Protestantism many kinds of churches and confessions arose, to whom one could not deny the Christian mark, then it became even for the strictest impossible to uphold the confessional mark of the state and the demand for punishing heretics.
In England this came to light most clearly in the 17th century. Not only Romans and Episcopalians fought there with each other for the foremost place, but soon after one another the Presbyterians, Independents, Quakers, Levellers, and Deists stepped forth. Thus, led by the facts, men went step by step from the confessional to the broadly Christian and thence to the deistic mark of the state, and tolerance and moderation became the watchword of the eighteenth century.
Roger Williams, the "arch-individualist," was the first who in the 17th century spoke out the demand for parting of church and state and craved utter freedom of worship for each, even for heretics and Jews, and brought these grounds into working in his settlement at Rhode Island. On the Christian and on the revolutionary side this theory found ever more agreement. Some states in America put it to work since 1776; the French Revolution drove it through in many lands.
Nevertheless, it exists nowhere pure and steadfast, and each shrinks back in practice from its outcomes.
6. The Power of the Church. That Christ has granted certain power to his church on earth is hardly open to doubt. In general, it is an undeniable truth that nothing can exist without order and rule, that being without form is unthinkable, that a proper matter everywhere and in every field is nothing but a philosophical abstraction. A household cannot exist without a head, a people without government, a society without administration, an army without a general, and so on; anarchy is impossible. To say that Christ founded a church without any organization, government, or power is a claim that arises from mystical-philosophical principles but takes no account of the teaching of Scripture nor of the reality of life. The question that divides is therefore not really whether the church of Christ, in order to exist, needs certain power and government, for all agree to that, whether they let the congregation give itself this government or entrust it to the civil authority. But the difference concerns whether Christ himself in his Word, naturally not in all sorts of particulars but in principles and main points, has granted to his church a power and government that therefore constitutes and may constitute an article of our faith and a part of our confession, Dutch Confession art. 30-32. But even this difference is decided by Holy Scripture as strongly and clearly as possible. Christ did say that his kingdom is not of this world, but he is not a spiritual king in the sense that he cares absolutely nothing for the outward and earthly. On the contrary, he assumed the full human nature and came into the world not to condemn it but to save it; he planted his kingdom in that world and provided that it could exist therein and work renewing like leaven in all areas of life. His work was to destroy the works of the devil everywhere and to bring the right and honor of God to recognition; as far as sin has destroyed and corrupted everything, so far does his reconciling and redeeming activity extend intensively. Therefore, he does not merely bring some people individually to faith through his Spirit, so that they might then freely unite and serve one another with the received gifts of the Spirit. But he establishes a congregation, a church, and from the outset sets it up in such a way that it can exist, propagate, expand, and fulfill its task on earth. For clarification, distinction may and must be made between the essence and the government of the church. But this distinction must never be understood as if the believers were originally devoid of all government and power. On the contrary, the previous section has shown that from the first moment of its existence after the fall, the church has had a certain organization, first in the patriarchal families, then in the people of Israel, and since Christ's coming on earth in the various extraordinary and ordinary offices that he has instituted in his congregation, Mark 3:14, Luke 10:1, Acts 20:28, 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 4:11. Every office, however, includes a power, a right, an authority. It is true that there are many gifts in the congregation, granted by the Holy Spirit, manifesting as services of Christ and as workings of God the Father, and serving for the mutual edification of the congregation, 1 Cor. 12:4ff. Nevertheless, Christ connected to the offices that he instituted in his congregation a special power, authority, consisting in preaching the gospel, Matt. 10:7, Mark 3:14, 16:15, Luke 9:2, etc., in administering the sacraments, Matt. 28:19, Mark 16:15, Luke 22:19, 1 Cor. 11:24-26, in performing various miracles, Matt. 10:1, 8, Mark 3:15, 16:18, Luke 9:1, 10:9, 19, etc., in binding or loosing sins, Matt. 16:19, 18:18, John 20:23, in feeding the flock, John 21:15-17, Acts 20:28, in exercising discipline, Matt. 18:17, 1 Cor. 5:4, in serving the tables, Acts 6:2, in the right to live from the gospel, Matt. 10:10, 1 Cor. 9:4ff., 2 Thess. 3:9, 1 Tim. 5:18. This description, which Scripture gives of the power of the church, not only points to its undoubted existence but also to its complete independence and uniqueness over against all other power in the world. There is various power and authority on earth, in household, society, state, art, science, etc. But the church's power is essentially distinct from all these and completely independent over against it. For all that other power comes from God as Creator of heaven and earth, Rom. 13:1, but this church power has its origin directly in God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 4:11, Acts 20:28, and is therefore completely free and independent with respect to all other earthly power. Whoever with Caesaropapism or Erastianism curtails this power of the church, limits it, and entrusts it to the civil authority, comes too near the honor of Christ and does injury to the rights and freedoms granted to the church. This power of the church must remain independent over against all other earthly power, because it is wholly unique, cannot be taken over or exercised by any other power, and thus in such a transfer is robbed and destroyed of its nature. For all the power that Christ has given to his church—administration of word and sacrament, exercise of discipline, service of the tables, etc.—has, besides its own origin, also its own organ, its own nature, its own goal. It is bound to offices that Christ alone has instituted in his congregation, to which he alone grants and can grant the gifts, which he alone calls and sends; no one takes this honor upon himself except he who is called by God, Rom. 10:15, Heb. 5:4. Furthermore, this power is spiritual. That does not mean that it is invisible and wholly inward, for Christ is indeed a spiritual king but rules over both soul and body, his word and sacrament address the whole person, the service of mercy even primarily relieves bodily needs. But when the power of the church is called spiritual, it is thereby indicated that it is granted by the Holy Spirit of God, Acts 20:28, can be exercised only in the name of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, John 20:22, 23, 1 Cor. 5:4, extends exclusively over people as believers, 1 Cor. 5:12, and works and can work only in a spiritual, moral way, not with compulsion and punishment in money, goods, or life, but through conviction, faith, goodwill, freedom, love, and thus only with spiritual weapons, 2 Cor. 10:4, Mark 16:16, John 8:32, 2 Cor. 3:17, Eph. 6:17, etc. Finally, this power also has its own goal; although it brings to the unbelievers an increase of judgment, it serves for salvation, for edification and not for destruction, for the perfecting of the saints and the building up of the body of Christ, Matt. 10:13, Mark 16:16, Luke 2:34, 2 Cor. 2:16, 10:4, 8, 13:10, Eph. 4:12, 6:11-18, etc. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. IV 783. By all this, the church's power is specifically distinct from all political power. Already under the Old Testament, state and church, though closely connected, were not one and the same. Much more clearly, however, Christ pronounced the distinction between his kingdom and the kingdoms of the world, Matt. 22:21, John 18:36; he himself refused all earthly power, Luke 12:13, 14, John 6:15, and forbade his disciples anything that smacked of worldly dominion, Matt. 20:25, 26, 1 Pet. 5:3. Between church and state and their powers there is therefore all sorts of difference; not only in origin, as already noted above, but further also in organs, for the offices in the congregation of Christ are all services, but the political authority is sovereign and has, though a servant of God, the right and power to issue laws and demand submission to them; in nature and character, for the power of the church is spiritual, but the power of the political authority is natural, earthly, worldly, extends over all subjects without other quality than that they are subjects, and regulates only their earthly interests; in goal, for the church's power serves the building up of the body of Christ, but the political power has its destination in this life and strives for the natural and common good; in means, for the church has no other than spiritual weapons, but the authority bears the sword, has the right over life and death, and may demand obedience with compulsion and force. Therefore, just as it is unlawful on one side to entrust the church's power to the authority, so it is sinful on the other side to change the church's power into a political one. Romanism and Anabaptism both make themselves guilty of this, because both proceed from the opposition of nature and grace. Only Anabaptism makes that opposition absolute and thereby destroys nature; Rome conceives it relatively and subjugates nature. In the Middle Ages, when the Roman church possessed sole dominion, this striving came more clearly to light; but in principle it has not changed, and it is still driven by the same desire to free the clergy as much as possible from political subjection, to draw all sorts of civil matters into its sphere and subject them to its judgment; to shine with outward splendor and pomp, to expand possession of capitals and fixed goods, to exercise political influence at the courts; on the ground of Matt. 28:18 and according to the theory of the two swords, to claim for the pope if not direct then indirect power over the whole world, etc., cf. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. I 115. Not only, however, is the Roman church always intent on making all earthly, political power serviceable to itself; worse still is that it robs the church's power itself of its spiritual character and changes it into a political dominion. First, this is manifest in the fact that the Roman church attributes to itself, that is, to the pope, the highest legislative power. Formerly this power was still limited by Scripture and tradition, by bishops and councils; the government was a monarchy tempered by aristocracy. But since the proclamation of the infallibility dogma, this relation has been reversed. The pope is in a formal sense absolute monarch. By virtue of the alleged assistance of the Holy Spirit, he infallibly determines what must be believed and done. There is no higher appeal; what he binds or looses is bound or loosed in heaven; what he says has as much authority as if it were spoken by Christ himself. The dogmas and laws that he proclaims bind the conscience and oblige to faith and obedience on pain of eternal salvation. From the authority there is appeal to God, but the sovereignty of the pope is the highest; God himself speaks through his mouth. Second, the Roman church attributes to itself, that is, to the pope, the highest judicial power. The church's power is twofold, power of order and power of jurisdiction; the power of teaching, even if named separately, properly belongs to the power of jurisdiction. Therein lies the implication that in Rome the administration of word and sacrament is not a proclamation of the gospel but a legal proceeding and a judgment. All the baptized belong not in a moral, spiritual sense but by right, in a juridical sense, with an unchangeable and inalienable right, to the pope; they are his sheep, whom he may if necessary bring back to the sheepfold with force, even if he perhaps cannot do so because of the circumstances of the time. According to the right of the Catholic Church, all the baptized properly belong to the church, thus also to the parish, but for lack of means of compulsion, the enforcement of this claim is missing over against those of other faiths, Vering, Lehrb. des kath. orient. u. prot. Kirchenrechts³ 603. And all Roman church members come under preaching and to the sacrament of penance to hear their judgment. The confessional is a court, the priest a judge; after hearing the accusations that the penitent brings against himself, he pronounces the sentence; he binds and looses, not deprecatively and conditionally, but by virtue of the official spirit that dwells in him, peremptorily and absolutely; as he judges, so God judges in heaven. Third, Rome, that is, the pope, claims the highest executive and coercive power. The distinction between church and civil punishment has no value for Rome. If the church deems it useful and is able to do so, it applies the latter as well as the former. It is true, it did not execute the death penalty, for the church does not thirst for blood. But otherwise it left no means untried to compel disobedient children to submission. And Rome was inventive. Fines, penalties, imprisonment, inquisition, torture rack, assassination, ban, interdict, release of subjects from obedience to the prince, etc., have all served. That was and in principle still is the conception of church power in Rome.
The Reformers, on the other hand, understood the potestas ecclesiastica again in the sense of Scripture as a spiritual power. Thus, the potestas docendi, the ministry of word and sacrament, naturally came to the forefront. The Lutherans even let, at least in practice, the entire ecclesiastical power be absorbed into it; they had only pastors, no presbyters and deacons. But the Reformed restored these offices as well and therefore included, alongside the potestas docendi, also the potestas jurisdictionis. However, the word jurisdictio did not find general approval, although Calvin adopted it. Coccejus on 1 Cor. 5 rejected it; Maresius said that, purely and rightly spoken, there was no jurisdictio in the church and that the word on the ecclesiastical field might only be understood analogically; all acknowledged that the jurisdictio in the church was of an entirely different nature than in the state and bore a spiritual character, Voetius and many avoided the word and spoke rather of potestas gubernans, ordinans, disciplinaris, etc. Furthermore, some distinguished twofold, but others threefold power. For the power of the church was not exhausted in the ministry of word and sacrament and in the exercise of discipline; it also had the right and the authority, for the sake of order, to make laws and to take measures of various kinds. Thus, alongside and often between the potestas docendi (doctrinae, scientiae, dogmatica, ordinis) and the potestas disciplineae (critica, jurisdictionis, correptionis) there came to stand the potestas directionis (regiminis, ordinis, diatactica, legislativa), Calvin. Bucanus. Maresius. Voetius. Vitringa. Remarkable is that in this power of the church the diaconate was never brought into discussion. Yet Christ has also granted to his church a power therein, which is of the greatest significance. Therefore, there is a threefold power, in connection with the offices of pastor, presbyter, and deacon, and further in connection with the threefold office of Christ, the prophetic, kingly, and priestly office, to be distinguished in his church: the potestas docendi, the potestas gubernans (of which the potestas disciplineae is a part), and the potestas misericordiae.
7. The teaching authority has its beginning and foundation in the prophetic office, to which Christ is anointed and which He himself still always carries out through his Word and Spirit. He has not handed it over to any man, and has appointed no pope or bishop, no shepherd or teacher as his deputy and stand-in; but He is still our highest prophet, who from heaven teaches his church through Word and Spirit. Yet in this He mostly makes use of men as his tools, not only of the office-bearers in the stricter sense but of all believers and of each one according to the grace given to him. The church herself is a prophetess, and all Christians share in the anointing of Christ and are called to confess the Lord's name. The office does not crush the gifts but only guides them. There are many gifts that belong to the teaching authority of the church, wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, and so on, 1 Cor. 12:8ff. Christ teaches and instructs through the father in the family, through the teacher in the school, through the elder at the house visit, through all believers in their dealings with one another and in their dealings with others. But He does it especially in a distinct way, officially, with expressly given charge and full power, in the public gatherings of God's people, through the servant of the Word. Under the teaching authority is now chiefly to be understood this official ministry of the Word. This service must be upheld in its independence on two sides. First, toward the side of the Roman church, which makes the word under to the sacrament, the preacher to the liturgist, the preaching to the worship, the teaching authority to the authority of jurisdiction. According to Scripture, indeed, the word goes first, and the sacrament comes to it as an addition and seal; there is no sacrament without word, but there is word without sacrament. The sacrament follows the word; whoever ministers the word does not always have to, 1 Cor. 1:14-17, but can and may yet minister the sacrament, and is then also a minister of the word, of the visible word, which is added to the audible. Second, this official ministry of the word is independent over against all teaching of the word that takes place among believers with one another or toward those outside, and even essentially distinct from the application which the elder has to make of the word in visiting the members of the church. Certainly the official ministry of the word in the gatherings of the church can and may also be seen as a feeding of the flock. Scripture leads us in this. The Lord is the shepherd of his people, Ps. 23:1, 80:2, Isa. 40:11, 49:10, Jer. 31:10, Ezek. 34:15; Christ is called the shepherd of the flock, Ezek. 34:23, John 10:11, 14, Heb. 13:20, 1 Pet. 2:25, 5:4, Rev. 7:17. And under Him as the archipoimēn , 1 Pet. 5:4, his servants also bear the name of shepherds, poimenes , pastors, Isa. 44:28, Jer. 2:8, 3:15, 23:1ff., Ezek. 34:2ff., etc., John 10:2, John 21:15-17, Acts 20:28, 1 Cor. 9:7, Eph. 4:11, 1 Pet. 5:2; cf. the Formulary of the Reformed churches for the confirmation of servants of the word. But since the two tasks of feeding and teaching, of ruling and working in the word and doctrine were separated and each got its own organ, Eph. 4:11, 1 Tim. 5:17, the name of teacher has become the mark-title of the servant of the word. By his readying and training, by his full giving over to the work in the word, by the power to live from the gospel, by his official ministry of word and sacrament in the gathering of believers he is set apart from the overseer, the ruling elder, who is specially charged with the poimainein , Acts 20:28, 1 Pet. 5:2. Yet this teaching must not be understood in an intellectualist sense; rather it is to be explained with the above-named Formulary in this way, that the servants of the Lord's word shall set forth and apply it deeply and uprightly to their people, both in general and in particular, for the good of the hearers, with teaching, warning, comforting, and rebuking, according to each one's need, proclaiming turning to God and being at peace with Him through faith in Jesus Christ, and refuting with Holy Scripture all errors and heresies that fight against this pure doctrine. Further, in this teaching authority is enclosed the right and duty of the church, 1. to care for the training of her coming servants or to watch closely over that training, to call her servants, to examine, to send, to confirm, to maintain them, through their service to have God's word preached both to believers and unbelievers, and thus to strengthen, spread, and carry on the church of God among mankind; 2. to minister God's word through the office in different forms according to each one's need, namely in the form of milk to the young, and in that of solid food to the grown members of the church, but further always so that the full counsel of God, the whole wealth of his word is unfolded and developed and applied according to the needs of each people and land, of every age and time, of each church and of all believers in particular, Isa. 3:10, 11, 2 Cor. 5:20, 1 Tim. 4:13, 2 Tim. 2:15, 4:2; 3. to keep God's word, to translate it, to explain it according to the rule of faith, to defend it against all attacks of the lie, 1 Tim. 1:3, 4, 2 Tim. 1:13, Titus 1:9-11, 13, 14, and thus to build up the church on the foundation of apostles and prophets, Eph. 2:20, and to make her a stylos kai hedraiōma tēs alētheias , 1 Tim. 3:15, that is, a pillar and ground, which bears the truth, sets it out before everyone's eye, and makes it known to all.
Directly flows from this the authority of the churches, to confess the truth which they believe and to uphold it as confession in their midst. From the side of the Remonstrants in the preface to their Confession and Apology, of the Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, cf. Schaff, Creeds I. and of many others it has been objected that the drawing up of binding confessions is in strife with the all-sufficiency of Scripture, destroys Christian freedom, brings in an unbearable tyranny, cuts off further inquiry and ongoing unfolding. But Scripture clearly lays upon the churches the duty to be a pillar and ground of the truth and to confess it before all men, to shun those who turn aside from the teaching of the truth, and to uphold the word of God against all challengers. The church has been almost from the beginning, that is, from the start of the second hundred-year span, a confessing church, which had her oneness in the rule of faith common to all, that is, in the baptismal confession, in the first, later somewhat broadened, apostolic symbol, and further time and again in the course of the hundred-year spans driven by heresy and slander to broader unfolding of the truth, cf. Zahn, Rule of Faith and Baptismal Confession in the Old Church, in his Sketches from the Life of the Old Church 1898. Id. The Apostolic Symbol 1893. Kattenbusch, The Apostolic Symbol I 1894. Kunze, Rule of Faith, Holy Scripture and Baptismal Confession, Leipzig 1899. A church also cannot live in a world full of lies and deceit without a rule of faith, becomes, as history teaches especially in this hundred-year span, without a firm confession a prey to all kinds of error and confusion and subjected to the tyranny of prevailing trends and views. With such a confession the church also does no harm to the fullness of Holy Scripture, but speaks out nothing other than what is held in that Scripture; the confession stands not beside, much less above, but deep below Holy Scripture; this alone is self-trustworthy, unconditionally binding to faith and obedience, unchangeable, but the confession is and remains always examinable and revisable by Scripture, it is no norming norm, but at most a normed norm, no norm of truth, but norm of teaching received in some church, underlaid, fallible, man's work, unwhole utterance of what the church has taken up from Scripture as godly truth into her awareness and now on the warrant of God's word confesses against all error and lies. Also the church with this confession forces no one nor binds inquiry, for she leaves each one free to confess otherwise and to take up God's truth in another sense; she listens carefully to the qualms that may be brought against her confession on the ground of God's word and searches them as her own confession requires; only she refuses and must refuse to lower herself to a debating society or thoughtful fellowship, in which today holds for truth what yesterday was lie, for she is not like a wave of the sea, but like a rock, pillar and ground of the truth. Cf. volume I and further still (Dunlop) A collection of confessions of faith, catechisms, directories, books of discipline etc. of public authority in the church of Scotland, I Edinburgh 1719 preface.
8. Christ is not only prophet, He is also king, who still continually from heaven personally rules His church. But He makes use therein yet of men and gave thus in so far to His church a power of government. In broader sense is thereunder all the leading and care to understand, which the believers together towards one another exercise. In the church holds the word of Esau not: am I my brother's keeper? All are one another's members, suffer and rejoice with each other, have the skill and the calling, to also among themselves one another to teach, to warn, to comfort, to build up, Rom. 15:14, Col. 3:16, 1 Thess. 5:11. There are gifts of leading, of ruling, which Christ through the Holy Ghost shares out to the church and which He through the offices does not undo but keeps in the good track, Rom. 12:8, 1 Cor. 12:28. And among those gifts stands love at the top, which makes the one the other in worth and high regard go before, Rom. 12:10, Phil. 2:3, 1 Pet. 5:5. But yet has Christ as king of His church in the presbyterate also a set office set up, whereby He rules His church. This ruling bears however a ghostly character, because Christ is king in the kingdom of grace, and is in the Scripture called a poimainein , John 21:15-17, Acts 20:28, 1 Pet. 5:2; all that makes think of earthly might and worldly lordship is thereof shut out, 2 Cor. 1:24, 1 Pet. 5:2, 3. In broader sense embraces this poimainein also the work of the teacher, but there is yet a great difference between the open preaching and the personal, single applying of the word, between the keeping of the flock in general and the caring for each of the sheep in sunder. The believers are well called, to all take heed on one another to sharpening of love and of good works, Heb. 10:24, but that no single sheep of the flock stay uncared, has Christ yet to a set office the feeding of the sheep laid on. That He herein in an essential need of His church has provided, shows therefrom, that, when the presbyterate little by little faded, in the shrift a manly stand-in for this office work is set up. Without doubt holds therefore the shrift something good, James 5:16, Calvin, Inst. III 1, 13, but it can not weigh up against the well ordered service of the presbyterate. For it brings in an unallowed forcing of conscience, makes the believers hang on the freeing from the priest, lays in the owning of all sunder, set of the death sins, an un doable to follow duty on, makes grace and bliss each eyeblink unsure and unsteady, drives to a case-wise and tallying handling of sin and pain, and gives rise to all kinds of unclean doings. The Scripture speaks then also nowhere of such a forced shrift. But what it in ensample and forewrit to us says, is this, that Nathan to David and Elijah to Ahab and Isaiah to Hezekiah goes, to them personally over their sins to hold; that Christ the land through goes preaching and blessing, that He all His sheep by name knows and none lets be lost, John 10:3, 28, that He to Peter and to all the apostles not only the feeding of the flock but also the feeding of the sheep lays on, John 21:15-17, that He to His learners bids, to in towns, spots and houses the gospel preach, Matt. 10:11, 12, that Paul the brothers in each town seeks, Acts 15:36, the churches strengthens, Acts 15:41 in the open and by the houses, dēmosia kai kat' oikous , the turning to God and the belief in Christ preaches, Acts 20:20, 21, cf. Calvin, Inst. IV 1, 22. Besides lies the need for such a lasting ghostly caring in the state of the church of Christ in this sharing out of itself shut in. Even if the church is once planted, it is not at once full grown; on the contrary has it strife from within and without, stands as prey to all kinds of onsets of sin and lie, and runs it each eyeblink danger, to stray off to right or to left side. The church is a field, that lasting weeded, a tree, that on its time snipped, a flock, that always through led and fed, a house, whereto ever built, a bride, that made ready must be to as a clean maiden to her man be fore set. There are sick, dying, tried, saddened, fought, onset, doubting, fallen, bound etc., who teaching and under teaching, warning and comforting need have. And even set aside hereof, the church belongs to grow up in the knowing and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ; the children must younglings, the younglings men, the men fathers become in Christ, and have thereto leading and caring need. Also the teachers are weak and sinful men and belong under oversight to stand; if the board of elders and the gathering of neighbor churches this not does, becomes the church a plaything of the pastor or else a overseer hood or bishopric needful. In one word, the teachers sow the word, the elders seek the fruit.
Calvin, Inst. IV 1, 22. 12, 2. Martyr, Loci. Zanchius, Op. IV 730. Bullinger, Housebook, Dec. 5 serm. 3. Junius, Op. I 1563. Bucanus, Inst. theol. 493. Mastricht, Theol. VII 2, 22. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. III 436-479. VI 92-109. M. Vitringa IX 229. Renesse, Of the ruling eldership 1659. Koelman, Office and duty of elders 1765. New works of Th. Harnack, Prakt. Theol. II 291-350. Id. in Zöckler's Handb. der theol. Wiss. III 503-537. Achelis, Prakt. Theol. II 177-323. H. A. Koestlin, The teaching of soul care, Berlin 1895. Kuyper, Enc. III 524. Biesterveld, The house visit, Kampen 1900 etc.
9. To the work of the overseers belongs in particular also the church discipline, potestas disciplinee. The Hebrew has for discipline the word musar, which properly means binding, constriction, and in Greek is translated by nouthetema, didaskalia, nomos, sophia, and in the New Testament especially by the word paideia. Both words, like the Dutch word tucht, from tien, to draw, in general signify that something young, tender, small, weak is with care brought up. But since in general and especially among men this upbringing must always oppose abnormal development, the word discipline gets the added meaning of reproof, chastisement, correction. Almost never do the words indicate only teaching, instruction, cf. however Acts 7:22, 22:3, but always such an education and teaching which acts reprovingly and chasteningly. Thus God brings up his children, Heb. 12:5-11, and Christ his church, Rev. 3:19, by means of the Scripture, which is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for discipline in righteousness, 2 Tim. 3:16. And such a discipline Christ has also instituted in his church. In the Old Testament there was not yet a proper church discipline, although Adam was also banished from paradise and in Israel the uncircumcised, lepers, and unclean were kept out of the sanctuary, Lev. 5ff., Ezek. 44:9, for unintentional sins there was always atonement, on sins with a high hand stood extermination, and the cherem was at the same time a civil punishment. Only when Israel became a congregation did the exclusively churchly punishment arise, the separation from the congregation of believers, Ezra 10:8, and this ban is still applied by the Jews in some cases, Gunning, De Chasidim. Perhaps in connection with this synagogal discipline, Christ has ordained discipline in his church. In Matt. 16:19 he gives the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter, in Matt. 18:18 to the church, in John 20:23 to the apostles, so that they have the power on the ground of the confession of Christ and under the guidance of the Spirit to bind and to loose, to retain or forgive sins for someone. Only because Christ gives this power to his church is it competent to exercise discipline. In Matt. 18:15-17 he then indicates how this discipline must be exercised. God does not will that one of the little ones who believe in Jesus should perish, Matt. 18:1-14. If therefore someone is offended or unjustly treated by his brother, then he must first by personal reproof, then by reproof with two or three witnesses, and thereafter by reproof on behalf of the whole church try to win him; and only if all that does not help, then may he, the offended one (soi, vs. 17, in singular) regard him as a heathen and a tax collector, then he has tried everything with him, and is free from his blood. Such a judgment then has force in heaven. This is the ordinary way along which discipline in the church must proceed according to Jesus' command. But from that is well to be distinguished the discipline which God himself, which Christ, and which also the apostles sometimes exercise in his name and power. God can visit sins in the church, e.g., the unworthy use of the Lord's Supper with sickness and death, 1 Cor. 11:30. Ananias and Sapphira fell dead at Peter's feet for their lying against the Spirit of God, Acts 5. Paul punished Elymas, Acts 13:11 with blindness. In 1 Cor. 5 Paul commands the church, while it is gathered together with his spirit, which has already pronounced judgment over the incestuous person in their midst, vs. 3, and thus connected with the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, in Christ's name to deliver such a one to Satan, that he may be stricken by him in his body and thus yet be saved in the spirit on the day of Christ. Paul thereby reproves the Corinthians vs. 2, that they had not already earlier removed him from their midst and assumes therefore that they had the right and the duty thereto. And precisely because they had not done that, but had tolerated the sinner and thus had part in his sin, therefore he now deems a radical measure necessary. He himself as apostle has already for himself passed judgment, and now demands that the church, in full assembly, immediately, without further admonition, according to the power now granted to it by the apostle, yes according to the power of Christ himself, in his name judge the evil one; and not merely simply place him outside the church, as was demanded of it in vs. 2, but specifically deliver him to Satan for bodily chastisement. There is here therefore talk, not of ordinary excommunication, as e.g. in Matt. 18:17, but of a special, apostolic act of power. This appears also from 1 Tim. 1:20, 2 Tim. 2:17, where Paul as apostle, entirely alone, without the church, in the same way delivers Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan, that they may be chastened not to blaspheme anymore. There is therefore great difference between these extraordinary punishments and the ordinary exercise of discipline, which is entrusted to the church. Of this latter Paul treated in 1 Cor. 5:2 and further in vs. 9-13. There he says namely, that he in an earlier letter, which thus preceded this "first" letter, had admonished them not to associate, that is, to have no fellowship with fornicators. But the Corinthians had misunderstood that and therefrom deduced that they might have absolutely no intercourse, not even in civil matters, with fornicators, covetous, robbers, idolaters outside the church. But that was not the intention of the apostle; that would have been an impossible demand, equivalent to their having to go out of the world. Only had he required that they should have no fellowship with a fornicator etc., if such a one was called a brother and was a member of the church. Yes, in that case he wishes that they shall not even hold a meal with such a fallen brother, not go to eat with him nor invite him to eat, not associate with him in a friendly and brotherly way, but that they, while they leave those who are outside to God's judgment, shall remove such an evil one who is in their circle from their midst, cf. 2 Cor. 2:5-10. In the same way Paul speaks elsewhere of the right and duty of the church to take heed to and to turn away, ekklinein, from those who cause divisions and offenses, Rom. 16:17; to withdraw in Jesus' name, to separate, stellein apo, from every brother who walks disorderly, 2 Thess. 3:6, 14; after first and second, that is, after repeated admonition to avoid, not to meddle with (paraiteisthai, to excuse oneself from something or someone by pleas, to let go, to dismiss) a heretical person, who (as a member of the church, or perhaps also from outside) breaks the unity of faith in the church, Titus 3:10. The same says John; if anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, then you may not receive him into your house as a brother, not associate with him in a friendly and brotherly way, and not greet and welcome him as a brother, 2 John 10. And finally in Rev. 2:2 the church of Ephesus is praised because it does not tolerate the evil ones; in Rev. 2:14, 20, 24 those of Pergamum and Thyatira are reproved because they tolerate heretical teachings and heathen abominations. Cf. Meyer, Die Lehre des N. T. von der Kirchenzucht, Zeits. f. kirchl. Wiss. u. kirchl. Leben.
This teaching of Holy Scripture is most purely applied in the discipline of the Reformed churches. According to it, 1. no impersonal things, writings, buildings, lands, but always persons are the object; and not people in general, for those outside, God judges, 1 Cor. 5:10, no deceased, no class or group of people, but always certain, individual persons, who either by baptism alone, or also by confession are members of the congregation.
2. The cause of discipline is not all kinds of weaknesses that befall believers, nor such dreadful sins which the Christian government punishes, although the church then follows and her discipline is not needless, Calv. Inst. IV 11, 3. Bucanus, but such sins that stir up offense in the midst of the congregation and are not or very lightly punished by the government, Mastricht, Theol. VII 6, 8.
3. Among these sins, to which church discipline applies, a distinction must be made between hidden and public sins. The first are handled according to the rule of Mt. 18, and only gain the character of public sins when private admonitions do not help and thus the whole congregation, or its representation in the church council, becomes involved in it.
4. With these sins that have become public through stubbornness and with those that are public from the outset by their nature (e.g., murder, adultery), the procedure is thus: as soon as the offender shows true repentance, all church discipline in the stricter sense ceases. The Lord's Supper may then still be withheld, so that the offense may be removed from the congregation and the sincerity of the confession of guilt may come to light; but of discipline there is no more speech. He who confesses his sin finds mercy with God and thus also with his congregation. The discipline that leads to cutting off always begins only after proven impenitence and stubbornness. So that the congregation may be fully convinced of this and not lightly proceed to put away the evil one from its midst, the church council begins with admonitions. If the offender hardens himself against these, there follows first with withholding of the Lord's Supper the announcement of the sin without the name of the sinner in the midst of the congregation; then the announcement of the sin with the name of the sinner, but not without a well-grounded advice of the classis; next the announcement that he, if he persists, will be cut off; and finally the cutting off itself with the form of the ban. The time that must pass between all these admonitions and disciplinary measures cannot be fixed, since it stands in connection with the nature of the sin, the behavior of the offender, the offense in and outside the congregation.
5. The punishments that the church applies herein are purely spiritual. They consist not and may not consist in fines, bodily chastisement, branding, torture, imprisonment, dishonor, banishment, death penalty, etc., as Rome claims, nor in dissolving family, civil, political relations, as the Anabaptists taught; nor even in exclusion from public worship services, as the Christian church in the first times applied this. For the weapons of the congregation are not fleshly but spiritual and therefore mighty before God, 2 Cor. 10:4. But the discipline of the congregation is a serious testing whether someone who misbehaved and hardens himself against all admonition can and may still be regarded as a brother. Excommunication is therefore in the end nothing other but also nothing less than a canceling of brotherly fellowship and brotherly communion; a withdrawing of the congregation; a final, sorrowful letting go of him who presented himself as a brother but proved not to be a brother. It is no delivering over to Satan, which in the N.T. occurs only as an apostolic act, no damnation or cursing, no anathema, which in the N.T. is never, not even in Rom. 9:3, used of church discipline, cf. Cremer s.v., but only and yet also not less than a solemn declaration of the congregation in Jesus' name, that the sinner has become manifest as not being a true brother in Christ, and thus a placing of him outside the congregation and its communion, so that God alone may judge over him.
6. Excommunication is an utmost remedy, so that the one removed from brotherly fellowship may come to repentance. Even the apostolic delivering over to Satan had this meaning, 1 Cor. 5:5, 1 Tim. 1:20. Though the congregation may regard the cast-out one as a heathen and a publican, because it has spent all effort on him without fruit; though it had to cast him out, to have no fellowship itself in his sins, 1 Cor. 5:6, 7, 11:30; yet the hope remains that he is still a brother, who by admonition from his error will be brought right, 2 Thess. 3:14.
7. Therefore, readmission into the congregation is always possible again, Mt. 16:18, 18:18, Jn. 20:23, 2 Cor. 2:5-10; but therein a preceding public confession is necessary, which in all other cases may be required only with all caution and according to the judgment of the whole church council.
Cf. Calvin, Inst. IV 12. Ursinus, Explic. Cat. qu. 83-85. Zanchius, Op. IV 736. Polanus, Syst. Theol. p. 544. Martyr, Loci 411. Junius, Theses Theol. 47. Bucanus, Instit. theol. 531. Heidegger II p. 600. Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 48. Voetius, Pol. IV 770-982. Mastricht, Theol. VII c. 6. Moor VI 400-422. M. Vitringa IX 1 p. 498-573 etc. From more recent times: Scheele, Die Kirchenzucht 1852. Fabri, Kirchenzucht im Sinne und Geiste des Evang. 1854. Art. Bann, Kirchenzucht, Schlüsselgewalt, Gerichtsbarkeit in Herzog. Müller, Dogm. Abh. 496 f. Vilmar, Von der christl. Kirchenzucht 1872. Id. Kirchenzucht u. Lehrzucht 1877.
10. Christ as Priest. Thirdly, Christ is also priest and still exercises this office from heaven in his church through intercession and blessing. Just as he teaches his own as prophet and rules them as king, so he shows them as priest the riches of his mercy. When he was on earth, he went about the cities and villages, not only teaching in the synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, but also healing every sickness and every disease among the people, Matthew 9:35. And this was no side or chance work but a chief part of the task that the Father had given him to do, Matthew 8:17, John 5:36, 9:3, 4, and so on. The fullness of his power and the riches of his mercy were shown in it; the works of sin and Satan were broken by it; the outcomes of sin in the bodily world were at first taken away by it; they led to and received their seal and end in the resurrection, which was the win over death and the start of the renewal of all things. So when he sends out his disciples, he gives them not only the charge to preach the gospel, but just as surely and strongly, to cast out unclean spirits and to heal every sickness and every disease, Matthew 10:1, 8, Mark 3:15, Luke 9:1, 2, 10:9, 17. The disciples fulfilled this charge, not only during Jesus' stay on earth but also after his ascension, Acts 5:16, 8:7, and so on. Even, as Jesus' own promise said, Mark 16:17, 18, in the first times many out-of-the-way gifts of healing and works of power were given to the believers, Acts 2:44, 45, 4:35, Romans 12:7, 8, 1 Corinthians 12:28. But as it went with the gifts of teaching and the gifts of ruling, so it went with those of mercy. The out-of-the-way state of the church became step by step normal. And though the gifts were not quenched or destroyed, they were yet little by little more and more bound to the office. The teaching was given to the teacher, the ruling to the elder, and likewise the service of mercy to the deacon, Acts 6. And the gifts themselves, though staying gifts of the Holy Ghost, took on a more simple and everyday kind. Rome claims that the wonder-power lasts with her, but fairer than those wonders on which she boasts are the works of mercy that give a strong witness of her faith and love. For when the diaconate in the Christian church little by little fully changed in kind, the store of love and mercy that Christ pours out in his church has shown itself richly in private goodwill. Though the ordering of the service of mercy in Rome leaves much to wish for, yet she takes the first place in works of love among the Christian churches. For though the Reformed church has brought back the office of deacon, she has not rightly ordered its place and service nor brought its work to growth. This growth, to which the need of the times now drives, can in main not happen otherwise than in this way:
1. that the office of deacon be honored more than till now as a self-standing tool of the priestly mercy of Christ,
2. that love and mercy be known and done as the Christian virtues above all,
3. that it be laid on deacons to stir all members of the church, above all the well-off, in the name of Christ to mercy, and to warn and guard against the sin of greed, which is a root of all evil,
4. that the diaconate not kill private goodwill but wake it, order it, and lead it,
5. that the bearers of this office, if need be, in large churches make use of the help of deaconesses, in the same way as the other two offices make use of catechism teachers and comforters of the sick,
6. that they share out their gifts in Christ's name, as taken from the tables of the Lord, on which they are laid by the church and given to Christ himself, Matthew 25:40,
7. that they stretch out their help to all poor, sick, strangers, prisoners, idiots, madmen, widows, orphans, in one word to all wretched and needy who are in the midst of the church, and meet them in their suffering with word and with deed,
8. that the service of mercy get a much broader place on the agenda of all church meetings than till now has been the case,
9. that deacons with teachers and elders be sent to the greater meetings of the churches and get a vote in all things touching the service of mercy,
10. that on these meetings the service of mercy be ordered by broad grounds, keeping the difference of church states; be taken up together for broad needs, and stretched from the local church to upholding other churches, and further also to helping poor, oppressed fellow believers abroad, and
11. that this deaconal work stay upheld in its self-standing and not go under in or be mixed with the work of the inner mission, or also with the state's care for the poor, which bear a fully other kind. Cf. Calvin, Institutes IV 3, 9. Musculus, Loci Communes 425. Bullinger, Housebook V 3. Zanchi, Works IV 765. Junius, Works I 1566. Bucanus, Institutes 494. Voetius, III 496-513. M. Vitringa IX 272-296.
G. Uhlhorn, Christian Charity, Stuttgart 1882-1890. Bonwetsch, The Office of the Diaconate in the Ancient Church, 1890. Seesemann, The Office of Deaconesses in the Ancient Church, 1891. Schäfer, Diaconics in Zöckler's Handbook of Theological Sciences III 538-572. Achelis, Practical Theology II 324-451. Wurster, The Doctrine of the Inner Mission, Berlin 1895. Kuyper, Encyclopedia III 535-545.
11. This power, granted by Christ to his church, comes together in the local church in the church council. Every local church is according to the New Testament independent, a complete church, and therefore bears as well as the church in its entirety the name of temple of God, 1 Cor. 3:16, 17, 2 Cor. 6:16, bride, 2 Cor. 11:2, or body of Christ, 1 Cor. 12:27. The believers do not stand on their own but form a unity, and so also the office-bearers in a local church do not remain loose beside each other but join together in a council of the church. Traces thereof are already in the New Testament. In Jerusalem the believers, after they were incorporated into the church by baptism, came together from time to time, continuing steadfastly in the apostles' teaching, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread, in prayers, Acts 1:14, 2:41ff., 5:12 etc.; and they stood under the leadership of the college of apostles, who were soon assisted therein by the presbyters, Acts 6:2, 15:2, 6, 22. All sorts of circumstances, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially those of teaching, prophecy and speaking in tongues, the gatherings of the believers, the ministry of word and sacrament, the collection of offerings, the care of the poor etc., made leadership and regulation and therewith also counsel and consultation of themselves necessary. At first the apostles provided as much as possible for all these needs, took measures and made determinations, Acts 15:28ff., 1 Cor. 11:4-6, 34, 14:27ff., 16:1, 1 Tim. 3 etc. For all things must in the church of Christ be done decently and in order, in peace and for edification, 1 Cor. 14:26, 33, 40. But when the office of elders was instituted, these were charged with the leadership and government of the church; and these formed among themselves soon a college, presbyterion , 1 Tim. 4:14. Under the leadership of such a college the church however in the first times enjoyed a great measure of independence, it was in weighty matters regularly consulted. In Acts 1 the disciples come together to choose an apostle; in Acts 6 the church chooses the deacons; in Acts 15 it attends the meeting of apostles and elders; in 1 Cor. 5 it exercises discipline. The first synods were gatherings of the local church. But also the local churches all together form a unity. They also all together bear the singular name of ecclesia ; they all stand under the apostles, to whom the leadership and government of the whole church is entrusted; they are with each other one in Christ, one therefore in doctrine, in faith, in baptism, in love, they greet each other, Rom. 16:16, 1 Cor. 16:20, 2 Cor. 13:12, serve each other with gifts of love, Rom. 15:26, 1 Cor. 16:1, 2 Cor. 8:1, 4, 9:1, Gal. 2:10, and let each other read the letters which they receive from the apostles, Col. 4:16. It lay therefore in the nature of the matter, that these churches, which were spiritually one, would if need be consult with each other about matters of general interest. The first example thereof occurs in Acts 15, on occasion of the question whether the Gentiles could be saved without circumcision. The church of Antioch sent Paul and Barnabas and some others to Jerusalem, to exchange thoughts with the apostles and elders there about this important question and to come to agreement. The apostles and elders therefore held with these delegates from Antioch a meeting, 15:6, which perhaps was also attended by the church, 15:12, 22 (in verse 25 however kai hoi before adelphoi probably must be omitted). After much zetesis , inquiry, debate, not merely an advice was given, but in the Holy Spirit a decision taken, which bound the brethren in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia, communicated to them by letter and by Judas and Silas still orally, in a meeting of the church, explained, Acts 15:22-31. All these meetings, of which the New Testament reports, were meetings of the local church, only in Acts 15 attended by delegates from elsewhere. This custom was later, already in the second century, followed. In weighty matters, such as appointment and deposition of a bishop, excommunication, absolution from mortal sins etc., not only the presbytery gave its leadership but also the church its consent. Cyprian still says that from the beginning of his episcopate he did nothing without the counsel of his presbytery and the consent of the church, Ep. 14, 4. On the synods of the second and third century therefore not only bishops but also presbyters, deacons and ordinary church members are present. Even the council of Nicaea was, besides by bishops, also attended by presbyters, deacons and members, who took part in the debates. And the delegates who on church meetings were invited from neighboring churches, were in the first time by no means only bishops but also presbyters, deacons or other members of the church. But the development of the hierarchical idea brought with it that the consent of the church was asked less and less, that presbyters and deacons were detached from the church and changed into counselors and helpers of the bishop, and that the synods gradually were held only by bishops. Furthermore, in the second and third century all church meetings, attended by delegates from neighboring churches, were equal in rank; there was yet no hierarchy of church meetings, there were yet no provincial, metropolitan, ecumenical councils; all meetings of the churches took place in the name of Christ, made decisions in the Holy Spirit, and held for the whole Christendom (universal council, catholic). But therein also change came. Already in the third century there are here and there definitely provincial synods, that is, meetings of bishops in a certain province held. In the fourth century there came, as a result of the great disputes which divided the church, synods of bishops from different provinces. And the council of Nicaea, although by no means a representation of the whole Christendom, since it was attended by only a few bishops from the West, was yet called together by the emperor from all sides. Thus there came gradually an ordering of provincial, national, patriarchal, ecumenical councils, Sohm, Kirchenrecht 247-344. But the characteristic mark of an ecumenical council is hard to point out. It cannot lie therein that it is called together by the pope, for from the fourth to the tenth century it was convened by the emperor; nor also in the general validity and great significance of its decisions, for often the canons of ecumenical councils are rejected and those of provincial synods accepted; nor also therein that an ecumenical council represents the whole Christendom, for this has by no means always been the case with the so-called councils. Toward the end of the Middle Ages indeed the theory arose that a council was only ecumenical and infallible when it consisted of delegates from all churches. But this theory was of revolutionary origin, led in practice to all sorts of difficulties and was by Rome also never accepted. For Rome a council is only ecumenical when its decisions are approved by the pope and thereby obtain an infallible character binding the whole Christendom, Bellarmine, de conciliis et ecclesia lib. I II. Heinrich, Dogm. II 476 ff. Scheeben, Dogm. I 230 ff. Vering, Kirchenrecht 613 ff. etc.
In the Protestant churches, the synodal church government first came to development on French soil. In the Lutheran church, synods did arise, but these consisted only in gatherings of pastors. Zwingli set up synods in 1528 at Zurich, which were called together by the council, consisted of the ministers of town and country and some members of the council, and were chiefly to consider complaints against the doctrine and life of the ministers. Calvin likewise ordained in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances that the ministers should come together every three months to oversee one another's doctrine and life, and furthermore introduced in 1546 a yearly visitation. Franz Lambert designed in 1526 for Hesse a church order, in which both congregational meetings and synods, consisting of the ministers and delegates appointed by the congregations, were included, but this church order did not come into effect. A synodal church government first arose in France, where the churches greatly spread and, through need of unity, came together for the first time in synod at Paris on the 26th of May 1559 and united themselves in a common confession and church order. Remarkable in this is that the general synod arose first, that this introduced the provincial synods, and that later, in 1572, between these and the church councils the classis was inserted; compare likewise in Scotland. Such a synodal church government was then later also introduced in other Reformed churches, in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, America, and so forth. But soon opposition came against it from two sides. The Remonstrants, joining themselves to Zwingli and Erastus, ascribed the ecclesiastical power to the government and deduced therefrom that synods were indeed allowed but not commanded and not necessary for the being or well-being of the church, and that, when they were held, the right to call them together, to send delegates, to set the agenda, to preside, belonged to the government. And the Independents went yet further under the influence of the Anabaptist error, held every group of believers to be independent, and rejected all binding classical or synodal connection. The grounds that can be brought against the synodal church government are indeed not without weight. For the local churches in the New Testament are all fully independent with respect to one another; of a legal, binding classical or synodal connection there is not a word spoken. Such a connection also seems wholly at odds with the independence of the local churches, because it introduces assemblies that stand above the local churches and act with authority over against them, and thus again brings into the church of Christ an unlawful hierarchy and tyranny. And added to this is that the history of synods does not always give a favorable testimony of their usefulness, and often presents them as the cause of all sorts of strife and division, so that Gregory of Nazianzus could already say, "I have seen no good end of any synod"; and the proverb not unjustly says: every council begets war. But over against this, other considerations clearly set forth the necessity and usefulness of synods.
1º In the New Testament there is yet no classical or synodal connection of the churches, but there was also then yet no need for it, since the apostles themselves lived, assisted the congregations with counsel, and also cared for them through evangelists as their substitutes.
2º The congregations were also then already bound to one another in all sorts of ways by spiritual bonds, and received the right, not only to gather themselves, but also to send delegates to other congregations and there to ask decision in certain disputes; Acts 1, 6, 15, 21 show that synods in a wholly general sense are of divine permissive right.
3º Synods are not decidedly necessary for the essence of the church and are also not particularly commanded by God's Word, but they are allowed and necessary for the well-being of the church.
4º The necessity lies therein, that the unity of doctrine, discipline, and worship, to which the congregation is called; the order, peace, and love, which it has to preserve; and the common interests that are entrusted to it (such as training, calling, sending of servants; mission among the heathen; support of needy churches, and so forth) can come to their right in no other way than through synods.
5º Synods are no pedestal for but an undermining of all hierarchy; they maintain the independence of the local churches and preserve them from confusion, division, hierarchy of the pastor, domination of some members; they confirm the freedom of the individual members, by giving them support in connection with other churches and allowing appeal to higher assemblies.
6º Also they are no cause of division and strife, but a means to bring disputes, which always arise again in the church here on earth over doctrine, discipline, service, to decision in a peaceful way, through careful investigation and ample discussion.
7º In order that they may answer to their purpose, synods ought always to be assemblies of churches, whose members (pastors, elders, deacons, or ordinary members) are delegates of churches and bound to mandates from churches, which are called together by the churches themselves and not by government, pope, and so forth, and led by ecclesiastical persons chosen thereto, and which freely and independently, without interference of the government, judge and decide over ecclesiastical matters.
8º The ecclesiastical assemblies (local, classical, provincial, general, ecumenical) are not essentially different from one another. One assembly is not per se higher, weightier, less exposed to error, or more assured of the leading of the Holy Spirit than the other. For every church and every group of churches is independent over against the other; and all are in the same measure bound to the Word and partakers of the promise of the Spirit. In the ecclesiastical assemblies no representatives of the people but ecclesiastical office-bearers come together, who are called from Christ's side to the government of his church. They are thus distinguished, not by a different kind or higher but only by greater power, which is brought together there and extends over a wider area.
9º The authority of all ecclesiastical assemblies is no other than that of the churches themselves; it is subject to the Word of Christ. Christ is the only one who has authority in the churches and in their various assemblies; his Word alone decides; what seems good to the Holy Spirit in and through the members, that alone is binding in the church of Christ. But even these decisions taken according to God's Word and in the Holy Spirit the church can maintain in no other way than by moral means. It has no ruling, compelling but only a serving power.
Cf. Calvin, Inst. IV c. 9. Polanus, Synt. Bullinger, Van de Conciliën, Dordrecht 1611. Martyr, Loci Comm. Junius, Op. Theses Salmur. Amyraut, Du gouvernement de l’Eglise contre ceux qui veulent abolir l’usage et l’autorité des synodes, Saumur 1653. Heidegger, Corp. Theol. Turretinus, Theol. El. Synopsis pur. theol. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. Redevoering van C. Vitringa over de Synoden enz., uit het latijn door S. H. van Idsinga, Harlingen 1741. Moor. M. Vitringa. Ch. Hodge, Discussions on Church polity, New York 1878. Karl Lechler, Die neut. Lehre v. h. Amte 1857. Stahl, Die Kirchenverfassung u. s. w.
12. Thus the church stands with its own origin, essence, activity, and goal in the midst of the world. It is in every respect distinct from that world, yet it never stands separated beside it. Indeed, various movements in Christendom have placed church and world in an absolute, ethical opposition to each other, and identified creation and re-creation with sin and grace. But these movements, however mighty they have at times been, have yet never ruled the history of Christianity, and could always only lead a sectarian life alongside the churches. Apart from these movements, there are but two ways in which the relation of church and world can be principally determined: the Roman and the Protestant, the supernatural and the ethical.
Rome views the natural not as sinful like Anabaptism and does not come to avoidance and separation, but teaches indeed that the natural is of lower order, easily becomes a cause of sin, and therefore needs the bridle of the supernatural. Just as the image of God as a supernatural gift was added to natural man, so from above mechanically comes grace to nature, the church to the world, the higher to the lower morality; whoever wishes to live according to Rome's ideal must become an ascetic, suppress the natural, and devote himself wholly to religion; whoever cannot do that receives for the natural the necessary playroom, and finds in the supernatural the boundary that determines it.
Wholly different was the relation that Protestantism assumed between church and world. It replaced the quantitative, supernaturalistic opposition with the ethical. The natural was not of lower order but was in its kind just as good and pure as the supernatural, for it was created by the same God who in re-creation revealed himself as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Only it was corrupted by sin and therefore had to be reconciled and renewed by the grace of Christ. Grace serves here not to avoid, suppress, or kill the natural, but precisely to free it from its sinful corruption and make it truly natural again.
It is true that Luther in applying these principles stayed halfway, left the natural undisturbed, and limited Christianity all too much to the ethical-religious realm. But Calvin, the man of action who came after Luther and therefore could mirror himself in Luther, continued the work of the Reformation and sought to reform all of life through Christianity. Avoidance is the word of the Anabaptists; asceticism that of the Romans; renewal and sanctification that of the Protestant, specifically of the Reformed Christian.
This last view is without doubt the richest and most beautiful. For there is but one God in both creation and re-creation. The God of creation, of the Old Testament, is no lower God than that of re-creation, than the Father of Christ, than the God of the New Covenant. Christ, the mediator of the New Covenant, is also the one through whom God created all things. And the Holy Spirit, who is the author of regeneration and sanctification, is the same who in the beginning hovered over the waters and adorned the heavens.
Creation and re-creation cannot therefore stand over against each other as lower and higher. They are both good and pure, both glorious works of the one and triune God. Furthermore, sin, which has entered the world, has indeed corrupted everything, not only the spiritual, the ethical-religious life but also all the natural, the body, the family, society, the whole world. But it is yet no substance, no matter, but form, and thus not identical with the created, but dwelling in and on the created and always able to be loosened and removed from it by the grace of God. Substantially and materially the creation after the fall is the same as before that time; it remains a work of God, and as such to be honored and praised.
To recover that fallen world, God indeed brings the powers of grace into that creation. But that grace too is no substance or matter, enclosed in word or sacrament and dispensed by the priest, but it is a renewing, re-creating power. It is not per se supernatural, but it bears that character only because of sin, and thus in a certain sense accidentally and temporarily, to restore the creation.
This grace is dispensed in twofold form, as common grace for restraint, as special grace for renewal. Both have their unity in Christ, who is king in the realm of power and grace; both are directed against sin; both bring and keep creation and re-creation in connection with each other. Even the world after the fall is not left to itself, and not stripped of all grace, but it is borne and spared by common grace, guided and preserved for the special grace in Christ.
Separation and suppression are therefore unlawful and impossible. Man and Christian are not two beings. The creation is taken up and restored in the re-creation. The man who is regenerated is substantially no other than he was before regeneration. Incorporated into the church, he yet remains in the world, and has only to keep himself from the evil one. Just as Christ, the Son of God, assumed from Mary the full human nature and therewith deemed nothing human and nothing natural foreign to himself, so the Christian is nothing other than the regenerated, renewed, and therefore the true man.
The same people who are Christians are and remain in the same calling with which they were called; they remain members of the family, citizens of society, subjects of the government, practitioners of science and art, men or women, parents or children, lords or servants, and so on. The relation that must exist between church and world is therefore in the first place of an organic, moral, spiritual nature.
Christ is prophet, priest, king even now, and he works through his Word and Spirit on the whole world. Through him there goes forth from everyone who believes in him a renewing, sanctifying influence into family, society, state, occupation, business, art, science, and so on. The spiritual life is destined to make the natural and moral life in full depth and extent answer again to the law of God.
Along this organic way, Christian truth and Christian life are brought into all circles of natural life, so that family and home life are restored to honor, the woman again regarded as the equal of the man, science and art Christianized, the level of moral life raised, society and state reformed, laws and institutions, customs and habits stamped Christian.
But there is yet another regulation of the relation of church and world, which is much more difficult and about which the greatest difference of opinion exists. Christ rules his church namely also through offices and institutions; and the question is whether the relation of the church to the various realms of natural life is also to be regulated officially and institutionally.
Papalism and Caesaropapism stand here over against each other. Caesaropapism regulates the relation so that the church is subjected to the Christian state and has to conduct itself according to its laws. There is some truth in this; the relation of the church to the state is wholly different since the latter has become Christian. Before the government was Christian, for example, many more sins fell under Christian discipline than after that time. Attending pagan festivals, idolatry, emperor worship, Sabbath violation, oath-breaking, blasphemy, marriages in forbidden degrees, abominable sins of fornication, adultery, etc., were indeed recognized and punished as sins by the church but not by the state.
Since the government has been Christianized, much greater agreement has come in moral view and judgment. In many cases the church can thus wait for the handling of scandalous transgressions by justice and needs no court of its own. But yet too much is deduced from this when all power is taken from the church and entrusted to the Christian government. For essentially the power of the church has remained the same, though its exercise has been importantly modified.
For the ministry of word and sacrament is the inalienable right of the church; furthermore, there always remain many sins, such as Sabbath violation, fornication, drunkenness, cursing, etc., which are not at all or only, when they are very public and scandalous, moderately punished by the government; and finally the church has also with those sinners whom the government punishes its own task, for the government is satisfied with the punishment, but the church seeks to convince, to bring to conversion, and to preserve (Calvin, Institutes IV.11.4).
On the other side stands the papal system, which indeed deserves praise insofar as it maintains the independence and freedom of the church, but otherwise, if not the whole world, yet all baptized Christendom in all its spheres and relations, juridically and legally wants to subject to the pope; family, society, state, art, science, etc., must be ecclesiastical, for ecclesiastical is identical with Christian, Roman, papal.
This claim of Rome is not meant morally and spiritually, so that everyone who does not submit to the pope stands guilty before God; but it bears specifically this character, that everyone who refuses obedience to the pope also legally and juridically stands guilty before this vicar of Christ, can be punished by him if he deems it useful and has the power, and not only with spiritual and moral means but also with bodily and civil punishments can be forced to obedience.
From this papal tyranny, the faith-courage and spiritual strength of Luther and Calvin have freed us. Their mighty reforming deed consisted in this, that they restored Christianity in its religious-ethical meaning, as the religion of grace, and freed the natural not from this Christianity but from the jurisdiction of the Roman church.
From this it followed naturally that the connection between church and world, besides in the above-mentioned organic way, could only be laid contractually. It is true that Calvin held fast with tooth and nail that the government was subject to God's word, had to maintain both tables of the law, and to listen to the church as interpreter of God's word and also civilly to punish various sins over which the church exercised discipline. He drew the boundary line between church and state indeed clearly and sharply but he drew it differently than we; the area on which both had something to say was much larger than it is now determined by us; the government as Christian had also on its territory and in its measure to watch for the honor of God, for the flourishing of his church, for the extension of his kingdom.
But nevertheless, the relation between church and state was contractual and free. The church could do nothing other than preach God's word, witness in his name of his commandments; but if the government or whoever refused to listen, then the church, then Calvin himself, then every Christian had no more power and also no right to coercion. Then nothing remained but negative resistance, passive resistance (Calvin, Institutes IV.20.29; cf. for others, Moor VI 513).
Even such resistance was a deed, for as Doumergue so beautifully says in Calvin le fondateur des libertés modernes (Montauban 1898, p. 14): "It is submission, but of the body and not of the soul. Humbled before God who chastises him, the Calvinist remains the inexorable judge of the despot who oppresses him. There are submissions more deadly to tyranny than revolts!" But all right to coercion and punishment was yet taken from the church over against the government and over against every man, and Christianity restored and honored in its pure spiritual power.
The government remained, like every man, for its unbelief, for its rejection of God's word, for its transgression of his commandments, for the persecution and oppression of his church accountable only to God. However, if the government freely and independently professed the Christian, the Reformed religion—as indeed was always preached as its duty and calling—then it followed that it in its quality and on its territory had to promote this religion and to ward off and root out heresy and idolatry.
The fault therein lay not in this, that the promotion of God's honor and service was entrusted to the Christian government, but that the boundaries of state and church were wrongly drawn and unbelief, heresy, etc., were regarded as state crimes. In the century of the Reformation this could hardly be otherwise. But since the task of the government has been limited, the peoples have become free and mature, the churches more and more split and divide, and all sorts of directions in thinking and living have arisen, the distinction between crime and sin is seen more clearly and all coercion as precisely in conflict with the Christian confession is recognized by ever more.
In regulating the relation between church and state, therefore, the following is to be held fast: 1. that the church, though by its pluriformity its testimony is weakened, cannot let go of the demand that all creatures, art, science, family, society, state, etc., submit to the Lord's word; 2. that this demand is only a preaching, a moral testimony and may never directly or indirectly be urged by coercion or punishment; 3. that a Christian, Reformed government has the calling to promote God's honor, to protect his church, and to destroy the kingdom of the antichrist; 4. that it however can or may never do this except with means that are in agreement with the nature of the gospel of Christ, and only on that territory that is entrusted to it for guarding; 5. that it, itself accountable for its stance toward God's word to him, may not interfere in the rights of the individual man nor also in those of family, society, art, science and thus is not accountable for what happens within these territories against God's word and law; 6. that it has to draw the boundaries between sin and crime according to the demand of the gospel and in accordance with the guidance of God's providence in the history of the peoples; which boundaries however do not coincide with those between the first and second table of the law, for many sins against the second table fall outside the oversight and punishment of the government, and many others against the first table (oath-breaking, Sabbath violation) are also punishable for the Christian government; 7. that fixed boundaries can be indicated by no one in the abstract, since they vary with people and age and only by the testimony of the people's conscience can somewhat be determined in their direction.
1. All salvation and blessedness flows to fallen man from grace as God's virtue. Objectively, that grace with all its benefits has appeared in Christ, who acquired them in the way of the covenant and distributes them. The fellowship of those who partake of Christ with all his benefits bears the name of church or congregation. Now the question arises whether Christ, in the imparting of these his benefits, does or does not make use of means. The mystics are all inclined to answer this question in the negative. Entirely in agreement with their dualistic starting point, they cannot think of grace as dependent on or bound to outward signs and actions; God himself alone, or the Christ in us, the Spirit or the inward word or light works grace in man, and word and sacrament can do no more than indicate and portray that inward grace; the written word expresses what is written in the heart of every believer, and the sacraments outwardly set before the eyes what Christ has inwardly bestowed through his Spirit. Mysticism finally amounted to the same as rationalism, which through Socinianism and Remonstrantism saw in the sacraments only ceremonial precepts, signs of remembrance, and acts of confession.
Directly opposite stands Romanism, which thinks of grace as absolutely bound to means. According to Rome, the church, the visible church borne by the invisible Spirit, is the proper, true, perfect means of grace, the sacrament par excellence. In her, Christ continues his God-manly life on earth, fulfills his prophetic, kingly, and especially his priestly office, imparts the fullness of his grace and truth; the church is Christ on earth, Christ as he, after his completed work of redemption, has entered into the development of the human race bound to space and time. And that grace, which Christ earned and imparted to his church, serves above all to lift man from the natural to the supernatural order; it is a grace that elevates, a supernatural, physical power, which is infused into the natural man by the priest in the sacrament ex opere operato. Just as in Christ the divine and human natures, in the church the invisible Spirit and the visible institute, so in the sacrament the spiritual grace and the visible sign are inseparably bound to each other; outside Christ, outside the church, outside the priest, outside the sacrament there is therefore no salvation. It is true, Christ continues in the church not only his priestly but also his prophetic and kingly office. But the doctrine of Christ proclaimed in the church serves only to awaken faith, that is, assent, and the discipline maintained in the church serves only to foster obedience to the moral law; faith and obedience are neither the grace itself, but its preparation and its fruit. The word of God, which moreover in Rome is contained in Scripture and tradition and is conceived as a law, therefore has only a preparatory, pedagogical significance, and faith is only one of the seven preparations for grace. The sacrament dispensed by the priest is the proper means of grace, by which true righteousness either begins, or once begun is increased, or if lost is repaired.
Between this mystical undervaluation and magical overvaluation of the means of grace, the Reformation took its position and brought about a great change in the place and character of church, office, and means of grace. For according to the Reformation, Christ is the complete Savior, the only Mediator between God and men, and the church is in the first place the communion of saints, not the mediatrix of salvation, but the assembly of believers who live in fellowship with Christ. Indeed, Christ has instituted offices in that congregation, but all those offices are not a priesthood but a ministry, absolutely bound to Christ's word and having no other power than the power of that word. The relation of Scripture and church is thus in Protestantism entirely different from that in Romanism. In Rome, the church precedes the Scripture, the church is not built on the Scripture but the Scripture has come forth from the church, the Scripture needs the church but the church does not need the Scripture. But the Reformation placed the church again on the foundation of Scripture, and the Scripture high above the church. Not the church, but the Scripture, the word of God became the means of grace par excellence; even the sacrament was subordinated to the word and had without the word no significance or power whatever. And now that word was indeed, according to Christ's institution, administered in the midst of the congregation by the teacher; but that did not prevent that word from being given into everyone's hand, that it was clear to everyone who searched it with a desire for salvation, that it did its work not only when publicly proclaimed, but also when investigated and read at home. Thus the Christian man who accepted that word not merely with a historical faith but with trust of heart was freed from priestly dominion; there stood between him and Christ no one or nothing; through faith he had the whole salvation; and in the sacrament he received thereof the sign and seal. Thus the Reformation modified the Roman doctrine of the means of grace.
But on the other hand, there threatened the danger of mysticism, which entirely rejected the means of grace and could adduce all sorts of grounds for it. For God's omnipotence might not be bound by such outward means; he was sovereign and free and could, but did not need to, make use of such means for the distribution of the treasures of grace. That grace was also not a material something, no physical power, no superadded gift, no elevation of human nature, but it consisted chiefly in restoration to God's favor, in the forgiveness of sins, in renewal after his image. Therefore it could not be enclosed in a sensible sign as in a vessel nor distributed by the minister. Christ was and remained the only one who, after he had acquired it, could also distribute it. He appointed no vicar on earth and instituted no priest, but he himself from heaven continued to exercise his prophetic, priestly, and kingly office; the sign he might entrust to his servant, but he himself remained the only distributor of the signified thing. And did this not appear in reality? Thousands received every day the sign of word and sacrament without partaking of the grace; and conversely, thousands of covenant children died daily who never received a means of grace and whose salvation believers might not doubt on the ground of God's word.
Alarmed by these considerations, the Lutherans partly retraced their steps and again absolutely bound grace to the means, introduced emergency baptism, regarded baptism as the washing away of sins itself, denied faith to the little children. And also in the Reformed churches, particularly in the Anglican, this same Romanizing tendency has repeatedly come to the fore and to dominance. But originally the Reformation took a different standpoint. One could not limit God's omnipotence and freedom; he could also without outward means glorify his grace in the heart of sinners; if he made use of men and signs therein, that was to be ascribed only to his good pleasure, to his great love and grace. Therefore Zwingli taught that God had even chosen, regenerated, and led to heavenly blessedness heathens who had never heard of the gospel. And although the other Reformers did not go so far, they had to admit, especially in the case of covenant children dying young, that God could regenerate and save also without word or sacrament solely through the Holy Spirit. Yet they presented these cases as exceptions and held as a rule that word and sacrament for those who grow up were the ordinary means by which God gave his Spirit and imparted his grace. The working of regeneration and faith through the preaching of the word is the ordinary economy and dispensation of the Lord, which he is wont to observe in calling his own.
This answer does not satisfy, because the number of children who are saved without means of grace is much greater than is generally supposed and cannot be booked as an exception to the rule; and also because in those who grow up, regeneration by the Holy Spirit to baptism, to the hearing of God's word, and to faith, if not always precedes, yet certainly can precede. Hence among the Lutherans grace was more and more bound to the means, and particularly regeneration to baptism, and among the Reformed, who conceived the sacraments as signs and seals of bestowed grace, regeneration was thought of as preceding baptism, so that the means of grace did not serve to regenerate but to bring the regenerated to faith and conversion. Yet this later development was not free from one-sidedness. That among the Lutherans led back to Rome, and that among the Reformed ran the danger of regarding word, sacrament, church, and office, yes even the person and work of Christ for the acquisition and application of salvation as superfluous and only still necessary for the revelation of life and truth outwardly in the world. But thus the significance of the means of grace is weakened and their concept too much restricted.
For the means of grace of word and sacrament do not stand alone by themselves but are closely connected with church and office, with Christ's person and work. One can well ask whether God could not regenerate and save without Christ and forgive sins without satisfaction. But such questions lead to nothing; we must rest in God's good pleasure, which distributes salvation in no other way than in and through Christ. He is the Mediator between God and men, the only name under heaven given to men for salvation. But further, it has likewise been God's good pleasure to distribute salvation in no other way than through and in the congregation of Christ. Whether God, as Zwingli taught, worked his electing grace also among the heathens can here, since this in any case, according to the confession of all Christian churches, counts as an exception, remain undiscussed. The rule is that God voluntarily binds the distribution of his grace to the congregation of Christ. The church is the fellowship and thereby also the mother of believers. God establishes his covenant with the parents and in them with their children. He imparts his benefits in the way of the covenant. In that sense it is correct that the church as the communion of saints is the great means of grace of which Christ according to his good pleasure makes use to gather his elect from the beginning to the end of the world. The church in this sense certainly intends the salvation of the elect; that is not her only reason for existence; she serves also for the perfecting of the saints, for the building up of the body of Christ, for the preaching of the gospel to all creatures, for the glorification of God. But she is there nevertheless to form on earth that holy circle within which Christ imparts all his benefits, also that of regeneration.
To that end he imparted his Spirit to her, poured out all sorts of gifts in her, instituted the offices in her, entrusted to her the ministry of word and sacrament. And all these too are means which Christ employs to bring those given him by the Father and to lead them to heavenly blessedness. Yes, the whole guidance of life with its changes of prosperity and adversity is in the hand of the Holy Spirit often a means to bring the elect to Christ or into closer fellowship with him. The concept of means of grace can even be conceived more broadly, so that it also includes what on our side is necessary to enjoy the benefits of the covenant for the first time and continually, such as faith, conversion, struggle against sin, prayer. Now it deserves no recommendation to include all this under the means of grace. For Christ is not a means but the Mediator, the acquirer and applier of salvation. The church is no means of grace alongside word and sacrament, for all the power entrusted to her consists in nothing else than in the ministry of both; church and office give no grace by themselves but only through word and sacrament. And faith, conversion, prayer are rather fruits than means of grace; they are no objective institutions but subjective conditions for possessing and enjoying the remaining benefits of the covenant. In the strict sense only word and sacrament are to be regarded as means of grace, that is, as outward, sensible actions and signs which Christ has given to his church and to which he has bound the imparting of his grace.
But yet these may not for a moment be detached from the person and work of Christ, nor from the church as organism and as institute. Christ brings his own in various ways, and he can do this because he alone, as the acquirer, so is and remains the distributor of grace. He does it therefore without or through word and sacrament; but he does it nevertheless always through the inward calling of that Spirit whom he gave to the congregation; in the fellowship of that church which he charged to preach the gospel to all creatures; in the way of that covenant which received the gospel as content and the sacrament as sign and seal.
2. Lutherans and Reformed agree in this. Yet the latter do not bring the word of God under the means of grace in discussion, because they usually have already handled it earlier in dogmatics in a separate chapter, Calvin, Inst. II 7-9. Musculus, Loci Comm. § 11. 20. Junius, Theses Theol. § 23. 24. Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 18. 22, or also about the law in the covenant of works, and about the gospel in the covenant of grace, Marck, Med. Theol. c. 11. 17. This peculiar method of treatment gives no right to the claim that the Reformed did not acknowledge the word of God as a means of grace, for time and again they state the opposite, cf. for example Conf. Belg. 24. Heid. Cat. qu. 65. But it may well be inferred from it that the word of God had for the Reformed a much richer meaning than that it only served as a means of grace in the narrower sense of the word. The word of God is also distinguished from the sacrament in that the latter only serves to strengthen faith and thus only has a place in the midst of the congregation. But the word of God, both as law and as gospel, is the revelation of God's will, is the promulgation of the covenant of works and of grace, concerns all people and creatures, and has a universal meaning. The sacrament can only be administered by the lawfully called minister in the assembly of believers, but the word of God also has an existence and place outside of that and even then exercises its manifold working. As a means of grace in the proper sense alongside the sacrament, the word of God only comes into discussion insofar as it is openly preached by the teacher; then all the emphasis falls on the word preached in God's name and by virtue of his sending. But as a rule, people have already long come into contact with that word in the family, at school, through address or reading, before they heard it openly proclaimed in the congregation. The public ministry of the word thus by no means encompasses all the power that goes out from the word; it also serves to work faith in those who still lack it, but much more to strengthen it in believers in their assembly. In a Christian society, the word of God comes to man in all sorts of ways, in all kinds of forms, from all sides, and it comes to him from his earliest youth onward. Yes, God often brings that word in the inward calling, even before consciousness awakens, to the hearts of children, to regenerate and sanctify them, just as He writes the work of the law in every man's heart from his first existence and implants the seed of religion in him. Therefore, a distinction must be made here between the word of God and Scripture. Not in the sense as if the word of God is only to be found in Scripture and Scripture itself is not; but in this other sense, that the word of God by no means always and even not in most cases comes to us as Scripture, in the form of Scripture, but that it, taken up from Scripture into the consciousness of the congregation, from there again goes out in the form of admonition and address, upbringing and instruction, book and writing, tract and discourse to the most diverse people and does its working. And always God stands behind that word; it is He who causes it to go out to people in those diverse forms and thus calls them to repentance and life. In Scripture, too, the expression word of God is never identical with Scripture, although Scripture may without doubt be called God's word by us. A single place may be pointed out where the expression word of God is applied to a part of Holy Scripture, for example, to the written law. But otherwise, word of God in Scripture is never the same as Scripture, which is also impossible for that reason, because Scripture was not yet complete then. The expression word of God has in Scripture various meanings and can denote the power of God, by which He creates and upholds the world, or his revelation to the prophets, or the content of the revelation or the gospel, which was proclaimed by the apostles, cf. volume I 338. But always it is a word of God , that is, never a sound alone but a power, no mere announcement but also an accomplishment of his will, Isa. 55:11. By the word God creates and upholds the world, Gen. 1:3, Ps. 33:6, 148:5, Isa. 48:13, Rom. 4:17, 2 Cor. 4:6, Heb. 1:3, 11:3, Jesus stills the sea, Mark 4:39, heals the sick, Matt. 8:16, casts out devils, 9:6, raises the dead, Luke 7:14, 8:54, John 5:25, 28, 11:43 etc. By the word He also works in the moral and spiritual realm.
3. The word that God uses to make known and fulfill his will in the moral and spiritual realm is to be distinguished in law and gospel. When Jesus appears on earth to announce the coming of the kingdom promised in the Old Testament, Mark 1:15, to bring to tax collectors and sinners, to the poor and captives, the gospel of forgiveness and salvation, Matthew 5:1ff., 11:5, 28-30, Luke 4:18, 19, 19:10 etc., he naturally comes into conflict with the Pharisaic, legalistic view of religion that ruled in his time. Yet he rejects the human traditions of the elders, Matthew 5:21ff., 15:9, and though he has another view of murder, Matthew 5:16, adultery, 5:27, oath, 5:33, fasting, 6:16, divorce, Matthew 19:9, Sabbath, Mark 2:27; he upholds the whole law, also in its ceremonial parts, Matthew 5:23, 24, 17:24-27, 23:2, 3, 23, Mark 1:44, 11:16; he explains it in its spiritual sense, Matthew 5-7, lays stress on its ethical content, views love to God and the neighbor as its chief sum, Matthew 7:12, 9:13, 12:7, Mark 7:15, 12:28-34, and desires a different, more abundant righteousness than that of the Pharisees, Matthew 5:20. He himself, though greater than the temple, Matthew 12:6, has placed himself under the law, Matthew 3:15, and has come to fulfill the law and the prophets, 5:17. And therefore he knows that, though he never urges the abolition of the law, his disciples are inwardly free from the law, Matthew 17:26, that his church is not founded on the law but on the confession of his Messiahship, Matthew 16:18, that in his blood a new covenant is established, Matthew 26:28, that in one word the new wine also demands new wineskins, Matthew 9:17, and the days of temple and people and law are numbered, Mark 13:2. Jesus desires no revolutionary overthrow of the legal dispensation of the Old Covenant, but a reformation and renewal which is born naturally from its complete fulfillment, cf. volume III 217. And so it has indeed come to pass. The church in Jerusalem held in the first time still to temple and law, Acts 2:46, 3:1, 10:14, 21:20, 22:12. But a new view prepared itself. With the conversion of the Gentiles the question arose as to the meaning of the Mosaic law. And Paul was the first who fully understood that in the death of Christ the handwriting of the law was blotted out, Colossians 2:14. Paul understands by νομος, unless a further determination indicates otherwise, e.g., Romans 3:27, Galatians 6:2, always the Mosaic law, the whole Torah, including also the ceremonial commandments, Romans 9:4, Galatians 2:12, 4:10, 5:3, Philippians 3:5, 6. And he views that law not, as the Epistle to the Hebrews, as an imperfect, preparatory, Old Testament dispensation of the covenant of grace, which disappears when the high priest and surety of the better covenant has come, but as revelation of God's will, as religious-ethical demand and requirement, as a regulation willed by God of the relation between him and man. And of this law, so understood, Paul now teaches that it is indeed holy and good, and given by God, Romans 2:18, 7:22, 25, 9:4, 2 Corinthians 3:3, 7, but instead of, as the Pharisees claimed, being able to bestow righteousness, it is powerless through the flesh, Romans 8:3, stirs up desire, 7:7, 8, increases transgression, 5:20, Galatians 3:19, works wrath, curse, and death, Romans 4:15, 2 Corinthians 3:6, Galatians 3:10, and is only for a time, for pedagogical reasons, come in between, Romans 5:20, Galatians 3:19, 24, 4:2, 3. Therefore this law has now also in Christ, the seed of the promise, reached its end, Romans 10:4; the believer is free from the law, Galatians 4:26ff., 5:1, because he is redeemed by Christ from the curse of the law, Galatians 3:13, 4:5, and has part in the Spirit of sonship, the Spirit of freedom, Romans 8:15, 2 Corinthians 3:16, 17, Galatians 5:18. This freedom of faith, however, does not abolish the law but establishes it, Romans 3:31, because its righteousness is fulfilled precisely in those who walk according to the Spirit, 8:4. For that Spirit renews the believers, so that they have delight in God's law according to the inward man and examine what God's holy will is, Romans 7:22, 12:2, Ephesians 5:10, Philippians 1:10, while they are urged to the doing of God's will by all kinds of motives, the great mercy of God, the example of Christ, the dear price for which they are bought, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, etc.
Cf. on the law in the N.T. Weiss, Bibl. Theol. Holtzmann Neut. Theol. I 130 f. II 22 f. L. Jacob, Jesu Stellung zum mos. Gesetz, Gött. 1893. Grafe, Die Paulin. Lehre v. Gesetz², Leipzig Mohr 1893. Zehnpfund, Das Gesetz in den paulin. Briefen, Neue Kirchl. Zeits. 1897 S. 384-419. Art. νομος by Cremer etc.
4. This opposition between law and gospel was in the Christian church on the one side, by antinomianism in its sundry shapes of Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Paulicianism, Anabaptism, Hattemism, and so forth, still further sharpened and made into an unyielding strife. The whole Old Testament came from a lower God, from a wrathful, jealous, vengeful God, and was now replaced by the wholly other revelation of the God of love, the Father of Christ. On the other side, the opposition between law and gospel was by nomism in its sundry shapes of Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism, Romanism, Socinianism, Rationalism, and so forth, weakened and wiped out. Law and gospel were already by the church fathers and later by scholastic and Roman theologians made one with Old and New Testament and then not set against each other in opposition but deemed as a lower and higher revelation of God's will. Law and gospel differ not therein, that the first only demands and the second only promises, for both hold commands, threats, and promises; mysteries, promises, precepts; things to be believed, hoped for, and done; not only Moses, but also Christ was a lawgiver. But in all this the gospel of the New Testament, the new law, far surpasses the law of the Old Testament, the old law; the mysteries (Trinity, incarnation, satisfaction, and so forth) are in the New Testament much more clearly revealed, the promises are much richer in content and embrace above all spiritual and everlasting goods, the laws are much more glorious and lighter, since ceremonial and civil laws are done away and replaced by a few ceremonies. Furthermore, the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The law was timely and meant for one folk; the gospel is everlasting and must be brought to all folks. The law was unwhole, a shadow and pattern, the gospel is whole and the body of the goods itself. The law bred fear and bondage, the gospel wakens love and freedom. The law could not make righteous in full sense, it gave no riches of grace, it bestowed no everlasting blessedness, but the gospel bestows in the sacrament the strength of grace, which enables one to fulfill God's commands and to gain everlasting life. In one word, the law is the unwhole gospel, the gospel the whole law; the gospel was in the law as tree in seed, as grain in ear, cf. part III and further Suicerus s.v. law and gospel. Augustine, City of God VIII 11. In Gospel of John tract. 30. On the Spirit and the Letter 19. 20. Lombard, Sentences III dist. 25. 40. Thomas, Summa Theologica III qu. 106-108. Council of Trent VI can. 19-21. Bellarmine, On Justification IV c. 2 sq. and so forth. Insofar now as the Old and New Testament dispensation of the covenant of grace according to its eye-catching form following the Holy Scripture can be named with the name of law and gospel, the distinction made by Rome between both is not in all parts but yet in main thing well to be approved. But Rome made Old and New Covenant wholly one with law and gospel, misread the gospel in the Old and the law in the New Testament, took the whole teaching proclaimed by Christ and the apostles as gospel, took therein not only promises but also laws and threats, and thus made the gospel into a second law. The Pauline opposition of law and gospel was wiped out. For although it is that Paul under the law understands the whole Old Testament dispensation, he views it then just in its lawish form and sets it so straight against the gospel. And also when he does that, he acknowledges that the lawish dispensation by no means did away the promise that was already made to Abraham, Gal. 3:17, 21, that also in the days of the Old Covenant the gospel was preached, Gal. 3:8, that also then righteousness was gained out of and through faith, Rom. 4:11, 12, 11:32, Gal. 3:6, 7. Of the law as law, thought away from the promise to which it in the Old Testament was made serviceable, Paul asserts that it cannot make righteous, that it increases sin, that it is a ministry of damnation and just thereby prepares the fulfillment of the promise and makes needful another righteousness, namely the righteousness of God in Christ through faith. And this opposition of law and gospel was again seen by the Reformation. Indeed there are sayings among church fathers that also witness to a better insight, cf. quotes in Suicerus, t.a.p., in Bibliotheca studii theol. from most doctors of the early age collected, at Is. Crispinus 1565. Gerhard, Loci XIV 16. But it comes to no clearness, because they always again mix the distinction between law and gospel with that between Old and New Covenant. But the Reformers, on the one hand holding fast the oneness of the covenant of grace in its two dispensations against the Anabaptists, have on the other hand grasped the sharp contrast of law and gospel and thereby again restored the own character of the Christian religion as religion of grace. For although it is that law and gospel in broader sense can be used for the old and new dispensation of the covenant of grace, in their own meaning they yet name two revelations of God's will that in being differ from each other. Also the law is God's will, Rom. 2:18, 20, holy and wise and good, spiritual, Rom. 7:12, 14, 12:10, giving life to him who keeps it, Rom. 2:13, 3:12; but it is through sin become powerless, does not make righteous but stirs up lust, increases sin, works wrath, kills and curses and damns, Rom. 3:20, 4:15, 5:20, 7:5, 8, 9, 13, 2 Cor. 3:6ff., Gal. 3:10, 13, 19. And over against that stands the gospel of Christ, the good tidings, that holds nothing less than the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises, Mark 1:15, Acts 13:32, Eph. 3:6, that comes to us from God's side, Rom. 1:1, 2, 2 Cor. 11:7, has Christ as content, Rom. 1:3, Eph. 3:6 and brings nothing else than grace, Acts 20:24, atonement, 2 Cor. 5:18, forgiveness, Rom. 4:3-8, righteousness, Rom. 3:21, 22, peace, Eph. 6:15, freedom, Gal. 5:13, life, Rom. 1:17, Phil. 2:16, and so forth. As demand and gift, as command and promise, as sin and grace, as sickness and healing, as death and life stand law and gospel here over against each other. Although they agree therein that they both have God as author, both speak of one same whole righteousness, both address the man to bring him to everlasting life, yet they differ therein that the law comes forth from God's holiness, the gospel from God's grace; that the law is known from nature, the gospel only through special revelation; that the law demands whole righteousness and the gospel bestows it; that the law leads through works to everlasting life and the gospel makes works come forth from the everlasting life bestowed in faith; that the law now damns man and the gospel acquits him; that the law addresses all men and the gospel only those who live under it, and so forth. On account of this distinction, there even came difference over whether the preaching of faith and repentance, which yet seemed a condition and demand, truly belonged to the gospel and not rather with Flacius, Gerhard, Quenstedt, Voetius, Witsius, Cocceius, Moor, and others to be reckoned to the law. And indeed in the strictest sense there are in the gospel no demands and conditions, but only promises and gifts; faith and repentance are just as much as justification and so forth benefits of the covenant of grace. But so the gospel never comes concrete; it is in practice always bound with the law and is then also through all the Scripture always woven together with the law. The gospel always takes the law for granted, and also needs it in the ministry. It is after all brought to reasonable and moral men, who are answerable to God for themselves and therefore must be called to faith and repentance. The demanding, calling form in which the gospel appears is borrowed from the law; every man is not first through the gospel but is by nature through the law bound to believe God on his word and thus also to take the gospel, in which he speaks to man. Therefore the gospel from the outset lays claim on all men, binds it in their conscience, for that God who speaks in the gospel is no other than he who has made himself known to them in his law. Faith and repentance are therefore demanded of man in the name of God's law, by virtue of the bond in which man as reasonable creature stands to God; and that demand addresses not only the elect and reborn, but all men without distinction. But they themselves are yet content of the gospel, no workings or fruits of the law. For the law indeed demands faith in God in general, but not that special faith that directs itself to Christ, and the law can indeed work regret, penitence, but no repentance, which rather is fruit of faith. And just because faith and repentance, though man is by nature bound thereto by the law, are content of the gospel, there can be speech of a law, of a command, of an obedience of faith, Rom. 1:5, 3:27, 1 John 3:23, of being disobedient to and judged according to the gospel, Rom. 2:16, 10:16, and so forth. Law and gospel, viewed concrete, differ not so much therein that the law always appears in commanding and the gospel in promising form, for also the law has promises, and the gospel admonitions and duties. But they differ above all in content: the law demands that man work out his own righteousness and the gospel bids him to forsake all self-righteousness and take that of Christ and even bestows thereto the gift of faith. And in that bond stand law and gospel not only before and at the beginning of repentance; but in that bond they stay through all the Christian life, even to death. The Lutherans have almost only eye for the accusing, condemning working of the law and therefore know no higher blessedness than freedom from the law. The law is only needful because of sin. In the whole state there is no law. God is free from the law; Christ was utterly not for himself under the law; the believer stands no more under the law. The Lutherans indeed speak of a threefold use of the law, not only of a political (civil) use, to curb sin, and a pedagogical use, to waken knowledge of sin, but also of a didactic use, to be to believers a rule of life. But this last use is yet only and alone therefore needful, because and insofar as believers still remain sinners and by the law must be held in check and led to ongoing knowledge of sin. In itself with faith and grace the law ceases and loses all meaning. But the Reformed thought wholly otherwise. The political use and the pedagogical use of the law are but by chance become needful through sin; even if these fall away, the foremost use remains, the didactic, normative use. The law is yet outflow of God's being; Christ was as man of himself under the law; Adam had before the fall the law written in his heart; with the believer it is again graven on the tables of his heart by the Holy Ghost; and in heaven all shall walk according to the Lord's law. The gospel is timely but the law is everlasting and is just by the gospel restored. The freedom from the law consists then also not therein that the Christian has no more to do with that law, but it lies herein that the law from the Christian no more as condition of blessedness demands, can no more condemn and damn him. But otherwise he has delight in God's law after the inward man and thinks on it day and night. And therefore that law must always in the midst of the church, in bond with the gospel, be preached. Law and gospel, the whole word, the full counsel of God is content of the preaching. Much broader room than in the teaching of misery takes the law with the Reformed in the teaching of thankfulness. Cf. Luther in Köstlin. Melanchthon, Loci Communes on the gospel. Symbolic Books, ed. Müller. Gerhard, Loci XII-XIV. Quenstedt, Theologia IV. Hollaz, Examination. Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church § 52. Heppe, Dogmatics of German Protestantism II. Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation I. Frank, Dogmatic Studies 1892. Zwingli, in my Ethics of Zwingli. Calvin, Institutes II 7-9. Zanchi, Works VIII. Junius, Theological Theses 23. 24. Ursinus, Explanation of the Catechism qu. 19. 92. Synopsis of Pure Theology disp. 18 and 22. Voetius, Disputations IV V. Witsius, Economy of the Covenants III 1. Miscellanea Sacra II. Cocceius, On the Covenant IV VI. Moor III. Vitringa VI and so forth.
5. Besides the relation of law and gospel, there exists in Christian theology also an important difference over the power, the efficacy, of the word of God and thus over the relation of word and Spirit. Here too stand as extremes on the left and on the right side nomism and antinomism. Nomism, which from Judaism through Pelagianism onward to the newer rationalism runs, has enough with an outward calling, with an understanding, moral or aesthetic working of the word and deems a special, supernatural power of the Holy Spirit thereby needless. Rome also shows clearly to be akin to this direction, insofar as it weakens the preventing grace, assigns to faith only the preparatory meaning of a historical assent, goes more and more the way of Molinism and Congruism, and first lets the proper, supernatural grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit be imparted by the sacrament. The opposite extreme is taken by antinomism, which first against the law and the Old Testament but then soon against all outward word and against all objective, historical mediation of salvation resists and expects everything from the working of the Holy Spirit, from the Christ in us, from the inward word and the inward light. In the Anabaptism of Schwenckfeld, Franck, Denck and others this direction expressed itself on this point the clearest. Outward and inward word stand to each other as body and soul, death and life, earth and heaven, flesh and spirit, shell and kernel, foam and silver, image and truth, sheath and sword, lantern and light, manger and Christ, nature and God, creature and Creator. Knowledge of the word gives therefore in itself nothing and leaves us cold and dead. To understand it, the inward word is needed beforehand. As words can only teach us when we know the things, so the Scripture teaches us something only when Christ already dwells inwardly in our heart. The word is but a sign, a shadow, image, symbol and only speaks out, only points to, only reminds what is inwardly written in our heart. The inward word thus goes before, stands higher than the Scripture, which is but a paper word and moreover also dark and full of contradictions. And that inward word is nothing other than God or Christ or the Holy Spirit himself, who is one in all men, and is the whole full truth. To find God and to know the truth, we thus have not to go outside ourselves, to the Scripture or the historical Christ; but descending into ourselves, withdrawing from the world, killing understanding and will and passively waiting for the inward, immediate revelation we find God, live in his fellowship and are in his beholding blessed. This Anabaptism was in fact a revival of the pantheistic mysticism, which in the finite sees an eternally changing appearance of the infinite and therefore seeks fellowship with God in the depth of the feeling, where God and man are one. Over against these both directions of nomism and antinomism the Reformers held jointly that the word alone is insufficient to bring to faith and conversion, that the Holy Spirit indeed can work but commonly yet does not work without the word, and that therefore word and Spirit in the application of the salvation of Christ to man go paired with each other. Between Lutherans and Reformed there was at first no difference about this. Also the first-named taught that the Holy Spirit, though working through word and sacraments as his instruments, yet only through a special power works and can work faith, and that he does that where and when it seems good. But yet there was from the outset already some distinction. While the Reformed commonly present it so that the Holy Spirit pairs himself with the word, with the word, the Lutherans prefer to express themselves and lay ever stronger the emphasis on it that the Holy Spirit works through the word as his instrument, through the word. And while the Reformed always made distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary way on which God worked grace in the heart, the Lutherans, out of fear for the Anabaptists, let the extraordinary way more and more fall away and said, God gives to no one his Spirit or grace except through the word and with the outward and preceding word, or as Luther often said: God gives internals not except through externals. And when now in 1621 the Danzig preacher Hermann Rathmann died 1628 issued a writing in which he taught that the word alone had no power to convert man unless the Holy Spirit came thereto with his grace, then almost all Lutheran theologians rose up against him and developed as the true Lutheran doctrine that the word of God possesses in itself the power of the Holy Spirit to conversion, that that power is laid therein by divine disposition and is so inseparably connected therewith that it is in the word even still before and outside all legitimate use, just as the hand of man, even if it does not work, yet always retains the power of working.
Indeed, the word that goes forth from God's mouth is always a power that accomplishes that for which God sends it. This is so in the natural realm in creation and upholding, and it is also so in the moral and spiritual realm in the work of re-creation. And this holds true not only for the gospel but also for the law. Paul indeed says of the Old Testament legal dispensation that the letter kills, 2 Cor. 3:6, but thereby he expresses as strongly as possible that it is no dead letter; rather, it is so mighty that it works sin, wrath, curse, and death; the law works wrath, Rom. 4:15, is the strength of sin, 1 Cor. 15:56, the ministry of condemnation, of death, 2 Cor. 3:7, 9. And over against this stands the gospel as a power of God unto salvation, Rom. 1:16, 1 Cor. 1:18, 2:4, 5, 15:2, Eph. 1:13; it is, because it is no human word but God's word, Acts 4:29, 1 Thess. 2:13, living and abiding, 1 Pet. 1:25, living and powerful, Heb. 4:12, spirit and life, John 6:63, a light that shines in a dark place, 2 Pet. 1:19, a seed that is sown in the hearts, Matt. 13:3, grows and is multiplied, Acts 12:24, of great worth, even though those who plant and water it are nothing, 1 Cor. 3:7, a sharp two-edged sword that pierces into the inmost being of man and judges all his thoughts and intents, Heb. 4:12.
And therefore it is not empty and vain, but it works, is effective, in those who believe, 1 Thess. 2:13; and the works that it brings to pass are regeneration, 1 Cor. 4:15, James 1:18, 1 Pet. 1:23, faith, Rom. 10:17, enlightenment, 2 Cor. 4:4-6, Eph. 3:9, 5:14, 1 Tim. 1:10, instruction, correction, comfort, etc., 1 Cor. 14:3, 2 Tim. 3:16. Even in those who perish, the gospel exercises its working; it is to them a fall, a stumbling block and foolishness, a stone against which they stumble, a savor of death unto death, Luke 2:34, Rom. 9:32, 1 Cor. 1:23, 2 Cor. 2:16, 1 Pet. 2:8.
Over against spiritualism, this power of God's word and particularly of the gospel is to be upheld with the Lutherans in its full, rich meaning. The opposition between the inward and outward, the spiritual and the material, eternity and time, essence and form, etc., stems from a false philosophy and is at odds with Scripture. God is the Creator of heaven but also of earth, of soul and body both, of spirit and matter together. And therefore the word is no vain sound, no empty sign, no cold symbol; but every word, even from man, is a power, greater and more lasting than the power of the sword; there is thought, spirit, soul, life in it. If this holds for the word in general, how much more for the word that goes forth from God's mouth and is spoken by Him? That is a word that creates and upholds, judges and kills, re-creates and renews, always does its work and never returns empty. With a human word it makes a great difference whether it is written or printed, read or heard; and with the spoken word, the form and delivery are of the greatest meaning. Also, the power of the human word depends on the measure in which someone has laid his heart, his soul into it, on the distance that exists between the person and his word. But with God it is otherwise. It is always His word; He is always present with it; He bears it always by His almighty and omnipresent power; He is always Himself who, in whatever form and by whatever means, brings it to men and calls them by it. Therefore, although the word of God, which is freely proclaimed by servants or brought to men in admonition, address, book, or writing, is indeed taken from Holy Scripture but not identical with that Scripture, yet it is a word of God that comes to man from God's side, is spoken by the Holy Spirit, and therefore also always does its work. The word of God is never loose from God, from Christ, from the Holy Spirit; it has no existence in itself; it is not deistically to be separated from its creator and author. Just as Scripture is not once inspired by the Holy Spirit but continually borne, preserved, made powerful by that Spirit, so it is also with the word of God that, taken from Scripture, is preached to men in one way or another. Jesus spoke by the Spirit, John 6:63; the apostles, who received that Spirit, Matt. 10:20, Luke 12:12, 21:15, John 14:26, 15:26, proclaimed the gospel not only in words but also in power and in the Holy Spirit, 1 Thess. 1:5, 6, in demonstration of Spirit and power, 1 Cor. 2:4, and handled it as the sword of the Spirit, Eph. 6:17. Insofar the Lutherans are also fully right; the word of God is always and everywhere a power of God, a sword of the Spirit; the Holy Spirit is always present with this word.
But nevertheless, Scripture and experience teach that that word of God does not always do the same work; it is efficacious in a certain sense always, it is never powerless; if it does not lift up, it casts down; if it is not unto a resurrection, then unto a fall; if not unto a savor of life, then unto a savor of death. The question arises, then, when the word of God is efficacious in the sense that it leads to faith and conversion. The Lutherans now, to make man inexcusable, enclose this divine, supernatural efficacy in the word, but thereby gain nothing and must, to explain the different outcome of the word with man, take refuge in the free will. But the Reformed reckoned with the fact of that double outcome, regarded the efficacy not as an impersonal, magical power laid in the word, but thought of that word always in connection with its author, with Christ, who administers it by the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit is no unconscious power but a person, who is always with the word, always bears it and makes it active but does not always make it active in the same way. He uses according to the unsearchable good pleasure of God that word for conversion but also for hardening, for a resurrection but also for a fall. He works always through the word, but not always in the same way. And when He so wills to work through it that it leads to faith and conversion, then He needs objectively to add nothing to the word. That word is good and wise and holy, a word of God, a word of Christ, and the Holy Spirit takes all from Christ. But that the seed of the word may bear good fruit, it must fall into well-prepared ground. The field also must be made ready for the reception of the seed. This subjective working of the Holy Spirit must therefore come alongside the objective word. From the nature of the case, it cannot be enclosed and contained in the word; it is another, an additional, a subjective working, not a working through the word but with the word, an opening of the heart, Acts 16:14, an inward revelation, Matt. 11:25, 16:17, Gal. 1:16, a drawing to Christ, John 6:44, an enlightening of the understanding, Eph. 1:18, Col. 1:9-11, a working of the will and the working, Phil. 2:13, etc., cf. vol. III p. 498. Thereby the Spirit is not detached or separated from the word, not even when He, as with little children, works regeneration without any means of grace. For the Spirit who regenerates is not the Spirit of God in general, but the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit whom Christ has acquired, by whom Christ rules, who takes all only from Christ and who is poured out by Christ in the church and thus is the Spirit of the church. Leaving aside whether the Holy Spirit sometimes also works and can work in heathens, which in any case is exceptional, as a rule He works regeneration only in such as live under the administration of the covenant. Also little children who are regenerated by Him are children of the covenant, of that covenant which has the word of God as its content and received the sacrament as sign and seal. The Holy Spirit thus follows Christ in His course through history; He binds Himself to the word of Christ and works only in the name and according to the command of Christ. Individually and subjectively, when e.g. a child is thought of apart from all its surroundings, from the church in which it is born, it may seem as if the Spirit works without the word; objectively and factually the Holy Spirit works only where the covenant of grace with the administration of word and sacrament has extended itself. And therefore regeneration in little children, when they grow up, is always known thereby and proved in its genuineness, that it passes over into the acts of faith and conversion and then attaches itself to the word of God that objectively lies before us in Holy Scripture. The Holy Spirit, who in regeneration applies nothing else than the word, the power, the merit of Christ, naturally also leads the conscious life to that word which He took from Christ and caused to be written by prophets and apostles, cf. vol. III pp. 484, 504, 525 and further Belgic Confession 24, Heidelberg Catechism qu. 65, 67, Helvetic Confession II 18, Canons of Dort III 6, V 7, 14, Calvin, passim, e.g. Institutes III 2, 33, IV 14, 11, against the Libertines c. 9, Turretin, Theol. El. XV, 4, 23 sq., Hodge, Systematic Theology III 466-485, Bartlett, The Letter and the Spirit, Bampton Lectures 1888, Müller, Dogmatic Essays 127-277, Dorner, Christian Faith II 799, Frank, Christian Truth II 243.
1. Besides the Word comes the sacrament as the second means of grace. Holy Scripture does not know this name and also has no teaching on the sacraments in general. It does speak of circumcision and Passover, of baptism and the Lord's Supper, but does not gather these institutions under one concept. So it also did not happen yet in the first Christian churches. Although we read in Acts 2:42 that the church at Jerusalem continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, in fellowship, in breaking of bread, and in prayers, and from Acts 6:4 we can infer that there was a ministry of the Word, yet we know little about the order of the church gathering at Jerusalem. Something more is known to us from 1 Cor. 11:1-14:40 about the worship services of the believers from the Gentiles. After the believers on the ground of personal confession were received through baptism into the church in the name of Christ, into one body, Rom. 6:3-5, 1 Cor. 12:13, Gal. 3:27, they came together regularly on the Lord's Day, Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2, Rev. 1:10. Likely they held two gatherings on that day, one for the service of the Word, at which access was also free for non-members, 1 Cor. 14:23, a portion from the Old Testament Scripture and later also from the apostolic writings was read aloud, each member of the church could freely take the word, 1 Cor. 14:26, and prayers and singing took place, Acts 2:42, Rom. 12:12, 1 Cor. 14:14, 15, 26; and another for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, eis to phagein , 1 Cor. 11:33, to which only the believers might partake, 10:16ff., 11:20ff., in which first prayers and thanks were offered, then a common meal (agape ) Jude 12, 2 Pet. 2:13 was held from the gifts brought together by the believers, thereafter again prayers and thanks (eucharistia ) and the Lord's Supper was celebrated. Indeed, Jülicher, Spitta, Haupt, Hoffmann, Drews, and others think that in the apostolic time the Lord's Supper was not distinguished from the ordinary meal, but that the whole agape was a eucharistia , a Lord's Supper, but this view is rightly rejected by Harnack, Zahn, Grafe, and others; Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper after the ordinary meal, Matt. 26:26, 1 Cor. 11:25, and Paul distinguishes both in 1 Cor. 11:20, 21 and proposes to separate them entirely, by holding the ordinary meal beforehand at home, 1 Cor. 11:22, Weiszäcker, Das apost. Zeitalter. Moeller-von Schubert, Kirchengesch. I. Zahn art. Agapen and Drews art. Eucharistie in Herzog. W. Schmidt, Dogm. II. But in the second century great change gradually came in this. The celebration of the Lord's Supper was, for whatever reasons, cf. Drews in Herzog, detached from the agapes, and the two gatherings, that for the service of the Word and that for the Lord's Supper, were united. Henceforth the celebration of the Lord's Supper took place in the ordinary worship service after the ministry of the Word; the worship service was distinguished into two parts, at the first, the ministry of the Word, heathens or at least catechumens and penitents might also be present, but the second, the celebration of the Lord's Supper, was open only to the baptized, and received through the addition of baptismal confession, baptismal administration, the Lord's Prayer, and all kinds of ritual and symbolic actions more and more a mysterious character. The widespread Greek mystery cults gained influence on the Christian religion. In the New Testament mysterion is the name for words and deeds of God, which were formerly hidden but which have now become manifest, Part I § 30. But this word soon received in the Christian church a wholly different meaning and became the designation of all that in the Christian religion was secretive and incomprehensible. In Latin this word was translated by sacramentum , which had the meaning of oath, especially that laid by the soldier to the banner, or of a sum of money, which in a lawsuit had to be deposited in a sacred place and in case of loss of the lawsuit fell to the gods, but which now took up the thought of a mysterious, holy action or thing. In this sense all that stood in any connection with God and his revelation could be called a sacrament, the revelation itself and its content, the doctrine, the Trinity, the incarnation, etc., further all kinds of signs, such as the sign of the cross, the salt that was given to the catechumens, finally all holy actions, priestly ordination, marriage, exorcism, Sabbath observance, circumcision, and all ceremonies; cf. besides the works, Part I named, Moeller-v. Schubert I and there cited literature. Herzog art. Sakrament. Ziegert, Ueber die Ansätze zu einer Mysterienlehre, Stud. u. Kr. Although now among these holy actions designated with the name of sacrament baptism and Lord's Supper still clearly stand in the foreground, yet the vagueness of the name was cause that the number of sacraments for a long time remained undetermined. Also Augustine uses the concept still in a broader sense and proceeds in his definition from that meaning. First Pseudo-Dionysius in the 6th century counted in his eccl. hier. IV 2 sq. six sacraments: baptism, confirmation, eucharist, priestly ordination, monastic ordination, and usages at burial. But the Scholastics joined in the determination of the concept sacrament to Augustine and reckoned various holy things and actions under it. Hugo of St. Victor, de Sacr. I 9, 7 names no less than 30 sacraments and divides them into three classes: such as are necessary for salvation (baptism, confirmation, eucharist, etc.), such as communicate a higher grace (use of holy water, etc.), and such as serve for preparation for the other sacraments (consecration of holy utensils, etc.). Abelard counts five: baptism, confirmation, eucharist, last anointing, and marriage, while Robert Pullus also names five, but replaces the last two by confession and priestly ordination. Bernard gives no number but names on different places baptism, footwashing, confirmation, eucharist, confession, last anointing, priestly ordination, investiture, marriage with the name of sacraments. First Lombard, Sent. IV dist. 2 has the well-known seven, but also after him theologians and synods (e.g., the Lateran Council of 1179) still speak of sacraments in a broad sense. And this continues until the sententiae of Lombard became the general handbook for the study of theology and the Council of Florence 1439 established the seven, cf. Schwane, D. G. III. Harnack, D. G. III. With this limitation of the number went the determination of the concept hand in hand. Among the church fathers many holy actions, especially baptism and Lord's Supper, were indeed highly exalted, and thought of as provided with a supernatural power and grace. But a doctrine of the sacraments is lacking; the relation of the sensible and spiritual element is not clearly determined, and the manner of working not clearly described. Augustine distinguishes in the sacraments two components: sacraments are so called, because in them one thing is seen, another is understood. What is seen has a spiritual form, Serm. 272. Take away the word and what is water but water? The word is added to the element and it becomes a sacrament, in Ev. Joh. 80, 3. Sometimes he lays so much emphasis on the word and for the working of the sacrament on the faith of the receiver, that the sign becomes merely an image of the signified thing. But on the other side he gave such a broad definition of the concept sacrament, that all kinds of church actions could fall under it, and against the Donatists he bound the sacraments so to the church, that they could indeed be taken along by the heretics but yet only within the church could communicate grace, Hahn, Die Lehre v. d. Sakr. Breslau. Harnack, D. G. III.
The actual teaching of the sacraments is a product of the Middle Ages scholasticism; it first set up a careful and often splintery inquiry about the concept, the setting up, the server, the needfulness, the fitness, the tally, the building blocks, the bond of the sacramentum and the res sacramenti, the sunder between the sacraments in the garden, the old and the new testament, the sundry sunder of the seven sacraments, the bodily or moral working, the sundry grace, that they share, the needs for the sharing out and the taking of the sacraments, Hugo of St. Victor, de sacramentis. Lombard, Sent. IV 1. 2. and comm. of Thomas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 60-65. Bonaventure, Brevil. VI 1-5. Schwane, D. G. III. Harnack, D. G. III. Outcome of this scholastic unfolding was, that in part already on earlier councils but above all at Trent about the teaching of the sacraments in the overall the following was set fast:
1º all sacraments of the New Bond are set up by Christ and are seven in tally: baptism, strengthening, eucharist, penance, last oiling, priest hallowing and wedlock.
2º These are all true and actual sacraments, from those of the Old Bond beingly sundered, but yet among themselves in worth sundry.
3º They are, though not all for each man, to bliss needful, so that without them or at least without longing thereafter, through faith alone, the grace of rightmaking is not to be gotten.
4º They betoken not only the grace, but hold it also and share it ex opere operato.
5º From the side of the server is for the truthhood of the sacrament at least needed, that he have the intent to do, what the church does, but is it otherwise uncaring, if he be in deadly sin.
6º Lawful sharers out of the sacraments are only the ordered priests, but strengthening and priest hallowing happen only by the bishop, and baptism may in case of need also by laymen be served.
7º From the side of the taker is only needful, that he have the intent to take what the church gives and lay no hindrance in the way of the grace.
8º Each sacrament gives a sunder grace, and baptism, strengthening and ordering give a character indelebilis.
Cf. Conc. Trid. VII de sacr. Cat. Rom. II cap. 1. Bellarmine, Controv. III de sacramentis in genere in 2 books. Theol. Wirceb. ed. 3 IX 1-151. Perrone, Prael. theol. ed. Lov. V 301-391. Simar, Dogm.³ 659-693. Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. der Kath. Kirche² I 20-132. Möhler, Symbolik § 28. Jansen, Prael. III 281-367 etc. Over the sacraments teaching in the Greek church cf. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Confessionskunde I.
2. The development of this sacrament doctrine shows that it grew ever further removed from Scripture. Especially in three respects this is the case. First, the grace which the sacrament imparts is understood by Rome only as a gratia sanctificans , that is, as a power infused into man, raising him to the supernatural order and making him partaker of the divine nature. Grace is almost entirely detached from guilt and forgiveness of sins and changed into a supernatural gift coming to man from without. Second, the bond of the sacrament to the word is as good as wholly broken by Rome; the word indeed has some meaning, but only a preliminary and preparatory one; the faith wrought by the word is nothing but a historical faith, which is insufficient for salvation and must be supplemented by love, that is, by the infused grace. And this grace is imparted only through the sacrament, which therefore occupies its own independent place beside the word and far surpasses it in value. Third, faith is absolutely no longer a requirement in the recipient of the sacrament; grace lies enclosed in the sacrament as gratia sanctificans , as something material, is imparted by it ex opere operato , and thus presupposes at most that the recipient lays no insurmountable obstacle in the way. The sacrament thus works physically and magically, by virtue of a power granted by God to the priest as an instrument in his hand. On all three points the Reformation revised and modified the Roman sacrament doctrine according to Scripture; Zwingli, Luther, Calvin were here in agreement with one another and jointly declared that the grace imparted in the sacrament is in the first place forgiving grace and has reference not to the lower nature deprived of the superadded gift but to sin; that the sacrament is a sign and seal attached to the word, imparts no grace that is not bestowed by the word, and thus without the word has no value at all; and that not the sacrament itself but yet its working and fruit depend on faith and thus in the recipient always presuppose saving faith. But otherwise there soon appeared important differences in the sacrament doctrine among the Reformers. The sacraments became the center of the struggle between Romanists, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Reformed, Anabaptists, and so on. They became the shibboleth of every dogmatic system; in them the principles from which one proceeded in church and theology, in doctrine and life, were embodied practically and concretely; the relation of God and world, creation and recreation, divine and human nature of Christ, sin and grace, spirit and matter came to their practical application in the sacrament; all strife centered on the unio sacramentalis , the union of sign and thing signified, the connection of sacrament and res sacramenti . Luther first, in 1518 and 1519, laid all emphasis on faith, which alone makes the sacrament work and thus makes us partakers of fellowship with Christ and his benefits; then, from 1520 to 1524, he brought the sacrament especially into connection with the word, of which it is a sign and seal; and finally, after 1524, he came, out of fear of the Anabaptists, more and more to regard the sacraments as indispensable, to maintain their objective character on the ground of Christ's institution, and to understand the connection between sign and thing signified temporally, corporeally, and locally, so that according to the later Lutheran view the heavenly thing is hidden in , with , and under the element, just as the power of the Holy Spirit has entered into the word, and grace works through the sacraments as through their instruments, means, supports, vehicles, organs. Over against this, Zwingli taught that the sacraments, since they are administered only to such as have faith and through that faith are partakers of Christ and all his benefits, are in the first place signs and proofs of faith, acts of confession, and then in the second place also means for the strengthening of faith, since they remind us of the benefits to which our faith has reference, direct our faith more and more away from ourselves to God's grace in Christ, and thereby exercise and strengthen that faith. Now Calvin also understands the sacraments as acts of confession, as mutual testimony of our piety toward God. But with him they are that only in the second place; first of all the sacraments are testimonies of God's grace toward us confirmed by an external sign, signs and seals of God's promises in his word, mirrors in which we behold the riches of his grace. The invisible element, the matter and substance of the sacrament, is thus the word, the promise, the covenant of grace, the person of Christ with all his benefits. But the visible element does not enclose these spiritual goods within itself; it does not bestow them on us by its own intrinsic power; God does not surrender his work to the signs in the sacrament; he and he alone is the possessor and remains also the sole distributor of grace. The signs perform only an instrumental, ministerial service; God makes use of them to impart his grace. But he imparts this grace only to those who believe and then strengthens and nourishes their faith; unbelievers receive only the sign without the thing signified. How now God makes use of the sacraments for the distribution of his grace is not made clear by Calvin and also by the later Reformed. There thus remains room for all sorts of questions: Is grace always connected with the sign, so that the sacrament objectively always remains the same? Or does God connect grace with the sign only when the sacrament is received by believers? Or does God offer grace with the sign also to unbelieving users, so that it is their fault if they take and receive only the sign? In what is the sacramental grace distinguished from that which believers already received earlier, and in what does it differ from the subjective working of the Holy Spirit, who opens the eyes of believers to the sacrament and unlocks their hearts to it? Does the distribution of grace accompany the administration or the reception of the sign? Does it take place simultaneously with it, or can it also occur earlier or later, and can the fruit of the sacrament thus be enjoyed before, during, and after the reception?
Outside the Lutheran and Reformed churches, which in following Luther and Calvin upheld the objective character of the sacraments, the teaching of Zwingli gained more and more ground. The Anabaptists still accepted footwashing, baptism, and the Lord's Supper as sacraments, but saw in them only signs and symbols, no seals; the sacraments do set forth visibly the benefits which believers have received from God, but they do that as confessions of our faith and impart no grace, Cloppenburg, Op.
The Socinians, like Zwingli, rejected the name sacrament, regarded the Lord's Supper as a memorial meal and a declaration of what we have in Christ, and denied that baptism rested on a command of Christ and was a lasting institution, Fock, Der Socin.
The Remonstrants confessed in their confession ch. 23 that God in the sacraments displays his benefits and in a certain way exhibits and seals them, but their Apology showed that they understood thereunder no sealing of God's promise and no imparting of his grace; the sacraments are signs of the covenant between God and men, whereby these bind themselves to a holy life and God sets his grace visibly before their eyes, cf. Limborch, Theol. Christ.
Among the Rationalists the sacraments became memorial and confessional signs, whose aim was the furtherance of virtue, and which therefore could easily be increased with other solemn ceremonies, Wegscheider.
The Quakers rejected the sacraments as Jewish ceremonial, took baptism as the baptism of the Spirit which cleanses us from our sins, and the Lord's Supper as a picture of the feeding of our soul by Christ, Barclay, Verantwoording.
This dissolving process was to some extent halted by Schleiermacher, as he made an attempt to uphold the objective character of the sacraments and to unite all the different views in a higher unity. To this end he defined them as continued workings of Christ, wrapped in actions of the church and most intimately bound up with them, through which he exercises his high-priestly activity on individuals and maintains and propagates the life-fellowship between him and us, for whose sake God sees individuals only in Christ, Chr. Gl.
But this attempt at reconciliation did not succeed. The workings of Christ, wrapped in actions of the church, left undecided what in the sacraments was the first and foremost. So theology soon diverged again in different directions. Some retained the mediating standpoint, Nitzsch, Chr. Lehre. Kaftan, Dogm. Oosterzee, Dogm.; others reproduced the view of Zwingli, Lipsius, Dogm. Schweizer, Chr. Gl. Biedermann, Chr. Dogm. Ritschl, Unterricht in der christl. Rel. Scholten, L. H. K., or returned to the confessional standpoint of the Lutheran or Reformed churches, Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. Hodge, Syst. Theol.
And finally, by the Neo-Lutherans in Germany and by the Zwinglians and Puseyites in England, a doctrine of the sacraments was put forward which in many ways recalled Rome, let grace work through the sacrament not only on the soul but also on the spirit-body nature and on the body of man, and often expanded the number of sacraments, Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe, Erl. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis. Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. Martensen, Dogm. Vilmar, Dogm. Paget, Sacraments in Gore’s Lux mundi.
3. The Scripture knows not the word sacrament and contains also in the abstract no teaching about the sacraments. Yet it speaks of sundry churchly actions in the Old and New Testament but does not gather them under a common concept. And also in the Christian church it is not the concept but the thing that is first; sundry doctrines and usages of the church were by degrees marked with the name of sacrament. Therefore it is understandable that very many had objection against this name and would rather replace it with that of signs, seals, mystery signs, mysteries, secrets. Not only Carlstadt, Zwingli, Socinus, Schleiermacher, Doedes and so forth condemned the word; but also Luther said in his Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity that the Scripture knew not the word in that meaning which it had in theology; Calvin, Institutes IV 14, 13 noted that the church fathers had laid a new sense in the Latin word; Melanchthon replaced in the first edition of his Loci the word sacraments with signs, and also Musculus, Hottinger, Burman, Cocceius and others gave preference to the Scriptural names of signs and seals. This objection against the name is yet strengthened thereby, that the Greek meaning of the word μυστηριον, translated in Latin by sacramentum, has exercised influence on the conception of the churchly solemnity marked with that name. Yet for all this the word is not to be rejected. For theology makes use of many words which occur not in the Scripture and which within her circle have obtained a technical meaning. If she must abstain therefrom, she would have to cease all scientific labor and all preaching and exposition of God's word, yea even all translation of the Holy Scripture would be unlawful. For that reason it is also not to be condemned to let the treatment of the doctrine of the sacraments go before that of baptism and the Lord's Supper. For indeed there is in the Scripture no separate teaching about the sacraments to be found and this must rather be built up from what the Scripture teaches about the particular institutions of circumcision, Passover, baptism and Lord's Supper; but a preceding chapter about the sacraments in general puts us just in a position to sum up what those particular institutions in the Scripture have in common and to set this right, Scriptural conception over against the impure doctrine which about the sacraments by degrees has crept into the Christian church. In the definition of the sacraments therefore the Reformed joined as closely as possible to the Scripture. The scholastics disputed whether a definition of the sacraments could be given, since they, as composed of thing and words, were no real being, no one per se, cf. Bellarmine, de sacr. in genere I 10. Yet one derived from Augustine, who oftentimes in the sacraments distinguished a visible and an invisible component, the definition that they were a sacred sign or sign of a sacred thing, Thomas, Summa Theologica III qu. 60 art. 1. 2. Hugh of St. Victor, de sacr. I 9, or also visible form of invisible grace, Lombard, Sentences IV 1. Although not incorrect, this determination is yet too broad. Later Roman theologians therefore usually took over the determination of the Roman Catechism II 1, 6, 2, and described the sacraments as certain signs subject to the senses, which by God's institution have the power both to signify and to effect sanctity and righteousness. Although this definition can be well understood, it has yet in Roman theology obtained a sense which is in conflict with the Holy Scripture and therefore makes it unusable for the Reformation. For the Roman theology conceives the sacrament as a sacred thing, hidden and concealed and lays therein the sense, not of the Biblical, but of the Greek μυστηριον. And further it lays all the emphasis thereon that the sacraments contain the grace in themselves, that they communicate this ex opere operato, and that this grace consists especially in the sanctifying grace. The Scripture however speaks of the rainbow and circumcision as sign of the covenant, Genesis 9:12, 13, 17, 17:11, cf. Exodus 12:13, Acts 7:8 and calls the latter a sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of faith, Romans 4:11; and it brings likewise baptism and Lord's Supper into closest connection with the covenant of grace, with the Mediator and the benefits of that covenant and particularly with the forgiveness of sins, Mark 1:4, 14:22-24 and so forth. Accordingly the Reformed theology described the sacraments as holy visible signs and seals, instituted by God, whereby He the better gives to understand and assures to the believers the promises and benefits of the covenant of grace, and these on their part before God, angels and men confess and confirm their faith and love. Herein it deserves attention, first, that God is named as the institutor of the sacraments. In general there is herein no difference in the Christian churches. All confess that God alone can be the author, the institutor, the efficient cause of the sacraments. For He alone is the possessor and distributor of all grace; He alone can determine to which means He will bind Himself in the distribution of His grace. Further, Christ as Mediator also has the right to institute sacraments, for He as Mediator is the acquirer of all God's grace. It is not for men to institute and form the worship of God, but to receive and keep that delivered by God, Helvetic Confession II 19. But Rome falls herein into a peculiar difficulty. Since by Christ no other sacraments were instituted than those of baptism and Lord's Supper, of the other sacraments it had to be asserted that they either were no sacraments or that also the apostles had the right to institute sacraments. Before the Council of Trent many asserted, Lombard, Sentences IV dist. 3, Hugh of St. Victor, de sacr. II 15, 2, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure and others, that the sacraments, for example confirmation, confession, were not immediately by Christ but by the apostles instituted, Schwane, Dogmengeschichte III 597. But the Council at Trent session 7 canon 1 determined expressly that all seven sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord Himself (not mediately for that all acknowledged; then no council decision would have been necessary, but immediately, Bellarmine de sacr. I c. 23) and thereby laid upon theology an unfeasible obligation. Yet the council had in so far right as it acknowledges that the right to institute sacraments even by God cannot be transferred to creatures. Men can make known the institution of a sacrament, Exodus 12:1, Mark 1:4, 11:30, 1 Corinthians 11:23, can administer the sign thereof, can announce God's grace, but they cannot from the nature of the case really bestow this grace. For grace is no material good, but it is the favor, the fellowship of God, inseparable from Him and therefore communicable by no creature, by no man or angel. Therefore God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is the only institutor but also the only distributor of the sacrament. Only that sacrament is the true one which is administered by God Himself. It is Christ Himself who in His church baptizes and holds the Lord's Supper. He has not transferred His office and appointed no vicar on earth, He rules Himself and as He alone as prophet administers the word, so is He also the only minister of the sacrament, although it be that He therein also uses men as His instruments, Helvetic Confession II 19. Synopsis purioris theologiae 43, 8. Turretin, Institutio theologiae elencticae XIX 1, 14. Amyraut, Theses Salmurienses III 10. Vitringa VI 338. Second, in the Reformed definition of the sacraments it is also remarkable that they are described as signs. Although some Reformed also well, whether usually or by alternation, reckoned them to the ceremonies, rites or actions, Bullinger, Housebook V 6. Trelcatius Jr. Loci Communes p. 141, Junius, Theses Theologicae 50, 6 and so forth, yet by far the most reduced them to the genus of signs, seals, images, symbols, types, antitypes, cf. De Moor V 231. Vitringa VI 341. They deviated herein, in part also from the Romans but especially from the Lutherans, who were particularly set on the description by actions and saw therein an important point of dispute with the Reformed, Gerhard, Loci XVIII 22 sq. This is from the Lutheran side therefore strange, because they in the word teach that the power of the Holy Spirit lies enclosed therein, also before and outside the use. The analogy would require that not on the action but on the sign in the sacrament the emphasis fall. Yet this is not the case. The Lutherans see in the sacrament first of all an action, consisting in communication of grace in, with and under the sign. The Reformed now absolutely did not deny that there was in the sacrament an action. But this was a hidden, invisible action of Christ, who inwardly in the hearts through the Holy Spirit bestows the grace. On the other hand in the sacrament the main thing lies not in the action of the minister, as if that were of so much weight and even brought about a con- or transubstantiation, but in the sign-being of the sacrament; it images and assures the action of Christ, yea the action of the minister of the sacrament, although an action, is itself a significative action. And the Scripture therefore calls the sacraments by the name of signs and seals and obliges also Romans and Lutherans to approve this naming, Bucanus, Institutiones theologicae 559. Maresius, Systema Theologicum XVIII 8. Van Mastricht, Theologia VII 3, 14. Turretin, Theologia Elenctica XIX 3, 9. Vitringa VI 341. Third, the Reformed definition of the sacraments is yet therein peculiar that it unites the act of God and the confession of the believers which is to be noted therein with each other. Calvin, Institutes IV 14, 1 has in that way reconciled Luther and Zwingli with each other. With Luther he was agreed that the act of God in the sacrament took the first and chief place; but with Zwingli he judged that the believers in the sacrament also made confession of their faith and their love before God, angels and men. In the sacrament God first comes to the believers to signify and seal to them His benefits; He assures them with visible pledges that He is their God and the God of their seed; He attaches seals to His word to strengthen their faith in that word, Genesis 9:11-15. 17:11, Exodus 12:13, Mark 1:4, 16:16, Luke 22:19, Romans 4:11 and so forth. But on the other hand the sacraments are also acts of confession; the believers therein confess their conversion, their faith, their obedience, their fellowship with Christ and with each other; while God assures them that He is their God, they solemnly testify that they are His children; every use of sacrament is a covenant renewal, a vow of fidelity, an oath which obliges to the service of Christ, Mark 1:5, 16:16, Acts 2:41, 8:37, Romans 6:3ff., 1 Corinthians 10:16ff., cf. Dutch Confession 36. Forms of baptism and Lord's Supper. Vitringa VI 423 sq. Heppe, Dogmatik der reformierten Kirche 441.
4. In the name of sign and seal is implied that the sacrament consists of two parts, which are distinguished as word and element, the reality of the sacrament and the sacrament (in a narrower sense), the thing signified and the sign, the heavenly reality and the earthly reality, the internal matter and the external matter. For both sign and seal point to something else, of which they are sign and seal. There are many and various signs; there are, as Augustine noted in De doctrina christiana II.1, natural and positive, adopted, instituted signs. To the first belong, for example, smoke, which points to fire; the dawn, which points to the sun; the footprint, which points to the walker; the scent, which points to the flower; the laugh, which points to joy; the tear, which points to sorrow. Positive signs are those that are established by agreement, convention, custom, or usage and are accepted and recognized in a narrower or wider circle; to this kind belong all letter signs, passwords, banners, insignias, and so on. All these signs are distinguished as ordinary from the extraordinary, among which miracles hold the foremost place; in Scripture, these are often designated with the name semeia , because they are a proof and sign of God's presence, of his grace or power, of his truth or righteousness. Signs are also grouped into different categories, according as they, like memorial signs, remind us of something past (Josh. 4:6), or, like prophetic signs, of something future (Gen. 4:15), or also, like many other signs, of something present and enduring (Deut. 6:8). Now sacraments belong to the instituted, extraordinary signs, which are taken by God, not arbitrarily, but according to an analogy preformed by him, from visible things and employed to indicate and explain invisible and eternal goods. Besides signs, the sacraments are also seals, serving for confirmation and strengthening. For seals are distinguished from signs in that they not only recall the invisible thing to our thought but also authenticate and confirm it for our consciousness. Because there is so much deceit and falsehood in the world, various means are used to distinguish the true from the false, the genuine from the counterfeit. Thus, a trademark serves to authenticate the manufacture, a standard to verify the purity of measures and weights, a coin to indicate the exact value of money, and a seal to warrant and guarantee the genuineness of writings. Seals are also frequently mentioned in Scripture when something must be authenticated as genuine and preserved from falsification. Letters from kings (1 Kings 21:8; Neh. 9:38; Esth. 3:12) or from other persons (Jer. 32:10), and further laws (Isa. 8:16), books (Dan. 12:4; Rev. 22:10), Daniel's den of lions (Dan. 6:18), the tomb of Jesus (Matt. 27:66), and so on, are sealed and thus protected from violation. God also has a seal (Rev. 7:2); he seals the stars when he hides them and covers them with clouds (Job 9:7); he seals the book of judgment so that no one but the Lamb can open and read it (Rev. 5:1); he seals the abyss in which Satan is confined, so that he may no longer deceive (Rev. 20:3); he seals his servants in the final tribulation so that they may not be harmed (Rev. 7:3; 9:4); he seals all believers with the Holy Spirit so that they may be preserved as heirs for the future salvation (2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:13; 4:30); he seals Christ through various signs as the giver of the food that endures to eternal life (John 6:27); he gives Paul in the blessing on his labor a seal, a confirmation of his apostleship (1 Cor. 9:2); he impresses his seal on the building of the church as a pledge that it is his property (2 Tim. 2:19). Seals are always means to guarantee the authenticity of persons and things or to preserve them from violation. Thus, Abraham also received in the sign of circumcision a seal, that is, a confirmation, ratification, pledge of the righteousness that he had by faith (Rom. 4:11). Therefore, sacraments are, besides signs, also seals attached by God to his word, in order to increase its credibility and reliability for our consciousness in faith—not in itself, for as God's word it is firm enough, but for us. However, in the sacraments, the visible elements of water, bread, and wine are not only sign and seal, but the various ceremonial actions that accompany them also have signifying and sealing power. The sprinkling or immersion in baptism, the blessing, breaking, distribution, and reception of the bread in the Lord's Supper are not arbitrary and indifferent customs, but they also constitute part of the sacraments, enable us to better understand the promises and benefits of the covenant, and together with the elements form the sacraments into signs and seals of the invisible goods of salvation (Vitringa VI 352).
The internal matter in the sacrament, the unseen thing that is pictured and sealed therein, is the covenant of grace, Gen. 9:12, 13, 17:11, the righteousness of faith, Rom. 4:11, forgiveness of sins, Mark 1:4, Matt. 26:28, faith and turning, Mark 1:4, 16:16, fellowship with Christ, with his death and rising, Rom. 6:3ff., with his flesh and blood, 1 Cor. 10:16, and so forth. In summary, one can thus say that Christ, the whole, rich, full Christ, according to his godly and manly nature, with his person and work, in the state of his lowliness and in that of his uplifting, is the internal matter, the heavenly thing, the signified matter in the sacrament.
This Christ is indeed with all his good deeds and blessings the middleman of the grace covenant, the head of the gathering, the yea and amen of all God's promises, the content of his word and witness, the wisdom, righteousness, hallowing, and freeing of the believers, the seer, priest, and king, in whom God alone shares all his grace and who is yesterday and today and forever the same. Jesus Christ is the truth of the sacraments, without whom they would not be at all, Dutch Confession 33, cf. Belgic Confession 34, 35. Heidelberg Catechism 67. Helvetic Confession II 19. Scottish Confession 21. Westminster Confession 27, 1. Calvin, Institutes IV 14, 16, 17. Synopsis of Pure Theology 43, 20, 21. Mastricht, Theology VII 3, 7, and so forth.
The Roman Catholics understand under the internal matter of the sacraments the hallowing grace, that is, the grace added to nature, enabling one to do good works and once to behold God, a created grace, which does not differ in being from the uncreated grace, that is, from God himself, for truly God gives himself in every created grace, Heinrich-Gutberlet, Dogmatics VIII 550ff., and they teach that this grace as something thing-like has entered into the sign and is contained therein, thus is shared ex opere operato therewith, and is to be gotten in no other way, namely, through faith alone in God's word. Council of Trent VII canon 4 sq.
The Lutheran dogmaticians in the first time named the two parts of the sacrament word and element, and thus let the same grace be shared through the sacrament as through the word. But as a result of their consubstantiation teaching, they gradually came, especially since Gerhard, to accept in the sacrament besides the word yet a heavenly matter. Through the word of consecration, the element not only ceases, as the older dogmaticians said, to be a common, outward element, but also takes up a special, godly might into itself, which is distinct from the word, is marked as heavenly matter, and works through the element as its means and carrier.
There thus came a difference between the grace benefits that are shared through the word and those through the sacrament; in the Lord's Supper, indeed, the very flesh and blood of Christ is enjoyed. Because, however, such a heavenly matter distinct from the saving benefits could be pointed out only in the Lord's Supper and not in baptism, Baier and others opposed speaking of a heavenly matter in the sacraments in general, Schmid, Dogmatics of the Evangelical Lutheran Church 391ff. Yet newer theology has often presented a like view of the sacrament and distinguished word and sacrament so that the first exercises a person-working, and the second a nature-working; that the one is a means of the turning-working and the other a means of the rebirth-working of the Holy Ghost; that the word changes the awareness, but the sacrament changes the spirit, the I, yea the spirit-bodily nature of man.
All this, however, is against the Scripture and a bringing in of Roman false teaching. The sacrament gives no single benefit that is not also received from God's word through faith alone. For whoever believes is born again, John 1:12, 13, has eternal life, John 3:36, is made right, Rom. 3:28, 5:1, hallowed, John 15:3, Acts 15:9, uplifted, Rom. 8:30, has fellowship with Christ, Eph. 3:17, with his flesh and blood, John 6:47ff., with his Father, 1 John 1:3, with the Holy Ghost, John 7:39, Gal. 3:2, 5, and so forth. The word holds all God's promises, and faith takes them all. The content of the word is Christ, the whole Christ, and this is also the content of the sacrament. There is no single benefit of grace that is held back in the word and now shared to the believers along a special way, through the sacrament. There is neither a separate baptism grace nor a separate Lord's Supper grace. The content of word and sacrament is fully the same; both hold the same middleman, the same covenant, the same benefits, the same blessedness, the same fellowship with God; they are one even in the way and tool of receiving, for also in the sacrament Christ is enjoyed not bodily but ghostly, not through the mouth but through faith.
They differ only in outward form, in the way in which they offer the same Christ to us. In a certain sense, the word too is a sign and seal; a sign that makes us think of the thing it points to; a seal that strengthens what exists in truth. That holds in general for all words, but it holds in special measure for God's word; whoever denies that makes God a liar, 1 John 5:10. But the word signifies and seals Christ to us through the sense of hearing; the sacrament signifies and seals Christ to us through the sense of sight. Together they offer Christ with all his benefits to us along the way of the two higher senses which God has given to man, without thereby wholly shutting out the others, smell, taste, and touch.
From this difference in the way in which word and sacrament offer Christ with his benefits to us, it further flows that the sacrament is under the word; it is a sign of the content of the word; a seal that God has attached to his witness; a pillar, as Calvin says, that is built on the groundwork of the word; an appendix that comes to the gospel and is added thereto. The word is thus something and much without the sacrament, but the sacrament without the word is nothing and has no worth or might; it is nothing less but also nothing more than a visible word.
All goods of salvation are to be gotten from the word and through faith alone, but there is no single benefit that could be received from the sacrament alone without the word and outside of faith. The word thus works and strengthens faith, it speaks to unbelievers and believers both; but the sacrament says nothing and holds nothing for the unbelievers, it is meant only for the believers, it can only strengthen the faith that is there; for it is nothing but a sign and seal of the word. Therein lies its only but yet, according to God's intent, its enough worth and might, to make clear and strengthen the word and thereby strengthen faith.
In the fight against Rome, upholding this agreement and this difference between word and sacrament is of the highest weight. Whoever sets them otherwise and gives to the sacrament another grace-working than to the word, shares out Christ and his benefits, breaks the oneness of the grace covenant, makes grace thing-like, makes the sacrament standalone over against and above the word, turns around the bond of Scripture and church, makes the sacrament needful for salvation and man hanging on the priest.
Therefore the Reformed, as also the Lutherans in the first time, did not tire of setting this right, scriptural bond of word and sacrament ever again in the light and ever anew showing that the sacrament is under the word and that both serve to point our faith to the offering of Jesus Christ on the cross as the only ground of our salvation. Cf. Luther in Köstlin II 503. Symbolic Books ed. Müller 202, 320, 487, 500. Heppe, Dogmatics of German Protestantism II 36. Calvin, Institutes IV 14, 3, 5, 6, 14. Zurich Consensus in Niemeyer 204, 206. Gallican Confession 34. Belgic Confession 33. Heidelberg Catechism 66. Helvetic Confession II 19. Polanus, Syntagma VI 51. Mastricht, Theology VIII 3, 11. Turretin, Elenctic Theology XIX 3, 6.
5. The bond that exists between sign and signified thing was sometimes called the form of the sacrament, sometimes also the sacramental union. Against the latter name, Gomarus made objection, not without ground; the relation, he says, which exists between sign and signified thing and unites both in a certain sense, is commonly named, in a new and obscure phrase, sacramental union, in imitation of the Ubiquitarians, not rightly. Because the signified thing is more truly united to us than to the signs, and that is denoted and confirmed by the signs; compare also Heidegger. Roman Catholics and Lutherans can to a certain degree speak of a union between the external and internal matter in the sacrament at the Lord's Supper, for they teach that the signified thing enters into and is contained in the sign; they assume a physical, bodily, local union. But even on their standpoint there is objection; for among the Roman Catholics the sign changes into the signified thing, and thus no proper union is possible; and among the Lutherans the signified thing is indeed in, with, and under the sign and thus brought together with the sign in the same place and in the same space, but such a juxtaposition is yet something wholly other than a union. Furthermore, the sacramental union in word and baptism and also in the other sacraments accepted by Rome bears such a different character from that in the Lord's Supper, that it is not fitting to speak so generally of a sacramental union. Much more objection is there on the Reformed standpoint. Scripture calls the sacraments signs and seals and thereby indicates the bond that exists between the internal and external matter. No one will call the bond between a word and the thing it denotes, between an image and the person it represents, between a pledge and that of which it is a pledge, a union. And yet of the same kind is the relation which exists between sign and signified thing in the sacrament. It is no physical, local, bodily, substantial bond; the signs of water, bread, and wine are no miracles, medicines, vehicles, channels, physical causes of the signified thing. But it is an ethical bond, a relation, fully like that between Christ and the gospel, between the benefits of the covenant of grace and the word of God which makes them known to us. Mastricht. Turretin. In the word that bond with the things it describes is given of itself. But in the signs in the sacrament this is not the case. Water, bread, wine are not by nature signs and seals of Christ and his benefits. No one could or might see that in them, if God had not expressly declared it. That does not mean that these signs were wholly arbitrarily chosen by God from visible things. On the contrary, now that God has told us in his word, we discover between sign and signified thing the most striking agreement. After all, it is the same God and Father who reigns in the kingdom of nature and in the kingdom of grace; he created the visible so that we can understand the invisible from it; the natural is an image of the spiritual. But yet a special word of God was needed to see in the signs of baptism and Lord's Supper a portrayal of the spiritual goods of salvation. And this was all the more needed, since water, bread, and wine not only portray grace but also seal it and thus in God's hand serve to strengthen our faith. In these two things, then, consists the form of the sacrament: in the above-mentioned relation between sign and signified thing (internal form) and in the divine institution, which by the word lays such a bond between both. Bucanus. Junius. Maresius. M. Vitringa.
In agreement with their teaching of the sacramental union, Roman Catholics and Lutherans ascribe to the words of institution a different power than the Reformed. For them, namely, it must serve to change the sign into the thing signified or to bring the thing signified into the sign. It therefore has a consecratory and working power, is directed more to the element than to the hearers, and for that reason in the Roman Church is spoken by the priest in a mysterious, whispering way and in the Latin tongue, Bellarmine, de sacr . But among the Reformed, the words of institution, spoken by the minister, have no hidden, mysterious, magical power; they serve not and need not serve to embody the thing signified in the sign; they are rather a verbum concionale seu praedicatum , spoken loudly to the congregation, which bring about no change at all in the sign, but only set it apart for the awareness of the hearers from common use and give it here and now a special purpose, Calvin, Inst . IV 14, 4. Turretin, Th. El . XIX qu. 6. Without those words and outside the use, water, bread, and wine are nothing but ordinary, daily food. Detrahe verbum et quid est aqua nisi aqua; accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum . Therefore the minister, even after he has spoken the words of institution, holds nothing but the sign in his hand, and nothing but the sign does he share out to the believers. God alone has bound Himself, where the sacrament is administered according to His command, to grant the unseen grace Himself through His Spirit. God and He alone remains the giver of grace, and the Christian hangs also in the sacrament not on the minister but on God alone and has all to look for from Him. This hanging on God alone is changed by Roman Catholics and Lutherans into a hanging on the minister, and this latter is moreover strengthened at Rome by the fact that in the ministers, when they give out the sacrament, at least the intention is required to do quod facit ecclesia , Tridentine Council VII can. 11. In dogmatics this intention is greatly weakened; a intentio generalis , not to do this, but to give out a sacrament, is enough, and that intention needs not be actualis but is already enough as virtualis . It is not even needful to have the intention to do what the Roman Church does; if a minister in the church at Geneva but has the intention to do what the church does which he holds for the true one, then he answers the demand, and Rome acknowledges the sacrament administered by him, Schwane, D. G . III 600. Bellarmine, de sacr. in genere I 27. Nevertheless the requirement of intention remains, without further clearing up, as an unfailing saying in the Tridentine canons and keeps the earnest Roman Catholic Christian in ongoing uncertainty. And when Calvin in his Antidote draws heed to this, Bellarmine only answers that man in this life needs not such an unfailing certainty of his salvation, that a human, moral certainty is enough, and that this is fully to be gotten, even if one hangs on the intention of the minister, cum habere intentionem sit facillimum , ib. 28. Cf. M. Vitringa VI 458 sq.
Although the bond between sign and signified thing does not consist in a bodily and local union of both, yet it is therefore objective, real, essential. Roman Catholics and Lutherans, however, have a different notion of reality than the Reformed. If the signified thing is not physically united with the sign, they think that the bond between both is not essential and that Christ with his benefits is not truly imparted and enjoyed in the sacrament. Yet the difference in the doctrine of the sacraments does not run on whether God truly imparts his grace, but on the way in which he does it. And the Reformed said: in a spiritual way, because only thus is the grace truly imparted and can be imparted. Physical imparting of Christ and his benefits is at odds with the nature of the Christian religion, with the essence of grace, with the nature of recreation, and would, even if it were possible, yet profit nothing, John 6:63. But the spiritual way in which Christ with his benefits is imparted in the sacrament forms so little a contrast with true reality that it rather brings it to full fruition and warrants it. It is with the sacrament no otherwise than with the word. In the word Christ is truly and essentially offered and given to everyone who believes. And just as really is he imparted to the believers in the sacrament. The sacrament gives the same full Christ as the word and in the same way, that is, in a spiritual way through faith, although the means is different, one time audible, and the other time visible. Therefore in Reformed theology the so-called phraseologia sacramentalis comes into its own just as well as in the Lutheran and Roman. For Scripture, because of the relation which God has laid between sign and signified, sometimes denotes the signified thing with the name of the sign, Romans 2:29, or the sign with the name of the signified thing, Matthew 26:26, or also ascribes the property and working of the signified thing to the sign, Acts 22:16, 1 Corinthians 11:24. For this usage takes nothing away from the fact that also according to Lutherans and Roman Catholics God is the proper dispenser and worker of grace in the hearts of men. And with this the Reformed heartily agree. Whether God imparts that grace in, with, under the sign, through the sign as a channel, or whether he does it in connection with the sign, does not touch the reality of that imparting itself. Also in Scholastic and Roman theology there was at all times difference about the way in which the sacraments work grace. The Thomistic school ascribed to the sacrament a physical, the Scotistic a moral working. According to Thomas and his followers God works through the sacrament so that it itself in a physical way causes the grace in the receiver. According to Scotus, however, God had bound himself to let grace follow upon the performance of the sacramental act, without therefore leading it through the sign as through a channel; he presented the sacrament as a bond of debt, upon which the user receives grace from God. Rome thus indeed teaches that the sacrament works ex opere operato , but leaves open in what way God, the causa principaliter efficiens , imparts the grace through the sacrament as the causa instrumentalis . Although the Reformed thus reject the doctrine that grace is conveyed to us through the sign as a channel, they have thereby in no wise done short to the truthfulness of the sacrament. Yes, they have thereby much better than Rome and Luther upheld the spiritual nature of grace. For the rest the way in which God makes use of word and sacrament in dispensing his grace remains a hiddenness. Scripture also says of the word of God that it creates and recreates, regenerates and renews, justifies and sanctifies. But who describes in what way God thereby makes use of the word and likewise of the sacrament?
6. According as the bond between sign and thing signified is understood in different ways, so also the strength and working ascribed to the sacrament differs. Because in Rome the seen sign has taken up the unseen grace into itself, the sacrament works ex opere operato , without anything else or more being asked in the receiver than the purely naysaying non obicem ponere , Trent VII can. 6-8. Already Augustine had sought the difference between the sacraments of the Old and New Covenant in this, that the sacraments of the new testament give health, the sacraments of the old testament promised the Savior, Enarr. in Ps. 73, 2. The schoolmen worked this out so that the sacraments of the Old Covenant, because they foreshadowed the coming Christ, had no strength in themselves to share grace but only worked out of and through faith. Under the Old Testament, therefore, everything hung on the opus operans , that is, on the believing subject, which looked toward the coming Christ. But with the sacraments of the New Testament it is otherwise; the offering of Christ has been brought, and therefore the sacraments now work per se , by their own strength, ex opere operato . This last saying, which was brought into theology by William of Auxerre and Alexander of Hales, at first formed no withstanding therewith, that in the receiver of the sacrament a certain readiness was asked—Thomas says for instance still, that the strength of the sacraments is chiefly from the faith of Christ's suffering, S. Theol. III qu. 62 art. 5 ad 2—but only made known that the New Testament sacraments from the fulfilled suffering of Christ had received the strength to bestow justifying grace, Thomas, ib. art. 6. But the upholding of this outward, causing kind of the sacraments led then of itself to weakening the needed readiness in the receiver more and more, and at last to lessening it to the naysaying non obicem opponere . Earlier with this saying, which already comes in Augustine, Ep. 98, 9, a forthright bent of mind, a good inward stirring was thought of. But the New Testament sacraments worked ex opere operato and shut out from the side of the receiver all strength and worth; a good stirring is however according to Rome worthy and therefore for the sacrament needless; yes even the seven ready-makings, which in grown folk go before baptism, have yet a worth of fittingness and are therefore for the sacrament overmuch; the sacrament works grace in each who does not on purpose harden himself, who lays no forthright hindrance in the way, who naysayingly and sufferingly bears himself thereunder, Schwane, D. G. III 581. Harnack, D. G. III 479 f. Bellarmine, de sacr. in genere II 1 sq. Simar, Dogm. 686. The grace which is shared through the sacraments is the gratia habitualis , poured in, hallowing, whether this, as in baptism, is given for the first time, or as in penance, renewed after loss, or also, as in the other sacraments, increased. Therefrom is yet sundered the gratia sacramentalis , which to the gratia sanctificans yet adds a godly help to reach the end of the sacrament, is sundry in the sundry sacraments and makes able to reach that special goal which is own to each sacrament in sunder, Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 62 art. 2. And at last there are yet three sacraments, baptism, confirmation, and ordination, which, besides this grace, yet stamp an character indelebilis , Trent VII c. 9. The church fathers said already that baptism was a ghostly sign and seal which was stamped on the baptized; even as a sign which is burned into a soldier's hand always makes him known and binds him. So also baptism stamps a πνευματικη σφραγις , mark, character, which is never lost, Schwane, D. G. II 734. The schoolmen brought also this teaching point to further unfolding. They set it forth as a habit or strength which was stamped into the soul and gave man right and might to godly worship. For there were three sacraments which brought man into sundry ranked standings and unchangeably made him known as a limb thereof before God, angels, and men. Baptism brings into the standing of begotten faith, sunders the believers from the unbelievers, and makes us like to Christ as our ghostly head; confirmation brings into the standing of strengthened faith, sunders the strong from the weak, and makes us fighters under Christ as king; ordination brings into the standing of manifolded faith, sunders the priests from the lay folk, and lifts them to likeness to Christ as high priest. It is a sign setting ready, sundering, shaping like, binding, which hallows man to God, binds him to his service, and is never, even not in the lost, wiped out, Schwane, D. G. III 592. Thomas, S. Th. III qu. 63. Bonaventure, Brevil. VI 6. Bellarmine, de sacr. II 18-22.
This doctrine was unanimously rejected by the Reformation. For Scripture plainly teaches that the sacraments are signs and seals of the covenant of grace, that they are intended only for believers and thus always presuppose faith, Mark 16:16, Acts 8:37, 38, 9:11, 17, 18, 10:34, Rom. 4:11, and so on. Only then, when faith is present, are they means in God's hand to signify and seal the unseen goods of grace, Acts 2:38, 22:16, Eph. 5:26. Furthermore, Scripture makes absolutely no distinction between the sanctifying grace, which is bestowed in the sacrament, and a special sacramental grace different from it; for the grace that is sealed in the sacrament is neither less nor other than that which is bestowed through the word in faith and which consists first in forgiving grace and then also in sanctifying grace. And finally, there is not a word in Scripture about an indelible character that is impressed by baptism, confirmation, and ordination; the texts, 2 Cor. 1:22, Eph. 1:13, 4:30, on which Bellarmine appeals, do indeed speak of a sealing of believers by the Holy Spirit unto future salvation, but they mention no sacrament to which that sealing is bound, nor any separate habit or virtue in which that sealing would consist. Although it is true that God holds each one accountable and judges according to the measure of grace bestowed upon him, yet thereby no juridical belonging to the church of Rome or any other church is impressed, Calvin, Antid. 7, 9. The Lutherans later deviated from their original standpoint insofar as they allowed regeneration in children to be wrought by baptism and allowed unbelievers in the Lord's Supper to partake corporeally of the flesh and blood. But yet they always maintained that in adults faith is decidedly necessary for a salutary reception of the sacrament. Thereby the Protestants were faced with the task of maintaining the objective, real character of the sacraments, despite the fact that their working depends on faith.
Among the Roman Catholics and also among the Lutherans this character seems better preserved, because the working of grace is incorporated in word and sacrament. In contrast, the Reformed seem to be in a double difficulty. First, they teach that grace is distributed by God not per verbum et sacramentum but only cum verbo et sacramento . And second, they hold that an external calling to salvation is insufficient, that with the calling through the word a calling by the Holy Spirit must be added, and that thus by consequence the sacrament without more, without a special working of the Holy Spirit in the heart of believers, does not answer to its purpose. Yet hereby the reality and objectivity of the sacrament is not in the least done away with. For 1. the bond between sign and signified thing in the sacrament is no other but also no less than that which exists between the word of the gospel and the person of Christ. Whoever believingly receives the word, truly receives according to God's promise Christ as his portion; and likewise, whoever believingly receives the sacrament, receives in that same way and according to that same promise the whole Christ with all his benefits and goods. Whoever on the other hand rejects the word through unbelief, thereby rejects Christ himself, even if he has heard the word and even historically accepted it; and in the same way, whoever despises the sacrament, thereby despises Christ himself; although he receives the sign, he does not become partaker of the signified thing. One rule applies to both; objectively the bond remains for word and sacrament with Christ; for that bond is laid by God himself. He has said: if anyone believingly receives my word and my sacrament, he shall not perish in eternity. 2. Roman Catholics and Lutherans assure to the sacrament no other, better reality than that which also according to Reformed confession belongs to it. For to salvation nothing else but also nothing less and more is necessary than the whole Christ, who is offered in word and sacrament and accepted by faith; and one can do nothing more dreadful than to reject that same Christ in and with the word and sacrament. Whether unbelievers then corporeally and locally in the signs of bread and wine eat the very flesh and blood of Christ, detracts nothing from the objectivity of the sacrament, is wholly useless, and also does not serve to aggravate the judgment, for the moral rejection, that is, unbelief is the great sin. The grace of God in Christ is of spiritual nature and can therefore only be received spiritually. 3. Also the Lutherans dare not abandon the requirement of faith for the reception of the sacrament in adults. In children they allow, like the Roman Catholics, regeneration to be brought about by baptism, but children form a category of their own, which according to Reformed confession is in no respect in a less favorable condition than according to Lutheran and Roman Catholic confession. In adults, however, faith is required. And even the Roman Catholics require in that case that the recipient of the sacrament shall not place any hindrance in the way. According to both, therefore, the sacrament does not work absolutely ex opere operato . There are cases in which the sacrament does not work, that is, bestows no grace, and yet retains its objective character. The scholastics still unanimously taught that those who approach without faith or fictitiously receive the sacrament, not the thing, Lombard, Sent. IV dist. 4. And Roman theology still always treats the question whether the sacrament, which was first rejected by an obstacle, can still later exercise its working, Schwane D. G. IV 371. Jansen, Prael. Theol. III 330. The working of grace according to no confession always accompanies the sacrament. And yet nevertheless the objectivity, and the bond of sign and signified thing is maintained. 4. Roman Catholics and Lutherans finally face the same difficulty as the Reformed, that is, the question when and in what case the sacraments serve the recipients to salvation and communicate grace to them. The question is the same as that which earlier presented itself with the calling through the gospel. There it was answered in this sense, that with the external calling an internal calling must be added. And it is no different with the sacrament. The sacramental union taught by Roman Catholics and Lutherans, however intimate, is yet not, without more, able to communicate grace, for then it would have to communicate it always and everywhere and in all cases. There must in adults on the part of the subject something be added; the obstacle must be removed and faith must be put in its place. Objectively the sacrament is indeed sufficient; in the sacrament the whole Christ is bestowed just as really as in the word. But in the subject it is necessary that his understanding be enlightened, his will bent, in order truly to understand and receive the sacrament. If one says that unbelief is the fault of the subject, then one speaks the truth, but does not name the last and deepest cause of the distinction which is to be observed in the use of the sacrament, just as in the hearing of the word. And therefore the Reformed said that although Christ is indeed objectively, truly and earnestly offered to all users of the sacrament just as in the word to all who hear it, yet subjectively a working of the Holy Spirit was necessary to enjoy the true power of the sacrament. Non omnibus promiscue, sed electis Dei tantum, ad quos interior et efficax Spiritus operatio pervenit, prosunt signa , Cons. Tigur. in Niemeyer 209. 5. For believers, for those who receive and enjoy the sacraments in faith, they are signs and seals of the covenant of grace. With a view to the many who receive the sacrament and yet do not believe, a distinction was already made by Gomarus, disp. de sacr. § 31. Essenius, Comp. Theol. dogm. XI 6. Kant on 1 Cor. 7:14, between an internal and external covenant. And when the state of the church more and more showed a separation and opposition between both, this distinction gave occasion to repeated controversy. On one side it was asserted that in the Old Testament an external covenant had existed but that now there was only an internal covenant (C. Vitringa, Labadie, etc.); on the other side many said that even now an external covenant existed, in which all who made confession were participants and had right and claim on the sacraments (Swarte, van Eerde, Janssonius). And between both stood those who tried to unite external and internal covenant in a more or less happy way (Koelman, Appelius, Bachiene, Kessler), cf. Vitringa VI 361-398. Indeed the older theologians and confessions know nothing of such a separation. Internal and external covenant are no more two covenants than invisible and visible church are two churches. And the sacraments therefore cannot be only signs and seals of an external covenant, on which also "unregenerate unblessed" would have right. They are not a confirmation only of the sentence of the gospel, that whoever believes shall be saved, but they are for believers seals of the whole covenant of grace, of all its promises, of the whole Christ and all his benefits. They therefore assure not merely a general truth, but they are seals on the promise: I am your God and the God of your seed; they set before us, both what God gives us to understand through his word and what he inwardly does in our hearts, concisely and firmly making the salvation which he communicates to us, Dutch Confession 33; they give us better to understand it and seal to us that God on account of the one sacrifice of Christ accomplished on the cross grants us forgiveness of sins and eternal life out of grace, Heidelberg Catechism 66. Thereby it is not denied that those who receive the sacrament without faith would not enjoy some temporal fruit thereof, for God is rich in mercy and bestows even many benefits on those who reject his word and sacrament in unbelief, cf. part III 491 sq. But the full, true fruit of the sacraments is, just as that of the word, only for believers. They are thereby assured of their salvation.
From all this follows the worth of the sacraments. They are not needful in themselves, for God did not need to set them up; and his covenant and grace, his word and pledge are, as those of a true God, steadfast enough, that they would not need the upholding of the sacraments. They are also not needful in an utter sense for blessedness, for the Writ binds blessedness only to belief, John 3:16, Mark 16:16, and Roman Catholics and Lutherans, though seemingly teaching the utter needfulness and therefore upholding emergency baptism, do not hold this in deed and say, for instance, with Augustine, that in the case of the thief on the cross the baptism of blood takes the place of the baptism of water. Not the lack but the scorn of the sacrament makes one guilty before God. But nonetheless the sacraments have great worth. Because we are no spirits but bodily, earthly beings, who can grasp the ghostly only under bodily shapes, God has set up the sacraments, that by beholding those tokens we might gain a better understanding of his kindnesses, receive a mightier upholding of his pledges, and thus be upheld and strengthened in our belief. The sacraments do not work belief, but they strengthen it, like the wedding ring strengthens love. They pour in no bodily grace, but bestow the whole Christ, whom believers already own through the word, yet they bestow that same Christ in another way and along another path and strengthen belief. And furthermore they renew the believers' covenant with God, strengthen them in the fellowship of Christ, bind them more tightly together, set them apart from the world, and bear witness to angels and men, that they are God's folk, the church of Christ, the communio sanctorum .
7. The number of the sacraments is determined very differently, according as the concept of sacrament is taken more narrowly or more broadly. If with Augustine it is said: every holy sign is a sacrament, the number is greatly extended. And also if with Calvin under sacraments all those signs are understood, which God ever gave to men, to assure them of the truth of his promises, the Holy Scripture gives us a whole series of sacraments, Inst. IV 14, 18. The Reformed then also counted many of them, especially when later the doctrine of the covenants was worked out and every covenant and every covenant dispensation must have the needful number of sacraments. Thus sometimes in the covenant of works before the fall, although there could properly be no speech of means of grace, the sabbath and paradise, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life were counted as sacraments. And in the Old Testament dispensation of the covenant of grace not only circumcision and passover, but often also the driving out from paradise, the making of coats, the offering of Abel, the bow of Noah, the passage through the Red Sea, the manna, the water from the rock, the brazen serpent, Aaron's rod, Gideon's fleece, Hezekiah's sundial etc. were considered as sacraments, Polanus, Synt. Theol. VI 50-54. Witsius. Oec. foed. I 6. IV 7. 10. Moor V 258-267. Coming to the New Testament sacraments, however, the concept was at once taken in a narrower sense and their number limited to two, although it is true that Calvin called the laying on of hands, Inst. IV 14, 20 and Luther and Melanchthon the absolution, Symb. B. ed. Müller 173. 202 sometimes still a sacrament. Rome however extended the number of sacraments to seven and introduced besides a great number of so-called sacramentals. The difference between both consists in this, that the sacraments are instituted by God, the sacramentals by the church; the former work by the power granted them by God, the latter by the intercession and blessing of the church; the first effect immediately man's inward sanctification, the latter contribute thereto only by granting subordinate graces and preserving from temporal evils; the sacraments are necessary by God's command, the sacramentals are recommended by the church as useful and wholesome. To the sacramentals belong objects like churches, altars, priestly garments, chalices, bells, water, oil, salt, bread, wine, palms etc., which are consecrated by the church and set apart for religious use, and further the acts of exorcising and blessing, which the church employs, to withdraw things and persons from the evil influence of the devil and to bring them over to the holy heritage of the church. For to Rome the creation is of much lower order than the recreation; the creation is nature, the recreation is grace, that is, elevation of nature; the world bears a profane character and stands moreover under the influence of Satan; all that therefore passes from the world into the service of the church must be withdrawn from the power of the devil and consecrated and blessed to the service of God. While thus the sacramentals form the great enclosure, which separates the church from the world, the sacraments are the means by which God inwardly sanctifies the members of the church, imparts the supernatural grace and makes them partakers of his nature. They are the means for the redemption and elevation of the whole visible creation, which is represented in the four elements that they use, namely water, oil, bread and wine, and they are seven in number, because they, connecting the number of the Godhead with the number of the world, through the supernatural grace sanctify the whole creation and consecrate it to the service of God. Baptism, instituted by Christ, Mt. 28:19, not only takes away all guilt and punishment of sin, but also frees from the stain of sin, plants the principle of grace and holiness, the seed of the new life through regeneration in the soul, and thus makes man a living member of Christ's mystical body and receives him into communion with the triune God. Like Adam through the donum superadditum entered into a higher world, into the kingdom of grace, so the baptized is elevated into the state of supernatural holiness. But just as Adam had to preserve the given grace by his free will, so also the Christian must appropriate the baptismal grace by his free will. To grant him power thereto, serves the second sacrament, confirmation or the chrism. The Romanists cannot prove that Christ instituted this sacrament and commanded it to the apostles, but they must yet believe it because the church says so, and appeal therefore to Acts 8:15, 19:6, Heb. 6:2, where only extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit are spoken of, which were imparted by the apostles with laying on of hands, as clearly appears from Acts 8:18, 10:44, 45 cf. 1 Cor. 14:1, 15, 37. Besides in laying on of hands, the chrism consists further in anointing and in the uttering of a formula by the bishop, which is wholly unknown to Holy Scripture and was first gradually introduced in the church. According to Rome this sacrament now grants to the baptized children, when they have come to the use of their reason, the power of the Holy Spirit, to preserve the life of grace received in baptism and to confess the faith steadfastly with word and deed. This power of the new life is nourished and strengthened by the third sacrament, that of the altar or of the eucharist, in which Christ himself with his divine and human nature is present, offers himself in an unbloody way for the sins and gives his true body and blood to the communicants for nourishment of their soul to enjoy. Because however the life of grace by man's weakness can suffer damage through all kinds of sin and can be lost, Christ has instituted a fourth sacrament, that of penance, in order to restore or renew his sanctifying grace. For the institution by Christ Rome appeals to the power which Christ granted to his apostles to forgive sins, Mt. 16:19, 18:18, Jn. 20:22, 23. Now this commission of Christ stands firm, but not a word is said that it bears the character of a sacrament; a sign is lacking to it and Rome knows nothing else to say than that contrition, confession and satisfaction are the sign in this sacrament of penance. The sacrament of penance has therefore with Rome become a tribunal, in which the priest judges the sins confessed in the confessional, according to the standard of the libri poenitentiales and, although absolving from guilt and eternal punishment, yet imposes all kinds of temporal punishments on earth or in purgatory to be atoned for, which however can again be remitted by indulgences. The sacrament of extreme unction serves not for the healing of the sick, as the cited proof text James 5:14 would lead to expect, but for preparation of the dying for death; the anointing with holy oil signifies the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the imparting of grace, which frees the soul from its defects and grants the needful power for the last conflict. To these five sacraments come then still the sacrament of orders, which distinguishes the priest from the layman by an official gift of the Holy Spirit and grants him the power to change in the mass bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and to forgive the sins of the penitent sinner in Christ's name; and the sacrament of matrimony, which according to the word of Eph. 5:25 makes the married state an image of the union between Christ and his church, thereto binds the married not only by natural bonds but by supernatural grace to each other and grants them the power to persevere in mutual love unto death and to bring up their children in the fear of God. Cf. Lombard, Sent. IV Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 65 sq. Trent Sess. 7. 13. 14. 21-24. Catech. Rom. pars II. Bellarmine, Controv. Tom. III etc.
From the Protestant side, this set of seven sacraments has sometimes been overly praised, for example by Leibniz in his System of Theology ; Goethe in From My Life ; Vilmar in Dogmatics ; Bilderdijk in Essays and Letters , and so on. Even so, there arose here and there a striving to broaden the number of sacraments and ceremonies and to enrich the Protestant churches with the symbolic rites of Rome. Yet there is no ground to be envious of the concept and number of Rome's sacraments. With all esteem for the beauty shown therein, for the Protestant Christian this is already settling beforehand, that for the five sacraments added by Rome to baptism and the Lord's Supper, the Scriptural proof is wanting.
Sometimes this is openly owned from the Roman side. Thus, for example, Deharbe in Explanation of the Catholic Doctrine of Faith and Morals says of confirmation that we nowhere read that Christ set up this sacrament or bade his disciples to give it. And this holds in the same measure for shrift and last anointing, for wedlock and priestly hallowing. But setting this aside, what does Rome gain with all these sacraments? It seems that the hoard and sharing of grace in Rome is uncommonly rich, but in truth it is so poor that each time only a small share of sins and punishments is forgiven and can be forgiven, and that each time a new sacrament is needful to bestow grace and free from punishments.
Yea, though one has taken baptism and the Lord's Supper, shrift and last anointing, yet there still stays after this life a penance in purgatory needful. Sins and punishments are so endlessly split and sundered by Rome that all sacraments together with indulgences besides cannot fully free therefrom. Over against this stands that the saints can bring it so far that they even over-earn and swell the treasury of merits. But that is an outlier; it is only workable for saints who, besides the commands, fulfill the counsels and lead a solely godly life, and it yields them no sureness or comfort.
The common Roman Christian, who lives amid the world, dwells in even greater unsureness; he stays even after his death standing before God as before a Judge, whom he must fulfill and whom he must yet soothe through sundry penances. His grace-state is never sure and steadfast; always he dwells in dread whether he be therein and will not fall out the next blink. And this unsureness is not the least bit taken away thereby that the sacraments work from the work wrought.
For though baptism, confirmation, and ordination bestow an unerasable mark, the hallowing grace which the sacraments share is yet always losable again; its taking in shrift, communion, last anointing, wedlock hangs on a sorrowful mood; and also, where it is given, it frees not from all punishment; satisfaction of works stays always needful, even after this life in purgatory. And what kind of grace is it that the Roman Christian takes in the sacrament? No grace of forgiveness and of taking as children, but a grace that is added as a gift over-added to nature, which never becomes one with man, and therefore either drives him into the cloister or leads him to a twofold life in the world.
Over against this, the Protestant Christian has enough with the word and the two sacraments set up by Christ. Therein, if he takes them in faith, he has the whole Christ, the full hoard of his merits, the full righteousness and holiness, the unbreakable fellowship with God. From all guilt he is freed, from all punishment loosed. In baptism he is assured thereof, and in the Lord's Supper he is ever strengthened and upheld in that faith.
So he has no need of sundry grace in confirmation, shrift, and last anointing, for through word, baptism, and Lord's Supper he takes all grace which he needs in life and death, for time and everlasting. His only comfort is that he is Christ's own; in that comfort he lives, in that comfort he dies. Christ has fulfilled all for him; from him no penance or punishment is asked, neither in this nor in the life to come.
And all this grace which the Christian takes stands so little above nature or over against it, that it rather renews and hallows all that is natural. When he weds, therefore, he has no need of new, sacramental grace, for wedlock is holy by its birth, and thus needs not to be lifted above its setting but must only be restored and renewed in its natural order. Or if he seeks an overseer's office, he is not knit by a sacramental grace into a special rank but called from God to a service in his church and thereto fitted by the same grace of Christ.
In baptism and Lord's Supper the Protestant Christian owns endlessly more than the Roman in his seven sacraments; for not the tally of sacraments settles it but the setting up by Christ and the fullness of grace which He shares therein.
Calvin, Institutes IV 19. Chamier, Panstratia Catholica Loc. IV lib. 4. Synopsis of Purer Theology disp. 47. Turretin, Theologia Elenctica XIX qu. 31. De Moor V. Gerhard, Loci XIX. Hase, Protestant Polemic . Tschackert, Evangelical Polemic , and so on.
1. The baptism in the New Testament was readied in the days of the Old Covenant by circumcision, which was outspokenly set forth by God to Abraham, Gen. 17:10ff. According to Herodotus II 36, 104, circumcision also came forth among the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Syrians. The Reformed, for example, Witsius, Aegypt. III 6, 11, 12, Marck, Med. Theol. 29, 8, sought to gainsay this witness or also to show that these folk had taken it over from Israel. But this feeling is unholdable. Among the Egyptians it was already in use in hoary times, at least for the priests. And newer folk-lore searches have set beyond all doubt that circumcision is a rite which comes forth among many folks in Asia, America, Africa, and even Australia, Delitzsch on Gen. 17. Art. Beschneidung in Herzog³. Glassberg, Die Beschneidung in ihrer geschichtl. ethnogr. relig. u. medic. Bedeutung , Berlin Boas 1896. Even as God in the setting up of temple and priesthood, of offering and altar, of laws and orderings among Israel linked Himself to sundry uses among other folks, so He does also with circumcision. He takes it over, as it were, but gives it another, a sacramental meaning. For among the folks the bodily circumcision did come forth, but it bore there no wise the mark of a sacrament. Also it was there oft times, like among the Egyptians, only done to sundry persons, and wontedly not in the first life-days but at later age, fulfilled. When God however sets up circumcision with Abraham, then He bids that all that is manly shall be circumcised, both the bondman and the son of the house; that this circumcision must take place on the eighth day; and that it serves as token of the covenant, so that who receives it not, is a covenant-breaker and must be rooted out from the midst of his folk. Though circumcision may thus also be a health measure, it finds therein yet among Israel its goal not; here it stretches to token and strengthening of the covenant of grace, whose one, great, all-embracing behest is: I will be your God and the God of your seed, Gen. 17:7. Outspokenly it is a seal of two boons of that covenant, of the righteousness of faith, Rom. 4:11, and of the circumcision of the heart, Deut. 10:16, 30:6, Jer. 4:4, Rom. 2:28, 29, Col. 2:11, that is, of the rightwising or forgiveness of sins and of the new birth or hallowing. Not that it works these boons tool-wise, for outward circumcision without that of the heart is without worth, Acts 7:51, Rom. 2:28, 29; 3:21, 30, 1 Cor. 7:19, it is a seal of the righteousness of faith and underlays thus the faith. When the Jews ever longer sought to rear up their own righteousness from the law, they became even as the Heathen and in spite of their outward circumcision doom-worthy before God, Rom. 3:21. Therefore God already before the open coming forth of Jesus through John set up the water baptism. Also this baptism was not something new, no more than of old the circumcision. All the olden times wrote in the worship to the water a token-like meaning. The water of Euphrates, Indus, Ganges had an atoning, hallowing might. Among Greeks and Romans were at sundry happenings, for example at inwending in the mysteries, washings set forth, Pfanner, Syst. Theol. gent. 346. Also among Israel were already long times before the godly setting up of the baptism sundry washings in use, Schürer, Gesch. des jüd. Volkes ³ II 481, and for the newcomers was besides circumcision and offering also a baptism needful, to be taken up in the gathering, ib. III 129. But sacrament, token and seal of grace, becomes this baptism yet first through the setting up of God. The New Testament teaches then also outspokenly, that a word of God went out to John to baptize, Luke 3:2, 3, that God sent him thereto, John 1:33, that his baptism was not from men but from heaven, Matt. 21:25, and that the toll-gatherers, who let themselves be baptized, rightwised God, while the Pharisees and law-knowers, shunning the baptism of John, thrust away the counsel of God, Luke 7:29, 30. With that baptism John preached to the Jews of his time, that they, though circumcised and baptizing the newcomers, themselves guilty and unclean were and had need of the baptism, to go in into the kingdom of the heavens. The baptism of John was thus a charge against, a dooming of the Jews, a preaching of their doom-worthiness, but --let one not forget it-- he was also yet something more. He was the unshakable proof, that God thought on His covenant and fulfilled His behest. Notwithstanding the Jews were guilty and unclean, there was yet forgiveness with God; and this would now yet richer go to open itself than in the days of the Old Testament. John the Baptist is therefore also not to be beheld as the last of the Old Testament foretellers, for all the foretellers and the law have unto John, heos Ioannou , foretold, Matt. 11:13, but as the forerunner of the coming God's kingdom, Matt. 3:2, as the preacher of the nearing gospel, Luke 3:18, as the way-maker of Christ, Mark 1:2, as the witness of the uprising light, John 1:7, 29, 34, 36 cf. Matt. 3:11, Mark 1:7, Luke 3:16, Acts 19:4, who soon makes room for the greater and leads his young ones thither to Him, John 1:35ff., 3:27ff. With this inhold of his preaching comes his baptism together. It was a baptisma metanoias eis aphesin hamartiōn , Mark 1:4, which means not, that John's baptism only readied for the later forgiveness to be received through Christ (Meyer), but very outspokenly, that he in the way of turning gave the forgiveness. For it is said in the same wise in Acts 2:38 of the Christly baptism, that it befell eis aphesin hamartiōn , because one through the baptism as token and seal gets the forgiveness. Furthermore Jesus Himself is baptized with the baptism of John, makes between the baptism, by His young ones served, and that of John no wise a sundering, John 3:22, 23, 4:1, takes over the by John baptized young ones simply, without rebaptizing them, John 1:37, Acts 18:25, and sets up in Matt. 28:19 no other or new baptism, but broadens him only to all folks. On these grounds was by Reformed, Calvin, Inst. IV 15, 7, 8. Mastricht, Theol. VII 4, 17. Turretin, Theol. El. XIX 16, M. Vitringa VII 52 and Lutherans, Gerhard, Loc. XX 15 sq. 43 sq. by stepwise sundry yet the beingly sameness of the Johannean and the Christly baptism held fast. But this was fought by the Romans, Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 66 art. 4. Trent sess. VII can. 1. Bellarmine, de bapt. I 5, by the Anabaptists, Socinians, Arminians and by many newer god-learned, Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 136, 1. Steitz in Herzog¹ 15, 468. Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe I 26 f. van Oosterzee, Dogm. § 87, 2 etc. There are also indeed against the sameness weighty beswares to bring in. First is from Matt. 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16 the besware taken, that the baptism of John and the Christly baptism stand over against each other as water- and as Spirit- and fire-baptism. But Acts 1:5 teaches clearly, that John here not his baptism against the Christly baptism, but against the overbearing so named baptism of the Holy Ghost on the Pentecost day over-sets. The own Christly baptism is forsooth also a baptism with water, betokening the off-washing of sins, and the baptism of John was even so a baptism with water, but which also sealed the turning and forgiveness. Both baptisms come thus in token and betokened thing wholly together. Else would there also the unrhymed follow therefrom, that not only the baptism of John, but also the baptism, which Jesus Himself before the Pentecost day through His learners let serve, nothing but a baptism with water had been. And that dare even the fighters of the sameness of the baptism of John and of Christ not on. They say wontedly, that the Christly baptism either already at Jesus' baptism by John or at the baptizing of Jesus Himself through His learners is set up. But both baptisms, as well that of Jesus as that of John, were sundered from that Spirit-baptism, which on the Pentecost day would take place, though they both also betokened and sealed the same boons of turning and forgiveness of sins. But now is yet again --and that is the second besware against the above-meant sameness-- the Spirit-baptism of the Pentecost day brought in link with the Christly water-baptism. According to Acts 19:1-7 forsooth Paul met at Ephesus some learners, who were baptized eis to Iōannou baptisma , who were called mathētai and pisteusantes and yet had not received the Holy Ghost and even knew not, ei pneuma hagion estin . By Paul better taught about the preaching of John, they let themselves be baptized eis to onoma tou kyriou Iēsou , and the hands laying on and received thus the Holy Ghost and began to speak in tongues and to foretell. From this last shows, that by pneuma hagion here, even as 8:15, 10:44, 11:15, 15:8 to the Ghost-gift of tongue-speaking and foretelling must be thought; these had the learners in Ephesus not received and they had even not heard thereof. The baptism gave not always that gift, not only that of John not but also not that of Jesus. For in Acts 8:15 we read, that the believers in Samaria were well baptized eis to onoma tou kyriou Iēsou , but yet none of them had received the Holy Ghost and got Him first through hand-laying of the apostles. And even so lets Acts 19:6 this gift not a following be of the baptism but of the hand-laying. But the strange in Acts 19 is, that the learners in Ephesus before this hand-laying were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Paul must thus the baptism, which they had received, not as a true, real baptism have acknowledged. They were baptized eis to Iōannou baptisma . The baptism of John was well good, for he baptized the baptism of turning to faith in Christ. But among the learners of John, who stayed with him and not to Jesus were overgone, was sundry error slipped in, also about the baptism; and so must the learners in Ephesus not anew but for the first time in Jesus' name be baptized, for their baptism to the name of John was no true baptism, not the real Christly and also not the real, first Johannean baptism. Cf. Baldensperger, Der Prolog des vierten Evang. Freiburg Mohr 1898, who means, that all the foreword of John 1 against these Baptists or followers of John the Baptist is written.
2. The divine setting up of baptism thus already falls with John, but Jesus took it over after undergoing it himself, had it given by his followers, John 3:22, 4:1, and in Matt. 28:19 made it binding for all believers from all folks. This last place is deemed by many as not true, because in the apostolic time baptism still took place in the name of Jesus and the trinitarian wording is first from a later date; and there are even those who claim that Jesus did not set up baptism at all for his church. Yet against this there are all kinds of drawbacks. It is indeed not open to denial that Jesus himself let the baptism of John be given to him and thereby acknowledged it; He leads it, where he speaks of it outright, from a command of God, Matt. 21:25. There is also no ground to deny that Jesus took over the baptism and gave it, if not himself, then yet through his followers, John 3:22, 26, 4:1, 2, for Jesus came forth with the same preaching as John, namely of the nearness of the kingdom of the heavens and set the same calls for the entry thereto, namely faith and turning, Mark 1:15; it thus lay at hand that He, just like John, let the baptism of turning be given to everyone who wanted to belong to the narrower ring of his learners. In John 3:5 there is indeed not speech of baptism, but the place yet proves that the Spirit's giving in the church was seen as having its sign in the water. As the contrast of the Jewish folk with Him and his followers grew greater, an act of setting apart on one side and of taking in into the church of Jesus on the other became all the more needful. Baptism as bringing into the Christian church must also well have been willed and meant by Jesus himself, for otherwise it would not be explainable that it right away, without any strife, was brought in and used in all Christian churches, both in those from the Jews as from the heathen, Acts 2:38, 41, 8:12, 13, 16, 38, 9:18 etc. Rom. 6:3-5, 1 Cor. 1:13-17, Gal. 3:27, Eph. 5:26 etc. In 1 Cor. 1:17 Paul indeed says that Christ did not send him to baptize, but to preach the gospel. But this proves not at all that Paul deems baptism small or needless; Rom. 6 and other places teach this quite otherwise. Jesus himself however also did not give the baptism but let it be given. And so too Paul kept himself mainly with the preaching of the gospel and left the baptizing and other works in the building and upbuilding of the churches to his fellow workers.
Now the baptism is indeed called in the first time a baptism ἐν τῳ ὀνοματι or εἰς το ὀνομα Ιησου, Rom. 6:3, 1 Cor. 1:13, Gal. 3:27, Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, 19:5, but thereby it is by no means said that the baptism was administered with that particular formula. For Paul says in 1 Cor. 10:2 that the Israelites were baptized εἰς τον Μωυσην, in 1 Cor. 1:13 that the believers at Corinth were not baptized εἰς το ὀνομα Παυλου, in 1 Cor. 12:13 that they were baptized εἰς ἑν σωμα, and in Acts 19:3 the disciples at Ephesus said that they were baptized εἰς το Ιωαννου βαπτισμα; in all which cases no one thinks of a formula that was spoken at the baptism. The expression: in the name of Jesus, is not meant as a formula, but is a description of the character of the Christian baptism, Zahn, Einl. in das N. T. II 309. The Israelites let themselves, going out from Egypt, be baptized in the cloud and in the sea εἰς τον Μωυσην, in relation to Moses, so that they acknowledged him as their saver and redeemer, put their trust in him, and let themselves be led by him. The disciples at Ephesus were baptized εἰς το Ιωαννου βαπτισμα and had thereby joined themselves to John. And so also is and is called the Christian baptism a baptism in or unto the name of Jesus, because it places the believers in his fellowship and directs all their trust only upon Him. This same is now also meant when Jesus in Matt. 28:19 says that his disciples must be baptized εἰς το ὀνομα του πατρος και του υἱου και του ἁγιου πνευματος. He does not here prescribe to the apostles what they must say at the administration of baptism, but what they must do ; the Christian baptism is and must be an incorporation into the fellowship with that God who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. The name denotes God in his revelation, and the highest revelation of God consists therein that He makes himself known and called as Father, Son, and Spirit. Being baptized in that name thus does not merely make known that one is baptized on the command or behest of God or unto the confession of his name; for the expression: in the name, can be interchanged with the person himself, as Paul also speaks of being baptized εἰς Χριστον, Rom. 6:3, Gal. 3:27. But it makes known that the one baptized is placed in relation to and in fellowship with that God who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, and now on that ground is also bound to confess and glorify that name. Cf. Julius Böhmer, Das biblische „im Namen”. Eine sprachwiss. Untersuchung über das hebr. בְּשֵׁם und seine griech. Aequivalente, Giessen Ricker 1898.
Although Jesus however after his resurrection had described the baptism as an incorporation into the fellowship with Father, Son, and Spirit, it lay at hand that it in the first time was mostly brought into connection with the person of Christ. At the entry into the church it came first of all to repentance and to faith in Christ, in order through that way to obtain forgiveness of sins, and thereof was the baptism the sign and proof. Therefore the baptism in Acts is still called just as with John a βαπτισμα μετανοιας εἰς ἀφεσιν ἁμαρτιων, Acts 2:38, 22:16. But in the first time something else came besides. John and also Jesus himself had set this baptism of repentance over against the Spirit-baptism, which would take place on the day of Pentecost. This Spirit-baptism was by no means bound to the water-baptism, the baptism of repentance unto forgiveness of sins, for in Acts 2:33 all disciples receive that Spirit without baptism; in Acts 9:17, 10:44 the gifts of the Spirit are already bestowed upon Paul, Cornelius, and others before the baptism, cf. 11:15-17; in Acts 8:1, 9:17, 19:6 glossolalia and prophecy are granted not through the baptism but through the laying on of hands. But yet for those who stood outside, the baptism of repentance was the ordinary way along which they could also receive the gifts of the Spirit, Acts 2:38, 19:5, 6. This connection was however timely; glossolalia and prophecy were not the proper benefits of the baptism; the Christian baptism remained essentially a baptism of repentance and of faith in Christ unto forgiveness of sins. So it is also everywhere in the New Testament understood and described. Peter says in 1 Pet. 3:21 that, just as Noah and his were saved through the water that bore the ark from death, so the believers are rescued from perdition through the baptism; but that baptism must then be understood, not as σαρκος ἀποθεσις ρυπου, not as it outwardly makes us put off the uncleanness of the flesh, but as συνειδησεως ἀγαθης ἐπερωτημα εἰς θεον, δι’ ἀναστασεως Ιησου Χριστου, that is, likely, the plea to God for a good conscience freed from guilt, which the baptism only is and can be through the resurrection of Jesus Christ as proof of our justification, Rom. 4:25. The same view returns in the epistle to the Hebrews; this indeed reckons the διδαχη βαπτισμων, that is, not the doctrine of the Christian baptism but of the washings in general, of which a right view was urgently needful for Jewish Christians, cf. 9:10, to the ground-beginnings of Christianity, but distinguishes in the Christian baptism two elements: the washing of the body with pure water and the cleansing of the heart from an evil, accusing conscience, 10:22, 23. From another side the baptism is considered by Paul; he brings it not so much into connection with justification as well with sanctification. As a going down into and coming up out of the water, the baptism is a portrayal and pledge of entering into fellowship with Christ, with his death and with his resurrection, Rom. 6:3-6, Col. 2:12. As many then as are baptized into Christ, into his fellowship, have put on Christ, appropriated Christ to themselves, so that they now are in Christ, belong to Him, Gal. 3:27-29, walk in newness of life, Rom. 6:4, 6ff., Eph. 5:26, live unto God, Rom. 6:11, 13, yea bear the life of Christ himself in them, Gal. 2:20. And just as they through the baptism have entered into fellowship with Christ, so also with his church, which is his body; they are all baptized by one Spirit into one body, 1 Cor. 12:13, Rom. 12:5. The water-baptism with Paul is at the same time Spirit-baptism, but not a baptism with the spiritual gifts of glossolalia and prophecy, but with the Spirit as the beginning of the new life. Baptized folk are new, spiritual folk, πνευματικοι. But this renewal of man through the Holy Spirit in baptism stands not loose beside and comes not by chance besides the justification out of faith. They fall together; the Corinthians are at the same moment washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and through the Spirit of our God, 1 Cor. 6:11. In the baptism all these benefits are joined together and bestowed upon the believers, which however does not take away that the Corinthians, despite their baptism, are still called by Paul σαρκικοι, νηπιοι ἐν Χριστῳ and are earnestly warned for possible falling away, 1 Cor. 3:1, 3, 10:1-12. Cf. Bossert, Die Bedeutung der Taufe im N. T., Zeits. f. k. Wiss. u. k. Leben 1888 S. 339 f. Ehlers, Das N. T. und die Taufe 1890. Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. I 378 II 178.
3. A fixed teaching about and a generally valid rite for baptism is not yet found in the old Christian church. But yet the Didache 7, 1 already knows the trinitarian formula, while Hermas, Vis. III 7 still speaks of a baptism in the name of the Lord, or calls it, Sim. IX 16, a seal of the Son of God, that gives life. The workings of baptism are especially forgiveness of past sins and a new, supernatural, everlasting life through the Holy Ghost, Justin, Apol. I 61. Tertullian, de baptismo 4. 5. Cyprian, de grat. 3. 4. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 40, 3 sq. Although it is clearly said that the water in baptism keeps its nature, the connection of sign and signified thing is mystically understood; εἰ τις ἐστιν ἐν τῳ ὑδατι χαρις, οὐκ ἐκ της φυσεως ἐστι του ἱδατος, ἀλλ’ ἐκ της του πνευματος παρουσιας, Basil, de spir. sancto c. 15. Λι’ ἐκεινου του ἱδατος ἡ θεια χαρις την αἰωνιον δωρειται ζωην, Theodoret, qu. 26 in Gen., in Suicerus s. v. βαπτισμα, cf. Tert. de bapt. 4. Baptism is therefore also denoted with all kinds of names borrowed from the mysteries, φωτισμος, μυστηριον τελετη, τελειωσις, μυησις, μυσταγωγια, and is regarded as ὀχημα προς οὐρανον, ὀχημα προς θεον, κλεις οὐρανων βασιλειας, Schwane, D. G. II 735. Hatch, Griech. u. Christ. 219. Suicerus s. v. And when since the second century the worship service fell apart into a public and private part, the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper took on more and more a mysterious character, understandable only for the initiated. Preceded by the catechumenate, baptism itself was surrounded with all kinds of symbolic acts, such as the presentation of the baptizand by godparents, the laying off of confession, the blowing on the face and the signing with the cross, the laying of hallowed salt in the mouth of the baptizand, the exorcism, the thrice repeated immersion or sprinkling, the anointing with the chrism, the giving of a new name, the hanging around with a white garment, the handing over of a burning candle, the reception into the congregation, the brotherly kiss, and sometimes immediately thereafter the celebration of the Lord's Supper, Suicerus s. v. Moeller-von Schubert, Kirchengesch. I² 339, cf. Catech. Rom. II 2 qu. 45 sq. Bellarmine, de bapt. c. 24-27. While thus in the apostolic time baptism followed immediately upon conversion and was administered in the simplest way, Acts 2:38, 41, 8:12, 36, 10:47 etc., it was from the second century onward wrapped in an ever more expanding ritual and changed into a magical and mystical means of grace. Even Augustine furthered the development of the doctrine of baptism in this spirit, although it is true that he required for a salutary working of baptism in adults a preceding faith and conversion. For first he says that baptism gives forgiveness of sins and regeneration only within the church; the sacrament is a sacrament of Christ and given by Him to His church; heretics and schismatics can indeed take it with them outside the church, but then it is a stolen and unlawfully possessed good and therefore exercises no salutary working, but tends to perdition, de unit. eccl. 68 de bapt. 3, 13. 5, 7 sq. Second, he seems to teach in children a salutary working of baptism ex opere operato; children dying unbaptized are lost, de anima I 9. III 12. de pecc. mer. I 20. de nat. et gr. 8., but in those who are baptized, baptism itself or the intercession of the church or the faith of the parents replaces the faith which they themselves cannot yet exercise, de pecc. mer. I 19. 34 sq. And third, Augustine ascribes to baptism in every case the working of a character indelebilis, whereby the baptized belong rightfully to Christ and His church and if need be may be brought back under her care by force, de bapt. V 21 VI 1. c. epist. Parmen. II 16, cf. Dorner, Augustinus 248 f. Schwane, D. G. II 744 f. Harnack, D. G. III 143 f. The Scholastics at first still stayed with Augustine and acknowledged that baptism in adults presupposed faith and also was not absolutely necessary for salvation. But they moved more and more in this direction, that they let the sacrament work ex opere operato, and made the subjective requirements lose more and more in significance, Lombard, Sent. IV dist. 3-6, Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 66-71. Bonaventure, Brevil. VI 7. Schwane, D. G. III 605-622. Harnack, D. G. III 478 f. Thus the doctrine of baptism at Rome was prepared, which in short comes down to this: baptism is the first sacrament, the door to the spiritual life, the entrance to the church; it gives the first supernatural grace, which is presupposed and increased by the other sacraments and is therefore absolutely necessary for salvation, except in some cases, in which it can be replaced by a baptismus sanguinis or flaminis (voti). It must therefore also be administered as soon as possible and in case of need by laymen or non-Christians. For by that baptism are imparted: 1º the character indelebilis, which brings someone under the jurisdiction of the church, 2º the forgiveness of all sins, both original and actual sins, which were committed before baptism and remission of all eternal and also of all temporal punishments, insofar as they are opera satisfactionis, but not, insofar as they are natural punishments of sins, 3º the spiritual renewal and sanctification of man, by the infusion of sanctifying grace and the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and love, so that the stain of original sin is wholly done away and only the concupiscence natural to man as a physical being remains, which however itself is no sin but can become an occasion to sinning. 4º The incorporation into the communion of saints and into the visible church of believers. These workings baptism exercises thereby, that under the pronouncing of the known formula the word of God or the power of the Holy Ghost connects itself in a mysterious way with the water and makes this into an aqua viva et efficax, into a uterus maternus of the new man. In fact, then, by the sacrament of baptism are reborn not only all children, but also all adults, who have fulfilled the seven preparations and place no obex in the way. Cf. Conc. Flor. in Denzinger n. 591. Trid. VI 4. VII de bapt. XIV de poenit. 2, Cat. Rom. II 2. Bellarmine, de sacr. bapt. c. 1-27. Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. I² 141 f. etc., and for the doctrine of the Greek church, Damascene, de fide orthod. IV 14. Conf. orth. qu. 102. 103. Conf. Dosith. decr. 16. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Conf. I 400 f.
4. The strife that the Reformation waged against Rome's doctrine of the sacraments did not center on baptism but on the Lord's Supper. The German Reformers even held that baptism in the papacy had been kept fairly unharmed and thus took it over with small changes. Many ceremonies that had slowly been added to baptism stayed in use among the Lutherans, such as name-giving, the sign of the cross, exorcism, godparenthood, laying on of hands, white clothing, blessing, and so forth. Furthermore, Luther taught in his two Catechisms and in the Smalcald Articles that the word of institution made the water of baptism into a divine, heavenly, holy, and saving water; indeed, he rejected the view of Thomas and the Dominicans, who overlooked the word of institution and let God impart a spiritual power to the water; but he still took up an objective, real union of the word and the water; baptism is the word of God with immersion in water, water grasped by divine command and sealed by the word of God; the water in baptism is, as Luther put it elsewhere in his Sermon on Baptism, fully made godly by the divine Majesty, like iron is heated by fire. Later dogmaticians worked this out and taught that through the word of institution the heavenly matter, that is, the whole Trinity or the blood of Christ or the Holy Spirit, so bound itself with the earthly matter, that is, the water, that God in, with, and through the water of baptism, not separately and by a special action but together with the water of baptism and through it, in one and undivided action, wrought regeneration. And lastly, Luther in the early time did make the wholesome working of baptism always hang on faith, whereby the benefits of baptism were taken up, but later he laid more and more stress on the objective mark of baptism, and no longer said that the children are believers or can be, but let infant baptism rest only on God's command. The Lutherans therefore later taught that the wholesome working of baptism in grown folk does hang on faith, at least on a passive readiness, and thus, if faith is there, consists in sealing and strengthening; but in children baptism works regeneration, is the ordinary means of regeneration and cleansing from sins, yet always so that indeed the guilt and might but not the whole stain of sin is taken away; the root or tinder of sin stays.
But the Reformed not only cast off most ceremonies that little by little had been bound to baptism and turned back to the plainness of Holy Scripture. But they also went out from the thought and sought to hold fast to it, that baptism was set up for believers and thus did not work faith but strengthened it. Thereby they came, with infant baptism, to stand before a twofold hardship. First, they had to show, mainly against the Anabaptists but then also against Romanists and Lutherans, that the children of believers were already to be seen as believers before baptism and as such ought to be baptized. And second, they were bound to give an answer to the question wherein, with children, the grace-working of baptism lay, since they, as not yet come to their understanding and thus not yet having actual faith, could also hardly be strengthened and upheld in this faith. To the last question, however, little heed was commonly given; folk mostly set themselves to say in general that baptism for the parents was a proof that their seed was taken up in God's covenant, for the children later when they grew up was a rich comfort and blessing, and even already in their unthinking state gave them a right to the goods of the grace-covenant.
The first question, however, was from the outset answered very differently. For the right of infant baptism, folk called on Holy Scripture with one mind, namely on its teaching about the covenant of grace. By the rule of that covenant, children and also grown folk were to be judged; faith and turning give no right to baptism, but only the covenant. The children born of believing parents were no heathen children, lay not under God's wrath, dwelt not under Satan's might, so that an exorcism must first take place with them. But they were before baptism already children of the covenant; baptism was therefore also not utterly needful for salvation, and there was no need for emergency baptism. As soon as folk thought further about what this being taken in of the children in the covenant of grace held in, they went apart. There were those who wished to hold fast the oneness of election and covenant as long and as closely as might be; they therefore claimed that all children born of believing parents must, by the judgment of love, be held as reborn, until they in teaching or life clearly showed the opposite, or that at least the chosen little children as a rule were already reborn by God's Spirit before baptism or even before birth. But others, looking at the hardships of practice, which so often teaches that baptized children grow up without showing any token of ghostly life, dared not make of this regeneration before baptism a rule. They all acknowledged without bar that God's grace is not bound to the means and can also work regeneration in the heart of young children, but they left in the midst whether that regeneration with the chosen little children takes place before or during or also, sometimes even many years, after baptism. This showing got the upper hand when the church through overlooking of discipline came to decay. Election and church, inner and outer side of the covenant, earlier bound as much as might be but since Gomarus more and more set apart, fell ever further asunder; in the church a little church formed itself. Baptism was therefore little by little fully loosed from regeneration, and, since folk yet wished to keep it for the children, taken up and upheld as a sacrament of the church and pledge of the seed of believers in general, or as a strengthening of the objective, conditional promise of the gospel, or as proof of fellowship in the outward covenant of grace, or as warrant of a losable regeneration bound not unbreakable with salvation and later to be upheld by personal faith, or as an upbringing means that spurs the baptized on later age to true turning.
The strife broke out thereby time and again at the point of the baptism form. Some understood the saying "to be hallowed in Christ" of the inward renewing by the Holy Ghost and therefore had qualms to put this question of the baptism form to parents who yet brought their child to baptism but otherwise cared neither for God nor his command; under pietistic sway they fastened ever less worth to the outward baptism deed, urged personal turning, and drew back into the narrow ring of the fellowships. Others understood the saying in an objective, covenant-wise sense, saw in baptism nothing more than a token of the outward covenant, whereto a historical faith and an unblameworthy life gave enough right.
Thus in the Reformed churches themselves the baptism was almost wholly robbed of its worth and in fact that doctrine of baptism was introduced, which in the age of the Reformation was already held by Socinians and Anabaptists and later by Remonstrants and Rationalists. These, despite all their differences among themselves, agree in this, that baptism has worth not as a seal of grace from God's side but in the first place as a confessional act from man's side. Baptism works nothing and gives nothing, but is only a symbol of the passage from Judaism and Heathendom to Christendom, a token of faith and conversion, a promise of obedience and therefore either not at all instituted by Christ as an abiding sacrament or in any case for children at most allowed and useful, but not needful and commanded; the Quakers went even so far that they wholly rejected water baptism and acknowledged only the baptism of the Spirit, and the Rationalists disputed whether baptism, which after all was no more than a solemn emblem, could not better be abolished, cf. M. Vitringa VII. Strauss, Dogm. II. Wegscheider, Instit § 171. 172. Kant, Religion ed. Rosenkranz. Modern Protestantism still stands on this viewpoint and makes baptism optional, Scholten, Initia, Ehlers, Das N. T. und die Taufe, Giessen 1890; and among many others the slighting of the sacrament works on in this, that the weight is shifted from baptism to the later following, ever more solemnly arranged reception and confirmation of members.
But over against this, in this age from various sides an attempt was again tried to uphold the objective character of baptism. Schleiermacher saw in baptism indeed first of all an act of the church, whereby she receives the believer into her fellowship, but then at the same time an reception into the life-fellowship with Christ, Chr. Gl. § 136-138, cf. Schweizer, Chr. Gl. § 171. Lipsius, Dogm. § 846. Others again placed the gracious act of God in the sacrament in the foreground and taught that baptism does not presuppose regeneration but yet grants the power of regeneration or regeneration itself, is a linking of the bond of love from Christ's side and lays the foundation for all later benefits, however then only to be gotten in the way of faith, Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. V 2. Kahnis, Luth. Dogm. II. Dorner, Chr. Gl. II. Frank, Chr. Wahrheit II. Althaus, Die Heilsbedeutung der Taufe im N. T. Gütersloh 1898. H. Cremer, Wesen und Wirkung der Taufgnade, ib. 1899. W. Schmidt, Dogm. II. Oosterzee, Dogm. § 138 9v. Many Lutherans even returned to the old doctrine that the Holy Ghost in and through the water of baptism works regeneration and let this consist not only in a spiritual renewal but also in the implantation of a heavenly bodiliness, Vilmar, Dogm. II. Martensen, Dogm. Höfling, Das Sakrament der Taufe I. Thomasius, Christi Person u. Werk II. In England the Tractarianism arose with the doctrine of a baptismal regeneration, therein consisting that the children by baptism were so renewed that they later could independently receive grace through faith, Newman, Lectures on Justification 1838, Waterland, Works, Oxford 1843 IV cf. Hodge, Syst. Theol. III and Cunningham, Historical Theol. II. Ryle, Knots untied, 11th ed. London Hunt 1886.
Here in this land Dr. Kuyper sought to uphold the objective character of baptism by ascribing to it a special grace. This consists not in regeneration, which is presupposed at baptism and thus needs no more to be bestowed, but in a special, otherwise not to be gotten benefit, namely, in the incorporation into the body of Christ, or rather in the implantation in our faith of the habit or the urge not to stand on ourselves but to feel ourselves one with the whole body of Christ, Heraut.
5. Most churches nowadays know baptism almost only as infant baptism. Except in the field of missions and in Baptist denominations, the baptism of adults occurs only as an exception. Yet in Scripture the opposite is the case; it nowhere speaks of infant baptism in so many words, it always starts from adult baptism; and Christian confessions and theologians have always followed it in this respect, insofar as they took the baptism of adults as their starting point and only then proceeded to infant baptism. This baptism was now instituted by John and then by Jesus on God's command, because the whole world was condemnable before God. That applied not only to the Gentiles, but also to the Jews, who indeed sought to establish their own righteousness from the works of the law and therefore did not come to the law of righteousness, Rom. 9:31. Already the prophets proclaimed that God, who is faithful and remembers his covenant, would in the future give to Israel repentance and life, a new heart and a new spirit, forgive all their sins, pour out his Spirit upon them, sprinkle clean water upon them and cleanse them from all uncleannesses, Hos. 6:2, Joel 2:28, 29, Mic. 7:18-20, Isa. 1:16, 40ff., Jer. 31:31-34, 33:8, Ezek. 11:17-20, 36:25-28, 37:1-14, 39:29, Zech. 13:1 etc. Regeneration, repentance, faith was necessary, as much for Israel as for the Gentiles, to enter into the kingdom of heaven and to partake of its goods. John and Jesus appeared with that preaching, and those who accepted it were baptized. Thus, the offering and acceptance of the word of the gospel preceded baptism. Scripture leaves no doubt that baptism is instituted exclusively for believers. No other persons are baptized than those who confess their sins and give proof of repentance and faith, Matt. 3:2, 6, Acts 2:37, 38, 8:12, 37, 18:8; baptism is therefore called a baptism of repentance, so that in that way one may obtain the forgiveness of sins, Mark 1:4, Acts 13:24; in Matt. 28:19 the two participles βαπτίζοντες and διδάσκοντες indeed indicate the way in which the μαθητεύειν πάντα τὰ ἔθνη must be accomplished, but baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit precisely presupposes the preceding preaching of and faith in that name, as this is also clearly expressed in Mark 16:15, 16 and in John 4:1 making disciples precedes baptizing; they are children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, who have put on Christ through baptism, Gal. 3:26, 27. As long as the baptism of adults is in question, there is no difference about this among the Christian churches; no single church baptizes an adult without prior instruction in the truth, without a confession of faith made beforehand. Even Rome acknowledges that in the adult the seven praeparationes must precede baptism, and makes not the objective validity but yet the subjective working dependent on an intentio virtualis as conditio sine qua non in the recipient, Tridentine Council VI c. 5. 7. Roman Catechism II 2 qu. 30. 44. But Rome has increasingly weakened these subjective conditions in the recipient, and shifted the emphasis from the word and faith to the sacrament; this sacrament indeed works ex opere operato , without requiring anything else in the recipient than a negative obicem non ponere ; just as sins, so the benefits of grace are endlessly split by Rome, distributed in pieces and bits here and hereafter; it is always the same idea of hierarchy that here in the doctrine of grace, as everywhere else, makes its influence felt. Therefore Rome also teaches that preaching and faith have only preparatory significance; the actual, sanctifying, supernatural grace is communicated only through the sacrament of baptism, which therefore, except in a few cases where it is replaced by the baptismus sanguinis or flaminis , is absolutely necessary for all people, adults and children, for salvation. The Reformation, in contrast, has set forth this scriptural principle, that the sacrament communicates or can communicate no single benefit which the believer does not already possess through his trust in the word of God. Faith alone, apart from all sacrament, puts one in possession and enjoyment of all the benefits of salvation. If now baptism presupposes this faith, no single benefit remains that could still be communicated to the believer through baptism. Baptism can do nothing other than signify and seal the benefits that are received through faith and thereby strengthen faith, Belgic Confession art. 33. 34. Heidelberg Catechism qu. 69. The Lutherans also agree to this for the baptism of adults, who are reborn beforehand and have made confession of their faith; just as faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit are increased in the reborn through the preaching of the word, ita quoque idem fit per baptismum, quin et baptismus donum regenerationis in illis efficaciter obsignat , Gerhard, Loc. XX 123. Quenstedt IV 145. Schmid, Dogm. of the Ev. Luth. Church 400. 407. A Protestant principle is involved here; whoever attributes to baptism a communication of grace that cannot be obtained through the word and faith opens the door to the Roman doctrine of sacraments.
The form of baptism consists in a bond laid by God between a visible token and an unseen ghostly good. As a token, water serves, Matt. 3:6, Acts 8:36, which is not chosen by chance or whim but because of its striking likeness to the thing betokened. What unclean, befouling, and choking dust is to the body, that is sin to the soul; and just as water washes away the body's uncleanness, so the blood of Christ cleanses from all sins. Among nearly all folk and in all faiths, water has therefore a rich, token-like meaning; serving in sundry washings, it shadowed forth the ghostly cleansing which every man needs to dwell in fellowship with God. In the Old Testament worship, water took a broad place, Ex. 30:18-20, 40:30, Lev. 6:28, 8:6, 11:32, 15:12, Num. 8:7, 19:7ff., etc., and the prophets set forth the ghostly cleansing of the folk as a sprinkling with water, Ezek. 36:25, 37:23, Zech. 13:1. Of itself and by nature, that is, by the kind that God gave it at the making, water is thus outstandingly fit to picture and seal in baptism the washing away of sins and the ghostly renewal. Therefore it is not needful, as Rome claims, that the baptismal water be beforehand hallowed on Easter or Pentecost Saturday and mingled with oil, Catech. Rom. II 2 qu. 47. Much less may the use of water be left off with the Paulicians, because Christ is the living water, or with other sects be replaced by branding with a mark or by scourging to blood, Moor V 409-411. Even it is needless to grant with Beza and others that, if water lacks, another liquid may be used, for such a case is as good as unthinkable, M. Vitringa VII 14. In the first times, the act of baptizing consisted in the one to be baptized being plunged under the water and after a moment drawn up again. The Greek word βαπτίζω points to this already, for it means word for word to dip, to plunge in, John 13:26, and even when used in a broader sense for washing, Matt. 15:2, Mark 7:4, Luke 11:38, Heb. 9:10, or in likeness, Matt. 3:11, 20:22, Acts 1:5, etc., it betokens such an act whereby the person or thing baptized is wholly plunged under and cleansed. Further, the cases which Scripture tells clearly show that baptism in the apostolic time took place by way of plunging, Matt. 3:6, John 3:23, Acts 8:38. And lastly, the wording of the sacrament is wholly built on this way of giving baptism, Rom. 6:3, 4, Gal. 3:27, Col. 2:12. For ages, then, immersion remained in use in the Christian church; the Greek church still holds to it, sprinkling (adspersio) or rather pouring (infusio) came in old times only when there was not enough water, Didache c. 7, or when the sick had to be baptized on their beds (baptismus clinicorum); Cyprian, Ep. 69, 12, upheld in this last case the sprinkling or pouring by appeal to Ezek. 36:25, but otherwise the church fathers always speak of baptism as a plunging into the water, Suicerus, s. v. ἀναδύω. Pope Stephen II in 754 allowed baptism by pouring in cases of need for children and the sick, but a council of the year 816 still wrote to the priests, that they should not pour water over the heads of infants but always plunge them in the bath. Thomas said, it is safer to baptize by immersion, because this has the common use, S. Theol. III qu. 66 art. 7. The Council of Ravenna 1311 left the choice between immersion and pouring free. Up to the 13th century, then, in the West immersion still comes alongside sprinkling; but then the latter becomes more and more general. As in the Christianized Europe the baptism of grown folk became the outlier and infant baptism the rule, there came change in the way of giving baptism not from dogmatic but from healthful thoughts; children were in a sense all placed in weakness. The Reformers joined in this use; Luther gave the nod to plunging, Calvin held the question for a thing indifferent, but the Anabaptists made a groundwork of it and therefore turned back to immersion. And this is the only thing that needs to be fought. There is no doubt that plunging was of old in general use, is still allowed, and brings out the rich meaning of baptism better than sprinkling. But one cannot make a groundwork of it here. For 1º the water is not the blood of Christ itself and does not itself work the washing away of sins, but is thereof a token and seal; so in baptism it cannot come down to the amount of water that is poured out on the one baptized or in which he is plunged. 2º The ghostly boon which is pictured by baptism is called not only a washing away of sins but also a sprinkling with clean water and with the blood of Christ, Ezek. 36:25, Heb. 12:24, 1 Pet. 1:2, cf. Ex. 24:6, 29:16, 20. 3º Though plunging remained in use for ages, yet from the oldest times in cases of need sprinkling was thought allowed; the Christian church never thought to deem baptism ungelded only because it was given by way of sprinkling; and the upholders of plunging mostly shrink back in deed from this outcome. 4º Although, despite the threefold immersion used from old times, Did. c. 7, with Gregory the Great it is to be held: whether a single or threefold washing is done, it is to be thought to make no odds, Catech. Rom. II 2 qu. 14, yet sprinkling may not be done in so small a measure that all thought of washing is lost. Just as the Lord's Supper, however shrunk, must remain a meal, so also in sprinkling with baptismal water the token-likeness of washing ought to be kept. Cf. Calvin, Inst. IV 15, 19. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. I 683-694. Moor V 413-421. M. Vitringa VII 16-30. Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe I 46-60. De Hoop Scheffer, Overview of the History of Baptism by Immersion, Amsterdam 1882.
6. This water becomes a sacrament through the word of institution. In Scripture, baptism is sometimes described as a baptism in the name of Christ, Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, 19:5; compare Romans 6:3, 1 Corinthians 1:13-15, 6:11, Galatians 3:27; and at other times as a baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Matthew 28:19. These expressions do not aim to provide a formula to be spoken at baptism, but they describe the essence of Christian baptism; it must be a baptism in the name of Christ and thus in the name of the Triune God. That they are not intended as a formula is evident from the fact that no such formula is mentioned for circumcision and Passover, for John's baptism, or for the Lord's Supper. But certainly, from the beginning, something was spoken at the administration and reception of baptism; there was confession of sins, Matthew 3:6, and of faith in Christ, Acts 8:37; compare 1 Timothy 6:12. Soon, by the nature of the matter, a fixed formula came into use, derived from the words of institution in Matthew 28:19. The Didache speaks of Christians as βαπτισθεντες εἰς ὀνομα κυριου , 9:5, but it already knows the Trinitarian formula, 7, 1. 3; compare Justin, Apol. I 61. Although a baptism in the name of Christ or with the confession that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, Acts 8:37, was fully sufficient in the earliest times, later, when various heresies arose, the Trinitarian formula was increasingly regarded as necessary to maintain the Christian character of baptism; compare Cyprian, Ep. 73, 16-18, and other church fathers in Suicerus s.v. βαπτισμος . But even this Trinitarian formula is not the same in the different churches. The Greek church uses the words: βαπτιζεται ὁ δουλος του θεου ὁ δεινα εἰς το ὀνομα του πατρος--ἀμην, και του υἱου--ἀμην, και του ἁγιου πνευματος--ἀμην, νυν και εἰς τους αἰωνας των αἰωνων . Although the Latin church recognizes baptism administered in this way, it itself uses the formula: ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti , Catech. Rom. II 2 qu. 10. 11, and the Protestant churches usually adopted this. The Syrian and Armenian churches have a formula that differs from both the Greek and the Latin, Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe I 44. All this proves that the validity of baptism in itself does not depend on the literal words spoken by the minister. The Trinitarian formula became necessary only to ward off heresy, to provide assurance that the baptism administered is the true, Christian baptism, and to bring desired uniformity to liturgical usage. In addition, it is important to note that the Trinitarian baptismal formula possesses no magical power to change the water into the blood of Christ. The Reformed not only deny this, but the Greek, Roman, and Lutheran churches also speak differently about baptism than about the Lord's Supper. In the latter sacrament, the emphasis falls on the recitation of the words of institution, on their consecratory power, and on the transubstantiation or consubstantiation thereby effected. But although in baptism one also speaks of a divina virtus imparted to the water, of aqua vivida, sancta, divina , of a regeneratio per aquam in verbo , even the Catech. Rom. says that the words of institution must be spoken clearly and distinctly for the instruction of the people, II 2, 10, and denies that in baptism there is a transubstantiation, a change of the water into the blood of Christ, II 4, 9. The unio sacramentalis is thus different here than in the Lord's Supper. Certainly, there remains a difference. Roman Catholics and Lutherans conceive the working of the Holy Spirit in baptism as proceeding per aquam . The Reformed reject this local, physical union and instead assume a connection like that in the word. Just as the Holy Spirit works cum verbo but does not confine his power and operation within the word, so it is also with the water of baptism. In Ephesians 5:26, the words ἐν ρηματι are not, as the Lutherans wish, a further determination of λοντρῳ or ἱδατος , for then they would require the article before them: τῳ or του ἐν ρηματι . But they belong with ἁγιαση : Christ sanctified his church through the word of the gospel, while he cleansed her through the bath of water. Paul here distinguishes the working of Christ through the word from that through the water, just as is done in Hebrews 10:22 and 1 Peter 3:21. Not the minister and not the water, but Christ sanctifies and gives the thing signified, Matthew 3:11, 1 Corinthians 6:11, Hebrews 9:14, 1 John 1:7. If the water of baptism effected regeneration, Paul could not have said in 1 Corinthians 1:14 that Christ did not send him to baptize but to preach the gospel. However much there is difference about the manner in which sign and thing signified are connected in baptism, there is agreement regarding the reality of that connection. The Reformed church also confesses that in baptism Christ promises and assures to everyone who receives it in faith that he is as certainly washed with his blood and Spirit from the uncleanness of the soul as he is outwardly washed with water, which is wont to take away the impurity of the body, Heidelberg Catechism 69.
Also concerning the blessings which in baptism are bestowed upon adult believers, there exists in the main agreement. They are all comprehended in the fellowship with the triune God, into which the believer is incorporated by baptism, Mt. 28:19. The Father witnesses to us in baptism that He establishes with us an everlasting covenant of grace, and takes us to be His children and heirs, Gen. 17:7, 10, Acts 2:39. The Son seals to us that He washes us in His blood and incorporates us into the fellowship of His death and resurrection, Rom. 6:3, Gal. 3:27. The Holy Ghost seals to us that He dwells in us and hallows us to be members of Christ, 1 Cor. 6:11, 12:13, Tit. 3:5. Worked out more fully, these blessings are: 1. The justification or forgiveness of sins , Mk. 1:4, Acts 2:38, 22:16, 1 Pet. 3:21, Heb. 10:22. Doedes thinks that this blessing does not come into view in baptism but first in the Lord's Supper, because baptism is called a baptism of repentance unto forgiveness of sins. But this view is clearly contradicted by Acts 22:16, 1 Pet. 3:21, Heb. 10:22; repentance is indeed the way along which the forgiveness won by Christ comes into our possession and enjoyment, but baptism is precisely the proof and pledge of that forgiveness obtained in the way of repentance; for the confession of sins and justifying faith go before baptism. In baptism, therefore, all sins with all their guilt and punishment are forgiven, not only the past but also the present and future, for justification is a judicial act, a change of state and therefore brought about at once, fully and for good. 2. The rebirth, repentance, dying of the old man and rising of the new man through fellowship in the death and resurrection of Christ , Mk. 1:4, Rom. 6:2-10, 1 Cor. 6:11, Eph. 5:26, Col. 2:12. According to Rome, in baptism that same grace is bestowed again which Adam received as donum superadditum but lost through sin. Just as in Adam as homo naturalis even before the fall concupiscence dwelt, which was bridled by the donum superadditum , so it is with the baptized. Concupiscence remains in him, but this is in itself no sin and is natural to man as consisting of flesh and spirit. Only it can easily become an occasion for sin, if man, instead of letting himself be led by supernatural grace, hearkens to it and consents to it. But apart from this danger, which always threatens the baptized, he is through the grace which he receives in baptism freed not only from all guilt but also from all stain of sin. Over against this, the Belgic Confession art. 15 declares: original sin is not wholly done away or altogether uprooted even by baptism (originally in the French text of 1561: et n’est pas aboli mesme par le baptesme , enlarged by the synod of 1566 with the words: ou desraciné du tout ). Although many with Doedes reject these words, they are yet fully correct and in agreement with Holy Scripture. For this teaches in the places cited above very clearly that baptism, understood as sign and seal, rebirths and renews man, breaks the power of original sin in him, makes him walk in newness of life, yet so that sin still dwells in his flesh and against his will takes him captive under its law. The original stain is thus indeed in part and in principle but not wholly done away by baptism as sacrament; although it no longer condemns the believer, it yet remains in him unto death as an unholy fountain of all kinds of sin. 3. The fellowship , not only with Christ Himself, but also with the church, which is His body. The baptized is saved from the evil generation, set apart from the world, Acts 2:40, 41, made a disciple of Jesus, Mt. 28:19, John 4:1, incorporated into His church, 1 Cor. 12:13, and thus also bound to a walk in uprightness, Gen. 17:1, and in newness of life, Rom. 6, to confession of God's name and to keeping of Jesus' commandments, Mt. 28:19. All these blessings are already bestowed upon the baptized before baptism in the word of the gospel; they are accepted on his part by faith; but now they are signified and sealed to him in baptism. It may therefore not be presented as if in faith before baptism only some or in any case not all blessings were bestowed, and that the lacking ones are then still granted in baptism. For the word contains all promises and faith accepts them all. There is no single grace which is not bestowed by the word and only by the sacrament. Also the incorporation into the body of Christ takes place by faith and receives in baptism its sign and seal. The grace of baptism consists and can according to Scripture and Reformed confession consist in nothing else than declaration and confirmation, Heidelberg Catechism 66, 69. Compare further Calvin, Institutes IV 15. Martyr, Loci Communes. Polanus, Syntagma. Bullinger, Housebook 1612. Ursinus, Explanation of the Catechism qu. 69 sq. etc.
7. The Infant Baptism. Thus far there is in the main agreement among the Christian churches in the doctrine of baptism. But all sorts of differences reveal themselves as soon as infant baptism comes into discussion. From the beginning of its introduction up to the present day, it has been rejected by a considerable part of Christendom, especially on these two grounds: that it does not occur in Scripture and that according to its original institution it always presupposes faith and conversion, which in children do not occur or in any case cannot be revealed and discerned. Cf. William Wall, The History of Infant Baptism , 4 vols., new ed. Oxford 1836. A. H. Newman, A History of Antipaedobaptism from the Rise of Paedobaptism to A.D. 1609 . Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1897. Strong, Systematic Theology , 534–538. Indeed, up to the time of Tertullian, all direct and positive testimony is lacking that baptism was administered to the children of believers. But from this silence not too much may be inferred. It goes without saying that in the first and second centuries, when the Christian church was rapidly spreading in the world, the baptism of proselytes attracted much more attention than infant baptism. First, adult baptism was the ordinary, frequently occurring baptism; alongside it, infant baptism gradually arose; and finally, when the church was established and one people after another was Christianized, infant baptism became the rule and proselyte baptism, except in heathen lands, the exception. When Tertullian, therefore, first mentions infant baptism (De Baptismo 18), he indeed opposes it, but not on the ground that it is a novelty and not customary in apostolic times, but because his conviction in general is that delay of baptism is more useful: Si qui pondus intelligant baptismi, magis timebunt consecutionem quam dilationem . In this conviction Tertullian did not stand alone. As long as Christianity could still expand in the villages, cities, and countries where it was established among the heathen, and thus transitions were always taking place, many were of the opinion that one could do no better than to postpone baptism as long as possible, because otherwise there was danger of falling into sins again later and losing the grace received in baptism. But Tertullian was the only one who wished this view to apply also to the children of believers. The church, even in Africa, however, paid no attention to this opposition and continued with infant baptism; Origen testifies that in his days infant baptism was in general use and derived from the apostles; and Cyprian, in agreement with the council held at Carthage in 256, defends that infant baptism should be administered not first on the eighth day but already on the second or third day after birth. Cf. Höfling, Das Sakrament der Taufe I, 104ff. As soon as infant baptism became the rule and adult baptism the exception, naturally its meaning had to be further elucidated and its legitimacy defended against various opponents. This was done in different ways.
1. When Augustine defended original sin against the Pelagians and thus also the necessity of baptism for children, he had to give an account of the right that children had to baptism. Confessing that baptism was instituted only for believers and yet acknowledging that children could not believe themselves, he therefore appealed to the faith of the parents who presented the child for baptism and answered in its place: Pie recteque creditur, prodesse parvulo eorum fidem, a quibus consecrandus offertur (De Libero Arbitrio III, 23). Children of believers must themselves be reckoned among the believers, for they believe by the faith of their parents: Credit in altero, qui peccavit in altero (De Verbis Apostoli , sermo De Baptismo Parvulorum contra Pelagianos c. 14). And not only the faith of the parents but of the whole church benefits them: Offeruntur quippe parvuli ad percipiendum spiritalem gratiam, non tam ab eis quorum gestantur manibus, quamvis et ab ipsis, si et ipsi boni fideles sunt, quam ab universa societate sanctorum atque fidelium (Ad Bonifacium ep. 25). On this ground, according to Augustine, the children of believers have a right to baptism, and in that baptism they themselves partake of the forgiveness of sins and regeneration, but with the understanding that if the baptized child, upon reaching years of reason, does not believe nor abstain from unlawful desires, what he received as a child will profit him nothing (De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione I, 20). Cf. Bibliotheca Studii Theologici Crispin 1565, 115–128, and further the same representation among theologians of various directions: Lombard on Sententiae IV dist. 4; Thomas, Summa Theologiae III qu. 68 art. 9; Bonaventure, Breviloquium VI, 7; Catechismus Romanus II, 2 qu. 27, 30; Bellarmine, De Baptismo I, 10–11; Luther in Köstlin I, 236, 352; II, 88; Calvin, Corpus Reformatorum VIII, 483, 493; Beza, Tractationes Theologicae III, 345; and many others: Oecolampadius, Zanchi, Perkins, Bucanus, Marlorat, Rivetus, Venema, Hartmann (cf. M. Vitringa VII, 136); Quenstedt, Theologia IV, 148; C. Vitringa, Observationes Sacrae II c. 6; Kalchreuter, “Der stellvertretende Glaube und die Kindertaufe,” Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie 1866, 523–544.
2. Such a fides aliena cannot, however, compensate for the lack of personal faith in the child and therefore imperceptibly leads to the doctrine of regeneration through baptism. The faith of the parents or of the church may give the child the right to be baptized, but in the child itself nothing is required except at most a naturally present passive capacity, a negative not placing an obstacle. Therefore, the child, which is as it were offered to God by the whole church with prayers, receives in baptism itself the grace that it needs. But that grace which the child receives is again described very differently. Some scholastics said that in baptism no virtues were infused into children, neither in act nor in habit nor in root, but that these were communicated to them later when they grew up, or also, if they died, bestowed at the separation of the soul from the body; others thought that children received the virtues in baptism, either according to the root or according to the habit (Commentaries on Sententiae IV dist. 4, e.g., Bonaventure ibid. pars 2 art. 2 qu. 2; Thomas, Summa Theologiae III qu. 69 art. 6). Trent decreed that the sacraments of the New Testament contain grace and communicate it to all who place no obstacle, so that children also receive grace and virtues in baptism ex opere operato and are not believers beforehand but become believers through baptism (Trent VII can. 6–8, De Baptismo c. 13, 14; cf. Bellarmine, De Baptismo I, 10–11). The Lutherans denied that children had faith before baptism and likewise that they were baptized in the faith of others, but taught that they received faith in baptism, and indeed not merely in habit or potentiality, but even in act: Per baptismum et in baptismo Spiritus S. fidem veram, salvificam, vivificam et actualem accendit in infantibus, unde et infantes baptizati vere credunt (Quenstedt IV, 147). Also some Reformed theologians—Pareus, Baronius, Forbes of Corse, Davenant, Ward, de Brais in Saumur, and others—taught that to all children in baptism a certain grace of forgiveness and regeneration was bestowed, which, if they died young, was sufficient for salvation, but otherwise had to be accepted and confirmed on their part by personal faith (cf. Witsius, De Efficacia Baptismi in Infantibus , Miscellanea Sacra II, 618; Voetius, Disputationes II, 409; M. Vitringa VII, 72). And with this agrees the doctrine of the High Churchmen of a baptismal regeneration.
3. But this doctrine is burdened by many objections. The fides aliena , which at first with Augustine and others was still maintained as a reminder of the faith required by Scripture for baptism, becomes entirely superfluous if baptism communicates grace ex opere operato and presupposes in the child nothing other than a passive capacity. If children can already receive the grace of baptism when they place no obstacle, it is advisable to baptize as many children as possible, even heathen ones, for they are all passive and thus all receptive of grace; the Scotist school also defended this against the Thomist and determined the practice of the Roman Church (Schwane, Dogmengeschichte III, 621). Second, baptism is deprived of its scriptural character, since it is detached from faith and the word, ceases to be a sign and seal of God's promises, becomes an independent, ex opere operato working means of grace, and even among the means of grace occupies the first and foremost place. And finally, the benefits which baptism communicates are on the one hand exaggerated and on the other weakened. For in view of the facts which Scripture and experience present, no one can maintain that all baptized children later prove to be believers and are saved. Thus one must assume that the benefits bestowed in baptism are losable and must later be accepted by personal faith. They are sufficient for salvation for those dying young, and insufficient for those growing up, and place the latter in a doubtful state between believers and unbelievers (e.g., Examen van het Ontwerp van Tolerantie VI, 282–287; VII, 493–495; Moor V, 489; Witsius loc. cit.).
The Reformed therefore returned to Scripture and unanimously took their standpoint in the covenant of grace for the defense of infant baptism, which according to God's promise included not only believers but also their seed. Not regeneration, faith, or conversion, and much less our presumption concerning them, but only the covenant of grace gave, both for adults and for children, the right to baptism (Calvin, Institutes IV, 16, 23–24; cf. Kramer, Het Verband van Doop en Wedergeboorte , 122). This covenant was the firm, scriptural, objective ground on which all Reformed without distinction rested the right of infant baptism; they had no other, deeper, firmer ground. But the Anabaptists always brought forward a second proof against infant baptism; they claimed not only that infant baptism does not occur in Scripture, but also that children cannot have or show faith and conversion and therefore may not be baptized. Against this, the Reformed argued that children could indeed not, like the Lutherans, possess the act of faith, but certainly the habit of faith. They expressed themselves very differently; one spoke of faith in seed, in root, in inclination, in potentiality, in habit, in principle, in internal power of the Spirit, of the seed of regeneration, etc. (cf. M. Vitringa VII, 134). But in the matter itself there was complete agreement. All Reformed held, on the ground of Scripture (Jer. 1:5; Luke 1:15) and in accordance with the catholicity of the Christian religion over against the Anabaptists, that little children as well as adults could be accepted by God in grace, regenerated by his Spirit, and endowed with the seed of faith. And with this they had enough against the Anabaptists. The mutual differences that appeared as soon as they began to work out and apply their principles receded into the background in this common conviction.
8. The right of infant baptism hangs solely thereon, how the Scripture views the children of believers and thus wills that we shall view them. If Scripture speaks of such children in the same way as of adult believers, then the right and also therewith the duty of infant baptism stands firm; for we may not withhold from children what we grant to adults. In the baptism of children it is thus not allowed to require less, but no more either than in the baptism of the aged. In the latter case we are and must according to Scripture be content therewith, that someone confesses his faith. We are never fully sure that someone is no hypocrite and thus unrightfully receives the sacrament; but thereon judgment comes not to us, de intimis non judicat ecclesia . So it is also in infant baptism. He who wants utter certainty can never dispense any sacrament. The question is only, whether the certainty that we in the children of believers have to do with believers, is the same as that which we possess concerning those who on adult age confess their faith. Another, stronger certainty we need not and may not require. So the question posed, Scripture gives a clear answer. 1º First of all the strangeness must be removed, that the New Testament nowhere with so many words speaks of infant baptism. This fact is to be explained therefrom, that the baptism of adults in the days of the New Testament was the rule and infant baptism, if it occurred at all, was the exception. It was the time wherein the Christian church was founded and spread by transition from Judaism and Heathendom. And it was just that transition which was clearly pictured in baptism. Adult baptism is therefore the original baptism; infant baptism is derived; the former must not be conformed to the latter, but the latter to the former. Therewith the right of infant baptism falls not away, nor does it for its upholding according to Roman claim need tradition; for also what by lawful deduction from Scripture is derived, is just as binding as what is expressly mentioned therein. So the church acts every moment in the ministry of the word, in the practice of life, in the unfolding of doctrine; she stays never at the letter but draws from the data of Scripture under the leading of the Holy Spirit deductions and applications, which make her life and unfolding possible and further. And so she acts also, when she passes from adult baptism to infant baptism. Scripture gives the general rule when baptism may and must be applied, and the church applies this rule concretely in life. She needs nowhere to say that children may be baptized; she says enough if she views children in the same way as adults who have come to confession of faith, and never mentions a baptismal ministry to such adults who were born of Christian parents. 2º In the Old Testament circumcision was administered to children of the male sex on the eighth day after their birth. According to Col. 2:11, 12 this circumcision is replaced by baptism. For the Colossians are, although Christians from the Gentiles, just as well circumcised as the Jews. But they are circumcised not with a fleshly, by hands performed circumcision, which consists in the putting off of the σωμα της σαρκος , of the whole fleshly, sinful nature. And it has taken place in Christ, by means and from the power of the circumcision which Christ himself with respect to sin underwent in his death, at the moment when they in baptism were buried and raised with Christ. Through the death of Christ, which was a complete putting off and overcoming of sin and thus fully realized the idea of circumcision, that circumcision has become old and come to its antitypical fulfillment in baptism. Baptism is thus more than circumcision, not in essence but in degree; circumcision pointed forward to the death of Christ, baptism points back thereto; the former ends, the latter begins with that death. If now however that circumcision already as sign of the covenant might and must be administered to children, then this holds a fortiori for baptism, which is not poorer but much richer in grace. That comes also forth therein, that the sacrament of the Old Covenant was administered only to males, but that of the New also to females; and even the opponents of infant baptism acknowledge in this respect the richer grace of baptism. For sin bears namely in humans the character of σαρξ ; it reveals itself especially in the organs of reproduction and shows there its power. Circumcision sets that in the light, just as also the uncleanness of the woman after bearing. But Christ has by his death, which is the true circumcision, taken away all sin, also that which cleaves to reproduction; He has placed the woman in independent relation to himself; He makes her share just as well as the man in his grace; in Him there is neither male nor female; and therefore both are in baptism buried with Christ and raised to a new life. And finally the richer grace of the sacrament of the New Covenant appears also therein, that circumcision might first be performed on the eighth day after birth, for the children shared so long still in the uncleanness of the mother; but now, in the days of the New Testament, children have from their birth right to baptism, because they from the first moment of their existence share in the grace of Christ. 3º Circumcision is far from the only proof that the Old Testament views children as partakers of the covenant. The whole covenant idea brings this view with it. Therein yet the covenant is distinguished from election, that it shows how this realizes itself along organic and historical ways. It is never made only with one single person but in that single also at once with his seed. It never comprises the person of the believer alone, in the abstract, but that person concretely, as he historically exists and lives, thus him not alone, but also all that is his; him for his person not alone but him also as father or mother, with his household, with his goods and possessions, with his influence and power etc. Especially the children are reckoned in him. There is a community of parents and children in sin and misery. But over against that there is also by God a community of parents and children in grace and blessing. Children are a blessing and an inheritance of the Lord, Ps. 127:3. They are always reckoned with the parents and taken together with them; it goes well with them together, Ex. 20:6, Deut. 1:36, 39, 4:40, 5:29; 12:25, 28. They serve the Lord together, Deut. 6:2, 30:2, 31:12, 13, Jos. 24:15, Jer. 32:39, Ezek. 37:25, Zech. 10:9; the deeds and statutes of God must by the parents be handed over to the children, Ex. 10:2, 12:24, 26, Deut. 4:9, 10, 40, 6:7, 11:19, 29:29, Jos. 4:6, 21, 22:24-27; the covenant of God with its benefits and blessings continues from child to child and from generation to generation, Gen. 9:12, 17:7, 9, Ex. 3:15, 12:17, 16:32, Deut. 7:9, Ps. 105:8 etc. Grace is no inheritance but it is yet in the rule dispensed in the line of generations. Piorum infantibus primus ad salutem aditus est ipsa ex piis parentibus propagatio , Beza, Resp. ad coll. Mompelg. II 103 in Gerhard, Loc. XX 211. 4º This view passes over into the New Testament. Jesus appears just as John with the preaching: repent and believe the gospel; He takes over the baptism of John and proclaims therein that the Jews despite their circumcision need repentance and forgiveness; the opposition becomes gradually so strong that Jesus has no more expectation from his people and the people rejects Him and hangs Him on the cross. And yet notwithstanding He continues to view the children as children of the covenant, Mt. 18:2ff., 19:13ff., 21:15ff., Mk. 10:13ff., Lk. 9:48, 18:15. He calls them to himself, embraces them, lays hands on them, blesses them, says that theirs is the kingdom of heaven, sets them as example to the adults, warns these not to offend them, says that their angels watch over them, and sees in their Hosanna cry a fulfillment of the prophecy that God has made the speech of children into a power whereby those who hate Him are brought to silence, and from their mouth has prepared praise, αἰνον according to the LXX. 5º From the same thought the apostles proceed. The covenant of grace, established with Israel, is indeed changed as to the dispensation, but in essence remained the same. The εκκλησια has taken the place of Old Testament Israel, she is the people of God and God is her God and Father, Mt. 1:21, Lk. 1:17, Acts 3:25, Rom. 9:25, 26, 11:16-21, 2 Cor. 6:16-18, Gal. 3:14-29, Eph. 2:12, 13, Tit. 2:14, Heb. 8:8-10, 1 Pet. 2:9, Rev. 21:3. Just as in the Old Testament, under that people of God the children of believers are also included. For the church of the New Testament is no group of individuals, but an organism, a body, a temple and as such, as a people, has taken the place of Israel. She is as a wild olive tree, while some branches are cut off, grafted onto the trunk of the tame olive tree and thus become partakers of its root and fatness, Rom. 11:16, 17. Therefore sometimes whole households pass over to Christianity. The household itself is an institution of God, an organic whole, which shares in a common blessing or curse. Jesus' disciples bring peace to the house which they enter, Lk. 10:5, and He himself says that if Zacchaeus believes, salvation has come to his house, Lk. 19:9. The apostles teach not only in the temple but proclaim the gospel of Christ also repeatedly in the houses, Acts 5:42, 20:20. With the head of the family the whole household is saved, Acts 11:14, 16:31, and whole households believe and are baptized, Acts 16:15, 34, 18:8, 1 Cor. 1:16. Herefrom it is indeed not to be proved that infant baptism was already applied by the apostles, but from the silence the opposite is no more to be deduced; from the early introduction of infant baptism, from the general acknowledgment which it at once found, and from the testimony of Origen follows the possibility and even the probability that it was already an apostolic custom. Further Peter says that the promise of the Old Testament, that God would be the God of believers and of their seed, passes over into the dispensation of the New Testament, Acts 2:39. Indeed this applies first to the Jews, and of the Gentiles there is first speech in the words: and all who are afar off. But this takes not away that the Jews who convert to Christ receive the promise of the covenant not only for themselves but also for their children; and the Gentiles who come to faith share in the same privileges and according to the whole New Testament stand in no respect behind the believers from the Jews. According to Paul, 1 Cor. 7:14, even the children from a household where one of the two parents has become believing are holy. If such a case occurred, namely, the believing spouse must not think that he might not continue the married life with the other half. On the contrary, by the faith of the one spouse the whole marriage is sanctified, also the other spouse is sanctified, ηgiaσται . And this Paul proves therewith, that indeed the children from such a marriage are not ακαθαρτα but αγια . That stood thus firm, was generally accepted and could therefore serve as argument. Children in a household where father or mother is believing are reckoned according to the believing spouse, even if this is the wife of the house. The Christian confession gives in such a house the tone; it is the standard whereby the whole family must be judged; faith is the higher which dominates over the lower. The holiness of which Paul here speaks is not to be thought as a subjective, inward, but as an objective, theocratic one, for otherwise the children and the husband would not through the believing mother and wife but through themselves be holy. Also Paul thinks here not at all of infant baptism, nor of something that must serve as a ground therefor. But it is his concern only to show that Christian faith does not break the natural life orders but confirms and sanctifies them, cf. vs. 18-24. For infant baptism this place is however of importance insofar as it teaches that a whole family is reckoned according to the confession of the believing spouse; the believer has the calling not only for himself but with all that is his and with his whole household to serve the Lord. Therefore the children of believers are also by the apostles admonished as Christian children in the Lord, Acts 26:22, Eph. 6:1, Col. 3:20, 1 Jn. 2:13, 2 Tim. 3:15; also little ones know the Lord, Heb. 8:11, Rev. 11:18, 19:5, and are placed before the throne, Rev. 20:5. Of a neutral upbringing which wants to leave the children on advanced age fully free and independent to choose, Holy Scripture knows nothing, Council of Trent on baptism c. 14. The children of believers are no heathens, are also no devil's children who yet, as Romans and Lutherans teach, must be exorcised at baptism; but they are children of the covenant, to whom the promise comes just as well as to the adults, they are included in the covenant and are holy non natura , Job 14:4, Ps. 51:7, Jn. 3:6, Eph. 2:3, sed foederis privilegio , Heidelberg Catechism 74. Canons of Dort I 17. 6º This all binds the more because grace, especially in the dispensation of the New Testament, is much more abundant than sin, Rom. 5:12-21. If the rejection of infant baptism came solely therefrom that it is not commanded with literal words in Scripture, it would be to be judged with indulgence. But usually it hangs together with wholly other considerations and flows from a limiting of grace and a misrecognition of the catholicity of Christianity. For Anabaptism sets to grace, unless it denies original sin and deems regeneration for children unnecessary, a boundary in the childish age, in the not yet come to years of discretion, that is thus in laws and orders which by God himself at creation are fixed in nature. Such bounds however grace knows not. Under the Old Testament it may in a certain sense have been enclosed within the people of Israel; in the midst of that people it was as wide as possible. And in the New Testament every boundary of people and land, of sex and age is fully wiped out. In Christ there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither child nor graybeard, but only a new creature. The Father has loved the world; Christ is a propitiation for the whole world and has also shed his blood for children; and the Holy Spirit, who caused Jesus to be conceived in Mary's womb and was given already from the first moment of their existence to a Jeremiah and John, has access to every heart and is therein hindered by no age or youth. Children can therefore, as they without their knowledge partake of damnation in Adam, in that same way again be received in Christ to grace. Though they cannot actually believe, they can yet be regenerated and therein also receive the ability of faith. 7º By all this the right and thus also the duty of infant baptism is abundantly demonstrated. For if children of believers are to be viewed as Scripture teaches us, then they according to the divine institution of baptism have claim to this sacrament, in the same and even in stronger measure than the adults who make confession. Utter certainty is there yet in neither case to be obtained. With the aged we can judge the heart no more than with children. For us who are bound to the outward there is always only possible a judgment of love. According to that judgment we hold those who make confession for believers and dispense to them the sacraments; and according to that same judgment we reckon the children of believers to the believers themselves, because they with their parents are included in the covenant of grace. Even the probability that the baptized are true believers is with children greater than with adults. For not only does in a Baptist church the weakening of the meaning of baptism, the neglect of discipline and the deadening power of habit creep in just as well as in a church which practices infant baptism; but nearly half of humans die away before they have come to years of discretion. For all those there lies in Scripture, insofar as they are included in the covenant of grace, a promise of the Lord, which they cannot with consciousness and willingly reject. If they die before the time that they can do that, godly parents may not doubt their election and salvation, Canons of Dort I 17, cf. Voetius, Disp. II 408. 417. M. Vitringa II 51. And even with those children who grow up, may and must so long according to the judgment of love which must rule in the church of Christ be believed in their salvation, as the opposite does not clearly appear. From the children of believers yet continually the church, the assembly of true Christian believers, is built. 8º Therewith however it may never be forgotten that this both with adults as with children is a judgment of love. It is no infallible pronouncement which fixes the salvation of every baptized, but only a rule according to which Scripture commands that we in the practice of church life shall act. Ground for baptism is not the presumption that someone is regenerated and even that regeneration itself not, but only the covenant of God. On the subjective opinion of the minister of the word about the spiritual state of the baptizand it comes not at all; whether he is or is not for himself convinced of the sincerity of faith with the baptizand, he has not to reckon therewith but to act according to the revealed will of God and the rule of his word. But moreover, it avails nothing to close the eyes to the fact that baptism is often administered to such who later prove not to walk in the way of the covenant. Scripture and experience both teach that not all is Israel that is called Israel, that there is chaff among the wheat, that in the house of God there are not only golden and silver but also earthen vessels. Far from all were therefore regenerated when they received baptism. Even it is not to be proved that the elect are always in their youth, before baptism or even before birth, regenerated by the Holy Spirit; God is free in the dispensing of his grace and can let enjoy the fruit of baptism also on much later age. Therefore there remains also in the Christian church place for the preaching of the gospel, of regeneration, faith and repentance. The prophets, John the Baptist and Jesus appeared therewith in the midst of their people which yet was the property of the Lord; and also the apostles administered the word not only to bring the hidden life to revelation, but preached it also as a seed of regeneration and as a means to working of faith. 9º Yet therefore the essence of baptism may not be made dependent on its working in life. Just as upright faith remains what it is according to the description of the Heidelberg Catechism 21, even if reality shows all sorts of deviations and deformities thereof, so also is baptism and may it be no other than what Scripture teaches thereof. The genuine, essential, Christian baptism is that which is administered to believers. Although baptism, just as the outward calling, also for unbelievers yet yields many a blessing, yet its genuine fruit and full power is enjoyed only by believers. Objectively baptism remains, just as the word, the same. Who receives the word, and so also who receives baptism in faith, really partakes of the promises which God has connected therewith. God remains true to himself and grants salvation to everyone who believes. But faith is not all's. In the end the fruit of baptism is enjoyed only by those who are elect and therefore on the Lord's time also come to faith. In that outcome all must acquiesce, whether they be Roman or Protestant, Lutheran or Reformed. Sacramenta in solis electis efficiunt quod figurant , said Augustine and scholasticism repeated it, cf. Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure on Sent. IV dist. 4, and further also Calvin on Eph. 5:26. Inst. IV 14, 9. 10. C. R. VII 694. Beza, Tract. III 124. Voetius, Disp. II 408. Westminster Confession 28, 6. M. Vitringa VI 90. VII 378. The elect have grasped it but the others have been hardened. The children of the promise are reckoned for the seed. 10º The benefits of baptism are with children the same as with adults, namely the forgiveness of sin, regeneration and incorporation into the church of Christ. And these are not first granted in baptism but are already through faith the part of him who according to the will of God receives baptism. Baptism grants no single benefit which is not already promised in the word and accepted through faith, but it grants the same benefits as the word only in another way and in another form, so that faith, according to the measure which God has granted to each, is thereby confirmed and strengthened. Also for children this rule holds. For as they unconsciously can be regenerated by the Holy Spirit and gifted with the ability of faith, so they can also by that same Holy Spirit without their knowledge be strengthened in that ability of faith. There is here, as on so many fields, a mysterious interaction. As light and eye presuppose and support each other, so faith enjoys the sacrament the more according as it is stronger and is also in that same measure sealed and confirmed thereby. The sacraments therefore for the believer, as he grows up, do not gradually decrease in meaning but continually gain for him in value. They always spread fairer and more glorious before the eye of faith the riches of God's grace. They are for every believer and for the whole church a proof of received grace, a sign of God's faithfulness, a plea ground for prayer, a pillar for faith, an admonition to new obedience. Cf. on infant baptism: Calvin, Inst. IV c. 16. Ursinus, Tract. theol. 1584 p. 597-619. Junius, Theses Theol. 52. G. J. Vossius, Disput. XX de baptismo , disp. 13. C. Vitringa, Observ. Sacrae lib. II c. 6. Turretin, Theol. El. XIX qu. 20. de Moor V 476. M. Vitringa VII 99. Martensen, De Kinderdoop 1842. Wormser, De Kinderdoop 1853. Pieters en Kreulen, De Kinderdoop 1861. van Oosterzee, Dogm. § 138. Thym, De beteekenis van den Christ. doop en het goed recht van den Kinderdoop 1884. Kuyper, Heraut 652ff. Steitz art. Taufe in Herzog². Bartels, Die bibl. Lehre v. d. Taufe in Gegensatz zur bapt. Entw. , Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1874 S. 69 f. Boy, Die Begründung der Kindertaufe , Neue Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. 1895 S. 500-511. Lobstein, Zur Rechtf. der Kindertaufe , Zeits. f. Theol. u. Kirche 1896 S. 278-298. Dorner, Chr. Dogm. II 818. 835 f., etc.
9. Of this baptism Christ is the minister. And only when He baptizes and grants along with the sign also the thing signified, is someone truly baptized. But in the ministration of baptism Christ makes use of men, to whom He entrusts the dispensation of the mysteries of God. Under the Old Testament circumcision was not bound to any office; every Israelite might perform it; usually the father of the house did it, Gen. 17:23, in case of need also the mother, Ex. 4:25, 1 Macc. 1:60, later usually the physician and nowadays mostly a specially appointed mohel. But in the New Testament baptism is only administered by such as are placed in office, John, Mark 1:4, Jesus' disciples, John 4:2, the apostles, Acts 2:38, to whom it was expressly committed by Christ, Matt. 28:19, Philip, who was a deacon in Jerusalem but later appeared as an evangelist, Acts 21:8, and as such administered baptism, Acts 8:38, Ananias, who laid hands on Paul and probably also baptized him, Acts 9:17, 18, Paul, who sometimes baptized himself but otherwise left the baptizing to his fellow workers, because as apostle of the Gentiles he was in the first place called to the preaching of the gospel, 1 Cor. 1:14-17, cf. Acts 10:48. From this it clearly appears that the ministration of the sacraments is subordinate to the preaching of the word, but nevertheless has always been connected therewith. The sacrament follows the word, and therefore the right to administer the sacraments passed naturally from the apostles and evangelists to the teachers, to those presbyters who labored in word and doctrine. When these teachers were later regarded as bishops, who were distinguished in office from the presbyters and elevated above them, the administration of baptism was deemed a right of the bishop, Tert. de bapt. c. 17. But the expansion of the congregations and also the increasingly prevalent view that baptism was absolutely necessary for salvation, led to the fact that baptism might also be administered by presbyters, deacons, parochi, and in case of need even by every person who has his understanding. The Roman Church recognizes the baptism which is administered by a heretic, yes even that which is administered by an unbeliever, by a Jew or Gentile, although the required intentio faciendi quod facit ecclesia is here difficult to demonstrate, and thereby reserves to itself the right to apply the cogite intrare to all baptized; only the se ipsum baptizare it does not recognize. To be safe, it has even, if there is any doubt whether baptism has been administered or rightly administered, introduced the conditional baptism, whereby the minister says: si non baptizatus es, ego te baptizo etc., cf. Suicerus s. v. βαπτισμος. Comm. on Sent. IV dist. 5. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 67. Trid. VII de bapt. 4. Cat. Rom. II qu. 18. 23. 42. Bellarmine, de bapt. c. 7. Also other churches, such as the Greek, the Lutheran etc., teach the necessity of baptism and therefore in case of need allowed its administration to laymen. But in the end none of them dare accept the consequence that someone solely because he died unbaptized entirely without his fault would be lost; all allow exceptions in which a baptismus sanguinis or flaminis suffices. Conversio cordis potest inesse non percepto baptismo, sed contempto baptismo non potest, Lombard, Sent. IV 4, 4. The Conf. Aug. art. 9 says in the Latin text indeed of baptism, quod sit necessarius ad salutem but teaches in the German text only, dass sie nöthig sei. The Lutheran theologians do not deny salvation to children who have died unbaptized without the fault of the parents, Quenstedt, Theol. IV 164. And all who impart a special grace through baptism acknowledge that this can also be bestowed by God in other ways, Heraut 651. Therefore the Reformed judged otherwise. For baptism was not a cause but a sign and seal of regeneration, which God bestows before and without the sacrament; no single benefit was conferred by baptism which was not bestowed by the word and accepted by faith. Thus baptism could not be absolutely necessary for salvation; not the privatio baptismi in itself, but the contemptus baptismi makes guilty before God. Therefore in Mark 16:16 baptism is omitted in the second clause and in John 3:5, which place from the other side is generally understood of baptism, Trid. VII de bapt. c. 2. Catech. Rom. II 2 qu. 31, according to Calvin etc. there is no mention of baptism, although perhaps baptism is also thought of, for the water appears here, just as in Matt. 3:11 the fire, as a symbol of the working of the Holy Spirit and is not mentioned at all in vs. 6 and 8. Therefore there is also no reason to deviate from the apostolic usage and to allow the administration of baptism in cases of need also to other persons than the teachers of the congregation, Calvin, Inst. IV 15, 20. Bucanus, Inst. 613. Perkins, Works I 461. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. I. 631. M. Vitringa VII 75. 163. Moor V 435. Therefore the Reformed were also intent that baptism should always be administered in the midst of the congregation. Although in the New Testament the administration of baptism took place wherever there was water, Matt. 3:6, John 3:23, Acts 8:36, yet it soon became customary, when the believers obtained their own meeting places, to have it take place in these. Yet in cases of need, in wintertime, in illnesses, for princes and notable persons an exception was made and the administration of baptism in private houses allowed. This is certainly in conflict with the general rule which must prevail in the church. Although cases are conceivable in which the administration of baptism may take place in houses; they can and may be nothing but high exceptions, are not for the judgment of the minister of the word alone but of the entire church council, and even then require that the administration take place only in the presence of the church council. For in the dispensation of the sacrament it does not depend on the building, but indeed on the assembly of the congregation. The sacrament is a component of the public worship, is a good which Christ has bestowed on His church and must therefore be administered publicly in the congregation with the word. For the sacrament is always united with the word; Christ Himself has connected the ministration of baptism with that of the word, Matt. 28:19. In the planting of the church among a non-Christian population baptism by the nature of the case cannot immediately take place in the midst of the assembly of believers. But as soon as this exists, the ministration of word and sacrament must be transferred to it, for they are a component of the public worship and a good of the congregation. Thus in apostolic times the supper was celebrated in the midst of the congregation, 1 Cor. 11:20. And thus it ought no less to happen with baptism, which indeed depicts incorporation into Christ and His congregation, 1 Cor. 12:13, and therefore is most fittingly administered in the public assembly of believers, Calvin, Inst. IV 15, 16. Voetius, Pol. Eccl. I 726-730. Moor V 510-512. M. Vitringa VII 171. Synod of Dordt sess. 163. 175 Church Order art. 56.
Regarding the time when baptism should be administered, there was no small difference in the church. Circumcision was performed on the eighth day; baptism in the New Testament was usually administered at once, when someone believed and made confession, Matt. 3:6, Acts 2:41, 8:12, 36, 9:18, 10:47, 16:15, 33, 18:8. But when in the following time various persons wished to join the church, who were wholly unacquainted with her teaching and life, the catechumenate arose already in the second century, which was then ever more regulated and according to the synod of Elvira around 300, had to last two years. At the end thereof, the catechumens, preferably on one of the great feast days, were solemnly baptized and incorporated into the congregation. Guided by the thought that baptism forgave only past sins, many even postponed baptism as long as possible and until the deathbed. But the increasingly common infant baptism and the teaching of the absolute necessity of baptism drove the church in another direction. It became the custom not to postpone baptism as long as possible, but to administer it as soon as possible after birth. At first, many pleaded that baptism should be administered in the third or thirtieth year of life; but others preferred it on the eighth or fortieth day after birth; the synod of Carthage in 252 under the presidency of Cyprian already determined that children should be baptized as soon as possible, on the second or third day after their birth, Cyprian, Ep. 59; and this soon became general practice and was regarded as an apostolic custom, cf. Suicerus, s.v. βαπτισμός and κλινικός. Schwane, D.G. Moeller-Schubert, Kirchengesch. The Greek church has no determination about the time, but usually does not postpone baptism longer than the eighth day and administers it in case of need even earlier, even immediately after birth. The Roman church urges that the child be baptized as soon as possible after birth, Tridentine Council VII de bapt. c. 12. Roman Catechism II 2 qu. 28. With this general rule, the Lutherans agree, Gerhard, Loc. XX 245, and also the Reformed. The provincial synod of Dordrecht 1574 art. 57 even declared that the affection of parents who desire to postpone the baptism of their children until the time when the mothers themselves present their children, or wait long for the godfathers, is no lawful cause to postpone baptism. But no other synod adopted this statement. Although all needless postponement is disapproved and speedy presentation of the child for baptism is repeatedly urged, it is by no means the intention of the church orders, when they speak only of the fathers, to exclude the mothers, but to oppose the system of witnesses and not to let these take the place of the fathers, cf. Bucanus, Inst. 634. Bullinger, House Book 1612 f. 249 f. Synopsis pur. theol. 44, 52. Voetius, Pol. eccl. I 724. De Moor V 512. M. Vitringa VII 176. The system of baptismal witnesses, ἀνάδοχοι, sponsors, fidejussores, susceptores, compatres, commatres, patrini, matrinae, spiritual fathers and mothers, arose when infant baptism became general practice, and is already mentioned by Tertullian, de bapt. 18. There were now persons needed who in the place of the child made confession and answered the customary questions; who as it were acted as sureties, sponsors, for the child, and promised to educate it later on the foundation of baptism in a Christian manner. They were the representatives of the church, which indeed itself properly as a whole holds the child for baptism and bears it with her prayer. Now it lay at hand to let the parents act as such sponsors at the baptism of the child. And in the first time this also happened thus. But gradually fatherhood and godfatherhood were placed alongside each other, just as birth and rebirth, natural and spiritual kinship. Parents were naturally already obliged to the Christian upbringing of their child and seemed unable to take a special vow thereto upon themselves. They were the natural parents of the child, but godparenthood was a wholly other spiritual kinship, and therefore gradually became an impediment to marriage between the susceptores on one side and the baptized and his parents on the other, and also between themselves. The council of Mainz 813 already forbade: nullus proprium filium vel filiam de fonte baptismatis suscipiat, cf. Roman Catechism II 2 qu. 20-24. But this same Catechism had to complain that this service in the church was so neglected, ut nudum tantum hujus functionis nomen relictum sit. Lutherans and Reformed considered this system of baptismal witnesses by no means necessary, since it was not prescribed or mentioned in Scripture, but usually held it to be an adiaphoron, which sometimes could be of some use, Gerhard, Loc. XX 267. Buddeus, Inst. p. 1071. Dordrecht Church Order 57. Synopsis pur. theol. 44, 54. Bucanus, Inst. theol. 640. Voetius, Pol. eccl. I 704. De Moor V 509. M. Vitringa VII 159. But the Reformed laid special emphasis on the fact that in the first place the parents should answer the questions at baptism and act as susceptores and sponsors for their child, and required that if witnesses were taken, these should be of pure confession and walk. Calvin, Op. ed. Amst. IX 142. Hooyer, Old Church Orders pp. 7, 11, 17, 46, 69, 105, 153, 205, 265, 314, 344, 456. Added to this is that in the Roman church the godfathers and godmothers must serve to instruct the child in the doctrine of the faith, because the pastors, as the Roman Catechism II 2 qu. 20 says, have no time for it. But the Reformed church, following Calvin, introduced the catechizing of the baptized youth and entrusted this to the teacher. Thus in a well-ordered Reformed church, the system of witnesses, which otherwise soon degenerated into a mere name, except in some special cases, has become superfluous and unnecessary and practically also as good as disappeared. Cf. Suicerus, s.v. ἀνάδοχοι. Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe II 4-20. Steitz in Herzog² 15, 247.
This entire teaching of baptism, as it was unfolded by the Reformed, sets in the light how closely they clung to Holy Writ. All the more does it deserve heed, that they nonetheless or rather just therefore in their acknowledgment and ministration of baptism knew to shun all sect-mongering and kept a truly Christian wideness of heart and breadth of outlook. In keeping with the Catholic Church in her strife against the African churches, the Reformed also with one accord taught that the heretic baptism, if ministered in the name of God threefold-one, must be owned; but since they did not take the baptismal wording in a magical way and did not loose baptism from church and office, they added the further bound, that it must be ministered by a servant owned in a Christian gathering. Cf. Dr. G. van Goor, The Strife over Heretic Baptism. Utrecht 1872. Herzog art. Ketzertaufe. Calvin in Herzog, The Life of John Calvin. Voetius, Pol. eccl. Turretin, Th. El. Moor. Synod of Dordrecht 1574 qu. 10. Middelburg 1578 qu. 29. Dordrecht 1618 sess. 162. And from baptism they indeed shut out all things and stuff, all dead, perished or yet only partly born folk, all monsters, all children also of heathen parents who were taken captive, Synod of Dordrecht 1618 sess. 18. 19, but they let in to baptism all children who after the death of their parents or as foundlings were taken up in Christian households, who were born from an unlawful wedlock or from the excommunicate, schism-makers, heretics, if there was but some ground for the guess that the line of the covenant was not wholly broken. Voetius. Moor. M. Vitringa. The Reformed are rather to be blamed for too wide than for too narrow acknowledgment and ministration of baptism. But thereby they have in an outstanding way upheld the oneness and catholicity of the church of Christ on earth. All Christian churches yet own each other's baptism and thereby in deed speak out that in them all there is yet so much truth at hand, that the likelihood of being saved is not shut out. There is one confession on which they all are built, one faith which they all share. In spite of all sunder and strife, they all own one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
1. With baptism comes as the second sacrament the Lord's Supper, which in the Old Testament had its pattern in the Passover. Just as among the heathen, Numbers 25:2, so also among Israel, meals were often connected with the sacrifices. Sometimes the sacrifices were wholly burnt on the altar of burnt offering, but with others only a part was burnt and the rest preserved for use, either by the priests alone at the altar, Leviticus 2:3, 10, 6:16, 25-30, 7:1-10, 10:12, 13, for atonement, Numbers 10:17; or by the officiating priest with his family in a clean place for his maintenance, Leviticus 7:12-14, 31-34, 10:14; or by the offerer with his family and guests, provided they were Levitically clean, and outside the sanctuary, Leviticus 7:19-21, Deuteronomy 12:7, 12, 1 Samuel 9:13ff., 2 Samuel 6:19. The meaning of these meals was that God came together with his people and on the ground of the offered and accepted sacrifice united himself in joy with his people. In this sanctuary God comes to the children of Israel and dwells among them, Exodus 20:24, 29:42-46, 33:7, Numbers 11:25, 12:5, 17:4, Deuteronomy 31:15; he is the host, who sets aside a part of the sacrifice brought to him and invites his people to the meal; whoever partook of it entered into covenant with him. Participation in the heathen sacrificial meals was therefore forbidden to Israel, Exodus 34:15; it was a joining oneself to, a uniting with the false gods, Numbers 25:3, 5, Psalm 106:28; the apostles later forbade them to Christians, Acts 15:29, 21:25, or warned against them for the sake of the weak in faith, 1 Corinthians 8:1ff., 10:18ff. As such unions of God with his people and also among themselves, these meals bore a character of gladness and joy and often gave occasion to revelry and drunkenness, 1 Samuel 1:13, Isaiah 28:8, Proverbs 7:14, but on the other hand also served as images and pledges of the highest joy in God, Deuteronomy 27:7, Psalm 22:26ff., Isaiah 25:6, 62:8, 9, cf. article Opfermalzeiten in Herzog2. Such a sacrificial meal took place especially at the Passover. Many Protestants maintained against Rome that the Passover was wholly absorbed in it, Moor V 322. Witsius, Oec. foed. IV 9, 6. But this is undoubtedly incorrect; the Passover was first of all a sacrifice and then a sacrament. In Exodus 12:27, 34:25 it is called a sacrifice to the Lord; the action that accompanied it is called service, Exodus 12:26; and its celebration is called in Numbers 9:7 a bringing of an offering to the Lord. Furthermore, the housefather, after he had four days before the feast, on the 10th of Abib or Nisan, set apart a year-old, male, perfect lamb, had to slaughter it on the 14th of that month between the two evenings and with a bunch of hyssop sprinkle some of the blood on the two doorposts and the lintel of the house door, Exodus 12:3ff. This blood served for atonement. In itself Israel deserved death just as much as the Egyptians; but it is not treated like Egypt but graciously saved from death by the Lord and delivered from the land of bondage. For this the blood had to be a sign. When the Lord saw that blood on the house door, he was reconciled, laid aside his wrath, and passed by sparingly (pesach, to stride over something, to pass by, Isaiah 31:5, hence pesach, pascha), Exodus 12:13, 23, 27. The sacrificial character of the Passover appears even more clearly from the way in which it was later celebrated in Canaan. There the lamb is no longer slaughtered by the housefather but by the Levites, 2 Chronicles 30:16, 35:11, Ezra 6:19; the blood is sprinkled by the priests on the altar, 2 Chronicles 30:16, 35:11; the fat parts are burnt on the altar, 2 Chronicles 35:14; and the meal is held at the sanctuary, Deuteronomy 16:2. But although the Passover is thus in the first place a sacrifice, it does not exhaust itself in that; it soon becomes a meal. After the lamb was slaughtered between the two evenings on the 14th of Abib and its blood sprinkled on the house door or in later times on the altar, it had to be roasted whole at the fire, without a bone being broken, with head, legs, and inwards, and then in the same night of the 14th of Abib eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs by all who were in the house, thus also by the women, but not by uncircumcised strangers, sojourners, or hirelings, in haste, with girded loins, shod feet, and a staff in the hand, in the house or later at the sanctuary, and the remainder burnt with fire, Exodus 12:1-28, 43-49, 13:3-9, 23:15, Leviticus 23:5-14, Numbers 9:10-14, 28:16-25, Deuteronomy 16:1ff. The Passover thereby occupied a wholly special place in the Israelite cultus; it was a sacrifice but immediately passed over into a meal; it did not belong to the sin offerings, for it was eaten, nor to the thank offerings, for atonement preceded the meal. It was, moreover, instituted by God on a special occasion, before all other sacrifices, and bears its own nature; it is a sacrifice for atonement and a meal of communion with God and with one another; it is sacrifice and sacrament at the same time. The New Testament ascribes to this Passover a typical meaning, so that it is not only a remembrance of the deliverance from Egypt but also a sign and pledge of the redemption from the house of bondage of sin and of communion with God in the promised Messiah. Jesus himself pointed this out when he deliberately connected the institution of the Lord's Supper with the celebration of the Passover. But concerning the way in which he did this, there is no small difference. Some appeal to the Synoptics and say that Jesus on Thursday the 14th of Nisan partook of the actual Passover with his disciples and on that occasion instituted the Lord's Supper. Others hold with John, 12:1, 13:1, 2, 29, 18:28, 19:14, 31, and maintain that Jesus on Thursday the 13th of Nisan held an ordinary meal with his disciples and there washed their feet, and then on the 14th of Nisan, the actual day of the feast, died as the true paschal lamb. Whether one now conforms the Synoptics to John or John to the Synoptics; or leaves both unreconciled side by side; or also, on the ground of the testimony of the Quartodecimans in the second and third centuries, who for their practice of celebrating the Christian Passover feast in the evening of the 14th of Nisan appealed among others to the apostle John, denies the authenticity of the fourth gospel, cf. article Passah, Herzog2 11, 270. Meyer on John 18:28. Schäfer, Das Herrenmahl nach Ursprung und Bedeutung 1897 pp. 53-99. Zahn, Einl. in das N. T. II 309 f.; there is always agreement in so far that Jesus held a meal with his disciples on Thursday evening, died on Friday, and rose on Sunday. Even if this meal was not the ordinary Passover of 14 Nisan but held a day earlier, on Thursday 13 Nisan; then there would still be nothing against assuming that Jesus, who was to die the next day and thus could not eat the Passover at the usual time with the Jews, partook of it a day earlier and in this way connected the Lord's Supper with it. For this last is elevated above all doubt. Both Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:16, 11:24, 25, and the Synoptics have Jesus institute the Lord's Supper in the closest connection with the Passover; from the paschal table he takes the bread and the wine, which are to serve as signs and seals in the Lord's Supper; while he immediately takes over the baptism from John, he waits with the institution of the Lord's Supper until the last Passover feast and then makes the covenant meal of the Old Covenant pass over into that of the New Testament; and this finds no contradiction in John, because he is wholly silent about the institution of the Lord's Supper. And furthermore, the date of Jesus' death on 14 or on 15 Nisan is completely indifferent for the fact that Jesus died as the true paschal lamb. For not only does the gospel of John bring this out, 19:33, 36; but Paul also says expressly in 1 Corinthians 5:7 that our Passover, namely Christ, is sacrificed and that therefore the believers must purge out the old leaven of sin, and as unleavened, as new creatures, unmixed with unrighteousness, ought to walk. And in addition, the lamb that is led to the slaughter, Isaiah 53:7, not improbably contains an allusion to the paschal lamb and is thus applied in the New Testament to Christ, John 1:29, 36, Acts 8:32, 1 Peter 1:19, Revelation 5:6 etc. Just as circumcision was a pattern of baptism and through the death of Christ passed over into that baptism, so the Passover pointed forward to the Lord's Supper and was thereby replaced according to the command of Christ. While however the Passover was still in the first place a sacrifice, the Lord's Supper has wholly lost this character. For the sacrifice that was brought in the Passover has obtained its perfect fulfillment in the death of Christ. And it is on the ground of that once accomplished and perfect sacrifice that Christ establishes the new dispensation of the covenant of grace and invites and strengthens his disciples at his holy table.
2. After some in earlier times had led the way, however, in the last years by Jülicher, Spitta, Mensinga, Brandt, Grafe and others the setting up of the Lord's Supper by Jesus has been very earnestly withstood. As grounds they bring forth that the words: do this to my remembrance, are lacking in Matthew and Mark and only come forth as a free adding by Paul in 1 Cor. 11:24, 25 and Luke 22:19; that some handwritings, especially D, in Luke 22:19, 20 leave out the words: το ἱπερ.... ἐκχυννομενον and thus know nothing of a giving of the body of Christ, of a doing to his remembrance and of the cup of thanksgiving; that the gospel of John makes no telling of it and the other reports strongly differ from each other; and above all, that Jesus could not link bread and wine with his death, much less give them as tokens of his body and blood to eat, but that these showings could first arise when in the gathering a certain beholding over the person and over the death of Jesus had shaped itself. Yet all these proofs are of little strength. For it is a deed, that in the time when the gospel of John was written, the Lord's Supper was widely held in the Christian church; the keeping still of the setting up can therefore in no wise come from unknowing. Even so it is with Luke; the lacking of the above-named words in chap. 22:19, 20 cannot undergird that men then thought, that at the last supper nothing else had befallen than what is held in these words: και λαβων ἀρτον εὐχαριστησας ἐκλασεν και ἐδωκεν αὐτοις λεγων τουτο ἐστιν το σωμα μου. For then the handling that then took place would be fully ungraspable; the text in Codex D undergirds that at that happening more was done and spoken and is therefore either spoiled or in the best case an unwhole telling of what befell at the last supper. From the time of John and Luke we can climb up to that of Paul; and then it shows that this apostle goes out from the underlaying that the Christian church widely knows and holds the Lord's Supper as a setting up of Christ; yea, he says even that he took what belongs to the setting up of the Lord's Supper from the Lord and handed it over to the Corinthians, παρελαβον ἀπο του κυριου, 1 Cor. 11:23. The time wherein Paul took this teaching not παρα but ἀπο του κυριου, from the side of the Lord, falls without doubt together with that of his turning, Acts 9, and is thus only a few years sundered from the last night wherein Christ set up his supper. Therefrom follows that already in the very first years after Jesus’ death the Christian gathering one-mindedly with all the apostles knew the Lord's Supper as a setting up of Christ. This is more than enough to lift the truth of that setting up above all reasonable doubt.
Another question is, however, how Christ set up this supper and what He meant by it. And then it deserves first of all notice that Jesus set up His supper on the occasion of the Passover meal. The keeping of the Passover was in Jesus' time broadened with all kinds of rites and happened in short in the following way. As the feast drew near, thousands upon thousands of Israelites went to Jerusalem, bought there a lamb and let it be slain in the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan by the Levites in the forecourt; priests stood by ready to catch the blood in silver and golden bowls, to pass these from one to another, and at last to pour them out all at once over the altar. Meanwhile, under the singing of the Hallel by the Levites, the animals were hung up, stripped of the inwards, and the offering pieces brought by the priest in a vessel to the altar. Thereafter those who had offered the lamb for slaughter and whose number commonly lay between ten and twenty men, took the slain lamb with them to a private house and roasted it there, without breaking a bone of it. The meal itself began with the passing around of a cup and with thanksgiving; then bitter herbs and a dish of sauce were brought to the table and eaten, and thereafter the lamb with unleavened cakes was served. Before this was eaten, the housefather or later a reader told the story of the exodus, the table fellows raised the first part, Psalm 113-114, of the Hallel, Psalm 113-118, and the second cup went around. Thereafter first began the meal itself. After its end the third cup was blessed by the housefather and drunk with the table fellows. And the whole was then ended with the pouring of the fourth cup, with the singing of the second part of the Hallel, Psalm 115-118, with the blessing of the fourth cup by the housefather with the words of Psalm 118:26 and with the emptying thereof by the sitting guests. These four cups were required at the meal, but sometimes a fifth cup went around under the singing of Psalm 120-137. Likely Jesus now set up the supper after the Passover lamb was eaten, meta to deipnēsai , Luke 22:20, at the third cup, the cup of thanksgiving. He takes thereby from the common bread and the common wine that were used at the Passover, and brings these according to the witness of all four reports, Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:19, 20, 1 Corinthians 11:23-25, straightway in link with His death. There is no ground at all to doubt this; Jesus knew and foresaw His death and had already many times made known its meaning to His disciples. Clearly He here takes His death as an offering; so only are the words and deeds to be made clear that go with the setting up of the supper. The Passover was just now eaten, and that Passover had been the beginning and groundwork of the covenant that God set up with Israel in the wilderness; for it first, by the lamb being slain and its blood shed and sprinkled on the altar, served as an offering of atonement, and was thereafter used for an offering meal to mean the fellowship of God with His folk. All this Christ brings over to Himself; He is the true Passover lamb, which by His death, by the breaking of His body and by the shedding of His blood, works the atonement with God and lays the groundwork of a new covenant. Jesus shows this clearly by setting up the supper on the occasion of the Passover, by using to that end the bread and the wine of the Passover table, by not only taking the bread and blessing it but also, according to all four reports, Acts 2:42, breaking it, and above all also by the words that He spoke thereby. While breaking and sharing the bread He said: touto estin to sōma mou , Matthew, Mark; touto estin to sōma mou, to hyper hymōn didomenon , Luke; or touto mou estin to sōma to hyper hymōn , Paul (klōmenon is lacking in the foremost manuscripts and shifts in others with thryptomenon and didomenon ). And at the giving of the drinking cup He spoke: piete ex autou pantes, touto gar estin to haima mou tēs diathēkēs to peri pollōn ekchynnomenon eis aphesin hamartiōn , Matthew; touto estin to haima mou tēs diathēkēs to ekchynnomenon hyper pollōn , Mark; touto to potērion en tō haimati mou to hyper hymōn ekchynnomenon , Luke; touto to potērion hē kainē diathēkē en tō emō haimati , Paul. The differing readings prove enough that Jesus no more at the supper than at baptism laid down a fixed, unchanging wording; it is even unworkable to make out which words were spoken word for word by Jesus Himself at that time; He did not set what must be said at the supper, but He laid out what the supper was and must be. And this is fully clear from the four reports. Jesus has raised the bread and the wine of the Passover table to signs of His body and blood, and indeed of that body and that blood, as it soon in death as an offering of atonement would be given over. The thought that Jesus' body yet at the cross was not broken in pieces like the bread, and His blood there also not shed like the wine at the supper and that therefore these likenesses do not fit, is of little strength. Jesus goes indeed from the Passover and from the Old Testament offering out, takes over the handling and wording commonly used thereby and fits this to His death. Therefore Luke and Paul add to the words: touto estin to sōma mou the making clear: to hyper hymōn didomenon or only to hyper hymōn . Whether Jesus spoke these words word for word so or not; in that meaning He yet meant it, when He showed in the bread a sign of His body. It is a sign of the body of Jesus, as it in death is offered for the atonement of sins. Hence also that the meaning of the second sign in all four reports is so much broader laid out. In the offering the blood shedding is the head thing, Hebrews 9:22. The blood of Christ, of which the wine is a sign, is offering blood, blood of atonement, that is shed for many, and thereby beginning and hallowing of a new covenant. As Passover and old covenant, so belong supper and new covenant together. The drinking cup is therefore to haima mou tēs diathēkēs or hē kainē diathēkē en tō haimati mou , that is, covenant blood, Exodus 24:8, which as offering blood for the fulfilling of the covenant with God was needful and helpful, or the covenant itself, that through that blood, while working and bringing with it the forgiveness of sins, comes to stand and rests therein. The disciples were sorrowful, looked against the death of Christ and understood it not; but Jesus makes known to them here at the setting up of the supper, that that death is their gain; thereby yet comes that forgiveness and that covenant to stand, which in the Old Testament were shadowed forth and foretold; the time of promise is past, that of fulfilling breaks in; the old is passed away, behold it is all become new.
But Jesus does not stop here. In the signs of bread and wine, He gives not only an explanation of His death, but He also shares those signs for the use of His disciples. According to Matthew, Jesus clearly used the words labete, phagete , and piete ex autou pantes ; and although Mark only mentions the word labete and Luke and Paul make no mention of all these words, yet on the ground of all the accounts it stands firm that Jesus not only raised the bread and the wine to signs of His body and blood but also handed them out as such to His disciples and gave them to enjoy. After the Passover was used, Jesus set up a new meal, whose parts were bread and wine, not in and for themselves, but as signs of His broken body and shed blood. Against this, Spitta has brought forward that the eating of the slain body of Jesus and the drinking of His blood are "as gruesome as unbearable thoughts for an Israelite mind." And therefore some have thought that, even if Jesus pointed to bread and wine as signs of His body and blood, He yet did not give them as such to His disciples to enjoy; that He only declared what would soon happen to Him, but not what His disciples would receive and enjoy; that the eating of Jesus' body and the drinking of His blood at that moment, when Jesus Himself sat at the table, was not possible; that, if this enjoyment was the true mark of the Supper, then the Supper later after Jesus' death had a different nature than at the setting up; and that it matters so little on the using of bread and wine as such signs, that until the middle of the second hundred-year, at least in the churches of Rome and Ephesus, the Supper was held not with wine but with water. There lies in these counter-throws a part of truth. Though the Passover in the Old Testament pointed to Christ, the eating of the Passover lamb was yet no eating of Christ's broken body, like the enjoyment of the bread in the Supper now is. And the blood was indeed shed and sprinkled at the offerings of the Old Covenant, but it was yet never drunk. The thought that Jesus' flesh must be eaten and His blood drunk was also so strange to the Jews that they took offense at it and left Jesus, John 6:52, 60, 66. The setting up of the Supper happens indeed in linking to the Old Testament offering thoughts but yet goes above them. The Supper is akin to but not the same as the Passover. As new to old covenant, as the offering of Christ to those of the Old Testament, so stands Supper to Passover. The Passover was a sacrament on the ground of a sacrifice but in both parts a shadow and foretelling of the goods of the New Testament. But now through Christ the true and full offering is brought, and therefore on the ground of that offering the fellowship with God in the Supper is much richer and fuller than it could be in the days of the Old Testament. The Supper is a meal, the true meal of God and His folk; a sacrifice meal, the sacrifice meal by outstanding worth, where the believers enjoy Christ Himself, as He died for them. That Jesus shows by giving bread and wine as signs of His broken body and shed blood to His disciples to enjoy. He gives Himself not only for His own; He gives Himself also to His own. Cup and bread in the Supper are koinonia tou haimatos kai tou somatos tou Christou , 1 Cor. 10:16. The above-named counter-throws have further still in so far strength, as they clearly show that a Capernaite eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ is wholly shut out. The Supper, which Christ Himself, while He sat at the table, set up, is the same as what after His death in the Christian church up to the present day is held. Bread and wine have no bearing on the person of Christ without more, but set on Christ as crucified. He sets therein His offering before our eyes, but also makes us enjoy it. And on that enjoyment it does indeed come in the Supper. Jesus gave the signs of bread and wine; He held them not in the hand, but He shared them out; He bade His disciples to take them and eat; and He added according to Luke (only at the sharing of the bread) and Paul (also at the giving of the cup) the words: touto poieite eis ten emen anamnesin . That these words are missing in Matthew and Mark proves not at all that they either were not spoken by Jesus or were added by Luke and Paul against His meaning. For in the eating and drinking of the bread and the wine as signs of Jesus' broken body and shed blood lies the doing to His remembrance itself shut in; the first is without the last not possible. These words further hold not in that the Supper is only a remembrance meal, but they show that the whole Supper, which in its being is a sacrifice meal and a fellowship practice with Christ, must happen to remembrance of Him. They outline not the being of the Supper but take for granted that Jesus will soon be away and set forth that then yet the Supper to His remembrance, as an ongoing preaching of His death, 1 Cor. 11:26, must be held. Therefore there stand with Paul also the words still by: as often as you shall eat this bread and drink this cup, 1 Cor. 11:25, 26. The Supper is set up by Christ as a lasting good for His church; it is a boon, added to all other boons, to mean and seal these. And it shall stay until the coming again of Christ. His death must be preached until He comes. For the cross is and stays in this sharing the cause of all blessings, the midpoint of the remembrance of the church. Jesus said Himself that He from now on, from the setting up and the use of the Supper, would no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until He would drink it new with His disciples in the kingdom of His Father, Matt. 26:29, Mark 14:25, cf. Luke 22:16, 18. He went indeed to heaven, to ready a place for His disciples. And first when He comes again and shall have taken His disciples to Himself, will He sit with them at the wedding table of the Lamb and drink with them of the new wine, which the Kingdom of His Father in the new heaven and the new earth shall yield. For that between-time He has set up the Supper, to a remembrance of His suffering, to a preaching of His death, to a means of His rich grace.
Cf. Cremer, art. Abendmahl I in Herzog³ 1, 32-38 with the there cited writings and further still J. G. Boekenoogen, De oorsprong des avondmaals, Amst. 1883. Rogaar, Het avondmaal en zijne oorspronkelijke beteekenis, Gron. 1897. Schultzen, Das Abendmahl im N. T., Göttingen 1895. Josephson, Das H. Ab. und das N. T., Gütersloh 1895. R. A. Hoffmann, Die Abendmahlsgedanken Jesu Christi, Königsberg 1896. Holtzheuer, Das Ab. und die neuere Kritik, Berlin 1896. Schaefer, Das Herrenmahl nach Ursprung und Bedeutung mit Rücksicht auf die neuesten Forschungen, Gütersloh 1897. Eichhorn, Das Ab. im N. T., Leipzig 1898. Clemen, Der Ursprung des h. Ab. Leipzig 1898. W. Schmidt, Chr. Dogm. 1898 II 466. Lichtenstein, Des Ap. Paulus Ueberlieferung von der Einsetzung des h. Ab. Berlin 1899.
3. This supper took from the beginning a foremost place in the Christian worship service. It was commonly kept in a special gathering of the congregation on the Lord's day in the evening and in connection with an ordinary meal. Of the manner of this keeping little is known to us; we only know from the Didache 9, 10, 14, that first a confession of sins took place, then over the cup and over the bread separately a prayer of thanks was spoken, then the meal was held and the whole was ended with a thanksgiving. But in the second hundred years there came little by little in the whole church a parting between the agapae and the eucharistia. The first went their own way and soon fell into decay, Zahn, art. Agapen in Herzog³; and the second was moved to the morning worship service and brought into connection with the serving of the word. With that went sundry changes hand in hand. The one worship service was soon split into two parts, of which the first, the serving of the word, stood open also for catechumens, penitents and unbelievers, but the second, the keeping of the supper, was open only for the baptized. This last got ever more a mystery-like character; baptism and supper became a mysterion , a sacramentum , Tertullian adv. Marc. 4, 34, and by this name as well as by all kinds of added solemn rites were wrapped in a mystery-filled darkness. Wholly wrong is it therefore also, to read the views of those first times after the thoughts that in the West later, and above all in the 16th hundred years were held about the unio sacramentalis . The Scripture said, that the bread is the body and the wine the blood of Christ, and this way of speaking was taken over and by each understood and laid out in his own way. An official reading was lacking; strife arose not over it; and the question about the kind of that joining of sign and thing meant came not up; a real con- or trans-substantiation lay just as far outside the awareness of that time as a solely symbolic or figurative meaning of the supper. Symbol and thing was for the Eastern thinking much closer bound than for the Western; we understand, says Harnack, D. G. I² 397 rightly, under symbol a thing, that is not what it means, but then one understood much more under symbol a thing, that in one way or another also is what it means. It stood from the beginning firm in the Christian church, that bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ; but the way, in which they thought of both their joining, is not clear and therefore open to sundry layings out. That holds for Ignatius, Smyrn. 7. Eph. 20. Justin, Apol. I 66. Irenaeus adv. haer. IV 18, 5 and of many other writers. But the unfolding of the supper teaching was above all led into a wrong path by the applying of the offering idea. In the N. T. indeed the hallowing of the body, Rom. 12:1, the prayer, Hebr. 13:15, cf. Rev. 5:8, 8:3, the well-doing and sharing, Hebr. 13:16, Phil. 4:18, but never the supper is called an offering. Now however in the first time the supper was bound with an ordinary meal, and for that meal the more well-off congregation members brought the needful makings with them, bread, wine, oil, milk, honey etc., which likely by the deacons were taken in, laid for the bishop on head- and side-tables (the later side-altars), served at the meal and then set for the upkeep of the servants and for the upholding of the poor. These gifts got the name of prosphorai , oblationes , thysiai , sacrificia , offerings, and were by the bishop with a prayer of thanks, eucharistia , blessed. This view was carried over to the whole supper. After the prayer of thanks, that was spoken over the gifts, soon the supper itself and also the both supper elements were called eucharistia , Didache 9. Ignatius, Philad. 4. Smyrn. 7. 8. Justin, Apol. I 66, and it was also soon taken up as an offering, that by the congregation was brought to God, Didache thysia kathara , already with calling on Mal. 1:11. This was now yet so long fairly harmless, as the supper truly as a meal was seen and the thanksgiving in name of the whole congregation was done; the inhold of the offering was not the body and blood of Christ but the by the congregation brought together gifts, so that one in the first time thus only to a thank- but by no means to an atone-offering thought. But there lay yet a harmful seed in it, that in its time would work wrongly, above all when it by the clerical view of the office was strengthened. Already Clement likens the bishops and deacons with the priests and Levites of the O. T., sets forth their working as a prospherein ta dora tes episkopes and brings their eucharistia with the O. T. thysiai in link, 1 Clem. 40-44. And when supper and agapae, the offering of bread and wine for the supper and the givings for the upkeep of the servants and the upholding of the needy fell out of each other, the supper got ever more the mark of an offering, that not by the congregation but by the bishop was brought, not in her offering but in his thanksgiving and hallowing stood, and not on the gifts for but on the elements of the supper had bearing, Justin, Dial. 41. 70. Irenaeus adv. haer. IV 18, 5. This view of the supper as an offering had now again sway on the thought, which one shaped of the unio sacramentalis , like backwise this on that. As far as the bishop as priest, the thanksgiving as hallowing, the supper as an offer was seen, so must also the real joining of bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ the stronger put itself forward. The symbolic, spiritualistic view of Origen, that in the being of the thing also with Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and others is found, makes in link with the Eastern Christology with Cyril, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom and John of Damascus for the real teaching of the metabole , metapoiesis or transformation room, which then later yet in the teaching of the metousiosis or trans-substantiation went over, Damascene, de fide orthod. IV 14. Conf. orthod. qu. 107. Conf. Dosith. decr. 17, cf. Steitz, Die Abendmahlslehre der gr. K. in ihrer gesch. Entw. Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1864 p. 409-481. 1865 p. 64-152. 399-463. 1866 p. 193-252. 1867 p. 211-286. 1868 p. 2-67. 649-700. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Konf. I 410 f. Loofs, art. Abendmahl in Herzog³ 1, 38-57.
The development in the West went much slower, though it later led to the same outcome. Cyprian indeed put the sacrificial character of the Supper strongly in the forefront but saw therein yet only an imitation of what Christ in truth had done on Golgotha, Ep. 63, 2. 14. And although Augustine often in the language of Scripture calls the bread the body and the wine the blood of Christ, yet there is in him nothing to be found of the later transubstantiation theory. On the contrary, Augustine makes as strong as possible a distinction between word and element, accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum; bread and wine are therefore called sacraments, quia in eis aliud videtur, aliud intelligitur. The sign is indeed often named with the name of the signified thing, but that comes because it shows a likeness thereof. Si enim sacramenta quendam similitudinem earum rerum, quarum sacramenta sunt, non haberent, omnino sacramenta non essent. Ex hac autem similitudine plerumque etiam ipsarum rerum nomina accipiunt. Sicut ergo secundum quendam modum sacramentum corporis Christi corpus Christi est, sacramentum sanguinis Christi sanguis Christi est, ita sacramentum fidei fides est, Ep. 23 ad Bonif. Bread and wine are similitudes, signs, remembrances of the body and blood of Christ; Dominus non dubitavit dicere: hoc est corpus meum, cum signum daret corporis sui, c. Adam. c. 12. Christ is bodily also no more with us, but is ascended to heaven; secundum praesentiam majestatis semper habemus Christum, secundum praesentiam carnis, recte dictum est discipulis: me autem non semper habebitis, tract. 1 in Ev. Joann. When Augustine then also many times calls the Supper a sacrifice, he understands thereunder not that Christ is once more in truth, though also in an unbloody way, offered; but then he calls it so because it is a remembrance of Christ's offering on the cross. Hujus sacrificii caro et sanguis ante adventum Christi per victimarum similitudinem promittebatur; in passione Christi per ipsam veritatem reddebatur; post ascensum Christi per sacramentum memoriae celebratur, c. Faustum 20, 21. Christ se ipsum obtulit holocaustum pro peccatis nostris et ejus sacrificii similitudinem celebrandam in suae passionis memoriam commendavit, 83 qu. qu. 61. de doctr. chr. III 16. Or also he understands under the body of Christ, which in the Supper is offered, the church. How is, so he asks, the bread the body of Christ? and he answers: corpus Christi si vis intelligere, apostolum audi dicentem fidelibus: vos estis corpus Christi et membra. Si ergo vos estis corpus Christi et membra, mysterium vestrum in mensa propositum est, mysterium Dei accipitis. And the bread is there the sign of, quia panis non fit de uno grano sed de multis, Serm. ad infantes, cf. de civ. 10, 6. 22, 10. Therefore Augustine also tires not to assure that the use of the Supper in itself is not enough, that it only for the believers is to blessing but for others to ruin, that the true eating of Christ's body consists in believing: crede et manducasti, Tract. 25 in Joann. and so passim, cf. Bibl. studii theol. apud J. Crispinum 1565 p. 89-100. Dorner, Augustinus 263-276 etc. The teaching of Augustine through her mighty sway yet long time held back the full unfolding of the realistic theory, and ruled yet among the Carolingian theologians, but was in the strife of Ratramnus against Paschasius Radbertus and later in that of Berengar against Lanfranc more and more pushed back and at last wholly and all by the metabolic theory replaced. The word transubstantiation we meet first with Hildebert of Tours † 1134, but this uses it in a sermon, so that it then already fairly widely known must have been, cf. Deutsch in Schürer's Theol. Lit. Z. 1898 col. 442. The thing which thereby was expressed stood already earlier fast. Berengar must 1079 the formula sign, panem et vinum... per mysterium sacrae orationis et verba nostri Redemptoris substantialiter converti in veram et propriam ac vivificatricem carnem et sanguinem Domini nostri J. C. etc. And the fourth Lateran Council 1215 set that the body and blood of Christ in sacramento altaris sub speciebus panis et vini veraciter continentur, transsubstantiatis pane in corpus et vino in sanguinem potestate divina, Denzinger, Enchir. 298. 357. This dogma set to the dialectical wit of the scholastics a row of problems about kind, time and length of the change, about the bond of substance and accidents, about the way whereupon Christ was present in both elements and in each part thereof, about keeping and worship of the host etc., Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus on Sent. IV dist. 8-13. Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 73-83. c. Gent. IV 61-69. Bonaventure, Brevil. VI 9, cf. Schwane, D. G. III 628-661. Harnack, D. G. III 488-498 etc. Of the sacrament of the Supper teaches then Rome thus: the signs in this sacrament are unleavened bread and with a little water mingled wine. These elements are through the word of consecration changed into the own body and blood of Christ. When the Savior namely at the last meal the words spoke: this is my body, this is my blood; then has He not only for this one time bread and wine into his body and blood made to change, but He has at the same time therein his disciples to priests set and in the words which He spoke a might laid to change of the substance of bread and wine. The serving of the eucharist is therefore the priestly work by excellence and may never by another than an ordained priest be taken. As the priest the words of consecration speaks out, changes the substance of bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ. The bodily presence of Christ in the eucharist can indeed not thereby come to stand, that Christ the heaven leaves and in the sacrament goes to dwell, for Christ is and stays seated at the right hand of the Father; nor also can she by creation be wrought, for then were the bread not the own body of Christ, not the same wherewith He from Mary born and on the cross died is; she can therefore only in that way happen, that the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ's body and blood passes over, about like the food which we use is turned into a part of our body. The accidents of bread and wine, namely the shape, taste, smell, color and even the feeding might, stay indeed after the consecration, but they inhere no more in a subject; the substance whereof they the properties were is taken away and by a wholly other replaced, of which they no properties are, but which they only through their show cover for the eye. Because now Christ's body and blood not from his human nature and this not from his Godhead is to be sundered, so is the whole Christ in each element and in each part of both elements fully present. Therefore is it not needful, though it also not unlawful and sometimes to be allowed, that the eucharist sub utraque specie enjoyed be, for in the smallest bit of bread is yet the whole Christ present. And this Christ is in the elements present from the eyeblink of the consecration off till the time to that they used are, thus also ante and extra omnem usum. The eucharist is therefore from all other sacraments set apart. For these are all through the use fulfilled; the baptism for example is then first a sacrament when the man thereby truly is washed off. But this is with the eucharist not the case. The formula which hereby spoken is directs itself not to the receiver but directs itself to the element and serves to this element into the body and blood of Christ to change. With the eucharist is thus the use, the communion, secondary; it belongs to the perfectio but not to the necessitas of the sacrament. The sacrament of the eucharist consists in essence in the consecration itself, in the thereby brought about transubstantiation, in the handling of the priest, that is in the offering. The eucharist is with Rome not only a sacramentum, she is in the first place a sacrificium. When Christ the words spoke: this is my body, has He at that same eyeblink himself to God offered; and as He said: do that to my remembrance, has He therein ordained that his priests this offering should repeat from day to day, Mal. 1:11. The offering which through the priest in the mass happens is the same as that fulfilled was on the cross; she is there but no image, symbol, remembrance of, but she is there fully identical with, she is wholly the same offering, only with this difference that that on the cross a bloody and this in the mass an unbloody offering is. For it is also the same priest who himself on the cross and who himself here offers, for Christ himself is it who by means of the priest himself to God offers and therefore through his mouth the words speaks: this is my body. Therefore is the mass offering not only a praise and a thank but also a true atonement offering, not less rich in working and fruit than the offering on the cross. While the eucharist as sacrament the ghostly life feeds, for deadly sins keeps, timely punishments forgives, the believers unites and the coming glory warrants, works she as mass offering the forgiveness of timely punishments and the grace of penance, not only for them who the mass attend but also for the absent; not only for the living but also for the penitents in purgatory. The mass is the midpoint of the Roman worship, φρικτον μυστηριον, tremendum mysterium. And because the whole Christ bodily in the elements of bread and wine present is must these carefully kept, in a monstrance to the folk for worship held forth, on the feast of Corpus Christi in solemn procession carried round be and can they also to sick in their dwelling served and to dying as a viaticum given along be. Cf. Trident. 13. 21. 22. Catech. Rom. II 2 cap. 4. Bellarmine, de sacr. eucharistiae 1. IV and de sacrificio missae, 1. II in part III of his Controversiae p. 150-376. Perrone, Prael. Theol. Lovan. 1841 VI 136-364. Möhler, Symbolik § 34. Jansen, Prael. theol. dogm. III 408-596. Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. der Kath. Kirche 2nd Aufl. 1864 I 301-584. C. Pesch, Prael. dogm. VI 238-399. Gihr. Das h. Messopfer, 6th Aufl. Freiburg Herder 1897 etc.
4. The Reformation with one voice cast off the Roman teaching of transubstantiation and the mass as a sacrifice, of the keeping, worship, and carrying about of the host, of the withholding of the cup and the use of the Latin tongue, but it soon fell apart in its positive understanding of the Lord's Supper. Luther first taught that bread and wine were signs and pledges of the forgiveness of sins, which was won by Christ's death and received by faith. But soon he came back from this and held, above all since 1524 against Carlstadt and Zwingli, on the ground of the synecdochically explained words of institution, that the body of Christ according to the will and almighty power of God and his own ubiquity was truly and substantially present in, with, and under the Supper, like his divine nature in the human and like warmth in iron, and therefore also bodily eaten by the unworthy, though to their own doom. This teaching passed into the Lutheran confessions, and was more broadly worked out by the dogmaticians.
But many were already in the age of the Reformation of a wholly other mind. Following Honius, Zwingli took the words of institution in a figure-wise way and explained the little word "is" by "means," just as everyone does time and again elsewhere, for example, Genesis 41:26, John 10:9, 15:1. Bread and wine in the Supper are thus signs of and remembrances to Christ's death, and the believers, trusting thereon, enjoy in those signs the body and blood of Christ. Zwingli firmly fights against the bodily presence of Christ in the Supper, but he by no means denies therewith that Christ is present in a ghostly way for faith. On the contrary, Christ is indeed enjoyed in the Supper, as John 6 clearly teaches, but Christ is not otherwise present in the Supper and is not otherwise enjoyed therein than in the word and through faith, that is, in a ghostly way. This enjoying of Christ consists in nothing else than in trusting on his death. To eat Christ's body in a ghostly way is nothing other than to lean with spirit and mind on the mercy and goodness of God through Christ. And whoever thus enjoys Christ through faith and then comes to the Supper, he enjoys Him there also sacramentally in the signs of bread and wine. In the Supper we therefore confess our faith, speak out what we through faith ever have in Christ and enjoy from Him; and we do that to Christ's remembrance, to the preaching of and thanksgiving for his good deeds. Soon there came between the German and Swiss Reformation a split and strife, which was not laid by through the religious talk at Marburg and through the bridging efforts of Bucer from the Reformed side and Melanchthon from the Lutheran side. They did not understand each other; on both sides it was acknowledged that Christ truly, with his divine and human nature, with his own body and blood, was present in the Supper and enjoyed, but they gave to this "true" presence a different meaning.
When Calvin stepped forth, there was no longer any thought of making peace, though he also with his teaching of the Supper took a standpoint between and above both parties. For Calvin stands firmly on Zwingli's side, insofar as he wholly casts off all bodily, local, substantial presence of Christ in the signs of bread and wine; such a presence is indeed at odds with the nature of a body, with the true manhood of Christ, with his ascent to heaven, with the kind of fellowship that is between Christ and his own, and differs heaven-wide from a needless oral eating. But further Calvin feels himself not fulfilled by Zwingli; he has above all two things against his Supper teaching, first that Zwingli lets God's gift in the Supper all too much step back behind what the believers do therein and thus understands the Supper one-sidedly as a confessing act, and second that he sees in the eating of Christ's body nothing else and higher than believing in his name, trusting on his death. Therefore Calvin sets himself further on Luther's side and says that Christ, though not bodily and locally, yet truly and in essence, with his whole person, also with his body and blood, is present in the Supper and enjoyed. Not over the fact, only over the way of that presence is there a difference between him and Luther. And the eating of Christ's body in the Supper does not go up in believing, in trusting on his death. The eating is not one with believing, though it ever comes to stand only through believing, but it is rather the fruit thereof, just as in Ephesians 3:17 the dwelling of Christ in us indeed happens through faith but yet is marked off from that faith.
It is clear that Calvin is about the mystical union, about the fellowship of believers with the whole person of Christ. This does not first come to stand through the Supper, for Christ is the bread of our soul already in the word, but it is yet given to us in the Supper more brightly and sealed and strengthened in the signs of bread and wine. In the Supper there is a fellowship not only with the good deeds but also with the person of Christ, and again not only with his divine but also with his human nature, with his own body and blood; and this fellowship is called an eating. This consists thus not in a bodily coming down of Christ from heaven nor also in a mixing or pouring over of Christ's flesh with our soul, but in a lifting up of our hearts heavenward, in a uniting with Christ through the Holy Ghost, in a sharing in his body, as an outcome whereof Christ breathes from the substance of his flesh life into our souls, yes, pours his own life into us. The showing of Calvin is not in every way clear, above all not what the fellowship with the own flesh and blood of Christ and the life flowing forth therefrom concerns. Utenhove therefore asked him not without right, when he handled the Supper, to hold back from more or less dark sayings. And so there was also in the confession and teaching of the Reformed churches and theologians indeed a difference of saying. Some, such as Bucer, sought nearing to the Lutheran showing and said that Christ's body was substantially, as to substance, present in the Supper. But Calvin's main thought, that in the Supper through the Holy Ghost a ghostly fellowship is worked with the person and thus also with the body and blood of Christ and that the believers are thereby fed and quenched to everlasting life, is taken over in sundry Reformed confessions, and became common good of Reformed theology.
But there soon arose opposition against this Calvinistic teaching of the Lord's Supper. The wording in the French Confession 36, that Christ feeds and quickens us with the substance of his body and blood, stirred up no small doubt in the Swiss churches. They turned in the year 1572 to the national Synod in France with a request for change of these words, but found no hearing. Yet the doubt remained with many, and it grew when Bossuet in his Exposition of the Doctrine of the Catholic Church on Matters of Controversy 1671 sought strength in it for the Roman teaching of the Lord's Supper.
Bit by bit the Zwinglian view gained ground again, according to which eating is nothing other than believing and fellowship with Christ nothing other than taking his benefits, Ostervald, Treatise on the Revealed Religion 1742.
The slackening of discipline helped this outward turning of the Lord's Supper and caused the sacraments to be seen only as signs of an outward covenant, to which all who live without scandal have right and claim, Swarte, van Eerde, Janssonius, cf. Ypey and Dermout, History of the Dutch Reformed Church III.
Thus the way was paved for rationalism, which repeated the thoughts of Socinians, Remonstrants, Mennonites, and so forth, cf. M. Vitringa VIII 2 and saw in the Lord's Supper nothing higher than a memorial meal, act of confession, and moral upbringing means, Wegscheider, Institutes §§ 178, 179.
Through Schleiermacher, who not only cast off the teaching of the Romans, but also that of the Socinians and so forth, and acknowledged those of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all as right-believing, there awoke however a striving to uphold the Lord's Supper as an objective means of grace and to give it a strengthening of the life fellowship with Christ. This happened however in very sundry ways. Some went out from the Lord's Supper as a symbolic deed and act of confession but added that the believers therein bore witness that they took Christ as having died for them, Doedes, Doctrine of Salvation § 144ff. Dutch Confession 502. Heidelberg Catechism 352.
Others took it as a deed of the church, but one that according to God's order serves to strengthen faith in the forgiveness of sins and fellowship with God along ethical and soul-wise paths, Lipsius, Dogmatics § 853. Biedermann, Christian Dogmatics § 927. Pfleiderer, Outline § 156.
Many mediating theologians cast off the Lutheran consubstantiation and oral eating, and draw near the teaching of Calvin, when they say that Christ is present in the Lord's Supper in a ghostly manner, even as in the word, and shares himself and his benefits (forgiveness, life, ghostly strength, blessedness) to the believer, Kahnis, Lutheran Dogmatics II 339. Dorner, Christian Faith II 848f. Müller, Dogmatic Treatises 467. Ebrard, Dogmatics § 545. Nitzsch, Evangelical Dogmatics 567-569. Schmidt, Christian Dogmatics II 471, 478.
The old Lutheran teaching was again set forth by Scheibel, Rudelbach, Philippi, Church Faith V 2 and by the neo-Lutherans yet filled out with the theosophical showing, that Christ through bread and wine feeds not only the soul but also straightway the body, by healing the weaknesses of the body and strengthening the new man of the uprising, who is shaped in the hidden by baptism, Martensen, Dogmatics § 265. Thomasius, Christ's Person and Work II³ 327, 341. Hofmann, Scripture Proof II 2. Vilmar, Dogmatics II 245. Frank, System of Christian Truth II² 290. Rocholl, Spiritualism and Realism, New Church Journal 1898, cf. Luther himself in Köstlin II.
In the English church at last the ritualistic party took over more and more the teaching and customs of the Lord's Supper from Rome, Wilberforce, The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist 1853. Pusey, The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist 1853 cf. Ryle, Knots Untied 1886. Williams, The Crisis in the Church of England, Presbyterian and Reformed Review July 1899.
The dogmatic-historical works of Hagenbach, Münscher-von Coelln, Harnack, Schwane and so forth, the articles Lord's Supper, Transubstantiation, Mass in Herzog². Lord's Supper, Eucharist in Herzog³. Rückert, The Holy Supper, Its Essence and Its History in the Ancient Church 1856. Ebrard, The Dogma of the Holy Supper and Its History 2 vols. 1845/6. Stahl, The Lutheran Church and the Union, Berlin 1859. Kahnis, Dogmatics II 360-438, and further literature in Dorner, Christian Faith II 848. Luthardt, Compendium of Dogmatics § 72.
5. In Scripture the Lord's Supper is marked out by the names deipnon kyriakon , 1 Cor. 11:20, trapeza kyriou , 1 Cor. 10:21, klasis artou , Acts 2:42, 20:7, potērion tou kyriou , 1 Cor. 11:27, potērion tēs eulogias , 1 Cor. 10:16. And the church later added many others to these, such as agapē , because in the first times the Supper was bound to a love feast; eucharistia , already in Didache 9, Ignatius Smyrnaeans 7, 8, Justin Martyr Apology I 66, because the believers at the Supper gave thanks to God for the gifts of his grace; eulogia , because over bread and wine by thanksgiving and praise to God the blessing was spoken out; synaxis , koinōnia , since the believers, coming together at the Supper, held fellowship with each other; prosphora , thysia (holy, spiritual, mystical, bloodless, etc.), because the believers brought the makings for the meal and offered them to God, or because the Supper was an image and reminder of the offering of Christ on the cross; and further still deipnon mystikon , euōchia , ephodion , viaticum, latreia , leitourgia , phrikton mystērion , tremendous mystery, sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, sacrament of the altar, missa, drawn from the dismissal of the catechumens after the teaching part of the worship service, and so on. Though Luther still spoke of the sacrament of the altar, Smalcald Articles III 6, Greater Catechism 5, the Protestants as a whole gave the choice to the name holy supper or supper of the Lord and also held fast therein that the Supper was a true meal. Some Roman theologians, such as Maldonatus on Matt. 26:25, noted against this that the wording deipnon kyriakon in 1 Cor. 11:20 did not hit on the Supper but on the meal that was held after the Supper and offered by the richer church members to the poorer, Campegius Vitringa VIII 10; yet the Supper was held not before but after the common meal, vs. 21, and is under the wording if not alone then yet also taken in. But even if this were not the case, thereby the wrongness of the naming would by no means be proven. For the Supper is yet according to the sound of Scripture a true meal. The binding with the agapes, the setting at the time of the Passover meal, the parts of bread and wine, the eating and drinking thereof—all point thereto, that we in the Supper have to do with a true meal, and we may never take this mark from it. But it is a deipnon kyriakon , a meal of the Lord. Jesus is the setter thereof and also fulfilled therein the will of the Father, which to do was his meat. The Supper is even as the baptism of godly spring and must be that, to be able to be a sacrament; for God alone is the dealer of grace and he alone can bind its dealing to means ordained by him. And Jesus sets this Supper clearly as mediator in; he steps therein up as prophet, who makes known and explains his death; he works therein as priest, who gave himself for his own over to the cross; he comes therein forth as king, who freely deals over the won grace and gives it under the signs of bread and wine to his learners to enjoy. And like the setter, so is he also the host and the server of the Supper; he takes himself the bread and the wine, blesses them and deals them out to his young ones. And host and server was he not only when he bodily sat with his learners; but is and stays he everywhere and always, where his meal is held. Each Supper, served matching his setting, is a deipnon kyriakon . For Christ is setter not only by pattern but also by forewriting. It is a meal to his remembrance, 1 Cor. 11:24, to making known of his death, vs. 26, to fellowship in the body and blood of Christ, 1 Cor. 10:16, 21, 11:27. In the Supper Christ comes with the church and the church with Christ together, bearing witness of their ghostly fellowship, cf. Rev. 3:20. The server, who blesses and deals out bread and wine, does this therefore in the name of Christ and is only a tool in his hand. Because Paul in 1 Cor. 10:16 speaks in the plural of them who bless the cup, and Tertullian, Exhortation to Chastity 7 says, where there is no sitting of the churchly order, the priest both offers and dips, who is there alone; but also where three are, there is a church, even if laymen, some held, such as Grotius, Salmasius, Episcopius and others, that if a priest or teacher was lacking, the Supper might also be served by a common member of the church. But this thinking lacks enough ground. In Matt. 28:19 the serving of baptism is laid on the apostles at the same time with that of the word; they with the teachers are dealers of the hidden things of God, proclaimers of the mysteries that God has opened in the gospel of Christ, 1 Cor. 4:1; house carers of God, who have to deal out his grace, 1 Cor. 9:17, Titus 1:7. Without doubt in these hidden things one is first to think of the word of the gospel. But the sacrament follows the word and is always bound with the word. The apostles in Jerusalem worked there the service of prayers and of the word, Acts 6:4; at the breaking of bread, Acts 20:7, 11, Paul bears the word; the speaking out of the thanksgiving at the Supper was a share of the serving of the word and thus laid on the teacher, though it even as the breaking of bread in 1 Cor. 10:16 is set forth as a handling of the church, Sohm, Church Law 69. According to Didache 10, 7 the eucharistein also falls to the prophets, according to Ignatius Smyrnaeans 8 to the bishop, according to Justin Apology I 65 to the proestōs , while the deacons therein lent their service and gave over bread and wine to the sharers, cf. Suicerus, s.v. diakonos and synaxis , Voetius, Ecclesiastical Polity I 756-751. Moor V 638-641. Campegius Vitringa VIII 1 p. 327 sq. This tight binding of the serving of the Supper with that of the word proves that the server steps up in the name of Christ and is working as house carer and dealer of his hidden things. The Supper is a meal of which Christ is the host.
Furthermore, the idea of a meal in the Lord's Supper comes out very strongly in the food and the drink which are shared out and enjoyed there. Just as little as the water in baptism, so the signs of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper are not chosen at random or by chance. In the offerings of the Old Testament, flesh and blood were the main things, because they pointed typically to the offering of Christ on the cross. But the Lord's Supper is itself no offering but a remembrance of the offering on the cross and sets forth the fellowship of believers in that offering. Therefore Christ chooses not flesh and blood but bread and wine for food and drink in the Lord's Supper, to make known that it is no offering but a meal, a meal grounded on, in remembrance of, and for fellowship with the crucified Christ. And for this the signs of bread and wine are outstandingly fitting; they were in the East the usual parts of the meal, they are still easily gotten everywhere and at all times, they are the foremost means for strengthening and gladdening the heart of man, Psalm 104:15, and they are a speaking token of the fellowship of believers with Christ and with each other.
Moreover, it is all the same whether the bread is made of wheat, rye, or barley, and the wine bears a white or red hue; whether the bread is eaten leavened after the custom of the Greek church or unleavened after that of the Roman church; and whether the wine is used unmixed after the teaching of the Armenian Christians or mixed with water after the firm saying of Trent. Christ has set or laid down nothing of all this. Even the Reformed did not hold back from saying that, if bread and wine were utterly lacking, other food and drink, for example, rice and bread, might be used as signs in the Lord's Supper. But with that, willful straying from Christ's setting up is not yet allowed. Just as in these times, so in the first ages there were some Christians (Tatians, Severians, Gnostics, Manicheans, Aquarians) who from an ascetic groundwork replaced the wine in the Lord's Supper with water. But we must not be wiser than Christ, who outspokenly set wine as the sign of his blood, and whose bidding in this has been followed by the Christian church at all times. For the claim of Harnack, that the custom of using water in the Lord's Supper was rather widespread in the first and second hundred years and still had to be fought in the fifth hundred years; and that even Paul, speaking of the drinking cup, does not surely think of a cup with wine, has been enough gainsaid by Zahn.
Likewise the custom of the Roman and Lutheran Christians is to be shunned, to give the bread in the shape of a wafer (oblate, because the believers in old times themselves offered the needs for the Lord's Supper; host, because the bread is a sign of Christ's offering). For though the amount of the bread is no more set than the kind, yet the mark of a meal must stay kept, and this goes almost wholly lost in the use of a small, round wafer. At last, the place and the time in which the Lord's Supper was set up and kept in old times also clearly shows that it is a true meal. For Jesus set up the Lord's Supper when he lay at table with his learners at the Passover meal. And in the first time the Lord's Supper was kept in link with an everyday meal, Acts 20:7, 11, 1 Corinthians 11:21, in the open gathering of the church, 1 Corinthians 10:17, 11:18, 20, 21, 33, and daily or at least every rest day, Acts 2:46, 20:7.
Only bit by bit was the Lord's Supper loosed from the love feasts, shifted from the evening to the morning worship, given outside the gathering of the church also to the sick and dying in their houses, kept as mass wholly and altogether outside and without a coming together of the church, and the use of the Lord's Supper for believers set at three or at a single time in the year as the least, Trent session 13 canon 9. Though now some Reformed were of the mind that the Lord's Supper in very special happenings might also be given to the sick in their dwelling, but then yet in the being there of others, yet they all broadly held fast the thought that it as a share of the public worship belonged in the gathering of the church and might not be kept privately. And though the upholding has shown stronger than the teaching and the keeping of the Lord's Supper mostly bounded to six or four times in the year, yet it was at first the wish of Calvin to keep it at least once a month. If the baptism as bringing into the Christian church already belongs to take place in the open gathering of believers, then this holds yet much more of the Lord's Supper, which is truly a supper, a gathering, a feast, and holds in not only a fellowship with Christ but also a fellowship of believers.
Therefore the setting of the mark of the Lord's Supper at last gathers wholly around the asking, whether it must be given on a table or rather on an altar. Jesus and his learners sat at a table when they used the Lord's Supper, and the first Christians knew nothing of an altar. But bit by bit the split between the Old and New Testament stewardship went lost; the gathering place was changed into a temple, the server into a priest, the Lord's Supper into an offering, and the table into an altar. In the Roman and Greek church the whole worship is ruled by this outlook; the Anglican church took it over largely and bends toward it now more and more; the Lutheran church kept the altar and looked on it as a thing neither here nor there. But the Reformed brought back the scriptural thought of the Lord's meal also in the table of the Lord's Supper. For the split between the worship of the Old and New Testaments lies in this, that temple and altar, priest and offering are no more on earth but in the heavens. The Jerusalem that is above is mother of us all, Galatians 4:26; there is Christ, the everlasting High Priest, gone in for us, Hebrews 6:20, after he through one offering had brought about an everlasting freeing, 9:12, to show up before the face of God for us, 9:24; and there the Christians have their holy place, into which they go in with boldness in the blood of Jesus, 4:16, 10:19, 12:22. Here on earth we have only a coming together among ourselves, in which there is no room for an offering, 10:25. The only altar of Christians is the cross, on which Christ brought his offering, 13:10. From that altar, that is, from the offering brought on it, they eat as they through belief have fellowship in Christ and his blessings. The believers have no other offering to bring than offerings of praise, that is fruit of lips that praise his name, 13:15. The Lord's Supper is an offering meal, a meal of believers with Christ grounded on his offering and therefore not to be given on an altar but on a table. It is most sure that Christ's cross is overturned as soon as an altar is set up.
6. The Lord's Supper is thus a real meal, but as such it yet has its own, spiritual meaning and purpose. Christ did not set it up so that it might feed us bodily but so that it might feed us spiritually. Before He hands out bread and wine, He blesses both and says that the bread is His body and the wine is His blood; as such, as His broken body and shed blood, must bread and wine be taken and enjoyed by His followers. The matter of the sacrament, the thing signified in the Lord's Supper is thus the body and blood of Christ, as it was broken and shed in His sacrificial death for His church unto forgiveness of sins, that is the crucified and dead Christ with all the benefits and blessings won by His death, Christ Himself with all His benefits, Heppe, Dogm. In the moral, rationalistic view of the Lord's Supper this meaning does not come to its right. For 1º the Lord's Supper is indeed a memorial meal, but it is this first on the ground that Christ set up bread and wine as signs of His body and blood. In the Lord's Supper it comes in the first place not to what we do, but to what God does. Before all else the Lord's Supper is a gift of God, a benefit of Christ, a means for His grace. If the Lord's Supper were nothing but a memorial meal and a confession act, it would cease to be a sacrament in the proper sense; only sideways and indirectly would it then, like prayer, be called a means of grace. But the Lord's Supper stands with word and baptism on one line and is thus first of all, like these, to be seen as a preaching and assurance of God's grace to us. 2º Christ does not lift up bread and wine in general to signs of His body and blood, but He does this set for that bread and that wine, which He holds in His hand and shares with His disciples. And He does not say that they in that bread and that wine have only to see His body and blood, but He says outspokenly that they must take, eat, and drink both as such. He makes it a meal, in which the disciples enjoy His body and blood and thus enter into the closest fellowship with Him. That fellowship lies not therein only that they sit together at one table, but they eat of one bread and drink of one wine; yes the host offers under the signs of bread and wine His own body and blood as food and drink for their souls. That is a fellowship which far overtops that in a memorial meal and confession act. It is no mere remembering of, no mere thinking on Christ's benefits, but it is a most inward bond with Christ Himself, like the food and drink joins with our body. 3º In the Lord's Supper we receive indeed no other and no more, but yet also no less benefits than in the word. Now Jesus, John 6:47-58, has said outspokenly that we in the word and by faith eat His flesh and drink His blood and thus receive eternal life. Though in John 6 there is not straightway speech of the Lord's Supper, yet it may and can serve to explain this second sacrament. Through the word and in faith we get such an inward fellowship with Christ, with His body and blood, as arises between the food and him who enjoys it. And this is the teaching not only of John 6, but of the whole Scripture. The word gives in the literal sense not that fellowship nor yet faith, but God has bound Himself to give to him who believes His word, His fellowship in Christ and all the benefits bound thereto. Rightly therefore Calvin marked against Zwingli that the eating of Christ's body and the drinking of His blood does not go up in believing. Believing is a means, a means even that is timely and once goes over into beholding, but the fellowship with Christ that thereby arises goes much deeper and lasts in eternity. It is a mystical union, which we can only somewhat make clear under the images of vine and branch, head and body, bridegroom and bride, cornerstone and building. And it is this mystical union which in the Lord's Supper is signified and sealed.
The Christian church has upheld this mystical union almost unanimously in the Lord's Supper; Greek and Roman, Lutheran and Reformed Christians are therein in agreement with one another, that in the Lord's Supper there takes place an objective and real imparting of the person and benefits of Christ to each one who believes. But among themselves they differ greatly about the way in which that imparting happens. The first-named are not satisfied unless the body and blood of Christ are also physically and locally present in the signs and received and enjoyed by the bodily mouth. The Reformed, however, teach that Christ is truly and essentially imparted to the believers in the Lord's Supper, but in a spiritual way and so that He can only be received and enjoyed by the mouth of faith. And for this the Scripture yields abundant proofs.
1. In the words touto esti to sōma mou the subject touto can refer to nothing else than to the bread which Jesus holds in His hand. The predicate is to sōma mou , and thereby denotes the own body of Christ, which He took from Mary and gave over into death for His own. The copula is esti , which by Jesus in the Aramaic was not spoken at all but in any case links two disparate concepts, bread and body, and thus cannot be a copula of actual being . So esti must here have significative, figurative meaning, for a disparate thing cannot be predicated of a disparate except figuratively. The sentence contains a trope, and this lies not in the subject or in the predicate, but as Zwingli rightly saw, in the copula esti , just as that is so often the case in Scripture, e.g., Gen. 17:13, 41:26, 27, Ex. 12:11, Ezek. 5:5, Luke 12:1, John 10:9, 15:1, etc. Gal. 4:24, 1 Cor. 10:4, Heb. 10:20, Rev. 1:20 etc. And that in the words of institution such a trope must be assumed is proved in abundance besides by the fact that Jesus according to Luke and Paul at the second sign does not say: this wine, but this cup is the new testament in my blood. Even the Romans and Lutherans are forced here to assume a trope.
2. When the subject touto does not refer to the natural bread and to the natural wine, but already to the substance of Jesus' body and blood, which are hidden under the form or within the signs of bread and wine, then bread and wine are already changed into Jesus' body and blood or have already taken them up in themselves, before the words: this is my body, this is my blood, are spoken, and they lose all the power and worth which Romans and Lutherans ascribe to them. For the trans- or consubstantiation has then not come about through those words but has already preceded them; and the words, on which so much stress is laid, contain nothing but a declaration of what already exists and came about earlier. It is difficult, yes impossible then to say when and how the trans- or consubstantiation came about; for indeed there is mention of preceding blessing and thanksgiving, but the content thereof is not mentioned with a single word; we know absolutely nothing of what Jesus said therein and thus also not what we must say to bring about the trans- and consubstantiation. And besides, when Paul in 1 Cor. 10:16 says: the cup which we bless is communion in the blood of Christ, then he proceeds from the assumption that the cup contains wine and no blood, for otherwise we could not bless it, and that it as such, as containing wine, through the blessing is communion in Christ's blood.
3. The words which Jesus spoke at the institution of the Lord's Supper are not intended as any fixed formula. That appears from the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul render them in different readings and that the liturgical use of the Christian churches among themselves shows all sorts of deviation. According to the Greek church the so-called epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit, belongs essentially to the words of consecration, Schwane, D. G. II 810. Kattenbusch, Vergl. Conf. I 413, while according to Rome the transubstantiation comes about through the speaking of the words: hoc enim est corpus meum , wherein the little word enim is arbitrarily inserted and the words: which is broken for you, are arbitrarily omitted. Much less is it to be proved that the words—suppose it were fixed which ones were to be used—possess a consecratory, operative, conversive power. For Jesus does not say: this becomes , but: this is my body and has thus already beforehand set apart the bread from common use and by blessing and thanksgiving destined it for a higher purpose.
4. When Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, He sat bodily with His disciples at the table. These could therefore not come to the thought that they enjoyed with the bodily mouth Jesus' own body and blood and could still much less eat that body itself and drink that blood. It avails nothing to say with Philippi that they were lifted above the measure of their ordinary understanding by the enlightening Spirit, K. Gl. V 2 S. 451, or with Hollaz, Ex. theol. 1119, that Jesus sat in a natural way at table but sacramentally gave Himself to be eaten. For not only is nothing of this in Scripture, but the question runs precisely about the way in which Jesus at the first Lord's Supper gave His body and blood to be enjoyed and may not be answered with a petitio principii. If the way in which Romans and Lutherans with their trans- and consubstantiation imagine this enjoyment of Jesus' body and blood is excluded by the first Lord's Supper or therein can be maintained only by an appeal to a miracle or by all sorts of evasions for which Scripture gives no ground, then it ought to be let go by the Christian who submits himself to God's word. And if at the first Lord's Supper there was no trans- or consubstantiation and no manducatio oralis, then it may also not be assumed at the Lord's Supper which the Christian church after Jesus' death celebrates at His command and according to His institution.
5. Just as much as with His bodily sitting at the table, the trans- and consubstantiation is now at odds with His bodily ascension and with His local abode in heaven. For if bread and wine at the Lord's Supper are changed into Jesus' body and blood or take these up in themselves, that body must descend from heaven or already, according to the Lutheran ubiquity doctrine, cf. Kübel, art. Ubiquität in Herzog², be present everywhere beforehand. In the latter case there is yet again an act needed whereby the presence of Christ's body in the Lord's Supper is brought about in a special way, for ubiquity is of course not sufficient for that; and therefore Luther, Brenz, and others said that it is yet something else when God is there and when He is there for you . But He is there for you when He adds His word thereto and binds Himself therewith and says: here you shall find me, in Kübel, art. Ubiquität in Herzog² 16, 123. 128. The word thus brings about in Rome and in Luther such a presence of Christ's body and blood in the Lord's Supper that He is present not only bodily in heaven but also on earth, in the signs of bread and wine. And this presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper is moreover then thought of in such a way that Christ wholly, not only according to His divine but also according to His human nature, is present in every Lord's Supper, wherever and whenever it is celebrated; that He with His whole divine and human nature is present in every sign of the Lord's Supper, yes in every particle of the bread and in every drop of the wine, totus in tota hostia et in qualibet parte . This now is an endless multiplication of Christ which is in direct conflict with the doctrine of Scripture about His human nature, about His ascension, and about His abode in heaven. For certainly that human nature is glorified at the resurrection and ascension but not thereby robbed of its essential properties of finitude and limitation, part III 414ff. Jesus institutes the Lord's Supper precisely to His remembrance because He goes away and soon will no longer be bodily with His own, as He elsewhere also expressly declares, Matt. 26:11. And at the ascension He went away and was taken up, Acts 1:9-11, into heaven, which is a place, John 14:2, 4, 17:24, Acts 7:56, Col. 3:1, Eph. 4:10, Heb. 7:26, to remain there until His parousia, Acts 1:11, Phil. 3:20, 1 Thess. 1:10, 4:16.
6. But even if Christ were bodily and locally present in the Lord's Supper, one does not see to what this is necessary and serviceable. The benefit of the manducatio oralis cannot be shown in any way, cf. Köstlin, Luthers’ Theol. II 516. Suppose even that we eat with the bodily mouth Jesus' own body, what benefit do we have therefrom? It comes yet in the Lord's Supper to this, that our soul, that our spiritual life is nourished and strengthened. And this cannot by the nature of the case happen through the eating of Christ's body with the bodily mouth; for what we eat therewith passes partly into components of our body and is partly cast out. Newer theologians have therefore come to the thought that the manducatio oralis of Christ's body plants the seed of a new, of a resurrection body in us. But this representation runs wholly against Scripture and is fruit of a false theosophy. Yet if this fruit is not connected with the eating of Christ's body, there is no other to be pointed out. The manducatio oralis is useless and vain and at bottom, however much one disputes it, Capernaite. The Capernaites could imagine no other eating of Jesus' flesh than with the bodily mouth, John 6:41, 52. And although Romans and Lutherans do indeed assume a spiritual eating of Jesus' body, they yet connect this with, they yet make it dependent on the bodily eating, without making the way of that connection or the nature of that dependence in the least clear. Jesus however intended in the whole discourse which He holds against the Capernaites nothing other than a spiritual eating, an eating by faith, and makes no mention at all of a bodily eating.
All the aforesaid objections apply to both the Roman and Lutheran doctrines; against the first, the following are added. 7. Transubstantiation is decidedly contradicted by the witness of our senses, by sight and touch, by smell and taste. And our senses have a right to speak here, because bread and wine fall under their reach and can and may be judged by them. They are also, if they observe accurately, as trustworthy here as elsewhere, because otherwise skeptical nominalism stands at the door and all certainty of faith and knowledge vanishes. Rome too must yield to their witness but has devised that the substance changes and the accidents remain the same. How this is to be thought remains unanswered. At Cana the water became wine, but so that substance and accidents changed. Accidents cannot be separated from the substance and thought of as resting in themselves, for then they cease to be accidents and become substances themselves. Moreover, in the bread and wine of the supper all accidents remain unchanged, both those perceived by smell and taste and those by sight and touch; weight, firmness, color, corruptibility, nourishing power, etc., all remain; what then is left for the substance that can change and has changed?
8. Transubstantiation conflicts with the twofold signs that Jesus ordained at the supper. Although formerly sometimes in the administration of the supper in private houses, to the sick, to prisoners, to anchorites, to abstinent virgins, and in masses of the presanctified, only the sign of bread was distributed, and conversely to infants, as now still in the Greek church, only the wine was administered; yet only since the twelfth century did the custom come into vogue to withhold the cup from the laity, and only the Council of Constance in 1415 raised this custom to church law. In spite of the opposition conducted against it by the Hussites and the Reformers, the Council of Trent also attached its approval to the withholding of the cup and was led thereto by grave and just causes, Sess. 21. The synod does not mention these reasons, but they are easy to guess. Besides the aversion of some to drink with others from one cup, the dislike of wine, the danger of spilling and thus dishonoring the sacrament, etc., the Roman church was moved to this withholding of the cup especially by the desire to exalt the priestly estate above the laity, and by the conviction that each sign and each part thereof was changed into the whole Christ, Oswald, Die dogm. Lehre v. d. h. Sakr. I 501. Transubstantiation makes a second sign in the supper wholly needless; in the bread alone and even in the smallest piece thereof the whole matter of grace is already contained. Thereby the Roman church comes into conflict with a direct command of Christ, Matt. 26:27, against which her appeal to the conjunction ἠ in 1 Cor. 11:27 avails nothing, and at the same time, by her own confession, with the custom of the Christian church in the first centuries. She knows how to defend herself only with the claim that she possesses power to proceed in the distribution of the sacraments as she sees fit, Trid. sess. 21 c. 2. Conversely, the institution of the supper under two signs is a strong proof that transubstantiation is not the teaching of Scripture. Together they set before our eyes the crucified Christ and communicate Him to believers, not in a bodily but in a spiritual manner, not in and under but together with the signs; they form together one sacrament, as images and pledges of the one spiritual good, the communion with Christ and His benefits.
9. Transubstantiation is finally refuted by the idolatrous practices that have followed it. Although the mass was prepared by the sacrifice and priest idea, which was early connected with the supper, it is yet essentially built on the doctrine of transubstantiation first worked out in the Middle Ages. And this is equally presupposed by the reservation, adoration, and procession. By the doctrine of the change of substance the supper has passed over into the mass, and thereby been wholly robbed of its original character. Although the communion, despite various restrictions, has continued to exist, yet the mass has become the center of the Roman worship. It is also nothing less than the fullest outworking of the Roman thought that the church with her priesthood is the mediatrix of salvation, the continually realizing God-man on earth. In the mass Christ always and ever anew repeats His offering on the cross; He offers Himself therein essentially and truly, though in an unbloody manner, and thereby effects with God that the fruits of His offering on the cross, which there are acquired only wholly in general and in the abstract, are now applied, cf. Trid. 22 c. 1, to all who live in the communion of the church, whether on earth or in purgatory, whether they are present at the mass or absent, whether they desire it for themselves or for others, for spiritual or bodily needs, for forgiveness of sins and for prevention or averting of sickness and misfortune, drought and flood, war and pestilence, etc. That is what Rome has made of the supper of our Lord Jesus Christ! Grounds, which yet in such a weighty doctrine as the mass should be present in abundance and unshakably firm, are wholly lacking. In Gen. 14:18, where Melchizedek offers bread and wine to Abraham for refreshment, there is not a word of a sacrifice, though there follows immediately, not: for, but: and he (Melchizedek) was a priest of the most high God. Mal. 1:11 perhaps does not even speak of the future; but even if this is the case, this place describes only in Old Testament forms that the Lord's name shall be great among the Gentiles and that incense and a pure offering (מִנְחָה, offering in general) shall be brought to Him; and these forms are in the New Testament precisely replaced by the prayer and the spiritual offering of believers, Rom. 12:1. At the institution of the supper Jesus indeed said: τουτο ποιειτε εἰς την ἐμην ἀναμνησιν, Luke 22:19, but that Jesus thereby instituted the supper as a sacrifice and raised the disciples to priests is in these words in no wise contained and is certainly not proved thereby that the Hebrew עשׂה and the Latin facere are sometimes used in the sense of offering. In 1 Cor. 10:21 Paul sets the table of the Lord over against the table of devils; but because the table of devils was an altar, it by no means follows that the table of the Lord is also an altar on which sacrifice must be offered. These are the chief and strongest proofs which the Romans can bring from Scripture for their doctrine of the mass. And little stronger is their appeal to the church fathers, for they forget thereby that these, applying the sacrifice idea to the supper, attached to it a wholly different sense than Rome later connected with it. And over against all these seeming arguments stands a series of proofs that set the unscriptural character of the mass in the clearest light. To the institution and the celebration of the supper customary in the apostolic church all that resembles the mass is wholly foreign. The eternity of Christ's priesthood, Heb. 5:6, 7:17, 21-25, and the perfection of His cross-offering, Heb. 7:27, 9:12, 28, 10:10, 12, 14 make a, though unbloody, repetition of His self-offering needless and unlawful; all benefits of grace, forgiveness, sanctification, redemption, the whole salvation, are acquired by the offering on the cross and can neither need to be supplemented. Yea, because Christ once on the cross offered Himself and gave Himself over to death, He cannot even do this a second time, His offering in death is susceptible of no repetition, Heb. 9:26-28. His priestly activity indeed continues in heaven, but consists not in any atoning offering but in His intercession and appearance before God's face for the sake of His people, Heb. 7:25, 9:24; and in that intercession and appearance before God's face the offering accomplished on the cross always works for the benefit of His own. Because Christ Himself lives in heaven to pray for believers and in that prayer lets His offering work through, therefore there is no place for the repetition of His offering on earth. His state of exaltation, His elevation above all suffering, sorrow and death, His kingly rule as head of the church are in direct conflict with a sacrificium propitiatorium et impetratorium that He would still have to bring on earth every day and in thousands of places. However much Rome claims that the unbloody offering does not weaken the bloody one on the cross but makes it effective, in fact it is yet a denial of the one offering on the cross; for an offering that does nothing but make the fruits of another offering enjoyed is a palpable absurdity. If the offering on the cross is sufficient, others are needless; if these are necessary, the first is imperfect. And this is confirmed by the Roman practice; the attention of the believer is diverted from Christ and His cross and directed to the priest and his mass. For the least grace the Roman Christian is dependent on the priest and the church. He cannot dispense with them for a moment. In theory it is held fast that Christ has acquired all grace; but in practice grace is dispensed successively, bit by bit, by the priest. The supper has in the hands of Rome become a tremendum mysterium that keeps believers in the state of infancy, binds them for their whole life and well-being to the hierarchical priesthood and makes them kneel in idolatrous adoration before a God of their own making. Cf. against the doctrine of trans- and consubstantiation: Calvin, Inst. IV 18. Beza, Tract. theol. I 211 sq. 507 sq. III 148 sq. Martyr, Loci Comm. IV c. 12. Ursinus on Heid. Cat. 78-80 and Tract. theol. 359-596. Chamier, Panstr. Cath. IV l. 6. Amesius, Bellarminus enervatus l. IV. Rivetus, Op. III 339-376. Turretinus, Theol. El. XIX qu. 21. M. Vitringa VIII 769. Art. Messe e. a. in Herzog². Hase, Prot. Polemik⁵ 488-535 etc.
7. Better than the Lutherans, the Reformed have cleansed the Lord's Supper of Roman mixtures and restored it to its first meaning. The Lord's Supper was, according to Christ's setting up, a meal, a true meal, in which bread and wine were used as food and drink to strengthen the body, and above all served as signs and seals for fellowship with the crucified Christ. It is a common, natural but also an uncommon, spiritual meal, in which Christ the host offers his own crucified body and shed blood as food for our souls. Therefore in that meal which Christ set up, all things are weighty; nothing in it is without meaning; all has a deep sense. First, the signs of bread and wine are not chosen at random but are most fitting to give us an understanding of the spiritual food and drink which Christ has made ready in his death for our souls. Second, all the deeds are of meaning which Jesus did in setting up the Lord's Supper. He takes the bread and the wine not as first at the Passover, from the hand of others, δεξαμενος, Luke 22:17, but He takes them himself from the table, λαβων, vs. 19, as proof that He is the host and orders the food and the drink. He blesses (εὐλογησας, Matt. 26:26, Mark 14:22, changing at the cup with εὐχαριστησας, Matt. 26:27, Mark 14:23, while Luke 22:19, 20 and Paul, 1 Cor. 11:24, 25 have only εὐχαριστησας) the bread and later likewise the cup; under that blessing is not to be understood that Christ asks a blessing from God over bread and wine, but the change with εὐχαριστησας proves that Jesus blesses God, that is, praises and thanks for the gifts which are given by Him. The content of that praise and thanksgiving is not told, but surely had to do with the gifts of creation, shown in bread and wine, and further above all with the gifts of grace, which would be won through the death of Christ and offered in his body and blood to the disciples. By that thanksgiving already were bread and wine set apart from common use and marked for a higher end, and the disciples were also made ready for a right understanding of the meaningful words, this is my body etc., which Jesus would soon speak to explain. Further, Jesus broke the bread, in which the Reformed rightly saw a deed which belongs not to the essence but yet to the wholeness of the sacrament; for not only is this breaking told in all four accounts, but the whole Lord's Supper is named after it, Acts 2:42; as the breaking of the bread is needful to make it fit for the guests to enjoy, so must Christ give his body in death, that it may be food for our souls, John 6:51, 12:24. Lastly, Jesus himself shares the bread and the wine to his disciples, that they may eat and drink of them; He does it with the clear words: λαβετε, φαγετε, πιετε ἐξ αὐτου παντες, which strongly condemn the Roman mass without communicants; the sharing belongs to the being of the Lord's Supper. Third, the words are weighty which Jesus speaks in sharing the bread and wine; as He gave the bread to his disciples, He said: this is my body, which is given for you, Luke 22:19; and in handing the cup He spoke: this cup is my covenant blood, or the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you or for many for the forgiveness of sins. That these words have a consecrating, working power finds no support at all in the text of the accounts. But after Jesus by the thanksgiving has set apart bread and wine from common use, marked for a higher end and made ready his disciples, He now speaks the words: this is my body and blood. He says not: let this bread become my body; He commands and orders not, but He makes clear and sheds light. For it is a sign-filled deed which He does; a spiritual meal which He sets up. And of that meal his body and blood, as it is given over in death, is the food and the drink. All the signs, deeds and words in the Lord's Supper are aimed there, that they point our faith to the offering of Jesus Christ on the cross, as to the only ground of our salvation. Yet the Lord's Supper does not thereby become only a meal in memory of Christ and his blessings. Under the signs of bread and wine Jesus gives his own body and blood to enjoy; the Lord's Supper table brings a true fellowship between Christ and the believers, a fellowship not only to the blessings but also and first of all to the person of Christ, both to his human and to his godly nature.
Over the reality of that fellowship there is no difference between Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Christians; in this respect they stand together over against Zwingli. But they do differ among themselves over the nature of that fellowship and over the way in which it is enjoyed in the Supper. Roman Catholics and Lutherans think that it cannot truly and fully come to pass unless they let Christ bodily descend from heaven to earth and eat and drink his body and blood, not only spiritually, but also with the bodily mouth. Over against this, Calvin from the beginning and ever anew laid stress on it, that the fellowship of believers with Christ, also according to his human nature, is spiritual in kind, and that it comes to pass, not because Christ bodily descends downward, but because we spiritually lift up our hearts upward to heaven, where Jesus Christ is, our advocate, at the right hand of his heavenly Father. And this teaching rests on Scripture and agrees with the nature of the New Testament dispensation. For 1º the fellowship of Christ and believers is indeed so close and unbreakable that it can hardly be put into words and can only be somewhat made clear under images, such as of head and body, vine and branch, bridegroom and bride. But it is yet no pantheistic mingling or identification, no overflowing of substance, no oneness of being as of the three persons in the Trinity, no personal union as of the two natures in Christ. Christ and believers remain distinct; their personhood is upheld; the mystical union is a union of persons, even if not only according to their will and mind, but also according to their being and nature. 2º This fellowship is wrought by the Holy Ghost, who dwells in Christ as the head and in believers as his members. There is no other way to become partaker of that fellowship. A physical union, as trans- and consubstantiation with the linked oral eating seeks to bring about, is wholly vain and useless. Only the Holy Ghost, who is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, can so unite men with Christ that they have part in his person and benefits and by no death or grave, by no world or Satan can be sundered from him. And therefore that fellowship is also ever spiritual in kind. It indeed includes the human nature of Christ and believers according to their bodies. For Christ as mediator is not to be thought of without his human nature, and he bought believers not only according to their soul but also according to their body. Yet the union remains spiritual in kind, because it comes to pass in no other way than by the Holy Ghost. 3º The fellowship with Christ, which is strengthened in the Supper, is no other than that which also comes to pass by the means of grace of the word. The sacrament adds no single grace to that which is offered in the word; it only strengthens and confirms what is taken from the word by faith. When therefore Roman Catholics and Lutherans bring in that the fellowship with Christ in the Supper according to the Reformed view is no true fellowship with the very body and blood of Christ, then against this it need only be noted that the fellowship assured in the Supper is no other and can be no other than that by the word. Wholly in the same way as man by faith is grafted into Christ, he is also strengthened and confirmed in that fellowship by the Supper. There is no other, higher fellowship. He who believes the word becomes Christ's own according to body and soul; and he who receives the Supper in faith is thereof assured and made sure. The sacrament gives no other grace but gives the same grace, for the strengthening of faith, only in another way. 4º Also among the Reformed, Christ is thus truly and essentially present in the Supper with his divine and human nature, yet in no other way than he is present in the gospel. He is not bodily shut up in bread and wine any more than in the preached word, but he who believingly takes the sign receives according to God's ordinance truly fellowship with the whole Christ. Not in and under, but with the sign Christ gives the thing signified, that is, himself with all his benefits. For while among Roman Catholics and Lutherans grace is something thing-like and passive, which is even bodily received by the unbeliever, among the Reformed it is the personal, living Christ himself, who in the Supper gives himself as spiritual food to believers, Müller, Dogm. Abh. 458. Present is he thus according to the Reformed in the Supper no less, but much stronger and truer than according to Rome and Luther, for he is present, not physically, locally within the signs but spiritually, as the acting Christ himself, in the hearts of believers, Aliud est praesentem Christi substantiam, ut nos vivificet, in pane sistere; aliud vivificam esse Christi carnem, quia ex ejus substantia vita in animas nostras profluit, Calvin, adv. Westph. in Müller 443 cf. Conf. Angl. 28 and Ryle, Knots untied 235-254. 5º Therefore faith is for the receiving of the sacrament an indispensable requirement. The truth of the sacrament does not hang on that faith. For just as with the word, God has bound himself in the Supper to give Christ and his benefits truly to everyone who believes. But the unbeliever of course receives only the sign, just as with the word he hears only the sounds and does not become partaker of the thing itself which is marked thereby. To have part in the promises and benefits of word and sacrament, therefore a working of the Holy Ghost in man's heart is needful; and it is just this working of the Spirit which outside and in the Supper brings to pass and upholds the fellowship with Christ. 6º The benefits which are enjoyed in the Supper are easily drawn from this. In the forefront stands the strengthening of fellowship with Christ. The believer is already partaker of that fellowship by faith and receives in the Supper no other than that which he already enjoys by faith. But when Christ himself by the hand of the minister under the signs of bread and wine gives him his body to eat and his blood to drink, then he is by the Holy Ghost strengthened and confirmed in that fellowship, and ever more closely united according to body and soul with the whole Christ both according to his divine and according to his human nature. For the eating of Christ's body is nothing other than the closest joining with Christ, Junius, Theses theol. 52, 7. From the baptism the Supper is hereby set apart, that baptism is the sacrament of grafting in, the Supper the sacrament of growing up in fellowship with Christ. By baptism we are buried with Christ in his death and raised in his rising, and are thus passive; but in the Supper we ourselves come forth acting, eat the body and drink the blood of Christ and are thus fed by his fellowship unto everlasting life. But if we have part in the person of Christ, then we have it of itself also in all his benefits. Among these forgiveness of sins is named in Scripture in the first place and with the most stress. In the Supper Christ gives his body and blood for food of our souls, but that body and blood is not such food, because it is bodily substance, in the way it would be bodily food but insofar as the body of Christ is given for the life of the world, Junius ibid. Therefore body and blood are set forth separately, each under its own sign, in the Supper. Therefore Christ says expressly that his body is given and his blood shed for forgiveness of sins. Therefore the meaning of the blood is in the words of institution yet more broadly set forth and made clear than that of the body, for it is the blood which on the altar makes atonement for sins. Even if Christ is now glorified, the fellowship which comes to pass by faith and is strengthened in the Supper is and remains a fellowship in his crucified body and in his shed blood. On the standpoint of trans- and consubstantiation this is impossible; there the dead Christ steps back behind the glorified. But if the eating of Christ's body and the drinking of his blood is the same as the closest joining of us with Christ, Bucanus, Inst. theol. 677, then this and every other benefit is solely a fruit of Christ's death and we are fed from Christ only because he was crucified for us. And among the benefits which Christ won by his death, forgiveness of sins stands at the top. This benefit too is not given in the Supper for the first time; for the Christian already has it by faith and has thereof received the sign and seal in baptism. Wrong therefore is it to divide the different graces with Rome over the sacraments so that each time in each sacrament a special group of sins is forgiven and a special grace given, for the forgiveness which word, baptism, and Supper offer us is ever the same. The forgiveness which is given in the Supper has therefore by no means only to do with daily faults, with venial sins, Trid. sess. 13 c. 2. 22 c. 1. But it is the same full, rich benefit of forgiveness which is offered in the word, taken by faith, and marked and sealed by the sacrament of baptism and Supper. With this benefit it comes out clearly that the sacrament adds no single new grace to the word; it gives the same grace only, for our weakness' sake, in another way, that we might firmly believe and be healed of all doubt. With this benefit of forgiveness comes that of everlasting life. The Supper is a spiritual meal, where Christ feeds our souls with his crucified body and shed blood. The eating and drinking thereof serves for strengthening of the spiritual, everlasting life, for he who eats the flesh of the Son of man and drinks his blood has everlasting life and is raised up at the last day, John 6:54. It comes out clearly hereby that everlasting life is a benefit which is given to the whole man, not only according to his soul but also according to his body. Wrongly some have drawn from this that from Christ's body, which is enjoyed in the Supper, a straightforward working goes out on our body, so that this is healed of all sickness and weakness and in beginning reshaped into a new resurrection body. It is understandable that one came to this view especially on the Lutheran standpoint; for if the oral eating has not this usefulness, it has none at all. Yet Holy Scripture teaches nothing about this. In 1 Cor. 11:30 Paul indeed says that because of the dreadful misuse of the Supper in Corinth many sicknesses and deaths came; but this is clearly a judgment, vs. 29, a punishment which God let come upon this misuse of the Supper, and proves not at all that the use or a believing use of the Supper also serves for healing of the sicknesses of the body. Moreover, John 6 may well be used for illustration of the Supper, but does not handle it straightforwardly; and this chapter too teaches only that he who by faith, also without the Supper, eats Christ's flesh and drinks his blood has everlasting life and shall be raised up at the last day, cf. 6:40. By no means therefore only by the oral eating, but in general by faith man becomes partaker of everlasting life and the hope of the rising. The Holy Ghost, who dwells in believers, is the surest pledge for the rising of the body and the day of redemption, Rom. 8:11, Eph. 1:14, 4:30. But this Spirit of Christ does make use of the Supper to strengthen the believer in the hope of everlasting life and of the blessed rising at the end of the days. For where the soul is healed, there the body is also helped, Luther in Müller, Dogm. Abh. 419. The presence of the body brings not only undoubted trust of everlasting life to our souls, but also makes us secure of the immortality of our flesh, since it is now quickened by his immortal flesh and in a way shares in its immortality, Calvin, Inst. IV 17, 32, cf. also in Ebrard, Dogm. of the Supper II 460, and further Philippi, K. Gl. V 2 p. 282 f. Müller, Dogm. Abh. 417. In this sense the Supper may be called the medicine of immortality, Ign. Eph. 20. Lastly the Supper serves yet as a memorial feast and proclamation of Christ's death for confession of our faith over against the world and for strengthening of the fellowship of believers among themselves. In 1 Cor. 10:17 the apostle proves that the bread must be fellowship in the body of Christ, for how else could believers, who taken by themselves are many, be one? That oneness comes to pass only thereby that they in the one bread have fellowship in the one body of Christ. Believers are one in Christ and therefore also among themselves. As from many grains of corn one bread is baked and from many berries, pressed together, one wine and drink flows, so all who by true faith are grafted into Christ are together one body; and that they confess at the Supper over against the world, which knows not their oneness.
8. Even as the baptism, so is the Lord's Supper only instituted for believers. Jesus used it only with his disciples. Whether Judas was still present or had left the room before the institution of the Lord's Supper cannot be said with certainty. Matthew 26:21-25, Mark 14:18-21, John 13:21-35 give the impression that Judas had gone before that time, but Luke 22:21-23 recounts the discovery of Judas as betrayer after the institution of the Lord's Supper in verses 19-20. It is possible, however, that Luke does not hold to the chronological order here. But however this may be, the question has no dogmatic importance. If Judas partook of the Lord's Supper, then he sat at table as a disciple of Jesus; that he was, so he presented himself, what he inwardly plotted in his heart against Jesus remained his own account. M. Vitringa. In like manner, later the Lord's Supper was celebrated exclusively in the circle of the congregation by believers, Acts 2:42, 20:7. Unbelievers did have access to the assembly of the congregation where the word was ministered, 1 Corinthians 14:22-24, but were excluded from that where the love feasts were held and the Lord's Supper was celebrated, 1 Corinthians 11:18, 20, 33. So it remained also when gradually in the second century the Lord's Supper was separated from the love feasts and took place in the same assembly as the ministry of the word in the morning. The first part was accessible to all, but the second part began only when unbelievers, catechumens, excommunicated, and so forth were removed. In this second part of the worship service, the sacraments were administered; and it was an old and widespread custom that those who were baptized after completing the catechumenate immediately thereafter received the Lord's Supper. When infant baptism came into use, this custom was also followed with children and moreover urged by the prevailing exegesis of John 6:53, according to which this verse applied to the Lord's Supper and thus this sacrament was just as necessary for salvation as baptism. In the West, however, this custom especially since the twelfth century wore away and was gradually declared unnecessary by various synods, cf. Council of Trent 21 c. 4. But in the Greek and other Eastern churches it remained and is still today administered to newly baptized children in the form of a piece of bread dipped in wine. Article on Children's Communion in Herzog. M. Vitringa. But the magical conception of the Lord's Supper had even worse abuses as a result. The original simplicity was lost under all kinds of solemn ceremonies. Not only by self-examination, but also by fasting, washing of hands, clothing, and so forth, the communicants had to prepare themselves for the Lord's Supper. The bread was first received with the bare hand, later in a linen cloth or a golden dish, and still later, since the eleventh century, with the mouth and in a kneeling posture at the altar from the priest. The consecrated bread was not only consumed by the communicants in the church, but also administered to the sick in their homes, given as a viaticum to the dying, and considered useful for warding off all kinds of calamities and obtaining all kinds of blessings and benefits. Not only to the living but also to the dead did the effect of the sacrament extend. From ancient times there existed the custom to bring offerings not only for oneself but also for deceased relatives on their death day and to pray for their souls. And when now the doctrine of purgatory was established by Gregory the Great, the Lord's Supper was conceived as an offering of the very body and blood of Christ, and the participation of the congregation became less and less, then it soon became fixed that the mass could work not only for present or absent living but also for the deceased in purgatory a reduction of penances and temporal punishments. M. Vitringa. Herzog. All these corruptions made a return to Holy Scripture necessary, according to which the Lord's Supper is a meal, impossible without seated guests, and destined exclusively for believers. To go purely and to let Scripture in this regard come fully to its right, the Reformed usually posed two questions: 1° who have right to the Lord's Supper and must approach it, and 2° who must be admitted by the church to the Lord's Supper or kept away from it. Heidelberg Catechism 81, 82. The first question deals with the duty of the communicants, the second with the duty of the church and its ministers. To the latter question the answer was given and could not according to Holy Scripture be otherwise than that the church had to keep away from the Lord's Supper all who present themselves with their confession and life as unbelieving and ungodly people. The Lord's Supper is a good of the church, given by Christ to his congregation and thus to be enjoyed only by householders of the faith. The unbaptized, unbelievers, heretics, schismatics, public sinners, excommunicated were thereby automatically excluded. But the number of those who had right to the Lord's Supper was limited even more. First, by the rejection of the mass and purgatory, the administration of the Lord's Supper for the deceased was also abolished. In Scripture, something like this does not occur with a single word. Indeed, Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 15:29 of those who let themselves be baptized for the dead. But even if (what however is by no means proven, cf. Cremer) this place must be understood so that there were Christians at that time who let themselves be baptized for the benefit of unbaptized deceased friends, then the apostle uses this custom no otherwise than as a proof for the resurrection and leaves it without approval or disapproval. The church has decidedly condemned the baptism for the dead, which was in use among some sects, at the Council of Carthage in 397 and therefore can derive no argument from it for the administration of the Lord's Supper for the benefit of the deceased. Second, many Reformed had objections to the Lord's Supper being administered outside the public assembly of believers in a private home to the sick and dying: Musculus, Bullinger, Beza, Daneau, Aretius, and so forth, the Reformed churches of France, Scotland, the Netherlands, and so forth. And indeed others, such as Calvin, Oecolampadius, Martyr, Zanchi, the churches of England, Poland, Hungary, and so forth sometimes allowed this. But even then they usually limited it so that a small assembly of believers had to be present and thereby all occasion for superstition was prevented or avoided. Voetius, Ecclesiastical Polity. M. Vitringa. Moor. Third, children are also excluded from the Lord's Supper. Trent condemned only the necessity, but not the permissibility of the Lord's Supper for children. And on that standpoint also Musculus placed himself among the Reformed in his Common Places. He adduced these grounds for it: that whoever possesses the signified thing also has right to the sign; that children, who according to baptism can receive the grace of regeneration, can also without consciousness be nourished in that spiritual life; that Christ is the savior of his whole congregation, also of the children, and feeds and gives drink to them all with his body and blood; that the admonition to self-examination in 1 Corinthians 11:26-29 is not intended by the apostle as a general requirement. But all these grounds lose their weight over against these considerations: 1° in the Old Testament there was a great difference between circumcision and Passover. Circumcision was prescribed for all children of the male sex, but the Passover was celebrated, not immediately at the institution, but later in Palestine at the temple in Jerusalem; very young children were thus automatically excluded from it. 2° In like manner there is a great distinction between baptism and Lord's Supper. Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration, in which man is passive; the Lord's Supper is the sacrament of growth in the fellowship of Christ, of the nourishment of the spiritual life and presupposes conscious, active participation in him who receives it. 3° Christ instituted the Lord's Supper in the midst of his disciples, said to them all: take, eat, drink, and presupposes that they receive the bread and the wine from his hand. And Paul says that the congregation at Corinth came together to eat and gives no other impression than that only conscious, adult persons participate in the Lord's Supper. 4° In 1 Corinthians 11:26-29 the apostle specifically sets the requirement that one examine oneself before the Lord's Supper, so that one may discern the body of the Lord and not eat and drink unworthily. This requirement is stated quite generally, directed to all participants in the Lord's Supper and therefore automatically excludes children. 5° Withholding the Lord's Supper from children deprives them of no single benefit of the covenant of grace. This would indeed be the case if baptism were withheld from them. For this can only be done by one who thinks that children stand outside the covenant of grace. But with the Lord's Supper it is otherwise. Whoever administers baptism to children but not the Lord's Supper acknowledges that they are in the covenant and partake of all its benefits. He withholds from them only a particular way in which the same benefits are signified and sealed, because this does not suit their age. The Lord's Supper gives no single benefit which was not already bestowed beforehand in the word and baptism through faith.
This distinction between baptism and the Lord's Supper soon made a preparation for the worthy receiving of the second sacrament needful. In the apostolic time, when as a rule only grown folk were baptized, there was no such preparation yet. Whoever heard and took the word of the gospel was straightway baptized and let in to the Lord's Supper. But when in the following hundred years the comings over to Christendom grew more in number but also less trustworthy, the catechumenate little by little came up, which first readied for baptism and later, after child baptism became widespread, for the Lord's Supper.
In the Roman Church this preparation little by little fully went over into the sacrament of confirmation, which grew out of the hand-laying first bound with baptism and linked with an anointing. The Reformation cast off this sacrament, since it had no ground in Scripture, and set in its stead the catechizing and the open confession, cf. Höfling, Das Sakr. der Taufe. Bachmann, Die Gesch. der Einführung der Confirmation. Caspari, Die evang. Confirmation vornehmlich in der luth. K. Art. in Herzog. Thereby the shift was made from baptism to the Lord's Supper and the church at the same time kept from spoiling. Calvin wished that, when a child was enough taught in the catechism, it should openly in the gathering make confession of its faith, by Bachmann. à Lasco wished that children, who had become fourteen years old, should make confession before the gathering and the following Sunday go to the Lord's Supper; but those who lived badly were warned and at last, if stubbornness lasted, at eighteen or twenty years of age cut off from the gathering.
The Dutch Church Orders likewise set forth a confession before the church council or in the midst of the gathering, and sometimes yet speak of a beforehand looking into before the church council. This teaching ran pure: the children of believers are baptized as believers, then taught in the truth, on enough looking into and after open confession let in to the Lord's Supper or on unchristian teaching or unruly walk after oft warning put out from the gathering. After this teaching our church life is yet to be shaped, though it every bit runs into hindrances of the doing. For pietism and rationalism are always bent to split what God has yoked together and with scorn of the sacrament to lay the weight on own turning or on church taking in or strengthening.
But the rule of the covenant is this, that the church upbringing her young members, who as children of the covenant are born and by baptism brought into her, to self-standing, own confession and on that ground let them in to the Lord's Supper. Over the heart she judges not and can not judge. While she thus on one side keeps from the Lord's Supper all who with confession or life set themselves as unbelieving and godless folk, she on the other side never leaves off the earnest preaching, that the Lord's Supper is only set for them, who themselves because of their sins mislike, yet trust that these are forgiven them for Christ's sake and also yearn ever more to strengthen their faith and better their life.
1. Like the beginning and being of things, so too is their end unknown to us. On the question: whither, knowledge gives an answer no more fulfilling than on that, whence all things are. And yet religion has urgent need to know something of the end of each man, of mankind and world. All folk have thereon some thought or other, and all faiths hold a kind of eschatology. True, there are still those who say that belief in the undyingness of the soul was at first wholly not inborn to all men, and even today, for instance, among the Vedda on Sri Lanka, among the Indian Selungs and others, is lacking, Büchner, Kraft und Stoff. Haeckel, Die Welträthsel, Bonn 1899. On the standpoint of unfolding, belief in God, in the self-standing being of the soul and in her undyingness could have made no inborn part of man's kind, but must have slowly and by chance arisen and grown through sundry happenings. Forebear worship, love for dead kin, life-joy and wish for life-lengthening, hope for better life-bonds on the other side of the grave, fear of punishment and hope for reward, and so on, were then the causes that little by little brought forth the undyingness-belief. But against this, the most and best workers in the history of faiths witness that belief in undyingness is found among all folk and is a part even of the lowest and roughest faiths. We meet it everywhere and on every step of growth, where no wise-doubts have undermined it or other causes have thrust it to the background, and everywhere it is also bound with faith, Tiele, Inl. tot de godsdienstwetenschap, second series Amst. 1899. Peschel, Volkerkunde. One can even say that this belief was at first something very inborn. Even as the writer of the Eden-tale in Genesis, says Tiele, t. a. p., all folk go out from the mind that man by kind is undying and that not undyingness is to be proven, but death must be made clear. Death seems something against-kind. There must have befallen something whereby something so unthinking came into the world. The tales of sundry folk, differing in stock and growth, utter that thought. There was a time when there was neither sickness nor death on earth. The "simple kind-man" can even yet not believe in death when he sees it before his eyes. It is a sleep, says he, a state of unmindfulness; the ghost has left the body but can yet come back. Therefore he waits yet some days to see if this will not befall. And if the ghost of the dead does not come back, they hold that he has only gone away to somewhere, wheresoever, to go into another body or to dwell with the over-earth ghosts. The shapes in which this life of the soul after death was set forth were very sundry and were often also bound and mingled with each other. Now one thought that the souls after death stayed living near the grave and for their being needed the ongoing care of the kin, or also in the under-world, in Hades, far away from gods and men, led a sad, shadow-like life. Then again one believed that the souls of the dead, even as they sometimes already before their dwelling in the man-body had undergone sundry shape-changes, so too after leaving it must yet a time dwell in other bodies of beasts and men to cleanse themselves, reach fullness, and go up into the Godhead or into an unmindful Nirvana. Or also it was taught that the souls straight after death came into the Godly doom, and if they had done the good, went over the fearful dead-bridge into the land of the blessed, where they lived in fellowship of the gods, or also, if they had done the evil, fell down into a stead of everlasting darkness and torment. Cf. the second part of C. W. Flügge, Gesch. des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, Auferstehung, Gericht und Vergeltung, Leipzig 1795. Spiess, Entwicklungsgesch. der Vorstellungen vom Zustande nach dem Tode auf Grund vergl. Religionsforschung 1877. Knabenhauer, Das Zeugniss des Menschengeschlechts über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, Freiburg 1878. Merschmann, Die Idee der Unsterblichkeit in ihrer gesch. Entw., Berlin 1870. Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos. 1896. Runze, art. Unsterblichkeit in Herzog. Id. Die Psychologie des Unsterblichkeitsglaubens und der Unsterblichkeitsleugnung, Berlin 1894.
The teaching of personal immortality passed from religion into philosophy. After Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles had already led the way, Plato especially sought in the Phaedo to support his religious faith in immortality with philosophical reasonings. His proofs come down to this: that the soul, which draws the knowledge of the ideas from memory, already existed before its dwelling in the body and so also will continue to exist after leaving that body; that it, by its thinking contemplation of the eternal ideas, is akin to the divine being and by its mastery of the body and its desires is something self-standing and simple, far exalted above the body; and especially, that it, as the beginning of life and one with life, cannot be thought of as not-living and perishable.
With this teaching about the immortality of the soul, he then links all kinds of notions about pre-existence, fall, union with the body, judgment, soul-migration, which for a chief part bear a mythical character and also by Plato himself surely not all meant in a scientific sense. Although other philosophers, such as Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, fought against the immortality of the soul or, like Aristotle, did not speak decidedly about it, the teaching of Plato had an amazingly great influence on theology and philosophy. The mythical elements of pre-existence, metempsychosis, etc., often found entry among sectarian directions. And theology, under Plato’s influence, gave much greater heed to the immortality of the soul than to Holy Scripture.
The teaching of the natural immortality of the soul became a mixed article, whose truth was argued even more from reason than from revelation, Tertullian, de an. 22. Origen, de princ. VI 36. Irenaeus, adv. haer. II 34 etc., among the Reformed, Heppe, Dogm. 166. Yet there always remained some difference. The awareness never wholly died out that Holy Scripture attaches to life and death, besides a physical, also always a religious-ethical meaning. Life in it is never only continuance, and death is never equal to destruction, but life includes fellowship with God and death is lack of his grace and favor.
Hence the church fathers often say that Christ came to give us immortality and it sometimes can seem as if they denied the natural immortality of the soul. And added to that was that one had to fight Plato’s teaching of pre-existence, that is, of the uncreatedness of the soul, and for that reason sometimes had trouble calling the soul naturally immortal, since God alone was immortal by himself and the soul could only be immortal by his will, Justin, Dial. 5. Theophilus, ad Autol. II 27.
This one must keep in mind in the inquiry whether there were also upholders among the church fathers of conditional immortality. For although a single one, such as Arnobius, taught a destruction of wicked souls and although Tatian assumed that the soul dies with the body at death, to rise again at the end of days, yet the faith was general that the soul by virtue of the nature given her by God was immortal, Münscher-v. Coelln, D. G. I 333 f. Harnack, D. G. I 449. Dr. Jonker, Theol. Studiën I 167v. Atzberger, Gesch. d. christl. Eschat. 118 f. 187 f. 222 f. 338 f. 577 f.
Also in philosophy, Plato’s teaching of immortality kept an important place. Descartes viewed spirit and matter, soul and body, as two separate substances, each with its own attribute, namely thinking and extension, each able to exist for itself and therefore could be united only mechanically. Spinoza took these same two attributes but saw them as forms of appearance of the one, eternal, infinite substance, as two sides of the same thing, which cannot fall apart but are always together as subject and object, as image and counterpart, as idea and thing. For immortality there was no place in his system, and he also had no need of it, for although we did not know that our mind is eternal, we would still hold piety and religion and absolutely all that we showed in the fourth part refers to courage and generosity as primary, Eth. V 41.
The philosophy of the eighteenth century, however, was not inclined to Spinoza; it bore a deistic character, contented itself with the trilogy of God, virtue, and immortality, and deemed of these three the last still the greatest. Following Leibniz, Wolff, Mendelssohn, and others, its truth was argued with all kinds of metaphysical, theological, cosmic, moral, and historical proofs and urged with sentimental considerations about a blessed recognition and reunion beyond the grave, literature in Bretschneider, Syst. Entw. 824. The saying of the poet in Ps. 73:25 was, according to the word of Strauss, turned into this other: if I only have my I in safety, I ask nothing after God and world.
To that certainty, however, Kant made an end by showing the insufficiency of all proofs brought forward for the immortality of the soul, and deemed it only acceptable as a postulate of practical reason. Schleiermacher set against the egoistic wishes of rationalism his word: whoever has not learned to be more than himself loses little if he loses himself, and acknowledged no other and higher immortality than to become one with the Infinite in the midst of finitude and to be eternal in every moment, Reden über die Religion II, cf. Chr. Gl. § 158, 1.
And the idealistic philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel left no place at all for the immortality of the soul, although it hesitated to speak out its intimate thought openly on this point. The book of Fr. Richter, Die Lehre Von Den Letzten Dingen 1833, however, brought the consequence of Hegel’s system to light and paved, in spite of many contradictions, the way to materialism, which was already loudly preached by Feuerbach and later supported by Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, Haeckel, and others with so-called natural-scientific arguments.
On philosophy these reasonings have made such an impression that it wholly gives up the immortality of the soul, Strauss, Chr. Gl. II 738. Id. Der alte und der neue Glaube² 123 f. Schopenhauer, Die Welt u. s. w. I 330. Hartmann, Religionsphilos. II 232, or at most argues its possibility and speaks only of a hope of immortality, Hoekstra, De hoop der onsterfelijkheid 1867. Rauwenhoff, Wijsbeg. v. d. godsd. 811. Also theologians often attach to the proofs for the immortality of the soul only slight or no value at all, Vilmar, Dogm. II 295. Runze in Herzog² 16, 211 f. Frank, Chr. Wahrheit II 437 f.
But over against them still stand many men of name who deem all or some or at least a single one of the proofs strong enough to build thereon a firm faith in the immortality of the soul, Weisse, Philos. Dogm. § 952-972. Fichte, Die Idee der Persönl. u. d. indiv. Fortdauer 1834. Id. Die Seelenfortdauer u. die Weltstellung des Menschen 1867. Göschel, Von den Beweisen für die Unsterbl. der menschl. Seele 1835. Art. Unsterblichkeit in Herzog (1 and 2). Kahnis, Dogm. II 485 f. Dorner, Gl. II 916 f. Luthardt, Komp. d. Dogm. § 75. W. Schmidt, Christl. Dogm. 492 f. Doedes, Leer v. God 248. Oosterzee, Dogm. § 68 etc.
2. The proofs for the undyingness of the soul, drawn from history and wit, give no full certainty but are yet not empty of weight. In the first stead, it is already of meaning that the belief in undyingness is found among all folks, at every step of unfolding. The consensus gentium is here as strong as in the belief in God, Cicero, Tusculanae I 3. The sundry thoughts from which one has led off the belief in undyingness, such as for byspel from the dread of death and the thirst for life, the undergoings of dream and rapture, the riddle of death and the unmightliness to think up an utter wiping out of the thinking being of man, the dread of strafing and the hope on rewarding, cf. Herzog² 16, can well uphold and strengthen the belief in undyingness after the deed, but they give no fulfilling clearing of its uprising. Even where such thoughts are wanting or deemed worthless, yet the belief in undyingness comes forth. The wish to last on is oft in many men weaker than that with death an end came to being. The hope on rewarding clears not the belief in them who have died off all self-seeking and in the fellowship with God have found the highest bliss. The thought of payback is outlandish to the thinkings of lasting on as a shadowy shade-life. The riddle of death leads not, but in high outtakings, to the undyingness of beasts and growths. And the undergoings of dream and rapture quench not out the knowing of the beingly sundering that lives between these showings and the dying. Rather have we in this belief in the undyingness of the soul, even as in that in the being of God, to do with a fulltrust that is not gotten from afterthinking and reasoning but goes before all thinking back and self-mightly upsprings from mankindly kind. It is self-speaking and kindly and is met everywhere where no wit-lorely twibblings have undermined it. With the wit-knowing of the own, self-standing, onefold being wakes also that of the personly lasting. The self-wit-knowing, not the offdrawn self-wit-knowing whereof mind-lore handles, but the self-wit-knowing of man as a personly, self-standing, witful, sithely, godservingly being shuts in everywhere and always the belief in undyingness, that therefore also is no bare wish or yearning, no end-leading from fore-settings, but a mighty, unoutrootbar, against all reasoning and withstriving self-upholding witnessing of mankindly kind itself. And the so-named proofs for undyingness are nothing other than sundry strivings which this belief wields in the way of reasoning to give itself thinking somewhat reckoning of itself, without that it ever in worklyhood hangs therefrom or makes itself hanging. Therein lies their strength and at the same time their weakness; witnessings are they of, no grounds for the belief; the knowing stays far behind the believing back.
The ontological proof, which concludes from the idea of immortality to its truth, no more bridges the chasm that sunders thought from being than does the ontological proof for the existence of God. It only sets forth the awareness that belief in immortality in man is no whim or chance, but is given with his nature and is needful for him in a moral sense. Man draws the idea of immortality not from the world around him, for this preaches to him nothing but passing away and death; but it is thrust upon him by his own nature. Even as God does not leave himself without witness but speaks to us from all the works of his hands, so from man's own being there presses upon him the conviction that he does not perish like the beasts of the field. And this is what the ontological proof seeks to show; it does not cross the border from thought to being, but it gives utterance to the universality, the needfulness, and the apriority of the belief in immortality.
A step further goes the metaphysical proof, which concludes from the nature of the soul to its immortality. It can do this, however, and does it in sundry ways. One may point out that the soul as the beginning of life and one with life, is untouchable by death; or that it, as shown by the oneness of self-awareness, forms an undivided, simple oneness, lacks all putting together and therefore is not open to breaking apart; or that it, amid all changes of stuff and all shifts of the body, again as shown by self-awareness, ever stays the same with itself and thus enjoys a being and life sundered from the body, standing on its own; and along these sundry paths one may then seek to come to the end that the soul is deathless. But against this proof very weighty barbs have been brought in. Though the soul be an active, living beginning, yet it is never one with life itself. God alone is life itself; he alone is deathless, 1 Tim. 6:16. If the soul abides onward, that can only happen through God's everywhere-present and almighty might. The soul is a made thing, and thus bounded, endful, kin-bound, never fully free from all passiveness and putting together, from all change and shift. Indeed, we see it before our eyes, that it changes, grows or shrinks in knowledge and strength, hangs on the body and undergoes all kinds of inflows. And the inward oneness and sameness of the I proves not at all the outward oneness and simpleness of the soul or would, if it proved this, also prove the deathlessness of plants or at least of beasts, as this was then also steadily taken up by Leibniz, Bonnet, Bilderdijk, and others. But over against these misgivings stands the unanswerable deed, that life from tool-like stuff-shifting is not to be made clear and points back to an own beginning. Omne vivum ex vivo is still today the last word of knowledge. And what holds for life in the broad, holds in yet stronger measure for aware life; the simplest feeling is already sundered by an unbridgeable chasm from every nerve-shaking. We step therewith into a wholly new, higher world, which in essence differs from that of the sense-like, touchable, weighable and measurable things. That life and so also aware life is bound to the sense-world and with it most nearly knit, was already long known and is truly no finding of newer knowledge to name. But that it has its spring in the sense-world, has been often claimed but thus far by no one proven. The metaphysical proof keeps its worth, insofar as it concludes from the own-kind soul-like showings to a beginning sundered from stuff, standing on its own, ghostly. Yet there still abides the barb, that in the same way with plants or at least with beasts may be reasoned and ended, and that their deathlessness yet is not takeable.
Therefore to the metaphysical must next be added the anthropological proof, which concludes from the own-kind of the soul-life of man to a ghostly being sundered from beasts and plants. The soul of the beast, though also simple and standing on its own over against the shifting of stuff, is bent on the sense-like; it is bounded within the endful; it lives in the now; it is so bound to the body, that outside it it cannot be. But man has not only feeling and beholding, but also understanding and reason; through thinking he goes above the sense-like, stuff-like, endful world; he lifts himself to the ideal, the logical, to the true, good, and fair, which with the eyes cannot be seen and with the hands cannot be touched; he seeks a lasting, everlasting bliss, a highest good, which this world cannot give him, and is through all this a dweller and in-liver of another, higher realm than that of kind. The reasonable, moral, godly awareness of man points to a soul-being that goes out above the seeable world; what by its nature seeks the everlasting, must be meant for everlastingness. Thereto comes yet the moral and the retribution proof , which shows the disharmony that in this life is between ethos and physis, and therefrom concludes to another life, wherein both are made one. Let no one bring in against this, that this proof rests on self-love and that worth bears its wage and sin its scourge in itself, Spinoza, Eth. V 41. 42. Strauss, Gl. II 706 f. For this the godly of all ages well knew, that God must be served for himself and not for any wage, cf. also Calvin, Inst. III 2, 26. 16, 2. But nonetheless they held fast that they, if they were hoping on Christ only in this life, would be the most wretched of all men, 1 Cor. 15:17, 19, 30, 32. For here is utterly not the fulfilling of a self-seeking longing in play, but herewith is no less at stake than the lordship and the win of right. The ask that lies at the ground of the moral proof is this: shall at the end the good or the ill, God or Satan, Christ or Antichrist win? The tale gives thereon no full answer. From the standpoint of the here-side there is no fulfilling clearing of the world likely; then there is all too much ground for gloom-ridden despair. And therefore the right-feeling, which the righteous God himself has planted deep in man's heart, asks that there come right-mending at the end of days, that there be oneness between worth and bliss, between sin and scourge, that truth everlastingly win from the lie and light from darkness. Though it has been rightly said, that nothingness was always the skyline of bad awarenesses, even they who have nothing good to hope from a life after this life, are by their right-sense swayed of the needfulness of this right-mending. If right does not triumph at the end, then there is no right. And if God at last does not show to be the overcomer of Satan, the life is not worth the living. Not a self-seeking wish, but a deep right-feeling, the thirst for oneness, longing for the full glorying of God, in whom holiness and bliss are one, comes to utterance in the moral proof. Even art foretells of such a forthcoming, as it sets the ideal in seeable shape before us. All these proofs, and yet more those which are drawn from man's fitness for full-making, from his moral personhood, from the many un-dwelt stars, from the spirit-like showings etc., are no proofs in that sense that they bring all gainsaying to stillness, but they are yet witnessings and pointings, that the belief in immortality wholly kindly and of itself comes up from man's own nature. Who denies and fights it, does harm to his own nature. The thought of immortality is already the first act of immortality , Von Baer in Splittgerber, Death, Ongoing Life and Resurrection ³ 1879 p. 93.
3. However much worth these indications may have, which nature and history offer us for the belief in the immortality of the soul, Scripture takes a standpoint with respect to this teaching that at first acquaintance can do nothing but bewilder. The immortality of the soul seems to be of the greatest meaning for religion and life; and Scripture never makes mention of it in so many words; it never proclaims it as a godly revelation and nowhere puts it in the forefront; and still much less does it ever make any attempt to prove its truth or to uphold it against its gainsayers. It is therefore understandable that formerly and later many have claimed that the teaching of the immortality of the soul does not appear at all in the Old Testament, or at least in the oldest books thereof, and was first brought in from outside among Israel, cf. Oehler, Unsterblichkeit in Herzog. Himpel, Die Unsterblichkeitslehre der A. T. Atzberger, Die christl. Eschatologie. But little by little men have turned back from this, and nowadays it is generally acknowledged that Israel, like all peoples, well and truly believed in a continuance after death. Indeed, Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel and Ueber die altt. Vorstellungen vom Zustande nach dem Tode, further Oort, De doodenvereering bij de Israelieten, Theol. Tijdschr. and especially Fr. Schwally, Das Leben nach dem Tode nach den Vorstellungen des alten Israel have tried to prove that in old times among Israel, as among other peoples, the dead were honored, and thus undoubtedly thought to exist. The proofs for this they drew from the ritual customary at a death, such as the tearing of clothes and wearing of mourning garb, the covering of face and head, the laying aside of ornaments, special hairdressing and self-marring, the throwing of dust and ashes, the not washing and anointing, the fasting and holding of meals, the raising of laments and the bringing of offerings, all which customs would be explainable only from earlier honoring of the dead. But Schwally himself must acknowledge that in the time when Israel enters into history, the animistic nature religion in principle is already overcome. And against his derivation of the mourning customs from an original animism, Joh. Frey, Tod, Seelenglaube und Seelenkult im alten Israel, has brought forward such earnest objections that the hypothesis of an original cult of the dead among Israel can first be made acceptable by other and new proofs. Yet it is clear that in Israel there was a great difference between the folk religion, which contained all kinds of superstitious and idolatrous parts, and the service of YHWH, which was put forward by Moses and his followers. Yahwism has on the one hand withstood that folk religion, forbidden and rooted it out, but on the other hand has also let various religious notions and customs, which in themselves were not wrong, quietly exist or taken them over and sanctioned, cf. Wildeboer, Jahvedienst en volksreligie in Israel. In his revelation to Israel, God has joined himself to the historical circumstances under which it lived; grace did not undo nature but has renewed and hallowed it. So it has also gone with the folk belief in continuance after death. Already the custom of burying and the great meaning attached thereto is a proof of that belief. Burning of bodies was not native in Israel; it took place only after the death penalty was carried out, Gen. 38:24, Lev. 20:14, 21:9, Jos. 7:15, 25; from 1 Sam. 31:12 and Am. 6:10 nothing can be drawn, because the text may be corrupted or else reports only of standalone cases; and 2 Chr. 16:14, 21:19, Jer. 34:5 deal only with the burning of sweet-smelling spices at the burial. Burial, however, was held in high worth and is therefore time and again separately mentioned in the Old Testament; to remain unburied was a great shame, 1 Sam. 17:44, 46, 1 Kings 14:11, 13, 16:4, 2 Kings 9:10, Ps. 79:3, Eccl. 6:3, Isa. 14:19, 20, Jer. 7:33, 8:1, 9:22, 16:6, 25:33, Ezek. 29:5. A dead one belongs no more in the land of the living; his unburied body wakens loathing; the shed blood cries for vengeance, Gen. 4:10, 37:26, Job 16:18, Isa. 26:21, Ezek. 24:7, because the blood is the seat of the soul, Lev. 17:11; and therefore the dead must be covered, hidden, withdrawn from the eye. Through death all souls come into the realm of the dead, into Sheol, a word of unsure derivation and according to some comes from asking, demanding, or also claiming, bringing to decision, according to others from being slack, hanging downward, sinking, Delitzsch, Neuer Comm. über die Genesis. Atzberger, Christl. Eschat. This Sheol lies in the depth of the earth, so that one goes down into it, Num. 16:30, Ps. 30:4, 10, 55:16, Isa. 38:18, belongs to the lowest places of the earth, Ps. 63:10, Ezek. 26:20, 31:14, 32:18, lies yet below the waters and the foundations of the mountains, Deut. 32:22, Job 26:5, Isa. 14:15, and is therefore many times strengthened by the attribute lowest, Deut. 32:22, Ps. 86:13, 88:7. Therefore Sheol also stands in close bond with the grave or the pit; both are not the same, for the dead who are not buried are yet in Sheol, Gen. 37:33, 35, Num. 16:32; but just as body and soul form the one man and even after death are yet thought in some mutual relation, so grave and Sheol are not to be thought loose from each other. Both belong to the lowest places of the earth, are set forth as the dwelling of the dead, and switch with each other time and again; Sheol is the one great grave that holds all graves of the dead; the realm of the dead, the underworld, and therefore wrongly often rendered by hell in our State Translation. For Sheol is the place where all dead without exception come together, 1 Kings 2:2, Job 3:13ff., 30:23, Ps. 89:49, Isa. 14:9ff., Ezek. 32:18, Hab. 2:5, and from which return is possible only by a wonder, 1 Kings 17:22, 2 Kings 4:34, 13:21; the realm of the dead is as it were a city provided with bolted gates, Ps. 9:14, 107:18, Job 17:16 (to the bolts of the underworld my hope goes down), 38:17, Isa. 38:10, Matt. 16:18, and by its might, Ps. 49:16, 89:49, Hos. 13:14, holds all men as in a dungeon, Isa. 24:22. Sheol is an everlasting house, Eccl. 12:5; the foes of Israel who are cast down into it cannot rise again, Isa. 26:14; who goes down into the grave comes not up again, Job 7:9, 10, 14:7-12, 16:22. Straightway therefore this realm of the dead stands over against the land of the living, Job 28:13, Prov. 15:24, Ezek. 26:20, 32:23ff. Indeed the dead are thought as existing and living; they are often so set forth and described as they showed themselves here on earth, and are therefore also known by each other, and at the meeting stirred, 1 Sam. 28:14, Isa. 14:9ff., Ezek. 32:18ff. There is also talk of innermost, deep inward-lying chambers in Sheol, Prov. 7:27, Ezek. 32:23, and there is insofar difference among the dead as each is gathered to his fathers, Gen. 15:15, Judg. 2:10, or to his people, Gen. 25:8, 17, 35:29, 49:29, and the uncircumcised are laid together, Ezek. 32:19. But otherwise Sheol is always described from its negative side, in contrast with the earth as the land of the living. It is the realm of darkness and the shadow of death, Job 10:21, 22, Ps. 88:13, 143:3, the place of destruction, yes destruction itself, Job 26:6, 28:22, 31:12, Ps. 88:12, Prov. 27:20, without orders, that is, without fixed outlines and clear distinctions, Job 10:22, a land of rest, of stillness, of forgetfulness, Job 3:13, 17, 18, Ps. 115:17, where God and men are no more to be seen, Isa. 38:11, God no more praised and thanked, Ps. 6:6, 115:17, his virtues no more proclaimed, Ps. 88:6, 12, 13, Isa. 38:18, 19, and his wonders no more beheld, Ps. 88:11, 13, where the dead know nothing at all, do no more work, make no more reckoning, possess no more wisdom and knowledge and have no part at all anymore in all that happens under the sun, Eccl. 9:5, 6, 10. They are shades, from the adjective slack, Job 26:5, Prov. 2:18, 9:18, 21:16, Ps. 88:11, Isa. 14:9, weakened, Isa. 14:10, without strength, Ps. 88:5.
This whole portrayal of Sheol is shaped from the standpoint of this earthly being, and holds only in contrast with the wealth of life which man enjoys here on earth. Then dying is indeed a breaking of all earthly bonds, a being dead to the rich life on earth, a resting, a sleeping, a being still, a not-being in relation to the things on this side of the grave. The state in Sheol is no wiping out of being, but yet a dreadful lessening of life, a robbing of all that in this life makes up the joy of living. For a view that lets only the body die and finds comfort in the undyingness of the soul, there is no room in the Old Testament. The whole man dies, when at death the spirit, Ps. 146:4, Eccl. 12:7, or the soul, Gen. 35:18, 2 Sam. 1:9, 1 Kings 17:21, Jon. 4:3, goes out from the man. Not only his body but also his soul is in the state of death and belongs to the underworld; therefore there can also be talk of a dying of the soul, Gen. 37:21, Num. 23:10, Deut. 22:20, Judg. 16:30, Job 36:14, Ps. 78:50, and of defiling by touching the soul of a dead one, that is, of a body, Lev. 19:28, 21:11, 22:4, Num. 5:2, 6:6, 9:6, 7, 10, Deut. 14:1, Hag. 2:13. As the whole man was meant for life in the way of obedience, so by his trespass he falls wholly, both soul and body, to death, Gen. 2:17. This thought had to be deeply stamped in the awareness of mankind; and it was also felt in old times by all folks, that death is a punishment, that it is something unnatural, at odds with the being and calling of man. The revealing which God gave to Israel joins itself to that; it keeps it and takes it over, as it takes over so many uses and rites (offering, priesthood, cutting around, and so on); only it cleanses it from the unclean bits that among the folks little by little bound themselves with it, such as self-marring, Lev. 19:28, 21:5, Deut. 14:1, and asking the dead, Lev. 19:31, 20:6, 27, Deut. 18:10, 11. But the revealing does yet something else and more. It not only upholds and strengthens the contrast that is between life and death, but it brings into this life itself a yet sharper contrast. For this life is not the true life, because it is a sinful, unclean, by suffering tormented and for death marked life. It first becomes life in true sense and first gets a real life-content through the service of the Lord and in fellowship with God. Wholly in keeping with the then dealing out of the bond of grace and with the choosing of Israel to folk of God, the Old Testament thinks the link between godliness and life so, that the former in a long life on earth receives its fruit and its reward, Ex. 20:12, Deut. 5:16, 29, 6:2, 11:9, 22:7, 30:16, 32:47, and so on. In the widely known, natural contrast of life and death weaves itself another, moral, ghostly contrast, that namely between a life in the service of sin and a life in the fear of the Lord. To evil is death bound, to good is life linked. Deut. 30:15. They who with might have wished to find the wise-teaching lore of the undyingness of the soul in the Old Testament, have not understood the revealing of God to Israel and laid in Western, reason-based thoughts into the belief of the Eastern folk. Much more truly says Pfleiderer, Religionsphilos. 626: what men often have held for a weakness of the prophetic Lord-belief of Israel (namely that the beyond takes so small a place in it), is in truth its outstanding strength; the living God, who in historical deeds shows himself, has nothing in common with the shades of Sheol. The God of Israel is not a God of the dead but of the living. Therefore the waiting of the godly Israel turned itself almost wholly to the earthly hereafter of the folk, to the making real of the God-kingdom. The asking after the hereafter of the single persons in Sheol stepped thereby wholly into the background. God, folk, and land were unbreakable with each other bound, and the single ones were taken up in that bond and were reckoned thereafter. First as Israel after the out-driving becomes a belief-gathering and the belief makes itself single, then the asking after each one's hereafter lot pushes itself to the fore; the ghostly contrast, which the revealing had woven into the natural, worked through; the marking off of righteous and godless took the place more and more of that of Israel and the folks, and set itself forth also on the other side of the grave. The givings therefor were besides also already in the revealing of earlier time there. The man who serves God stays living, Gen. 2:17; to the keeping of his biddings is life bound, Lev. 18:5, Deut. 30:20; his word is life, Deut. 8:3, 32:47. In the Sayings is under life well often length of days understood, 2:18, 3:16, 10:30; but noteworthy is yet, that they link death and Sheol mostly only with the godless, 2:18, 5:5, 7:27, 9:18, and against that grant life almost wholly to the righteous. Wisdom, righteousness, the fear of the Lord is the way to life, 8:35, 36, 11:19, 12:28, 13:14, 14:27, 19:23; the godless is overthrown when ill-luck hits him, but the righteous keeps also in his death yet trust and comfort, 14:32. Blessed is he who has the Lord to his God, Deut. 33:29, Ps. 1:1, 2:12, 32:1, 2, 33:12, 34:9, and so on, also in the heaviest woes, Ps. 73:25-28, Hab. 3:17-19; over against that the godless come to naught and take an end, even if they timely enjoy so much thriving, Ps. 73:18-20. From this standpoint the godly wait not only freeing from press and woe in time, but they push with the eye of belief also many times through to the other side of the grave and wait a blessed life in fellowship with God. The places that for this are commonly brought, Gen. 49:18, Job 14:13-15, 16:16-21, 19:25-27, Ps. 16:9-11, 17:15, 49:16, 73:23-26, 139:18 are of unsure outlaying, and hit according to many only on timely saving from death. But even if this also be the case, the whole Old Testament teaches that God is Maker of heaven and earth, that his might knows no bounds and that He also owns full lordship over life and death. It is God the Lord who has given life to man, Gen. 1:26, 2:7, and yet every man, like all that is, makes and upholds, Job 32:8, 33:4, 34:14, Ps. 104:29, Eccl. 12:7. He binds freely to his law the life and sets on its overstepping the death, Gen. 2:17, Lev. 18:5, Deut. 30:20, 32:47. He dwells in heaven but is also with his Spirit in Sheol there, Ps. 139:7, 8. Sheol and the pit lie naked and open before the Lord spread out, even as the hearts of men's children, Job 26:6, 38:17, Prov. 15:11. The Lord kills, keeps in life and makes alive, makes go down into Sheol and therefrom come up again, Deut. 32:39, 1 Sam. 2:6, 2 Kings 5:7. He has outways for death, can free when death already threatens, Ps. 68:21, Isa. 38:5, Jer. 15:20, Dan. 3:26, and so on, can take Enoch and Elijah without death to himself, Gen. 5:24, 2 Kings 2:11, and make the dead turn back into life, 1 Kings 17:22, 2 Kings 4:34, 13:21. He can make death naught and through waking of the dead over its might fully win, Job 14:13-15, 19:25-27, Hos. 6:2, 13:14, Isa. 25:8, 26:19, Ezek. 37:11, 12, Dan. 12:2. Cf. on the undyingness in the Old Testament, besides Oort, Schwally, Frey, Stade also yet Oehler, Theol. des A. T. and art. Unsterbl. in Herzog. Schultz, Alttest. Theol. Schmend, Altt. Rel. Atzberger, Die christl. Eschat. Bertholet, Die israel. Vorstellungen vom Zustande nach dem Tode, Freiburg 1899. Matthes, Rouw en doodenvereering bij de Israel. Theol. Tijdschrift 1900.
4. This teaching of the Old Testament did not wholly perish in the later Jewish writings, but it was yet changed and broadened by sundry outlandish parts. In the main, the writings of this kind agree in that they take religion more as a lone matter, under the sway of the thought of reward already straightway at death let a forehand sundering come between the righteous and the godless, and give a more wrought-out telling of the sundry steads where these abide. Yet they are clearly to be split into two bands, one Palestinian and one Alexandrian. The first-named, to which belong chiefly the apocryphal writings of the Maccabees, Baruch, 4 Ezra, Enoch, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and so forth, ascribe to the between-state only a forehand kind. Indeed, they also take up outlandish bits and teach a certain sundering between the righteous and the godless straightway at death. The Apocalypse of Enoch sets Sheol in the West, tells of it as cut through by streams and ringed about, and marks out four shares in it, two for the good and two for the evil, 17:5, 6, 22:2v.; besides, it takes up a paradise that lies high above and at the ends of the earth and straightway at their dying became the dwelling-stead of Enoch and Elijah, 12:1, 87:3, 89:52, and shall also become so for all who walk in their ways, 71:16, 17. But the weight yet lies with all the writers of this band in the worldwide last things, in the coming of the Messiah and the setting up of God's kingdom at the end of days. Until then the souls of the departed are kept in Hades, be it also in sundry shares and in forehand sundered lot, stored as in storehouses, promptuaria animarum, Apocalypse of Baruch 21:23, 4 Ezra 4:35, 5:37; resting and sleeping they await the last judgment, 4 Ezra 7:32-35, Apocalypse of Baruch 21:24, 23:4, 30:2. But the writings of the second band, such as the Proverbs of Jesus Sirach, the Book of Wisdom, Philo, Flavius Josephus, and so forth, lay stress just on the lone last things and thereby let the coming of the Messiah, the uprising, the end-judgment, and God's kingdom on earth wholly fade into shadow or speak not a word of them. Chief teaching is the undyingness of the soul, which according to Philo was fore-being, for her fall was for a time shut up in the dungeon of the body and as befits her deeds after death shifts into other bodies, or in any case straightway after dying receives the endmost choosing of her lot, Sirach 1:12, 7:17, 18:24, 41:12, Wisdom 1:8, 9, 3:1-10, and goes to the holy heaven or to the dark Hades, Josephus, Jewish War III 8, 5. In the time of Christ therefore sundry thoughts of the last things crossed among the folk of Israel. The Pharisees believed in an after-living and a forehand reward after death, but held fast thereby the awaiting of the Messiah, of the uprising of the dead, if not of all men yet of the righteous, and the setting up of God's kingdom on earth. The Sadducees denied the uprising, Matthew 22:23, Mark 12:18, Luke 20:27, Acts 23:8, and according to Josephus, Jewish War II 8, 14, Antiquities XVIII 1, 4, also the reward after death and the undyingness. The Essenes took, according to Josephus, Jewish War II 8, 11, that the body is dying but the soul undying. The souls dwelt at first in the finest ether, but were overtaken by fleshly lust and set in bodies, from which they are then again freed by death. The good souls receive a blessed life on the other side of the ocean in a stead that is plagued by no rain, snow, or heat, but the bad must in a dark, cold place suffer unending pains.
Following in the footsteps of the law and the prophets, the New Testament devotes much more attention to general than to particular eschatology. Yet it is incorrect, both to assert with Episcopius, Limborch, Oertel, Schleiermacher, Hofmann, that Scripture says almost nothing about the intermediate state or at least contains no teaching valid for us, and to maintain with Kliefoth that the New Testament probably says everything that can be said about it. For there are statements that shed as much light on the intermediate state as is needful for us in and for this life. Even more strongly than the Old Testament, the New Testament brings out that death is a consequence and punishment of sin, Romans 5:12, 6:23, 8:10, 1 Corinthians 15:21; and this death extends to all men, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Hebrews 9:27; only a few, like Enoch, are taken away so that they should not see death, Hebrews 11:5; and also those who live to see the parousia of Christ are changed in a moment without the intervention of death, 1 Corinthians 15:51, 1 Thessalonians 4:14-17, cf. John 21:22, 23, so that Christ will judge not only the dead but also the living, Acts 10:42, 2 Timothy 4:1, 1 Peter 4:5. But this death is not the end of man; the soul cannot be killed, Matthew 10:28, the body will one day be raised again, John 5:28, 29, Acts 23:6, Revelation 20:12, 13 and believers even partake of an eternal life that cannot die, John 3:36, 11:25. All the dead are also according to the New Testament in Hades until the resurrection, which is the realm of the dead. In Matthew 11:23 the descent to Hades indicates that the proud Capernaum will be brought down to the depths. In Matthew 16:18 Jesus promises his church that the gates of Hades will have no power over her, that death will not triumph over her. According to Luke 16:23 the poor Lazarus is carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom and the rich man comes immediately through death and burial into Hades; whereby it is not proven that Hades is already the same as the place of torment, since this is first indicated by the further addition: being in torments. Jesus also, as long as he was in the state of death, was in Hades, even though he was not held by it, Acts 2:27, 31; for he descended into the lower parts of the earth, Ephesians 4:9. And so all the dead are under the earth, Philippians 2:10; not only the ungodly but also believers are after death in Hades, they are dead in Christ, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, cf. 1 Corinthians 15:18, 23; at the resurrection the sea, death and Hades give up all the dead that were in them, that they may be judged according to their works, Revelation 20:13; Hades follows with and after death, so that death always brings about a transfer into Hades, Revelation 6:8. This view, that believers also according to Scripture are in Hades from death until the resurrection, is strengthened by the expression resurrection from the dead, Matthew 17:9, Mark 6:14, Luke 16:30, John 20:9 etc., from the dead, Ephesians 5:14, that is, not from death, but from the dead, from the realm of the departed. This common being in the state of death does not exclude, however, that the lot of believers and unbelievers there is already very different. The Old Testament already expressed this thought, but much more clearly it meets us in the New Testament. According to the parable in Luke 16 the poor Lazarus is carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom, whereby it is indicated that Lazarus in heaven, where indeed the angels dwell, enjoys blessedness in the nearness of and in fellowship with Abraham, cf. Matthew 8:11. To one of his fellow crucified Jesus promises that today he will be with him in paradise, Luke 23:43. The word paradise is of Persian origin and denotes in general a garden, a pleasure ground, Nehemiah 2:8, Ecclesiastes 2:5, Song of Solomon 4:13; the Septuagint used it as translation of the garden in Genesis 2:8-15; the Jews denoted by it the place where God grants fellowship to the righteous after their death, Weber. Undoubtedly according to the New Testament also paradise, like Abraham's bosom, is to be thought of in heaven; shortly after Jesus had promised the thief that today he would be with him in paradise, he commended his spirit into the hands of his Father, Luke 23:46; in 2 Corinthians 12:2, 4 paradise alternates with the third heaven; in Revelation 2:7, 22:2 it denotes the place where in the future God will dwell among his people. In agreement with this the Gospel of John teaches that believers, who already here on earth have the beginning of eternal life and have escaped the judgment of God, 3:15-21, 5:24, partake of a fellowship with Christ which is broken neither by his departure, 12:32, 14:23, nor by death, 11:25, 26, and is one day completed in an eternal being together, 6:39, 14:3, 19, 16:16, 17:24. Dying, Stephen prays that the Lord Jesus receive his spirit with him in heaven, Acts 7:59. Paul knows that the believer partakes of a life which is exalted above death, Romans 8:10, and that nothing, not even death, can separate him from the love of God in Christ, 8:38, 14:8, 1 Thessalonians 5:10; although he must remain in the flesh for a time for the sake of the churches, he yet desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:8. According to Revelation 6:9, 7:9, the souls of the martyrs are with Christ under the altar of burnt offering standing before the throne of God in the temple of heaven, cf. 2:7, 10, 17, 26, 3:4, 5, 12, 21, 8:3, 9:13, 14:13, 15:2, 16:7, and also Hebrews 11:10, 16, 12:23. And just as believers immediately after death enjoy with Christ in heaven a preliminary blessedness, so unbelievers, as soon as they have died, come into a place of torment. The rich man was in torment when he lifted up his eyes in Hades, Luke 16:23. Unbelievers who reject Christ remain under the wrath of God and are already judged on earth, John 3:18, 36, and immediately after death have with all men a judgment to await, Hebrews 9:27. But yet this place of torment is not yet identical with Gehenna or the lake of fire, for Gehenna is the place of the unquenchable and eternal fire prepared for the devils, Mark 9:43, 47, 48, Matthew 18:8, 25:41, 46, and the lake of fire is not the present but indeed the future place of punishment of the beast and the false prophet, Revelation 19:20, of Satan, 20:10 and of all the ungodly, 21:8, cf. 2 Peter 2:17, Jude 13. Rather they are all now kept in a prison, 1 Peter 3:19, or in the abyss, Luke 8:31, cf. Matthew 8:29, Romans 10:7, Revelation 9:1, 2, 11, 11:7, 17:8, 20:1, 3 for the last judgment and the lake of fire, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6, 13. This distinction in the intermediate state of the good and the evil does not conflict with the fact that they all together are in Hades, for all the dead are as such under the earth, belong before the resurrection still to the realm of the dead, and are first through that resurrection completely, in soul and body both, freed from the dominion of death, 1 Corinthians 15:52-55, Revelation 20:14. Cf. Cremer s.v. Hades, abyss, Gehenna etc. and further on the New Testament eschatology in general, besides the well-known works of Weiss, Holtzmann and others on New Testament theology, Briet, The Eschatology or Doctrine of Future Things According to the Scriptures of the New Covenant, 2 volumes, Tiel 1857/58. Haupt, The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, Berlin 1895. Schwartzkopff, The Prophecies of Jesus Christ Concerning His Death, His Resurrection and Return and Their Fulfillment, Göttingen 1895. Kabisch, The Eschatology of Paul in Its Connection with the Overall Concept of Paulinism, Göttingen 1893. Teichmann, The Pauline Presuppositions of Resurrection and Judgment and Their Relation to Jewish Apocalyptic, Freiburg 1896. Atzberger, Christian Eschatology in the Stages of Its Revelation in the Old and New Testament, Freiburg 1890.
5. In the first time, Christian theology limited itself to these simple data of Holy Scripture. The apostolic fathers have no doctrine yet about the intermediate state and are generally of the opinion that the pious at death straightway partake of heavenly blessedness and the ungodly of hellish punishment. Burnet in his tractate on the state of the dead and those rising again, 1727, and others after him, such as Blondel, Ernesti, Baumgarten-Crusius, and so on, did try to show that the oldest Christian writers let the actual blessedness of believers begin only after the world judgment, but they could not bring forward sufficient proofs for this, Atzberger, History of Christian Eschatology within the Pre-Nicene Period, Freiburg: Herder 1896. Only when the parousia of Christ did not come as soon as was generally expected at first, and various heretics deformed or attacked the doctrine of the last things, did men begin to think more deliberately about the intermediate state. Ebionitism tried to hold fast to the national privileges of Israel to the detriment of Christian universalism and was therefore generally inclined to chiliasm; Gnosticism rejected, by virtue of its dualistic principle, the whole Christian eschatology and had no other expectation than the freeing of the spirit from matter, and its straightway at death taking up into the divine pleroma, Atzberger, ibid. Christian theology was thereby compelled to give a clearer account of the character of the intermediate state and of its connection, both with this life and with the final state after the last judgment. Justin already said that the souls of the pious after death tarried in a better place and those of the unrighteous in a worse one, to await the time of judgment, Dialogue with Trypho 5, and condemned it as an unchristian doctrine that there is no resurrection of the dead and that souls are straightway at death taken up into heaven, ibid. 80. According to Irenaeus, the souls of the pious at death do not straightway come into heaven, paradise, or city of God, which after the last judgment will be three distinct dwelling places of the righteous, Against Heresies V 36, but into an invisible place appointed by God, where they await the resurrection and the following beholding of God, for Christ also first tarried three days there where the dead were, in the lower parts of the earth, to deliver his holy dead from it, and, after thus fulfilling the law of the dead, was raised and taken up into heaven, V 31. There, in the shadow of death, in Hades, each man receives a worthy habitation, even before the judgment, the pious likely in Abraham's bosom, which is thus a division of Hades, II 34. The same representation of different receptacles in Hades, where the departed await the final decision on the last day, we also find in Hippolytus, Tertullian, Novatian, Commodian, Victorinus, Lactantius, Hilary, Ambrose, Cyril, and also still in Augustine, Enchiridion 109. 110, cf. Atzberger loc. cit. Schwane, Dogmatic History II 585. But as the parousia of Christ receded into a far distance, it became harder to maintain the old representation of Hades and to keep the stay there as a short, provisional, more or less neutral state. For the martyrs, an exception was made early on; these, according to Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others, straightway after their death entered heaven and were admitted to the beholding of God. The descent of Christ into Hades was in connection therewith so explained that it had freed the believers who had died before Christ's offering and brought them over to heaven. And the doctrine of the necessity and meritoriousness of good works, which more and more entered the church, naturally led to the thought that those who had dedicated their whole life in a special sense to God were now also at their death straightway worthy of heavenly blessedness. Thus Hades was gradually robbed of its inhabitants. Indeed, the unbelievers still remained, but this just had the result that Hades was more and more regarded as a place of punishment and identified with Tartarus or Gehenna. Of the Christians, only those could still tarry for a time in Hades who here on earth had not brought it so far in sanctification that at their dying they could straightway enter heavenly glory. Therewith the thought of a purifying fire was gradually connected, which was first expressed by Origen. According to him, all punishments were medicines, pharmaka, and the whole Hades, including Gehenna, a place of cleansing, Against Celsus III 75. VI 25. 26; and specifically the sins were consumed and men cleansed by the purifying fire that at the end of this dispensation would set the world aflame, ibid. VI 12. 13. 21. 64. V 15. 16. On the footsteps of Origen, the Greek theologians later assumed that the souls of many departed still had to suffer pains and could be delivered from them only by the intercessions and offerings of the living, Orthodox Confession questions 64-68, but they still had objections to a special purifying fire, as the Western church taught; only at the Council of Florence did they make some concession on this point, Münscher-von Coelln, Dogmatic History II 313. Schwane, Dogmatic History II 587 III 486. Kattenbusch, Comparative Confessions I 327. In the West, on the other hand, the purifying fire of which Origen had spoken was transferred from the final judgment to the intermediate state. Augustine sometimes said that after the general resurrection or at the last judgment some purgatorial punishments were still imposed, City of God XX 25. XXI 24. But yet he usually lets the development of the kingdom of God close with the last judgment, and therefore deems it not impossible that some believers are saved through a certain purgatorial fire, the more or less they loved perishing goods, the slower or faster, Enchiridion 69. Caesarius of Arles and Gregory the Great worked this out so that specifically the venial sins could be atoned for here or hereafter. And when with this doctrine the church practice already mentioned by Tertullian, On Monogamy 10. 11, Exhortation to Chastity 11, of making intercessions and offerings for the departed, was connected, the dogma of purgatory was complete. Scholasticism gave it broader development, Lombard and others on Sentences IV 21. Thomas, Summa Theologica appendix question 2. Bonaventure, Breviloquium VII 2. 3; the Council of Florence 1439 and of Trent, session 6 canon 30. session 22 chapter 2 canon 3. session 25 established it, and later theology gave it ever greater significance for religious and church life. According to Roman doctrine, the souls of the damned straightway go to hell (Gehenna, abyss, infernus), where they are tormented with unclean spirits in an eternal and unquenchable fire. The souls of those who after receiving baptism are no longer stained by sin or are cleansed from that stain here or hereafter are straightway taken up into heaven and there behold the face of God, though according to their merits in different degrees of perfection, in Denzinger nos. 870. 875. By Christ's descent into hell, the souls of the saints who had died before that time were also brought over from the limbus patrum (Abraham's bosom) to heaven. Children dying unbaptized, about whose lot the church fathers judged now more mildly, now more harshly, are sent to the infernus, where however the punishments are very unequal, in Denzinger ibid., and according to the most common representation come into a special division (limbus infantum), where they suffer only an eternal punishment of loss, but not a punishment of sense, Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure on Sentences II distinction 33. Thomas, Summa Theologica supplement question 69 article 4. But those who, after having received sanctifying grace in baptism or also again in penance, make themselves guilty of venial sins and have not been able to satisfy the temporal punishments appointed for them in this life, are not pure enough to be straightway admitted to the blessed beholding of God in heaven; they come into a place between heaven and hell, not to acquire new virtues and merits, but to remove the hindrances that lie in the way of their entrance into heaven. To that end, they are in the first moment after death freed from the guilt of venial sins by an act of contrition, through an act contrary to the disposition of venial sin, and then they still have to bear the temporal punishments that remain set on those sins even after forgiveness. Purgatory (from purging, sweeping, that is, cleansing, purifying) is therefore not a place of conversion, of testing, of sanctification, but a place of punishment, in which the mostly materially conceived fire serves to work ideally, through the representation of pain, purifyingly on the "poor souls." Moreover, the church by virtue of the communion of saints can come to the aid of these suffering souls and soften and shorten their punishment by intercessions, mass offerings, good works, and indulgences. Indeed, no one knows which souls specifically come into purgatory, how long they must stay there, and under what conditions on their side the prayers and offerings of the living benefit them; but this uncertainty does no harm to the cult of the departed. For more and more it holds as a rule that, with a few exceptions such as martyrs and special saints, the great mass of believers first come into purgatory. In any case, they are far ahead of the living who also must go through that purgatory to heaven; poor souls on the one hand, they are yet, viewed from another side, blessed souls, who with the angels and the blessed are invoked by the living in need for help. Cf. Roman Catechism I chapter 6 question 3. Bellarmine, On Purgatory, Controversies II 228-269. Perrone, Praelections III 309. Möhler, Symbolics § 23. Oswald, Eschatology² 1869. Simar, Dogmatics § 164. Atzberger, Christian Eschatology 269. Deharbe, Catholic Doctrine of Faith and Morals II 328. Jansen, Praelections III 975.
6. The Reformation saw in this purgatory a limitation of the merits of Christ and taught, by virtue of its principle of justification by faith alone, that man forthwith after a particular judgment in the agony of death entered into the blessedness of heaven or into the perdition of hell. Luther himself often set forth the intermediate state of the godly as a sleep, in which they quietly and calmly awaited the coming of the Lord, Köstlin, Luthers Theol.; but later Lutheran theologians nearly wiped out the distinction between intermediate state and final state altogether and said that the souls of the godly forthwith after death enjoyed a full and essential blessedness and those of the ungodly forthwith received a perfect and consummate damnation, Quenstedt, Theol. Gerhard, Loc. Schmid, Dogm. der ev. luth. K. In the main, that was also the sentiment of the Reformed, Heidelberg Catechism. Belgic Confession. Helvetic Confession II. Westminster Confession. Junius, Theses theol. Voetius, Disp. But commonly they yet better than the Lutherans brought out the difference that existed in the state of the deceased before and after the last day. Calvin said in his writing on the soul-sleep, that Abraham's bosom meant nothing else than that the souls of the godly after death would enjoy full peace, but that even then something remained lacking to them until the day of resurrection, namely, the highest and perfect glory of God, to which they ever aspire, and that our salvation thus always remained in progress until that day which closes and ends all progress, C. R., cf. Inst. III, and further, though usually expressing themselves somewhat more weakly, Belgic Confession. Synops. pur. theol. Witsius, Oec. foed. III, Heidegger, Corpus Theol. Others went still further and assumed a definite intermediate state. Louis Cappel said that the souls of the godly after death came into a state which indeed could be called blessed in comparison with that here on earth, but which was far different from that blessedness which began after the resurrection; for the intermediate state consisted almost wholly in hope and expectation of future glory, not indeed in the fruition of glory itself. And in like manner the souls of the ungodly after death came into a state in which they awaited the firmly determined future punishment in anguish and fear, but yet did not suffer that punishment itself, for expectation of punishment is not the punishment itself. And so thought in the main also William Sherlock, Thomas Burnet and many other English theologians, and among the Lutherans Calixtus, Hornejus, Zeltner, Tresenreuter, J. H. Ursinus and others, cf. M. Vitringa. Even since the previous century all the thoughts returned in Protestant theology which formerly had been expressed by heathens and Christians, by philosophers and theologians about the intermediate state. The doctrine of the Roman purgatory was again taken up by many mystics and pietists, such as Boehme, Antoinette Bourignon, Poiret, Dippel, Petersen, Arnold, Schermer and others, cf. M. Vitringa, and further by Leibniz, Syst. der Theol. Lessing, Education of Mankind, J. F. von Meyer, Leaves for Higher Truth. Jung-Stilling, Theory of Spirit-Knowledge. Lange, Dogm. Rothe, Ethik. Martensen, Dogm. Dorner, System of Faith. Oosterzee, Dogm. and others. In imitation of some ancient Christian writers, the Socinians taught that, just as the bodies return to the earth, so the souls return to God and with Him lead an existence until the resurrection without perception or thought, without pleasure or displeasure, Fock, Der Socin. Closely related to this was the doctrine of a soul-sleep, which formerly had already been advocated by some heretics, later by the Anabaptists, and since the previous century again found acceptance with Artobe, Heyn, Sulzer, cf. Bretschneider, Dogm., with Fries, Yearbook for Theology. Ulrici, God and Nature. and with the Irvingians. By others this doctrine of soul-sleep was so modified that the souls indeed retained an inward consciousness but were cut off from intercourse with the outer world, Episcopius, Op. Limborch, Theol. Christ. J. Müller, Doctrine of Sin. Martensen, Dogm. Ebrard, Dogm. Dorner, System of Faith. Frank, Christian Truth. Others avoided this doctrine of soul-sleep by assuming that the souls upon laying aside the material covering retained the organic and basic form of the body, or also that they after death received a new body composed of the finest matter, whereby they could remain in communion with the outer world, Paracelsus, Helmont, Boehme, Oetinger, Ph. M. Hahn, Swedenborg, Priestley, Schott, Jean Paul, cf. Bretschneider, Dogm., and further Rothe, Ethik. Hamberger, The Rationality of Heavenly Corporeality, Yearbook for Theology. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology. Martensen, Dogm. Ulrici, God and Nature. Güder, Doctrine of the Appearance of Christ among the Dead. Splittgerber, Death, Continued Life and Resurrection. Rinck, On the State after Death. Mühe, The Unveiled Secret of the Future. Nitzsch, Evangelical Dogmatics. Grétillat, Systematic Theology and others. There are even those who have returned to the ancient doctrine of the transmigration of souls and have commended it in this form, that the souls through continued transitions from one human body to another gradually become partakers of perfection, Lessing, Education of Mankind, Schlosser, Ungern-Sternberg, Dr. D. Burger, The Platonic Doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls, Amersfoort, Carl Andresen, The Doctrine of Rebirth on Theistic Basis, Hamburg, who finds reincarnation taught in John 3:3-17, and others with M. Vitringa. Bretschneider, Dogm. Spiess, Developmental History of Ideas about the State after Death. Falke, The Doctrine of Eternal Damnation. The idea of development is nowadays so all-dominating that it is also applied to the state on the other side of the grave. The doctrine of the limbus patrum was again adopted by Martensen, Dogm. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology. Vilmar, Dogm. Splittgerber loc. cit. Cremer, On the State after Death. The opinion that in the intermediate state there is still preaching of the gospel and possibility of conversion is a favorite idea of the new theology, Lange. Rothe. Delitzsch. Martensen. Dorner. Ebrard. Cremer loc. cit. Kliefoth, Eschatology. Falke loc. cit. Krauss, Doctrine of Revelation. Rinck loc. cit. Mühe loc. cit. Grétillat. Oosterzee. Doedes, Dutch Faith and others. Many even conceive the whole hereafter as a continuing purification, the result of which is that some possibly are eternally lost (hypothetical universalism), or that those who persist in evil are finally annihilated (conditional immortality) or that in the end all are saved (apocatastasis), cf. § 56.
7. The History of the Intermediate State. The history of the intermediate state proves that it costs the theologian and mankind in general much toil to keep within the bounds of Holy Scripture and not to be wise above that which one ought to be wise. The data which Holy Scripture contains about the intermediate state are enough for life, but leave many questions, which can arise in the curious mind, unanswered. If one still wants to solve these, one can do nothing else but tread the path of guesses, and runs the danger of making void the divine witness through inventions of human wisdom. This already comes out at once in speaking about death and immortality. Philosophy handles this in a wholly other way than Holy Scripture. The former deems death something natural and thinks to have enough in immortality, that is, in the ongoing being of the soul. But Scripture judges wholly otherwise. Death is not natural, but has its cause in the breaking of God's command, Gen. 2:17, in the devil, insofar as he through his tempting made mankind fall and die, John 8:44, in sin itself, since it works dissolving on the whole human life and as it were brings forth death out of itself, James 1:15, in the judgment of God, since He rewards sin with death, Rom. 6:23. And that death is in Scripture never the same as destruction, with not-being, but always consists in breaking of the harmony, in cutting off of the sundry life relations, in which a creature according to its nature is placed, in return to the elemental, chaotic being, that underlies the whole cosmos, at least logically. According to Herbert Spencer, life consists in ongoing fitting of inner to outer relations. Though with this setting the being of life is by no means made clear, yet it is true that life is the richer, the more in number and the sounder in kind the relations are, in which it stands to its surroundings. The highest creature is therefore mankind; by his making he stands in bond with nature and the world of men, seen and unseen things, heaven and earth, God and angels. And he lives, if he and insofar as he stands to this whole surroundings in the right relation willed by God, cf. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Death is therefore in its being and in its whole outreach upsetting, breaking of all these relations, in which mankind first stood and still ought to stand. Its cause is therefore no other and can be no other than sin, that is, upsetting of the right relation to and breaking of the life fellowship with God. Sin has death in this sense not merely as outcome but falls together with it; sin is death, death in ghostly sense; who does sin, stands therewith in the same eyeblink over against God, is dead to God and godly things, has no lust for the knowledge of His ways, turns himself in enmity and hate from Him. And since this relation to God, this made being after His image and likeness, is no gift added on but belongs to mankind's being and bears a central mark, the upsetting of this relation must work destroying on all other relations, in which mankind stood to himself, to his fellow men, to nature, to the angels, to the whole making. Sin had properly after its kind, at the same eyeblink that it was done, the full, whole death as outcome, Gen. 2:17, return of the whole cosmos to its chaotic being.
But God has stepped in between both and has broken the power of sin and death. Indeed, as Schelling said, an irrational remainder lies at the ground of all that exists. All that is left to itself goes over to decay. The natural world, if not tilled, runs wild; the man, if not brought up, grows base; the folk, that falls outside of upbringing, grows corrupt. By kind, all things in and outside of man stand in enmity against each other. Understanding and will, conscience and leaning, duty and desire, soul and body, the man and his neighbor, the worlds of men and beasts and angels, all find themselves at war's foot against each other and dwell in a state of decay and downfall. But yet God has stepped in with his grace between both, first with his common grace, to curb the power of sin and death, then with his special grace, to break and overcome them. The bodily death is not only put off and by sundry means a human being and growth made possible; but Christ wins through his cross in principle the victory over sin and death and brings to light the life and the deathlessness, Rom. 5:12ff., 1 Cor. 15:45, Heb. 2:14, 2 Tim. 1:10, Rev. 1:18, 20:14, so that whoever believes in Him has the everlasting life and shall not die into eternity, John 3:36, 5:24, 8:51, 52, 11:25. This life now it is and this deathlessness, which steps to the fore in Holy Writ. The deathlessness in the wise-thinking sense, the ongoing of the soul after death, has with her an underling worth; she denies it not but she teaches it also not on purpose and is least of all, as deism thought, given thereto, that she should make known to us this deathlessness as one of the weightiest truths of belief. For this truth is enough known to man by kind. What Writ had to teach us, was this, that bare being, sheer is without more is yet no life, as it belongs to men and befits men. That it is not on this side, and that it is yet much less on the other side of the grave. Here on earth the life of man, even of him who lacks the fellowship of God, still stands in sundry ties and thereby receives some filling and worth. But when all this falls away and all these bonds are broken, then life sinks back to a poor, empty, unfilled, shadowy being. From this side the Old Covenant usually views the Beyond. Dying is a going out from this life, a breaking of all bonds with this world; death is in regard to the life on this side a not-being, a resting, a sleeping, in one word a full dead-being for the whole rich, joyful life on earth. The dead have no share more forever in all that happens under the sun, Eccl. 9:5, 6. In the thought of Sheol the negation of this earthly life and working stands to the fore and shapes there if not the only, yet the foremost part. Whether now in Sheol for this fully broken-off earthly life another comes in its stead and the dead there toward another side step into new ties, is in the Old Testament spoken out only a few times, when the faith-eye of the godly pierces through the shadows of death to the everlasting life in fellowship with God. Enough it was on the standpoint of the Old Testament opening, that the great thought was brought into man's awareness, that the true life is only found in fellowship with God. The dread of hell stayed as well as the joy of heaven for the believer of the old day wrapped in mists. Only when Christ had died and risen, was the life in incorruptibility brought to light. Christ has not won or opened the deathlessness in the wise-thinking sense, the ongoing of souls after death. But He has the by sin wasted and emptied life of man here and hereafter again filled with the positive filling of God's fellowship, with peace and joy and blessedness. Death is no death more for him who is in Christ Jesus, but a throughway to the everlasting life, and the grave a hallowed resting place until the morning of the uprising.
8. Whoever loses sight of this teaching of Scripture concerning immortality falls into all kinds of errors. For we cannot form any conception of a pure spirit, of its being and life and working. Of God, who is pure spirit, we can speak in no other way than anthropomorphically, in which indeed Scripture itself leads the way. The angels are spiritual beings, but they are represented as human and often take on human bodies when they appear. And humans are not only bodily beings, but all their activities are bound to the body and dependent on the body; not only the vegetative and animal but also the intellectual activities of thinking and willing. Although the brain is not the cause of the higher faculties of knowing and desiring, it is yet their bearer and organ; every disturbance in the brain results in an abnormal working of the rational soul. Because the body is not a prison of the soul but belongs to the essence of man, we can form no conception of the life and working of a soul separated from the body and are therefore easily inclined to conjectures and guesses. Three hypotheses have therefore been devised in the main, to make the existence of souls after death somewhat understandable.
First, many among the Gentiles and also among the Christians have thought that the souls, after being separated from the body, could lead no other than a sleeping life. Indeed, the change that enters at death is of extraordinary meaning. For the whole content of our soul-life is drawn from the outer world; all knowledge begins with sense perception; our whole form of thinking is material; even of spiritual things we speak in words that originally had a sensible meaning. If death now, as Scripture teaches, is a sudden, violent, complete, and absolute break with this present world, then there seems truly no other possibility than that the soul is wholly closed off from the outer world, loses all its content, and as it were sinks back into itself. In sleep, the soul also withdraws from the outer world and breaks off dealings with it; but in sleep it does this only in a relative sense, since it remains in bond with the body and keeps the rich life that it has gained from the world; even there, though in a confused way, it remains active in dreams. And yet, what a change sleep already brings in human life; knowing and desiring powers cease their working; consciousness stands still; all sensation and perception stops; only the vegetative life carries on its ordered work. How much more then will all working of the soul cease when death enters and breaks all bonds with this world once for all! Everything thus seems to plead for the souls after death being in a sleeping, unconscious state. And Holy Scripture, as it superficially appears, is so far from condemning this teaching of soul sleep that it rather praises and favors it. For it calls dying not only in the Old but also in the New Testament many times a sleeping, Deuteronomy 31:16, Jeremiah 51:39, 57, Daniel 12:2, Matthew 9:24, John 11:11, 1 Corinthians 7:39, 11:30, 15:6, 18, 20, 51, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-15, 2 Peter 3:4, and so on; Sheol is a land of stillness, of rest, of forgetfulness, where there is no part anymore forever in all that happens under the sun, above page 366; Jesus speaks of the night of death, in which no one can work, John 9:4; and nowhere does Scripture make any mention that those returned from death to life, such as Lazarus and others, have told anything of what they saw or heard in the intermediate state. Yet all these reasonings are not able to prove the teaching of psychopannychia. For 1° it is clear that the dependence of the soul on the body yet does not exclude its self-standing. The outer world may be the occasion for the awakening of our self-consciousness and the first source of our knowledge; thinking may be bound to the brain and have therein its seat and organ; it is unproven and unprovable that the psychic life of man finds its source and origin in physical appearances. Thinking and knowing are workings of the soul; not the ear hears and the eye sees, but it is the psychic I of man that hears through the ear and sees through the eye; the body is an instrument of the spirit. Therefore there is nothing absurd in thinking that the soul, if need be, without the body can carry on its workings. Besides, whoever would deny conscious life to the spirit as such would have to come to deem consciousness and will also impossible in God and the angels. For though we speak of God in human wise and often picture the angels as bodily, they are yet in themselves spirit and nonetheless partake of consciousness and will. 2° Scripture teaches as clearly as possible that death is a total break with this whole earthly life and insofar a sleeping, a resting, a keeping still. The state of death is a sleep, the dead one sleeps, because dealings with this present world have ceased; but nowhere does Scripture say that the soul of the dead one sleeps; on the contrary, it always sets it forth after death as more or less conscious; and as revelation goes on, it comes ever clearer to light that, while in death all ties to this world are cut off, at once other bonds to another world take their place. The great thought of Scripture, that to the service of the Lord life is bound and to its rejection death, casts its light also over the other side of the grave. While the rich man at once after his death is in pain, the poor Lazarus is carried into Abraham's bosom, Luke 16:23. And all believers, who indeed here already on earth partake of eternal life, do not lose this through death, John 11:25, 26, but enjoy it after death much richer and more blessed in fellowship with Christ, Luke 23:43, Acts 7:59, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Philippians 1:23, Revelation 6:9, 7:9. Dwelling in the body is just a dwelling out from the Lord, and dying thus the way to a nearer and closer fellowship with Christ. 3° Besides, it need not surprise that those returned to life by resurrection tell nothing of what they have seen and heard on the other side of the grave. For setting aside the possibility that they did share one thing or another, which is not recorded in Scripture, it is most likely that they were not allowed or able to report to us anything of their experiences on the other side of the grave. We have enough in Moses and the prophets, Luke 16:29; and Paul could, after he had been caught up into the third heaven, say nothing else than that he had heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
Cf. Tertullian, de an. 58. Calvin, Psychopannychia, C. R. 33, 177-232. Bullinger, Housebook Dec. 4 serm. 10. Cloppenburg, Op. II 413-417. Voetius, Disp. I 832-835. Witsius, Oec. foed. III 14, 18-22. Gerdesius, Exerc. Acad. 592 sq. Moor VI 594-602. M. Vitringa IV 82-86. Gerhard, Loc. XXVI 293. Delitzsch, Bibl. Psych. 419. Splittgerber, Death, Afterlife and Resurrection³ 102. Rinck, On the State after Death 1885 p. 19. Kliefoth, Christian Eschatology 1886 p. 66. Atzberger, Christian Eschatology 212.
9. Others are of the mind that the souls after death receive a new bodiliness and thereby can again come into fellowship with the outer world. For this feeling, one calls upon the fact that no fore-stelling can be formed of the life and working of the soul without a body, and further on those places of the Writ which seem to ascribe a certain bodiliness to the souls of the departed. The dwellers of the realm of the dead are described just as they looked on earth. Samuel is set forth as an old man clad with a mantle, 1 Sam. 28:14; the kings of the heathen sit on thrones and go to meet the king of Babel, Isa. 14:9; the heathen lie there as uncircumcised, Ezek. 31:18, 32:19ff. Jesus speaks among the departed still of eyes and fingers and tongue, Luke 16:23, 24. Paul awaits that, if the earthly house of the tabernacle is broken, he shall have a building from God and shall not be unclothed but overclothed, 2 Cor. 5:1-4. And John saw a great throng, standing before the throne and the Lamb, clad with long white garments and with palm branches in their hands, Rev. 6:11, 7:9. But 1. from this way of speaking of Holy Writ nothing can be led off for the bodiliness of the souls after death. For it can speak of God and the angels, of the souls in the realm of the dead, of the joy in heaven and the sorrow in hell no otherwise than in mankind's tongue, under images borrowed from earthly states and bonds. But alongside this it yet clearly and firmly declares that God is spirit and that the angels are spirits, and thereby gives the rule by which all these man-like ways of speaking must be taken. And so it does also in regard to the departed. It can speak of them no otherwise than as men of flesh and blood, but says alongside that they, while their body rests in the grave, are souls, spirits, Eccl. 12:7, Ezek. 37:5, Luke 23:46, Acts 7:59, Heb. 12:23, 1 Pet. 3:19, Rev. 6:9, 20:4. To these clear sayings we must hold ourselves. Whoever nevertheless ascribes to the souls a kind of body must also come to think of God and the angels in a certain way as bodily, with the theosophers. 2. The strongest place that speaks for a between-bodiliness of the souls is 2 Cor. 5:1-4. But also this text loses at healthy out-legging all its proof-strength. For over the head-thought which Paul here speaks out, there is no difference; the apostle knows that he, when his earthly body is unbound, has a building out of God; but he sighs yet and is burdened in this body, because he looks up against death, and would therefore rather wish not to be unclothed of this body, but at once after soul and body alike to be overclothed by the heavenly dwelling, so that the deathly may be swallowed up by life. Though this be also his dearest wish, he knows that he after breaking of this earthly body, even if he be unclothed of the body (the reading in vs. 3 εἰ γε και ἐκδυσαμενοι deserves in my mind above εἰπερ or εἰ γε και ἐνδυσαμενοι the fore-choice), yet therefore shall not be found naked but shall dwell in with the Lord, vs. 1. 3. 8. If this however is the head-thought, then by the dwelling out of God nothing else can be thought than the heavenly glory thought as a place and at the same time as a garment, the everlasting light in which God himself dwells, 1 Tim. 6:16, which is out of God, made without hands, out of and in heaven, and into which the believers at dying or at the uprising are over-set, cf. Col. 1:12, John 14:2, 17:24. Lastly 3. the bodiliness which one ascribes to the souls after death is a begrip whereby nothing settled lets itself be thought and over which the minds also run very far apart. Delitzsch takes on his three-fold standpoint that the soul fulfills this service of the between-body for the spirit. The soul stands with him between spirit and stuff; it is the life-beginning led off from the spirit of the body, the bodily, outward clothing of the spirit and yet also the un-stuffly, inward side of the body. Güder teaches that the might which ordered our earthly body remains kept and on the other side of the grave forms a new body out of the elements there at hand. Splittgeber says that the ordering ground-form of the body goes with the soul and gives her in the between-state an unwhole, fore-running bodiliness. Binck is of the mind that the nerve-body, a fine inward body which is the bearer of the soul-life, goes with the soul after death and with the reborn is overclothed by the Spirit of God and through the beaming of the glorified body of Christ is formed to a between-body, while with the godless it is more and more through-trecked with sin and darkness etc. But whatever one may say of it, it remains even unclear about it. We know nothing other than spirit and stuff; an un-material bodiliness is a with-striding, which at an ill hour from theosophy into Christian god-learning is over-brought and the false two-foldness of spirit and stuff, of setting and with-setting, in vain through an un-thinkable together-setting seeks to make good, cf. part II 193. 537.
10. In the third place, there are many who think that the souls after death still stand in some bond to earthly life. Among many folks the thought ruled that the souls after death stayed near the grave, and the Jews also thought that they still hovered about the body for a time after dying and explained thereby that the witch at Endor could still call up the spirit of Samuel, Weber, System of Ancient Synagogal Palestinian Theology. Widely spread was the use to give the dead food, weapons, belongings, sometimes even their wives and slaves in the grave; and usually this honoring of the dead was not limited to the day of burial or the time of mourning, but was kept up thereafter and taken into the common, private or public worship. Honored were not only the dead in general, but also the dead kin, the parents and forefathers; the fathers and heads of the tribe; the heroes of the folk; the princes and kings of the land, sometimes already in their lifetime; and in Buddhism and Islam also the saints. The worship consisted in keeping their graves, caring for their bodies (for example by embalming), from time to time laying flowers and food on their grave, showing honor to their images and relics, holding meals and games in their honor, sending up prayers to them and bringing them offerings. Between the honoring of these dead men and of the gods, one often made, as in Persia, India, Greece, a distinction, but nevertheless the worship of the dead was a main part of the religion. With their honoring one meant in part to come to their own help, but above all to ward off the harm that they could cause and to assure their blessing and help, whether in ordinary or extraordinary ways, through oracles and wonders, cf. Ch. de la Saussaye, Manual of the History of Religions I 79-87. All these elements already pushed through into the Christian worship from the second century on. Just as in Buddhism the monks and in Islam the mystics, so in the Christian church the martyrs soon became objects of religious honoring; on the place where they died or their relics were laid, altars, chapels, churches were built; there especially on the death days (dies natales) of the martyrs, the believers came together to keep their memory through vigils and psalm singing, through reading the acts of the martyrs and hearing a preaching in their honor and above all through celebrating the holy Eucharist. And after the fourth century this worship of Mary, the angels, the patriarchs, the prophets and the martyrs spread also to bishops, monks, hermits, confessors, virgins and to all kinds of saints and to their relics and images, Schwane, History of Dogma I 389 f. II 620 f.; and in spite of all resistance both in and outside the Roman church, it has not only held itself up to this day but it still grows in a frightful way and pushes the worship of the one true God and of Jesus Christ whom He has sent more and more into the background. Rome keeps in this worship in a practical way the fellowship of the saints. The one Christian church has three parts, the church triumphant in heaven, the church suffering in purgatory, and the church militant on earth. The share that the church suffering takes in this fellowship consists in that the blessed in heaven come to the help of the poor souls in purgatory with their intercessions; that the church on earth softens and shortens the punishments of those souls through prayers, alms, good works, indulgences and above all through the mass offering; and finally also in that the souls in purgatory, who in any case are far ahead of most members of the militant church, and therefore may be called upon, help and strengthen the believers on earth through their intercessions. This last element, although also already taking a broader place in the fellowship with the church suffering, yet forms the main part of the fellowship of the militant with the triumphant church. The blessed in heaven are, just like the angels, partakers of the perfect, supernatural holiness; and therefore they are objects of worship and honoring. In that holiness they do not all share in the same measure; just like the angels, they form a spiritual hierarchy; at the top stands Mary and after her follow the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, the confessors etc. It is a descending row, but in all something of the godly virtues shines out. And therein also shares all that has stood or still stands in any bond with the saints, their body, limbs, clothes, dwelling, image etc. And in the same measure as something stands closer to God and shares more in His holiness, it is an object of religious honoring. Also in this there is thus all kinds of difference. There is latria, which belongs to God alone; the human nature of Christ and all its parts, for example the sacred heart, is indeed not per se and propter se but yet in se an object of latria; Mary has claim to hyperdulia; the saints to dulia; their relics to relative religious worship etc.; there are as many kinds of adoration as there are kinds of excellence, adoration is diverse according to the diversity of excellence. The honoring of the saints consists in general in prayers, fasts, vigils, feast days, gifts, pilgrimages, processions etc., and has the goal to gain the favor of God through their intercessions and to get some benefit from Him. But this honoring and intercession is not only general, but also particular; there are certain saints for certain folks, families, persons, and there are special saints for the different needs and wants. Saint George is the patron saint of England, James of Spain, Stephen of Hungary; the painters honor Saint Luke, the carpenters Joseph, the shoemakers Crispin; Saint Sebastian helps especially in plague, Ottilia in eye disease, Anthony in case one has lost something; even animals have their protecting saint, the geese are especially guarded by Saint Gall and the sheep by Saint Wendelin etc. Cf. Council of Trent session 25 and other church rulings in Denzinger 243. 273. 866 etc. Catechism of Rome III 2 qu. 4-14. Jerome, Against Vigilantius in Migne XXIII 339-452. John of Damascus, On Images, Id. On the Orthodox Faith IV 15. 16. Lombard and others on Sentences IV dist. 45. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II 2 qu. 83 art. 11. Supplement qu. 71. 72. Bellarmine, On the Triumphant Church or On the Glory and Worship of the Saints, Controversies II 269-368. Oswald, Eschatology² 121-233. Atzberger, Christian Eschatology 263-269 etc. Many of these views have time and again come back in Protestant theology. The Lutherans granted that the angels and also the saints pray for the church universal in general, Apology of the Confession 21. Smalcald Articles II 2. Just as Hugo Grotius earlier defended the calling upon of saints in his Vote for Peace, so Leibniz later protected this and even the honoring of images and relics, System of Theology 1825 p. 116-195. The ritualism in England goes the same way, Ryle, Knots Untied p. 491 etc. Many theologians take that after death a certain bond between the soul and the body stays, Beck, Doctrine of the Soul 40 f. Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology 444 f., that the souls still keep some dealings with the earth, know of the weightiest happenings, pray for us and look down blessing us, Splittgerber, Death, Continued Life and Resurrection 157 f. In the last century many thought, such as Swedenborg, Jung-Stilling, Oberlin, to stand in direct dealings with the departed spirits, cf. especially J. C. Wötzel, My Wife's Actual Appearance after Her Death, Chemnitz 1804. The likelihood of their appearances was and is still granted by many, such as by Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Lessing, Dramaturgy, J. H. Fichte, Anthropology, Jung-Stilling, Theory of Spirit Knowledge 1808. Kerner, The Seeress of Prevorst 1829. Eschenmayer, The Mystery of the Inner Life, Explained from the History of the Seeress of Prevorst 1830. Thereto has come since 1848 spiritism, which on purpose tries to put itself in rapport with the spirit world and thinks to have received actual revelations (through signs, knocks, writing, psychography), workings (lifting and moving of furniture, untying of knots, playing of musical instruments) and appearances (materializations) of spirits. Of the rich writings of spiritism let only be named the work of the Russian state councilor Alexander Aksakow, which holds all the material and is titled: Animism and Spiritism 2 vols., Leipzig Mutze 1894.
1st , Now to begin with the last, it deserves attention that superstitious practices occur among all peoples, also among those with which Israel came into contact, such as the Egyptians, Gen. 41:8, Ex. 7:11, the Canaanites, Deut. 18:9, 14, the Babylonians, Dan. 1:20, 2:2 etc. Also among Israel they penetrated and were often busily practiced, 1 Sam. 28:9, 2 Kings 21:6, Isa. 2:6. To these practices also belonged the consulting of the dead, and those who busied themselves with it were called oboth or yiddeonim . The word ob first denotes the soothsaying spirit that dwells in someone, Lev. 20:27, that someone possesses, 1 Sam. 28:7, 8, that is questioned by someone, 1 Sam. 28:8, through whom someone causes a dead person to arise, 1 Sam. 28:9, and who, as one imagined of the dead, proclaims oracles in a whispering, mysterious manner, Isa. 8:19, 19:3, 29:4; and then it denotes the soothsayer himself, 1 Sam. 28:3, 9, 2 Kings 21:6, 2 Chron. 33:6, LXX engastrimythos , ventriloquist. The other word, yiddeonim , knowers, wise ones, is but a further designation of oboth and first denoted the soothsaying persons and then the soothsaying spirit that was in them, Lev. 19:31, 20:6, 27, Isa. 19:3. This soothsaying could happen in various ways, but among others also by consulting the dead, Deut. 18:11, cf. Stade, History of the People of Israel I 443 f. 505. Schwally, Life after Death 69 f. But law and prophecy declared themselves decidedly against it, and called the people back to the Lord, to his revelation and testimony, Ex. 22:18, Lev. 19:26, 31, 20:6, 27, Deut. 18:11, 1 Sam. 28:19, Isa. 8:19, 47:9-15, Jer. 27:9, 29:8, Mic. 3:7, 5:11, Nah. 3:4, Mal. 3:5; and the New Testament sets its seal upon it, Luke 16:29, Acts 8:9ff., 13:6ff., 19:13ff., Gal. 5:20, Eph. 5:11, Rev. 9:21, 21:8, 22:15.
2nd , It is even unprovable that Holy Scripture assumes the possibility of calling up and appearing of the departed. Indeed, sometimes resurrections of the dead take place through God's wondrous power, and Scripture acknowledges demonic powers and workings that surpass human ability, Deut. 13:1, 2, Matt. 24:24, 2 Thess. 2:9, Rev. 13:13-15. But nowhere does it teach the possibility or the reality of an appearance of the dead. The only place that can be brought against this is 1 Sam. 28, where Saul takes refuge with the witch at Endor; for the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Christ on the mount of transfiguration, Matt. 17, Luke 9, is wrought by God alone without human mediation. But although the rationalistic explanation is to be rejected, which sees in this history nothing else than a deliberate deceit of the woman; an objective, real appearance of Samuel is equally not to be assumed. For Saul does not see Samuel, vs. 14; the woman does see him but is in a hypnotic state, vs. 12, and she sees him as he looked in his lifetime, as an old man wrapped in a prophet's mantle, vs. 14. The woman's fright, vs. 12, also had its cause not in that she actually saw Samuel contrary to her expectation, but in this, that seeing Samuel, in her hypnotic state she also immediately recognized Saul the king and feared him. After Saul is brought under the impression that an underground, spiritual being, elohim , had arisen from the earth and Samuel himself had appeared, this one speaks out and through the woman to Saul and announces judgment to him. There is nothing in 1 Sam. 28 that goes beyond the known phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism and cannot be explained in the same way.
3rd , However, there are many who precisely from the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism, spiritism etc. think they must conclude to the working of spirits. But this hypothesis seems for the present absolutely not justified. Apart from the many deceits that have taken place in this area, what is related of appearance and working of spirits is so childish and insignificant that the involvement of the spirit world need not at all be assumed for it. Thereby it is not denied that all sorts of phenomena occur that are not yet explained; but these are all of such a nature (such as e.g. the sudden knowing and speaking of foreign languages, clairvoyance, hypnosis, suggestion, second sight, premonition, knowledge of what happens elsewhere at the same moment, telepathy etc.), that they are by no means made clearer by the hypothesis of spirit appearance. When we further consider that man in his observations is bound to and limited within a certain number of ether vibrations, so that some change therein would show him a wholly different image of the world and he himself possesses a deep and rich soul life, which comes to appearance in self-consciousness but very partially, cf. my Principles of Psychology 70ff. 78ff.; then within the bounds of this side there lies still such an extensive field open for occultism, that for the present we need not yet take refuge in the influence of the spirit world. Cf. Kirchner, Spiritism, the Folly of Our Age , Berlin Habel 1883. Ed. v. Hartmann, Spiritism , Leipzig Friedrich 1885. Id. The Spirit Hypothesis of Spiritism and Its Phantoms , ib. 1891.
4th , Furthermore, the whole Scripture proceeds from the thought that death is a total break with the life on this side of the grave. Indeed, the departed retain memory of what happened to them here on earth. The rich man and poor Lazarus know who and what they were here and in what surroundings they lived, Luke 16. In the last judgment people are conscious of what they have done on earth, Matt. 7:22. The works follow them who have died in the Lord, Rev. 14:13. What we have done here on earth becomes our moral property and goes with us into death. Also there is no doubt that the departed recognize those whom they knew on earth; the underground inhabitants mockingly greet the king of Babylon, Isa. 14; the mighty heroes speak from the midst of Sheol to Egypt's prince and people, Ezek. 32; the rich man knows Lazarus, Luke 16. The friends whom we acquire here by doing good receive us once with joy into the eternal tabernacles, Luke 16:9. But otherwise Scripture always presents it so that communion with this earth is totally broken at death. The departed have no more part in all that happens under the sun, Eccl. 9:5, 6, 10. Whether their children come to honor or fall into poverty, they know it not, Job 14:21. Abraham knows not of the children of Israel and Jacob knows them not, and therefore they call upon the Lord, who indeed is their Father, Isa. 63:16. Of a communion of the departed with the living there is nowhere mention; they belong to another realm, which is totally separated from the earth. Also Heb. 11:1 does not teach that the cloud of witnesses sees and watches us in our strife. For the martyres there are not eyewitnesses of our strife but witnesses of faith, who serve for our encouragement.
5th , Therefore there is also no place for invocation and veneration of the saints. In itself there is nothing strange or unseemly in the thought that angels and the blessed intercede for people on earth; an interest in the history of the militant church, a general intercession was also often assumed by Protestants. But all the more remarkable is it that Scripture, which so often mentions intercession of people on earth and definitely recommends and prescribes it, Matt. 6:9ff., Rom. 15:30, Eph. 6:18, 19, Col. 1:2, 3, 1 Tim. 2:2, and moreover teaches that God often spares others for the sake of the elect and on their intercession, Gen. 18:23ff., Ex. 32:11ff., Num. 14:13ff., Ezek. 14:14, 20, Matt. 24:22 etc., never speaks with a single word of an intercession of angels and of the blessed for those living on earth. With regard to the intercession of angels this was already proven earlier, part II 449ff., and of the intercession of the blessed the Roman Catholics themselves admit that it does not occur in Scripture, cf. e.g. Oswald, Eschatology 132; only 2 Macc. 15:12-14 mentions an intercession of Onias and Jeremiah for their people in a dream vision to Judas and proves only that the Jews at that time were convinced of the intercession of the blessed departed.
6th , Even less ground is there for the invocation and veneration of the saints. Holy Scripture indeed says that believers on earth may invoke each other's intercession, Num. 21:7, Jer. 42:2, 1 Thess. 5:25, but mentions nowhere a request to the departed for their intercession; and angels and men expressly ward off all religious veneration from themselves, which belongs to God alone, Deut. 6:13, 10:20, Matt. 4:10, Acts 14:10, Col. 2:18, 19, Rev. 19:10, 22:9, cf. part II 451ff. Also of the veneration of relics there is no mention; although God sometimes performs miracles through them, 2 Kings 13:21, Matt. 9:21, Luke 6:19, Acts 5:15, 19:12, they may not be objects of veneration, Deut. 34:6, 2 Kings 18:4, 2 Cor. 5:16. Oswald loc. cit. 143 also reckons the invocation and veneration of the saints among the tradition dogmas. Even if a general intercession of the saints for the believers on earth is granted, it by no means follows therefrom that they may be invoked and venerated for it. For indeed a request for someone's intercession is in itself absolutely not unlawful, and also repeatedly takes place among believers. But such a request always presupposes some means of communion, and must be able to be conveyed orally or in writing. And that is precisely lacking here and is also in direct conflict with the teaching of Scripture about the state of the departed. Rome therefore also dares not say that the invocation and veneration of the saints is commanded and necessary, but only declares, bonum atque utile esse, suppliciter eos invocare , Trent sess. 25. Theology knows absolutely not how to make clear how the saints obtain knowledge of our prayers, and proposes all sorts of conjectures. Some think that they are communicated to them by the angels, who repeatedly come to earth here, or that the saints like the angels can move with wondrous speed and are quodam modo ubique ; others are of the opinion that the saints are informed by God himself of the content of our prayers, or behold all things that they need to know in the divine consciousness; and there are also those who say that it is not necessary that they know everything, provided they have knowledge in general of our needs, or also, that we need not concern ourselves with the manner in which they obtain knowledge of our prayers, Thomas Summa Theologiae II 2 qu. 83 art. 4. Suppl. qu. 72 art. 1. Oswald, Eschatology 139. Added to this is that the Roman Catholics absolutely do not know with certainty who of the departed are in heaven and belong to the perfect saints. The pious of the Old Testament were first in the limbus patrum and were indeed brought by Christ into heaven, but stand too far from us to be much invoked by us, Oswald loc. cit. 132. 167. Of some pious in the New Testament, such as Mary, the apostles, and also of the later martyrs, Rome indeed assumes that they are received into heaven. But these are few, and error is not excluded here. In earlier times it was the voice of the people that accorded to a departed the predicate of holiness; and thereby it happened that men who possessed this predicate lost it again, as e.g. Clement of Alexandria by Benedict XIV. To prevent these errors, therefore, since Alexander III and Innocent III the ecclesiastical declaration of someone's holiness, that is canonization, has become a right of the apostolic see. However, here again it is a question whether the pope in this canonization is infallible or not. And even if this be the case, by the nature of the thing the pope makes sparing use of it. By far the most saints are invoked and venerated without one knowing accurately whether they dwell in heaven or in purgatory. One must therefore content oneself with a moral conviction, further consider that a possible error brings no harmful consequences, and for safety's sake extend the invocation also to the "poor souls" in purgatory, as in practice increasingly happens, Oswald loc. cit. 148. 164.
7th , With Rome the invocation of the saints is absolutely no longer only a request for their intercession (ora pro nobis ), but has gradually passed over into an adoration and veneration; the saints are objects of a cultus religiosus , even if this is called not latria but dulia . Now there is no doubt that we would have to pay reverent homage to angels and the blessed if we met them and had any communion with them, part II 455. But precisely this latter does not occur. And therefore all invocation of angels and of the blessed runs out into a religious veneration, which is not made good by the name of dulia , ibid. 451ff. On the way that Rome treads with this veneration of the creature there is no stopping. Holiness is thought by Rome as a donum superadditum , as something substantial, which can be communicated to all creatures in different measure, and in that same measure may then be religiously venerated. Insofar as a person or thing shares in the divine holiness, they have claim to a cultus religiosus . First of all, therefore, Mary, the apostles, the martyrs, the saints share in it, but further all and everything that has been in contact with these or still stands in relation to them, thus also relics, images, dwellings etc. According to this principle every creature can be religiously venerated, quod et quatenus respectum habeat ad Deum , even to the hands of the soldiers who seized Jesus, and the lips of Judas who kissed him, Voetius, Disp . III 880. 896. In any case it is not to be seen why the saints who are on earth are not already invoked and venerated by Roman Christians, and among them especially the pope, who is the saint par excellence. Es spricht an sich nichts dagegen, dass auch die Heiligkeit auf Erden religiös veneriert werde. Wäre man also von der Gottseligkeit einer Person vollkommen überzeugt, so durfte sie an sich wohl eine Verehrung geniessen, wie sie den Heiligen im Himmel zukommt. In einzelnen Fällen mag es privatim geschehen sein und geschieht vielleicht noch , Oswald loc. cit. 157. What Oswald further brings against it is borrowed from utility and shows that the veneration of living saints, specifically of the pope, with Rome is only a question of time. The communion of saints degenerates into a mutual veneration, which pushes the Mediator of God and men into the background.
11. Thus far we have only spoken of whether the departed still have any direct dealings with the earth; now the question arises whether Holy Scripture teaches us anything about the new dealings and states in which the dead find themselves on the other side of the grave. Much is not what Scripture tells us thereof. Yet already in the Old Testament the lines are present which, when drawn out, lead to a sundering in the state of the righteous and the ungodly after death. The fear of the Lord is the way to life, but the ungodly perish and come to an end. And according to the New Testament, the rich man straightway comes into a place of torment, which however is not yet the same as Gehenna or the Abyss. Where this place is to be sought is not told in Scripture. Indeed, Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, the Abyss are always shown as being below us. But this can and may not be understood in a topographical sense. For the thoughts of above and below, taken locally, are very kin-bound and in this bond have only an ethical meaning; we place the kingdom of darkness straight against that of light and seek, following a natural likeness, the first below and the second above us. All setting of the punishment place of the departed, in the earth, under the earth, in the sea, in the sun, in the air, or on one of the wandering stars is nothing more than a guess. Only can it be said that the Beyond is not only a state but also a place, for souls may not be bound in time and space by marking around, yet they are much less everlasting and everywhere-present and must be somewhere and also have a following of time-moments. Otherwise it is more in keeping with the few givings that Scripture offers us to forgo all setting of the punishment place of the dead; let us not seek where it is, but how we may flee it (Chrysostom). Just as little do we know of the state in which the unbelieving and ungodly find themselves after death until the last judgment. Only can we say with sureness that, when the wrath of God already abides on the unbelievers here, this after death must be felt much heavier, since all turning away from earthly life is lacking and the bare being is filled with nothing but the awareness and feeling of that wrath. The question has however been raised whether for such as these, who here on earth have not heard the gospel or only very poorly, on the other side of the grave there may yet be a chance to turn and believe in Christ. The first who in the Christian church gave a yes-saying answer thereto were Clement, Stromata VI 6, and Origen, Against Celsus II 44. They drew from 1 Peter 3:18, 19 that Christ and also the apostles had preached the gospel to the departed in Hades who were open thereto. Although this feeling was now gainsaid by Augustine, On Heresies chapter 79, and others, and the going down of Christ to hell was commonly understood otherwise, yet it kept coming back and found in this age, wherein one gained a clear awareness of the great throng and swift spreading of the non-Christians, entry with very many. Indeed it is a fact of the greatest meaning that there have been and still are millions of folk who have never borne any knowledge of the way of bliss in Christ and thus have never been set in the chance to take Him with a believing heart or to cast Him off with setness of will. To the unbelievers in narrower sense these are not to be reckoned, and Scripture itself says that they are judged by another yardstick than Jews and Christians, Matthew 10:15, 11:20-24, Luke 10:12-15, 12:47, 48, John 15:22, 24, Romans 2:12, 2 Peter 2:20-22.
Nevertheless, it does not follow from this in the least that there is or must be a preaching of the gospel on the other side of the grave. For 1. Scripture speaks not a single word about it. Many passages that have sometimes been brought forward for it, such as Matt. 12:40, John 20:17, Acts 2:24, 27, 31, 13:29, 30, 34–37, 1 Tim. 3:16, have not the least force of proof and deal absolutely not with a preaching of Christ in hell. Ezekiel 16:53–63 also opens no prospect on this; there it is promised by the Lord that He will nevertheless restore Jerusalem in the end and receive it in grace, in spite of the abominations it has committed, which are worse than those of its sisters, Sodom and Samaria. However, to take away all false trust in God's promise and all self-exaltation among Israel, it is added that the Lord will not only turn the captivity of Jerusalem but also that of Sodom and Samaria, vs. 53, so that these also will return to their former state. From this some have concluded to a possibility of conversion in the intermediate state; for Sodom and its sisters, that is, the other cities in the Siddim valley, had all long been destroyed in Ezekiel's days and thus could not be restored to their former state and received by God in grace unless their former inhabitants came to conversion in Sheol through the preaching of the word of God. But this thought lies far outside the text. The Lord promises here only that He will nevertheless receive Jerusalem in grace in spite of its whoredom; and not only that, but Sodom and Samaria, which, according to vs. 61, are clearly types of all the heathen nations, will be restored to their former state, that is, the future will be such that Jerusalem is restored and the heathen cities will be subject to it. There is no mention of a preaching and conversion in Sheol and of a resurrection and return of the former inhabitants.
2. The only passages on which one can appeal with an appearance of right for a preaching of the gospel in Hades are 1 Pet. 3:19–21 and 4:6. But these texts also do not contain what one wants to read in them. Even if there were mention there of a preaching which Christ held after his resurrection to the contemporaries of Noah in Hades, then only this fact would be established thereby but by no means give right to the doctrine that there is in Hades a continuing proclamation of the gospel to all who have not heard it on earth. For indeed, the contemporaries of Noah were precisely not such people who had never heard the word of God during their life on earth; they had scorned the word of Noah, the preacher of righteousness, in willful wickedness and had been disobedient to the voice of the Lord in full consciousness. With them it was thus an entirely special case that gives no right to further conclusions; the aorist ἐκηρυξεν also indicates that this preaching by Christ occurred only once. Furthermore, this preaching could not have been a proclamation of the gospel unto salvation, for if one considers how strictly Scripture always judges all the ungodly and how it always describes the generation of men in Noah's time as given over to all wickedness and unrighteousness, then the thought becomes absurd that Christ precisely to them, in distinction from so many others, would have proclaimed the gospel of salvation. At most there can then be mention of a solemn announcement of his triumph to the inhabitants of the underworld, as the old Lutherans explained the text. Moreover, all sorts of difficulties are connected with such a continuing preaching of the gospel in Hades. According to 1 Pet. 3:18, 19, Christ, specifically after He was quickened and risen, held that preaching. Did He then go locally to Hades with his body? When did He do that? How long did He stay there? And even if all this is possible, however unlikely it is in itself, who then brings that preaching in Hades after that time and now always? Is there then also a church in the underworld? Is there a mission, a calling, an ordination? Are they men or angels, are they the apostles or other ministers of the word, who after their death proclaim the gospel there? The doctrine of a mission institute in Hades comes in all sorts of ways into conflict with Scripture. But it also finds, as was shown earlier, absolutely no support in 1 Pet. 3:18–22. There it is only said that Christ, after his resurrection, being quickened as Spirit, went to heaven and by this his ascension preached to the spirits in prison and made the angels, powers, and authorities subject to himself. Just as little is there mention in 1 Pet. 4:6 of such a preaching of the gospel in Hades. Already the aorist εὐηγγελισθη suggests not a continuing preaching but a definite fact. That proclamation of the gospel took place once, and indeed with the purpose that they who heard it would be judged according to men in the flesh, that is, would die, but according to God live in the spirit. The preaching of the gospel thus preceded dying; the νεκροι are those who are now dead but who in their lifetime heard the gospel. The reason why Peter calls these people νεκροι lies in the preceding verse. There it was said that Christ is ready to judge the living and the dead. Well then, just as to the living now, so formerly to those who are now dead, the gospel was proclaimed, so that they indeed would still die in the flesh but yet now already live in the spirit with God.
3. With these objections, derived from Scripture, the whole doctrine of the preaching of the gospel in the intermediate state already falls. For if Scripture does not contain it, it is not free to Christian theology to present it nevertheless. But there are yet also many other considerations. Assuming that the gospel is still preached in Hades, does that preaching go out to all without distinction? Usually one says no and lets it be brought only to those who did not come to know it here on earth. This is now not only in conflict with their exegesis of 1 Pet. 3:18–22, for if there is mention there of a gospel preaching by Christ in Hades, then this takes place precisely to such as had indeed heard the gospel through Noah, but it also naturally raises the question whether life here on earth is totally indifferent for that preaching of the gospel in Hades. On this also one understandably usually does not dare to give a negative answer, for then this life would be entirely without value or meaning. Therefore one usually says with Clement and Origen that the gospel in the intermediate state is brought only to such as are susceptible to conversion, who have prepared themselves here on earth by their attitude toward the real calling for the believing acceptance of the gospel, cf. for example also Ebrard, Dogm. § 576. In fact, thereby the center of gravity is again shifted to this life, and the gospel proclamation in Hades only brings to light what was already hidden in the hearts here on earth. That is, the decision about salvation and perdition rests not with the gospel but with the real calling, with the law. And this is in essence the same view that was also embraced by the Pelagians, the Socinians, the Deists, etc., namely, that there are three ways to salvation: the law of nature, the law of Moses, and the law of Christ.
4. In addition, the doctrine of a gospel preaching in Hades proceeds from all sorts of incorrect assumptions. Namely, underlying it is that it is God's intention to save all men; that the preaching of the gospel must be absolutely universal; that all men personally and individually must be placed before the choice for or against the gospel; that the decision in that choice lies in the power of man; that original and actual sins are not sufficient to condemn but that only decided unbelief with respect to the gospel makes worthy of eternal perdition, etc. All these assumptions are in conflict with definite statements of Scripture and make the doctrine of the gospel preaching in the intermediate state unacceptable. And if finally it is asked whether it is not hard to believe that all who here on earth entirely without their fault did not hear the gospel are lost, then the answer must be: a. that in this highly serious matter not our feeling but God's word decides; b. that the doctrine of a gospel preaching to the dead does not soften this hardness in the least, since it only benefits those who have already sufficiently prepared themselves here on earth for faith; c. that it even increases the hardness, since it does not think of the interest of the millions of little children who die young and in fact places them outside the possibility of being saved; and d. that it does not reckon with the sovereignty and the omnipotence of God, which can also save without the outward preaching of the word, solely through the inward calling and the regeneration of the Holy Spirit.
12. The State of Deceased Believers. The state of deceased believers, who have not yet reached full holiness here on earth, is thought by Rome to be a cleansing of souls through the punishment of fire. The thought of such a purifying state is of heathen birth and came forth mainly in two shapes. The teaching of soul migration, which is found among the Indians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Jews, and so on, holds that the soul, before it came into the human body, already dwelt in other bodies and also, after it has left the human body, enters into new living forms, to cleanse itself and at last reach fullness. This teaching, however, fights too much with Scripture for it to ever win agreement within the bounds of Christendom other than among a few sects and lone persons. For it goes out from the thought that souls are preexistent, at first had no body, and stand aloof toward all bodies. Furthermore, it fights with the teaching of redemption, which was fulfilled by Christ, and looks upon the cleansing and fulfilling as man's own work. And at last it makes wholly unclear how souls, by ever going over into other bodies, could be freed from sins and brought up to holiness.
More sway on Christian godlore had the other showing, that souls after death must yet for a time be cleansed through sundry punishments, to first thereafter have share in the highest bliss. In Parsism we find the belief that after the overall uprising there follows a three-day cleansing in flowing metal, which for the good is mild but for the evil very painful. The Jews taught that only the fully righteous went straightway to heaven; the others were sent to Gehinnom, which according to some was for all men but in any case for the Jews a purgatory. Since Origen this showing also pressed in among Christians and led there to the teaching of the Roman purgatory or of a cleansing time taken by many Protestants.
At first hearing this thought has much draw. For believers in the twinkling of their dying are all yet beset with sin; even the holiest own but a small beginning of full obedience. This sin, which clings to believers, sits not in the body but in the soul, which therefore cannot enter heaven unless it beforehand is not only freed from the guilt of sin but also fully cleansed from its stain. It is hard to think how this cleansing could suddenly come to pass through or at death. For not only does hallowing in this life go on slowly, but in every field we see no sudden shifts, but stepwise growth and unfolding. All things plead therefore that the souls of believers after death must undergo a cleansing, to first thereafter be taken up into heaven and let in to the beholding of God.
But whatever human reasoning may recommend such a purgatory, the first and in itself already sufficient objection is that Scripture nowhere speaks of it. Indeed, the Roman Catholics cite some texts, but none of them proves the service that is demanded of it. Matthew 5:22 speaks not a word of a purgatory but indeed of Gehenna. To think of the prison in Matthew 5:25 as the purgatory is arbitrary; rather it is an image of Gehenna, for whoever enters it is beforehand condemned by the judge and never has opportunity again to pay off the debt and leave the prison; the "until" in verse 26 indicates an unreachable term.
In Matthew 12:32 Jesus says that the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come. The words "neither in the world to come" serve only to strengthen the unforgivableness of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost and therefore by no means need to assume that some sins can still be forgiven after this life. But even if this were so, this text would still prove nothing for the doctrine of purgatory, for here it speaks of forgiveness of sin, while purgatory is precisely not a place for forgiveness but only a realm for paying off temporal punishments; and the text speaks of forgiveness in the world to come, that is, the time after the parousia, while purgatory falls before that parousia and ceases to exist with the last judgment.
According to 1 Corinthians 3:12-15, the work of the ministers of the church shall have to stand the test on the day of Christ's parousia; whoever has built gold, silver, precious stones upon the foundation Christ, that is, whoever in his office and service has performed good, virtuous work, he shall indeed be tried in his work, but since that work proves resistant to the fire of judgment, he shall receive reward; whoever on the other hand has built wood, hay, stubble upon the foundation, which are not resistant to the fire, he shall be punished, lose his reward, even though he himself is saved through the fire of judgment. Indeed, here then is spoken of a revealing fire (verse 13), a testing fire (verse 13), and a consuming fire (verse 15); but Paul places this fire of judgment in the future of Christ and therefore precisely leaves no room for a purgatory that would now cleanse believers and end before the last judgment. There are no other texts on which Rome can appeal for the doctrine of purgatory, even if only with some appearance of right. Only one place in the apocryphal books of the Old Testament, namely 2 Maccabees 12:42-46, teaches that the Jews of that time deemed offerings and prayers for those who died in sins necessary and good, which indeed is known from elsewhere. But all the more does it deserve attention that this popular belief existing among the Jews is mentioned neither in the Old nor in the New Testament and much less approved.
The doctrine of purgatory is closely connected with that of justification. Rome understands by it the infusion of supernatural, sanctifying grace, which then enables man to do good works and thereby merit eternal life. This grace, however, is susceptible to increase and decrease; whoever loses it through mortal sin and then dies is lost; whoever through keeping precepts and counsels has brought it to perfection at the hour of death goes immediately to heaven; but whoever still has to satisfy the guilt and temporal punishment for a venial sin or whoever, after receiving back the infused grace lost through a mortal sin in penance, yet at his death was still in arrears in paying off the temporal punishments, is referred to purgatory and remains there until he has paid the last penny. Justification, sanctification, glorification is with Rome the work of man himself, albeit on the basis of the supernatural grace infused in him; when he has received this, he must make himself worthy of eternal life and the blessed vision of God in heaven by a merit of condignity; and if he does not bring it so far here on earth, he must, just as the pagans imagined it, continue the begun work hereafter as long as until he has attained perfection. But the Reformation learned again from Scripture the justification of the sinner by faith and therefore had to come to the rejection of the purifying fire. Christ has accomplished all, not only borne the punishment but also by his obedience to the law acquired eternal life for us. And all those benefits which Christ has acquired by his suffering and death and which lie fully perfect in him are immediately the portion of someone as soon as he truly believes. Whoever believes has eternal life. In justification there is imputed to man not only the merit of Christ's passive but also of his active obedience. He receives in that benefit not only forgiveness, impunity, and does not thereby come into the state of Adam before the fall, who with the power given him had to keep the law and merit eternal life. But on the basis of Christ's perfect obedience he immediately has right to eternal life; the holy works which Christ has performed are imputed to him; he does not have to merit eternal life by fulfilling the law but does good works from the principle of eternal life which is already given him in faith. Sanctification is here therefore no self-preparation for heaven, no self-perfection, but nothing other than the unfolding in the believer of what he already has in Christ, a walking in the good works which God has prepared in Christ (Ephesians 2:10). God therefore does not need to wait for any further good works before he can receive the believer into heaven, for in Christ that heaven is immediately opened for everyone who believes. Whoever believes has forgiveness and eternal life, is "ripe" for heaven, and needs neither here nor hereafter to go through a purgatory. Even the suffering which he often still has to bear here on earth and even as a result of sin is no punishment, no penance, no payment of a demand of the law, but a fatherly chastisement which serves for his upbringing.
The only question from the Reformation standpoint is therefore this: when does the believer come into full possession of the benefits given him in Christ? Whoever believes receives these immediately in a juridical sense; he has in Christ right to all the goods of the covenant, to the whole salvation. But on earth he is not yet put in full possession of them; when then does this take place, when does the believer cease to be a pilgrim and arrive in the fatherland? To this Scripture has but one answer: at death. Nowhere does it present the pious as still tormented after death by punishment or suffering for sin. Always the pious express their certain expectation that with death the end of their pilgrimage and the entrance into the eternal, blessed life of heaven is reached (Psalm 73:23, 24; Luke 23:43; Acts 7:59; 2 Corinthians 5:1; Philippians 1:23; 2 Timothy 4:7). After death there is no more sanctification, but a state of holiness enters in which the spirits of the just made perfect (Hebrews 12:23) are clothed with long white robes and stand before the throne and before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9, 14). Of the humble de Saci of Port-Royal it is related that he always stood in the fear of God and therefore dared not hope for immediate blessedness after death but dying exclaimed: O blessed purgatory! But such a state of mind is wholly foreign to the pious of the Old and New Covenant and is only explainable from the fact that someone, looking at himself, has no eye for the finished work of Christ.
In what way the state of holiness enters immediately at the death of the believer is naturally not to be understood nor clearly described. Also the regeneration and sanctification which is worked here on earth by the Holy Ghost is a mystery. But without doubt death serves there as a means. Not in the sense of Platonic dualism, as if the liberation from the body were in itself already the sanctification of the soul, for sin has its seat precisely in the soul. Nor in the sense of sentimental rationalism, which makes man become an angel through death as a messenger of peace, for death in itself is a revelation of God's wrath and a wages of sin. But indeed according to the meaning of Holy Scripture, which sees in death for the believer a dying to sin. For all chastisement serves believers for their profit, that they may be partakers of God's holiness (Hebrews 12:10). Whoever like Christ suffers in the flesh for sin's sake ceases from sin (1 Peter 4:1). But this applies especially to death. The ethical death, that is, dying in fellowship with Christ to sin, has as consequence that one is justified from sin and dead to sin and henceforth lives to God in Christ (Romans 6:6-11; 8:10; 1 Peter 2:24). And this ethical death completes itself in physical death (Romans 7:24; 2 Corinthians 5:1; Philippians 1:21, 23). Death is a violent change, a breaking of all bonds with this earthly life, and an entering into a new world with wholly other relations and conditions. There is nothing strange in God using death, as all suffering, to sanctify the soul of the believer and cleanse it from all stain of sin. Against this it does not count as objection that such a sanctification is mechanical and happens with a leap, for death is the greatest leap one can make, a sudden transference of the believer into the presence of Christ, and thereby a complete destruction of the outward and a total renewal of the inward man.
In addition, the doctrine of purgatory does not make this sanctification of the believer any more understandable. For first, Roman theology must also ascribe to death a similar critical significance as Protestant. For purgatory is not a place where sins are still forgiven, but only a realm where remaining temporal punishments can be paid off. Whoever then has committed venial sins and received no forgiveness for them in this life must become partaker of this in death; and so Roman theologians also teach that the soul dying in venial sins immediately in death receives forgiveness of guilt, in order then in purgatory to satisfy the temporal punishments determined for them. Furthermore, it is not to be seen in what way purgatory effects the sanctification of souls. Apart from the fact that purgatory is mostly described by Roman Catholics as a material fire which therefore can act on the soul only ideally, the question naturally arises how pain alone can sanctify. That would indeed be possible if by means of that torment repentance, humiliation, conversion, faith, love, etc., might be worked in the soul. But that may not be assumed from the Roman standpoint. For purgatory is no mission institute, no conversion establishment, no school for sanctification, but a place of punishment where only temporal punishments are paid off. The poor souls therefore on the one hand can no longer sin and incur new guilt, and on the other hand they cannot improve themselves, for all improvement includes with Rome merit and in purgatory no more can be merited. Of the state of the poor souls in purgatory no good conception can therefore be made. If they are still to be thought of as more or less stained by sin, then from the Roman standpoint it is not understandable that they cannot still sin and even lose again wholly the received grace. If this is excluded, then the souls are in themselves pure and holy and have only still some temporal punishments to bear which they could not satisfy on earth, whereby it is again incomprehensible that perfect righteous ones can still be shut out temporally from heaven and given over to the torment of purgatory. And in both cases it remains a riddle how purgatory can be a purifying fire; it is nothing other than a vindictive fire. Finally, there are still various questions to which the doctrine of purgatory remains owing the answer. The pious of the Old Testament went according to Roman belief to the limbus patrum; is this limbus to be thought of as a purgatory, or was no purgatory necessary for them? And how are they purified who die a short time before the parousia and therefore can no longer come into purgatory, since this ceases to exist with the end of this world? The souls of those who died in earlier centuries have much heavier to account for than those who come later into purgatory, for the possible duration of the torment in purgatory becomes ever shorter. How is this to be reconciled from the Roman standpoint with God's justice and with the purification need of the souls? If one says that as the end of the world approaches, sanctification is the more transferred to the suffering of the present time and to death, then one undermines the doctrine of purgatory in a questionable way and approaches the standpoint which the Reformation took over against this Roman doctrine.
If the doctrine of purgatory is untenable, then therewith also all offering and prayer for the departed falls away of itself. Veneration of the dead by offerings and prayers was customary among the pagans. Intercession for the departed came later into use among the Jews (2 Maccabees 12:40-45) and remained so to the present day. In the Christian church the custom soon arose to wish the departed peace, light, refreshment and to remember them in prayers and at the celebration of the Lord's Supper. In the first time this took place with regard to all who died in the Lord without distinction and these offerings and sacrifices were celebrated only for their commemoration. But gradually distinction was made between those souls which were immediately received into heaven and others which still had to tarry a time in purgatory. Communion with the first was then gradually exercised by invocation and veneration, that with the second by intercessions, good works, indulgences, and soul masses. In the Old Catholic sense, as prayer to God that he might increase the blessedness of those fallen asleep in Christ and accept their prayers for the living, and at the same time as commemoration of and communion with the departed, intercession for the dead was also approved by the Greeks, many Anglicans, the Lutherans, Grotius, and by many newer theologians. But the Reformed rejected intercession for the departed because their lot was unchangeably decided at death. In Old or New Testament there is also not a word of such intercession. The only place on which one can appeal is 1 Corinthians 15:29, where Paul mentions those who are baptized for the dead. However, it cannot be derived from this that such a baptism was undergone by the living so that it might benefit the departed. For there is no single proof that such a custom occurred in Paul's time or later. Indeed, Tertullian and others report that this custom was found among the followers of Cerinthus and Marcion, but first the accuracy of this report is by no means above all doubt, and second it would follow that it was a heretical custom which never existed or found entrance in the Christian church. Whoever wanted to let this text count as proof for the right to pray for the dead would first have to begin by baptizing living ones for the benefit of the departed. However, Paul also does not say that the living let themselves be baptized for the dead so that that baptism might benefit the departed. The dead are presented by Paul as the motive why the living let themselves be baptized. Because those who had fallen asleep in Christ would rise, therefore for their sake, on their behalf, the living believers let themselves be baptized. The apostle expresses no other thought than this, that baptism presupposes faith in the resurrection of Christ and the believers; take away the resurrection and baptism becomes a vain ceremony. Intercession for the departed therefore finds not the least ground in Scripture, as indeed Tertullian already acknowledged. For after he had spoken in De corona militis chapter 3 of various church customs and thereby also of offerings for the departed, he added in chapter 4: of these and other such disciplines, if you demand the law of the Scriptures, you will find none; tradition is presented to you as author, custom as confirmer, and faith as observer. Because there is no precept of the Father, one must content oneself with the institution of the mother, that is, of the church, which thus again comes to stand beside and above God's Word. Since thus intercession for the departed cannot stand before Scripture, the question of its usefulness and comfort no longer applies. Yet these are also hard to point out. For although it seems beautiful that the living can help the departed by their intercessions and make good what they perhaps misdid toward them during their life; in fact this church practice leads Christian piety into a wholly wrong track. It makes it appear as if in conflict with Matthew 8:22 care for the dead is of higher value than love for the living; it ascribes to one's own works and prayers a meritorious, satisfactory power which even exercises its effect on the other side of the grave and there can benefit the departed; it is built on and promotive of the doctrine of purgatory, which on the one hand, especially among the rich, nourishes carelessness and on the other hand perpetuates the uncertainty of believers; it weakens in Christian consciousness the faith in the sufficiency of the offering and intercession of Christ.
Calvin, Institutes III 5. Polanus, Syntagma Theologiae VII 25. Chamier, Panstratia Catholica Tome III book 26. Ames, Bellarminus Enervatus Tome II book 5. Voetius, Disputationes II 1240. Forbes of Corse, Instructiones Historico-Theologicae book XIII. Gerhard, Loci XXVI 181 sq. Quenstedt, Theologia IV 555. Kliefoth, Eschatologie, 82 f. Charles H. H. Wright, The Intermediate State and Prayers for the Dead, Examined in the Light of Scripture and of Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature, London: Nisbet, 1900.
13. The Communion of Saints. Though there is no place for the worship of saints or for intercession for the departed, there is and remains an unbreakable fellowship between the church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven. The believers on earth, when they became Christians, have joined the heavenly Jerusalem, which is above and is the mother of us all; to the innumerable company of angels, who there serve and praise God; to the assembly of the firstborn, that is, of the pious of the Old Covenant, who are enrolled in heaven and have received citizenship there; to the spirits of the righteous, that is, of the Christians who have already fallen asleep and have attained perfection, the consummation; to Christ, the mediator of the New Testament, and to God, the judge of all creatures, Heb. 12:22-24. This fellowship does not imply that there must be direct intercourse between the members of the church militant and the church triumphant; for although this is also lacking between different people and nations in various times and places, yet humanity is an organism, sprung from one blood. The personal fellowship that each believer has here on earth is limited to a few persons, but nevertheless he is a member of the one, holy, catholic, Christian church. The unity that binds all believers, both the departed and the living, together lies in Christ, and through Him in fellowship with the same Father, in the possession of the same Spirit, in the participation in the same covenant blessings. The love that remains, even when faith and hope vanish, keeps all believers united with Christ and with one another. And that love expresses itself on our part in that we remember the saints who have gone before us with reverence, that we speak worthily of them, that we follow them in faith and good works, and spurred on by their example, run with patience the race that is set before us, that we feel and live as one with them in the expectation of going to them, that with them and all creatures we magnify the name of the Lord.
Among the forms in which the fellowship of the church militant with the church triumphant manifests itself, the hope of reunion takes a broad place. There has been dreadful misuse of this by rationalism; it seemed as if the blessedness of heaven consisted not in fellowship with Christ but in the sentimental enjoyment of one another's presence. But nevertheless, there is a good, true thought in it. The hope of reunion on the other side of the grave is wholly natural, truly human, and also in agreement with Holy Scripture. For it teaches no bare immortality of shadowy souls, but eternal life of individual human beings. Regeneration does not erase individuality, personality, character, but sanctifies them and places them in the service of God's name. The church is the new humanity, which bears all kinds of shades and distinctions within itself and reveals the richest diversity in unity. The joy of heaven therefore lies indeed first of all in fellowship with Christ, but next also in the fellowship of the blessed with one another. And just as this on earth, though always imperfect here, does not infringe upon the fellowship of believers with Christ but rather confirms and enriches it, so it is also in heaven. The highest thing that Paul desired was to depart and be with Christ, Phil. 1:23; 1 Thess. 4:17. But Jesus himself presents the joy of heaven under the image of a banquet, where all sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Matt. 8:11; cf. Luke 13:28. The hope of reunion is therefore not wrong in itself, if it remains subordinate to the longing for fellowship with Christ.
And on the other hand, it is also no absurd thought that the blessed in heaven long for the believers who are on earth. For they retain the memory of the persons and circumstances they knew on earth, Luke 16:27-31. The souls under the altar cry out for vengeance on the blood that has been shed, Rev. 6:10. The bride, that is, the whole church both in heaven and on earth, prays for the coming of the Lord Jesus, Rev. 22:17. Although Scripture gives us no right to believe that the blessed in heaven know everything that happens here on earth, yet it is probable that they know at least as much of the church militant on earth as this knows of them. And that little, joined to the knowledge they possess from memory and which perhaps is continually expanded by communications from angels and the newly departed, is sufficient to make them think continually with interest of this earth and of the mighty struggle that is being fought here. Added to this is the fact that the state of the blessed in heaven, however glorious, still bears a provisional character for various reasons. For they are now only in heaven and limited to that heaven, and not yet in possession of the earth, whose inheritance is promised to them along with that of heaven. Furthermore, they are deprived of the body, and this bodiless existence is not, as dualism must suppose, a gain but a loss, no increase but a diminution of being, since the body belongs to the essence of man. And finally, the part cannot be perfect without the whole; only in the fellowship of all the saints is the fullness of Christ's love known, Eph. 3:18; one group of believers cannot attain the consummation without the other, Heb. 11:40. Therefore, there is still room among the blessed in heaven for faith and hope, for longing and prayer, Rev. 6:10; 22:17. Just as the believers on earth, they reach out toward the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the restoration of all things. Then first is the end attained, 1 Cor. 15:24.
This thought stands so much in the foreground in Scripture that the intermediate state shrinks to a short span of time, which does not come into consideration at all at the final judgment. Nowhere is it said that what the departed do in that intermediate state will also be judged on the last day before the judgment seat of Christ. The judgment pertains exclusively to what has been done in the body, whether good or evil, 2 Cor. 5:10; the universal judgment is in that respect identical with the particular judgment. From this, however, it cannot be inferred with Kliefoth, Eschatologie 61-66, that after death the souls live outside of time and space and are deprived of all development or progress. For although there is certainly no development as on earth, and still less is there to be thought of a possible change for better or worse, yet a true existence and life of the souls without activity is not possible, unless one considers them sunk in unconscious sleep. For the departed remain finite and limited beings and cannot exist otherwise than in space and time. The dimensions of space and the calculations of time are without doubt on the other side of the grave wholly different from those here on earth, where miles and hours are our measure. But even the souls that dwell there do not become eternal and omnipresent like God; they must, like the angels, have a definite location, cannot be in two places at once, and are always somewhere in a particular place, in paradise, in heaven, etc. And likewise they are not above all form of time, that is, above all succession of moments, for they have a past which they remember, a present in which they live, and a future which they go to meet. The rich man knows that his brothers still live, Luke 16:28; the souls under the altar look forward to the day of vengeance, Rev. 6:10; the bride longs for the coming of Christ, Rev. 22:17; they who have come out of the tribulation serve God day and night, Rev. 7:15; and those who have worshiped the beast have no rest day and night, Rev. 14:11.
If now the souls exist in any form of space and time, they also cannot be thought of without all activity. Indeed, Jesus says that in the night of death no one can work, John 9:4, and the heavenly blessedness is often set forth in Scripture as a resting, Hebrews 4:9, Revelation 14:13. But just as it does not clash with each other that God rested from his work of creation, Genesis 2:2, and yet always works, John 5:17, or that Christ had finished his work on earth, John 17:4, and yet in heaven prepares a place for his own, John 14:3; just so it does not shut out the one from the other, that the believers rest from their works and yet serve God in his temple. Their work on earth is done, but for that reason they still have other works to do in heaven. Scripture teaches this clearly. Those who have fallen asleep in the Lord are with Jesus, Philippians 1:23, stand before the throne of God and of the Lamb, Revelation 7:9, 15, cry out and pray, praise and serve, Revelation 6:10, 7:10, 15, 22:17. Besides, if they have awareness and know God, Christ, the angels, each other, then they thereby of themselves carry out workings of understanding and of will, grow in knowledge and are strengthened in love. As Paul can say that the believers on earth, by beholding the glory of the Lord in the mirror of his word, are changed into his likeness from glory to glory, 2 Corinthians 3:18; how much more will that be the case, when they are let in to his near presence and see him face to face? There is no change of state; there is also no unfolding in an earthly sense; even no hallowing, like in the fighting church, for holiness itself is the share of all. But just as Adam before the fall and Christ as man, though fully holy, yet could grow in grace and wisdom, so there is in heaven an ongoing strengthening of state, an ever more likeness to the image of the Son, a never-ending upgrowing in the knowledge and love of God. And with that each has his own task and place. The Romans take it that the godly of the Old Testament after their death stayed in the limbus patrum and from there were first set free by Christ at his going down to hell; and at the same time they think that the unbaptized dying children neither in hell nor in heaven but in a separate holding place, the limbus infantum, are taken up. But for neither of these holding places is there ground in Scripture. Indeed it speaks for itself, that whoever loses sight of the oneness of the covenant of grace and takes the blessings won by Christ as a new stuff that did not exist before, must let the godly of the Old Testament wait in the limbus patrum for this winning and sharing of Christ's blessings. But whoever owns the oneness of the covenant, and takes the blessings of Christ as the good favor of God, which with an eye to Christ could already be given out before his suffering and dying, that one has no need of a limbus patrum. The way to heavenly blessedness was under the Old the same as under the New Testament, though there is also difference in the light whereby the believers then and now walk. And just so there is on the other side of the grave no place for a limbus infantum; for the children of the covenant, baptized or unbaptized, dying go into heaven; and over the lot of the others so little is opened to us, that we do best to hold back from a firm judgment, cf. B. B. Warfield, The development of the doctrine of infant salvation, in his Two Studies in the history of doctrine, New York 1897. But yet there lies in the limbus patrum and infantum this true thought, that there are different degrees both in the punishment of the godless and in the blessedness of the godly. There is difference of rank and working in the world of angels. There is manifoldness among all creatures and richest among men. There is difference of place and task in the church of Christ; to each believer here on earth his own gift is given and his own task laid on. And at death each one's works follow him who falls asleep in the Lord. Without doubt this manifoldness in heaven is not wiped out but on the contrary cleansed of all the sinful and richest multiplied, Luke 19:17-19. Yet this difference in degree takes nothing from the blessedness which each enjoys after his measure. For all dwell with the same Lord, 2 Corinthians 5:8, are taken up into the same heaven, Revelation 7:9, enjoy the same rest, Hebrews 4:9, and find their joy in the same service of God, Revelation 7:15.
1. Just as it is appointed unto men once to die, so also must there once come an end to the history of the world. Not only religion, but also science has at all times been convinced of this. A few, such as Aristotle in ancient times and Czolbe, Friedrich Mohr, and others in modern times, have indeed thought that this world was eternal and had neither beginning nor end. But the untenableness of this opinion is now generally admitted; there are many considerations that raise the finite duration of the world above all doubt. The rotational speed of the earth decreases, according to calculation, by at least one second in 600,000 years; however small this may be, after billions of years it still brings about a reversal in the relation of day and night on earth, which puts an end to all life. Furthermore, the rotation of the earth is continually slowed by the influence of ebb and flow, since these displace parts of the earth and reduce the store of kinetic energy; therefore, the earth continually approaches the sun and must finally disappear into it. Next, the space in which the planets move is not absolutely empty but filled with ether or rarefied air, which, however weak, hinders the motion, reduces the rotational speed, causes the orbits of the planets to shrink, and thus brings them ever closer to the sun. Moreover, the sun cannot last forever; whether it produces its heat by falling meteors or by continual contraction or by chemical actions, it gradually consumes that heat, reduces its volume, contracts, and meets its end; according to Thompson, the diameter of the sun would decrease annually by 35 meters, and since it has already shone for 20 million years, it could exist for only another 10 million years. For kinetic energy can indeed be converted into heat, but heat no longer into kinetic energy, unless it flows out onto a colder body. Thus, when the temperature is once equal everywhere, the conversion of heat ceases, and the end of things is reached. The question is only which of the two, the sun or the earth, will hold out the longest; if the sun, then the earth will finally be devoured by it, and everything ends in burning; if the earth, then all heat will once cease, and life will perish in the death of freezing. In addition, there are all sorts of other grounds for the finitude of the world; the water of the earth must continually decrease because of its chemical affinity with minerals; water and oxygen are increasingly bound to solid substances; the products of the earth, coal, wood, peat, foodstuffs, diminish; the earth, however rich, will one day be exhausted, and this all the sooner as the human race increases and the danger of overpopulation threatens. Therefore, on the standpoint of science, there is absolutely no place for an optimistic expectation concerning the future. Yet many have given themselves over to it and dreamed of a steady progress and a future paradise of humanity in this world. Humanists and materialists vie with one another in cherishing such illusions, consider their bread-prophecies warranted by the principle of cosmic evolution, and judge that through the increase of ideal goods, such as science, art, morality, or through progress in material welfare, through abundance of food and shelter and clothing, the happiness of humanity will one day be fully attained. Kant, Lessing, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, and others deemed a future imminent in which the ethical kingdom of God would embrace all, the Enlightenment would be the portion of all, and humanity the principle of all life. Even Darwin, at the close of his book on the Origin of Species and in the last chapter of his Descent of Man, expresses the hope that man, who from his animal origin has already climbed so high, goes toward a still higher destiny in a distant future. In that future, according to Pierson, marriage will no longer be desired by the noblest, but man will associate with woman as with his sister, and lust will no longer be the death of the zest for life, or according to others, marriage among a highly civilized people will in time take the form of a double marriage, and two friends will jointly marry two women. Still more extravagant are the expectations of the socialists, these chiliasts of unbelief, who think that in the future state according to their model all sin and strife will have vanished, and a carefree, contented life will be the privilege of all. But, as has been said, there is not much ground for such expectations. And even if a time of greater prosperity and greater happiness for humanity should dawn, what would be the benefit of it if all development, as science teaches, must finally succumb to death? Friedrich von Hellwald, at the close of his Cultural History, knows not the least answer to give to the question, what has it all been for, why has man with his struggling and striving, his civilization and development existed. And Otto Henne am Rhyn ends his Cultural History with the prediction that all humanity with its culture will one day disappear without trace; one day everything we have done will be found nowhere anymore; and he can console himself against this only with the thought that it will still be a long time before it comes to that. Whoever lives without God and without Christ, and must expect everything from this world, from immanent, cosmic powers, is also without hope in the world. Even culture cannot be thought of as endless. Billions of years can indeed be arbitrarily assumed in the past or future of the world but cannot be concretely thought of, filled with history. If, for example, humanity were once a thousand million years old, a textbook on world history that treated a century on ten pages would form no fewer than two hundred thousand volumes, each volume reckoned at five hundred pages, or still twenty thousand volumes if only one page were devoted to each century, or still five hundred volumes if no more than one line were dedicated to each century. And so it would be with all that forms the content of our culture. Man and humanity are finite, and therefore their civilization cannot be thought of as endless. An infinite time is as much an absurdity for the earth as for our race, one that is even more palpable than the folly of the millions of years known to us from pagan mythologies. On the standpoint of science, there is much more ground to accept the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, which places the redemption of the world in the combating of the alogical will by the logical representation, in the absolute denial of the will, that is, in the destruction of the world itself. But even then there is not the least guarantee that the absolute will will not proceed to another world process and always begin again from the beginning unto infinity. Many Greek philosophers held that many other worlds had preceded this one and many others would follow it; the Pythagoreans and Stoics even judged that everything would return exactly as it existed on this world and had in former ones; and even now many, for example, Haeckel, have returned to such sentiments, although Windelband rightly calls it a painful thought that in the periodic recurrence of all things the personality with all its doing and suffering should also return. Cf. Lange, History of Materialism. Pesch, The Great World Riddles. Mühlhäusser, The Future of Humanity. Reiff, The Future of the World. Fürer, World End and Final Judgment. Siebeck, Philosophy of Religion. Caro, The Question of Progress, in his Problems of Social Morality. Orr, Christian View.
2. Religion has never reconciled itself with this idea of an endless development or of a complete downfall of the world. Various reasons held it back from adopting these philosophical theories. For it is beyond contradiction that all such notions do wrong to the worth of the personhood and sacrifice it to the whole. Furthermore, they overlook the meaning of the religious-moral life and place it far below culture. And finally, they build for the present and for the future only on the strengths that are immanent in the cosmos and reckon not at all with a godly might that governs the world and at last, by straightforward meddling, makes it answer to the goal set by Him. All religions therefore have another outlook for the future. They all know, in more or less clear measure, a strife between good and evil; all cherish the hope of the victory of the good, wherein the upright are rewarded and the godless punished; and mostly they deem that future reachable only through a showing of above-natural strengths. In the Persian religion, even at the end of the third world period, the appearing of the third son of Zarathustra, Sosiosh, was awaited, who would lead in a thousand-year peace realm and fulfill the redeeming work of his father. And among the Muslims, alongside the belief in the return of Jesus, there slowly arose the awaiting of a Mahdi, who would lead the believers back into the golden time of the "four righteous Caliphs." Among Israel, the outlook concerning the future was built on the groundwork of the covenant that God had set up with Abraham and his seed. For this covenant bears an everlasting stamp and is not undone by man's unfaithfulness. Already in the law, God witnesses time and again to the folk of Israel that He, when it breaks His covenant, will visit it with the heaviest punishments but thereafter will yet again have mercy on it. When Israel, because of its sins, shall be scattered among the folks and its land laid waste, then the Lord in that time, by taking in other folks, will stir Israel to jealousy and thereafter turn it and lead it back into its land, bless it with all kinds of ghostly and bodily blessings, and wreak vengeance on all its foes, Lev. 26, Deut. 4:23-31, 30:1-10, 32:15-43. After the promise to David's house that it would be steadfast and his seat firm unto everlasting, 2 Sam. 7:16, 23:5, 1 Chr. 17:14, in the outlook concerning Israel's future this element gains ever more meaning, that the turning and restoring of Israel will come about only through the anointed king from David's line. In prophecy, these thoughts are unfolded more broadly and take on, despite the ownness that they bear with each of the prophets, ever firmer shapes.
In the expectation which the Old Testament fosters concerning the future of the people of God, the following moments are clearly to be distinguished.
All the prophets proclaim 1º to Israel and Judah a day of judgment and of punishment . The day of the Lord, that is, the time in which the Lord shall have mercy upon his people and take vengeance upon his enemies, was understood by the prophets wholly otherwise than by the people. The people misused this expectation and thought that the Lord, regardless of their spiritual state, would protect them against all danger, Amos 5:18, 6:13, Jeremiah 29, Ezekiel 33:23ff. But the prophets said that the day of the Lord would also be for Israel a day of judgment; the people would go into exile and their land would be given up to destruction, Amos 2:4ff., 5:16, 18, 27, 6:14 etc., Hosea 1:6, 2:11, 3:4, 8:13, 9:3, 6, 10:6, 11:5, 13:12, 14:1, Joel 2:1ff., Micah 3:12, 4:10, 7:13, Zephaniah 1:1-18, Habakkuk 1:5-11, Isaiah 2:11ff., 5:5ff., 7:18ff., Jeremiah 1:11-16 etc. But yet, that punishment is 2º temporary . It comes to an end after many days, Hosea 3:3, after a few days, that is, after a short time, 6:2, after seventy years, Jeremiah 25:12, 29:10, after three hundred and ninety years for Israel and forty years for Judah, Ezekiel 4:4ff. God chastens his people with measure, Isaiah 27:7ff., Jeremiah 30:11. He forsakes it only for a little while; his anger is small, but his lovingkindness is eternal, Isaiah 54:7, 8. He loves his people with an everlasting love, and therefore will again have mercy, Micah 7:19, Jeremiah 31:3, 20. He cannot destroy his people, though he shake it as in a sieve, Amos 9:8, 9. His repentance is kindled within him, Hosea 11:8. He remembers his covenant, Ezekiel 16:60. He will deliver his people, not for Israel's sake, but for his name's sake, for his glory among the Gentiles, Deuteronomy 32:27, Isaiah 43:25, 48:9, Ezekiel 36:22. At the end of the time of punishment, God sends 3º the Messiah from the house of David. Obadiah speaks still in general of saviors who shall protect the community that has escaped on Zion, vs. 17, 21, cf. Jeremiah 23:4, 33:17, 20, 21, 22, 26. Amos says that God after the judgment over Israel will raise up again the fallen tabernacle of David, 9:11. Hosea expects that the children of Israel will return and seek the Lord and also David their king, 1:11, 3:5, cf. Jeremiah 30:9, Ezekiel 34:23, 24, 37:22-24. Micah prophesies that Israel will not be delivered from the power of the enemies until the Ruler shall be born from the Davidic royal house in Bethlehem, 5:1, 2. That he shall come forth not from Jerusalem but, like David himself, from Bethlehem, proves that the Davidic royal house has lost the throne and has fallen into a state of lowliness. Isaiah says therefore that a twig shall come forth from the stump of Jesse, 11:1, 2, and Ezekiel expresses the same thought thus, that the Lord will take from the topmost branch of the high cedar a small, tender twig, 17:22. God will cause him to sprout forth as a branch to the house of David, Isaiah 4:2, Jeremiah 23:5, 6, 33:14-17, so that he also bears the name of Branch thereafter, Zechariah 3:8, 6:12. Born in Israel's time of suffering, this Davidide shall grow up in poor circumstances, Isaiah 7:14-17; he is a king, but righteous, meek, humble, and therefore riding upon the foal of an ass, Zechariah 9:9; with the kingly he combines the prophetic, Deuteronomy 18:15, Isaiah 11:2, 40-66, Malachi 4:5, and the priestly dignity, Isaiah 53, Jeremiah 30:21, Zechariah 3, 6:13, Psalm 110; the kingdom which he comes to establish is a kingdom of righteousness and peace, Isaiah 11, 40-66, Micah 5:9, Psalm 72, 110; he is and procures himself the righteousness and the salvation for his people, Isaiah 11, 42, 53, Jeremiah 23:5, 6, Psalm 72 etc. His appearance therefore does not first take place after the day of judgment, but precedes it; Judah is first delivered when God shall give to David a branch, Isaiah 9:1-16, 11:1ff., Jeremiah 23:5, 6, 33:14-17. Among the benefits 4º which by this Anointed One shall be bestowed upon his people belongs first of all the return from the land of exile. Land, people, king, and God belong together; the restoration of Israel therefore begins with return from exile, Amos 9:14, Hosea 11:11, Micah 4:6, Joel 3:1, Isaiah 11:11, Jeremiah 3:18, Ezekiel 11:17 etc. This return shall according to the depiction of Isaiah be extraordinarily glorious; the wilderness shall blossom as a rose, mountains shall be made low and valleys filled; there shall be a highway on which even the blind cannot go astray, 35:1-9, 41:17-20, 42:15, 16, 43:19, 20 etc. In this return both Israel and Judah shall share, Amos 9:9-15, Hosea 1:11, 14:2-9, Isaiah 11:13, Jeremiah 3:6, 18, 31:27, 32:37-40, Ezekiel 37:17, 47:13, 21, 48:1-7, 23-29. But the return from the Babylonian captivity corresponded to this expectation only very partially. The post-exilic prophets therefore see in that return only a beginning of the fulfillment of the promises, detach their expectation from a return from exile, and speak, except Zechariah 8:13, no more of the ten tribes; the returned ones regarded themselves as the representation of the whole Israel, Ezra 6:17. Nevertheless, all the prophets conceive 5º the return from exile at the same time in an ethical sense, as a conversion of Israel. Gathering from the nations and circumcision of the heart go together, Deuteronomy 30:3-6. By no means all shall return and convert to the Lord; many, the most, shall perish in the judgment which the day of the Lord shall also bring over Israel. The Lord will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, but he will yet shake it as in a sieve and cause the sinners to die by the sword, Amos 9:8-10. When the Lord brings back Israel and Judah, he will first lead them into the wilderness and there enter into judgment with them and purge out the ungodly, Hosea 2:13, Ezekiel 20:34ff. Many men shall then fall, so that seven women shall lay hold on one man, Isaiah 3:25-4:1. The destruction is firmly decreed, only a remnant shall return, Isaiah 4:13, 6:13, 7:3, 10:21, 11:11. The Lord shall thresh the children of Israel and then gather them one by one, Isaiah 27:12. He shall destroy the proud, but leave a poor and needy people, Zephaniah 3:21, and preserve his work in life, Habakkuk 3:2. One from a city and two from a family shall be brought back, Jeremiah 3:14, two parts shall be cut off but the third part refined, Zechariah 13:8, 9. But these remnants shall then be to the Lord a holy people, which he espouses to himself in eternity, Hosea 1:10, 12, 2:15, 18, 22, Isaiah 4:3, 4, 11:9. The Lord forgives them all iniquity, washes them from all their uncleanness, gives them a new heart, pours out his Spirit upon all, causes all idolatry and sorcery to disappear from their midst, and establishes a new covenant with them, Micah 5:11-14, Joel 2:28, Isaiah 44:21-23, 43:25, Jeremiah 31:31, Ezekiel 11:19, 36:25-28, 37:14, Zechariah 13:2 etc. An unclean one shall no more be among them, Isaiah 52:1, 11, 12; all are righteous, Isaiah 60:21, who, taught by God, know him, trust in his name, and do no injustice or speak lies, Isaiah 54:13, Jeremiah 31:31, Zephaniah 3:12, 13. All shall be holy there, even to the bells of the horses, Zechariah 14:20, 21. For the glory of the Lord is risen upon them, Zechariah 2:5, Isaiah 60:1, and God himself dwells among them, Obadiah 21, Joel 3:17, Hosea 2:22, Zechariah 2:10, 8:8 etc. These spiritual benefits include 6º for the Old Testament prophecy the expectation of the restoration of temple and worship . According to Obadiah there shall be deliverance on Zion; there dwell the saviors who shall protect Israel and judge its enemies, vs. 17, 21. Joel prophesies that the Lord shall dwell on Zion, his holy mountain, and that Jerusalem shall be a holy place, no more accessible to strangers and eternal in duration, 3:17, 20. Amos expects that the cities of Palestine shall be rebuilt and inhabited and Israel no more driven out from there, 9:14, 15. Micah proclaims that, though Zion shall be plowed as a field and Jerusalem become heaps of stone, 3:12, yet the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established on the top of the mountains, that from Zion the law shall go forth and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, and that the Lord shall dwell on Zion, 4:1, 2, 7, 7:11. The same thought is expressed by Isaiah, 2:2, who further adds that Zion and Jerusalem, kingship and priesthood, temple and altar, offerings and feast days shall be restored, 28:16, 30:19, 33:5, 35:10, 52:1, 56:6, 7, 60:7, 61:6, 66:20-23. Likewise Jeremiah expects that Jerusalem shall be rebuilt, the throne of the Lord established there, and the worship in the temple renewed, 3:16, 17, 30:18, 31:38, 33:18,21. Haggai predicts that the glory of the second temple shall be greater than that of the first, 2:6-10, and Zechariah proclaims that Jerusalem shall be rebuilt and enlarged, that priesthood and temple shall be renewed, and that God shall dwell in Jerusalem in the midst of his people, 1:17, 2:1-5, 3:1-8, 6:9-15, 8:3ff. But by none of the prophets is this picture of the future so minutely elaborated as by Ezekiel. After he has said in chapters 34-37 that Israel and Judah shall again be gathered by the Lord, taken as one people under the one shepherd from the house of David to be his possession and endowed with a new heart and a new spirit, and then in chapters 38 and 39 has predicted that Israel, returned to its land, has yet to endure one last attack from Gog of Magog, he gives in chapters 40-48 a detailed drawing of the Palestine of the future. The land on the west side of the Jordan shall be divided by parallel lines into nearly equal strips. The upper seven shall be inhabited by the tribes Dan, Asher, Naphtali, Manasseh, Ephraim, Reuben, Judah, and the lower five by Benjamin, Simeon, Issachar, Zebulun, and Gad. Between these upper and lower parts of the land a strip of land is set apart for the Lord. In the midst of this strip, 25,000 cubits wide and long, lies a high mountain; and upon it is built the temple filled with the glory of the Lord, which measures 500 cubits square and is surrounded by a space of 500 cubits on each side. Around it the priests, who must all be sons of Zadok, receive in the south and the Levites in the north their dwelling place of 25,000 cubits length and 10,000 cubits breadth, while in the east and west a portion of the holy strip is assigned to the prince. The city Jerusalem is separated from the temple and lies south of the land assigned to the priests, in a plain of 25,000 cubits length and 5,000 cubits breadth. On each side of the city there are in the wall three gates, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. On the great feasts all Israel comes to the temple to offer, but access to the temple is forbidden to the Gentiles. If Israel so lives according to God's ordinances, it shall enjoy rich blessing; from under the threshold of the temple door flows a stream which continually deepens, makes the land fruitful and even heals the water of the Dead Sea; and on its banks stand trees whose fruits are for food and whose leaves are for healing.
To these spiritual benefits come, 7th, all sorts of material blessings .
Israel shall dwell in safety under the Prince of Peace from David's house. War shall be no more; bow and sword shall be broken, Hos. 2:17; horses and chariots shall be cut off, strongholds destroyed, Mic. 5:9, 10; swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and all shall sit under their vine and fig tree, Isa. 2:4, Mic. 4:3, 4; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and He is their strength, Obad. 21, Joel 3:16, 17. The land shall receive an extraordinary fruitfulness, so that the mountains shall drip with sweet wine and the hills flow with milk; a fountain going out from the house of the Lord shall water the dry land and turn the wilderness into an Eden; the evil beasts shall be driven away, foes shall no more rob the harvest, and all trees, refreshed in due season by gentle rain, shall bear fruit abundantly, Amos 9:13, 14, Hos. 2:17, 20, 21, 14:6, Joel 3:18, Isa. 32:15-20, 51:3, 60:17, 18, 62:8, 9, 65:9, 22, Jer. 31:6, 12-14, Ezek. 34:14, 25, 26, 29, 36:29, 47:1-12, Zech. 8:12, 14:8, 10. There shall even be a great change in all of nature; the animals shall receive another nature, Isa. 11:6-8, 65:25; heaven and earth shall be renewed, and the former things no more remembered, Isa. 34:4, 51:6, 65:17, 66:22; sun and moon shall be changed, the light of the moon shall be as the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold stronger, Isa. 30:26; yes, sun and moon shall cease, it shall be one single day, for the Lord shall be an everlasting light, Isa. 60:19, 20, Zech. 14:6, 7. And also in the world of men the change shall be great. When Israel is gathered, Palestine shall resound with people, Mic. 2:12, 13; the seed of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, and especially that of David's house and of the Levites shall be multiplied, Hos. 1:10, Isa. 9:2, Jer. 3:16, 33:22. Because of the multitude of people and beasts, Jerusalem shall not be measurable and must be inhabited as villages, Zech. 2:1-4. This wondrous increase has various causes. Many Israelites shall, when a part is already brought back, come to Jerusalem and wish to share in Israel's blessing, Zech. 2:4-9, 8:7, 8, Jer. 3:14, 16, 18; yes, when the Lord's messengers make that blessing known among the Gentiles, these shall bring the Israelites still dwelling among them to Jerusalem in wagons and litters, with horses, mules, and swift beasts, Isa. 66:19, 20. Furthermore, the dead Israelites shall also share in those blessings. All Israel can be said to be brought back from death to life, Hos. 6:2, 13:14, Isa. 25:8, Ezek. 37:1-14; but specifically Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2 proclaim that the slain Israelites shall rise and at least in part awake to everlasting life. And finally, all citizens of the kingdom of God shall reach a high age. There shall no more be an infant of few days, nor an old man who does not fill his days, for he who dies as a youth shall be a hundred years old, and the sinner who dies at a hundred years shall be thought to be stricken by a curse for his sin and therefore to have died so young, Isa. 65:20; cf. Zech. 8:4, 5. There shall also be no more sickness, no mourning or crying, 25:8, 30:19, 65:19; yes, the Lord shall destroy death and swallow it up in victory, 25:8. Finally, 8th, in that blessing of the kingdom of God the Gentiles shall also share. Through all the Old Testament prophecy runs the thought that God will avenge the blood of His servants on His enemies. To various peoples—Philistia, Tyre, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Assyria, Babylon—the prophets therefore announce God's judgments. But those judgments serve not for destruction but for the salvation of the Gentiles; in Abraham's seed all nations of the earth shall be blessed. Indeed, in one prophet the political side of this subjection of the Gentiles under Israel comes more to the fore, and in another the religious, spiritual side. But all expect that the dominion of the Messiah shall extend to all peoples; cf. Ps. 2, 21, 24, 45, 46, 47, 48, 68, 72, 86, 89, 96, 98, etc. Israel shall inherit the Gentiles, Amos 9:12, Obad. 17-21; they shall indeed be judged, Joel 3:2-15, but whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved, for on Zion there is deliverance, 2:32. The Ruler from Bethlehem shall be great to the ends of the earth and protect Israel against its enemies, Mic. 5:3ff., but the Gentiles shall yet go to Zion to learn the ways of the Lord, 4:1, 2. After the Lord has destroyed all the gods of the nations, Zeph. 2:4-11, 3:8, the isles of the Gentiles shall bow before Him, and He shall give to all peoples pure lips to call upon His name, 2:11, 3:9. Ethiopia shall bring gifts to the Lord in Zion, Isa. 18:7; Egyptians and Assyrians shall serve Him, 19:18-25; Tyre shall yield her gain to the Lord, 23:15-18; and to all peoples He shall prepare a feast of fat things on Zion, 25:6-10; yes, the servant of the Lord shall also be a light to the Gentiles, make the glory of the Lord known among the nations of the earth through His messengers, and be served by them; the house of the Lord shall be a house of prayer for all peoples; all shall bring offerings there, worship the Lord and call themselves by His name, and pasture Israel's flocks and build its fields, while the Israelites as priests can devote themselves wholly to the service of Jehovah, 40-66 passim. When Israel is restored and Jerusalem is the throne of the Lord, all Gentiles shall be gathered there for the name of the Lord, bless themselves in the Lord, and glory in Him, Jer. 3:17, 4:2, 16:19-21, 33:9. All nations shall at last acknowledge that the Lord is God, Ezek. 16:61, 17:24, 25:5ff., 26:6, 28:22, 29:6, 30:8ff. All Gentiles shall bring their treasures to Jerusalem and fill the house of the Lord with glory, Hag. 2:7-10. They shall come and say: Let us go up to entreat the face of the Lord; and ten men shall take hold of the skirt of a Jewish man and want to go with him, because God is with him, Zech. 2:11, 8:20-23, 14:16-19. The people of the saints shall receive dominion over all nations of the earth, Dan. 7:14, 27. Cf. the literature cited in vol. III, 232, and for the Messianic expectations among the Jews in Jesus' time: Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 3rd ed., II, 496-556.
3. These Messianic expectations of the Old Testament bear, as everyone immediately sees, a very peculiar character; they limit themselves to a future blessedness on earth. In the Old Testament, a believer may once or twice express his hope that after his death he will be taken up into eternal glory, but this expectation is individual and stands alone; usually the eye of prophecy directs itself toward that future in which the people of Israel under the king from David's house will dwell safely in Palestine and rule over all nations of the earth. There is no mention of an assumption of believers at the end of the times into the heaven of glory; blessedness is expected not in heaven but on earth. In connection with this, the Old Testament prophecy knows only one coming of the Messiah. Indeed, it knows that the Anointed One will be born from David's house when this house has fallen into decay, and that He will share in the suffering of His people, yes, that as the Servant of the Lord He will suffer for His people and bear their iniquities; He will be a wholly different king than the princes of the earth, humble, meek, doing justice, protecting His people; He will be not only king but also prophet and priest. But the Old Testament prophecy never separates in the life of the Messiah the state of humiliation and the state of exaltation; it comprehends both in one image; it distinguishes no first and second coming and does not place the latter, which is for judgment, a long time after the first, which serves for salvation. It is one coming, whereby the Messiah grants to His people righteousness and blessedness and brings it to dominion over all peoples of the earth. The kingdom that He comes to establish is therefore also the completed kingdom of God. He Himself will indeed reign as king over His people, but He is then nothing more than a theocratic king, who does not rule arbitrarily but realizes God's government in the absolute sense. The Old Testament prophecy makes no distinction between a Christ-government and a God-government; it does not expect that the Messiah from David's house, after reigning temporarily, will deliver up His kingdom to God; it does not regard the future which it paints in the Messianic kingdom as an intermediate state that at the end must make way for a God-government in heaven; it views the Messianic kingdom as the final state and clearly lets the judgment over the enemies, the repelling of the last attack, the change of nature, the resurrection from the dead precede the founding and confirmation of this kingdom. And this kingdom is sketched by all the prophets in colors and hues, under forms and images, which are all borrowed from the historical circumstances under which they lived. Palestine will be retaken, Jerusalem rebuilt, the temple with its sacrificial service restored, Edom and Moab and Ammon, Assyria and Babylon subjected, to all citizens a long life, a quiet sitting under vine and fig tree granted; the image of the future is thoroughly Old Testament, it is wholly historically and nationally determined. But in those earthly, sensory forms the prophecy lays an eternal content; the shell becomes the bearer of an imperishable kernel, which even in the Old Testament sometimes breaks through. Return from exile and true conversion coincide; the religious and political side of Israel's victory over the enemies are closely connected; the Messiah is an earthly prince but also an eternal king, a king of righteousness, an everlasting father for His people, a prince of peace, a priest-king; the enemies are subjected to Israel but acknowledge therein that the Lord is God and serve Him in His temple; this temple with its priesthood and sacrificial service are the visible proof that all citizens of the kingdom with a new heart and a new spirit serve the Lord and walk in His ways; and the extraordinary fruitfulness of the land presupposes a whole change of nature, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
The later Judaism brought various changes to these Old Testament expectations. Deprived of its political dominion and scattered among the peoples, it began more and more to reckon with the future lot of individuals and widened its outlook to mankind and to the whole world. Israel would indeed one day, on the ground of its own legal righteousness, be brought by the Messiah to a political dominion over all peoples; but this Messianic kingdom bore a provisional, timely character and would at the end give way to a kingdom of God, to a blessedness of the righteous in heaven, which was ushered in by the resurrection of all men and by the general world judgment. The political and the religious side, which in the prophetic picture of the future were most closely united, were in this way torn apart. Israel expected in Jesus' days a sensual, earthly Messianic kingdom, whose state was described in the forms and images of the Old Testament prophecy. But these images and forms were now taken in a literal sense; the husk was swapped with the kernel, the thing with the image, the essence with the form; the Messianic kingdom became a political dominion of Israel over the peoples, a period of outward prosperity and bloom. And at the end thereof, only after the general resurrection, the world judgment took place, whereby each one was judged according to his works and either received blessedness in heaven as reward or torment in Gehenna as punishment for his deeds. In this way arose the doctrine of Chiliasm. Indeed, a great part of the Jewish apocryphal literature still stands by the Old Testament expectations. But often, especially in the Apocalypse of Baruch and in the fourth book of Ezra, the notion appears that the glory of the Messianic kingdom is not the last and the highest, but after a fixed time, which is oftentimes reckoned and in the Talmud, for example, set at 400 or at 1000 years, will give way to the heavenly blessedness of the kingdom of God. Chiliasm is thus not of Christian but of Jewish and furthermore also of Persian origin. It always rests on a compromise between the expectations of an earthly and of a heavenly blessedness and seeks to let the Old Testament prophecy come to its right in this sense, that it deems an earthly Messianic kingdom foretold by it, which after a set time will be replaced by the kingdom of God. The strength of Chiliasm now seems indeed to be the Old Testament, but in fact this is not so; the Old Testament is decidedly not chiliastic, it portrays in the Messianic kingdom the completed kingdom of God, which is without end and lasts forever, Dan. 2:44, and which is preceded by judgment, resurrection, and world renewal. Nevertheless, it found belief among the Jews and also among many Christians and came up again and again, as the world unfolded its power hostile to God and made the church suffer under persecution and pressure. In the oldest time we meet it with Cerinthus, in the Testament of the XII Patriarchs, with the Ebionites, with Barnabas, Papias, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Apollinaris, Commodianus, Lactantius, Victorinus. But Montanism warned to caution; Gnostics, Alexandrian theologians, and especially also Augustine fought it most strongly, and the changed state of the church, which had overcome the world power and held itself more and more for the kingdom of God on earth, caused it gradually to die out altogether. Anew it arose before and during the Reformation, when many began to view Rome as the false whore and the pope as the antichrist; it revived with the Anabaptists, the Davidjorists, the Socinians, and since then did not die out anymore, although the official churches rejected it. The political upheavals, the religious wars, the persecutions, the sectarian movements gave it new life again and again. In Bohemia it was preached by Paul Felgenhauer and Comenius; in Germany by Jacob Böhme, Ezechiel Meth, Gichtel, Petersen, Horche, Spener, J. Lange, S. König; in England by John Archer, Newton, Joseph Mede, Jane Leade, and many Independents; in the Netherlands by Labadie, Antoinette Bourignon, Poiret, etc. Even Reformed theologians leaned toward a mild Chiliasm, such as Piscator, Alsted, Jurieu, Burnet, Whiston, Serarius, Cocceius, Groenewegen, Jacob Alting, d'Outrein, Vitringa, Brakel, Jungius, Mommers, and others. Voetius, Disp. II. Maresius, Syst. Theol. VIII 38. Moor VI 155. M. Vitringa IX. Marck, Expectatio gloriae futurae Jesu Christi, 2 tomi, L. B. 1730. In the 18th and 19th century, under the pressure of societal and political revolutions, it not only found entrance with the Swedenborgians, the Darbyites, the Irvingians, the Mormons, the Adventists, etc., but was, after the realistic direction taken by Bengel, Oetinger, Ph. M. Hahn, J. M. Hahn, Hasenkamp, Menken, Jung-Stilling, J. F. von Meyer, etc., also embraced by many theologians in the churches of the Reformation, such as Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 586 f. Hofmann, Weiss. u. Erf. II 372 f. Delitzsch, Die bibl. proph. Theol. 6 f. Beck, Christl. Gl. II. Auberlen, Der Prophet Daniel und die Offenb. Joh. 2e Aufl. 1857 S. 372 f. Martensen, Dogm. § 280. Lange, Dogm. II 1271 f. Luthardt, Die Lehre v. d. letzten Dingen³ 1885. Komp. d. Dogm. § 76. Frank, Chr. Wahrh. II 463 f. Vilmar, Dogm. II 307. Ebrard, Dogm. § 572 f. Oosterzee, Dogm. § 146. Saussaye. Bogue, Discourses on the Millennial Kingdom, Gron. 1825. Guers, Israel's Future and Restoration along with a Sketch of the Millennial Kingdom, Amst. 1863. John Cumming, The Great Tribulation, Amst. 1861. Id. The Redemption Near, 1862. Id. The Millennial Rest, 1863. Id. Considerations on the Millennial Kingdom, 1866, etc. Seiss, The Coming Christ, Brussels 1892. Art. Chiliasmus in Herzog³ 3, 805-817 and the literature cited there.
4. The ground thoughts of Chiliasm are well-nigh the same among all; they come down to this, that there is a twofold coming again of Christ and a double uprising to be set apart; that Christ at his first coming again shall overcome the antichristian might, bind Satan, raise up the dead believers, gather the church, in special the church of the turned and to Palestine brought back Israel around him, rule over the world from out that church, and for his folk a time-span of ghostly bloom and bodily welfare shall make to dawn; and that He at the end of that time shall once more come again, to raise up all men from the dead, to judge them before his judgment seat, and to set their everlasting lot. But these ground thoughts yet allow all kinds of changes. The beginning of the thousand-year realm was set differently; following the lead of the letter of Barnabas many church fathers and later also the Cocceians taught, that it would begin with the seventh thousand-year of the world; the Fifth-monarchmen let it begin after the fall of the fourth world realm; Hippolytus set its beginning in the year 500, Groenewegen in 1700, Whiston in 1715 and later in 1766, Jurieu in 1785, Bengel in 1836, Stilling in 1816 and so on. The length was set at 400 (4 Ezra) or 500 (Gospel of Nicodemus) or a thousand (Talmud and so on) or twice a thousand (Bengel) or only 7 (Darby) or also an unset number of years, so that the number in Rev. 20:2, 3 is taken as a sign (Rothe, Martensen, Lange and so on). Some think, that for the setting up of the thousand-year realm no coming again of Christ (Kurtz); or at least no seen coming again (Darby), or one only seen by the believers (Irving) shall take place, and that no uprising of the believers before the millennium needs to be taken (Bengel). Many do take that Christ after his first coming again stays on earth, but others are of mind, that He only shows for a bit, to set up his realm and thereafter draws back into heaven. The ruling of Christ in the millennium happens according to Piscator, Alsted and so on from out heaven. In that lordship then share the uprisen martyrs, who either in heaven were taken up (Piscator) or on earth stayed behind (Alsted), or all the uprisen believers, who here on earth stay (Justin, Irenaeus and so on) or who are led to meet Christ at his showing in the clouds in the air (Irving), or above all the folk Israel. For mostly the chiliasts look for a folk turning of Israel, and most think that the turned Israel shall be brought back to Palestine and there be the foremost burghers of the thousand-year realm (Jurieu, Oetinger, Hofmann, Auberlen and so on). If one takes a staying of Christ on earth after his first coming again, one mostly sets the rebuilt Jerusalem as his dwelling place, though the Montanists in their time thought of Pepuza and the Mormons now of their Salt Lake Valley. Restoring of temple and altar, of priesthood and offering was in the rule, as all too clearly at odds with the New Testament, thrown out, but yet found upholding among the Ebionites and in newer times among Serarius, Oetinger, Hess and others. Of the kind and state of the thousand-year realm one makes very sundry fore-thinkings. Sometimes it is written as a realm of fleshly enjoyments (Cerinthus, Ebionites and so on); then again it is taken more ghostly, and all joy of food and drink, all wedding and breeding therefrom taken out (Burnet, Lavater, Rothe, Ebrard). Most times the millennium is seen as a go-between state between the this-side and the yon-side; it is a realm, wherein the believers are readied for the beholding of God (Irenaeus); wherein they enjoy rest and peace, without yet wholly freed from sin and raised above death; wherein the earth-kind (Irenaeus) and also the men (Lactantius) shall be out-of-the-way fruitful; and wherein following a later loved thought the church above all shall fulfill her sending work to mankind (Lavater, Ebrard, Auberlen and so on). All these changes shape just as many weights against Chiliasm; already for the foretelling of the Old Testament, whereon it above all calls, it cannot stand. For, besides that, as above already said, the Old Testament in the Messianic realm sees no fore-running, timely state but the end outcome of world history, Chiliasm in the unfolding of the foretelling makes itself guilty of the greatest willfulness. It doubles the coming again of Christ and the uprising of the dead, without the Old Testament knowing anything thereof. It lacks all rule and way in the laying out and makes willful halt, after the self-thought of the lay-outer. The foretellers all cry just as loud and just as strong, not only the turning of Israel and of the folks, but also the back-coming to Palestine, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the restoring of temple, priesthood and offering service and so on. And it is nothing but willfulness, to take one stroke of this picture word-for-word and the other ghostly. It is one picture of the forthcoming, that the foretelling draws for us. And this picture is either to be taken word-for-word, as it gives itself, but then one breaks with Christendom and falls back into Judaism; or there is of this picture a wholly other unfolding to be given, than Chiliasm tries. Such an unfolding is by the Writ itself given us in hand and must by us be drawn from her.
5. Already in the Old Testament there are many signs of another and better reading than Chiliasm gives to the foresaying hopes. Even the newfangled way of looking at Israel's yore owns that the Yahweh-faith of the foresayers stands out by its upright mark from the worships of the wild and bit by bit gave a ghostly meaning to the worship laws and ways under Israel. The true foreskin-cutting is that of the heart, Deut. 10:16, 30:6, Jer. 4:4; the offerings that are pleasing to God are a broken heart and a crushed ghost, 1 Sam. 15:22, Ps. 40:7, 50:8ff., 51:19, Hos. 6:6, Am. 5:21ff., Mic. 6:6ff., Isa. 1:11ff., Jer. 6:20, 7:21ff., etc.; the true fasting is the loosening of the knots of godlessness, Isa. 58:3ff., Jer. 14:12; for a great deal the fight of the foresayers is aimed against the outward, self-righteous worship of the folk. The being of the household of the forthcoming lies then also therein, that the Lord will set up a new bond with his folk, that He will give them a new heart and write therein his law and that He will pour out his Ghost on all, so that they love Him with their whole heart and walk in his ways, Deut. 30:6, Jer. 31:32, 32:38ff., Ezek. 11:19, 36:26, Joel 2:28, Zech. 12:10. And indeed now that forthcoming is painted in likenesses, drawn from the yore-wise settings, so that Zion and Jerusalem, temple and altar, offering and priesthood therein keep a great stead. But 1st bethink that we also do the same and of God and godly things, of ghostly and heavenly things cannot speak otherwise than in earthly, sense-wise shapes. The Old Testament worship was set up by God also thereto, that we not in self-made but in by Him self-given, right likenesses of the heavenly things might speak after truth. The New Testament takes therefore this speech-way over and speaks in the forthcoming God's kingdom of Zion and Jerusalem, of temple and altar, of foresayers and priests; the earthly is a likeness of the heavenly, All that fades is but a likeness. Forget 2nd not, that all foresaying is song-craft, which must be laid out after her own kind. The flaw of the earlier ruling outlaying lay not in her ghost-making without more, but indeed therein, that she wished to turn all serving-to-show details into a ghostly sense and thereby, even as with the likenesses of Jesus, often lost sight of the head-thought. When e.g. it is said, that the Lord will raise a twig from the cut-off stump of Jesse, that He will lift the hill of Zion on the top of the hills, that He will bring back one from a town and two from a kin of the banished, that He will sprinkle clean water on all and cleanse them from their sins, that He will make the hills drip with sweet wine and the knolls flow with milk etc., then each feels, that he herein has to do with a song-wise writing, which cannot or may not be taken word-for-word. The earth-bound reading comes here with itself in strife and mis-knows the mark of the foresaying. Also it is 3rd untrue, that the foresayers themselves were utterly not aware of the mark between thing and likeness. Not only are the above-named song-wise writings without doubt taken by the foresayers as likeness, but with the names of Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom, Moab, Philistia, Egypt, Assyria, Babel they often mark the might of the heathen world, which once will be underlaid to Israel and share in its blessings, Ob. 16, 17, Isa. 34:5, Ezek. 16:46ff., Dan. 2, 7ff., Zech. 14:21. Zion is often the name for the folk, for the gathering of God, Isa. 49:14, 50:1, 51:3, 52:1, 54:1. And though the Old Testament foresaying cannot think the forthcoming God's kingdom without temple and offering, yet she goes each time above all folk-wise and earthly ties and calls out, that there will be no ark of the bond more, while all Jerusalem is God's throne, Jer. 3:16, 17, that the kingdom of the Messiah will be everlasting and hold the whole world, Ps. 2:8, 72:8, 17, Dan. 2:44, that all dwellers will be foresayers and priests, Isa. 54:13, 61:6, Jer. 31:31, that all uncleanness and sin, all sickness and death will be banned there, 25:8, 33:24, 52:1, 11, Zech. 14:20, 21, Ps. 104:35, that it will be set up in a new heaven and on a new earth, and will need no sun or moon more, Isa. 60:19, 20, 65:17, 66:22. Even the earth-bound forthcoming likeness of Ezekiel holds bits that make a mark-wise reading needful; the even shares that are given to all stems, though very unlike in tally-strength; the measured strips that are set for priests, Levites and lord; the sundering of temple and town, the high lying of the temple on a hill and the brook that streams from under the threshold of the east temple door to the dead sea; and at last the craft-wise in-setting and the work-wise un-doableness, they set against a so-called earth-bound outlaying. Lastly 4th in the outlaying of the Old Testament the ask is not, whether the foresayers were wholly or in deal aware of the mark-wise mark of their foretellings, for even in the word of olden writers lies more, than they self thought therewith or meant therewith. But indeed is the ask, what the Ghost of Christ, that was in them, therewith witnessed and wished to lay bare. That now is made out by the New Testament, that is the fulfilling, the filling and therefore the reading of the Old, for in the fruit the kind of the tree is laid bare. Even the newfangled picking owns, that not Judaism but Christianity is the full making-true of the worship of the foresayers.
There can be no doubt about this, that the New Testament views itself as the spiritual and thus as the perfect and true fulfillment of the Old Testament. The spiritualizing of the Old Testament, if understood in a good sense, is not an invention of Christian theology, but has its beginning in the New Testament itself. The spiritualized Old Testament, that is, the Old Testament stripped of its timely, sensory form, is the New Testament. The peculiarity of the old dispensation was precisely that the covenant of grace was set forth under visible images and clothed in national, sensory forms. Sin was symbolized in Levitical uncleanness. Atonement was brought about by the offering of a slain animal. Cleansing was shadowed forth in bodily washings. Fellowship with God was bound to the going up to Jerusalem. Need for God's favor and nearness expressed itself in a longing for his courts. Eternal life was thought of as a long life on earth, and so on. All the spiritual, heavenly, and eternal was, in accordance with the capacity of Israel, which as a child was placed under the discipline of the law, veiled in earthly shadows. Although the great mass of the people often remained at those outward forms, just as many Christians cling to the sign in the sacrament, the pious Israelites did penetrate with their hearts to the spiritual kernel that was hidden in the shell, but even they saw that spiritual only in shadow and image. Therefore the New Testament says that the Old was σκια των μελλοντων, το δε σωμα Χριστου, Col. 2:17, ὑποδειγμα και σκια των ἐπουρανιων, Heb. 8:5. The shadow is not the body, but yet points to the body, and falls away when the body itself has come. The New Testament is the truth, the essence, the kernel, the proper content of the Old Testament; the Old Testament is open in the New, the New Testament is hidden in the Old. Therefore there is so often mention of the truth in the New Testament. Over against the law, which was given by Moses, stands the truth, which has become in Jesus Christ, John 1:14, 17. He is the truth, John 14:6; the Spirit, whom he sent forth, is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, 1 John 5:6; the word of God, which he preached, is the word of truth, John 17:17; the good of salvation promised and shadowed forth under the Old Testament has in Christ become openly manifest as eternal, true reality for all; all the promises of God are in him yes and amen, 2 Cor. 1:20; the Old Testament is not abolished but has in the new dispensation come to its fulfillment and still comes therein to fulfillment up to the parousia of Christ. Christ is therefore the true prophet, priest, and king; the true servant of the Lord, the true propitiation, Rom. 3:25, the true circumcision, Col. 2:11, the true Passover, 1 Cor. 5:7, the true offering, Eph. 5:2, and his church is the true seed of Abraham, the true Israel, the true people of God, Matt. 1:21, Luke 1:17, Rom. 9:25, 26, 2 Cor. 6:16-18, Gal. 3:29, Titus 2:14, Heb. 8:8-10, James 1:1, 18, 1 Pet. 2:9, Rev. 21:3, 12, the true temple of God, 1 Cor. 3:16, 2 Cor. 6:16, Eph. 2:22, 2 Thess. 2:4, Heb. 8:2, the true Zion and Jerusalem, Gal. 4:26, Heb. 12:22, Rev. 3:12, 21:2, 10; her spiritual offering is the true worship, John 4:24, Rom. 12:1, Phil. 3:3, 4:18, cf. part III. All concepts of the Old Testament lay aside their outward, national-Israelite meaning and become manifest in their spiritual, eternal sense; the Semitic need no longer be translated by us, as Bunsen wished, into the Japhetic; the New Testament itself has given to the particularistic ideas of the Old Testament a universalistic, cosmic meaning. Wholly wrong, therefore, is the view of Chiliasm, according to which the New Testament with the church from the Gentiles is an intermezzo, a byway, which God has taken because Israel rejected its Messiah, so that the proper continuation and fulfillment of the Old Testament would first begin at the second coming of Christ. Rather, the opposite is true. Not the New, but the Old Testament is an interlude. The covenant with Israel is timely, the law is inserted between the promise to Abraham and its fulfillment in Christ, that it might increase the trespass and as a schoolmaster lead to Christ, Rom. 5:20, Gal. 3:19. Therefore Paul always goes back to Abraham, Rom. 4:11ff., Gal. 3:6ff., and attaches his gospel to the promise that was made to him. Abraham is the father of believers, of all believers, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles, Rom. 4:11; the children of the promise are his seed; Rom. 9:6-8; the blessing of Abraham comes in Christ to the Gentiles, Gal. 3:14; those who are of Christ are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise, Gal. 3:29. The people of Israel were in the days of the Old Testament timely chosen, that the salvation might soon in the fullness of time come to the good of the whole world. Israel is not chosen to the harm but to the benefit of the nations. The promise to Adam and Noah had from its first beginning a universalistic tendency and has, after laying aside its timely, legal form under Israel, in Christ been fully revealed for all nations. The veil is torn, the dividing wall is fallen, the handwriting of the law is nailed to the cross; and now the believers from the Gentiles with those from the Jews are fellow heirs, fellow citizens of the saints, household members of God, drawn near in Christ, and built on the same foundation of apostles and prophets, Eph. 1:9-11, 2:11-22. The New Testament is therefore no intermezzo, no interlude, no byway, no deviation from the line of the Old Covenant, but the long beforehand intended goal, the direct continuation, the true fulfillment of the Old Testament. Chiliasm, judging otherwise, comes into conflict with Christianity itself. Principally considered, it is one with Judaism and must come to ascribe to Christianity, to the historical person of Christ, to his suffering and dying, a timely, passing value and to expect the proper salvation first from Christ's second coming, from his appearance in glory. Just like Judaism, it subordinates the spiritual to the material, the ethical to the physical, stiffens the Jews in their fleshly mind, excuses their rejection of the Messiah, thickens the veil that lies on their face in the reading of the Old Testament, and promotes the conceit that the fleshly descendant of Abraham still as such will have a prerogative in the kingdom of heaven. But Scripture says that the true reading and explanation of the Old Testament is to be found with him who is converted to the Lord Christ, 2 Cor. 3:14-16, that he is a Jew who is one inwardly and has the circumcision of the heart, Rom. 2:29, that in Christ there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, but all are one in Christ Jesus, 1 Cor. 12:13, Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11. The Jew who becomes a Christian was not but becomes through his faith a child of Abraham, Gal. 3:29. Cf. against Chiliasm: Augustine, City of God XX c. 6-9. Luther in Köstlin II. Gerhard, Loci XXIX c. 7. Quenstedt, Theol. IV. Calvin, Inst. III 25, 5. Walaeus, Op. I. Voetius, Disp. II. Turretin, Theol. El. XX qu 3. de Moor VI. Hengstenberg in his commentary on the Revelation of John. Keil on Ezekiel. Kliefoth, Eschatology. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. VI. Hodge, Syst. Theol. III. Kuyper, Heraut, etc.
6. Although hereby in general the outcome is already fully settled, that the New Testament is antichiliastic, this must yet in particulars be further shown. Chiliasm includes the hope that before the return of Christ there will be a folk turning of Israel, that the Jews will then return to Palestine, and from there under Christ rule over the folks. Therewith is there among the chiliasts difference over whether the turning goes before the return or this before that. Since it is hard to think that the scattered Jews first one after another are turned and then together take up the plan to go to Palestine, some think that the Jews first little by little return to Canaan and there then together will be turned to Christ, or others seek both thoughts so to unite, that first a great part of the Jews go to Palestine, and that these, after first city and temple and worship restored to have and thereafter to Christ turned to be, little by little by their other folk kin followed become. And they point thereto, that this hope at first already fulfilled becomes. There are already thousands of Jews in Palestine; the Eastern question goes toward its answer, for Turkey thanks its being only to the underling envy of the great powers; and becomes Turkey once destroyed, then is there all chance that Palestine is given to the Jews, to whom it rightly belongs; further works there in many Jews, as from the in latest time arisen Zionism shows, a longing to return to Palestine and there a self-standing realm to form; and at last makes the great bettering of the travel means, which one already in Nah. 2:3, 4, Isa. 11:16, 66:20 foretold thinks, such a return also simple and easy. How one now also judge over these statewise blendings, the New Testament offers to such a hope not the least uphold. When the fullness of the time was come, stood the Jews, as folk beheld, with the Heathens on one line; they were together doomed before God, because they a own righteousness out of the law sought to set up and the righteousness that out of belief is, cast away, Rom. 3:21. Therefore sent God John to them with the baptism of turning and let it to them therein say, that they, though cut and proselytes baptizing, themselves guilty and unclean stood before his face and even as the Heathens the new birth and the turning needed, to go in into the kingdom of the heavens. Through the baptism set John the true Israelites already from the mass of the folk apart. And Jesus went on this footstep forth; He took the baptism of John over and let it be given by his learners. Well stepped He even as John at first up with the preaching that the kingdom of God near was come. But He took that kingdom wholly other than his time kin up; He understood thereunder not a statewise but a belief-ethic lordship and taught that no fleshly offspring from Abraham but only new birth out of water and ghost the way into that kingdom of the heavens unlocked. Thereby gathered He little by little around him a throng of learners, that set itself apart and sundered from the folk of the Jews. And these were the true church, the real folk of God, as Israel that had ought to be but now in its casting away of the Messiah showed not to be. This sundering between the folk of the Jews and the New Testament church became how longer how sharper. Well were there many who in Christ believed, but the folk, led by the Pharisees and Scribes, cast Him away. Though for some to a rising, was He for many to a fall and to a token that withspoken was, Luke 2:34. He came to his own, but his own have Him not taken, John 1:11. Jesus says himself that a foreteller not honored is in his fatherland, Matt. 13:17. Ofttimes undergoes He that the Jews not to Him come will, John 5:37-47, 6:64; He witnesses that they in their sins shall die, 8:21, that they children of the devil are, 8:44, plants not by the Father planted, Matt. 15:13, 14 and sees in their unbelief no chance, unforeseen happening but fulfilling of the foretelling, Matt. 13:13ff., John 12:37ff. But not only has Jesus from the Jews in the now nothing to hope, also in the forthcoming waits He nothing for them. On the other hand He tells the whole wasting of city and temple, so that no stone on the other shall left be, John 2:18-21, Matt. 22:7, 23:37-39, 24:1ff., Mark 13, Luke 21:6ff. At his inride into Jerusalem weeps He over the city, Luke 19:41-44. The Monday before his death curses he on the way to Bethany the fig tree, that therein that he yet no fruits but well already leaves had, a likeness was of the show-holy, own-righteous Israel, and spoke that no one any fruit more from him eat should in eternity, Mark 11:12-14. At his cross way bids He the women not over Him but over Jerusalem to weep, Luke 23:28. Even preaches He that the bliss, by Israel cast away, the share of the Heathens shall become. The kingdom of God shall Israel taken away and to another folk given be that its fruits forthbrings, Matt. 21:43; the vineyard becomes to other landmen let out, Matt. 21:41; to the wedding become called those who on the outgoings of the ways are, Matt. 22:9; the lost son goes before the eldest son, Luke 15. And so says He that many shall come from East and West and with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob shall sit down in the kingdom of the heavens, Matt. 8:10-12; that He yet other sheep has that of this fold not are, John 10:16; and joys therein that, as some Greeks Him wish to see, He now as a wheat grain in the earth fall and die and thus much fruit shall bear, John 12:24. After his uprising bids He then to his learners to preach the gospel to all folks, Matt. 28:18. And a same deeming over Israel meet we by all apostles. Well must they as Jesus' witnesses from Jerusalem out their work begin, but then it forthset to the outermost of the earth, Acts 1:8. Peter brings therefore the gospel at once to the Jews, Acts 2:14, 3:19, 5:31, yet sees in a sight that henceforth no one unclean is, but that to God pleasing is everyone who Him fears, from what folk he also come, Acts 10:35, 43. Paul begins his preaching always first by the Jews, but turns himself, as these it cast away, to the Heathens, Acts 13:46, 18:6, 28:25-28. First the Jew, but also the Greek, is the rule that he on his sending travels in heed takes, Rom. 1:16, 1 Cor. 1:21-24. For Jews and Heathens are both doomed before God and have the same gospel needful, Rom. 3:19ff. There is only for all one way to bliss, namely belief, as that already before the law by Abraham done and him to righteousness reckoned is, Rom. 4, Gal. 3. Who of the Jews Christ cast away, are no true, real Jews, Rom. 2:28, 29; they are not the cutting but the offcutting, Phil. 3:2, they are unruly, vain speakers, misleaders of minds, whom one the mouth must stop, Titus 1:10, 11; they have the Lord Jesus and their own foretellers killed, they hound the believers, they please God not and are all men against, they hinder the apostles to speak to the Heathens, and make the measure of their sins full, so that the wrath over them to its outermost bound come is and now itself over them unloads, 1 Thess. 2:14-16. The Jews who the gathering of Smyrna revile, say well that they Jews are, but they are it not, they are much more a gathering of Satan, Rev. 2:9, 3:9. Real Jews, true children of Abraham are they who in Christ believe, Rom. 9:8, Gal. 3:29 etc. So deems the New Testament over the Jews; the gathering of believers has in all ways the folkish, fleshly Israel taken the place of; the Old Testament is in the New fulfilled.
7. Only a few places seem to be at odds with this ongoing teaching of Scripture and to hold something else. The first place is Matthew 23:37-39, Luke 13:33-35, where Jesus says to the dwellers of Jerusalem that their house shall be left forsaken, and that they shall not see Him until they shall say: Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Here Jesus indeed speaks forth the hope that the Jews shall one day, namely at His second coming, acknowledge Him as Messiah. If from elsewhere a thousand-year kingdom and a matching turning of Israel were set fast, this place could be made clear toward that. But since this is not the case, also not in Revelation 20, as shall later be shown, here one can only think of the Messiah-acknowledgment of the Jews at Christ's second coming to judgment. And so long, says Jesus outspokenly, shall Jerusalem be left forsaken; a rebuilding of city and temple is thus in any case not looked for by Jesus before His second coming.
Second, Luke 21:24 comes into reckoning, where Jesus says that Jerusalem shall be trodden underfoot by the heathen until the times of the heathen shall be fulfilled. The linking word achri hou does not yet shut in that at the breaking in of the term marked thereby the other side, namely the rebuilding and dwelling of Jerusalem by the Jews, shall take place. But even if this were so, then Jesus does not yet say therewith that an end shall come to the treading down of Jerusalem before His parousia, for He goes straightway, after having spoken the doom over Jerusalem, to the speaking of the signs before and at His second coming, Luke 21:25ff.; the times of the heathen last until His second coming.
Again, if the New Testament taught a twofold second coming of Christ, this place could be made out in keeping therewith, but it shall soon be clear that no ground for that is at hand in the New Testament. The third text that comes to speech here is Acts 3:19-21. There Peter warns the Jews to turning, that their sins may be wiped out and that kairoi anapsuxeos , times of refreshing, may come from the side of the face of the Lord and He, namely God, may send the Christ Jesus set for you (the Jews), whom the heaven must take up until the times of the setting up again of all things.
Some deem that the times of refreshing, of which here is spoken, shall then break in when the Jewish folk is turned and all things are again set up toward their first setting in the thousand-year kingdom, and that they shall then last until the second second coming of Jesus. But against this laying out there is great bar. The chronoi apokatastaseos panton are hard to understand of the setting back of the inborn and upright bonds, which by the Chiliasts is looked for in the millennium, for it stands clear that these times are the endpoint of the stay of Jesus in heaven; until so long Jesus thus dwells at the Father's right hand, and since Scripture knows only one second coming of Christ, the times of the setting up again of all things fall together with the full ending of the world; besides, apokatastasis panton is much too strong a speaking for that setting back of the Jewish kingdom which Chiliasm looks for.
The times of refreshing are therefore not the same as but go before the times of the setting up again of all things. For Peter gives a twofold goal of the turning of the Jews, that times of refreshing may break in for them and that God may send them the Christ set for them. The times of refreshing fall before the second coming of Christ and look then either to the ghostly peace which is the outgrowth of turning and forgiveness of sins, or to set forthcoming times of godly blessing and goodwill. The latter is the likeliest, because the times of refreshing are not straightway with the wiping out of sins but with the sending of Christ brought in bond. And the thought which Peter here speaks out is then this: Turn yourselves, O Jews, to wiping out of your sins, that there may also for you as folk, who have handed over, denied, and slain Christ, vs. 13-15, times of refreshing from God's face break in and God thereafter from heaven may send that Christ who in the first place is set for you and therefore also first came to you, vs. 26, to also set up again all things for your weal. Whether such times shall ever break in for the Jews, Peter does not say; that hangs on their turning, and whether this is to be looked for is here not marked with a word.
The last place is Rom. 11:11-32. In Rom. 9-11 Paul handles the awesome problem, how God's promise to Israel is to be matched with the casting off of the gospel by the overwhelming greater part of Israel. The apostle gives thereon in the first place as answer, that God's promise holds not for the fleshly but for the ghostly seed of Abraham and works this out at length, Rom. 9 and 10. And in the second place he notes, that God even among Israel still always has his elect, and thus has not cast off that folk; he himself is therefor a proof and many with him; however many also are hardened and blinded, the elect have yet gotten salvation, there is ever a remnant according to the election of grace, Rom. 11:1-10. But this hardening, which has come over the greatest part of Israel, is yet not God's end goal; rather is it in his hand a means, to bring salvation to the Gentiles, that these, taking that salvation in faith, on their turn may stir Israel again to jealousy, 11:11-15. After warning the believers from the Gentiles, not to lift themselves up hereon, vs. 16-24, Paul works this thought yet nearer out and says, that over a part of Israel the hardening has come, until the fullness of the Gentiles, the full tally of those from their midst ordained for salvation, shall be fulfilled. And in that wise shall all Israel according to God's promise be saved. The unbelieving Jews are thus now indeed hated by God in regard to the gospel, that the salvation cast off by them might come to the Gentiles; but according to the election they are beloved for the fathers' sake, for God's promises are without rue. As it thus has gone with the Gentiles, so shall it also go with the hardened Jews; the Gentiles were first disobedient and are now shown mercy, and so also are the Jews now disobedient, that they through the mercy shown to the Gentiles may also receive mercy. For God has shut up all, Gentiles and Jews, under sin, that he might be merciful to them all, vs. 25-32. Most interpreters think, that the question, whether God has cast off his folk, 11:1, is not fully answered therewith, that God among Israel always holds his elect, who one after another in the course of the ages are brought in, 11:1-10, and they judge therefore, that all that which in chapter 11 follows, is not but a nearer unfolding, yet a filling up of the answer given in vs. 1-10, a new answer, that first fully weakens the scruple, as if God would have cast off his folk. Under πας Ισραηλ in vs. 26 they understand therefore the folk-whole of Israel, which in the last days shall be turned. But however general this reading also be, there are weighty scruples against it.
a. If it were the meaning of the apostle, to give in 11:25-32 a new, filling-up answer, he would bring his reasoning at the end into strife with its beginning and starting point. For he has said 9:6ff., that God's promises have not fallen out, because they hold for the ghostly seed of Abraham, and in this ghostly seed still always gain their fulfilling, 11:1-10. A priori it is very unlikely, that Paul later would have come back on this reasoning and filled it up and bettered it in this sense, that God's promises in this salvation of the ghostly Israel do not come fully to their fulfilling but then first fully brought to pass, when in the last time a folk-turning of Israel takes place.
b. In any case there is in chapter 9:1-10:11 with no single word speech of such an awaiting for the folk of Israel, and there is no single saying, that makes it guess and readies it. And also chapter 11:11-24 holds yet nothing, what points to such an awaiting. Indeed 11:11-15 is taken in that sense by many. But even if these words are not what-if, as an element in the reasoning but as writing of a deed to be understood, then they hold yet only this thought: the casting off of Christ by Israel has been for the Gentiles a great gain, for thereby is the atonement brought to stand by Christ's death become the share of the Gentiles; a much greater gain shall then the taking in of Israel by God be for the Gentiles, for when Israel shall have reached its fullness, its full tally of elect, and also the fullness of the Gentiles is gone in, then shall that have the life out of the dead, the uprising out of the dead of the new mankind as outcome. To Israel's defeat the Gentile world thanks in a middle way its atonement, to Israel's fullness it thanks once its life out of the dead.
c. If Paul in 11:25 wanted to share a new deed, the wise greatly wonders, on which he does this. For he says yet not: and then , thereafter , namely after the fullness of the Gentiles is gone in, shall all Israel, but: και οὑτως πας Ισραῃλ σωθησεται, and in that wise shall all Israel be saved. That can mean nothing other than: in that wise, as in the former verses is written. Right before, in vs. 24, Paul has said, that the hardening always but for a part , ἀπο μερους has come over Israel. The believers from the Gentiles could well go think, even as Israel formerly, that they alone were the elect folk of God, and that Israel wholly was cast off. But Paul says, that this is not so. No, Israel is not as such cast off; there is among them always a remnant according to the election of grace; there are indeed some branches broken off, for which the wild olive tree of the Gentile world is come in the place, but the stem of the tame olive tree is stayed; the hardening is but for a part come over Israel; while the fullness out of the Gentiles goes in, is also the fullness out of Israel brought in; and in that wise is all Israel saved.
d. This deed, namely that the hardening but for a part has come over Israel, Paul calls a μυστηριον, 11:25. Elsewhere he calls so often the deed, that the Gentiles now are fellow heirs and fellow burgesses of the saints and house fellows of God, and here he marks with the same word the deed, that the Jews but for a part are hardened and that God many elect ongoing from them to his church brings. For that partly hardening shall last, until the fullness of the Gentiles shall be gone in. Never, until the end of the times, shall God his old folk wholly cast off; always shall beside a part out of the Gentile world also a part out of Israel be brought to the faith in Christ. The Gentiles but also the Jews had so wholly otherwise earned. Yet this is the great mystery, that God is rich in mercy, that he out of all folk, also out of the folk of the Jews, that cast him off, gathers his elect, that he shut up all under sin, that he might be merciful to all. That mystery brings the apostle into rapture and makes him wondering worship the depth of God's wisdom and knowledge, 11:33-36.
e. Πας Ισραηλ in 11:25 is thus not the folk of Israel, that at the ends of the days in mass shall be turned; it is also not the church out of Jews and Gentiles together, but it is the fullness, that in the course of the ages out of Israel is brought in. Israel stays as folk, so foretells Paul, beside the Gentiles be; it shall not go under nor from the earth fade; it stays until the end of the ages, yields its fullness for the God-realm even as the Gentiles, and holds for that God-realm its sundry task and place; out of all folks and kindreds and tongues is the church of God gathered.
f. How great that fullness out of Israel shall be, Paul reckons not. It is well likely, that the tally of the elect out of Israel in the last times shall be much greater, than it in Paul's or in later or in our days was; there is no single ground, to deny this; rather does the spreading of the gospel under all folks await, that as well out of Israel as out of the Gentiles an ever greater tally shall be saved. But that means Paul not to say; he tallies not, but he weighs. Out of the Gentile world shall the full fullness come, and also out of Israel, and that fullness shall be πας Ισραηλ. In that fullness is all Israel kept, as in the church in her whole the whole mankind is redeemed.
g. Another turning of Israel, than on the wise by Paul shown lets itself also hardly think. What yet is a folk-turning, and how and when shall it by Israel take place? There is naturally nothing against, rather pleads the deed of the ongoing being of the folk of Israel in bond with the prophecy therefor, that there also out of Israel yet a very great tally to the faith in Christ be brought; but however great this tally also be, it stays a remnant according to the election of grace. Also the strongest chiliast shall yet not think, that once at the end all Jews without out-taking shall be turned. And even if he took that on, thinking, that so alone Rom. 11:25 fully is fulfilled, then would such a folk-turning at the end yet not come to good to the millions of Jews, that through the ages until on that end time in unbelief and hardening are away died. If one truly thinks, that God's promise to Israel then alone truly is fulfilled, when not an ἐκλογη out of the folk, but the folk itself is brought in, then one comes with the history in clash. Always, all ages through, also in the days of the O. T., when the national Israel was God's folk, was it but a small part of the folk, that in truth served and feared God. And so is it not only by the Jews, but so is it also by the Gentiles. Always is it a remnant according to the election of grace, that out of the Christian folks gets the salvation in Christ. Besides stays there for such a folk-turning of Israel, as the Chiliasts await, in Paul's sketch of the forthcoming no place over. He says yet outspokenly, that the hardening over a part of Israel has come, until the fullness of the Gentiles is gone in, and that not thereafter but that in that wise all Israel is saved, Rom. 11:25, 26. The hardening over a part of Israel lasts thus as long, until the fullness out of the Gentile world is brought in, and according to the Chiliasts must then thereafter the folk-turning of Israel fall. But lies there then yet a time span between the going in of the fullness of the Gentile world and the end of the ages? If yes, are there in that time then also yet Gentile folks, and is there out of them no single more turned? The going in of the fullness of the Gentiles lets itself not think as timely fore-going to the saving of all Israel. Rom. 11:26 names no new deed, that after the going in of the fullness of the Gentiles takes hold. But the going in of the fullness of the Gentiles and the saving of all Israel run alongside, because the hardening but for a part has come over Israel. At last note one yet on, that, even if Paul at the end also awaited a folk-turning of Israel, he yet with no word makes telling of a back-coming of the Jews to Palestine, of a rebuilding of city and temple, of a seen Christ-rule; in his forthcoming picture is for that all no place.
8. In discussing the hopes which the New Testament cherishes for the future concerning the people of Israel, it was left open whether the New Testament perhaps teaches in other places than those brought up there a middle state between this dispensation and the end of the ages. If this were the case, as was acknowledged, then Matthew 23:37-39, Luke 21:24, and Acts 3:19-21, although they themselves give no occasion at all for accepting such a time of transition, could yet be understood and explained in that sense. Now therefore the question comes up, whether according to Jesus and the apostles a time of power and glory is to be awaited for the church, which goes before the general resurrection and the world judgment. If this were so, we would expect a clear mention of it in the eschatological discourse which Jesus held to his disciples in the last days of his life, Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21. But there is in it no word, not even a hint of such a kingdom contained. The Chiliasts do try to insert their millennium in one place or another in this discourse, and say for example that the first coming of Christ is mentioned in Matthew 24:27 and the second coming in verse 30, but this exegesis lacks all ground. In his eschatological discourse Jesus gives answer to two questions which his disciples put to him, namely, when the things shall happen which he has spoken concerning Jerusalem, namely, that no stone of the temple shall be left upon another, and what shall be the sign of his coming and of the end of the world. Jesus answers first the first question, and that in such a way that he first treats of the foretokens, Mark 13:1-8, cf. Matthew 24:1-8, Luke 21:5-11, then of the lot of the disciples, Mark 13:9-13, cf. Matthew 24:9-14, Luke 21:12-18, and finally of the catastrophe in Judea, Mark 13:14-23, cf. Matthew 24:15-26, Luke 21:20-24. The second question concerning the parousia of Jesus and the end of the world is answered in Mark 13:24-31, cf. Matthew 24:29-35, Luke 21:25-33; and thereby Jesus joins his parousia immediately to the destruction of Jerusalem; in the fall of this city he sees the announcement and the preparation of the end of the world; Matthew 24:29 immediately, Mark 13:24 in those days. He even says that this generation shall by no means pass away until all these things shall have happened, Matthew 24:34, Mark 13:30, Luke 21:32. Now however this expectation of his speedy parousia, immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem, is also to be understood in Jesus (about which more later); in any case it is clear that in this discourse there is no place for a thousand-year kingdom. Jesus first lists, Mark 13:1-8, some general foretokens, by which the disciples can see that all together, namely, the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world is drawing near; and these common signs are: the rising up of false Christs, wars and rumors of wars, commotion and uprising of the peoples with earthquakes, famines, etc., further the preaching of the gospel in the whole world for a testimony to all nations, Mark 13:10, and finally, as prelude to the end drama, what happens in Judea and Jerusalem, Mark 13:14-23. Thereafter follow the foretokens immediately preceding the parousia, the proper signs, namely, darkening of sun and moon, falling of the stars, shaking of the powers in the heavens, Mark 13:24, 25. With the parousia of Christ is then immediately connected the judgment, the separation of good and evil, the end of the world, Mark 13:26, 27. This agrees with what Jesus says in Matthew 13:37-43 and 47-50; the growing together of tares and wheat, and the bringing together of all kinds of fishes continues until the end of the ages, until the time of the harvest and of the world judgment. Jesus knows only two ages, the present and the future. In the present age his disciples have nothing else to expect than tribulation and persecution and must forsake all for his sake. Nowhere does Jesus foretell to his disciples a glorious future on earth before the end of the world; on the contrary, as it has gone with him, so it shall go with his church; a disciple is not above his master and a servant not above his lord; only in the future age do his disciples receive all back with eternal life, Matthew 5:3-12, 8:19, 20, 10:16-42, 16:24-27, 19:27-30, John 16:2, 33, 17:14, 15, etc. So also when the disciples in Acts 1:6 ask Jesus whether he will at this time restore the kingdom to Israel, he does not deny but tacitly admits that this shall once happen; but he says that the Father has put the times or seasons for it in his own power, and that the disciples in this time have the calling to act as his witnesses from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. In this same spirit speaks the whole New Testament, which is written from the standpoint of the cross church. The believers, who are not many wise and mighty and noble, 1 Corinthians 1:27, have here on earth nothing but suffering and tribulation to expect, Romans 8:36, Philippians 1:29, they are sojourners and strangers, Hebrews 11:13, their citizenship is in heaven, Philippians 3:20, they do not look at the things which are seen, 2 Corinthians 4:18, but consider the things which are above, Colossians 3:2, they have here no continuing city but seek the one to come, Hebrews 13:14. But they are saved in hope, Romans 8:24, and know that if they suffer with Christ, they shall also be glorified with him, Romans 6:8, 8:17, Colossians 3:4. Therefore they stretch themselves out with all the groaning creation eagerly toward the coming of Christ and toward the revelation of the glory of the children of God, Romans 8:19, 1 Corinthians 15:48ff., etc., against which glory the suffering of the present time does not weigh, Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17. Nowhere in the New Testament does any hope shine through that the church of Christ shall yet here on earth come to power and dominion. The highest that it imagines for itself is that under the kings and all who are in authority it may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, Romans 13:1ff., 1 Timothy 2:2. And therefore the New Testament does not in the first place commend those virtues which enable the overcoming of the world, but names, although avoiding all false asceticism, Romans 14:14, 1 Timothy 4:4, 5, Titus 1:15, as fruits of the Spirit the virtues of love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, Galatians 5:22, Ephesians 4:32, 1 Thessalonians 5:14ff., 1 Peter 3:8ff., 2 Peter 1:5-7, 1 John 2:15, etc.
Even so, it is the ongoing expectation of the New Testament that, as the gospel of the cross spreads, the enmity of the world will also become manifest. Christ is appointed to be for many a rising up, but also for many a fall, and to bring their hostile thoughts to light; He has come for a judgment in the world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind, Matt. 21:44, Luke 2:34, John 3:19-21, 9:39, Rom. 9:32, 33, 1 Cor. 1:23, 2 Cor. 2:16, Heb. 4:12, 1 Pet. 2:7, 8. In the last times, in the days that go before the return of Christ, the ungodliness of men will rise to a dreadful height; the days of Noah will come back; lust, pleasure-seeking, looseness, greed, unbelief, pride, mockery, blasphemy will break out in a fearsome way, Matt. 24:37ff., Luke 17:26ff., 2 Tim. 3:1, 2 Pet. 3:3, Jude 18; also among the believers the falling away will be great; the temptation will become so mighty that it would, if it were possible, bring even the elect to fall; love will grow cold in many, and watchfulness will so lessen that the wise virgins will fall asleep with the foolish; it will be such a widespread falling away that Jesus can ask whether the Son of Man will find faith on earth at his coming, Matt. 24:24, 44ff., 25:1ff., Luke 18:8, 1 Tim. 4:1. The book of Revelation by John agrees with this. The letters to the seven churches do deal with concrete conditions as they then existed in those churches and are first of all addressed to those churches to spur them to watchfulness and to ready them for the coming persecutions and the return of Christ. But they clearly have a much wider reach. The number seven, which in Revelation always has such great meaning, points to this; it is the number of fullness and makes the seven churches, chosen out of the many in Asia Minor, appear as types of the whole Christian church. The letters sent to them by John did not first exist separately, nor were they each first sent to the respective church, but they belong together, were written together and joined together, and are addressed to the whole church; whoever has ears, let him hear what the Spirit says to all the churches. But although the letters undoubtedly have a meaning that stretches much further than to the seven named churches then existing in Asia Minor, this is not found in their describing successive periods in the history of Jesus' church and being a small summary of the whole church history. But they sketch church conditions that were then present and that are also typical for the whole church of Christ, which can thus happen again and again in the church and will especially come back at the end of days. For it is clear that they are all written under the sway of the coming persecution and the soon return of Christ. All contain a pointer to the parousia, and with an eye to it spur the churches to watchfulness and faithfulness. They serve to call back Christendom, which was becoming more and more like the world, to the first love, to wake it from indifference, and with an eye to the crown that awaits it, to gird it for the fight and to make it hold out with unbroken faithfulness unto death. For the day of the Lord draws near; after John has first described the conditions that exist in his time, and later, especially toward the world's end, in the church of Christ, he goes on to tell what will happen after that, 4:1. The book of God's counsel about the end of things is opened in heaven by the Lamb, chapters 4 and 5, and in particular that shown by an angel to John which concerns the very last time, chapter 10, and touches all peoples of the earth, 10:11. By turns John takes us now to earth and to heaven. In heaven, all is already settled and set, there glory is already brought to God and the Lamb, as if the fight were already fought and the victory won, chapters 4 and 5; there the souls of the martyrs are already clothed in long white robes and wait only for the filling up of their number, 6:9-11; there John sees already in foretaste the whole host of the redeemed standing before the throne, 7:9-17; there the prayers of the saints are already heard by God, 8:1-4; there are already, also in foretaste, taken up the 144,000 who were sealed, 7:1-8, as firstfruits going before the others, 14:1-5, and have won the victory over the beast and his image, 15:1-4; there the whole host of the redeemed already brings glory and honor to God, because the wedding of the Lamb has come, 19:1-8. The church on earth need therefore not fear the judgments with which God visits the world at the end. The 144,000 servants of God from all the tribes of the children of Israel are sealed beforehand, 7:1-8; the temple and the altar and those who worship in it are not given over to the Gentiles, and the two witnesses who have prophesied there are indeed killed but also raised up and taken into heaven, 11:1-12, and the Christian church, though persecuted by Satan for Christ's sake, finds a hiding place in the wilderness, 12:1-14. In principle the fight is already settled. For Christ is taken up into heaven, 12:5; and Satan is overcome by Michael and his angels and thrown out of heaven onto the earth, 12:7-11. Now he has only a short time left on earth, 12:12. But he makes use of that time. He causes the rising of the beast from the sea or the abyss, 13:1, 11:7, 17:8, and gives it power and glory. This beast is the Roman Empire, 13:1-10, is upheld by another beast, the beast from the earth, that is, the false prophet, the false religion, the antichrist, 13:11-18, realizes itself fully in one person, who himself can therefore be called the beast, 13:3, 12, 18, 17:8, 10, 11, and has its center in the city Babylon, that is Rome, the great whore, which rules over all peoples, chapters 17 and 18. But all this show of power is vain. By the opening of the seven seals, by the blowing of the seven trumpets, by the pouring out of the seven bowls God shows his wrath, visits nature and mankind with his judgments, and readies the last judgment. First Babylon falls, chapter 18. Then Christ appears, 19:11-16, overcomes the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, 19:19-21, and soon also Satan, 20:1-3.
9. Now it is very strange that this final victory over Satan takes place in two stages. First he is bound for a thousand years and cast into the abyss, and then he deceives the nations again, wages war against the church, and is then forever overcome and cast into the lake of fire and sulfur, 20:1-10. The supporters of Chiliasm find, besides in the Old Testament, in this pericope their strongest support, and the opponents are not a little embarrassed by it and have tried all their exegetical skill on it. The thought that after the victory over the world empire there must still be a final attack of the nations to be repelled is undoubtedly borrowed by John from Ezekiel. This prophet expects that Israel, after it has returned to its land and will dwell there securely, will yet once be attacked by Gog from the land of Magog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal, that is, by the people of the Scythians, in alliance with various other peoples from the north, east, and south. However, the attack ends with God himself destroying these peoples on the mountains of Israel in his wrath, chapters 38 and 39. In chapter 38:17 the Lord says that he has already spoken of those peoples earlier through the service of his prophets. And indeed, earlier prophets proclaimed that not only those historical peoples in whose midst Israel lived and with whom it came into contact, but also all far-dwelling Gentiles would be judged by the Lord in his day, Joel 2:32, 3:2, 11ff., Micah 4:5, 11, 5:6-8, Isaiah 25:5-8, 26:21, Jeremiah 12:14-16, 30:23, 24. A similar prophecy appears very clearly in Zechariah, who in chapters 12-14 sketches how against the day of the Lord Jerusalem will be besieged by the nations, and these will then be judged by the Lord. And Daniel sees not only in Antiochus Epiphanes the embodiment of the world empire hostile to God, but also expects that this power hostile to God will yet once exalt itself and thus become ripe for judgment, 11:40ff. Twofold, therefore, was the expectation of prophecy: first of a victory of the people of God over the nations in whose midst it dwelt, and then of a triumph over the nations that had not yet appeared on the stage of world history. This double expectation passed over into the apocryphal literature, Schürer, History of the Jewish People II³ 532, 551, but also into the New Testament. Naturally, the first expectation stands in the foreground. The appearance of Christ awakens the antichristian principle. Jesus speaks of false prophets and false christs who will set themselves against him and his kingdom, Matthew 7:15, 24:5, 24, Mark 13:21, 22, Luke 17:23. To temper the impatience of the Thessalonians in their expectation of Jesus' speedy return, Paul points out in 2 Thessalonians 2 that the day of Christ does not come unless first comes the apostasy and the man of sin is revealed. This one cannot come yet, because there is something that holds him back. Indeed, now also the mystery of iniquity is already at work, but yet the man of sin cannot come before he who holds him back is taken out of the way. Then first will the lawless one be revealed but also immediately destroyed by Jesus. The Apocalypse sees the antichristian power embodied in the beast from the sea, that is, the Roman empire, which has the city of Rome as its center and a certain emperor as its head, and besides that in the beast from the earth, that is, the false prophecy, which seduces to the worship of the world empire and its emperor. This opponent of Christ John then first names in his letters with the name of antichrist, in 1 John 2:18 probably even without the article; and he sees his essence realized in those who principally deny the coming of Christ in the flesh, 1 John 2:22, 4:2, 3, 2 John 7. The representations of the antichrist are thus different in Scripture. Daniel sees his type in Antiochus Epiphanes; Jesus detaches the antichristian principle from the Old Testament opposition of Israel and the nations and sees it embodied in many false christs and many false prophets who will arise after and against him; Paul lets the man of sin arise from a general apostasy and calls him the lawless one and the adversary, namely of Christ, but also portrays him, with traits borrowed from Daniel, as the one who exalts himself above all that is called God and that is worshiped by men, so that he sits in God's temple as a god and shows himself as a god. John in his letters considers the antichrist to have come in the heretics of his days. And the Apocalypse sees his power developing in the world empire, which is supported by the false prophecy. From this it appears that with the antichrist one must not think exclusively of one person or of a group of persons, for example, the heretics of the first centuries, the Roman empire, Nero, the Jews, Mohammed, the pope, Napoleon, etc. Scripture clearly teaches that the antichristian power has its history, reveals itself in different times in different ways, and finally develops fully in a general apostasy and breaking of all natural and moral bonds that now still hold back such an apostasy, and then embodies itself in a world empire that takes the false church into its service and in the deification of the head of that empire apotheosizes itself. To this antichristian power in its highest and final development, Christ himself then makes an end by his appearance.
Lünemann in his commentary on Thessalonians, 3rd edition, pp. 219-225. Rinck, The Doctrine of Holy Scripture on Antichrist. 1867. Boehmer, On the Doctrine of Antichrist, Yearbook for German Theology 1859 pp. 405-467. F. Philippi, The Biblical Church Doctrine of Antichrist 1877. Kliefoth, Eschatology 205 ff. Renan, The Antichrist 1877. Bousset, The Antichrist 1877. Wadstein, The Eschatological Idea Group Antichrist, World Sabbath, World End and World Judgment, Leipzig 1896. Ebbes, The Antichrist in the Writings of the New Testament (Theological Works from the Rhenish Westphalian Preachers' Association. New Series Issue 1 pp. 1-57). Article in Herzog³ by Seuffert.
But with that, the full victory has not yet been won. The antichristian principle can of course only appear among those nations that have known the gospel and in the end rejected it in conscious and deliberate enmity. But there have always been, there still are, and there will be until the end of the days peoples who, like cut-off branches, stand outside the history and culture of mankind. Indeed, Jesus says in Matthew 24:14 that the end will come only after the gospel has been preached in the whole inhabited world as a testimony to all peoples. But this prophecy does not include that Christianity will one day be the ruling religion among all peoples, or that it will be known to every person, head for head; for history teaches that millions of people and many peoples, even in the centuries after Christ's coming to earth, have died away without any knowledge of the gospel. But Jesus' word only holds that the preaching of the gospel will penetrate to all peoples and by no means precisely determines the measure in which, nor the boundary to which this will happen. The prophecy is also not fulfilled at once but successively through the course of the centuries, so that many peoples who once walked in the light of the gospel have later been robbed of it again. While in this nineteenth century the gospel is spreading among the heathen, among the Christian peoples the apostasy is increasing hand over hand. And therefore it is more than likely that at the time of the parousia many peoples on earth will again be deprived of the knowledge of Christ. And with this fact the twentieth chapter of John's Revelation reckons. Because there is talk there of a thousand-year binding of Satan and of a living and reigning of the martyrs with Christ during that time, many have thought that here the so-called thousand-year kingdom is taught clearly and indisputably. But in fact this is an explanation of Revelation 20 not according to the analogy of Scripture, but according to the analogy of the apocryphal literature. Revelation 20 in itself contains nothing of all that belongs to the essence of the chiliastic faith. For, 1° not a single word is mentioned of a conversion and return of the Jews, of a rebuilding of the city of Jerusalem, of a restoration of temple and worship, of an initial renewal of the earth. Rather, all this is excluded. For even if the 144,000 in chapter 7 are to be understood as the pleroma from Israel and are distinct from those in 14:1, yet nothing else and nothing more is meant by that than that many Christians from the Jews will remain steadfast in the great tribulation and will occupy their own place among the multitude before God's throne; but it is not said at all that they will rise and dwell in Jerusalem. The Christians are the true Jews, and the Jews who harden themselves in their unbelief are a synagogue of Satan, 2:9. Even if the earthly Jerusalem is perhaps once more called the holy city and the temple there the temple of God, 11:1, 2, yet that Jerusalem is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, 11:8; the true Jerusalem is above, 3:12, 21:2, 10, and there is also the temple of God, 3:12, 7:15, 11:19 etc., and the ark, 11:19, and the altar, 6:9, 8:3, 5, 9:13, 14:18, 16:7. And that Jerusalem does not descend to earth already in Revelation 20 but only in Revelation 21. 2° The living and reigning of the believers who remained faithful in the great tribulation takes place not on earth but in heaven. Not a word is spoken of the earth. John sees the angel who binds Satan coming down from heaven, 20:1; the thrones that he beholds, 20:4, are in heaven, 4:4, 11:16; and the souls of the martyrs are seen by John here, 20:4, just as everywhere else in heaven, 6:9, 7:9, 14, 15, 11:12, 14:1-5, 18:20, 19:1-8. The believers are already on earth made kings and priests to God by Christ, 1:6; they are this in heaven, 5:10, and expect that they will one day be so on earth also, 5:10, but this expectation is fulfilled only in the new Jerusalem that descends from above; then they will be kings forever, 22:5. But now, in heaven, their kingship is temporary; it lasts a thousand years. 3° John also knows nothing of a first bodily resurrection that would precede the thousand-year kingdom, and a second that would follow it. Nowhere in Scripture is such a first resurrection taught. Indeed, there is talk of a spiritual resurrection from sin, John 5:25, 26, Romans 6:4 etc. There is also an ἀνάστασις ἐκ νεκρῶν that refers to individual cases, such as the resurrection of Christ, 1 Peter 1:3, cf. Acts 26:23, 1 Corinthians 15:23, or that relates only to believers, Luke 20:35, 36, Acts 4:2, but in this case is by no means temporally separated from the general ἀνάστασις νεκρῶν by a thousand-year kingdom, Matthew 22:31, John 5:28, 29, Acts 24:15, 1 Corinthians 15:13, 42. Indeed, people have thought to find this in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, but wrongly. In 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 Paul certainly deals only with the resurrection of believers, while he does not speak here at all of that of the ungodly and does not need to; but of that resurrection of believers he clearly says that it will take place at the parousia of Christ and that then the end will be, in which he delivers the kingdom to the Father, verses 23, 24. From this passage by itself one could well infer that according to Paul there is no resurrection of the ungodly, but it is impossible that this is separated from that of the believers by a thousand-year kingdom. For upon the resurrection of the believers immediately follows the end and the delivery of the kingdom, because all enemies are conquered and the last enemy, which is death, is destroyed. Just as little is there anything of such a first, bodily resurrection of believers in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. In Thessalonica people were anxious about the fate of those who had died in Christ. We do not know what kind of anxiety that was. The chiliasts think that the Thessalonians did not doubt the resurrection and eternal life of those who had fallen asleep in Christ, but that they believed in two resurrections, one before and one after the thousand-year kingdom, and were now worried that the already deceased believers would rise only at the second resurrection and thus would have no part in the glory of the thousand-year kingdom. But this opinion is far-fetched and finds absolutely no support in the text; if there was a first resurrection of believers, one would just expect that the church in Thessalonica would not be anxious about the fate of the deceased, for they would then precisely share in the privilege of that first resurrection. And if one answers that they precisely in Thessalonica did not know that there was a first resurrection of believers, then the apostle could have simply told them that with a few words. But he does not do that at all; he does not speak of a first and a second resurrection; he only argues that the believers who are still alive at Jesus' coming will have nothing ahead of those who have already fallen asleep in Christ earlier. In what the Thessalonians thought that the latter would lag behind the former is unknown to us. But that does not matter; the fact stands that they judged so in Thessalonica. And over against that Paul now says that this is not the case, for God will bring the fallen-asleep believers by means of Jesus, who will raise them, immediately with him (with Jesus) in his coming, so that he as it were brings them along, and the believers who remain alive will by no means precede them, for the resurrection of the dead goes before, and then all believers, both the risen and the changed believers, are taken up together in the clouds to meet the Lord. The text thus contains nothing of a first and a second resurrection. If now nowhere in Scripture such a twofold resurrection occurs, one will do well not to find it too quickly in Revelation 20. And indeed it does not occur there either. There in verses 4 and 5 it only says that the souls of the believers who remained faithful in the great tribulation live and reign as kings with Christ a thousand years and that this is the first resurrection. John clearly says that he saw the souls, τὰς ψυχάς, of the martyrs, cf. 6:9, and makes no mention of a resurrection of their bodies. He further says that those souls did not rise or were raised or entered into life, but that they lived and that they immediately lived and reigned as kings with Christ a thousand years. He further speaks of the rest of the dead, οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν, and thus assumes that the believers whose souls he saw in heaven also still in a certain sense belong to the dead, but yet lived and reigned; over against that he says of the rest of the dead, not, as it stands in the Statenvertaling, that they did not become alive again, but that they did not live, οὐκ ἔζησαν. And he finally adds with emphasis that this living and reigning of the souls of the faithfully remaining believers in contrast to the not living of the rest of the dead is the first resurrection. One feels as it were the contrast: that is not the first resurrection which some, even already in John's days, assumed, as if there would be a bodily resurrection of believers preceding the thousand-year kingdom; but the first resurrection consists in the living and reigning of the faithfully remaining believers in heaven with Christ. The believers to whom John writes and who soon face the tribulation must not think that they will be blessed only at the end of the days. No, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on , ἀπάρτι, 14:13; they receive rest from their labors immediately; they are crowned at once upon their death; they live and reign with Christ in heaven from the first moment after their death; and therefore they can courageously face the tribulation; the crown of life lies ready for them, 2:10. John here repeats, 20:4, 5, in brief, what he earlier wrote to the seven churches. The promises which there were given to the believers, if they persevered to the end, all came down to this, that he who overcomes would be crowned. He who overcomes receives to eat of the tree of life, 2:7, of the hidden manna, 2:17, gets power over the heathen, 2:26, receives the morning star, 2:28, is clothed with white garments, 3:5, is made a pillar in God's temple, 3:12, holds supper with Jesus, 3:20. In one word, he who overcomes, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, 3:21. What John first saw in the promise, he now sees in chapter 20 in the fulfillment; they who remain faithful unto death live and reign immediately with Christ on his throne in heaven; and that is the first resurrection. But John adds something more, and thereby confirms the explanation given above. He says namely: blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection; over him the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with him the thousand years. The second death is according to 20:14 nothing other than being cast into the lake of fire. Whatever may be the lot of the rest of the dead mentioned in verse 5, in any case the faithfully remaining believers who live and reign with Christ are safeguarded from that second death. They already have the crown of life and already eat of the manna of life, and thus need not fear the judgment that follows later; he who overcomes will not be hurt by the second death which enters at the final judgment, 2:11. If John understood the first resurrection in a chiliastic sense, as a bodily resurrection of believers before the thousand-year kingdom, then he would not have needed to give such a comfort to the believers. He could then have sufficed with saying that they would rise even before the thousand-year kingdom. But no, the believers still remain in a certain sense among the dead until the final judgment; but no matter, if they persevere to the end, then they are crowned immediately and, even if the first death still reigns over their bodies, cannot be hurt by the second death.
10. Against this explanation, however, one can bring in that John yet clearly speaks of a thousand-year reign of the believers with Christ, be it even in heaven, and that he places this after the second coming of Christ, 19:11-16, and the fall of the world-kingdom and of the false prophet, 19:20. Yet this thought weighs not so heavy as it seems. For 1. the placing of the vision in Rev. 20 after that in chapter 19 decides by itself not at all about the time-wise order. In general, the art of the word, in difference for example from painting, can only tell one after another that which takes place at the same time. The Scripture makes no out-taking here and often tells one after another what in truth comes side by side. With the prophets it happens many times that they see and write one after another what takes place at the same time or even in a wholly other order. Above all is that, as more and more is known, the case in the book of Revelation. The letters to the seven churches are no writings of church states following one another in that same order. The seven seals, the seven trumpets, and the seven vials form no time-wise row but run alongside and lead us each time to the end, to the last wrestling of the antichristian might. And so there is by itself nothing against taking on that what is told in Rev. 20 runs even with the happenings of the earlier chapters. 2. It must be known that John, with the world-kingdom that he draws, thinks of the Roman empire. The prophecy, in the Old and also in the New Testament, moves not high in the air but stands on historical ground and sees in the concrete mights, in whose midst it lives, the wrestling made body of the world-kingdom against the kingdom of God. The book of Daniel, for example, runs to Antiochus Epiphanes and sees in him the person-making of the foe-ship against God and his folk. And so also John takes the marks for his world-kingdom from the Roman emperor-kingdom of his days. Though all that is written before is also written to our learning, yet the Revelation of John is in the first place a comfort-book for the cross-church of his time, to spur her to holding out in the strife and to hearten her by the sight of the crown that awaits her. If John for himself meant that in the Roman emperor-kingdom the very last unfolding of the world-kingdom had come up and that Christ would come within some years to make an end to it, then therein would be nothing un-wonted to find, nothing that would be in strife with the ghost of prophecy. We are not bound to John's own meaning, but to the word of his prophecy; and the prophecy, which throws its light over the history, is on its turn also made clear and unveiled by the history. 3. If John truly for himself believed that the Roman empire within some years would be made naught by the showing of Christ, then he in any case meant that the history of the world therewith was not yet done, for in that case there would be for the reign of the believers with Christ in heaven no place alongside and this must first begin after that time. But this time-historical up-taking gives, how much truth it may also hold, not the full thought of John's Revelation again. For clearly it shows that in chapter 19 the history of the world has reached her end. Babylon is fallen, chapter 18, God reigns as king, 19:6, the wedding of the Lamb is come, 19:7-9, Christ is shown, 19:11-16, the last strife of all kings of the earth and of their war-hosts is striven, 19:17-19, the world-kingdom and the false prophet are destroyed and thrown in the pool of fire, which as the second death is first opened after the judgment, 19:20, cf. 20:14, and the others were killed, 19:21. The 19th chapter thus clearly runs through to that same world-end that in 20:10-15 is drawn. There is no stuff more for the following of the world-history. The time-historical out-legging leaves the coming of the folks that in 20:3, 8 come up unexplained or comes otherwise in strife with 19:17-21. As however the letters to the seven churches and even so the seven seals, trumpets, and vials all first see on the states and happenings in John's days but then have a further stretching for the church of all ages and for the whole history of the world, so it holds also of the world-kingdom, drawn in the Revelation, that it has its type in the Roman empire of the first ages but therein yet not its full real-making. It lifts itself each time again and must always anew yield to the showing of Christ, until it at last strains its outermost strengths, wears itself out in a last giant wrestling, and then for good is destroyed by the coming of Christ. 4. If this up-taking is right, the vision of Rev. 20 means not to tell us what in time-wise order after the in Rev. 19 happened will fall, but has it a self-standing place and tells us what runs alongside with the fore-going. There is namely twofold out-end of the history of the world to tell, one of the historical folks, among which Christendom comes up, and another of the wild folks, who, as Rev. 20:8 so clearly says, dwell in the four corners of the earth, and thus have lived outside the center of the history and the culture of mankind. Under the former could only the world-kingdom and the false prophecy come up, for the antichristendom under-lays the knowing with the gospel; these bring it only to a wild onset on the church of Christ. But it is yet the same Satan who yonder and here works. Each time as he among the culture-bearing folks is driven back and beaten, he orders in the wild folks a new tool to the strife against Christ. First he is thrown out of heaven; thereafter he works on earth and sets up there against Christ his world-kingdom; and at last he lets the wild folks show on the breadth of the earth, to strive the last strife against Christ. But this all not in time-reckoning but in logical, ghostly sense. 5. The thousand years are a symbol number, as now widely known; they stand over against the few days, during which the true-staying believers here on earth are pressed and followed, 12:14, but also over against the fulfilled glory, which is everlasting, 22:5. They are a marking of the holy, blessed rest of the died believers in heaven with Christ and also of the longing, wherewith they look out to the day of wreaking of their blood, 6:9, while on earth the strife of world-kingdom and folks-world against Christ yet lasts. And as John then in Rev. 20:1-9 has told the history of the wild folks to that end, whereon also that of the culture-bearing folks in 19:17-21 is run out, then the thread of both visions is taken up and the very last end of the whole world-history told. There, in 19:21, the men were killed by the sword of Christ; here in 20:9, they are eaten by fire out of heaven. But after world-kingdom, false prophet, and Satan are doomed and thrown in the pool, 19:20, 20:10, all dead stand up and are judged after their works, 20:11-15.
11. The doctrine of Scripture developed thus far clearly shows that the course and outcome of world history is altogether different from what men commonly imagine it to be. If anywhere, then above all with regard to the end of things, it holds true that God's ways are higher than our ways, and his thoughts higher than our thoughts. The kingdom of God, though like a mustard seed and leaven and a seed that sprouts and grows without man's knowing or doing, Mt. 13:31, 33, Mk. 4:27, yet reaches its completion not by way of gradual unfolding or an ethical process. Rather, the history of mankind, both among culture-bearing and culture-less peoples, according to the unassailable witness of Scripture, leads to a general apostasy and to a dreadful final struggle of all satanic powers against God and his kingdom. But then the end is also there; the world, in the time and with the power granted it by God, has done nothing other than, as in the days of Noah, make itself ripe for judgment; at the height of its power, it suddenly collapses at the appearing of Christ. A catastrophe, a sweeping act of God, at last puts an end to Satan's dominion here on earth and brings about the completion of the unshakeable kingdom of the heavens. Just as with the believer perfection is not the fruit of a slowly advancing sanctification but enters immediately after death, so also the perfection of mankind and the world comes not gradually but suddenly through the appearing of Christ. Specifically, it is Christ who is appointed by the Father to make an end of the history of mankind and the world. And he is appointed thereto because he is the Savior, the perfect Savior. The work he accomplished on earth is but a piece of the great work of redemption that he has taken upon himself; and the time he spent here is but a small portion of the ages over which he is set as Lord and King. Anointed from eternity by the Father, he began to exercise his prophetic, priestly, and kingly activity immediately after sin entered the world; he continued that activity through all the revolving ages; and he will one day complete it at the end of the times. What he acquired on earth through his suffering and dying, that he applies from heaven by the power of his word and the working of his Spirit; and what he has thus applied, that he upholds and protects against all attacks of Satan, in order one day at the end, wholly perfect, without spot or wrinkle, to present it to his Father who is in heaven. The return of Christ to judgment is therefore not an arbitrary addition that can be detached from his preceding work and set by itself; but it forms a necessary, indispensable part of that work, it brings that work to its completion and sets the crown upon it; it is the last and highest step in the state of his exaltation. Because Christ is the Savior of the world, he comes one day again as its Judge; the krisis , which he brought about by his first coming, he completes at his second coming; the Father gave him authority to execute krisis , because he is the Son of man, John 5:27. Eschatology therefore roots in Christology and is itself Christology, the doctrine of the final, perfect triumph of Christ and of his kingdom over all his enemies. We can even go further back with Scripture. The Son is not only because of sin the mediator of reconciliation, but also apart from sin the mediator of union between God and his creature. He is not only the exemplary cause, but also the final cause of creation; the world has in the Son its foundation and pattern and therefore has in him also its goal; it is created through him and also unto him, Col. 1:16. Because the creation is his work, it can and may not remain a prey of Satan; the Son is Head, Lord, and Heir of all things. Gathered together in the Son, assembled under him as Head, the creatures return again to the Father, the fountain of all good. The second coming of Christ is thus demanded by his first; it is included in this, flows from it in due time necessarily, brings it to its full outworking and completion, and was therefore by the Old Testament prophecy summed up with the first coming in one image. And not only does the second coming hang together with the first ideally and logically, but there exists between both also a real connection. Just as the Old Testament was a continual coming of God to his people, until he in Christ dwelt bodily among them; so also the dispensation of the New Testament is an ever-continuing coming of Christ to his inheritance, in order finally to take it into his possession for good. Christ is not only the one who in the days of the Old Testament was to come and in the fullness of time has come; but he is also the coming one, ho erchomenos , and the one who shall come, ho erchomenos hēxei , Heb. 10:37, cf. Rev. 1:4, 8 etc. The second coming of Christ is the complement of the first.
12. This ideal and real bond of Christ's first and second coming. This ideal and real bond of Christ's first and second coming also makes clear the way in which the New Testament speaks about the time of his parousia. A whole row of places sets this parousia very near. Jesus ties the foretelling of the end of the ages right to that of the wasting of Jerusalem, Matt. 24:29 and parallels. Paul thinks it likely that he and his fellow believers will yet live to see the parousia of Christ, 1 Thess. 4:15, 1 Cor. 15:51. And all the apostles say that they are in the last times, that the coming of the Lord is near, and from this they draw a spur to watchfulness, Rom. 13:11, 1 Cor. 10:11, Heb. 3:14, 6:11, 10:25, 37, James 5:7-9, 1 Pet. 1:6, 20, 4:17, 5:10, 1 John 2:18, Rev. 1:3, 3:11, 20, 22:7, 10, 12, 20. In the understanding of this New Testament hope about the speedy return of Christ, there has been wandering on both sides. The New Testament holds no teaching at all about the time of Christ's return. It in no way sets forth that this return will yet happen before or right after the wasting of Jerusalem. Indeed, this has been drawn by many from Matt. 10:23, 16:28, 24:34, 26:64 and parallels, but wrongly. For it is beyond any fair doubt that Jesus spoke of his coming in different senses. In John 14:18-24, cf. 16:16-24, he speaks to his followers of his coming in the Spirit after Pentecost or, according to other explainers, of his coming after the uprising, when he will again show himself for a short time to his young ones. In Matt. 26:64, Jesus not only strengthened his Messiahship with an oath before the high council, but he also said that he would sway them of this, because from now on, aparti , they would see him sitting at the right hand of God's might and see him coming on the clouds of heaven. Of such a coming in his glory there is also speech elsewhere. Matt. 16:28, cf. Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27, lifts this above all misgivings. Jesus says there that some of those standing by will not taste death until they have seen the Son of man coming in his kingdom. Right before, he had warned them to be most heedful of the saving of the soul; and he pressed this warning by saying that the Son of man would come, clad with godly glory, and then repay each one according to his works. But so long, he adds in verse 28 as if making it clear, this will not even last, for even before all those standing by have died, the Son of man already comes in his kingdom, en te basileia autou , that is, with the kingly might and worth that the Father will give him. By his uprising and heaven-going, Christ is set by the Father as Head, King, Lord, Acts 2:33, 5:31; and from that blink onward he comes ongoing in his kingly worth, as his kingdom is set up and spread on earth. And therefore in Mark 9:1 and Luke 9:27 the saying is made clear thus, that many will not taste death until they have seen the kingdom of God or have seen it come in might. In the same way Matt. 10:23 is to be made clear: the followers would not have fulfilled their round through the towns of Israel until the Son of man would come; though the coming here is not further made clear at all, yet the parousia cannot be meant, since Jesus would then be at odds with himself; in Matt. 24 he lets his parousia in any case follow upon the wasting of Jerusalem. How long after this dreadful happening it would take place, Jesus does not say. Indeed, he binds them right to the fall of Jerusalem in his foretelling; the rendering of eutheos in Matt. 24:29 by suddenly instead of forthwith , also backed by van Leeuwen, The Parousia-Hope in the New Testament , Utrecht 1898, p. 37, brings no change therein, for it stands clearly by it that the signs of the parousia will begin eutheos after the affliction of those days, in those days, after that affliction, Mark 13:24, cf. Luke 21:25-27. This is strengthened by Matt. 24:34 cf. Mark 13:29, Luke 21:32, where Jesus says that this kin will not pass away until all these things have happened. The words he genea aute cannot be understood of the folk of the Jews, but without doubt strike on the then living kin, cf. Cremer s.v. On the other hand, it is clear that the words panta tauta do not take in the parousia itself, but only aim at the signs that go before it and foretell it. For after Jesus has foretold the wasting of Jerusalem and the fore-signs and his return and even the gathering of his chosen by the angels and thus truly ended his end-times speech, he goes on in verse 32 to put it to work and says that, just as the shooting out of leaves on the fig tree foretells summer, so also panta tauta are fore-signs thereof that the end is near or that the Messiah is near at the door. Here panta tauta without any doubt strikes on the fore-signs of the parousia, not on it itself, for otherwise it would be unfit to say that when panta tauta shall happen, the end is first near. In verse 34 the words panta tauta have the same sense; and Jesus thus does not say that his parousia will yet take place within the time of the now living kin, but that its fore-signs and foretellings, like those that would be seen in the wasting of Jerusalem and the happenings therewith, would yet begin in the time of the now living kin. And Jesus is so sure of this that he says that heaven and earth will indeed pass away, but that his words will by no means pass away. But otherwise Jesus holds back from all further time-setting. It is not his aim to make his followers know the right time-point of his parousia, but to spur them to watchfulness. And therefore he does not say when he will come, but what the signs of the times are that foretell his coming. The heeding of the signs of the times is a duty for Jesus' followers; the reckoning of the right time of his coming is forbidden them and also unworkable. The first calls for Jesus to let his light fall on the happenings that will take place; and so he does, just as before him all the foretellers and after him all his apostles have done. Therefore he also does not say that between the wasting of Jerusalem and his parousia many hundred-years would yet run; that would have made the warning to watchfulness forthwith strengthless. Just as foretelling does at all times, Jesus foretells in the happenings of his time the nearing of the end. And the apostles follow his lead and mark for us in the false teaching and lie, in the judgments and dooms, in Jerusalem's fall and Rome's empire the forerunners of Christ's return and the beginning fulfillment of his foretelling. For all believers ought at all times so to live as if the coming of Christ were at hand. That nearness of the parousia is in a way only another saying for the full sureness of the same, Baldensperger in Holtzmann, Neut. Theol. I 312. But therefore the second also, that is, the reckoning of the right time-point of the parousia, is not fitting for Christians. For Jesus has left this with aim fully undecided. His coming will be sudden, unlooked-for, overtaking like that of a thief in the night, Matt. 24:43, Luke 12:39, cf. like a snare, Luke 21:35. Many things must happen before the end is there, Matt. 24:6. The gospel must be preached in the whole world, Matt. 24:14. The bridegroom tarries and the lord of the servants went abroad for a long time, Matt. 25:5, 13, 19. Weeds and wheat must grow together until the day of harvest, Matt. 13:30. The mustard seed must become a tree, and the leaven work through all, Matt. 13:32, 33. Yes, Jesus says outright, when he deals with his parousia, that the day and hour of his coming is known to no one, to angels nor men, yes not even to the Son, Mark 13:32, and bears witness even after his uprising that the Father has set the times and seasons for the setting up of his kingdom in his own might, Acts 1:7. And likewise all the apostles speak; Christ comes as a thief in the night, 1 Thess. 5:1, 2, 2 Pet. 3:10, Rev. 3:3, 16:15; he shows not until first the antichrist has come, 2 Thess. 2:2ff.; the uprising takes place in a set order, first of Christ, then that of the believers in his coming, 1 Cor. 15:23; and that coming tarries, because the Lord has another yardstick for time than we and in his long-suffering wills that all come to turning, 2 Pet. 3:8, 9.
Even as soberly as it speaks about the time, Holy Scripture speaks about the manner of Jesus’ second coming. The second coming of Christ is often denoted in the New Testament by the name of parousia , whether absolutely, Matt. 24:3, or more precisely described as the parousia of the Son of Man or the parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ, Matt. 24:27, 37, 39, 1 Thess. 3:13, 4:15, 5:23, etc., or the parousia of the day of God, 2 Pet. 3:12. The word does not properly include the concept of second coming, but indicates that Jesus, after having been absent and hidden for a time, Acts 3:21, Col. 3:3, 4, and then having come anew, Matt. 16:27, 24:30, etc., cf. Luke 19:12, 15, will again be present and at hand and will then remain present. Therefore, it also alternates with epiphaneia , Matt. 24:30, 1 Tim. 6:14, Titus 2:13, apokalypsis , Luke 17:30, 1 Cor. 1:7, 2 Thess. 1:7, 1 Pet. 1:7, 13, phanerōsis , Col. 3:4, 1 Pet. 5:4, 1 John 2:28; in 2 Thess. 2:8, there is even mention of the epiphaneia of his parousia . This parousia is a work of God, insofar as he will send his Christ and determines the times and seasons for it, Acts 1:7, 3:20, 1 Tim. 6:14-16, but it is also an act of Christ himself, as the Son of Man, to whom the Father has given judgment and who must reign as king until all enemies are put under his feet, John 5:27, 1 Cor. 15:25. Because at his departure from the earth he was taken up into heaven, he comes at his parousia from heaven again, Phil. 3:20, 1 Thess. 1:10, 2 Thess. 1:7, Rev. 19:11; and just as a cloud took him up at his ascension and hid him from the eyes of his disciples, Acts 1:9, so he is also described in Old Testament language as returning on clouds of heaven, which carry him like a chariot of victory to this earth, Matt. 24:30, 26:64, Mark 13:26, 14:62, Luke 21:27, Rev. 1:7, 14:14. For he returns not again in the form of a servant, but with great power and with his and his Father’s glory, Matt. 16:27, 24:30, Mark 8:38, 13:26, Luke 22:27, Col. 3:3, 4, 2 Thess. 1:9, 10, Titus 2:13, as a King of kings and Lord of lords, Rev. 17:14, 19:11-16, surrounded by his angels, Matt. 16:27, 25:31, Mark 8:38, Luke 9:26, 2 Thess. 1:7, Rev. 19:14, by his saints, among whom perhaps the already blessed are also included, 1 Thess. 3:13, 2 Thess. 1:10, Jude 14. Although his parousia, because of its unexpectedness, resembles the breaking in of a thief in the night, yet it will be visible to all people over the whole earth, like lightning that flashes from one side of heaven to the other, Matt. 24:27, Luke 17:24, Rev. 1:7, and announced by the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of the angels, Matt. 24:31, 1 Cor. 15:52, 1 Thess. 4:16. In connection with their doctrine of the ascension, the Lutherans said that the second coming of Christ was not subject to a succession of moments but consisted in nothing else than the sudden making visible of the body of Christ, which at the exaltation had become invisible and omnipresent. Although it was generally acknowledged that the second coming of Christ was visible and local, yet this was understood only to mean that the human nature of Christ, by a singular disposition of God for the special purpose of judgment, became visible for a time in a certain place, without thereby relinquishing its presence in other places, Gerhard, Loc. XXVII de extr. jud. n. 35. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 614. Hollaz, Ex. 1249. But the Reformed ascribed to the second coming of Christ a bodily, local, temporal character; they even acknowledged that this second coming, even if it would be very sudden, was nevertheless successive, subject to a succession of moments; even at the highest stage of his exaltation, at the second coming to judgment, Christ retained his truly human nature, cf. M. Vitringa IV 160.
Thomas, S. Theol. III qu. 59 art. 2 Suppl. qu. 90 art. 1. 2. Oswald, Eschat. 234 f. Jansen, Prael. III 1038. Atzberger, Die christl. Eschat. 300 f. Simar, Dogm. § 166. Gerhard, Loc. XXVIII de extr. jud. c. 3. Quenstedt, Theol. 649. Hollaz, Ex. 1249. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 65. Voetius, Disp. II 51 sq. Marck, Exspect. Jesu Chr. I c. 1-24. M. Vitringa IV 160. Kliefoth, Eschat. 228 f. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 607 f.
1. With the appearing of Christ on the clouds begins the day of the Lord, the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, Matt. 24:36ff., Luke 17:24ff., 21:34, Acts 17:30, 1 Cor. 1:8, 5:5, and so on. The Scripture by no means intends to say that all that belongs to the last things—return, uprising, judgment, and so forth—will be finished in a time span of twelve or twenty-four hours. Under the Old Covenant, the day of the Lord was that time in which God would come to his folk in a wondrous and lordly way as king, to free it from all its foes and let it dwell with him in Jerusalem in peace and safety. With that coming of God, the great turning point came in, whereby the old time passed over into the new, and all states and bonds in the world of nature and mankind would wholly change. Later this was pictured by the Jews so that with the day of the Lord the present world-time, this age, passed over into the coming one, the world to come, which then often was further split into the three kindreds or into the 40 or 100 or 600 or 1000 or 2000 or 7000 years lasting days of the Messiah, the days of the Messiah, and the thereafter entering endlessness, the world to come or the coming time, Weber, System 354. According to the New Covenant, with the first coming of Christ the last part of this age has begun, so that we now live in the last days or in the last hour, 1 Cor. 10:11, Heb. 1:1, 9:26, 1 John 2:18, and with his second coming the coming age steps in, Matt. 19:28, Mark 10:30, Luke 18:30, 20:35, 1 Cor. 15:23, Heb. 2:5, and so on, cf. Cremer s.v. age. And this coming age begins with the day of the Lord, that is the time in which Christ appears, wakes the dead, holds the judgment, and renews the world. This time is nowhere in the New Testament shown as going to last long; Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:52 that the changing of the living who remain and the uprising of the dead believers will take place in a twinkling, in a blink of an eye, cf. 1 Thess. 4:15-17; uprising and last judgment are tightly bound, as to one act, Luke 14:14, 2 Cor. 4:14, Rev. 20:11-13; and the judgment is set on a day, Matt. 10:15, 11:22, and so on, yes even on an hour, Rev. 14:7. But this last setting proves that the Scripture does not think to bound all the happenings in the coming of Christ exactly within a space of twenty-four hours or of sixty minutes; hour, at first year-tide, often means a much longer time than an hour of sixty minutes, Matt. 26:45, John 4:21, 5:25, 16:2, 32, Rom. 13:11, 1 John 2:18. The happenings which must take place in the coming of Christ are also so wide-reaching that they surely take up a goodly time. The findings of this hundred-year span have shrunk the spans for mutual dealings, for the upholding of fellowship, for the hearing and seeing of what happens in great farness, to a smallest; and they are likely yet but beginning and foretelling of what will be found in following hundred-year spans. But however much with this all reckoning ought to be held in the teaching of the last things; yet the appearing of Christ, so that all see him, uprising of all dead and changing of the living who remain, judging over all mankind after all their works, burning and renewing of the world are such dreadful happenings that they can take place in no other way than in a certain time-span.
The first happening that follows the appearing of Christ is the uprising of the dead. This is not the outcome of a unfolding of bodies in general, or in special of the uprising-body planted in believers through new birth and sacrament, but the working out of an almighty, making deed of God, Matt. 22:29, 1 Cor. 6:14, 15:38, 2 Cor. 1:9. In particular, the Father works this out through the Son, to whom He has given to have life in Himself, John 5:28, 6:39, 40, 44, 1 Cor. 6:14, 2 Cor. 4:14, 1 Thess. 4:14, who is the uprising and the life, the firstborn from the dead, John 11:25, Acts 26:23, 1 Cor. 15:20, Col. 1:18, Rev. 1:5, and therefore must needs bring about the uprising of His own, John 6:39, 40, 1 Cor. 15:20-23, 47-49. The Writ teaches without doubt a general uprising, an uprising not only of believers but also of unbelievers and of all mankind, Dan. 12:2, Matt. 5:29, 30, 10:28, John 5:29, Acts 24:15, Rev. 20:12, 13, and it also writes this to Christ, John 5:29.
But it speaks of this general uprising yet very seldom, for it stands to Christ in a wholly other bond than the uprising of believers. The uprising of the dead in general is yet not more than sidelong a fruit of Christ's work; it is only needful become, because timely death has come in; and this has been sundered from the everlasting death, because God with His grace came between. The punishment on sin was at first the death, the death in its full reach and weight. But because God out of the fallen mankind kindred had chosen for Himself a gathering to everlasting life, He straightway by Adam and Eve already put off the timely death, let them beget from kindred to kindred and sends first at the end of the ages those who are unheeding to His law and gospel to the everlasting undoing. The general uprising serves thus only to mend in all mankind the timely breaking of the band between soul and body, which came between for grace's sake in Christ, and to set them all as mankind , soul and body together, before God's judgment seat and to let them hear the doom from His mouth. This general uprising too the Father brings about through Christ, because He has given not only the life but also the judgment to the Son and this judgment must strike the whole man, both soul and body, John 5:27-29. The uprising of the dead in general is thus in the first place a judging deed of God. But this deed is for believers full of rich comforting. And therefore in the Writ the uprising of the gathering stands everywhere in the forefront, so much even that the uprising of all mankind is sometimes wholly set aside and unspoken, Job 19:25-27, Ps. 73:23-26, Hos. 6:2, 13:14, Isa. 26:19, 20, Ezek. 37, Mark 12:25, 1 Cor. 15, 1 Thess. 4:16, Phil. 3:11.
This uprising is the own, true uprising and is straightway won by Christ, for it is not but a here-uniting of soul and body, but a life-making, a renewing, a straightway stepping into fellowship with Christ both soul and body, a being remade after God's likeness, Rom. 8:11, 29, Phil. 3:21. Therefore Paul lets the uprising of believers fall together with the changing of the living leftovers; the latter have nothing before the former, for the uprising goes before the being changed, and together they are then led to meet the Lord in the air, 1 Cor. 15:51, 52, 2 Cor. 5:2, 4, 1 Thess. 4:15-17.
2. In this resurrection, the identity of the resurrection body with the body that died is preserved. In the raisings that take place in the Old and New Testaments, the body that died is enlivened with new life. Jesus rises with that same body in which He suffered on the cross and which was laid in the grave of Joseph of Arimathea. When Jesus died, many bodies of the saints were raised and came out of their graves, Matt. 27:52. In the resurrection on the last day, all who are in the graves will hear Jesus’ voice and come forth, John 5:28, 29; from the graves, from the sea, from death and Hades the dead return to the earth, Rev. 20:13. And Paul teaches that the resurrection body comes forth from the body that died, just as God brings forth another from the sown grain, 1 Cor. 15:36ff. This identity of the resurrection body with the body that was laid aside at death is of great meaning in the Christian religion. For first, it stands in straight opposition to all dualistic teaching, according to which the body is only a chance dwelling or even a prison of the soul. The being of man consists precisely in the closest union of soul and body into one personhood. The soul belongs by nature to the body and the body to the soul; indeed, each soul, though it does not itself create the body, yet has its own body. In the identity of the body, just as in that of the soul, the ongoingness of the individual human being is upheld. And second, the redemption through Christ is no second, new creation but a re-creation. Much simpler it would have been if God had destroyed the whole fallen world and replaced it with a wholly new one. But it was His good pleasure to raise up the fallen world again, and to free the same mankind that had sinned from sin. This freeing consists in Christ redeeming His church from all sin and from all outcomes of sin, and thus also fully triumphing over death. That is the last foe that must be brought to naught. And therein the might of Christ shines forth, that He not only gives eternal life to His own but therefore also raises them up on the last day. The rebirth from water and spirit is fulfilled in the rebirth of all things, Matt. 19:28. The spiritual redemption from sin is first completed in the bodily redemption at the end of the days. Christ is a full Savior; just as He first appeared to set up the kingdom of heaven in the hearts of believers, so He comes once more to give it a visible shape and to bring His utter might over sin and death to open showing and acknowledgment before the eyes of all creatures. Leiblichkeit ist das Ende der Wege Gottes . The care for the dead stands in straight linkage herewith. Burning of bodies is not to be cast aside because it would set bounds to God’s all-might and make the resurrection unworkable. But it is yet of heathen birth, was never in use among Israel and among Christian folk, and fights against Christian ways. On the other hand, burial is much more in keeping with Scripture and confession, history and worship, with the teaching of the image of God, which also shows in the body, and of death as a punishment of sin, with the honor owed to the dead and the resurrection on the last day. The Christian does not keep the bodies by craft, like the Egyptians; he does not destroy them by machine, as many now wish, but he trusts them to the bosom of the earth, and lets them rest until the resurrection day.
Bibliography. Kuyper, Ons Program. Sartorius, Die Leichenverbrennung innerhalb der christl. Kirche, Basel 1886.
The Christian church and theology therefore held strictly to the sameness of the uprising body with the dead body. Even it often went over to another extreme and confessed not only an uprising of the flesh , but sometimes taught that the totality of the matter, which had belonged to a body, in the uprising by God from all corners of the earth would be gathered together and in the same way and measure as formerly led back to the sundry parts of the body, cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies V 12, 13. Augustine, Enchiridion 26. City of God XX 4, 13 sq. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III qu. 75-86 etc. But this view meets with insurmountable hindrances. For 1° it leads to all kinds of subtle and curious searches, which are of no worth for the teaching of the uprising. The question then is, whether hairs and nails, blood and gall, seed and urine, bowels and genitals shall arise and be formed from the same atoms, in number and kind alike, as those from which they here in the bodies consisted. With maimed folk, who lack one or more limbs, and with children, who died young and sometimes even before birth, one came by this view into no small straits; one must yet, whether one would or not, in all these and like cases take refuge in the supposition that the uprising bodies would be filled up by parts that formerly did not belong to them. The uprising cannot consist in the return and quickening of the totality of the matter. 2° Physiology teaches that the human body, like all living things, is subject to ongoing change of stuff, so that after seven years no single stuff-particle is still there of those which before that time formed the substance of the body. The stuffs of which our bodies consist, such as oxygen, water, nitrogen etc., are the same in kind as those that appear in other creatures around us, but they change without cease; and this change proves enough that the sameness of the bodies cannot lie therein, that they always consist of the same stuffs in number. It is enough that they consist of the same stuffs in kind. 3° This is strengthened by the many changes of shape which nature shows in all her realms. By the working of air, water etc., plants pass over into peat and coal, coal into diamond, clay into claystone and stone into fruitful earth. In the plant and animal realms there is within the bounds of the kinds an endless variety. And each living thing undergoes in the time of its being a row of changes; the maggot becomes a fly, every larva passes from the undeveloped state into a more developed one, the embryo runs through sundry phases and then comes to an outer-womb being, the caterpillar becomes a pupa and thereafter a butterfly etc. What under all these shape-changes stays the same, we know not. Stuff and form change, there seems in the whole living thing nothing steadfast to be; and yet the sameness is upheld, which therefore is free from the gross stuff-mass, from its change and quantity.
3. If we bring these data into connection with what Scripture teaches us about the resurrection, we see the way opened to us to maintain both the substantial unity and the qualitative distinction between the present and the future body. For Scripture teaches in the strict sense no resurrection of the flesh but of the body. From the raisings up of which it informs us, and from the resurrection of Christ, we may indeed conclude something about the essence, but not about the form and the manner, with regard to the resurrection of the dead in the last days. For in all those raisings up the body still existed in its entirety, and the body of Christ was not even given over to corruption, Acts 2:31. But the bodies of those who rise in the parousia are dissolved in their components and scattered in various ways and passed over into other creatures. Of flesh there can in the proper sense be no more question, for flesh is always animated; what ceases to be animated and living thereby also ceases to be flesh and returns to dust, Gen. 3:19. Indeed, Job can say, even granting that this translation is the right one, that he shall behold God from his flesh, 19:26, and Jesus after his resurrection can testify that a spirit has no flesh and bones as he had, Luke 24:39. But this does not furnish conclusive proof for the resurrection of the flesh in the strict sense of the word. For the flesh of which Job's body consisted was indeed the substrate for the body of the resurrection, but did not therefore form its substance. And Jesus rose with the same body in which he had died and which had not even seen corruption, and moreover was until his ascension in a transitional state, so that he could still partake of food. Very clearly Paul teaches, nevertheless, that flesh and blood, being subject to corruption, cannot inherit the incorruption in the kingdom of heaven. Altogether wrongly has it been inferred from this by Holsten, Holtzmann, and others, that according to Paul the dead body does not rise at all and that the proper resurrection takes place already at death. For the apostle expressly confesses his faith in the bodily resurrection and defends it against those who denied it in the church at Corinth both with respect to Jesus and to believers. And he is also fully of the mind that the same body which is laid in the grave is raised in the resurrection, cf. Bornhäuser, Das Recht des Bekenntnisses zur Auferstehung des Fleisches, Gütersloh 1899. But at the same time he argues that the resurrection is not a restoration but a reformation. The body rises, but not as flesh and blood, weak, corruptible, mortal, but as a body clothed with incorruptibility and glory. The body consisting of flesh and blood is indeed the seed from which the resurrection body comes forth, 1 Cor. 15:35-38. But nevertheless there is between the two a great distinction. Already on earth there is much difference in flesh among organic beings, and in body among inorganic creatures, vs. 39-41. And likewise there is an important distinction between the present and the future body, as the contrast between Adam and Christ also proves, vs. 42-49. The first is a σῶμα ψυχικόν, consisting of flesh and blood animated by ψυχή, subject to change; but the last is a σῶμα πνευματικόν, it is indeed a true σῶμα but is no longer governed by the ψυχή but by the πνεῦμα; it consists no longer of flesh and blood, it is above the life of generation, Matt. 22:30, above the need of food and drink, 1 Cor. 6:13, and therein even distinct from the body which man possessed before the fall; it is immortal, incorruptible, spiritualized, glorified, 1 Cor. 15:42ff., Phil. 3:21. According to Paul also, therefore, the identity of the resurrection body with the body entrusted to the bosom of the earth is independent of the mass of matter and its continual change. All organisms and so also human bodies consist indeed always of the same substances in kind but not in number. And so also for the resurrection body it is by no means necessary that it consist precisely of the same atoms in number as those of which it consisted when it was laid in the grave. But for the identity it is a requirement that in the resurrection body the same organization and form, the same schema and type be preserved, which here stamped the body as the own body of a particular person. Under the transformations of form to which all creatures are subject, their identity and continuity remain preserved. The human body may after death decay and according to its mass of matter be transformed into all sorts of other organisms, something of it remains on earth which forms the substrate of the resurrection body. What that is, we do not know and can never find out. But the strangeness of it disappears as soon as we consider that the very ultimate components of things are completely unknown to us. Every smallest atom is still susceptible of decomposition; chemical analysis continues endlessly but never reaches the absolutely simple being. And yet there must be in all organisms and so also in the human body something which in the continually ongoing transformation of form preserves its identity. What absurdity is there then in assuming that such an "organic ground form," such a "schema of individuality" also remains after the death of the human body, to serve as seed for the body of the resurrection? For according to Scripture this stands firm, that the body of the resurrection is not brought along by the blessed from heaven or formed from spiritual, heavenly elements. The body of the resurrection comes not from heaven but from the earth; it is no self-formed product of pneuma or psyche, but comes up from the body which at death was laid in the grave; and it is therefore not spiritual in the sense that it would have pneuma as its substance, but it is and remains material, though that matter is no longer organized into corruptible flesh and blood but into a glorified body. Cf. Tertullian, de resurrectione carnis. Augustine, de civ. XXII c. 12-20. Enchir. 84-93. Lombard, Sent. IV dist. 43. Thomas, suppl. qu. 82-87. Oswald, Eschat. 262 f. Jansen, Prael. III 1044. Simar, Dogm. § 168. Gerhard, Loc. XXVI tract. 2. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 576-605. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 66. Synopsis pur. theol., disp. 51. Mastricht, Theol. VIII 4, 6. Amyraldus, Theses Salm. III 840. Turretin, Theol. El. XX qu. 1-3. Marck, Exspect. J. C. II c. 1-18. M. Vitringa IV 109-156. Kliefoth, Eschat. 248 f. Splittgerber, Tod. Fortleben und Auferstehung 1879. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 614 f. Art. Auferstehung in Herzog.
4. After the resurrection follows the judgment, which in the Old Testament is set forth as a victory by the Messiah over all the enemies of Israel, but in the New Testament is described more spiritually as a judicial work of Christ, whereby He judges and sentences all men according to the law given them by God. For Jesus came the first time to earth, not to condemn the world but to save it, John 3:17, 12:47; yet right away at His appearing He brought about a crisis in life, which has the effect and the aim that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind, 3:19, 20, 9:39. Jesus continually holds judgment as the Son of Man, as He already here on earth gives eternal life to those who believe and lets the wrath of God rest on those who do not believe, 3:36, 5:22-27.
There is therefore without doubt an inward, spiritual judgment; a crisis that unfolds from generation to generation; an immanent, this-side judgment that is stretched out in the consciences of men. Faith and unbelief already here on earth bring their fruit and their reward; just as faith is followed by justification and peace with God, so unbelief leads to ongoing darkening and hardening and to surrender to all kinds of unrighteousness. Yes, even outside the opposition of faith and unbelief, virtue and vice each bear their own fruits; the good and the evil also in natural life have their own reward, not only in the excusing or accusing of the conscience, but also in the outward prosperity or adversity that are often bound up with them. Scripture and history teach besides as if in strife that blessing and curse, mercy and wrath, favors and judgments alternate with each other in the life of men and of peoples. There lies a great truth in the word of the poet: the world history is the world judgment. But yet in this saying the truth is mingled with the lie. It is not thought theistically but pantheistically, and undermines all judgment, instead of confirming and upholding it. For if world history is the world judgment, it altogether ceases to be a judgment and becomes a natural process, which about the awesome opposition of good and evil in the whole does not trouble itself and drives this back to the hidden nook of the conscience, and even there only for a time.
There is then indeed no God anymore who can make the natural order serve the moral order, but there is nothing other than a natural power that rules the whole physical world and soon also shrinks and makes disappear that limited field which at first was still allotted for the moral rule of the good. For the good is no power that can withstand nature, if it has not its support in an almighty God who is Creator of both nature and moral order. Indeed, pantheism always brings against this that the good must yet be done for its own sake and not from hope of reward or from fear of punishment. But the longing of the soul for the triumph of the good, for the victory of the right, has nothing at all in common with the selfish wish for earthly happiness and sensual satisfaction. On the contrary, however much Scripture reckons with it that man is a sensual being, and holds out to him a reward great in the heavens; that reward is always subordinate to the honor of God's name and acquired by Christ with the good works in which the believers walk.
It is precisely the godly who longingly look out for that day in which God glorifies His name before the eyes of all creatures and in their cause makes His own triumph over all opposition. And this longing becomes the stronger, the more the blood that cries for vengeance flows in broader and deeper stream over the earth, the more unrighteousness triumphs, godlessness increases, the lie prevails, and Satan's kingdom spreads and rises up against the kingdom of righteousness. The whole history cries out for a world judgment; the whole creation sighs for it; all peoples witness to it; the martyrs in heaven cry for it with a loud voice; the church prays for the coming of Christ; and Christ Himself, who is the Alpha and the Omega, says: Behold, I come quickly and my reward is with me, to give to each according to his work.
However much Scripture thus, especially in the Gospel of John, acknowledges a spiritual judgment running through history, yet it speaks everywhere also of a final judgment, which makes the kingdom of Christ triumph over all unrighteousness. World history may be a world judgment; the world judgment takes place at the end of the days, when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead. Many times Holy Scripture ascribes the judgment to the Father, Matt. 18:35, 2 Thess. 1:5, Heb. 11:6, James 4:12, 1 Pet. 1:17, 2:23, Rev. 20:11, 12; but He yet exercises this work through Christ, to whom He has given all judgment, whom He has appointed as Judge, John 5:22, 27, Acts 10:42, 17:31, Rom. 14:9, and who therefore one day will summon all men before His judgment seat and judge them according to their works, Matt. 25:32, Rom. 14:9-13, 2 Cor. 5:10, 2 Tim. 4:1, 8, 1 Pet. 4:5, Rev. 19:11-21.
For Christ is the Son of Man, who by His appearing already brought about a crisis, who continues it in history and at the end of the days completes it. The relation to Him determines man's eternal weal or woe; in the judgment over living and dead He celebrates His highest triumph and reaches the completion of His kingdom and the full subjection of all His enemies. Therefore the chief question at the last judgment is also that of faith or unbelief. For faith in Christ is the work of God par excellence, John 6:29, 1 John 3:23. He who believes does not come into judgment, John 5:24, and he who does not believe is already judged and remains under God's wrath, John 3:18, 36. The standard in the final judgment is thus in the first place the gospel, John 12:48. But that gospel does not stand over against and is not even to be thought apart from the law; the demand for faith is indeed itself grounded in the law, and the gospel is the restoration and fulfillment of the law.
Therefore in the final judgment all the works also come into account which have been done by men and recorded in the books before God's face, Eccles. 12:14, 2 Cor. 5:10, Eph. 6:8, 1 Pet. 1:17, Rev. 20:12, 22:12. For those works are expressions and fruits of the life principle that dwells within the heart, Matt. 7:17, 12:33, Luke 6:44, and include everything that has been done by man, not in the intermediate state, but in his body, not only the deeds, Matt. 25:35ff., Mark 9:41, 42, Luke 6:35, 14:13, 14, 1 Cor. 3:8, 1 Thess. 4:6 etc., but also the words, Matt. 12:36, and the hidden counsels of the heart, Rom. 2:16, 1 Cor. 4:5; for nothing remains hidden and everything becomes manifest, Matt. 6:4, 6, 18, 10:26, Eph. 5:11-14, 1 Tim. 5:24, 25.
The norm in the final judgment is thus the whole Word of God, according to its two parts: law and gospel. But besides this, Scripture says clearly that account will be taken of the measure of revelation which has fallen to someone's lot. Those who knew the will of the Lord and did not do it will be beaten with double stripes, Luke 12:47. It will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for Jerusalem and Capernaum, Matt. 10:15, 11:22, 24, Mark 6:11, Luke 10:12, 14, Heb. 2:3. Those who did not hear the gospel are also not judged according to the gospel but according to the law; and the Gentiles, who did not know the Mosaic law but sinned against the law that is known to them by nature, also perish without that Mosaic law, while the Jews are judged precisely by this, Rom. 2:12.
Although Scripture lets the judgment pass over all men without exception, Matt. 25:32, Acts 17:31, Rom. 2:6, 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10, 2 Tim. 4:1, Rev. 20:12, yet it makes a distinction between those nations which knew the gospel and in the end brought forth the antichristendom, and those other peoples which never heard of Christ and therefore for the first time at His parousia hear of Him, while it further speaks particularly of the judgment over the evil angels, and of the place which the good angels and the believers take in the final judgment.
Certainly it costs effort to form a somewhat clear conception of that judgment. It bears without doubt not only an inward and ghostly character, so that it would only take place in the conscience of man; but it is surely a judgment that is also outwardly fulfilled in the sight of all creatures.
Image and reality may flow together ever so much, the appearing of Christ, the uprising, and likewise all that is told of the judgment is drawn too truly, than that it would be free to make all things ghostly. But then for the holding of this judgment also a place and some span of time is needful. And the Scripture gives us ground to think that it has a following course.
The angels go with Christ at his coming on the clouds, to help him in the carrying out of the doom; they gather the righteous, sunder the wicked from them, and drive them away from before his face, Matt. 13:30, 49, 24:31. Moreover, he is ringed about by the blessed, 1 Thess. 3:13, 4:16, 2 Thess. 1:10, Jude 14, Rev. 17:14, 19:14. After then the uprising of the dead and the changing of the living leftover believers has taken place, these are taken up together in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, 1 Thess. 4:17.
Not unlikely is it, that, just as with Christ's uprising and heaven-going they fell apart and were even sundered by forty days from each other, so also the uprising or changing of the believers at the end of the days does not yet at once add to them that full glory, which after the world-renewing in the new heaven or on the new earth shall be their share, Lampe and Gerdes in M. Vitringa IV 143. But however this may be, the uprising or changing shuts in for the believers, just as for Christ, the rightwising. Indeed the Scripture says that all men without sundering, thus also the believers, must appear before the judgment seat of Christ. But it witnesses also that whoever believes is not judged and comes not into judgment, for he already has the everlasting life, John 3:18, 5:24; that the dead believers are already in heaven with Christ and are clad with long white garments, 2 Cor. 5:8, Phil. 1:23, Rev. 6:11, 7:9, 14; and that Christ comes to be glorified in his saints and wondered at in all who believe, 2 Thess. 1:10.
Before Christ speaks out the doom over the evil angels, over the antichristian world, and over the cultureless folks, he has already set the sheep at his right hand and is hedged about by his angels and his saints. This shows also from 1 Cor. 6:2, 4, where Paul outspokenly says that the saints shall judge the world and the angels, M. Vitringa IV 163. For this saying may not be weakened to an approving by the believers of the judgment that Christ fells over world and angels, but shows surely from the linking that the saints shall take part in the judgment over the world and angels. Besides, Jesus already promised to his twelve learners that they would sit with him on twelve thrones, judging the twelve kindreds of Israel, Matt. 19:28, Luke 22:30, and John saw around the throne of God thrones in heaven, beset by the elders of the church, Rev. 4:4, 11:16, 20:4, 6.
Christ indeed and his church are one; what world and angels have misdone against her, that he reckons as if it were done against him, Matt. 25:40, 45, Mark 9:41, 42. Even to the good angels this judgment of Christ and his church stretches out, 1 Cor. 6:4, for the angels are serving ghosts, who are sent out to service for the sake of those who shall inherit salvation and therefore gain a place in the coming God's kingdom according to the service which they have wrought in regard to Christ and his church.
In the sight of John therefore Christ draws, ringed about by his hosts, against the antichristian might, Rev. 19:11-21; the triumphing church has share in his kingly lordship, Rev. 20:4-6 and at last with Christ makes an end to all withstanding, as he judges the folks who dwell in the four corners of the earth, Rev. 20:7-10.
Lombardus, Sent. IV dist. 43 sq. Thomas, Suppl. qu. 88-90. Oswald, Eschat. 334f. Atzberger, Die christl. Eschat. 356-370. Jansen, Prael. III 1062. Simar, Dogm. § 169. Gerhard, Loc. XXVIII. Quenstedt, Theol. IV 605-634. Polanus, Synt. VI c. 69. Synopsis pur. theol., disp. 51. Mastricht, Theol. VIII 4, 7. Turretinus, Theol. XX qu. 6. Marck, Exspect. J. C. 1. III c. 1-18. Moor VI 706-718. Kliefoth, Eschat 236f. 275f. Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 620f. Art. Gericht in Herzog³.
5. The place to which the ungodly are sent after the judgment bears in the New Testament the name of Gehenna. The Hebrew ge hinnom was originally the name of the Valley of Hinnom, which lay to the southeast of Jerusalem and, according to Joshua 15:8, 18:16, formed the boundary between two tribes. Under Ahaz and Manasseh, this valley became a place for the worship of Moloch, in whose honor children were slain and burned, 2 Kings 16:3, 21:6, 2 Chronicles 28:3, 33:6, Jeremiah 32:34, 35. Therefore, this place was destroyed under Josiah and declared unclean by the priests, 2 Kings 23:10. Jeremiah prophesied that a dreadful slaughter would be inflicted on the Israelites here, and the name of the valley Topheth would be changed to that of the Valley of Slaughter, Jeremiah 7:32, 19:6. And the apocryphal book of Enoch expressed the expectation that in this valley the ungodly would be gathered for judgment. For this reason, the name Gehinnom was later transferred to the place of punishment for the ungodly after death. According to others, however, this transfer had another cause. After the Valley of Hinnom was destroyed by Josiah, it was used, according to later Jews, for the casting down and burning of all kinds of uncleanness. Just as the Garden of Eden denoted the place where the righteous dwelt after death, Gehinnom became the name of the realm to which the unclean and ungodly were sent, to suffer punishment there in the eternal fire. Fire, moreover, has from of old been a revelation and symbol of the wrath and fierceness of the Lord. Israel's God is a consuming fire, an everlasting burning, Deuteronomy 4:24, 9:3, Isaiah 33:14; He spoke to the children of Israel from the midst of the fire, Deuteronomy 4:12, 33, 5:4, 22-26, 9:10, 10:4, compare Exodus 3:2; His wrath is a burning fire, going out from His nostrils, Psalm 18:9, 79:5, 89:47, Jeremiah 4:4; fire, going out from the face of the Lord, consumes the offering, Leviticus 9:24; by fire He destroys Nadab and Abihu, Leviticus 10:2, the murmurers of the people, Numbers 11:1, Psalm 106:18, the Korahites, Numbers 16:35, the bands sent against Elijah, 2 Kings 1:10ff.; and in fire He comes at last to execute judgment on earth and to punish the ungodly, Deuteronomy 32:22, Psalm 11:6, 83:15, 97:3, 140:11, Isaiah 30:33, 31:9, 66:15, 16, 24, Jeremiah 4:4, 15:14, 17:4, Amos 1:4ff., Joel 2:30; and that fire burns even to the lowest Sheol, Deuteronomy 32:22, it is never quenched, Isaiah 66:24, and burns forever, Jeremiah 17:4.
This conception passed over into the New Testament. Gehenna is the place of punishment for the ungodly after the day of judgment, distinguished from hades , phylake , abyssos , but identical with the kaminos tou pyros , Matthew 13:42, 50, and the limne tou pyros , Revelation 19:20, 20:10, 14, 15, 21:8. It is the place appointed for the beast from the abyss and for the false prophet, Revelation 19:20, for Satan and his angels, Revelation 20:10, for death and hades, Revelation 20:14, and for all the ungodly, Revelation 20:15, 21:8. And they are all cast into it after the resurrection, Matthew 5:29, 30, 10:28, and after the final judgment, Revelation 19:20, 20:10, 14, 15, 21:8, while before that time hades, the prison, phylake , 1 Peter 3:19, Revelation 20:7, or the abyss is their abode, and the punishment of the eternal fire or the darkness of outer gloom is still reserved for them, Matthew 8:29, 25:41, 46, 2 Peter 2:17, Jude 13. For in that Gehenna burns the eternal, unquenchable fire, Matthew 18:8, Mark 9:43, 44, 48, the worm gnaws that does not die, Mark 9:44, 48, and there is eternal torment, Matthew 25:46, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Revelation 14:11; it is a geenna or kaminos tou pyros , Matthew 5:22, 13:42, 50, 18:9, and at the same time a place of outermost and outer darkness, Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 25:30, 2 Peter 2:17, Jude 13, compare Deuteronomy 5:22, Psalm 97:2, 3, situated outside, Revelation 22:15, in the depths, so that one is cast into it, Matthew 5:29, 30, Revelation 19:20, 20:10, 14, 15, far from the wedding table of the Lamb, Matthew 8:11, 12, 22:13, far from fellowship with God and with Christ, Matthew 7:23, 25:41, Luke 13:27, 28, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, in the company of Satan and his angels, Matthew 25:41, Revelation 20:10, 15. The wrath of God reveals itself there in all its terror, Romans 2:5-8, 9:22, 1 Thessalonians 1:10, Hebrews 10:31, Revelation 6:16, 17, so that Gehenna is not only a place of deprivation, but also of sorrow and pain, both in soul and in body, a place of kolasis , Matthew 25:46, Revelation 14:10, 11, of klauthmos and brygmos ton odonton , Matthew 8:12, 13:42 etc., of thlipsis and stenochoria , Romans 2:9, 2 Thessalonians 1:6, of apoleia , Matthew 7:13, Romans 9:22, Philippians 1:28, 3:19, 2 Peter 3:7, Revelation 17:8, 11, of phthora , Galatians 6:8, olethros , 1 Thessalonians 5:3, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, 1 Timothy 6:9; Gehenna is the realm of the second death, Revelation 2:11, 20:6, 14, 15, 21:8.
On this firm ground of Scripture, the teaching of the everlastingness of hellish punishment was built in the Christian church; and theology and preaching, poetry and painting often vied with each other in lively description and lifelike drawing of the pains which there, in body and soul, were suffered in the everlasting fire. But from time to time, objections were nevertheless brought against this teaching. And since the Enlightenment in the last century brought about a milder judging of sin and crime, did away with the torture benches, lessened the punishments, and everywhere awakened a feeling of humaneness, there also came a wholly other view of the punishments of hell, and these were set forth by many as changed or wholly cast aside. Lecky, History of the Origin and Influence of the Enlightenment in Europe, Leipzig 1873. The grounds on which the everlastingness of hellish punishment is fought against always come down to this:
a. Everlasting punishment fights against the goodness, the love, the mercy of God and makes Him into a tyrant who takes delight in plaguing and paining and readies praise for Himself out of the everlasting groaning of millions of unhappy creatures.
b. Everlasting punishment fights against the righteousness of God, for it holds no link with and is not even to the sin, which, however dreadful, yet always bears a bounded, finite kind. It is not to be thought that God, who is full love and the highest righteousness, would punish a child of man, even if it had sinned a thousand years, with an everduring paining.
c. Such an everlasting punishment is also unthinkably and unthought. The Scripture speaks of fire and worm and darkness, but these are all likenesses; taken word for word, they would shut out each other. But setting that aside, what is the worth of an everlasting punishment that has no other goal than to pain the sinner everlastingly? What good does it have for him who undergoes it, since it must of course shut out true sorrow and ever makes him go on with sinning? What honor does it bring to God's name, if it overcomes not and destroys not the sin but upholds it and makes it last evermore? And how is it workable that the lost under such an everlasting punishment ever harden themselves, without ever coming to inturning and lowly themselves before God?
d. The Scripture teaches then also no everlasting, endless punishment in hell. Indeed it speaks of everlasting pain and so on, but everlasting has there even as elsewhere not the meaning of endless, but marks a time-length whose bound withdraws from watching or reckoning; aiōnios is what goes out beyond a longer or shorter aiōn . This is yet strengthened thereby, that aiōnios , in a good sense used of the goods of salvation, for example of life, mainly marks an inner quality, whereby all these salvation goods are set forth as lifted above passing away. Over against that, the state of the lost is marked as apōleia , phthora , olethros , thanatos , which points thereon that they so cannot stay everlastingly but are either at one time fully destroyed or once wholly restored.
e. For the last, the Scripture offers hope, as it teaches that Christ is an atoning for the sins of the whole world, 1 John 2:2, Col. 1:19, 20, and that God in that way wills the salvation of all, 1 Tim. 2:4, 4:10. Even as all men die in Adam, so are they all made alive in Christ, 1 Cor. 15:22, Rom. 5:18. Now God gathers all things under Christ as head together, Eph. 1:10, that once every knee may bow before Christ, Phil. 2:10, and God may be all in all, 1 Cor. 15:28. God has shut all under sin, that He might be merciful to all, Rom. 11:32.
On these considerations, regarding the end of the godless—if we set aside pantheism and materialism, which deny all immortality and eternity—the following three hypotheses are built.
First, there are those who teach that a possibility of conversion remains open, not only in the intermediate state up to the final judgment, but also thereafter and even unto all eternity. Whether there is a hell and an eternal punishment depends wholly on man and on his free will. If he continually resists the call to conversion, he wraps himself ever more firmly and deeply in sin and prolongs his punishment. But since the preaching of faith and conversion never ceases and man's will always remains free, the possibility of an eternal punishment in hell becomes very unlikely, and one rather flatters oneself with the hope that in the end all will come to conversion and enter into eternal life. Eternal pain in Scripture thus means only that those who convert so late will always retain the memory of their stubborn resistance and will eternally lag behind those who believed the gospel in this life. This hypothetical universalism thus amounts to a continual purification and is a renewal of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The difference is only that metempsychosis lets this purification take place in the here and now, while hypothetical universalism places it in the hereafter. This doctrine found entrance especially in the previous century among the Rationalists, but is also now defended by many theologians; cf. Wegscheider, Instit. § 200 . Bretschneider, Dogm. II 468 f. 581 f. Reinhard, Dogm. 706 f. Lange, Posit. Dogm. § 131 . Dorner, Gl. II 972 . Nitzsch, Ev. Dogm. 624 . W. Schmidt, Christl. Dogm. II 517 . Saussaye, mijne Theol. van Ch. d. l. S. 71-75 . H. Ernst, Geloof en Vrijheid 1886 pp. 407-444 . Furthermore in England the advocates of the so-called future (second) probation or of the wider hope, such as Robertson, Maurice, Theol. Essays 1853 p. 442: the word eternal and the punishment of the wicked . Thomas de Quincey, On the supposed scriptural expression for eternity 1852 . Tennyson, In Memoriam . Farrar, Eternal Hope 1878 and Mercy and Judgment 1881 with the literature called forth by these two works; cf. The wider hope, essays and strictures on the doctrine and literature of future punishment by numerous writers, lay and clerical , London Unwin 1890. In America the defenders of the Andover position, taken by the five professors of Andover College, Churchill, Harris, Hincks, Tucker and Egb. C. Smith, who deviated from various articles of the confession, also from that concerning eternal punishment; cf. Andover Review April 1890 p. 434 etc.
Naturally this view of a continuing conversion and purification leads to the doctrine of the so-called universalists, who believe that in the end all creatures will partake of salvation and glory. What is wished and hoped for there is here certainly expected and proclaimed as dogma. The doctrine of the return of all things to God already appears in Indian and Greek philosophy, passed from there into Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and was then first presented in Christian theology by Origen. He indeed speaks repeatedly of an eternal punishment in hell but sees in it only a practical doctrine, which is necessary for the undeveloped but is understood quite differently by the gnostics. According to Origen, all spirits were originally created equal by God, but the acts of the free will bring inequality and cause the souls of men to be transferred for purification into a material world and bound to bodies. But this purification continues also after death and after the final judgment, until out of and through the greatest possible diversity equality again appears and all spirits return to God in the same state in which they originally dwelt with Him. Since however the free will always remains the same, it can just as well return from evil to good as from good to evil, and thus there is a continual alternation of fall and restoration of all things, an endless creation and destruction of the material world; cf. Atzberger, Gesch. der christl. Eschat. 1896 S. 366-456 .
This thought of the restoration of all things found echo in antiquity with Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Didymus, Diodorus of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and others; cf. Petavius, de angelis III 7. 8 , in the Middle Ages with Scotus Erigena, Amalric of Bena and the brothers and sisters of the free spirit, after the Reformation with Denck and many Anabaptists, with Jane Leade, J. W. Petersen, Ludwig Gerhard, F. C. Oetinger, Michael Hahn, Jung-Stilling, Swedenborg etc., and in modern times with Schleiermacher, Chr. Gl. § 117-120 and § 163 Anhang . Schweizer, Gl. II 577 f. 591. 604 . Schoeberlein, Prinzip und System der Dogm. 679 . Riemann, Die Lehre von der Apokatastasis ² Magdeburg 1897. Scholten, Initia 268 sq. W. Francken, Geloof en Vrijheid 1886 . Cf. Köstlin, art. Apokatastasis in Herzog³.
Much greater agreement, however, was found by a third view, which is known under the name of conditional immortality. Although the earlier theology very often spoke of immortality in a spiritual sense, as a gift acquired by Christ, yet almost no one thought of denying the natural immortality of the soul. The Socinians first taught, under the influence of their abstract supranaturalism, that souls were not immortal by nature but became so only in case of obedience through a gift of God. From this it followed that the godless and the devils, by virtue of a natural perishability, must one day cease to exist. Socinus did not yet express this so clearly, but his followers taught without hesitation that the second death consisted in annihilation; and this then according to Crell, Schmalz and others took place not at or soon after death, but only after the general resurrection and the world judgment; Fock, Der Socin. 714 f. From the Socinians this doctrine was taken over by Locke, Warburton, Whiston, Dodwell, Walter and others, and in this century by Rothe, Theol. Ethik § 470-472 and Weisse, Ueber die philos. Bedeutung der christl. Eschat. Stud. u. Krit. 1836 . But especially it began to gain ground and find adherents since it was defended in 1875 by Edward White in his Life in Christ, a study of the Scripture doctrine on the nature of man, the object of the divine incarnation and the conditions of human immortality , 3 ed. Stock London 1878. This book set many pens in motion and elicited not only serious opposition but also various expressions of agreement. Everywhere conditionalism now finds numerous defenders, such as e.g. Schultz, Voraussetzungen der christl. Lehre von der Unsterblichkeit 1861 . H. Plitt, Evang. Glaubenslehre 1863. II 413 . Weisse, Philos. Dogm. § 970 . Lemme, Endlosigkeit der Verdammnis und allgemeine Wiederbringung , Lichterfelde-Berlin, Runge. (lecture, held 12 Aug. 1898). Charles Byse, L’immortalité conditionelle ou la vie en Christ , Paris 1880. Petavel-Olliff, Le problème de l’immortalité , Paris 1891. Dr. Jonker, De leer der condit. onsterfelijkheid , Theol. Stud. I.
6. If now in the teaching of everlasting punishment the feeling of man had to decide, it would surely be hard to uphold and nowadays also find but few upholders. We should thankfully acknowledge that since the last hundred years the thought of mankind's kindness and the feeling of fellow-suffering have strongly awakened and have put an end to the cruelty which formerly ruled especially also in the field of criminal law. But no one can yet be blind to it, that also this kindly view brings with it its one-sidedness and dangers. The mighty change which has taken place can be set forth in this one saying, that while formerly the mad were handled even as wrongdoers, now the wrongdoers are looked upon as mad. Before, guilt was seen in every unlikeness; now all thoughts of guilt, wrongdoing, answerability, reckoning, and the like are robbed of their truth, cf. Simons, New Directions in Criminal Law Knowledge, Guide April 1900. The sense of right and righteousness, of law-breaking and guilt is weakened in a worrisome way, as the measure of all these things is shifted not to God, but to man and to fellowship. With that all sureness and safety go lost little by little. For if the good of fellowship gives the deciding stroke, then not only is every bound between good and evil wiped out, but right also runs the risk of being offered up to might. It is gainful for you that one man die for the folk and not the whole folk be lost, John 11:50, then becomes the speech of the highest law-giving. And the same feeling of man, which first pleaded for the kindly handling of the wrongdoer, does not spare itself to soon demand the torment-death of the guiltless; the hosanna makes way for crucify him; the voice of the folk, which often wrongly is honored as a voice of God, shrinks from no horrors; and while the righteous still reckons how it is with his beast, even the inward parts, the heart, the mind of the godless is yet cruel, Prov. 12:10. On the feeling of man therefore little can be built; that may and can not give the deciding in the setting of right and law; even if the seeming is against it, it is yet endlessly much better to fall into the hand of the Lord than into that of men, 1 Chron. 21:13. And this holds also in the teaching of the everlasting punishments in hell. For 1º it deserves marking, that this teaching, however much it has often been worked out too lifelike in church and god-learning, yet is grounded in the Writ. And no one speaks of it in the Writ more often and at greater length than our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom no one can deny depth of man's feeling and fellow-suffering, and who was the meekest and lowliest among all the children of men. It is the highest love which threatens with the heaviest punishments. Over against the blessedness of everlasting life, which He won for His own, stands the woe of everlasting ruin, which He tells to the godless. Both were in the Old Witness in shadows hidden and set forth under likenesses. But in the New Witness it is Christ who opens the outlook both into the depths of the outer darkness and into the dwellings of the everlasting light. 2º That the punishment in this place of the outer darkness is an everlasting one, cannot be doubted with the Writ in hand. It is true, αἰωνιος (from αἰων, Hebrew עולם, that is, time-length, life-length, life-course, man's age, unbounded long time in past or future; the now world-time, αἰων οὑτος; the coming age, αἰων μελλων) very often means a time-length which goes beyond man's reckoning but is utterly not endless or everlasting. Often it is also used in the New Testament of the whole world-time gone by up to the showing of Christ, in which God's counsel was told by the foretellers but yet not fully opened, Luke 1:70, Acts 3:21, Rom. 16:25, Col. 1:26, 2 Tim. 1:9, Titus 1:2. But the word αἰωνιος serves in the New Testament chiefly to mark the unpassing, above all rot and ruin lifted kind of the welfare-goods won by Christ, and is then especially very often bound with ζωη; the everlasting life which Christ gives to each who believes has its beginning already here on earth but is yet first in the future fully shown; it belongs in being to the αἰων μελλων, Luke 18:30, is unrotting, John 11:25, 26, and is called everlasting, even as the building from God, 2 Cor. 5:1, the saving, Heb. 5:9, the loosing, 9:12, the heirship, 9:15, the glory, 2 Tim. 2:10, the kingship, 2 Pet. 1:11, even as God, Christ, the Holy Ghost are also called everlasting, Rom. 16:26, Heb. 9:14, 13:8, and so on. Over against that it is said that the punishment of the godless shall be in το πυρ το αἰωνιον; Matt. 18:8, 25:41, Jude 7, κολασις αἰωνιος, Matt. 25:46, ὀλεθρος αἰωνιος, 2 Thess. 1:9, κρισις αἰωνιος, Mark 3:29. Even as the everlasting life, by this setting forth the everlasting punishment is shown as belonging to the αἰων μελλων, in which no change of state is more workable. Nowhere does the Writ mark with any word or even leave open the workableness, that to the state which there comes in, an end can yet come. And forthright it speaks out that the fire there is unquenchable, Matt. 3:12, that the worm dies not, Mark 9:44, that the smoke of the tormenting goes up in all everlastingness, Rev. 14:11, and lasts day and night in all everlastingness, 20:10, and that it as everlasting torment stands over against the everlasting life of the righteous, Matt. 25:46. Unbound reading can here find nothing other than an everlasting, never ending punishment. Cf. Cremer s. v. 3º The state of the lost is set forth as ἀπωλεια, Matt. 7:13, φθορα, Gal. 6:8, ὀλεθρος, 2 Thess. 1:9, θανατος, Rev. 2:11, and so on, in keeping therewith, that in Old and New Witness it is often said that the godless shall be wiped out, rooted out, laid waste, rotted, done away, cast out, as chaff burned, and so on. The upholders of the bound unending life understand all these sayings in the sense of a full wiping out, cf. White, Life in Christ. But this understanding lacks all ground. Life means in the Writ never bare being, and death is never the same as wiping out. Of the timely, body death also the bound-lifers cannot deny this; they take mostly as the Socinians that the godless also after death yet keep on being, whether to first after uprising and end-judgment be wiped out by God, or to slowly die away and at last also bodily go to ground. The last is both wisdom-wise and Writ-wise an unworkable thought. Sin yet is no stuff, no matter but form, which underlays a being and that being not wipes out but steers in a wrong, from God turned away way, part III. And the bodily death is not but a kindly following but a forthright, by God threatened and fulfilled punishment on sin, ib. In that death God wipes not out the man, but parts He soul and body timely asunder, to hold both in being and at the uprising again to unite. The Writ teaches clearly and unanswerably the unending life of man. The bound-life-ism mixes the right-wise with the bodily being, as it in ἀπωλεια, which is the punishment of sin, sees a wiping out of the stuff of man. And even as God in the first death wipes not out the man, so does He this also not in the second death. For this is also set forth in the Writ as tormenting, Matt. 25:46, weeping and gnashing of teeth, Matt. 8:12, pressing and straitness, Rom. 2:9, unquenchable fire, Matt. 18:8, never dying worm, Mark 9:44, and so on, which sayings all underlay the being of the lost. But their state can yet be called ἀπωλεια, φθορα, ὀλεθρος, θανατος, because they in right-wise, ghostly sense are fully gone to ground and in full sense miss that life-fullness which is given to the believers through Christ. So the lost son is called νεκρος and ἀπολωλος, Luke 15:24, 32, the Ephesians in their former state νεκροι in their sins and misdeeds, Eph. 2:3, estranged from the life of God, Eph. 4:18, those of Sardis νεκροι, Rev. 3:1, and so on, without that anyone hereby thinks on their not-being. 4º To a same mis-knowing of the right-wise kind of sin make the upholders of the all-bringing-back themselves guilty. The word is taken from Acts 3:21 but holds there, as now everyone acknowledges, utterly not in what is now meant therewith. The Writ teaches nowhere that once all men and even all devils shall be blessed. Indeed it speaks often very all-wardly, because the work of Christ deeply of unending worth is and comes to good to the whole world and mankind in its living whole being, part III. But it shuts out decidedly that all single ones among men or also even the devils once would become dwellers in the kingship of God. At all times the teaching of the again-bringing of all things has also only been taught by a few standing-alone persons, and even today among the god-learned finds yet rather the bound-life-ism than the all-bringing-back upholding. In deed this teaching is also not of Christly but of heathen spring, and bears it no Writ-kind but a wisdom-kind mark. It is the all-god-ism which lies thereunder and all things, as they come forth from God, so also one after other brings back to Him. God is here no Law-giver and Judge, who once shall judge the world in righteousness, but an unthinking, in-dwelling might, which drives all forth to the end and once brings all back to itself. Sin is here no lawlessness, but a needful blink in the world-unfolding. And the loosing in Christ is no law-wise mending and no right-wise new-making but a bodily working which rules all. 5º To make right the everlasting punishment is therefore before all things needful, that one with the Writ acknowledge the unbreachable righteousness of God and the deep sinful kind of sin. Sin is no weakness, no lack, no timely and little by little fading unwholeness, but it is toward its spring and being lawlessness, overstepping of the law, uprising and foe-ship against God, nay-saying of his right, of his sway, even of his being. Indeed sin is bounded in that sense that it is done by a bounded made-thing in a bounded time, but Augustine has already rightly marked that not the time-length in which the sin is done, but its inward kind is the measure of its punishment. An hour of unthinking can make that one weeps years. On sins of a single eye-blink follows a whole life of shame and punishment. Who does a misdeed is sometimes punished with death and by the earthly over-might brought into an unmendable state. So does God also; for what on earth is the death-punishment is the punishment of hell in the end-judgment. He judges and punishes sin toward its inward goodness. And then sin is unbounded in that sense that it is done against the highest Majesty, who has an utter right to our love and our honoring. God is worthy of our hearkening and giving on utter, unbounded way; the law in which He asks this is therefore utter binding, its bindingness unbounded great; and the overstepping of that law is thus, deeply looked at, an utter, an unbounded evil. Besides here comes not so much the long-lasting of sinning in reckoning, as well the will of the sinner, which is such that it would always will to sin if it could, Aug. de civ. 21, 11. Who does sin is a bond-servant of sin and will and can not other than sin. It lies truly not on him if he is set outside the chance to go on on the sinful way; toward his inward longing he would not other will than to live everlastingly to be able to sin everlastingly. Who would then, heeding this sinful kind of sin, dare say that God is unrighteous if He visits it not only with timely but also with everlasting punishments? 6º Commonly this upholding, taken from the righteousness of God, is also only shyly and waveringly brought forth. All the more is the everlasting punishment thought at odds with the goodness and love of God. If however it is not at odds with the righteousness of God, then it is this also not and can even not be with his goodness. There is here no choice. If the everlasting punishment is unrighteous, then it is therewith judged and needs the goodness of God not more be brought thereto. If however it answers to God's righteousness, then stays the goodness of God thereby unharmed; what is righteous is also good. The upholding taken from God's goodness against the everlasting punishment brings thus on the footstep of Marcion secretly a clash between God's righteousness and his goodness and offers the first to the last. A goodness however which undoes righteousness is no true, being-wise goodness more. It is nothing other than man's weakness and softness, and brought over to God a making of the man's brain, in no way answering to the living, true God who has opened himself in the Writ and also in the kind. For if the everlasting punishment is unstandable with God's goodness, then is it also the timely punishment. But this is a deed which by no one can be denied. Mankind goes under under God's wrath and by his anger is it frightened. Who can rhyme the suffering of the world with God's goodness and love? Yet must it be brought therewith in keeping, for it is. If now the being of the awful suffering in this world may not make us doubt God's goodness, then may also the everlasting punishment not lead us to its nay-saying. As this world is standable with God's love, as it is and must be, then is it also hell. For outside the Holy Writ there is no stronger proof for the being of hell than the being of this world, from whose woe the marks of the likeness of hell are taken. 7º Besides there is for the man who fights the everlasting punishment great danger to play the seeming-holy over against God. He shows himself as the loving one who in goodness and fellow-suffering far overtops the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That takes not away that that same man, as soon as his honor is touched, bursts into wrath and wishes his offender all evil in this and in the coming life. Envy, hate, wrath, vengeance come up in the heart of every man against each who stands in his way. We seek our own honor but about the honor of God we trouble not ourselves; we come up for our own right but the right of God we let be trodden with feet. That is truly a doing-away proof that man is not the fit judge of the words and doings of God. And yet also in that coming up for own right and honor lies something good. How wrongly man also wields it, there lies yet in it that right and honor go above good and life. There slumbers also in the sinner yet a deep right- and honor-feeling. And as that is touched, it awakens and underpresses all fellow-suffering. As it in a fight between two men or between two folks goes about right, then prays each from whole heart that God make right triumph and strike the breakers thereof with his judgment. All men yet grasp something of the fiat justitia, pereat mundus, and make right that right triumphs at the cost of thousands of men's lives. About right it also goes in the judgment day, and not about one or other own right but about the right by outstanding, about right in its whole meaning and in its full reach, about the righteousness of God, about God himself as God to praise in everlastingness. 8º There is then also no doubt or God shall in the judgment day, also as He speaks out the everlasting punishment over the sinners, for the eye of all made-things fully make himself righteous. Now we know in part and know also the frightfulness of sin only in part. But as we here already at the hearing of some horrors think the heaviest punishment yet not heavy enough, what shall it then be as we at the end of days receive an insight into the depths of unrighteousness? And therewith we here on earth are always one-sided; right-sense and fellow-suffering come ever in clash; we are or too soft or much too strict in our judgment. But so it is not and can not be with the Lord our God. In Christ has He opened his full love, and that love is therefore so great because it has given a loosing from the coming wrath and from the everlasting ruin. The fighters of the everlasting punishment do not only to the doom-worthiness of sin, to the strictness of the Godly right short; they make also breach on the greatness of God's love and of the loosing which is in Christ. If it had not gone about the saving from an everlasting ruin, the price of the blood of God's own Son would have been much too dear. The heaven which He through his atone-death won for us underlays a hell from which He freed us. The everlasting life which He gave us underlays an everlasting death from which He loosed us. The favor and good-pleasure of God in which He makes us share everlastingly underlays a wrath under which we else had must sink everlastingly. And therefore shall this Christ also once hold the judgment and speak out the doom. A man, a true, whole man who knows what is in man, who is the meekest of all men, shall be the judge of men, so righteous that all shall acknowledge it and every knee bow before Him and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. God shall at the end, if not willing then unwilling through all made-things be acknowledged as God. 9º This must be enough for us. Seekings about the lying and greatness of hell, about the kind of fire and worm, about the soul-wise and the bodily state of the lost lead to no outcome because the Writ keeps still over it. Only this we know yet, that the punishment of hell first takes a beginning after the judgment day, that it is ever threatened to those who stubbornly withstand the truth of God, to the fearful and unbelieving and gruesome and manslayers and whoremongers and spell-makers and idol-servers and liars, Rev. 21:8, and that it also then yet differs toward the measure of each's unrighteousness. Nowhere teaches the Writ that there then yet room for turning and forgiving is. The adding in Matt. 12:32: neither in this age nor in the coming, stretches not to the forgivableness of the sin against the Son of man also yet in the coming age, but to set in light the full unforgivableness of the sin against the Holy Ghost. Punishment is in its being upholding of righteousness and serves set after the judgment not to cleanse but to repay each toward his work. But yet teaches the Writ very clearly that there in that punishment are steps; the pain of loss is alike but the pain of sense differs; each receives toward his works, Matt. 10:15, 11:24, 23:14, 24:51, Luke 10:12, 14, 12:46, 47, 2 Cor. 5:10, and so on. And therein speaks itself yet something of God's mercy, part II. All sin stands utterly over against righteousness but yet reckons God in the punishment with the kin-wise difference which between sins is. Also if therefore not with Augustine, Enchir. 110, cf. Lombard, Thomas, Bonaventure on Sent. IV 46 is given, that the pains of the damned at set time-spans somewhat are lightened, yet shows itself his righteousness in the everlasting punishment on that way that his goodness and love stay unharmed and never rightfully can be charged. Also in hell holds the word that He plagues not men from heart, Lam. 3:33; the smart which He sends is no thing of his or of the blessed' delight but a means to glorifying of his virtues and thus through this end-goal in its heaviness and its measure set. Cf. Augustine, Enchir. 110-113. de civ. XXI. Lombard and others on Sent. IV 46-50. Thomas, S. Theol. suppl. qu. 97-99. Dante, The Hell. Petavius, Theol. dogm. t. IV de angelis III c. 4-8. Simar, Dogm. § 163. Jansen, Prael. III. Bautz, The Hell, Mainz 1882. Sachs, The Everlasting Length of Hell Punishments, Paderborn 1900. Gerhard, Loc. IX tract. 5 and Loc. XXX. Quenstedt, Theol. I. Vilmar, Dogm. II. Philippi, Kirchl. Gl. III. Kähler, Art. Hell Punishments in Herzog³. Limborch, Theol. Christ. VI 13. Calvin, Inst. III 25, 12. Synopsis pur. theol. disp. 52. Turretin, Theol. El. XX qu. 7. Marck, Exspect. J. Chr. III c. 12. 13. Moor III. VI. M. Vitringa IV II. J. A. Turretin, Op. II. Swinden, An inquiry into the nature and place of hell. London 1727. Jonathan Edwards, Works, New York 1881 I IV. Id. Proof for the Everlastingness of Punishments in a Future Life, Utrecht 1792. Hodge, Syst. Theol. III. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. II. Oosterzee, Dogm. § 149.
7. After the final judgment follows the renewal of the world. Some have placed this, with Thomas, Summa Theologica suppl. qu. 74 art. 7, before the last judgment, but the usual view is nevertheless this, that it follows thereon and only then comes in, when the ungodly are already banished from the earth. Without doubt this order also agrees most with that in Holy Writ. In the Old Testament the day of the Lord is indeed gone before by all kinds of dreadful signs and the judgment over the folk takes place under all kinds of fearsome happenings, but the new earth with her outstanding fruitfulness only then begins, when the win over the foes is gained and the folk of Israel has turned back to its land and is restored. In like manner, according to the New Testament, many signs go before the day of judgment, such as the darkening of sun and moon and stars, stirring of the mights of heaven, and so on, Mt. 24:29, but the burning of the earth nevertheless only takes place on the day of the Lord, 2 Pet. 3:10, and then comes the new heaven and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells, 2 Pet. 3:13. When the judgment is fulfilled, John sees the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, Rev. 21:1ff. In this outlook of a world renewal, Writ takes a standpoint between two outliers. On the one hand, by many, such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophanes, Philo, Maimonides, Averroes, Nolanus, Peyrère, Edelmann, Czolbe, and so on, it has been claimed that this world would last forever in her present shape. And on the other hand, Origen, the Lutherans, the Mennonites, the Socinians, Vorstius, the Remonstrants, and also some Reformed, such as Beza, Rivetus, Junius, Wollebius, Prideaux, were of the mind that she would not only be changed in shape but destroyed in substance and replaced by a wholly new world, M. Vitringa IV 194-200. But neither of these thoughts finds backing in Writ. The Old Testament foretelling looks for an outstanding change in all of nature but yet teaches no destroying of the present world. The places where one thinks to find the latter taught, Ps. 102:27, Isa. 34:4, 51:6, 16, 65:17, 66:22, set forth the change which will come in after the day of the Lord in very strong words, but yet hold in no destroying of the world substance. For first, the setting forth which is given there is much too likeness-rich, than that a word-for-word bringing back to nothing of all the world could be drawn from it. Further, the perishing, אבד, of heaven and earth, Ps. 102:27, which in itself never gives to know a full destroying of the substance, is cleared up thereby, that they will grow old as a cloak, change as a garment, fall off as a leaf, fade away as smoke, Ps. 102:27, Isa. 34:4, 51:6. And lastly, the word create, ברא, which is used of the new heaven and the new earth, Isa. 65:17, by no means always gives to know a bringing forth from nothing, but often marks such a working of God whereby He brings forth something new from the old, Isa. 41:20, 43:7, 54:16, 57:19; therefore it also shifts with plant, ground, make, Isa. 51:16, 66:22, and the Lord can say in Isa. 51:16 that He begins that new creating therewith, that He lays His word in Israel's mouth and hides it with the shadow of His hand. The New Testament proclaims in the same way that heaven and earth will pass by, Mt. 5:18, 24:35, 2 Pet. 3:10, 1 Jn. 2:17, Rev. 21:1, that they will perish, and grow old as a cloak, Heb. 1:11, be loosed, 2 Pet. 3:11, burned, 2 Pet. 3:10, changed, Heb. 1:12. But none of these sayings shut in a destroying of the substance. For Peter teaches outspokenly that the old earth, which arose through sundering of the waters, perished through the water of the flood, 2 Pet. 3:6, and that the present world in like manner, though by God's behest no more through water, yet will perish through fire. To a destroying of the substance in the perishing of the present world one can therefore think as little as in the spoiling of the former world in the flood; fire burns, cleanses, purifies but destroys not. The withstanding in 1 Jn. 2:17: he who does the will of God abides forever, teaches that with the words: the world passes by with her lust, is not meant a destroying of the substance of the world, but a fading away of the world in her shape wrecked by sin. Paul therefore says very clearly that the shape, το σχῆμα, of this world passes by, 1 Cor. 7:31. Besides, such a world renewal alone agrees with what Writ teaches about the loosing. For this is never a second, new creating, but a re-creating of the being. Therein lies just God's honor, that He looses and renews the same mankind, the same world, the same heaven and the same earth, which were spoiled and befouled by sin. As a man in Christ is a new creature, in whom the old has passed by and all has become new, 2 Cor. 5:17, so also this world passes by in her present shape, to give being to a new world from her womb at God's mighty word. As with the single man, so at the end of days there also takes place with the world a rebirth, Mt. 19:28, which is no bodily creating but a ghostly renewal.
Cf. Thomas, Summa Theologica Suppl. qu. 74 art. 1 and qu. 91. Atzberger, Die christl. Eschat. 372 f. Gomarus, Op. I 131-133. 416. Spanheim, Dubia Evang. III 670-712. Turretinus, Th. El. XX qu. 5. Moor VI 733-736. M. Vitringa IV 186-215. Kliefoth, Eschat. 297 f.
8. This renewal of the visible world sets in light the one-sidedness of spiritualism, which limits the future blessedness to heaven. In the Old Testament prophecy there is no doubt possible that it describes blessedness as an earthly one; it expects that the people of God after the great day will dwell in safety and peace under the anointed king from David's house in Palestine and will be surrounded and served by the heathen nations. There lies truth in the words of Delitzsch on Isaiah 66:24: That is indeed the difference between the Old and New Testaments, that the Old Testament this-worldifies the beyond, the New Testament beyondifies this world; that the Old Testament draws the beyond into the field of view of this world, the New Testament lifts this world into the beyond. But yet they do not fully do justice to the New Testament expectation of future blessedness. There is undoubtedly in the New Testament a spiritualizing of the Old Testament prophecy; because Jesus' coming falls into a first and second, first the kingdom of God is planted in a spiritual sense in the hearts of men; and the goods of that kingdom are all inward and unseen, forgiveness, peace, righteousness, eternal life. Accordingly, the essence of future blessedness is also conceived more spiritually, especially by Paul and John, as an always being with the Lord, John 12:26, 14:3, 17:24, 2 Cor. 5:8, Phil. 1:23, 1 Thess. 4:17, 5:10, 1 John 3:2. But yet that blessedness is not thereby enclosed within heaven. That this cannot be the case is shown in principle already from this, that the New Testament teaches the incarnation of the Word and the bodily resurrection of Christ, expects at the end of days his bodily return and immediately thereafter the bodily resurrection of all men, and especially that of the believers. This all overthrows spiritualism, which, if it remained true to its principle, like Origen after the day of judgment could leave nothing but spirits in an uncreated heaven. Scripture however teaches wholly otherwise. According to it the world consists of heaven and earth, man of soul and body, and accordingly the kingdom of God also has a spiritual, hidden and an outward, visible side. While Jesus came the first time to establish that kingdom in a spiritual sense, he returns at the end of days to give it also a visible form. The reformation goes from within to without; the rebirth of men completes itself in the rebirth of creation; the kingdom of God is then first fully realized when it is also visibly extended over the earth. So also the disciples understood it when they asked Jesus after his resurrection whether he would now restore the kingdom to Israel. And Jesus in his answer to that question does not deny that he will one day establish such a kingdom, but says only that the times for it are appointed by the Father and that his disciples now have the calling to be his witnesses in the power of the Holy Spirit to the ends of the earth, Acts 1:6-8. Elsewhere he expressly testifies that the meek shall inherit the earth, Matt. 5:5, and he presents future blessedness as a meal where one sits down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Matt. 8:11, enjoys food and drink, Luke 22:30, eats of the new, perfect Passover, Luke 22:16, and drinks of the fruit of the new vine, Matt. 26:29. Indeed in this dispensation, until the parousia, the eye of believers is directed upward, toward heaven. There is their treasure, Matt. 6:20, 19:21; there is Jesus, who is their life, seated at the right hand of God, John 14:3, 17:24, Col. 3:1-3; there is their citizenship, while they are strangers here, Phil. 3:20, Heb. 11:13-16; there their inheritance is kept for them, Heb. 10:34, 1 Pet. 1:4. But that inheritance is destined to be revealed. Christ comes once visibly again, and then shares in his glory the whole church, yes the whole world. Believers are not only changed into his image, John 17:24, Rom. 8:17, 18, 28, Phil. 3:21, Col. 3:4, 1 John 3:2, but the whole creation shall be freed from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God, Rom. 8:21; earth and heaven are so renewed that righteousness dwells in them, 2 Pet. 3:13, Rev. 21:1; the heavenly Jerusalem, which is now above and was the pattern of the earthly Jerusalem, then descends to earth, Gal. 4:26, Heb. 11:10, 13-16, 12:22, 13:14, Rev. 3:12, 21:2ff. This new Jerusalem is not identical with the church, although it can also figuratively be called the bride of the Lamb, Rev. 21:2, 9, for Heb. 12:22, 23 makes a very clear distinction between the heavenly Jerusalem and the church of the firstborn (the pious of the Old Testament) and of the perfected righteous (deceased Christians). The heavenly Jerusalem is a city built by God himself, Heb. 11:10; it is the city of the living God, because God is not only its architect but also dwells in it himself, Rev. 21:3; the angels are therein the servants and form the court of the great King, Heb. 12:22; the blessed are therein the citizens, Rev. 21:27, 22:3, 4. The description which John gives of that Jerusalem, Rev. 21 and 22, may certainly no more than his preceding visions be taken literally; this is already excluded by the fact that John presents it as a cube, of which length, breadth, and height are equal, namely 12,000 stadia, that is, 300 German miles, while the height of the wall is yet only 144 cubits, Rev. 21:15-17. John intends with his description no drawing of the city, but he gives thoughts and interprets them in images, because the glory of the kingdom of God can in no other way be brought to our consciousness. And he borrows those images from paradise, with its river and tree of life, Rev. 21:6, 22:1, 2, from the earthly Jerusalem with its gates and streets, Rev. 21:12ff., from the temple with its holy of holies, in which God himself dwelt, Rev. 21:3, 22, from the whole realm of nature with all its treasures of gold and precious stones, Rev. 21:11, 18-21. But although they are thoughts which in that way are interpreted by images, those thoughts are yet no imaginations or fictions but this-worldly descriptions of beyond-worldly realities. All that is true, all that is honorable, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, all that is gracious, in the whole creation, in heaven and earth, is gathered in the future city of God, but renewed, recreated, raised to its highest glory. The substance for it is present in this creation. As the caterpillar develops into the butterfly, as carbon is transformed into diamond, as the grain of wheat, dying in the earth, brings forth another, as the whole nature revives in spring and adorns itself in festive attire, as the church is formed from Adam's fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that died and was buried in the earth; so also by the recreating power of Christ from the fire-purified elements of this world the new heaven and earth shall one day appear, shining in imperishable glory and forever freed from the bondage of corruption. More glorious than this fair earth, more glorious than the earthly Jerusalem, more glorious even than paradise shall be the glory of the new Jerusalem, of which God himself is the artist and architect. The state of glory shall not be a mere restoration of the original state of nature, but a reformation which, thanks to the power of Christ, brings all matter to form, all potentiality to actuality, and places the whole creation before God's face, shining in unfading splendor and blooming in the spring of an eternal youth. Substantially nothing is lost. Outside are indeed the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves or practices falsehood, Rev. 22:15. But in the new heaven and the new earth the world is restored; in the church the human race is preserved; in that church, which is bought and gathered by Christ from all nations and languages and tongues, Rev. 5:9 etc., all the peoples, also Israel, each keep their distinct place and calling, Matt. 8:11, Rom. 11:25, Rev. 21:24, 22:2; and all those peoples bring together into the new Jerusalem all that they each according to their distinct nature have received from God in glory and honor, Rev. 21:24, 26.
9. The blessings in which the blessed partake. The blessings in which the blessed partake are therefore not only spiritual but also material or bodily in kind. As wrong as it is to make the latter, with the heathen peoples and also with some Chiliasts, the chief part of the future blessedness, so one-sided is it also to count them, in Stoic wise, as indifferent or even to shut them out from the blessedness altogether. The Scripture always keeps the spiritual and the natural in close bond; since the world consists of heaven and earth and man of soul and body, holiness and glory, virtue and happiness, moral and natural world order must also in the end be harmoniously bound together. The blessed will therefore not only be free from all sin, but also from all aftereffects of sin, from unknowing and error, John 6:45, from death, Luke 20:36, 1 Cor. 15:26, Rev. 2:11, 20:6, 14, from poverty and sickness, sorrow and fear, hunger and thirst, cold and heat, Matt. 5:4, Luke 6:21, Rev. 7:16, 17, 21:4, from all weakness, dishonor and decay, 1 Cor. 15:42 etc. But the spiritual blessings are yet the foremost and are untold many: holiness, Rev. 3:4, 5, 7:14, 19:8, 21:27, salvation, Rom. 13:11, 1 Thess. 5:9, Heb. 1:14, 5:9, glory, Luke 24:36, Rom. 2:10, 8:18, 21, adoption as children, Rom. 8:23, everlasting life, Matt. 19:16, 29 etc., beholding of and likeness to God and Christ, Matt. 5:8, John 17:24, Rom. 8:29, 1 Cor. 13:12, 2 Cor. 3:18, Phil. 3:21, 1 John 3:2, Rev. 22:4, fellowship with and serving and praising of God and Christ, John 17:24, 2 Cor. 5:8, Phil. 1:23, Rev. 4:10, 5:9, 13, 7:10, 15, 21:3, 22:3 etc. Because all these boons are in kernel already bestowed on the believers on earth, as for example the adoption as children, Rom. 9:4, 8:15, Gal. 4:5, Eph. 1:5, and the everlasting life, John 3:15, 16, 36 etc., many have taken the salvation which Christ bestows only as a present one, which only in the way of an ethical process realizes itself ever more and more, Pfleiderer, Grundriss § 177. Biedermann, Dogm. § 974 f. Scholten, Initia c. 7. Also Ritschl and many of his followers lay one-sided stress on the this-worldly world-standing of man, hold the moral freedom which the Christian receives in faith over against the world as the foremost boon, and speak little or not at all of the everlasting salvation which Christ prepares in the hereafter for his own, Ritschl, Rechtf. u. Vers. III² 459 f. 484 f. 534 f. 600 f. Over against the abstract supranaturalism of the Greek and Roman church, which takes salvation only as transcendent and thus here on earth deems the Christian life-ideal embodied in the monk, this view upholds an weighty truth. The Reformation, going back to the Scripture, has in principle overcome this supranaturalistic and ascetic life-view. He who believes has at that same twinkling forgiveness of sins and everlasting life; he is a child of God, who serves the Father, not as a bondman out of hope for reward, but as a son, who out of love and thankfulness fulfills the Father's will; and he fulfills that will, not by fleeing away from the world but by being faithful in the calling which is entrusted to him here on earth. The life for heaven therefore forms no withstanding to the life in the midst of the world; just in that world Christ keeps his learners from the Evil One. The new heaven and earth is indeed built up out of the elements of the world which now is, and the church is the restored mankind under Christ as Head. But however much the salvation in a certain wise is already the lot of the believers on earth, it is that yet but in kernel and not in full outworking. The believers are saved in hope, Rom. 8:24; Jesus speaks the poor in spirit etc. blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, which in the hereafter shall be set up on earth, Matt. 5:3-10. The believers are children of God and yet await the full outworking of that childhood, Matt. 5:9, Rom. 8:23. They have the everlasting life, and must yet receive it at the uprising, also according to John, 5:20-29, 6:40, 44, 54. Both are therefore true, that the kingdom of heaven is there and that it yet comes. And this twofold truth shapes the whole mark of the state of glory. As the new heaven and earth is shaped out of the elements of this world and the church is a re-making of the in Adam fallen mankind, so also is the life of the blessed hereafter to be thought as in likeness with the life of the believers here on earth. It consists on the one hand not in a vision of God in Roman sense, whereto the human kind can only be uplifted by a gift superadded, and on the other side it is also not a slow and stepwise unfolding of the Christian life which is already led here on earth by the believers. It is a true natural life, but by grace uplifted to its highest glory, and in its richest fairness unfolded; the stuff abides, but the shape differs. Religion, that is fellowship with God, therefore takes therein the first, the midmost stead. But that fellowship shall be richer, deeper, more blessed than it ever was or could be here on earth, for it shall be broken by no sin, sundered by no farness, middled by no kind or Scripture. Now we see in the looking-glass of God's unveiling only his likeness; then we see face to face, and know, even as we are known. Vision, grasping, enjoyment of God make out the being of the future blessedness. The blessed see God, indeed not with bodily eyes, but yet in a wise which far outstrips all unveiling in this stewardship by means of kind and of Scripture; and fittingly they shall all know him, though each after the measure of his grasping, with a knowledge which has in the knowledge of God its likeness and sameness, straightway, unmiddled, clean and pure. They receive and hold then all that they here have only awaited in hope. And thus beholding God and holding God, they enjoy God and are in his fellowship blessed; blessed after soul and after body, in understanding and in will. In theology there was sundering over whether the blessedness hereafter formally dwelt in the understanding or in the will, and thus consisted in knowledge or in love. Thomas said the first, S. Theol. I 2 qu. 3 art. 4, and Duns Scotus upheld the last, Sent. IV dist. 49 qu. 4. But Bonaventure brought both together and marked that the enjoyment of God was not only a fruit of the knowing of God but also of the love of God and had in the togetherness and working-together of both its ground, Sent. IV dist. 49 p. 1 art. unic. qu. 4. 5, cf. Voetius, Disp. II.
10. The blessedness of fellowship with God is enjoyed in and increased by the fellowship of the saints. Already on earth this fellowship is a glorious benefit of faith. Those who for Jesus' sake have left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields receive already in this life, with persecutions, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields in return, Mark 10:29, 30, for all who do the will of the Father are Jesus' brother and sister and mother, Matt. 12:50. Through the Mediator of the New Testament, believers come into fellowship not only with the militant church on earth but also with the triumphant church in heaven, the assembly of the firstborn, the spirits of the righteous made perfect, even with the many thousands of angels, Heb. 12:22-24. But this fellowship, though in principle already existing on earth, will be incomparably much richer and more glorious when all dividing walls of descent and language, of time and space, are leveled, all sin and error banished, and all the elect brought together in the new Jerusalem. Then Jesus' prayer will be fully answered, that all his sheep form one flock under one Shepherd, John 10:16, 17:21. All the saints will then together fully comprehend what is the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ, Eph. 3:18; they will together be filled with all the fullness of God, Eph. 3:19, Col. 2:2, 10, for Christ, whom God fills, Col. 1:19, in turn fills the church with himself and makes it his fullness, Eph. 1:23, 4:10. And sitting down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at one table, Matt. 8:11, they lift up from one mouth the song of praise to the honor of God and of the Lamb, Rev. 4:11, 5:12, etc. Of the church on earth, Scripture often says that it forms a little flock, Matt. 7:14, 22:14, Luke 12:32, 13:23, which is confirmed by history up to the present day. And even toward the end of the days, when the gospel will have been preached among all nations, apostasy will increase and the number of the faithful will be small; already the prophecy of the Old Testament proclaimed that only a remnant of Israel would turn to the Lord and be saved; and the New Testament cherishes the same expectation, that those who endure to the end will be few, Matt. 24:13, 25:1ff., Luke 18:8. But on the other hand, Scripture often speaks very universalistically. The covenant of grace is made known in Adam to all humanity, Gen. 3:15. The covenant of nature, concluded after the flood, includes all creatures, Gen. 9:9, 10. In Abraham all the families of the earth are blessed, Gen. 12:3. The redemption that will one day be granted to Israel benefits all Gentiles. Jesus says that he will give his life as a ransom for many , Matt. 20:28, and that many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, Matt. 8:11. The grace that has appeared in him is much more abundant than the transgression of Adam; it comes upon all people to justification of life, Rom. 5:12-20, 1 Cor. 15:22. Now in this dispensation all things in heaven and on earth are gathered together in Christ, Eph. 1:10. And once at the end, every knee will bow before Christ and every tongue confess him as Lord, Phil. 2:10, 11. Then a great multitude, which no one can number, will stand before the throne and the Lamb, Rev. 7:9, 19:1, 6. They are nations that are saved and walk in the light of the new Jerusalem, Rev. 21:24, 26, 22:2. And God will then be all in all, 1 Cor. 15:28. In connection with and appealing to this last series of texts, many have cherished the hope that in the end, if not all creatures, then all humans, and if not even that, then by far the most humans would be saved; hell would not exist at all or be only a small corner in the universe. They based this expectation either on the possibility of also being saved by the works of the law (Pelagians, Socinians, Deists, etc.), or on the opportunity to hear the gospel even after death in the intermediate state or even after the day of judgment and to accept it in faith (Universalists). These views have been discussed earlier and therefore do not need to be tested against Scripture now. But also among those who hold to the confession that no one comes to the Father except through Christ and that there is only one name under heaven given for salvation, John 14:6, Acts 4:12, there have always been some who believed in the possibility of salvation in this life outside the preaching of the gospel. They thus taught regarding the children of the covenant, all infants dying young within and outside the bounds of Christendom, idiots, the insane, the deaf-mute, who are in fact deprived of the preaching of the gospel, and also of some or many Gentiles who in their clear insight and virtuous life gave evidence of true godliness. Some church fathers assumed an activity of the Logos in the Gentile world. Augustine believed that from the beginning there had always been not only among Israel but also among other nations some who believed in the Logos and lived piously and righteously according to his commandments, Ep. 102. de civ. 18, 47 and other places. Abelard claimed that Gentiles too could partake of salvation. According to Strauss, Chr. Gl. I 271, Luther once expressed the wish that God might be gracious to men like Cicero and Seneca, and Melanchthon left it open whether he had perhaps in a special way communicated some knowledge of forgiveness in Christ to Solon, Themistocles, and others. Zwingli spoke more decisively and believed that God also had his elect among the Gentiles, Chr. fidei expos. Op. IV 65. But others left only the possibility open and dared no more than hope and wish, as for example à Lasco. Zanchius. Bilderdijk, Brieven V 81. Kuyper, Heraut 594. Ebrard, Das Dogma v. h. Ab. II 77. Shedd, Dogm. Theol. I 436 II 704. This view, however, always remained the view of a few; the churches did not express themselves about it in their confessions, and most theologians opposed it. Something more favorable was judged about the salvation of infants dying young. The Roman Catholics teach that all Christian children who die, baptized in desire or in fact, are saved, and all other infants dying young suffer in the limbus infantum a punishment of loss, not of sense, Lombard and others on Sent. II dist. 33. The Lutherans judge regarding Christian children as the Roman Catholics and leave the others to God's judgment, Gerhard, Loc. XVI § 169. Buddeus, Inst. theol. V I, 6. The Reformed tended to believe that all children born in the covenant of grace and then taken away by death before the years of discretion partake of heavenly salvation, Can. Dordr. I 7. Voetius, Disp. II 417, although many also here distinguished between elect and reprobate children and did not dare to ascribe salvation with certainty to each of these children individually, Martyr, Loci Comm. p. 76. 436, Beza, Pareus, Zanchius, Perkins, and others. Regarding infants dying young outside the covenant, some judged rather mildly; Junius preferred out of love to suppose that they are saved rather than lost, Op. II 333, and Voetius said: whether they are lost or whether some among them are elect and regenerated before their death, I would not deny, I cannot affirm, Disp. II 413. With Scripture in hand, we can, both in relation to the salvation of the Gentiles and to that of infants dying young, go no further than to abstain from a decided and definite judgment in a positive or negative sense. It only deserves notice that Reformed theology in these serious questions is in a much more favorable condition than any other. For all other churches can here cherish only a milder judgment when they retract their doctrine of the absolute necessity of the means of grace or infringe on that of the damnability of sin. But the Reformed wanted first not to fix the measure of grace with which a person even amid many errors and sins can still be connected to God, nor to determine the degree of knowledge that is indispensably necessary for salvation, Voetius, Disp. II 537. 538. 781. Witsius, Apost. Geloof II 2 and 15. Spanheim, Op. III 1291. And second, they maintained that the means of grace are not absolutely necessary for salvation and that God can also regenerate to eternal life apart from word and sacraments, Calvin, Inst. IV 16, 19. In the Second Helvetic Confession, art. 1, it says: we acknowledge that God can illuminate people even without external ministry, whom and when he wills; which is of his power. And the Westminster Confession speaks in ch. X § 3 that elect children dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by the Spirit of Christ, who works when and where and how it pleases him, and that this also applies to the other elect who are incapable of external calling through the ministry of the word. Reuter therefore rightly says, when he has set forth Augustine's doctrine on this point: Indeed, the paradox can be justified that precisely the particularistic doctrine of predestination has made possible those universalistic -sounding phrases, Aug. Studien 92. In Reformed theology, even the above-quoted universalistic texts of Scripture come best and most beautifully into their own. For universalistic in the sense that all humans or even all creatures are saved, those texts are certainly not intended and have not been understood by any Christian church. All confess without exception that there is not only a heaven but also a hell. At most there is difference about the number of those who are saved and those who are lost. But about that there is no disputing; for that number is known to God alone. To the question: Lord, are there few who are saved? Jesus only answered: Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many will seek to enter and will not be able, Luke 13:24. This alone is directly of importance to us; the number of the elect need not be known to us. But in any case, this is certain, that the number of the elect in Reformed theology for no reason and in no respect needs to be thought smaller than in any other theology. When it comes down to it, the Reformed confession is broader of heart and wider of view than any other Christian confession. It finds the final, deepest cause of salvation only in God's good pleasure, in his eternal compassion, in his inscrutable mercy, in the unsearchable riches of his almighty and free grace. What firmer, broader foundation could be found beside it for the salvation of a guilty and lost human race? Though many fall away; however moving this may be, in Christ the church, humanity, the world is saved. The organism of creation is restored. The ungodly are destroyed from the earth, Ps. 104:35, they are cast out, John 12:31, 15:6, Rev. 22:15. But under Christ all things, in heaven and on earth, are gathered together into one, Eph. 1:10. All things are created through him and for him, Col. 1:16.
11. The Communion with God The communion with God, which is enjoyed in the communion of saints, surely no less in the coming age than in this dispensation excludes all action and all activity. Christian theology has here as a rule paid little heed to this and mostly spoken of heavenly blessedness as a knowing and enjoying of God. And this is without doubt also the core and the center, the source and the strength of eternal life. The Scripture also offers little data to form a clear picture of the activity of the blessed. It describes blessedness more as a resting from earthly labor than as the fulfilling of a new activity, Heb. 4:9; Rev. 14:13. But yet the rest which is enjoyed in the new Jerusalem is no more to be thought of with God, John 5:17, or with his children, as a blessed doing-nothing. Holy Scripture itself says that eternal life consists in a knowing and serving, in a praising and honoring of God, John 17:3; Rev. 4:11; 5:8, etc. His children remain also his servants, who serve him day and night, Rev. 22:3. They are prophets, priests, and kings, who reign on the earth for all eternity, Rev. 1:6; 5:10; 22:5. According as they have been faithful over a little on earth, they are set over much in the kingdom of God, Matt. 24:47; 25:21, 23. Each keeps his own personality, for of all who enter into the new Jerusalem, the names are written in the book of life of the Lamb, Rev. 20:15, 27, and each receives his own new name, Isa. 62:2; 65:15; Rev. 2:17; 3:12; cf. 21:12, 14. The dead who die in the Lord rest from their labors, but are each followed by their own works, Rev. 14:13. Generations, peoples, nations bring their own to enrich the life in the new Jerusalem, Rev. 5:9; 7:9; 21:24, 26. What is sown here is reaped in eternity, Matt. 25:24, 26; 1 Cor. 15:42ff.; 2 Cor. 9:6; Gal. 6:7, 8. The great diversity which exists among men in all kinds of ways is not destroyed in eternity but cleansed of all sin and made serviceable to communion with God and with one another. And as the natural diversity in the church on earth is yet increased with spiritual diversity, 1 Cor. 12:7ff., so this natural and spiritual difference in heaven yet again increases thereby, that there are different degrees of glory. In opposition to the meritoriousness of good works, some Reformed, such as Martyr, Loci C. III 17, 8; Camero; Schoenfeld; Tilenus; Spanheim, even as in the fourth century already Jovinian and later some Socinians and now still Gerlach, have denied all difference in glory hereafter. And it is also true that to all believers the same benefits in the future are promised from Christ; they all receive the same eternal life, the same dwelling in the new Jerusalem, the same communion with God, the same blessedness, etc. But nevertheless Scripture puts it beyond all doubt that in that unity and equality there is a very great variety and diversity. Even the parable, Matt. 20:1-16, on which one often appeals for the contrary, pleads for such a difference; for Jesus wants with that parable to teach that many, who according to their own and others' opinion have labored long and hard, in the future messianic kingdom will by no means lag behind those who have been active in the vineyard for a much shorter time; the last catch up with the first, for many are indeed called and labor in the service of the kingdom of God, but few are there who for that hereafter enjoy a special distinction and receive a choice place. Much more clearly such a gradual difference in glory is taught in other places in Scripture, especially where there is talk of a reward which will be given to each according to his works. That reward is now kept in the heavens, Matt. 5:12; 6:1ff.; Luke 6:23; 1 Tim. 6:19; Heb. 10:34-37, and is first publicly distributed at the parousia, Matt. 6:4, 6, 18; 24:47; 2 Thess. 1:7; 1 Pet. 4:13. It is then given as compensation for what the disciples of Jesus have denied and suffered here on earth for his sake, Matt. 5:10ff.; 19:29; Luke 6:21ff.; Rom. 8:17, 18; 2 Cor. 4:17; 2 Thess. 1:7; Heb. 10:34; 1 Pet. 4:13, and further also as recompense for the good works which they have done, such as for good use of talents, Matt. 25:15ff.; Luke 19:13ff.; for love of enemies and disinterested generosity, Luke 6:35; for care of the poor, Matt. 6:1; for praying and fasting, Matt. 6:6, 18; for serving the brothers, Matt. 10:40-42; for faithful service in the kingdom of God, Matt. 24:44-47; 1 Cor. 3:8, etc. That reward will stand in connection with and be proportionate to the works, Matt. 16:27; 19:29; 25:21, 23; Luke 6:38; 19:17, 19; Rom. 2:6; 1 Cor. 3:8; 2 Cor. 4:17; 5:10; 9:6; Gal. 6:8, 9; Heb. 11:26; Rev. 2:23; 11:18; 20:12; 22:12. The blessedness is indeed the same for all, but there is difference in luster and glory, Dan. 12:3; 1 Cor. 15:41; there are in the Father's house, which takes in all children, many dwellings, John 14:2; and the churches receive each according to the measure of their faithfulness and devotion, from the king of the church a special ornament and crown, Rev. 1-3. The Roman Catholics have on these statements of Scripture built the doctrine of the meritoriousness of good works, Trent VI can. 31, 32, and the right to special rewards in heaven, which according to Exod. 25:25 are called aureolae and added to the corona aurea which falls to all, especially granted to martyrs, celibates, and teachers, Thomas, Summa Theol. III qu. 96; Bonaventure, Brevil. VII 7. But this misuse does not take away the truth that there is difference in glory according to the works which believers have done here on earth. There is no reward on which man by nature could make claim, for the law of God is absolutely binding and does not make the demand for fulfillment depend on the free choice of man. If therefore he has fulfilled the whole law, it yet befits him to say nothing else than that he is an unprofitable servant who has only done what he was bound to do, Luke 17:10. All claim to reward can therefore only flow from a covenant, from a free and gracious disposition of God, and is therefore a given right, part II 553. So it was in the covenant of works and so it is yet much more in the covenant of grace, part III 563. For Christ has fulfilled all, not only suffered the punishment but also by fulfilling the law acquired eternal life. The eternal blessedness and glory which he received was for him the reward for his perfect obedience. But as he gives his righteousness through faith to his own and connects eternal life to it, then both, as well that given righteousness as the future blessedness, are gifts of his grace, which altogether exclude all merit on the side of believers. For believers are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has prepared beforehand that they should walk in them, Eph. 2:10. It is given to them by grace in the cause of Christ, not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him, Phil. 1:29; Acts 5:41. Not only in the gift of eternal life to each who believes, but also in the distribution of a different measure of glory to those who from that faith have brought forth good works, God crowns his own work. But he does that then also, that there, as here, so hereafter in the church there may be a rich diversity and in that diversity the glory of his virtues may shine forth. For through that diversity the life of communion with God, with the angels, and of the blessed among themselves increases in depth and intimacy. In that communion each, as in the church here on earth, Rom. 12:4-8; 1 Cor. 12, in connection with his person and character, has his own place and task. Of the activity of the blessed we may not be able to form a pure picture, yet Scripture teaches that the prophetic, priestly, and kingly office, which man originally possessed, is in them fully restored by Christ. The service of God, the mutual communion, and the dwelling in the new heaven and the new earth undoubtedly offer abundant opportunity for the exercise of these offices, even if the form and manner thereof is unknown to us. But that working is a resting and enjoying at the same time. The difference of day and night, of sabbath and workdays has ceased; time is permeated with God's eternity; space is full of his presence; eternal becoming is wedded to unchanging being. Even the opposition of heaven and earth has vanished. For all that is in heaven and on earth is gathered into one under Christ as head, Eph. 1:10. All creatures are and live and move in God, who is all in all, who in the mirror of his works reflects all his virtues and therein glorifies himself.
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