In the opinion of liberal theologians, not the God but rather the man
Jesus forms the valuable religious essence of Christianity. [508] In
saying this it says nothing less than that the whole of Christendom
up to the present day--that is, till the appearance of a Harnack,
Bousset, Wernle, and others of like mind--was in error about itself,
and did not recognise its own essence. For Christianity, as the
present account shows, from the very first conceived the God Jesus,
or rather the God-man, the Incarnate, the God-redeemer, suffering with
man and sacrificing himself for humanity, as the central point of
its doctrine. The declaration of the real manhood of Jesus appears,
on the other hand, but as an after-concession of this religion to
outer circumstances, wrung from it only later by its opponents,
and so expressly championed by it only because of its forming the
unavoidable condition of its permanence in history and of its practical
success. Only the God, therefore, not the man Jesus, can be termed the
"founder" of the Christian religion.
It is in fact the fundamental error of the liberal theology to think
that the development of the Christian Church took its rise from
an historical individual, from the man Jesus. The view is becoming
more common that the original Christian movement under the name of
Jesus would have remained an insignificant and transient movement
within Judaism but for Paul, who first gave it a religious view of
the world by his metaphysics of redemption, and who by his break
with the Jewish Law really founded the new religion. It will not
be long before the further concession is found necessary, that an
historical Jesus, as the Gospels portray him, and as he lives in the
minds of the liberal theologians of to-day, never existed at all;
so that he never founded the insignificant and diminutive community
of the Messiah at Jerusalem. It will be necessary to concede that the
Christ-faith arose quite independently of any historical personality
known to us; that indeed Jesus was in this sense a product of the
religious "social soul" and was made by Paul, with the required amount
of reinterpretation and reconstruction, the chief interest of those
communities founded by him. The "historical" Jesus is not earlier but
later than Paul; and as such he has always existed merely as an idea,
as a pious fiction in the minds of members of the community. The New
Testament with its four Gospels is not previous to the Church, but the
latter is antecedent to them; and the Gospels are the derivatives,
consequently forming a support for the propaganda of the Church,
and being without any claim to historical significance.
Nothing at all, as Kalthoff shows, is to be gained for the
understanding of Christianity from the completely modern view that
religion is an entirely personal life and experience. Religion
is such personal life only in an age which is differentiated into
personalities; it is such only in so far as this differentiation
has been accomplished. From the very beginning religion makes its
appearance as a phenomenon of social life; it is a group-religion,
a folk-religion, a State religion; and this social character is
naturally transferred to the free associations which are formed
within the limits of tribe and the State. The talk about personality
as the centre of all religious life is with regard to the origin of
Christianity absurd and unhistorical, for the reason that Christianity
grew up in religious associations, in communities. From this social
religion our personal religion has only been developed in a history
lasting centuries. Only after great struggles has personal religion
been able to succeed against an essentially older form. What devout
people of to-day call Christianity, a religion of the individual,
a principle of personal salvation, would have been an offence and an
absurdity to the whole of ancient Christendom. It would have been to
it the sin against the Holy Ghost which was never to be forgiven; for
the Holy Ghost was the spirit of the Church's unity, the connection
of the religious community, the spirit of the subordination of the
flock to the shepherd. For this reason individual religion existed
in old Christendom only through the medium of the association of the
community of the Church. A private setting up of one's own religion
was heresy, separation from the body of Christ. [509]
We cannot refuse to concede to the "Catholic" Church, both Roman and
Greek, that in this respect it has most faithfully preserved the spirit
of the earliest Christendom. This alone is to-day what Christianity in
essence once was--the religion of an association in the sense to which
we have referred. Thus Catholicism justly refers to "tradition" for
the truth of its religious view of the world and for the correctness
of its hierarchical claims. But Catholicism itself beyond doubt first
established this "tradition" in its own interests. It teaches also
an "historical" Jesus, but clearly one that is historical merely by
tradition, and of whose actual historical existence not the least
indication has yet been established. Protestantism, on the other hand,
is completely unhistoric in passing off the Gospels as the sources,
as the "revealed" basis of the faith in Christ, as if they had arisen
independently of the Church and represented the true beginnings of
Christianity. Consequently one cannot base one's religious faith on
the Gospel and wish nevertheless to stand outside of that community,
since the writings of the New Testament can only pass as the expression
of the community's life. One cannot therefore be Christian in the sense
of the original community without obliterating one's own personality
and uniting oneself as a member with the "Body of Christ"--that is,
with the Church. The spirit of obedience and humility, which Christ
demanded of his followers, is nothing but the spirit of subordination
to the system of rules of conduct observed by the society of worship
passing under his name. Christianity in the original sense is nothing
but--"Catholic" Christianity; and this is the faith of the Church
in the work of redemption accomplished by the God-man Christ in his
Church and by means of the organisation infused with his "spirit."
On purely religious grounds the wrongly so-called "Catholicism"
could very probably dispense with the fiction of an historical Jesus,
and go back to Paul's standpoint before the origin of the Gospels,
if it could have faith to-day in its mythological conception, of
the God sacrificing himself for mankind, without that fiction. In
its present form, however, it stands or falls as a Church with
the belief in the historical truth of the God-redeemer; because
all the Church's hierarchical claims and authority are based on
this authority having been entrusted to her by an historical Jesus
through the apostles. Catholicism relies for this, as it has been
said, on "tradition." But Catholicism itself called this tradition
into life, just as the priests at Jerusalem worked up the tradition
of an historical Moses in order to trace back to him their claim to
authority. It is the "Irony of World-History" that that very tradition
soon afterwards forced the Church, with regard to the historical
Christ, to conceal its real nature from the crowd, and to forbid the
laity to read the Gospels, on account of the contradiction between the
power of the Church and the traditional Christ it had produced. But
the position of Protestantism is even more contradictory and more
desperate than that of the Catholic Church, in view of our insight
into the fictitious character of the Gospels. For Protestantism has no
means but history for the foundation of its religious metaphysics;
and history, viewed impartially, leads away from those roots of
Christianity to which Protestantism strives, instead of towards them.
If this is true of Protestant orthodoxy it is even more true of that
form of Protestantism which thinks it can maintain Christianity
apart from its metaphysical doctrine of redemption because this
doctrine is "no longer suitable to the age." Liberal Protestantism
is and wishes to be nothing but a mere faith in the historical
personality of a man who is supposed to have been born 1,900 years
ago in Palestine, and through his exemplary life to have become the
founder of a new religion; being crucified and dying in conflict with
the authorities at Jerusalem, being raised up then as a God in the
minds of his enthusiastic disciples. It is a faith in the "loving
God the Father," because Jesus is supposed to have believed in him;
in the personal immortality of man, because this is supposed to have
been the presupposition of Jesus' appearance and doctrines; in the
"incomparable" value of moral instructions, because they stand in
a book which is supposed to have been produced under the immediate
influence of the prophet of Nazareth. Liberal Protestantism supports
morality on this, that Jesus was such a good man, and that for this
reason it is necessary for each individual man to follow the call
of Jesus. But it bases the faith in Jesus once and for all on the
historical significance of the Gospels; though it cannot conceal
from itself, after careful consideration, that the belief in their
historical value rests on extremely weak grounds, and that we know
nothing of that Jesus, not even that he ever lived. In any case we
know nothing which could be of influential religious significance,
and which could not be put together just as well or better from
other less doubtful sources. [510] It is pierced to the heart by the
denial of the historical personality of Jesus, not, like Catholicism,
merely as a Church, but in its very essence, as a Religion. And as to
its real religious kernel it consists in a few fine-sounding phrases
and some scattered references to a metaphysics which was once living,
but which is now degraded into a mere ornament for modest minds. And
after disposing of its would-be historical value there is left only
a dimly smouldering spark of "homeless sentiments," which would suit
any style of religious faith. Liberal Protestantism proclaims itself
as the really "modern" Christianity. Confronted by the philosophic
spirit of our day, it lays stress upon having no philosophy. It
sets aside all religious speculation as "Myth," if possible with
reference to Kant, as this is "modern," without noticing that it
is itself most deeply imbedded in mythology with its "historical"
Jesus. It believes that, in its exclusive reverence for the man Jesus,
it has brought Christianity to the "height of present culture." As to
this Stendel justly says: "Of the whole apologetic art with which the
modern Jesus-theology undertakes to save Christianity for our time,
it can be said that there is no historical religion which could not
just as well be brought into accord with the modern mind as that of
the New Testament." [511] We have no occasion to weep for the complete
collapse of such a "religion." This form of Christianity has already
been proved by Hartmann to be worthless from the religious point of
view; [512] and it is only a proof of the fascinating power of phrases,
of the laxity in our creeds, and the thoughtlessness of the mob in
religious matters, that it is even yet alive. For such reasons it
is even allowed, under the lead of the so-called critical theology,
to proclaim itself as the pure Christianity, now known for the first
time. Thus it finds sympathy. This unsystematic collection of thoughts,
arbitrarily selected from the view of the world and of life given
by the Gospels, which even so requires to be rhetorically puffed out
and artistically modified before it is made acceptable to the present
age,--this unspeculative doctrine of redemption, which at bottom is
uncertain of itself,--this sentimental, æsthetic, Jesus-worship of a
Harnack, Bousset, and the rest on whom W. v. Schnehen so pitilessly
broke his lance; [513] this whole so-called Christianity of cultured
pastors and a laity in need of redemption, would have long since
come to grief through its poverty of ideas, its sickening sweetness,
if it were not considered necessary to maintain Christianity at all
costs, were it even that of the complete deprivation of its spiritual
content. The recognition of the fact that the "historical" Jesus has
no religious interest at all, but at most concerns historians and
philologists, is indeed at present commencing to make its way into
wider circles. [514] If one only knew a way out of the difficulty! If
one were only not afraid of following a clear lead just because
one might then possibly be forced beyond the existing religion in
the course of his ideas--as the example of Kalthoff showed! If
only one had not such a fearful respect for the past and such a
tender "historic unconsciousness" and such immense respect for the
"historical basis" of existing religion! The reference to history and
the so-called "historical continuity of the religious development"
is indeed on the face of it merely a way out of a difficulty, and
another way of putting the fact that one is not desired to draw the
consequences of his presuppositions. As if there can still be talk of a
"historical basis" where there is no history, but pure myth! As if the
"preservation of historical continuity" could consist in maintaining
as history what are mythical fictions, just because they have
hitherto passed for historic truth, though we have seen through
their purely fictitious and unreal character! As if the difficulty
of the redemption of present-day civilisation from the chaos of
superstition, social deceit, cowardice, and intellectual servitude
which are connected with the name of Christianity, lay in a purely
spiritual sphere and not rather in the sentiment, in the slovenly
piety, in the heavy weight of ancient tradition, above all in the
economic, social, and practical relations which unite our churches
with the past! Faith in the future of Christianity is still built
not so much on the persuasive inner truth of its doctrine, but much
more on the inborn religious feeling of the members of the community,
on the religious education in school and home, and the consequent
increasing store of metaphysical and ethical ideas, on protection
by the State and--on the law of inertia in the spiritual life of the
mob. For the rest, in pulpit, in parish papers, and in public life,
a method of expression is used which is not essentially different
from that of orthodoxy, but is so adapted as to allow every man to
think what he deems best for himself. We are enthusiastically told
that thus we are able to keep the rudderless ship of Protestantism
still a while above water, and that we have "reconciled" faith with
modern culture in "the further development of Christianity."
Thus nineteen hundred years of religious development were completely
in error. Is no other course open to us but a complete break with the
Christian doctrine of redemption? This doctrine, however--such was
the result of our previous examination--is independent of the belief
in an historical Jesus. Its centre of gravity lies in the conception
of the "incarnation" of God, who suffers in the world but is finally
victorious over this suffering; and through union with whom Mankind
also "prevails over the world" and gains a new life in a higher
sphere of existence. That the form of this divine Redeemer of the
world coalesced, in the minds of the Christian community, with that
of a man Jesus; that, consequent on this, the act of redemption was
fixed as to time and place, is only the consequence of the conditions
under which the new religion appeared.
For this reason it can only claim, in and for itself, a transient
practical significance, and not a special religious value; while
on the other hand it has become the doom of Christianity that just
this making into history of the principle of redemption makes it
impossible for us still to acknowledge this religion. But then the
preservation of historical continuity or the "further development"
of Christianity in its proper sense probably does not consist in
separating this chance historical side of the Christian doctrine
of redemption from its connection with the whole Christian view of
the world and setting it up by itself, but only in going back to
the essential and fundamental idea of the Christian religion, and
stating its metaphysical doctrine of redemption in a manner more
nearly answering to the ideas of the day.
From the conception of a personal God-redeemer arose the possibility of
sacrificing a man in God's place, and of seeing the divine and ideal
man, that is, the Idea of Man, in an actual man. From the growing
Church's desire for authority, from its opposition to Gnostic phantasy
with its intellectual volatilising of the religious-moral kernel of
the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and from the wish not to give up
the historical connection with Judaism on opportunist grounds, arose
the necessity of portraying the divine-human expiatory sacrifice as
the sacrifice of an historical person who had arisen in Judaism. All
these different reasons, which led to the formation of the belief in
an "historical" Jesus, have no force with us, particularly after it
has been shown that the personality of the principle of redemption,
this fundamental presupposition of the evangelical "history," is in
the end to blame for all the contradictions and shortcomings of that
religion. To lead back to its real essence the Christian doctrine of
redemption can consequently mean nothing but placing the idea of the
God-man, as it lies at the basis of that doctrine, in the central
point of the religious view of the world, through the stripping off
of the mythical personality of the Logos.
God must become man, so that Man can become God and be redeemed from
the bounds of the finite. The idea of Man which is realised in the
world must itself be a divine idea, an idea of the Deity, and so
God must be the common root and essence of all individual men and
things; only then may Man attain his existence in God and freedom
from the world, through this consciousness of his supernatural divine
essence. Man's consciousness of himself and of his true essence must
itself be a divine consciousness. Man, and indeed every man, must be
a purely finite phenomenon, an individual limitation, the clothing
of the Deity with a human form. In possibility he is a God-man,
to be born again an actual God-man through his moral activity, and
consequently to become really one with God. In this conception all
the contradictions of Christian dogmatism are solved, and the kernel
of its doctrine of redemption is preserved without being divested of
its true significance by the introduction of mythical phantasy or of
historical coincidences, as is the case in Christianity.
If we are still to use the language of the past, and to call the divine
essence of mankind the immanent Godhead, "Christ," then any advance of
religion can only consist in the development and working out of this
"inner Christ," that is, of the spiritual-moral tendencies dwelling
in mankind, in the carrying of it back to its absolute and divine
basis, but not in the historical personification of this inner human
nature. Any reality of the God-man consequently consists in "Christ's"
activity in Man, in the proving of his "true self," of his personal,
spiritual essence, in the raising of one's self to personality on the
ground of Man's divine nature, but not in the magical efficacy of an
external divine personality. This, indeed, is nothing but the religious
ideal of mankind, which men have projected on to an historical figure,
in order to assure themselves of the "reality" of the ideal. It is not
true that it is "essential" to the religious consciousness to consider
its ideal in human form, and that for this reason the historical Jesus
is indispensable for the religious life. Were this true, religion
would not be, in principle, in a position to raise itself above the
mythical and primitive stage of God's externality and appearance to the
senses, and to conquer these Gods, working them more and more into the
forms of an inner nature. This, however, is the essence of religious
development. Religion would otherwise be confined to a lower province
in the human life of the spirit; and it would be overthrown whenever
the fiction of that projection and separation of God from one's own
self was seen through. It is only to orthodox Christianity that it
is necessary to represent the God in Man as a God outside of Man,
as the "unique" personality of a historical God-man; and that because
it still remains with one foot in religious naturalism and mythology,
and the historical circumstances of another age occasioned the choice
of that representation and falsification of the idea of the God-man.
To think of the world's activity as God's activity; of mankind's
development, filled with struggles and sufferings, as the story of a
divine struggle and Passion; of the world-process as the process of
a God, who in each individual creature fights, suffers, conquers and
dies, so that he may overcome the limitations of the finite in the
religious consciousness of man and anticipate his future triumph
over all the suffering of the world--that is the real Christian
doctrine of redemption. To revive in this sense the fundamental
conception from which Christianity sprang--and which is independent
of any historical reference--is, indeed, to return to this religious
starting-point. Protestantism, on the contrary, which repudiates Paul's
religion and sets up the Gospels as the foundation of its belief,
nevertheless does not go behind Christianity's development into the
Church, back to the origin of Christianity, but remains always within
this development, and deceives itself if it thinks that it can prevail
over the Church from the point of view of the Gospel. [515]
In such an interpretation and development of the Christian conception
of redemption "historical continuity" is preserved just as decidedly
as it is in the one-sided making into history of that thought on the
side of liberal Protestantism. What is in opposition to it is, on the
one hand, completely unhistorical belief in an historical Jesus; on
the other hand, the prejudice against the "immanent God," or against
Pantheism. But this prejudice is based entirely on that fiction of
an historical "mediator" and the hypothesis contained therein of a
dualistic separation of world and God. The representatives of the
monistic conception--who began to organise themselves a short time
ago--should be clearer as to the significance of that conception
than they are for the most part even at the present day. They must
perceive that the true doctrine of unity can only be the doctrine
of the all in one. There must be an idealistic monism in opposition
to the naturalistic monism of Haeckel, which is prevalent even
to-day. This monism must not exclude but include God's existence;
and its present unfruitful negation of all religion must deepen
into a positive and religiously valuable view of the world. Then,
and not till then, will it be able to effect a genuine separation
from the Church, and the monistic movement, still in its childhood,
may lead to an inner improvement and renovation of our spiritual
life in general. It requires much short-sightedness on the part of
the exponents of a purely historical Christianity to suppose that the
soulless and poor faith in the personal, or as it is considered better
expressed to-day, in the "living" God, in freedom and immortality,
supported by the authority of the "unique" personality of a man Jesus
who died two thousand years ago, will be in a position permanently
to satisfy religious needs, even when the metaphysic of redemption,
still connected with it at all points, and the pious attitude based
upon this are completely stripped off from it. The earlier the orthodox
Christians, by giving up their superstition in an historical Jesus,
and the Monists, by sacrificing their equally fatal superstition
in the sole reality of matter and in the redeeming truths of
physical science which alone can give happiness, come to a mutual
reconciliation, the better it will be for both. The more surely we
shall avoid the total obliteration of the religious consciousness;
and the civilised nations of Europe will be saved from the loss
of their spiritual ballast--towards which loss there seems at the
present day to be a continuous movement on all sides. At present
there are only two possibilities--either to look on quietly while
the tidal wave of naturalism, getting ever more powerful from day
to day, sweeps away the last vestige of religious thought, or to
transfer the sinking fire of religion to the ground of Pantheism,
in a religion independent of any ecclesiastical guardianship. The
time of dualistic Theism has gone by. At present all the advancing
spirits, in spheres most widely different, concur in striving towards
Monism. This striving is so deeply grounded and so well warranted,
that the Church will not be able to suppress it for ever. [516] The
chief obstacle to a monistic religion and attitude is the belief,
irreconcilable with reason or history, in the historical reality of a
"unique," ideal, and unsurpassable Redeemer.