The Enlightenment and modern theology

Reason on the judge's bench

By the end of the seventeenth century Europe was weary of wars in which confessional differences had played a bitter part, and Newton's physics showed a universe running by exact laws. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century grew out of both experiences: people should think for themselves instead of leaning on church or tradition. In a short essay of 1784 Kant called enlightenment humanity's exit from a self-imposed immaturity and gave it a motto, ‘dare to know’ (sapere aude). Reason now sat on the judge's bench, and Scripture and doctrine stood before it.

Many educated people did not abandon God, but they often became deists. God, they said, made the world like a clock and lets it run by its laws without stepping into history. Deists held that a ‘natural religion’ of God, virtue and immortality is open to every reasonable person, and they doubted revelation, miracles and prophecy. What they wanted, after so much bloodshed over doctrine, was a reasonable faith everyone could share.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) gave the classic argument against believing reports of miracles Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 10. He began from a principle: "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." The laws of nature rest on uniform experience, and a miracle breaks them, so the evidence against any miracle is as strong as evidence from experience can be. No testimony can establish a miracle, Hume concluded, unless its being false would be more miraculous still. He added that miracle stories lack enough educated witnesses, feed on our love of wonder, flourish in ignorant ages, and that the miracles of rival religions cancel each other out.

Christians answered from the start. To call experience ‘uniform’ after setting aside every report of a miracle is to assume what was to be proved. If God exists, the laws of nature describe how nature usually runs, not what its Maker may do. And the resurrection is not a recurring event to be weighed by its frequency but a single event in history, to be judged by the evidence for it (see Are miracles possible?).

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) of Königsberg pressed further. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) he argued that we know things only as they appear to us through the forms of our own minds, never as they are in themselves. God, who lies beyond experience, can then be neither proved nor disproved by theoretical reason. Kant said he had limited knowledge to make room for faith, and he held that the moral law within us requires us to postulate God, freedom and immortality. In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793) he took seriously a radical evil in human nature, yet found true religion in recognising our duties as divine commands and living by them Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Jesus became the pattern of a morally perfect humanity, and the church's rites and doctrines a vehicle for moral religion.

Schleiermacher: a theology of the devout heart

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called the father of modern theology. The son of a Reformed army chaplain, he was schooled by the Moravians, lost his confidence in their doctrines and left. Yet he later said he had become a Moravian again, ‘of a higher order’, and the living fellowship with Christ he had learned among them stayed with him. For many years he preached in a Berlin church and taught at the new University of Berlin.

In 1799 he wrote On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers for his Romantic friends in Berlin, who dismissed religion as outworn dogma or a code of morals Schleiermacher, On Religion. Religion, he replied, is at bottom neither knowing nor doing but an intuition and feeling of the infinite. When the age of reason tried to reduce faith to metaphysics or ethics, he insisted that it has its own place in the depths of the human heart.

In his dogmatics, The Christian Faith, he defined piety as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. We depend on many things in part and act on them in part, but the awareness that our whole being is utterly dependent is our relation to God. Doctrines are this devout awareness put into words, above all the awareness of a church that has known the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is the Redeemer whose consciousness of God was perfect, and the church shares in it. Schleiermacher meant to commend Christ to his age in words it could hear. But in his method doctrine rests on the believer's consciousness more than on what God has said in Scripture, and though he accepted Christ's resurrection and ascension on the apostles' testimony, he did not count them essential to the doctrine of Christ's person.

Historical criticism and liberal theology

In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), aged twenty-seven, published The Life of Jesus Strauss, The Life of Jesus. He rejected both the traditional reading, that the miracles happened as told, and the rationalists' attempts to explain them as natural events. The Gospels' miracle stories, he argued, were myth: the early church, expecting the Messiah, had unconsciously clothed its faith in stories shaped on Old Testament patterns. The uproar cost him his post at Tübingen, and when Zurich named him a professor a few years later, protests kept him from ever taking up the chair.

Others set out to find the ‘historical Jesus’ behind the Gospels, hoping that once the church's confession was stripped away the real Jesus would appear. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer, surveying the search, judged that each writer had painted a Jesus in the likeness of his own ideals.

Liberal theology flowered in late nineteenth-century Germany. Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) is commonly summed up as teaching that theology should speak not of metaphysics but of the worth that God, revealed in Jesus, has for us, and that the kingdom of God is a moral community living by love. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) lectured in Berlin in the winter of 1899–1900 to students from every faculty, and the lectures appeared in 1900 as What Is Christianity? Harnack, What Is Christianity?. Strip away the husk of changing doctrines and institutions, he urged, and the kernel of Jesus' simple teaching remains: the kingdom of God, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul, and the commandment of love, often summed up as the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. The gospel Jesus preached, Harnack held, concerned the Father, not the Son.

In Denmark Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) spoke in quite another voice. He attacked both the philosophical system that claimed to explain everything and the comfortable state Christianity into which everyone was born. Faith, he insisted, is not the result of historical research or speculation but a passionate decision of the individual standing alone before God. He was widely read only in the twentieth century.

Weighed by Scripture

These thinkers asked questions that deserve a hearing. Christianity rests on events in history, so it need not fear honest historical study; Luke wrote his Gospel "having carefully investigated everything from the beginning" (Luke 1:3). Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard remind us that faith belongs to the whole heart, not the head alone, and Kant and Harnack took the life of duty and love seriously.

Yet evangelicals judged that they lost the gospel's centre. First, they read Scripture only as a record of human religious experience or moral insight. Peter says where Scripture's prophecy came from:

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation. For no such prophecy was ever brought forth by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:20-21

Paul says, "All Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Timothy 3:16). On Peter's words Matthew Henry writes, "The Holy Ghost inspired holy men to speak and write" Matthew Henry. Before Scripture is a record of what we have felt about God, it is what God has said to us (see Can the Bible be trusted?).

Second, sin and grace grew dim. If Jesus is above all a moral teacher or the pattern of a perfect consciousness of God, what people need is the effort to follow him. Third, the resurrection became myth or the disciples' inner experience. Yet Paul says that if Christ was not raised, the apostles' preaching is worthless and they are false witnesses about God (1 Corinthians 15:14-17), and he adds, "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Long before Strauss, Wesley wrote on that verse that "there needed something more than reformation, (which was plainly wrought,) in order to their being delivered from the guilt of sin even that atonement" Wesley. By reformation he meant moral improvement. Sinners need not better morals but atonement, and God declared that atonement sufficient by raising Jesus from the grave (see Did Jesus really rise from the dead?).

Some met the challenge by defending the inspiration of Scripture, among them the Princeton theologians, whose story continues in Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea. Reason is God's gift, but it is the servant of his word, not its judge. The story of modern theology, and of the answers to it, goes on into the twentieth century.

Practice