HC3310

1
HC3310

• European Church in Crisis

2
Joseph Mallord William Turner (17751851)Rain,
Steam, and Speed The Great Western Railway 1844
3
The Age of Materialism 1850-1914

• Karl Marx 1818-83, Das Kapital (1859)
• Dialectical Materialism

• Charles Darwin 1809-82
• Origin of the Species (1859)
• Natural Selection

4
19th Century Depiction of Dinosaurs, Natural
History Museum London
5
Lord Acton (1834-1902)/Thomas Huxley 1825-1895
6
Agnosticism

• Huxley was thinking of science in general, of
  the scientific method, and of the facts science
  had recently unearthed in natural as well as
  civil and scriptural history, facts having to do
  with physical changes that the heavens and the
  earth had undergone, the origin of man, the races
  of men, and the like. Late nineteenth century
  agnosticism would indeed be unthinkable without
  the new geology and biology. . .as well as the
  Higher Criticism
• Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought, 355

7
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809-1892 In Memoriam 1850

• LV
•         55.1The wish, that of the living whole
•         55.2  No life may fail beyond the grave,
•         55.3  Derives it not from what we have
•         55.4The likest God within the soul?
•         55.5Are God and Nature then at strife,
•         55.6  That Nature lends such evil dreams?
•         55.7  So careful of the type she seems,
•         55.8So careless of the single life
•         55.9That I, considering everywhere
•       55.10  Her secret meaning in her deeds,
•       55.11  And finding that of fifty seeds
•       55.12She often brings but one to bear,
•       55.13I falter where I firmly trod,
•       55.14  And falling with my weight of cares
•       55.15  Upon the great world's altar-stairs

• LVI
•         56.1"So careful of the type?" but no.
•         56.2  From scarped cliff and quarried
  stone
•         56.3  She cries, "A thousand types are
  gone
•         56.4I care for nothing, all shall go.
•         56.5"Thou makest thine appeal to me
•         56.6  I bring to life, I bring to death
•         56.7  The spirit does but mean the
  breath
•         56.8I know no more." And he, shall he,
•         56.9Man, her last work, who seem'd so
  fair,
•       56.10  Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
•       56.11  Who roll'd the psalm to wintry
  skies,
•       56.12Who built him fanes of fruitless
  prayer,
•       56.13Who trusted God was love indeed
•       56.14  And love Creation's final law --
•       56.15  Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

8
Matthew Arnold 1822-1888Dover Beach 1867

• The sea is calm to-night.The tide is full, the
  moon lies fairUpon the straits -on the French
  coast the lightGleams and is gone the cliffs of
  England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the
  tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the
  night air!Only, from the long line of
  sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanch'd
  land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf
  pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At
  their return, up the high strand,Begin, and
  cease, and then again begin,With tremulous
  cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of
  sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the
  Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid
  ebb and flowOf human misery weFind also in the
  sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant
  northern sea.

• The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and
  round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a
  bright girdle furl'd.But now I only hearIts
  melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating,
  to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast
  edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.
• Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the
  world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land
  of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath
  really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
• Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for painAnd
  we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with
  confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where
  ignorant armies clash by night.

9
Ludwig Feuerbach 1804-1872

• In these works I have sketched, with a few sharp
  touches, the historical solution of Christianity,
  and have shown that Christianity has in fact long
  vanished, not only from the reason but from the
  life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a
  fixed idea, in flagrant contradiction with our
  fire and life assurance companies, our railroads
  and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture
  galleries, our military and industrial schools,
  our theatres and scientific museums.
• The Essence of Christianity 1841, Preface to
  2nd ed. 1843

10
Historicism

• German scholars were, "consciously guided in
  their practice by a conception of history."i
  This conception has come to be called
  historicism, which may be defined as the
  assertion that human life displays in history an
  infinite variety of manifestations that must be
  investigated by any observer with complete and
  open empathy. It is in history that the totality
  of human life in all of its reality and meaning
  is to be found. "The world of man is in a state
  of incessant flux. . .There is no constant human
  nature rather the character of each man reveals
  itself only in his development."ii . . .
  Historicism means the acceptance of the
  relativity of human life. It is the insight that
  humanity lives not at the behest of static being
  and absolute truth, but rather forges itself in a
  constant process of becoming in which individuals
  and institutions struggle over competing truths,
  each vying for its place in the sun.
• i... George G. Iggers, The German Conception
  of History, rev. ed. (Hanover Wesleyan
  University Press, 1983) 3.
• ii... Ibid. 5.

11
Leopold von Ranke 1795-1886

• . "There are really only two ways of acquiring
  knowledge of human affairs, through the
  perception of the particular or through
  abstraction the latter is the method of
  philosophy, the former of history."i
  ii... Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of
  History (Cleveland Meridian Books, 1956) 58f.

12
Albrecht Ritschl 1822-1889

• Gospel the experience of freedom through
  forgivness, justification, reconciliation in
  Christ that ushers in the Kingdom.
• Religion is the experience which has to do with
  the sublime power of God to realize human
  blessedness. The special power that religion
  imparts as an historical phenomenon is the power
  to deliver human beings in their spiritual
  capacity both from the determinism of the
  physical environment and the enslaving passions
  of human nature.

13

• "Religion springs up as faith in superhuman
  spiritual powers, by whose help the power which
  man possesses of himself is in some way
  supplemented, and elevated into a unity of its
  own kind which is a match for the pressure of the
  natural world."i i... Albrecht Ritschl, The
  Christian Doctrine of Justification and
  Reconciliation, tr. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B.
  Macaulay (Edinburgh T T Clark, 1900) III
  199.

14
Adolf von Harnack 1851-1930

• We study history in order to intervene in the
  course of history and we have a right and duty to
  do so. . .To intervene in historythis means that
  we must reject the past when it reaches into the
  present only in order to block us. This means
  also that we must do the right thing in the
  present, i.e., to anticipate the future. . .
• quoted in Wilhelm Pauck, The Heritage of the
  Reformation, 1961, 340

15
Ernst Troeltsch 1865-1923Über historische und
dogmatische Methode" Concerning Historical and
Dogmatic Method"

• The principle of criticism the historical
  disciplines yield only judgments of probability,
  and of vastly different grades. For this reason
  each tradition has to be investigated for the
  degree of probability attaching to it
• The principle of analogy prescribes the means for
  facilitating such criticism "The analogy of what
  is occurring before our eyes or taking place
  within us is the key to criticism." This
  "omnipotence" of analogy spells the principal
  similarity Gleichartigkeit of all historical
  occurrence which, while acknowledging the
  uniqueness of historical events, asserts that
  they are also analogous to events drawn from life
  today.
• The principle of correlation the construal of
  analogy on the basis of the similarity of the
  human spirit and its historical activities
  assumes the alternation of all the phenomena of
  human existence. No change can occur without
  precursor or follower all occurrence consists of
  a continual flux in which everything relates to
  everything else.

16
Albert Schweitzer 1875-1965
17
Franz Overbeck 1837-1905
18
Johannes Weiss1863-1914/Wilhelm Wrede 1859-1906
19
Friedrich Nietzsche1844-1900

• "We have burned our bridges behind us -- indeed,
  we have gone farther and destroyed the land
  behind us."i i. Friedrich Nietsche, The
  Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York
  Vintage Books, 1974) 180.

20
Jacob Burckhardt 1818-1897

• . "Wars clear the air like thunderstorms. . .war
  alone grants to mankind the magnificent spectacle
  of a general submission to a general aim."i
• i. Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History,
  tr. M.D. Hottinger (Indianapolis Liberty Press,
  1979) 217-218.

21
Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

• "We have to be on our guard," says Otto, "against
  an error which would lead to a wrong and
  one-sided interpretation of religion. This is
  the view that the essence of deity can be
  expressed completely and exhaustively in such
  rational' attributes." The "idea of deity," in
  fact, implies a "non-rational or supra-rational
  Subject" who stands behind and beyond all human
  analogy. To encounter this "Subject" and bow
  before it in adoration is the original motivation
  and driving force of the human religious quest.
  It fills the pages of sacred books with their
  strange narratives. It inspires the building of
  hallowed places and furnishes them with works of
  art that form a precious heritage of
  civilization. Before anything else, the idea of
  deity that undergirds religion is "the idea of
  the Holy."i
• i. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr.
  John W. Harvey, second ed. (London Oxford,
  1950) 1-2.

22
Wilfred Owen

• The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
• So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,And
  took the fire with him, and a knife.And as they
  sojourned both of them together,Isaac the
  first-born spake and said, My Father,Behold the
  preparations, fire and iron,But where the lamb,
  for this burnt-offering?Then Abram bound the
  youth with belts and straps,And builded parapets
  and trenches there,And stretchèd forth the knife
  to slay his son.When lo! an Angel called him out
  of heaven,Saying, Lay not they hand upon the
  lad,Neither do anything to him, thy son.Behold!
  Caught in a thicket by its horns,A Ram. Offer
  the Ram of Pride instead.
• But the old man would not so, but slew his
  son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

23
Dulce Et Decorum Est

• Bent double, like old beggars under
  sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
  through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we
  turned our backsAnd towards our distant rest
  began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had
  lost their bootsBut limped on, blood-shod. All
  went lame all blindDrunk with fatigue deaf
  even to the hootsOf tired, outstripped
  Five-Nines that dropped behind.
• Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of
  fumbling,Fitting the clumsy helmets just in
  timeBut someone still was yelling out and
  stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or
  lime...Dim, through the misty panes and thick
  green light,As under a green sea, I saw him
  drowning.

• In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,He
  plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
• If in some smothering dreams you too could
  paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And
  watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His
  hanging face, like a devil's sick of sinIf you
  could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome
  gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,Obscene
  as cancer, bitter as the cudOf vile, incurable
  sores on innocent tongues,-My friend, you would
  not tell with such high zestTo children ardent
  for some desperate glory,The old Lie Dulce et
  decorum estPro patria mori.

24
Thomas Ernest Hulme 1833-1917

• It is necessary to realize that there is an
  absolute, and not a relative difference between
  humanism (which we can take to be the highest
  expression of the vital), and the religious
  spirit. The divine is not life at its intensest.
  It contains in a way an almost anti-vital
  element quite different of course from the
  non-vital character of the outside physical
  region. The questions of Original Sin, of
  chastity, of the motives behind Buddhism, etc.,
  all part of the very essence of the religious
  spirits, are quite incomprehensible for
  humanism.i
• i. T.E. Hulme, Speculations Essays on
  Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert
  Read (London Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1924) 8f.

25
The conception of the abundance of national
spirits was transformed into a feeling of
contempt for the idea of Universal Humanity. The
pantheistic idolization of the state turned into
blind respect, devoid of all ideas, for success
and power. The Romantic Revolution sank into a
complacent contentment with things as they are.
From the idea of a particular law and right for a
given time and place, men proceeded to a purely
positivistic acceptance of the state. The
conception of a morality of a higher spiritual
order which transcends bourgeois conventions
passed into moral scepticism. From the urge of
the German spirit to find embodiment in a state
there arose the same kind of imperialism as
anywhere else in the world.i i...
Troeltsch, Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa. 17-18
quoted and tr. in Iggers, The German Conception
of History, 188.
26
Douglas Horton (1891-1968)

• Only those who are old enough to remember the
  particular kind of desiccated humanism, almost
  empty of other-worldly content, which prevailed
  in many Protestant areas in the early decades of
  this century, can understand the surprise, the
  joy, the refresment which would have been brought
  by the book to the ordinary and, like myself,
  somewhat desultory reader of the religious
  literature of that time.1
• 1... Karl Barth, The Word of God and the
  Word of Man, tr. Douglas Horton (New York, Harper
  Row, 1957) 1f.

27
We all know the curiosity that comes over us when
from a window we see the people in the street
suddenly stop and look upshade their eyes with
their hands and look straight up into the sky
toward something which is hidden from us by the
roof. Our curiosity is superfluous, for what they
see is doubtless an aeroplane. But as to the
sudden stopping, looking up, and tense attention
characteristic of the people of the Bible, our
wonder will not be so lightly dismissed. To me
personally it came first with Paul this man
evidently sees and hears something which is above
everything, which is absolutely beyond the range
of my observation and the measure of my thought.
Let me place my self as I will to this coming
somethingor rather this present somethingno,
rather this coming somethingthat he insists in
enigmatical words that he sees and hears, I am
still taken by the fact that he, Paul, or whoever
it was who wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians,
for example, is eye and ear in a state such as
inspiration, alarm, or stirring or overwhelming
emotion, do not satisfactorily describe. I seem
to see within so transparent a piece of
literature a personality who is actually thrown
out of his course and out of every ordinary
course by seeing and hearing what I for my part
do not hearwho is, so to speak, captured, in
order to be dragged as a prisoner from land to
land for strange, intense, uncertain, and yet
mysteriously well-planned service.
28
And if I ever come to fear lest mine is a case of
self-hallucination, one glance at the secular
events of those times, one glance at the widening
circle of ripples in the pool of history, tells
me of a certainty that a stone of unusual weight
must have been dropped into deep water there
somewheretells me that, among all the hundreds
of peripatetic preachers and miracle-workers from
the Near East who in that day must have gone
along the same Appian Way into imperial Rome, it
was this one Paul, seeing and hearing what he
did, who was the cause, if not of all, yet of the
most important developments in the citys future.
And this is only one of the Biblical company,
Paul by name. Karl Barth, The Word of God
and the Word of Man, 62f. (1920)
29
Karl Barth 1886-1968

• World War I
• Thoroughgoing Eschatology Johannes Weiss
  1863-1914, Albert Schweitzer 1875-1965
• History of Religions School
• Form Criticism
• Soren Kierkegaard 1813-1855
• Luther Renaissance Karl Holl 1866-1926

30
Theological Method

• Lessing God/Humanity RevelationEducation
• Schleiermacher God/Humanity RevelationFeeling
• Hegel God/Humanity RevelationDevelopment
• Ritschl God/Humanity Revelation spiritual power
  to rise above the natural world
• Troeltsch God/Humanity RevelationNormative
  Value for West

31
Here are people, only two or three, perhaps, as
sometimes happens in this country, or perhaps
even a few hundred, who, impelled by a strange
instinct or will, stream toward this building,
where they seewhat? Satisfaction of an old
habit? But whence came this old habit?
Entertainment and instruction? Very strange
entertainment and instruction it is! Edification?
So they say, but what is edification? Do they
know? Do they really know at all why they are
here? In any case here they areeven though they
be shrunk to one little old womanand there being
here points to the even that is expected or
appears to be expected, or at least, if the place
be dead and deserted, was once expected
there. Word of God, 105 (1922)
32
People naturally do not shout it out, and least
of all into the ears of us ministers. But let us
not be deceived by their silence. Blood and
tears, deepest despair and highest hope, a
passionate longing to lay hold of that which, or
rather of him who, overcomes the world because he
is its Creator and Redeemer, its beginning and
ending and Lord, a passionate longing to have the
word spoken, the word which promises grace in
judgment, life in death, and the beyond in the
here and now, Gods wordthis it is which
animates our church-goers, however lazy,
bourgeois, or commonplace may be the manner in
which they express their want in so-called real
life. Word of God, 108f. (1922)
33
. . .in the most literal sense. . .the end of
history. . .the ultimate event. Word, 110 . .
.the ridge between time and eternity that is
narrower than a knife-edge. . .the boundary of
mortality Word 188 (1922)
34
When they come to us for help they really do not
want to learn more about living they want to
learn more about what is on the farther edge of
livingGod. We cut a ridiculous figure as village
sagesor city sages. As such we are socially
superfluous. We do not understand the profession
of ministry unless we understand it as an index,
a symptom, say rather an omen, of a perplexity
which extends over the whole range of human
endeavor, present and future. Word of God, 189
35
To meet their question with an answer commending
or condemning civilization, culture, or piety,
however well it may be meant, is simply to refer
them, is it not, to the world they already live
in? Are we going to keep this up forever? Are we
never to learn for what reason, for what amazing
reason, they endure us and think they need us. If
we believe it in secret, why not admit to them
openly that we cannot speak of God? Or if we have
serious compunctions against saying so, or saying
so in just this way, may we not at least make
their question about God our own? Why not make it
the central theme of our preaching.? Word of
God, 191
36
There is above this warped and weakened will of
yours and mine, above this absurd and senseless
will of the world, another which is straight and
pure, and which, when it once prevails, must have
other, wholly other, issues than these we see
today. Word of God, 13 (1916)
37
As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are
human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We
ought therefore to recognize both our obligation
and our inability and by that very recognition
give God the glory. This is our
perplexity. Word of God, 186
38
But my premises in this address have been the Old
Testament and the tradition of the Reformed
Churches. As a Reformed Churchmanand not only, I
think as suchI must keep my sure distance from
the Lutheran est and the Lutheran type of
assurance of salvation. Can theology, should
theology, pass beyond prolegomena to Christology?
It may be that everything is said in the
prolegomena. Word of God, 217
39

• Anselm's rule "If a proposition accords with
  the actual wording of the Bible or with the
  direct inferences from it, then naturally it is
  valid with absolute certainty, but just because
  of this agreement it is not strictly a
  theological proposition. If, on the other hand,
  it is a strictly theological proposition, that is
  to say a proposition formed independently of the
  actual wording of Scripture, then the fact that
  it does not contradict the biblical text,
  determines its validity. But if it did
  contradict the Bible, however attractive it might
  be on other grounds, it would be rendered
  invalid." (Barth, Anselm Fides Quaerens
  Intellectum (1931) p. 33.

40
Augustinian Creed/Enlightenment Creed

• Human nature corrupted by the Fall
• Salvation requires the direct intervention of God
  (Gods will is the necessity of all things)
• Humanity stands under the divine predestinating
  will of justice and mercy
• Spirituality grounded in distrust of the world

• Humanity is not natively depraved
• Salvation redefined the end of life is life
  itself, the good life on earth
• Humanity is capable by reason to perfect the good
  life on earth
• The essential condition for the good life is
  freedom from ignorance and oppression

41
Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945)
42
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (1959)

• One can distinguish two ways of approaching God
  the way of overcoming estrangement and the way of
  meeting a stranger. In the first way, man
  discovers himself when he discovers God he
  discovers something that is identical with
  himself although it transcends him infinitely,
  something from which he is estranged, but from
  which he has never been and never can be
  separated. . .

43

• . . .In the second way man meets a stranger when
  he meets God. The meeting is accidental.
  Essentially they do not belong to each other.
  They may become friends on a tentative and
  conjectural basis. But there is no certainty
  about the stranger man has met. He may disappear,
  and only probable statements can be made about
  his nature. (p. 10)