Modern German Philosophers

The independent metaphysical systems of the philosophers, which embraced God and the world, did not at first make any profound impression on the thought of theologians. Spinoza's pantheism was by its very nature excluded from consideration; but the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, with its conception of God as a supremely perfect, personal Being, in whom all possible realities were embraced in their highest form, and with its demonstration of God's existence, offered itself as a friend to Christian doctrine, and was widely influential. In so far, however, as the theologians adopted any of its conclusions, it was with little clearness of insight or independent thought as to the relation of these metaphysical concepts to the Christian faith or as to their own validity.

A new epoch in German philosophy, with which theology had and still has to reckon, came in with Kant. Confidence in the arguments by which God's existence had been proved and defined was at least shaken by his criticism, which, however, energetically asserted the firm foundation of moral consciousness, and so led up to God by a new way, in postulating the existence of a deity for the establishment of the harmony required by the moral consciousness between the moral dignity of the subjects and their happiness based upon the adaptation of nature to their ends. Fichte was led from this standpoint to a God who is not personal, but represents the moral order of the universe, believing in which we are to act as duty requires, without question as to the results.

But for a time the most successful and apparently the most dangerous to Christian theology was a pantheistic philosophical conception of God which took for its foundation the idea of an Absolute raised above subject and object, above thinking and being; which explained and claimed to deduce all truth as the necessary self -development of this idea. With Schelling this pantheism is still in embryo, and finally comes back (in his "philosophy of revelation ") to the recognition of the divine personality, with an attempt to construct it speculatively. In a great piece of constructive work the philosophy of Hegel undertook to show how this Absolute is first pure being, identical with not-being; how then, in the form of externalization or becoming other, it comes to be nature or descends to nature; and finally, in the finite spirit, resumes itself into itself, comes to itself, becomes self-conscious, and thus now for the first time takes on the form of personality. For Christian theology the special importance of this teaching, was its claim to have taken what Christian doctrine had comprehended only in a limited way of God, the divine Personality, the Incarnation, etc., and to have expressed it according to its real content and to the laws of thought.

The conservative Hegelians still maintained that God, in himself and apart from the creation of the world and the origin of human personality, was to be considered as a self-conscious spirit or personality, and thus offered positive support to the Christian doctrine of God and his revelation of himself. But the Hegelian principles were more logically carried out by the opposite wing of the party, especially by David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christliche Glaubenslehre, Tubingen, 1840) in the strongest antithesis to the Christian doctrine of a personal God, of Christ as the only Son of God and the God-Man, and of a personal ethical relation between God and man. Some other philosophers, however, who may be classed in general under the head of the modern speculative idealism, have, in their speculations on the Absolute as actually present in the universe, retained a belief in the personality of God.

The realist philosopher Herbart, who recognized a personal God not through speculations on the Absolute and the finite, but on the basis of moral consciousness and teleology, yet defined little about him, and what he has to say on this subject never attracted much attention among theologians. The Hegelian pantheistic " absolute idealism," once widely prevalent, did not long retain its domination. Its place was taken first in many, quarters, as with Strauss, by an atheistic materialism; Hegel had made the universal abstract into God, and when men abandoned their belief in this and in its power to produce results, they gave up their belief in God with it. Among the post-Hegelian philosophers the most important for the present subject is Lotze, with his defense and confirmation of the idea of a personal God, going back in the most independent way both to Herbart and to idealism, both to Spinoza and Leibniz. Christian theology can, of course, only protest against the peculiar pantheism of Schopenhauer, which is really much older than he, but never before attained wide currency, and against that of Von Hartmann. The significance for the doctrine of God of the newer philosophical undertakings which are characterized by an empiricist-realist tendency, and based on epistemology and criticism is found not so much in their definite expressions about God-they do not as a rule consider him an object of scientific expression, even when they allow him to be a necessary object of faith-as in the impulse which they give to critical investigation of religious belief and perception in general.

Theology, at least German theology, before Schleiermacher showed but little understanding of and interest in the problems regarding a proper conception and confirmation of the doctrine of God which had been laid before it in this development of philosophy beginning with Kant. This is especially true of its attitude toward Kant himself and not only of the supranaturalists who were suspicious of any exaltation of the natural reason, but also of the rationalists, who still had a superficial devotion to the Enlightenment and to Wolffian philosophy. In Schleiermacher's teaching about God, however, the results of a devout and immediate consciousness were combined with philosophical postulates. In his mind the place of all the so-called proofs of the existence of God is completely supplied by the recognition that the feeling of absolute dependence involved in the devout Christian consciousness is a universal element of life; in this consciousness he finds the explanation of the source of this feeling of dependence, i.e., of God, as being love, by which the divine nature communicates itself. For his reasoned philosophical speculation, however, on the human spirit and universal being, the idea of God is nothing but the idea of the absolute unity of the ideal and the real, which in the world exist as opposites. (Compare Schelling's philosophy of identity, unlike which, however, Schleiermacher acknowledges the impossibility of a speculative deduction of opposites from an original identity; and the teaching of Spinoza, whose conception of God, however, as the one substance he does not share.) Thus God and the universe are to him correlatives, but not identical-God is unity without plurality, the universe plurality without unity; and this God is apprehended by man's feeling, just as man's feeling apprehends the unity of ideal and real.

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