CHRIST IN MODERN THOUGHT
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the Ethical Christ, (3) the Jesus of History or the Historical Christ.
(1) The Christ of Speculation. — Each of the transcendental philosophies involved a speculative Christology. The first phase appears in Kant (1724-1804). The work of Kant in religious theory is the work of a pioneer. His equipment was not rich enough in mind or heart for more. Hume, as he tells us, ' awaked him out of his dogmatic slumber,' but only in philosophy. In religion he stood in line with the previous age. He shared the unhistorical views of the 18th cent, and its ' rational ' religion. What of personal religion he knew, he knew intensely, as the class to which he belonged, the poorer citizen class, knows it ; but, like that class also, with narrow- ness. It was a Christianity of heart and will, as practised among the common people, which was real to him. He stood quite outside Christianity in its ecclesiastical or mystical forms. Religious experience of any independent type, except as a department of moral life, he was unconscious of. He had no consciousness of God distinct from the dictates of conscience. Hence, when he came to rationalize his religious experience, the outcome, as was natural, was the simple translation into forms of reflexion of an imperious moral sense. The Kantian position is usually termed Ethical Deism. The extreme deistic view is, that creation is left to itself save for occasional Divine interfer- ences. Kant's central doctrine is in harmony— asserting 'the absolute value of the ethical life.' God having originally created man and endowed him with reason and free will, nothing further is necessary on the Divine side for moral advance or redemption. Each man, as a moral personality, rests entirely on himself, on his own reason and freedom, and may make moral progress quite independently. His moral consciousness is con- ceived as so aljsolutely self-sufficient as to have no need of outward aid, whether from Nature, or Society, or God. On this general idea he con- structs his conception of Christianity and Christ in his treatise. Religion withiji the Bounds of mere Reason (1793).
He starts with the perception of conscience of a radical evil dwelling in human nature as an indubitable fact of experience. The return to good prescribed by the moral law can be accom- plished only by a thorough revolution of the entire mode of thought which establishes a new character, one susceptible of good, on the basis of which progressive moral improvement is made possible. The means by which this change in man is brought about is that the idea of moral perfection, for which we are destined from the first, is brought to a new life in his con- sciousness. But in no way can the ideal of a humanity well- pleasing to God be brought home to us more vividly than under the image of a man, who not only himself promotes the good by word and deed, but is also ready for the benefit of the world to endure all sorrows, since we measure the greatness of moral strength by the hindrances to be overcome. In the historical figure of Jesus this ideal appears. Not as though the idea of a humanity well pleasing to God were first invested with power and obligation by means of an example furnished by experience ; rather has the idea its reality in itself, since it is founded on our moral reason. Only as an historical exemplar of this eternally true idea can such a figure as that of Jesus be presented to us. In Him the ideal of the good appeared in bodily form. When we believe in Him as the Son of God, the object of our saving faith is this eternal ideal of God-pleasing humanity, not the historical man ; the ideal of which the historical man is but the highest representation. Incarnation is the ' personalization of the Moral Ideal.' Jesus first declared the moral to be the only saving, and afforded in His life and death an example of it. This exhausts the significance of His Person.
Opposition to Kant's interpretation of religion as mere etliics and of Christ as a Moral Example, impelled more genial minds like Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, and others to reactionary in.sistence on the immediacy of the religious consciousness and the speciality of the Christian revelation ; but with neither critical nor philosophical depth. Tlie direct succession from Kant appears in Fichte (1762-1814), wiio was impressed with Kant's results, started from them as a disciple, and later
carried them to further consistency, and in so doing advanced decisively beyond them.
With Fichte, Christ was tiie first to apprehend the Divine, the first to recognize clearly and em- brace freely the Divine will, and hence is the first- begotten of God. The manner of His apprehend- ing was peculiar to Himself. The immediate unity of God and man in the spirit in which religion con- sists, came to Christ not by speculative philosophy or tradition as it does to us, but simply through His existence. This knowledge was to Him the primary and absolute thing, immediately identical with His self-consciousness. In Him, therefore, it may be said that God became incarnate. Fichte labours under the delusion of conceiving personality as a limit of the Divine nature. That God in be- coming man might not annihilate but enhance personality and raise it to its true infinite capacity, had to be discerned. The attempt came with Schelling (1775 - 1854), whose philosophy is a philosophy of the Incai-nation. His problem is determined for him by the conclusions of Fichte. According to the latter, the relation of the subject and object, human and Divine, is a unity of simiile identity. But such an identity, it is to be noted, ignores the characteristic differentia of the human, i.e. that in the essence of the human which it is necessary to safeguard in its union with the Divine. The unity with which Christology is particularly concerned, cannot be understood if the two members of the antagonism are not thought out purely by themselves according to their idea. The unity is not a true unity if the members of the antagonism are not united by that which distinguishes and opposes them. Those two considerations, the essential unity of the subject and object, and their unity in the midst of their differences, form Schelling's contribution to this high debate. To- gether they yield his doctrine of the Absolute.