THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
di\'ine attributes by Christ, including omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, during all tlie stages of his humihiition, and differed only as to the use (chrcsis) of them — whether it was a krypsix chreseos (a concealed use), or a fce/tas/.s chrenrdK (a non-use). Tlie cryptic view of Tiibingen is logically (i.e., from Lutheran premises) more consistent, but carries the theory of the communicalio idiomatum to the \ery verge of Gnostic Docetism, which resolves the human life of Christ on earth into a magical illusion. The Kenotic view of Giessen is more in accordance with the facts of Christ's life, but agrees with the other in principle, and admits, after all, an exceptional use in the performance of miracles. The controversy was waged with violence, and threatened to weaken the Protestant cause at a very critical period. The Lutheran princes interfered. In their name. Hoe \-on Hoenegg (q.v.) , court preacher at Dresden, issued a Solida decicio (1624), essentially favoring the cause of the Giessen Kcnoti cists; but the Tiibingen theologians defended their position till the controversy was lost in the disastrous events of the Thirty Years' War, without leading to any positive result. The Kenotic controversy was renewed recently, but in a modified form, and on a new basis (see below, X., 4; see also Kenosis).
X. Modern Christologies : The orthodox christology emphasized the divinity of Christ, and left his humanity more or less out of sight and, in the last stage of its Lutheran development, arrived at the brink of Gnostic Docetism. Rationalism arose, toward the close of the eighteenth century, as a reaction against symbolical and scholastic orthodoxy, and ran into the opposite extreme; it ignored the divine nature, and fell back upon a purely human, or Ebionitic, Christ. Its worth, as well as its weakness, consists in the examination of the human element in Christ and in the Bible.
With the revival of Evangelical faith in Germany, the divine element of Christ was again duly appreciated by theologians. Hegel and Schleiermacher mark a new epoch in christological speculation, with two tendencies — the one pantheistic, the other humanistic; and these, again, were followed by original reconstructions and modifications of the Catholic doctrine of the God-man. The pantheistic tendency of Hegel is more congenial to the maxim of the Lutheran Confession, that the finite is capable of the infinite; the humanistic of Schleiermacher to the tendency of the Reformed Confession, which guards the genuine humanity of Christ against confusion with the divine. The former starts from the divine, the latter, from the human element; but both may unite, and often do unite when they proceed' from naturalistic premises. Both Hegel and Schleiermacher gave impulse to orthodox as well as negative and destructive tendencies. To most of his pupils Schleiermacher was a sort of John the Baptist, who led them to f lhrist.
1. The Humanitarian or Unitarian Christology makes Christ a mere man, though the wisest and best of men, and a model for imitation. It is held in various forms, from the communicated semidivinity of the old Soeiiiiaus down to the pure
humanity of modern Unitarians and Humanitarians. Professor Bruce (Humiliation of Christ, Edinburgh, 1881, lecture v., p. 103) distinguishes five classes of Humanitarians. Kant may be said to have inaugurated the modern Humanitarian view. He regardcKl Christ as the representative of the moral ideal, but made a distinction between the ideal Christ and the historical Jesus. The conservative Unitarians admit the sinless perf<'ction of Christ. Wilham EUery Channing (q.v.) was, at least in his earlier period, a firm believer in the preexistence of Christ, and is sometimes called an Arian by his nephew and biographer. He certainly rose above the mere Humanitarianism of Priestley. He saw in Christ the perfect manifestation of God to man, and the highest ideal of humanity, and paid one of the noblest and most eloquent tributes to Christ's character and inspiring example. With this school must be reckoned Prof. Levi L. Payne, who dissociates christology, or the person of Christ, from theology, or the doctrine of God, and joins it to anthropology. Christ is a man and to be judged as a man. It was " not necessary that his moral consciousness should be divinized." He is separated by no miraculous act from the beings he came to save, and yet his moral consciousness has surpassed that of all other men (Critical History of the Evolution of Trinitarianism, Boston, 1900, pp. 199, 281).
S. The Pantheistic Christology, suggested by Schelling and Hegel, and best represented by Daub, Marheineke, and Goschel (of the right, or conservative, wing of Hegelianism), and by Baur, Strauss, and Biedermann (of the left, or radical, wing), starts from the idea of the essential unity of the divine and human, and teaches a continuous mcarnation of God in the human race as a whole, but denies, for this very reason, the specific dignity of Christ as the one and only God-man. This, at least, is the theory of the " left," or radical and negative, wing of the Hegelian School, although Hegel himself had no sympathy with rationalism, but despised it. " The infinite," says Strauss, " can not pour out its fulness into a single individual." The peculiar position of Christ, however, is that he first awoke to a consciousness of this unity, and that he represents it in its purest and strongest form. Under tliis view Biedermann (Christliche Dogmatik, Zurich, 1869) places Christ highest in the scale of hxunanity, not only in the past, but for all time to come. Even Strauss was at one time willing to go so far; but he destroycil nearly the whole historic foundation of his life, and ended in the philosophical bankruptcy of materialism.
3. The Christolog-y of Schleiermacher (d. 1S34) and his School represents the highest form of Humanitarianism with an important admission of the supernatural or divine element. , He regards Christ as a perfect man, in whom, and in whom alone, the ideal of humanity (the Urbild) has been fully realized. At the same time he rises above 'Humanitarianism by emphatically asserting Christ's essential sinlessness and absolute perfection '(" wesentliche Unsiindlichkeit" and " schlechthinigc Vollkommenheit "), and a peculiar and abiding indwell-