RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Bogrma
who made more of the historical development, show the new warmth and simplicity. The Biblical tendency fostered by Pietism won a peculiar power and independence in Wurttemberg, exemplified in Bengel (d. 1752), M. F. Roos {Die christliche Glaubenslehre, 1774; new ed. by J. T. Beck, 1845), and Beck himself, the most important and influential of these dogmatists.
The next great turn in the history of Protestant dogmatics came from a quarter opposed to Pietism;
the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, and later of Kant. Wolff's first and most influential disciple among the
3. Influence of
Wolff^^and dogmatists was S. J. Baumgarten, Kant. went out from Pietism (d. 1757;
his Evangelische Glaubenslehre was published by Semler in 1759-60). Wolff's influence was at first apparent only in the method of rational demonstration, then in the preference given to those truths which can be apprehended by the natural reason, and in the slighting and weakening of the other dogmas. Then Semler employed an important Biblical and historical criticism against the ecclesiastical dogmas. Still using the Bible as a recognized higher source of truth, rationalism gave a new turn to the difficult propositions. Then, when the WolSian and at the same time the English and French philosophy and the "Enlightenment" (q.v.) threatened to issue in downright rationalism with no strictly ethical spirit, Kant, asserting the absolute character of the categorical imperative and its assurance as to the existence of God, gave this rationalism a most powerful ethical impulse. None the less, the rationalists themselves learned little from Kant and continued to put all trust in their God-given reason. But also the supranaturalism gave a wrong treatment of Christian truth and of religious truth in general. It hoped by dialectic processes to establish not only the existence of God, but also a higher source of the Sacred Scriptures, and thence the reality of the miracles there recorded (which, however, are admitted to be incomprehensible), and also the truthfulness of the Biblical statements (likewise transcending reason) concerning God, the essence of Christ, the Trinity, etc.; at the same time, in opposition to the former orthodoxy, it sought as much as possible to confine itself in its dogmatics to the actual statements of Scripture. The most serious lack in the case of this rationalism and this supranaturalism is that — in F. Nitzsch's phrase {Lehrhuch der evangelischen Dogmatik, Freiburg, 1889, p. 31) — of a " sense of immediacy "; that is, of a knowledge of the significance of immediate perception and experience for faith and its certitude. Here belong, on the one hand, the systematic works of ToUner (1775); Doderlin (1780); then, revealing Kantian influences, Tieftrunk (1791); H. P. K. Henke (1793); Eckermann (1800); Wegscheider (1817; 8th ed., 1844); and Ammon (1803; 4th ed., 1830); on the other hand, Reinhard (1801), Storr (after 1793; a representative of the Wurttemberg Biblicism), Knapp (1826), A. Hahn (1827), and Steudel (1835).
A powerful awakening of the sense for the immediate, which became the most important factor
for a new period in the history of dogmatics, was introduced by the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century with the great political agitations which deeply reacted upon thought and feehng. Schleiermacher, proceeding Schlei- fj-ojjj Moravianism and well schooled ermacher • i , . ^
and his philosophy, sought, m opposition Contem- intellectualism of the rational-
poraries. ^^^^^ ^^'^ the supranaturalistic movements, to make the pious self-consciousness of the Church the basis of the system of doctrine. Like the original Pietism, his movement opposed a learned orthodoxy and at the same time strengthened the confessional church spirit. In the pliilosophy of that day, though Kant was willing to give vahdity to the content of religious faith only in the postulates of the practical reason, Jacobi at least taught a direct knowledge, according to the feelings, of the supersensuous and the divine through a believing reason just as the objects of sense perception are recognized by the senses. From Jacobi Fries adopted the view that reason as the faculty of ideas grasps these by way of feeling or presentiment. De Wette {Ueber Religion und Theologie, 1817) followed him. Nevertheless, at that time the Schelling-Hegel philosophy of the speculative reason gained the ascendency, and it was in the forms of this thinking that Daub and Marheineke thought they could state the true content of the Christian faith (Daub, Theologumena, 1806; Einleitung in das Studium der Dogmatik, 1810; Marheineke, Grundlehren der christlichen Dogmatik, 1819 and 1827; System der christlichen Dogmatik, after his death, 1847). Among the learned theologians Schleiermacher was most influential in remolding dogmatics by reason of his determination to make the system express the pious feelings or the pious self-consciousness {Der christliche Glaube, 1821; Reden iiber die Religion, 1799). He also influenced dogmatists who in opposition to him made it the task of dogmatics to represent the divine realities attested by the feelings as objectively true, and to ground them in reason; and he cooperated with those who had a different understanding from his of the inner processes of the soul and who found in these the workings of God and of the divine revelation in Christ and in the Biblical testimonies.
In more recent dogmatics must be noted first of all a simple Biblical tendency now more effective in scientific theology than before. A chief representative is the above-named Beck, 5. Biblical ^Ijq jg unique not only in that with Tendency pg^fect trust in the self-evidencing character of Scripture he sought to
and H. Schmidt.
take the content of faith purely from this source, but also in that he would, on principle, have nothing to do with the views of Schleiermacher, church orthodoxy, philosophy, or Bibhcal criticism. This new ecclesiastical and confessional interest is to be seen also in H. Schmidt's Dogmatik der evangel isch-lutherischen Kir che (1843), which had the merit of once more systematically presenting the actual content and the veritable treasures of the old and forgotten orthodoxy. While Rothe, Lange, Martensen, Dorner, and
Dog'ma