RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
God
theologian to set forth the content of the Christian faith from the standpoint of Hegelian philosophy without accepting (or even recognizing as Hegelian) the impersonal, pantheistic idea of the Absolute, and indeed without going deeply into 1 6. Modern the train of thought leading up to that Tendencies, idea. Other theologians who more or less followed Schleiermacher, while they agreed with his statements about the devout consciousness, feeling, inner experience, and the like, yet avoided his philosophical definition of God. Others, again, holding to the same point of departure, have striven with zealous confidence to use the main elements of the idea of God thus attained in connection with conceptual speculation and construction in the interests of an objective knowledge of God. Among these may be classed Rothe, Martensen, Dorner, and especially Frank. The point particularly aimed at by these men is the vindication of the personality of God, in opposition to the pantheistic philosophy noticed above. A tendency has also appeared to recognize the very being of this God in the world of being created by him, thus giving a theistic conception of God in opposition not only to the pantheistic but also to the deistic. This tendency has, on the one hand, done justice to so much truth as lies in the pantheistic conception, and, on the other, by its adherence to Scriptural forms of expression, it has led to a more vivid realization of the divine nature in its relation to the world than prevailed among the old rationalists and supranaturalists.
The question has also arisen among theologians of the strict positive school, in consequence of the doctrine of Christ as the God-Man, whether, and if so how far, it is consistent with the divine nature, as found in the Logos or the second Person of the Trinity, to speak of a Kenosis (q.v.) or self -emptying, sueh as was supposed to have taken place in the incarnation of the Logos, bringing with it a suspension of his eternal consciousness. This is in direct opposition to the old orthodox teaching, according to which Christ laid aside in his humiliation not what affected his Godhead, but what affected his humanity, endowed with divine qualities by the Communicatio idiomatum (q.v.).
Biedermann, a dogmatic theologian influenced by Hegelian speculation, treats the notion of the personality of God as one to be rejected from the standpoint of scientific philosophy. It is true that he designates personality as " the adequate form of presentation for the theistic conception of God "; but he goes on to say that a theism of this kind can never attain to pure thought, and is only an unscientific conception of the content of the religious idea, adopted in a polemical spirit against those who think this out logically. As against pantheistic notions of God, however, he is willing to admit the " substantial " validity of the theistic position. He himself describes God as absolute spirit, absolute being in and by himself, and the fundamental essence of all being outside himself. Quite a different tendency of philosophic thought on the matter is met with in Lipsius. He traces the belief in God back to a practical necessity felt by the personal human spirit, and reaches the concep-
tion of God as a purpose-determining intelligence and a lawgiving will, and thus as a self-conscious and self-determining personality. He finds our knowledge of God always inadequate as soon as we attempt to go on to transcendental knowledge of his inner nature, because we are forced to speak of this in metaphors borrowed from our human relations, and to carry over our notions of space and time to where space and time are not. He declares also that the metaphysical speculations which attempt to replace these inadequate notions by a real knowledge of God are themselves unable to do this, since they can not get beyond the boundary of an eternal and ever-present existence underlying all existence in space and time, and are unable to define this existence in distinction from spatial and temporal existence except by purely formal logical definitions which really add nothing to our knowledge. It is really Kantian criticism which appears here, more forcibly than in previous dogmatic theology, as it reappears also in the later post-Hegelian philosophy.
Ritschl, again, is reminiscent of Kant in his opposition to all " metaphysical " statements about God, and in the way in which he places God for our knowledge in relation to our personal ethical spirit, as well as the powers which he attributes to this latter in relation to nature (cf. Kant's so-called moral proof or God as the postulate of the practical reason). Through the revelation in Christ, God becomes to him to a certain extent an objective reality, and, rejecting the conception of God as the Absolute, he prefers to define him simply as love. Against this not only dogmatic theologians like Frank and Nitzsch, but Kaftan also objects that love is found also in the finite sphere, and thus can not sufficiently express the essential nature of God, which differentiates him from the finite. Ritschl himself says, moreover, that the love which God is has the attribute of omnipotence, and that God is the creator of the universe, as will determining both himself and all things, while these definitions can in no way be deduced from the simple conception of love. Kaftan begins by the statement that God is the Absolute; and this signifies to him not only that God has absolute power over all that is, but also and even more that he is the absolute goal of all human endeavor. Nitzsch employs the term " supramundane " to include the domination of the universe and to express at the same time not only the thought that he who conditions all things is himself unconditioned, but also the moral and intellectual exaltation of God.
The whole body, therefore, of these modern theologians hold fast to an objective doctrine of God with a strict scientific comprehension of terms; and they agree in displaying a characteristic which differentiates them from earlier schools of thought, though varying in degree and in logical sequence — the consciousness that the Christian doctrine of God is based not upon the operations of reason but upon the revelation of God in Christ, of which the witness is in our hearts and that it must grasp as the fundamentally essential in God and his relation to us the ethical element in him — must conceive him, in a word, primarily as the sacred Love.
(J. KoSTLINf.)
God