Dorner on the future state

Introduction

The course of recent theological discussion Las called general attention to Dorner's eschatology. To many these words designate some vague and portentous form of German speculation, which should be kept with all possible pains from corrupting the sources of New England theology. Men like the fervent Tholuck, the profound Mtiller, and the learned Dorner, may be good enough Christians for Germany, but not for New England ! Dorner's last great work, the ripe fruit of a ripe mind, may be profitable for the " state church " of Prussia, but it should hardly be tolerated in the free churches of America! Such suspicions and fears of good men among us, however, may be in part accounted for and pardoned in view of the fact that their knowledge of the master- work of this master-mind among theologians has been mainly derived from such fragmentary and imperfect statements, and even misrepresentations, of Dr. Dorner's theology as have found their way into the religious papers, and upon the platform, in this country. It seems to me to be a timely work, therefore, as it is a grateful task, to bring one portion, at least, of Dorner's " System of the Doctrine of Christian Faith " — that portion now particularly under discussion — before many American readers, who otherwise would still be dependent only upon the crude and secondhand reports of his eschatology which I find in general circulation among us. His whole system of theology has been translated in Clark's Foreign Theological Library; but the four volumes of this translation may be beyond the inclination or the reach of many who might be glad to study for themselves his views upon the special subjects around which of late the tides of theological discussion have been rising. If the possession of this portion of Dorner's theology shall lead any to make themselves acquainted, even at some cost, with his whole system of faith, I shall have accomplished a double purpose, and I believe a double good, by this endeavor to put into their hands this concluding chapter of his great work.

I should be doing Dr. Dorner, however, an injustice should I publish as a tract for the times his chapter upon eschatology, without seeking through an introduction to put it in its own proper perspective, and to indicate the general principles of Dorner's reasoning through which we should approach this portion of his system. This seems all the more necessary since American readers are perhaps too much inclined to go up to the master- works of German scholarship as some tourists enter a foreign gallery, note-book in hand, armed with certain stock questions, and then hurry away, imagining that they understand a great statue or painting. Dorner's reasonings are living outgrowths from his principles of faith, and his conclusions need to be apprehended and discussed not merely as so many logical quantities of thought, but they should be understood and estimated in the light of the principles in which they have grown to be what they are. No one can read with sympathetic thoroughness many pages of Dorner without becoming aware of the force and subtlety of his reasoning ; but he will also perceive that he is not led by mere logic, or gradually pressed into some predetermined conclusion by an adept in theological dialectics. Dorner knows nothing of the method by which conclusions are first deftly interwoven into definitions, and then logically deduced from those definitions. His pages are free from the intrigues of verbal logic, as well as from the assumptions of axiomatic science; his supreme object throughout seems to be to perceive the truth in all systems, and to present, in the consistency of the highest ethical principles, what he finds to be the real contents of Christian faith. His writings illustrate a remark of Newman in his essay on Development, that logic is necessary for the statement and communication of truth, but that other qualities also are necessary for the discovery of truth. It is this calm, truth-loving, and truth-seeing spirit of Dorner that renders his thinking not only at times wonderfully suggestive and stimulating, but also an invaluable help and guide for students who would think their way through the heart of the most difficult problems of theology. A humble, truth-loving spirit, combined with affluent and comprehensive theological learning, and a simple, reverent faith — the genuine child of Luther's reformation — together with rare gifts of philosophic insight and power to discern the inner relations and real development of theological beliefs, have rendered Dorner, these many years, pre-eminent among the evangelical teachers of Germany.

A recent critic of Dorner, in a theological review published in this country, asserts that Dorner's system has no centre. It is conceivable that his system might possibly make that impression upon one approaching it from the outside, with no sympathy for, and consequent power to understand, its inner spirit ; for it is indeed true that Dorner recognizes in Protestantism two cardinal principles, and would prove faithful to both in all his dogmatic construction, viz., the formal and the material principles, Scripture and faith. His theology revolves, a well-rounded sphere, upon these two poles — Scripture and faith. But it has one centre — Christ. It has one supreme law — Christianity. God in Christ, absolute Christianity, the self-revelation of God in Christ, — these words mark what Dorner ever recognizes as the real contents both of Scripture and faith, and consequently as the centre and summation of all theology. I know of no passage in modern theological literature so thoroughly satisfactory and so helpful as is the exposition which Dorner has given in his " History of Protestant Theology," of the relative independence and the real unity of these two cardinal principles of the Reformation — the Scripture and faith. The same thorough conception of the sources of Christian theology pervades his " System of Christian Doctrine." Both faith and the Scripture, he insists, " have the same origin in the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from Christ, — how can they disturb or be hostile to one another \ " 1 Faith and the

Scripture are respectively the Christian subjective and objective principle of knowledge, while the real principle of Christianity is God in Christ and the Holy Ghost. 1 Dorner's conception of faith, like Luther's, is one of intense Christian realism. Its object is not the word of God, but the Christian revelation, or God in Christ. It is not exact, and may be misleading, to say that Dorner makes the historical Christ, still less Christ as attested by miracles, the object of faith, and to contrast this with some vague conception of faith as the reception of a so-called "essential Christ." No one has more clearly recognized than Dorner the preparatory imperfection of a merely historic faith, or more clearly indicated the way from the Jesus of the Gospels to faith in the self -revelation of God — faith in absolute Christianity. What Dorner does say in his very first proposition in his doctrine of faith, is this : " Faith through which Christian experience is gained, and which must precede scientific knowledge and demonstration, has indeed in all its forms an unmistakable resemblance, for it will be in

1 Glaubenslehre, I. , s. 155 f, and note.

some way an appropriation of what Christianity objectively is." * Faith, that is, he regards as union with objective Christianity. Faith is the appropriation of the real contents of Christianity. There may be both " an historical and an ideal-divine side to Christianity," and different subjective positions may be assumed to these different aspects of it ; but he will lay the chief weight "neither upon the historical nor the ideal side," but "both factors," he holds, "may be conceived and appropriated as standing in inner unity, and interpenetration." 2

In accordance with this fundamental conception of faith as a real appropriation of Christianity, he proceeds to its scientific investigation and development, — his own language may best show how : " The Christian doctrine of faith has to proceed, indeed, not absolutely productively, but rather reproductively ; yet not on that account merely empirically and by reflection, but also constructively and progressively. The Christian illuminated sjDirit, through faith and its experience united with the objective Christianity, upon which faith

1 Glaubenslehre, I., s. 16. 2 Ibid., I., s. 64.

knows that it is founded, and which is confirmed by the sacred Scripture and the biblical faith of the Church, has to bring its religious knowledge to systematic settlement and unfolding." * His method or principle of procedure is further indicated in the following passage : " For exegetical theology the immediate subject is the sacred Scripture; for historical theology, the history of the Church ; but for the dogmatic and propositional (thetische), the subject is faith with its contents appropriated from the sacred Scripture, by which it has continually to show itself to be Christian. The supreme fact in this contents of faith is the Christian idea of God. From it, as the highest unity and truth, are all statements of faith, and all Christian truths, immediately or mediately to be derived." 2 Throughout Dorner's development of the Christian idea of God appears one of the most distinctive and pervasive elements of his thinking — its predominant ethical spirit. His system might almost be said to have its being in pure Christian ethics. One might illustrate this charac-

1 Glaubenslehre, I., s. 155. v Ibid., s. 157.

teristic by quotations taken almost at random from Lis discussion of the moral nature of God, the Trinity, or the divine attributes. Righteousness is essentially grounded in God's being as love. " All in God is for love." " Knowledge even is perfect in God first through love." God, that is, possesses his own omniscience for the sake of his absolute love, and his knowledge is perfect as the pure wisdom of love. " God has absolutely his un chan^eableness through and in his ethical na ture, from which he cannot and will not fall.' Dorner's discussion of the divine unchangeable ness, in the light of supreme Christian ethics is one of the most original and fruitful contri butions to modern theology. Conceiving of it thus, as ethical unchangeableness, he harmonizes it with the living relations into which God enters in history, and can even admit that consequently the atonement does not merely eif ect a change of the relations of the world toward God, but also that "the world, since Christ really belonged to it, has a different worth for God, which before Christ it did not have — the actuality of the reconciliation of the world through Christ has for God a worth, which before Christ for God himself did not really exist." 1 This vital ethical element in Dorner's thought is the strength and health in which Christian theology now needs above all to be revived. In reading Dorner we realize that Christian thought, as well as life, has primarily to do, not with abstractions of attributes, or extra-divine necessities of government, but with the living God — with principles of order and with laws of administration only as these are the manifestations and outgoings of Him who is the supreme moral good — whose government is his ethical, personal conduct of his universe.

Since in Christianity there is realized a supreme ethical idea of God, which faith may apprehend, for which indeed faith is the spiritual eye, it follows — so Dorner would assume — that we must determine what is Scripture, and interpret God's Word, and also construct Christian theology, in harmony with, and under the supreme influence of, this real, absolute

Christianity, or God manifest in Christ. Chris-

1 Glaubenslehre, I. , s. 445.

tianity can be read scientifically only in its own pure light. Any one who has once grasped this controlling principle of Dorner's theology, any one whose own theological thought has been uplifted into this pure ethical element in which Dorner's reasonings live and have their being, will need no explanation of Dorner's dogmatic hesitancy when he finds himself unable to reconcile facts of history, or texts of Scripture, with that which faith has already learned to deem Christlike and most worthy of God. Dorner would teach as a Christian dogma that only which can be made an integral part of faith ; for it is the object of theology to develop and show in their harmony the real contents of faith. It is not enough for a Christian doctrine that it be apparently contained in the Scripture ; it needs also to be recognized as Christian by faith, as sooner or later all the contents of revelation will become also part of the life of faith, for both are of God. Faith wrought in the soul by the Holy Ghost is "the eye for that which is Christian in the Scripture." Both are works of the Spirit, having the same essential contents ; and the object of Christian theology is to bring out into the Christian recognition of Christian experience that which is given for faith in the Scripture. Only in part may this idea of Christian theology be realized under our present limitations of ignorance and sin ; yet only as theology succeeds approximately, at least, in this, is it worthy the name of Christian theology — is it a Christian solution of the problems of life and destiny. Where theology must fall evidently short of this, dogmatism is certainly not yet a work of faith, and it may be a hazardous interpretation of Scripture.

Dorner's discussion of eschatology is in general consistency with the principles already described ; it is closely connected with the view of the absolute nature of Christianity, and the universal importance of Christ, which in his discussion of the doctrine of sin and the atonement he has maintained with great force. In his endeavor to reconcile the fact of original sin with the claims of pure justice we meet with the thought that every man's final worth and fate will be determined not on the plane of the law upon which the individual with the inheritance of human sinfulness is compelled to start, but upon the higher plane of grace to which Christ's work has lifted up the race, and upon which any human being, notwithstanding his inheritance of man's sinfulness, may come to a free personal decision for good or evil ; and consequently no man will be finally judged until he shall have definitely rejected the manifestation of God's love in the offer of Christ, or, in other words, shall have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, whom Christ has sent — the sin against the Spirit of the Christian revelation. This is only saying, in other words, that the last judgment shall be for all a Christian judgment.

In this profound and comprehensive discussion of the doctrine of sin Dorner does not question or overlook its ill desert, as he recognizes also an ethical necessity in God for the punishment of sin apart from grace. The view which Dorner maintains of the nature of the divine righteousness, particularly in its juridical aspects, 1 as well as his frequent discriminating assertions of the guilt and punishment due sin

1 Glaubenslehre, I., s. 24.

under the law, should have been sufficient to prevent any critic, who has read these portions of his work, from charging him with confusing law and grace. On the contrary, he has carefully distinguished between these different stages of man's history, and the different degrees of sin corresponding to each of them. If the question be asked, whether character may not become permanent under the operation of natural laws of habit, and upon the plane of the law, a student of Dorner would answer: Free, moral personality (for which God created man) can be fully developed out of the generic state, or race-connection, and can be finally self-determined in good or evil only through the actual choice or rejection of the supreme ethical good. Until free self-determination is reached in view of the final good ; until in the approach of that supreme good the definitive crisis comes to the individual, human character may indeed be sinful and worthy of punishment, but it cannot have reached its final form and permanence. Its guilt, before that last sin of unbelief, is not irredeemable, nor is its punishment final doom.

Everything up to that absolute personal determination, is still provisional and preparatory ; the generic and the individual sin and guilt are not yet thoroughly separated, and the individual person, is, therefore, not yet fully ripe for judgment. So, also, the atonement of Christ may avail vicariously for the individual in whom the sin of the world, which is his by nature, has not yet become his personal sin against the Holy Ghost through his rejection of the good in its absolute revelation. 1 On the other hand, any one who borrows from Julius Muller his principle of the development of the depraved will under natural law, and the tendency of sin toward final permanence of habit, should, also, in all ethical thoroughness, adopt Muller's general premise, and hold to a prior, free, self-determination in some preexistent state. Either that, or Dorner's view of final, free, personal decision, under the revelation of the supreme good, is the only logical, thoroughly ethical, alternative. They may follow " scientific methods " in theology, but they build on a slippery slope, half-way be-

1 Glaubenslehre, II. , s. 627 ff.

tween freedom and fate, who fail to ground their systems of "clear ideas" upon one or the other of these postulates of the two greatest of modern theologians. It is hazardous to borrow spasmodically, here a little and there a little, from German thinkers. Their theologies are apt to be ethical, as well as logical, wholes.

This entire discussion of the nature, development, and definitive judgment, of a moral personality, should proceed under what Dorner would call the regulative Christian idea of God. It is true that man's sin is worthy of punishment; and nature may offer room enough for man to ruin himself forever, but it may not be large enough for God to work out upon its plane, and for all men, his whole work of love. The ultimate question is not, what may a man under the law justly claim as a legal right, but what God, as he has revealed himself in Christ, may be satisfied in doing for all men. Dorner would hold that God can be self-satisfied in no instance with anything less than a judgment upon the plane of grace — a Christian judgment. What we should seek to learn and to think is always, what is most worthy of God — which is identical with the question what is most Christian. We cannot know God, as we may, in his relations to any of his creatures, if we are content to study his thoughts and ways simply upon some preparatory or provisional stage of his conduct of human history; but we must read all God's thoughts, and toward all men, in the light of the last perfect revelation of God, that is, in view of absolute Christianity. This is coincident, therefore, with the question what does absolute Christian ethics — the ethics of the regenerated Christian consciousness — the ethics of faith, measuring itself by the objective Scriptures, — lead us to think or to believe upon these dark problems of sin and destiny ? After recognizing the fact of sinfulness as our inheritance, Dorner remarks : " But here new problems open, and it is for us so to state the doctrine of the general inborn evil tendency, or the general need of redemption, that neither personal moral freedom, and the truth of the conception of guilt, nor the ethical idea of God shall suffer harm."

In working out this problem he reaches one conclusion which will not seem foreign to New England thought : " The definitive worth and the final destiny of the individual are bound to his personal decision." 1 But what is necessary to this decision, that is, necessary not merely for man to come to a self-determination, but for God as declared in Christ to be willing to leave him alone in his determination ? What on pure ethical grounds is necessary for the final worth and judgment of man ? In view of the Gospel Dorner does not hesitate to answer as follows : " From the objective side this, — that the good should be placed before the eyes in its full clearness and truth, not simply as the voice of conscience or as an ordinance, but in its brightest and most attractive form, as the personal love, in order that the decision for or against it may receive decisive importance. Subjectively, besides the knowledge of this good, there must be full freedom of decision from out one's own proper personality." 2 Further, he affirms that " this subjective and objective possibility of free

1 Glaubenslehre, II., s., 159. 2 Ibid., 174.

decision is now given from God through Christianity as the absolute religion." If any sin before Christ, he maintains, could be decisive unbelief, then the word would no more be true that Christ has power to overcome all sin before him ; " the sin previous to Christ would in some be beforehand stronger than grace." " So, then, from the true standpoint, that is, from Christianity, is it to be said : So long as the Gospel, which must come to all before the judgment, 1 has not come inwardly near man, consequently has not yet been rejected, he may deserve punishment, and remain without Christ in increasing unhappiness ; but neither has there been given to him the definitive condemnation, nor its opposite, but he is still as it were in a provisional condition. — In comparison with the sin which has known Christ and rejected him, is all previous sin preparatory; however condemnable in itself and punishable, yet it is only a stage (moment) in the process which has for its goal to make ripe for the judgment. . . . From this position of Christ, as he who brings the crisis (decisive test), and only

1 Matt. xxiv. 14.

against whom the highest guilt can be incurred, it does not, however, follow that sin before Christ was not in the proper sense sin ; was not laden with guilt and punishable, although in different degrees and measure, and therefore was not in need of atonement. But from this, ripeness for eternal salvation or perdition cannot proceed. The definitive worth, or unworthiness, of the person cannot come forth, so long as it still stands in an undecided process, and the crisis lies before it." 1 I will quote but one more sentence from this part of Dorner's work : "As little as the sinful creature can have a right to God's grace and to liberation from punishment, so, on the other hand, the administration of grace and of punishment is not arbitrary ; rather it is bound to ethical laws, and since undoubtedly the sin is more grievous, more worthy of condemnation, which rejects with contempt and scorn even the highest manifestation of love, the forgiving, yes, even the atoning love, so is it also in accordance with righteousness that the judgment should

1 Glaubenslehre, I., s. 177.

be determined by the position taken toward Christ." *

Having given thus a general statement of the ethical method and some tendencies of Dr. Dorner's system, I may properly be expected to indicate more definitely its relation to the received New England theology, as well as the service which it may render to our own evangelical theologians in the further development of their own principles. It would be a doubtful gain to transfer any foreign theology bodily into our seminaries ; and growth is not to be made by cutting ourselves loose from our own roots in the sturdy character of New England, or despising the soil upon which we have been planted. We have our own individuality to preserve, and our own work to round out to perfection, in theology as in life. But we need to assimilate to our own thought, and to transform in our own life, the most Christian thought, and the best life, of other countries, or we shall be hopelessly hardened in provincialism. Especially should we be willing to turn with a teachable spirit to a

1 Matt, xii. 20; Glaubenslehre, I., s. 178.

Christian theology which has grown up and shown its power to survive in the midst of an atmosphere of scepticism and rationalism; which has kept at least the substance of the faith in a land where evangelical belief has been compelled by hostile and searching criticism to make thorough work with the evidences of revelation, and the contents of our natural as well as Christian beliefs. The same questions are before us which have been for a longer time before faith in Germany ; and if we too are to feel our way through their darkness and doubt, it must be in the same spirit of liberty and honesty in which. German theology, under the conduct of men like Dorner or Weiss, is still following, and ever finding, its Lord.

The New England theology was at first providentially compelled to begin to work out the great problems of the ages in comparative isolation and independence. It had not much to work with besides the homely methods and clumsy forms of the Scottish philosophy and divinity. But it is one of the historical evidences of the providential election of great souls for great epochs that God put at the source of New England theology a man of spiritually creative power, who not only could take up into his own life the strength there was in his surroundings, but whose thought transcended his times, and scattered around him the seed-principles, at least, of richer and better things. Not all of the truths germinant in the works of Jonathan Edwards have fully come even yet to their proper development in the received New England theology. The later so-called Edwardian theology, in New England, has run too much into a logic and dialectics of the truths of redemption — following, as is apt to be the case among disciples, the more formal and obvious characteristics of the master, and leaving comparatively disused the deeper ethical elements, and spiritual intimations, which lie as latent powers of development scattered through the writings of Edwards. Especially is this true in regard to the doctrines of sin, and the atonement, where the later New England theology, in its logical straightforwardness and formal governmental completeness, lacks spiritual power and ethical thoroughness.

From the prevailing theological dialectics — one might in some instances almost say, from the orthodox rationalism of the later New England theology — a reaction was inevitable both from within and from without ; and that reaction is the main-spring of what is now popularly coming to be called the " new theology." The reaction from within had its source in the natural mysticism of the human soul — in the spiritual consciousness of a presence, power, and love of God, beyond the grasp of the hands of our logic, deep, abiding, and true, as the instincts of the Christian soul, and the life of the spirit which is in man. To this spiritual need and experience the Scriptures are found to correspond ; — a theology may be fully equipped with proof- texts and maintain the letter of Scripture, but to be really biblical it must have a heart, also, for the profound

mvsticism of Paul's faith and John's love. As the received governmental theology failed to satisfy what many felt to be the needs and teachings of their most religious experience, so also it seemed to come only into external contact with the profoundest passages and most spiritual texts of the New Testament, and to be often more biblical in form than in substance.

The reaction came also from without, — through enlarging culture, and increasing acquaintance with Anglican theology, and more particularly with the development of modern German theology. It was stimulated and hastened also by a growing sense of the practical needs of the Christian pulpit in its spiritual wrestling with the unbelief of the world.

As is usual, indeed, with reversions from established forms, this reaction has at times gone beyond all bounds in transcendentalism, or has occasion ally troubled with a lawless and impatient spirit the peace of our churches. But the reaction is a fact of our present spiritual life, and the movement of our theology forward is a present and powerful fact, and it should be freely and gratefully recognized by Christian wisdom and guided toward the most Christian results. To seek to stop it by building up ecclesiastical dams against it, would only cause a general inundation of the surrounding regions.

INTRODUCTION. 2J

It should be observed that this movement has not had its origin in the desire to restate or to remove any special doctrine of our common creeds ; still less did it start from eschatological problems, or does it carry as its burden of thought any novel theory concerning the world to come. Its heart's desire rather is that all our Israel may be saved from ideas of God and his conduct of the universe which it cannot recognize as most thoroughly and ethically Christian, and which it fears are present hindrances and difficulties in the way of real, practical Christian faith, and the universal mission of Christian love in the world. One of its initial impulses, at first more felt than understood, was an inward reaction from what seemed to be formal, merely logical, distant conceptions of the one living God. The Christian God — the heart of the Gospel — became well nigh lost in verbal definitions of divine attributes, and abstract demands of abstract moral qualities, and external conceptions of sin and atonement, wanting in truthfulness to the deep personal sense of need, and to the new, gracious, most personal friendship and union of the redeemed soul through faith with God in Christ. Many a student of theology began to feel, at first, as an indefinable sense of unreality and an unsatisfied longing for something going deeper down into his Christian life, this lack in a theology which has started from Edwards on the Will, rather than from Edwards on the Nature of the Spiritual and Divine Light, and the Religious Affections. Many for a season were driven back in this thirst and hunger of soul to the older Augustinian theology — to its deep moral realism — but they were nevertheless too genuine sons of Puritanism and New England to be able to tarry long in a system where full justice did not seem to be done to the idea of personality and the momentous fact of individual responsibility.