Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 336

312

§ 63.

FALSIFICATIONS OF

[Div. Ill

good was this, however, when they were bent on explaining, at any cost, this ideal view-point of the Christian religion from the normal data? They no doubt acknowledged the considerable interval between this ideal religion and the imperfect religious expression outside of the Christian do-

main, but they refused to attribute this to the supernatural,

what seemed to them the abnormal action of The interval between the highest and God. the lowest was not to be taken any longer as an antithesis, but was to be changed into a process, by which gradually the highest sprang from the lowest. Thus each in his way found the magic formula of the process. From Theism they For thus only was it possible to glided off into Pantheism. maintain the high honor of the Christian religion, and at the same time to place this exalted religion in organic relaAnd this was tion to the reality of our human existence. For from the meagre data the thing that avenged itself. of natural theology they were not able to operate along straight lines, and thus even these fundamental data were This became especially apparent in the school of falsified. Hegel, when in their way his younger followers tried to systematize religion, and soon rendered it evident that, and thus

to

the living

instead of vindication, the result, which in this school they

reached by strict consequence, was the entire undermining

and of all positive religious data. What Hegel thought he had found Avas not religion, but philosophic theology, and this theology was no true " knowledge of God," but a general human sense, in which the immanent Spirit (der immanente Geist) gradually received knowledge of himself. This did not find archetj-pal knowledge in God, but in man, and ectypal knowledge in tlie Hence it was the perversion of all incomprehensible God. Theology, and the inversion of the conception of religion itself, and both dissolved in a philosophic SA'stem. of historic Christianity

Though

at first the subjective-empiric school of Schleier-

macher appeared

less

dangerous,

and though

it

did not

lead to those repulsive consequences in which the

Hegelians

lost themselves, yet

even

tliis

young

did not escape

its

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