Pantheism's destruction of boundaries - pagina 23

Methodist Review,

was pantheist ami subjectivist. lie l)roui,^lit with liiia from the circles of the ^foiavians and found philosophic pantheism in Gernianv's univerThis was at once manifested in liis proposities of his day. sition that God is not thinkahle without the world, which proposition was defended among us, as Professor Bavinck correctly showed, by the late Professor De la Saussayc, of Groningen and every invention by the Martensens, the Kothcs, the Keerls, and the llolfmans, in Germany, to remove the ancient landmarks from the domain of the Christian religion, has been echoed from our pulpits ever since and reprinted by our press. By the conversion of truth into ethics the boundary fell which separates moral life from the life of thought, and presently dogmatics had to surrender its birthSelileiennaclier

religious

])aiitlieisiii

;

right to the ''description of nioral life."

A

"Union Church"

without confessional discipline became the ideal also among us. To be e(|ually stern with tlie Calvinist and sympathetic with the rationalist

became

degrees there stole in

all

indicative

of a

higher life; and by

manner of strange

doctrine.

Christ

would have come in the world even had sin never entered, for Christ was the natural ideal toward which the progress of the human race was dii'ected. In Christ the Son of God was not incarnate, but human nature had reached in him a higher, divine-human character. As a human being Jesus could not liave been mere man, and in this way was renewed the legend of the Androgyne. Soul and body were no longer two, but lost in the mingliui; of the Gehtleihllclie. The mystery of the Trinity \vas a})plauded, but recast as by charm in the sense of The atonement consisted not in the the newer pliilosophy. dying of the Lamb of God for our sin, but in the appearance upon the tree of our race of its ideal Ijrauch. The Holy Scriptures are no longer the protluct of a positive rt'vehition, but the fi'uit of Israel's organic development, under higher influences, in connection, therefore, witli whatever was imparted to other nations. Justification by faith became lost nearly altogether in the nursing process of a heaveidy holiness.

Even the

absolute boundary between this and the conn'ng life

Mas taken away. have

Conversion

I)ecn theologians

among

may occur who

these

after death

;

and there

jireached the contimi-

ance, on the other side of the grave, of a sacramental Church,

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