The Freedom of Science

The Vocation of Science

Science is, and ever was, an influential factor operating upon the thought, aims, and actions of man. Hence science must remain conscious of its vocation. First of all it is to hold aloft and preserve the spiritual possessions of mankind. True, science must also progress; but progress means growth, which presupposes the preservation of what has been received from of old. This applies pre-eminently to the philosophical-religious patrimony of the past; no error could be more fatal than to presume that each generation must start from the beginning, that the foundations, which have safely supported human life for centuries, must be obsolete because human nature is suddenly considered changed.

What are these foundations? They are the tested religious and moral convictions of mankind, and, for our nations particularly, the divine tenets of Christianity, that have been their highest ideals for centuries, and have produced serenity and a high standard of morality. If science aims to be the principle of conservation and not of destruction, it must look upon the safeguarding of those possessions of the nations as its sacred task. Indeed, it would perform this task but poorly were it to waste this patrimony piece by piece, or to shatter it with wicked fist, instead of respecting and honouring it, or to set fire to the sanctuary where mankind hitherto has dwelled in peace and happiness. A science of this kind would not only cease to be a bulwark for the mental life of mankind, but turn into a positive danger.

In as far as it follows the principles of liberal freedom of research, present-day science does present this danger. This cannot be denied, the facts speak too plainly. By its very nature it must become such danger. For it recognizes no belief, neither in God nor in the Church; no dogmas, no “prejudices,” no traditions, however sacred, are to be respected; it is fundamental unbelief, the principle of opposition to the Christian religion. Its autonomous Subject emancipates himself from the yoke of objective truth which he cannot procreate free out of himself. It confesses the principle that there are neither truths nor values that endure; plus ultra! always new ideas! Quieta movere, hitherto the watchword of unwisdom, is this science's maxim. And liberal freedom of research is what its nature compels it to be. Can it do any more than it has done, to prove itself a principle of mental pauperism? We shall not demand a list of the things it has thrown aside and shattered. Let us rather ask, what it has left whole of the sacred institutions of truth, inherited from a Christian past. Alas, it has cast off and denied everything; it has lost not only the things a Christian age has treasured, but even those a higher paganism had revered. Let us examine this sad work of negation and annihilation. It is a more melancholy spectacle than any war of extermination that was ever waged against Europe's Christian civilization by a people bent on trampling down every flower of Christian culture, and on razing every castle to the ground.

Are We Still Christians?

This was the question proposed some scores of years ago by D. Strauss to himself, and to those of his mind. With this question we will begin. To our forefathers, especially of the German nation, nothing was more sacred than the Christian religion; no people like the German has absorbed it so fully, has been so permeated with it. But now, wherever liberal science – here especially modern Protestant theology that brings liberal freedom of research into full application – wherever it has made the Christian religion a subject of its study, one treasure after another has been lost; of the whole of Christendom nothing remains but an empty name and a formal homage, reminding of the courtesy paid to deposed rulers.

In the first place, there has been dropped the fundamental thesis of the divinity of Christ, whereupon rests the entire structure of Christianity. Man's modern emancipation from everything supernatural has been accomplished also with respect to the person of Christ: the man Christ is divested of His divinity and of everything miraculous; His birth by the virgin, His miracles and prophecies, His resurrection and ascension, once the subjects of exalting feasts, have fallen a victim to unbelieving science. It is true, they exert themselves to keep His person in view, they want the purely human Jesus to hold His old position of God and man in the believing consciousness, to conceal the mental pauperization. But this trick is failing more and more. The Son of God sees Himself gradually placed among the great men of history; we are becoming accustomed to find in the “Biographies of Celebrated Men,” among “Religious Educators,” side by side with Confucius, Buddha, Augustine, Mohammed, Luther, Kant, and Goethe, also the name of Jesus. The lustre of the past belief in His divinity is paling. In the eyes of unbelieving science He has ceased to be the infallible, all-surpassing Authority, and the basis of the faith. The teaching of Jesus has become the subject of an analyzing and eliminating criticism, and whenever deemed advisable His authority is simply ignored; He was human, affected by the views and errors of His age.

Thus they know, as does H. Gunkel, that “Jesus and the Apostles evidently have taken those narratives (the miracles of Genesis) to be reality and not poetry”; “the men of the New Testament on such questions take no particular attitude but share the (erroneous) opinions of their times.” They also know “that in regard to persons possessed with demons Jesus shared the erroneous notions of his time” (Braun), and Fr. Delitzsch informs us that it was “particularly a Babylonian superstition,” in consequence of which “the belief in demons and devils assumed such importance in the imagination of Jesus of Nazareth and of his Galilean disciples.” Thus the word is fulfilled literally: “He is a sign which will be contradicted.”

No one knows really who Jesus was. His person is the football of opinions. “If any one desiring reliable information, as to who Jesus Christ was, and what message He brought, should consult the literature of the day, he would find buzzing round him contradictory voices… Taken all in all, the impression made by these contradicting opinions is depressing: the confusion seems past hope,” admits Prof. Harnack.

Also E. V. Hartmann remarks: “Thus, according to some, Jesus was a poet, to others a mystic visionary, a third sees in him the militant hero for freedom and human dignity, to a fourth he was the organizer of a new Church and of an ecclesiastical system of ethics, to a fifth the rationalistic reformer … to the eleventh a naturalistic pantheist like Giordano Bruno, to the twelfth a superman on the order of Nietzsche's Zarathustra…” A chaos of opinions agreeing only in the one aim of rejecting His divinity. A. Schweitzer, himself a representative of liberal Protestant research, says, “Nothing is more negative than the result of the research concerning the life of Jesus.” And knowing Jesus's person no longer, they no longer know anything certain about His teaching, as is clear from the above. According to I. Wellhausen, from the “unsufficient fragments at hand we can get but a scanty conception of the doctrine of Jesus.” – The fathers were rich, the children have grown poor. Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!

To many even the existence of Jesus has become doubtful; and this not only to men of an irreligious propaganda, like Prof. A. Drews, who, carried away by the corroding tendency of a radical age, journeyed from town to town in order to proclaim, in the twentieth century of Christian reckoning, the scientific discovery of the “Myth of Christ”; but even to others the existence of Jesus has become doubtful or at least valueless. The task now is to do away entirely with the person of Jesus, and to solve the problem of preserving a Christian faith without a Christ. In this sense Prof. M. Rade writes: “Serious and gifted men having asserted that Jesus never existed (or, what amounts to the same, that, if He ever lived, nothing is known of Him; hence, His existence is of no historical importance), we dogmatists almost have to be grateful to them for having helped us to put a very concrete question no longer in general terms: how does religious certainty face historical criticism? but quite specifically: how does religious certainty (of the Christian) regard the historic-scientific possibility of the non-existence of the historical Jesus?” They frankly assert that they could entirely forego the person of Christ. Thus Prof. P. W. Schmiedeldeclares: “My innermost religious conviction would not suffer injury were I to be convinced to-day that Jesus never lived… I would know that I could not lose the measure of piety that has become my property long since, even if I cannot derive it any longer from Jesus.” “Neither does my piety require me to see in Jesus an absolutely perfect type, nor would it disturb me were I to find someone else actually surpassing Him, which undoubtedly is the case in some respects.”For him to whom Christ is no longer God but a man and capable of error, His person and existence have necessarily lost their value.

Thus we have arrived at a Christianity without a Christ. As yet the person of the Lord is usually surrounded by a halo: it is the after-effect of a faithful past, the last rays of a setting sun. That this last glimmer, too, will pale and give way to darkness is but a question of time, when with more honesty expression will be given to the conclusion necessarily arrived at. If Christ is not what He claimed to be, God and Messiah, then the belief in His being the Son of God and the Messiah, in His right to abrogate the religion of the Old Testament and to found a new religion, commanding its acceptance under penalty of damnation – all this can be nothing but the result of religious fanaticism and mental derangement. And science is, in all seriousness, preparing to turn into this direction.

It is true, many are hesitating to draw these fearful conclusions and to utter them; arriving at this point, they cautiously stop: so Harnack. “How Jesus could arrive at the consciousness of His unique relation to God as His Son, how He became conscious of His power as well as of the obligation and task involved in this power, that is His secret, and no psychology will ever disclose it… Here, all research must halt.” It is the silence of embarrassment, but equally of unscientific method. Having arrived at untenable conclusions, when question upon question is impetuously suggested, they stop suddenly and have nothing to say but a vague word about inscrutableness.

But there are those who actually speak the word so horrible to a Christian heart: Jesus was demented, a subject for pathology. Straussindicated this cautiously: “One who expects to return after his death in a manner in which no human being had ever returned, he is to us … not exactly a lunatic, but a great visionary.” Others speak more plainly. Holtzmann's answer to the question: Was Jesus an Ecstatic, is an emphatic: “Yes, He was.” De Loosten considers him insane. E. Rasmussen thinks Him an epileptic, but grants to physicians the right to reckon him among paranoiacs or lunatics. To A. JülicherJesus is a visionary, “a mystic, not satisfied to dream of his ideals, but who lived with them, worked with them, even saw them tangibly before his eyes, deceiving himself and others.” Thus the supernatural has become madness; Jesus Christ, for whose divinity the martyrs went to their death, wears now, before the forum of a false science, Herod's cloak of foolishness.

With the fall of this fundamental dogma there must necessarily fall all other specific truths of Christianity, and they have fallen. The Holy Writ, once the work of the Holy Ghost, has now become a book like the Indian Vedda, to some perhaps even more unreliable; original sin, Redemption and grace, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments, have been dropped or changed into symbols, of which every one may think what he pleases. They have tried to make Christianity “acceptable to our times,” to “bring it nearer to the modern idea.” There is really nothing left to offend modern man, nothing that could get in conflict with any idea. The essence of Christianity is depreciated and emptied until it has become only a vague sentiment, without thought; a few names, without ideas. “Christianity as a Gospel,” so teaches Harnack, “has but one aim: to find the living God, that every individual may find Him as his God, gaining strength and joy and peace. How it attains this aim through the centuries, whether with the Coefficient of the Jewish or the Greek, of flight from the world or of civilization, of Gnosticism or Agnosticism – this all is of secondary consideration.” Of secondary consideration it is, then, whether one is convinced of the existence of God or whether he doubts with the agnostics, whether he believes in a personal God or not. To-day even the pantheist who does not acknowledge a Creator of Heaven and Earth may be a Christian; and so can he who no longer believes in personal immortality and in a hereafter; for, we are informed, “this religion is above the contrasts of here and the beyond, of life and death, of Reason and Ecstatics, of Judaism and Hellenism” (Harnack). Thus there is no thought which could not be made to agree with this despoiled Christianity. For, we are told further, “much less does the Gospel presuppose, or is joined to, a fixed theory of nature – not even in a negative sense could this be asserted” (Harnack). Materialism and Spiritualism, Theism and Pantheism, Belief or Negation of Creation, everything will harmonize with a Christianity thus degraded to a thing without character or principle.15

All that is left is a word of love, of a kind Father, of filiation to God, and union with God: words robbed of their true meaning; a shell without a kernel, ruins with the name “Christianity” still inscribed thereon, telling of a house that once stood here, wherein the fathers dwelt, but long since vacated by their children. Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!

As to God and divine filiation, everybody is welcome to his own interpretation. He may form with O. Pfleiderer the “Neoprotestantism”which, “after breaking with all ecclesiastical dogmas, recalled to mind the truths of the Christian religion, hidden beneath the surface of these dogmas, in order to realize, more purely and more perfectly than ever before, the truth of God's incarnation in the new forms of autonomous thought and of the moral life of human society.” Christianity and God – the symbols of autonomous man! Or he may follow Bousset, to whom nature is God, and in this way combines harmoniously Christianity and Atheism. “This is the forceful evolution of Christian religion,” says he, “the notion of redemption, the Dogma of the divinity of Christ, the trinity, the idea of satisfaction and sacrifice, miracles, the old conception of revelation – all these we see carried off by this wave of progress.” “What is left? Timid people may think: a wreck. But to our pleasant surprise we found stated at many points in our inquiry: what is left is the simple Gospel of Jesus.” And what does this simplified Gospel contain? “Of course we cannot simply accept in full the Gospel of Jesus… There is the internal and the external. The external and non-essential includes the judgment of the world, angels, miracles, inspiration, and other things.” All this may be disregarded. “But even the essentials, the internal of the Gospel cannot be simply subscribed to. They must be interpreted.” What, then, is this essential, this internal of the Gospel, and what is its interpretation? “The belief of the Gospel in the personal heavenly Father; to this we hold fast with all our strength. But we carry this belief in God into our modern thought.” And what becomes then of “God”? “To us, God is no longer the kind Father above the starry skies. God is the Infinite, Omnipotent, who is active in the immense universe, in infiniteness of time and space, in infinitely small and in infinitely large things. He is the God whose garb is the iron law of nature which hides Him from the human eye by a compact, impenetrable veil.” We see the belief of the Gospel has dwindled down to atheistic Monism.

As early as 1874 Ed. von Hartmann, in his book “Die Selbstzersetzung des Christentums,” came to the conclusion that “liberal Protestantism has in no sense the right to claim a place within Christendom.” In a later book his keen examination demonstrates how the speculation of liberal Protestantism has changed the Christian religion step by step into pantheism: “Not a single point in the doctrine of the Church is spared by this upheaval of principle, every dogma is formally turned into its very opposite, in order to make its religious idea conform to the tenet of divine immanence.”