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STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART I: 1800-1900
Prof. Daniel Alvarez, Florida International University
Bibliography and History: William Baird, History of New Testament Research: From Deism to
Tubingen (Fortress, 1992); John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the 19th Century (S.P.C.K,
1984).
Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834). Major works: On Religion: Speeches to its Despisers among
the Educated (1799, 3rd edition, 1821); Celebration of Christmas (1806); The Christian Faith (1821);
Life of Jesus (published posthumously in the 1864); Introduction to the New Testament (1829-
1832); and an influential work on Hermeneutics [Biblical interpretation], based on handwritten
manuscripts (first published in 1838, but published in a critical edition without student notes
in 1959). English translations of these works are in print, except for the Introduction to the New
Testament.
One of the founders of the University of Berlin in 1810, preacher, classical scholar, whose
translation of Plato’s Dialogues is the standard translation in Germany today. S. had close
Jewish friends and was instrumental in the rise of Reform Judaism and Jewish emancipation.
Otto von Bismarck, who in 1871 unified Germany, was S.’s catechumen as a young man.
That in the same year that he became chancellor of a united Germany Jews were recognized
as citizens with full civil rights might not be an accident (nor perhaps an accident either that
Germany embarked on a path towards militarism and imperialism under Bismarck). Brought
to Berlin W. M. L. de Wette (father of modern Old Testament criticism), Augustus Neander
(father of modern church history, and famous for his dictum “the heart makes the
theologian”), G. W. Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831), as well as E. W. Hengstenberg (d. 1866), the
leader of German conservative theology from 1827 until his death. Influenced his young
colleague, Friedrich Tholuck (d. 1877), specialist in Oriental languages, who became a
conservative under the influence of E. W. Hengstenberg, but who in his early career believed
Islam was superior to Christianity, and who wrote an important book on Sufism (Sufism, or
the Pantheistic Philosophy of Persia [1821]) and a translation of Islamic mystical writings, Eastern
Mysticism (1825). David F. Strauss (d. 1873) was his student at Berlin and was later to criticize
severely S.’s Life of Jesus as seriously defective from a historical standpoint.
Scheliermacher is considered the father of Liberal theology. Although influenced by Kantian
idealism, he shifts the essence of religion from dogma and revelation (orthodoxy) and ethics
(Kant) to feeling. As he says elsewhere, religion is a matter of the heart, not the head, of the
affections, not concepts (reminiscent of the theology of the American Puritan theologian,
Jonathan Edwards [d. 1758]). He accepted the new historical criticism coming into its own in
the 18th century, including the Kantian critique of religion that challenged the viability of the
dogmatic and epistemological assumptions of 17th century Protestant scholastic theology;
and he saw that a Christian faith based on the old assumptions would neither satisfy nor fit
in with the new historical and scientific developments. In shifting the seat of religion to the
heart, S. argued that no result of historical or scientific criticism of Christianity could destroy
faith, since faith, our communion with God, is not dependent on the vagaries or accidents of
historical or scientific investigations. Our communion or relationship to the divine is
grounded in “the divine in our feelings,” or as he also says, our “God-consciousness,” and
thus not dependent on the “concepts” through which our relationship to the divine has been
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variously expressed in different historical eras or even in different religions (cf. Speech V of
On Religion).
However, by abandoning the basis of Christianity in dogma and revelation, and specifically,
the Biblical revelation, as the normative sources for the interpretation of Christianity, S.’s
interpretation of religion based on an inalienable god-consciousness (“feeling of
dependence”), or “the sense of the heart,” is in danger of degenerating into pure
subjectivism, pantheism, and relativism. Subjectivism, because concepts and reason are
demoted to a subordinate status; what matters are one’s “feelings,” not truth in any objective
sense, one’s faith rather than the facts and the object upon which that faith is grounded.
Pantheism, because the radical distinction between God and the human appears to be
obliterated. For S. the difference between Jesus and us is one of degree, not of kind. We are
in principle capable of achieving a god-consciousness to the same extent and of the same
kind as Jesus, thus denying Jesus’ unique relationship to God the Father as maintained by
orthodox theology. Furthermore, for S. the incarnation becomes a symbol of the essential
unity of the human and divine, and hence a denial of the radical transcendence of God and
of the essential finitude of the human. A corollary of S.’s Christology is that Jesus’ role as
savior of humankind is made superfluous, as well as his unique mediatorial role. Every
human being, whether Christian or not, is in principle in the relationship to the divine as
Jesus was, and thus Christianity becomes one vehicle through which our god-consciousness
is awakened, but not the only one. Neither Jesus, his incarnation, his unique mediatorial and
salvific role, nor the Christian religion can be taken as unique or as the exclusive location of
the divine-human encounter, and thus S.’s position, despite his own high view of Jesus
Christ, degenerates into relativism.
For S. hardly one dogma of Catholic, Reformation, or 17th century Protestant theology
survives without major qualification or drastic reinterpretation. But to be fair to S., he saw
himself as an apologist (advocate, defender) of the Christian faith for his generation. He
believed that the radical paradigm shift brought about by the Enlightenment threatened to
dissolve religion and Christianity in particular. S. thought that Christianity was much more
than the dogmas, concepts, beliefs, assumptions, through which the Christian faith had been
expressed by earlier generations. Christianity for him could not be held hostage by the
worldview—historical, scientific, cultural, cosmologica assumptions--of the first generations
of Christians. But to identify Christianity with the concepts through which it was expressed
in times past as both the orthodox and the despisers of religion in the 18th century (atheists
or skeptics who argued that Christianity and all religions are a mass of superstitions and
falsehoods) whom he was directly addressing in his speeches did was to do precisely that. S.
wanted to recast Christianity in modern terms, make it once more intelligible and compelling
to men and women of his generation, and show that the greatness of the message of Jesus
was still worth taking seriously. Whether in the end S. gave up too much (as Karl Barth,
Gresham Machen, and Francis Schaeffer, among others, believed he did) I leave for you to
judge.
Notable quotes from Schleiermacher: “It matters not what [concepts] a man adheres to, he
can still be pious. His piety, the divine in his feelings, may be better than his [concepts], and
his desire to place the essence of piety in [concepts] only makes him misunderstand himself”
(On Religion, 3rd edition, translated by John Oman, 95, translation modified by me).
3
“Here it was that for the first time I awoke to the consciousness of the relations of man to a
higher world… Here it was that that mystic tendency developed itself, which has been of so
much importance to me, and has supported and carried me through all the storms of
skepticism. Then it was only germinating; now it has attained its full development, and I may
say, that after all that I have passed through, I have become Herrnhutter [Moravian
Brethren, a Pietist sect with whom he studied in his youth] again, only of a higher order
(from a letter to Gorg Reimer (April 30, 1802), quoted in Rowan Life of Schleiermacher, volume
1, 283-84).
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (d. 1849). Major Works: Contributions to the Introduction
to the Old Testament (1806); Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Books of the Old and
New Testament (1817-1848); On Religion: Its Essence, the Forms of its Appearance and its Influence on
Life (1827); Letters of Martin Luther (1825-28); The Essence of the Christian Faith from the Standpoint
of Faith (1846); Short Exegetical Handbook to the New Testament (1836-48).
Influenced by Schleiermacher and the Kantian philosopher Jacob Fries. The father of the
modern historical criticism of the Old Testament. In his ground-breaking Contributions of
1806, de Wette formulated a comprehensive interpretation of the Old Testament on strictly
historical principles. The result was as spectacular as it was disturbing to many. De Wette
acknowledge that it was S.’s (and Fries’ strikingly similar) approach to religion that had freed
him to investigate the Bible critically, without fearing that his investigations and conclusions
would destroy his faith. But the orthodox were not amused. The naïve picture of the origin
and composition of the Hebrew Bible and the religion of Israel was subverted: The Books of
Chronicles were late and worthless from a historical point of view, and the Levitical and
Priestly religion of the books a post-exilic fabrication read back to the time of David and
Solomon; Moses was certainly not the author of much, if any, of the books or the Levitical
religion (as described in the bulk of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy)
attributed traditionally to him (the first five books or the Pentateuch), most of the contents
of the Pentateuch being quite late (post-exilic, after the exile, in the 5th century); the
Pentateuch are made up of documents or traditions or sources (J for Yahwist, E for Elohist),
confirming what earlier critics (Astruc, 1753, and Eichorn, 1787) had argued; contradictions,
historical errors, duplications that betray a complex literary tradition behind the narratives
that undermines traditional claims to authorship abound in the Bible. Only the work of the
prophets and the rise of a prophetic Yahwism, as well as the history of Israel contained in
Judges-II Kings (reflecting the prophetic critique of Israelite religious practices), can be
placed with any degree of probability between the 9th-6th century, or close to the traditional
chronology.
De Wette was off the mark in one fundamental point however: The Levitical religion and
institutions of Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers was dated by him as earlier than the book of
Deuteronomy. It was up to his successors, in particular Bramberg, George, Kuenen, Graf,
and finally Wellhausen to date priestly institutions and rituals to the exile, and hence
posterior to Deuteronomy (which de Wette rightly dated to the 7th century B.C.). It was the
identification and reconstruction of the “P” or Priestly source by the next generation of
scholars (and Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s in particular) that solved the puzzles and
tensions evident in de Wette’s reconstruction of the religion of Israel. His dating of
Chronicles in the exilic period should have led him to see the priestly religion of the bulk of
4
the Pentateuch, which issues from the same priestly circle and world of thought that
produced Chronicles, as late as well, but it was not to be.
For de Wette, the naïve biblicist picture of the Bible as the “inerrant” word of God
dominant until the 17th century, and the religion of Israel dependent on that picture, will not
survive sustained, detailed, examination based on rigorous application critical-historical
principles derived from secular history. Other critics, from Thomas Hobbes, Baruch
Spinoza, Richard Simon, Jean Astruc, and a host of critics both in England (the Deists) and
then in Germany (Eichorn, Gabler, Semler, Michaelis, Paulus) had seen pieces of the
historical and literary problems before, but none had put the pieces together to produce a
comprehensive historical-critical interpretation of the entire Old Testament as de Wette did.
Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918), the greatest Old Testament scholar after de Wette, recognized in
the 1870s that de Wette had anticipated the fundamental aspects of his own views of the Old
Testament at least forty years before him. It should be noted that although de Wette is best
known for his criticism of the Old Testament, he also wrote an important introduction and
commentary to the New Testament, to which he applied the same critical principles he had
applied to the study of the Old Testament and with equally devastating results.
Given the undeniable fact that de Wette was a passionate critic of the Bible, and that he
assailed the traditional (orthodox) picture of the Bible with perhaps too much glee and
enthusiasm, it is understandable that he alienated the conservatives in Germany, particularly
and fatefully at a time when conservatism was on the ascendancy in 1817 and thereafter. In
1819 he was dismissed from Berlin and practically exiled to Switzerland, where he became
professor at the University of Basel in 1822 until his death. German students were
prohibited from studying with de Wette, given that from 1827-1866, under the leadership of
Hengstenberg, Germany experienced a tide of conservatism that also blocked the
professorship of the more radical David F. Strauss in 1835. It took the personal intervention
of Otto von Bismarck in 1871 for Adolf von Harnack, a liberal church historian, to be
appointed professor of Church History at Berlin.
However, to think that de Wette was simply a destructive critic with no positive view of
religion would be a gross mistake and an incomplete characterization of his work. Like
Schleiermacher, to whose interpretation of religion de Wette’s own bears a strong affinity
and family resemblance, de Wette did not understand his work as on the whole negative. He
believed that the “rubble” had to be cleared first before the permanent in religion and
Christianity in particular could emerge with greater force and clarity. Notwithstanding the
“fallible forms” or garb through which religion is mediated to us through the historic
religions (with Christianity being one form of religion, among others), once the critical
moment is completed, one can move towards a “constructive” moment where the
movement of God is now transparent and discernable (“graspable”) in the religious life,
institutions, myths, history, and literary productions. Far from seeing his work as merely
destructive, de Wette saw his work as preparatory to an appreciation and appropriation of
the religious spirit and the work of God in and through the religion of Israel and its
continuation and fulfillment in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the fallible,
the finite, the uncertain (for history gives us only probabilities and educated guesses with no
hope for absoluteness or definitiveness in our judgments), the communion of the Israelites
with God is palpable; the Bible gives us an “intimation” or a “presentiment” (technical terms
for de Wette) of God’s presence, “graspable” now not through the objective certainties and
dogmatic beliefs of an ahistorical orthodoxy, but through the humble, often conflicting and
contradictory, manipulated and embellished, distorted and hyped, yet nevertheless, and in
spite of it all, real and compelling testimony of all-too-human witnesses to and transmitters
to us of the work of God in their lives and hearts. De Wette remained to his last days, like
Schleiermacher before him and Ferdinand Christian Baur after him, a preacher.
But what we said about Schleiermacher applies with equal force to de Wette. His position,
like Schleiermachers’, fails to satisfy us because it is unstable. It wants to be historical, but
faithful to the Christian faith. But can it be both without loss to one or the other? This
question was answered decisively by Strauss, but not in the way we would like. Mysticism of
the Schleiermachian or de Wettian variety might save religion, but what about Christianity?
The title of one of de Wette’s books is suggestive in this regard: On Religion: Its Essence, the
Forms of its Appearance and its Influence on Life. Religion takes many forms, one of which is
Christianity. Relativism, subjectivism, and pantheism rear their ugly head again.
Notable quote from de Wette: “I would gladly have arrived at results more definite and more
in harmony with the views generally received in the Church; but the Truth can alone decide.
That is no genuine love of Truth which is not ready to sacrifice its inordinate curiosity where
certainty is unattainable, as well as its pious prejudices. The value of criticism I place chiefly
in the activity to which it excites the spirit of inquiry; but this spirit of inquiry can never
harm a genuine Christian piety (quoted by Baird, History of New Testament Criticism, 224,
from de Wette’s Historico-Critical Introduction to the Canonical Books of the New Testament, 5th
edition, 1848, v).
