Scope:
Nineteenth-century religious thinkers responded to the challenges of Enlightenment philosophy and modern historical studies in different ways. Liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics attempted to show that there was no inherent conflict between Christianity and modernity. The American Protestant Horace Bushnell took on the problem of traditional Christian doctrine by arguing that doctrines should be interpreted not a philosophical propositions but as figurative or poetic expressions of religious experience. Albrecht Ritschl, another Protestant, was a Kantian who argued that in Christian community, we find Jesus as the perfect embodiment of God's ethical calling. The Anglican John Henry Newman stressed obedience to the earliest traditions of the church, which he claimed could be determined through historical study. Finally, theologians of the Tubingen school of Catholic theology stressed the importance of historical study for understanding the development and continuity of God's revelation through the Holy Spirit.
Outline
I. Three primary groups of thinkers can be seen in 19'"-century religious thought in the West: fundamentalist and antimodern Christians who perceived modernist scientific and religious developments as threats to biblical and divine authority, Jewish thinkers who not only had to deal with the challenges of modern thought and society, and the focus of this lecture, progressive, liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics.
A. These lines of thought were shaped by two main influences.
B. First were the efforts of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel to articulate a thoroughly modern vision of religious belief and practice.
C. Second was a growing historical consciousness that expressed great optimism about the present and future of Western civilization but also gave scholars and scientists new tools for exploring and, possibly, dismantling basic convictions at the foundations of that civilization.
II. The work of Protestant thinkers Horace Bushnell and Albrecht Ritschl offers good examples of liberal Protestant theology.
A. To understand Bushnell, it is necessary to consider the American religious context.
1. This context has its roots in the English Reformation that produced the Anglican Church, which was very close, theologically and liturgically, to the Catholic Church but also to more radical Protestant sects, such as the Puritans.
2. As a result of Anglican repression, many Puritans fled to the New World to join what will become a heavily Protestant but nonetheless diverse religious landscape.
3. In the early 17th century, the introduction of Pietism to the colonies, with its emphasis on a religion of the heart rather than a religion of doctrine, led to the First Great Awakening, which created new lines of connection among diverse Protestant groups.
4. This is the origin of evangelical Protestantism in the United States.
B. Horace Bushnell decided on a career as a minister when he was swept up in the Second Great Awakening in 1831.
1. Bushnell was influenced by both the Pietism of the evangelicals and Romanticism: He thought that religious truth is, first of all, an interior matter of the heart, but he was orthodox enough to believe that traditional doctrines of sin and salvation could not be dismissed.
2. He negotiated this tension by arguing that the language of Scripture and the language of doctrine were more like poetry than science. Given that such language is figurative, we should not read the Bible as a "magazine of propositions and mere dialectic entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life."
3. Although the doctrines of different branches of Christianity may appear, from a literal perspective, to make very different, even contradictory, assertions, they can, in fact, be different ways of pointing to the same basic truth.
4. As forms of life differ and change, doctrines will have to change, not because basic Christian truths are no longer true, but because different forms of life require that these truths be brought to life in different forms of language.
C. The liberalism of Albrecht Ritschl was influenced less by Schleiermacher than by Kant and his emphasis on religion
and morality.
1. The meaning of the grace we receive from God is a spiritual freedom from natural necessity that makes possible moral action,
2. It is only in the context of Christian tradition and Christian community that this liberating work is fully experienced.
3. Christ's ethical work justifies the Christian community, that is, makes possible God's forgiveness of our sins and inspires us to act morally and, thus, to reconcile ourselves with God.
4. In this way, salvation, as forgiveness, is mediated only through Christ and the church as a communion of believers.
5. Like Hegel, then, Ritschl saw in his own time and place, in the Protestant Christianity of late 19th-century Europe,
the consummation of God's plan for humanity.
III. Anglican thinkers, including John Henry Newman in England, and Catholic thinkers, such as Johann Sebastian von Drey and Johann Adam Mohler, defended the traditional role and authority of the church but took modernist views of religious experience and history.
A. Newman and his colleagues stressed that even in true religious experience, God's truth remains mysterious and, thus, must be approached with a sense of deep awe and reverence made possible by submission to the authority and discipline of the church.
1. The Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura was too individualistic and led to schisms in the Protestant churches.
2. One comes to know God only through an existential stance of self-denial and obedience.
3. The church is the indispensable guide to the holy mysteries of God and Christ.
4. The study of history allows us to identify a canon of doctrines on which the church must base its authority.
B. In contrast to Anglicans in England and Catholics in France, German Catholics demonstrated a greater openness to historical criticism, in part because Catholic theology was more grounded in German universities and, hence, worked in closer contact with Protestant theologians and biblical critics.
1. Drey and Mohler argued that historical research could show us how world history is moved by divine activity.
2. This historical study could not focus on the Bible, as it did for many Protestants, nor could it confine itself to only the earliest traditions, as in the Oxford movements, but it must be understood in terms of the continuing development of Christianity and the world, a kind of continuing revelation of God and God's purposes.
3. The end of this historical process is a universal ethical Kingdom of God. Mohler argued that Catholics must trust that God has given the church the gift of infallibility and that church authority is necessary to ensure the continued proper development of the church.
Suggested Reading:
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume 1.
Lilla, The Stillborn God.
Ritschl, Mackintosh, and Macaulay, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation.
Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. How do modern conceptions of history find expression in the work of Bushnell and Ritschl?
2. What are some of the ways in which modernist Catholics balance the authority of the church with modern views of history?
Lecture Thirteen — Transcript
19'"-Century Christian Modernists
Over the past five lectures, we've examined how the three giants of modern religious thought — Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel transformed Enlightenment debates about modernity and religion by probing deeply into questions of knowledge, morality, experience, and history to produce radically new visions of the human condition and the place of religion in human life.
I want now, over the next five lectures, to explore how these developments helped to shape religious thought and questions about faith and suspicion after Hegel. We'll consider how some 19'" century thinkers based their work on the ideas of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, but also how some rejected or ignored these influences — often in an effort to reassert what they saw as more traditional and often anti-modern views of religion and faith. We'll consider how these thinkers continued to grapple with the challenge of historical consciousness and the suspicion that emerged for some in and through this historical consciousness. On the one hand, historically oriented thinkers expressed great optimism about the present and future of Western civilization. They considered it the pinnacle of human civilization and a constructive, benevolent force for civilizing and modernizing the rest of the world. At this point in time, the Industrial Revolution was continuing to gain momentum to build and transform the Western world and beyond — and Christian missionary activity, both Catholic and Protestant, was expanding its reach across the globe. On the other hand, we have seen how this historical consciousness gave scholars and scientists new tools that some religious thinkers saw as posing a threat to basic convictions at the foundations of Christianity and of Western civilization.
So, in the last lecture, we explored how the critical, historical study of the Bible raised disturbing questions about the figure of Jesus Christ and about the origins of the Bible itself. In the lecture after this one, we will consider the challenge of Darwinism — in which a new biological view of history challenged traditional ideas about God's purpose and power. So, the question of history was a particularly volatile one, and efforts to address it produced radically different visions of Christianity and, as we shall see, Judaism. In this lecture I'll focus on liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics who in one way or another continued the project of reconciling the Christian tradition with modern intellectual developments. On the Protestant side, I'm going to look at the American theologian Horace Bushnell and the German Albrecht Ritschl. I'll then look at the Oxford Movement — a group of Anglican thinkers who were moving closer and closer to Catholicism, and then to the Tubingen school of Catholic thought. This agenda is an ambitious one, so I'll only be able to touch briefly on each of these thinkers and movements, but I'll highlight those aspects of their thought that are the most important for understanding how theology and modernity converged in the 19th century.
To understand Bushnell, we need a little background because to this point in the lecture series, I've not really said much about religion in North America. The main reason for this is that the major thinkers who established the fundamental philosophical and theological frameworks for thinking about faith before the 19th century were European. But as we move into the 19th and then into the 20th century, the American context becomes more and more important so now I'm going to just step back in time for a minute to make a few points about the history of religion in the colonies and the United States.
We need to begin this with the Reformation in England. The Reformation came to England very shortly after it emerged in Germany and Switzerland, but it took a very different form, because England's original break from the Catholic Church had less to do with theology and ecclesiastical reform than with the fact that the British monarch, Henry the VIII, was chafing under papal authority. In 1534, then, only 17 years after Luther posted his Ninetv-Five Theses, Henry broke from Rome and created the Church of England, otherwise known as the Anglican Church. Later, the Anglican Church would take shape in the United States as the Episcopal Church. Since this break did not involve radical changes in the theology and liturgy of the Church, it meant that of all the Protestant denominations, Anglican Christianity was — and remains to this day — much closer to Catholicism than the Lutheran or Reformed Churches. But it would be almost two centuries before the Anglican Church would be fully and finally established in England — for between 1534 and the early 18th century, Anglicans, Catholics, and more radical Protestants called "Puritans" would vie for religious and political power. This was a period that saw both Catholic and Anglican monarchies and even a short-lived Puritan commonwealth in England.
One of the main tensions in England during this time was between Anglicans and Puritans — the Puritans being influenced by Calvinist ideas — and in the midst of one period of particularly harsh repression in the early 17th century, many Puritans left England for the New World, including the Mayflower pilgrims and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was this latter group who established Congregationalism, one of the most important Protestant denominations in the colonies and early United States. The Puritans, though, of course, were not alone — for by the end of the 17th century a wide range of Christians had settled in the New World: Anglicans in Virginia and the south; a small number of Catholics, especially in Maryland; Presbyterians throughout the colonies; and more radical religious groups, such as the Baptists, in Rhode Island; and the Quakers in Pennsylvania.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this religious landscape underwent a major change under the influence of the Pietist Movements that we discussed earlier. This Pietism swept over the colonies for the first time in the 1730s and '40s, in what is known as the First Great Awakening. As in Europe, this Pietism was a religious sensibility less concerned with doctrinal differences separating Protestant denominations than with strong feeling of connection with God through the personal experience of Jesus and the regenerated moral life that was said to result from this experience. Theologically, much of the impetus for this Awakening can be traced to the Massachusetts theologian, one of America's great religious thinkers, Jonathan Edwards. But much of the impetus also came from fiery orators from England, such as George Whitfield, who traveled through the colonies, fro revival meeting to revival meeting, preaching a populist message of rebirth and personal salvation in Jesus — a message that paid no real attention to the denominational differences and was critical of established Church institutions.
The Great Awakening was one of the major factors in forging a sense of unity among the different British colonies that together would wage the Revolutionary War against Britain later in the century. In this new religious sensibility, we find the origin of Evangelical Protestantism in the United States — although properly speaking, there was no real self-conscious Evangelical Movement until a Second Great Awakening swept through the now United States in the early part of the 19ih century. It's here that we can start talking about Horace Bushnell. In 1831, inspired by the revival of the Second Great Awakening, Bushnell left behind his law training to enter Yale Divinity School. From there, he became the pastor of a Congregationalist Church in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served for many years before retiring to a life of writing. Bushnell's mature years were a time of great religious ferment in New England — for although the Evangelicalism of the Great Awakenings was hugely popular, it was not, by any means, the only game in town.
On the one side, defenders of traditional Calvinist Congregationalism of the Puritans were critical of the emotionalism and the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals. They wanted to retain much of their Calvinist doctrine. On the other hand, the impact of the Enlightenment and Romanticism were making themselves felt in radically modern movements, such as Unitarianism, which in many ways can be described as a religion of reason, and in the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson that borrowed heavily from European Romanticism. Bushnell himself, like Schleiermacher, was influenced by both the Pietism of the Evangelicals and by Romanticism — in particular, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Most importantly, Bushnell believed that religious truth is, first of all, an interior matter of the heart, rather than an intellectual matter of doctrine.
But he was orthodox enough, and he was an orthodox enough Calvinist, to believe that traditional doctrines of sin and salvation couldn't be dismissed. In part, this meant that he was suspicious of the individualist stress on rebirth found in the Evangelicals — instead, he believed that salvation had to be understood in the context of a Christian Church community. Unlike the Unitarians or the Transcendentalists, who viewed human nature as fundamentally good, Bushnell retained the Christian vision of original sin, So, his challenge, and here he wasn't too far from Schleiermacher, his challenge was how to firm a religion of the heart while stressing the importance of traditional doctrine and a disciplined Church life. His basic answer was to argue that religious language, the language of scripture and the language of doctrine, was more like poetry than like science.
For Bushnell, we make a mistake if we assume that the words we use to talk about God, or about sin, or salvation are propositions of fact, so a proposition such as "this podium is white," "this ball has a circumference of 24 inches" — this is not how we should understand the claims of the Bible, for Bushnell. The Bible, as he puts it, should not be read as a "magazine of propositions and mere [dialectical] entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life." Religious language, in other words, is always figurative — and the same religious truth can be expressed in different, even contradictory, ways. This approach to religious language allowed Bushnell to argue that although the different doctrines of different branches of Christianity may appear, from a literal perspective, to be asserting very different — even contradictory — things. They may, in fact, be different ways of pointing to the same basic truth. It also allowed him to argue that doctrines can become lifeless. They can lose their connection with experience and with Christian life. They can turn into dead letter, rather than living Spirit.
So, as forms of life differ and change through history, through social location, doctrines will have to change — not because basic Christian truths are no longer true, but because different forms of life require that these truths be brought to life, become meaningful, in different forms of language. So with this, Bushnell can account for historical changes in the Christian tradition while claiming that the basic truths endure. But Bushnell did not reject the importance of articulating and transmitting doctrine. Although he had a strong sense of personal religious experience, unlike many Evangelicals he also believed that such experience is always shaped in the context of the Church. We are never sinners or saved as isolated selves, but rather we only become selves in relation to others. We are formed in the context of particular social matrices — such as the family and such as the Church. Our identities, character, experience are deeply social and historical. So, Bushnell views the Christian community, the Church, as a site for the formation of the Christian self — and insofar as doctrine plays a role in constituting this community, in guiding it, in shaping its identity, it will also play a role in this formation of the self.
This emphasis on the Christian community is also a key element in the theology of another major liberal Protestant thinker, the German Albrecht Ritschl. Ritschl was born into a Lutheran family and spent many years teaching theology at the Universities of Bonn and Gottingen and devoting much of his scholarly life to the study of biblical criticism and the history of Christianity. He was generally acknowledged to be one of the most learned Protestant thinkers of his time. Ritschl, though, in contrast to Bushnell, was less influenced by Romanticism and Schleiermacher than by Kant's project of grounding religious life in moral reason. He was suspicious of what he saw as Schleiermacher's "mysticism" — the deep sense of feeling through which the individual could experience himself or herself as connected with the whole of reality. Ritschl, instead, stressed that religion is a matter of experiencing ourselves in our spiritual freedom. By spiritual freedom, he meant the ability to transcend natural necessity — that is, the ability to guide our lives by morality rather than our basic needs and desires. You' ve seen already that this sense of morality is at the heart of Kant's moral theory. This spiritual freedom, for Ritschl, is the key to Christianity because God's grace is what makes this freedom possible.
However, and here we do see some affinities with Bushnell, it's only in the context of the Christian tradition and Christian community that this liberating work is fully experienced. Here, the figure of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Bible, plays the crucial role for Ritschl in two respects. First, the Bible reveals a Jesus who perfectly embodied God's ethical calling. As Ritschl sees it, Christ' s ethical work is important because it justifies the Christian community — that is, it is what brings about God's forgiveness of our sins. Further, because it inspires us to act morally, it leads us to act in ways that reconcile us with God. So, salvation, as Ritschl sees it, as justification and reconciliation, forgiveness and reunion, is mediated only through Christ. The second point that Ritschl makes is that Christ's work continues to live in the Church, which Ritschl viewed as a society of free, ethical persons. Where Ritschl really made his mark, and for many in the 20th century came to embody the attraction — but also the hubris — of 19th-century theology, was in his view that this communion of believers was realizing the Kingdom of God on earth. That is, Ritschl, like Hegel, saw a convergence of God's plan in modern Western civilization. The Kingdom was being realized in this time and place, in the Protestant Christianity of late 19th century Europe.
So, if we think about these liberal Protestant thinkers, Bushnell and Ritschl, we have the American Bushnell, who developed a theory of religious language in a theological vision that took shape between Schleiermacher and Pietism on the one side and the doctrines of Calvinism on the other. We have Ritschl, a strong Kantian who links ethics and religion and sees God's ethical Kingdom coming to light in modern Europe. I want now to turn to some Anglican and Catholic thinkers who, like Bushnell and Ritschl, sought to incorporate modern views of reason and history into their religious thought. But these thinkers tended to be less enamored than their Protestant counterparts with modern Western culture and society — particularly as it affected the role of the authority of the Church. During the 19th century, as the secular state gained more and more power vis-a-vis the Church and as European societies become more liberalized and more secularized, some Anglican and many Catholic thinkers found themselves wanting to reassert the authority and autonomy of the Church. We will see how this takes a conservative and clearly anti modern form in our next lecture.
Here, however, I want to explore a modernist expression of this same concern as it took shape in Britain with a group of Anglican theologians who together formed the Oxford Movement — a group that wanted to bring the Anglican Church back to its Catholic roots in the middle of the 19th century. Preeminent among these clergy and theologians was the Anglican priest John Henry Newman, who would, in fact, later convert to Catholicism and be made a cardinal in the Catholic Church. As an Anglican, though, Newman and other members of the Oxford Movement criticized the growth of political and social liberalism in England — in part because they saw it threatening the role of the Church. At the same time, though, as theological modernists, they did take seriously Romantic views of reason and affirmed the importance of thinking historically about Church tradition. With the Romantics, they criticized Enlightenment rationalism, and they stressed the importance of moral sense, feeling, and imagination. Like the Pietists, they believed that religious truth had to be felt and experienced.
But, Newman and his colleagues thought that even in genuine religious experience, God's truth remained mysterious and thus had to be approached with a sense of deep awe and reverence. These sacred mysteries, they believed, needed to be treated very delicately and exposed only to those who had prepared themselves through proper disciplines. They were critical, therefore, of the ease with which Protestants, and particularly Evangelical Protestants, claimed to have found Jesus and changed their lives. They were critical, too, of the reduction of religious truth, as in someone like Ritschl, to fairly transparent ethical rules. So, it's here that we can see why the Oxford Movement puts a lot of emphasis on the authority of the Church. For them, the Church was an indispensable guide to the holy mysteries of God and Christ, and so they thought it was essential that believers relate to the Church in an attitude of obedience and humility. But this is not just obedience for the sake of obedience, but a kind of discipline or training. By being obedient to the Church, one is practicing the kind of self-denial that allows one to approach the mystery of God with the correct attitude — and to the extent that it is possible, to come to know God in this mystery.
We should think carefully about this kind of claim. On the one hand, it will likely seem to most of us that submitting in obedience to an institution like the Church goes against everything we believe and value about individual freedoms and rights. It would have appeared this way to many in the 19th and even 18th centuries especially to critics of Church power, such as Voltaire. On the other hand, though, we should, with thinkers like Newman, also consider the problem of how to properly think about the relation between God and human. At what point does the human centeredness of modern thought, the high value placed on individualism and freedom, conflict with the very basic biblical idea that we are God' s creatures — that we owe worship and obedience to a God that we can never fully know or comprehend?
The problem, for thinkers such as Newman, is that whether we think in terms of Kantian morality, or Hegelian history, or, as we shall see in the next lecture, the Evangelical emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus, God gets too easily domesticated to human ideas and human projects. We come to think that we know, exactly, what God wants and demands, when really what is going on is that we are invoking God to authorize some very human desires and values. From this perspective, cultivating a strong sense of God' s mystery and our obedience to God makes some sense for thinkers like Newman. But, does submitting in obedience to the Church truly teach us to be obedient to God, or is it yet just another means by which certain human desires and values come to stand in for God those desires and values that the Church authorities have instituted?
One way to address this question is to ask: What, exactly, for Newman, constituted the authority of the Church? Here, the question of the Bible and history came into play for Newman and the Oxford Movement. Although, as noted, the Anglicans were, in some sense, Protestant, the theological tradition of the Church Fathers and the early Church had always played a prominent role for them. By the 19th century, it was becoming clear to them that the principle of Sola Scriptura —"Scripture Alone" — was too individualistic and had led to schisms in the Protestant Churches. The Oxford Movement certainly affirmed the authority of the Bible, but they argued, very much in line with Catholic thought, that certain doctrines and traditions of the ancient Church were necessary to guide the proper interpretation of the Bible.
The questions of which doctrines were necessary could be answered, they thought, through historical study of the Church Fathers and the Church councils. Through such study, they established a canon of early doctrines, shaped by the Church, that the Oxford Movement claimed had the authority of revelation. Although as we saw, both Bushnell and Ritschl did value doctrinal traditions to some extent, and in this way resisted as Protestants the extreme biblicism of many other Protestants, especially the Evangelicals, the Oxford Movement and most Catholics were not as inclined as many Protestants to affirm the historical development of doctrine after this early period. For them, historical study showed that Church authority was rooted in the definitive doctrines of the early Church.
An exception to this rule can be found in some modernist Catholicism, in particularly the modernist Catholicism of Johann Sebastian von Drey and Johann Adam Mohler — both of whom were based in the venerable University of Tubingen in Germany. Both thinkers were more receptive to historical criticism and historical study than many other Catholic theologians, and there are a few reasons for this. First, and due to a variety of historical factors, the Catholic Church in Germany had experienced more freedom from the Vatican than had their counterparts in most other European countries. In addition, Catholic theology in Germany had strong roots in the university, where Catholics worked in closer contact with Protestant theologians and biblical critics than elsewhere. Finally, the influence of Hegel's historical perspective was very strong in Germany, and we can see this in the work of both Drey and Mohler. Like the members of the Oxford School, Drey and Mohler were critical of Protestant individualism and believed that biblical criticism in the Protestant context led ineluctably to schism and secularization. Yet, they also realized that it was no longer possible to dismiss historical consciousness, and so they argued that historical research could show us how world history is moved by divine activity. They argued that historical study should not focus only on the Bible, as it did for many Protestants, nor only on the earliest Church traditions, as in the Oxford Movement — but instead should explore the continuing development of Christianity, which they understood as the continuing revelation of God and God's purposes.
In one sense, of course, this revelation, for all Christians, culminates in Christ — but Drey, in particular, argued that we continue to gain deeper understanding of what this revelation means as God, through the Holy Spirit, continues to guide the Church, and thereby to allow the Church to fulfill its mission to educate humankind. The Church, then, is the locus of God's continuing revelation, the expression of God's purpose, and, as we saw in Ritschl, the presence in the world of God's moral Kingdom. For Drey and Mohler, this development was to be identified and understood through the historical study of the Christian tradition. It was an approach to theology and ecclesiology that did not sit well with many other Catholic theologians or with the Vatican — who, as we shall see, was very much invested in the idea of unchanging truth. But Drey and Mohler did have a strong understanding — even though they emphasized this idea of development, they did have a strong understanding of Church authority. Mohler argued that the Catholic must trust that God has given the Church the gift of infallibility — and that Church authority is necessary to ensure that the development of the Church continues as it should. But Mohler did not see this authority vested primarily in the pope, which, as we shall see, ran against the grain of dominant Catholic ideas in the latter half of the 19th century.
In conclusion, let me try to summarize the wide range of ideas we've explored in this lecture by noting some significant commonalities between liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics. All of them, in one way or another, veered away from a strict Enlightenment rationalism — if we understand that rationalism to involve an exclusively intellectual approach to knowledge and the tendency to view biblical literature and theological doctrine primarily in terms of propositional claims about the nature of the world and cosmos. This isn't to say that they rejected reason, but that they argued for a more expansive sense of what reason is. Thinkers like Ritschl and Drey combined the approaches of Kant and the Romantics by stressing the centrality of moral reason while also affirming, with the Romantics, that moral reason has to be existentially appropriated in the context of the Christian life and community. All of them stressed the importance of Christian doctrine and Christian community as the context in which this moral and religious life must be lived — though the Catholic thinkers put a stronger emphasis on the importance of Church authority in guiding this process. These thinkers also tried to address questions about the history of the Bible and of Christian traditions that were emerging at the time. Much of the impetus for this came from biblical criticism and its application of historical methods of investigation to the biblical text. To some extent, each of the thinkers we have discussed in this lecture acknowledged the necessity of bringing modern historical tools to the study of the Bible and the tradition. However, it is precisely here that we see a significant difference between these thinkers, and the difference has to do with the extent to which they affirmed a kind of Hegelian notion of development at the heart of Christianity. The Protestants Bushnell and Ritschl, the latter especially, embraced this historical vision of development — where Christianity is at the heart of the development of Western civilization and culture towards a consummation.
This was one of the central ideas of Protestant liberalism — to the point where even though, to some extent, Christianity was no longer as socially and institutionally powerful as it had been in the premodern period, modernity, in fact, for these thinkers, was the full realization of Christianity — and the Kingdom of God, through modernity, was at hand. To some extent, we also see an affirmation of the idea of development of the Christian tradition in the Catholics Drey and Mohler — for, as they put it, the Church is the locus of a continuing revelation. But the stress here is on the Church as the locus of revelation, while the Protestants tended to see the locus as the culture at large. Most conservative in this respect was the Oxford Movement, for they invoked historical study not to show that revelation continues as history unfolds, but to show that there was a definitive period of revelation in the early Church. This meant that final religious authority resides not in the contemporary modern period, but in an ancient past to which we moderns must be obedient.
