last traces which true Christianity still has left in life. What is accomplished serves wholly for the greater glory of the modern (ad majorem gloriam moderni) and to the detriment of Christianity (ad detrimentum Christianismi)’ (p. 67).
‘It is no wonder that the modern world so thirsts for orthodoxy and has so little use for Pietism, or that a dogmatic system like Ritschl’s won such a following while Rothe’s suffered so tragic a shipwreck.… The modern world is ready to do everything to make it possible to remain within the illusion of Christianity; and for that purpose, as it is easy to see, orthodoxy is more usable than Pietism’ (p. 274). ‘In modern life, Christianity is thirsting for life and in so far for Pietism. In modern Christianity, the modernity thirsts for orthodoxy since it has already drunk its fill of life; and so in modern Christianity, Christianity gets nothing to drink. For its thirst is of a wholly different nature from that of modernity.… Can this tragicomedy really have a prospect of playing before the world much longer?’ (p. 275).
And so it is that ‘the most significant fact about Christianity is its powerlessness, the fact that it cannot rule the world’ (p. 279). Think of its relation to Socialism (pp. 26–8). Or consider how shaky a bulwark it has shown itself against the danger of nationalism (p. 257). Look at the air of solemnity which Ritschleanism habitually wears when it handles in a cursory way the concept of vocation (pp. 278, 288). Consider (and in dealing with this evidence Overbeck for his part puts on a certain ‘solemn’ attentiveness) the religion of Bismarck (pp. 148–59), which provides the most magnificent example of the way the world pleases itself and wins the applause of the representatives of religion. Therefore Bismarck is the best-known advocate of the indispensability of religion for all earthly effectiveness. He had religion simply in order to keep his hands free for secular work. For the enigma which religion wills to solve, he had no time. All he wanted was something to free him from anxiety. His religion was erected on the basis of his self-esteem. Moreover, it was something which he had reduced to the size of a personal plaything and which he could lay aside at any time.
But the fact that he could play with it and occasionally had a Christian notion was sufficient in the eyes of the modern advocates of Christianity to make him a Christian, even a model Christian. He could even be hung in the gallery of ‘the classics of our religion’ next to Jesus, Francis, and Luther—to amplify with a more recent illustration. Thus Christianity has now been handed over to every holder of power. So cheap is today’s canonization in the Christian heaven. But none the less, it is this Bismarck who has done more for the historical existence of modern theology that Ritschl and Harnack. And what can be expected for this Christianity except ‘a gentle fading away’?
Again we are reminded of the attack on Christianity which the men of Möttlingen and Bad Boll once made from the same central standpoint, the expectation of the Second Coming; of their inquiry concerning the real power of the Kingdom of God, and the overcoming of religious subjectivity. But the friends of historico-psychological realism and the alleged Overbeck specialists in Basel need not be troubled. Against the greater keenness of observation and thought on the side of Overbeck is to be set the greater love, the enthusiasm and the joy in witnessing on the side of Blumhardt.
Yet Overbeck also was not without the holy fire, and Blumhardt was not without knowledge. In its essential nature—and that alone is important—the attack made is the same here and there. And with this double attack, theology has not yet really grappled.
IV
Overbeck’s third protest is directed against theology specifically, against the theology which today in Germany and Switzerland (and where not?) presides over the pulpit and the professor’s desk, the theology of a positive or liberal shade. One and all, those in authority today are ‘modern’.
I confess that I am not wholly of one mind about this attack, about which I feel strongly. I feel a glow of approval hard to restrain for the strong polemical food which is there offered. And yet there is the other feeling that it would have been better for the sake of the essential point to have held back some of these priceless apothegms on men and events. The ‘chest stuffed full of alphabetic notes’ left by Overbeck (as the preface states, p. xx) must, according to reliable reports, have included also some wholly different comments.
Bernoulli will be able to say in his own justification that he was forced to practise restraint in dealing with such a mass of material. But I recall what Overbeck himself said (pp. 3 f.) about the inaccuracy, in fact the impossibility, of all writing of contemporary history. I think of the emphatic words: ‘Men are not called to give final judgement on one another’ (p. 250). Now if what we read (pp. 159–80) under the heading ‘Albrecht Ritschl as Head of a School of Theology’, for example, or (pp. 198–241) under the heading ‘Adolf Harnack, a Lexicon’ is not a ‘final judgement’, then I have no idea what would deserve the name. Diana of the Ephesians will be overthrown only from within and below. Arguments ad hominem such as these, in which the other side still has the advantage of us, offer to our psychological age such easy opportunities for counterattack that any instruction which can be so turned aside will never penetrate. After this observation on tactics, we can now turn to the matter itself.
What is theology? ‘The Satan of religion’ (p. 12), ‘Christianity become worldly-wise’ (p. 124), Overbeck answers. It is ‘the attempt to impose Christianity on the world under the explicitly hallowed garb of modern culture, by concealing, even by denying its basically ascetic character’ (p. 125). It is ‘a desperate wrestling match, fought on behalf of religion against certain primary truths which show us too ruthlessly the final problems of our existence, the difficulties and the limitations under which men live’ (p. 13). Its typical representative is the Abbé in the French salon of the eighteenth century (pp. 125, 198). Its fiercest opponent is Blaise Pascal, who had no fear of using caricature, ‘the knight of truth, who undertook the impossible’ (pp. 126–34). Accordingly its nature is Jesuitry, the classic witness to the dire state of the church (p. 122).
The worst error of the Jesuits was not that they questioned morality, the most questionable of all the assumptions which exist among men. It was rather that they sublimated and refined and accommodated Christianity—an enterprise in which Protestant Jesuitry in the form of modern theology has far surpassed the Catholic (pp. 123–5). By this activity, the theologians have become ‘the most outstanding traitors to their cause’ (p. 236).
‘Do the modern theologians think that they can put us off much longer with their absurd delusion that Christianity’s best defence to insure its continued existence is its unlimited capacity for change?’ (p. 138). ‘Moses, Christ, Paul, and Luther are still given a place by these modern theologians as a part of their understanding of world history, but only as a kind of ornamentation which is recommended for display in public exhibitions. So far even modern theologians remain orthodox. But at the bottom of their hearts, they are the best of “believers in new things” and their master is Bismarck’ (p. 155).
‘Basically they have little to do with Christianity, but just for that reason they have a particular itch to start something with it’ (p. 278). ‘The Zeus on the Olympus of their priestly company they call “the present”. Their gaze is directed unwaveringly to the modern man’ (p. 218). ‘Theologians are never simply Christians, never men whose relation to Christianity is simple and unambiguous’ (p. 273). They expect indeed ‘to put God daily into their bag’ (p. 268). They allow themselves ‘to play [with God and the human soul] like children with their dolls, and they have the same assurance of ownership and the right of disposal’. They live in the naïve confidence that ‘men may do all things with God and in his name’; that ‘with God man finds himself in complete adjustment with the world; with him, man succeeds best’ (p. 267).
But the very existence of these servants of Christianity has as its prerequisite the existence of a world beside and outside of Christianity. ‘They are, under the most favourable conditions, middlemen between Christianity and this world; and therefore no one really
