Note (return) — Chapter I

The man who was the Erasmus of the 18th century, neither orthodox nor pietistic, nor rationalistic, but capable of appreciating all these tendencies, familiar with English, French and Italian literature, influenced by the spirit of the new English Science,21 while avoiding all statements of it that would endanger positive Christianity. John Lorenz Mosheim, treated Church history in the spirit of his great teacher Leibnitz,22 and by impartial analysis, living reproduction, and methodical artistic form raised it for the first time to the rank of a science. In his monographic works also, he endeavours to examine impartially the history of dogma, and to acquire the historic stand-point between the estimate of the orthodox dogmatists and that of Gottfried Arnold Mosheim, averse to all fault-finding and polemic, and abhorring theological crudity as much as pietistic narrowness and undevout Illuminism, aimed at an actual correct knowledge of history, in accordance with the principle of Leibnitz, that the valuable elements which are everywhere to be found in history must be sought out and recognised. And the richness and many-sidedness of his mind qualified him for gaining such a knowledge. But his latitudinarian dogmatic stand-point as well as the anxiety to awaken no controversy or endanger the gradual naturalising of a new science and culture, caused him to put aside the most important problems of the history of dogma and devote his attention to political Church history as well as to the more indifferent historical questions. The opposition of two periods which he endeavoured peacefully to reconcile could not in this way be permanently set aside.23 In Mosheim's sense, but without the spirit of that great man, C.W.F. Walch taught on the subject and described the religious controversies of the Church with an effort to be impartial, and has thus made generally accessible the abundant material collected by the diligence of earlier scholars.24 Walch, moreover, in the "Gedanken von der Geschichte der Glaubenslehre," 1756, gave the impulse that was needed to fix attention on the history of dogma as a special discipline. The stand-point which he took up was still that of subjection to ecclesiastical dogma, but without confessional narrowness. Ernesti in his programme of the year 1759. "De theologiae historicae et dogmaticae conjungendae necessitate," gave eloquent expression to the idea that Dogmatic is a positive science which has to take its material from history, but that history itself requires a devoted and candid study, on account of our being separated from the earlier epochs by a complicated tradition.25 He has also shewn in his celebrated "Antimuratorius" that an impartial and critical investigation of the problems of the history of dogma, might render the most effectual service to the polemic against the errors of Romanism. Besides, the greater part of the dogmas were already unintelligible to Ernesti, and yet during his lifetime the way was opened up for that tendency in theology, which prepared in Germany by Chr. Thomasius, supported by English writers, drew the sure principles of faith and life from what is called reason, and therefore was not only indifferent to the system of dogma, but felt it more and more to be the tradition of unreason and of darkness. Of the three requisites of a historian, knowledge of his subject, candid criticism, and a capacity for finding himself at home in foreign interests and ideas, the Rationalistic Theologians who had outgrown Pietism and passed through the school of the English Deists and of Wolf, no longer possessed the first, a knowledge of the subject, to the same extent as some scholars of the earlier generation. The second, free criticism, they possessed in the high degree guaranteed by the conviction of having a rational religion; the third, the power of comprehension, only in a very limited measure. They had lost the idea of positive religion, and with it a living and just conception of the history of religion.