Note 29 — THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

If Christ was no more, and did no more, than this rationalistic doctrine supposes, it is not easy to see how piety has come to make him her special object, or dogmatism to lay down special propositions concerning him. Consistent Rationalists have in fact admitted, that what the orthodox dogma calls Christology, forms no integral part of the rationalistic system, since this system consists indeed of a religion which Christ taught, but not of a religion of which he is the object; that, viewing Christology as the doctrine of the Messiah, it is merely an accommodation to the Jewish mind,—that even taken in a more noble sense, as the doctrine of the life, the actions, and the fate of Jesus as a divine messenger, it does not belong to a system of faith, for the universal truths of religion are as little connected with our ideas concerning the person of him who first enunciated them, as are the philosophical propositions in the systems of Leibnitz and Wolf, of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, with the opinions we may happen to form of the persons of their authors; that what relates to the person and work of Jesus belongs, not to religion itself, but to the history of religion, and must either be prefixed to a system of religious doctrine as an historical introduction, or appended to it as an elucidatory sequel.29 Accordingly Henke, in his Lineaments, has removed Christology from its wonted position as an integral part of systematic theology, and has placed it as a subdivision under the head of anthropology.