An accent on experience is associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher was a child of the Romanticism which dawned as the eighteenth century ended. Romanticism was geared towards feelings, and Schleiermacher based his theology on religious experience. Kant had dismissed revealed truth, and this seemed to leave theologians nothing to rest on or work with. But Schleiermacher maintained that the gap could be filled by the Christian ‘God-consciousness’, the church’s shared sense of dependence on God through the God-filled man Jesus Christ. True theology is God-feelings put into words. Read more
Rationalism here means the belief that unaided reason can reach and judge everything, drawing full metaphysical maps of the whole universe and God too. Reason can judge revelation, if there is such a thing as revelation (and reason can judge that, too). Reason is lord for the Rationalist, and God is what the philosopher declares him to be. Read more
Martin Luther (1483-1546) and his most distinguished admirer, John Calvin (1509-1564), the two chief architects of Reformation theology, were Bible men. Their theology, like the New Testament’s, revolved round the themes of sin and saving grace, Christ and the church. They avoided commitment to any particular system of philosophy; that was not their interest. And they rejected scholasticism, which they knew well, as unbiblical. Their great aim was to let the Bible, the living word of the living God, speak for itself.
From the Bible they proclaimed the God of the church’s faith — transcendent, three-in-one. They set him forth as the holy judge of sin, who graciously gives sinners peace with himself, through faith, on the basis of the death and mediation of Jesus Christ. Read more
Medieval theology was called ’scholasticism’, because it was developed for teaching purposes by professional instructors in monastic schools (scholae) and universities. It flourished between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was its greatest, most creative and most influential figure. (A pope declared his theology to be eternally valid as recently as 1879!) Read more
Who is God, and what is he like? This question has been answered very differently in different periods of history since New Testament days. The medieval understanding ofGod, for instance, is light-years away from the modern existential understanding. And these different answers have affected us all. Our opinions are shaped, much more than we think, by ideas dominant in previous centuries. This is just as true of our beliefs about God as of any other area of thought. The pictures of God painted by leading thinkers help, for good or ill, to set the tone forsucceeding generations. So we do well to note what these pictures have been. Read more
The fathers’ ways of thought and speech about God were overhauled and upgraded in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas. There are three basic principles in Thomas’s theism:
- God is essentially the act of his own existence, pure and simple. God, we might say, is in no respect a passive principle or static essence, but eternally exists as total, inexhaustible, personal energy — a living God, actively forming and ordering everything in his world.
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Jesus Christ is the heart of the Christian faith. What has the Christian church believed about Jesus down the centuries? Who was, who is Jesus Christ? Man, or God, or both? If he is both, how are his manhood and his ‘Godhood’, or divinity, related to each other?
These are questions about the person of Christ - who he is. As a subject of Christian belief it has traditionally been distinguished from the work of Christ-what he did and does for humanity as saviour and Lord. This article traces the development of Christian beliefs about the person of Christ. ‘Christ°logy’ is the name theologians use for this subject. Read more
Modern theology cannot be understood apart from the influence of the movement of thought in the eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment. This gave a new authority and freedom to human reason. Since then, the supernatural character of the life and work of Christ has often been rejected or watered down. Friedrich Schleiermacher (born 1768) is frequently called the father of modern theology’. He thought of Jesus Christ as divine because of his unique consciousness of God. Jesus was first and foremost the perfect example of a life lived in total dependence upon God.
Although ‘absolutely distinguished from all other men through his essential sinlessness and his absolute perfection’, he was no more than a man. Read more
The traditional Christian doctrine of the incarnation, that is Christ was God made man, has recently been increasly questioned. The modern ‘Christian can no longer believe, literal fact, some say, that Jesus is God. The doctrine of the incarnation may be valuable as myth’, which expresses the Christian’s attitude to Christ in embolic way, but it is not rally true. They also argue t we lose nothing essential Christianity if we abandon belief. Read more
