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by revelation and history. It was Martensen who said: "Christian speculative theology is,-I am firmly convinced of it,—the only one that really has a future. The present movement in theology is no period in theology, but only a transient episode." The speculative method here adverted to, in its necessity to theological progress, is, we need hardly point out, to be wholly differentiated from the purely speculative fashion of thoroughgoing rationalism, and "the future" of which we speak is to be distinguished from that simply of numerical adherence, since theological truth has worth of itself not to be measured by numbers or names. The reconciliation of modern knowledge and faith, of science and religion, of natural civilisation and Christianity, will be fully compassed only as all the external facts furnished by nature, revelation, and history are reduced to living unity in the inmost consciousness of Christianised man. It is this which a true spec

1 Vide Briefwechsel Zwischen H. L. Martensen und I. A. Dorner, Band ii. S. 67: "Die Christliche speculative Theologie ist-davon bin ich fest überzeugt — die einzige, die wirklich eine Zukunft hat. Das jetzige theologische Treiben ist keine Periode in der Theologie, sondern nur eine vorübergehende Episode." Berlin, 1888.

ulative method in Christian theology essays to effect, and that in no empirical fashion, but in a methodical and thoroughly scientific manner. That its presupposition of more than the negative attitude which sees ab extra in the Christian contents only so much reasoning and evidence, that its assumption of specific Christian experience on the part of its scientific investigators, leaves Christian theology with no empirical taint, should be obvious to every one who reflects on the like necessity of specific experience to the scientific investigators in geology, biology, and physics, and on the unquestioned fact that theology, while perceiving more truly how disastrous must be the divorce of the dialectic process from the light of love, never more clearly foresaw the dissolution that awaits itself, should it unduly follow the light of mere experience.

The Christian thought of the future shall be enriched by experience, in a broad sense as catholic Christian experience, free from the peculiarities to which subjective individual experience is prone, with elements at once more solid and more spiritual, and furnished by it with larger inductions from that intangible realm of

fact that lies within the sphere of consciousness, even though the experiential element remain, as it will remain, but a subordinate one. The scientific process outruns the realm of subjectivity, that it may recognise in their independence and divine essential truth the whole contents of objective Christianity, and make them its own in a growing scientific apprehension. A real organic unity will, more than ever before, belong to Christian theology in the future, through Christ, the distinctive element in Christianity itself, being more truly recognised as the unifying principle and living historic centre of theological thought, and through His having a larger place assigned Him as its Mittelbegriff or "middle term," as Nitzsch1 styled it, in Whom, without the doctrine of His Person of necessity standing first in the treatment of Christian thought, our thoughts of man and God meet and are harmonised. Christian thought feels the need to do its own thinking in this present time and the difficulty of reading the future, but it feels assured that the best and wisest thought of the coming days will seek a more vital synthesis of the

1 System der Christlichen Lehre, § 56.

written with the personal Word, Who is the original Source of our objective knowledge of God, and will assign a larger place to Christ than theology has been wont, and will seek to subdue mind unto Him, as Head and Fulfiller of all,—a finality for us because in Him all things are summed up and the Father found,— not to win it to mere formulas of an esoteric science.

So far as may be anticipated at present, no questions, if we may judge from the Christological trend of the thought and inquiry of our time, will concentrate more of the attention of the theology of the future than those which relate to the Person of Christ, despite the "noxious exaggeration" with which, in Emerson's view, Christendom has already dwelt upon this theme. Its stress will still be-for just here lies for it scientific possibility—on the historical Christ, Who will form its starting-point, Whose divinehuman Person will have guiding light and regulative force for the formation of all its doctrines, and Who will form for it also the end and goal of revelation. In its study of the Person of Christ, it will wisely seek, not to rest in, but to rise from,

the conception of His manhood to that of His Godhead, so that the modern tendency to allow His Divinity to remain obscured may be transcended. The Christian thought of the coming time will, notwithstanding the Ritschlian indifference to Christ's present relations to the Church, concentrate itself more around the universal and eternal Priesthood of Jesus, for it will realise more profoundly that not only upon our Lord's great Atonement in the past, but also upon His undying Priesthood, exercised in living love as the exalted World-Redeemer, must the temple of man's true life in the present be built. Personality, as the point of contact between God and man, will play a larger part in that theology, undaunted by such endeavours as that of Biedermann1 to resolve it into the category of the unreal: it is in the sphere of personality, profoundest of mysteries yet most real of facts, that its doctrines will be revealed in power to man: in this sphere that it will press beyond the Ritschlian view of love as the primary conception of Deity, and will hold to personality as a conception prior to love: in the same sphere

1 Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, in loco.

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