The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel: Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904 — John Shaqi
The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel: Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904Sanday, W. (William)
Religion
The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel: Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904
Sanday, W. (William)
Bible. John -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
The other four German writers whom I have mentioned all belong to the
younger generation. Dr. Schmiedel (who though a Swiss Professor is, I
believe, German by birth) is the eldest, and he is not yet quite
fifty-three: Jülicher, the next on the list, is forty-seven. And as they
belong to the younger generation, so also they may be said to mark the
rise of a new School, or new method of treatment, in German Theology.
The Germany for which they speak is not the dreaming, wistful,
ineffective, romantic Germany of the past, but the practical, forceful,
energetic and assertive Germany of the present. All, as I have said, are
able writers; and the type of their ability has much in common, though
they have also their little individual differences. They have all a
marked directness and lucidity of style. What they think they say,
without hesitation and without reserve; no one can ever be in any doubt
as to their meaning. They are all apt to be somewhat contemptuous, not
only of divergent views, but of a type of mind that differs from their
own. Of the four, Jülicher and especially Wernle have the warmer
temperament; Schmiedel and Wrede are cold and severe. Wrede writes like
a mathematician, who puts Q. E. D. at the end of each step in the
argument—though it would be a misfortune if the demonstration were taken
to be as complete as he thinks it. Schmiedel is rather the lawyer who
pursues his adversary from point to point with relentless acumen: if we
could grant the major premises of his argument, there would be much to
admire in his handling of the minor; but the major premises, as I think
I shall show, are often at fault. Jülicher is just the downright capable
person, who sees vividly what he sees and is intolerant of that which
does not appeal to him. Wernle alternately attracts and repels; he
attracts by his real enthusiasm for that with which he sympathizes, by
his skill in presentation, and his careful observance of perspective and
proportion; he repels by aggressiveness and self-confidence.
The two French writers also have something in common, though they belong
to different communions. We are not surprised to find that both have an
easy grace of style, to which we might in both cases also give the
epithet ‘airy,’ because both are fond of speaking in generalities which
are not always in the closest contact with facts; both are
thorough-going allegorists, and regard the whole Gospel as a pure
product of ideas and not literal history. In spite of their difference
of communion, M. Loisy is on the critical side of his mind as
essentially rationalist as his Protestant _confrère_, though he brings
back, by an act of faith which some of us would call a _tour de force_,
in the region of dogmatics what he had taken away in the field of
criticism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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