RITCHLIAN THEOLOGY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20075, 16 April 1927, Page 4

RITCHLIAN THEOLOGY.

THE EASTER MESSAGE. "For ii generation Dr William Herrmann was one of the moat influential ami reipectod of the religious teachers of Britain, as well as of Germany .... he was the most outstanding figure of the > Ritschlian school which has profoundly affected British thinking.” This sentence from the introduction to an English version of “Systematic Theology” (George Allen and Unwin, Ss net) explains the purpose of the publication. The book was not issued in Germany until after the author’s death; it wag not even prepared by him for the press. It contains, however, what appears to be the final and best form of his constantly revised paragraphs for dictation. Herrmann was born on December 6, 1846, a son of the manse. In 1866 he went to the University of Halle. His philosophical ability impressed Professor Ulrichi, who sought to divert him from theology to philosophy. But Herrmann’s heart was in theology even though in Halle he found tho theological atmosphere most uncongenial. It was to Albrecht Hitachi, of Bonn, that he gave his allegiance. and it was Kitsch!'g influence that dominated his mind. In 1879 he went to Marburg as professor, and from Marburg till his death on January 2, 1922, he exercised a personal and theological, and spiritual ministry which has profoundly influenced modern Protestantism. Tho translators express tho hope that tho appearance of tho book in English may bo of wide usefulness and advantage to tho Protestant churches. The first part of the book treats of religion as a science, its intellectual apprehension, and its historical facts. The second part is devoted to discussing the faith of evangelical Christianity. It is both seasonable and typical to taka Herrmann’* treatment of tno Resurrection. He discuase* first of all the trustworthineaa of the narratives given in the Gospels, and *ays: —“From the latter stories we can no longer divine what. the original happenings were, but they indicate the value which the appearance recorded by Paul had on the first disciples. Only the appearance of the Crucified to them as a living presence made his death actually a redemption in their eyes. , . One may not say that their faith first found its basis in these appearances: but it is manifest that it was these which preserved their faith from shipwreck.” Herrmann deduces from this that the events by which the faith of the first disciples was saved from shipwreck have imperishable importance for the Christian community in every age. Ho continues: — If they had not so occurred we should not have received the witness of the earliest communities to Jesus’s life on earth. If the picture of Jesus there given us is for us the means of our salvation, then also in the events upon which the disciples built after tho death of Jesus, we see the works of God for our saivation. Ibis, then, is tho content of tho Easter message to which we can be well assured as a fact on which our faith is based; for that alone presents itself to ns as a matter of our own experience. On the other hand, this experience of tho first disciples at that time is not vouchsafed to us, and there is no historical proof that can make it completely certain to us. In Christian , preaching, tho reference to tho Scripture story of Easter can only bo used in such a way as to point tho congregation to that which nlono can create faith in its members, Christian preaching must confine itself strictly to that which is presented to Us as indubitable fact. If we accept such fact as God’s gift to us. tho real obedience of faith will help us then

to have unqualified joy even in tho narratives of the appearances of tho Risen Lord (contradictory and obscure though they are to tho historian), and nf Mis communion with the disciples. It will then be enough for us that this, at any rate, was tho way in which the picture of those events established itself in the minds of those men who, as the first generation' of a new humanity, lived in the power of the Person of Jesus. The fact that what happened at that time remains. by God’* will veiled from us, will then cease to trouble us.