Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 37:145 (Jan 1880)
Article: Dr. Dorner’s Christian Theology
Author: D. W. Simon

BSac 37:145 (Jan 1880) p. 179

Dr. Dorner’s Christian Theology1

Dr. D. W. Simon

In the last Number of the Bibliotheca Sacra we promised to give a more extended notice than was then possible of the new System der Christlichen Glaubenslehre.

According to some of our contemporaries, theology is a moribund, if not an altogether dead science, if indeed it ever deserved to be regarded as a science. Theologians have now a hard time of it with the leaders of public opinion. Under these circumstances it is unusually refreshing to come across a work like this new one from the pen of the celebrated author of the “History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ,” and the “History of Protestant Theology,” — a work which, for compass, method, and thoroughness cannot fail to attract attention.

It is the first instalment of a System of Christian Theology that Dr. Dorner presents us with. His own title is Christliche Glaubenslehre, a title whose literal translation, Doctrine of the Christian Faith, fails to represent the German in one direction as much as System of Christian Theology does in another.

At the very outset the author takes his stand on the platform of modern scientific thought; he accepts the principle that all knowledge — and science is primarily concerned with knowledge — presupposes experience, either outward or inward. The experience he demands for the Christian theologian is Christian faith. Faith is for him the experience which sight or hearing or taste or touch is to the scientist. He defines the task or goal of Christian theology to be the conversion of the immediate matter-of-fact certitude which inheres in Christian faith into scientific knowledge, or, in other words, into the consciousness of the inner connection and objective validity of its contents. To require specific experience of him who undertakes to pronounce a judgment on Christian matters is quite in harmony with the spirit and practice of modern science. With the question whether such experience is possible or real neither Dr. Dorner nor we have now to do. As a Christian theologian writing for the Christian church he rightly takes both for granted. Herein, too, he follows the example of scientists who, as scientists, would surely be very much amazed

BSac 37:145 (Jan 1880) p. 180

if they were called upon to prove that the experiences on which they were working were possible and real.

This first volume, which Dr. Dorner entitles Apologetic or Ground-laying, treats, in a comprehensive introduction, first, of faith as the condition of the knowledge of Christianity as the truth; and, secondly, of three phases of the relation of the human mind to Christianity — that...