It must be said at the very beginning that there perhaps is never a religion that is totally subjective or totally objective. However, this discussion will deal largely with the trends or directions of emphasis in religion of either of these two types as they have appeared down through the centuries, and how they have affected man's philosophy of life and his relation to a Supreme Being. To be totally subjective would be to be completely controlled by one's inner emotions. On the other hand, to be absolutely objective would produce a hard, cold formalism or pure legalism.
Confusion Multiplied
Religion is an element in our life's experience dealing with our relation to a Supreme Being, whether in worship or in acts of piety. Thus it would seem a foregone conclusion that anyone having religion must be moved or directed someway, either from within or without, by a supernatural power, or a claim thereto. But were he without an objective standard received from this Supreme Being, each one, having different backgrounds, would be moved differently both in his worship and in his acts of piety. This would indicate that a totally subjective experience would be unreliable, and hence man must be guided religiously by something outside of himself. If not, man, left to a subjective experience, would produce as many types or forms of religion, as there are individuals. This could certainly not bring the answer to Christ's prayer for unity recorded in John 17. In this regard the pendulum of religion has swung back and forth throughout the centuries—at times objective and at times subjective, with all the stages in between, perhaps more often out of balance than in balance.
Apostles, Old Testament Writings, and Christ
The early Christian church began its work upon the foundation laid by Christ. They had a way of life set before them by His example (John 14:6). They also had the Scriptures, that is, the Old Testament which had testified of Him (John 5:39). To them this was an objective standard, a guide to their spiritual life, the core of which was the law of God contained in the Ten Commandments, of which Christ had been a living example (Ps. 40:7, 8; Matt. 5:17). To be sure, this Christian life, exemplified by Christ, was motivated by an inner subjective experience as manifested on Pentecost and in other recorded experiences. But they had to have something outside of themselves to give guidance to their subjective experience.
As time passed, this balanced experience became more rare and men were more and more moved by subjective fear and superstition, with its sorcery and system of terrorism. The external standard of the Word gave place to subjective or human guidance. Speaking of this period when religion rested on a system of terrorism and the power of evil spirits, Lecky says, "The panic which its teachings will create, will overbalance the faculties of multitudes. The awful images of evil spirits of superhuman power, and of untiring malignity, will continually haunt the imagination."'
Dark-Age Subjectivity
This subjective experience of the church led into the period justly termed the "Dark Ages,- which began in the sixth century. During this period, between the sixth and thirteenth centuries, superstitions were most numerous and men's minds were completely imbued by supernatural conceptions.' Satanic power was well-nigh universal. Devil possession, exorcisms, miracles, and apparitions of the mind were accepted without any question.' "It was firmly believed that the archfiend was forever hovering about the Christian; but it was also believed that the sign of the cross, or a few drops of holy water, or the name of Mary, could put him to an immediate and ignominious flight."
Then came the Renaissance, the turning point of European intellect. A general revival of Latin literature, as well as Greek and Hebrew, modified the thinking of the people. A feeble spirit of doubt began to combat the spirit of credulity of the past, which greatly affected the theological interest and concept. Desire for secular knowledge began to replace the passion for theology and the subjective superstitions of former times. Men of active minds began to test the subjective fears and the terrorisms of the church that had held them in the bondage of fear. To this the church reacted with inflexibility. To her this doubt and rebellion was a heinous crime. Of this Lecky says, "Accordingly we find that about the twelfth century, the popular teaching began to assume a sterner and more solemn cast and the devotions of the people to be more deeply tinctured by fanaticism." Thus, where the church controlled, in the century just before the Reformation, witchcraft pursued its course among the ignorant in conflict with the opinions of the educated. Had the church always maintained its objective guide, this long disastrous period would never have occurred. As we shall observe later, it was this subjective superstitious credulity that created such a reaction in the church toward faith in God and His Word that resulted in the agnosticism, atheism, deism, and rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are still reaping a harvest in the varied concepts and philosophies of men who have separated from a standard outside of themselves and thus have cast themselves adrift on the subjective speculations of men.
Stop Scholastic Subtleties
This intellectual reaction of the thirteenth to the sixteenth century resulted often in extremes and subtleties in which faith in God and Christ was at times reduced to zero. So much so that Erasmus wrote in 1518 to Capeto, "I wish that there could be an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply. . . . Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only darken our eyes," as quoted by Rufus M. Jones from Erasmus' Epistle CCVII.8 Both the superstitions of the Dark Ages and the intellectualism of the Renaissance, with their opposite reaction, had departed from the balance of an objective-subjective religion.
The Reformation made an attempt to correct this unbalanced situation by again restoring an objective guide outside of man himself and thus restoring equilibrium to religious life. The Bible became the objective guide, and the subjective spiritual life led them in obedience to its precepts. Saintes had depicted it as follows: "The spiritual grounds on which the reformers relied to impress on their labours the seal of immortality, and to secure for them the regard even of those who could not agree with them, were their respect for the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, which they considered as inspired by the Spirit of God himself."'
Luther and the Scriptures
The following sample quotations from Luther could be duplicated from the other Reformers: "Scripture alone is the true lord and master of all writings and doctrine on earth." "God's will is completely contained therein, so that we must constantly go back to them. Nothing should be presented which is not confirmed by the authority of both Testaments and agrees with them." " "Know, then, that the Old Testament is a book of laws, which teaches what men are to do and not to do . . . just as the New Testament is a gospel or book of grace, and teaches where one is to get the power to fulfil the law."
Here was a restoration of faith based on something outside of themselves, and yet they were strongly moved from within. They were back to the foundation of the early church. But this did not continue long. The spiritual force was soon lost, the objective guide was dimmed, and many controversies arose. To quote Saintes: "Luther and Melancthon were hardly in their graves before the theologians of their school set to work, though indirectly, to destroy the fruits of their masters' labours." New hair-splitting controversies arose too numerous to mention. They had lost their inner spiritual experience and with it their objective standard. They had lost their subjective-objective balance. Hurst says, "There could be but one moral result to the prolonged strife—a great, spiritual decline."
Detached Deism
By the end of the Thirty Years' War practical religion was forgotten and angry diatribes against one another took its place. Their objective guide, the Scriptures, became only a tool to forward their selfish and unscriptural ideas. Doubt and skepticism arose and a new concept of God developed known as deism in which God is not immanent but is a faraway transcendent God, uninterested in this world's present problems. Hence, revelation was not divine but was positively superfluous. This could lead only in one direction, namely, humanism. Thus objective religion with a supernatural guide was lost and man was on his own, wholly dependent on human reasoning alone. Hurst concludes that English deists, influenced largely by the French, exerted a great influence in preparing the way for rationalism." All this served to undermine the influence and power of the Bible so recently restored to its apostolic position, and the way was opened for further development in this same direction.
Pious Pietism
A natural reaction to this spiritual decline and formalism into which the churches had fallen was pietism. From the extreme of formalism the pendulum swung to the other extreme, the mystical spirit of subjectivism. This movement began, however, with the purest of motives, but its momentum gradually carried it over into many extreme and fanatical positions. Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), like some of the other early mystics, endeavored to restore spiritual life and confidence in the Bible." However, soon the theory of divine illumination led the movement into interpreting Scripture by deep and mysterious meanings.
Spener, one of the early Pietists, recognized much good in the Reformation but felt it had never been sufficiently completed." He regarded the Scriptures not only as a standard of doctrine but a standard of life. His emphasis was on devotion and practical Christian living. But soon this movement led into ecstatic disorders. Some went into trances, saw visions, and uttered predictions. The standard, which had held them to a true and sane way of life, in their ecstatic exuberance began to take second place, and they emerged with a totally subjective experience with no guide except their own inner experience. Friedmann describes pietism in a similar vein: "Pietism, . . . is not a uniform phenomenon but a movement which found expression in markedly different groups, among which there is only one common element, namely that they all depart from the 'concrete' conception of the Bible into a subjectivism of faith expressed in terms of a human rational experience."" This is not to be interpreted that the majority were not sincere godly men and women seeking a better life but that their stress was on the inner experience rather than on Nachfolge ("imitation of Christ"), and as a result they sometimes lost their balance, which led to diverse, fanatical extremes.
To say that pietism led to rationalism would almost be a paradox. But strange as it may seem, in some cases the one subjectivism led into the other. Friedmann, in discussing the tie-in of Anabaptism with pietism, especially in its later period, and its eventual breakup, says that in some cases "it led to indifference or rationalistic attitudes." "
Notes:
1 W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, pp. 12, 13.
2 These false conceptions were developments from within due to fear of spirits, et cetera, and not derived from the objective standard of the Scriptures.
3 Lecky, op. cit., pp- 61, 62.
4 Ibid., p. 62.
5 Ibid., p. 73.
6 Rufus M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, p. 3.
7 Amand Saintes, A Critical History of Rationalism in Germany, p. 11.
8 See Calvin's Institutes (7th American ed., rev.) vol. I, p. 89; Westminster Confession of Faith on "Bible," Sec. VI; The Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (rev. 1801) in Creeds of Christendom by Philip Schaff, VT 3, pp. 489, 500; The French (Protestant) Confession of Faith (1559) Article 5, in Philip Schaff, op. cit., p. 362; The Belgic Confession (1561) in Philip Schaff, op. cit., pp. 397, 398.
9 George W. Forell, "Career of the Reformer," Luther's Works, vol. 2. p. 12.
10 M. Reu, Luther and the Scriptures, p. 17 (Works, vol. 4, 180:11).
11 E. Theodore Bachmann, "Word and Sacrament," 1, Luther's Works, vol. 35, p. 236.
12 Saintes, Ibid., p. 35.
13 John Fletcher Hurst, History of Rationalism, p. 31.
14 Hurst, Short History of the Modern Church in Europe, p. 28.
15 Ibid., pp. 54. 33.
l6 Arthur Wilford Nagler, Pietism and Methodism, p. 44.
17. Robert Friedmann, Mennonite Piety Through the Centunes, p. 83.
18 Ibid., p. 9.