At One Ment by Propitiation 91 ism, “The Atonement, by Three Chicago Professors of Theology,” we are startled with the advance. A very broad space of rationalism intervenes between the broad school of today and the broad school of half a century ago. The present day liberal theology may be traced to two streams of influence: First. The influence of German rationalism, pre-eminently the Ritschlian theology, and the critical theories of Well- hausen, Kuenen and their school. Second. The widespread acceptance of the theory of evolu tion. To the first may be traced the free and easy way of the modernists of dealing with the Scriptures; and to the second, the revolutionized attitude of theologians with regard to sin, its source, its penalty, and its atonement. Albrecht Ritschl, Professor of Theology at Gottingen, whose magnum opus, “Justification and Reconciliation,” was published in 1870, is par excellence, the ruling influence of continental theology. What Germany thought yesterday, America and Scotland think today, and England will think tomorrow. It is an epigram that has more than a grain of truth in it. The Germanic way of accepting or rejecting what it pleases of the Bible, and opposing its knowledge to the authority of the apostles, is becoming more and more the custom of the lead ing theologians of the three ruling nations of today, British, American, and German. If a text is inconvenient, modernism- disputes it; if a passage is antagonistic, it dismisses it as Pauline or Petrine, not Christian. Suppose a Christian of the old days was to enter for the first time the class room of one of the extremer modernist pro fessors, addressing a representative body of theologians from Germany, Britain, or the United States. He would be amazed to hear the rankest Socinianism taught. The question the pro fessor would propose would not be the vicarious or the moral theory of the sacrifice of Christ, but did Christ really die, and - -
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