The 'New Theology'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 11, 14 March 1907, Page 9

The ' New Theology '

Literary and theological reputations are nowadays often manufactured by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain. Any small cleric of tenth-rate scholarship is tolerably sure of a blazing newspaper advertisement if, while professing to be a Christian minister, . he publishes a pamphlet or preaches a sermon that attacks the foundations of Christian faith and morality. He has simply to be, so toi speak, a cheap' phonograph emitting odd notes from the - discordant jangle of the little tingods of the rationalistic and idestructive 'higher criticism ' that is ' made in Gfermany '. The sixteenth century reformers employed their principle- of private judgment to make a fetich of the Bible ; the lesser twentieth century ' reformers ' employ the principle of

private judgment to make a football of it. They are now busy kicking it to tasters, and contemptuously tossing the tatters to the winds of heaven. This is the foreseen and predicted result of the substitution of fickle personal opinion for the old Christian principle of authority in religion, during the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. On the principle of private judgment, the right to N deny is as great as the right to affirm the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Moreover : once the Reformed principle is accepted, the denial must be considered as sound doctrine as the assertion— the negation and the affirmation of the same thing may both be doctrinally true. Which is absurd. On Reformed principles, the ' new theologians ' (who are merely the old heretics in frock-coats and • bifurcated continuations ') are within their rights, and are just as good Protestants as Dr. Martin Luther. To us it is a surprise that surprise should be expressed — much less that a journalistic nine days' wonder should be created—at seeing the ' right of private judgment ' in religion pushed to its natural, obvious, and long-predic-ted conclusion. It would rather be a surprise if this were not the case. And in Germany it seems to have to a great extent undermined or destroyed belief *n dogmatic Christianity among the Reformed denominations. Ass the • Edinburgh Review ' once said, the cradle cf the Reformed faith has become its grave. Sic transit the Reformation.

Meantime, Catholics— like UMand's Knab' vom Berge —sit serenely in the blessed sunlight of God's fa»lth, on the hill-top on which His Holy City (the Church) is built ; and with sympathetic . interest — but without sear — they view the clouds and storms and mists that befog and mislead and dismay the less fortunate dwellers in the valleys far below.