The Logic of Hegel · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE
But the evangelicals are not alone to blame for the bald and undeveloped nature of their religious life; the same want of free and living growth in religion characterises their opponents. 'By their formal, abstract, nerveless reasoning, the rationalists have emptied religion of all power and substance, no less than the pietists by the reduction of all faith to the Shibboleth of Lord! Lord! One is no whit better than the other: and when they meet in conflict there is no material on which they could come into contact, no common ground, and no possibility of carrying on an inquiry which would lead to knowledge and truth. "Liberal" theology on its side has not got beyond the formalism of appeals to liberty of conscience, liberty of thought, liberty of teaching, to reason itself and to science. Such liberty no doubt describes the _infinite right_ of the spirit, and the second special condition of truth, supplementary to the first, faith. But the rationalists steer clear of the material point: they do not tell us the reasonable principles and laws involved in a free and genuine conscience, nor the import and teaching of free faith and free thought; they do not get beyond a bare negative formalism and the liberty to embody their liberty at their fancy and pleasure--whereby in the end it matters not how it is embodied. There is a further reason for their failure to reach a solid doctrine. The Christian community must be, and ought always to be, unified by the tie of a doctrinal idea, a confession of faith; but the generalities and abstractions of the stale, not living, waters of rationalism forbid the specificality of an inherently definite and fully developed body of Christian doctrine. Their opponents, again, proud of the name Lord! Lord! frankly and openly disdain carrying out the faith into the fulness of spirit, reality, and truth.'
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