The Protestant Reformation led, in Catholic theology,
to the development of a scholarly apologetics (e.g., the Con-
troversiae of Bellarmino, 1621); the criticisms of the philo-
sophes likewise elicited an abundant apologetic production in
the eighteenth century and down to the first third of the
twentieth. Theology found itself faced with new activities of
critical reason: history, science of religions, critical exegesis,
psychology of religion. The serious urgency of the questions
thus raised led to the modernist crisis. There had been cre-
ative minds that cultivated a healthy openness to modernity
as well as close ties with tradition (Johann Adam Möhler,
Matthias Joseph Scheeben, John Henry Newman), but the
chief fruit of the Catholic restoration that the nineteenth
century found necessary was a renewed scholasticism possess-
ing little creativity. Once the modernist crisis was past, theol-
ogy regained its vitality from a renewed sense of the church,
a renewed contact with its own sources (Bible, Fathers, litur-
gy), and with the questions raised by twentieth-century
thinkers (ecumenism, problems of unbelief, theology of lib-
eration, and so on).
Luther began his Reformation with a reform of theolo-
gy. In reaction to Scholasticism and Aristotle he eliminated
philosophical concepts and expressed the religious relation-
ship of salvation in biblical terms. The object of his theology
is man as sinful and lost and God as the one who justifies
and saves him; a “theology of the cross,” not a theology of
the inner ontology of God; a theology that draws its life not
from a symbiotic relationship with metaphysics but from
pure faith in the gospel of grace, which is consonant with the
spirit of scripture. Luther himself did not compose a compre-
hensive systematic treatise. His disciples made up for the lack
by their loci communes, or dogmatic expositions (Melanch-
thon, 1531; Chemnitz, 1591; Gerhard, 1610–1625; Hutter,
1619). John Calvin produced his Institutes of Christian Reli-
gion as early as 1536, but he also commented on scripture
daily. Protestant theology took the form of an exposition of
what the church ought to be teaching in the light of its bibli-
cal norm and also in the light of the church’s own past. Thus
Luther and, to an even greater extent, Melanchthon and Cal-
vin, referred back to the Fathers and especially to the ancient
symbols or creeds and the first four ecumenical councils.
Starting at the end of the sixteenth century, Lutherans
reintroduced into theology the metaphysics of Aristotle
along with that of Francisco Suárez. Seventeenth-century
Lutheran orthodoxy was much like Catholic Scholasticism.
In the eighteenth century, however, two divergent currents
exercised their influence: Pietism, which expressed theology
in terms of personal experience, and rationalism, which in-
terpreted religion and God in terms of man and not of God
and rejected the heteronomy involved in supernatural faith.
An example of this theology based solely on reason is Julius
Wegscheider’s Institutiones theologiae Christianae dogmaticae
(Institutes of Christian dogmatic theology; 1815). The cul-
ture of the day had cut itself off from the faith as celebrated
by the church. Some philosophers who had begun as theolo-
gians (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling) treated religion as a branch
of their philosophy. Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834) took
up these challenges and ushered in a new era of Protestant
theology. He asserted the originality of religion, which is not
to be identified with either metaphysics or morality: “The
essence of religion is neither speculation nor action, but intu-
ition and feeling,” and specifically the feeling of dependence,
which constitutes our relation to God. Jesus Christ gave su-
preme expression to this feeling, and a community of believ-
ers took shape that found its origin in him. Theology, for
Schleiermacher, is the sum total of scientific knowledge
without which the life of the Christian community could not
be ordered.
All subsequent Protestant schools of theology—the con-
fessional, the orthodox, the liberal, as well as the contempo-
rary restoration in the form of a return to the Reformers
under the influence of Karl Barth (d. 1968)—have depended
on Schleiermacher. Rejecting a simple description of what
is believed and preached (Glaubenslehre), Barth began with
the sovereignty of God’s word understood as an act of God.
The Bible as such is not the word of God, but only a testimo-
ny to the acts through which God spoke and ultimately to
Jesus Christ, who is God’s Word made flesh. The word can
be received only in faith, which is the act by which God (the
Holy Spirit who bears witness within us) enables us to under-
stand when he speaks. This word has given rise in the course
of history to the special community, the church, whose mis-
sion is to confess its faith in the word of God within the cir-
cumstances of the particular historical moment. At this point
theology comes on the scene. Theology is the reflective criti-
cal act by which the church goes back over the word it speaks
and the confession it makes of Jesus Christ; the purpose is
to test the truthfulness of that word and confession, that is,
their conformity to the word of God as attested in scripture.
This theology has three parts: does the Christian word come
from Christ? (biblical theology); does it lead to Christ? (prac-
tical theology); is it in conformity with Christ? (dogmatic
theology).
The whole of Protestant theology is, of course, not re-
ducible to Barth, and not all Protestant theologians accept
his radicalism. Thus, while the pragmatism of William James
(d. 1910) is not a genuine theology, the dogmatic theology
of Emil Brunner (d. 1966) admits the validity in theology
of a natural knowledge of God. There are even strict Calvin-
ists in Holland, Scotland, and France, who allow a value to
a natural knowledge of God. Paul Tillich (d. 1965) sought
to bridge the gap between the modern mentality or culture
and Christianity by establishing a correlation between the ul-
timate questions raised by human beings and the ever new
challenge of the word of God. His work elicited an enormous
response.Catholic theologians for their part carry on their work
not only under the supervision of a teaching authority but
also in the context of a fidelity and a continuity that is pro-
vided by a tradition developed through the centuries. Protes-THEOLOGY: CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY 9137