thodoxy, to surrender the judgment to an external
authority in the church, nor to give unbounded liberty to it like the
critical school: not going back like the one to the ancient faith of the
church, nor progressing like the other to new discoveries in religion,
they seek to understand that which they believe, to find a philosophy for
religion and Christianity.

Two theologians stand out above the others, as evincing vitality of
thought, and boldly attempting to grapple with the philosophical
problems;--Dorner(842) and Rothe,(843) both very original, but bearing
traces of the influence of their predecessors. The former, moulded by the
Hegelian school, investigates the Christological problem which lies at the
basis of Christianity; the latter, moulded rather by the school of
Schleiermacher, has attempted the cosmological, which lies at the basis of
religion and providence.

The work of Dorner on "the Person of Christ" formed an epoch in German
theology, by its fulness of learning, its orthodoxy of tone, and its union
of speculative powers with historic erudition. The Christian doctrine of
the incarnation is, that God and man have been united in an historic
person as the essential condition for effecting human salvation. If the
doctrine be viewed on the speculative side, the problem is to show _a
priori_ that this historic union ought to exist; if viewed on the
historic, to prove that it has existed as a fact. The great aim of the
Christology of the Hegelian system was to effect the former; the aim of
Strauss was to destroy the latter. Dorner strove to reconstruct the
doctrine, by making the historical study of its progress the means of
supplying the elements of information for doing so. He commences by an
examination of other religions,(844) in order at once to show the
existence in them of blind attempts to realise that truth which the
incarnation supplied, and to prove the impossibility that the Christian
doctrine can have been borrowed from human sources, as the critical and
mythical interpreters would assume. He discovers in all religions the
desire to unite man to God; but shows(845) that the Christian doctrine
cannot have been derived from the oriental, which humanised God; nor from
the Greek, which deified man; nor from the Hebrew in its Palestinian form,
which degraded the idea of the incarnate God into a temporal Messiah; nor
in its Alexandrian form, which never reached, in its theory of the {~GREEK CAPITAL LET