Book Description

Neander's theological position can only be explained in connection with Schleiermacher, and the manner in which he modified and carried out the principles of his master. Characteristically meditative, he rested on the great central truths of Christianity, and recognized their essential reasonableness and harmony. Alive to the claims of criticism, he strongly asserted the rights of Christian feeling. "Without it," he emphatically says, "there can be no theology; it can only thrive in the calmness of a soul consecrated to God." This explains his favourite motto: "Pectus est quod theologum facit." His General History of the Christian Religion and Church (Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche) remains the greatest monument of his genius. In this Neander's chief aim was everywhere to understand what was individual in history. In the principal figures of ecclesiastical history he tried to depict the representative tendencies of each age, and also the types of the essential tendencies of human nature generally. His guiding principle in dealing both with the history and with the present condition of the church was that Christianity has room for the various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating and glorifying them all; that according to the divine plan these various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to be forced into a single dogmatic form.