Of the significance of this for the material content of social ethics some hint has been given above. Here we are interested not in the content, but in the motives of moral action. ↩
How this idea must have promoted the penetration of Puritanism with the Old Testament Hebrew spirit is evident. ↩
Thus the Savoy Declaration says of the members of the ecclesia pura that they are “saints by effectual calling, visibly manifested by their profession and walking.” ↩
“A Principle of Goodness,” Charnock in the Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 175. ↩
Conversion is, as Sedgwick puts it, an “exact copy of the decree of predestination.” And whoever is chosen is also called to obedience and made capable of it, teaches Bailey. Only those whom God calls to His faith (which is expressed in their conduct) are true believers, not merely temporary believers, according to the (Baptist) Confession of Hanserd Knolly. ↩
Compare, for instance, the conclusion to Baxter’s Christian Directory. ↩
Thus, for instance, Charnock, Self-Examination, p. 183, in refutation of the Catholic doctrine of dubitatio. ↩
This argument recurs again and again in Hoornbeek, Theologia practica. For instance, I, p. 160; II, pp. 70, 72, 182. ↩
For instance, the “Confessio Helvetica,” 16, says “et improprie his [the works] salus adtribuitur.” ↩
With all the above compare Schneckenburger, pp. 80 ff. ↩
Augustine is supposed to have said “si non es praedestinatus, fac ut praedestineris.” ↩
One is reminded of a saying of Goethe with essentially the same meaning: “How can a man know himself? Never by observation, but through action. Try to do your duty and you will know what is in you. And what is your duty? Your daily task.” ↩
For though Calvin himself held that saintliness must appear on the surface (Institutio Christianae, IV, pp. 1, 2, 7, 9), the dividing-line between saints and sinners must ever remain hidden from human knowledge. We must believe that where God’s pure word is alive in a Church, organized and administered according to His law, some of the elect, even though we do not know them, are present. ↩
The Calvinistic faith is one of the many examples in the history of religions of the relation between the logical and the psychological consequences for the practical religious attitude to be derived from certain religious ideas. Fatalism is, of course, the only logical consequence of predestination. But on account of the idea of proof the psychological result was precisely the opposite. For essentially similar reasons the followers of Nietzsche claim a positive ethical significance for the idea of eternal recurrence. This case, however, is concerned with responsibility for a future life which is connected with the active individual by no conscious thread of continuity, while for the Puritan it was tua res agitur. Even Hoornbeek (Theologia practica, I, p. 159) analyses the relation between predestination and action well in the language of the times. The electi are, on account of their election, proof against fatalism because in their rejection of it they prove themselves “quos ipsa electio sollicitos reddit et diligentes officiorum.” The practical interests cut off the fatalistic consequences of logic (which, however, in spite of everything occasionally did break through).
But, on the other hand, the content of ideas of a religion is, as Calvinism shows, far more important than William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, p. 444 f.) is inclined to admit. The significance of the rational element in religious metaphysics is shown in classical form by the tremendous influence which especially the logical structure of the Calvinistic concept of God exercised on life. If the God of the Puritans has influenced history as hardly another before or since, it is principally due to the attributes which the power of thought had given him. James’s pragmatic valuation of the significance of religious ideas according to their influence on life is incidentally a true child of the world of ideas of the Puritan home of that eminent scholar. The religious experience as such is of course irrational, like every experience. In its highest, mystical form it is even the experience κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, and, as James has well shown, is distinguished by its absolute incommunicability. It has a specific character and appears as knowledge, but cannot be adequately reproduced by means of our lingual and conceptual apparatus. It is further true that every religious experience loses some of its content in the attempt of rational formulation, the further the conceptual formulation goes, the more so. That is the reason for many of the tragic conflicts of all rational theology, as the Baptist sects of the seventeenth century already knew. But that irrational element, which is by no means peculiar to religious experience, but applies (in different senses and to different degrees) to every experience, does not prevent its being of the greatest practical importance, of what particular type the system of ideas is, that captures and moulds the immediate experience of religion in its own way. For from this source develop, in times of great influence of the Church on life and of strong interest in dogmatic considerations within it, most of those differences between the various religions in their ethical consequences which are of such great practical importance. How unbelievably intense, measured by present standards, the dogmatic interests even of the layman were, everyone knows who is familiar with the historical sources. We can find a parallel today only in the at bottom equally superstitious belief of
