Jesus' death on the cross can not have been removed by such psychological experiences.

And with this reference to the death of Jesus, Brückner indicates another weakness in Bousset's theory. Brückner says:57

It is certain that the idea of the suffering Messiah of later Judaism can not be shown to have existed at that time; and it is an unsolved enigma that the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah appears as its Scriptural proof so seldom and so late. . . . Moreover the definite dogmatic statement that the resurrection occurred on the third day or after three days can scarcely have developed, as Bousset thinks, from the common popular belief that the soul of a dead person remained near the body for three days. Certainly underlying this is the general dogmatic datum that the dying Hero rises on the third day or after three days.

Brückner in his criticism of Bousset thus approaches the view of Maurenbrecher, or a position intermediate between the "liberal" and the "mythological" interpretations. This view has the advantage which comes from combining the real and the ideal, the personal and the dogmatic, the actual and the mythological. Maurenbrecher insists that the impression of the historical Jesus does not explain the character of the faith which followed the vision-experiences of Peter and the other disciples. These visions must have had in them the element which distinguishes the resultant faith, and this is the transcendent conception of the Messiah in which Jewish and mythological ideas were combined. The Jewish alone will not explain the resultant faith, for this involved the ideas of death and resurrection, both of which are foreign to the Jewish and characteristic of the mythological conception. And it is just this combination of ideas and their application to the historical Jesus that supplied the motive power which differentiated Christianity from other religions of the time, qualified it for its world-mission and resulted in its ultimate triumph. Maurenbrecher also adds. to the psychological derivation of the resurrection by antecedent influence of this combination of ideas a historico

national factor. In agreement with Bousset and Brückner he insists that the cause of this faith must have been implicit in the disciple's consciousness prior to its origin. He supplements the impressionistic memory-motive of Bousset's acting upon the Jewish apocalyptic conception of the Messiah not only by the mythological idea of the dying and rising God but also by the hypothesis of a special disposition in the mental inheritance of Jesus' disciples wrought in them through the national experiences of the people to which they belonged. Of the disciples confronted by the overwhelming fact of Jesus's death he says:5

.58

At this point it appears that [the mental disposition of] these men was determined by the development of the people from which they had sprung. For centuries this people had been trained in the ability to take from every disillusionment new hope and new illusions. How frequently in the last eight centuries had the great "Now" [of God's intervention] sounded in its history. The appearance of Jesus in Capernaum and the hour of exaltation on the Mount of Olives were not new in the background of its experience. They corresponded with a view which both before and afterward influenced hundreds of men. Without this discipline of their instincts, the recovery of the disciples after Jesus' death would not have happened. But since the recovery from illusion was a commonplace thing among this people, so now from the terrible catastrophe hope was quickened again and all the more exultantly. What the disciples experienced in the appearances of the risen [Lord] was thus no individual occurrence that might have happened anywhere and at any time. It was the product of the history of this people under whose influence these individuals had been formed. This century-long training of the feeling and volition characteristic of the individual constitutes the necessary condition precedent upon which the very possibility of the experience of the appearances of the risen [Lord] by the Galilean Sea was contingent.

The multiplication of causes to account for the faith of the disciples is indicative of the insufficiency of the separate elements of the theory; and their combination is neither adequately grounded nor possessed of any unifying principle in the conditions precedent to the result to be explained. Memory of Jesus there was; and the impression of His person

58 Von Nazareth nach Golgatha, 1909, p. 262.

upon His disciples during His earthly life was undoubtedly profound. But this alone will not explain the triumph of their faith nor its form. Apocalyptic Messianism, which was also a condition precedent, fails equally to account for the element of suffering or explain the form of the new faith. The pagan idea of the dying and rising God is non-Messianic, anti-historical, and there is not only no evidence of its influence but rather of the absence of influence upon the thought of the disciples prior to Jesus' death. Those therefore are more consistent who seek to escape the difficulties of this explanation of the resurrection-faith by eliminating not simply the resurrection but the death, and thus the person, of Jesus from the sphere of history. But this view, like the myth which it substitutes for historical fact, isnot partially but consistently-anti-historical, and is by the evidence condemned as untrue.

But if the "liberal" impressionistic theory, with the help of the pre-Christian Jewish transcendental Messiah conception, fails to explain the element of suffering and resurrection in the Christian faith; and the intermediate theory of Maurenbrecher, with the help of a historico-national psychology and the mythological motive, fails to ground the mediation of the idea of the dying and rising God in the circles in which Christian faith arose and Maurenbrecher offers no evidence of its influence but bases his whole contention on the possibility of its presence in the semi-pagan circles of Galilee-there are but two alternatives; the mythological or "radical" theory which eliminates the historical element in Christian faith by transforming Jesus Himself into a pre-Christian myth; and the view of the New Testament which combines the two elements, the historical and the transcendent, and grounds them in the reality which was manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. The "radical" view is disproven by substantial evidence, and serves a useful purpose by exhibiting in concrete form the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic theories. The other-the New Testament view-is frankly supernaturalistic and ex

plains Christian faith and the course and vitality of the Christian religion in terms of the reality of its object. To this object both faith and worship are due because the high predicate of transcendence is grounded in His divine nature; and of this personal object of faith and worship the resurrection is believed upon the same grounds upon which His transcendence and the atoning significance of His death are believed.

Princeton.

WILLIAM P. ARMSTRONG,

REVIEWS OF

RECENT LITERATURE

APOLOGETICAL THEOLOGY

The Threshold of Religion. By R. R. MARETT, M.A., D.Sc., Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford; University Reader in Social Anthropology; President of the Folk Lore Society. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1914. 8vo; pp. xxxii, 224. $1.50. We have here eight essays. They have all, or almost all, been published before. They are now issued, after but slight revision, in a single volume with an "Introduction" and an "Index." The titles of the essays are I. "Pre-Animistic Religion", II. "From Spell to Prayer", III. "Is Taboo a Negative Magic", IV. "The Conception of Mana", V. "A Sociological View of Comparative Religion", VI. "Savage Supreme Beings and The Bull-Roarer", VII. "The Birth of Humility", VIII. "In a Prehistoric Sanctuary".

"The papers here brought together bear one and all on the same general topic, namely, the nature of the experience involved in rudimentary religion." "Again, all of them alike illustrate the same general thesis, namely, that much of what has hitherto been classed as magic-so far as it has been noticed at all-is really religion of an elementary kind." "As regards method, while the author's general attitude is that of an anthropologist, his special interest is psychological. He approaches the history of religion as a student of Man in evolution. But his more immediate aim is to translate a type of religious experience remote from our own into such terms of our consciousness as may best enable the nature of that which is so translated to appear for what it is in itself." In a word, "he concentrates his attention on the psychological analysis of rudimentary religion."

His analysis of rudimentary religion sets forth from the assumption that, as a form of experience, it develops mainly within a sphere of its own. It belongs, as it were, to a wonder-world, from which the workaday world is parted by a sufficiently well-marked frontier. Why there should be this discontinuity pervading the activities and affairs of savage life the writer does not seek to explain so much as to describe. His purpose is to set forth "what sort of an experience it is how "it feels"-to live in such a wonder-world. Such are the subject, the method, and the aim of these papers. That they are well done is only what was to be expected from the author's position and reputation. It is not always, however, or often, that scientific and technical essays are written with such grace, brightness and, we may add, humility. Dr. Marett has succeeded in rendering interesting, and