God through our Spiritual Network (Pray Pub). The Armor of God is mentioned in Ephesians 6:10-18 and symbolizes the spiritual protection provided by God. The different activities mentioned above overlap substantially. Troeltsch, it may be noted, had some effect on the sociology of religion-e.g., in his distinction between church-type and sect-type organizations in the history of Christianity, a distinction that has formed the starting point of considerable researches in recent times, as noted above. One such was that of the aforementioned German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), whose ideas have been sketched above. Important in trying to spell out principles for dealing with the material was Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), who argued that history has to be written in accordance with the following principles: first, the principle of criticism-i.e., the sifting of the evidences and testing of conclusions (thus historical certainty about much in the ancient witnesses to Jesus is impossible); second, the principle of analogy-i.e., in the absence of firsthand experience, scholars must treat reports of miraculous events with skepticism since people do not encounter such events in their own experiences (here Troeltsch adopted the position of David Hume); and, third, the principle of correlation-i.e., events in history are continuous with one another in a causal nexus, which rules out irruptions into the causal order by God: if he works in history, he is immanently in all of it.

We believe that salvation is a free gift of God, wholly apart from works (Eph. The system works on the principle of a Free Market, in which all financial dealings are controlled by private producers and consumers. His own system, the system of the Absolute, contained a view of the place of religion in human life. Authenticity, on the other hand, involves a kind of stoicism (positive attitude toward life and suffering) in which death is taken up as a possibility and human beings face the “nothing.” The structure of the human world as analyzed by Heidegger is revealed, in a sense, affectively-i.e., through care, anxiety, and other existential attitudes and feelings. A pioneer in the attempt to understand the mythological elements in the New Testament was the German theologian David F. Strauss (1808-74), whose controversial Life of Jesus (published in German, 1835-36) was an attempt to sift out the historical Jesus from the overlay of myth created by the poetic imagination of the early church.

The French theologian Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), from a Roman Catholic point of view but taking into account the work of Protestant biblical critics, found the essence of Christianity in the faith of the developed church, which could not be found simply by trying to discover the nature of the historical Jesus. Bultmann came to the New Testament material partly as a historian and partly as a theologian influenced by the existentialism of Heidegger. The most influential modern existentialists were the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and the French philosopher, dramatist, and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80); the former was especially important in the development of modern Continental theology, particularly for the use made of some of his ideas by Rudolf Bultmann. Similarly, the German church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), influenced by Albrecht Ritschl, intended to penetrate the accretions of dogma attached to the historical Jesus. Thus, incidentally, it became important for New Testament historians who were influenced by Schleiermacher to penetrate the religious consciousness of Jesus-this becoming, in effect, the reputed locus of his divinity. This was some distance from the rationalism of Kant, though Cassirer was nevertheless influenced by the Neo-Kantian tradition. Schleiermacher’s delineation of religious experience was complemented by attempts among the Romantics and by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) to exhibit the nature of symbolic thinking and in particular the special character of religious symbolism.

Troeltsch thereby raised some important questions about the relationship between Christianity and other religions and showed how Christian theology was beginning to take a more realistic view of religious experience and history, in distinction to the earlier rather simplistic dichotomies between special (i.e., Judeo-Christian) and general (i.e., natural) revelation. Metaphysical systems (concerning the nature of reality) sometimes function as analogues to natural theology and thus provide a kind of support for a revealed religious belief system. Since religions are cultural products and since each system of belief is organic and particular, there are, according to Kraemer, no points of contact between them and the Gospel (even Christianity as an empirical religion must be distinguished from it: its only advantage is to have been continuously under the judgment and influence of the Gospel). But Kant’s system depended on drawing certain distinctions, such as that between pure and practical reason, which were open to challenge. They have always believed and depended on God whenever some kind of crisis reared its head and they somehow survived. His theology depended in part on a distinction between the Word (i.e., God’s self-revelation as concretely manifested in Christ and in preaching) and religion. For this reason philosophy can easily become an adjunct of theology or of antireligious positions.