AUTHOR’S PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE theology of the nineteenth century has aimed at giving special prominence to the ethical phase of Christianity; and yet, strangely enough, the scientific treatment of Christian ethics has shown, as compared to the other branches of theology, a far inferior productiveness, and in fact a degree of barrenness. This phenomenon is not explainable from any precedent over-fruitfulness. nor from any unquestioning satisfaction with any already-attained relatively-definitive perfection of the science, nor from the imposing pre-eminence of any exceptionally great author; on the contrary, every competent theologian knows perfectly well that no other branch of theology is so far from having reached any, even relatively, settled completeness and generally-accepted form and contents, as precisely the science of ethics. Even the very idea, contents, and boundaries of ethics, are as yet in many respects so unsettled that the different presentations of the science have often only very remote resemblances to each other; 2and there are some recent theologians who look upon the ethical field as something like an ownerless primeval forest wherein they are at liberty to roam at simple discretion and to give free scope to all sorts of pet speculations. We would of course not wish to shut the field of theology against philosophical thought; on the contrary, we regard its scientific completion as possible only on condition of its permeation with mature philosophical thought-labor. In view, however, of the not only manifold, but also (in very deep-reaching and essential ground-principles) self-contradicting philosophical systems of the time, we could not advise Theology—that guardian of sacred treasures—to cast itself away, in characterless self-forgetfulness, into the arms of the first transiently-shining philosophical system, and to seek its glory only in a pliable self-conformity to the rapidly-passing Protean forms of the philosophies of the day. Remarkable indeed, though not precisely very praiseworthy, is the metamorphic capability of those theologians who have kept pace in their theology with the entire history of philosophy from Kant down to Hegel, and have furnished the public at each decade with an entirely different form of theology. It is not scientific truthfulness to attempt violently to force together irreconcilable elements; and it is high time that the day were past when men presume to introduce Spinozistic and other kindred Hegelian 3conceptions into Christian ethics as its own contents proper. We fully recognize the high services of precisely the latest forms of philosophy, for the science of ethics; but we must guard against allowing theological ethics, as conscious of its divinely revealed contents, and as basing itself upon the holy Scriptures, to be cramped and thrown into the background by these philosophical systems. Precisely the most recent developments in this field justify us in entertaining, at this point, a prudent distrust. The manner in which some have introduced philosophical, or a so-called “theological, speculation” into the field of Christian ethics, reminds one only too much of the feats of the suitors of Penelope in the house of Ulysses, who presume to cast their footstools at the head of the returning master, and yet prove incapable even of bending the bow of the hero, to say nothing of shooting through the twelvefold target.

What we attempt in the present work is neither speculative ethics nor yet Biblical ethics in the sense of a purely exegetico-historical science, but, in fact, a system of theological ethics based on the substance and spirit of the Bible, and constructed into a scientific form, not by the help of a philosophy foreign to that spirit, but by the inner self-development of the spirit itself. Whether we have properly comprehended this spirit, and whether we have faithfully learned from the general 4history of science, including also philosophy, others will have to judge; this much, however, we know, that we have endeavored to acquire such learning only in honest loyalty to the Gospel. And the fact that we have omitted to employ many technical forms that have been imposed upon this science by ingenious authors, will, we hope, be regarded, by those who have grown familiar with said forms, as at least an indication of a sincere endeavor on our part to avoid breaking the impression of simple evangelical truth by any element foreign to the spirit of the Scriptures, however much it may enjoy the prestige of profundity, and however artfully it may have been fitted upon Christian ideas.

BERLIN, Dec. 31, 1860.