Strauss was
deprived of his professorship at Tuebingen, and his career was ruined.
Renan, whose sensational Life of Jesus also rejected the supernatural,
lost his chair in the College de France. Buechner was driven from
Tuebingen (1855) for his book on Force and Matter, which, appealing to
the general public, set forth the futility of supernatural explanations
of the universe. An attempt was made to chase Haeckel from Jena. In
recent years,
[199] a French Catholic, the Abbe Loisy, has made notable contributions
to the study of the New Testament and he was rewarded by major
excommunication in 1907.
Loisy is the most prominent figure in a growing movement within the
Catholic Church known as Modernism--a movement which some think is the
gravest crisis in the history of the Church since the thirteenth
century. The Modernists do not form an organized party; they have no
programme. They are devoted to the Church, to its traditions and
associations, but they look on Christianity as a religion which has
developed, and whose vitality depends upon its continuing to develop.
They are bent on reinterpreting the dogmas in the light of modern
science and criticism. The idea of development had already been applied
by Cardinal Newman to Catholic theology. He taught that it was a
natural, and therefore legitimate, development of the primitive creed.
But he did not draw the conclusion which the Modernists draw that if
Catholicism is not to lose its power of growth and die, it must
assimilate some of the results of modern thought.
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