Nathaniel Schmidt - Theology

Theology

A few years prior to his death and reflecting on his life’s work, Schmidt used a speech before the Society for Ethical Culture to note that theology, as an area of study, could only survive and maintain its influence as a science dealing with all the religious phenomena if it increased its level of scrutiny, investigation, and finding new ways of practical application. Schmidt reserved some of his more caustic critique for Christian denominations holding to practices which no longer served the purposes upon adoption. The theology of Professor Schmidt was decidedly literal and non-traditional. He found no evidence in Scriptures for the miraculous birth of the Christ, nor did the traditional love songs of David prophesize the coming of the Messiah.

In 1930, Professor Albert Einstein prompted a theological discussion through the New York Times Magazine. Eight renown theologians responded to the physicist’s views on religion. The Reverend John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church endorsed Einstein’s view and noted that it answered one half of two essential questions in human existence. The first question, what is this world? The answer to that question is provided by “Science.” The second question, what can be done with the world? The answer to that question is provided by “Religion.” In laying out this analysis, Reverend Holmes noted, “his is surely what Professor Nathaniel Schmidt means when he says in this recent book, “The Coming Religion,” that religion is “man’s consciousness of some power in nature determining man’s destiny, and the ordering of his life in harmony with its demands.” The commenter then continued by noting that Schmidt’s work in The Coming Religion established the theological framework for theology half of Einstein’s two-question dichotomy. There is a sense in Schmidt’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s that the First World War changed the nature of people’s religious beliefs. In particular, he observed that traditional manifestations of religious expression were in decline, but that the boundaries of religious expression were expanding, and “the essence of religion gaining in clarity, purity and depth.” With respect to the study of the Hebraic roots of Western culture, Schmidt’s final position was that the expansion of historical knowledge, a widening of the historians subject-matter reach, had lessened the importance of Hebrew heritage.