Evolution. Since the Enlightenment the optimism
concerning progress already founded in humanism has
broken new ground and, coupled with awakening his-
torical thought, leads to the idea that history strives
toward its goal of salvation in constant or in undulating
development. This notion of development can be con-
nected, as we have seen, with the apocalyptic idea of
the sudden end of history. In idealism it clearly leaves
virtually no room for apocalyptic eschatology, and
even in secular eschatology ideas of evolution and
revolution are in mutual contention.
Evolutionary ideas were particularly stimulated
(mostly they had sought the felicitous outcome of his-
tory in a remote future, and originally they were based
solely on the philosophy of history) in the nineteenth
century by Darwin's scientific theories of evolution and
by the enormous advances of modern technology. The
incorporation of the totality of Nature in an eschatol-
ogy assimilated to apocalyptic accounts had already
been initiated by Oetinger and in Schelling's philoso-
phy of nature, although it had appeared also in a
number of Enlightenment figures; and thus combina-
tions of hopes for the Kingdom of God and techno-
logical utopias are to be found since the Renaissance.
Darwin's doctrine of the higher development of species
as well as faith in technological progress then led in
the nineteenth century, on the one hand, to purely
secularized hopes for the
Übermensch and a perfected
society liberated from material need, and, on the other
hand, to theological attempts to reconcile the evolu-
tionary ideas of natural science with the superseded
eschatology. Mention should be made in this connec-
tion, for example, of the Scotsman James McCosh
(d. 1894), the Unitarian Minot J. Savage (d. 1918),
and also the English theologian Henry Drummond
(d. 1897), on whose views God reveals Himself in a
natural evolution that is to lead to a “more divine”
man. By comparing the evolution of creation with a
column topped by a capital, Drummond takes Chris-
tian salvationism as the pinnacle of universal evolution.
Among others thinking along the same lines in the
twentieth century are the German philosopher Leo-
pold Ziegler and the French Jesuit and anthropologist
Teilhard de Chardin, who associates the “God from
above” with the “God striving forward,” and whose
thinking is not only regarded highly in Christian circles,
but also plays an important role in the Christian-
Marxist dialogue whenever revolutionary Marxist
pathos is corrected by evolutionary thought.
