If the Socinians and the theologians of the Aufklärung still insist that no necessary connection is to be assumed between the forgiveness of sins and the historical position of Christ, this view depends as usual on certain assumptions, and not on a careful consideration of historical facts. The former thinkers lay stress on God’s equity, the latter on His love, as the permanent ground for expecting forgiveness to be, properly speaking, a matter of course between God and men. Now what the writers of the Aufklärung understand by God’s love is distinguished from the equity asserted by the Socinians merely by the fact that the latter is deduced from a special resolve of God, while the former is presupposed as God’s natural attitude. But that positive assertion and this natural presupposition both stand as much out of relation to a moral order of the world as they conflict with all the historical conditions under which religions exist. There is no religion that is not positive, and there has never been; natural religion, so called, is an imagination. Every social religion has been instituted. For not only must every social and regular cultus be referred back to special causes and the authority of individual men, but even the myths of the gods are special combinations of natural phenomena with the idea of God—combinations which were first made by individual men and recognised by others on their authority. The general ideas of God—that He is not the world, that He is absolute Power, that He is the mild and indulgent Will, that He is the Lawgiver who imposes universal duties—are products of scientific knowledge, which as such are also subject for their production to special conditions, and have gained a special currency through the consent of men; but they are neither innate in each individual human mind, nor necessary results of reflection upon our position in the world. These ideas came into vogue as substitutes for the religious knowledge of God, when the understanding of the positive religions had become obscure. However general the adoption of these ideas in such circumstances has become, their vogue as a kind of religion is proved to be surreptitious by the very fact that they have led to no kind of common cultus. The Socinian assertion, that God by a counsel of equity treats men created without rights as possessors of relative rights in reference to Himself, is so far from being self-evident that it is merely a modification of the scientific hypothesis current in the theology of the Middle Ages. The Aufklärung assumption of the love of God is the expression of a habituation to the Christian idea of God, under the peculiar circumstances in which philosophical naturalism and religious and moral individualism paralysed the persuasive power of the statutory Dogmatics. If, therefore, God’s love or equitable forbearance is recognised as the ground of forgiveness, it is indispensable, with a view to historical fulness of conviction, to connect the latter with the personal activity of Jesus in His vocation as the necessary intermediate cause. To this has to be added the fact that both the Socinians and the theologians of the Aufklärung always relate the forgiveness of sins and the moral order of life merely to single individuals as such. This conception of the religious and moral life, however, conflicts with the general rule that the individual acts in these relations only as a member of the family, the tribe, the nation, the spiritual humanity, and with a more or less clear consciousness of this principle. The latter also regulates the history of the positive religions in so far as they have become a cultus, and in so far as they have become operative as a standard for the valuation of all kinds of social and political institutions. Finally, the existence of the Aufklärung itself is an example of the same principle, for it has a persuasive power merely as a tradition in certain strata of national culture, and not as necessarily produced by an independent knowledge of each individual as such.

Against the necessity of attaching the forgiveness of sins to the personal work of Christ, the Socinians further appeal to the fact attested by the Old Testament, that God also communicated forgiveness in former times without this means, simply according to His free resolve. We see here a peculiar overestimate of what is indefinite and imperfect in its kind, as against the definite and perfect. And indeed this judgment is again determined less by a full historical consideration of the facts, than by the Socinian view of God as intrinsically indeterminate Will. No doubt in the religion of the Old Testament a certain exercise of Divine forgiveness is statutorily defined in the offerings for sin and guilt; still the personal moral craving for forgiveness is not satisfied by such an institution, all the less because the idea of sin which accompanies it is generally confined to unavoidable bodily uncleanness, and involuntary violations of theocratic rights. In part, however, the individual petitions for Divine forgiveness in the Psalms stand out of relation to those acts of worship; in part, the prayers of the Psalmists and the prophetic promises of universal forgiveness count on the restoration of personal prosperity, or of the political integrity of the nation, as the proper evidence of Divine favour (vol. ii. p. 58). If, then, we recognise in cases of the latter kind, particularly in Jeremiah’s promise of the new covenant, a distinct tendency to assure oneself of forgiveness as a general dispensation belonging to the higher stage of the development of the religious community, the similar prayers of individual Psalmists appear, according to the standard already found in the Old Testament, as the first and less perfect attempts to reach that goal. But the imperfection of both phenomena in comparison with Christianity is shown by the very fact that the restoration of outward prosperity, protection from the injuries of persecutors, in general, equilibrium between the unfettered use of nature and spiritual purity, is anticipated as the necessary consummation and proof of inward holiness. According to this standard, the Psalmists can, of course, scarcely ever have reached the conviction that their prayer was fulfilled; and the promises of the prophets were fulfilled through Christ only by their expectation of outward prosperity for the Chosen People being transformed into the idea that all sufferings have to be patiently borne for the sake of the forgiveness of sins. Thus the Socinian appeal against connecting forgiveness with the work of Christ would be valid only if the Old Testament anticipations were verified—the anticipations, namely, that spiritual reconciliation with God would be accompanied by material deliverance from all the ills of life, or would be followed by deliverance from the material penalties of sin. For the change of the sinner’s relation to God must be verified by his position relatively to the world. But as experience never furnishes this proof of forgiveness which was expected by the men of the Old Testament and again by the Socinians, and as the formal change of position relatively to the world which is asserted as the consequence of forgiveness in the Christian sense is neither clearly expressed in the Old Testament nor looked for by the Socinians, the Socinian assumption of a general order of Divine forgiveness which should be independent of Christ is out of all relation to experience and utterly void of meaning.

On the other hand, the particular cases in which Christ bestows forgiveness result from His consciousness of standing in the closest conceivable relation to God, and of being called to receive others into the same relation in such a way that their sins shall present no obstacle to their trust in God and God’s communion with them. In comparison with this, it is a matter of indifference whether the punishment due to definite personal sin is materially removed, in accordance with the Old Testament expectation, by Christ’s healing power, or whether the estimate of it is formally changed. This personal method is not inconsistent with the fact that the representatives of the Christian community attach the general validity of forgiveness to Christ’s death, especially as the idea of doing so was suggested by Christ’s own discourse at the Supper. For the new covenant which He announces that He is about to conclude by His sacrificial death unites the new community with God, in accordance with Jeremiah’s prophecy, on the basis of forgiveness. Now, if we reflect that the fulfilment of Christ’s task in His vocation, through His willingness to die for its accomplishment, constitutes the highest proof of His personal communion with God as His Father (§ 48), and that this position of His also establishes Christ’s right to bestow forgiveness on individuals in those cases which occurred previously, it is but logical to connect with Christ’s death the forgiveness provided for later generations. For Christ’s death, as it must be explained by His previous obedience, is, in the view of the Apostles, the summary expression of the fact that Christ maintained His religious unity with God and His position as the Revealer of God throughout the whole course of His life. As an indication of His personal perfection in the life-destiny which fell to Him, and which was recognised in His intention to found a new covenant-community, Christ’s death, with forgiveness as its purpose, merely represents the religious value of Christ’s Person, fully exhibited in its nature, for later generations. If we ascribe the cases of special forgiveness by Christ to His ordinary authority, as His words in Mark ii. 10 require us to do, the reference in the Supper discourse, which Matt. xxvi. 28 appropriately supplements, can be explained in harmony therewith only provided we do not conceive the purpose of Christ’s death under any principle which would be opposed to the purpose of His life. But if we still suppose that the purpose of Christ’s death is to be interpreted as penal satisfaction, we see ourselves compelled to exclude the previous cases, contrary to the words of Scripture, from Christ’s ordinary authority, or we should have to force on these utterances of Christ the meaning that He made them beforehand in view of His vicarious penal suffering. This, however, would be no exposition, but a violent importation, which theological caprice cannot allow itself without pronouncing its own condemnation.

§ 56. As Christ connects the bestowal of forgiveness with the prophecy of Jeremiah, forgiveness is to be regarded as the common fundamental attribute of the community to be founded by Him. This goal quite distinctly transcends the sporadic and casual form of the blessing of forgiveness, from which the Socinians and the theologians of the Aufklärung borrow their standard for judging the matter. Their representations therefore set at nought the specific character of the Christian religion.

Forgiveness, as an attribute of that Christian community, implies that in that community men may enjoy fellowship with God in spite of their sins and in spite of the intensifying of their sense of guilt. For this peculiar antithesis, to be found in men’s religious self-judgment and feeling, has to be taken into consideration in a full account of the matter in hand. Just as forgiveness on God’s side does not mean that He forgets men’s sin and arrives at a judgment which would belie the facts of the case (§ 13), so on men’s side the assurance of forgiveness cannot be supposed to imply that they forget their sins as something indifferent, and pay no regard to them in their own judgment of themselves. On the contrary, the impression of the value of forgiveness is the first thing that will keep the sense of the unworthiness of our own offences properly awake. For the more highly the Divine grace in this bestowal of forgiveness is prized, the more keenly must the contrast between our offences and our reception into God’s fellowship make itself felt. This fact is not made quite clear by the ordinary doctrine of poenitentia, which Lutherans owe to Melanchthon (vol. i. p. 200). This doctrine posits the idea that the greatest intensity of the sense of guilt, arising from a comparison of sin with the Divine law, precedes the act of faith which embraces forgiveness; and the consequence would be that in peace of conscience even the recollection of former guilt would be able to cause no disturbance of feeling. This doctrine, in analogy with the Catholic sacrament of penance, is based on the assumption that a loss of grace, and consequently an interruption of the consciousness of forgiveness, has taken place, and that grace is to be recovered by contritio and fides. This principle, however, would not only deny all coherent development of Christian character, but it is also opposed to Luther’s Reformation principle that the whole of life is a repentance. The culture of Christian character is secured by the fact that faith in Divine grace is always the motive and not the end of contritio, since all self-examination and self-discipline through the Divine law originates in that love of the good which is based on the turning of the will to God, that is, on reconciliation with God. This is in keeping with the other principle that it is just by the gospel of forgiveness that we recognise our sin (p. 160). For as forgiveness does not remove the sense of guilt for past sins, but only its power of separating us from God, or that distrust of God which attaches to it (p. 60), so the assurance of forgiveness is confirmed by the very fact that it intensifies the sense of guilt for sins which we commit, and in general awakens a sensitive dread of transgression. For if a fall from the state of grace as such can be made out, it would hold good of such a sin as a man did not immediately repent of, but excused and palliated and refused to acknowledge as sin at all. In so far, then, as forgiveness is experienced in Christianity by every individual as the common foundation and presupposition of the communion with God which is experienced in faith, it necessarily has associated with it the continuance in the memory of the previous sense of guilt, and the intensifying of the sense of guilt for subsequent cases of sin. But this has no longer the significance of Divine punishment attached to it, since the confidence which lays hold of God’s promise is associated with these phenomena, and excludes the unhappiness of the previous state. A want of tenderness of feeling accompanied by the assurance of forgiveness would prove the latter to be surreptitious, and indicate a state of religious hypocrisy (vol. i. p. 465).

If, however, the abiding assurance of communion with God, which is attained in spite of the fact that we have sinned and do sin, is bound up with the Fatherly love of God, and if we are conscious of this position relatively to God as one which is common to many, and if even the Socinians and the writers of the Aufklärung will not deny that it is just in the Christian community that we exercise this relation, this result will have to be referred to the action of Christ by which He became the Founder of that community. This is different from the case of Jeremiah, who, as a prophet, anticipated the forgiveness of sins, under certain objective and subjective conditions, for a future state of human affairs which was independent of himself. Rather does the admission of the members of the Christian community to communion with God in spite of their sins and their sense of guilt, which is expressed in forgiveness, find its typical standard and historical ground in Christ’s communion with God, which He maintained in the whole course of His life, especially in His willingness to suffer for the sake of His vocation, and in the patience which He exercised even unto death. Now, though the material of His vocation is one and the same, yet in it Christ may be compared both to a prophet and to a priest. In the course of His life He in the first place demonstrated to men His Father’s love, grace, and truth, by exercising His Divine vocation, to found the Kingdom of God, from the same motive of love to men which constitutes God’s proper will for the realising of their happiness. At the same time we must remember that He exercised the love of God in the form of obedience to God’s commission, and that He accomplished this task by faith in His Father and by prayer, in such a way as to continually assure Himself in this form of His activity of the ground of His existence as the Revealer of God (John xv. 10, x. 17, 18). This achievement of His life, from this point of view, is also intelligible as being not only for His own sake, but for the purpose of introducing His disciples into the same position towards God. If Christ assures Himself by the obedience indicated of His nearness, His priestly relation, to God, that includes the intention that the existing and the future community should reach the same position. That is to say, Christ as a Priest is the representative of the community which He brings to God through the perfect fulfilment of His personal life (xvii. 19–26). This use of representation is inclusive, not, as it generally is, exclusive. The meaning of the idea is not that what Christ does as a Priest, the community does not require to do; but rather that what Christ as a Priest does first in the place and as the representative of the community, there the community itself has accordingly to take up its position. But the community of Christ is composed of sinners, who as such are aliens and strangers to God. Their effective union with God is therefore to be thought of as the forgiveness of their sins, as the ending of their separation from God, as the removal of that sense of guilt which is associated with distrust. This special means of founding the Church also originates in Christ’s whole conduct of His life, viewed in the light of His double relation to God. For in so far as our aim is to understand forgiveness as proceeding from the loving will of God the Father, Who permits sinners to draw nigh to Himself, this will is manifested as the grace and truth in which Christ represents God for men. On the other hand, when what we want is to see forgiveness become operative as the attribute of a community, this aspect of it is guaranteed by the community’s Representative, Whose inviolably maintained position towards the love of God, which is distinctive of Him, is imputed by God to those who are to be accounted His (p. 71). Because Christ kept Himself in the love of God by His obedience even unto death, God’s forgiving love is thereby secured beforehand to those who belong to Christ’s community. Their guilt is not taken into account in God’s judgment, since they are admitted in the train of God’s beloved Son to the position towards God which was assumed and maintained by Him. The verdict of justification or forgiveness is therefore not to be formulated in such a way that the community has its relationship to Christ imputed to it, but in such a way that the community which belongs to Christ has imputed to it His position towards the love of God, in which He maintained Himself by His obedience.

This argument is related to the line of thought which is indicated in Christ’s discourses in John. Of equal value with this train of ideas are Christ’s parables of the flock for which the shepherd cares and lays down his life, of the vine which bears the branches and keeps them alive. In both of these figures He brings His saving, life-preserving work into relation to the community of His disciples as a whole. In the same way it is the unmistakable meaning of the Supper discourse that the result of Christ’s priestly offering or sacrificial death is designed for the disciples, in so far as they are the community of the new covenant to be founded on forgiveness. The Apostles attach themselves to this covenant in that they regard Christ’s death partly in accordance with the pattern of the covenant sacrifice, partly in accordance with that of the yearly sin-offering, both of which are related to the Israelitish community. Empirically the community always comes into existence as a collective unity of individuals. But in so far as the individual determines by faith the meaning of the community in the Christian view of the world and of life, he must regard the community as the whole which, without regard to enumeration of members, is founded by Christ in consequence of God’s purpose of salvation, and which the individual always finds already existing as the body within which, as a believer in Christ, he will meet his own kind. If we are to explain forgiveness, in accordance with the teaching of the Church, by the purpose of Christ, we inevitably think of it as addressed to the community for the present and the future, and not to the twelve individual disciples and the multitudes who should follow them; for no human intelligence is capable of grasping the latter idea.

The introduction of the community into the idea of forgiveness as a benefit to be derived from the love of God and the mediation of Christ (p. 110), was planned by Luther and carried out in the theology of Calvin and his followers (vol. i. pp. 205, 308). The idea is also advocated by Lutheran ascetics and Pietistic theologians. On the other hand, it is not current in Lutheran Dogmatics, as Melanchthon never adopted Luther’s idea. Through Melanchthon’s influence the assumption became prevalent in the Lutheran theology that the individual is the direct correlate of justification in God’s purpose, and this has bound up with it the expectation that the assurance of justification can be obtained immediately, i.e. without the mediation of the idea of the community. At the same time this gives rise to the supposition that the view for which I contend denotes a return to Catholicism (vol. i. p. 313). This objection is no doubt very closely connected with the formula in which Schleiermacher expressed the contrast between Catholicism and Protestantism, namely, that the one makes the relation of the individual to Christ dependent on his relation to the Church, the other his relation to the Church on his relation to Christ (vol. i. p. 520). This formula, however, is inconsistent with the very principle with which Schleiermacher enters upon the doctrine of redemption, namely, that the consciousness of redemption through Christ is referred to the mediation of His religious fellowship (vol. i. p. 511). It was only because Schleiermacher was unable to develop this idea (vol. i. p. 519) that he lapsed into the opposite formula in the introduction to the Glaubenslehre. This formula, however, is false. For even the Evangelical Christian’s right relation to Christ is both historically and logically conditioned by the fellowship of believers; historically, because a man always finds the community already existing when he arrives at faith, nor does he attain this end without the action of the community upon him; logically, because no action of Christ upon men can be conceived except in accordance with the standard of Christ’s antecedent purpose to found a community. This position, however, is distinguished from the Catholic view by the fact that it pays no regard to a legal organisation of the community of believers.¹ For the idea of the Church which the Catholic doctrine foists in as a necessary medium between Christ and the individual is the ecclesia repraesentans, the legally privileged clergy, whose members are deemed fit for that purpose even if, ex hypothesi, they do not belong to the community of believers at all, but, as Möhler says, are on the way to hell, or, as Melanchthon has it, are membra satanae. He who cannot distinguish between the legal and the religious idea of the Church is not qualified to pronounce a judgment on this subject. Schleiermacher’s formula, moreover, is merely the reflection of that Pietistic disintegration of the idea of the Church which was rendered possible from the outset by the vagueness in which the Lutheran Dogmatics left the idea of the Church in the order of individual salvation. But this form of doctrine cannot lay claim to clearness and completeness till it is supplemented by the introduction of the idea of the community. It is a Lutheran principle that the justification of the individual is necessarily conditioned by the proclamation of the Gospel. Now this cannot be regarded as the function of Church officials, otherwise we reach no antithesis to the Catholic view, and the religious texture of the exposition is broken. The proclamation of the Gospel, by which the justification of the individual is conditioned, must rather be thought of as the necessary function of the community of believers, cui claves principaliter traditae sunt. If, therefore, this principle of Melanchthon’s tractate De Potestate Papae 24 must be incorporated in the ordinary doctrine of justification, we are bound to admit that the community of believers precedes the justification of the individual. For how shall we regard the community as the original subject of the Gospel, unless we consider it at the same time as the original object of the justifying grace which continues to operate in the Gospel! If, then, we duly supplement those parts of the doctrine which shrivelled up in the hands of the Lutheran divines, we must develop their view into the formula, expressed by Luther, of the justification of the community by Christ. Unless we do so, the inevitable supplement will end in the ministerium verbi divini becoming the precondition of the justification of the individual; and it would then be impossible to point out any essential difference upon this point between Lutheranism and Catholicism (vol. i. pp. 311). But if we are prevented by all kinds of reasons, particularly by the comparison with Luther’s idea of the regnum Christi spirituale (§§ 35, 46), from regarding this supplement as genuine, there is only the other left, which corresponds with the Reformation principle of Lutheran Dogmatics.

In Christ’s purpose, then, the guaranteeing of a general forgiveness to humanity, and the founding of the community whose members recognise in God as His Father their Father also, are equivalent ideas. And in the acknowledged result of His work, our assurance of forgiveness, i.e. of a communion with God which is possible in spite of our sin—and our belonging to the community of those who believe in Christ, are identical. Only on the understanding that these are equivalents it is possible to establish the necessity of the connection asserted between the forgiveness of sins and the personal life of Christ, particularly the completion of His life in His sacrificial death. Now Christ is the Mediator of these coincident effects just in the twofold position which He occupies with the identical material of His life. He is not the Mediator of forgiveness, because, as Head and Representative of humanity or of the community contemplated by Him, He exercises a determining influence upon God to be gracious to men. For His priestly position towards God is subordinated to His displaying, as the Revealer of God, the grace and truth—the love of God to sinners, which purposes their reconciliation without having first to be evoked by the human merit of the Mediator. But in so far as Christ’s obedience includes an effect upon God, Whom Christ Himself at the same time represents, instead of the “merit” with which Christ is supposed to win something from Him, I must again remind my readers that Christ by obedience keeps Himself in the love of God, and further point out that in doing so He at the same time represents His community before God that it may be the recipient of the forgiveness which God first guarantees by Christ’s grace and truth. This achievement has for God the value that by its means humanity, entering into the community of Christ, is brought to the goal of the Kingdom of God, which is God’s own most personal end.

The Kingship of Christ, however, while it includes under His prophetic and priestly work one and the same material of His life, has not the same value in both. Patience in suffering is the possessor of dominion over the world; it is in this respect the mark of Christ’s Godhead and His solidarity with the Father. It is at the same time the mark of the perfect obedience which enables Christ as Head of the community to represent it before God for the receiving of forgiveness. But in the former relation it is Christ’s dominion over the world, in the latter His much closer dominion over the community that comes into view. Now this gradation is just the right order of the relation. For unless the dual position of Christ in His mediatorship is to lead to a contradiction, His priestly quality must be subordinated to His prophetic so as even to be embraced in it. This, however, cannot be maintained unless the supreme, that is, the kingly dignity assumes a wider meaning when Christ is regarded as the Revealer of God than when He is a Representative of the community. No revelation of God is complete apart from recognition of the believing community. If, however, the Christian community views the revelation of God in Christ as perfect, it must in some way or other be capable of being combined in thought with Christ, it must find its own position prefigured in the course of the revelation in Christ. Now this takes place when, along with His quality as a Revealer, and with reference to the same material of His life, it likewise recognises Him as its foregoing Representative, Who as the Receiver of revelation represented it before it gained its special historical form. This also shows that Christ as Lord and King of the Church has not the directly cosmical significance which is expressed in His Divine dominion. It is only indirectly that the latter also has to be considered in His relation to the community, in so far as His obedience exalts Him above the world, and in so far as the community by its endowment with the forgiveness of sins has received the capacity for life and blessedness.

The only question is whether this exposition is complete. It will have to be tested in view of such New Testament data as have not been specially considered, and may be regarded as traversing the rounded conception of Christ’s vocation. It will also be necessary to allow for the claims of individual religious experience, which partly opposes the principle that it can assure itself of justification only within the framework of the community, and partly connects with Christ’s achievement expectations which cannot be biblically verified. I am the more willing to discuss these objections because the author² of them agrees on the whole with my expositions, and merely endeavours to supplement or deepen them. If I rightly understand the starting-point of this undertaking, it is the method of the Pietists, which is at once to long for the forgiveness of sin, and to struggle against the simple appropriation of it from the promise of God. It is to this phenomenon that Häring alludes when he brings into prominence the twofold nature of the consciousness of guilt, as being at once the state of Divine punishment, properly so called, and the condition of God’s forgiveness. He bases on this an objection to the reference of forgiveness to the community and to the individual in it. For he thinks that this combination of ideas affords no adequate solution of the problem how the individual becomes conscious of justification, and that this is a question which cannot be evaded. Still, the doctrine which I have set forth coincides with the view which prevailed from the time of Luther (Cat. major, iv. 41, 44) till that of Spener inclusive—the view that as members of the Church we are to determine the reference of forgiveness to ourselves by the baptism which we have received. When Luther made this statement he knew from his experience in the Catholic Church the same difficulties as the Pietists feel in their striving after the assurance of salvation. Therefore I no more require to be guided by these arbitrary endeavours to reach assurance of forgiveness than did Luther.

For the satisfaction of the Pietists, however, who are never done with their confession of sin and repentance, in order that they may bring forgiveness in Christ into relation to themselves, what more is to be assumed in Christ’s vicarious work? According to Häring, the point is that the imperfect repentance wrought by men is completed by an analogous work on Christ’s part. This does not imply that Christ Himself repented of sin; for as he had no personal experience or knowledge of sin, this work is not to be imputed to Him. But Häring thinks it may be assumed that Christ’s consciousness in His vocation included the painful knowledge of the opposition of all sin to God, and thus realised the purpose of punishment, which sinners with all their sense of guilt do not perfectly realise. I admit in general that in Christ we have to count upon the purest and tenderest sense of the contrariety of sin to God; but if such a value is to be put on that as is done by Häring, I expect Scripture proof to be adduced. I regard a construction which entirely dispenses with the latter as unreliable; it arouses the suspicion that the picture of Christ is being touched up at one’s own pleasure. The various cases in which Christ showed His grief for the obduracy of certain classes (Mark iii. 5; Matt. xxiii. 37) are no sufficient proof for the statement that Jesus’ sensibility was regularly excited by reflection on sin in general or as a whole. On the contrary, He always regards sinners in their gradation as redeemable and hardened (vol. ii. p. 38). It was Paul who paved the way for a general and identical idea of sin, such as appears in the doctrine of original sin. It was, moreover, in the asceticism of the Middle Ages, from Anselm onward, that this idea received the explanation which Häring regards as self-evident; and Pietism follows the latter because it carries on the mediaeval mode of thought. The Pietist aspires to embrace the sin of all men in his repentance, although, as may be observed in Arndt’s True Christianity, it is rather a mere aesthetic aversion—disgust—which is set forth, than a real imputation of guilt. For we are responsible only for our own sin. It is therefore a mistaken tendency which gives rise to the requirement of the Pietists, for the sake of which Häring postulates that supplementary work of Christ. As the attribute of guilt cannot be proved to belong to original sin, it is a delusion to expect our own repentance to make itself responsible for sin as a whole. But if it cannot do that, we must not look for any supplement in Christ’s infinite grief for sin, which, being in any case different in kind from repentance, can in no way serve as a supplement. People must rather be shown that they are expecting of themselves something which cannot be realised. I therefore reject the proposed deepening of my exposition as something which is not based on Scripture, but called forth by a use of the doctrine of original sin which has its home in the practice of monasticism. But I also reject Häring’s assumption because it is inconsistent with the blessedness of Christ. We may form an idea of the latter by bringing it into line with the fact that we count it all joy to be surrounded with persecutions. In order to fulfil this precept, we must, according to the example of Christ, be filled rather with sorrow for than indignation against those who by unjust persecution tempt us to retaliate. If, however, to prove our reconcilability, we were to fix ourselves in sympathetic grief for the obduracy of our adversaries, little room would be left for the joy which we have to derive from persecutions. There is no reason to transfer to Christ the Pietistic sentimentality which never comes to full joy and pure blessedness, because the effort from which it springs is spurious.

It affords me satisfaction that Häring has withdrawn this attempt to improve upon my doctrine.³ Only he does not rest there, but brings forward what purports to be a supplement of another kind. He agrees with me in believing that Christ’s passion is not the punishment for the sins of men. He says: “Christ awakens repentance essentially by the mysterious (?) fate of His passion; the Cross is the powerful sermon-in-action, telling of the inviolable earnestness of the Divine love, which makes Him to be sin Who knew no sin. He Himself, however, given up to this dark fate, accepts it in humble obedience, because He knows the Divine purpose to show the guilty in this way how earnest God is in condemning sin.”⁴ Häring appeals for support to Dorner, Kähler, Gess, and others. I need only point out that the idea here expressed is that of penal example, which Grotius first introduced under a mistake; and if the theologians named meant to express something weighty and significant in this way, it will no doubt afford them satisfaction to find themselves on the path taken a century ago by Semler, Gruner, Michaelis, and other adherents of the supernaturalistic school (vol. i. pp. 336 ff., 414, 420 ff.).

§ 57. The exposition of the connection between justification as an attribute of the Christian community, and therefore of its members, and the completion of the work of its Founder in His vocation, is conditioned by two considerations, namely, by the positive idea of forgiveness or justification, and by the equally positive estimate of the value of Christ’s suffering as the occasion of His patience, and the test of His fidelity in His calling, and steadfastness in His faith. In this our exposition is in harmony with the positive aim of forgiveness or justification or reconciliation, namely, that freedom of believers in communion with God which consists in dominion over the world, and is to be regarded as eternal life (§§ 52, 54). This result, however, must still be tested on various sides. First of all, it seems to stop short of the requirement that there should be derived from Christ not only a changed relation of men to God as regards the status of sin, but also an actual removal of sin in believers. That is what the saying in 1 Pet. ii. 24 points to in its own way (vol. ii. p. 258). Now the assertion of an effective deliverance of believers from sin seems to require to be reached, partly that Christ’s moral action upon believers may remain in equilibrium with their religious emancipation by Him, partly that the mediating position of the community for the latter purpose may be preserved unimpaired. For the truth already ascertained regarding this position seems to be threatened if we must conceive that the community of believers continues to live and move in active sin; for this fact, if admitted, appears to detract from the genuineness of their religious knowledge of the truth, and from the power of the religious impulse which individuals in the community receive. Certainly this latter consideration is discounted when Oetinger and especially Menken teach that Christ, by Himself resisting all temptations to sin, made human nature sinless, or destroyed the source of ever fresh guilt in believers. Menken declares that this effect must be attributed to Christ, in addition to the removal of guilt (vol. i. p. 613). But this is an ill-considered antithesis. For the removal of guilt must be defined in a positive sense, as meaning that there comes to exist communion with God in which the person reconciled with God directs his will to God as his universal final end. Now as this is the opposite of the sinful direction of the will, the effective removal of guilt becomes the basis of the positive possibility of a life no longer sinful as a whole. But this theory is far from coming up to Menken’s view. For the general direction of the will to the Divine final end which is included in the idea of reconciliation, does not exclude the possibility of fresh guilt. This possibility lies for every individual in the fact that the general motive to sin is complicated in each man with special inclinations and impulses. If Menken, then, intends to affirm that Christ directly and immediately changes believers in this respect, he affirms something which is contrary to experience, and which at the same time we know to be impossible. As a matter of fact, evil inclinations are always got rid of solely by the cultivation of contrary good inclinations; but in so far as this requires special resolves, these never attain their end except where the development of good character is undertaken as a whole. Although the general direction of the will to God—the direction received in reconciliation—becomes operative as the principal motive for the development of good character, there are still required the special moral resolves and decisions which do not logically or of themselves result from the faith of reconciliation, but must always be apprehended by the will as special. By the general assurance of reconciliation or the general purpose of conversion alone, no special vice is uprooted; we cannot thus evade that special conflict with each vice which consists in the fulfilment of the contrary resolutions. These processes, however, which serve for the effective removal of new offences, necessarily fall within the sphere of the self-active moral will which is to be explained by grace. For this reason, sinful depravity, which is not only a common but also a special depravity in every man, cannot be removed at the outset and immediately by the universal atonement of Christ. We may make experiment upon those “believers” who with a very vigorous consciousness of their reconciliation and a life in many respects virtuous, combine arrogance and dogmatism in religion, and a want of respect and charity for those who think differently from themselves. Such men proceed in this way as if their honest zeal for God’s glory protected them without more ado from sins or errors. For I do not suppose that such persons, if we could subject them to serious cross-examination, would palm off those vices as virtues, or as their special licence. Probably the fact of the matter rather is, that they repose too exclusive confidence in the general good will which they have, through reconciliation, in their being directed toward God and the end of the Kingdom of God, just because it is God who guarantees them this good will. But as the idea of a genus does not lead to a knowledge of the species without special observation of the latter, no more does the application of the will which is good on the whole to special cases follow of itself from the presence of the general disposition. On the contrary, the will, which in the latter form is thought of as the general ground of the corresponding activity, must begin to work anew in every special resolution. In so far, then, as sin has its activity in every man in a special form, reconciliation through Christ implies anything but an actual deliverance of believers from sin.

Menken’s statement may, however, be understood in another sense, if we consider the formula, which is also advocated by Oetinger, that Christ, by resisting the temptations of the devil, made human nature sinless. What is expressed here is not the idea of single individuals as sinners, but the idea of that which is common to them all. In this sense, therefore, human nature, as it belongs to every individual, denotes the fact that our moral endowment has for its end the moral destiny of the race. Every individual, however, oversteps this circle of attributes by his special endowments and his peculiar moral activity; the latter may even bring about changes in the subject. Now, if sin, or, as in Christ, the possibility of sin, is presupposed as a general affection of human nature, it is conceivable that human nature should be altered by moral activity, and thus raised above the temptation to sin. This result can be conceived, however, only in so far as the subject has human nature in himself. On the other hand, in so far as human nature belongs to other subjects, the assertion that this endowment is changed simply by the normal moral conduct of another, is altogether worthless.

Menken’s view, however, in the form of it already criticised, appears to be re-echoed in the fundamental formulae of Schleiermacher (Glaubenslehre, §§ 87, 88): “We are conscious that all approximations to the state of blessedness which occur in the Christian life are grounded in a new divinely-produced common life, which counteracts the common life of sin and the unhappiness developed therein.” “In this common life, which goes back to the activity of Jesus, redemption is effected by Him through the communication of His sinless perfection.” It is necessary to come to an understanding with these principles; the more so as Schleiermacher here emphasises the importance of the community of redemption in a way, the absence of which could not but be felt in his special definition of the ideas of redemption and reconciliation (vol. i. p. 517). Now, if the sinless perfection of Christ, which He communicates in redemption or in the common life founded by Him, were to be understood as active moral righteousness, it would have to be objected that such communication was altogether contrary to experience, and inconsistent with the necessary conditions of moral righteousness. However much, even from the religious point of view, must be regarded as divinely communicated, and however distinctly all our ethical endeavours presuppose the reign of Divine grace, we still experience the formation of our moral character, and the separation of it from the impulses of sin which are peculiar to us, as an act of our own will. But Schleiermacher’s purpose in choosing the above expression is not to be understood in Menken’s sense. As he defines the idea of sin as the restriction of the God-consciousness (§ 66), so the sinless perfection of Christ denotes in his sense nothing else than the absolute potency of the God-consciousness. That this consciousness may be communicated, and that it must be specifically represented as communicated and received, follows from the fact that we necessarily conceive our relation to God in the form of God’s action upon us. Since, then, we can think of ourselves as children of God only in the community founded by Christ, in all our consciousness of the activity which corresponds to the Divine sonship we regard this status itself as something received from the historical action of Christ, something appropriated from Him. Schleiermacher, however, raises for himself the objection that the Christian community as a whole, and particularly in certain periods, is seen to participate so largely in the general sinfulness, that we cannot help becoming doubtful of its fitness for the mediation of salvation which is entrusted to it. This circumstance also demands a special consideration in view of the doctrine above developed (§ 56).

The reconciliation of the individual has been connected with the whole life-work of Christ in His vocation thus, that the individual who knows himself reconciled finds himself in the community founded by Christ, and reckons himself as belonging to it, in so far as Christ has established for it the right to see in sin which, as such, is repented of, no hindrance to fellowship with God, but rather to assert the Divine sonship in spite of sin. The Christian community, however, in the course of its history, has carried with it so much actual sin, that the question must be raised whether it has not altogether forfeited the relation of Divine sonship bestowed upon it through Christ’s work of reconciliation, and accordingly become unfit in any sense to mediate for the individual the religious benefits which proceeded from Christ. Is it not this doubt which gives rise to the claim that the Church fulfils its commission to mediate salvation only if from Christ we rightly derive not only reconciliation but effective deliverance from sin, or when the reconciled community is limited in sectarian fashion to those members who have in the strength of reconciliation attained a recognisable degree of special sanctity? The first alternative, however, is impracticable, and the other is, to begin with, at least suspicious. For the moral and the religious aims of Christianity do not absolutely coincide. Good conduct, prompted by the final end of the Kingdom of God, is indeed the conditio sine qua non for the authentication of Divine sonship, so that doubt is cast upon the genuineness of the religious factor where flagrant sinfulness is found along with the profession of Christian truth. But the experience of our Reformation teaches that the discovery of prevalent immorality and superstitious perversity in the Christian Church may be the very means of directing the attention more closely to the redemptive power of the Christian religion. On the other hand, the sectarian type of Church has no succour to offer, partly because the principle of sectarian Christianity guarantees no continuity of moral education, partly because the legal kind of sinlessness aimed at in the sects usually leads to the sin of hypocrisy.

What other means, then, are left us to escape these difficulties? Schleiermacher rightly showed the way out of them in essential harmony with Reformation and orthodox theology. He points to an experience which is possible in the Church in spite of its prevalent entanglement with sin. In this he distinguishes a personal and a common element. “The former consists in the fact that the individual still receives from the image of Christ, which exists in the Church as a common fact and a common possession, the impression of the sinless perfection (the absolute potency of the God-consciousness) of Jesus, which gives him at once the perfect consciousness of sin and the removal of unhappiness; and this in itself is a communication of that perfection. The other consists in the fact that in all those confusions in the Church, be they never so like the sinful common life of man, there is nevertheless a settled tendency proceeding from Christ’s perfection—a tendency which in all its manifestations, yes, even in the assertion of the ideas of the true and the good, more or less has to yield to the eclipse of sinless perfection, but in its essence or as an impulse is worthy of its origin; and this equally with the first element is a true and real communication of the perfection of Christ.” The first point determines the way in which the mediation of Christ’s reconciliation by the community is to be correctly defined. On the one hand, we should have no experience and no knowledge of an operation of Christ upon later generations, unless a community of the children of God existed due to His impulse, and propagated itself throughout all the changes of time. Yet, on the other hand, the connection of the spiritual life is of such a kind that the Author of Divine sonship is operatively present in every genuine case of faith in God as our Father; and His presence is not so merged in these manifestations and their connection that the knowledge of the Founder of the Church can ever cease to be indispensable for the existence and maintenance of Divine sonship. On the contrary, the religious possession of Divine sonship must always take its bearings from the Archetype and Founder of this state, just as it is always called forth in the individual by the idea of Christ. The orthodox doctrine expresses this truth by saying that the preaching of Christ in the Church is the indispensable condition of justification and the awakening of faith, and thus of the Divine sonship of individuals. But even though the psychological scheme which the old theology uses makes it appear as though this mediation of salvation were restricted to the form of theoretical teaching, yet nobody will question the fact that the Christian religion is not propagated and awakened in individuals in this way alone. All kinds of aesthetic and moral motives of education are required even to unfold the meaning of the image of Christ to the understanding, still more to use the impression of this image for the awakening of childlike trust in God. But although the manifold stimulus of the piety of other men, of morale and discipline in the family and the school, is required to lend weight to religious instruction and preaching, yet the independent assurance of Divine sonship can completely stay itself on nothing but the standard of the living Figure of Christ, even as fundamentally it springs from the power of that Figure. This moulding of piety on Christ will meet with modifications of the most diverse kinds; but in any case it proves the necessity of including the estimate of Christ as the Founder and Archetype of Christianity in the completed system of this religion (§ 44). I intentionally choose these wide and indefinite expressions in order to remind my readers at this stage of the fact, that an inexhaustible series of different kinds of religious estimate of Christ owe their existence to the diversity of ages, sexes, temperaments, and types of Christian confession. Who, then, will take it upon himself, by setting up an exclusive theoretical formula, to decide between the impressions of Christ’s Person, which, in various degrees of clearness and fulness, with more or less design, provide a standard for every form of piety which is of Christian origin; and to decide between them in such a way that one part of such phenomena would be declared to be absolutely false!

Here we already touch the other experience noticed by Schleiermacher, which is not indeed very clearly expressed by him, but is to be understood, I think, in the following way. Though in large departments of the Christian Church the God-consciousness made operative by Christ is so much hindered by sin that even the standards of Christian truth and goodness are vitiated, yet it is always to be placed to the credit of such phenomena that the hope of realising true Christianity is working in them as their hidden impulse. This way of looking at them is certainly the expression of a charitableness which at present, perhaps, is scarcely intelligible. Still, it does not exclude a very decided judgment of the errors by which Christianity, in large or small groups of its adherents, is theoretically and practically distorted. This view, however, is the only right basis of polemical theology, so that if religious or theological controversy forsakes this standing-ground, it descends to the mean gratification of party spirit and dogmatism. For if we deny to any Christian party the wish to attain a right understanding of Christianity, we can neither rightly estimate the extent of the error they have committed, nor contribute to removing it. Schleiermacher’s opinion, on the contrary, is not only logically and experimentally correct, but also in a religious aspect the only seemly one. It is a principle to which Augustine, for example, is led almost against his will in his judgment of sin, that everything evil has the condition of its reality solely in the secret obligation of the will to the good. No theoretical and practical perversion of Christianity, then, can as such be conceived, unless there is assumed at the same time a wish, however dim it may have become, to realise Christianity as such, and a working of this purpose, however incalculable it may be in amount, towards the desired result. This explains not only the striking phenomena of reformations which break forth from a state of general corruption, for these have but a limited area, but the phenomena, certainly much more frequent, of Christian humility and moral purity which appear in the midst of a general state of perversion of Christian Churches. Finally, however, apart from all correctness of dogmatic knowledge, it shows nothing but a want of trust in God, or despair as to the extent of the spiritual influence of Christ, when a polemical theologian does his best, either by direct expression of opinion, or indirectly by his style of controversy, to represent this action as limited to the party to which he himself is attached.

§ 58. Further objections to the basing of reconciliation upon the above explained connection between Christ’s value as a Revelation and His purpose to propagate His peculiar reverence for God as His Father in a community of the children of God, are to be expected from the fact that people are generally in the habit of interpreting the life-work of Christ by a negative formula. Certain features of the theological tradition have a strong tendency in this direction, all the more because they are liturgically fixed. The standing designation of Christ as the Redeemer, the interpretation of His peculiar achievement as being the propitiation for our sins, the image of the Lamb which bears the sins of the world, disclose a different view of His saving work from the one developed above, and that, too, with the assumption that the whole truth is completely described by these formulae, and may be correctly and adequately developed within the framework they offer. Here I leave out of account the fact that the delineation of the Servant of God by the Old Testament prophet, and the formula of the expiation of sins, are usually understood in the sense of vicarious penal satisfaction. For there is no ground for this interpretation either in the words of the prophet or in any Biblical connection of ideas. The Scriptural idea is that the sufferings which the Servant of God has not merited, but which He experiences on account of His fellowship with the guilty people, and which He takes upon Himself the more patiently and therefore the more completely on account of His righteousness and fellow-feeling, impel the rest of His countrymen to repentance after they have clearly perceived the fact of the Sufferer’s innocence and their own guilt (ii. p. 61). According to this analogy, it is not wrong to say that the sufferings which Christ brought upon Himself, without any demerit, through the fulfilment of His vocation to His people, are the form in which the sinless Son of God completely demonstrated His fellowship with sinful humanity, for the purpose of moving them to repentance so soon as His innocence and the morally necessary fellowship in suffering on the part of the Innocent with the guilty should be understood by the latter. It is questionable, however, whether this formula should have so great importance attached to it as sometimes happens, since there is no more indication of it in the discourses of Christ than in the words of the Apostles. Certainly Christ traced His sufferings, and the measure of them which He might expect, not merely to the pragmatical circumstance that He came into conflict with the traditional claims of the Jewish theocracy, but to the more general principle that the righteous man suffers through his connection with the unrighteous world (Matt. xi. 28–30, p. 462). Nevertheless, He did not accept His sufferings as an independent task, the meaning of which was to be sought in an idea of sin in general or as a whole (p. 554), but bore them as the accident of His positive fidelity to His vocation. The idea of innocent suffering as the form in which the sufferer enters into sympathetic fellowship with the guilty, implies in the prophet’s words that this association with the guilty becomes operative through their being shamed into repentance. The effect of this association is thus thought of as the moral change of the individuals who belong to the already existing community, and who let themselves be brought by shame to their right mind. This goal, however, is a different one from the religious reconciliation of men with God which Christ had in view, when He purposed to make a community of forgiveness possible for the first time by the fulfilment of His vocation in the suffering of death. In the allusions and discourses of Christ bearing on this subject, the purpose of bringing His adversaries to repentance by the sense of shame which His sufferings would awaken in them, is not so much as casually mentioned. Finally, the discourses in the Acts of the Apostles connect the impulse to repentance and entrance into the Christian community, not with a peculiar explanation of the sufferings of Christ, but with the fact that He whom the Jews have crucified has been by God installed as Lord (ii. 36–39; iii. 13–19; v. 30, 31).

Most nearly akin to this view is that meditation upon the sufferings of Christ which was elaborated in the Middle Ages, and continued with slight changes by Luther and his followers. There exists a Latin sermon-sketch of Luther’s of the year 1519,⁵ in which the way the Catholic preachers had of evoking a sympathy with Christ which ended in superficial emotion is first dismissed; and then three principles are brought forward: that in Christ’s passion the wrath of God is manifest and compensation is made for the sins of the beholder; that in Christ’s readiness to suffer there appears God’s gracious will or love to sinners; and finally, that we have to take an example from Christ’s patience, humility, and self-denial. This line of thought on the part of the individual Christian naturally presupposes the doctrine of redemption; it involves both the principles of the doctrine of redemption, Christ’s satisfaction and God’s love, but in the opposite order to that in which they appear doctrinally; and it ends in the application of the pattern of Christ, which goes beyond the doctrine. Now in this sketch Luther has on the whole followed the mediaeval models; he also appeals to Bernard and Albertus Magnus. Only, in the first part, by bringing in the wrath of God he has given an edge to the motive for shame; and he has set aside that distribution of the sufferings of Christ in which the meditation of his predecessors deliberately indulged. The men of the Middle Ages intend, on the one hand, methodically to evoke sympathy and responsive love; on the other hand, in doing so they follow out the idea that Christ’s sufferings are remedies against sins, and the sufferings of the particular parts of His body means for the restoration of our corresponding organs as organs of righteousness. This combination of ideas suggests the prevalent custom of painting the blood and wounds of Christ.⁶ Luther makes no use of this in the above-mentioned sketch for the meditation of Christ’s passion. Nevertheless the mediaeval models have again come to exert an influence in the Lutheran Church since the seventeenth century, and have been imitated, sometimes with more, sometimes with less, taste in poetry and prose. Among the most valuable hymns of this kind used in the Church are Johann Heermann’s “ Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen ” and “ Jesu, deine tiefe Wunden, ” and Paul Gerhardt’s “ O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. ” The last, as is well known, is a translation of the seventh hymn of Bernard’s Rhythmica oratio ad unumquodlibet membrorum Christi patientis et a cruce pendentis. Both of Heermann’s hymns are composed after passages from pseudo-Augustinian writings; through this channel the second Oratio of Anselm is their source.⁷ In the first hymn the same arrangement may be observed as that sketched out by Luther. Now the beauty of these hymns is beyond all question, and I do not mean to take any exception to their use in the Church on Good Friday, though they were not composed for that purpose. But as meditations of the individual they do not express that by which Good Friday must be signalised as a Festival—the praise of reconciliation in general, and the founding of the community of reconciliation. In accordance with Catholic models, they keep to the lines of the idea of Good Friday as a day of mourning, mourning being referred both to Christ’s sufferings and to men’s sins. The combination of comfort and good resolutions with which they close is treated, in keeping with the character of meditation, quite individually, and fails to stir the Christian and Churchly common feeling which should be directly excited at a Festival.

Another formula of negative meaning appears in the statement that Christ expiated sin by His passion. Current as this formula is among many theologians of the present day, it has very little warrant in the Biblical circle of thought. For the German word Sühne—expiation—came into use in this department merely through imitation of the false Greek translation of the Hebrew formula of sacrifice (vol. ii. p. 199). In itself this word signifies either punishment or peace. Now, if the formula is used to express the idea that Christ suffered the punishment for the sins of humanity as punishment, I repudiate this view absolutely, because it stands out of all relation to the Biblical idea of sacrifice, and, besides, does not fit the facts of the case. It is still more unsuitable to use that word in the interpretation of Christ’s death as a penal example. The question remains to be considered, then, whether it yields an admissible sense to say that Christ by His passion established peace in relation to the sins of humanity. If we are not playing with words, we must not confound this thought with the content of the idea of reconciliation which we have hitherto been expounding. When Christ reconciles sinners with God, He establishes peace for them Godwards, and does it in such a way that they enter His community. This is a very different thing from the literal exposition of that formula, namely, that Christ reconciled God with the sins of pre-Christian humanity, brought Him into a state of peace with their sins. For God did not enter into the relation of peace with pre-Christian humanity, but humanity, in the form of the community of Christ, attained to peace with God. Therefore Christ’s expiation of the sins of humanity, or, as Hofmann following Collenbusch expounds it, His making men good by the counter-working of His obedience against the entire sin of mankind (vol. i. pp. 611, 618), can have no reference to God. Thus the proposition that Christ expiated the sin of humanity can be understood only in reference to our human, Christian way of looking at the matter. The compensation for the entire sin of mankind made by Christ’s personal goodness, and that, too, through the proof He gave of His goodness by voluntary suffering, as also through His demonstration of loving fellowship with an apparently lost race, reconciles us to our participation in the fate of our race. That, however, is an aesthetic judgment, not a necessary religious idea. Therefore we look in vain for traces of this view in the New Testament. But seeing that the idea has been once formed, I am far from disputing its truth in its own sphere or its value. For it serves as evidence for the general normality of the Christian view of the world, that the event which denotes the authoritative revelation of God should at the same time satisfy our aesthetic and moral interest in the destiny of our race. Accordingly I understand the formula to mean that our tragic participation in the apparently aimless, and therefore vain development of the human race, is brought into harmony with our aesthetic sense of justice by the fact that perfect human goodness not only appears in the Person of Christ, but also displays itself in that condition of suffering which falls to His lot in accordance with the law of history that no established form of life willingly renounces its power. The destruction of Him Who is lawful Ruler in the sphere of the good, through the tenacity with which the powers which had hitherto been dominant maintained themselves, serves to reconcile us aesthetically even with this despotic manifestation of sin, because in the very sacrifice of His life we discern Christ’s victory. In this connection it is evident that the aesthetic satisfaction derived from the drama of Christ’s death presupposes the religious recognition of His worth; but this recognition is not expressed by the above theory. The formula, then, denotes no religious knowledge properly so called, and therefore is not a proposition forming part of Dogmatics.⁸

A definition of expiation (Sühne), which was introduced by Stahl⁹ to support the theory of penal satisfaction in the suffering of Christ, is to be assigned to the same aesthetic form of theory. Stahl, indeed, would permit us to apply this idea of expiation only to the interpretation of Christ’s death; but if expiation is to be distinguished from passive punishment by the fact that it expresses the voluntariness of the endurance of punishment, this sense of the word is also applicable to the case of a criminal who does not receive his merited punishment passively, or at all unwillingly, but consents to its infliction upon him. Stahl’s interpretation therefore narrows the ordinary idea of expiation. For expiation means punishment in general, whether the criminal consents to it or not. If, however, we regard a case of crime as a drama in which the criminal’s positive guilt excites our tragic sympathy by reason of its complication with the common guilt of the society around him, yet, as soon as the criminal acknowledges his personal guilt and the justice of his punishment, a different impression is left from that received in the opposite case. We have a feeling of reconciliation in so far as the criminal imputes to himself and takes upon himself the culpable influences of society. On this presupposition it follows that both the possible meanings of expiation are embraced in the definition of the word given by Stahl. The punishment which the criminal willingly takes upon himself awakens the sense of aesthetic satisfaction in the sympathetic observer, in so far as it forms the moral conclusion of an immoral development of life. I would add, however, that such a case as this has no connection whatever with the interpretation of Christ’s fate. On the contrary, our very sense of aesthetic justice would be offended if the unmerited suffering of the Righteous were estimated by the value of a vicarious penal satisfaction.

The predominantly negative mode of defining the saving work of Christ is favoured, in the last place, by the fact that in Protestant Dogmatics and ascetic literature the problem of sanctification is generally treated in the negative sense of the renunciation of sin and the world. By this negative definition of the principle of ethics I think I may explain the fact, that Oetinger and Menken make their entirely positive estimate of Christ’s personal righteousness subordinate to the negative purpose that human nature may thereby be made sinless. Regarding the barrenness of this assertion, I need add nothing to the previous discussion (§ 57). But in the theological circle which follows Bengel and Oetinger, the latter’s idea of the conflict of Christ with the devil and the wrath of God, which goes farther back to the authority of Luther, is wont to be understood in an essentially negative sense. Now, assuming that we understand the opposition of Christ’s adversaries to Him better if we interpret it as a specific action of the devil, we may still inquire how much light this casts upon the valuable content of Christ’s life. Christ did not come into contact with God’s wrath; Luther’s utterances pointing in that direction are based on a misunderstanding. But in what does a spiritual conflict with the untruthfulness and wickedness of others consist, but in a man’s speaking the known truth and doing his duty in accordance with his vocation? The idea of Christ’s conflict, therefore, does not carry us a step beyond the judgment of the value of His fidelity in His vocation, but shows that we were right in determining precisely by the latter our estimate of the significance of Christ for salvation. Even the polemical discourses of Christ, by which the idea of His conflict with Satan must be measured, denote nothing more than the application of His knowledge of the true religion — the knowledge implied in His vocation—to the judgment of the characteristics which belong to the false religion and its adherents. If the idea of a conflict is attached to this because the discourses are so pointed and therefore so humiliating, and because the absence of all passion and exaggeration, and of all violation of the truth contrasts so strongly with the loathsome calumny which constitutes the most characteristic mark of Satan in the adversaries of Christ and everywhere, yet Christ’s conduct, even in this situation, only gives expression to the fact that He was maintaining the position called for by His vocation.

The idea of a conflict of Christ with the devil is not, however, confined to these relations, but is supposed to be proved by the fact that Christ, throughout His whole life, offered resistance to all kinds of ever-recurring temptations, and precisely in this way fought and conquered the devil, who wanted to make Him unfaithful to His task. This conception also would issue in the maintenance of His fidelity in His vocation being affirmed, but would modify the idea of His fidelity in a peculiar way. It is therefore necessary to examine the statement more closely. Temptation is a cause of possible sin, originating in an impulse, the satisfaction of which appears on first thoughts to be in itself legitimate. The excitation of an impulse which appears from the outset to be unlawful, and so evil, does not give rise to temptation, but is a phenomenon of sinful propensity. It is therefore a signal mistake to refer the well-known saying of James (i. 14, 15), as is generally done, to evil desire. Christ was also exposed to temptation, simply because a temptation is always bound up with an inclination which is at the outset morally legitimate or permissible. It was the impulse, in itself lawful, of self-preservation which led to Christ’s desire to be spared the suffering of death. But this gave rise to a temptation to sin, because the wish collided with His duty in His vocation. Christ, however, did not consent to this temptation. He renounced His self-preservation, because He assented to the Divine disposal of the end of His life as a consequence of His vocation. If Christ, then, before His entrance upon His public work was tempted by Satan, the idea that the temptations which affected Him were entangled with the kingdom of sin cannot have been His first impression of them. For no man of moral worth will find a temptation in a situation in which he from the outset recognises Satan. Those experiences of Christ must therefore be understood to mean that the impulses which became temptations to Him, because they at first appeared legitimate, were in due time condemned by Him because their satisfaction would entangle Him in the kingdom of evil. Now, the more mature the moral character is, the more comprehensive and penetrating the insight into one’s position relatively to the world, the surer one’s judgment of the possible relations of the momentary situation—then the more seldom does temptation occur, and all the easier will the decision against it prove.

On the other hand, an inward conflict sets in under these circumstances, if we swing round, and, under a painful sense of want of freedom and decision, bring before our minds the possibility of our adopting resolutions of an opposite moral tendency. Is it supposed, then, that this was the regular course of Christ’s inner life before He arrived at good and dutiful conduct, and courageous utterance of the truth, and open censure of His adversaries? For this is the only form in which I can conceive a continuous inner conflict with Satan. Now he who makes this assertion, even if but indirectly, in the first place imports into the Evangelical story aspects of which it betrays just as little trace as it does of that development of Christ’s consciousness of Himself and His vocation which others seek in the sources. Further, this assumption of an ever-recurring vacillation between extreme moral opposites shows but a small degree of understanding of, and esteem for, Christ’s character, a degree which is least of all compatible with pretensions to a peculiarly believing mind and exclusive orthodoxy. If anything in the Evangelical story is authentic, it is the impression of Christ’s tranquil and steadfast character, withdrawn into itself from the vacillation which commonly prevails, remote from all passionate and painful excitement; and if on occasion the perfidy of His adversaries moves Him to indignation, yet this is ennobled by sorrow for their hardness of heart, and balanced by the perfect goodness of His disposition and by His Divine patience. What do people mean, then, by asserting a conflict of Christ with Satan, more than is expressed by affirming His positive fulfilment of His vocation, with uninterrupted fidelity to that vocation, with the conduct and speech which are worthy of it, with inviolable patience under all the suffering, even the most intense, which was allotted to Him in consequence of His vocation, and which He willingly accepted as the expression of Divine providence! In this way Christ demonstrated for Himself His Father’s relation to Him as His Son and Revealer; in this way He made possible the community of the children of God, who share His nature. If Christ, however, at the same time vanquished the devil for Himself by withstanding all the temptations which, had they taken effect, would have dragged Him down into the kingdom of sin, yet that does not in any way secure the community founded by Him against the possibility of a countless number of its members falling away to Satan, and even of certain undertakings in the Church being drawn directly into the service of the devil. How, then, can it be asserted in the face of Church history that Christ by His victory over the devil altogether withdrew His believing followers from the latter’s power?

Hofmann’s view of reconciliation also contains no reference to Christ’s conflict with Satan. “Christ’s life, which manifested itself in His obedience in His vocation even unto death, is itself reconciliation, because in that life God carried out without interruption His loving fellowship with the one sinless member of humanity, and because Christ passed through this experience not for Himself, but in His destiny as the Beginner of the new humanity which is His community” (vol. i. p. 618). This is a thoroughly positive conception of the matter, in which the value of Christ’s life is quite positively defined. But the agreement between Hofmann and myself has its limits. If we ask what constitutes the new relation between God and humanity which is brought about by the perfecting of Christ’s obedience in His vocation, Hofmann’s readers always stumble upon the negative formula that this relation is no longer, like the previous one, conditioned by sin. He, too, has failed to observe that this formula, which primarily exactly suits the idea of forgiveness, requires to be supplemented by the positive idea of eternal life, or the freedom of the children of God over the world. As he did not derive the latter datum from the source of his theology, and did not extend his investigation of Scripture to this point, his incomplete account of reconciliation leads to an effort to extract from Christ’s passion still another meaning than that it is the occasion of a special proof of His obedience in His vocation. This is how we are to regard Hofmann’s formula, that in Christ’s life and suffering God manifested not only His will of love towards humanity, but also His hatred against sin, since the creative beginning of a new relation between God and humanity did not take place without the corresponding conclusion of the previous sin-determined relation. The question has to be considered whether Hofmann himself, in his view of Christ’s life, has carried out the intended co-ordination of both the points of view—God’s loving will towards humanity and His hatred of sin.

We may actively manifest our hatred or abhorrence of sin, if we have the power and ability to do so, in either a legal or a moral way. We may, if we have the power, deprive sin of its pretended rights by punishment. Or we may, if we have the ability, show our abhorrence of it by the practice of the good, to which there pertain as accidents censure of sin, its contrary, and readiness to suffer under the sin of others rather than acquiesce in it. Hofmann himself would not have the first case applied to Christ’s death. The second case he asserts, inasmuch as he embraces all the valuable phenomena in Christ’s life under His obedience in His vocation, an obedience which exhibits God’s fellowship of love with Him, and at the same time represents the beginning of the new humanity. Now, in knowing as in willing, every position established in a certain direction is the denial of the opposite direction. It is therefore impossible to see how God’s hatred against sin could be manifested in Christ’s work of living and suffering otherwise than in the setting forth of the good by His perfect obedience in His vocation, an obedience which includes acquiescence in the sufferings inflicted by the representatives of sin. Hofmann himself, now, is not in a position to escape from this line of thought; he cannot conceive the circumstances of Christ’s suffering such that they would be to him an exhibition of God’s hatred of sin apart from their subordination to Christ’s positive obedience in His vocation. For he says that Christ gave Himself up to God’s wrath against men and to Satan’s power over them in order to perfect His obedience by subjecting it to the severest trial which could befall it, and in order so to experience the consequences of sin that His last and extremest suffering should also be the consummation of His obedience.¹⁰ Hofmann’s doctrine, then, may appear to enjoy the advantage of having proved that Christ’s passion comprised not only His positive achievement towards reconciliation, but in addition to that a negative operation of the Divine hatred against sin; but while he did, indeed, attempt to create this impression, yet in reality he kept to the lines of that positive view and interpretation of Christ’s achievement towards reconciliation which alone is fitted to establish the positive inference of eternal life.

§ 59. The individual, too, can pronounce forgiveness or justification, reconciliation and adoption into Divine sonship, to be his possession, only in virtue of his attaching himself to Christ’s life-work as a whole. For we have this possession only as members of the religious community of Christ, as the result of the incalculable and mysterious interaction between our own freedom and the determining influences of fellowship; and this fellowship is possible in its own order only through Christ’s unique life-course in its well-known double aspect, and its continuous action through all the ages. The condition of faith, through which the individual knows himself to be justified by Christ or reconciled with Christ, alters nothing in the connection of ideas which I have set forth. Certainly there is in no case either a mechanical or a logical necessity laid upon individuals to join themselves in faith to the existing Christian community. Faith begins in harmony with the law of freedom. It cannot be calculated beforehand whether Christ will find faith, and the fact that He found it was no more determined beforehand than the purpose in general guarantees the result. But after, in this case, the result has happened, the guiding purpose of its Author provides the standard by which it is to be judged. The individual can experience the peculiar effect which proceeds from Christ only in connection with the community founded by Him, and on the presupposition of its existence. The assurance of Divine grace is bound up with this economy, and with nothing else. This is also the meaning of the 5th and 7th Articles of the Augsburg Confession. For religion is always social. Christ did not aim at any action upon men which would merely be a moral instruction of individuals. On the contrary, His purpose in the latter direction was subordinated to the creation of the new religion. The individual believer, therefore, can rightly understand his position relatively to God only as meaning that he is reconciled by God through Christ in the community founded by Christ. The fellowship with God through Christ which is thus conditioned is the intelligible and valuable content of the faith which is specifically conscious of itself. Now if, on account of Rom. iv. 5, we are to adopt the formula that faith is counted for righteousness, this proposition can be understood in harmony with our leading line of thought only as meaning that we esteem faith as the subjective manifestation of fellowship with Christ. For it is just Christ’s value for God, and the determining influence of Christ’s fellowship with him upon the subject, which forms the ground on which the latter is justified, i.e. admitted in spite of his sins to fellowship with God.¹¹ On the other hand, the proposition would not be understood as Paul himself meant it, if faith were interpreted as a self-activity, with a content due to the subject himself.

Repeated reference (vol. i. pp. 359, 626; supra, pp. 84, 107) has been made to the fact that this perversion of the Reformation view was brought about in the circles of Pietism. Now just as the phenomenon of Pietism was possible at all in the Lutheran and the Reformed Church only on the presupposition that the teleological relation of the idea of justification to eternal life as consisting in freedom over the world had been forgotten, so that distortion of the conception of justification is to be explained especially by the fact that more attention was directed to the efforts of the subject after a lively and sensible faith than to the object, which was for the Reformers the principal thing. According to this view, the believer is justified¹² on account of his resolve to believe, as subject of the principle of the sinless life. This result is also partly due to the circumstance that the idea of righteousness, which as an attribute of the believer is derived from the judgment of God, is understood, in accordance with orthodoxy, as equivalent to moral perfection. The tacit assumption that God can have communion only with the morally perfect (§ 14), led to the interpretation of justification in the sense that God imputes the moral perfection of Christ to believers, and therefore regards them as perfect though they are not so. This mode of arriving at the judgment of God is abandoned in Pietistic circles, but in its place there is constructed the formula that God imputes to the believer the moral perfection which is contained in faith as the principle of the new life that is beginning; and Oetinger and Rothe at the same time asserted that God in this way anticipates His judgment upon the course of the believer’s moral life (vol. i. pp. 552, 610). We can here perceive how much this divergent account of justification is dominated by that definition of the idea which prevails in the school from whose doctrines in other respects these very writers desire so widely to differ. This, however, is a phenomenon of frequent occurrence in theology, that the most glaring inconsistencies are connected with the fact that we unconsciously take over from our opponent the very point on which they turn.

It is still necessary to subject to criticism this Pietistic theory in a modernised form. Sulze¹³ expresses himself as follows: “In repentance the power of Divine grace which entered our soul at our enlightenment and was received by us in faith, i.e. with trust, fights the decisive battle with sin. The power of sin is thus broken at its centre. Certainly that does not yet make us perfectly righteous and sinless. The development of life in us, of which God is the Author, has only gained a vigorous beginning in us. God in His grace regards this beginning as the completion, for indeed He is the Author of it. God Himself best knows the omnipotence of the Divine love which is now in us. Therefore He can have full confidence regarding us, that the completion will not fail the beginning. On the ground of this assurance He regards us as righteous though we are not yet so. We believe in this judgment of God, and therefore also regard ourselves as righteous, and have the full joy of our sanctification just as if we were already righteous. Thus, on both sides, faith is a representation of the future as present.” The rights of religion are claimed for this interpretation as against the traditional view that justification is brought about by God, because we believe in the satisfaction of Christ, which He made to God for us and by which the tension between justice and love in God is removed. For this historical knowledge has as such no religious value and no trustworthiness. Further, the need of satisfaction before forgiveness is provided for by the fact that in our earnest repentance the Spirit of God, Who is in us through regeneration, innocently suffers for the sin of the old man, and by doing so testifies that by the rule of Divine justice punishment follows guilt, though punishment as such is now removed. Justification, however, is bound up with Christ, since humanity as a whole first becomes acceptable to God in Him as its Head, and then the Divine life of the individual believer, which God regards as righteousness, is awakened by Christ. Conformity to the image of the Lord is of course brought about, not by the inculcation of a system of doctrine regarding Him, but by free and unconstrained love to Him, and in this way, through the righteousness of Christ, there is wrought in us the righteousness which justifies us. In particular, the death of Christ serves to beget in us the new life, through the power which this event exercises upon the heart, inasmuch as by it sin is broken at the very heart of the life of this world.

The same principle, exhibiting the same opposition between the religious and moral interest and the juristic form of the traditional doctrine of reconciliation, is asserted by Hanne¹⁴ as an expression of the “modern” religious view: “That we may stand as righteous before God, that is, that we may get rid of the burden of sin and the condemnation felt in our conscience, we ought no longer to remain sinners, but must become quite other men. This takes place when we turn the whole heart to God and receive Christ inwardly, that with Him and through Him, God’s Son, we ourselves may become children of God. When we have become one with Christ by faith, that is, when we begin to strive with all our energy to become children of God, we appear before God as such—as His children whose sin He graciously forgives in view of the future complete dominion of the Christian spirit in us. For we are not, indeed, perfect forthwith; but we have in us the power which irresistibly changes us and necessarily brings us in the end to perfection. In view of this certain event in the future God declares us righteous, and removes from our conscience the burden of sin. The fact that we are for the present still weak in the new life, and imperfect beginners, is not taken into account in view of the future, which must be entirely different, and which has already planted in us its shoots and sprouts, from which the full flower is slowly but surely developed. Thus it is only by actually receiving Christ into our inner life that we arrive at peace of conscience and blessedness. By this path of religious and moral renewal alone does the sinner, according to the modern view, become a Christian and receive true salvation.”

Now this line of thought is not in truth so very modern; for it is as a whole the creed of Böhme and Dippel, who regard the imitation of Christ’s death and resurrection in continual repentance as the righteousness which is by faith. The mystical background of this theory is also indicated clearly enough by Sulze, when he makes the life of God in the believer the central idea, and indirectly by Hanne, when he emphasises at the cost of moral freedom the necessity and irresistibility of the principle working in the believer. But the direct descent of the accordant formulae of Sulze and Hanne can be traced back through Rothe and Schleiermacher to Oetinger, and in particular to Kant. Exegetical proof from the New Testament can be claimed for this doctrine, only if we assume that the contents of the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and Paul’s other utterances to the same effect do not indicate a secondary line of thought, but the central point of his view of Christianity. But I at least cannot believe that (vol. ii. p. 226). In this theory the moral transformation of the individual is in itself set forth as the proper purpose of Christianity, and the religious factor is taken into account only in the sense that God recognises beforehand the effect which the spiritual action of Christ will have upon the formation of the believer’s good character. The need for this judgment of God is explained by saying that it is the condition on which the conscience is delivered from the burden of guilt, and the true joy of sanctification called forth. Now when the individual as such is compared with Christ and brought into connection with Him, Christ’s action upon him is supposed to mean that he receives Christ into himself as his ruling ideal, and gives up the sinful direction of his will by a free resolution, the possibility of which depends upon the conception that Christ admitted no sin into His own soul. For this idea has still to be supplemented if we are to understand the power which the death of Christ must exercise upon the heart, in so far as that death effects the destruction of sin as a whole.

The advocates of this view are justified in emphasising the opposition between their theory and the traditional theory of the Evangelical Church. For they exalt the interest of the individual’s moral transformation above the religious interest of Christianity, no less distinctly than the orthodox doctrine is calculated to exalt the common religious transformation above the moral renewal of the individual. Thus we see that the modern theory is analogous to Socinianism, though it generally uses means which are derived from “holiness”-Pietism. This judgment is confirmed in particular by the way in which the Divine sentence of justification is interpreted. For the principle of the new life, which in spite of its imperfect working out in the believer is to be regarded as factually identical with individual moral perfection, is equivalent to the practical obedience of faith which, according to the Socinian doctrine, God regards in spite of its defects as empirically perfect. Now, if the advocates of this theory urge against orthodoxy that the imputation of the moral righteousness of Christ to the individual would indicate a self-deception on God’s part, and that it is impossible to see how this assumption serves for the appeasement of the conscience and for moral impulse—I too am unable to understand how the assumption of a Divine judgment upon the new life of the believer, which does not correspond with the believer’s judgment of himself, can have any value for the latter. It may be true that God knows the individual man more thoroughly than it is possible for him to know himself, and in particular that God for the moment regards the man as precisely the opposite of what he appears to himself to be, in good as well as in evil. But what will the result be if, in addition to denying the conditions of freedom, we inculcate upon ourselves a faith in our own perfection on the ground of the theoretical persuasion that God, in accordance with conditions of His knowledge inaccessible to us, regards us as perfect? Will the appeasement of the conscience and the joy of sanctification keep their proper limits on these terms? I should imagine that if this were the case it would be very accidental. It is therefore probable that a mistake has been committed at this point, the more so as along with the intention to oppose orthodoxy there goes the admission of the idea—not clearly discarded by orthodoxy—that in justification the question at issue is the recognition of our moral perfection.

The same dependence on the form of doctrine which is regarded as orthodox Lutheran—namely, that justification has reference to the individual as such—leads in the case of another representative of modern Christianity to the thesis that the action of Christ is to be appropriated through the imitation of His religious and moral uniqueness. Christ’s decisive and permanent value for humanity consists, according to Schwalb,¹⁵ in His being our example; and he says it is no innovation, but the practice of faith from the earliest times, to strive after likeness to Christ in His Divine Sonship, i.e. His peculiar consciousness of God as His Father, and, further, to copy His moral purity. Now this preacher is certainly right in saying that his programme of the imitation of, or assimilation to, Christ is nothing new; it is in truth the formula of practical Christianity in the Middle Ages, which coincides with the monastic endeavour to renounce the world. It will have to be shown later how this task was modified in the Protestant sense (§ 68); but in any case this change in the idea is not adverted to by Schwalb. He can only appeal to the way in which the example of Christ is developed in the True Christianity of Johann Arndt, as the standard of all the relations of life. Likeness to Christ is set forth in certain statements of Paul as the end of life in the Christian community (2 Cor. iii. 18; Rom. viii. 29). If Schwalb, however, according to his principle of the typical character of Christ in His God-consciousness and moral purity, makes it the Christian’s duty “to become like the Lord Christ,”¹⁶ the question remains how this is to be done. Now among the theologians of this group it is, indeed, constantly being said that “we receive Christ into our hearts,” or that “we give up our hearts to Him,” and so it is possible that what they mean is not exhausted by the phrase that Christ is our example. But whatever relation the vague and vacillating expressions of these theologians may have to the claim they make to be “modernising” Christianity, it concerns our interest to determine how far imitation really goes, for the idea of imitation suggests itself as correlative to the pattern character thus asserted to belong to Christ alone.

Imitation has but a very limited scope in mental life. It is a regular form of mental acquisition in childhood; as the form assumed by evil habits, it extends into the years of riper youth; if it appears further as the predominant form of mental appropriation, it is the mark of mental narrowness or approach to idiocy. For imitation extends only to particular relations of mental life, and these, too, such as are very apparent to the senses. It is therefore quite impossible to imitate a person’s character as a whole, even though it expresses itself never so strongly and clearly in his demeanour. If it is possible to regard a son as the spiritual image of his father, similarity of natural disposition is the principal motive of his sympathy with his father’s manner, the appropriation of which in childhood and in the father’s presence is assisted by the imitation of externals, but is in truth brought about by the incalculable aesthetic attraction which the father’s well-defined character exercises upon the similarly constituted son. If imitation were the form in which likeness to the father’s character was to be reached, the child would have to understand how to separate and to combine again in thought all the particular virtues as such in which character consists; but this goes beyond the knowledge which is possible in childhood. Harmony of characters is often found, too, outside the hereditary fellowship of the family, between juniors and seniors, between scholars and teachers; this, however, is the case only in consequence of their free recognition of the same life-purpose, and the normal special means employed for its personal inculcation. But pre-eminent men, the master-minds of history, cannot be in any danger of being matched by imitation; for all agreement of character with them, the more widely it extends, is the more markedly accompanied by a sense of the dissimilarity that remains behind, all pointing to the fact that these great men are originals, and matchless in their own order.

No man, I suppose, was ever more in earnest about the imitation of Christ than St. Francis; but he laid hold upon the outwardly perceptible circumstances of Christ’s life of poverty, and exaggerated them. Yet this method was dominated by that submission to Christ which is of a general and inward kind. Not only did he assume that he was subject to Christ in virtue of redemption, but the resolution to imitate Christ’s poverty was bound up with the fact that Francis conceived his Model not only in His relation to God, but also in a relation to the world, which implies that the Bearer of the perfect religion renounced the world, inasmuch as He withdrew Himself from all the natural ways and arrangements of life. On this assumption, that religion reflects itself in a definite attitude towards the world, the imitation of Christ in the features of poverty and renunciation of the world seemed possible. This whole field of course lies quite outside the horizon of the “modern” theologian, who looks upon Christianity as exhausted in the reproduction in men of Divine sonship, and thus sets aside the idea of redemption or reconciliation by Christ, not only in a definite doctrinal form, but in every form, or limits its validity to the voluntary act of the individual’s self-conversion. But how do we come at all to imitate Christ’s Divine Sonship? Does this task possess no special features which would be worth discussing? Is it so much as intelligible without any special presuppositions? What reply can be made if I again call attention to the fact that the imitation of great men in their distinctive character is an impossibility, not to judge it more severely? But certainly the utterly unpractical attitude and the emptiness of the programme of “modern” Christianity is not to be urged solely against the representative of the standpoint which I am at present criticising. On the contrary, the error which is primarily observable in this school rests upon a tradition to which people usually surrender themselves without criticism.

For since Schleiermacher raised the problem of the peculiar psychological character of religion, German theology has never grown weary of occupying itself with it afresh. Nobody, indeed, has been able to maintain the conception of feeling in the sense asserted by Schleiermacher, as the function of absolute dependence upon God; on the contrary, psychological investigation has always been led on to other lines. In one respect, however, Schleiermacher’s precedent dominates all subsequent attempts, namely, in the fact that religion is always represented simply as a relation to God, but not at the same time as a relation or attitude of man to the world (p. 28). Schleiermacher was able to disregard this latter requirement because his dialectic led him to include in the idea of God neutrality towards the world, the indifference of undivided unity towards the manifold of existence. Certainly he satisfied that requirement in so far as he taught that the feeling of dependence on God fills up a moment of time, only when it is combined with an act of sensuous feeling or with acts of ideation or volition which relate to the world. But this view has had no effect upon his followers, who, in spite of their proposed alteration of psychological theory, have regarded the contents of religion only as related to God and never at the same time as related to the world, though the historical appearance of all religions actually demands the latter view. People reflect on the relation of religion, especially the Christian religion, to the world only when they want to determine the way in which moral conduct is related to religious faith. But as in doing so care has to be taken not to confound the two, their attention is never drawn to the fact that there is another relation of man to the world, the regulation of which must be directly provided for in the idea of religion. I mean that in Christianity we are not religiously dependent upon the supramundane God without at the same time experiencing our religious freedom relatively to the world, and actively manifesting our religious dominion over it in our view of the world and our personal tone of feeling.¹⁷

What, then, do exhortations to imitate the God-consciousness of Christ or to awaken the assurance of Divine sonship in ourselves signify, unless it is at the same time taught that this form finds its material in all those relations of man to the world in which, according to the natural view of things, he is dependent on the world, while this form becomes operative in the material indicated when our judgment regarding these relations and the tone of feeling they produce changes the impression we have naturally into that of dominion over things? But if the Christian God-consciousness is conceived, as it must be, in such a way that spiritual dominion over our situation in the world is the obverse side of our Divine sonship, then it is at least a dubious formula which prescribes the imitation of the God-consciousness of Christ. For those relations to the world in which Christ experienced His God-consciousness and made proof of it for Himself and for God, are so distinct from those in which the members of His community stand, that Christ is withdrawn from all direct imitation. The maintenance of Christ’s God-consciousness in His relation to the world is especially expressed in the patience which He brought to bear on His sufferings, which were the outcome of the situation called for by His vocation and of the antagonism to it felt by the ruling society. His vocation, however, is unique in its kind; for its special character is directed to the general moral task as such, in other words to the founding of the Kingdom of God and the community destined for this task (§ 48). Therefore nobody can directly imitate Him; and an imitation which selects particular visible aspects of His life-course would still be no imitation of Christ. For this reason what even St. Francis presents is by no means a satisfying, but rather an unsuccessful copy of his Master.

If Christ’s pattern character is nevertheless to be used as a standard of the Christian life, what it yields is nothing but fidelity in the moral vocation which is assigned to everyone as the special field of his contribution to the Kingdom of God.¹⁸ But before we can assert this idea as valid for ourselves, we must remember that owing to the difference between Christ and us we have primarily no right to that consciousness of Divine sonship in which we might copy the God-consciousness of Christ. It has been possible for Schwalb to disregard this fact because he has not clearly and fully described the position of those whom he exhorts to imitate Christ. The fact that it gives us no difficulty, or that we look upon it as a matter of course, to set our trust on God like children, is due to our having grown up and having been educated in the Christian community. This circumstance, however, must be expressly recognised in a theory of the Christian religion, and must be declared to be the given presupposition of the desired imitation of the God-consciousness of Christ. Apart from this practical social foundation for every exercise of Christian piety, we must at the outset confess that through our participation in the sin of society we stand far away from God. We are justified, however, in the assurance of Divine sonship, in spite of our sense of guilt, because we belong to the community which is founded by Christ as the community of reconciliation with God—founded through the fulfilment of His vocation, and under circumstances such as to surround the idea of our imitating that vocation with the most important limitations. On these presuppositions, and following the impulse of reconciliation, we may, without any intention of imitating Christ in all the situations of life in which a natural dependence on the world is expressed, prove our Divine sonship by a frame of mind which changes the sense of dependence into its opposite. In the assurance that all things work together for good to them that love God, because God’s love is manifested to them in reconciliation through Christ, we may exercise the same dominion over the world which Christ exercised by the assertion of His consciousness of God. But we shall do this all the more surely, the less we propose to imitate Christ in this relation, and the more we extend our confidence in our reconciliation with God through Him to trust in the Fatherly grace of God in all our experiences. Without this positive supplement given by the independence of our self-feeling over the world, the formula of our freedom in God obtained for us by Christ is certainly as empty and meaningless as the task set us to imitate His God-consciousness. For without that content freedom in God is the formula of world-renouncing mysticism, which attains its end only with that renunciation of spiritual personality after which it also strives (vol. i. p. 122). The latter, however, must rather be preserved unto eternal life in Divine sonship, and the lordship over the world corresponding thereto.

§ 60. The statement that it is inside the community of believers that experience of reconciliation through Christ is to be had, corresponds to the general experimental truth that every spiritual acquisition is brought about by the incalculable interaction between the freedom of the individual and the stimulating and guiding impressions which he receives from fellowship with others. That statement does not, however, imply that the value which inheres in the personal work of Christ for our reconciliation is superseded by the existence of Divine sonship in the other members of the community, and pushed so much into the background that we might disregard Christ as the Author of our reconciliation. Still less can it be maintained that Christ’s work of reconciliation is bound up with the privileges of an order in the Church, and transmitted ex opere operato through their sensible actions. Christ comes to act upon the individual believer on the one hand through the historical remembrance of Him which is possible in the Church, on the other hand as the permanent Author of all the influences and impulses which are due to other men, and like in nature to Himself; and this necessarily takes place in a personal, and not in a material form. Accordingly, the result of reconciliation appears in its normal completeness in subjective faith in Christ. Here it is only necessary to repeat and to bring in what has already (pp. 101, 142) been set forth as the view of the Reformers and as the inevitable result of observation. To believe in Christ implies that we accept the value of the Divine love, which is manifest in His work, for our reconciliation with God, with that trust which, directed to Him, subordinates itself to God as His and our Father; whereby we are assured of eternal life and blessedness. Faith in Christ is neither belief in the truth of His history nor assent to a scientific judgment of knowledge such as that presented by the Chalcedonian formula. It is not a recognition of His Divine nature of such a kind that, in affirming it, we disregard His life-work and His action for the salvation of those who have to reckon themselves as belonging to His community. In so far as trust in Him includes a knowledge of Him, this knowledge will determine the value of His work for our salvation. This value is to be decided by the fact that Christ, as the Bearer of the perfect revelation of God, through His solidarity with the Father, in the right exercise of His love and patience over the world, demonstrated His Godhead as man for the salvation of those whom, as His community, He at the same time represented before the Father by His obedience, and still represents. In this way He awakens the trust in Himself which, as passionate personal conviction, overcomes and subordinates to itself all the other motives of life, using as it does the tradition of Christ propagated in the Church, and thus putting itself into connection with all those who believe in Christ. The recollection of guilt which has been forgiven us, and is daily forgiven, combined as it is with faith in the Redeemer, and suffused with penitence, does not hinder us from asserting a distinct self-feeling over against the world, which no longer dominates us or separates us from God. Faith, if it is derived from Divine grace, will also overcome the disturbances which arise from temptations due to the world. For either these temptations can be repelled, or, if we fail to do so, the sins which we commit afresh are, in our readiness to repent through trust in Christ, subordinated to His forgiving grace. As this comes to be a question of the rule of the Christian life, the view of the world which befits the believer in Christ is designed to enable him to assume, throughout the whole of the world created and governed by God, the position guaranteed to him by Christ. For in Christianity a direct claim is made for the personal feeling of self by the assertion that, on the ground of reconciliation with God, each man has, not the significance of a dependent part of the world, but the value of a whole—a value which proves itself by spiritual dominion over the individual and particular motives which are contained in the world. But the key to every conception of an actual whole lies in the knowledge of the special conditions under which a universal end may, in accordance with law, be realised in a complex of particular phenomena. According to this rule, personal conviction of the Christian view of the world, in which the corresponding self-feeling is assured of its validity, depends on faith in the Divine worth of Christ. For His historical appearance denotes not only the organising centre of the world-whole within which the spiritual self-feeling of Christians receives its permanent and specific satisfaction, but also the absolutely sufficient ground of knowledge by which we make that view of the world our own. We make this very view of the world, and the self-judgment corresponding to it, valid for ourselves when we become personally convinced of the value of Christ as the Revealer of the Divine purpose of the world, and the Founder of the community reconciled with God by Him. At the same time we affirm the value of the view of the world guaranteed by Him by making it the supreme motive for our exercise of will, and that in the direction both of reverence for God and of moral activity devoted to the final end of the Kingdom of God. For these reasons, faith in Christ is the full and clear expression of our subjective conviction of the truth of His religion.

Faith in Christ and God falls within the compass of the idea of love already defined (p. 277). It is that continuous direction of the will to the final end of God and Christ, which the believer maintains for his own sake. In this sense Thomas rightly decided that love to God is the essence of faith, since it raises the intellectual act to the worth of a religious function (p. 103). Now in the New Testament, in spite of the commandment of love to God, a very sparing use is made of this idea (vol. ii. p. 100), and love toward Christ is not expressed except in John xxi. 15, 16. There is good reason why it is otherwise in the Epistles of the New Testament. As a generic idea love to Christ is more indefinite than faith in Him. The former term leaves the point undecided whether we put ourselves on a level with Christ or subordinate ourselves to Him. But faith in Christ includes the confession of His Godhead and His dominion over us, and thus denies the possibility of equality with Him. This is the evident purpose which leads the Reformers to elaborate the idea of faith in Christ. If Christ takes the place of God, faith in Him is necessarily a kind of obedience (Rom. i. 5). Nevertheless the demand for love to Christ occupies an exceedingly large place not only in the Middle Ages, but also in the Churches which sprang from the Reformation. Advocates of this trend of feeling have declared that my exposition of faith, which has kept to the line of the doctrinal standards of the Reformation, is antiquated. I affirm, on the contrary, that the Reformation antiquated that “love to Christ” which is here in question. For love very distinctly implies the equality of the person loving with the beloved. St. Bernard (vol. i. p. 116), who gave to the world the pattern of this species of piety, expressly states that in intercourse with the Bridegroom awe ceases, majesty is laid aside, and immediate personal intercourse is carried on as between lovers or neighbours.¹⁹ And these features recur wherever love to the Lord Jesus is expressed in the terms of the Song of Songs. Now in the Latin Catholic Church this form of devotion and its excitement by sympathy with the sufferings of Christ are logically consistent. For that Church’s view of Christ is dominated by a complete breach between His Godhead and manhood (vol. i. pp. 38, 47, 56). In the traditional formulas the Godhead which forms the background of the man Christ is confessed, but a living interest attaches only to this latter Being, Whom Augustine designated as the Bearer of mediation with God, as the Representative of God’s love, and in Whom later writers further reverence the Ideal of human destiny, the fairest of the sons of men, and Whom by the play of fancy upon Him they clasp in their arms. In the Latin Middle Ages people purchased, by the verbal confession of Christ’s Godhead, freedom to love Him as a mere man, to imitate Him as such, to bring Him down to their own level, to play with Him (p. 391). At that time they attached a practical idea to His Godhead only when they thought of His Judgment. The latter idea, however, held good for a class different from those who cultivated familiar intercourse with Him; or if such became alarmed at this prospect, then all love-play with the Lord Jesus was forgotten. The Reformers transcended these fragmentary and incoherent views, inasmuch as by faith in Christ they expressed reverence for the God-man, and taught men by trust in Him to banish their terror at the Judge. These conditions of Protestant piety correspond to the efforts of the Reformers to show that His Godhead is present precisely in the mediatorial achievements of His earthly life (p. 394). It was therefore a reaction from the clearly recognisable purpose of the Reformation when the Mediaeval material of devotion was again admitted into the Lutheran Church soon after the settlement of the Book of Concord, and later into the Reformed Church.²⁰

If, then, it is claimed that the Reformation conception of faith in Christ is transcended and superseded by familiar intercourse with the Saviour, I must assume that this pretension has behind it all those strainings of the fancy with which I am familiar all the way from Bernard to Spangenberg.²¹ In my History of Pietism, however, I have given reasons why they mark no improvement upon the attitude of faith in Christ described by the Reformers. The principal reason against the above contention is that the excitement of the fancy and the effort after a more or less sensuous feeling of pleasure usually end in the opposite result of desertion and dulness of feeling. This method accordingly brings unhappiness in its train, whilst blessedness is guaranteed by faith in Christ when rightly understood. Perhaps this objection does not apply to the assertion which is made by many of my theological opponents—that an immediate personal relation to Christ and to God is the kernel of the Christian life. But if they demand that theological doctrine shall expressly justify this practice of theirs and determine its conditions, the following facts have to be considered. Every religious judgment, and so every devout consideration of God’s leadings and claims as well as of Christ’s benefits, is due to our regarding God and Christ as present. But we find ourselves placed immediately over against that which we view as present. In this sense Melanchthon designates the intuition of Christ, or of the promise of grace of which He is the Bearer, as the regular means of impressing upon ourselves the forgiveness of sins or the assurance of salvation (p. 142). Now this method of devotion may keep wholly within its own special rights, even when theology, having as a science fully and clearly to determine the inner texture of religion, is obliged to point out that such acts of religious imagination proceed from a series of mediating causes, the consideration of which is overleapt in the moment of contemplation. If those who are intent on the practice of an immediate personal relation to Christ also possess theological culture, they will not, I hope, deny that their contemplative presentation to themselves of Christ as their Redeemer and Lord is possible only because they have been brought up in the Church, have in it become believers, and in it have been furnished with the right knowledge of Christ; and they will not, I hope, gainsay Calvin’s statement that Christ, even as He is represented in devotion, can be rightly conceived only as invested with His Word (p. 113). One who understands physiology and psychology acts like every other man on the assumption that in his sense-perceptions he stands immediately over against things. But in his scientific estimate of such occurrences the physiologist and psychologist points out that these include a very complicated process of mediation, in which the judgment of the beholder modifies the physical impressions of light on the eye so as to determine the size and distance of things in the way which we think a matter of immediate perception. In the same way the theologian is obliged to trace back the immediate contemplation of Christ in the exercise of devotion to all the historical presuppositions of that act, and to remind his readers of these, in order that devotion may not be taken up with arbitrary distortions of the picture of Christ.

For this purpose theology has to insist that the contemplation of Christ which befits the Evangelical Christian shall have mixed up with it none of the elements of the Song of Songs, that is, no love-play on an equal footing with the beloved. For this whole domain lies outside the Word with which Christ is invested when He presents Himself to contemplation. But that also implies that the contemplation of Christ should not be practised for the purpose of deriving from it direct feelings of happiness. For this, too, is merely a Catholic and not an Evangelical method; what is sought in this way is merely aesthetic enjoyment, and not religious strength, which as such we prove by vindicating our reconciliation with God through our attitude towards the world. What befits the Evangelical Christian in this respect may be seen from the prayers which in the German Passional of our Lord Jesus Christ (Nürnberg, 1548) are subjoined to the sections into which the story of Christ’s suffering is divided.²² Here the petitions are attached to the contemplation of the suffering Christ in its separate acts—that “Thou wouldst for Thy Passion’s sake protect us from every snare of the devil and from all the assaults of sin”; that “I may be strengthened to overcome all afflictions, sufferings, and sickness in Thy Passion”; that “I may entirely surrender all my will to Thy most perfect will, so that my walk and life may ever be found in Thy service”; that “I may not be moved by wicked slander, but may possess my soul in Christian patience.” And if it is the bestowal of eternal blessedness which is sought in the majority of these prayers, that goal is not conceived save as including the joy of victory over all enemies.

Faith, marked by the above described characteristics, is an expression for the whole position which the individual assumes towards Christ as the Bearer of reconciliation and the Representative of God the Father. Now, not every moment of the Christian life is occupied by the distinct appearance of all the characteristics contained in faith. In particular the emotion which attaches to faith is excited only by special adverse circumstances, when it is necessary to emphasise the weight of believing conviction. What Calvin meant by that characteristic (p. 101), and what follows from the worth of God and Christ and salvation (p. 211), is at the same time subject to the limitation that all education is designed to set bounds to our feelings and emotions (p. 165). It follows that our normal experience of the Christian religion, which in the highest sense relies on education, and is unhealthy without it, comes to us through that moderate state of feeling which makes continuity and equilibrium possible. The fact that the temperature of this feeling will be different in individuals according to their temperament, need merely be indicated here; for the whole series of these cases eludes scientific examination. In the full compass of its characteristics faith in Christ marks the beginning of the Christian life, if it is attained through sudden conversion. This case presupposes that a man has lived in vice or in antichristian convictions, and thus that the Christian education expended upon him remained fruitless. But if, amid the surroundings of Church life, education is the normal form in which individuals attain to faith in Christ, it is not to be expected that faith should be called forth in its definite peculiar character, in the totality of its characteristics, prior to the operations of God’s grace in the sphere of moral discipline and action. Education is always designed to deprive evil inclinations of their power by particular impulses to moral activity, and thus to attain the cultivation of character as a whole. Accordingly, the arousing of the right religious estimate of self can only be brought about by education indirectly, inasmuch as the practice of goodness ought not to be accompanied by self-complacency, but must be accompanied by humility. Out of the practice of humility and trust in parents and teachers the right sense of guilt in relation to Christ and trust in Him will arise in the maturer period of life. Accordingly that which proves itself the comprehensive motive of the Christian life in the later period can neither be directly understood nor experienced in childhood. Others, certainly, are of a different opinion as to this. Because faith in Christ is represented in systematic theology as the supreme motive of all good conduct, the attempt is made in certain circles to produce in young children a love for the Saviour, and to use this argument systematically in guiding their education. It may be granted that in childhood love to the Saviour is analogous to faith in Christ. The latter, however, is something very serious; the former is playful, for otherwise it would not be within the reach of a child. But moral education, which is a serious business even in nonage, the successes or failures of which must be taken equally seriously, can hardly be inculcated upon a child in the right way by means of a playful idea. The mental development of a child is not brought about by the instillation of general ideas into his mind, in order that by their means he may come to understand what is special and particular. Just as little does education in Christianity and for Christianity depend upon imparting to the imagination a general motive of obedience and good conduct, in order that the requirements of obedience may thence be deduced. The books which represent children of this kind as patterns for others are useless and injurious both from the paedagogic and the Christian point of view. Faith in Christ can be expected only in maturer life. As the general attitude which corresponds to reconciliation, it embraces all the particular acts of reconciling faith, patience, and humility, by which our standing in grace is put to the proof. These are not something alongside of faith in Christ, or something which merely results from it, but are the forms in which faith in Christ is applied to the life which the believer leads in the world.

§ 61. One who, as a believer, is no longer controlled by natural impulses—impulses, that is, at once self-seeking and world-loving—which bear the chief mark of sin in their indifference or mistrust towards God, is in the state of regeneration. Now justification or reconciliation is also contained in faith in God through Christ. The question arises, accordingly, how the idea of regeneration is related to these two. It is apparently very easy to decide the point if we only attend to the connections of Biblical phraseology. For on the assumption that God receives us as His children when He reconciles us with Himself through Christ, reconciliation is equivalent to adoption, and the possession of justification or reconciliation is equivalent to Divine sonship (§ 18). Now if the figure of generation is applied to the establishment of the latter status through God’s judgment of grace, and this spiritual generation is compared to the antecedent natural generation, it follows that adoption, which is equivalent to reconciliation, may be designated as regeneration by God. Since, further, no natural conditions are included in this idea, it can only be understood in the same sense as adoption, namely, as that for which man is destined by the Divine will of grace, and that, too, in such a way that the believer conforms to God’s final end as revealed to him. Since this destination of man, which takes effect in regeneration, is mediated by the revelation of God’s Fatherly grace, the Word of God is compared to the generative seed, but is at the same time contrasted with the material means of natural generation as the incorruptible seed (1 Pet. i. 23). Thus regeneration, or, as we inaccurately say, the new birth, cannot as a predicate of the individual believer be materially distinguished from effectual justification or reconciliation or adoption. In this sense Melanchthon, in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (ii. 45, 72, 78, 117), treats justificare, regenerare, and justum efficere as synonymous (p. 173), because in the connection he is expounding he has in his eye precisely the production of the religious virtues of trust in God, patience, etc., as the goal of justification [Gerechtsprechung] or regeneration or sanctification [Gerechtmachung] (justus being equivalent to acceptus, p. 72).²³ For those functions are just the new life which formerly did not exist, and is now awakened by the sin-pardoning grace of God. The fact that this conjunction of ideas has not been handed down in theology is due to the action of disturbing influences.

It has been shown (vol. i. p. 303) how vacillating the usage of regeneratio is in such a theologian as Baier. Among the different interpretations of this idea we find Melanchthon’s view that regeneratio is equivalent to justificatio, qua confertur jus filios dei fieri. Yet this conception is not asserted as normative against the other interpretations; on the contrary, he chooses to distinguish them thus, that regeneratio is coextensive with the donatio fidei, and precedes it as the condition of justificatio. Now, if this relation is to be interpreted not only theoretically, but operatively and temporally, we must remember that regeneration as the awakening of faith also includes the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. Though Baier makes a restriction here by saying that what is meant by regeneration is not the special powers of good conduct, but only the capacity ad credendum in Christum vitamque adeo spiritualem inchoandam, yet other theologians have not been able to accept this limitation, but have regarded regeneration through the communication of the Holy Spirit as the actual turning-point in the life of the believer, which the Divine judgment of justification must appropriately follow. It is beyond question that an approximation, though an unintentional one, is here made to Catholic doctrine. It is therefore a fitting thing that we should try to reach a decision by examining the latter.

While the Catholic doctrine takes justificatio in the Latin sense as a “making righteous” by God, and regards the recognition of this operation by the Divine judgment as a subsequent event, it includes the assertion of a materialistically conceived means, namely, the infusion of love to God. By this process is meant that the contrary tendency of the will is displaced from the seat of the will, as a lighter substance gives place to a heavier—for instance, air to water, when the latter is poured into an open vessel. In itself the application of the idea of space to express various functions of the mind is unobjectionable, as it is the indispensable form of our intuition of differences in any unity. Accordingly, we believe ourselves to be also right in saying that the good will subordinates to itself the impulses working in the mind; we even use from this point of view the metaphor of weight, when we say that the good will suppresses the movement of the impulses to evil. But we employ this method of looking at the matter with the reservation that the will directed to the good end is, on account of the universal character of this latter idea, a power of a different kind from the impulses, each of which only strives after something particular—which are therefore in themselves indifferent to the universal good and the universal will, but may be raised to be means of the evil as well as the good will. If, then, in ordinary speech we judge many phenomena of a moral kind according to the difference of weight between the good will and impulses which are inclined to evil, we do not put this quantitative estimate of the factors of moral conduct in the place of its qualitative opposite; we make the full understanding of these phenomena dependent upon the latter. This reservation, however, is not operative in the Catholic account of justification. On the contrary, as the infusion of love to God is meant quite literally, it is precisely the quantitative difference of good from evil that is here represented. Under this category, love is thought of in the first instance as a substance different from the impulses. Assuming, however, that the qualitative opposition to a given sin exerted by love to God is taken into account, yet it follows from the quantitative view, which is reckoned the higher, that love to God is still co-ordinated with the subjective impulses which are the channels of sin, i.e. it is itself viewed as a special impulse alongside of the latter. That this interpretation is right is proved by the ascetic view of the Christian life which prevails in Catholicism, and with which the dogma in question must have some connection. For this asceticism implies that the particular impulses can assume no positive relation to the good end, that the special goods to which they are related have no validity within the highest good, and thus that the will is directed to the latter only when it renounces the special goods of human life, and therefore also the activity of the impulses connected with these. If, then, justification (Gerechtmachung) by God proves itself in this way the principle of independent action, the infusion of love to God can only mean that a special and therefore qualitatively determinate impulse becomes operative as a quantum, the beneficial expansion of which has to displace the impulses, not only as channels of sin, but in every form, from the seat of the will.

Now the approximation to the Catholic doctrine of justification which appears in the exaltation of regeneration above justification, is occasioned in the case of Evangelical theologians by the vagueness with which they hold the conception of the Holy Spirit, which is associated with regeneration. Indeed, scarcely any part of the Christian theological view as a whole has been so steadily neglected as this conception. In well-known statements of Paul, the Holy Spirit is brought into connection with Divine sonship, so that in particular the involuntary invocation of God as Father is traced to the Spirit of God (Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 6). Now as regeneration leads to Divine sonship, so again Dogmatics has represented the Holy Spirit as the Divine means whereby regeneration is brought about. That, however, not only distorts Paul’s thought, which represents the possession and the characteristic utterance of the Holy Spirit as the accompanying mark of Divine sonship, but unintentionally makes this Factor appear as if He were to be conceived as a hyperphysical natural force. True, this conception does not for the most part assume a distinct form, especially as Church teaching, with sound tact, usually avoids suggesting the practical application of so vague an idea. But sectarian or half-sectarian practice customarily appeals to the Holy Spirit just in so far as thereby justification is supposed to be found for passionate zeal, or pathological experiences, or forced, vague, aimless efforts to reach passive assurance of salvation. The idea here expressed is that this Divine Factor moves man with a kind of natural necessity. If, then, the Holy Spirit is appropriated as a particular something which manifests itself directly, He is brought into the closest analogy to the natural powers of the mind, which, apart from the counteraction of the will directed to a universal end, work like natural forces; but in that case He simply cannot act as a counterpoise to egoism.

I think that these phenomena of sectarian Christianity throw light upon the meaning of the idea of regeneration through the Holy Spirit, which ecclesiastical Dogmatics also affirms. For if that process is to be distinguished from justification, which expresses the formal character which belongs to the believer by and for the judgment of God, regeneration by the Holy Spirit can only be understood as a material change. That is to say, there is thought to be awakened in man by the Word of God a supernatural and quantitatively mightier motive, which aims in general at pleasing God and in particular at everything good, and therefore counteracts the old impulses to sin. Now, the important point would still be that God declares a man righteous for Christ’s sake, and his conviction of his acceptance with God would depend primarily on this Divine act. But as this judgment of God is conditioned by faith, which forms the comprehensive manifestation of an altered kind of life, and as it appears that God’s formal decision regarding a man in justification (Gerechtsprechung) must find a reason for it in the man himself, the placing of regeneration before justification recommends itself. This is the way in which the theory arose to which Baier gives the preference. This theory, however, stands in distinct contrast to the Catholic doctrine, for the material change in the individual, which is indicated in the donatio fidei, has no independent value assigned to it apart from formal justification (Gerechtsprechung), in the sense that no material is real in its kind apart from the form. On the other hand, no weight is given to this consideration in the Pietistic and modern use of the formula that justification is the Divine judgment upon the material change of the believer; that change is rather regarded as a reality in the form of the subjective spirit, which would still have to be subjected to the Divine determination of form by justification.

The Holy Spirit, however, cannot be regarded as a substance, nor is He represented in the New Testament as the Divine means of the regeneration of the individual as limited to the beginning of the new religious life. If this remark seems to be inconsistent with John iii. 5, Tit. iii. 5, I would add that both of these passages refer, not to the Christian baptism of the individual, but to the renovating consummation of the common life of the people of Israel which Ezekiel (xxxvi. 25 ff.) proclaims. If, therefore, the symbolising of the Spirit of God by purifying and refreshing water makes it appear as though He were represented as a substance, theological usage must not be tied to this appearance. On this point we must be guided by the richest and most distinctive conception, which Paul supplies. The Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit, Who in relation to God Himself is the knowledge which God has of Himself, is at the same time an attribute of the Christian community, because the latter, in accordance with the completed revelation of God through Christ, has that knowledge of God and of His counsel for men in the world which harmonises with God’s self-knowledge. The Holy Spirit, however, as the power of the complete knowledge of God which is common to believers in Christ, is at the same time the motive-power of the life of all Christians—a life which, as such, is necessarily directed to the common end of the Kingdom of God (1 Cor. ii. 10–12; Rom. viii. 2–4; Gal. v. 22–26). If, then, in harmony with this exposition of Paul, the state of regeneration or of the new life is in the Reformation system of doctrine brought into immediate relation to the Holy Spirit, that is to be understood as meaning, not that each individual is changed by the specific power of God in the form of a natural force, but that he is moved to patience and humility, as well as to moral activity in the service of the Kingdom of God, by that trust in God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ which is common to all Christians. For this reason it is not permissible for any man to determine his relation to the Holy Spirit by observation of himself, in which he isolates himself from all others. In that case there would be reason to fear lest spiritual movements, the course of which is guided by laws of freedom, might be referred to some mechanical power, and be made the occasion of fanaticism. The New Testament witnesses to a series of ecstatic phenomena as operations of the Holy Spirit; and even Paul, when he interprets such phenomena, indulges in mechanical distinctions and interactions between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, e.g. in Rom. viii. 1; 1 Cor. xiv. Now, while we may leave it to sectarians to judge themselves according to these models of ancient times, it is advisable to restrict ourselves in formulating the doctrine of the Holy Spirit to the definition that He, as the power of the complete knowledge of God, bases the co-operation of all individuals in the Christian community upon trust in God as our Father, and upon the realisation of the Kingdom of God. This suffices, too, for practical instruction in Christianity. For if we thought we had to employ the idea of the Holy Spirit in our practical judgment of individual Christians, such an attempt would hardly deserve commendation. For it can be proved from 1 Cor. iii. 1–4 that factious Christians are not to be regarded as possessors of the Holy Spirit. Now, if we point out that so-and-so are factious, and draw the conclusion that they have not the Holy Spirit, we should hardly succeed in convincing them, but should rather increase the evils of controversy which are rife enough in the Church. We must not, however, admit into Dogmatics anything which cannot be employed in preaching and in the intercourse of Christians with one another. In that case we may rest satisfied with an interpretation of the Holy Spirit, which every one can and should put to the test by fostering in every way the Christian sense of union, in self-judgment and in conduct, in pain felt at the pernicious practices of the factious, in restraining or even in giving vent to righteous indignation against them, and at the same time in the fear lest we should contribute to their hardening.

Regarding the justification and regeneration of the individual, then, nothing further can be objectively taught than that it takes place within the community of believers as a result of the propagation of the Gospel and the specific continuous action of Christ’s personal character in His community, through the awakening in the individual of faith in Christ as trust in God as Father and of the sense of union rooted in the Holy Spirit, by which are dominated our whole view of the world and estimate of self, despite the continuance of the sense of guilt. How this state is brought about eludes all observation, like the development of the individual spiritual life in general.²⁴ Rules for the objective operation of Divine grace upon individuals are not to be found, the less so as the relations between men and God always manifest themselves in experience solely in the form of subjective self-consciousness. Thus the relations of the grace of God to believers can be conceived only in the most general forms, as the presuppositions of that which presents itself to observation in the framework of subjective experience.

1. The forgiveness of sins or reconciliation with God, as the common and permanent determination of the relation of men towards God, is not recognisable and operative outside the community founded by Jesus Christ, and dependent upon His specific action.

2. If forgiveness or reconciliation is understood as the right of this community to place itself, in spite of sin and a lively sense of guilt, in the relation towards God of children to their father, it is indispensable to trace forgiveness to Christ in the sense that He, as the Revealer of God, through His whole conduct inspired by love to men, manifested God’s grace and truth for their reception into God’s fellowship, and, with the intention of creating a community of the children of God, proved His religious fidelity to God by the faultless discharge of the task of His vocation; and that God vouchsafes to sinners who are or shall be Christ’s disciples, that position relatively to Himself which Christ thus maintained.

3. While it is only as a member of this community that the individual becomes assured of his reconciliation with God and his Divine sonship, this connection does not serve as a means to that spiritual acquisition in such a way as to render superfluous his conscious subordination to Christ as the Reconciler; on the contrary, the conviction of faith in Christ, within the community which shares the same faith, is the permanent form of the individual’s reconciliation and Divine sonship, in the sense that the community both is the medium of our clear remembrance of Christ, and, in spite of all defects of knowledge and of religious and moral practice, exerts an impulse to the religious estimate of self which corresponds to the specific action of Christ.

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Footnotes

1. In this sense even Calvin (iii. 2. 3) admits: “Fides in dei et Christi cognitione, non in ecclesiae reverentia iacet,” despite the fact that in § 35 he says: “Huc redit summa, Christum, ubi nos in fidem illuminat spiritus sui virtute, simul inserere in corpus suum, ut fiamus bonorum omnium participes.” ↩

2. Theodor Häring, Ueber das Bleibende im Glauben an Christus, Stuttgart, 1880. ↩

3. Zu Ritschl’s Versöhnungslehre, Zürich, 1888, p. 39. ↩

4. Op. cit. pp. 40, 41. ↩

5. Opp. var. arg. ad hist. reform. pertin. iii. p. 410. ↩

6. Anselm, Cantuar. Oratio ii. : “Intuere dulcem natum toto corpore extensum, cerne manus innoxias pio manantes sanguine, et remitte placatus scelera, quae patraverunt manus meae. Considera inerme latus crudeli perfossum cuspide et renova me sacrosancto fonte illo, quem inde fluxisse credo. Vide immaculata vestigia, quae non steterunt in via peccatorum, sed semper ambulaverunt in lege tua, diris confixa clavis; et perfice gressus meos in semitis tuis, facque odio habere benignum omnem viam iniquitatis… . Candet nudatum pectus, rubet cruentum latus, tensa arent viscera, decora languent lumina, regia pallent ora, procera rigent brachia, crura pendent marmorea, rigat terebratos pedes beati sanguinis unda. Specta, gloriose genitor, gratissimae prolis lacerata membra, et memorare benignus, quae mea est substantia … Vide redemptoris supplicium et remitte redemti delictum.” ↩

7. Geschichte des Pietismus, ii. p. 64 ff. ↩

8. The view of Hülsmann (Beiträge zur christlichen Erkenntniss, published by Hollenberg, 1872, p. 427 ff.) also goes on the lines of aesthetic reflection. ↩

9. Fundamente einer christlichen Philosophie. I derive my knowledge of this work from Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre, iv. 2, p. 216 ff. ↩

10. Schutzschriften, Pt. i. p. 9. ↩

11. As often as the formula that faith justifies occurs in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, we see clearly that it is an inexact expression, which has to be supplemented and corrected by the ideas expressed above. ↩

12. [Gerechtgesprochen, pronounced righteous.] ↩

13. Die Hauptpunkte der kirchlichen Glaubenslehre mit den Worten der Bekenntnisse dargestellt und an der heil. Schrift und den Forderungen des Glaubens geprüft, 1862, p. 87 ff. ↩

14. Der ideale und der geschichtliche Christus, 1871, p. 15. ↩

15. Der alte und der neue Glaube an Christus, 1868. ↩

16. So Hanne, op. cit. p. 42: “He who strives with full earnestness to appropriate the ideal Christ, and to become like Him, cannot succeed in doing so without the historical Christ.” ↩

17. I have before me two popular theological treatises of recent date, the one from the field of critical, the other from that of apologetic theology. It is noticeable how little their formulae regarding justification and Divine sonship differ from one another, but at the same time how little practical fruit they yield, because neither of them embraces the Christian goal of dominion over the world. Brückner, Was ist die Rechtfertigung aus dem Glauben? (Heidelberg, 1872) pp. 30, 32: “All religion is a feeling of dependence on God. Freedom in God is its end and aim. The phrase sola fide makes that dependence on God absolute, to the exclusion of every other temporally conditioned, humanly mundane, mediation or authority; at the same time, however, it conditions the true ideal freedom of the spirit and conscience by the idea of the omnipotence and love of God… . The idea of Divine sonship manifests itself in Jesus Christ in its truth and perfection, through the power of the satisfaction and blessedness which it is capable of giving; it shows in Him as the Founder and Pattern of Christianity how absolute dependence on God, the Father of love, is one with absolute freedom in God.” Pfeiffer, Das Gotteskindschaftsbewusstsein (Bern and St. Gallen, 1873), p. 74: “The right filial relation of man to God, according to the teaching of Jesus, is the unconditional surrender of the soul to God, and, as the result of acceptance through grace, the consciousness of receiving the continual communication of the Spirit from the Being of the Father and of being blessed in this communication of life.” ↩

18. Apol. C. A. xiii. 45-50. ↩

19. Geschichte des Pietismus, i. p. 49. ↩

20. Op. cit. i. pp. 129, 281, ii. p. 48, iii. pp. 94, 212. ↩

21. Spangenberg (Idea fidei fratrum) first develops the doctrine of grace in relation to faith, but in addition to that prescribes love to God as a contemplative exercise (op. cit. iii. p. 454). ↩

22. They will be found in the Prayer-book published by the Evangelical Book Society (Berlin, 1849), pp. 384-410. ↩

23. Eichhorn in Stud. u. Krit. (1887) pp. 425, 460. ↩

24. I take the liberty of calling the attention of certain readers to the fact that I, too, recognise mysteries in the religious life, but that when anything is and remains a mystery, I say nothing about it. ↩