It is not then as a pattern of theology fruitful in results, that Schleiermacher marks an epoch, but as a theological lawgiver. To be a lawgiver it is confessedly immaterial whether subsequent generations perfectly observe the law or partly depart from it. Schleiermacher was qualified for the work of lawgiving in theology, first by the original part which he took in the movement of the general culture of his age; and next by his familiarity with all fields of theology save the Old Testament. Accordingly, in the code of his theological legislation, his Kurze Darstellung des theol. Studiums (1811), fitness to lead the Church is made to depend upon an independent command of all theological departments. What Schleiermacher has here laid down respecting exegetical theology, and respecting historical theology in the narrower sense of the word, it would hardly be possible even to-day to state otherwise; and the supplementary treatises and lectures upon “hermeneutics and criticism” are recognised even by philologists as authoritative. His principles regarding philosophical, and particularly regarding systematic, theology, must of course be looked at from other points of view; for it is precisely in them that the individual limitation of Schleiermacher’s theology appears; in any case no one will be able to avoid coming expressly to a distinct understanding with these principles, because in them the basis of the heterogeneous developments of the subsequent period may be recognised. It is immaterial whether Schleiermacher himself has in all branches of theology produced work equally masterly; in every case his theological writings reflect his legislative power, even where they do not so much solve as propose problems to the discerning, or solve the problems so far as to render necessary a putting of the question in a new form. Assuredly Dorner has not done well in leaving out of sight the Darstellung des theol. Studiums in characterizing Schleiermacher. For in order to establish Schleiermacher’s importance to the sciences of exegesis, criticism, and Church history, he appeals partly to his Beispiel einer aus dem Glauben stammenden Kritik, partly to his arrangement of the tasks of biblical theology, partly to his discussions on the Athanasian and Sabellian doctrines, and on the doctrine of election. But these discussions are partly not historical, partly not models of the exercise of historical objectivity, and the “criticism that proceeds from faith” is either everywhere a criticism concealed under his criticism, or at least is not discernible in his writings upon the Gospel of Luke and the first Epistle to Timothy.

At the same time it must be admitted that Schleiermacher’s leading importance for theology is expressed in the laws he lays down for the study of it only because he at the same time brought into currency a peculiar standard for the understanding of the Christian religion. It will be expected that, as is usual, I should find this expressed in his idea of subjective religion. I am very far from undervaluing his effort to separate religion from objective knowing, and from moral acting, and to place it in a position of superiority as a peculiar subjective function over these activities so far as they have religious value. And even if his exposition of these relations does not offer the solution of the problem, to have proposed it is at all events of pre-eminent consequence. But what I am alluding to lies beyond the region of the Glaubenslehre. For Schleiermacher has established the much more general truth, that the religious moral life of the spirit cannot at all be conceived of outside of the fellowship that corresponds thereto, and that, in reciprocal action and reaction therewith, the individual attains his peculiar development. Hereby Schleiermacher has given a new aspect, primarily to ethics, and secondarily to theology; and has risen above the field of vision alike of the Wolfian and Kantian schools. This thought has a greater range than his attempt to form a peculiar idea of subjective religion; and even his Glaubenslehre is perhaps still more strongly characterized by the feature that sin and redemption are from the beginning exhibited in the form of social life, than by the feature that their essence and operation are referred to the weakening and strengthening of the consciousness of God, which lie in the region of feeling. Schleiermacher’s importance in this respect is put in a clearer light by the fact that Kant also, at a particular point of his philosophical doctrine of religion, found himself obliged to assume for the dutiful acting of the individual, and to explain by religious considerations, the existence of a moral fellowship (p. 402); though, indeed, he did not hold fast by this thought, because his dogmatic application of the critical principles of morality ordinarily brought the moral subject before him as an individual, and pointed towards a real dependence of religion on morality. But though Schleiermacher, by his conspicuous assertion of the social character of all the activities of the human spirit, actually accomplishes what Kant’s thought had only casually touched upon, it still is not right to take for granted that by means of this advance of Schleiermacher, Kant’s commanding importance in the science of ethics, as well as in the science of religion, was altogether put out of date. This would be the case only if Schleiermacher had appropriated Kant’s leading thought, namely,—the specific distinction of the power of the will from all powers of nature. But this he has not done. As he rather in the main reduces the movement of the powers of the spirit to the category of operative cause, and the antitheses of morality to the category of quantitative difference, he has fallen short of Kant in these respects. And we shall see further on whether it was possible for Schleiermacher, labouring as he did under these defects, to carry out, in a masterly way, his idea of moral fellowship in application to the material of the Christian doctrine of faith. The ethical views of these two men, and their views in religious philosophy therefore, serve to supplement each other in so far as they mutually correct one another; and in both respects they maintain the elements of that problem with the solution of which the theology of the present day also is occupied after its own fashion. We can therefore understand Schleiermacher rightly, as the leader of the theology of our century, only in so far as we give the same position to Kant also. I do not doubt that the undeniable decline of the influence of Schleiermacher upon the theology of the present, and the decay which has overtaken the group of theologians who attached themselves to him, is accounted for by this, among other things, that from the beginning men allowed themselves to be influenced by Schleiermacher without at the same time taking counsel with Kant. But people supposed that they might carry their contempt for the Illumination theology of the Kantians, even to disregard of Kant himself. The fault is of course partly to be attributed to the fact that the contemporaneous development of the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel pretended to have superseded Kant. But he who at this time of day appeals to to Schleiermacher cannot afford to forget Kant.

63. To his remarks upon the religious feeling in Der christliche Glaube,⁴ Schleiermacher appends this proposition:—“The devout self-consciousness, like every essential element of human nature, in its development necessarily becomes fellowship, on one side, indeed, indefinite and vague, but on the other side, distinctly limited, that is a Church” (sec. 6). As this truth admitted of being completely developed only in the course of a scientific theory of morals, he satisfies himself, in the passage referred to, with announcing the essential elements of the process as a fact of which every one is supposed to be aware. The religious feeling, he says, will display itself without a definite purpose and reference, and the social consciousness which is to be found in every man will call forth in others lively imitation of the thing which is expressed; for the social consciousness finds its satisfaction only in stepping out from the limits of its own personality, and in taking up into its own personality the things pertaining to other personalities. Now, as every one must concede, as matter of experience, that it is his natural condition to stand always in a many-sided fellowship of feeling, and that his feeling of absolute dependence on God has been awakened in him by means of the communicative and stimulative power of human utterance, this fact also implies that he would have established such a fellowship had it not as matter of fact already existed. The necessity of fellowship, even for the religious feeling, though asserted, is not proved in this place. The proof here assumed has been led by Schleiermacher in his first dissertation Ueber den Begriff des höchsten Gutes.⁵ In it he shows that if moral science be restricted to the doctrines of duty and of virtue, it is scientifically imperfect and practically inoperative. By means of those ideas, action comes to be so considered that it seems unimportant what results from it, or fails to result from it. The idea of purpose, however, by which an action receives moral character, is not indifferent to the result; and the greater part of what occurs in the world of men, and conditions and determines our life, does not come to pass in virtue of moral determinations of will and dutiful actions on our part, and on the part of other individuals, but in a different way. The totality of our conceptions of moral ends is therefore not exhausted until the field in which virtue and duty are exercised, and produce practical effect, has been taken independently into consideration and not committed to chance or to the providence of God. To remedy these defects, he then suggests that the idea of the summum bonum be taken up, an idea which in Greek philosophy was regarded as the chief problem of ethics. In the idea of the Good is denoted something proceeding from human activity, and which always anew calls forth and propagates that activity. The summum bonum is not that which by comparison surpasses all Goods, but includes them as parts in itself, in such a way as to bring out their essential connexion with each other, and the perfect solution of the ethical problem, through their existence side by side with, and on behalf of, each other, inasmuch as in them all moral activities always reproduce themselves. If in this totality dutiful action and virtue are not included, these, separated from it, cannot be perfectly defined in accordance with their idea. Schleiermacher hereby steers clear of the error of Greek ethics, which brought this notion to bear only on individual men as such, and which only asked the question wherein consists the highest good of the individual, and therefore could not bring this idea to its perfect shape. For such a question implies that we have to disregard the result of the action, for that never concerns the individual as such, or at least not necessarily; and, for that reason, nothing remained to the Greeks but to define the summum bonum as something quite internal, as virtue or as felicity, which, however, can never be represented as in a state of isolation, and never as a private good, and thus also never as a summum bonum of the individual. For the moral productivity of the individual does not admit of being separated from the concurrence or from the appropriation of others. Hence, only that can be exhibited as something definite and special which proceeds from a joint activity, and the sum and substance of all good things can only be referred to a resultant operation of the reason, in which every part is a member of the whole, but no part finds a place which has not sprung from moral action and so is not fitted to propagate and repeat it. In this connexion, the ideas of virtue and of duty also find their proof and their limitation. This they do not gain, if they have to be defined in accordance with the paltry and confused relations of the isolated person. But the idea of the highest good is the standard for the entire concatenation of our common history; and as each of us is merged in this history, that idea is also the highest expression of the personal consciousness.

In this way Schleiermacher has proved the social character of all activities of the spirit which possess moral value to be a necessary thought, from the theoretical presupposition that moral science ought to include not merely the inner region of virtue and dutiful purpose, but also the mutual relation between these and their results. This conclusion is derived in following the line of real knowledge; or flows from the special physiology of human existence. The law of human existence is the destiny of men to rule earthly nature by reason, and this under the condition by which our reason itself is attached to earthly nature, i.e., the condition that the principle of soul manifests itself in a life sexually differentiated and determined in part by the cycles and oscillations of physical nature. The physical antecedent condition, on which rests the first beginning of the solution of the ethical problem, is the co-existence of the sexes; an independent sphere for the moral exercise of reason is thus not the individual as such, but only the association of the sexes for the propagation of individuals, that is, the family; and the individual is such a sphere only within the other, or at least presupposes it. Now in judging physiologically of genera, we recognise the human race, endowed with the principle of soul, as the most perfect species; that is, that principle is the same in all men, and only in men; and at the same time exists in each individual in a way separate from all others and peculiar. But the reciprocal relation between the one common type of the race endowed with soul and the inalienable stamp which characterizes the individual soul is thus ordered, and becomes the occasion of so rich an abundance of varieties, because it is subdivided into various parts by national distinctions. But in that nationality which extends at once to the physical character and to the spirit, the family does not disappear, but maintains its fixed relation to humanity as a whole. Thus step by step, through family and nation, each personality discloses itself as a moral magnitude influencing the spirit-life of the human race in most manifold gradation, always in accordance with the prevailing types of generic identity or individual peculiarity. According to this rule, nations display Reason in their life only in proportion as each one opens itself to fellowship with all mankind; and so the activity of reason first rises to its level as a revelation of itself when by it the spirit announces that its home is above the earth; that is, when morality takes a religious direction and is founded upon religion,—that is, in the Christian stage of development, in the conception of the kingdom of God. The morally organized totality of the human race is thus to be thought of as the moral Good which embraces all Goods.

Such is Schleiermacher’s proof of the necessity for every religion having the character of fellowship. With respect to the Christian Religion in particular, it is defined in the Glaubenslehre (sec. 11), as all know, to be that monotheistic phase of faith within the teleological (moral) line of piety, in which everything is brought into relation to the redemption wrought by Christ. For, as all Christians refer the fellowship to which they belong to Christ, their common possession is herein summed up, that they recognise their translation from slavery in an evil state to a qualitatively better state in which they now stand as having originally been brought about by Christ; further, that this assurance of redemption is not, as in other religions, something of casual importance, but is the main thing towards which all their religious exercises are characteristically directed. Moreover, the relation of the Christian religion to the Person of its founder is of a different sort from the relation of the other monotheistical religions to Moses and Mahomet respectively. In both these the main business is the founding of a society upon a definite doctrine, and after a definite form. By Jesus and in Christianity, on the other hand, redemption has become operative as a principle for the moulding of the devout self-consciousness, which does not take its shape from a legally enjoined doctrine and constitution, but from the never-ending value of the Redeemer for the society founded by Him. The ideal contents, and the definite historical form of this religion, thus coincide in such a way that the thought of redemption prevails in every devout Christian consciousness, simply because the beginner of that Christian society is the Redeemer; and Jesus is the Founder of a devout society only in virtue of the fact that the members of that society become conscious through Him of their redemption. While Moses and Mahomet are elevated as it were arbitrarily from the body of like or only slightly different men, in order to receive the commandments of God for themselves as well as for others, Christ the Redeemer stands out in contrast with all as being He who alone did not need to be redeemed. If this distinction between the monotheistic religions be not admitted, and Christ be represented in the same light as the other founders of religions, that is to say, as a lawgiver, there is then set up between the religions only an outward distinction of doctrines and of precepts. Either then, as such, they remain separated in definite distinction, in which case their values can be distinguished only relatively; or they admit of being perfected, in which case this distinction of their values is shown to be relative herein, that reason would altogether sweep away the limits that separate between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Such an advancement of Christianity being an advance beyond Christ, would leave to Him no higher dignity than that of an eminent point of development, and would present itself as a redemption from Him, from His specific influence. But here again we recognise that Schleiermacher’s formula does justice to the peculiar value and the inner excellence of Christianity above the two other monotheistic religions. For, even although in this place he carries his regard to his illuminantist contemporaries so far as to imply that the assertion of the perfectibility of Christianity ought not to break up the religious fellowship of Christianity so long as it is sought at the same time to maintain a living consciousness of God in and through that fellowship, he yet sees apostasy from Christianity in the case where “one actually believes himself to have been emancipated from the need of clinging to Christ.”

I will not dispute the question whether this expression be not too loose; in any case, the test offered by the doctrine of the perfectibility of Christianity serves to confirm Schleiermacher’s definition of it. That definition is an excellent expression of the central importance of those doctrines, the history of which we are now tracing,—an expression of their value to the height of which none of the theological schools hitherto under consideration has risen. In it, for the first time, is taken up into theology, as a principle, that thought which, as a practical motive, dominates the Reformation and genuine Protestantism. In it, for the first time, is the attempt which Kant made so carried forward to its goal that all temptation to a relapse into Illuminantism is taken away. Schleiermacher has been able to accomplish this by having for the first time applied the philosophy of religion, which fixes the contents and value of other religions, to the defining of Christianity as a positive historical religion. Here one sees that, if the orthodoxy of both parties alike in the seventeenth century failed to render this service, the fact is to be accounted for not so much by the improper accentuation of the authority of Scripture in theology, as Dorner represents, as by the circumstance that that form of theology could not then raise itself to the points of view afforded by the science of comparative religion. Under the idea of revelation it was always the Christian revelation that was then kept before the mind; the contents of Christianity were imported into the religion of the Old Testament, and the contents of this, the one acknowledged revelation, were defined as a doctrinal law, such as Islam claims to be. And therefore the value of Scripture was expressed in no other terms than those in which Islam previously had expressed the value of the Koran.

It is thus of great importance that Schleiermacher indicated the form of Christianity to consist not in a doctrine like Islam, not in a social constitution like Mosaism and Catholicism, but in the idea of redemption by Christ. In addition to this, there is the fruitful truth that this religion, like all religions and like all activities of the spirit, can be rightly set forth only in that fellowship,⁶ which, presupposing the redeeming activity of its founder, exists as the communication and diffusion of that redeeming activity (sec. 11. 4). As this predicate of Christian fellowship is subsequently restricted (sec. 122. 3) the predicate of complete receptivity on the part of the society for the original redemption is included. If, then, redemption by the founder be the form and essence of this fellowship, that thought has necessary reference to this object.. To the theological discernment, redemption, the Redeemer, and the community that is the subject of redemption, stand in inseparable relation to one another. Hereby for our scientific knowledge is again fixed that which I have already pointed out to be the culminating point of the religious and practical consciousness of the Reformers (p. 157). Certainly this combination had continued to be operative only in the Reformed theology by means of the thought that the effect, as also the purpose of Christ’s redemption, bears upon the community of the Elect; that, in particular, justification in the first instance belongs to it, and only on this presupposition comes to the consciousness of the individual (pp. 271, 283). In the Lutheran theology, on the other hand, this connexion has not been maintained as such. We might be tempted, perhaps, to conjecture that this leading thought of Schleiermacher is a heritage which he derives from having originally belonged to the Reformed Confession. But his idea of the redemption-fellowship does not take the same form as that which it has assumed in Reformed dogmatics; and his view of justification, however nearly it approaches that of the Reformed school, betrays in its departure from them that he was all along unacquainted with these models. Rather does Dilthey’s minute investigation of Schleiermacher’s life show that one of his earliest and most independent conceptions lies in the thought of the summum bonum. If, then, the consciousness of community belongs to the fundamental conditions of religion, and religion cannot be rightly apprehended or practised apart therefrom, then German Protestantism in which this consciousness had been obscured ever since the time of Melanchthon, and as good as lost by means of the Illumination, owes a debt of gratitude to the independent, scientific discernment of Schleiermacher, for having opened up to the religious contents of Christianity the path of a richer development than that which it had found in the entire course of Lutheran theology up to his time.

64. As in all other cases, so with Schleiermacher also, the doctrines of redemption and of sin correspond. The former is not intelligible without the latter. It is all the more necessary, however, to direct our attention to the doctrine of sin, because Schleiermacher distinguishes the data of the positively Christian consciousness from those which are common to religion as a whole, in that he refers the dissatisfaction and the satisfaction, in which the religious feeling reveals itself as Christian, to the antithesis between sin and redeeming grace. The method of the Glaubenslehre has upon this point the important effect that the subjective consciousness of the Christian is applied as a key to the ascertainment of what the general objective estate of sin is; that is, the idea of sin is conditioned by the assurance of redemption. Up to that time, in all forms of theology, the doctrine of atonement and of redemption had been framed in accordance with the objective idea of sin which men had constructed for themselves from diverse intellectual considerations, and from the influence of these upon their interpretation of Scripture. This procedure was in accordance with the assumption that Christian revelation consists in statements concerning all the conditions of true religion, and that these statements are fixed in given writings; but in this way Christianity, or the Divine revelation made in Christ, was formally put on the same footing with Judaism and Islamism. But, if we are to preserve for Christianity its peculiar character, not merely in its contents, but also in the form in which it exists, then all the truths which are peculiar to it, and so also the idea of sin, must be deduced from the common consciousness which accompanies participation in the fellowship produced by Christ’s redemption. For redemption being correlative to sin, the consciousness of redemption which is necessary in the Christian fellowship implies a continuing and peculiarly determined consciousness of sin. Schleiermacher expressly holds to this in his representation of the idea of original sin.

This specific view of sin is not, however, inconsistent with the fact that the universal of God-consciousness also furnishes a standard whereby sin is known. In this sense Schleiermacher, in his introductory discussions, elucidates the fact that sin is apprehended as a struggle of the flesh against the spirit even outside of the sphere of the Christian life. Consciousness of sin always presupposes a consciousness of the Good, a bad conscience always implies in itself the craving for harmony with the God-consciousness. These phenomena thus have their root in the original perfection of man, which, not being in every respect extinguished by sin, is the pledge of the possibility of redemption (sec. 68. 2). But the psychological scheme in which the fact of sin is shown to be a datum of consciousness is the weak point of Schleiermacher’s theology. While religion in general may consist in the reciprocal relation of the God-consciousness (the feeling of absolute dependence) and the sentient self-consciousness (the feeling which moves between the poles which constitute the world), Schleiermacher has defined the Christian religion as a teleological kind of piety. But this has for its characteristic mark “that prevailing reference to the moral task constitutes the fundamental feature of the pious disposition.” “The figure of a kingdom of God which is so important in Christianity, which indeed is so all-comprehensive, is only the general expression of the fact, that in Christianity all pain and all joy are pious only in so far as they are related to activity in the kingdom of God.” (sec. 9. 1, 2). It were now to be expected that this particular characteristic of the Christian God-consciousness should at once be carried out with reference to the doctrine of sin. But Schleiermacher has omitted to do this; rather, in that doctrine he makes use only of those dim and indefinite categories under which he has apprehended religion as a whole, without applying the particular teleological direction of the God-consciousness towards the actual realization of the kingdom of God as the regulative point of view. I explain to myself this omission, which makes Schleiermacher’s own fundamental propositions inoperative towards the chief problem of the Glaubenslehre, from the circumstance that the notion of indifference which is brought out in his idea of God, as in that of the feeling of absolute dependence, stands in a relation of indifference also to his own religious philosophical insight, and therefore has thwarted its influence upon the Glaubenslehre. For if the teleological character of Christianity had been carried through, then neither would that idea of God have been maintained, nor that idea of religion in general which is so highly praised.

The teleological point of view presses itself upon Schleiermacher, however, at his very first step in the doctrine, in his judgment of sin. Apprehending as he does the normal movement of the human personality in such a way that every factor in life begins in the Spirit or God-consciousness; and the flesh, the sentient self-consciousness, or the totality of the so-called lower faculties of the soul, stands related to it only as a living link, as a healthy organ, he adds to this that the Spirit presses towards that perfect oneness (sec. 62. 2), i.e., that every factor of the world-consciousness and the activity corresponding thereto, ought to be appropriated by the God-consciousness or determined by it. But he immediately neutralizes this cognition, refusing to explain sin as a transgression of God’s law. His reason is, that in this definition the law is separated from God as if it were a single and perhaps arbitrary act; and in this sense law is no originally Christian expression. But that is neither the only, nor the necessary, nor the traditional significance of that definition. Schleiermacher, therefore, in resisting it, shows that he renounces the teleological judgment of human action in the same measure in which he strives to maintain that God is the indifference of all antitheses. If he had carried out as the standard of his Glaubenslehre that peculiarity of Christian piety which was recognised by him, it was incumbent on him to take up into the idea of God also the ultimate purpose of the kingdom of God, i.e., to differentiate that idea by distinctions lying within itself.

If, then, what Schleiermacher recognises as sin is not teleologically conceived, there is nothing else left to him but to apprehend it mechanically as “the impediment to the determining force of the Spirit which is caused by the independence of the sentient functions;” as the “incapacity of the spirit;” as the “positive struggle of the flesh against the spirit,” which is possible because both must be thought of as intensive magnitudes, of which the former attains to its development at an earlier time than the latter, and is not prompt to give up to the God-consciousness, which is developed at a later period, the scope for exertion which it has acquired for itself by its self-directed activity (sec. 67). Now, it is by no means doubtful that the life of the created spirit is subject to mechanical conditions. But the conception as sin of the mechanical preponderance of the flesh over the spirit always depends upon the fact that the spirit-life is not covered by the laws of mechanism, but that it is accompanied by the consciousness of freedom; freedom I mean, in Kant’s sense, which gives itself the absolute law, and therein sets an absolute end before itself. But who in attentively reading Schleiermacher’s treatise can suppress the thought that that mechanical impediment of the spirit by the flesh is conceived of as sin, only because the spirit knows that this ought not to find place?—that, accordingly, it is only the teleological self-judgment of the spirit that makes that fact to be sin? Schleiermacher himself cannot avoid asserting that if from the moment of awakening of the God-consciousness the spirit were gradually and increasingly to acquire power over the flesh, the self-consciousness would hardly have such a character as that of consciousness of sin. The latter arises because we always advance in unequable, impactual development, which makes the impediment of the spirit by the flesh to be keenly felt precisely in the futile attacks made upon the latter. “The claims of the spirit being uniformly the same, it appears uniformly where it falls short of attaining these claims as if it were repulsed and conquered; therefore the man is in a state of sin” (sec. 67. 2). Thus the impediment of the flesh is made to be sin by the claims of the spirit; that is, because the spirit judges itself in accordance with the absolute end. Nothing else than this involuntary because unavoidable intrusion of the teleological point of view is expressed also in the statement that we apprehend sin from the unequable development of the discerning faculty, and of the power of will (sec. 68). By this is not meant scientific apprehension, but the practical consciousness of each one, which, finding itself in the presence of fleshly habits, judges them to be sin. But this happens in accordance with the subsequent perception that the sensuous direction of life, although it actually exists in men, yet ought not to exist at all. To this finally are we led by the cognate assertion, laid down by Schleiermacher, that we do not recognise sin as unavoidable. This verdict he establishes for the Christian consciousness particularly upon the ground that faith in the human perfection of the Redeemer excludes the possibility that sin should be unavoidable; for the view of the absolute strength of the God-consciousness which we get in Him shows sin to be a disturbance of human nature. The person of the Redeemer being to him therefore the expression of the law in accordance with which a certain direction of life is sin, it follows that in every degree of the God-consciousness, that is recognised as sin which ought not to be in man.

It has been necessary for me to accompany with this criticism Schleiermacher’s psychological representation of individual sin, because, after having openly repudiated the sole valid standard by which the facts can be judged, he yet always recurs to it secretly; and because this peculiarity of his doctrine cannot otherwise be clearly brought to light, except by calling the thing by its name. We are led now to expect that the idea of redemption, which is correlative to that of sin, will suffer from that deliberate suppression of the decisive factor in the idea of sin. But, on the other hand, the idea of redemption receives the benefit of what Schleiermacher states respecting the social character of sin. “We are conscious of sin, partly as grounded in ourselves, partly as having its ground beyond our own being” (sec. 69). The first is implied in the idea of sin in itself; the the truth of the latter is connected with the fact that the development of the sentient self-consciousness, which is known to be sin by means of the subsequent discernment, reaches back to congenital tendencies, and through them to the succession of generations, from which the individual receives his origin and his up-bringing. That the moral fellowship transcends the personal activity of the individual thus justifies, in a general way, the Christian doctrine of original sin. But this as the opposite of the Good, and, in so far as it is taken away by means of redemption, is to be thought of as perfect inability towards what is good (sec. 70), reserving always that indestructible fitness for redemption, which the doctrine of the symbols upholds by means of the recognition of justitia civilis in the state of sin. As we must regard everything which in our circumstances is not sin as a result of redemption, Schleiermacher willl have us recognise in the tenacious resistance which sin continues to make even in the sphere of redemption, that in and by itself sin must be regarded as really infinite. But one cannot mistake that this concession to the tradition commencing with Anselm gains a different meaning from that which tradition gave, being due to other motives; and on that account will not bring with it the well-known inference for the value of satisfaction. As that predicate of sin is not derived from the infinity of the God who is injured, but only from the human discernment of the difficulty of the struggle against it, it is really only the relative greatness of sin that is shown. It can therefore only be called infinite in the negative sense, that is neither possible experimentally to measure its extent and power of resistance in the human race, nor can any individual overcome it by his own good will.

In like fashion Schleiermacher seeks to accommodate himself also to the doctrine of the symbols that original sin is guilt in each one (sec. 71). He denies, indeed, that any one ought to impute to himself as guilt original sin irrespective of actual sins. He declares it to be contrary to nature and inconsistent with the right and universally recognised rule to separate original sin from its connexion with actual sin. The Church-doctrine, however, which does not profess to take experience for its guide, but relies upon the dicta probantia of Scripture in the order of the loci theologici, exhorts us on the contrary rather to recognise the guilt of original sin before passing any judgment upon actual sins, which really can add nothing to that guilt. Schleiermacher has tried here to smooth over the difference between his view and that of Church tradition. But he has not succeeded in proving the truth of the above proposition from his own point of view. Taking together original sin and actual sin in looking at the matter, he asserts that the former is to be regarded as the sufficient cause of all actual sins in the believer, so that it is only something external to himself, and not anything new within him that has to be added in order that actual sins may be developed. He further maintains that, as any disposition in man becomes a dexterity by practice, so connatural sinfulness grows by exercise—by spontaneous exercise. If now by this increase of the propensity we draw upon ourselves an inculpation which, however, at the same time is identical with that innate to us, it follows that the latter also is guilt in man. This argument is sophistical, and proceeds upon contradictions. If original sin is the sufficient cause of all actual sins; it is no mere disposition. If it is a disposition, then something new must be added to it in man before effect can be given to it, namely, the decision of the will. In virtue hereof, actual sin and the increase of propensity thereby is proved to be guilt, but, at the same time, proved to be different from the connatural disposition. Thus it cannot be conceded that Schleiermacher in pronouncing, in common with the old theology, that the individual is the subject of original sin, only taking actual sin into the account at the same time, has convincingly proved independent guilt to be predicable of original sin. It admits of no doubt whatever that in comparison with this statement of the problem, the service rendered by Kant (p. 405) surpasses both in positive and negative respects the attempt which Schleiermacher has made.

That attempt could have been foregone all the more easily, because Schleiermacher goes on (sec. 71. 2) to represent the whole race as the subject of sin, from the point of view which takes together in one original and actual sin. “If, in every individual, sin is, on the one hand, produced by the sins of others, but is, at the same time, on the other hand, by the personal actions of each individual propagated to others and confirmed in them, then is sin in all points a thing of society. Whether it be regarded rather as guilt and as work, or as a life-principle and a state, in either respect it is thoroughly social, not accruing to each individual apart and relating to him alone, but in each one the work of all and in all the work of each one; indeed, only in this social character can it be truly or wholly understood. Hence also, the doctrinal propositions which treat of it are by no means to be understood as expressions of the personal self-consciousness, with which the doctrine of actual sin has to do; they are expressions of the common consciousness. The state of fellowship implies the solidarity of all places and all times in regard to the matter before us.” “Guilt it is called with perfect accuracy only if it is regarded simply as a joint deed of the whole race, for it cannot be guilt of the individual, at least so far as it is produced in him.” Schleiermacher then insists upon the importance of this mode of viewing the question (sec. 71. 3). “Were the consciousness of sins no common feeling, but a personal one in each individual, there would not necessarily be connected with it a consciousness of a general need of redemption. Hence also the two things are wont to go together, that original sin as common to the race is denied, and that the worth of redemption by Christ is rated at a lower value.”

By these sentences the Christian thought of general sinfulness is transferred to an essentially different field of contemplation from that which it had occupied since the time of Augustine. In consideration of this, we may perceive that Schleiermacher might well have spared himself the trouble of that accommodation to the traditionary point of view, which he undertakes at the beginning of the section; for that point of view is directly rendered invalid if the doctrinal statements respecting original sin are not to be understood as expressions of the individual self-consciousness. This resultless and yet ambiguous procedure arises simply from his mode of putting the problem of the Glaubenslehre, as if it were a branch of historical theology,—an exhibition of the prevailing doctrine of the Church. Unfortunately, however, he has not guarded the above vindication of the fact of sin as a totality from accommodation to the churchly expressions. For he speaks of it always as “original sinfulness,” and he will have it that in all men actual sins always proceed from original sin (sec. 73), although, in his view of sinfulness in general, all actual sins have been included as media. For this reason he has also omitted to analyse the acknowledged state of the facts in a satisfying manner, and has exposed himself to the charge that his idea of collective sin curtails individual freedom. If we, accordingly, liberate Schleiermacher’s opinion from the perplexing influences of his concession to the expression with which tradition furnished him, then the real difference between his view of collective sin and the idea of the Church is to be calculated from the fact that Augustine has postulated the guilt of naturally-inherited sin in the individual, irrespective of any actual display of sin, in order to maintain the sacramental character of infant baptism, and the retrospective action of the forgiveness of sins conveyed therein. This is the sole and the direct ground of that doctrine which is so fruitful of consequences. But Schleiermacher neutralizes the distinctions of naturally-inherited sin, of inbred sin, and of sin that has been increased by one’s own personal action, and also propagated to others, in order clearly to bring out by the inseparable reciprocal action, between the state of the community and the action of the individual, that the guilt with which redemption has to deal is that of the actual race. Warned by Socinianism and rationalism he takes this course, in order to maintain a redemption in general, as what is positively contained or declared in the Christian religion. Augustine’s combination also was regulated by regard to the general redemption-character of Christianity; but his regard expressed itself in his case in the Catholic form,—namely, in the thought that the redeeming power is connected exclusively with the sacraments, and that the fellowship of the universal Church is founded upon these secondary vehicles of grace. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, defends the evangelical view which apprehends redemption in its historical source, in the Person of the Redeemer, as the efficient power of religious fellowship and what constitutes its special character. And having to withstand a much more fully developed Pelagianism than was that with which Augustine contended,—having also observed, as matter of experience, that the Pelagian principle, since the Reformation, had risen up in rebellion against the general character of redemption, Schleiermacher was led to give a more comprehensive, more concrete, more ethical expression to the thought of common sin than was given by regarding it as the natural heritage of the individual.

How far Schleiermacher withdrew from the traditional path is specially shown in his denial of the significance of original sin as punishment; for this is an essential feature in Augustine’s doctrine. He alleges that punishment is always a superadded infliction; but sin can never be a thing superadded, therefore punishment must always be something which is not sin in him who suffers it (sec. 71. 2). In the same direction, he guards himself against the view that the true feeling of the need of redemption is to be brought about by means of the consciousness of having deserved punishment (sec. 71. 4). The purity of Christian piety would be disturbed if one hoped, above everything else, to be free from the evil consequences of sin, and not directly from that which impedes the God-consciousness. This demand promises to the doctrine of redemption a different aspect from that which it receives in the traditionary form; while at the same time the thought touches on the distinction between remission of punishment and remission of guilt, which had been set up by Töllner (p. 356) and Tieftrunk (p. 423). Finally, Schleiermacher’s view of evil as being the consequence and punishment of sin connects itself with that position which the problem had assumed from the beginning of the Illumination; but yet reaches a result which could be brought forward neither by the illuminantist successors of Wolf nor by those of Kant.

The old form of the doctrine of the reconciliation of God was designed to exhibit redemption from the punishment of sin. As such, from Anselm’s time, the everlasting condemnation of the whole human race had been assumed,—a punishment grounded on the one hand by original sin, and on the other hand on the necessity under which God lay, in virtue of His honour or of His penal justice. If the condemnation of the whole human race was upon this ground regarded as a necessary consequence of original sin, it still could not be forgotten that original sin itself represented a punishment wherewith God arbitrarily visited the fall of the first man. In the assumption of the eternal condemnation of men, therefore, the marks of arbitrary and natural punishment were confounded (see above, p. 379). While that infliction moreover was treated as a perfectly clear and distinctly defined thought, and the conditions of redemption were strictly accommodated to it, no attention whatever was paid to all those evils, which, so far as present experience is concerned, must stand in one relation or another to active sin; for just as the guilt of active sin had no importance attached to it in comparison with that of original sin, neither could present evils be made any account of in comparison with everlasting condemnation. The problem of present evil had come, however, into closest relation with the design of the Christian religion, if not with the idea of redemption, ever since the Illumination had exchanged the old assumption of the condemnation of the whole race for the conjecture of the possibility of reformation after death. Inasmuch as it was inferred from Christ’s proclamation of God’s loving-kindness, that He threatens the punishments of this life only as means of the sinner’s reformation, and inasmuch as people no longer chose to believe, with Leibnitz, in such a degree of obstinacy in active sin on the part of individuals as could withstand God’s purposes of reformation (see above, p. 362), there was left for the redemption by Christ no other purpose than that of amelioration or of incitement to virtue. On the other hand, neither the dogmatic method of Wolf’s disciples, nor the critical method of those of Kant, was able to solve the question as to the marks of the congruence, whether of natural or of positive punishments, with actual sins. Now Schleiermacher entered directly into the problem thus defined without taking notice of the assumption of the eternal condemnation of the sinful race. He does not directly handle the problem as it presents itself under the point of view of redemption. Still we cannot fairly say that in this respect he falls short of Gruner (p. 372); for his idea of sin, which is followed by the doctrine of evil, is framed with reference to the certainty of redemption, and the same circumstance is clearly enough brought out in the judgment he forms of evil.

Evils are those hindrances in life which arise in the relation between man and the world, in consequence of the fact that the original perfectness of man has given place to sin. Evils are partly those which arise from human activity, the original harmony between the world and man having ceased (social and immediate evils), partly those which, independently of human activity, arise from the fact that the world appears differently to the sinner (natural and mediate evils). The circumstances which in the latter sense are felt to be evils, have their root in relative opposition to the world; into which opposition men as finite creatures are forced, but which in itself belongs to the original perfectness of the world, it having been designed as a stimulus to the exercise of the God-consciousness, and of moral decision. The conditions of finitude and transitoriness come thus to be impediments of life only through the weakness of the God-consciousness, and that because the circumstances, which are materially the same as before, produce in the sinner a different impression from that which they formerly produced (sec. 75). Now, all evil is to be regarded as punishment of sin,—as punishment in this sense,that evil is connected with wickedness by a Divine arrangement, which arrangement, however, exhibits itself in the general ordering of the universe and in the whole system of nature (sec. 76. 1). For that the world is the place of evil corresponds to the truth that sin is the joint deed of the human race (sec. 75. 3). On this account the congruity of penal evil with sin admits of being proved experimentally in this sense alone, for it is a Jewish and Pagan error to look for it in the life of the individual man as such. For not only did Christ declare this rule to be inapplicable in the case of the man born blind, He even set before His disciples the prospect of persecution and suffering in the prosecution of the work to which He had called them (sec. 77). While, now, resignation to the evil that God ordains is the expression of the simple feeling of absolute dependence, which elicits also our understanding of the connexion between punishment and sin, it would still contradict the full meaning of redemption if we were to try to fix Evil as such, and it would at the same time contradict the spiritual character of redemption were we to seek to do away with Evil in and for itself, inasmuch as Evil, materially considered, always offers the impulse to spiritual and moral development.

In this doctrine the importance of the conception of sin as the joint action of the human race is confirmed in the first instance; and then more remotely Schleiermacher’s idea of the summum bonum as the standard whereby its opposite can be measured. The moral common consciousness of sin, which had been asserted to be the truth embodied in the doctrine of original sin, is shown to be the view appropriate to Christianity just in so far as it accounts for the implication of the individual in the common evil, while to require a harmony between the happiness and the worthiness of the individual belongs to the religion of the Old Testament and to Greek philosophy. In this standpoint, which is beneath the Christian level, the illuminantist view of the problem of sin and punishment had its root. Their distinction between natural and positive punishment, which they were never able to verify within the bounds of individual life drawn by themselves, is refuted by the new distinction of natural and of social evil, by the mediate reference of the former and the immediate reference of the latter. The appearance of Divine arbitrariness in so-called positive punishments is obviated by referring social evil to the common consciousness of sin, and at the same time to the congruity of the Divine arrangement with the order of the universe. If anything is lacking in Schleiermacher’s presentation of this matter, it is again to be found in the teleological or ethical point of view. The merely mediate significance of natural evil as punishment first comes to be clearly seen when the consciousness of special guilt is indicated as the ground of that judgment. But, again, the like judgment pronounced upon social evil can only be arrived at when the individual bethinks himself of what he has himself contributed personally to the common guilt. Without this, neither is the common consciousness of sin shown to be consciousness of guilt, nor is the significance of the individual personality as an independent member of moral society secured, nor is the subjective truth of the idea of punishment evinced. I unreservedly concede that the whole human race must be regarded as the subject of sin, and that God’s justice ordains common evil as the punishment of common sin (sec. 84. 2); but the religious conviction of that can exist only in the individual subjects whose personal consciousness of guilt widens into the recognition of that truth, and who accordingly patiently submit to the measure of social evil which falls to their lot,—conscious that by their own fault they have implicated themselves in the coil of evil. This fact of the Christian consciousness is not brought into clearness by Schleiermacher, because, with him, in consequence of his overlooking the teleological point of view, the standard for the freedom of the individual in the community disappears.

For this reason, neither does his objective idea of Divine punishment come into the clear light that were to be wished. In so far as he allows this idea to have validity at all,—as being the expression of the necessary thought of God’s justice (sec. 84. 2),—he finds himself compelled, in spite of all his efforts, to test it by the individual consciousness. The question therewith is naturally turned, though still indirectly, to the ascertainment of the purpose of punishment. But in the doctrine of Christian faith this purpose must be determined by reference to the teleological relation of that religion to the kingdom of God. While omitting this he decides alike against the purpose of reformation, and against that of bare retribution or revenge. For the latter function of civil justiciary procedure he declares to be unsuitable so far as God is concerned, because originally moral evil and other evil are incommensurate, and become commensurate for human law in so far as the bad will inflicts what is bad on another,—civil punishment being merely a modification of private vengeance, and such a procedure being credible only where crude notions of God are entertained. Nor does he allow that punishment is designed for the reformation of the subject; because, if fear be set over against pleasure, a different distribution of the motives that appeal to the sentient nature will certainly ensue, but no greater force of the God-consciousness can be produced thereby. He decides therefore in favour of the “protective or intimidative design of punishment” (sec. 84. 3). “For it is a thing which must of necessity intervene, where and in so far as in the sinner no force of the God-consciousness yet shows itself, in order that the prevalent sensuous tendencies may not, through unbroken custom, become predominant before that be developed.” Schleiermacher supports this affirmation by reference to the design of the Mosaic law as preparatory for the future redemption (Gal. iii. 22-25). Herein it is implied that from the standpoint of the consciousness of redemption evils can no longer be regarded as Divine punishments at all. Upon this question a special consideration of Christ’s reconciling function will give the requisite elucidation.

65. In the consciousness of redemption or of being brought nigh to blessedness, we are from the outset conscious, according to Schleiermacher, of being partakers of a joint life just as in sin. The Divine origin and the historical continuity of that life is guaranteed by reference to the activity of Jesus, which communicates His sinless perfection. As the sin, however, to which redemption relates, does not point back, like the latter, to an ordinance of God, the institution of the new joint life is to be regarded as the perfecting of human nature. As the personal significance of the author is measured in accordance with these purposes of the new joint life, the doctrine of the Redeemer is not merely included in an external way within that of redemption, but also is innerly regulated thereby, so that His specific value is made clear and intelligible precisely by reference to the matter of His peculiar activity. In this way, of course, the individual characteristic in Schleiermacher’s definition of the Christian religion (p. 448) comes conspicuously into prominence; but the recognised specific difference of this religion, which had been already overlooked in his doctrine of sin, fails also in his doctrine of redemption to exercise its befitting influence. Schleiermacher certainly at one point calls the new joint life, which Christ aimed at, by the name of the kingdom of God (sec. 87. 3); but he has entirely shunned the historical determination of this undoubtedly ethical thing by reference to the discourses of Jesus. To demand this of him would not be to run contrary to the general method in accordance with which Schleiermacher has planned his Glaubenslehre, the method, namely, of describing the subjective consciousness of grace. For as this comes under consideration as a common consciousness, and, in fact, as one which directs itself to the purpose of the Redeemer, it can therefore receive its normal form only from regard to the design which Christ set before Him for His own work; and that design is the kingdom of God regarded, as Kant expresses it, as a fellowship of men regulated by laws of virtue. There is not one word of anything of this sort, however, in Schleiermacher. Rather the explicit substance of redemption, being, in fact, the communication of that sinless perfection of Jesus, which consists in the strength of the God-consciousness, and in unclouded blessedness, is set forth only within the framework of those lines of thought which the idea of the religious feeling as a whole offers, and in accordance with the idea of God which is correlative to that subjective function.

Suppose now we assume it as proved that Jesus, regarded as possessor of the absolutely effective God-consciousness, is as archetypal as historical, and that the abiding power of His God-consciousness was a proper in-being of God in Him. According to Schleiermacher the consciousness of redemption by Him is produced by the instrumentality of His religious fellowship, in so far as the picture of His life, which is fixed in Scripture, arose and is preserved only in that fellowship. Our interest in Christ is not hereby lessened however, because the power of that fellowship to awaken faith is also only the result of Christ’s personal perfection (sec. 88. 2). This instrumentality of the Church, however, cannot be empirically verified; for we are not to think of an infallible representation of Christ in the Church; the mass, on the contrary, seems to be so entangled in sin that it is, on the whole, doubtful whether it can be regarded as the subject of redemption. In spite of this, not only have we experience of the historical image of Christ, and, therefore, of His redeeming power in the Church, but by faith we also recognise that in the perplexity of the general state of Christianity, which is still so great, a tendency which proceeds from the perfection of Christ, and which resembles it, makes itself felt as an impulse (sec. 88. 3). In the work of Christ which is accomplished throughout the whole self-revelation of His life Schleiermacher distinguishes the redeeming and reconciling activity. His redemption is the actual liberation of believers from the sin that prevails in them, by communication of the power of His consciousness of God, which the individual receives in the fellowship of those who resemble Him (sec. 100). It is at once clear that what is here treated of is a positive function, without which the opposite state could not, as matter of fact, be abolished. But the thought of redemption, moreover, is so extensive as to include within it the doctrines of regeneration and of (active) sanctification. It therefore reckons upon the presupposition of human freedom; that is, the promotion of a higher life, which is sought by means of redemption, assumes that the act of the Redeemer is represented at the same time as the proper act of the individual believer. Christ having possessed the consciousness of sin as a sympathetic feeling, while yet in His sinless conduct of life He had shut out sin from Himself both as an act and as a state, He takes up believers into the fellowship of His activity and of His life on the condition that they die to sin. But, in virtue of the in-being of God in Him, His activity is creative, liberative, even although it be regulated according to the free constitution of the human spirit. This operation being, with respect to its initiation, supernatural, and, with respect to its manifestation, natural and historical, extending itself at once to the individual and to the aggregate, Schleiermacher expresses himself as content that his view should be called mystical, in order to distinguish it from others that are current. Of these he characterizes as magical alike that fanatical separatist view which, without taking any account of the religious commonwealth, derives regeneration from the exalted Christ, as also the Lutheran theory which derives regeneration from the exalted Christ, but through the instrumentality of the preaching of the Divine Word. The empirical view, or the moral rationalistic, which derives growing perfection from the doctrine and the example of Christ, likewise refuses to regard the influence of religious fellowship, and, as Schleiermacher adds, the truth of redemption as a taking away of sin.

In order now to arrive at a decision respecting the mystical view of Schleiermacher, we must test the figures of which he avails himself in describing the matter. For if he offers a scientific formula, then the pretext of mysticism will not suffice to preclude us outsiders, who do not “belong to the circle,” from “coming within it” in the prescribed way, if we only can. I think I perceive that Schleiermacher defines the peculiar activity of Christ when he refers it to the individual freely-acting subject æsthetically, and when he refers it to the aggregate in a physical and physiological way. The former is proved by his words—“the original activity of the Redeemer is best conceived under the form of an impressive activity, which, however, is received by its object as an attractive activity, in virtue of the free movement with which he yields to that impression, just as we ascribe a power of attraction to any one to whose formative spirit-influences we willingly surrender ourselves (sec. 100. 2). Respecting the new joint life on the other hand, he says—“When regard is had to the Redeemer himself, it is no miracle, but is the moral naturalization of the supernatural, for every distinct power draws masses to itself and holds them fast” (sec. 88. 4).⁷ “According to the law of the historical continuity of human nature, the higher perfection of the second Adam must act upon the like nature by stimulating and communicating, primarily in order by means of the difference to bring to perfection the consciousness of sinfulness, but also in order to take away infelicity by means of assimilation” (sec. 89. 2). The former æsthetic appreciation of Christ’s personal influence, and the latter comparison with mechanical and organic processes of nature, are not heterogeneous. For a character which exercises an attractive influence by means of the harmonious impression of beauty exhibits morality developed into spiritual nature, which therefore appears to work after the fashion of nature. Conversely by means of the attractive power of gravity the harmony of mechanical motion is produced; by assimilation the elective affinity of matter towards a possible fellowship in organic life is evinced; thus something is brought about which is analogous to beauty. Now, even although the redeeming activity of Christ is not altogether misinterpreted by the above formula and these figures, Schleiermacher has hardly exhausted the problem by means of them; for certainly the teleological character of Christian piety, of which he himself (sec. 100) again reminds us, demands yet another display of the redeeming power of Christ, besides that which is expressed in the beauty of His character. That beauty will assuredly contribute its influence towards the conversion of a man, but æsthetic complacency in the contemplation of Christ’s figure, as displayed in His life, cannot be recognised as being alone the adequate motive of the decision of the will that leads to a change of mind. The want of a properly ethical point of view is also the reason why Schleiermacher could remain satisfied with expressing the relation between the Church and its Founder simply in the figure of physical processes. When this kernel of the mystical view has once been discovered, the others, which are rejected by Schleiermacher, rise in value. For the rationalistic has certainly an ethical direction; and that it does not explain the actual taking away of sin does not serve to distinguish it from the mystical. And the Lutheran view ceases to be magical, in so far as the preaching of the Divine word reckons upon an ethical effect; rather by placing in the background Christ in His state of exaltation it shows itself to be at the same time of a mystical character.

As the redeeming function of Christ transplants the believer into a state where he successfully strives against the sin that is in him, so reconciliation by Christ consists in the taking up of the believer into His peculiar blessedness (sec. 101). This function is as far-reaching as the redeeming function, and manifests itself therefore just like the other in the regenerate. Now, although in Christ Himself blessedness and the power of the God-consciousness are made to be regarded as independent of each other, and as reciprocally conditioning each other, the operation of reconciliation in the regenerate yet depends simply on his redemption, because the latter is accomplished only when the receptivity shows itself in hatred of sin, and not in aversion to the evils which flow from sin. For by reconciliation Schleiermacher does not understand what the apostle Paul intends by the thought which has been thus translated—the turning of the will towards God,—but the reconciliation of man with suffering—with his position in the world, which as sinner he had traced to his guilt; thus he means that determination in his emotional sensitiveness, which rests upon the judgment that evils in his case no longer have any connexion with sin. As reconciled, the believer knows himself to be no longer worthy of punishment, “consequently the first thing in reconciliation is the forgiveness of sins.” For in Christ Himself blessedness was secured by His having regarded all the hindrances which the sinner feels to be evils always only as incitements to His activity; He always meeting them at once with the impulse of His God-consciousness, and they never coming to be felt by Him otherwise than as they were determined by that consciousness. Since blessedness thus co-existed in Christ’s case with this experience of the hindrances of life, the forgiveness of sins does not exclude the experience of evils, but only makes them to be no longer judged of as punishments for sin. If Schleiermacher had not always cherished a dislike towards that teleological manner of viewing the question, which in words he acknowledged, he could not have found means to make this thought more clear than by saying that, in the forgiveness of sins, what is treated of is the removal of guilt, and of the consciousness of guilt, and not of penal evil as such. His distinct opposition to the Illumination, as also to the orthodoxy of Döderlein and Knapp (p. 383), could be proved by nothing more strikingly than by his declared adherence to this view of Töllner and Tieftrunk (pp. 356, 423), of which he was the first to undertake the proof.

In order, however, to show the cogency of this proof, it is necessary to follow out further the elucidations of Schleiermacher. For he designates this doctrine also as mystical, and contrasts it with the magical and the empirical view of the matter. With regard to the latter, he approves of it in so far as it reckons upon the decrease of evil along with the decrease of sin, but he objects to the application of this principle to the life of the individual. For as the principle is true only of the moral joint-life, the other view is always refuted by the fact that the masses of evil gravitate exactly to the point where growing perfection makes its appearance. If the Illuminantists saw themselves compelled on this account to postulate the equalization of these abnormalities in the future life, they in doing so admitted themselves unable to prove that blessedness follows moral amelioration in equal ratio. According to Schleiermacher, it is the magical view that is expressed, when the forgiveness of sins is derived from the transference of punishment to Christ without the mediating influence of the thought of a life-fellowship with Him. The Church tradition which is alluded to has never been chargeable with this, for it connects the forgiveness of sins with faith. It is, however, really touched by the reflection that though the prospect of punishment is taken away, the moral consciousness of being worthy of punishment will continue to show itself for all that. This is exactly the point wherein the carelessness of the old school had been unmistakeably shown in the cases of Döderlein and Knapp. It must be conceded that the mystical form of the idea of reconciliation does not suggest the same objections as had to be made against the idea of redemption. Christ’s attitude towards the hindrances of life that befell Him, an attitude which is pointed to as the pattern and as the key to that change which the believer experiences in his judgment, and in his sense of evils, can be apprehended only in a directly teleological or ethical manner. Although it be left undecided whether Christ’s personal blessedness can be proved even independently of His active consciousness of God and of His vocation, that blessedness is perfectly intelligible by the consideration that He by constancy in His life-purpose transformed all hindrances into instrumentalities towards the aim He had in view. The imitation of this attitude by believers in correspondence with the pattern, although only relative and approximate, has its root also only in the specific direction of the will towards the kingdom of God as its chief end. But if this result is to be recognised as brought about by the archetypal attitude of Christ, it is made by Schleiermacher to depend upon the influence of redemption—upon that life-fellowship which includes in itself the believer’s effective resistance to his sins. But redemption was not adequately expressed by means of æsthetic attractiveness, by means of the impression of beauty that the picture of Christ’s life produces; and nothing confirms this criticism more fully than the reflection that if we “give ourselves up however willingly to the formative spirit-influences of Christ,” and that too with the result of a constant resistance to our own sins, there reveals itself in this no necessary transition to a deliverance from the general consciousness of guilt which would evince itself for us in an altered judgment regarding the significance of evils. The impression on the spirit of believers of Christ’s similar attitude would be nothing but a magical result were these premisses accepted.⁸

In his investigation of those two ideas, Schleiermacher has purposely refrained from taking Christ’s passion into consideration, because he discerns in it no “primary element” for those ideas. For he is of opinion that he must leave open the possibility that a man might have been perfectly absorbed into life-fellowship with Christ, even previous to His suffering and death. He declares, moreover, that the passion belongs to redemption only mediately, in other words, only in so far as Christ’s God-consciousness displayed itself also in active self-surrender to suffering. It was immediately connected with reconciliation on the other hand inasmuch as it perfectly proved that blessedness of the Redeemer which maintained itself even in His fellow-feeling with sin and its misery, and which was strong enough not to be overcome by the depth of His suffering. But now, before we can pass to the consideration of the question what position Schleiermacher in accordance with these two ideas assumes towards the doctrine which passed current as that of the Church, it will be necessary to enter more fully into the understanding of their meaning, which we have already tried to gain in particular points.

For, as has already been shown with reference to his idea of reconciliation, the usus loquendi which Schleiermacher adopts in his indifference to tradition may easily confuse. What he calls reconciliation is reconciliation with evil; what he calls redemption ought in reason to have been called reconciliation with God. For the uplifting of the God-consciousness as a free act of the believer means, teleologically considered, that directing of the will towards the Divine end whereby the sin which previously had prevailed is repressed. If, now, this operation of Christ be called redemption, it is not the primary but the secondary element of the process that is brought into prominence. But if in consideration of the chief matter this operation of Christ must be called reconciliation with God, then that abolition of the general consciousness of guilt which is included in this might suitably have been called redemption if it was to be brought into prominence as a characteristic feature. For the removal of actual sin is to be counted on only in a relative measure, even where the general direction of the will seeks the Divine end; on the other hand, with it the reversal of the judgment regarding evil, and therefore redemption from its pressure as the prevailing mode of feeling, must not merely be connected with a will so directed, but also must admit of being firmly held. If thus it seems permissible to correct in this fashion Schleiermacher’s unfamiliar use of language, in order to make his meaning more intelligible, that meaning amounts to the following: that Christ, having in the abiding powerfulness of His God-consciousness given the Being of God in Him to be plainly seen, elicits the like direction of the consciousness towards God in the individuals who surrender themselves to Him. From this it is clear that he, like Töllner and Tieftrunk (pp. 354, 422), follows Abelard’s type of doctrine. But when he represents Christ’s influence upon men not directly as ethical, but rather as æsthetic, he gives a peculiar modification to Abelard’s thought.

Neither has Schleiermacher satisfied the expectations which he had awakened by his introduction of the idea of life-fellowship into the problem in question; nay, rather the previously established meaning of this expression is involuntarily distorted in his doctrines of redemption and reconciliation. For what he calls redemption in this place is nothing else than what he subsequently presents under the title of conversion, and what he calls reconciliation subsequently comes up again under the title of justification. Now the latter notions are expressly referred to individuals; but it cannot be ignored that Schleiermacher has in his eye no other reference in analysing the work of Christ into redemption and reconciliation. For with regard to the former, he counts upon its becoming a proper act; but this is only conceivable in the individual will. Reconciliation in like manner can only alter the individual feeling by the change of judgment regarding evils. While then in this connexion regard is always had in a secondary way to the fact that Christ’s operation takes effect on the community, this community is only explained as the product of all individuals who are similarly determined. But this thought runs counter to Schleiermacher’s original tendency. Since Christ, as endowed with the Being of God, is in this place set over against the entire mass of mankind upon whom He is to exercise His redeeming and reconciling work, and since these influences are presented to our view only in individuals, the idea of the life-fellowship into which He takes them up becomes tacitly the expression of an entirely individual relation, and the new joint-life, instead of being regarded as a pre-requisite, comes to be a simple consequence thereof. This divergence from the original purpose is also far from casual, for every view of reconciliation that follows the type of Abelard will be framed so as to seek its direct verification by reference to the individual.

The divergence operates also in a characteristic way upon Schleiermacher’s doctrine of the Church. Empirically (according to the method of his treatment of that subject), he finds that “now indeed the new life of every individual proceeds from the joint-life” (sec. 113. 1); but the origin of the Church he represents as being the association of individual regenerated persons for the purpose of orderly co-operation (sec. 115). When now side by side with this statement, he yet asserts that the origin of the Christian Church is the same as that which daily takes place before our eyes (sec. 114. 1), he thinks of the joint-life only as the sphere of preparatory grace, as the outer fellowship of expectancy of salvation (sec. 113. 2), out of which one must pass in a twofold sense in order to enter the inner circle of the really regenerate, who as individuals first constitute the community of believers, the Church. For if he viewed the matter otherwise he would not be able to regard himself as the defender of Protestantism, which, according to its well-known formula, makes the individual’s relation to the Church to depend on his relation to Christ, while Catholicism makes the individual’s relation to Christ to depend on his relation to the Church (sec. 24). Accordingly, he so interprets the instrumentality of the Church in the attainment of Christ’s perfection and blessedness, an instrumentality which is expressed in the designation of the Holy Ghost as the common spirit of the Church (sec. 116. 3), as to see in it only a preparing and rousing of the individual to that self-exertion in which one comes to experience Christ’s properly redeeming influence (sec. 122. 3). If, accordingly, Schleiermacher formulates the problem of the doctrine concerning the Church by saying that we always both distinguish and connect our independent personality in the life-fellowship of Christ and our life as an integral part of the whole (sec. 114. 2), it is easy to perceive that here too he gives to the idea of life-fellowship with Christ as an individual relation the pre-eminence over participation in the Church. The formal congruity between the doctrine of redemption and that of sin is not therefore carried out; and the expectation which had been awakened by the general idea of religion is corrected by this result. I point this out merely as a fact without drawing from the incongruity any inference against the accuracy of his presentation of the doctrine. But we shall now go on to consider how Schleiermacher, with his view of redemption analogous to that of Abelard, approximates precisely the opposite Church tradition which he is bound to set forth according to his definition of the doctrine of the Christian faith.

66. In spite of his disinclination to Old Testament relations, Schleiermacher adopts, in setting forth the ecclesiastical doctrine, the scheme of Christ’s threefold office current since the Reformation. In accordance with his principles he could not escape this accommodation, and he justifies his procedure on the ground that, were he to leave out any one of the three parts, the security for completeness of apprehension of Christ’s saving work would be impaired. In this he has not regarded the objections which Ernesti had brought against the distinctions conveyed by that scheme,⁹ and which may appropriately be mentioned here. Ernesti in testing the value of the individual types of Christ, by reference to the whole material that Scripture offers on the subject, finds that Jesus is not to be regarded as a prophet in general, but as the prophet that is like unto Moses—a notion which according to the type includes kingly power (Deut. xxxiii. 5). For Moses, as prophet, was the liberator of the people, and the founder and leader of its commonwealth. The Kingship or pastoral office of Christ moreover relates to the sphere of super-sensuous truth, that is, to the sphere which it is the vocation of a perfect Prophet to direct. The kingly and prophetical office thus coincide in Christ, for the regnum potentiæ et gloriæ cannot be regarded as officium. The kingly or pastoral office again has its highest function or task in self-sacrifice for those who are its subjects (John x. 15), and thus includes in itself the character which is expressed by the priestly office. For the general idea of that Divine service which the priest discharges on behalf of the people belongs to the king also, and is by Christ applied to His own offering up of His life under this attribute, while He Himself never assumes the name of Priest. The three titles thus do not exclude but include one another, and the whole series of Christ’s activities in discharge of His vocation can be developed from His title of Prophet as clearly and completely as from that of King. By this biblico-theological criticism of the traditional teaching the Lutheran treatment of the matter is indubitably confuted in the most conclusive way. For in Lutheranism the order of Christ’s offices had been laid down only according to the order of their appearance in time, and therefore His kingly office was applied merely to those attributes of His status exaltationis which Ernesti rightly refuses to regard as expressions of an officium. The Reformed theology, on the other hand, had followed Ernesti’s main point of view in so far as it conceived of Christ’s priestly substitution of Himself in the room of believers as a token of His Kingship.

While presenting the parts of the doctrine in the usual order, Schleiermacher certainly modified the Lutheran view of the kingly office, but did not discover between it and the office of priest the connexion which Calvin and the Reformed divines had carried out, and which Ernesti had hinted at. He recognises the kingly office as expressing that Christ designed an organic fellowship outside of which no individual comes into relation with Him. He guards himself against the Lutheran view that the kingly power of Christ begins first after His exaltation to heaven; for Christ Himself declares, not that He is to be a king, but that He is one (sec. 105. 1). He confirms this truth, however, only by the consideration that Christ has given unchangeable laws for His commonwealth, and directions for its organization. On the other hand, it is a thought perfectly foreign to Schleiermacher that Christ accomplished the offering up of His life precisely in the assured conviction of His Kingship, and that it was as Head of the Church that He chose to die for it. Schleiermacher’s representation thus subordinates the kingly office to the priestly, just as in his doctrine of redemption he made the joint-life to proceed from the individual life-fellowship of believers with Christ. His interpretation of the prophetic office, on the other hand, is so framed as to embrace all that Christ did or spoke. For He could effectually induce men to enter the fellowship which He offered them only by making known His peculiar dignity; wherefore His practical exhibition of Himself, in active as in passive obedience, belongs to His prophetical office (sec. 104. 1), and His doctrine relates to His Person, being at once outwardly the doctrine of His vocation, or of the communication of eternal life in the kingdom of God, and inwardly the doctrine of His relation to God as His Father. Hence everything pertaining to His kingly and priestly office must likewise occur in His teaching, as He published His destination to raise men to fellowship with God and spiritually to rule them. Under these conditions His self-exhibition is the publication of God’s will by word and deed; He is a prophet as God’s representative towards men (sec. 103. 2; sec. 104. 3).

If, then, Christ’s twofold obedience is to be regarded also as the matter of His priestly function, that function sets Him forth in a relation quite opposite to that of prophet; for the High Priest is the agent of the people with God; His actions serve to represent men in the presence of God (sec. 104. 1). Under this point of view Schleiermacher lays down the following propositions:—(1.) Passive and active obedience are in Christ unseparated and inseparable from one another in every moment of life, as well as in His life as a whole. For in all suffering there is a reaction of activity, namely, of the God-consciousness which, as impulse and standard of what takes place, gives value to the suffering. On the other hand, every movement of the activity has its occasion in pain, and the limited nature of every result as compared with the purpose of the activity, is always reflected in a feeling of pain. In accordance with this, Christ’s full self-surrender to suffering without flinching and without bitterness was the crown of His active obedience; and His entire active life was so entangled with hindrances through the sin of others, that these served, in His sympathy with sin, to maintain and intensify His activity. (2.) The active obedience, which thus includes the passive along with it, has its standard not in the Divine law but in the Divine will; for law invariably betokens a discrepancy between a superior commanding will and an imperfect subordinate will, but such a discrepancy cannot be assumed in the relation between Christ and God. Thus it would only amount to a contradiction in itself, were we to assert that Christ voluntarily made Himself subject to the law. What is to be understood by the Divine “will” in this connexion Schleiermacher has not explained otherwise than by citing John iv. 34; v. 19, 30; vi. 38. But if we remember that he found Christ’s prophetical discourse to point to His special vocation, and if we consider that He discerns the moral measure of Christ’s spontaneous offering up of His life in the consciousness of the duty to which He was called (sec. 104. 4), then the Divine will amounts to the idea of that particular moral vocation, the objective validity of which can never be recognised without the subjective determination to accept it, and in which therefore no distance between Him who commands and him who obeys can appear. (3.) Christ did not fulfil the Divine will in our room or for our behoof. For, irrespective of the false interpretation of these words, as if we thereby were released from the fulfilment of God’s will, it is only what is perfect that has any value before God; but in Christ there cannot, by reason of His perfection, be supposed to exist any surplus of pleasingness to God which might be transferred to us, in order to make up for our deficiency therein. And, looked at in and by itself, irrespective of our assumption into His life-fellowship, the obedience of Christ cannot possibly have achieved anything for us, or changed anything in relation to us. (4.) In particular, Christ by his passive obedience has not endured the punishment of human sins in the sense that His passion represented exactly the sum of the evils which would have corresponded to the amount of human sins and the Divine righteousness. For, irrespective of the fact that the Divine nature is incapable of suffering, such an assumption, taking the shape of the assertion that Christ endured the wrath of God, is in contradiction with that particular character of the life of Jesus in virtue of which He was free from guilt, and stood in any relation to sin only in virtue of His sympathy. In that assumption is at the same time presupposed the idea of the Divine justice that it renders punishments necessary even without any natural connexion with wickedness; but this is derived from the example of the rudest states of human society. As against these negations Schleiermacher proceeds positively to affirm: (5.) As the acceptance with God of the Israelitish people was brought about by its participation in the official action of the high priest, so the active obedience of Christ has the significance of satisfaction for us, inasmuch as it is the fountain of a spiritual and blessed life, and inasmuch as God judges each one of us not as he is in himself but as he is in Christ, who presents us before God in that purity to which we receive the impulse from Him. But this satisfaction is not vicarious, because neither could we be expected to begin the spiritual life of ourselves, nor are we allowed to regard ourselves as released from the continued conduct of this life by our own activity. (6.) In His passive obedience Christ has taken away the punishment of sin. For in human society, where there is just as much evil as sin, but where every one does not fully and exclusively experience in himself the evil that corresponds to his guilt, the innocent suffers, in the undeserved evil that overtakes him, what to the guilty would be punishment. The fellow-feeling with which Christ was ready to take upon Himself His suffering of death as a consequence of the sin of His enemies accordingly guarantees such a separation between punishment and sin that these shall no longer be felt to be connected with each other in the fellowship of His blessed life. Christ’s passion is thus vicarious for us in His fellow-feeling for sinners, and in His endurance of the evils that are appropriate to them; but not satisfactory, because precisely in our fellowship with Him must we lay our account with similar suffering.

I must confess that I cannot, with Gass,¹⁰ recognise a masterpiece of dialectic in this new shaping of the doctrine of Christ’s priestly office. Rather does it leave upon me, in so far as it seeks to be dialectical, an impression just as painful as is produced by Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre almost throughout; and so far as it is critical it is imperfect and precarious. I admit that the inseparableness of Christ’s active and passive obedience in the contemplation of His life is admirably shown. This, however, is nothing new; for even the old school apprehended this whole as being the matter of the meritum Christi—as being that positive datum which by faith is imputed as righteousness, or which is the ground of forgiveness of sins. But if to view the life of Christ in this light is ethically necessary, if patience in suffering is only a mode of Christ’s positive moral activity, a powerful objection arises against the distinction and co-ordination of the two kinds of Christ’s obedience, which, out of deference to dogmatic tradition, are treated as severally productive of diverse effects. The fact is that Schleiermacher assigns to this distinction a reference that is quite out of harmony with the old school. The old school distinguished the two kinds of obedience as the matter of a twofold satisfaction to God in accordance with the terms of His law, which at once exacted punishment of sinners and fulfilment of its demands on the part of men, in order to their obtaining eternal life. Thereby accordingly a negative prerequisite was assigned to the positive bestowal of grace, but the latter as a single act in itself was founded upon the entire merit of Christ’s obedience. Now, Schleiermacher connects with the two separate kinds of obedience those effects upon men which he describes as redemption and reconciliation. Christ, he says, in His active obedience gave satisfaction, not however to a universally valid demand of God, but simply to our need of new spiritual life. And He wrought reconciliation by His passive obedience; not, however, reconciliation of God with men, but of us with the misfortunes that befall us. The old school really carried out the distinction of the two kinds of obedience to a co-ordination, for the fulfilment of the law in deed is different from the fulfilment of it in penal suffering. Schleiermacher, in his interpretation of the active and of the passive obedience, brings out a co-ordination of the effects just as little as he does so in his dominant presentation of the ideas of redemption and of reconciliation. For as, when the life of Christ is rightly considered, the elements of suffering have their value altogether only in subordination to His active obedience, so in like manner the change in the way in which misfortune affects us is invariably and of necessity carried back to the awakening of that God-consciousness which has the power to counteract sin; in other words, to redemption. The consciousness of reconciliation can hold good only as a phase of the assurance of redemption. But if, moreover, the two kinds of obedience that are distinguished from one another as conveying the redeeming and reconciling influence of Christ respectively have their reference to men, then they are not embraced in the scheme of Christ’s priestly office, which can only comprehend the representation of men before God.

The above refutation certainly does not affect the whole connexion of Schleiermacher’s theory; but it is only by its aid that we pick our way through the various parts of the investigation. For example, in the first instance, where he keeps strictly in view the analogy with the high priest of the Old Testament, he says “we are presented pure before God by Christ, in virtue of His own perfect fulfilment of the Divine will, whereunto by His life in us the impulse arises within us also, so that in this connexion with Him we also are objects of God’s complacency” (p. 133). But it cannot be conceived according to this that Christ’s action ought in no sense to be called vicarious (p. 142). For in the judgment of God the perfection of Christ surely stands in the stead of the imperfection of His kindred who are connected with Him, and thereby are becoming more and more like Him. But this reflection upon the judgment passed by God upon the state of redemption derived from Christ occurs only in an altogether casual way, and exercises no abiding influence. For as early as p. 134, precisely when he is setting forth the distinction between the prophetical and the priestly office, he loses sight of the analogy with the Old Testament institution. “The high-priestly value of Christ’s obedience has reference to His alliance with us, in so far as His pure will to fulfil the Divine will is operative in us also in virtue of the living fellowship that subsists between us and Him, and thus we have part in His perfection—if not in achievement, at least in aspiration; so that our alliance with Him, although phenomenally it does not develop itself except in other aspects, is yet recognised by God as absolute and everlasting, and is assumed as such in our faith.” This direct elucidation of Christ’s high-priestly value is so incorrect as almost to apply to His kingly function; in the apodosis certainly we catch a reference to Christ’s priestly relation to God; but even this proposition is not in harmony with the original meaning given to priesthood. For the point to be made out is not merely that our alliance with Christ is recognised by God; but also that in it we are personally acceptable to God in spite of our individual shortcomings. But where (p. 142) the significance of the active obedience as satisfactory is recognised, where, namely, it is recognised that Christ has done what is sufficient in order to be for us the fountain of spiritual life, and where at the same the relation of substitution is denied, Schleiermacher has completely lost sight of the scheme of the priestly office. The same had already been the case (p. 139), where, with reference to Christ’s passion, we read that therein “pure self-denying love is shown, and in that love is exhibited to us the manner and way in which God was in Him, in order to reconcile the world to Himself.” “The high-priestly value of the passive obedience consists chiefly herein, that we see God in Christ, and behold Him as the most immediate partaker of the everlasting love which sent and equipped Him.”¹¹ So masterly is the dialectic shown in this section, that even the scheme of the three offices which had been accepted for the treatment of the matter is not maintained! The last proposition now being directly in harmony with Abelard’s view, the result of this investigation may be stated thus, that Schleiermacher in general follows Abelard in seeking to understand the saving influence of Christ as proceeding exclusively from God to men, and so has failed to appropriate that element of dogmatic tradition which, after Anselm, gives expression at the same time, in one or another shape, to a reciprocal effect wrought by Christ upon God. For what in this respect he almost under compulsion concedes, namely,that God in view of Christ’s perfectness accepts with complacency the men who are united with Christ, Abelard also has expressed in a slightly modified way, in saying that the merit and intercession of Christ make up for the imperfection of our love in the Divine judgment (p. 38).

Doubtless Schleiermacher’s aversion to those ideas which formed the standard for the assertion of Christ’s twofold satisfaction—the forensically viewed penal justice of God and the Divine law—contributed to the above result. What he urges in objection to the former idea (under No. 4), certainly affects the traditionary doctrine as much as the similar observations of Faustus Socinus do (p. 301). Not so manifest is the force of the objection against measuring Christ’s active obedience by the law (under No. 2), viz., that by the law there is always expressed some interval between the will that commands and the will that obeys, and that any such union between these as is to be found in the case of Christ is precluded. For the special vocation of Christ, which Schleiermacher recognises as the measure of His action under the biblical expression of the will of God, does not find its ethical value if it falls outside of the general moral law, but only if it is included thereunder. If by vocation is understood that special sphere of ordinary activity in which an individual has to work towards the purpose of society, he is bound by this very speciality to the observance of the universal law. No doubt this is just what excludes the idea that Christ’s active obedience can materially have superseded man’s duty of obedience to the law in any respect (under No. 3); but yet it is precisely from the notion of vocation introduced by Schleiermacher that the inference which he rejects flows—that Christ worked on our behalf. For His special vocation was the founding of the kingdom of heaven. So insecure and indefinite is the position of this idea with Schleiermacher, that he only casually designates it by its right name, and does not fully recognise the reference of that name. And yet this hint is the most valuable in his whole treatment of the high-priestly office. Piscator anticipated him in apprehending Christ’s historical appearance under this point of view. For, in order to support his denial of the vicarious significance of Christ’s active obedience in respect of His fulfilment of the law, that theologian maintained that the Divine will, which Christ by His atoning death obeyed, was not the universal law, but a special prescription laid on him alone.¹² And the distinctive feature of voluntariness whereby Schleiermacher contrasted Christ’s vocation-task (the will of God) with the Divine law, had already been brought into prominence by Cocceius.¹³ Still both Piscator and Cocceius, following Heb. x. 7-10; Ps. xl. 9, limit the contents of the special will of God to Christ’s dying, while Schleiermacher was the first to comprehend under the idea of vocation the whole conduct of His life. He certainly has failed to give this cognition its due importance in estimating the priestly office of Christ, just as he has failed clearly to apprehend it as a whole. For if that idea of vocation as a whole embodies a more definite form in which the life of Christ may be understood, it were surely worth while to try whether by the guidance of the idea something more satisfying in regard to Christ’s action on God could not be reached than what the old school expresses by means of the idea of the law.

It still falls to be explained why Schleiermacher plainly never thought of such a task, and why, moreover, the whole problem of Christ’s priestly office slipped though his fingers. I think I find the explanation in the fact that in pursuance of the plan of his Glaubenslehre he sets about exhibiting the idea of redemption without summoning up the specific thought of God which corresponds to the consciousness of redemption. He might of course have set it forth in accordance with his plan, by way of appendix, under the attributes of love and wisdom. But as the religious consciousness of redemption knows itself to be dependent for that benefit on the love of God, it is quite a mistake when the treatment of redemption by Christ pursues its course in utter indifference to this distinctive feature. But this explains why Schleiermacher was unable steadily to adhere to the schema of Christ’s high-priestly work. For the representation of believers before God through Christ’s official obedience is thinkable only in relation to a quite definite idea of God. The old school regarded God in this connexion under His attribute of legal justice, vindicating the eternal law. Now, to reject this idea was not enough; it required to be superseded by another. That a blank was left instead, has led to the result that Schleiermacher’s elucidations glide from the schema of the priestly office into those of the prophetical and of the kingly. The dialectic which makes this possible is not masterly.

67. Redemption and reconciliation by Christ had substantially been referred to individuals by Schleiermacher, and regarded as influencing the functions of the individual self-consciousness. If, then, the way in which fellowship in the individual soul with the perfection and blessedness of the Redeemer is expressed is yet to be specially considered, it is to be expected that the immediately following idea of regeneration, which subdivides itself into conversion and justification, will present only a specification of those operations of Christ that have already been exhibited. This expectation seems justified all the more, as those ideas are developed irrespective of their being directly conditioned by the joint-life. It would correspond to the original significance of the idea of life-fellowship if the doctrine of the Church were unfolded before that of the regeneration and sanctification of the individual; and Schleiermacher himself acknowledges an inducement thereto in the fact that the doctrine of Christ’s work issues in the reference of His kingly office to the fellowship of His people. But for all this he adheres to the usual Lutheran procedure of treating the individual’s salvation prior to the doctrine of the Church. For he expressly recognises only the equal possibility of this and of the converse order, setting up a complete reciprocity between the social and the individual factor of the life of the redeemed. But he decides in favour of the precedence of the latter aspect, from the empirical consideration that, in the first instance, it was individuals that were laid hold of by Christ, and that even now it is by an operation of Christ, through His spiritual presence in the word, that individuals are taken up into the fellowship of the new life (sec. 106. 2). Schleiermacher assuredly did not originally think that the individual and the fellowship stand related to one another in the bare schema of action and reaction; his doctrine of the summum bonum is certainly not exhausted by this schema. But when in the doctrine of redemption the idea of life-fellowship had been carried out in the sense of an entirely individual relation, we can no longer wonder at the decision arrived at. Moreover, the empirical consideration of the subjective circumstances involves the treatment of justification as the correlate of conversion under the comprehensive title of regeneration. For the transition of the individual from the joint-life of sinfulness to life-fellowship with Christ, when regarded as an altered form of life, as a direction of the will, is conversion; in the reflection of the God-consciousness upon this process is at the same time expressed a new relation to God, namely, justification (sec. 107. 1). That neither of these two factors can be separated from its neighbour is perfectly true in the line of consideration undertaken by Schleiermacher (that is, in reference to the empirical subject), and is in harmony with the original practical self-consciousness of the Reformers. In this respect it may readily be granted also that the two factors must be regarded as contemporaneous. But the other assertion, that the one is the unmistakeable token of the presence of the other, does not, however, mean that the two stand in real reciprocity of action. On the contrary, Schleiermacher makes justification to depend on conversion. This view ought not to surprise us if the appearance of the two acts in the subjective consciousness were what was being considered. For in this respect the theologians of the old school also agree with him. But Schleiermacher does not appeal to subjective psychological observation, but to the objective theological point of view, when he says, “Justification presupposes something in consideration of which one is justified; and as in the Supreme Being no error is possible, it is assumed that something has occurred to the man between his past and his present, whereby the previous displeasure of God is taken away, and without which he could not be an object of the Divine complacency” (sec. 107. 2). Although this has a rather vague sound, it cannot be understood in the sense of the Reformed theology (which had no existence for Schleiermacher) as referring to the high-priestly representation of men before God by Christ. For Schleiermacher, in so far as he adopts this thought, acknowledges its force only when the union of the believer with Christ is supposed to have actually taken place.

All doubt about the proper meaning of the quotation is set aside by this direct doctrinal position: “that God justifies the man who turns himself to Him, implies that He forgives his sins, and acknowledges him to be a child of God. But this change of relation to God takes place only in so far as the man has true faith in the Redeemer” (sec. 109). To elucidate this proposition, I remind my readers in the first place that Schleiermacher, in treating of reconciliation, had already made allusion to the forgiveness of sins as the disappearance of the consciousness of having deserved punishment, as being “the first step of reconciliation.” The doctrine before us thus helps to make the doctrine of reconciliation more specific. Now by this idea had been denoted only that operation of Christ consequent upon redemption, whereby the believer is reconciled with the misfortunes that befall him, no longer feeling them to be penal (p. 470). No reference to God in this consciousness is bound up with this declaration of Schleiermacher. The doctrine of justification therefore, the precise function of which is to define the relation of the believer to God, affords a supplement to the doctrine of reconciliation. This actual bearing, however, of the doctrine comes less into prominence, because Schleiermacher chiefly adheres to the Church tradition regarding it, and particularly to the schema adopted by the Lutheran theology. For he accepts the distinction usual in the latter between negative forgiveness of sins and positive justification; taking the two in the order in which they are named. Only he chooses the expression of Divine sonship through adoption to denote justification on its positive side which, besides the removal of penal desert, guarantees the assurance of perfect blessedness. In this, too, he has had anticipators. But, moreover, he defends this sequence of the forgiveness of sins and adoption by means of their congruence with the two parts of conversion, repentance and faith, which in like manner he accepts from Lutheran tradition, although for his own part he cannot quite close his eyes to the original opinion of Luther (pp. 143-4) and of Calvin (p. 193), that true repentance presupposes faith (sec. 108. 2). Finally, he also attaches himself to Lutheran tradition in striving directly to connect the consciousness of forgiveness of sins and of justification with the process of conversion. And in this the dependence of the former on the latter comes clearly to be seen. Consciousness of guiltiness before God and of penal desert must cease only when by and in faith living fellowship with Christ has begun. Here now one or other of two things is conceivable. On the one hand, it seems self-evident that the longer and the more uninterruptedly we are led by Christ, so much the more do we forget sin, and thereby also our guilt. But this would be no change of relation to God, and would not in itself convey any assurance that the consciousness of sin should never return. For this reason only the other alternative can be regarded as what actually takes place; viz., that justification is contemporaneous with conversion. “Forgiveness of sins must have place in us even while sin also and consciousness thereof continue still to dwell in us. Only, indeed, if the reference of sin to the holiness and justice of God is to cease, the consciousness of sins must also have become different from what it was before.” We should be mistaken were we to expect that this exigency would be met by bringing forward another thought of God, namely, His love. On the contrary, Schleiermacher refers to the fact that the converted person “who has been taken up into the life-fellowship of Christ is a new man, and knows himself to be such, inasmuch as he has been appropriated by Christ.” “Thus in the new man sin no longer operates; it is only the after-effect or remaining influence of the old man. The new man accordingly no longer takes sin to himself, and also works against it as against something foreign to him, whereby the consciousness of guilt is taken away.” “By reason of faith the consciousness of sin changes in him to that of the forgiveness of sin.” In adding that positive justification or the consciousness of adoption also follows from the fact that Christ lives in us, and thus also allows us to share His relation to the Father, Schleiermacher lets us see that this last is no second element separate from the first. On the contrary, just as against his own mind he had to confess that faith is the ground of true repentance, so at the foundation of his elucidation of the forgiveness of sins lies the thought that the new man as child of God no longer stands in any relation to His holiness and righteousness.

But what is the connexion of thought in this view? Its inconsistency not only with the doctrine of the Church, but also with the universal Christian consciousness, has already been alluded to in the passing remark, that while the reference of the consciousness of sin to the holiness and justice of God was recognised, the foundation of the forgiveness of sins in the love of God is not distinctly stated. This reticence is analogous to that to which I have already (p. 485) adverted when the reference of the obedience of Christ to the justice of God was denied, and no reference of it to any other attribute of God maintained. As it resulted from this that the reference of Christ’s obedience to God was changed into its influence upon men, so the failure to refer the consciousness of forgiveness of sins to God virtually means that that consciousness is regarded merely as a consequence of the consciousness of conversion. The syllogism elaborated by Schleiermacher is the following. Sins and the consciousness of sins pertain to the old man—in life-fellowship with Christ I am a new man—the sins therefore which, as an old man, I committed, are no longer any concern of mine. This conclusion is the correct epitome of a statement with regard to which Schleiermacher flatters himself that it is not easily liable to be so misunderstood as if each justified himself, for it carries back everything to the influence of Christ. For it is precisely under this presupposition that the converted man passes this judgment upon himself. Nor is this result very different from the suggestion which shortly before had been rejected in the same quarter—the suggestion that sins are forgotten in the course of continued and progressive sanctification; nay, the view now put forth has less to commend it than the rejected supposition, for the self-bestowed forgiveness of sins is prematurely appropriated by the subject of conversion, under the title (to which he has as yet no claim) of being a new man. Hereby is confirmed the objection already urged (p. 472), that from Schleiermacher’s view of redemption there can be seen no necessary transition to the pacification of the universal consciousness of guilt. Finally, this issue shows how little the merely æsthetical view of redemption through Christ (p. 468) is adapted to the exigencies of the problem. But although the theoretical failure of this argument may seem to be Schleiermacher’s individual fault, we cannot ignore the fact that in it he has given expression to the solution of those self-assertive æsthetical Christians who, from their life-fellowship with Christ, assume the right to forgive themselves certain sins out of hand.

The roots of this view, however, spread beyond the doctrine of redemption into that of sin. But what is advanced in this line in sec. 81 of the second edition of the Glaubenslehre is not so distinct as what is to be found in the original text, though the former has no different meaning from the latter. In the first edition (volume second, 1822) Schleiermacher expresses himself as follows: “In so far as sin cannot have its root in the Divine will, so far also it has no existence at all for God. But in so far as the consciousness of sin is actual within us, it must also be ordained by God as that which makes redemption necessary” (sec. 102. 5). “For God has undoubtedly ordained that the strength of sensuous impulse, and the powerlessness of the God-consciousness (which, so far as He is concerned, are simply the state of human nature while still imperfect and awaiting its perfection through a Redeemer) should become one in our consciousness as sin; and this Divine ordinance is one and the same with that of redemption, because aspiration after a better state of things can be intensified into a longing for redemption only through the consciousness of sin. Therefore, in accordance with God’s ordinance and will, sin, so far as we are concerned, must be regarded as something real and necessary (he should have said; sin must of necessity be conceived by us as a correct idea); while so far as God is concerned it is no more so than any one of those things which we figure to ourselves only by negation is the same to Him as it is to us” (sec. 103. 4). In accordance with this position Schleiermacher cannot understand by the forgiveness of sins any change of God’s present judgment as compared with a previous one; for God always judges of that which ought to be regarded by us as sin in its connexion with the order of the universe; so that to Him it is only the still imperfect nature of man. In like manner, if we view this state as sin in order by the rule of logical antithesis to develop in ourselves aspiration after redemption, it follows that in the consciousness of redemption the judgment that our moral defectiveness is sin no longer finds place, because the subject of that defectiveness is no longer present; only in living fellowship with Christ, a subject of sinless perfection. Yes, indeed! if only the ethical opposition between sin and redemption were extensively and necessarily a motive to aspire after the latter, and not just as often a motive to hardening!

The result of the doctrine of justification, the connexion of which with the nearer and remoter Schleiermacherian principles has thus been shown, is not cancelled by the development which is appended to it (sec. 109. 3). The traditional doctrine lays particular stress upon the fact that God is to be regarded as the author of justification. Schleiermacher accordingly undertakes to bring his own view and this formula into harmony. In the first place, he can appeal to the fact that the Divine act of justification stands related to the receptivity of faith; it therefore cannot be thought of as independent of Christ’s activity in conversion. This is held also by the old Lutheran school, which makes the donatio fidei to precede justification (p. 279). But he diverges from the old school when he declares, in the second place, that justification cannot be conceived as an act distinct in point of time in its reference to individuals as such; but only as an individual operation in time of one Divine act and decree. For, following out the general idea of God that he upholds, he affirms that there is only one eternal and general decree of the justification of men for Christ’s sake, which is identical with that of the sending of Christ, and indeed with that of the creation of the human race, inasmuch as in Christ alone is human nature perfected. From Christ onwards the proclamation in time of this Divine act has continued without interruption, yet in its efficacy appears, in an isolated way, in the union of individual men with Christ. So that justification, as a single act of God, presents itself only in the self-consciousness of him who is apprehended of Christ. As God cannot be set forth under the antitheses of abstract and concrete, general and particular, the justification of the individual depends simply on the condition that that individual apply to himself, in syllogism, the general decree of God to accept the human race in His Son; but the middle term of this syllogism must be conversion. Moreover, we are reminded that consciousness of guilt and of penal desert is appointed to men by God only with a reference to redemption, and with a view to its disappearance when the individual enters on the redeemed state. From this general truth it follows, that the individual subject of redemption as such pronounces himself free from guilt by a logical syllogism. Finally, Schleiermacher admits only with regard to this syllogism, that the Divine decree of justification acquires the form of a judgment, of a declaration, in the realization of the conversion of the individual. Irrespective of that, in the general apprehension of the Divine decree we cannot distinguish between thought and deed, and so the declarative act disappears in the creative. The thought of justification, that practical characteristic feature of evangelical Christendom, is thus in part explained as a mere phenomenon of the religious self-consciousness, and partly reared in an objective manner upon an assumption which was expressly repudiated by the leaders of the Reformation. This last point will come before us yet once more in another connexion.

68. Important as it is on the whole, that Schleiermacher has traced back the distinctive peculiarity of Christianity to redemption through Christ, his doctrine of redemption is nevertheless not of such a nature as to be epoch-making. It lies in the line taken up by Abelard, and finds more modern anticipations in Töllner and Tieftrunk; and any modification of its meaning in accordance with the analogy of the æsthetic kind of spiritual influences may have suited the culture of Schleiermacher’s age, but can by no means be allowed to pass for an essential improvement. Rather does the change of meaning assigned to justification by faith, which is intimately connected therewith, seem to indicate that the moral strictness of the believer’s self-judgment is by no means placed on a secure footing by this doctrine. The attempt (which Schleiermacher seemed to make in his doctrine of Christ’s priestly office) to combine with Abelard’s type of doctrine regard to what in general terms may be designated as Anselm’s type, was not fully carried out. If now it shall appear that, in reference to these doctrines, many theologians go in Schleiermacher’s track, I would not have it supposed, after what has already been remarked (p. 441), that this fact is to be understood as implying that these theologians constitute Schleiermacher’s school. But, at all events, as the claim to possess the “genuine spirit of Schleiermacher” is ventilated by others, I should be accompanied in the further prosecution of my task down through the latest period of German theology, by the fear that I had left certain obscurities unremoved, were I to omit a plain declaration of my view of the relations in which the various theological parties of the last fifty years stand to the Glaubenslehre.

For this is the treatise with which we have to deal; theological schools are ever formed only through principles of systematic theology; and the theological spirit of the man must be ascertained chiefly from this work. Now it cannot be overlooked that, in so far as Schleiermacher was a scientific personality, the central point for him lay in the interests of philosophical ethics, and that he set his hand to the task of the Glaubenslehre, so specifically theological as it was, only because his official position in life gave him at the outset occasion to give expression to his personal piety in a public and universally valid way. When it is recognised accordingly that Schleiermacher makes an epoch in Ethics, and that in dialectics he has given a characteristic counterpoise to the course of speculative philosophy, his high importance for theology also is secured. And this importance remains unquestioned even though we were compelled to assert that the Glaubenslehre is simply a leading cause of the theological confusion that at present prevails; and that too not merely according to the way in which men have used or misused it, but even according to its very essence. When I see how Strauss and Kliefoth¹⁴ push their roots into the Glaubenslehre, and how the intermediate groups of theologians contend about the genuine spirit of Schleiermacher, an inevitable presumption is raised that the work does not possess the qualities on which a sound theological development might have been built, and that the value which current opinion assigns to it arises from all sorts of persistent self-deception.

If we judge the work not merely by its actual contents, but also by the task it proposes to itself, it presents two pairs of distinctive features, each pair forming an antithesis. The Glaubenslehre professes to set forth as historical science the doctrine current in the Evangelical Church; while yet it is not symbolic, but, by regard had to partial departures from the general persuasion, and in accordance with the individuality of him who sets it forth, follows the intention of correcting the ordinary doctrine. On the other hand, the Glaubenslehre is carried through as a setting-forth of the devout frames of the spirit, as these are recognised in their reference to the Redeemer as something given, not as something rationally to be deduced; while yet in the devout consciousness (connected with the antithesis between sin and redemption) is at the same time authenticated a consciousness of God and the world, which indeed is indifferent to the specifically Christian movements of the Spirit, but yet is regarded as contained in each one of these. Schleiermacher was able to carry out his work only because he kept up his own direct personal persuasion that in neither of these antitheses is a contradiction to be found. Still he has not succeeded in communicating this persuasion to any one else; nay, rather it has long ceased to be a secret that the numerous contradictions in his work are in part merely hushed up in an artificial way, and in part reveal themselves in the preponderance over all that distinguishes the Christian religion, of a particular philosophical view and an individual tendency of the Spirit; and, specially, that the thought of Christ’s archetypal character, which guarantees the redemption character of the Christian religion, cannot be brought into agreement with that fundamental view of the universe which is expressed in the idea of God’s omnipotence. However powerfully, therefore, this work has drawn and moved men’s spirits, it does not admit of doubt that the more energetic souls have made use of the one or the other pole of the fundamental propositions brought together in the work as points d’appui for utterly heterogeneous developments of theology, and that the others, who persevere in the middle course contemplated by Schleiermacher, have indeed appropriated to themselves many of his ideas, but yet at the same time have adopted very diverse bases for systematic theology. So far, therefore, as Strauss and Kliefoth are concerned, Schleiermacher offers a standpoint they have already surmounted; both have spent all their share in his inheritance in acquiring their own sovereign domains. The intermediate group, on the other hand, in which professedly the genuine exercise of the Schleiermacherian spirit is kept up, has, to begin with, received only legacies from his heritage. His spiritual property, so far as it was expressed in his Glaubenslehre, has been broken up into fragments, because from its very nature it could not be kept together by any one.

As for the doctrines of Redemption, Reconciliation, and Justification, the type of doctrine held by Schleiermacher recurs in theologians of the subsequent period, who in all other respects stand generally tolerably far apart from each other. The criterion, however, by which their dependence on Schleiermacher is known, is the elaboration of the thought of the reconciliation of men by the Divine love displayed in Christ, along with repudiation of the forensic notion of a reconciling influence of Christ with God. A few individuals only get so far as to connect with this Abelard’s other point of view,—that Christ in virtue of His obedience is our representative before God. But almost all those whose doctrine coincides with that of Schleiermacher in the way just stated, diverge from him herein, that they seek to set forth reconciliation or the forgiveness of sins as Christ’s decisive operation, and in this remain true both to the tendency of the apostle Paul and to the explicit traditions of Protestantism. As however they regard Christ primarily as God’s representative to men, they give to the divine nature of Christ a share in His redemptive work in a way that specifically distinguishes their view, and which orthodoxy failed to find (p. 259).

The first group of theologians that falls to be considered is that of the biblical supra-naturalists of Storr’s school—viz., Steudel and Klaiber. The fact that Steudel,¹⁵ even in the doctrines before us, expressly disputes Schleiermacher’s views, does not militate against a certain relationship between them, in which the younger is a follower of the elder. Among Steudel’s hostile observations (pp. 284-287) there are some which are obviously misunderstandings, particularly the objection that Schleiermacher resolves Christ’s redeeming power into that of the community. Other points taken exception to by Steudel,—the physical (or, as Steudel calls it, magical) representation of Christ’s attractive power, the purely negative conception of sin, the abandonment of the Christian notion of God, have been censured by me also. Steudel’s divergence from Schleiermacher certainly has reference also to the specific definition of Christ’s task, which he in agreement with Storr regards as consisting in the removal of the punishments due on account of sin, and not directly in redemption from sin as a fact (pp. 248-267). But by the punishments of sin he understands (duly taking into account the suggestions of the New Testament) guilt in so far as it alienates man from God; and therefore the stricter designation of Christ’s saving work is the forgiveness of sins—i.e., the assurance that in spite of our sinfulness, which always comes up to our remembrance as guilt, there is no longer any obstacle on God’s side to our closing with Him or to our beatification. To this end he maintains that Christ’s suffering and death are efficacious as part of His vocation, of course on condition that we appropriate the Divine gift by faith, so that not till faith is found does the reconciliation of men actually take place. The death of Christ now is the specific instrumental cause of the forgiveness of sins in two respects—the first, because it is an ordinance and a specific proof of that unconditionally abiding love of God, in token of which He, though devoid of all personal guilt, was given up to the lot of sinners; the second, because it has the value of a sacrifice to God who graciously accepted the life of Christ as surrendered to Him in death. Here it is plain that the effect upon God of Christ’s obedience—the point conveyed in the doctrine of Christ’s priestly office—is recognised by Steudel as a necessary part of the doctrine. While, accordingly, he discerns, on the one hand, in the Manifestation of Christ, as in His suffering and dying, an exhibition of God’s love to men, he, at the same time, views Christ’s obedience even to the cross as an exhibition to God of human nature made perfect in sinlessness; and maintains that, without this, reconciliation is not guaranteed. For if we desire to regard ourselves as objects of the Divine good pleasure, we need to be assured of this value to God of Christ’s obedience, which supplies the germ of life to us who stand in faith. “As those who have appropriated to themselves the righteousness of Christ, men appear in the sight of the Holy One as righteous.”

This train of thought, which certainly is not presented by Steudel in so concatenated a form, seems to diverge from Schleiermacher just in proportion as it must be allowed to Steudel’s credit that he is the first that has rightly defined the idea of forgiveness of sins, to the effect that guilt, which cannot be forgotten, and which therefore cannot at all be annihilated, only ceases to be any longer an obstacle to the restored relation with God. At the same time, too, he gives intelligible expression to the significance of the sacrifice of Christ, although he denies its penal value for God. But the necessity for this formula for the purpose proposed, is not so clear as its connexion with the expressions of the New Testament. This criticism receives characteristic confirmation in the view taken by Steudel of justification by faith. For that view bears the mark of Schleiermacher as distinctly as the transition to Schleiermacherianism evinces itself already in the idea of the life-germ which Christ’s obedience is for believers. Justification is referred to faith because, in the sight of God, man never passes save for what he inwardly is. But in faith he recognises the adjustment of his relation with God to be a pure work of grace, and he stands in inseparable love to Christ, whose image he strives to reproduce in himself in humility and trustfulness. “Accordingly, what lies at the foundation of the sentence of justification on God’s part is in man the openness of his spirit to the reception of that grace which works only as sanctifying, and which when more closely viewed is the life of Christ appropriated to ourselves as an element of life” (pp. 359-364). This conclusion seems an echo of Osiander, but diverges from him in so far as it is not the Divine nature but the human perfection of Christ that supplies the middle term for the value of faith towards justification. Steudel’s view lies rather in the direction of Schleiermacher; and his exceptions to the latter justify one in asking how this transference of the life of Christ to believers is to be explained. Steudel here (p. 287) sets up against the “magical” attractive power, “the power of thankful love, which by faith transforms us into partners of Christ.” This is the factor to which Abelard had attributed the reconciling efficacy of God’s love to us revealed in the death of Christ. For, eliciting this counter love, however, it is utterly indifferent whether Christ’s obedience be viewed in the light of a special value that it has for God. If so, the necessity of this thought to the establishment of the forgiveness is not shown. Or this bearing of Christ’s obedience upon God is held fast as the archetypal ground of our peace with God, in which case his significance as life-germ in believers can be understood only by Schleiermacher’s rule, which Steudel rejects, that all power attracts masses, or that an æsthetic reflection of Christ’s peace with God manifests itself in the believer, while at the same time the experience of the love of God in Christ as an ethical motive directs our will toward God.

Klaiber’s full exegetic and dogmatic exhibition of the “New Testament doctrine of sin and redemption”¹⁶ resolves itself more directly into the Schleiermacherian type of doctrine. He pursues the fundamental proposition that as God’s love and holiness are revealed and communicated as a unity in the person of Christ, so also the receiving and the enjoying of God’s forgiving love on the part of man is not to be separated from the receiving and enjoying of the sanctifying powers that are given in the life and death of Christ. The denial of the form of doctrine traditionally accepted in the Church, which Klaiber makes, thus does not limit itself to a negation of the forensic idea of satisfaction, but applies also to the separate treatment of reconciliation on its objective and on its subjective side. He prefers to represent it as a continuity, just as Schleiermacher’s idea of redemption includes along with it regeneration and sanctification also (p. 467). For the rest, in explaining the significance of Christ, he distinguishes the two sides; first, the exhibition of the objective relation, scil., between the love and holiness of God and sinful humanity; secondly, the exhibition of the human relations in so far as their hitherto sinful shape is removed and a new shaping of them instituted. This second view, however, has not the force of an exhibition of the human relations towards God in the schema of the high-priestly office, but has reference entirely to influences bearing upon men. Thus also it corresponds only to Schleiermacher’s view of redemption, as the participation of the sinless perfection of Jesus, which denotes the peculiar in-being of God in Him. Klaiber’s distinction thus diverges from Schleiermacher’s schema only in that, following the concrete biblical idea of God, he marks off the active revelation of God in the person of Christ, and the human archetypal character of the latter as distinct from one another; but this procedure has no important influence, for the effects of the two points of view cannot be separated from one another. Klaiber certainly adheres to the biblical standard, in so far as he at least directly ranks the remission of guilt above the actual removal of sin, and he further supplements Abelard’s chief point of view by declining to recognise in Christ any revelation of the love of God, save in connexion with that holiness of God which excludes sin. But he will have the two Divine attributes to be regarded in their oneness, not in their opposition, which Church tradition seeks to reconcile by means of the idea of satisfaction.

The death of Christ then is the revelation of the love of God which forgives and delivers from the misery of sin; for that love was the prime motive of His mission into the world, and forms the contents of the whole conduct of His life, reaching its climax in His suffering and death. The death of Christ, moreover, is a revelation of the Divine holiness, which loathes sin and connects misery with it, in so far as Christ with triumphant success withstood the sin that assailed Him; and that too not for Himself alone, but also “with the purpose and the result of the implanting and imitation of the same disposition and power in man by means of faith” (viii. 1, p. 70). This positive imitation of Christ in faith, as a principle of the new life, is made use of to explain all the salutary effects which in the New Testament are associated with the death of Christ. The law which Klaiber, like Schleiermacher (p. 478), regards not as the expression of the absolute will of God, but as a relative ordinance occasioned by sin, and which brings the pressure of constraint to bear upon the sinner; this law and its curse are taken away by Christ in so far as He in His death terminated His voluntarily undertaken relation to the law, and the believer has ideally endured death along with Christ. The meaning of Christ’s sin-offering Klaiber explains to be that Christ in His fellow-feeling with the sin of others surrendered to death, i.e., to annihilation that side of His life which in other men through their separation from God had become a source of sin; and that by His resurrection, which is inseparable from that death, He opened up the beginning of new life to those who believe in Him. In this Klaiber has again taken up a line of thought that is frequent with Luther, but at the same time justifies the remark made above (p. 202), that the victory over sin which Christ gained for Himself by His moral constancy, has general significance only on condition of subjective imitation of His moral conduct. When once this point of view is suffered by Klaiber to fall out of sight, and the penal value of the death of Christ cannot be evaded, the idea of a penal example comes in (viii. 1, p. 149), that God could not have showed His hatred of sin in a stronger way or in a way that would be more convincing to the human spirit than by surrendering His Son to the pains which men suffer on account of sin. The last feature I shall mention is that justification is designated by Klaiber also as the judgment passed on the new life-germ implanted by faith (viii. 2, p. 100). I cannot concur in all the commendation that Baur (p. 649) bestows even on the exegetical part of this work. Its exegesis lacks every fixed guiding principle, and the dogmatic question is not solved at all. It is possible to excuse this, by saying that only a biblico-theological representation, and not a dogmatic one, is aimed at. But these limits are not adhered to, when Klaiber declares that redemption, as it is exhibited in the New Testament, consists in a real communication of life, and not in the efficacy of the example of Christ. This is a dogmatic dilemma, the solution of which cannot be put off in any such way as that which Klaiber attempts, in saying that in the New Testament the manner of this communication is not strictly described but only associated with faith as its condition (viii. 2, p. 111). Nay, in the course that his delineation takes, everything can be deduced from the schema of example; and “life-fellowship” is an expression taken, not from the New Testament, but from Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre. I may add that it is an expression which, in the work now under review, plays its role as a mysterious phrase; just as too often this has been the case in other quarters.

The group of theologians which by means of the theologische Studien u. Kritiken has for not a short time held a conspicuous place in Germany, and which I would designate as the group of nineteenth-century Melanchthonians, has C. J. Nitzsch and Lücke as its dogmatic representatives.¹⁷ In the doctrines before us, however, the latter falls far short of the first in clearness of construction; so that I may simply assert the fact that Lücke as well as Nitzsch retains the Schleiermacherian type. Nitzsch, then, acknowledges the schema of the three offices, distinguishing as he does in the entire life of Christ, so far as He is Redeemer, the testimony, the reconciliation, and the formation of a community, so that His speaking as well as His doing and suffering is operative towards all the three functions; and the founding of His kingdom “was also a sort of condition of His prophetical and priestly activity.” The entire life of Jesus means that the new Divine joint-life lives into the Adamitic life and appropriates it to itself by suffering. Redemption, as bestowal of life, since it cannot be of a magical nature, is effected by enlightenment. It includes justification and sanctification as liberation from guilt and liberation from sin. This is the frame on which Schleiermacher’s delineation is worked out, within which, of course, certain divergences are pointed out. Such a divergence appears in that Nitzsch, like Steudel and Klaiber, recognises the central point of redemption in the reconciliation of sinners, in the forgiveness of sins or the removal of guilt. This operation takes place upon man (like every other real determination) in accordance with his nature; but anything which has to be wrought upon a community must proceed from a personal beginning which embodies and appropriates in itself the new commonwealth. The accomplishment of this purpose is not connected with the doctrine, but with the entire impression produced by the leading personality. But as in this case the task has to do with a recalcitrant race sunk in sin, the continuance of Christ’s holy love in suffering even unto death is necessary, in order that sin may be finished in Him. For without this it could not be recognised as such, and much less could it be forgiven. Therefore is the showing forth of His love even unto death the ground of our reconciliation, the ground of the forgiveness of sin that could not otherwise be brought home at all. The last active cause of this train is indeed that in Christ’s love to men, displayed in the form of His obedience toward God, the grace of God is revealed. As God’s representative He discloses God’s gracious purpose of forgiveness. If, in this apprehension of the reconciliation of the world, Abelard’s fundamental thought is reproduced, Nitzsch tries to be as fair to the Church tradition as Schleiermacher and Steudel had sought to be. He sets about explaining Christ’s passion, in so far as that represents men before God, as a ground of the expiation of sin. As special aids towards the solution of this problem, Nitzsch had at his command the thoughts that the priestly office is conditioned by the kingly, and that Christ, as the Founder of the Christian fellowship, represents it in Himself; but he makes no use of either. It happens to him as to Schleiermacher, that, in rejecting the forensic way of filling out the schema of the priestly office, he loses hold of the schema itself, and constructs a train of thought in which Christ is exhibited not as the representative of men, but again as the representative of God. In His working upon men He effects their vivification; but this takes place in sinners, when sin is judged, punished, destroyed, and so forgiven in repentance. Thus Christ is the propitiation for sin, not in a direct sense, but indirectly in eliciting conversion! The rhetorical manner in which Nitzsch goes to work is an obstacle not merely to the solution but even to the statement of the problem; and although this analysis shows how fruitful were the thoughts that lay to his hand, he has not succeeded in giving dialectic effect to them.

Nitzsch set forth the doctrine of justification¹⁸ against Möhler in the old Protestant sense, and at the same time rejected the view of J. A. H. Tittmann of Leipzig,¹⁹ that justification is more properly understood as a change in the nature of man. But in his “System” he follows Schleiermacher in the formula that regeneration is made up of justification and conversion; the former as change in feeling of relation to God, the latter as change of will. Now, though it is a matter of course in the Protestant system of doctrine, that God regards as righteous no one whom He does not also convert and sanctify, the question still presents itself, Which process comes before the other and conditions it? Here also Nitzsch states the view that justification is the first element. But the method, which he has borrowed from Schleiermacher, of considering these relations according to their subjective appearance without keeping firm hold of their connexion with the doctrine of objective reconciliation, leads to the result that the relation between the two acts is represented in the reverse order. Faith, as trust in reconciliation by Christ, according to him, justifies only in proportion as it opens the spirit to the converting and sanctifying activity of the Redeemer. In these vacillating declarations we see how ill-omened it is to reproduce a doctrinal system derived from tradition when the technical ideas which lie at its foundation have changed. The Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century found no insuperable difficulty in making regeneratio as donatio fidei precede justification merely as a formal determination of the soul without regarding the real change of the will as included in the notion. Then the priority of justificatio to communicatio spiritus sancti or of renovatio in the individual life of man was taught (p. 279). But Nitzsch and those who think with him are of the very intelligible opinion that there is no such thing as formal determinateness where the corresponding contents are not found. Attempting, accordingly, to solve the problems before us on the schema of the Lutheran tradition, they entangle themselves in the contradiction that justification must be prior to conversion, and yet can be conceived only as arising from conversion. So that Nitzsch’s view after all really amounts to what Tittmann held. Here it may be observed that on this point some acquaintance with Reformed theology might have been useful, attention to which was already suggested by the tendency to evangelical union. But can we be surprised that the Lutheran tradition of the seventeenth century now overruns the Church when even the divines who favoured the union, in so far as they had any connexions at all with the past reaching beyond Schleiermacher, made themselves acquainted only with the Lutheran doctrine, and when at the same time the barrenness that then prevailed in dogmatic theology was shown by the diffusion of compendia of the old Lutheran Dogmatic?

The theosophic character of Rothe’s theology²⁰ conditions his view of the Person and Work of Christ; in this connexion, however, in the proper doctrine of the work of redemption, there occurs a complexus of ethical notions. The second Adam (in whom, in virtue of his normal, i.e., good and holy development into Spirit, God really indwells, so that in the religious and moral development of Christ man becomes God just as much as God becomes man) conveys in His whole life a revelation of God’s essence. On the other hand, His entire life as human takes its form from His vocation to be the Redeemer of natural sinful humanity, i.e., to destroy sin’s power over them and in them. To this purpose now it belongs that as Mediator He is the link that forms an actual vital connexion between God and sinful humanity. He does so, on the one hand, by perfecting into absolute union His fellowship with God—His religious task: on the other hand, by dedicating Himself in unconditioned love to humanity—His moral task. In both these respects He must advance to perfect voluntary self-sacrifice, i.e., to the surrender of His sentient life. For as His place in the world draws down the hostility of sin precisely on Himself, and involves Him in battle with the kingdom of darkness, He could keep Himself pure from temptations, and carry out His obedience to God, who was arranging His lot, only by proving His love to sinners, even unto the surrender of Himself to death. But in relation to sinful humanity Christ is not only God’s revealer, He is its representative. For being appointed to be the Head or Central Individual of the renewed spiritual humanity which He is to develop out of the old sinful race, His suffering and dying subserve that end, in so far as in them He has secured the victory over sin not merely for His own person, but also for sinful humanity and in its room. The perfecting of Christ into absolute oneness with God, and to be the Head of the world of intelligences, which was accomplished in His resurrection and exaltation, is not, of course, the actual removal of sin in the old race. But as all the individuals of the new spiritual race meet in His individuality in One Person, He in history appropriates them to Himself by His Holy Spirit, and thus accomplishes at once their redemption from sin, and their actual exaltation as well as also the completion of the Incarnation of God, and the solution of the problem of creation. In this sphere now (that is, in the applicatio gratiæ) it is obvious that not merely the fact but also the guilt of sin must be taken away in order that Redemption may correspond to its idea. But God cannot forgive where, as matter of fact, there is no separation from sin; and, on the other hand, this last presupposes forgiveness. This antinomy²¹ is thus solved. God, for the sake of the sinner who is to be redeemed, as well as for His own sake, anticipates a forgiveness of sins, in which, indeed, the reaction of the holiness of God against sin is implied as the active commencement of the actual removal of sin from the personal life. This expiation of sin includes in itself the needed pledge for the future in the case in which we enter into personal and living fellowship with the Redeemer. As far as He is Redeemer in His relation to God as well as to men, so far is He also the means of propitiation for the sins of humanity. If we leave out of sight the theosophic arabesques of this presentation, all its characteristic features are to be found in Klaiber and Nitzsch,—both the indication of a train of thought that exclusively dwells upon the line of relation from God to man, and also his making propitiation to depend on the real and positive living fellowship of the individual with Christ. The idea also that the second Adam is the central individual is indeed something new in this way of putting it; yet it also has been hinted at by Nitzsch. But if, remembering the analogous idea in the dogmatic theology of the Reformed Church, we were to expect to find Christ under this title viewed as men’s representative before God, such a connexion of ideas lies altogether beyond Rothe’s sphere of vision. If, finally, we might think that so far as Christ’s life-calling is thought of under ethical forms, His redeeming efficacy could be entirely referred also to the pattern He gave, as is the case in Klaiber’s writings, Rothe, nevertheless, gives a peculiar character to the life-fellowship he insists on by the theosophic background of his entire view of the universe.

Though there can be no sharper contrast than that between Rothe’s objective and theosophic speculation and Rückert’s subjective and critical procedure,²² the two, nevertheless, not only go chronologically together, but also coincide herein, that they develop essentially the same view of redemption by Christ on the ground of what may be demanded or expected from redemption in accordance with the needs of sinful man. At the same time we are directly reminded of the procedure of Kant and of Tieftrunk, when Rückert postulates the idea of redemption to solve the contradiction between sin and the order of the universe, and that on the conditions that the removal of actual sin be regarded as an act of freedom, and that it be looked for from God in faith, who, as the Idea of the Good, and as the Law of the world, secures even for the sinful race its destination to Good. These two conditions of redemption, however, hold good only when redemption on God’s side appears not as the working of omnipotence, but as the prompting of freedom. Redemption itself, moreover, has to do not merely with the removal of guilt, but also with the removal of sin from the will; guilt ceasing of itself when this last takes place. As, finally, it is laid down that God exercises that influence partly by means of His revelation, partly by the training of men, history accordingly embodies in the life of Christ the revelation of God, which is the most perfect possible to men. That life was an uninterrupted living in God, because Christ at every moment willed that Idea which rules the world; and, therefore, it was at the same time an abiding self-manifestation of God as the Idea of the Good, which with reference to sinful humanity is saving love. His action is the organ whereby these contents of His Person were revealed. But, in so far as our historical information upon Christ’s life comes short of the clearness we desire, His voluntary death is so clearly marked as the highest deed of His life for the purpose of redemption, that from it His inmost being plainly shines forth to all susceptible observers. But as the action and voluntary dying of Christ reveals God’s holy will, His life also at the same time is the realization of Godlike humanity. But that which, proceeding as it did from Christ’s free determination, is the deed of highest love and the evidence of oneness with God—the sacrifice of His own Self, namely, for the salvation of others—is at the same time the highest beauty. The effect it produces is the awakening of love in those who are susceptible to it. But in the person we love, it is his ideality we love; in the Person of Christ, it is the idea of the Good itself. “But where Christ’s death on the cross awakens love to Him, that love slays sin.” All true love awakens also shame that one is unideal in comparison with the beloved person; by shame in the presence of the sinless Christ is called forth the struggle against sin in those who turn their love to Him. All love finally awakens effort after union; this is impossible where there exists a separating opposition; love to Christ, therefore, is the motive of earnest striving after release from sin. This influence of the crucified Christ in awakening counter love depends, however, just as much upon the human actuality of His life as upon its divine elevation. For without the former condition that faith in the possibility of assimilation to Christ would not exist, which makes counter love work towards its purpose, the removal of sin. But faith in Christ has its value as directing the life to that idea of the good which is presented and operates in Him, this faith is imputed by God as righteousness, because by it man grafts himself into the Divine order of the Good.

While this almost identical reproduction of Abelard’s line of thought is distinguished by a psychological analysis of the utmost strictness of the love which is awakened by Christ, there at last appears in Alexander Schweizer’s²³ presentation of the same thought, a historical statement as to who the thinker was in whose track all the men from Töllner onwards moved, apparently without knowing whom they followed. Schweizer is, of all the theologians of the present, the one who most deliberately has adopted Schleiermacher’s points of view and the Schleiermacherian method. But the idea upon which the epoch-making importance of that divine rests,—the idea, namely, that all individual spirit-life is rightly understood only in all-sided relation to the community, finds even in this disciple only a very interrupted currency; nay, as a presupposition of the doctrine of redemption, it is only hinted at rather than allowed to exercise a real influence. For though the specifically Christian knowledge of God as the Father is referred to His revelation of Himself in the new life, and in the kingdom of heaven,²⁴ and though also the redeeming activity of Christ is made to consist in His life-giving communication of the religion of redemption, yet the entire contents of this thought are set forth only in application to the individual subject.²⁵ Doubtless Schleiermacher himself made the same departure from his own fundamental thought (see above, p. 475). But Schweizer keeps to the traces of his great predecessor herein, that he starts from the principle that redemption and the Person of the Redeemer entirely correspond. For this reason the contents of the Person are determined entirely according to His redeeming activity, and according to the qualities which are needed to explain the latter. In this department Schweizer lays it down against Strauss that the Person of Christ is indispensable to the explanation of the phenomena of the Christian religion, which take their rise with Him; that these were not merely occasioned by Him; and that they could not possibly have existed apart from Him, and could not be reached by satisfactory deduction simply from the idea as such. For on such a foundation only a religion of law could be built; it could not furnish the adequate basis for a religion of redemption. The personal fellowship with God, which, in general terms, is the form of this religion, assumes rather that Christ is and continues to be the central personality or the life-giving medium of religious life; the common doctrine of His personal oneness with the Father continuing to be indispensable. He is, at the same time, the perfect revelation of God, the Word of God, and also the genuine ideal of humanity, not indeed immediately for all the ramifications of life, but mediately in the principle which supplies in the religious completeness and perfection of His life the standard of moral activity in all its branches. The inmost life of His Person is His Vocation as Mediator and Redeemer, and from that His suffering also and His death became for Him morally necessary. His sinlessness also (which even if it is not at once established historically by the fact that He Himself lays claim to it, is so by the fact that His biography is free from every trace of repentance) is to be referred to His carrying out of His vocation. For redeeming love is the kernel of His personality;—redeeming love which, humanly viewed, appears as the highest attribute of God in Christ, and which expresses His whole being in its disposition and its activity. In these leading features Schweizer reproduces, in a more concrete style, the Christology of Schleiermacher, elaborated by means of ethical ideas, grounded on the Christian idea of God. If there is any defect that one has reason to complain of, it is that he does not carry far enough the ethical normation of the intuition of Christ; particularly, that His importance as central personality (which is recognised in His vocation) is not measured by reference to the thought of the kingdom of God, and is apprehended apart from that idea and also apart from the relation between the love of God and the kingdom of God.

Schweizer defines redemption by Christ very much in the terms supplied by Schleiermacher, but with the well-known modification that reconciliation with God is ranked before liberation from sin and before sanctification. These effects appear subjectively in the religion of redemption, for objective redemption consists just in the communication of that subjective function.²⁶ As far as the book has advanced at present the question regarding the kind of the above-mentioned results remains unanswered, for this falls to be treated under the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. Christ’s work, Schweizer holds, can have no bearing upon God, to produce a change in Him, —not even in the office of High Priest. For this function also bears upon men, to help them, and to bring them before God in an acceptable way; and it is only in so far as Christ leads us and goes before us therein, that He assumes any attitude towards God. What Christ does, then, He works as the embodiment of God’s loving will towards men, and, in fact, His obedience in His calling is the form in which this is shown. The ransom also which Christ has effected, having in death endured the curse of the law, is no satisfaction given to the wrath of God; but it is our redemption from the religion of the law, the negative side of the positive awakening in us of confidence towards God’s love; for this confidence is what is contained in the religion of redemption. So far is Christ from having given a vicarious satisfaction, that it is incumbent even upon the redeemed man, in recognising God’s right to punish, to complete the expiation of his sins by penitence, by self-condemnation. While this feature recalls Nitzsch, a thought on the other hand, which had been touched upon by Steudel, comes into a clearness that it had never before attained. As Schweizer had not succeeded in his interpretation of the priestly office in entirely setting aside the reference of Christ’s work to God, he comes back in another place (as above, p. 134) to the position that, as Christ by the perfect offering of His obedience in His calling earns the complacent approval of God, and as He experienced the misery of human sin more deeply than we, He assumes a vicarious and even satisfactory character as security for those who are His; that His power to save develops itself in them into growing victory; and that He thus makes them to be objects of the Divine complacency. But Schweizer is just maintaining the line taken by Abelard when he adds this consideration as an appendix, as our own reflection—to which, as it seems, there is no counterpart in any purpose of Christ, as indeed even our redemption from the religion of the law was accomplished by means of Christ’s accursed death only in so far as Christians, by this proof of the contradiction between Christ and the Judaism that remained faithful to the law, have gained a conviction of the mutual incongruity of the two. Schweizer protests against the idea that his own view of redemption by Christ sets forth merely a change of subjective standpoint, and is therefore unsatisfactory from the religious point of view. I am very far from passing such a judgment upon it; but I find his elucidation to be theologically unsatisfactory, because, just as was intentionally the case with Rückert, it regards Christ, and particularly the fact of His death, only as the occasion for Christians having confidence in God as a Father, casting off the religion of the law, and recognising in Christ the pledge of their acceptance with God. This objection seems, I admit, to apply also to Abelard’s doctrine. But his thought offers as a counterpoise to the seeming contingency of the reciprocal relation of God’s love and the love of men, the consideration that it is on God’s chosen ones that the act of reconciliation takes awakening effect.

Schweizer, with justice, condemns the undervaluing of Abelard’s doctrine as compared with that of Anselm, to which the representatives of modern orthodoxy assign a value that has never been given to it in any previous age. In fact as a vehicle of religious life and feeling, it is only Abelard’s thought that can be directly accepted,—not Anselm’s theory. With respect to this, I may point out to those admirers of the latter who abhor the former as rationalistic, that so decided a representative of modern Moravian Pietism as Madame von Krüdener moved wholly in Abelard’s line of thought. She was wont, as a contemporaneous observer bears witness,²⁷ to express herself to the effect that the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ is love to the crucified One. In the great sacrificial death of Christ lay, as she put it, the fountain of Divine love. Only by counter love to Him could we share in forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. From this love to God, she maintained, springs that living faith which cannot for a moment doubt the promise of God.

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Footnotes

1. Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, p. 813. ↩

2. As above, p. 793. ↩

3. As above, p. 794. ↩

4. In what follows I make use of the second edition of 1830, unless when I expressly cite the first, 1821-2. ↩

5. Philosophische und vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 446-468. The dissertation belongs to the year 1827, but was published for the first time in 1830. Compare also the second dissertation: as above, p. 469 sq. ↩

6. Although Schleiermacher (sec. 14. 1) affirms that every one can join the Christian fellowship only by means of a free decision of his own, he does not disclose any grounds of such a decision that lie outside of the religious impression that Christ produces. But this impression, where it is made, constitutes the religious fellowship of which it is the principle. Therefore he declares, in the appendix to sec. 14, that he assumes no intermediate step between the faith of the individual.and his participation in Christian fellowship, but rather that, with faith, that participation is ipso facto given, not only in so far as this depends upon the spontaneous activity of him who has become a believer, but in so far as it depends upon the fellowship itself as the source from which the testimony that awakens faith had proceeded. This is to exclude the possibility of a personal believing persuasion of the individual’s membership in the Christian fellowship by demonstration drawn from the miracles and prophecies. ↩

7. With this may be compared the manner in which Lavater in his Briefe über die Schriftlehre von unserer Versöhnung mit Gott durch Christum (in his posthumous writings edited by Gessner, vol. ii. pp. 56, 57) explains the operation of Christ. “Can there be a power without effect in the world? Can there be merit or self-earned power in the moral sphere of being without its effect? Merit must be rewarded, that is, to the self-earned power material must be afforded upon which it can act. He who is best attracts, so to speak, by a physical law of nature, the best circle of operations. Inner worth forms around itself a circle in correspondence with it. I should like to give all possible clearness to this thought, which is so important in throwing light upon the great matter before us.” ↩

8. Schleiermacher (sec. 101. 3) acknowledges that even in the course of growing perfection there arise life-hindrances of such a nature that they obviously appear to the believer, that is, to the reconciled person, to stand in connexion with his sins that still remain, and so to be punishments. By this concession the whole idea of reconciliation becomes illusory in relation to the premisses from which it is deduced. ↩

9. De officio Christi triplici. Opuscula theologica (1773; ed. sec. 1793) pp. 371-396. ↩

10. Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik, Bd. iv. p. 621. ↩

11. In connexion with this proposition, it is affirmed yet again that the high-priestly value of Christ’s active obedience lies in the fact that God regards us in Christ as sharers of His obedience. But this mode of formulating the doctrine also is incorrect, and made it possible to append the totally erroneous exposition of the high-priestly value of the passive obedience. ↩

12. Cf. ap. Gerhard; Loci theol. tom. vii. p. 65: Voluntatem illam cœlestis patris, quam Christus in officio redemptionis implevit, non intelligendam esse de lege mosaica, sed de speciali mandato satisfaciendi et moriendi pro electis. ↩

13. Summa doctr. de fœdere et testamento Dei, cap. v. 93: Mandatum hoc a patre accepisse censetur, ut ipse solus et unus hominum omnium non quidem animam invitus amitteret, sed sponte et ex libera potestate tanquam liberrimus sponsor in satisfactionis pretium poneret positamque resumeret. ↩

14. The specific influence which Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre exercised upon D. F. Strauss, I assume as well known. A singular evidence of the fact is the circumstance that even Braniss (Ueber Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre; ein kritischer Versuch, 1824, p. 147 sq.) developed from Schleiermacher’s philosophical premisses the same speculative view which Strauss subsequently took up, in order to show that the former do not harmonize with the christological tendency of the Glaubenslehre. In like manner it is in accordance with Schleiermacherian ideas, aided in some degree by the formulæ of Hegel, that Kliefoth (Einleitung in die Dogmengeschichte, 1839, pp. 20, 21) shows how Christian doctrine and Ethic arise as the common work and possession of the fellowship of believers, how in that way they no longer pertain to the individual, but have come to be objective historical things (!); how by Church government and Church legislation they come to be creed and law, to which the individual consciousness ought to subject itself in order to mould itself thereupon; how the Church-organism that thus comes into being has its purpose in the Christian culture of the individual; its goal and its norm in creed and law; how accordingly, in the outward existence of the Church, the unity of the Christian spirit gives itself reality. This deduction accords only with the definition of Dogmatics, as the exhibition of the doctrine of the Church,—a view set up by Schleiermacher, and never before maintained by any one. On the other hand, the view of the Church’s development-process as a progressive incarnation of God (p. 14) is suggested in the Glaubenslehre, sec. 100, 2; sec. 120, 2. Kliefoth’s agreement with Möhler on this point is also not casual, in so far as the latter’s treatise Ueber die Einheit in der Kirche (1825) adheres as closely to the Schleiermacherian formulæ as it foreshadows Kliefoth’s view of thought. That people do not yet discern in Kliefoth’s Einleitung in die Dogmengeschichte a counterpart of equal greatness to Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which preceded it by only a few years, is a fault that I should like by these remarks to remedy. ↩

15. Die Glaubenslehre der evangelisch-protestantischen Kirche, 1834. ↩

16. In the Studien der evangelischen Geistlichkeit Württembergs, edited by him (vii. 2, viii. 1, 2, 1834-35); published as a separate work in 1836. It is a reconstruction of his earlier work: Die Lehre von der Versöhnung und der Rechtfertigung des Menschen. Ein philosophisch-exegetischer Versuch, 1823. ↩

17. Nitzsch: System der christlichen Lehre, 1828, 6th Ed. 1851. Lücke: Grundriss der evangelischen Dogmatik (printed for private circulation), 1845. The respect for Schleiermacher, which is kept up in this and cognate circles, is not carried so far as to entitle these theologians to the name of Schleiermacherians. On the other hand, I do not think I do them any injustice, I believe I merely vindicate their rights, when I designate them as Melanchthonians. Melanchthon is regarded by them as the theologian who was at once churchly, and at the same time dogmatically liberal and friendly to union; and the Augsburg Confession is to them at once a church standard, and the fundamental type of their dogma (compare a very characteristic utterance by Nitzsch in the Stud. u. Krit., 1833, p. 929). Just as in the sixteenth century, Lutheranism has risen up over this Melanchthonianism,—and for this the latter is not altogether to be absolved from blame. For it has not made itself master of the central tasks of theology, but has allowed its problems to be set for it by its adversaries for the most part. It has spent its chief strength in polemics, particularly against the Leben Jesu of Strauss, and has failed to see the danger of a Lutheranism like that of Kliefoth. With all its valuable “studies and criticisms” it has never associated the purpose or the power to make a school; it has invariably refused to hold science as high as churchliness, and thus has paved the way for that churchliness on the high places of which but slight regard is paid to the “Mediation Theology.” ↩

18. Eine protestantische Beantwortung der Symbolik Möhler’s, 1835. ↩

19. Programma de summis principiis confessionis Augustanae, 1830. The definition of justification in this tract runs as follows (Nitzsch: System, p. 138): Est igitur justificatio beneficium Dei quo homines miseriae peccati obnoxii eum naturae statum consequuntur, ut a Deo probari (pro justis haberi) et gratiam Dei aeternamque salutem merito Christi capessere possint. This is not Catholic; neither is it Osiandrian; it is primarily a misuse of the technical usus loquendi. For if the state of grace is determined by Christ’s merit, the justificatio which is indicated as its previous condition means what the old divines called regeneratio, but in this instance not merely as donatio fidei, but as real life-fellowship with Christ. This view, as we shall see later, is one that had been anticipated in the early pietistic school. ↩

20. Theologische Ethik, Zweiter Band, 1845, p. 279 sq. The new edition of the work, which was interrupted by the death of the author, presents in the two first volumes changes of view; but in the third volume edited by Holzmann there is no new elaboration of the doctrine of redemption; the text of the first edition is merely reproduced. ↩

21. For which Rothe finds support in Ebrard (as above, p. 303); he might have given his treatment of the subject greater weight by appealing to Kant! (See above, p. 413.) ↩

22. Theologie, 2 Bände. 1851. ↩

23. Christl. Glaubenslehre nach protestantischen Grundsätzen. First part of the second volume (1869), comp. p. 190. ↩

24. As above, vol. i. 360 sqq. ↩

25. Vol. ii. p. 114 sqq. ↩

26. This suggests J. H. Scholten: Dogmaticæ Christianæ initia; Pars Materialis, p. 59. Scholten, however, limits the significance of Christ to the fact that he is the archetype of true religion: while this thought with Schweizer is subordinated to the other one, that He is bearer of the perfect revelation. ↩

27. See Frau von Krüdener, Ein Zeitgemälde. Berne, 1868, p. 196. ↩