Freylinghausen, in the first instance defines justification quite correctly as meaning that God gives and imputes to the true penitent and believer the righteousness of Christ, and for the sake of that righteousness forgives his sins and remits their punishment. In so far as on man’s side faith is the cause of justification, it is not regarded as a virtue but as God’s work in man. But, indeed, only those become real partakers of justification who in honest repentance die to sin, and by faith seek and appropriate its forgiveness in the blood of Christ, with renunciation of all worthiness and righteousness of their own. Believers can be assured of their justification inasmuch as, following the order of repentance and of faith, it is based upon the worth of the Mediator. This active wrestling of faith with God to gain assurance of justification, which is asserted and required by Antony and Joachim Lange in language more distinct, is found by Löscher to be liable to the objection that something is included as a ground of salvation which belongs only to its ordering. For in orthodox Lutheranism, faith, to which justification is referred, had been posited as a passive form, and not as an active power (p. 280). The witness of the Holy Ghost to adoption and justification, as a witness of Divine authority, was sharply distinguished from merely moral assurance as an opinion arising from human conjecture. For, as Gerhard shows against Bellarmin,² that witness is distinguished from any arbitrary emotion of the soul, in that it never occurs extra verbum Dei. The inner witness invariably finds place only in so far as, in the first instance, the Holy Ghost makes Himself felt in the promise of grace preached and heard; in this view of Rom. viii. 16 it is implied that the human spirit stands in a relation of mere passivity to the Divine. But should the other interpretation (which is preferred by the Reformers) hold good, that in the invocation of God by His name of Father the Divine Spirit works in alliance with the human, and that accordingly the pacification of our conscience, earnestness in prayer, striving after virtue, and patience in misfortune evince our adoption as children of God, all this is explicable only from that first synthesis in which the Divine Spirit shows itself active, and the human spirit is passive. The case of hypocritical faith does not set aside the general trustworthiness of that Divine testimony; were it otherwise we should be compelled to doubt our own actual humanity, because there are such things as ghosts in human shape. But now the preached word contains the promise of grace in general, and thus the witness of the Holy Ghost that is active therein cannot appropriate in a particular manner the assurance of our being in a state of grace. Gerhard’s answer to this objection betrays the weak side of the orthodox view. For in it the two thoughts of the revelation of the Word and of the witness of the Spirit are separated; and by appealing to the expressed assurance of salvation of a Job, a Paul, a John, Gerhard ventures only to assert it to be possible that believers should be assured of their standing in faith and of their sonship.³ And when he bases this assertion particularly upon Paul’s exhortation (2 Cor. xiii. 5) to examine ourselves whether we be in the faith, the psychological basis of the theory he intends to establish is shown to be inadequate. In no case can the human spirit be conceived to be thoroughly and exclusively passive; otherwise it is thought of as an object of mechanical movement apart from its essential and distinctive feature of self-consciousness. But if a determinateness prior to the self-consciousness is to be regarded as belonging to the human spirit, the spirit must yet appropriate to itself that determinateness in self-consciousness. If, therefore, the influence of the Holy Spirit is to be directly represented as the cause of the human self-consciousness that corresponds to it, this can yet be represented as actual only under the form of the last, and in accordance with the conditions of its activity. Or if the witness of the Holy Spirit is to be included in the general proclamation of salvation, then as witness for any one subject it holds good only in virtue of a syllogism which the subjective self-consciousness draws out according to its own particular experiences. As Gerhard himself cannot escape these impressions, he has in his character as the defender of orthodoxy prepared the way precisely for the practical application which was finally enunciated in principle by the Pietists. These last would have it that the question whether the general promise of justification through Christ applies to the individual subject or no can be decided only by the completeness of his repentance and the liveliness of his faith. And since for the rest they recognised with all correctness this objective vehicle for the reception of justification, they did not in theory at all depart from orthodoxy, and they exercised repentance as the Lutheran dogmatic prescribed. If, notwithstanding this, Löscher was puzzled by the practical physiognomy of Pietism, we shall have to conclude therefrom that the distinction of repentance into remorse, arising from the law, and faith arising from the general promise, constitutes in religious and moral respects the weakest side of the Lutheran system. And this is beyond all doubt by what has been said above (p. 183).

This Halle Pietism, the praxis of penitential exercise, has not continued to exercise any public or at all regulative influence in the Evangelical Church of the nineteenth century. In the first beginning of the “awakening,” such a tendency may have run in an under current; but the refutation devoted to this method by Hengstenberg in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung for 1840 met no actual want of the time, but perhaps only served the purpose of masking that other modern Pietism for which he just at that time held it seasonable to seek to gain dominion over the Evangelical Church. The modern Pietism within the Church does not descend directly from the old separatistic movement. The positive peculiarity of the latter—perfectionism, as the orthodox polemical divines expressed themselves —that earnest and retiring striving after sanctity which characterized “the quiet in the land,” is not to be found in modern Pietism, at least in so far as it has come into publicity as a party and exercised influence upon theology and the Church. The literary influences which proceeded from members of the older school, such as Lavater and Jung-Stilling, were also so conditioned by their opposition to the Illumination, that they rested not so much upon the ethical speciality as upon the general and positively Christian basis of Pietism. From Methodism, too, modern Pietism has received into itself only casual and by no means specific impressions. On the contrary it confessedly takes colour from the Moravian Brotherhood,⁴ and demonstrably descends from it through definite persons. Thus it is possible fully and rightly to ascertain its distinctive features. Zinzendorf separates himself from the whole previous history of evangelical Christianity hereby, that he appropriated the latter as an object of phantasy, and as a motive of feeling deliberately introverted, i.e. of sentimentality. Sentimentality expresses that other tendency of culture of illumination which in the previous century became current in conjunction with the morality of common sense. Before that mood, under the influence of the intellectual “illumination,” took a position of indifference to Christianity, it corresponded with the traditional preponderance of the positively Christian system that such a man as Zinzendorf brought to bear upon this material the plenitude of his power of imagination, and connected with it his introverted love for the sentimental. On the whole, the representation of religion in the phantasy is nothing abnormal, for it is the earliest agency in the objective presentation and communication of religion, and at every epoch in the development of Christianity there can clearly be discerned an intensification of the phantasy, and the appropriation by that faculty of new motives. But what in this fashion has been gained in any particular period was always, before Zinzendorf, fixed in the intellectual forms of public doctrine or the social rule of a monkish order. To Zinzendorf, on the other hand, the tendency to such a course is altogether unknown. Nay, as he himself regarded the phantasy not as the elementary organ of religion but as the chief one which gives it all its value, he sought to make sure that the religious feelings of his followers should have the advantage of what he had himself acquired, by arranging the order of worship and the social constitution of his society, with the deliberate intention that a definite manner of feeling and of looking at things might always be kept alive.

There are in the Christian Church one man and one society to whom Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brotherhood, comparatively speaking, bear a resemblance. They are Ignatius Loyola and the order of the Jesuits. In the Spaniard, just as in Zinzendorf, awakening is the result of an enthusiastic and gushing excitement of the phantasy, and maintains itself in the sentimental mood of chivalrous devotion to the Holy Virgin. The founder of the order of the Jesuits, moreover, in the so-called exercitia spiritualia S. Ignatii, has devised a characteristic schooling of the faculty of imagination, in order to dispose the spirits of men in a manner corresponding to the nature of this society; and wherever patterns of peculiar piety are to be detected in the modern saints of the Roman Catholic Church, saturated as it is with Jesuitism, sentimentality is their fundamental feature. But of course the relation between the constitution of the society and the common fantastic sentimental piety is inverted on the Catholic and the evangelical side respectively, in accordance with the respective characters of the two phenomena. For the constitution of the Moravian Brotherhood is designed only as a means for the maintenance of pious intuitions and of a certain frame of feelings in its members. The methodical excitement of the phantasy, on the other hand, in the Jesuit exercises, only serves to make the spirits compliant to the intellectual machinery of the political purposes of the Society of Jesus. The order of the Jesuits, in intention, defends the catholic, universal, political claims of the Romish Church; but precisely by this may it be discerned to be the representative of the real particularism of the Romish Church and a witness against its catholicity. The Moravian Brotherhood, which by reducing to indifference the confessional differences of the evangelical churches, assumes to itself a certain character of evangelical catholicity, by no means conceals its particularism on the other hand, when, after its own style, it promises peace of mind only to men of peculiar spiritual and religious wants. Thus it unmistakeably assumes the type of a sect which, in certain circumstances (as, for example, in Livonia), it has even evinced in aggression against the Church. On the whole, however, such a designation appropriately belongs to the Moravian Brotherhood as such, in a sense that conveys no reproach, so far namely as it intentionally confines its task to definite psychological conditions of religious agreement.

Modern Pietism, on the other hand, is the form in which the piety which bears the stamp of the Moravian Brotherhood seeks to become authoritative within the evangelical Church of Germany and at the same time to control its theology. According to the peculiarity of the Moravian Brotherhood that we have described, it is conceded that the awakening which began to spread visibly some time about the year 1817,⁵ consisted chiefly in an excitement of phantasy and of introverted feeling by the ideas of reconciliation and justification in Christ, and that this was brought about in smaller circles of society, which, however, did not stand in a negative attitude towards the Church forms of Christianity, but sought rather to cultivate them as much as possible. From the positive doctrinal tradition that prevailed in the Moravian Brotherhood, from the fact that public teaching in the Church at that time was for the most part rationalistic, from the influence of the rising culture of the Romantic school, and, finally, in view of the standing peculiarity of the evangelical Church of Germany, may be gathered the special marks and conditions of the position taken up by this Pietism within the Church. Zinzendorf, in his appropriation of the traditional doctrinal idea by the fancy had, in one direction, violently distorted its structure by raising into prominence his pet ideas, and in another direction had far overstepped its limits in approximating to Separatists and Mystics. On the other hand, his collaborateurs and successors, particularly the “sober and judicious” Spangenberg, succeeded, while remaining wholly faithful to the essential ideas of Zinzendorf and those that exercised living power, in making the doctrine of the Moravian Brotherhood conform as much as possible with the orthodoxy of the Lutheran Church, so that in the present century the theology of the founder has come to be almost less known in the brotherhood itself than outside its limits.⁶ Hence, the awakening within the Evangelical Church of Germany, which proceeded from the Moravian Brotherhood, connected itself with the main features of the Lutheran doctrinal system. But now, as the chief interest of this church was always expressed in theology, while the proper organization of the congregations was neglected, the awakening not only immediately placed itself in opposition to the rationalism prevailing in the pulpits, but, on the whole, sought after and attained, as its main object, a theological change in the state of doctrine. Rationalism was that culture from which, in the awakening, men withdrew themselves. In this awakening men did not experience a conversion out of the acute life of sin to a life in moral duty, but the transition from the low intellectuality of the Illuminantist effort after virtue to the positively Christian view of the entire universe, the connexion of which laid hold of the phantasy and feeling of the awakened, and the dignity of which laid hold of the determination of their will, and that too all the more powerfully as they were met by something new and unexpected. For though they might perhaps know the formal outlines of the orthodox system from the polemic which rationalism had conducted against the point of particular doctrines of orthodoxy, this could only deepen the impression produced by a living and systematic biblical representation of the doctrine of God’s grace, on men in whom the romantic culture of the time had developed the necessary capacity of æsthetic appreciation. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader how much the æsthetic sense for the historical appreciation of remote circles of culture had been developed and diffused by the so-called Romancists, how, in particular, all possible forms of the history of religion, which had been alien and unintelligible to the Illumination, were brought within the reach of the imaginative faculty and commended to the interest of humanity. This extension of historical view by the romance school proved beneficial also to the view of Christianity derived from biblical sources, and, at the same time, to the knowledge of the reciprocal relation between the New and the Old Testament. Such theological discoveries are set forth with peculiar freshness in, for example, Stier’s Andeutungen für gläubiges Schriftverständniss,⁷ because they serve at once to promote æsthetic and religious satisfaction. But just in proportion as this was the case did the particularistic and sectarian accompaniment of this tendency evince itself, on the one hand, in indifference or disinclination to the worldly literature, which was the spiritual substance of the general culture of the period, and on the other hand, in rejection of the claims which reason makes on theology, in order that the latter may show itself as a science; by this I mean historical criticism of the Bible records, grammatical strictness in their interpretation, systematic interest in all necessary branches of theological culture, particularly in Christian ethics and in Church history. I can follow with real sympathy the upward flight of the awakening, and disregard many exaggerated features, which, as Stier’s biography shows, connect themselves with it from the outset; but the sectarian character of this religious and theological movement, the leaning to a narrow social circle conditioned by social standing, explain perfectly why the theology, which was propagated in this party, never, as a rule, grew beyond dilettantism. The historical sense, which without any doubt is what originally conditioned this theology, never raised itself above the immaturity of the Romantic school; it dissipated itself in all sorts of obsolete and at bottom unhistorical hobbies in the sphere of Old Testament history; but as it never rose to a comprehensive understanding of the history of the Christian Church and doctrine, it renounced its own proper purification and completion. When we gather from the preface to John Fr. von Meyer’s Inbegriff der christlichen Glaubenslehre that it is absolutely of no value to know what all theologians in all time have thought, and that all that is necessary is to possess the key of the Holy Ghost in order to understand Scripture; this is to be regarded as a confession of the party in which this theological dilettante passes as a master. But the Holy Spirit is not an acquisition of individual enthusiasm,—He is the Spirit of God in the Church, and He cannot be claimed as the strength and as the standard of our theological knowledge, unless we maintain our insight into the primal form of Christianity in reciprocal relation with a comprehensive understanding of the history of the Church and its doctrine. That, moreover, the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung came to be not only the organ for the practical aims of the party, but also the dominant and central point of its theological culture, at once shows right clearly that the party was doomed to fall ere it had produced results of value. For this Kirchenzeitung is of such a character that it could not but incapacitate its followers for all earnest and systematic theological work, and cause them to cease to have any respect for it.

70. Before, however, this institution began its fatal career, before the “awakening” allied itself in it with the interests of all sorts of theological reaction, modern Pietism exhibited a certain liberality precisely with reference to the doctrine of reconciliation, which it presented in more than one shape that bore a heterodox stamp. I must omit taking special notice of Zinzendorf’s notions of the doctrine. Plitt, in the above-cited book, distinguishes between an original and sound doctrine, taught by the founder of the brotherhood, and a corruption thereof, dating no further back than 1742. This is an assertion with regard to which I cannot pronounce an opinion, but at least there is no need for any repetition of those orthodox trains of thought which Plitt has set forth in the first volume of his work, and which Spangenberg defends in the Idea fidei fratrum; while, on the other hand, Zinzendorf’s fanciful contemplations of Christ in His passion fall specifically outside of the compass of my task. One circumstance, however, merits attention,—that in Zinzendorf as well as in other forerunners of modern Pietism, the elementary representations of the patristic period are resuscitated just in proportion as the devout fancy applied itself to clothing positively Christian ideas in lively images. Zinzendorf accordingly again took it upon him to bring Christ’s redemption into relation with the power of Satan, whose claim to all mankind is assumed to be recognised by God. The expressions indeed that Plitt quotes (as above, pp. 297-300), are of such a nature that I am unable to get any intelligibly connected meaning out of them. Lavater, Jung-Stilling, and Hamann, on the other hand, following the type of Hilary of Poictiers (p. 8), explain upon the analogy of a chemico-physiological process the redemption of the human race viewed as a natural unit;⁸ whence also Schleiermacher’s similar comparisons (p. 468) receive a measure of explanation. The “awakening,” however, with its keener theological interest immediately advanced to the now prevailing preference for Anselm’s theory, and, while thus unfurling the banner of Scholasticism, handed over to oblivion those patristic reminiscences of its forerunners.

Notwithstanding this, Tholuck and Stier, who are the most brilliant representatives of the theology of the awakening, display each in his own way a remarkable independence towards the juristic feature of orthodoxy, by which the new school was so much attracted. We do the former no injustice when we presume that in his Lehre von der Sünde und vom Versöhner (1823) he has not hesitated in part to adopt suggestions from Schleiermacher; but the hints which he gives for the doctrine of reconciliation⁹ proceed upon the schema of the high-priestly office, which the other was not able to hold fast (p. 483). The priestly office is that of mediation between man and God. It embraces everything that Christ was in this life in His new manhood, which is identical with the Godhead; and the prophetical office, as an exhibition of the person of Jesus in speech, can, he maintains, be easily subsumed under the other. Could not the kingly office also be included under the priestly, or shown to be a presupposition of it? Christ’s priestly work is no other than the fulfilment of the righteousness demanded by the law; the active obedience is everything; but in order to be able to yield it, “it was needful that He should not shun any hard thing that His entrance into the human race brought along with it.” Having taken upon Himself that which in human nature is the wages of sin, having experienced in Himself the enmity of sin to all that is good, having in supreme love had a fellow-feeling of the misery of sin in the world, His action was passion, and His passion the highest act. Could not this correct view of the life and passion of Christ, as fulfilment of the universal law, be put on a firmer footing by means of the notion of Christ’s vocation, which is the true expression of that will of God which was the meat of the Son? As in this obedience He took death upon Himself, death was for Christ the condition of His own beatification and glorification, with the design that those should enter into righteousness and life who by faith come into fellowship with Him. This new humanity, made one with Christ, has (as glorified) been declared by God from all eternity to be righteous; but as what God speaks is His Will, and what He wills is deed, to be declared righteous means to be made righteous, and the annihilation of sin is included in its forgiveness. This line of thought also recals Schleiermacher (p. 492), but its application is freed from a multitude of objections which otherwise surround this point of doctrine, because the concrete idea of God lies under it. Christ’s prestation of righteousness, recognised in His life and Passion, makes it possible to Tholuck to adopt the proposition that God is reconciled through Christ, that satisfaction has been given to His justice. But it cannot very well be concealed that this proposition has quite another meaning than that which it has in the forensic theories of the atonement. This impression is deepened by Tholuck himself, when he briefly develops the hypotheses of Anselm, Thomas, and Grotius; but why do we miss in this series the criminal-law theory of Lutheran and Reformed divines? and if, on the other hand, concern is expressed lest, by the complete setting aside of juridical forms of representation, the kernel of the leading ideas of Scripture should receive injury, would not a contrasting of Tholuck’s own view with the orthodox theory of punishment bring into clearest light the purely ethical meaning of the former, and its removal from juristic spheres of vision? This and other instrumentalities have not been employed by Tholuck toward the full unfolding of the point of view indicated in his book, which in design is ascetic rather than scholastic; I must not, however, conceal the fact that these hints contain in themselves an element of truth, which, with fine tact, has been kept unharmed by foreign additions.

In comparison with Tholuck, Stier’s essays proceed upon studies that are even historically imperfect, for he directs his investigation to the question of the significance of Christ’s death alone as distinguished from His active life. This difference from Tholuck is probably to be explained from the fact that in his autodidactic efforts Stier stood aloof from the influence of Schleiermacher. In brief succession he has elaborated two outlines of the doctrine of reconciliation, which are not mutually complementary, as Stier gives out, but entirely exclude one another.¹⁰ He begins with a denial of the juridical doctrine of satisfaction more decisive than anything that has been written (that is, in this line of presentation) since Faustus Socinus.¹¹ If God’s love or grace must be regarded as the ground of the plan of salvation that remains always the same and unchangeable, if we are gratuitously redeemed, and as by a gift, then this attitude of God cannot be called forth by a satisfaction on Christ’s part, which would include in itself a valid claim of right on our part. If then God forgives sins, he does not punish them either in the person of the sinner or in the person of another in his room. If, on the other hand, the justice of God demands punishment for infinite guilt, then only the annihilation of sinners would be the full satisfaction which God could exact for Himself. The passion of Christ, on the other hand, can have been no punishment, because it is only the conviction of having offended God that can make a pain become a punishment; but Christ was always assured within Himself of the love of God, precisely on account of His death. And if we concede that God accepted the passion of Christ as a fully sufficient punishment, then this half-renunciation of God’s claim of right really admits the entire invalidity of the claim. Finally, the imputation of Christ’s legal obedience cannot be maintained,—in the first place, because neither guilt nor merit admits of transference; in the second place, because on such a presupposition the bestowal of grace would be by merit and not gratuitously. In the Bible too there is no word either of a punishment which is an end in itself, or of reconciliation of God by Christ, or of the reference of God’s wrath to Him. According to Scripture, the necessity of Christ’s suffering and dying does not arise in God but in men. For Scripture is altogether silent upon the deep things of the eternally hidden God, while it sets forth His revelation to us and in us. If now, as Stier in his first sketch argues at length, Christ is the bearer of God’s love and grace, then it was needful at the same time to overcome in sinners the impression of the wrath of God which stood as an obstacle in the way of recognition of eternal grace. For God’s mercy and justice are not opposed to one another in God Himself, but only in the consciousness of the sinner. In order that this opposition may be done away, it is needed that God’s forgiving love should be combined with clear proof of His serious displeasure against sin. Now, in Christ, we have no mere ratification of the love of God, as neologians think; but, at the same time, an equally serious ratification of His wrath, and a threatening view of what awaits us if we do not surrender ourselves to such love.

Christ is thus a penal example in His death.¹² And, indeed, Stier does not any longer, like the half-orthodox opponents of the Illumination, place this view in combination with that of the penal satisfaction (p. 381), but in conscious opposition to it. This, however, is the point in defence of which Stier undertook his second copious dissertation. But while admitting the error of his previous deduction, he yet excuses it by citation of the coincident declarations of men of a similar tendency, partly Germans, partly English,¹³ which enable us to see how widely diffused the idea has come to be among the very persons who, as defenders of positive Christianity, opposed themselves to the Illumination. What Stier suggests in room of the theory of Grotius, is Luther’s thought (adopted also by Klaiber) that Christ in His death overcame sin in so far as He had to do with it. As Christ, according to Rom. viii. 3, was born in the likeness of sinful flesh, He assumed to Himself for the good of men, and as their representative, weakness or liability to be tempted to sin, as a consequence of sin compatible with His own divinity and personal sinlessness. He accordingly experienced in Himself temptation in the form of allurement to the omission of what is good, specially in the impulse towards self-preservation. In order then to withstand this temptation, and in it the obstructing influence of human sin in its totality, so far as He was accessible thereto, it was requisite for Christ to submit Himself to the lot of death and to renounce self-preservation. This eventful struggle of life with death, the conditions of which are stated with delicate observation, is, according to him, the regeneration of the corrupt creature-basis of sinful humanity. “The connexion of engraftment between the spirit of God and our flesh is restored again when the Son of God, in our flesh and blood, overcomes the might of death and destruction, and its powers to impede; and His humanity allied to us is transfigured thereby into a blood of the spirit, flesh, and life, which we can enjoy, by partaking of which we again acquire life in ourselves, and in unction with which we acquire the power to sustain and labour after the great and indispensable process of the new-birth of our nature.” In this view, just as is the case with Luther, Christ’s struggle with sin is characterized only as the maintenance of His own individual purity. If, however, the renovation of the human race is deduced in a really intelligible way, and not merely asserted in the phrase of the new-birth of the creature-basis of humanity, then instead of Christ’s death it is rather His resurrection that comes into central prominence. But the universal significance of the death of Christ where this is presupposed, arises only in so far as faith in Him is awakened, and in that faith, the condemnation of sin completed by imitation of His death, i.e., by repentance and patient endurance of all the sufferings with which we are visited. “Thus our entering into Christ’s death for us, with discerning and appropriating faith, is at the same time our entering into His resurrection for us. This faith, which once for all takes possession of us, makes us to be in our conscience righteous before God; for it is the living root that guarantees our perfect sanctification as long as we abide in it, and by it strive to be ever more intimately one with Christ in His death and life.”

71. Stier’s doctrine of reconciliation, both in its negative and positive interests, is maintained by others also, who descend from the older Pietism, and who take up again Luther’s thought of the vanquishing of sin by Christ in such a way that for the first time it loses that stamp of casualness which it appears to have both with Stier and with Klaiber. Here the school of John Albert Bengel comes to be considered.¹⁴ It rests upon the orthodox doctrine of the Divine inspiration of the whole Bible. But in this proposition was contained more than was utilized by the orthodox school in the use it made of Scripture. That school only required that the dicta probantia of Scripture which were needed for the theological system should be clothed with Divine authority. For Scripture, although it was affirmed to be the single source of the system, was yet as matter of fact employed only as the supplementary norm of a system that had been propagated in tradition; and the surplus of ideas which Scripture offered remained in the background. It is easy to see that the importance of Scripture as the source of revelation, as a divinely-inspired whole, could not fail at length to take its effect within evangelical theology. Pietism, in Bengel’s case, gave an impulse to the employment of this thought, in so far as in that circle the use of the Bible for purposes of edification rose to a much higher pitch, as in fact did the use of all ascetic instrumentalities which had indeed previously held a place in the Church, but had not been applied with the same conscientiousness as Pietism bestowed upon them. If piety required to draw nourishment from all parts of the Bible because it is throughout inspired by God, Bengel inferred on the same grounds that even the recondite and scattered chronological data of Scripture have an emphatic value, and point not merely to a material, but also at the same time to a chronological, order in the Divine economy in the human race. The emphasis which was presumed to lie upon all historical particulars had led other thinkers, who started from the same premisses, to an allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Bengel, on the contrary, was led by it upon the path of apocalyptic computation of time. This, however, is only the elementary form in which he made the concatenation of historical revelation as such to be the task of theology. The Cocceians had already offered the germ of this idea; but that school, the indirect influence of which on Bengel is very probable, had still employed it in the service of the orthodox system.¹⁵ Bengel, however, takes up the historical task as such. But at the same time he lays hold of the Bible immediately as the source of a theological system; and herein lies his error. His expression in the Ordo temporum, xi. 13: “We must not regard Holy Scripture as books of sayings and examples, but as an incomparable statement of the Divine economy in dealing with the human race from the beginning down to the end of all things through all the ages of the world; as a beauteous, magnificent, concatenated system,”¹⁶ lays down as identical two characteristics which in their very nature cannot co-exist. Bengel has unquestionably undeniable merit in assigning to the thought of the kingdom of God its constitutive importance towards the understanding of revelation and the “training of the human race” contemplated therein. But his prevalent leaning to eschatology, which prevented him from discovering the full ethical contents of this thought, was connected with the very casual circumstance that the barely canonical Apocalypse of John closes the series of the books of the Bible, while the Pentateuch opens with the narrative of the creation of the world. But, however the pretended biblical system of Bengel is carried out in detail, it of necessity comes into collision with popular Lutheranism inasmuch as reconciliation through Christ and justification by faith take the position of media under the dominating thought of the kingdom of God, and no longer can keep their place as the main thing or as the sum and substance of Christian doctrine. This conviction was reached, even before Bengel, in the pietism which concentrates itself on personal sanctity; but it was at least strengthened by the theological influence of Bengel upon the followers of the pietistic tendency.¹⁷ But conversely from the fact that the field of view opened up by Bengel was in the main cosmical in its character, there arises a risk of lowering and losing sight of the ethical nature of Christianity, and so of resolving it into a commingling of the spirit with nature,—a tendency that of necessity runs off into a confusion between revealed religion and science, which is no better than what occurred in the use of the Bible made by the old school.

I cannot here pause to discuss how far Fr. Christopher Oetinger has fallen into that peril; but that he has not altogether escaped it is proved hereby that “life” is his highest idea, a notion which is indifferent to the antithesis between spirit and nature. However alien many isolated features in the theosophic language and thought of that deep-thinking man may be to me, I am very ready to admit that the magnificent independence of his Biblical combinations has something of exaltation in it even to him who can neither altogether agree with them nor regard imitation of such a pattern as commendable.¹⁸ The notion of life which, as the notion under which God is regarded, dominates Oetinger’s whole view of the universe, lies at the root also of the way in which redemption by Christ is conceived of by him. For Christ as the Person to whom God has granted to have life in Himself, who as the Logos from all eternity contains in Himself the original forms of things, in His Mediatorship shows Himself to be the Prince and Centre of life for humanity. The chief point of His saving activity consists indeed in the discharge of His kingly and priestly office since His resurrection; for in His state of exaltation He is a quickening spirit, as which He brings back all to God, and imparts to humanity a glorification which did not originally belong to it in the first creation. But now the thought that Christ’s resurrection, as a new and real birth for Him, should at the same time be the ground of the regeneration of our souls, and the ground of our sanctification and righteousness is presented by Oetinger by means of the intermediate idea of a “new, real, and physical vital power” proceeding from Christ—an idea which he uses with all the less hesitation, because his ideas of spirit and of body intentionally interpenetrate one another, while the analogous statements of Lavater and Jung-Stilling are hardly so conditioned.

Christ now attained to the state of exaltation in such a way that He earned it for Himself. Although Oetinger recognises for the incarnation of the Logos the schema of the communicatio idiomatum, and not that of κένωσις, he yet so distinctly lays emphasis upon Christ’s human development, and His moral progress from the status psychicus to exaltation, that his interpretation of the life of Christ, more than anything else, is dominated by the ethical point of view, which in this regard leads him to be on the side of the Reformed school. Although, moreover, he occasionally does not object to interpret the death of Christ in the quite orthodox sense, to the effect that Christ as liberator of His brethren had to endure the wrath of God, and surrender His life as a ransom in order to redeem them from the rigour of the law, and that He thus had to give satisfaction to the holiness of God in order to fulfil all righteousness, yet His own reflection leads Him in another direction. Christ’s positive fulfilment of the law has its foundation in the requirement of the law, not for God’s sake, but in order to establish in the human race moral order in the place of disorder, and thereby at once to overcome the power of evil, and also to rebut Satan’s charges against men. Victory over the evil in human nature is also the result which Christ attained against Satan’s temptations. And His death as completion of His obedience and His fulfilment of the law as completion of His self-sanctification are, at the same time, the acme of His victory over Satan. The application of the thought of sacrifice also begins with a recognition of the reference of Christ’s death to God, but passes over into its reference to men for whom Christ has kindled the fire of the Holy Ghost in order to sanctify them. Finally, by Christ’s subjection to the wrath of God there is no such thing expressed as what the orthodox doctrine teaches. For by that wrath Oetinger understands, indeed, in the first instance, God’s displeasure against sin, but at the same time (like Jacob Böhme) the condition of the creature which provokes God’s displeasure, in other words, the connexion of sin and evil; and in this sense Christ endured the wrath of God. The moral mode of contemplation, which is devoted to the life of Christ, dominates also the interpretation of that struggle with Satan which extends throughout the life of Christ. But the thought that Christ’s victory over evil was completed precisely in His death, departs from this point of view, and veers round to a physical and alchemistic manner of delineation, which, generally speaking, I am not able to follow, and a verbal reproduction of which could be of no use to anybody. I mention only that the communication of the Spirit by Christ, and the flowing of His blood from His body are treated as identical, and that hence is deduced the significance of the Lord’s Supper, not merely as imparting spiritual invigoration, but at the same time as laying the foundation for the powers of bodily immortality.

But, however much Oetinger’s trains of thought vacillate between spiritualism and materialism, it still demands explanation why this view (stated with manifold variations by Luther after Augustine, and subsequently taken up by Jacob Böhme), which regards the death of Christ as at bottom the vanquishing of death and the devil, should have met with wide acceptance in the circles of Pietism. For Augustine, as for Luther, the thought has hardly any special soteriological value, but only a value cosmical and theocratic; but for Böhme and Oetinger this value has to be combined with a specially soteriological one. In the rhetorical antitheses, in which Augustine expands the thought that Christ by His death has brought life into humanity, that by His death He has overcome death in general, he always sets before his mind’s eye only images of the opposite circumstances of humanity as a whole, and the question never rises to the contemplation of the individual’s need of salvation. So in like manner the phantastic picturing, which that thought receives at Luther’s hands with all the colouring of mythic tradition, bears no relation to his main religious problem,—how the forgiveness of sins is to be gained. For this last, when all is said, is to be found only in a particular relation to the love of God in Christ, and to the satisfaction which the latter made to the Father. But in the case of Böhme we are led to expect to find that that idea was recommended to him not by its cosmic dimensions alone, but by its directer relation to the task of sanctification which originally parted that theosophic separatist from the popular churchism of his time. But by this also, as we shall find, it was recommended to the similarly disposed Pietism of the period. For as from this view of the passion of Christ there is no direct line that leads to the establishment of the abolition of the guilt of sin, the conquest of sin through Christ stands in a relation of correspondence to the chief task of the “quiet in the land”—the task of conquering sin within themselves by means of sanctification.¹⁹

Accordingly, Oetinger’s apprehension of justification is by no means orthodox, rather in certain respects is it Arminian. For him it consists herein—that to him in whom the Spirit has the upperhand the future perfection which gradually and slowly is to be wrought in him by the Holy Ghost is imputed by God as already present, and that to each one according to his nature and degree, so that to every one his faith is imputed unto righteousness.²⁰ In like manner Stier also makes justification depend on regeneration (p. 529); the same view has been already shown to be that of Steudel, Klaiber, Rothe (pp. 497, 501, 506), as it has also been shown that Schleiermacher and Nitzsch (pp. 492, 504) were not quite successful in their endeavours to keep clear of it. This fact in the “modern theology” has been observed by Schneckenburger;²¹ and he has sought to understand it as a renewal of the old Reformed theory brought about through the mediation of Schleiermacher. I have already shown the untenableness of this assumption (above,pp. 192, 273), and the fact is to be explained rather as follows:—The old Protestant assertion of the priority of justification to regeneration entirely corresponds to the reference of Christ’s satisfaction and merit to God, and to the way in which they are ranked before the applicatio gratiæ. But when, in Abelard’s schema, Christ’s prestations in living and dying are directly referred to men, or when, particularly, they perfect and render further possible the victory over sin in the human race, then of necessity the active imitation of Christ in the believer precedes his justification by God. Generally speaking, these modern theologians guard themselves against adopting the Arminian view of the matter so unaffectedly as Oetinger does. But the divergence of this Pietistic theory of justification by faith from the orthodox doctrine of the two evangelical confessions cannot be mistaken. And indeed I may apply this title to the view of Schleiermacher also, and of those followers of him whom I have mentioned, who certainly have all imbibed the influences of Pietism.

The orthodox opponents of the older Pietism were not very far wrong when they believed that what they called Perfectionism threatened, by depreciation of the value of the means of grace, to lessen the traditionary significance of the doctrine of reconciliation and justification.²² The previous history of Gottfried Menken’s doctrine of reconciliation proves that in those circles people showed themselves accessible to the influence, not merely of a mystic like Dippel, but even of Faustus Socinus, and so were alienated from the Church doctrine of satisfaction, manifestly because in both was found an anticipation of the movement towards practical perfection. For Joh. Gerhard Hasenkamp (Rector of Duisburg, ob. 1777), in whose suggestions Menken’s doctrine ultimately has its root, has admitted that it was under the influence of Dippel and Socinus that he was led to his flat denial of the doctrine in question.²³ It was entirely in the bosom of the older Pietism that Menken himself came to base his theological culture exclusively on the Bible; it was not till later that he became acquainted with Bengel’s writings, and attached himself to him as the leader of the same tendency. His treatise, Ueber die eherne Schlange und das symbolische Verhältniss derselben zu der Person und Geschichte Jesu Christi²⁴ (1812, 2d Ed. 1829), to which I may confine myself almost entirely in exhibiting his teachings, also partakes of that character (hardly ever laid aside by any writer of the school) which leaves us uncertain whether it is intended merely for edification or for a scientific demonstration; and it shows, moreover, that in emphatic and typological use of the Old Testament the latter outvies orthodoxy itself. The brazen serpent which Moses lifted up on the pole, is, according to him, a figure of the devil, in so far as he is vanquished by Christ on the cross; it is accordingly the prophetic symbol of this idea of reconciliation. Reconciliation cannot consist in the pacification of the infinite wrath of God against the finite sin of men by a punishment in correspondence with that wrath, so that it still should continue to exist against the eternally reprobate. For on such a theory wrath would still triumph over love. Neither does the history in Genesis offer any hint of such a wrath on God’s part, representing as it does fallen man as objects of His loving concern; and Christ does not testify that God is angry with the world unto death, but He Himself loves the world and is come to appease the wrath of God by His life. That men are by nature children of wrath is boldly twisted into the meaning that they are subjects of sinful passion.²⁵ For the fundamental notion of God is love; and His holiness, which originally means His sublimity, His separation from sin, means, in its connexion with the history of redemption, His gracious condescension.²⁶ In this sense Menken is, so far as I can make out, the first who coins the phrase, now so common, of “holy love.” From it alone is Christ’s work of redemption intelligible. And in fact Menken more distinctly and thoroughly than Oetinger regards the incarnation of the Logos as a laying-aside of all Divine nature, and a participation of human nature as that is at present constituted after Adam’s fall.²⁷ This statement being made entirely with a view to what is to be exhibited as the meaning of redemption, Menken affirms, on the other hand, that the positive sinful disposition in Christ never became active or effective. Following the traditionary false interpretation of tempting lust (James i. 13-15), as wicked lust, and drawing a false distinction between the outer and inner conditions of temptation, he asserts that no man overcomes a temptation without sinning, but that Christ, having withstood temptations without sin, did not, properly speaking, undergo temptations but only trials and probations! Christ, accordingly, in the form of sinful flesh, having not only kept Himself pure from all actual sin but also in the sorest trial, when deprived of God’s help, evinced the Divineness of His disposition and the perfectness of His demeanour, has thereby in His own Person made human nature sinless. He has thereby quite compensated for human sin, and earned for the human race a new relation with God, forgiveness of sins, communication of the Holy Ghost, and the hope of the kingdom of God. But by what necessity is this series of effects connected with the other assumed fact? As it is not till His exaltation that Christ, in virtue of the perfecting of His own Person, becomes the Head and Saviour of His race, His power to vanquish universal sin depends, as is the case with Oetinger and with Stier, primarily on His resurrection, of which death is only the negative prerequisite. The leaning of this doctrine away from orthodoxy, and its old Pietistic character, are shown, moreover, herein, that with Menken what is of first importance is the actual taking-away of sin from men. “Guilt is the less important; sin is the weightier and deeper. With the remission of guilt the evil and ruin of sin is not taken away, the unholy fountain is not dried up, but continues to produce ever new guilt.” But though this result can only be attained through the believer’s own continued repentance, yet faith in Christ constitutes his worthiness to attain forgiveness of sins on account of Christ’s righteousness.²⁸

I bring this theory of Redemption and Justification into comparison with the orthodox doctrine only by way of historical elucidation, not with the view to criticise or pass judgment upon Menken. For the Lutheran orthodoxy is still always exposed to the objection which has already been pointed out (p. 172), against the contrasted connexion of justification and regeneration or renewal by the Holy Ghost. What necessity is there that God should not first forgive to any one his sins without in the next place bestowing His Spirit for the vanquishing of sin? Who can be surprised that the older Pietism gave up this connexion of thoughts, and deemed the removal of guilt to be the less important in comparison with the extirpation of moral evil, when the history of the Church had shown that all the offers of forgiveness of sins which are made in preaching, absolution, sacraments, were so far from leading to the renewal of the Christian life? Even though Menken’s theory exhibits very weak sides just when it is confronted with the Bible, that polemic directed against it is very naïve, which has no other ground to stand upon than the orthodox notional schemata, and is altogether wanting in insight into the historical conditions which regulate changes of view.²⁹

If I bring forward J. Chr. K. Hofmann’s doctrine of Reconciliation immediately after that of Menken, I wish at the outset to guard myself against the possibility of my being supposed to intend thereby to imitate the procedure of Thomasius,³⁰ his colleague, who places the two together as if they coincided in the highest possible degree, without emphasizing any of the characteristic differences between the later and the earlier writer, and without developing his knowledge of the history of dogma so far as to gain insight into the conditions and relative justice of the theological tendency that is common to both. For, undoubtedly, Hofmann as well as Menken belongs to the school of Bengel.³¹ And indeed the exclusive Biblicism which Bengel prescribes evinces itself very significantly in the case of Hofmann, in the manner in which he represents to himself that systematic theology for which he takes in hand to lead “Scriptural proof.” In particular, there are two sentences from the introduction to the Schriftbeweis, by the examination of which I purpose to exhibit at once Hofmann’s specific theological position, and my own distance from it, and thus hope to secure objectivity as much as possible for the account I shall subsequently give. “The systematic theologian,” says Hofmann, “has to express Christianity as a present fact, and as it is his own proper possession; which, on the other hand, will be Christianity just in proportion as he is personally united through Christ to God in the Church.” I must say that this definition could not be further removed from stating what is the specific mark of a theologian; for it applies equally well to the preacher and to the writer of Church hymns; or rather it does not apply strictly even to these. “In order that the fact of Christianity which is expressed in the short fundamental formula of personal fellowship between God and mankind through the mediation of Jesus Christ may come to have its manifold contents exhibited, thinking within it is needed. No ideas which have originated outside of it can be allowed to have any determining influence upon its unfolding of itself. An actual relation is the object of our thinking, in which, and not about which, we think.” If I can get any meaning out of these sentences, it is that Hofmann knows of nothing except biblical theology. For the discomposing exhortation “to think within the fact,” I can understand in the circumstances only as meaning that by the aid of the imaginative powers we have to adapt ourselves to that way of apprehending revelation which we find in Jesus and the sacred writers, and to reproduce this under its peculiar conditions. Hofmann accordingly will seek to find a necessary concatenation in revelation only in the direction expressed in Luke xxiv. 26, 27; but he will reject every scientific inquiry into a necessary concatenation between revelation and the necessary idea of God, and the necessary view of the world and human history, because this idea of necessity has arisen outside of the fact of Christianity. I, on the other hand, am convinced that the science of systematic theology, however much it has materially to be based upon biblical theology rightly understood, can be developed only from the problem which Hofmann sets aside. The manner, accordingly, in which Hofmann sets about his work, that expression of “thinking within a fact,” which, to say the least, is a clumsy one, and the very naïve statement of motives in the last of the sentences quoted,—as if an “actual relation” if rightly realized was not fitted to be thought about, i.e., to have its general truth and necessity investigated,—betray to me that separatism in scientific culture which corresponds to the home of the school of Bengel, to wit, separatistic Pietism. Hofmann’s epistemological theory, so far as it is denoted in the sentences quoted, stands upon the same niveau as Oetinger’s theory of spirit; and his regardlessness of all that is proper in a definition shows right clearly that the theologian has need of ideas which have arisen outside of the fact of Christianity, and which, even though they be only logical, will yet have a determining influence upon the theological presentation of Christianity. Of course this error may be excused from the circumstance that the above-indicated task of systematic theology has not been openly recognised since the Reformation, and was carried out in the scholastic divinity of the Middle Ages only in an indirect and imperfect way. In Protestantism, systematic theology was meant to be just biblical theology; and the investigation of the universal necessity of its propositions was always only casually insisted upon in the form of Polemics. The biblical character of the orthodox theology, however, was perplexed by notions which “had arisen outside of the fact of Christianity,” and which were already incorporated in its dogmas. Now, Hofmann might easily find in his own neighbourhood occasions for restoring to its rights biblical theology regarded as an interpretation of Scripture by itself; in their opposition to the repristination of Lutheran dogmatic, his principle and the work he has done have to me a value that I very willingly acknowledge. But this circumstance cannot prevent me from raising my voice against the pretended principles of systematic theology exhibited by Hofmann, as against an uncalled-for curtailment of the business of theology in general. For it admits of being easily shown that the biblico-theological results reached by Hofmann, so far as they are correct, have their peculiar convincing power for the refutation of his opponents only in virtue of being founded in the manner I have indicated upon universal scientific notions.

The literary controversy provoked by Hofmann’s Schrift- beweis,³² has put beyond all doubt the divergence of his doctrine of reconciliation from Lutheran orthodoxy; but his negation of its principles has quite another value than the opposition of Menken and Stier. These two argue from general, moral, and legal considerations against the well-known leading features of the doctrine of satisfaction, exactly as Faustus Socinus does. Hofmann’s analogous negative judgments, on the other hand, flow from his comprehensive historical estimate of Christ, which has rendered his theological view possible to him. Nor is his merit in this respect any way lessened when I show that the following determinations arrived at by him, leaving out of account their Trinitarian back-ground, are in harmony with Schleiermacher, and may be supposed to betoken his influence. For, assuming his own peculiar Trinitarian premisses, Hofmann maintains (1.) that the self-determination of Jesus to become the Mediator of perfect love-fellowship between God and men is the self-determination of God as archetypal end of the universe to become man, so that in His incarnation the relation that previously subsisted within God comes to be the historical relation between God and the man Jesus, and finds its completion in the integrity of the latter unto His death. Herein the archetypal character of the Person and entire life of Christ for the contemplated fellowship between God and humanity is recognised. (2.) What of the hostility of sin and of Satan Christ experienced in His suffering unto death is His own prestation in virtue of the freedom with which He submitted Himself thereto. Thus His passion is subsumed under His action. And, in fact, (3.) His entire activity is the obedience in His calling as the God-appointed Mediator of salvation. The contemplation of Christ’s life as a unity is here apprehended in a notion which Schleiermacher (p. 484) hints at almost casually, and which, previous to Hofmann, had been merely repeated, but not explained, by Steudel and Rothe, and it is from this idea that Hofmann’s denial of the orthodox doctrine flows as a necessary consequence, in the following points:—(1.) What Christ has done as His own calling most strictly proper to Himself, He cannot have done in the room of others who were not obliged to this. (2.) If in life it was His own special vocation that He fulfilled, then He did not thereby fulfil the law in general, nor accordingly did He do so in the place of others. (3.) If His passion belongs to the discharge of His calling, then it is not a vicarious endurance of punishment on behalf of others. Hofmann accompanies the denial of the orthodox doctrine, which he bases on these reasons, with the general reflexions that the arithmetical (juristic) equation which it aims at between what God requires of humanity on the one hand, and Christ’s prestations on the other, is never gained, and thus seems actually to oppose the object in view when the notion of reconciliation is set forth. Further, that thereby an appearance is imparted to the grace of God, as if God first required to be paid ere He could be gracious. Finally, that herein there is no point of attachment for living faith to lay hold of—a remark which agrees with that which I have made, that Anselm’s theory is no direct vehicle for piety (p. 512).

In Hofmann’s apprehension of the matter, accordingly, Christ’s life, which manifested itself in obedience in His calling even unto death, is itself the atonement, in so far as therein God, who was angry with sinful humanity, uninterruptedly carried out His loving fellowship with the sinless member of humanity, and in so far as Christ experienced this, not for Himself, but in His character as destined to be the beginner of renewed humanity. Hofmann’s view thus distinguishes itself in very essential features from that of Oetinger and Menken. These last subordinate Christ’s life of righteousness unto death as a means to the negative purpose of conquest over sin, and therefore do not find, till they arrive at the resurrection, any point with which to connect the positive reconstruction of humanity. But on this account also, Luther’s analogous expressions do not cover Hofmann’s view, although he calls them to remembrance in his second vindication, in order to satisfy himself that he belongs to the Lutheran confession. Indubitably that positive interpretation of Christ’s life in accordance with His calling; which approaches Schleiermacher just in proportion as it is not in harmony with Menken, is accompanied by a peculiar view of the value of Christ’s passion. Hofmann in fact discerns “in the life of Christ the active exercise not merely of God’s love towards humanity, but also of His hatred against sin, seeing that the creative beginning of the new relation between God and humanity has not been brought about without a corresponding termination of that which had previously existed and was determined by sin. This termination begins herewith, that the Beginner of a new humanity develops His life under that conditionality of human nature which is imposed by sin, finds its continuation when He, the righteous One, exercises a vocation-activity against sin, and attains completion when He submits Himself to what the enmity of sin against God imposes on Him.” “The utmost that the Mediator of salvation could suffer and perform having first come to be realized in His suffering and dying, or rather, He (as we read in p. 212) having permitted sin, regarded as hostility to the work of salvation, to pass over Him till it was exhausted,” accordingly “God’s relation which had been determined by sin passed over into an end which was at once in correspondence with Himself and with the Divine decree of love, and thus made up for sin” (p. 334).

I cannot avoid making the confession that, in view of these sentences, I am in the very unusual position of agreeing with Philippi,³³ to the effect that this connexion of thoughts, literally taken, is absolutely unintelligible. Thus much is clear, that if the God-derived life of Christ is sinless, and if it is the specific beginning of new humanity, then sin as a principle pervading human fellowship is taken away, and that herein God’s loving will can at the same time be recognised as hatred against sin, though this phrase, “hatred of sin,” hardly has a biblical ring. It is, moreover, intelligible to me that Christ’s life is presented as a vehicle of God’s counteraction against sin, in so far as sin is rebuked by Christ’s word and conduct, and (as temptation) is repelled from Him by the exercise of His will. But how God’s hatred against sin should directly show itself in Christ’s liability to suffering, and in His actual suffering and death, without the aid of the usual orthodox doctrine which is repudiated by Hofmann, is a question which it passes my reason to answer. Not more convincing is the assertion that in the death of Christ the enmity of sin to the work of redemption was exhausted. For all the persecutions the Church has suffered, all the martyrdoms, have not yet exhausted the hostility of sin to the work of redemption, even when we limit this idea, as Hofmann would have us to do, to the contemplation of Christ’s life. Only upon Christ personally could this enmity inflict nothing more than death. Hence however it is very far from following as a consequence that, in the new relation between God and humanity as represented by Christ, sin has come to a conclusion. The meaning of the fact is at most this: that Christ, in his vocation-obedience with a view to the establishment of the kingdom of God, surmounted all temptation that arose, through suffering, even the temptation to despair of the love of God, and that He gave no place to sin in His will, His desires, His disposition. If, now, Hofmann’s expression about the active exercise of God’s hatred against sin, which, according to him, was displayed in Christ’s liability to suffering and in His actual passion, has to be resolved into this, that Christ victoriously withstood the temptations involved in these circumstances, then Hofmann has fallen into a violent metonymy. But I am driven to suppose so since Hofmann, in his “First Vindication” (pp. 8, 9), does not deal otherwise with the idea of the wrath of God, which he now, out of complaisance to those of his own party, also applies to Christ. “Christ exchanged His Divine blessedness for subjection to the wrath of God against mankind, and to the power of Satan over mankind, in order so to complete His obedience that the wrath of God should bring Him to the utmost distress that could befall Him; and in order so to experience in Himself the fruits of sin that the last and utmost agony of His passion was also the completion of His obedience.” Hofmann is very far from hereby gliding into the orthodox schema of the idea of penal satisfaction. For even his adoption of the idea of expiation of sin has not in this “Vindication” the customary meaning. Christ’s obedience rather, according to him, expiates sin as the counter-prestation against the sin of Adam in so far as He brought to a conclusion well-pleasing to God the wrong relation to God which originated therein, and so compensated for sin, becoming the beginner of new sinless humanity.³⁴ So also the wrath of God against humanity, to which Christ submitted Himself, is not to be understood of the experience of the Divine act exercised on Christ Himself, but only of the experience of the evil which in humanity is the result of the wrath of God. If accordingly the metonymy of Böhme and Oetinger presents itself here, my respect for Hofmann compels me to conjecture that this key also might admit of application to the above delineated train of thought; although I am of opinion that theological science can dispense with the support of metonymies.

Accordingly in Hofmann’s view the atonement is Christ’s obedience in His calling fulfilled even unto death. “Not merely by Him but in Him are we reconciled; hence also rightly to discern His Person and His history is the right discernment of our reconciliation.” “He is not a separate Person near yet outside humanity, who has given what humanity ought to have given, but the Son of man in whom humanity has its second Adam.”³⁵ And the humanity of Christ is the Church, as we are told in the sixth chapter of the Lehrganzes of the Schriftbeweis. By this line of thought Hofmann goes as much beyond Schleiermacher as beyond the sphere of vision of his Church party and of those who until now have been his theological opponents. But hereby he has laid down the theme of the scientific doctrine of reconciliation, for he has rightly determined its religious connexion. Hereby finally has a Lutheran for once broken the ban of Melanchthonian tradition and renounced the remissness which has always prevented the due apprehension of the problem. If we, the members of the Christian Church, are to believe that God in Christ has reconciled us, the Christian Church, with Himself, then in the Mediator of reconciliation must be combined not merely the love of God that reconciles, but at the same time the humanity that is to be reconciled, the humanity of the new Adam. But now from this Hofmann further infers that justification is identical with reconciliation.³⁶ In the righteousness of Christ (the new) humanity is with God an object of complacency. In the Person of Christ is contained that assurance of the forgiveness of sins for men as a whole which the individual in faith applies to himself without the mediation of an intellectual process, inasmuch as by the Holy Ghost he is disposed to belong to the new humanity that springs up in Christ.

This line of thought had indeed already been elaborated by the Reformed divines. But Hofmann has undoubtedly discovered it for himself; for the exclusiveness of the theologians who desire to be specifically Lutheran is generally wont to show itself in the greatest possible ignorance of the Reformed theology.³⁷ He has discovered the purely religious expression for the idea of reconciliation in the path of Biblical theology, according to the obligation, which he recognises, to regard the Bible as the source of theology. But the opposition of his orthodox opponents has its root herein, that they make use of the Bible as a supplementary norm for a traditional system, while at the same time by Luther’s or by their own similar religious needs it is at the outset fixed what they must find in the Bible in order to maintain their soul’s peace.³⁸ In short, between the contending parties there subsists the opposition between the Biblical theology of the school of Bengel and the partial use of Scripture which orthodoxy makes; but not, as Weizsäcker supposes,³⁹ the opposition between speculative and experimental theology. For, as I have shown, it is equally certain, on the one hand, that theological speculation, i.e. properly theoretical and scientific theology lies beyond Hofmann’s sphere of vision, and, on the other hand, that precisely the biblico-theological results which he has reached call in their present form for theoretical work. They consist of a series of assertions, the mutual relation of which is not yet shown to be necessary and alone true, when they are simply based upon exegesis, however sound that exegesis itself may be. In order to reach a higher result we must advance to what Hofmann prohibits; in fact we must think about the matter. I should imagine that only in the connexion of Systematic theology can the problem of the justification of the totality and of the individual be fully solved, and that it is not satisfactorily adjusted by biblico-theological delineations. For Philippi is wrong when he says⁴⁰ that Hofmann changes justification from a forensic act into an ethical process. We might surely conjecture from Hofmann’s descent from the school of Bengel, or as Philippi expresses it, from his harmony with Schleiermacher in other respects, that his notion of justification would be of an old Pietistic texture. But in this very point his divergence from the beaten path enables him to maintain the Lutheran attitude at which he aims. For the thought of the justification of the entire race demands that justification be conceived of in the form of a Divine sentence. Still in the trains of thought that are proper to biblical theology, this proposition is accompanied by the conclusion that it is faith as a moral demeanour that is regarded by God as righteousness.⁴¹ How far this last thought can be brought into harmony with the other can only be ascertained by means of a dialectical procedure, which in its nature belongs to theoretical theology. While believing that in this matter I have vindicated my opposition to Hofmann’s view, I would still hope that in doing so I have treated his purpose and his conclusions fairly—more fairly than his former opponents, who stand nearer to him and yet much further off.

72. The school of Bengel, as represented by the thinkers whom we have passed under review, renounced the thought of Christ’s penal satisfaction. But that thought was rejected as a rule by all sections of the positive theology of Germany, with more or less distinctness up to the fourth decade of the present century—by Schleiermacher as well as by the biblical supra-naturalists of the school of Storr,—Steudel and Klaiber—by the modern Melanchthonians such as Nitzsch and Lücke; finally, by the representatives of modern Pietism, such as Tholuck and Stier. And it is only in quite a different camp—in Marheineke, that it finds currency—a currency, however, which has not been maintained in the school. But since the date just named, it has again found theological defenders within the school of Bengel. Probably indeed the Württemberg preachers of the old Pietistic stamp, who belong to that school, have since then invariably held the doctrine of Christ’s penal satisfaction. At the same time, the return to this thought on the part of the theologians of this school is far from meaning a direct return to the doctrinal tradition of Lutheranism. Rather does John Fr. von Meyer⁴² at the outset assign to that thought quite other premisses and references than he found in the orthodox tradition. As we have seen, this last operated with the ideas of God’s justice and eternal law in such a way that the habituality of this relation of God to sinful humanity was ranked above the actuality of His grace, and that satisfaction by Christ (which was regarded as necessary) appeared as a material rather than a personal pacification of God. For when it was taught that the wrath of God had to be endured and appeased by Christ, that wrath was understood (in accordance with a change of meaning in the word, received from the church fathers, and corresponding to their abstract fundamental conception of God) to be not so much an acute personal affection, as the operation of His habitual penal justice.⁴³ In opposition to this, and in harmony with the religious attitude which is common to the older Pietism and to the Illumination, Meyer establishes the personality of God, who is the ground of salvation, by means of the predicates of love and holiness. The latter, however, is regarded by him not merely as condescending grace (as Menken teaches), but at the same time also as the ground of God’s hatred and wrath against sin, while the sinner is an object of God’s compassion. In this Meyer undoubtedly has the Bible on his side more than Menken has. But he clothes the material of the biblical intuition of the wrath of God in a form which shows an indubitable dependence on Jacob Böhme, although the view itself goes back to Luther (p. 201). “The zeal for what is good, which belongs to God, is wrath, the consuming fire of love against the opposite quality of sinners. The expression of God’s holiness in the fire of wrath has its ground in the Being of God, but is foreign thereto, considered in itself. To speak in a physical way, the wrath of God is the repelling principle, His love the attractive; both are one, and again concur in the attraction which alone is eternal. But as long as the love of God cannot attract the creature with his will, that same love abides on him as wrath, like a cloud which the warm rays of the sun only compact and cannot dissipate.” We might now expect, according to these principles, to find Christ exhibited as an offering to the wrath of God in the room of sinners; but circumstances are not quite favourable to this deduction. By Meyer’s account, wrath, as the opposite of compassion, falls not upon the sinner but upon sin. This conception of a love that has no outlet does not coincide with that of penal justice, which visits the sinner in person, or his representative; it betokens merely that a reconciliation is needed, not of God but of men. For “to take away from the creature the cause of the expression of wrath (in other words, sin as a fact) is equivalent to reconciling the creature with eternal love” (as above, p. 174).

Thus although Meyer in the first instance moves on in this line, in which he had Oetinger and Menken as forerunners, he yet diverges into the inference already stated, which markedly distinguishes him from Menken. But he agrees with both in regarding the proper crisis towards reconciliation (of men) as lying in Christ’s exaltation, which to Him is the reward of that obedience which was complete even unto death, and at the same time, the cause which makes it possible for the rays of His glorified Spirit-life to flow into believers, quicken them inwardly and outwardly from sin and death, really justify them in their sanctification, and present them as justified children of God according to the spirit of holiness. But, besides this, Meyer, diverging from these cognate thinkers, refers Christ’s passion and death (which belong to His perfect obedience) particularly to the annihilation and slaying of sin, inasmuch as in it is contained “propitiation to the law,” and “a doing away of wrath by love in a lawful way,” since Christ, though He could not have been condemned to all the everlasting and accursed consequences of the first sin, did in sympathy with the sins of all ages taste the pains of hell upon the cross. Those formulæ are not so clear as could be wished, especially as the idea of wrath, which has been indicated above, is not confronted with them. And even if the Lutheran shaping of the doctrine were attained by Meyer, he yet stands far removed from that verification of the thought of Christ’s penal satisfaction in the religious experience, which Lutheranism makes. For the Lutherans satisfy themselves of the trueness of that thought, in the assurance of freedom from guilt and eternal punishment; Meyer, on the other hand, discerns in the death of Christ an exercise of the Divine penal justice, that accords with the analogous experience when “we are crucified with Him” (as above, p. 186);—and this is thoroughly Pietistic.⁴⁴ But along with this it is very worthy of notice that Meyer, in seeking to take his bearings entirely by the help of Scripture, comes to adopt principles that belong to the Reformed doctrine. That Christ in His exaltation received the reward of His obedience is indeed so clearly stated by Paul, that the unscripturalness of the Lutheran dogmatic in the denial of this truth is beyond a doubt. Hence, in the recognition of this fact, Meyer, Menken, Oetinger, Storr (p. 385), who are purely biblical theologians, fall in with the Reformed doctrine. Of similar import is Meyer’s assertion that Christ’s descent into hell means His consummated death, His deepest humiliation; as also the thought that we must regard Christ in His agony in the garden as in connexion with the whole of humanity as its Head and Representative, wherein again Hofmann coincides with him. And this is not mere chance. For with reference to justification also, Meyer (as above, p. 217) expresses himself in agreement with Hofmann and also precisely in that two-sided way which is unavoidable to purely biblical theology. On the one side there results in conversion, “that justification which not only is established in Christ for all the world, and potentially present, and which is now really appropriated to this penitent sinner;” on the other hand, “his repentance and his faith in the merit of Christ are imputed to him as righteousness, i.e., he is so regarded as if he had never sinned, but rather, like Christ, had from the beginning satisfied God’s law.” And it is again Reformed (p. 272) when Meyer, after the first conversion and justification by imputation, expects one that shall always go deeper, in other words, that the influences of sanctification shall be discerned.

Should it be thought desirable that the doctrine of reconciliation should combine the idea of Christ’s penal satisfaction with Abelard’s fundamental thought, J. Tobias Beck⁴⁵ has met this requirement as fully as possible. For what has already (see above, p. 259) been regarded as a defect in the orthodox doctrine,—that it does not in accordance with the Divine nature of Christ regard His personal prestations in His life and in His death as a revelation of the Divine grace, but interprets them only as satisfaction and merit in the room of men,—is brought by Beck in his doctrine into prominence. And in fact, not only does he carry out Abelard’s thought in such a way as at the same time to include the view (peculiar to the older Pietism) of the conquest of sin in the life and death of Christ, he also determines our intuition of the Mediator’s Person, and of the relation of His Work to His Person with a completeness previously unknown. (1.) As Christ in His eternal existence in the Godhead is of one essence with the Father, He accordingly, as the equal of God, represents the love of God in complete living reality. (2.) As He, being the eternally predestined Head of God’s kingdom, is the ground and purpose of the creation of the universe in general, and the standard of the moral destiny of men, so in like manner in His human individuality, in virtue of His liability to temptation, is He a member and representative of the human race; and in virtue of His obedience in His vocation, is Representative and supreme Head of spiritual humanity in accordance with its destiny. (3.) As His faithful obedience was the completion of His personal perfection, it was at the same time the actual fulfilment of His mediatorial calling to join Himself to sinful humanity and appropriate it to Himself. (4.) As His faithful obedience excludes all actual sin in Him, while love, on the other hand, has to prove itself by making itself serviceable to sinful men, He accordingly permitted evil to come upon Him as suffering; and as in obedience suffering and doing are one and the same, He vanquished sin in the completion of His obedience unto death, convinced it of its demerit in His patience under suffering and in the surrender of His life to the gracious will of God, glorified the love of the Father. His entire attitude in His death has the character of grace. (5.) While His self-surrender unto death attracts eternal vital power as a good of revelation to men, and emancipates from earthly flesh the fulness of life that was operative in Him, He becomes by His resurrection efficient to the unfolding of His life-treasure, which, as Head of His church, He imparts in the outpouring of His Spirit. This train of thought connects itself both by its general character and by its issue with Oetinger, Menken, Stier, and Meyer; while the assignation to the positive thought of a revelation of the Divine love in Christ’s entire obedience, of a higher value than belongs to the negation of sin, falls in with Hofmann’s view. It cannot be denied that there arises an incongruity in form between this conclusion and the express value assigned to the Person of Christ, since His obedience in His vocation is after all limited to His representing the love of God, while His place as Representative and Head of spiritual humanity or of the Church is not at the same time vindicated as is done by Hofmann. Beck rather reverts to the Lutheran representation of the case, according to which Christ becomes Head of the Church only in His exaltation; for he regards the communication of the Spirit as the positive mediatorial influence whereto the completion of His mediatorial task in the individual life of Christ stands related only as a preliminary preparation. This, indeed, is inconsistent with Beck’s obvious intention; but that could have been rightly carried out only if the same substance of Christ’s vocation-obedience had been conceived at once as a representation of God’s love to men, and as a representation before God of the humanity that was to be reconciled.

But Beck does not let the matter rest with the complete conviction and conquest of sin by the obedience of Christ in His vocation. For as sin is a real disturbance of the vital power of the Divine will, and brings upon the sinner the reaction of God’s wrath, death and the curse, there was necessary, for the attainment of the purpose of redeeming love, a mediation whereby “love comes into harmony with the consequence of wrath in holiness, their common focus.” Justice is the presentation of the harmony of God’s will as it displays itself in the world; particularly of His wrath and of His love towards the sinner. This justice forms the basis of the law of the moral world, and maintains the right of that law by rewards and punishments. If now, in place of the old order that had been destroyed by sin, a new one is to be introduced, then justice must exercise itself on the one hand in punishing, and on the other in rewarding. In correspondence with this come in, on the one hand, the satisfactory merit of the Mediator, and on the other hand, the law of faith, according to which they are made righteous who are the Mediator’s. Thus God’s wrath reconciles itself with His love through the judicial propitiation of His wrath unto the removal of the enmity of sin. Not merely does reconciliation presuppose propitiation, it includes it in itself; for not merely does God accept the propitiation, He Himself institutes it. And as the reconciliation of mankind in corpore holds good, the entire reconciling grace of the Mediator must be presented as really Divine, just as much as it must be received by humanity as its corporate life of love whence the individual’s achievement of grace is first to be deduced. Here we may forbear from showing how these postulates are maintained in connexion with the interpretation of Christ’s passion and death as a penal satisfaction. On the other hand, it is only in this connexion that the above-mentioned (No. 2) threefold quality of Christ as representative of God and also of sinful humanity is made use of; and Beck’s view coincides with that of Hofmann, at least in so far as he makes out reconciliation to be directly contained in the Person of Christ, which perfects itself in vocation-obedience.

But the idea of Christ’s penal satisfaction, by the assumption of which Beck is distinguished from Hofmann, is placed by him in a peculiar connexion, in consequence of which this approximation to the Lutheran doctrine is compensated for by an important departure therefrom in the idea of justification. Lutheran orthodoxy bases only the penal satisfaction of Christ on the justice of God; the justification of believers, on the other hand, it bases on His grace. The former accordingly has a real, the latter an imputed character. Beck bases both in the Divine justice, which has a real character whether it be punitive or rewarding. Hence it follows that Christ’s expiation of sin brings with it a continuous judgment thereupon in the life of the believer, and that the restoration of right in the Person of the Mediator lays the foundation for the righteous-making of the believer as a real endowment of humanity. Beck considers, just as Meyer does (p. 551), that the propitiatory value of the death of Christ is mirrored in the crucifixion of the sins of the believer, and not in the non-imputation of the guilt of sin and its punishment.⁴⁶ As in this the prevailing interest of Pietism—actual holiness—makes its appearance, Beck also does not satisfy himself with the Lutheran thought of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, but infers from it that union therewith through the spirit of the Mediator which takes place in faith. For the taking away of guilt—without which the sinner would still be a sinner and unjustified—first comes in when with the faith (which is the condition of all else) there is constituted a righteousness which, though not infused ready-made, has become a living law. In accordance with this, sanctification is the continuation of justification; and the cleansing of the conscience, which takes away guilt, must evince itself in the realization of purification from sins, as a getting rid of sin, as a redemption from sin that manifests itself in the conduct. This, as has been said, is entirely in harmony with the older Pietism; and at most, it is in the confidence with which he exegetically defends this meaning of justification that Beck rises above the similar views of his predecessors. Amidst the many points of contact, however, between Beck and Hofmann, this also ought to be remembered, that the former so thoroughly repudiates the forensic meaning of justification because he does not complete, with the requisite strictness, the common contemplation of the reconciliation and justification of renewed humanity or of the Church in the Person of Christ. In the Person of Christ the reconciliation between God and humanity can be seen and understood; but in Christ grace is not at the outset, as we are told above (p. 535), an actual gift to humanity, but an ideal one. This determination on God’s part, however, can only be thought of, as Hofmann supposes, in the form of a Divine judgment.

What is questionable in this Christliche Lehrwissenschaft is the very wide sense in which the word “science” is applied to Christian doctrine. If it were not for the many strange words, the work would in no respect differ from a second-rate sermon, for clear fixing of ideas and adequacy of definition are as much wanting as theoretic proof. As regards this, Beck takes the same attitude of hostility as Hofmann does, thinking with Bengel that he may reconstruct the system of thought contained in the Bible purely by exegesis and intuition. This kind of theology moreover is deliberately isolated from any history of theology—and that too not merely in so far as this last is a special science, but also in so far as it presents the connexion of the religious ideas that regulate the Church. In carrying out his doctrine of justification (which has been shown (above, p. 536) to be conditioned by Pietism) Beck takes an attitude of perfect indifference to the fact that the Reformation was dominated by this idea in the form in which it is rejected by him; he neither raises nor answers the question what religious interest connects itself therewith, or how that interest stands related to that which he himself has at heart. It is indeed his intention merely to exhibit the “Science of Christian Doctrine” “according to the Bible originals,” and these obviously are indifferent to the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and he thus seems to escape the objection which has just been made. But the authors of the original New Testament documents are not indifferent to the development of the Church to her perfection; the Reformation has its value in a specific effort after the perfecting of the Church; the nonchalance which Pietism displays towards the departure of a certain form of doctrine from the religious intention of the Reformers, and its general indifference to the history of the Church and its doctrinal development stand therefore after that may be said in a wrong relation to that universal impulse which proceeds from the original records of Christianity. To the majority of the works in dogmatic theology which have been produced in these days, but above all to this Christliche Lehrwissenschaft may be applied the saying of the Prophet, “they all look to their own way;” for which reason the many-sided stimulus to a fruitful reconstruction of theology which it affords has been utterly inoperative so far as the Church is concerned. But the Biblical theology which has sprung from the lap of separatistic Pietism is determined to assert itself just in this fashion, and therefore theoretical form and every reference to the history of theology are alike excluded.

73. Our consideration of the school of Bengel has led us to the conclusion that the older Pietism, which through it exercises an important influence on the theology of the present, partly remains disaffected towards the orthodox thought of Christ’s penal satisfaction, and partly defends it from a motive quite different from that which makes it precious to Lutheranism; and thus this school is far from giving to the thought that sharp definition in point of form which it formerly received. The transition, on the part of the modern Pietism, to the orthodox doctrinal form has accordingly no direct or necessary connexion with these phenomena, even though John Fr. von Meyer has attained to a position of special authority in those circles. That transition, speaking generally, is connected with the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung and with the name of Hengstenberg, who was its editor for almost forty-two years. If the character of the “awakening” and of the modern Pietism, which has passed over from the Moravian Brotherhood into the Evangelical Church of Germany, has been rightly stated, then Hengstenberg was little fitted by his mental constitution to participate in that religious tendency. Without vigour or originality of fancy, without delicacy of feeling, he brought bald intelligence and tenacity of will as his leading endowments into the circle of the “awakened.” He was therefore able to make its interests his own only by making an unctuous copiousness of typical language take the place of real play of fancy, and by substituting, in place of feeling, a spirit of stubborn contention for everything which, in the varying course of years, seemed to offer the prospect of advancing the interests of the party. He guided that party to a place of rule in the Church by associating it with the interests of political stagnation and reaction. Now, the pretended Churchliness of the learned gentlemen who conducted the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung led them in the special circumstances to a repristination of the Lutheran dogmatic, particularly in the doctrines of reconciliation and justification. For, formally regarded, the tendency of Lutheran orthodoxy to seek before everything else, or rather at the cost of everything else, the assurance of reconciliation and justification through Christ, corresponds to the style of Moravian piety in which they moved; while the older Pietism opposes itself to both in its striving after personal sanctity. It is therefore very significant that Menken’s doctrine of reconciliation was disputed by Steiger so early as in 1830 and once more in 1837—and that too not merely on account of its christological postulate. In this we are to recognise nothing else than the separation between Pietism in “the costume of society” and Pietism in “conventicle-garb” (to avail myself of Tholuck’s pregnant expression). If, accordingly, modern Pietism, in order to evince its Churchliness, even planted its foot on the neck of its older ally, there could not be any subsequent hesitation on the part of the Kirchenzeitung as to whether the Lutheran or Reformed Dogmatic should be adopted. For, although the editor was of Reformed origin, he was as ignorant of the Reformed dogmatic as any of his theological contemporaries; and all that was known about it, viz., that it was based on the doctrine of predestination, repelled those out-and-out moderns who in this respect could not deny that they were children of the Illumination. If we further take into account that even the theological defenders of the Union were as far as possible from thinking of the Reformed dogmatic—Schweizer was absolutely the first who in 1844 rediscovered it—it was a matter of course that the Moravian “awakening” should seek its dogmatic confirmation and its exclusive Churchly stamp precisely in the restoration of Lutheran tradition, long before Hengstenberg, from reasons of ecclesiastical politics, renounced the Union, under the shelter of which however modern Pietism had developed itself into a notable factor in the Church.

The writer of the dissertation Geschichtliches aus der Versöhnungs- und Genugthuungslehre,⁴⁷ which specially refers to Anselm, Grotius, Menken, and incidentally also to Socinus, Thomas, Duns, De Wette, has interspersed his own positive views as polemical purposes demanded. But as he himself neither aims at a historical understanding of the course of the doctrine of reconciliation, nor has attained anything of the kind in his broken and mangled presentation of the material—a presentation which is given in the usual petulant tone,—what here falls to our lot is simply to characterize his view in so far as from it the theological tendency which the Kirchenzeitung adopts may be gathered. For so far as the attitude of this scholar is determined by history, he asserts the substantial agreement of Anselm’s doctrine with the Bible; and although he himself allows it to be formally incomplete, he yet is of opinion that the opponents or “enemies” of that doctrine, in disputing it, take offence at Christ Himself! Hereby is the new dogmatism characteristically inaugurated; the recognition of Anselm’s schema of Christ’s satisfaction to God is proclaimed to be the indispensable condition of Christianity; the theoretical instrumentality is ranked along with the ground and the purpose of religion as equal in value to them. Then his objections to Menken resolve themselves into this, that the assurance of forgiveness of sins which corresponds to the penal satisfaction of Christ does not receive decisive weight from him. At the same time, the man recognises that the “orthodox dogmatic writers of our Church” have systematically separated sanctification too much from justification, and kept too much in the background what is common to both; it is according to him a merit of the modern period, particularly of Schleiermacher, to contemplate the representative attitude of Christ towards humanity, upon which justification and sanctification rest, more in the totality of His life and in the significance of His humiliation and incarnation taken as a whole. In his own name he affirms, with this purpose, that the Son of God being made man undertook the abolition of the guilt of human sin as well as of sin itself: that He did this in human nature, yea, as human nature; hereby human nature itself was delivered from sin in Him. If now this eagerness to make some progress is far from betraying a single clear thought, the learned author becomes more intelligible when he has to deal with the reproduction of the Lutheran tradition; but, as if he were ashamed of the modesty of his task, he embellishes his delineations with exaggerations of the most serious kind. “Sin is negation of God Himself. The relation of God to sin is an absolute one; it is His relation to the negation of Himself. The idea of punishment enters in along with this relation by the will of God. As soon as man falls into sin he of necessity becomes subject to ruin and death. The power of God which asserts itself, which at the same time is the outflow of His will, is, when thought of as an internal state having relation to sin, His wrath. To man his own conversion is absolutely impossible; because the absolute relation (which is one of destruction) must fulfil itself in him in accordance with eternal right. If the relation of destruction is to be done away, then not only must sin clear off its guilt, it must itself be abolished so far as men are concerned. Man as sinner is incapable of this; therefore,” etc. This theology assuredly needed its admixture of pathetic strength of faith and of ingenious straining after new thoughts, in order to divest itself of the feeling of its own meagreness, and to impose upon its readers (whose power of judging, however, was at the same time impaired by having mere theological fragments presented to it in many-coloured variety). Thus while this dissertation did not deserve to be noticed even for a moment, so far as its direct bearings on theological science and its history are concerned, it is yet significant as a symptom of the tone and of the theological pretensions which the learned conductors of the Kirchenzeitung were able to diffuse in the circles of the clergy; symptoms of the mental atmosphere which finally disposed people to accept the bald repristination of thoughts long ago superannuated.

The same pretension to progress with which this reactionary tendency began its career is, so far as the doctrine of Christ’s penal satisfaction is concerned, to be observed also in a treatise by K. F. Göschel,⁴⁸ which the contributor to the Kirchenzeitung, whom we have just been criticising, characterizes with high commendation as the deeply thought-out production of a talented jurist. It is in the forms of the Hegelian dialectic that this jurist places his notions of law at the disposal of theology—which last, as the science of the absolute spirit, he regards both as the summit and the foundation of all knowledge and science. It is moreover the juristic notion of punishment which he intends to develop; and this he proposes to do in accordance with Scripture—which is regarded as the source of all knowledge—Scripture which he designs to interpret, not after the wont of many “dear Christians,” merely by reference to single passages, but by the aid of the very Spirit which is its author. In accordance with this the opposition asserted in the ordinary doctrine between justice and grace, punishment and forgiveness, is denied. Punishment, according to him, is not an evil simply; and the pardon of a criminal or the quashing of a process leaves the criminal to appear a criminal after all, or does not make the accused person appear as innocent. Punishment, he thinks, does not mean merely the restoration of objective right as against subjective arbitrariness; it denotes also the adjustment between right and the subjective will, so that “at last hearts as it were fall in sincerely and of themselves with the right.” In this course of events the right itself exhibits itself as grace, as an outflow of love, and punishment as a ground of forgiveness; for “crime is forgiven precisely by punishment.” In correspondence with this is the appeal to the conduct of a human judge. While he has to exercise penal justice as an outflow of love towards the sinner, he must sympathize with the condemned, both to cheer him and to quicken his conscience. But what is exhibited among men very imperfectly in these respects, is seen in archetypal perfection in God, whose conduct is the ground of the derivative ordinance of men. For the God-man, who in His essence is one with God the Father, the punishing Judge, as well as with sinful humanity,—“for He is humanity wholly, which the individual in consequence of his apostasy is only in part,“—but by His Person is distinguished from both, carries out the punishment of universal sin, by that rule, to forgiveness. Now, we might expect to find the comparison carried out to the result that the God-man, as condemning judge, sympathizes with the humanity which he punishes, but that the God-man gives effect to this sympathetic disposition by taking this punishment vicariously upon Himself. This formula, however, is not framed by Göschel,—plainly because history is inconsistent with it. For Christ has not as judge visited mankind with evils as punishments. Rather is this function avowedly relegated to the future, although by the premisses it required to be traced, as the first and main thing, in the historical appearance of the God-man. Göschel thus does not, as might have been expected, frame his formula in accordance with the identity of the God-man with God and with humanity in His essence, but in accordance with His personal distinctness from both. “By His distinctness from the Person of the judge, who in essence is like Him, His penal suffering is for Him actual and cardinal suffering; wherefore it appears as vicarious satisfaction, in consequence of the personal distinctness between the suffering and the guilty persons; but essentially it is not vicarious, for in His essence He is one with the guilty; in fact, He is the essence which He represents more completely than is the individual whom He represents.” The second sentence of the formula, in spite of the prefatory remark about the appearance which His suffering produces, is carried up to an identity in essence with humanity. By this we know that the first sentence is wrong; for in it the point is the identity in essence of the God-man with the Divine Judge and His sympathetic suffering when punishment is imposed; the notion of penal suffering, which is introduced in place of this, has no ground whatever in the first sentence of the formula.

By this violation of logic, Göschel has disguised the incongruence of his theory with the historical appearance of the God-man. But his premisses also, respecting the relation between punishment and forgiveness, contradict his purpose. For what he unfolds is not the juristic but the pædagogic idea of punishment. This last form of punishment is based directly upon love; the justice which it embodies evinces love, “as we know from the very nursery” (as above, p. 483); forgiveness is of course implied in this idea of punishment; by it naughtiness is forgiven. But to say that by criminal punishment crime is forgiven, as Göschel phrases it, betokens the confusion that pervades his line of thought; and legal punishment is legal punishment, his assumption to the contrary notwithstanding, even when it is as far as may be from bringing the criminal to recognise his moral guilt and the justness of the evil with which he is visited; in this last purpose therefore it is not the essential feature of criminal but of pædagogic punishment that is expressed. In like manner also to demand sympathy as an essential condition of penal visitation, holds good only with regard to pædagogic chastisement; but in criminal justice this disposition of the judge comes in only incidentally, and has no influence upon the discharge of his function. In pædagogic penal justice, however, a vicarious representation of the guilty by the innocent has as little place as in criminal law. Rather if it stand firmly established that in that sphere forgiveness is brought about precisely by means of punishment, then the purpose of bringing back the mind to righteousness in general would be missed in the vicarious penal suffering of another; or if, at all events, in an exceptional case, a punishment that by oversight has overtaken an innocent person seems to be pædagogically operative upon the guilty party, in that case it falls, “as we know from the nursery,” under the category of penal example. Göschel, accordingly, if he had logically judged of Christ’s penal satisfaction in harmony with his premisses, would neither have reached nor found it necessary to reach the conclusion of assigning such a value to Christ’s passion, but would merely have found himself occupying the same standing-ground with Grotius.

The same tendency to divest the thought of Christ’s penal satisfaction of its juristic restriction and to deepen it ethically, is manifested by Ernest Sartorius.⁴⁹ Of course, as might be expected from his identification with Evang. Kirchenzeitung, in intention he adheres to the thought. But it is to be questioned whether by interpreting Christ’s entire obedience as an offering, and by his notion of expiation he realizes his intention of defending the juristic element in the old doctrine, and incorporating it with his own view. To begin, the preference given to the idea of sacrifice and the little concern shown for juristic precision in the use of the notion of satisfaction, reminds of Limborch (p. 316). But then Sartorius recedes from Lutheranism in the assertion that Christ’s sacrifice corresponds not to a law of works but to the eternal law of love and self-denial, so that he expressly declines to maintain a quantitative equivalence between the suffering of Christ and the punishment that humanity had incurred by reason of sin. For, says he, what we are considering is redemption not from punishment but from guilt.⁵⁰ This last is the real original punishment of sin, and we can be made free from all other punishments only on the assumption of our being entirely clear of the relation of guilt. But for this purpose a positive satisfaction by fulfilment of the law is needful,—a satisfaction which God as the Reconciler has provided for by the mission of the sinless God-man, and in such a way that He Himself is reconciled by the entire obedience of the latter, by the sacrifice of His full self-denial. For as sacrifice has its full value not in an objective material prestation, but in personal surrender to God, the true destination of sacrifice is realized (sin being presupposed) in voluntary endurance of the sufferings which are imposed as punishments. To the sinner, indeed, this willingness is not in itself possible, and therefore it is not every one who can produce this propitiatory prestation either for himself or for others. But Christ attains unto it, being as the Sinless One at the same time the Head of human society, and as the Obedient and Righteous One bearing, in His compassionateness towards men, sympathy with their suffering which is the reward of sin. Thus by His perfect love in obedience to the law He made propitiation for sin in suffering and dying, and God, having accepted this sacrifice, has forgiven its guilt to humanity as represented by Christ.

There are two points in this line of thought which are new and run counter to the Lutheran tradition. The notion of law is ethically and not legally conceived, and the notion of propitiation is separated from that of punishment. But this being the case, the notion required to be defined positively also; and though this is omitted by the theologians before us, we are yet helped to an understanding of their view by the remark that to propitiate, if it does not mean “to pay the penalty,” means only to “establish peace.” But if now, according to Sartorius, self-denying voluntary suffering of Divine punishment is the very idea of propitiatory sacrifice, then the proof that the notion of propitiation has place in a given case is not first found in an operation proceeding beyond this act itself, but is already given in a reflex operation of that act upon the sensitivity of the subject. The voluntary endurance of evils puts the subject in peace with the evils themselves, changes the feeling of pain that they occasion into a sort of pleasure, substitutes for their penal quality the meaning of Divine discipline, that is to say, relative benefaction. If now, Christ’s loving and patient submission to the sufferings which have for sinners the force of punishment operates with propitiatory efficacy, this has at first sight no other meaning than what is conveyed by Schleiermacher (p. 470) under the name of Reconciliation through Christ, to the effect that, while He “communicates His own good,”⁵¹ He reconciles those who are His to the evils that befall them, that is, to the whole divinely-planned ordering of their life. This agreement between the two is shown further herein, that Sartorius (as above, p. 68), like Schleiermacher (p. 480), discerns the satisfactory efficacy of Christ’s High-priestly activity in the merciful love whereby He on our behalf has descended from the throne of God to the deepest humiliation; in other words, the direction of the priestly work is towards us, not towards God. But when, over and above this, the analogy with orthodoxy is maintained by the thought that the prestation in question is directed towards the reconciliation of God Himself, whereby also peace between God and men is secured, Sartorius again glides into a similarity to Limborch. The fulfilment of the law of love by Christ as representative of humanity—such a restoration of the moral order of the world makes it possible to God to bring in an unimpeded loving intercourse with believers. Christ’s propitiation is then an extraordinary prestation, to which He was not bound for His part, and so in virtue of its voluntariness constitutes His merit.⁵² If, moreover, God, in consideration thereof, forgives men their guilt, while, as we have seen, the necessity that belongs to legal procedure is excluded from the whole connexion of ideas, we can only think of a free determination of God, which Sartorius expresses by saying that Christ’s sacrifice in its perfection was accepted by the Father (as above, p. 75). The material interpretation of Christ’s merit as propitiation, certainly, was one never made by Limborch. Sartorius, however, in the formal arrangement of his notions as clearly approximates to the model of Limborch as he avoids the Lutheran schema. It is worthy of notice how the intention ethically to deepen the idea of penal satisfaction, properly speaking, fails to carry Göschel beyond Grotius, and brings Sartorius into close proximity to Limborch.

The full and frank repristination of the doctrinal tradition of Lutheranism first made its appearance in literature in 1850, in the period of intense political and ecclesiastical reaction. In fact, through Thomasius it reached its climax in Philippi’s Kirchliche Glaubenslehre.⁵³ The former of these still departs in one or two respects from the correct reproduction of the opinions of the fathers of his Church, adopting some things from Sartorius. These “not unimportant vacillations” draw from Philippi the judgment that “even here a sure and full measure of Church knowledge appears to have been not yet perfectly attained.” With regard to Philippi himself, however, Hofmann⁵⁴ observes, that a man whose systematic activity in theology consists in stringing together traditionary sentences in a traditionary form undoubtedly runs no great risk of making mistakes. It is a pity that Hofmann has not noticed how Philippi, in his tract against him, makes a trip of a kind quite surprising, in interpreting the significance of Christ’s death to be that of a penal example.⁵⁵ However, as Thomasius and Philippi alike intend to reproduce the Lutheran doctrine of reconciliation and justification, and as the slight departures made by the former have already been catalogued by the latter (as above, p. 234); as, moreover, I have already, in the sixth chapter, brought forward and investigated the Lutheran doctrine and the peculiar character that of right belongs to it, I am so happily situated as to be able to spare myself the trouble of presenting the doctrinal views of the theologians of Erlangen and Rostock. Only two remarks force themselves upon me.

Firstly, they both develop the connexion of the Lutheran doctrine of reconciliation on the basis of the postulates which the individual religious need lays down, while Thomasius always makes use of subjective experience as an allowable ground of knowledge of truths of dogmatic theology. This is thoroughly modern; and is fitted seriously to compromise the objectivity of doctrine. Must the religious experience of these two gentlemen pass within the Church as the normal? Already (above, p. 555) it has been shown that the penal value of the death of Christ (which is postulated by both as that annulment of the law’s condemnation of the sinner which the case requires) is judged in the religious experience of others only by the standard of the penal value of the believer’s daily repentance. Are von Meyer and Beck on that account to be pronounced unworthy of full communion in the Evangelical Church? Or if a believer, from his readiness patiently to bear for Christ’s sake the evils that befall him, accepts indeed in the meaning of Sartorius the propitiatory value of the death of Christ, but denies its penal value, has he no title to do so within the Evangelical Church? Or finally, if with Hofmann one comes to the conclusion that in the juristic equation between Christ’s prestations and our liability nothing is held forth of which living faith may take hold, is one eo ipso excommunicated from the Lutheran Church? Who is audacious enough to proscribe in the Church even indirectly these religious standpoints? He who regards his own individual experience of a conscience crushed by the law, and of the pacification of his conscience by the penal satisfaction of Christ as the normal standpoint in the Lutheran Church, must at least not appeal to the fact that Luther himself counts upon the universal validity of his own experiences in that direction. For the postulate has been proved by the Church’s history of 300 years to have no universal validity, because in its very nature it can indeed call a sect into existence, but is not adapted for exclusively defining and limiting the piety that is possible and warrantable within the Church. Therefore I doubt whether a doctrine of faith so founded on individual religious experience has a churchly character. It is however in the relation of the party to the school of Bengel that we are to seek the circumstances which, beyond question, gave immediate occasion to this subjective way of establishing a would-be churchly theology. The latter school has brought the new orthodoxy to the proof that it can no longer profess to be the biblical theology which exhausts Scripture as the source of theology; nay, if the problem which the old school took in hand is worked out, the result is not the repristination of the doctrinal conceptions of Lutheranism. But the frank admission of what is actually the case with orthodoxy—that in it a system of belief reached by tradition subsequently proves its dogmas by the dicta probantia of Scripture as a norm,—would contravene a recognised principle of Reformation theology. All theological truths were accordingly, to begin with, postulated from the religious experience, and thereafter are proved, well or ill, from Scripture. But hereby the descent of modern Lutheranism from the Pietistic awakening is again made plain.

Secondly, with regard to the form of presentation, the distance which separates both these divines from the older ones, as well as their share in the impulses which have affected systematic theology since the time of Schleiermacher, is shown in their exclusion of that scientific aim which is followed by the old orthodox divines—the aim at clearness and completeness in their definitions, and at syllogistic refutation of their opponents. Dogmatic theology. takes the narrative form, and its opponents at once place themselves in the wrong when they depart from Lutheranism. Then along with this, to eke out the dogmatic text, there is incorporated (as has become customary since the period of Rationalism) a notice of the history of dogma. Rationalism occupied itself with this in order to show how doctrines suffer change; both Lutherans intend that hereby the continuity of the orthodox doctrine should be recognised. That there exists in our age in Germany a flourishing science of history cannot certainly be conjectured from their chronicle of the history of dogma which, in particular, is so incomplete in the case in hand that the change and the reason of the change which the older Pietism produced in the doctrines of reconciliation and justification are left entirely unelucidated, while the religious motives which were operative in the Illumination—motives which play around the dissolution of the traditionary doctrine of the atonement, although indeed they reach no goal—are not so much as dreamt of. “Every man looked to his own way” holds good here also; but we cannot expect anything else from this party, because, religiously viewed, it takes up the standpoint of Moravian Pietism, which in its nature is sectarian, and churchly only in appearance.

That precisely in the doctrine of justification there occur unsolved problems both speculative and practical is strikingly proved by the way in which Hengstenberg has finished off by swinging round to the side of the older Pietism.⁵⁶ It is a peculiar Nemesis that this man, by the impression which his departure from Lutheran tradition produced alike on friend and foe, saw himself compelled to remember that the old leaders of Lutheranism had hardly ever appealed to the confessional documents, while he himself hardly ever makes use of any other standard—that the principle of stability is essentially objectionable—that every scribe who is truly instructed must bring forth out of his treasure first new and then old things. His position was not very favourable for adding that his activity had from the beginning been regulated by these principles, when everybody could bear witness to the contrary. There lay a self-deception also at least in his claim to have said something new in his assertion that faith is developed and relatively perfected by active and fruitful love, and that degrees of justification correspond to the degrees of faith. But this self-deception was based simply on ignorance of the fact that Reformed theologians,⁵⁷ and that John Fr. von Meyer (p. 552), have said the same thing. Was it then perhaps also a self-deception on Hengstenberg’s part that for forty years he had understood the passage in Luke vii. as meaning that the amount of subjective love regulates the objective amount of the appropriated forgiveness of sins (1867, p. 299)? No, on this point I believe we may accept his assurance; and this I hold to be the most important part of the matter. For in the case before us, personal interest in the establishment of his assertions outweighs the purely objective interest. The exegetical proof which Hengstenberg leads in favour of his view is very indifferent; it is as sophistical as might be expected from its author; the number of the reasons must as always make up for their badness, and to attempt a dogmatic construction, or the necessary dialectical harmonizing of the view with the Lutheran doctrine, exceeded the powers of the editor of the Kirchenzeitung. But I believe that on this point Hengstenberg from the very first was of the old Pietistic view; for this corresponds to his mental constitution, as already described, to his pre-eminent strength of will and his jejune intelligence. I have no doubt therefore of the truth of his confessions in the second of the papers I have referred to, but this very fact forces us to the conclusion that the tendency of the man’s public activity and his personal religious inclination were not coincident. Publicly he did everything to consolidate into dogmatic Lutheranism the religious fluidity of the modern Pietistic party which he swayed; and when all is done, he declares, in justification of the old Pietistic view he has all along been cherishing,—the view that the forgiveness of sins is conditioned by the amount of sanctification,—that merely to repristinate Lutheranism would deeply lower the Church, because in the present deficiency of the corresponding premisses, the terrores conscientiae, the doctrine of justification would be abused as a cheap way of clearing scores with the holiness of the law. Plainly, however, he was guided in the choice of a path for his public action by the dread lest in his personal leaning to the old Pietistic effort after sanctity he might fall into any analogy with Rationalism (1867, p. 271). For this reason he mastered himself and joined the Moravian type of Pietism, which was heterogeneous to him; and in order that the disposition to Rationalism might not awake in his soul, he restlessly pursued a life-task, which, properly speaking, was alien to him with ever-growing grasping eagerness; he did not suffer the leaning towards free thinking (which he confesses himself to have felt, and with truth) to manifest itself outwardly, since the path he had entered upon of necessity pledged him to stability, repristination, reaction. Thus his fate clung to him; and when at last laying hold of a casual opportunity he discloses with bold frankness the long suppressed secret of his heart, he had of course to experience how the “world,” here in the shape of various church parties, is wont to visit such surprises. It is not my business to inquire into the blame attachable in this connexion. I believe that I have only exercised justice towards a man who has been always personally quite unknown to me in attempting to explain the contrast between his profession and his public action. I am led in the matter purely by the interest that lies in the fact that Hengstenberg in person proves that the contradiction between the old Pietism and Lutheranism has not yet been removed.⁵⁸

74. The work that has been devoted, since Schleiermacher, to the doctrine of reconciliation displays an incredible want of co-operation on the part of theologians; so much so that memory is unequal to the task of mastering all the variations, even of views which follow only one type. This is the result partly of mutual indifference, partly of the separatistic influence produced by the various forms of Pietism, partly of the almost complete absence of theological discipline. At the same time, in the alternation of opinions, there come forward several peculiar thoughts which theologians, with more or less of unanimity, agree in accepting, and which consequently may be regarded as forming in a sense the fruit of later theology. For (1.) there is thorough unanimity on the point that reconciliation is deduced from the love of God. And even where reconciliation through Christ is presented in accordance with Anselm’s schema, care is taken not to rank the justice of God before His love; with this intention it happens that the word holiness is often substituted for justice. Even the restorers of the Lutheran dogmatic guard themselves in accordance with this against the idea maintained by orthodoxy, that by Christ’s satisfaction God was brought round from wrath to grace. Of course it remains to be seen afterwards whether this intended correction has actually been accomplished. But the very intention to make God’s love the supreme principle of reconciliation through Christ, at once shows that it is Luther who is followed, and not Melanchthon, the latter of whom, properly speaking, was the founder of Lutheran orthodoxy on this point. It was the Illumination theology, however, that gave the first impulse towards regress to Luther’s view. (2.) While the old orthodoxy took the love of God into account towards reconciliation only in so far as it derived therefrom the mission of Christ and the imputation of His merit, the manifestation of that love as ground of reconciliation is extended throughout the whole life and passion of Christ, not merely by Schleiermacher’s followers, but also by Beck and Hofmann. (3.) The vicarious representation of men before God, in so far as it is discerned in Christ’s life and passion, is almost throughout founded on the assertion that Christ even in statu exinanitionis was the Head of humanity, of new humanity or of the Church; an idea which dominates the maturest presentation of the doctrine of reconciliation in the Reformed theology, and which can be traced back through Thomas up to Bernard. (4.) Partially also the connexion of Christ’s suffering and doing is apprehended in the idea of His vocation, whereby it is rendered possible to conceive His prestation at once as dutiful and as operative for men, while the idea of the merit of Christ never reappears at all. (5.) One section of those who again take up the thought of penal satisfaction do so in such a way that the juristic meaning of the thought is rectified by means of the ethical thought of propitiation; and though this is brought into some measure of clearness only by Sartorius, yet his presentation of the point, viewed in connexion with the fact that even Thomasius and Philippi take up the same thought, opens up the hope that the doctrine of reconciliation shall find its due adjustment in some other idea of law than that of legal code. (6.) The reproduction by Beck and Hofmann of the New Testament intuitions affords the prospect of the establishment, as a principle, of the identity of reconciliation and justification,—an identity which was long ago apprehended by the Reformed divines, and even by Melanchthon when he looked at the matter from the religious side; the prospect therefore arises of the settlement of the controversy between the old Pietism and the new as to the priority of regeneration or justification. These are, as I have said, elements which open up, to any attempt at a theoretical reconstruction of the doctrine that shall proceed upon them, the prospect of meeting with sympathy from the present tendencies in theology. But these thoughts are far enough from having the value of established results, partly because they are not clearly defined, partly because they are not proved, partly because they take their bearings only by biblical theology, partly because they are brought forward in vague connexion with heterogeneous traditions.

At the same time the tendency to an ethical view of Christ’s prestations in their bearing on God, which has been hinted at by Tholuck (p. 526), and evinced by Sartorius, in one respect at least (p. 565) has been exemplified with no small degree of precision by Schenkel also.⁵⁹ He distinguishes between reconciliation and redemption, holding that, by the former, humanity as such is transported back into fellowship with God, while by the latter the individual appropriation of the results of reconciliation takes place, and that in such a way that amongst these results justification is the special subjective realization of reconciliation itself. Here Schenkel recognises the problem found out by Hofmann. Now, while Christ is the Bearer of Reconciliation, Schenkel repudiates the exclusive truth of Abelard’s view no less than the assumption of penal satisfaction. Of course he recognises with Abelard, that in reconciliation God imparts Himself; but God not only reconciles humanity with Himself, He reconciles Himself with humanity. His wrath against sin, which is presupposed along with His love towards sinners, awaits removal, while the communication of life in Christ accomplishes itself in the form of a deed that works salvation to humanity, which in Christ is restored to be the perfect image of God. Thereby the interpretation of Christ’s work in its bearing on God comes to have importance for the idea of reconciliation. For in the idea of sacrifice, which constitutes the middle term, the revelation of God’s reconciling love coincides with the self-abnegation of man. While now Christ in His self-abnegation carries His whole life through even unto death as the perfect life in the image of God, while in doing this He has subdued sin for Himself, and thereby condemned it in general, He has at the same time inlived the Divine redeeming power into the humanity which He represents, and at the same time given in God’s presence the pledge of a sinless humanity. It is obvious that the character of this statement, which in essential points is in agreement with Hofmann, is throughout determined by ethical conditions; at the same time it can be clearly seen in it that, properly speaking, it has fixed the problem only with the help of what are doubtless biblical ideas, but that the law, in accordance with which this connexion is discerned to be true, has not yet been expressed.

Kahnis⁶⁰ gives expression to quite another tendency. In his opinion only that presentation of doctrine treats Scripture fairly, which proves the necessity of sacrifice as well as of punishment and of obedience in the death of Christ. Dogmatic, he maintains, must guard itself against elevating one of these ideas to the dignity of sole authority, and in the opposite procedure lies the error which each in his own way, the Arminians, the old school, and again Hofmann, have fallen into. If in this statement the programme of the Lutheran theology that contemplates scientific progress is to be recognised, then surely in order to the completion of the “historical” character of this Lutheran dogmatic, it ought to be added that the proposed task has already been carried out by one Lutheran theologian with a high degree of circumspection and formal care, and at the same time with that objectivity of bearing which becomes orthodoxy. That theologian is Ludwig Schöberlein.⁶¹ He regards reconciliation as the restoration of the sinner to the rights of the kingdom of God, and under this point of view comes upon the old problem how God’s love, the ultimate cause, stands related to God’s justice in reconciliation. But here he does not think fit to approve of the formulæ of the old school, which thinks of them as in contradiction with each other, or gives the justice the first rank; rather does he prefer that justice should be regarded as an immanent factor of love. For love is the essence of God, the purpose of self-communication, which, in relation to the humanity that is His image, is realized by the incarnation of God unto the deification of humanity in the kingdom of God. But as love presupposes and includes respect—the recognition of the independent personality of the other—God’s love includes in itself justice, in which His will to communicate Himself is regulated by the receptivity and worthiness of the other party, and eventually limits itself thereby. This is shown in relation to sinful humanity. The breach of loving fellowship, and the guilt of this iniquity is of infinite moment on account of the dignity of God’s legal ordinance which is set at naught. Wherefore also the love of God can exercise only its function of justice in the conscience’s sentence of condemnation and in the imposition of evils as punishment, which in itself results in everlasting condemnation. At the same time this infliction is not inconsistent with the love of God, for it proves God’s respect for the personal independence of men, and the wrath in which God’s penal justice finds its characteristic expression is to be conceived of only as a metastasis of love—as God’s active love-pangs on account of sin. The curse, therefore, which the wrath of God has poured out upon the natural and personal life in calamities and death is at the same time an evidence that the love of God has not abandoned men. As God loves men He sympathizes with their sufferings under the curse, and in this sympathy is founded His grace; in this sense His wrath is eternally atoned in His pity, and the pangs of His love are, by His purpose of grace, taken up into the unity of blessed joy in humanity. For God eternally loves mankind in His image, the Son of God. This ideal relation, which makes the incarnation of the Son to be necessary, is realized by Him as Head of humanity by the discharge of His life-calling, in which He carries out His personal destiny into a free and independent action. And as love is the principle of His life, that principle runs its course in the two-fold aspect of love to God and of love to men, in obedience to the Father and in sympathy with sinners. Under both conditions His life is, above all, the self-revelation of God’s love towards sinful humanity. Under this head falls also His passion upon which out of love He entered, because evil conditions the whole life of man, because the power of Satan that assails him can only be overcome by patience in suffering, and because it was only His own suffering that could develop full sympathy with the deeps of human sin.

But this destiny, to wit, of revealing the love of God, does not exhaust the value of the life and passion of Christ: that life and that passion have also a double bearing on God Himself. For just as His relation to humanity becomes operative under the graduated points of view of justice and complete love, the life and suffering of Christ serve for the expiation of sin and the reconciliation of humanity with God. Since, then, Christ represents humanity as its Head, He is qualified for that vicarious satisfaction which is demanded by the relation to God’s justice which actually subsists. By His active righteousness accordingly, He presents the humanity He represents as well-pleasing before God; as substitute He has borne in His passion the consequences of God’s curse even to the horror of the Divine wrath, to the endurance of which His sympathy extended. But as His passion had no place outside of His active obedience, it follows that He not merely materially bore the punishment of the sinful world, but also as innocent expiated the sin of the world. Hereby is the legal process of the Divine love against sinful humanity rendered inoperative, and man is at the same time redeemed from the power of Satan. For the law whereby the Divine love, keeping the ground of respect, exercised against sinful humanity its right to punish has exhausted that right in visiting the innocent with unmerited punishment; the merit of His obedience is thus the ground of His justification in the eye of the law which is implied in His resurrection, and the ground of the exemption of the humanity that pertains to the Head from God’s former legal ordinance of mere respect. As, moreover, Satan, in the sphere of God’s revelation of wrath, exercised over sinners a right of might that had been permitted to him by God, this also ceased with the disannulling of God’s right to punish. But this train of thought, in which Christ’s active and passive satisfaction has been explained from the juridical point of view, does not exhaust the truth: it has “only a relative warrant in the eye of faith and of science.” Were we to stop here, then “we should be making a mere transition stage into the goal itself, and be clinging to the mere form and seeming of the Divine life, without understanding from its proper essence the propitiation of sin.” There results accordingly “the task of rather developing this legal process immediately from love itself, and not merely from respect, which is but the first stage of love, for the latter constitutes the true principle of the kingdom of God.” From this point of view Christ’s passion must be conceived as sacrifice. Sacrifice, according to its idea, is the voluntary prestation of self-denial to God, conditioned by the feeling of sin and of penal desert, and which therefore strives at the restoration of the personal fellowship with God which had been lost by sin. But inasmuch as sacrifice includes at the same time the juridical meaning of satisfaction for sin, it completes itself by surrender to death. These marks attach to Christ’s suffering and death in so far as He voluntarily undertook it for God’s sake, and at the same time in sympathy for the world of sinners as their Head. While thus He has made all humanity an offering in Himself, the formation of a love-fellowship with God is realized; and not this alone, but the love-fellowship of God with man has principaliter become operative; the same act, accordingly, which is the ground of the reconciliation of man with God, perfects also God’s reconciliation with us. Finally, the resurrection, which constitutes Christ’s justification from the law, is at the same time the condition under which he becomes active as intercessory High Priest, applying reconciliation to men, whereby the kingdom of God is realized.

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Footnotes

1. Compare Von Engelhardt: Valentin Ernst Löscher nach seinem Leben und Wirken (1853), pp. 179, 215. ↩

2. Loc. Theol. xvii. Ed. Cotta; tom. vii. p. 107 sq. ↩

3. L. c., p. 109: Credentes in Christum non solum in genere sciunt præparatam esse electis vitæ æternæ hæreditatem, sed etiam in specie sciunt, sibi eam esse præparatam; illud norunt ex revelatione verbi, hoc vero ex interno Spiritus Sancti testimonio… . Utique ergo vere credentes scire possunt an sint in fide et an Christus in ipsis habitet. ↩

4. Tholuck in Herzog’s Realencyklopädie, xi. p. 662: “It cannot be said that the new awakening has gone back to the Pietism of Halle or taken colour from it;—rather may we say that it wears the colour of the Moravian Brotherhood, to the influence of which many declared themselves to be indebted for their new life, as also the circles influenced by Schleiermacher retained some sympathies for the Moravians. Yet in certain lineaments it also coincides with the former Pietism of Halle, as, for example, in the strict separation between the world and the children of God, the withdrawal from worldly enjoyment and sociality, not so much from science and art. The new party has had a public organ from the year 1827 in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. Without looking down with contempt upon the brethren in their conventicle dress, this new Pietism exchanged this garb for the costume of society, and Ruge saw himself compelled to distinguish amongst the Pietists the ordinary and the perfumed.” I add the remark that the brethren in conventicle dress are those Pietists who associate with the effort after sanctity in their ascetic withdrawal from the world an interest in mystic and theosophic culture. ↩

5. The contemporaneous awakening in the Reformed Church of Geneva, which, in the actual circumstances there, led to separation, is instructive. Compare Goltz: Die reformirte Kirche Genf’s im 19^ten Jahrhundert, 1862. ↩

6. This is the judgment of H. Plitt: Zinzendorf’s Theologie, vol. i., preface, pp. 11, 12. ↩

7. “Hints for a believing understanding of the Scriptures.” ↩

8. Stier: Andeutungen für gläubiges Schriftverständniss, ii. pp. 63, 64, quotes the following passages from one of Lavater’s letters (in Pfenninger’s Repertorium, ii. 1. p. 139): “By the inoculation, if I may so speak, of this new quantum of religiousness and morality, and of physical vital energy, the archæus of the whole race has again attained to such force, impetus, and vigour, that now once more, like a tree laden with glorious fruits, it can again grow up into the skies.—Sin is ignorance and sickness. When the ignorance and materia peccans are taken away, wrong and punishment are at an end. All sin is sin by reason of its hurtfulness. If the harm of sin is taken away, then sin is taken away. To forgive sin and to render innocuous sin, which in itself is harmful, or to make good the harm it has done, are one and the same thing. The grace of God is the antidote for the poison of sin. Christ is the antidote of sin, purifier, atonement. To purify and atone for are identical; so are to quicken and to bestow grace.”—Jung-Stilling: Heimweh (4ter Theil, in the 5th vol. of the Sämmtl. Schriften, p. 68): “The Logos whereby the Infinite One communicates Himself to finite reasonable Being, quickened one organ in this body (of humanity that had lapsed into corruption, death, decay) that yet remained sound, and allied Himself inseparably with it. Of this organ He made a fountain of life, and caused the Spirit of divine love to operate throughout the whole dead mass. But thereby the resistance of the power of death grew more intense, there arose a violent struggle in the body like a high fever; the organ already designated was itself affected by suppuration; but just thereby did it recover and come to be the Head, the life-source of a new moral Person, namely, of the regenerate humanity or the spiritual body of Christ. The Redeemer united that divine spirit of love with His own human spirit, and thus assimilated it with human nature, and made it invincible; brought it about that by His holy living, suffering, dying, and rising again, He overcame the Whole power of death which reigned in the entire body of humanity. Every member that frankly yields itself to the operation of the Spirit of Christ is made whole, and becomes an organ of His body.—Now do I understand the sinner’s reconciliation with God. As long as a member in this body corporate continues to derive no vital power from the Head, so long is it sick and an object of loathing in the eyes of God: but according as it is operated on by that Spirit it grows always liker to the Divine nature, and consequently by degrees is reconciled with it.”—Hamann: Fliegender Brief an Niemand den Kundbaren (in vol. vii. of Roth’s edition of his Schriften, p. 117):—“He whose conviction rests upon the word and deed of a Man who as God of the living, and not of the dead, after a triumph of right and might over the most universal law of nature, has brought to light a universal elixir of immortality against the sting of death. and from the carrion and bones of the despot and destroyer has derived meat and sweetness for nutrimentum spiritus; in order that peace on earth to the satisfaction of entire humanity might be prepared by the rejection of a wicked and adulterous generation, and the reception of the lost son procured as the latest prelude to the most glorious and most terrible resurrection, and the completion of the universe unto glory in the highest.” ↩

9. Lehre v. d. Sünde u. v. Versöhner, 3rd ed. (1830), p. 93 sqq. ↩

10. Andeutungen für gläubiges Schriftverständniss. 1ste Sammlung (1824), pp. 379-403; 2te Sammlung (1828, otherwise known as Beiträge zur biblischen Theologie), pp. 24-116. ↩

11. I may add, that Lavater also with all distinctness declares that doctrine to be unbiblical and nonsensical. (Briefe über die Schriftlehre von unserer Versöhnung mit Gott durch Christum (1793) in Gessner’s edition of his Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. ii. p. 84 sqq.) Menken’s similar view will be noticed afterwards. ↩

12. Baur (p. 668) has entirely ignored this issue of Stier’s presentation. ↩

13. Zweite Sammlung, p. 47 sq. ↩

14. Compare H. von der Goltz: Die theologische Bedeutung Bengel’s und seiner Schule in the Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. vi. (1861), p. 460-506. Diestel: Geschichte des alten Testaments in der christl. Kirche, 698 sq. ↩

15. Compare Diestel: as above, pp. 528, 533. ↩

16. Quoted by Von der Goltz: as above, p. 472. ↩

17. In a letter (quoted by Gildemeister: Leben und Wirken von Menken, i. p. 134), Menken thus expresses himself, “If we but speak scripturally of Jesus Christ as the Author and Finisher of our faith, as the Son of man made perfect by trial, of the kingdom of the Messiah in so far as we mean thereby a particular Divine Theocracy, of the kingdom of God in so far as it will extend itself over the whole universe, of the glory of the future world, of heaven and of hell, we find ourselves, strange to say, speaking something that is new to everybody. With spiritual indiscretion the doctrine of the atonement has been raised into one-sided prominence in com- parison with the doctrine of Scripture as a whole; in a certain sense it has been always and alone the theme of consideration. If this doctrine had been treated in a more Scriptural way, men would have been led by it to further advances; but it has often been separated from all others and treated in a manner contrary to Scripture… . . Christ for us,—this in all text-books is everything; but why so little or absolutely nothing of Christ in us who is the hope of glory? Grace and gift have been separated. Forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake is preached, but not liberation from sin by the quickening Spirit of Christ. In all this there is deficiency and patchwork.” This was written more than seventy years ago; and now— ? ↩

18. In the following notice I follow Auberlen: Die Theosophie F. Ch. Oetinger’s nach ihren Grundzügen (1848). I have compared also the Theologia ex idea vitæ deducta in Hamberger’s translation (1852). ↩

19. Consequently Stier, though socially he belongs to the modern and Moravian Pietism, really in virtue of his Reconciliation doctrine attaches himself theologically to the older Pietism. We are pointed to the same conclusion by the already quoted expression made use of by him (p. 421) regarding the relation between moral effort and the consciousness of grace. ↩

20. Compare Auberlen: as above, p. 311. ↩

21. Comparative Dogmatik, ii. p. 40 sqq. ↩

22. Compare Von Engelhardt: as above, p. 170 sqq., 207 sqq. ↩

23. Compare the paper in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (1830), Nos. 30, 31, 70-73; (1831), Nos. 38-41: Versuch zur Scheidung von Wahrheit und Irrthum in einer unter den Gläubigen verbreiteten Lehre vom Reiche Gottes,—a specimen, I may add, of dogmatic fanaticism, which, according to M. Göbel (Herzog’s Realencyk. ix. p. 338), is from the pen of William Steiger. ↩

24. “On the Brazen Serpent and its symbolical reference to the Person and History of Jesus Christ.” ↩

25. Gedanken über Epheser, 2, 3; in Menken’s Schriften, vol. vii. p. 275. ↩

26. Anleitung zum eigenen Unterricht in den Wahrheiten der heiligen Schrift. As above: vol. vi. p. 48 sqq. ↩

27. This idea comes from Dippel and other Mystics, who even affirm that there was actual sin in Christ. Compare Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (1838), No. 62. Similar but plainly nonsensical is the view of the sect-founder Edward Irving. Compare Evang. Kirchenz. (1837), No. 55. ↩

28. See as above: vol. vi. p. 220. ↩

29. This applies to a criticism passed in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1837-38.—Geschichtliches aus der Versöhnungs-und Genugthuungslehre, Art. iii. Without expressed adherence to Menken, his assumption of the sinfulness of Christ’s human nature is reproduced, as well as the corresponding doctrine of reconciliation (although with modifications that do not increase its clearness) by Gericke: Die Wirkungen des Todes Jesu in Beziehung auf seine eigene Person; in the Stud. u. Krit. 1843, p. 261 sqq. Compare against him O. F. A. Münchmeyer., ib. 1845, p. 319 sqq. ↩

30. Christi Person und Werk; iii. 2. pp. 127-140. ↩

31. Compare Diestel, as above, p. 704. ↩

32. I make use of the first edition of this work (2 parts, 1852-1855). Compare particularly the second part; 1ste Abtheilung, p. 212 sqq., 332 sqq. The modifications of his view which he made in consequence of adverse criticism, and which are incorporated with the second edition (1858), are first stated in the Schutzschriften für eine neue Weise alte Wahrheit zu lehren, 1. 2. (1856-7). Compare also Begründete Abweisung eines nicht begründeten Vorwurfs (Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche, 1856, Feb. and March). Upon the controversy compare C. Weizsäcker: Um was handelt es sich in dem Streite über die Versöhnungslehre? In the Jahrb. deutsche Theol. iii. (1858) pp. 154-188. ↩

33. Herr Dr. von Hofmann gegenüber der lutherischen Versöhnungs- und Rechtfertigungslehre, p. 47. ↩

34. Just as Schleiermacher (p. 481) adopted the idea of satisfaction in the sense that Christ did what was sufficient to procure redemption. ↩

35. Erste Schutzschrift, pp. 19, 20. ↩

36. In the Zeitschrift für Protestantismus u. Kirche (1856), p. 188. ↩

37. Otherwise Philippi (as above, p. 12) would assuredly not have contented himself with raising against Hofmann’s view of justification the objection that ” Scripture and the Church have never so spoken,” but he would have cried out against the Reformed taint in this distinction between the justification of the whole and of individuals. ↩

38. Compare Philippi as above, p. 56; Thomasius: Das Bekenntniss der lutherischen Lehre von der Versöhnung und die Versöhnungslehre Hofmann’s, p. 104. On the other side, see Hofmann: Zweite Schutzschrift, p. 91 sqq. ↩

39. As above, p. 173. ↩

40. As above, p. 50 sqq. ↩

41. Schriftbeweis, i. pp. 560, 563. ↩

42. Inbegriff der christl. Glaubenslehre, 1832. ↩

43. Gerhard: Loci theol. (ed. Cotta) tom. iii. p. 176.—Scriptura ἀνθρωποπαθῶς tantum Deo iram tribuit, notatur enim vindictæ divinæ effectus, non turbulentus Dei affectus.—Ira dupliciter considerari potest (1.) materialiter, quo respectu definitur sanguinis aut caloris, qui circa cor est, fervor et ebullitio; (2.) formaliter, quo respectu definitur appetitus doloris vicissim adversario inferendi. Neutro autem modo proprie Deo tribui potest ira. Non priore, quia corporalis ista motio in incorporea Dei essentia locum non habet. Non posteriore, quia Deus, utpote immutabilis ἀπαθὴς dolorem aut tristitiam pati nequit, et proinde appetitus doloris vicissim inferendi in eo non habet locum. ↩

44. Compare Philippi (as above, p. 56): “He who takes away from me the atoning blood of the Son of God, paid as a ransom to the wrath of God, who takes away the satisfaction of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, vicariously given to the penal justice of God, who hereby takes away justification or forgiveness of sins only by faith in the merits of this my Surety and Mediator, who takes away the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, takes away Christianity altogether so far as I am concerned. I might then just as well have adhered to the religion of my ancestors, the seed of Abraham after the flesh.” Who now is the exemplary Christian, Meyer or Philippi? ↩

45. Die christl. Lehrwissenschaft nach den biblischen Urkunden. Part i. 1841. ↩

46. As above, p. 553: “As condemning sin in the Mediator and rewarding His righteousness, justice in Him organizes itself as the new law of faith in Him, whence again its condemning power passes over all flesh, delivering sin over to death, so that man either dies to it or in it; in the first case receiving the full reward of life in and according to the newly-formed righteousness; in the other case, receiving the full punishment of death in and according to his increasing lawlessness. By both means combined, the Divine justice terminates in the complete organization of a world, freed from all disorder, that mirrors the justice of God.” ↩

47. Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1834, 37, 38. Baur’s conjecture (as above, p. 679) that Sartorius was its author, has since been denied by that writer (Lehre von der heiligen Liebe, ii. p. 70). ↩

48. Das Strafrecht u. die christliche Lehre von der Satisfaction. Zerstreute Blätter aus den Hand-und Hülfsacten eines Juristen. Part i. (1832) pp. 468-494. ↩

49. Die Lehre von der heiligen Liebe. Part ii. Von der versöhnenden Liebe, 1844. The track of Sartorius is followed more or less plainly by H. Martensen: Christliche Dogmatik (1849). From the Danish in 1850. W. F. Gess: Drei Abhandlungen über die Versöhnung in the Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol. ii., iii., iv., 1857-59. Herm. Plitt: Evangelische Glaubenslehre nach Schrift u. Erfahrung. Two vols. 1863-64. ↩

50. Here Tieftrunk’s distinction comes in (see above, p. 422). ↩

51. Sartorius: as above, p. 62. ↩

52. This last expression is of my selection, as the sentence in which it occurs is an inference of my own, drawn in order clearly to exhibit the range of the view of Sartorius. ↩

53. Thomasius: Christi Person u. Werk, Part III. Div. i., 1859. Philippi: Kirchliche Glaubenslehre, Part IV. sec. ii., 1863. ↩

54. Erste Schutzschrift, p. 2. ↩

55. As above, pp. 41, 42. The point to be urged is not so much that Christ has done and suffered what we ought to have done and suffered, but rather that the inviolable supremacy and the unqualified authority of the infinite holiness of God, which had been absolutely negatived by sin, had to be brought to absolute currency and recognition. ↩

56. Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1866, Nos. 93, 94 (a paper on the Epistle of James;) 1867, Nos. 23-26 (the woman that was a sinner, Luke vii. 36-50); Nos. 47, 48. ↩

57. Schneckenburger: Comparative Dogmatik; ii. p. 73. Compare above, p. 273, note 1. ↩

58. He says (Evang. Kirch. 1867, p. 271): “It is one of the greatest problems of the present time rightly to remedy the mischief which Pietism sought to remedy in a wrong way (i.e., by ranking sanctification before justification); and every attempt in this direction ought, if it spring from an earnest honest spirit and eager study of Holy Scripture, to be received with loving sympathy instead of being repelled with harsh charges of heresy.” This is a correct view of the case, though Hengstenberg had no right to give the closing admonition,—see only, for example, how in his paper on the Epistle of James, at the very time when he is insisting upon the active exercise of love, he vents the most malicious insinuations against the “Mediation-theology.” ↩

59. Die christliche Dogmatik vom Standpunkte des Gewissens aus dargestellt, vol. ii. Div. ii., 1859. ↩

60. Die lutherische Dogmatik, historisch-genetisch dargestellt, vol. iii. (1868), p. 401. ↩

61. See the Article Versöhnung in Herzog’s Realencyklopädie, xvii. (1863) pp. 87-143. Compare his essay Ueber die christliche Versöhnungslehre; Stud. u. Krit., 1845, pp. 267-318. In his interpretation of the notion of justification Schöberlein follows the Pietistic schema, and adopts also the view that has been traced in von Meyer and Beck of the correspondence between the penal value of individual repentance and the penal satisfaction of Christ, (Ueber das Verhältniss der persönlichen Gemeinschaft mit Christo zur Erleuchtung, Rechtfertigung, Heiligung; Stud. u. Krit., 1847, p. 45 sq.) ↩