Chapter XI. The Idea of Reconciliation According to the Speculative School
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THE claim made by the German speculative philosophy of this century, to leave nothing further to be desired in the interpretation of Christianity and its idea of reconciliation, is very intelligibly set forth in the disquisition by Baur which follows. (See as above, pp. 688-691.) He concedes that Schleiermacher gave its absolute expression to the notion of reconciliation when he exhibited, in life-fellowship with Christ, the abiding effect of the unity of the Divine and the human that was realized in Him, of the identity of the absolute powerfulness of the God-consciousness with the Being of God in Him; and in such a way that the individual enjoys his consciousness of the redemption thus brought about only as a member of the fellowship of the redeemed. But this process of reconciliation, he goes on to say, is yet apprehended only in its purely historical and subjective significance, but not at the same time as objectively divine. The Church doctrine of satisfaction, he says, has its deep significance in its tendency to ground the subjective consciousness of reconciliation in an adjustment of God with Himself; and herein lies its mysterious and fascinating power. Although the manner in which this thought has been traditionally expressed may be unsatisfying and repelling, its modern repristination nevertheless at once shows that, as matter of fact, its leading tendency is relatively a right one. “Only when God, in the reconciliation of man, reconciles Himself with Himself, only when the subjective spirit becomes one with the objective, and the finite with the absolute, is man truly and absolutely reconciled.” Schleiermacher fails to come up to this requirement, in so far as the God, in whom he grounds reconciliation through Christ, is shut up within Himself; for in that case He would still continue to be always strange to men. If hereby the needfulness of the correction which has been hinted at is made obvious, we yet require, in making that correction, to conserve in another regard that factor of objectivity gained by Schleiermacher, to wit, “the procuring of the redemptive activity of Christ which bears upon individuals by means of the fellowship established by Him, in so far as only that can be regarded as an objective truth which, in the historical consciousness of humanity, in the natural coherence of that fellowship of the species whereby the individual is upheld and determined, is in a position to assert itself in its objectivity.” It seems as if Baur in this sentence introduced, as equivalent magnitudes, three things which nevertheless require to be widely distinguished, both quantitatively and qualitatively—the Christian Church, humanity as bearer of a historical consciousness, humanity as a natural genus. The following sentence, however, lets us see that he knows how to appreciate the difference at least between the first magnitude and the other two. For what he had attributed to Schleiermacher as a “factor of objectivity”—that the consciousness of redemption is conditioned by the redemption-fellowship—immediately afterwards is viewed by him only in the sphere of the subjective consciousness, inasmuch as the joint consciousness of the redemption-fellowship to which the individual belongs is held to be only the extended consciousness of the subject. “Hence the problem can only be so to adjust with one another the two factors—historical and speculative—whereby the subjective spirit is to coalesce into unity with the objective spirit, that in both the living movement of the absolute spirit is revealed.” Unless this sentence be altogether unconnected with that which precedes it, Baur by it excludes from the reconciliation-process the individual’s consciousness of reconciliation within the Christian Church as something indifferent, and substitutes for it humanity as a natural genus which, as bearer of its historical consciousness, is a subjective spirit, but in speculative knowledge so coalesces with the objective spirit that in it the self-development of the absolute spirit comes at once to subjective consciousness and objective completion. If the idea of reconciliation finds its perfected expression in this schema, Schleiermacher, without a doubt, in every respect falls short of the appointed goal. This is the case not merely inasmuch as the thought of an inner process in God is foreign to him, but also in respect of the attitude of the individual to every grade of human fellowship. He acknowledges indeed, just as Baur does, that the individual is “upheld and determined” by society, but at the same time he maintains that in himself the individual constitutes a peculiar centre of force, which again efficiently reacts upon every fellowship within which he stands. This universal rule regulates also the value of the individual’s life-fellowship with Christ, and of that subjective consciousness thereof which one must have in the Church of Christ. We shall inquire whether the vaunted shelving of this factor of the idea of reconciliation really helps to a richer development.