Professor of Christian Theology in the
Newton Theological Institution
Newton Center, Mass.
More than three-quarters of a century ago Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher gave to the world his Christian Faith. This great theological treatise was the work of a man who, to the natural endowment of a rich emotional temperament and an intellect of unusual power, had added the culture that comes from a comprehensive acquaintance with the world’s leading thinkers and a varied experience in literary, political, and religious affairs. His Glaubenslehre, as the work is commonly called, represents his mature thought on the most important of subjects. No modern treatment of the questions raised by the religious life has surpassed it, or perhaps even equaled it, in respect to influence exercised on the course of religious thought.
Schleiermacher was the first Protestant theologian to grasp clearly the significance of the new situation created by the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century and the contemporary movement of thought that came to violent expression in the French Revolution. He represents a turning-point in the history of Christendom. Modern theological reconstruction begins with him.
Theology has usually been slow to acknowledge
the impact of new forces in the spiritual life. This
may partly account for the comparative neglect of
Schleiermacher by English-speaking theologians. German theologians of all shades of opinion have long
been quarrying materials for their own structures
The present work is a modest attempt to remedy to some extent this want. It makes no claim to a mastery of the great thinker’s whole system of thought, but represents the standpoint of an interested student and admirer. Its purpose is twofold: first, by indicating the historical setting of Schleiermacher’s theology, to cast some light on the origin of certain urgent problems of the present day; in the next place, by exhibiting Schleiermacher’s views of the traditional Christian doctrines and his constructive method, to suggest lines of reflection that may be of value to the rising generation of students of theology.
The sketch of his life offered in the Introduction
is drawn mainly from his published correspondence
and directs attention to the experiential basis of his
doctrine--indispensable to a clear grasp of it. The
outline of the course of Protestant life and thought
from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth
The central portion of the book is a careful condensation of the Christian Faith. I used the edition of 1889 (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes). Some of the difficulties attendant on an effort of this kind may be gathered from the fact that the original work in the German covers about 1,200 pages. The ramifications of Schleiermacher’s discussions are very extended and apt to confuse the reader and the more so since many of his sentences are of inordinate length. I have tried to follow closely the main thread of his argument without, on the one hand, reducing it to the limits of a mere outline or, on the other hand, failing to exhibit the full sweep of his thought. I believe my statement is in accord with the spirit of Schleiermacher’s work and will place the careful reader in possession of a clear understanding of its contents.
The brief estimate which closes this work is in tended to suggest lines of criticism and to point out the direction which, in the writer’s judgment, a constructive theology must now take if it is to meet the needs of our times.
I wish to express my sense of obligation to Rev. E. P. Tuller, Ph.D., for his kindness in reading the proof of this work and for many valuable suggestions.
GEORGE CROSS
NEWTON CENTRE, MASS.
March 15, 1911
PAGE | |
I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION | 3-113 |
A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life |
3-66 |
B. Schleiermacher’s Relation to Earlier Protestantism |
67-113 |
II. PRESENTATION OF “THE CHRISTIAN FAITH” |
117-293 |
Introduction (1-31) |
117 |
Chapter I: Explanation of Dogmatics (§§2-19) |
118-143 |
Chapter II: The Method of Dogmatics (§§20-31) |
144-293 |
I. Unfolding of the Religious Self-Consciousness(§§32-61) |
153-174 |
II. The Antithesis in the Religious Self-Consciousness (§§62-169) |
174-293 |
1. Unfolding of the Consciousness of Sin (§§65-84) |
177-193 |
2. Unfolding of the Consciousness of Grace (§§86-169) |
194-293 |
III. AN ESTIMATE |
297-334 |
WORKS OF REFERENCE |
335-337 |
INDEX |
341~344 |
Friedrich Daniel. Ernst Schleiermacher was born at Breslau, in Upper Lusatia, Prussia, on November 21, 1763, and died in Berlin on February 12, 1834. His life coincides with a period that is the most eventful in European history excepting, possibly, the age of the Protestant Reformation. It was a time of popular convulsions and general unrest. Revolution was in progress in economics, politics, society, and religion. The inevitable temporary and partial reaction followed. Next to France, of all the countries in Europe, Prussia was the most deeply affected by these movements. Allowing for brief intervals of absence, Schleiermacher’s whole life was spent within the borders of his native country and the greater part of his public career was occupied in her service at the capital, Berlin, in connection with its new and now famous university. His sensitive temperament and his broad sympathy enabled him to feel every pulse-beat of the life around him. His wide knowledge and liberal education fitted him to become one of the best interpreters of the European world of that day. As a religious man and a thinker he becomes a sort of reflex of its most potent ideas.
Schleiermacher belonged to a family of preachers on both sides of the house, His father was chaplain, of the Reformed church (the name given to the Calvinistic Protestants of the continent) to a Prussian regiment of soldiers. His mother was a daughter of Royal Chaplain Stubenrauch and sister to Professor Stubenrauch, of the University of Halle. The family were poor, but intelligent and pious. The father’s early theological studies led him in his twenty-fourth year to inward renunciation of Calvinism, though, perhaps for prudential reasons, he made no outward sign of it. In a letter written to his son many years later he admits having preached orthodoxy without actually believing it. He was a Freemason and a keen student of philosophy in his young manhood, and in respect to religious opinions he was only one out of a multitude of preachers in Protestant Europe who at that time conformed in their public ministrations to established doctrine but in their hearts held a rationalistic view that true religion and essential Christianity consisted in the belief in God, virtue, arid immortality. Strangely enough his experience was partly duplicated for a time in his son.
The mother was a noble-minded woman, of an ardent temperament, devoted to the care of her three children, strict and even severe in discipline, and prayerful.
In the father’s continual absence from home the burden of their training fell to
her lot. She took a great interest in their studies, observed the development
But in 1778 the father, being then fifty-one years
of age, experienced an inward change. His regiment
was quartered at that time at Gnadenfrei in Silesia.
There he came into contact with the Moravian Brethren. This much-persecuted sect, whose origin dates
back to the times of John Huss, had long maintained
a precarious existence in Bohemia and Moravia, and
at length a portion of them, under the leadership of
Christian David, sought a refuge in Saxony. Count
Zinzendorf gave them an asylum on his estate at
Berthelsdorf and later became a prominent leader.
This new home they named Herrnhut (“Watch of the
Lord”).
We now turn more particularly to the career of
his more famous son. Friedrich, or Fritz as he was
usually called at home, was the junior of his sister
Lotte and the senior of his brother Carl. He was an
unusually bright child, and in his early school days
made such rapid progress in his studies and showed
such a disposition to pry into difficult subjects that
his mother became alarmed at what seemed his pride
and conceit. When only ten years of age, according
to his own testimony, his mind was greatly distressed
with the thought of the eternal happiness and woe of
men, and many sleepless nights were spent in seeking
some solution of the relation of the sufferings of
Christ to the punishment of human sin. The attempt
The family moved to Pless in Upper Alsatia in the
year 1778 and the year after to Anhalt, where they
remained till the summer of 1780. That year Fritz
attended a boarding-school at Pless. While there he
came under the influence of Ernesti, the famous exegete and advocate of the grammatico-historical method
of Scripture-interpretation, whose enthusiasm awakened in the boy the desire for a scholastic career and
a love for the ancient classics. The rich fruit of this
appeared in later years in Schleiermacher’s splendid
At the same time these were days of spiritual
profit. At Anhalt and at Gnadenfrei, whither the
family soon removed, he saw a good deal of his father
and they often talked together of religious matters.
Long afterward, in 1802, when on a visit at Gnadenfrei, he wrote his friend Reimer of those happy days.
Here it was that there came to me for the first time the consciousness of man’s relation to a higher world . . . . Here it was that mystical temperament was developed which has been of so much worth to me and which through all the storms of skepticism has supported and preserved me. Then it was only in germ, now it has attained to full development, and I can say that, after all that I have passed through, I have become a Herrnhuter again--only of a higher order [italics mine].
He is not unmindful of certain dangers attendant on such an experience:
Here were laid the germs of an imaginativeness in matters of
religion, which, had I been of a more ardent temperament, would probably have
made me a visionary, but to which I am nevertheless indebted for many a precious
experience, and which is the reason that, while in most people the disposition
of the mind is formed unconsciously by theory and observation, in my case, it
bears the impress, and is the conscious product, of my own mental history.
In those days, however, he was still tossed about
by the fear lest all these experiences might be only
from himself, and his young soul was still harassed
by the questionings which had troubled him before.
He began to share his father’s dread of the effect of a
contact with the dangerous tendencies toward irreligion and immorality in the larger schools then open
to him, and when the father proposed to seek admission
for him to a school of the Brethren at Niesky, known
Application was duly made in May, 1783. It was not easy to obtain admission, for first of all the casting of the lot, which the Brethren regarded as indicating, immediately the Savior’s will, must result favorably, and the directors at Barby, which was at that time their educational headquarters, must approve. After a few weeks of waiting his desire was granted and he entered the Paedagogium in June. With this step the home life was brought to an end. He never saw his parents again, for his devoted mother died in the following December, and his father’s path and his own began to run apart.
The Paedagogium at Niesky was of the nature of
a gymnasium or preparatory college for young men
who wished to enter the Christian ministry, particularly the Moravian. At that
time it enjoyed a wide,
reputation. Among the students were members of
aristocratic German families, children of absent missionaries, representatives of eastern German provinces,
and youths from Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and
England. It was a student-cloister unlike any other,
whether Protestant or Catholic. The entering students became members of a new family. The teachers
held a sort of graded parental relation to them, and
brotherly affection was the dominant feature of the
The instruction given to students was fairly broad.
It aimed at breadth rather than learnedness in a single
field, at a many-sided intellectual activity with some
love for science, a keen appreciation of Latin and
Greek literature, and some taste for the fine arts.
Schleiermacher relates how he and his room-mate
von Albertini--who held afterward for a long time
a first place among the Brethren as scholar, preacher,
and poet--ranged at will over the field of classic literature, and even tried to work up a knowledge of Semitics. At the same time the aim of the institution was
mainly heart-culture. Coldness, hard-heartedness,
lack of feeling were regarded as the worst faults,
There was an attempt to play on the heart strings in
a thousand ways. A developed phantasy, a powerful
soul-life was the presupposition of religiosity. The
culmination of the education given was found in soul-intercourse with the Savior, and to that end it was
supposed to be necessary to exercise one’s self in
This meant, of course, that the works of many contemporary writers were sternly proscribed as being out of harmony with the views of the Brethren. Moreover, the greatest care was taken to impress students with the unquestionableness of Protestant orthodoxy, especially the doctrines of Christ’s deity and his substitutionary sacrifice, of human depravity, miraculous grace, and future punishment. No effort was spared to give the students an inward attestation of the truth of these doctrines by the cultivation of a religious experience corresponding with the doctrinal teaching. This artificial devotion to mysticism stimulated doubts of the worth of this religious intercourse in the minds of some young men who hesitated to submit themselves to a compulsory divine service.
At the same time the relations between teachers
and students and of students with one another were
characterized by a happy and wholesome intimacy.
With hard study were combined the cultivation of an
acquaintance with poetry and music and the enjoyment
of birthday parties and other festivals. Religious
meetings recurred with great frequency. The hymn-singing for which the Brethren were famous was a
notable feature of these gatherings. In later years
in -connection with his own conduct of public worship
Schleiermacher used to contrast the dull monotonous
liturgy of the state church with the lively, inspiring
worship in Moravian congregations, and to express
There can be no doubt as to the intentions of
Schleiermacher’s godly parents in sending him to this
school. They admired the religious life of the Herrnhuters and they feared the rationalistic tendencies of
the times. They were not unaware of the strength of
the great movement of thought which was sweeping
over Europe. European society was then stirred to
its depths over many questions. Ideas and institutions
hoary with age were subjected to the keenest and most
unrelenting criticism, and particularly in the ecclesiastical and religious realm. The skepticism of Bolingbroke and
Hume in England, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists in France, of Fredrick the Great and
the “Illuminants” in Prussia, had delivered a fearful
polemic against current orthodoxy and the church.
Science and philosophy seemed to corroborate its arguments. Political institutions traditionally associated
with established religion were threatened with a general overturn. The very
codes of morality were being torn to shreds. The ominous rumblings of the approaching revolution in France were heard all over
western and central Europe. The foundations of
the great deep were breaking up, To Schleiermacher’s parents the institutions of the Moravians seemed an
ark of safety for their children, and especially for
their gifted son. Mainly, perhaps, they were in the
right. His sympathetic, sensitive spirit, united with a
keen intelligence, might not have withstood at that
The immediate outcome was gratifying. At Niesky he yielded
himself heartily to the surrounding religious influences. At the end of three
months he was admitted by lot to membership in the society, to the great joy of
his parents and his sister Lotte, who
took a similar step about the same time. A period
of religious, elevation ensued. His mother writes,
in October, 1783, “Let us therefore, my dear son,
cling firmly to him alone who is the faithful shepherd
of our souls; let us give up our hearts entirely to him;
let us pour out all our gifts to him; let us speak to his
heart and pray daily to him to cast out and take away
everything that tends to separate us from him.” His
eager participation in these sentiments appears in a
letter to Lotte just then: “When I find that I do not
love the Savior enough, that I do not sufficiently honor
him; when the daily intercourse with him does not
go on uninterruptedly, then I am distressed.” And
later: “The heart may feel the peace and love of
Jesus, as I can assert from my own experience, thanks
be to his mercy.” By the advice of his spiritual
guardian he became, in February, 1784, a candidate
for admission to the Supper--for actual entrance
within the circle of the reborn. The way in which he
speaks of the prospect brings out his warmth of feeling, but at the same time the superstitious regard for the Supper, which Lutheranism and Moravianism
inherited from Catholicism. “On Maundy-Thursday I am to partake of the Savior’s flesh and blood
in the Holy Supper.”
His stay at the Paedagogium lasted two and a quarter years. In
the autumn of 1785 he was promoted to the theological seminary at Barby. The conditions there were much the same as at Niesky. Every
thing was arranged with a view to the promotion of
religious development in the pietistic sense. The
When he first went to Barby he gave himself
mostly to exegetical studies and followed the Herrnhuterite methods, He held distinctly to the Moravian
faith and hoped to become one of the society’s accepted
laborers, though how or where he could not tell. But
The first intimation that a change was in progress
was given in a letter to his father in July, 1786. He
complains that his desire for a thorough study of theology has not been met by his teachers. Students are
“kept within too narrow limits in point of reading.
Except what we see in the scientific periodicals, we
In January, 1787, six months after his first intimation of the intense struggle that had begun within him, he wrote that letter which announced to his astonished and bewildered parent the disappointment of all the hopes of former days. That faith which his father believed to be essential to salvation in the next world and tranquillity in this, is now lost to him. Here are his words:
I cannot believe that he who called himself the Son of Man was. the true eternal God; I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement because he never expressly said so him self; and I cannot believe it to have been necessary, because God, who evidently did not create men for perfection, but for the pursuit of it, cannot possibly intend to punish them eternally because they have not attained to it.
He declares that it pains him to the depth of his soul to write as he has done; indeed, he has shrunk from it and has brought himself to do it at last only at the command of his superiors at college, to whom he had evidently communicated his thoughts. He has not abandoned utterly the hope of returning to the views of the Brethren, but that can never be if he remains at the seminary. He pleads to be permitted to go to Halle, where he could live under the guardianship of his uncle, Professor Stubenrauch, and pursue his investigations unhindered. He concludes: “In sorrow, dear father, I kiss your hands, and entreat you to look at everything from the most favorable side, and to consider well, and to bestow upon me in future also, as far as it is possible, that fatherly affection which is so indescribably valued by your distressed and most dutiful son.”
This letter gives evidence in every sentence of the clearest
sincerity of purpose and earnestness of soul. Further, we must not do young
Schleiermacher the injustice of charging him with youthful precipitancy in
expressing himself as he did. He was only eighteen at the time, but he was far
beyond most men of his years in maturity of judgment. In order to understand
The letter . . . . is the farthest possible from resembling the utterance of some callow theologian who imagines that because an idea is new to him it is new to everybody else . . . . On the contrary its tone is throughout humble, self-distrustful, full of deepest regret for his lost faith and for the conclusions to which he felt, in the meantime, compelled to come; and full, even more, of reverential tenderness toward his father and bitterest sorrow for the pain which he is so unwillingly inflicting and which he tries to soften by the hope of a change by-and-by.
The distracted father’s reply is extremely painful reading. Pleading, rebuke, warning, counsel, and denunciation mingle. He breaks out: “O, thou insensate son! Who has deluded thee, that thou no longer obeyest the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was pictured, and who now crucifiest him?” He charges the son’s error to love of the world’s honors, to wickedness, conceit, and pride of heart. Then he turns to answer the son’s arguments, which he thinks a child could refute. At length, in exasperation, he goes so far as to declare, “With heart-rending grief I discard thee, for discard thee I must.” But this is hardly intended literally, for the letter closes with an outburst of affection and the desired permission to go to Halle.
One cannot help admiring the depth of affection and unswerving loyalty to his father and the unruffled patience which Schleiermacher exhibited in those trying weeks of excitement and suspense. In all his letters he addresses the disappointed parent, as “Tenderly beloved and best of fathers,” or in similar terms. Ere the father’s first reply can reach him, he writes another letter to mollify the wound his first letter made:
Oh! how often have 1 wished that I had been less honest, and that I had not disclosed my thoughts to anyone, or at least that I had not sent off the letter to you. I should then have spared my good father all the pain and troublous consequences of this matter, the end of which God only knows. But it had to be done some time and now I am glad that I took courage.
Most respectfully and yet most firmly in a later communication
he defends his own sincerity throughout,
The permission to go to Halle was granted none too soon, for the officials at Barby could not tolerate, such a heretic in their midst. He knew he “could reckon upon no pity, no mercy here, nor hope to be allowed to remain here.” They had decided to turn him adrift.
It is worth while in passing to notice that this
great change in Schleiermacher had a lasting effect
on the mind of the father himself. As he followed
his son’s career with fatherly interest and concern,
his own earlier interest in philosophical and theological
It can scarcely be disputed that the influence of
Moravianism on the mind of Schleiermacher was permanently beneficial. To that, more than to any other
single element in his character, he owes the peculiar,
place he has won in the world. His experiences at
Niesky and Barby may be regarded as having set for
Schleiermacher the problem of his whole life, which,
Lücke says,
Schleiermacher went to Halle in the spring of
1787 and remained there two years. He then accompanied his uncle to Drossen,
where the latter had accepted a pastorate, and stayed with him a year. These
three years represent an important period in our young theologian’s spiritual
development, for at this time he began to get his theological bearings. It is
true that in his own opinion
Moreover, Schleiermacher’s desire for an unrestricted study of the questions that distressed him was
now realized. At Halle he entered upon a course
of reading, continued for many years, which included
in its scope almost all that was of high value in ancient
philosophy and theology and the most famous writers
of the age of the Reformation. Plato and Aristotle;
the neo-Platonists; Origen and Augustine among the
church Fathers; Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin
among the Reformers; Spinoza, Descartes, and Locke;
and later, Lessing, Kant, Wolff, and Herder ultimately
became food to the omnivorous appetite of this young;
student and were made to contribute their quota to the
makeup of his mature thought later on. His reading
at Halle was not well connected and his thought was
quite unorganized. He chose his own course of reading and paid rather indifferent attention to the regular
class-work of the university. This course of action
was regarded with disfavor by professors and students
and was afterward regretted by himself. However,
his state of mind at the time may have made inevitable
the neglect of studies that did not seem to have the
solution of his problem directly in view. One thing
he did pursue with intense zeal--the history of human
We know little of his religious experiences at this time, for the subject is rarely mentioned in his letters. He mentions at times the kind Providence of God and expressed his trust in the heavenly Father. That he felt he had some sort of Christian message to give to men is evident from his application in the spring of 1790 for ordination as a licentiate in the Reformed church, to his father’s great satisfaction. In one of the father’s letters of that spring, which deprecates on the one hand the trend of the new methods of Scripture exegesis and the tendency to abolish the Augsburg confession as a standard authority, and on the other hand the compulsory acceptance of orthodoxy, we come across the curious advice to the son to imitate his own example of an earlier unbelieving period of life in not attacking the orthodox faith concerning the person of Christ, but utilizing it in the cause of morality and of love to God and man. This respect he thought was due to the belief which had been a blessing to millions. The son seemed to have acquiesced. Their correspondence at this time evinces a deep mutual affection and respect and a desire to avoid any occasion of difference. But the uncle continues to exercise the greater influence, and Schleiermacher ever afterward treasured a grateful memory of those days of quiet intercourse with the man who helped him to attain to some definiteness and coherency of theological views and to lay hold of a purpose in life.
The examination pro licentia was duly passed and he was ordained by Mr. Sack, chaplain in ordinary to the king. The same gentleman secured for him a tutorship in the family of Count Dohna of Schlobitten in Prussia. Here he remained for three years. The new experience was extremely profitable. Participation in the happy home life of a wealthy and cultured family brought him a new freedom and polish of manners. The work of teaching, visiting the sick people of the community, and, after a time, of occasional preaching brought home to him a deeper sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a mission. This, he declared, more than made up for the want of a library to read and of money to buy one.
His sister Lotte’s influence becomes very manifest
at this time. Before she left her father’s roof to
live in the Moravian choir-house her father noticed
what he playfully termed “the miserly idolatry” with
which she brooded over Fritz’s letters. This noble
young woman followed her gifted brother’s career
with the most affectionate solicitude for his moral
and spiritual well-being and proved more than once
in times of danger a guardian angel to him. That
he was conscious of making spiritual progress is evident from the occasional modest references he makes
to his own inner state. For example, in a letter to
his father he says, “I feel that I am becoming a better
man.” He has the love of preaching and of sermon-making. He writes more sermons than he preaches
His stay with the Dohna family came to an end through his refusal, on account of personal convictions, to conform to the parents’ ideas of education. He left Schlobitten in May, 1793. After four months again at Drossen he went to Berlin to teach in the Kornmesser Orphan Asylum. Here he also preached frequently, and a year later his desire to enter the regular pastorate was gratified by an appointment to a curacy at Landsberg on the Warthe. A letter from his sister in October, 1794, brought to him the news of his father’s death. At that time he wrote to her: “Had I felt when I lost my mother that which I now experience in giving up my father, it would have been too much for a human heart.” Then recalling the painful incident of his leaving Barby he says:
There was a period, the remembrance of which now often
forces itself upon me, during which I mistook the heart of our
excellent father; when I thought he was too hard upon me and
In this generous spirit he turns the blame for their trouble entirely upon himself. But when we search in this letter for some reference to the Christian assurance of immortality we are disappointed at finding nothing except “Peace! peace be with his ashes, and may his soul ever delight itself in his children!” It may be that he had special reasons for reticence on this great subject, especially in a communication to such an ardent Herrnhuter as his sister, but it is most likely that he conscientiously refrained from anything explicit on a subject on which he seems at the time to have had no very settled conviction.
The next eight years of Schleiermacher’s life, from
1796 to 1804, represent the period during which he
emerged from semi-obscurity to a recognized place
among the scholars of his native country and began
to exercise an influence in her affairs. Till 1802 he
was chaplain of the Charité Hospital in Berlin, and
then for two years he was court preacher at Stolpe
in Pomerania. In 1804 he removed to Halle. For
the greater portion of this time his life-story may be
drawn from his correspondence. His letters disappoint us, however, by their very scanty references to
his work as a preacher, but they relate principally to
literary efforts and his relations with a brilliant circle
Shortly after coming to Berlin he became acquainted with the family of Dr. Marcus Herz. Dr.
Herz was a Jewish physician of some distinction and
a man of learning. His wife, a woman of unusual
beauty united with splendid intellectual gifts and a
fine culture, made their home a center of attraction
to many men and women of good breeding and high
literary attainment. The social gatherings at their
home were characterized by intimate personal inter
course and the free, informal discussion of those
questions of science, philosophy, politics, literature,
and religion in which educated people are commonly
interested. Among the members of this social club
were Friedrich Schlegel, Alexander and Wilhelm von
Humboldt, Moritz, the elder and the younger Spalding,
Nicolai, Reichhardt the composer, Schadow the sculptor, Count Christian Bernsdorff, the Danish-Prussian
statesman Count Alexander von Schlobitten, eldest
son of the Dohna family where Schleiermacher had
been tutor (later he became minister of state in
Prussia), Brinkmann, and Fessler. Of these talented
men none excelled Schleiermacher in sparkling wit,
Such a man was likely to find his most intimate acquaintances among women. His refined, delicately constructed, sensitive nature was best understood by them. This he was aware of, and at the same time he felt that he was a debtor to them principally for the most ennobling influences he had experienced. Once he wrote: “It is through the knowledge of the feminine heart and mind that I have learnt to know what real human worth is.” But we are not to regard him as lacking in manliness, for the letters to his intimate women friends of those days, while not clear of emotional excess and some rather dull moralizing, are always characterized by a pure and deep respect for them and by the utterance of noble sentiments.
His sister Lotte, whom he kept closely informed
of all his experiences, from her cloister at Gnadenfrei
viewed these intimacies with misgivings and wrote to
him rather deprecatingly. In reply he went carefully
over his whole course and assured her that all was well.
But, though he was unconscious of it, she was partly
right. At Mrs. Herz’s he met Friedrich Schlegel, the
Romanticist, and at once entered into friendly relations
with him. With his customary exaggeration of a
friend’s good qualities fie was full of admiration for
Schlegel’s really powerful intellect and soon came to
confide deeply in him. When at length they took up
adjoining rooms in one house this intimacy increased.
The consequences were of a mixed nature. Schlegel
was probably the first to impart to Schleiermacher an
incentive to high literary effort. It began in the form
of contributions to the Athenaeum, a periodical edited
by the brothers Schlegel. This was in 1798. During
the next year he published anonymously the work that
first brought him fame, Discourses on Religion to the
Educated among Its Despisers, of which we shall
speak again. He and Schlegel next began in collaboration a translation of Plato’s
Dialogues, but Schlegel,
rather dishonorably, abandoned the work before it
had gone far, and Schleiermacher, with his accustomed
perseverance, completed the undertaking, though it
involved many years of hard labor. This translation
of Plato remains one of Schleiermacher’s great literary
monuments. So much to the credit of Schlegel’s influence. But, on the other hand, some of Schleiermacher’s
Never will I be the friend of a man of disreputable principles; but never either will I, out of fear of the world, with
draw the consolations of my friendship from anyone who has
innocently incurred its bann; never will I, on account of my
profession, allow myself to be guided in my actions by the false
appearances which determine others, instead of by the true
nature of the circumstances. Were this maxim to be allowed
sway, we ecclesiastics would be outlaws in the domain of sociability; for every calumny against a friend, provided it were
invented with sufficient cleverness to secure belief, would banish
us from his society. Far from submitting to this, the aim
which I propose to myself is to lead a life uniformly blameless,
that in time I may bring it so far, that no unfavorable light
Yet as time passed Schleiermacher became aware of the incompatibility between his temper and Schlegel’s. In a letter of June, 1801, he speaks of “the utter dissimilarity of our sensitive natures,” and adds presently, “Ever in my inmost soul [there are] secrets which I cannot impart to him.” That year he found in a new friend, Pastor Ehrenfried von Willich, a man whose heart and mind accorded well with his own. Of him Schleiermacher wrote: “Von Willich has not Schlegel’s deep comprehensive intellect, but he is in many respects nearer to my heart.” From whatever cause, Schlegel and his influence gradually receded and gave place to this higher friendship. Years later Schlegel became a Roman Catholic.
Schleiermacher’s doctrinal views flowed so directly
from his religious life and the latter was so largely
affected by his friendships that it will be proper to
refer at some length to an episode that constituted the
only moral shadow that passed over his career, and
that is fairly traceable, in a measure, to his association
with Schlegel. The latter had married a Mrs. Dorothea Veit, a member of the club referred to above
after she had secured a divorce from a husband with
whom she had no fault to find, but whom she did not
love. Schleiermacher came very near perpetrating a
similar wrong, but under different conditions. At
The reason for adverting to such an unhappy episode in this good man’s life is that it brings out some of the characteristics of his mind. In the first place it indicates a defect in his cast of thought--namely, an unsatisfactory view of the nature of the moral law. Not that Schleiermacher took an easy view of moral obligation so far as his own conduct is concerned, for no man ever forced himself more sternly to the doing of duty. But any system of thought which gives the primacy to the affectional, rather than the volitional side of human nature, is sure to intro duce moral confusion.
However, except in respect to moral judgment, Schleiermacher appears to advantage in this whole affair. His independence of the conventional, merely as conventional, his utter transparency of purpose, and his uprightness of character appear in his whole correspondence in this connection. He mentioned the matter freely to his sister Lotte and to his intimate; friends, and made known his intentions to them. He could countenance nothing that was surreptitious. When Mrs. Grünow requested, after he had gone to Stolpe, that his letters be not addressed directly to her house, she promptly received a flat refusal, and the declaration that she would receive no more letters from him. When his hopes at length were blasted he poured out his grief as openly in letters to his friends.
A reader of Schleiermacher’s letters written during these years would never suppose from the almost
incidental references in his letters to his pastoral and
pulpit work and his literary undertakings that he had
come to be already a powerful force in the intellectual
and religious life of Prussia and particularly Berlin.
Yet such was the case. At the same time that he was
cultivating those close personal friendships for which
his nature craved and which he felt to be indispensable
to any meaningful life for him, he was engaged in
the preparation of literary works that were to have
far-reaching consequences. In 1799 he published a
book that was to usher in almost a revolution in the
religious life of Prussia and to constitute a turning-point in the course of theological science. I refer to
his Discourses on Religion to the Educated among
Its Despisers. The “despisers” referred to are probably in the first instance the skeptical members of the
club that met in the Herz parlors, but in a general
way the whole school of rationalism. The argument
of the book will be given in another connection in this
present work. Here we may simply note that it was a
defense of religion in general rather than of Christianity in particular, and claimed for religion a universal
and necessary place in human experience, such as Kant
claimed for the moral law. His words on this subject
came to the reading public like a message from another
world. Men felt in those dark days that a new prophet
had arisen, and many of them awoke to a new interest
The truth is that Schleiermacher had found no food for his
soul in the rationalism into which he had passed on leaving the Moravians, and
his Moravian faith was returning, though as yet it was tinged with romanticism.
Romanticism with its canonization of the aesthetic sentiments is itself a poor
substitute for rationalism, at least the higher rationalism. For the nobler
types of the latter accord a dignity to the principles of morality and elevate
human life above the play of mere feeling or passion. But after all mere ethics
is not theology and mere morality is not religion.
In addition to the Discourses he published, in 1800,
his Monologues (a presentation of his philosophical
views), considerable portions of his Plato, Two
Impartial Judgments on Protestant Ecclesiastical Affairs, anonymously, and, in 1803,
A Critical Inquiry
into Existing Systems of Ethics, regarded by scholars
as epoch-making. This last was composed while he
was in wretched health and not expecting to live long. “This book,” he writes, “is my gravestone.” But
though suffering much in mind and body he went on
steadily with it, explaining his action by saying, “Just
as a man ought to do nothing because of death, so
also he ought to leave nothing undone because of
death.” However, the prospect of professorial work
at the University of Wurzberg or at Halle, and later
in Berlin, revived his spirits and his health. It was
impossible that a man of his ability should long remain
comparatively hidden, and in 1804 the government
appointed him extraordinary professor at Halle, and
preacher at the university, with the promise of a future
appointment at Berlin, should a new university be
Schleiermacher went to Halle in October, 1804. He did not find conditions there very satisfactory. His professorial work was of a rather varied nature and indefinite in range. We find him lecturing on Plato, philosophical ethics, introduction to the study of theology, fundamental Christian doctrines, and dogmatics, and delivering public exegetical lectures on the Epistle to the Galatians, and all within a single year. The delay and uncertainty as to his appointment to a regular professorship vexed him. Moreover, the arrangement for his preaching services at Halle were by no means to his liking. The stiffness and want of life in the liturgy he could not abide. His desires for a change in this respect were quickened by a visit to Barby in the spring of 1805, when he witnessed a Moravian Easter service. A letter written just after this visit sets forth his feelings at the time:
There is not throughout Christendom in our day a form of
public worship which expresses more worthily or awakens more
thoroughly the spirit of true Christian piety than does that of
the Herrnhut brotherhood. And while absorbed in heavenly
He hoped soon to transplant something of its nature into the services at Halle. He experienced on that occasion a renewal of the drawing toward the Moravian communion, and goes on to say, rather regretfully:
They would not have refused me permission to partake of the Lord’s Supper with the congregation, but I would not ask for what I knew to be contrary to rule. . . . . While dwelling on my loneliness in the world and my separation from those who, I believe, form the truest Christian communion which exists in the outward world, I consoled myself with the thought of the secret and scattered church to which we all belong and of the common spirit which animates it.
He felt so dissatisfied with the state of things at Halle that in the spring of 1806 he was disposed to accept an invitation to the pastorate at Bremen, but by certain concessions was prevailed on to. remain. We might trace without difficulty, if space would permit, his struggle through the rest of his life against formal ism. A state-controlled church was a veritable prison to a liberty-loving spirit like his, that longed for a lofty flight. The dread of Separatism helped to keep him within it, but to the end of his days he battered his wings against the bars of his cage without much avail.
While at Halle he met Goethe once or twice, but
Schleiermacher was small of stature and slightly deformed,
but so slightly as hardly to be disfigured by it. His movements
were quick and animated, his features highly expressive. A
certain sharpness in his eye acted, perhaps, repulsively at times. He seemed, indeed, to look through everyone. . . . . His face was long, his features sharply defined, his lips firmly and severely closed, his chin prominent, his look always earnest, collected, and self-possessed. I saw him under various circumstances
But the progress of events was now opening for
him a sphere of wider influence. Prussia was entering on her life-and-death struggle with Napoleon Bona
parte, and in the storm and stress of those bitter days
the preacher and lecturer became the Christian patriot.
Prussia, led by her king and oligarchy, had played of
late a rather unworthy part in the affairs of Europe.
Her government had fawned on Napoleon, hoping
to enjoy his favor and in alliance with him to hold
her territory intact or make fresh accessions without
cost to herself. That shrewd man, great in diplomacy
as in the battlefield, had utilized her friendship temporarily for his own ends, but the time had now come
to despoil her. His heavy exactions and the clamors
of the people forced the Prussian government at length
to declare war. But Napoleon crushed her like a
snuffbox. At Auerstadt and Jena her power was broken, and from her surrendered
capital the conqueror
Schleiermacher had been by no means unobservant of European affairs or unconscious of the mean spirit of the Prussian government. He clearly foresaw the approaching troubles of -his country and a strong patriotic spirit rose within him. He felt that Prussian sentiments, mental culture, and religion were at stake. In the early stages of the French Revolution he had sympathized with the Democratic party in France, and when Louis XVI was beheaded he did not share in the common feeling of horror. But the infant French democracy had soon given place to a virtual autocracy; his own deep love of liberty and his intense national sentiment aroused in him a determination to fight for the salvation of his fatherland. At the same time he perceived that Prussia was ill-prepared to defend herself, principally on account of the chasm between her government and her people. With the eye of a true statesman he saw that a war for freedom must be carried on by king and nation together, “not by kings and their hired armies.” Aware that the struggle on which the government was at length about to enter with Napoleon must ultimately promote the cause of freedom, he exclaims, “I exult in the war against the tyrant, which I think is now unavoidable.”
When disaster fell upon the Prussian arms and
Halle was taken, his house was plundered by French
soldiers. He and his half-sister Nanni, who had come
to live with him, and the Steffens family were reduced
One determination only I hold fast and that is, to follow the fortunes of my immediate fatherland, Prussia, as long as it continues to exist and does not prove itself quite unworthy of this resolve. Should it entirely succumb, then I will, as long as it is possible, seek the German fatherland wherever a Protestant can live and a German governs.
It was this spirit animating the breasts of patriots like himself, which saved Prussia and ultimately raised her to the headship of modern Germany.
Before we follow farther the career of Schleiermacher during the Napoleonic wars, we must turn
aside to notice certain domestic events. The friendship between him and Ehrenfried von Willich has
already been mentioned. Begun in the summer of
1801, it deepened with time. When the young pastor
married, his home became Schleiermacher’s chief resort for the inspirations and consolations of human
fellowship. Von Willich looked upon him as an
elder brother, and the wife regarded him as a spiritual
father. When their “Schleier,” as they familiarly
called him, came to see them, there was always a free
mutual outpouring of joys and sorrows. The love
of friends like these he described as “my highest good,
without which neither the world nor anything in
it would have the smallest value in my eyes.” (We
shall remember this when we come to the vital place
The correspondence continued. He finally visited Mrs. von Willich at her home on the island of Rügen and the personal interview resulted in a betrothal. In the year 1809, notwithstanding the extremely unsettled state of Prussia and the precariousness of Schleiermacher’s means of livelihood, they were married. He took as much care of her children as if they were his own. To them in course of time five others were added--two girls and a boy of his, and two adopted children. He reveled in the love and joys of the home life and found in his wife a companion who, though much his junior, entered heartily into his deepest religious experiences and his many trying labors.
The much-talked-of university to be established in
Berlin at last became a fact. Schleiermacher is considered to have had a powerful influence in its formation. Fichte was its rector, but Schleiermacher stood
at the head of the faculty of theology, as Savigny at
the head of that of jurisprudence, arid the organization
of the theological studies and the spirit he introduced
into them ushered in a new epoch. His Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, which was published
at this time, exhibits his view of the nature and relations of the various theological sciences. This little
book was a pathmaker in the proper apprehension of
the subject, and an evidence of its great value is seen in
To enter extensively into Schleiermacher’s connection with the history of Prussia during the later
Napoleonic wars would lead us very far afield. We must here content ourselves
with a few brief references. The regeneration of Prussia was owing in no
small degree to him. From a very early period in this
great struggle he apprehended the immensity of the
interests at stake and at the same time perceived the
incapacity of the Prussian government. He saw that
the power of the French movement lay in its popular
The French were not slow to recognize in him a
dangerous man, and as early as 1808 one of his letters
intimates that he had been arrested and brought before
Marshal Davoust and had been rebuked by that officer
as a hot-head and provoker of disorder. But his perfect composure during the interview thwarted the
marshal’s intention to keep him under restraint. He
continued the good work of preparing his countrymen
On the calling out of the Landwehr (“militia”) he was one of the first to enrol himself in a regiment and submitted to several hours’ military drill daily. The nature of his influence at the time is vividly represented in Bishop Eilert’s description (quoted by Lücke in Studien und Kritiken, 1850, and transl. by Miss Rowan) of a special occasion when a portion of the Landwehr made up of students of the university and the Gymnasium as a body requested Schleiermacher to preach and administer the sacrament to them just before their departure. At eight o’clock on the evening of May 13, 1813, they assembled in Holy Trinity Church, having piled their arms in and around the building.
After having pronounced a short prayer, full of unction,
Schleiermacher went up into the pulpit. There, in this holy
place and at this solemn hour, stood the physically so small and
insignificant man, his noble countenance beaming with intellect,
and his clear, sonorous, penetrating voice ringing through the
overflowing church. Speaking from his heart with pious enthusiasm his every word penetrated to the heart, and the clear, full,
mighty stream of his eloquence carried everyone along with it.
His bold, frank declaration of the causes of our fall, his severe
denunciation of our actual defects, as evinced in the narrow-hearted spirit of caste, of proud aristocracy, and in the dead
forms of bureaucratism, struck down like thunder and lightning,
and the subsequent elevation of the heart to God on the wings
of solemn devotion was like harp-tones from a higher world.
The discourse proceeded in an uninterrupted stream, and every
word was from the times and for the times. And when, at last,
with the full fire of enthusiasm he addressed the noble youths
already equipped for battle, and next turning to their mothers,
Notwithstanding the suspense and terrible anxieties of those days, his life was a happy one because of the character of his family life and enrichment of his spiritual nature. For a time, during the war, he sent his family into Silesia, thinking it a safer place for them than Berlin was likely to be. Great was his alarm when that country itself became the theater of war, but happily they escaped all injury. During this time the letters between him and his wife are full of expressions of tender regard for each other and their children and at the same time of a calm trust in the grace and goodness of God. More and more we are impressed, as we study his career, that in the simple relations of everyday life more than anywhere else is to be seen the true greatness of this wonderful man. We shall see a reflection of this later in the theological view of the identity of the spheres of the natural and the supernatural.
At the conclusion of the war, notwithstanding his
invaluable services to the cause of the country,
Schleiermacher found himself in a difficult position.
The overthrow of Napoleon was followed by a vigorous conservative reaction. As it has been said of
The religious struggles of those times are reflected in his
Glaubenslehre, or, to use the longer title,
A Systematic Exposition of the Christian Faith according to the Principles of the Evangelical Church
His differences with the civil authorities brought
Schleiermacher into considerable controversy. His
advocacy of congregational rights and of the freedom
of the church from dictation by the state led the king
to regard him as a secret republican and rendered his
position insecure. His friend and brother-in-law,
Arndt, was dismissed in 1817, and Schleiermacher’s letters for many years later indicate that for a long
time he expected the same treatment. But his immense
hold on the public esteem proved a secure protection,
and he was left undisturbed. His increasing years
and his chronic poor health unfitted him to become
leader of a popular movement for the liberation of
the church, and at last, so far as the liturgy was concerned, a compromise was reached, Schleiermacher
being left free to use it or not to use it as his conscience might decide. While the propagation of his
During all these years and up to the close of his life, Schleiermacher was carrying concurrently the work of his professorial chair and of his pulpit in Holy Trinity. Though continually accusing himself of laziness he was more abundant in labors than al most any other man of his day. At one point in the war, about the time of the battle of Leipsic, when all Berlin was full of excitement, he was the only professor who kept up his lectures. There have been more popular and able lecturers but his students were always numerous and enthusiastic. That his lectures were not written out in complete form need cause no surprise when we remember that he treated at one time or another every subject in the theological curriculum. However, what his lectures lacked in form and system was compensated for by their richness and suggestiveness. It will be generally acknowledged that Schleiermacher’s pre-eminence as a theologian is principally due to the rich veins of thought which he only tapped and opened up for other and less comprehensive thinkers to explore.
As a preacher he has had few, if any, superiors
in Germany. Old Trinity church has become famous
as the place where thousands felt the thrill of his warm,
attractive personality and those stirring appeals that
Those who knew the secret [of his method of preparation] could follow the artistic structure of his discourse. They perceived how, at first, he spoke slowly and deliberately, somewhat in the ordinary tone of conversation, as if gathering and marshaling his thoughts; then, after a while, when he had, as it were, spread out and again drawn together the entire net of his thoughts, his words flowed faster, the discourse became more animated, and the nearer he drew to the encouraging or ad monishing peroration, the fuller and richer the stream. . . . . He had modes of expression peculiar to himself and also a sphere of thought peculiar to himself. But the richness of his mind and the fulness of Christian life in him never allowed any of the ordinary defects of extemporaneous preaching to be apparent in his sermons and caused one to contemplate with unalloyed pleasure his wonderful mastery of the homiletical art and the rich fruits it bore. . . . . It is true that he expected a good deal from his hearers, yet in reality no more than attention and familiarity with the Scriptures; and as he knew how to rivet the attention of the less educated by the freshness and vivacity of his mode of delivery and by the constant application of even the deepest ideas to practical life and to the actual conditions of the church, of family life, and of the fatherland, this explains how it was that, although his congregation mostly belonged to the educated classes, persons of the lower ranks and even be longing to other congregations were constantly seen in his church. I believe that this portion of his congregation steadily increased, for just as his whole system of theology was ever in living progression, so also the fervor and Christian simplicity of his mode of preaching increased year by year in proportion as his experience was enlarged and his inner life expanded.
Considering his immense popularity it is astonishing to find how seldom in his correspondence he makes
reference to this part of his work or gives us a hint
of his influence. But we find a very interesting incidental
One word more must be added concerning his
family life. He paid the greatest attention to the
education of his children, stepchildren, and adopted
children. He shared their pranks and frolics and their
holiday making and imparted his own freedom and
spontaneity to their studies. In 1820 he was greatly
elated over the birth of a son, and on that occasion
writes, “My first prayer to God was to be inspired
with wisdom and power from above to educate this
child to his glory.” This child inherited the religious
precocity of his father and exhibited very early the
influence of the peculiar Moravian attitude to Jesus
of which deep traces still remained in Schleiermacher.
It is related by Auberlen (Studien und Kritiken, 1860)
that on one occasion when the boy was only four
years old his father asked him: “Nathaniel, dost thou
love me?” and the child replied, “Yes, I love thee, but
I love the Savior still better.” But his death when
only nine years of age was so deeply felt by his
father that he said it drove the nails into his own
In 1828 he made his first and only visit to England and preached at the opening of a German church at the Savoy. He noticed with wonderment the commerce and wealth of London. On a visit to St. Paul’s he was disappointed with the worship and criticized the indifference with which the officiating minister conducted a funeral service which he attended.
In 1831 evidence was given of the reconciliation
between him and the king in the tardy recognition of
his services to the nation by conferring on him the
decoration of the Order of the Red Eagle. Two
years later he visited Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
His fame had preceded him, and ovations met him
everywhere, especially at the schools of learning. But
long-continued suffering had undermined his strength
and the end was near. A slight cold contracted in
the middle of the winter of the next year developed
into pneumonia and after a few days of suffering
it terminated fatally. He died at his home in Berlin
The news of his death caused profound sorrow
everywhere and was regarded as a national calamity.
Schleiermacher takes his stand as a theologian avowedly within the position of Protestantism. A subject of religious experiences on which the Protestant spirit is nourished, he was profoundly convinced that the hope of Christendom lay in the Protestant faith. His Glaubenslehre was intended to set forth the inner meaning and wealth of Protestant Christianity. A true apprehension of the nature of the Reformation and the modifications through which it had passed in three centuries is therefore essential to a due appreciation of Schleiermacher’s views. A movement so complicated in its ramifications and so far-reaching in its effects cannot be adequately described in a mere sketch, and we shall attempt to outline only its chief features so far as they are related to our present study.
Protestantism, like all other impressive phenomena
in history, sprang out of the concurrent operation of
many forms of human activity. Political, ecclesiastical, social, economic, moral, and religious influences
combined to produce it; but, after allowing due weight
to all these forces, the secret of the great revolution
it wrought is to be found in a revival of the religious
spirit. It had been quietly gathering momentum for
In every country where the Reformation was finally established it was done by means of the sup port of the state but it had to take such a form as the state was willing to tolerate, namely, a modified Catholicism. This is true in respect to ecclesiastical organization and ritual and not less in respect to doctrine.
A glance at the creeds and confessions of faith put
forth by the churches of the Reformation is sufficient
to convince anyone of the importance attached to doctrinal statement by the Protestant parties. That
correct doctrine is traditionally a matter of greater
importance to Protestantism than to Catholicism needs
no proof. To the latter, doctrine is indeed a matter
of great concern, but it stands in a tributary relation
to the higher interest, that of the church. To the
Protestant truth is of supreme value. Its worth is
The true significance of the Protestant confessions
is not to be apprehended apart from a comparison with
the doctrines of the Catholic church on the one hand,
and the views of the radicals, the Anabaptists, on
the other. The additions made to the Catholic doctrines are rather meager. The substance, and some
times the very statements, of the ancient Catholic
creed, as set forth in the so-called Apostles’ Creed,
the Nicene Symbol, and the Chalcedonian Formula,
are reaffirmed with vigor and their force is revived.
Not only were the doctrines of the Trinity and the
duality of natures in the person of Christ maintained
against the Mariolatry and saint-worship of the Roman
church, but they were used as the foundation of the
doctrines of atonement and justification by faith.
Thus the doctrines of the ancient Catholic church be
came the base of the attack upon the teachings and
practices of the mediaeval church. These doctrines
Still more important, perhaps, was the Catholic
habit of mind which was carried over into Protestant
theology. The idea that Christianity is at bottom
doctrine, that revelation consists in the external communication of doctrine, that it reposes on authority
and miraculous attestation, that the Scriptures are an
authoritative (the Protestants said, the only authoritative) legislation in matters of belief and practice;
all these, as well as the method and the world-view
of Catholic theologians, were taken over into Protestant orthodoxy. In saying this we do not aim to
minimize the achievements of the early Protestant
thinkers or the spiritual value of the great movement
which they carried out. In their exegesis of Scripture
they were greatly superior to their Catholic opponents;
and in the deliverance of multitudes from moral thraldom by their impressive preaching of the atonement
of Christ and the free justification of believers they
were the ministers of a service of unspeakable worth
to mankind; their devotion to their cause was of the
Their hatred of Romanism was not less marked
than their dread of the radicals who were grouped
together under the common appellation of Anabaptists.
The opposition between them and the radicals shaded
from a moderate difference of views of doctrine to
the bitterest antagonism. They were as unsparing in
their denunciation of the Anabaptists and as ready to
subject them to imprisonment and death as were the
Roman Catholics. Whether or not their fury may
have been embittered by the latent feeling that the
Anabaptists were carrying out their own principles
to a logical conclusion we may not be sure, but it is
clear that many of the Anabaptist contentions have
been widely accepted by Protestant theologians in recent times. The term Anabaptist was given to these
people by their opponents because they “rebaptized” those who came to them from the Catholic and Protestant churches. It covered bodies of “heretics” extremely diverse in character and opinions but at one
in their belief of the worthlessness of the Catholic
baptism. When we remember that Catholics universally, and Protestants generally, admitted that regeneration was effected in baptism and that the Protestants did not deny the validity of the Catholic
This is the point of chief importance. For whether these people were mystics--such as Caspar Schwenkfeldt, the precursor of Quakerism--who subordinated the “outer word” of the Scriptures to the “inner word” of the heart; or children of the Renaissance--such as the Socini, the precursors of the eighteenth-century Rationalism--who emphasized the intellectual side of religion and rejected all mysticism; or men of the central group--such as Balthazar Hubmaier and his followers, the forerunners of the modern Baptists--who united with the recognition of the inwardness of true religion as a heart-experience a deep reverence for the Scriptures, especially the New Testament: their common rejection of infant baptism carried with it the renunciation of the whole Catholic system and, of course, that portion of it which was retained as authoritative by the Protestants. This was the head and front of their offending. Their demands were for a complete abandonment of Catholicism and a reinstitution of the churches of the primitive Christian times. Inasmuch as all the states of western Europe were professedly Christian, the Catholic baptism having been accepted everywhere, the radicalism of the Anabaptists was somewhat naturally interpreted as involving the disruption of all existing Christian governments. Nay, by their insistence on the prerogative of the individual, they often appeared to others in the light of anarchists.
We see, therefore, that the practice of rebaptism which gave the Anabaptists their name was in itself a comparatively unimportant thing with them; its importance lies in its signification of deeper things. They held to the prerogative of the individual with God; the immediacy of the relation of the soul to God; the apprehension and ministration of the Christian gospel by the common man; personal obedience as the essence of Christian faith; Christian churches as free associations on the basis of a common spiritual experience; the spiritual equality and freedom of all believers. The practical issue of these views was the rejection of the entire Catholic conception of the church--apostolic succession a worthless figment, priestly mediation a vain pretense, the sacraments impotent and useless. Along with these went the negation of the church’s authority, of the blindingness of its creed or its canon of Scripture, and of its right to call in the secular arm to support its teachings. It is plain that the Anabaptist principles were opposed not only to the Catholic church but to the program of the Reformers as well, and that they could be tolerated as little by one as by the other. In consequence these people were ruthlessly suppressed by both of these opposing parties and were finally almost exterminated. And yet, I have no doubt, they were the nearest representatives of the revived religious spirit that made the Reformation a possibility, and in the end Protestantism had to pay a heavy penalty for their suppression.
Instead, then, of a radical reconstruction of the forms of Christian self-expression we see in Protestantism, as then established, a conservative reform. The idea of the Catholic church was retained, separatism was condemned, and the one church was supposedly continued in the various Protestant state churches. The church’s sacraments were still maintained as necessary to salvation but they were reduced to two in number. Submission to external authority in religion was compulsorily enforced with respect both to creed and ritual. The Catholic canon of Scripture was adopted and exalted above the authority of the church that made it.
Established Protestantism was a compromise. It represents an inconsistent combination of Catholicism with Christian radicalism. In nothing is this more evident than with respect to doctrine. The consciousness of the immediacy of human relationships with God, of the spiritual character of that relationship, and of the freedom that springs from it, was the moving impulse of the Reformation, but it was fettered by being bound to creeds that reposed on outworn scientific, philosophical, and ecclesiastical assumptions. Time brought the inevitable nemesis. The course of events by which the Protestant systems, and particularly the doctrinal systems, were undermined cannot be described here at length; the main facts alone can be mentioned.
The identification of formal doctrine with Christian faith soon bore its natural fruit. The warm evangelicism of the early days of the Reformation gave
place to theological controversy that was mostly barren of good. The effort to reach a minute determination of the limits of truth led to theological hair
splitting and fruitless logomachies that threatened to
tear both the Lutheran and the Calvinist churches to
pieces. Controversies over the relation of faith to
good works and of justification to sanctification, free
will and the irresistibility of grace, election and reprobation, the nature and efficacy of the sacraments,
have left their monuments in such documents as the
Formula of Concord, the Lambeth Articles, and the
Articles of the Synod of Dort. Lutheranism degenerated into Antinomianism, Arminianism sprang up
as a reaction against Calvinism, while Socinianism
alarmed orthodoxy in general. For generations the
bitter strife went on. The evil condition of the
churches was aggravated by the connection of church
and state. Theological terms became the watchwords
of political parties, and political discord was intensified by religious strife. We have only to recall the
legislation in England against non-conformity and
dissent from the time of Elizabeth to James II--and
it was by no means a dead letter--and the civil wars
of the Stuart days in order to understand the demoralizing effect of the Protestant establishment of religion
by law. The attempt to make the boundaries of the
We are here concerned mostly with the undermining of Protestant orthodoxy through the operation
of forces resident within itself. Protestantism was,
in part, an affirmation of the right of the human mind
to freedom of thought. Its main polemic was naturally directed against the usurped authority of the
Roman church and the papacy, but it was equally op
posed in principle to many ideas and usages which
it had inherited from the distant past but which were
not discontinued by its leaders. It owes its very existence to the sense of the imperishable worth of the
individual human spirit and its unimpeachable freedom
of action. It was natural that the Reformation should
let loose the pent-up energies of the western European mind. The buoyant consciousness of freedom
that led men to explore new realms of earth and sky
An inkling of what was in store for orthodoxy was given by the Socinians. Developing Calvin’s view of the capacity of the human mind to discover the natural truths of religion for itself and denying the original depravity which he charged with vitiating the natural processes of the mind in matters of morality and religion, they proceeded to prove in a rationalistic way the divine origin of the Scriptures, with special emphasis on the New Testament, and went on to disprove the orthodox teachings as to the Trinity, the essential deity of Christ, foreordination, penal atonement, and the saving efficacy of the sacraments. Socinianism spread far in England and Germany and its influence was much felt as late as the eighteenth century. But it was superficial. The strength of the attack that shook the foundations of accepted doctrine came from developments in science and philosophy that were native to Protestantism and that continue in force to the present day, but with greatly augmented power.
Two realms of exploration here call for special
attention. Protestantism stands for the worth fulness
and the sanctity of the natural. Nature may therefore
be interrogated and may be trusted to reveal faith
fully her secrets. The human mind may also be
a) Bacon and Locke.--With the publication of
Lord Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum and John
Locke’s Essay concerning the Human Understanding
there began in England a new movement that culminated in the attempt to bring the whole complex
of facts in the universe within a unitary system of
(natural) laws. The significant thing about both was
the method. Bacon’s work was aimed at displacing
the traditional method of reaching objective knowledge
by the acceptance of universal principles and the use
of the syllogism, in favor of the method of induction
by observation and experience. The product of the
method as applied to the facts of Nature was a natural
philosophy and a natural theology which a religious
mind like Bacon’s found to be the noblest utterance
of the universe. Bacon’s regard for Christianity as
a revealed religion led him to an acknowledgment of
a “supernatural theology” to which he assigned a
The purpose of Locke’s philosophical inquiry was
to test the validity of our ideas by an examination of
the manner in which we come into possession of them.
The reality of our knowledge was to be decided by a
critical examination of the knowing process. The
individual mind was the realm of exploration and
the means of discovery was introspection. Locke
found that all our ideas arise originally or by combination from impression and reflection. This is the
simple source of all those so-called “innate ideas,” such
as God and the World, on which the older philosophers
and theologians had relied for the demonstration of
their fundamental beliefs. Like Bacon, Locke sought
to limit the application of his philosophy in the case
of Christianity. He claimed that faith is distinct from
reason and that in addition to natural propositions
there are also supernatural propositions that supply
truth for faith, and yet he held that all professed revelations
Reason is natural revelation whereby the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within reach of their natural faculties; revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God.
He identified this supernatural religion with true Christianity and urged that the original Christianity was in harmony with natural religion. In this way Locke supplied to both the assailants and the defenders of orthodoxy their weapons.
b) Deists and Apologists.--Some of the results of the investigations of these great thinkers were very different from what they had intended. The supreme reverence for the Christian religion that had prevented men like Bacon and Locke from drawing from their premises conclusions detrimental to Christian faith appears in lessening degree in the long line of their inferior successors, till in the later deists it entirely disappeared. The earlier deists, beginning with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, extolled the worth of “natural religion” and sought to identify the true Christianity with it, whereas in the course of the struggle the two came to be opposed. Here was the opportunity for the friends of Christianity to institute a frank inquiry into its essence, but unfortunately, discussion turned rather on the evidences of Christianity and the outcome of the long controversy was mostly negative.
The apologists for the accepted forms of Christianity were
much to blame for this result. They subscribed to natural religion on what
seemed to them rational grounds, but when they sought to show that natural
religion had been supplemented by supernatural revelation they were driven to
say that the existence of sin had rendered natural religion insufficient for
human need. This meant that revelation, as they understood it, was contingent on human conduct, which
was tantamount to saying that it rested on an inferior
basis. Then to prove that supplementary revelation
had really been given they were forced to rely on the
evidence of miracle (non-natural occurrence) and
prophecy (non-natural knowledge), prediction. They
were driven to try to prove the genuineness of the
miracles and predictions in the Scriptures, which, in
the state of knowledge at the time, they were as little
capable of doing as their opponents were of the contrary. There was little more than mere assertion on
the one side, answered by little more than mere denial,
often accompanied by ridicule, on the other. The
degeneration of the character of the controversies can
be traced in the gradually lowered tone of the deistical attacks. There was a good deal of buffoonery
and ribaldry on both sides. The later deists did not
hesitate to ascribe the miracles, predictions, and institutions peculiar to Judaism or Christianity to superstition, fanaticism, or the scheming of interested
priests. The issue of Deism is seen at its worst in
France, where no warm evangelical piety appeared to
The works of the deists were widely circulated in England and Germany and even in America. They were in accord with the prevailing temper of the times and the impression they made may be gauged by the efforts made to meet their arguments. It seems as if al most all the orthodox divines were drawn into the controversy. Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious is said to have called forth one hundred and fifteen replies. Among the many famous names that may be mentioned are Samuel Clarke, Nathaniel Lardner, Bishop George Berkeley, William Warburton, John Leland, and Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham. The last of these is commonly regarded as the greatest of the English apologists and his Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion is regarded as a masterpiece. I do not find in it any thing that had not been said by earlier apologists, but the succinctness and clearness of statement and the carefulness and orderly manner with which his arguments are marshaled have been rarely equaled. It is fair to treat this famous work, as a summary of the whole discussion from the orthodox standpoint.
Natural and revealed religion are made mutually
complementary. They differ in the mode of their
communication of truth and partly also in their content. The study of Nature leads to the belief in the
existence of God, rewards for well-doing and punishments for ill-doing, and a future life. While these
beliefs cannot be established absolutely for our human
The apologists did not succeed in turning the tide that was running against the traditional views. Butler’s lament in the opening sentences of his Analogy--
It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry, as that it is now, at length, discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world
is a humiliating admission of the orthodox failure to
command the confidence of the times and at the same
time points to the need of deliverance from another
quarter. (Thank God! the deliverance came in due
time. It will be spoken of presently.) It was not that
the opponents of orthodoxy were abler thinkers or
better scholars than its advocates. The opposite was
mostly the case. But the spirit of the times had run
on in advance of the accepted canons of theological
thought. Theologians were repeating the mistake
of Catholic apologists of an earlier time--trying to
bind the growing thoughts of men to the formulae
that satisfied the spiritual demands of an earlier age
but obscured the very truths they were intended to
preserve when used as an established rule of faith.
The apologists had not only failed to sustain confidence in those great doctrines which the Protestant
creeds expressed, but the attempt to maintain them by
The long controversy was by no means altogether
in vain. Beginnings were made in modern textual
criticism of the New Testament and in the recognition
of a distinction between the literal accuracy of the
c) David Hume.--The chaotic state of religious thought in Great Britain at the time is reflected in the writings of the famous philosopher David Hume. Hume is often spoken of as a deist. He is better described as a skeptic, I think, an unwilling skeptic.
Hume developed the philosophical principles of
Locke to their natural conclusions. Locke had traced
impressions and ideas to two corresponding substances,
a material substance and a spiritual substance. Bishop
Berkeley had shown the untenability of material substance on these principles, and now Hume drew the
same conclusion in reference to spiritual substance.
The principle of causation through which substances
had been posited as the sources of our ideas is discovered to be no impression at all to which something
real could be said to correspond, but only a lively idea
of the recurrence of certain phenomena which we are
in the habit of perceiving in attendance on certain
other phenomena. It is only a belief. This is all the
justification we have for arguing from an idea to its
cause and the only necessity that exists in the connection between cause and effect is a propensity of
the mind. Hence our ideas give us no knowledge of
Hume’s philosophy was fatal to “natural theology” and sounded the death-knell of philosophical deism. But not satisfied with this, he proceeded to attack the belief in miracles on the ground that a miracle would be in conflict with unalterable experience. The testimony to the actuality of miraculous occurrences is set aside with the affirmation that it must give way before the broader testimony of a firm experience. No sys tem of religion, he concludes, can repose on the evidence of miracles.
He next proceeded to demolish the prevailing views of the origin and history of religion. So far from arising from the activity of reason it sprang from the human emotions of hope, fear, and the like. The course of religion was the inverse of what it was commonly supposed to be--not from an original purity by corruption to lower forms, but from the lower and grosser polytheistic forms to the higher forms. Renouncing the current theology, whither orthodox or deistic, he declared that, “our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason.”
Here was a bold challenge to Protestant thinkers
to furnish a theoretical basis of confidence in morality
and religion. Kant took up the task of answering
the former part of the challenge and Schleiermacher
the latter. Before explaining their apprehension of
the allotted task we must turn our attention for a
Our opinion that the discredit into which the traditional beliefs had fallen in England was owing to influences that are native to Protestantism is confirmed by an examination of contemporary thought in Holland and Germany. There, too, Protestantism had accorded to reason an unimpeachable right in things natural, while also revealed religion was distinguished from natural religion. There was a similar account to that given in England of their origin, and revelation was similarly discredited. We find on the other hand less of keen analysis but more of speculation than in England.
In Holland the republican spirit favored a tolerance
of dissent, and though a strict Calvinism triumphed
at the Synod of Dort and stern measures of repression were sometimes employed, nevertheless the tendency to liberal thinking could not be repressed.
Arminianism spread, the Mennonites and Baptists
managed to live, and great thinkers like Hugo Grotius,
Professor Coccejus of Leyden, and George Calixtus
toned down the prevalent Calvinism. The first opposed
the doctrine of penal atonement, the second rejected
the doctrine of decrees and advocated such an exegesis
of the New Testament as would bring out its peculiar
spirit, the third sought to relate Christianity favorably
to current culture and to emphasize the great central
Greater in importance were the philosophical speculations of the philosophers René Descartes and Baruch
Spinoza. The former sought to satisfy the Protestant
quest for certainty by an appeal to the individual self-consciousness, all external authority being rejected.
All possible doubt is justified as a means of arriving
at certainty. But whatever else I may doubt I cannot
doubt that I think. Self-conscious thought becomes
the basis of all certainty. In my thinking I am aware
of my own existence. I am thus the (mathematical)
cause of my thought. From the idea of God he argues
to the certainty of the existence of God as the necessary cause of the idea. God is self-caused. He alone
is substance; mind and matter become substance in
only a secondary sense. Their phenomena are, respectively, modes of thought and mode of extension.
Mind and matter have their nexus in God, the final
substance. Spinoza developed this last idea. The
infinite substance necessarily differentiates itself in an
infinity of modes (finite existences) which again are
ultimately resolved back into their original. The
world thus becomes the necessary but fluent expression
of the attributes of God. The infinity of attributes
can find expression fully only in an infinity of worlds.
We err when we attribute reality to our own or the
world’s existence. God alone is real. The consequences for morality and religion are evident. Human
This attempt to explain all existence by the necessary forms of thought inaugurated the philosophical movement which is known as the Aufklärung (“Illuminism”). It was more constructive than the parallel movement in England. The explanation of all things was sought in the canons of reason. The conceptions of substance, attribute, cause, mode, etc., were the implements of discussion. Efforts were made to retain a portion of the territory of the super-rational but its boundaries were continually narrowed and it disappeared at last. Leibnitz developed the conception of substance in an unexpected direction. Instead of one all-embracing substance he posited an infinity of substances, mutually reflective, of which the one perfect substance is God, mirroring perfectly all the others. The knowledge of God, which is the same as knowledge with God, God’s knowledge, is love, religion. Reason and religion coincide as far as the former goes.
This incentive to develop the whole body of religious truths by a process of rational demonstration
was carried out by Christian Wolff and his successors
of the Aufklärung. Man was ultimately made the
measure of all things and only those doctrines were
received as true which were essential to man’s wellbeing. The Aufklärung resembled the deistical movement in England, but it was superior to the latter,
especially in its positive regard for religion and its
The famous Gotthold Ephraim Lessing inaugurated a more positive study of Christianity as the religion of revelation. By insisting that Christianity
precedes the New Testament and is greater than the
documents that represent it he maintained the compatibility of faith in it with a free critical judgment
of its documentary sources. He presented a philosophy of revelation that recognized in it a method of the
divine education of the human race and assigned to
it a positive relation to human culture and civilization--a lesson that Christians have been slow to learn:
Revelation is a divine mode of education. It may anticipate the discoveries of reason but gives nothing
that could not ultimately be attained by reason. Though
Lessing himself remained at bottom a rationalist, he
Our brief survey of the course of rationalism will
be brought to a close with a few words on the bearing
of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant on the questions
at issue. As Hume’s philosophy signalizes the destruction of the English deism of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, so Kant’s Critique of the Pure
Reason marks the end of the old German rationalism
and introduces a new era in philosophy. Its effect
on the course of theology is equally marked, even to
the present time. The aim of Kant was positive--to
lay a foundation for morality and also of religion.
His critique was concerned, not directly with the
various systems of philosophy and theology that reason had striven to establish, but with the rational
faculty itself. He finds that, while the sense-material
which is embraced in our knowledge is derived from
external impressions, the thought- forms by which it
At the same time the orthodox theology was also undermined, since it also professed to supply information concerning the supernatural or the super-rational world. The arguments for the existence of God and the other objects of religious belief are discovered to be fallacious if they are interpreted as giving in formation concerning matters of fact. The arguments for the reality of a revelation based on miracles and prophecy also fail for the same reason, and theoretical agnosticism in regard to these things takes their place.
But when we turn to his Critique of the Practical
Reason a different result appears. What Kant takes
away with the left hand he gives back with the right.
He finds that the mind is self-legislative in matters of
conduct. There is an unexceptionable law, a “categorical imperative,” an all-embracing
ought, without
In this way Kant makes a place for religion, such a religion as satisfies the demands of morality, a religion that depends for its worth on the value of moral demands. This is not the place to estimate Kant’s arguments for religion. Whatever else this religion of his may be, it is not a religion of redemption and therefore falls short of the Christian religion. The importance of Kant’s philosophy for our present purposes lies in the suggestion which his discovery of the categorical imperative gave to Schleiermacher in his vindication of religion and his exposition of the nature of the Christian faith.
With Hume and Kant a former era of Protestant theology comes to an end and a new era shortly begins. Let us now briefly sum up the theological situation at the time.
Roman Catholicism trained the peoples of Europe
to depend, in religious matters, on authority--the authority of the church. When the Protestant Reformation
But “natural theology” fell at the same time. The
work of Hume and Kant showed that its structures
were flimsy and that its so-called rational theology was
a mere cobweb of the human intellect. If reason had
Shall we say, then, that the Protestant confidence in the capacity of the human mind was misplaced? that in religion we must fall back on an authority that defies reason, or else admit that there can be no religious knowledge? Or is there a better way out of the difficulty? Might it not be that the nature of the human mind was too narrowly conceived--that the rationalists had erred by regarding it exclusively as intellect? Might it not be that the orthodox had also erred by conceiving religion and revelation too narrowly in making out revelation to be information and religion to be the knowledge and belief of it? Might there not be a view of religion that would remove it out of the religion of that old, bitter controversy? The way to a new apprehension of the whole matter was prepared by the great evangelical revival of the eighteenth century.
The cloud of unbelief that hung over Protestant
Christian lands was dispelled by the gracious outpouring of a new spiritual faith in England which has
a) The Pietists.--The story of religion in Ger
many for the same period is not very different. Here
we see the rise and spread of Pietism. State-churchism
and formal orthodoxy left religion, like the German land
at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, in a condition
of desolation. In those days John Arndt summoned
men to a living faith that should be marked inwardly
by an assurance of Christ’s indwelling and outwardly
by good works. Long afterward Philip Jacob Spener
heard Arndt’s call to a higher life and responded with
all the warmth of a soul that was remarkably endowed
by divine grace. He sought to draw men away from
theological strife and a mere external compliance with
the forms of religion, by holding informal assemblies
At this point its failure begins. Success begot
spiritual self-contentment and finally arrogant intolerance. Its sympathy with humanity in the broad
b) The Moravians and the Methodists.--When Pietism began to wane the smoldering flame of religious fervor was already being rekindled by the Moravian Brethren.
Moravianism was characterized by spontaneity and
initiative, Puritanic moral conviction, deep emotional
experience, missionary zeal, and a capacity for organization. Hymn-singing, extempore prayer, and fervent
utterance were marked features of their meetings. We
have seen how profoundly these things impressed
Schleiermacher. In middle life he used to look back
longingly to their meetings for worship and felt how
bare and poor was the official service in the German
church. Their doctrines were in general agreement
This is not the most important fact in the present connection. They were the true founders of the Wesleyan evangelism. To their preachers, Spangenberg and Boehler, Wesley owed that assured confidence in the inner testimony of the Spirit, which was such a mighty force in the Revival and has come to us in our day as a factor of indisputable value in the determination of Christian truth. Our present confidence in the testimony of the Christian consciousness is an in heritance from the Revival. It has come down to us from the old Anabaptists through the double channel of English and German religionists.
We need not repeat here the story of the great
revival--how it spread throughout the British Isles,
It may not be possible to describe the fundamental nature of this great revival of Christian faith in a word. There is, however, one outstanding conviction that seems to have wrought itself by means of the Revival into the fiber of our thinking--the unimpeachable worth of the individual man. We see how nearly identical it is with the motive power of the Reformation. It is working a like revolution in our thinking.
The effect on prevailing apprehensions of the nature
of religion has been immeasurably great. In the first
place men have come to see that religion is a universal, though distinctive phenomenon of human life,
The Revival was a restoration, a reinforcement, and an enrichment of the religious life that awoke to vigor in the early days of the Reformation and that had made an ineffectual attempt to find embodiment in those days. That life had never obtained a reasoned theological expression suited to its nature. If the new movement was not to degenerate into fanaticism on the one hand or into formalism on the other, then it must receive a coherent theoretical expression in doctrine. In those early religious experiences which formed the basis of his whole religious life Schleiermacher was a spiritual child of Moravianism. He was the first thinker of note to undertake the task of reconstructing the traditional doctrinal system from the standpoint of evangelical religious experience. The rejuvenescence of Protestant theology begins with him.
It has been shown that at the close of the eighteenth century the state of theological science was very unsatisfactory. The traditional creeds had been under mined and their defenders had propped them up with very shaky supports. Deism was itself dying of inanity. In the light of Kant’s Critique the great speculative systems now appeared as castles in the air. Kant’s own attempt to save belief in the three essentials of rational theology by making them postulates of the practical reason had subordinated religion to morality and theology to ethics. Theology was discredited both as to content and as to method.
Schleiermacher heard within himself the summons
to a vindication, first, of religion, and second, of theological science. He was peculiarly fitted for the task.
Though still a young man, he was well acquainted
with the best ancient and modern works on philosophy.
His Moravian training had called forth the powers
of his deep religious nature and left an ineffaceable
impression on his sensitive and ardent mind. He had
passed through a period of doubt when rationalism
swept away the doctrinal beliefs which he once received on authority. He knew that a shallow illuminism had no correspondence with the deepest longings of the human heart. Romanticism with all its
dangers was preferable to intellectualism. That the
canonization of human impulses bad and good, to
which Romanticism with its aesthetic pride gravitated,
had led him dangerously near to a confusion of moral
The treatise was timely. It obtained at once a wide reading in literary and learned circles. The redundancy and floridness of its style make it a little tedious to present-day readers^ but these qualities were an advantage to it at the time. Even its obscurities were a recommendation to it in contrast with the platitudes of the Aufklärung. Many who read it awoke as from a dream. Pastor Harms, a theological opponent of Schleiermacher’s at a later date, confessed that he sat up all night long to finish the book at a single reading. The Discourses proved a turning-point in the study of theology. To establish their value it is only necessary to refer to the discussions on this work which still continue to appear from the pens of German scholars.
Schleiermacher aims at laying a foundation for
theological science by first of all expounding the nature
of religion. He finds religion, as Kant had found
the fundamental moral law, in the human consciousness
as such--it is a necessary and inalienable constituent
element of human experience in its highest interpretation. It cannot therefore be a product of thought (it
is not to be identified with a doctrine or sum of doctrines or to be viewed as the effect of such); or of
The question as to the form of consciousness in
which religion appears is answered by saying it consists in feeling. In the first edition of the
Discourses
Schleiermacher added “and intuition,” but in the
later editions
As for the philosophical explanation of such an
experience, it is the universe, infinity, expressing itself
in the human consciousness. Therefore it occurs in
and with man’s relationship to the world. In one aspect
Therefore it pertains to the individual, and at the same time to the universal, consciousness. Accordingly it may be said that there are as many religions as there are men. Each man’s religion is his own. It cannot be given to or borrowed from another; it cannot be imposed on men from without or taken from them; no man’s religion is in itself false, for it is not false to him. But at the same time it may be said that after all there is only one religion, for in its essence religion is the same in all though varied in different people according to the stage or direction of their development.
The undeniable symptoms of a pantheistic trend in
the Discourses drew upon Schleiermacher much criticism. For example, his relative Sack, court-preacher,
accused him of Spinozism and a veiled pantheism.
But in his reply Schleiermacher vigorously repelled the
charge. While he had not set forth the doctrine of a
personal God, he had said nothing against belief in a
personal God; he had only said that religion did not
depend on whether, in abstract thought, a man predicated personality of the supersensuous cause of the
world or not, and he had mentioned Spinoza as one
instance. His aim was, in the present storm of philosophical ideas, to establish the freedom of religion from
any sort of metaphysics and from dependence on
The defectiveness of this view of religion, notwithstanding its warmth and suggestiveness, is apparent. It is as far from an apprehensible relation to any historical religion as Kant’s moral ideal is from relation to any historical morality. But the author rendered an invaluable service to the cause of religion and theology by exhibiting the originality, freedom, and universality of the former and its basic relation to the latter. In this view theology becomes a living and progressive science, ever drawing its main impulse from the growing religious life of humanity.
At a later time, when Schleiermacher had passed beyond the Romantic stage and found himself plunged into the great contest with the currents of thought that flowed through Germany along with the Napoleonic invasions, he aimed to bring his theory of religion into closer relation to ecclesiastical and national life. How this was done we shall see when we turn to his presentation of The Christian Faith.
Schleiermacher saw at once the need of correcting
the impression that he had little regard for ethics, and
in the next year (1800) he published his Monologues.
The theory is complimentary to his view of religion
and represents the ego in its consciousness of freedom
spontaneously determining its own inner development
and striving to represent in its own person the whole
of society, of the nation, and, ultimately, of humanity.
Among the many works of Schleiermacher of more or less note which appeared before his whole system was elaborated, we may mention just one, his Outline of Theological Science (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums), 1806, which presents his conception of the integration of the whole body of theological sciences. Editions of this compact little treatise still continue to appear.
The crowning work of Schleiermacher’s services
as a theologian is his Glaubenslehre, The Christian
Faith. The occasion of its publication was the attempt
of the Prussian king, Frederick William III, to unite
the Lutheran and Reformed churches of Prussia in a
new body, to be known as the Evangelical church. The
three-hundredth anniversary of the beginnings of the
Reformation seemed to offer a suitable opportunity
for such an effort. The weakness of Prussia in the
earlier part of the struggle with Napoleon had been
partly a consequence of religious decline and division.
Religious unity seemed necessary to political unity and
strength. Schleiermacher’s religious convictions and
his patriotism combined to make him a supporter of
the movement. But he saw the dangers that threatened the vitality of Protestantism. A strong conservative reaction had set in at the close of the
Napoleonic wars. Pastor Harms led a party that demanded a return to the older rigid Lutheran orthodoxy.
The king himself was not only a rank conservative
But the purpose of Schleiermacher’s work went
far beyond the needs of a temporary and local crisis.
This his greatest achievement obtained a permanent
place among the world’s most notable attempts to
solve the problems of the inquiring religious spirit,
because it treated those problems in a spirit which recognized their seriousness and breadth. It was the
work of a writer who had set himself diligently to
apprehend the meaning of religion, and especially of
Christianity, in a universe of things that lay open to
human experience and investigation; who had held
his mind open to receive whatever he might find nourishing
The task which confronted the genius of Schleiermacher may be set forth briefly as follows: to describe the inner nature of religion, and particularly of Christianity, so as to exhibit its basis in an original human enduement and its freedom from dependence, on the one hand, on a body of objective knowledge--whether that knowledge be externally communicated or be the product of rational thought--or on a form of morality, on the other hand; to relate Christianity as a historical magnitude to other historical religions so as to bring into relief its pre-eminence among the various forms of religious faith; to indicate the place of the religious experience in the entire realm of human consciousness so as to vindicate the claim that it supplies the highest interpretation of the universe; to restate the interpretations of the Christian faith which have appeared in the great historic confessional and creedal symbols so as to bring out their religious content, and at the same time to clear away those traditional philosophical and superstitious excrescences which have obscured the truth of Christianity; to effectuate the demand that no form of doctrine may be admitted to be Christian except in so far as it is an expression of the Christian religious consciousness--a present conscious religious faith; to furnish to aggressive Protestant Christianity an instrument for its advancement, in the form of a reasoned systematic statement of its own inherent nature.
Did space permit, we might show how upon a foundation of Christian religious faith he built the product of the rich speculative genius of Plato, the sin-consciousness of Paul and Augustine, Luther’s and the Anabaptists immediacy of fellowship with God, Calvin’s all-embracing divine purpose, Spinoza’s self-differentiating substance transmuted into the principle of causality, Leibnitz mirroring of the universe in the individual, Lessing’s philosophy of the revelation which, at the same time, is education, with Kant’s conviction of the incompetency of pure reason to establish religious truth running through it all. How all these elements, shot through with the Moravian warm love for Jesus Christ and the fellowship of grace, were recast in the crucible of Schleiermacher’s own thinking and were built up into a massive system, the following exposition will make an effort to show.
At the outset of this undertaking it is necessary to explain the meaning that is here attached to the term dogmatics and to set forth the method and the arrangement appropriate to it. For, while Christian communions generally make use of dogmatical (doctrinal) statements both in their own internal economy and in their intercourse with other religious bodies, an examination of the theological writings best known among them will discover great diversity and confusion in the articulation of the different theological disciplines and in the application of them to the purposes of the societies concerned. Of dogmatics this is true in an eminent degree.
The greatest differences in the orderly development of the subject will occur, of course, in those works which represent thoroughly different conceptions of dogmatics, but minor differences appear even in works which repose on a similar basis. In any case the method and order of treatment are best justified by results and, in order to the best results, should be set forth for the reader at the beginning.
Dogmatics is a theological discipline. Its sole use
is to serve the interest of the Christian church. This
consideration determines for us its peculiar task. Since
it presupposes the Christian church, a right apprehension of the church in general and of the character
of the Christian church in particular becomes its basis
and the touchstone of all that claims a place in it. This
being the case, we are not obliged, for example, to
derive a doctrine of God, of man, and of last things
from universal principles of reason, because these principles have no more relation to the Christian church
than to any other form of association among men;
but there are three auxiliary sciences whose aid we do
need as an introduction to dogmatics: first, ethics, because the idea of the church pertains to this realm,
since it denotes a fellowship or association which
originates and continues only through free human activities. Second, philosophy of religion, because in
defining the term church it is necessary to distinguish
the essential and permanent elements, subsisting in religious communions through all the stages of their
development, from the individual historical forms in
which their common principle may temporarily be embodied, so as to exhibit those elements as constituting
the entire manifestation of religion in human nature.
(Ethics)
An ecclesiastical communion is to be distinguished
from all other associations of men, such as the family,
the state, the school, in that it is based upon piety,
religion (Frömmigkeit). Religion is an immediate,
or original, experience of the self-consciousness in
the form of feeling. It is immediate, in that it is not
derived from any other experience or exercise of the
mind, but is inseparable from self-consciousness; and
it is feeling, in that it is subjective experience and not
objective idea, and in this respect it is identical with
the self-consciousness, (a) Religion is not an act of
knowledge nor the result of a process of knowing.
If it were the former, its source would lie in human
activity. If it were the latter, its content would be
doctrine, dependent upon prior processes of the intellect, and subject to all the uncertainties which pertain
Religion, then, as consisting in feeling, denotes a
state of our being, and hence in religion man is not
primarily active but receptive. It must be so, for
though in all consciousness there is a double element,
namely, the self-consciousness, or ego, and a determination of the
self-consciousness, or experience, it is impossible that the latter should be
produced by the former; because the ego is ever self-identical, but experience
Now, as we actually find ourselves in this world,
we experience a double relation, a relation of freedom and a relation of dependence, expressing respectively spontaneity and receptivity in the same subject.
As a part of that divided and articulated whole which
we call the world we stand toward it in a position of reciprocal
activity. We affect it and are affected by it. And therefore our feeling in
relation to the world is of relative freedom and relative dependence. But yet,
while it is impossible for us to have, as a part of the world, a feeling of
absolute freedom toward it, we do have in and with the world, even in the
experience of freedom toward it, a feeling of absolute dependence; and since we
have no self-consciousness independently of our place in the world-whole, the
consciousness of absolute dependence for ourselves involves the absolute
dependence of the whole world, The ground of our being and of the being of the
world is in a source beyond our being and the being of the world. This
feeling of absolute dependence is religion.
But though the term God is here used, it is not to be understood that religion avails itself of any idea of God previously obtained by information or theophany. For such an idea of God would be intellectual and sensuous and would spring from a source outside the religious experience, and therefore no place can be assigned to it in a body of Christian doctrine. In saying we are in immediate relation with God, the latter term is used only to designate the Whence of our spontaneous and receptive life, of which we be come aware in our feeling of absolute dependence. This Whence, co-posited in our consciousness, is the truly original meaning of the term God. We do not indeed reason from this feeling to the objective existence of God, but God is immediately given in the feeling of absolute dependence. Feeling, self-consciousness, properly interpreted, involves the God-consciousness. We do not hereby dispute a supposed original knowledge of the existence of God obtained in some other way, but we only assert that with such knowledge we have nothing to do in Christian doctrine.
This feeling of absolute dependence constitutes
the highest of the three stages of human consciousness:
the first, the animalistic, prevailing in infancy and
dreams, in which the antithesis of subject and object
This feeling of absolute dependence, the God-consciousness, being the highest stage of the immediate
self-consciousness, is an essential element of human
nature. (The absence of this feeling in the case of
any man or association of men could not prove that it
is only contingently related to human nature, unless
it could be shown that it is of no higher worth than
sensuous feeling, or that there are other feelings be
sides of equal value with it.) Now, every essential
NOTE.--If the religious nature is essentially social and expresses itself in the formation of churches, then it is confusing to speak of “natural religion”; because there is no natural church in existence in which the elements of such “natural religion” may be sought. It were better to speak of the religious disposition or religiosity (§§ 3-6).
(Philosophy of Religion)
The idea of history presupposes development. In
the political sphere the human race exhibits development in the progress of society through unions and
amalgamations to the tribe and the nation; in art and
science from rudeness to culture; similarly in respect
to religion. From its original home in the household
it spreads out into widely extended religious communions. But religious progress is not necessarily
parallel with the other forms. For while certain species of religion are incompatible with a low form of
civilization or culture, yet the development of piety
to the highest perfection is possible while other spiritual functions remain far behind. Nor does it follow
that, because two communities or peoples have passed
through the same number of stages of religious development, their religion will be of the same character.
Religions differ in kind as well as in their stage of
development, as may be seen in the case of widely
separated communities on the lowest stage. These
distinctions have not received much attention in the
past because the critical study of the history of religion
This twofold distinction--kinds and stages--will
serve to indicate the relation of Christianity to other
communions or modes of faith. The admission that
Christianity may occupy a stage of development similar
to that of other religions is not prejudicial to its pre-eminence or finality, but it is incompatible with the
view that Christianity stands related to other religions
as the true to the false. Were other religions mere
errors or absolutely false, how could Christianity contain so much in common with them and how could any
man make the transition to it from the others? For
error never exists in and for itself; it is a perversion
of the truth and can be understood only through its
connection with the truth. (See
The lowest stage of religious development is occupied by idolatry or fetichism, from which monolatry
is not generically distinct. In this, worship is paid
to a god whose interest and influence are confined to a
limited sphere, because the worshipers are at that
stage of mental development in which the sense of
totality has not yet been awakened. The addition of
several idols or fetiches is contingent on the discovery
of the incapacity of the first to meet all needs but in
no wise indicates higher religious aspiration. The
religious subject has not yet passed beyond that confused animalistic condition in which the distinction
The union of several objects of worship in such a way that a plurality of idols represents one essence inhering in a manifold, introduces the next stage, when idolatry passes over into polytheism proper. Here the local relations of the different deities entirely recede and the gods form an articulated, coherent, manifold exhausting the whole sphere of deity. This corresponds to a sense for plurality, multiplicity, of being, in which a One-All is presupposed and sought for. The self-consciousness is now able to make the clear distinction between subject and object--the religious feeling is accordingly reflected from various affections of the sensuous self-consciousness, so that it is impossible as yet to refer the feeling of absolute dependence to a unity rising above all sensuous apprehension. Polytheism is an intermediate stage partaking of the nature of the other two.
As the conception of the inherence of this plurality of beings in one Being rises more and more into
consciousness and the higher self -consciousness be
comes fully distinguished from the lower sensuous
consciousness, monotheism appears. It is based on the
unity of a Supreme. The self-consciousness has now
been extended so as to take in the whole world of
which we are a part; the world is apprehended as a
unity; the religious feeling is capable of connection
So soon as religion has in some place been developed up to the stage of faith in one God, it can be foreseen that all mankind is destined to attain to it; for this faith contains within itself the impulse to unlimited expansion and the power to appeal to the receptivity of all men. From this two conclusions follow: it is impossible to conceive the original condition of mankind as mere brutality, and it is impossible for any man to pass from a higher to a lower stage of religion. There is also no historical instance of either case.
On this highest stage history shows only three great communions: the Jewish, the Christian, and the Mohammedan--the first in process of extinction, the other two struggling for the mastery of the human race. Judaism, by its limitation of Jehovah’s love to the stock of Abraham, is akin to fetichism. This appeared in that tendency to idol-worship which was not eradicated till after the exile. Mohammedanism betrays by its passionate character and the strongly sensuous content of its religious ideas its affinity to polytheism. Christianity has neither of these defects; from it there can be no relapse to either of the others.
NOTE.--Since pantheism has never appeared as the confession of a historical
religious communion, it does not come into consideration
These three communions in the monotheistic stage
represent three kinds or species, because their development is on different lines. The fundamental, as contrasted with a merely empirical, distinction between
them is not to be found in a different quality of the
feeling of absolute dependence (which is absolutely
simple and therefore admits of no modifications), but
in the different ways in which the religious feeling
stands related to the sensuous experiences with which
it must be united in order to constitute a moment of
experience, an activity of life. Considering now the
whole of life as made up of action and passion in
their reciprocal operation, the relation of these to each
other as means and end gives two general types of
piety. When passion is a means to action, when it
becomes only the occasion of some activity, springing
from the God-consciousness, i.e., where the union of
the God-consciousness with the receptive experiences
which we receive from contact with the world becomes
a means of promoting personal activity in the kingdom
of God, the type of piety is teleological. Here it is
the dominant attitude to an ethical task that constitutes
Confining our attention now to those religions
which represent the highest stage we discover the
grand distinction between the three monotheistic religions. In Christianity everything is comprehended
under the conception of the kingdom of God; in it all
joy and pain and all impulses springing from passive
conditions partake of a religious character only in so
far as they promote activity in this kingdom. In Juda
ism, although the expectation of divine punishments
and rewards indicates on one side the prominence of
the sensuous element, yet the prevailing form of its
God-consciousness is that of a Governing Will and
hence passive states are ultimately subordinate to the
active. But Mohammedanism is fatalistic and subjects the ethical to the natural in that it seeks as its
end, even in its activities, the ease which results from
a favorable relation to the divine decrees. Hence,
while Christianity is wholly teleological and Judaism
Every religious community is a unit in two respects. (Compare the twofold distinction of stages and kinds, as above.) Externally, it possesses historical continuity from a definite point of beginning; internally, it puts its own characteristic stamp upon everything it possesses, even if other communions possess the same in some form. Thus as Mohammedanism arose with the Prophet, and Judaism with Moses, so Christianity began with Christ and possesses unbroken continuity to the present. Also the whole inward character of each is peculiarly its own. Christianity is not an offshoot of Judaism or a supplement to it. The sphere of religious experience in the case of these two religions is fundamentally different. In the case of the Christian religion faith in Christ must modify all pious feelings, must impart a new character to all the previously existent religious impulses, even to the God-consciousness in all the relations in which it is already present. Else Christ would be only an individual object capable of making certain impressions upon us, but no proper object of faith.
NOTE.--Positive and revealed religion: “Natural religion,”
like “natural right,” can only denote that which by a process of
mental abstraction is seen to comprehend the elements common
to all cases, and, like “natural right,” has never been and never
can be the basis of a communion. Such natural religion would
not be so much religion as doctrine. If “positive” is taken
to refer to the individualizing of this common possession, for
example in Judaism in the form of commandment, in Christianity
Though the terms “revealed” and “revelation” have
been subjected to much confusion of thought, it may
be said that they always imply the fact of a divine
communication and announcement which gave rise
to a union of individuals. Only, this original fact
constitutive of a basis of communion cannot be regarded as operative on man regarded merely as a
knowing being, for in that case the revelation would be
originally and essentially doctrine. But no super
natural energy is necessary to the production of a
combination of sentences which can be understood
from their connection with one another. Doctrines
therefore can be considered of supernatural origin only
as parts of a larger whole, as descriptions of the life-energies of a thinking Being who, as a personal
existence, works in an original way upon our self-consciousness by his advent into our sphere of life and
by the total impression of his person. This is the
original fact upon which the Christian communion
is founded. Revelation is only to be assumed where
not a single activity but a whole Existence is deter
mined by such a divine communication, and what is
then announced of such, that is to be considered as
(Apologetics)
It is the first duty of the apologist to discover and define the peculiar essence of that faith which he defends. The difficulty of doing this is very great in the case of Christianity because the Christian communion is split up into so many relatively separate communions. The apologist has to indicate not only the essence of Christianity in general but also that of the particular communion to which he adheres. This difficulty is accentuated by the variant forms of single doctrines, the diverse attitudes with which they are approached, and the many controversies which await settlement--to say nothing of the present wretched state of the science of apologetics. On this account we must content ourselves at present with the rather meager assumptions which follow.
All Christians are agreed on two points: (1) in referring the origin of their communion to Jesus of
Nazareth; (2) in the description of his work as redemption, though the term is not used by all, nor
The penances and purifications found in all religious communions are expressions of a universal
consciousness of this need of redemption, but Christianity is distinct from all other religions by regarding all its religious impulses as dependent upon the
redemption effected by Jesus of Nazareth, and also
in that this redemption is considered as perfected and
complete. The degree in which these two elements are
felt by different Christians of course varies, but neither
is ever entirely wanting. Other religions express the
need of redemption; Christianity presents its actualization;
Christianity stands in a special historical connection
with Judaism, for Christ was of the Jewish race, and
indeed it seems that a universal Redeemer could not
have arisen except from a monotheistic people. But
its relation to Judaism and heathenism were much
more alike than is commonly held. For in the time of
Christ Judaism had become permeated with many non-Jewish elements and many of the messianic promises
had been given up or misunderstood; while, on the
other hand, both Greeks and Romans had monotheistic
leanings and expectations similar to the Jewish messianic hope. The demands which Christianity made on
The appearing of the Redeemer was not a something absolutely supernatural. While Christ cannot
be considered as a product of the circumstances and
spiritual environment in which he appeared, yet he was
conditioned by them. His appearance must have been
in accordance with the laws of human nature in its
higher meaning. That is, the advent of such a life
as his may be regarded as the work of a power of development inherent in human nature from the first,
Neither was the appearing of the Redeemer some thing absolutely super-rational. If the life-energies of Christ by which he wrought the redemption could be explained from the common reason dwelling in all men, then any other could work the redemption as well as he. That the super-rational is to be posited in the Redeemer and in the redeemed, and consequently in the whole range of the operations of Christianity, has been acknowledged almost universally by its confessors. Yet the redemption is dependent upon reason in that the state of the heart which Christ conveys to men in it could not be bestowed upon an irrational soul. If there were a total separation between the work of the Holy Spirit and the highest elevation of human reason, a consciousness of the need of redemption could never rise and never be satisfied.
NOTE.--The doctrinal presentation of redemption is an entirely rational procedure, and doctrines are not to be divided into rational and super-rational, but they are all to constitute together a unitary system. In one reference all Christian doctrines are above reason in the inner experience to which they refer hence a proper appreciation of Christian doctrine cannot result from a purely scientific process. But in another reference all Christian doctrines are rational, in that all doctrinal constructions must follow the same laws of thought as propositions dealing with other matters. A distinction between rational theology and a theology which is above reason is inadmissible.
Entrance into the Christian communion is solely,
therefore, through faith in Christ as Redeemer. The
expression “faith in Christ” like “faith in God” means
the reference of our religious condition as effect to
Christ as cause. Like the feeling of absolute dependence, it is an inner certainty which accompanies
a condition of the higher self-consciousness. That
condition is one of freedom from the need of redemption and it begets in the subject an effort to draw
others into the same inner experience, an effort to
extend the communion of faith by an exposition of
the religious life in which Christ’s own activity is
present. That is to say, the representation of Christ
in the Christian communion of faith is Christ’s own self-presentation. The Christian message is,
thus, at bottom, a testimony to an inner experience
which is referred to the activity of Christ himself,
because in that presentation of his historical career
and his character which the testimony involves,
the impression made on the minds of those who believe
Like all other modifications of the self-consciousness, pious excitations have a tendency toward external
expression, as in look, movement, tone, gesture. This
is the source of systems of sacred signs and symbolic
actions. It is inevitable that in the higher stages of
mental development there should be an attempt to
apprehend religious experiences in the form of idea
Dogmatics, then, arises primarily out of the demands of the religious consciousness. As to subject-matter,
it is a description of subjective states of mind and it claims no validity
beyond that of the inner certainty which is the Christian’s possession. It is a
necessary expression of the Christian consciousness, for it appears in obedience
to the impulse of religion universally to exhibit itself and, in the case of
Christianity particularly, to the impulse to extend the redeeming
Tributary to the religious interest there is also a scientific interest to be satisfied. The human mind craves for unity, coherence, system, and the religious consciousness itself must remain unsatisfied until it has perceived the relation which faith bears to the other activities of the mind. A truly dogmatical statement must serve both of these interests, and its ecclesiastical worth is determined by its perfect correspondence with both. The same interests involve the combination of single dogmatical utterances into an interrelated and integrated whole, so that every potency of the religious consciousness in its full range may find an adequate expression.
Dogmatics stands in a derivative relation to the
Christian religious experience and not the reverse. As
to its content it is not made up of a series or system
of propositions unfolded from some objective truth
obtained by a speculative process, nor is it a combination of doctrines supernaturally revealed; because in
neither of these cases would Christian dogmatics stand
in any necessary relation to Christian piety, nor would
it possess any necessary validity for the Christian communion. Besides, since in both its origin would lie
in a source external to the Christian consciousness as
Christian piety expresses itself in the world in a multiplicity of ways, varying with the conditions of human progress in various places and ages. Its nature will, accordingly, be understood with growing perfection, as its expression in the many forms of Christian activity becomes ever more complete. Thus while dogmatics may gather its statement of doctrines from all this ever-varying and ever-growing material, it must itself ever remain incomplete, ever capable of fuller and more accurate expression, and ever in need of new scientific treatment. Dogmatic theology may be defined as “the science of the combination of the doctrines which are valid in a Christian church-communion at a given time.” From this, three conclusions may be drawn: (1) No statement of doctrines can be final but Christian dogmatics must be ever progressive; (2) Yet there is a standard for the testing of dogmatical expression the fundamental Christian self-consciousness; (3) The teacher of dogmatics must be in personal possession of the definite Christian consciousness pervading a Christian Church-communion (§§ 15-19).
In a statement of the doctrines of the Christian faith, as has been already pointed out, we cannot begin with some principle externally given and then develop from it by a dialectical process a system of doctrines; but since Christianity is a modification of the self-consciousness, Christian doctrine will be the expression of that self-consciousness and all alleged doctrines of Christianity must be tested by the same. In the course of history a great number of these in a more or less systematic form have already appeared, It is necessary, therefore, to find a rule for the testing of them and then a principle according to which they may be arranged and combined in an articulated system.
The Christian religion is historical in character,
Christian piety arises in no individual independently,
but is propagated in the Christian communion and
through it. This communion, comprehending many
individuals, is, by virtue of its common inner character,
a truly unitary life; it is one moral person existing
under conditions of spiritual sickness or health. The
fundamental basis of this communion is the peculiar
essence of Christianity, and this once ascertained, we
There are two ways of annulling the essence of Christianity while accepting the reference of the impulses of religion to Jesus redemptive activity as its basis, namely, by a wrong view cither of human nature or of the nature of the Redeemer. The result is that in neither is there implicated a participation in true Christianity. In the former case heresy arises when the redemption is accepted, but cither man’s need of it or his capacity to receive it is implicitly denied. Of those heresies which arise from a defective view of man’s nature, Pelagianism, implicitly denying man’s need of redemption, while admitting the full capacity of his nature; and Manichaeism, implicitly denying man’s capacity for redemption while admitting his need, are respectively the types embracing all.
The second class of heresies arises when the redemption is accepted but Christ’s ability to effect it
is implicitly denied. This also occurs in a twofold
NOTE.--Supernaturalism is often akin to Manichaeism and Docetism, and Rationalism to Pelagianism and Ebonitism.
The evangelical dogmatician must assume the additional task of developing the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism into clear consciousness and
of establishing it in a formula. For, just as the peculiar nature of Christianity is not to be found in an
abstract conception of religion and religious communion, so also, since the religion of the individual
and his relation to Christ does not arise or continue
in him independently of the Christian communion,
the peculiar nature of Protestantism is not to be discovered in a general conception of Christianity. For
the Reformation was no mere reform of abuses; it
NOTE.--There is no sufficient obstacle to the union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches since their doctrinal disharmonies do not rest on a fundamental difference in the religious frame of mind or a difference in morality and ethics, but they are solely an affair of the schools.
From the inherence of Christian piety in a communion it follows also that a statement of doctrine is not the mere independent opinion of an individual, but is an expression of the peculiar religious consciousness of the Christian communion in which he lives and upon which he also reacts. Thus there comes to light a characteristic of Protestantism dogmatics: it is not an inventory of doctrines finally determined; but the free play of the individual factor in religious life and reflection is combined and interrelated with the common life and doctrine of the ecclesiastical body in which he inheres and which has itself come into existence by this very activity of individuals. Protestant dogmatics possesses both an ecclesiastical character and individual peculiarity and originality, and consequently not only is but ever is becoming. The process of the transformation and development of doctrine which began at the Reformation is to go on, unhindered, indefinitely.
NOTE.--The terms orthodox and heterodox have no validity in Protestant dogmatics.
Christian dogmatics and Christian ethics are best treated separately, because, while both are expressions of a Christian religious frame of mind, and while in their combination they present the whole reality of the Christian life, the former represents a static modification of human nature, the latter represents its activity (§§ 21-26).
There already exists in ecclesiastical creeds, confessions, and doctrinal formularies a mass of professedly Christian doctrines, (a) Each one of these
separate doctrinal propositions admits of a critical
test; then the consistency one with another of all these
is to be tested in order to unite all the truly Christian
doctrines into one integral system. Every doctrine
must conform to the following conditions: (1) It
must be confessionally true, i.e., it must be a true expression of the Christian consciousness in some given
church communion; (2) it must be scripturally true,
i.e., it must be a genuine expression of that piety which
appears in the New Testament; (3) it must be scientifically true, i.e., it must be logically consistent with
other true expressions of the Christian faith and also
with the facts of the objective consciousness; the
terminology of dogmatics must be strictly scientific.
These three tests are to be applied in the order named.
Or, to put it in a word, Christian dogma must be the
self-consistent expression, dialectically exact and in
systematic form, of the common continuous Christian
That dogmas must be based on the New Testament rather than the whole Bible follows from what has been said of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, if a doctrinal statement can be shown to rest on the New Testament no additional weight can be given it by a further reference to the Old; while, if it be supported by the Old Testament alone, it cannot claim to be Christian. Further, it is quite inappropriate and misleading to import the very expressions of Scripture into a doctrinal system, for this is to overlook the difference between scientific language and the free, popular, and rhetorical usage in the Scriptures. Isolated texts are to be used only when they evidently issue from the same body of pious excitations as those which are expressed in the dogmatical propositions.
(b) The range of Christian dogmatics is deter mined by the consciousness of redemption. Within this consciousness lies a fundamental antithesis. On the one side is the need of redemption, a repression and limitation of the God-consciousness, a felt inability to erect the feeling of absolute dependence into a position of supremacy over all the activities of life. On the other side is the certainty of redemption through Jesus Christ, i.e., the God-consciousness is now put into a commanding position in all the energies of life, and this power to hold all in subjection to the religious feeling is referred to Christ. This does not imply that the consciousness of the need of redemption has disappeared; it may indeed be more vivid; but it is now specifically Christian.
Consequently, all professedly Christian doctrines
must conform to the demand that they have their
source in the Christian consciousness of redemption.
Thus it is impossible for Christian dogmatics to take
over from so-called “natural theology” descriptions
of a religious consciousness common to all men, or
the results of speculative theology, however true these
may be in themselves. Nor can this be done with
doctrines of the person of the Redeemer, relating to
a time anterior or posterior to, or apart from, his redemptive activity, or with doctrines of a state of
humanity in which men no longer feel the antithesis
implied in redemption, since those doctrines are not
expressions of the Christian consciousness, whatever
else they may be. Nor again can the discoveries of
Since all Christian piety rests upon the appearing of the Redeemer, nothing that concerns him can be set forth as distinctly Christian doctrine which does not stand in connection with his redeeming causality and is not capable of being referred back to the original impression which his existence made.
(c) As regards the framework in which dogma is to be exhibited: Since religion is in the last analysis the feeling of absolute dependence, and since that higher consciousness comes into actual supremacy over the sensuous consciousness in the Christian experience of redemption, Christian dogmatics will naturally commence with a description of the distinctively Christian consciousness. But since, as has been shown, the feeling of absolute dependence is inseparable from a world-consciousness over against which a God-consciousness stands, Christian dogmatics will also present a doctrine of the world and a doctrine of God from the standpoint of redemption.
We shall treat the historic confessional statements
under these three heads and in the order indicated.
The Christian consciousness presupposes and involves the consciousness of absolute dependence on God. But in that peculiar modification of the religious consciousness which is experienced in Christianity the exaltation of the God-consciousness from a condition of repression to a position of dominancy over all the sensuous impulses is referred to Christ, so that there can be no reference (relation) to Christ in which there is not also a reference to God. The pain which is felt at being unable to realize the supremacy of the God-consciousness is attributed to a want of communion with the Redeemer, while the satisfaction experienced in the opposite state is contemplated as an impartation which has come to us out of this communion; so that there is no religious activity or potency within the Christian communion in which a reference to Christ is not involved.
It has been pointed out already that the religious
feeling is never experienced in isolation from other
experiences but always in connection with a world-consciousness; and that the perfection of the God-
The experience of this feeling of absolute dependence is not contingent on any peculiar circum stance in human life, as though it were accidental and not absolutely constituent of human nature, nor does it vary in its character in different men, but is the same in all. The difference in degrees of perfection among men does not consist in a distinction in the quality of this feeling but is to be referred to the degree of development of the intellectual functions. (See above.) Supposed instances of a human self-consciousness which is destitute of the God-consciousness disappear on close analysis, except in those individuals whose intelligence is entirely undeveloped.
But even if our contention that the feeling of absolute dependence and the God-consciousness involved
in it constitute a potency essential to human nature
To resume: Since the Christian religious consciousness is connected with a consciousness of unity with the world on the one hand and involves the feeling of absolute dependence on God on the other, Christian dogmatics will naturally begin with a description of the religious consciousness so far as the relation between God and the world is expressed in it; it will proceed further to describe the qualities of the world and the attributes of God so far as these are involved in that relation. It may be repeated also that such a doctrine of God and of the world is not supplementary to, or to be supplemented by, a scientific or philosophical doctrine of God and the world. Christian dogmatics rests upon its own basis, namely, the Christian religious consciousness, and it is complete in itself. Whatever cannot be evolved from the religious consciousness cannot be admitted to a place in dogmatics, because it lies outside the sphere of religion.
Section I. Description of the Religious Consciousness, so Far as the Relation between God and the World Is Expressed in It
Only when we feel ourselves to have a place in that organic whole we call Nature, or, as otherwise expressed, only when we are conscious of belonging to that unity which we call the world, with its division into parts universally related to one another, do we recognize our absolute dependence upon that higher infinite unity we call God. Our absolute dependence on God involves the absolute dependence of the world also. Hence the doctrine of the world from the view point of religion is summed up in the proposition: The totality of finite being exists solely by dependence on the Infinite,
The creeds express this doctrine in the twofold
form of the creation and the preservation of the world
by God. Were not the use of these terms already established it would suffice to designate the whole relation of the world to God by either of them. If creation,
instead of denoting a divine activity which began and
ended at a definite point, were used to designate the
continuous and uninterrupted activity of God in the
world, it would include the idea of preservation. Or
if, for example, we think of the species in connection
with the individual existences embraced in it, the creation of the individuals is just the preservation of the
species and the latter would include the former. In
this way they become fairly interchangeable. The only
distinction between these two conceptions is that the
The doctrine of preservation more suitably sets
forth the fundamental religious consciousness. It has
been pointed out already that the highest development
of the self-consciousness involves a consciousness of
our being a part of the articulated world-whole, and
this again is a condition of the highest development of
the God-consciousness. Hence the highest knowledge
of the world and the highest knowledge of God are
interdependent, being a twofold expression of one and
the same self-consciousness. Scientific and religious
conceptions of the world are not antagonistic but complementary. The divine preservation of the world and
universal natural causality are one and the same thing
viewed from different standpoints. The affirmation
of our religious consciousness that all that affects us
exists in a relation of absolute dependence on God
falls into line with the intuition that all is conditioned
and determined by the world-order. If the common
idea were true that the religious and the scientific view
of things are mutually exclusive and that when the
religious consciousness is more lively the scientific
activity will be correspondingly weaker, and conversely, then the growth of scientific knowledge would
result in the gradual extinction of piety, and the interests of religion would be opposed to all research
and further extension of knowledge--altogether in
NOTE.--The distinction between general and special preservation is opposed to the universal interests of religion, and so also is the distinction between preservation and co-operation, for they imply the operation of forces which do not proceed from God. To add to these the idea of divine government is to make further confusion, for it introduces the antithesis of means and end to God, which implies a difference in the degrees of the immediacy of the relation of things to God.
Because of the prominence which is given to the
subject, particularly in apologetic writings, it is pertinent to apply the principles here enunciated to the subject of
miracles. It is commonly supposed that an
event which lies outside the fixed order of nature and
which cannot, therefore, be accounted for by natural
causality, has a special religious value because the
divine causality is demanded for its explanation. But
If it be urged that the Christian belief in the hearing of prayer and the new birth demands a belief in miracles it may be replied here (though these subjects are to be treated later) that our view relates prayer to the divine preservation so that the prayer and its fulfilment or non-fulfilment are only parts of the one original divine order of things. As to the new birth--if the revelation of God in Christ is not something absolutely supernatural then Christian piety cannot require that anything which coheres with that revelation, and issues from it, be absolutely supernatural. Yet it is to be noted that our knowledge of the relations of the physical and spiritual is too limited to warrant a denial of the historicity of certain remark able events related in the New Testament. But this is a question for scientific investigation and not for dogmatics.
The operation of influences which constitute
limitations upon our life is not to be denied.
There is a difficulty in connecting them with God.
for it seems to make him the source of evil, including
the morally bad. While dogmatics has nothing to do
The idea of these spiritual existences is brought
over from the Old Testament into the New Testament
As to bad angels, every attempted doctrinal representation of them is full of self-contradictions. As
to the doctrine of a supreme bad spirit called the devil,
whatever may be the source of the idea--whether in the belief in a servant of
God who announces the evil doings of men, or in oriental dualism with its doctrine
of absolute evil, or in the Jewish view of the angel
of death--it can have no place in Glaubenslehre (a
doctrine of faith). For if there is a personal actual
existence absolutely opposed to God, a religious view
of the world is impossible and faith in the Redeemer
is compromised. For if the devil be a part of the
world-whole, then God as absolute causality is not
present to the whole of existence, the totality of
experience cannot be referred to God, and religion
ceases to be fundamental to human nature as a part
Section 2. Doctrine of God. The Divine Attributes Which Are Implicated in the Religious Self-Consciousness so Far as It Expresses the Relation between God and the World
If, as has been pointed out, the feeling of absolute
dependence, which is the essence of religion, is implicated in the specifically Christian consciousness, and
Such a doctrine of God is not to be viewed as a
description of God in himself, for we possess no objective knowledge of God; and even if such were
possible, it could not become a part of our discipline;
because, as it does not spring out of the religious
feeling but stands in an external relation to it, such
knowledge, if introduced into dogmatics, would constitute an alien element destroying its unity. The
usual method followed in the discussion of this subject has produced confusion and a contradiction of
the religious feeling. The various experiences of the
religious spirit which have been expressed in poetry
or popular discourse have been handled by the dogmaticians in a speculative way, as if they constituted
a sum of knowledge about God. The necessity of
divesting such expressions of their figurative and
anthropomorphic form by a critical process before
they can be utilized as material for a scientific statement has produced a skepticism in regard to religion,
because it has become plain that in those ways no
actual scientific knowledge of God was furnished.
Instead of such “natural” or “rational” theology,
we must found our science upon the simple fundamental feeling of absolute dependence which (since
man is receptive in this experience) furnishes us with
the divine causality as the principle of dogmatics.
Hence the attributes that may be ascribed to God
will be those which express the various ways in which
the feeling of absolute dependence is referred to God
as the absolute causality. We necessarily posit absolute causality in God as that from which the feeling
of absolute dependence is the reflection in our self-consciousness. There are various modifications of
this feeling, that is, it is referred to God in various
ways; and hence arises the necessity of positing in
God attributes which correspond to the various ways
of referring the fundamental religious feeling to God.
Now these modifications arise from our relation to the
To carry out more fully the comparison with the finite, we may represent the absolute divine causality from the religious standpoint as follows:
1. God is eternal--that is: because no moment of
time can be disconnected with God, the religious consciousness relates the world to God as the power
2. God is omnipresent--that is: the religious spirit, because it admits no place in the whole world to be destitute of a religious stimulus, declares that the causality of God is absolutely unspatial but conditions all that is spatial and space itself. It cannot be said that there is a difference in the degree of his presence in different places, as, e.g., the spirit of man compared with dead forces; the only difference is in the receptivity of various existences. “Immensity” is objectionable, for it imports spatiality into the being of God.
3. God is almighty--that is: the articulated totality of nature with its universal connection of causes and effects is grounded in the infinite causality of God and is a perfect expression of it, and consequently all actually happens to which there exists a causality in God. What has not happened could not have happened. To make a distinction between the actual and the possible, or between God’s power and God’s will is to create confusion.
4. God is omniscient--that is: the divine omnipotence is to be conceived as absolute spirituality. We
cannot speak of the divine perception, experience,
comprehension, or vision, for these involve a sensuous
Unity, infinity, and simplicity are commonly classed with the four above-named attributes of God, but they can be admitted only if they possess dogmatical content.
a) As to unity.--Numerical unity is an attribute of nothing; the unity of existence and essence, like that of the individuals and the species, belongs to speculative thought. For the religious consciousness the expression “unity of God” signifies that the unity of all pious excitations is given with the same certainty as these excitations themselves. Accordingly unity is not so much a single attribute as it is the mono theistic canon which underlies all investigation into the divine attributes and is as little capable of proof as the divine existence itself.
b) As to infinity.--This means negation of limitation. To predicate infinity of God amounts to a
precaution against attributing anything to God which
c) As to simplicity.--It is used to negate materiality in God, to exclude the idea of parts or combination in him, in short, divine participation in anything whereby we designate the finite as such. As infinity is an attribute of all attributes, so simplicity expresses only the unseparated and inseparable mutual involution of all divine attributes and activities. As infinity guards against the predication of anything in God that is thought within limits, so simplicity is a precaution against attributing to God anything which essentially pertains to the sphere of antithesis (§§ 50-56).
Section 3. Doctrine of the World. The Nature of the World,
Which Is Implied in the Religious Self-
Consciousness, so Far as It Expresses
the Universal Relation between
God and the World
Since the religious consciousness expresses a relation between God arid the world, it implies a religious
view of the world-constitution. The doctrinal statement which describes that view will be the answer
to the following question: If the consciousness of
absolute dependence on God arises only in connection
with the world, how must the religious self-consciousness view the world which excites this experience?
Consequently, such a doctrine of the world is not to
be confounded with a scientific account of it or to
The religious principle is an essential and universal element in human nature, but this principle never comes into consciousness except under the influence of impressions received from the world, of which human nature is an integral part. Further, that the God-consciousness be connected with every experience is a demand upon our nature; consequently every world-impression must be capable of exciting the religious feeling. Otherwise the God-consciousness would be only a contingent feature of human existence, and God’s eternal, living omnipotence would be unable to obtain expression in the world. That is to say, if all finite being as it affects our consciousness is refer able to the eternal almighty Causality, the world must be such a world that every impression it makes upon us tends to produce in us the religious feeling. In other words, the religious consciousness presupposes the original (i.e., independent of special circum stances) perfection of the world. This is not to be understood as the equivalent of a doctrine of a definite condition of the world, past, present, or future, but it refers to the permanent ever self-identical relations which underlie all historical events. Such a perfection is ideal, never provable, and never demonstrably realized, but for our consciousness it is necessarily postulated as the presupposition of all world-history. The world-history is the developing, but ever incomplete, manifestation of that perfection.
But the self-consciousness is not exhausted in that identity with the world of which we are aware in our consciousness of dependence, along with the world, on God; for in self-consciousness we also recognize the antithesis between ourselves and the world. Hence a religious view of the world involves, besides a doctrine of the original perfection of the world, a doctrine of the original perfection of man.
1. The Original Perfection of the World
Since this original perfection of the world is a postulate of the self-consciousness, it can be a doctrine of the world, not as it is in itself, but only as related to man, the religious being. The relations between man and the world are twofold--each acts upon, and is acted upon by, the other. The perfection of the world in relation to man is therefore likewise twofold: (1) By means of the human physical frame, which both unites him to the world and becomes the organ of his spirit in relation to the world, it affects him on the real side; and on the ideal side it presents itself as knowable by him, and thus furnishes to him every where and at all times incitements to activity; it both supplies to him sensation and stimulates his powers of knowledge. (2) As receptive of man’s activity and through the physical organism which is operated by his activity, the world offers itself to man as the organ of his self-expression; and as he thus extends his dominion over it more and more, it awakens in him the consciousness of the divine causality as that of which his own is an image.
NOTE.--This doctrine of the original perfection of the world is to be distinguished from that doctrine of the world which represents the present world as the best out of many possible worlds, and as well from that of a former condition of the world which has passed away and has been changed into the present imperfect world. The former is the product of rationalistic speculation; since the time of Leibnitz particularly, it has been assigned a place in so-called natural or rational theology. It is not a product of the religious consciousness, and it at tributes to God such anthropomorphic conceptions as mediate knowledge and alternative choice. The latter doctrine has sprung from the narrative in Genesis and the legendary lore of many peoples; it appears in the story of a prehistoric golden age. On the one hand, as bare history, it could have no dogmatical importance; and, on the other hand, it destroys the entirety of the divine control and preservation of the world, and so is prejudicial against the religious feeling.
2. The Original Perfection of Man
As the original perfection of the world is perceived
only in reference to man, so the original perfection of
man is here considered only in reference to God. The
God-consciousness appears in the feeling of absolute
dependence. This feeling of absolute dependence,
as has been said before, occurs always in connection
with the sensuous consciousness; the tendency to the
God-consciousness thus appears as a condition in
separable from human nature, because this tendency
is experienced in the character of a demand upon
human nature to rise to that state in which the human
soul is conscious of communion with God. Now piety
(religion) consists in this, that we are conscious of
But besides this inner impulse to arrive at the realization of the God-consciousness, and inseparable from
it, there is an impulse to externalize this religious feeling, that is, to communicate to others that same religious feeling; and this is the same as to establish a
communion (association) among men based upon
that religious feeling. With this impulse is involved
the adaptability of human nature to circulate and appropriate the religious consciousness. In short, the
self-consciousness, which is fundamentally religious,
by development necessarily becomes a race-consciousness, and the possibility of this is grounded in human
nature itself. Out of this original perfection of human
nature proceeds the possibility of the propagation of
But as to the degree in which the religious consciousness has been developed in particular men, that is a matter for the historian and not for the dogmatician. Accordingly all that dogmatics may predicate of primitive man is: since religion is a necessary and universal element of human nature, it must have existed in primitive man to the extent that he was able to communicate it to posterity. Religion must be as old as the human race. When, however, men speak of an “original righteousness” in Adam, they make the mistake of taking as a type of righteousness a mere original capacity for development out of which no positive gain came to mankind since, according to the common view, that “righteousness” was lost; whereas, the true manifestation of righteousness is to be sought in Christ, in whom it came as a gain to all mankind. Summarily then, original perfection pertains to human nature, in that man possesses the original capacity of connecting all his experiences with God, that he is capable of propagating that same religious attitude to all men, and that all men are consequently capable of receiving it (§§ 57-61).
Introductory
There is no self-conscious human existence from
which the God-consciousness is entirely absent, yet
In the Christian religion, as teleological in character, all experience is judged by its relation to the activities of life. Accordingly, when the Christian looks back to his former state, just described, he regards the repression of the God-consciousness in himself ^s proceeding from his own act and not from an external source; from his present point of view religious feeling in him was subjected to sensuous experience by his own act of alienation from God; that is, he is conscious of it as sin.
But now in relation to the God-consciousness his
experience is one of enjoyment, pleasure, satisfaction.
The God-consciousness has now come to its rightful
position of supremacy in the activities of life, and
sensuous experiences are subjected to it. He has
entered into communion with God. And this turning
to God it is impossible for him to refer to his own
activity, for alienation from God is his own original
Consequently, redemption involves the consciousness of sin and the consciousness of grace. These
two essential elements of Christian experience are to
be understood only in relation to one another. This
antithesis in experience never disappears though it
is true that the former element, by means of the latter,
continually diminishes. As in the pre-Christian state
the God-consciousness was not extinct but subjected
to sensuous control, so now in the state of grace the
consciousness of sin is not extinct but is steadily
diminished as the energies of life become increasingly
The framework in which the doctrines of sin and grace are to be exhibited will be the same as in Part I, and for a similar reason.
If it be attempted to set forth a doctrine of sin
in and for itself, such a doctrine could not form a
consistent whole with that, already exhibited, of the
religious consciousness in general. First, as man’s own act it would appear contradictory to the tendency
to the development of the God-consciousness as a
living impulse in man, and inconsistent with the original perfection of human nature. Second, since in the
Section 1. Sin as the State of Man (§§ 66-74)
The method adopted in this work requires that
sin be treated from the standpoint of the personal
consciousness. Sin and the consciousness of sin are
not to be separated. It is an experience of the God-consciousness being hindered by sensuousness from
controlling the activities of life and it is expressed in
a feeling of pain, dissatisfaction. But no activities of
life, not even those which are governed by the impulses of religion, are without the appearing of sin
in consciousness, at least in germ, in some way--
Thus sin is a historical phenomenon in human
consciousness and pertains to all peoples and ages.
Its appearance indeed is the outcome of the perpetuation in some degree of an earlier sensuous state in
which the higher functions of human nature had not
yet been differentiated. Now, were the development
of the capacities of human nature regular and unbroken, there would be no consciousness of the repression of the higher spiritual nature by the lower
and sensuous; if the normal unfolding of the judgment were always accompanied by a parallel development of the powers of will, then there would be no
consciousness of the control of spirit by flesh, no consciousness of sin, or, to state it in equivalent terms,
no sin. But as a matter of fact judgment and will
power are unevenly developed. Of that we are
conscious as sin, and this very sin-consciousness is
conditioned by the presence of the higher, the religious, consciousness. Therefore
sin does not annul
the original perfection of man. But for that original
perfection there could be no sin. Sin is conditioned
by the very capacity for the development of the God-consciousness: a bad conscience would be an impossibility but for the persistent consciousness of a
But, on the other hand, sin is not conformable with that original perfection of human nature. Were it so, i.e., were it only a consciousness which we have of good, yet lacking when individual acts and states are held in mind, sin would be unavoidable. But this would be incompatible with the redemption, for we may feel the need of redemption and may be capable of receiving it only in case sin is unavoidable. There fore the defect of will-power in comparison with the judgment must be viewed as a confusion and damage produced in our nature. And since it is the Christian redemption which gives validity to the consciousness of sin (for sin is only in relation to redemption), the clear and full consciousness of sin cannot arise out of the precepts of the law, but from the appearing in history of a God-consciousness which developed to an absolute strength, i.e., from the manifestation in history of a sinlessly developed human perfection, which is seen in the person of the Redeemer. If this had not appeared in him, there could be no hope that it could ever appear in us.
While, however, it is true that we come to a
consciousness of sin in connection with personal activities and as our own act, when the self-consciousness
widens itself from the individual to the family, from
the family to the state, and from the state to the race
(for the self-consciousness in its widest range is a
1. Hereditary Sin
There is, then, a sinfulness already present in
every man before he commits acts of sin, and coming
from a source beyond his own individual existence.
But in what does this sinfulness consist? It must
consist in a relation to the possession of the God-consciousness as the good of man. It is not, there
fore, something of positive nature in itself, but a
defect consisting in a total inability to bring the activities of one’s nature under the control of the religious
feeling, Not that a total incapacity in relation thereto,
and so a total absence of all good, is thereby presupposed, for the redemption
and the preaching of it imply such a capacity as the indispensable condition of
its effectuation, and without it salvation would be such a total remaking of
human nature as would render redemption unmeaning; or, were it impossible to
remove that inability entirely, sin would be some thing infinite in itself and
the redemption impossible. That capacity to receive the God-consciousness is,
then, not: a good in itself, but a good in relation to the redemption and, as we
shall see, the product of it; and so it cannot be reckoned in any sense as
personal righteousness. That good in human nature is, however,
But can there be personal guilt in relation to that which comes from beyond the individual himself? Not if this original sin fulness be sundered from connection with the actual sins in which it appears and be viewed as a something existing in itself. But that would remove it beyond the range of Christian piety (which is ever teleological), and therefore beyond the range of dogmatics. The guilt of sin is the individual’s because the act of sin is his, but the guilt is not the isolated individual’s, for the individual cannot be isolated. The self-consciousness in its full significance is a race-consciousness. The whole race is a unity, the constituent members of which propagate their activity everywhere and at all times. Every individual act of sin is, on the one hand, caused by other sins and, on the other hand, causative of other sins, it is both propagated by antecedent sin fulness and propagates sinfulness. The consciousness of sinfulness is a common, universal consciousness. The individual thus represents the whole race both in space and time; his act is the act of the race and his guilt a race guilt. (This is the truth which is relatively described in the common theological terms, reatus, corruptio naturae, vitium originis, morbus originis, etc.)
From the standpoint of the self-consciousness
widened to a race-consciousness, the race-consciousness is a sin-consciousness. Yet the tendency to the
God-consciousness is never wanting and the effort
But the common doctrine that universal sin fulness
in the race is the product of an alteration of human
nature effected by an act of our first parents cannot
be accepted. For if Adam’s nature before the fall
were different from his nature afterward and from
universal human nature now; then, in the first place,
the unity of the race would be destroyed and there
could be no race-consciousness; and, in the second
place, it involves the impossible assumption that an
individual can so operate upon his own nature and
that of all succeeding generations as to destroy it.
The impossibility of accounting in this way for the
change appears in the attempts of theologians to account for the first sin by attributing it to unbelief,
pride, lust, ambition, etc., all of which presuppose it.
And this failure is inevitable since no individual can
act from outside his own nature, but only within it.
Or else such attempts involve the assumption of a
hopelessly bad being, the devil, and so lead to Manichaeism. We cannot accept the unity of the race
except on the ground of a common consciousness.
Consequently Adam’s nature was related to his own
sin in the same way as our nature to our sin. The
derivation of our sinfulness from a first individual
act of sin committed by our first parents can never
2. Actual Sin
That hereditary sin is ever breaking forth in actual
sin is an expression of the Christian consciousness.
For first, the clearness with which we perceive that
we are never free from sin is proportioned to the
clearness with which the Redeemer is presented to our
self-consciousness; and second, our consciousness of
sin is not empirical or contingent, but universal
and necessary. That is, it is not as isolated individuals
we are conscious of sinning, but as a constituent part
of the totality of mankind, and hence we are as certain that others constantly commit sin as we are of
our own sinning. Thus the consciousness of universal
sinfulness and of universal sinning are the same viewed
from different points; were they really separable, our
Apart from their relation to the redemption, there
are no distinctions of worthiness among men in respect to sin, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. When, for example, one man appears better
than another on the ground of possessing a more
powerful religious consciousness, on the other hand
he must appear worse, so soon as we consider that the
actual sins he does commit indicate a stronger opposition to the spirit on the part of the flesh. The disposition to separate ourselves as better than others
disappears with a vivid conception of the person of the
Redeemer, for with it we become vividly conscious
of our implication in the universal sinfulness and
equally conscious that the Redeemer stands out of
connection with it. But there is a distinction between
men according as they partake of the Redeemer’s God-consciousness or are destitute of it. In all men the
God-consciousness and the sin-consciousness so exist,
only in the case of the redeemed the God-consciousness gradually prevails over the sin-consciousness,
rendering all the activities of the nature good; while
in the case of the unredeemed the case is the reverse.
Hence the sins of the redeemed are pardonable because
Section 2. The Nature of the World in Relation to Sin: Doctrine of Evil (§§ 75-78)
Since a doctrine of the world has a place in dogmatics only in so far as regards the world’s relations
to man, there can be no discussion here of sin as affecting the constituent elements of the world, but only
of the relations which exist between man and the
world on account of sin. Those relations may be
comprehended in the two statements: that on account
of sin the world appears different to man, and that the
effect of sin is to destroy the original harmony between
man and the world. According to the doctrine, al
ready set forth, of the original perfection of man and
of the world, human life is not opposed or hindered
in the exercise of its energies by the forces of nature,
but all that is in the world in its operation upon human nature, even when it
produces weakness, sickness, and death, must be promotive of the higher
consciousness,
Sin and evil are therefore related to each other as
cause and effect. To reverse this relation and make
evil the cause of sin is to contradict the teleological
nature of Christianity, to turn ethic into aesthetic,
and to deny the Christian conception of God. Evil
is the effect, and, as referred to the divine causality
(for it cannot be referred to the operation of any
being or force outside of God), the punishment of
sin--social evil, immediately, on account of the directness of men’s relations to one another, and natural
evil, mediately. But this is incapable of application
to the individual in his isolation from the rest of
mankind. For as sin, properly understood, is the act
of the race in its entirety, and as the guilt is a race-guilt, so also evil in its totality is the punishment of
the race in its unity. Otherwise the true conception
Section 3. The Attributes of God Which are Related to the Consciousness of Sin (§§ 70-85)
In the religious consciousness all experience is referred to the absolute causality of God; therefore sin and evil as elements of that consciousness imply divine attributes which are comprehended in the divine causality or omnipotence. For us sin exists as a universal fact of consciousness. Therefore there is a sense in which God is the author of sin; but, on the other hand, in the Christian consciousness sin and grace are antithetical, and therefore, if there is not an antithesis within the divine nature, God cannot be the author of sin in the same sense in which he is the author of grace.
Now it has been shown that neither sin nor grace
exists in and for itself but each only in relation to
the other; both are implicated in redemption. The
solution of the difficulty in connection with the reference of sin to God cannot, therefore, be found by making a distinction between God’s permission and God’s decree, for these are equivalent to his preservation
and creation, which for the religious consciousness
are the same. But the solution is found thus: In
The Pelagian attempts at a solution by attributing sin and grace, as regards the exertion of energy in them, to man alone, abandons a practical (ethico-religious) interest, which postulates the impartation of a perfectly pure moral impulse, in the divine omnipotence to a theoretical interest, which advocates a similar relation to God on the part of all forms of living activity; for the denial of the operation of divine causality in redemption makes the redemption a mere seeming. The Manichaeans, on the contrary, sacrifice the theoretical interest to the practical by confining the exercise of divine causality to grace and denying it to sin (which supposes the operation of another will independently of the divine and limiting its operation), so that the feeling of absolute dependence, and with it, the absolute divine causality, is lost.
Hence if we are not, with the Manichaeans, to ascribe to sin an existence in itself, independent and op
posed to God; or, with the Pelagians, to minimize and
gradually annul the antithesis of sin and grace, the ecclesiastical doctrine that God is not the author of sin
but that it is founded in human freedom, needs
amendment. For while it is true that every act of
sin is the definite act of the individual himself and
is neither to be charged to a nature which is common
to all men nor to other individuals, yet human freedom, to be real, must be grounded in the divine causality, and consequently human sin, if it be mere
appearance, must have the same ground. The consciousness of sin, and therefore sin itself, pertains to
the truth of our existence--but only in relation to
redemption. The consciousness of sin is the consciousness of an opposition to the divine will that is to be
removed. These conditions, namely, that the God-consciousness is to be developed in men through the
gradual annulling of an opposition in man to the
divine will, have themselves been appointed by God.
For an absolute contradiction to the will of God, i.e.,
absolute obduracy, does not pertain to human existence. That is, God has ordered sin as that which
makes the redemption necessary. Sin is ordered of
God because otherwise the redemption also could not
be ordered of him, and, therefore, not sin in-and-for-itself, but sin in reference to the redemption. . . . . It is ordered of God that natural imperfections should be
apprehended by us as evil in the measure in which the
From this the doctrine of evil follows naturally. Sin being the joint guilt of the race, evil is its joint punishment. Evil is thus produced by human freedom, but is grounded ultimately in the divine causality. But evil is not in-and-for-itself, but only in reference to sin, as sin also is only in reference to the redemption. Consequently evil becomes a source of a stimulus to the consciousness of the need of redemption. Other wise evil would seem to be joined to sin by arbitrary divine determination.
Since all divine attributes must be viewed as modes of the divine causality, and sin and evil are ultimately grounded in the divine causality, the divine attributes which correspond with sin and evil will be the divine holiness and righteousness.
1. God is Holy
Those actions which flow from the God-consciousness possess such a worth in our self-consciousness
2. God is Righteous
Similarly the righteousness of God is that attribute which corresponds to our consciousness of the connection between actual sins and evil. Evil is indeed the effect of the universal sin fulness, as has been shown; but evil is apprehended as evil, i.e., as punishment of sin, only in and with the consciousness of actual sin. But with this consciousness of actual sin is involved the universal sin fulness of man and hence universal desert of punishment in man. Hence the divine righteousness is the divine causality apprehended as producing in the human soul the consciousness of the desert of punishment. And as the idea of desert of punishment, or the idea of evil as necessarily connected with sin, has meaning only in reference to the redemption, so also it is only in reference to the redemption that the divine righteousness is fully to be understood. If it be objected that this definition makes no room in the idea of righteousness for the reward of well doing, among other things we may say in reply that the Christian consciousness admits no actual rewards but regards all rewards as undeserved and therefore referable to the divine grace.
Our exposition brings out the truth that the divine holiness and righteousness cohere but at the same time are differentiated (§§ 84, 85).
Introductory
While the consciousness of sin is a personal experience, it relates not merely to the individual but
embraces the collective life of mankind. It is as a
member of the body of humanity, as a participant in
its common life, that he is conscious of sin and unblessedness. To this universal condition testify the
confessions, offerings, purifications, and penances in
all religions. While these are usually aimed at the
avoidance of punishment rather than the extinction
of sin their inevitable failure to remove unhappiness
amounts to an expression of an inclination toward
Christianity as that religion in which is found a Redeemer in whom appears the substance instead of the
shadow. Moral development of the peoples tends
in the same direction, because with moral progress
there is a sharpening and intensification of the dissatisfaction connected with moral failure. And
although for the distinctively Christian consciousness
there is an acknowledgment of the unavoidability of
sin and an assurance of its gradual disappearance,
these convictions are the outcome of the growing
power of the God-consciousness and are consequently
accompanied by a more painful sense of the need of
redemption and of the hopelessness of its removal
by the personal efforts of men, because these efforts
must partake of the sinful character of that common
life of humanity from which they issue. Hence in
The Christian experience of a growing dominancy
of the God-consciousness and, in the same degree, of
a growing blessedness, is not owing to any definite
form of activity or of conditions, such as devout
meditation or ascetic practices (for these have content
of happiness only in so far as they contribute to the
performance of those activities which one’s vocation
calls for), but it is owing to participation in a new
community which springs from the divine operation.
That is to say, the Kingdom of God has come and the
collective life of this new community constitutes it.
This new life in men is by faith referred to Jesus
Christ as its author, which is the same as to say that
in him the kingdom of God appears. This Christian
experience has indeed its source in Christ, but it never
exists apart from the Christian community. The
acceptance of the former with a denial of the latter
involves separatism and fanaticism and is destructive
of the essence of Christianity, because, in supposing
that an individual could have, as it were, Christ for
himself alone, it annuls the definite historical continuity of Christianity and renders an actual propagation
of the activity of Christ impossible. The reverse attitude, i.e., the acceptance of the communal character
of Christianity, with a denial of the necessity of a
reference to Christ personally, makes his historical
appearance only a link in a chain of prophets, supposes
that the new community could arise out of the old
If we ask: In what way specifically is the redemption wrought by Christ? the answer is: By an impartation of his sinless perfection through the communion
founded by him. The affirmation that Jesus possessed
sinless perfection does not admit of proof in the
ordinary sense. The Scripture proof fails because,
uncertainties of meaning aside, all it can show is that
this was the original form of Christian faith. The
proof by reference to miracles and prophecies fails
because it could only show how the primitive Christian faith arose and, besides, it is purely external. Our
proposition is not to be understood as equivalent to an
assertion that at a time when the consciousness of
sin both as personal and collective was powerful in
many men, all that was necessary was that a moral
pre-eminence should fitly exhibit itself in a public
life in order to bring about an ascription to such an.
individual of the desired sinless perfection as the only
possible succor of men. For this is as if it were said
that faith had constituted Jesus the Redeemer. It
would involve a gradual diminution of the certainty
of his value as we become farther removed from the
original impression of his person, and it would make
room for the expectation of another to whom that
perfection might be ascribed more worthily. But our
meaning is that the acknowledgment of that perfection
The existence of this illimitable power of the God-consciousness in Christ and its operation within the human race may be regarded as supernatural or as natural, according to the point of view taken. In view of the human race constituting a collective life which naturally propagates sin, this communication coming from a power without it is a supernatural work. But in relation to the Redeemer himself the existence of this new collective life is no miracle but the normal working of that supernatural power in its assumption of natural ethical forms and in its appropriation to itself of the material surrounding it. Similarly of the individual’s transition from the old collective life into the new; in relation to his former life the change is of supernatural origin, because it arises from a source beyond that old life; but in respect to the new life it is a natural event because it is its normal mode of activity. In the initiative divine activity is the supernatural, but by virtue of the living human receptivity the supernatural takes on historical, natural form. But the perfect connection between the old stage of human existence and the new stage brought in by the advent of the Redeemer lies only in the unity of the divine thought.
Now sin, in and for itself, is non-existent for God
and no object of his counsel; so also a redemption
merely in reference to sin can be no object of the
divine counsel. But since sin consists in the inability
to realize the God-consciousness, therefore the sin-consciousness
The unfolding of the consciousness of grace in the same framework as was used for the unfolding of the consciousness of sin will accordingly complete the dogmatic (§§ 86-90).
Section I. The State of the Christian so Far as He Is Conscious of Divine Grace (§§ 91-112)
In all the various forms of Christianity the fundamental element of every Christian’s consciousness of grace is that of fellowship with God only in a life-fellowship with Christ of such a sort that in our need of redemption we are freely receptive to his free self-originated activity in the communication of his absolutely sinless perfection and blessedness. These two elements, Christ’s activity and our receptivity thereto, will yield for us a discussion of the manner in which the Redeemer and the redeemed appear in the Christian consciousness of grace, in two divisions. In the first division will appear those propositions concerning Christ which are immediate expressions of this consciousness of grace; and in the second, those propositions which describe the relation between grace and the state of sin in the human soul, as that relation is mediated by Christ.
In the doctrine of Christ we may take our starting-point either from his
person or from his activity.
These are inseparable and each finds in the other its
full expression. It is in respect of his work that we
treat him as Redeemer; we set him over against
all other men in such a way that their conscious
blessed relation to God is ascribed solely to him
as the author of it and not in any degree to themselves or others. But this is to ascribe an exclusive
1. The Person of Christ
The Christian communion as a union of men
produced through participation in a common religious
life, as a union moreover into which all other religious
associations are destined to pass, finds that life entirely
in Christ, and owes the exercise of all its activities
to him as their source. Accordingly the worth of
the Redeemer must be so conceived as to account for
this effect. This religious energy, i.e., the power of
the God-consciousness, must have existed in him in a
If it be objected that in the Christian communion
the religious condition is never absolutely perfect,
but is ever in need of development, and that, therefore,
it is not necessary to attribute to the Redeemer such
an archetypal character, but only such a character as
served for the prefiguration of the end which the
communion ever strives to attain; and hence that such
ascriptions of dignity to Christ are only the hyperbole
of believers, we reply: If this were the case, with the
widening of the personal self-consciousness to a race-consciousness, i.e., so as to include the whole race,
there must arise a hope and expectation of some time
surpassing Christ, at least in the case of the noblest
of its members; but as a matter of fact such a hope
never has arisen and never could arise without destroying that very communion whose development is sup
posed to produce the hope; and further, if this
absolutely perfect religious energy did not exist in
Christ, it would be impossible to account for the
possession of such an archetype by the Christian communion. It can have arisen within the religious
If it be further objected that the imperfect human conditions, the unperfected state of language, of science, etc., in which Christ’s life was lived, rendered the appearing of such an archetype impossible and that he must constitute only a link, though an important one, in that gradual, continuous religious evolution which can be traced from early Jewish life, we may reply; At that rate Christ would be only a more or less original and revolutionary reformer of Jewish law and such a new communion as has actually arisen would be impossible; and further, since in such a case his life could only have been the product of that general sinful life of which men universally partake, the experience of redemption through him could never have occurred and the claim of Christianity finally to draw all other religions to itself and to develop out of itself ever-increasing perfection and blessedness could never have arisen.
The only possible explanation of the appearing of
Christ in the sphere of human life is that it was a
miraculous manifestation; his personal spiritual life
sprang by a creative divine act from the universal
fountain of spiritual life, so that the idea of man, as
the subject of the God-consciousness found in him
historically an absolute realization. Or to state it
differently: From his birth onward, along with the
gradual unfolding of his natural powers, the God-consciousness possessed
absolute control over the energies
The Redeemer, then, possessed sameness of nature with all other men. His freedom from sin does not annul his perfect identity with the race, since, as we have seen, sin does not pertain to the essence (Wesen) of man, but is rather a destruction of his nature, as is implied in the very consciousness of sin as guilt. Yet his activity, or the peculiar personal worth which conditioned it, is not thereby compromised or made attributable to other men. Faith in Christ implies that he held such a relation to the human race as none other could have, i.e., owing to the absolute power of the God-consciousness in him, his person was archetypal, which is the same as to say that God was present in him as a person.
We cannot speak with truth of the presence of
God in any individual thing or in man but only of his
presence in the world. Not in any individual thing,
for this would imply division in God. Not in man,
for neither man’s activity nor his rational thought in
But if, on the other hand, he shared in common with us the whole process of natural human development, yet without being involved in human sin, the beginning of his life must be regarded as an original act of human nature, i.e., an act of human nature as not affected by sin. And thence onward to the completion of his life there must have been such a filling of his nature with the God-consciousness as completely exhausted human receptivity. Therefore we may regard the beginning of Christ’s life as the perfected creation of human nature. As the creation of the first Adam constituted the self-propagating physical nature of man, so the appearing of the second Adam constituted for the same human nature its new self-propagating spiritual life. Both rest on one indivisible, eternal, divine decree, and they form in the higher sense one and the same (though beyond the grasp of our thought) coherent unitary Nature.
Proceeding from this standpoint, the current doctrinal formulae, which in large measure have arisen from speculative, apologetic, and polemic interests, may be subjected to critical treatment and restatement.
1. “In Jesus Christ the divine nature and human
nature were united in one person.” The aim of those
passages in the historic creeds which so describe the
Redeemer is doubtless to inculcate the possibility of a
communion between him and us in the new common
life which he originated, and at the same time to express the being of God in him; from which follows
that in our relation to him unlimited veneration for
him and brotherly fellowship with him are combined.
But the terms of the creedal statement are open to
criticism: First, the name Jesus Christ is used to designate not only the subject of the union of the two natures
but also the divine nature of the Redeemer before its
union with the human; so that the union appears no
longer as a moment (potency) constituting the person
Jesus Christ, but rather as the act of this person
himself. Whereas, in the New Testament the name
Jesus Christ is used only of the subject of this union.
Second, the use of the term nature in reference to both
the divine and the human is confusing. Besides, the
terms God and nature represent opposite conceptions in
our thought. Nature properly denotes the sum of finite
existences, the manifold phenomenal world in contrast
with the unconditional and the absolutely simple. We
cannot use the term natural properly of God. The
creeds betray here the play of heathen ideas. Third,
It is evident that the creedal statement carries us far away from the religious interest into hair-splitting and speculation. Its practical use in the church is small indeed. There is here offered as a substitute for it the following: The Redeemer is like all men in the possession of the same human nature, but distinguished from all men through the absolute power of the God-consciousness which constituted a personal existence of God in him. In him the human was the perfect organ for the reception and presentation of the divine. All that was human in him came forth from the divine. In this sense may be justified the statement: In the Redeemer God became man.
2. “In the uniting of the divine nature with the
human, the divine alone was active or self-communicative and the human only passive or receptive, but
during the continuance of the union every activity was
common to both.” The object in making special mention of a beginning of Christ’s existence was to
exclude the idea of a something subsequently added to
him--which would be an injury to faith in his person. But since we are not immediately affected by
the beginning of his existence the formula involves
a work of supererogation. Further, the beginning and
the continuance of Christ’s existence constitute a unity.
The beginning of his personal existence is the beginning of his activity and every moment (potency) in
his activity, so far as it can be regarded apart, is at
The idea that the divine nature took up the human
into the unity of its person is objectionable, not only
because of the impropriety of the expression, “divine
nature,” but particularly because it makes the personality of Christ entirely independent of the personality
of the second person of the Trinity, with which it is
nevertheless regarded as identical. The view is not
distinct from Sabellianism, and it is unfair to all
those views which approach Sabellianism to connect
this formula with the doctrine of three persons in one
essence. Historically a knowledge of the doctrine
of the Trinity had no connection with that original
impression of the personality of Christ which produced the first disciples faith or with their apprehension of him in thought. Moreover, since human
nature can become a person only in the same sense
in which persons exist in the Trinity, then the three
persons in the divine essence must be, like human
persons, separate self-existences, or else the human
personality of Christ becomes unreal. The Docetism
of the formula also appears in the putting of the human into a passive condition in the beginning of
Christ’s personal existence, which is yet not the case
with the beginning of any other personal existence.
But if he was a perfect human person, the formation
of this person must have been an act of human nature.
The contradictions inherent in this formula have given
rise to the scholastic doctrine of the impersonality of
That part of the creedal statement .which draws a distinction between the divine activity in the act of union and the subsequent divine activities treats divine activity as temporal and so brings God into the sphere of antithesis. All that is meant to be gained in the above statement and in the doctrine that the union was personal is secured by our statement that the person of Christ was the product of an original divine creative act the separate momenta of which appeared in his human development. In Christ the creation of humanity was perfected.
3. “Christ was distinct from all other men through
The events of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, as well as the promise of his return to judgment, are to be excluded from forming a part of the doctrine of his person, because they do not come into direct relation to faith in him nor could such visible events have any connection with his elevation to spiritual lordship or with his redeeming power; but they depend upon a doctrine of the records. Therefore they cannot be an expression of the religious consciousness of redemption or represented as constitutive of his redeeming activity. Christ’s promised continual presence and his continuous influence upon his disciples are not mediated by these events, for their faith in him was prior to any expectation of such occurrences; so also with many Christians since. The ascension served only contingently for the accomplishment of the seating at God’s right hand, and this, again, is only an expression of the peculiar and incomparable worth of Christ; and the promise of the return served in like manner for the satisfaction of the longing to be united with Christ. But the important point is: Faith in Jesus has not arisen from particular statements about Christ or acts of his, but from the total impression of his person; from which follows only this, that no individual events appear which could prevent that faith (§§ 93-99).
2. The Work of Christ
It has been pointed out that the dignity of the person of Christ and the value of his work are religiously equivalents. The worth of his person consists in the absolute power of the God-consciousness in him, as an original possession. However, it possesses that worth for us, not as a mere object of our contemplation, but because this consciousness is self-communicating, and so passes to us. The expression and impartation of this God-consciousness is rendered possible by the original perfection of man and of the world. His work, then, is summed up in his self-communication, and it may be regarded either from the point of view of the Redeemer’s activity, or from that of the experience (reception) of it by the redeemed. The latter will be dealt with in the section which treats of the manner in which communion with the Redeemer is expressed in the soul of the individual. The former will be treated here.
A. The possession by Christ of the God-consciousness to the degree that it had absolute control of all his energies involves his sinless perfection and blessedness. By the impartation of that God-consciousness to men, they obtain a communion with him in that perfection and blessedness. That is to say, they obtain redemption and reconciliation.
1) Redemption.--The personal consciousness of
the individual is a consciousness of sin and imperfection, and all his activities bear that stamp; but when
through our relation to Christ we have a participation
And further, since the divine creation had reference, not to individuals as such, but to a world and only
to individuals as related, constituent parts of the whole,
then the activity of the Redeemer must be world-forming, and its object human nature universally, and
not individuals as such. Thus the whole act of Christ
in redemption consists in the implanting of the governing God-consciousness, in the propagation of the creative divine activity, as a new principle of life, in the
whole of human nature, and all the energies of human nature become the organs
for the propagation of the God-consciousness in those who come into spiritual
contact with the communion in which that consciousness is operating, i.e., with the new organism which
Christ has formed for himself. The calling of Christ
is his work of bringing individuals to an acceptance
of this new life- fellowship with himself through the
activity of the communion in which it now dwells;
and his animating activity refers to his relation to
the common life as the cause of its continuance in the
church and in the individual. This mystical apprehension of redemption stands mid-way between two
other modes of representing the Redeemer’s work,
which may be designated as the magical, and the empirical The first is that which attributes to Christ a
redeeming activity independently of the founding of
the Christian communion as the means of its propagation--some say, through the medium of the written
word, others say, without it; and the second attributes
all to his example and doctrine, and thus renders his
2) Reconciliation.--If God was in Christ in such a way that the God-consciousness was his whole personal consciousness, perfect blessedness as well as sin less perfection is involved; that is to say, nothing in the world, in human existence, or in his own experience, became an evil to him through repressing or limiting that inner life, but rather a means for its exercise. Therefore his self-revelation to men as an act of self-communication brings them into the communion of that blessedness. Thus his reconciling work comes to expression as the result of his redemption. Hence, for the believer as for Christ, evil is excluded. Pain, sickness, sorrow, death are no longer evils to him; they do not limit his religious life, but serve rather for its guidance and progress. Through the possession of a common life with Christ the connection between sin and evil ceases for him. The old man has ceased to be. Sin is forgiven, punishment is ended. This is the common consciousness of all believers.
As in redemption, so in reconciliation, this mystical
apprehension stands in contrast to the prevailing magi
cal and empirical views, the former annulling the
naturalness of Christ’s continuous efficacy, and the
latter its supernatural beginning and distinctive peculiarity. For the former
makes the communication of Christ’s blessedness independent of our reception
into a life-communion with him, by making the forgiveness
While our view of redemption and reconciliation does not accord to the sufferings of Christ
themselves a primary relation to our salvation, this is
justifiable on the ground that the opposite view would
exclude a perfect acceptance into life-fellowship with
Christ prior to his death. His sufferings constitute
an element of the second rank, immediately in relation to reconciliation and only mediately in relation
to redemption. As concerns redemption: the perfection of Christ’s saving activity could be manifested
only in case it yielded to no opposition, not even to
that involving his death. This perfection does not
He in his sufferings but in his submission to them.
But when leaving out of sight the founding of the
new communion, the climax of his career is isolated
from the rest of his life and his submission to sufferings for the sake of those sufferings themselves is
looked upon as the sum of his redemptive activity, we
have a magical view, a caricature of the doctrine of
redemption. As concerns reconciliation: reception
Our view, on the contrary, keeps in mind that
salvation for men is found in their reception into a
life-fellowship with Christ; that such is nothing else
than a continuation of that creative divine act whose
manifestation in time began in the constitution of the
person of Christ; that every intensive exaltation of
this new life in its relation to the disappearance of
the collective life of sin is itself a continuation of that
divine activity, and that in this new life is attained
the original destiny of humanity, beyond which for a
B. The common division of Christ’s activity into the prophetic, the priestly, and the kingly is not arbitrary, but corresponds to the three factors operating in the development of the theocracy among the Jews. It was therefore a natural form of early Christian teaching in which a comparison with Judaism necessarily appeared, and in which there was ascribed to Christ a relation to God and men that exhausted the sphere of the divine economy of salvation.
1) The prophetic activity of Christ, as of the
Jewish prophets, appeared in doctrine, prophecy, and
miracle. The source of his doctrine was the pure
original revelation of God in him, and, so far as the
inner production of his thought is concerned, it was
independent of the Jewish law. The essential content
of it was his self-presentation, the setting forth in
discourse of the creative God-consciousness as it
stamped itself on his mental faculties so as to bring
men into communion with himself. It may be divided
into three inseparable portions: (1) the doctrine of
his person which again on its outer side is (2) the
doctrine of his calling or of the impartation of eternal
life in the Kingdom of God, and on its inner side is
(3) the doctrine of his own relation to God as the
Father to be revealed through him. His doctrine is
therefore summed up in the presentation of his person as the original revelation of God. The sufficiency
His prophecies, as did the Jewish (we refer not to special and hypothetical predictions but to their broad universal character), referred to the consummation of the Kingdom of God. Since this is given in himself, all prediction is completed and ended in him. We are speaking not of isolated predictions, but of the one all-embracing prediction of the historical unfolding of the revelation of God in himself, involving, of course, a foretelling of the downfall of the temporary, and, at the time, opposing, Jewish theocracy. Apostolic predictions are to be received as an exposition or an echo of Christ. All supposed predictions or anticipations of future events falling outside this field are to be subjected to natural psychic research.
His miracles at the time of their performance possessed value for those who beheld in them an exhibition of his person, but in themselves no longer possess validity for our consciousness because of our separation from these occurrences in time and space. They are subjects for scientific investigation and pass beyond the range of dogmatics. In place of them we have today the knowledge of the quality, range, and continuance of the spiritual workings of Christ. For us all miracles are comprehended and therefore ended in the one great spiritual miracle of his appearing. The miracles pertained to his prophetic office because they were a setting forth of the being of God in him.
2) The high-priestly office of Christ is not so suitable a description of his work because of the many contrasts between him and the Jewish high priest. As self-presentative, his priestly work is prophetic; and as supplying his people’s needs, his intercession is a kingly office. Yet the prophetic and priestly offices may be distinguished thus: In his prophetic work Christ’s self-presentation regards men as in antithesis to himself, and aims at making them receptive of union with him, which union is ever incomplete; his high-priestly work accepts our union with him as consummated in that, by a life-communion with him by which we participate in his perfection, his pure will to fulfil God’s will is actively present in us, if not in performance, at least as motive. Though our manifestation of this oneness with him is ever incomplete, it is acknowledged by God as absolute and eternal, and is so posited in our faith. Accordingly it may be said that he represents us as the principle of our new life, that his righteousness is reckoned to us, and that we become objects of the divine good pleasure--not in any external sense, but as one with him in inner life. But we cannot ascribe to him a fulfilment of the law for us nor a fulfilment of God’s will in our behalf in any other sense.
Turning now to what is commonly designated as
the passive obedience of Christ in contrast with his
active obedience, which has just been discussed (though
we must remember that these are merely distinctions
of convenience), we may describe it as follows: Christ
From this point of view we may correct two prevailing misinterpretations of his death. The first
is the almost antiquated so-called “wounds-theology,”
which thinks to find the worth of Christ’s sufferings in an emotional contemplation of them in
detail. But this doctrine of salvation by contemplation
annuls Christ’s activity and destroys his priesthood.
The second of these misinterpretations is that view
which understands the doctrine that Christ’s death
Finally, Christ’s intercession refers, not to single
Thus Christ is the climax of all priesthood, because he exhausts its significance, and he is the end of all priesthood because he is the perfect mediator between God and the human race for all time. At the same time, his priesthood has passed over to the communion of believers in that his whole redeeming activity is exhibited in them. They stand toward the rest of humanity in a similar relation to that of the Jewish priesthood toward the people. This annuls all special priesthood and the meritoriousness of all individual actions or sufferings.
3) The kingly office of Christ relates to his living union with believers in a communion; it refers not to a special relation to individuals but only to them as members of his community. Since the communion arises out of the impartation of his consciousness, he is the continuous and inexhaustible source of supply for all its needs; the kingdom of God begins, subsists, and is perfected in his person. He is the animating principle of that communion, the power that draws men into it, the source of all legislation in it, and hence absolutely and exclusively lord over it. His personal consciousness produces the laws of its life, and these are accordingly eternal; all legislation proceeding from another source is alien to his kingdom.
The question may be propounded: How does this kingdom stand related to the universal divine government? This question proceeds on theoretical grounds and produces only a theoretical difficulty. Faith is directed to Christ simply as source of grace and of the spiritual power and glory which flow from it, and when anything is said of his possession of a power over the natural world, as if he shared the lordship over it with God (which is contradicted by his prayers to God), this leads us beyond the sphere of faith. In the sphere in which Christ’s power is exercised it is of course infinite, but that sphere is the communion founded by him, and therefore he has power over the world only in the sense that through the communion of believers--by their presentation of his person in word and deed--his redeeming activity is exerted upon men in drawing them to himself.
Accordingly also Christ is the climax and end of
all spiritual kingship. All other sorts of spiritual
authority, as that of the teacher over his scholars,
the exemplar over his imitators, the legislator over
his subjects, are only partial and belong to a lower
and subordinate grade. In this respect he stands contrasted with all other founders of religions. All other
kinds of kingship end in his because they are only
an imitation of his. This involves a separation of
his kingdom from all political and civil powers, which
effectuate their decrees through the use of material
force. Christianity is neither a political religion nor
a religious state or theocracy. By the purely spiritual
authority of his God-consciousness he puts an end to
NOTE.--Christ’s humiliation and exaltation: These expressions must be excluded from a doctrinal statement of Christ’s person and work, since the conditions so designated have no
bearing on his person in itself or his work in itself, or the relation of his person to his work. The supposition of an earlier
condition of Christ’s which was higher than his earthly, or of
a later higher condition, is inconsistent with the unity of his
person and militates against faith in his person as he was manifested on earth. It implies also impossible changes in the divine
nature, as that to the absolutely extreme and eternal, and, there
fore, self-identical, a humiliation may be ascribed; or self-contradictory conceptions of the relations of the divine and
human in him, as that the attributes of one or another are
alternately subject to limitation or quiescence. It is contradicted by Christ’s own statements concerning his own relations
to the Father while on earth, which do not regard his sitting at
God’s right hand as an exaltation (cf.
The personal self-consciousness, properly under
stood, is a race-consciousness, from which the consciousness of sin is inseparable. The individual
But by the working of Christ, through the word and the activities of the communion which has its life-source in him, this relation of the individual states and activities to the God-consciousness is changed, for these are now continuously controlled by it as the governing force of the personal life. Or, as otherwise stated, the self-consciousness of the individual is fundamentally altered because it is identified with a new collective life which originates in the God-consciousness of Christ. But the man, though a new personality, is still, as regards the unity of his psychical life, the same. The new state is grafted on the old, as it were. The change forms a turning-point from which onward the new life is in a condition of becoming. This turning-point is regeneration, and the progressive development of the life there from is sanctification.
These terms have a reference to the race. The
entrance of Christ into the sphere of human existence
1. Regeneration
Regeneration may be regarded in two ways: (1)
Reception into communion with Christ may be regarded as a settled permanent relation of man to God;
formerly his relation to the divine holiness and
righteousness appeared in the consciousness of guilt
and desert of punishment, but with entrance into communion with Christ that disappears. (2) Reception
1) Conversion.--In the beginning of the new life
of communion with Christ there are for the individual
experience two elements--repentance and faith. Both
are the outcome in the individual of Christ’s self-presenting (prophetic), self-communicating (kingly)
activity as exercised in that communion with which
he comes into contact, by word and deed. Repentance
is related to the past life in its totality (and not to
separate acts merely, as it would be if produced
through the law), and manifests itself in the form of
regret for the sinfulness of the past and a change
of mind as to the aim and purpose of life. It is a
transition from activity in the old life to a subjection
to the energy of the new; accordingly it implies faith.
Faith is an act receptive of the Redeemer as presented
in the Christian communion. It is no mere static
condition, for human life is essentially active, and
Christian piety is teleological. Even in its receptivity of the divine grace human nature is active.
The contention of many teachers both in the English and in the German church that children born in
the bosom of the Christian church are to be received
as children into its fellowship because they are already
members of the body of Christ and have already been
regenerated in their baptism, is to be rejected. For in
all, whether born in the church or out of it, those forces
which cause the rise of sin are at work and in all
there is the tendency to degrade the divine to the
sensuous. Infant baptism does not affect this power
of sin in them, so that all are equally in need of conversion. The only actual distinction is that those
who are born in the church stand in a natural and
ordered connection with the operations of divine grace
But to say, that to some Christ is immediately and
inwardly revealed without the word, is to make the
redemption flow from the bare idea of the Redeemer
and renders the actual appearing of Christ unnecessary. And to leave the operations of divine grace
in conversion without actual historical connection with
the personal efficacious work of Christ is to abandon
all certainty of the identity of this inner Christ with
the historical. If now, on the contrary, the true view
is that all that operation upon the mind from the
first impression of the preaching of Christ up to its
establishment in converting faith is to be ascribed to
the activity of Christ, then all these operations of
divine grace are supernatural; but since they are in
|a natural historical connection with the personal life
2) Justification.--Justification implies forgiveness of sins and acknowledgment of sonship with God, and it depends upon faith in the Redeemer, as has just been shown. The divine act of justification is not to be sundered from the working of Christ in conversion. Justification for the self-consciousness which rests in contemplation is the same as is conversion for the consciousness which passes over into stimulus of the will. Corresponding with the two sides of conversion, repentance finds its issue in the forgiveness of sins, just as faith becomes for thought the consciousness of sonship with God as that which is the same as the consciousness of fellowship with Christ. Not that forgiveness precedes faith, but that it declares the end of the old state just as does repentance, and sonship with God expresses the character of the new state just as does faith. Both depend on the whole activity of Christ just as in the case of conversion, but immediately and in themselves they denote only that relation of man to God which supervenes upon the consciousness of guilt and desert of punishment.
Justification and conversion are synchronous. The
converted man is a new man. For in this new life-fellowship with Christ sin is no longer active, but it is
an afterworking or reaction of the old man. He no
longer appropriates it to himself but reacts against it
as an alien force, and accordingly the consciousness
of guilt is removed. In him the consciousness of
But justification is not an isolated act or pronouncement dependent upon some empirical activity or event, for this is to make the divine activity temporal and dependent in its nature, which would destroy the feeling of absolute dependence on God. Rather, there is one eternal and universal decree to justify men for Christ’s sake. This decree, again, is one with the decree to send Christ; were it not so the sending of Christ might be without effect. And the decree to send Christ is one with that for the creation of the human race so far as human nature is first perfected in Christ. And since in God thought and will, will and deed are inseparable, therefore all these constitute one divine act for the alteration of our relation to God. The manifestation in time of the divine act takes its beginning in the incarnation of Christ, from which the total new creation of mankind proceeds, and it continues in the union of individual men with Christ. We have therefore to assume only one divine act of justification gradually realizing itself in time (§§ 106-9).
2. Sanctification
The idea of holiness in men has been brought over
into the New Testament from the Old, where it is apprehended as an attribute of God. But for Christians, not
holiness, but sanctification, i.e., movement
toward holiness, is the appropriate term because of
their increasing separation from the pre-regenerate
The development must be gradual. For since the God-consciousness has come into a relation of control over the energies of human life only through a direct communication, after being regularly repressed by the sin-consciousness, it must be regarded as sustaining continually the opposition of this lower principle now gradually disappearing. Though this development is gradual, it is not perfectly regular for experience, because it occurs in the midst of a conflict, and there are times when the power of sin is exhibited in actions which obscure for the time the presence of the new spiritual power, just as in the former condition of life there occurred at times actions proceeding from the prevenient grace of God which obscured for a little while the presence of sin. In this respect Christ’s development onward from his birth and the development of the regenerate are not strictly parallel. Yet the occasional recurrence of the consciousness of sin does not annul the connection with Christ so as to negative regeneration as a divine act of union with human nature, or sanctification as the state of that union.
To express the same in another manner: In the
activities of the regenerate there are two elements,
the permanent and the variable. The permanent element is that ever self-renewing will (power) of the
kingdom of God which wrought in Christ, and this
The sins of the regenerate are not destructive of the state of grace because such never occur without the forth-putting on their part of effort (though in sufficient) against sin; likewise the good deeds of the regenerate are never unopposed by sinful tendencies or untainted with sin. The conflict with sin exists always; the difference in the character of the acts in the two cases is one of degree. The sinful deed proceeds from the old sinful collective life from which he has been personally separated and consequently no new form of sin arises in the regenerate man, and, so soon as he acknowledges the act as his own (i.e., repents), with the return of his consciousness of identification with the new collective life the consciousness of forgiveness arises. Hence we may say the sins of the regenerate are always accompanied by forgiveness.
The good deeds of the regenerate are objects of
the divine good pleasure, not as isolated empirical
deeds of the individual concerned, for no single act
is unmixed with sin, but in so far as they are the
product of the new collective life with which he now
identifies himself. That is to say, the good deeds of
the regenerate are the product of their union with
Section 2. The Nature of the World in Relation to Redemption. Doctrine of the Church (§§ 113-63)
The redemptive energy of Christ originally lay simply in himself. In the exercise of it he created a new spiritual organism through which it is historically propagated in the world. All the redemptive energy of Christ is accordingly comprehended within this new body, which is the communion of believers in him. Now, the consciousness of redemption involves a consciousness of participation in the communion of the regenerate, for this communion has not first to be established by an act of the regenerate, but in regeneration they already find themselves within it, and they trace the workings of grace through which they become participators in the redemption, to its activity.
This activity was exerted upon them prior to
their consciousness of redemption, their felt need of
redemption being an effect of it. Consequently, there
is no absolute leap out of one sphere into the other,
else conversion would be an unhistorical occurrence,
effected by some incomprehensible influence operating
We perceive, then, that the law of self-organization, as it appears in the naturalization of the super
natural in Christ, finds its parallel in the communion
founded by him. For the incarnation of Christ in
relation to human nature in general corresponds to
The character common to all the regenerate is
the governing will of the kingdom of God. That will
is exerted in two forms, (1) in gaining other individuals and receiving them into the kingdom, (2) in
the process of perfecting the work of the kingdom in
ourselves and the other members by mutual and complementary activity. But this spatial extension of
the kingdom and this co-operative and mutual influence
are subject to those circumstances of time and place
in which the members of the kingdom find themselves
placed. Accordingly, on the one hand, the origin
of the church must be viewed in its relation to the
1. Election
The consciousness of redemption in Christ is so related to the consciousness of unity with the race, that the incarnation of Christ is viewed as potentially the regeneration of the human race. Hence the desire to communicate the gospel to the world. The actual spread of the gospel is gradual--from the individual to the mass, from nation to nation, and from generation to generation--being subject to these conditions which determine all human activity. That is to say, participation in redemption is subjected to the laws of the divine world-government. This must be true in reference even to the mysterious fact of the rejection of the gospel by some and its acceptance by others. Just as in Christ the supernatural becomes natural, so the church as the possessor of that super natural which was in Christ appears in its course in the world as a natural historical phenomenon.
The final ground of the divine government of the
world is the divine good-pleasure, and in the last
analysis it is to this we must refer the facts of the
gospel’s earlier and later reception in different places,
its acceptance and rejection by different individuals
1. The doctrine of fore-ordination is a consequence. The self-consciousness of the regenerate and
the feeling of absolute dependence are one, since our
activity in the kingdom of God is referred by consciousness to the sending of Christ and is recognized
as dependent on our place in human relations; so that
the order in which the redemption is actualized in each
man is one with the carrying out of the divine world-order in relation to him. Thus the time and manner
of the individual’s entrance into the communion of
Christ are only a result of the determination of the
manifestation of the justifying divine activity by the
universal order of the world, and they are a part of
the same. Hence the kingdom of grace, or the kingdom of the Son, is absolutely one with the kingdom of
the Omniscient Omnipotent One, or of the Father;
and to say that the state of those to whom grace has
been given is a work of that divine grace which was
And further, since the Christian consciousness recognizes only one foreordination--namely, that to participation in the blessedness of Christ--the unity of the race-consciousness and the universality of the world-order can be in harmony with the Christian consciousness of redemption only by the acknowledgment of the foreordination of all mankind to an ultimate reception into the kingdom of grace.
2. From the above doctrine of election may be deduced also the doctrine of the determining grounds of election.
Of free existences, why are some chosen and others not? The peculiar condition of each individual in the human race is due to his place in the development of the divine world-government. If, then, we seek the determining grounds of the election of an individual absolutely in the beginning of all things, we shall find these in the divine good-pleasure; but if we seek the grounds of election in the final results attained in the end, we posit the divine foreknowledge. Divine good-pleasure and divine foreknowledge are one and the same principle viewed from opposite standpoints.
If, therefore, regeneration be viewed as the actualization of the union of the divine and human nature,
and the justifying divine grace as the temporal and
individual continuation of that universal act of union
which began in the incarnation of Christ, then the
NOTE.--But if while we trace the origin of the Christian church to the divine good-pleasure, we admit that a part of the human race is forever lost, the contemplation of that good-pleasure affects our race-consciousness and our personal consciousness in opposite ways, one painfully and the other pleasurably, and hence admits of no pure impartation of the blessedness of Christ to us. It becomes necessary therefore that we conceive the divine foreordination to salvation as embracing ultimately the whole human race (§§ 117-20).
2. The Communication of the Spirit
All those who are in the state of sanctification
are conscious of participation in the perfection
and blessedness of Christ, which is dependent on the
indwelling of God in him. This possession of the
perfection and blessedness that were in Christ belongs
to the believer in the form of that absolutely constant
will of the kingdom of God as the inner impulse of life.
It is not as isolated individuals standing in independent
This common spirit of all the sanctified is thus the
Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of God, and the
bestowal of that Spirit by Christ is what is meant by
the Communication of the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit is therefore just the common spirit of all those
who are sanctified, who together form one moral
person, having the one aim, common to all, of furthering the whole, and possessing peculiar love to one
another. If it be objected that our use of the term
does not coincide with common usage, we may reply
that it is in harmony with the New Testament where
the Holy Spirit is not regarded as our individual enduement apart from his connection with the totality
It may be said further in objection: If, as has been
stated, all peoples are destined to pass over into the
Christian communion by virtue of the unity of the
race, then, since there cannot be two life-unities for
one and the same whole, the common spirit of the
Christian church is simply the common spirit of the
human race. The answer is: It is just in the possession and communication of the Holy Spirit that the
unity of the members of the human family--now,
alas! torn asunder by mutual jealousies and animosities--becomes an accomplished fact. Through Christ
as Founder there is realized a union which by faith
and in love embraces all men, so that the race-consciousness
The believer is conscious of possessing this spirit
with the act of faith in Christ, which arises through
that representation of Christ which is given in the
preaching of him. But this gift is no longer received
direct from Christ personally, as was the case with
his first disciples. Up to the time of Christ’s separation from them they were only in the state of a
developing receptivity in relation to his spirit. The
transition from receptivity to self-activity took place
for them in the days of the resurrection. Up to the
time of Christ’s separation from them, their relation
to him was that of a household to its head or of a
school to its teacher--upon the death of the leader
dissolution was the result. But with the separation
of Christ from his disciples they became conscious
of their possession of his Spirit as their common spirit;
they ceased to be a school and became a church; they
ceased to be merely receptive of his teachings and
nature, and became spontaneous and communicative
in relation thereto. The Holy Spirit was thus communicated to them as their common possession, and was
thenceforth communicated by them to those who were
in the stage of preparatory grace in which they themselves had once been. Whenever these also, apprehending Christ by faith, are transformed from a merely
receptive to an active condition in their place within
Consequently, the life and activity of the church
proceeds historically--not in some secret, magical, or
mysterious way--from Christ. His incarnation was
the naturalization of the supernatural, the union of
the divine with human nature. So the communication
of the Holy Spirit constitutes the union of the Divine
Being with human nature in the form of a common
spirit animating the collective life of believers which
Christ founded. The operations of the Holy Spirit
are not to be found in something outside the Christian
church or in some superhuman nature or in some divine
power affecting human nature from without; but the
Holy Spirit is an actual spiritual force in the souls
of believers and must be conceived of as united with
the human nature in them, so as to become one with
it. Each believer participates in this common spirit,
not in his personal self-consciousness regarded by
itself alone, but only in so far as he is conscious of
his existence in this whole, personal peculiarities being
no element in this common consciousness. If then
we regard the union of the divine with Christ’s human
personality as an endowment of human nature in its
collective capacity, participation in the Holy Spirit
and fellowship of life with Christ are one and the
same, reversely contemplated. The Christian church
animated by the Holy Spirit is in its purity and perfection the perfect image of the Redeemer, and every
regenerated individual is a complementary constituent
The church is the creation by the Spirit of Christ,
out of individuals in the world, of a communion whose
common spirit is the same Holy Spirit. Its state of
existence in the world must, then, be in analogy with
that of the person of Christ. In him the supernatural,
the divine, as the abiding self-identical element of
his person, united to itself the natural, the human,
which was the variable element of his person. So
also in its common spirit the church possesses an ever
self-identical element, which makes its appearance in
Since the aim of the church is ever the same, namely, the realization within itself of the image of Christ, the mode of the existence of the divine in the human must remain the same as it was in him. The variable element in the church, as in Christ, is due to the human nature in and through which the Holy Spirit works. Now, human nature as undetermined by the Holy Spirit is the world, and therefore all that is variable in the church is due, not to its common spirit, but to the world, and the manner of the Spirit’s work among men depends on peculiarities of temperament and circumstances of individuals and, on a larger scale, of nations.
All in the church which is not wrought by the Holy
Spirit is of the world and constitutes its attack upon
All this discussion amounts to saying that Christianity is a power developing itself historically in the world. A treatment of it as such involves a discussion of its permanent, self-identical elements and its variable elements (§ 126).
1. The Essential and Permanent Features of the Church (§§ 127-47)
If our Christianity is to be the same as that of
the first disciples, it must arise like theirs from the
influence of Christ. But since his influence is no longer
an immediate, personal one, we are in need of a demonstration of the identity of our Christianity with that
which appears in their presentation of the personality
of Christ. For this we are dependent on the Scriptures of the New Testament. They show that from
the influence of Christ himself and from his disciples
testimony about him there actually proceeded the
church-forming activity promised by him. They also
complement the immediate utterances of Christ, because we can refer the ordinances and acts of his
first disciples to the teachings and expressed will of
Christ as their source. They are thus the work of
the Spirit of Christ which is the common spirit of the
church. With the loss of the original oral testimony
It is true that there are many Christian churches
mutually opposed in varying degrees. Their differences concern not the reality of a common life-fellowship with Christ, but the relations between the outer
forms which represent it and the inner fellowship
implied in them. The most important question as to
all these differences is, whether they are grounded in
these spatial and temporal differences which appear
in the spiritual nature of men and are therefore unavoidable, or whether they are grounded in the world’s attack upon the church and are therefore defects.
But amid all the divisions of the Christian communion
its universal self-identity appears in a triple manner:
1. Holy Scripture.--The Scripture of the New Testament is a work of the Holy Spirit as the common spirit of the church, and forms only a particular instance of the universal testimony of the church in its presentation of the image of Christ to men. The written word possesses, however, a superiority over the original word which was merely spoken, not in its higher authoritativeness, but in that it furnished a means of testing our present testimony of Christ by that which was originally given. Yet this word is to be viewed as no dead possession (legal conception), but as an ever self-renewing activity of the church in its work of awakening faith in Christ by its presentation of him to the world.
It is faith in Christ which gives rise to reverence
for the Scriptures, and not the converse. For, if faith
in Christ is to be made to repose on the authority of
the Scriptures, then that authority itself can be established
It is Christ’s Spirit as the common spirit of the
communion which gives utterance to itself in the
historical and epistolary writings of the New Testament,
The selection of the individual books for the Canon is to be regarded as proceeding analogously with the selection and combination of the historical elements. We are not to conceive of a definite and final decision given by apostolic authority, but of the gradual adjudication upon extant works, professedly Christian, by the Spirit which was common to the whole church. While, therefore, the Scriptures are to be subject to the freest investigation, the self-recognizing activity of the Holy Spirit in the church warrants the statement that the various books of the New Testament were given by that Spirit, and the collection of the same has been made under his guidance.
The Scriptures of the Old Testament cannot be allowed to claim the same dignity. The spirit of the Old Testament is not the spirit of the New, because it is the spirit of law. Its place in our Bible and the customary use of it in Christian teaching are owing partly to the manner in which Christ and his apostles and the early Christians in general made reference to it when as yet the Canon of the New Testament had not been formed, and partly to the historical connection between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue (§§ 128-32).
2. The ministry of the Divine Word.--The preaching
Now each member of the communion, in his participation, to some degree, in this work of self-communication, seeks to present only that in himself which
is of Christ, and to that degree he is an organ of the
divine word. The influence of the members is mutually
exercised and it is exerted through all the various
activities of life without any definite plan or conscious
arrangement. But owing to difference of temperament, talent, outer circumstances, and breadth of
Christian experience, these activities of the members,
both upon one another and upon the world, vary in
degree and extent, some members being prevailingly
active and others prevailingly receptive. And inasmuch as the common spirit of the communion must
find expression in the orderly public assembly and
3. Baptism.--Baptism is an act of the church by
which it signifies its will to receive an individual into
its communion. The common spirit of the communion
being Christ’s spirit, its act of reception succeeds upon,
and takes the place of, Christ’s personal act of choosing individuals for his fellowship during his ministry,
and it occurs as an act of faith in his promise, which
is attached to the baptismal act. Therefore, since
communion with Christ, regeneration, and justification
The act of baptism has an inner and an outer side.
The inner side is the spiritual intention to receive the
baptized into the communion from which issue all
the operations of the Spirit which effect the new
birth, and the outer side is the physical act through
which the intention is conveyed. Hence it is not correct to say that the baptism is conditioned by the new
birth, because that is to presuppose an activity in
the church prior to being received in it, which is ab
surd. On the contrary, then, we must say that the
new birth is conditioned by baptism, that is, when
baptism is taken to be the final act in that series in
which the church expresses its will to extend itself,
which it can do only by receiving new members. Accordingly it is through baptism rather than through
the fluctuating experience of sanctification that we
become personally assured of possessing the new birth.
But of course this assertion is to be understood not in
Thus infant baptism is valid, but only when respect is had to a confession of faith, to be made consequent upon perfected instruction, as the final act pertaining to that instruction. Though there are no traces of infant baptism in the New Testament, it is justifiable on the grounds of the necessities of the church and the demands of the parental feelings of those who are members thereof (§§ 136-38).
4. The Supper.--Beginning with a baptism properly administered the Christian has an experience of
blessedness in Christ. But the development of this
consciousness is not steady and uninterrupted; hence
arises the necessity that our consciousness of blessedness should be confirmed and strengthened. Christian
blessedness, outwardly regarded, is a communion with
other believers; inwardly regarded, it is a communion
with Christ, a personal (individual) attitude toward
him. These are coincident and reciprocally operative.
Against both of these two sides of the Christian life,
the repressive influence of the world is continually at
work. Hence arises the necessity for private meditation on the one hand--for hereby the believer excludes
the influences of the world by presenting Christ to
himself out of the Scriptures--and for public divine
service on the other for the mutual fellowship of believers is strengthened and stimulated by the exhibition
of a common Christian love. And this at the same
time both expresses and comprises the fellowship of
Christians do experience in the Supper a peculiar strengthening of their spiritual life, and have done so ever since the time of its institution by Christ. In it Christ is presented to them. In the public gathering of the church as such, he supplies a participation in his flesh and blood. In this connection two questions arise: (1) How does the Supper as a supplying of the flesh and blood of Christ relate itself to that purely spiritual participation which he himself declared to be necessary? (2) How docs the Supper as a constituent part of public divine service distinguish itself from other parts of the same?
To begin with the latter: The Supper is distinguished from all other kinds of public worship in
that, while in other forms of worship the degree in
which the different members of the communion are
actively or receptively related to one another varies
according to their gifts and their place in the communion, in the Supper all the members are similarly
placed in a receptive relation to the blessedness of
Christ. The administrator is nothing more than the
organ of Christ’s institution. The inworking of this
blessedness in the case of each believer proceeds solely
and immediately from Christ himself, through the
word of institution in which the redeeming and communion-forming love of Christ is presented and ever
operates as a stimulus to piety. The peculiarity of
the Supper is this individual and exclusive immediacy
In regard to the former question: In that discourse of Christ where he speaks of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood he had neither the Supper nor another definite action in mind, but he referred to the periodic renewal of our fellowship with him. The Supper lends itself naturally to such a description, In the Supper each member is conscious of a sympathy with all the others, so that as he knows that the others more closely unite themselves to Christ in it, he feels that he also is more closely united there by to them all. Thus each member represents to the others the whole society, and indeed the whole Christian communion. But this spiritual benefit is dependent on the definite observance of the rite which has been blessed and sanctified through the word of Christ. In and for itself there is nothing incomprehensible in the ordinance.
Consequently the teaching of the Roman Catholic
church is false when it affirms both that the union of
the elements with the body and blood of Christ is accomplished and that the spiritual benefit is attached
to the elements of the Supper through contemplation
and veneration of them, apart from the act of participation; for this is to make its effect of a magical
character. Those sacramentarians are also in error
who see in the elements only a representative image
of spiritual participation. We hold, on the contrary,
5. The office of the keys.--If the church were a perfect whole with nothing of the world in it, so that every individual within it would be a perfect organ of the common spirit, then the will of the whole church would be the will of every individual member. But since this is not the case, and since there arises in every individual some opposition to the will of the common spirit of Christ, that will comes to him as law. Where the individual member is definitely not subjected to it, then the church counts him as not truly a member. This legislative and judicial activity of the church is simply the perpetuation of the legislative and administrative power of Christ, which inheres in the church by virtue of its possession of his spirit; it is an exhibition of his kingly activity.
Every new subjection of an individual life to this activity of the church is a new acquisition achieved by its common spirit. Then the church, by extending to the individual the God-consciousness which is to supply to him the law of his spiritual life, first affords to him an entrance into the communion and afterward as signs to him his definite and proper place within it.
The church, then, according to Christ’s own utterances, has the power of binding: that is, it deter
mines through command and prohibition what may
or may not be done; and of loosing: that is, of leaving
certain matters to be determined by the individual.
The limit of this power of the church is assigned by
But just because this kingly activity of Christ in the church is living and abiding, there can be no decree which is final and valid for all time, but these must ever be subject to amendment. Hence also, there can be no ban of final exclusion from the church or abandonment of effort to bring the individual within its communion (§§ 144, 145).
6. Prayer in the name of Jesus.--The church’s historical progress in the world is opposed by obstacles
without and within: without, by the opposition of
that part of the world which the church has not yet
taken possession of and assimilated; within, by the
worldly elements remaining in each of its members.
Hence the church’s common consciousness is of its
imperfection. Now the longing to realize the aim of
Christ’s mission being a living and abiding element
of the church’s life, this, conjoined with the consciousness of imperfection, implies on the one side a
sense of need and on the other side a presentiment of
what is necessary to the fulfilment of that aim. All
progress in this direction is ascribed through the God-consciousness to the divine world-government, and is
expressed in thankfulness or resignation according
It is inevitable that the thinking subject should outline in many forms the manner in which the fulfilment of its aim appears possible. Hence the particular petitions in prayer. The judgment of each individual as to what particular occurrences would contribute to the end in view is, of course, defective and of uncertain value. Those of them who possess a gift analogous to the prophetic are therefore adapted to exercise a special influence on the whole body in the direction of its petitions. Beginning with Christ himself there have appeared from the earliest times individuals in whom the personal motives have been excluded and who possessed that foresight which qualified them in an eminent degree as organs of the common will of the church in respect to prayer.
True prayer, which is always united to an interest in the kingdom of God as the church’s end, is the expression of the common spirit of the church in respect to its needs; i.e., it is an activity of the Holy Spirit in the form of anticipation and desire.
To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray in the
matters which concern him (Angelegenheiten), or
(which is the sane) in his mind or spirit. That prayer
is therefore a prayer in the name of Jesus in which
those who pray occupy his relation to the kingdom of
Consequently, prayer is not the exercise of an influence upon God. Such a view of prayer postulates a reciprocation between the creature and the Creator, represents its effect as empirical (akin to magical), and contradicts the fundamental thesis of this work. Prayer and its fulfilment have a common basis in the character of the kingdom of God. For prayer is that Christian anticipation which is developed out of the whole activity of the divine spirit, and its fulfilment is an expression of the governing activity of Christ in relation to the same object. In this sense we may say that neither one can be without the other, for both grow out of the same divinely ordered conditions. Thus true piety and true prayer always go together (§§ 146,147).
2. The Variable Elements of the Church Owing to Its Coexistence with the World (§§ 148-56)
If everyone who receives the spirit of Christianity retained no longer any of the characteristics of his former life, but became receptive solely of the common spirit of the church, then the separation between church and world would be absolute and their influence be merely that of reciprocal opposition and enmity. But though the true ego of the regenerate man is that of delight in the divine will, his new birth is no instantaneous transformation of his whole being. Worldly elements inhere in all those who constitute the church; so that church and world are not spatially and temporally separated. At every empirical manifestation of human life both appear. Where faith and a communion in faith are found, there also are sin and a communion in universal sin fulness. Only by abstraction can the church be isolated. The workings of the church, which consist in the union of the Holy Spirit with human nature, constitute a coherent and co-operative whole, but Invisible, because never in empirical separation from the world. The totality of the connected operations of the Spirit constitutes the Invisible Church. These same operations as connected with reactionary elements of sin which appear in the lives of the regenerate constitute the Visible Church. Within the visible church, church and world coexist.
Hence, while the whole truth of redemption be
comes the believer’s possession through the communication
But at the same time, owing to the unlimited power of attraction possessed by the love of Christ in those persons in whom the Spirit dwells, there can never arise in one communion the desire that another communion may be annihilated; but there must ever arise efforts to express the oneness of spirit in attempted unions. There is always the implicit acknowledgment that all these separated communions form, potentially, according to divine arrangement, a larger communion capable of including all Christians when the necessary conditions are present. If two professedly Christian communions have nothing in common, then one or both is un-Christian. But such a total annulling of this communion is impossible so long as both hold to their historical connection with the revelation proclaimed in the Gospel and no other revelation is acknowledged as the basis of their origin. Hence even heretics are in the church after all. Present differences and divisions in the Christian church are only relative and destined to disappear in the final realization of unity.
The invisible church is infallible, but the visible church is liable to error. Here we consider truth and error only in the religious sphere. In the activity of the pious consciousness truth and error are always mingled, because the persistence of sensuousness renders our conception of the aim of the church and our relation to it more or less impure and false. Every one finds the source of error in himself, and therefore believes it is always present in some degree in all. But, on the other hand, with the confession of Christ the truth is ever present. Hence there can be no church-communion which is entirely destitute of it.
The same must have been true of the early church and of the apostles as individuals; but the whole church and the whole truth being in the common spirit, the false tendencies of the individuals naturally annul one another, and hence the church invisible possesses the whole truth and is infallible. This allows, how ever, that every partial-church can err even in its official presentations. Nor would an individual church at any one point of time possess the whole truth, for every period has its one-sidedness, which a later time corrects. Therefore no doctrinal statements, even if unanimously offered, would express final and perfect truth. Everyone must test them for himself and acknowledge them as Christian in so far as they harmonize with his personal religious consciousness or with Scripture. The improvement of public doctrine becomes not only a personal duty but also a right in the exercise of which he is to suffer no limitation.
The gradual improvement of the church’s doctrine will be a consequence.
Now the error existing in every part of the church being an error in relation to the truth which it possesses, the degree of error must be gradually diminished, the more the Holy Spirit in the church appropriates the organism of thought in its members. This is wrought out through the influence of the whole church upon the individual members in its public services, and through the influence of all those who are specially endowed with a clear Christian consciousness. We may conclude, therefore, that all error is finally to be banished.
The sufficient ground of the perfecting of the church lies in the Holy Spirit as its common life-principle. That perfection implies, on the one hand, the expansion of Christianity over the whole earth and the disappearance of all other religious communions with their opposing and contaminating influences; and, on the other hand, it implies that the church ceases to take the world into itself. That is to say, that the present increasing conflict with sin which is characteristic of the church militant--owing to the consciousness of sin which is continuously being renewed by the propagation of the race--gives place to that condition in which the church has assimilated the world, that is, the church triumphant.
But our Christian consciousness is unable to set
Now, although faith in the persistence of the human personality after death, or, to use the common
expression, in the immortality of the soul, is found
universally and prevailed in the time of Christ and
his apostles, it is not on that account entitled to a
place in Christian doctrine. How, then, came this
faith to be united with our Christian religious conscience? There are two possible ways: either it was
discovered by intellectual processes and became objective truth, or it was originally given in and with
the immediate self-consciousness with or without connection with the fundamental God-consciousness. If
in the former way, then the doctrine pertains to the
sphere of the higher natural science and depends on
The true Christian ground of the assurance of
immortality lies in faith in the Redeemer himself.
His confidence in his own personal continuance is seen
in his promises of a reunion with his followers. He
could say these things only as a human person, and
on account of the sameness of human nature in him
and in us the same confidence is valid in our case.
Faith in the Redeemer demands the immutability of
our connection with him. In that life-union with
Faith in the continuance of our personality is naturally accompanied by an effort to represent that state in some of the forms of the imagination. The attempted solution of the problem how to represent the church in its perfection and at the same time the state of the souls of men in the future life, appears in the ecclesiastical doctrine of “last things.” But it is impossible to combine the two in one harmonious representation. The perfection of the church, i.e., an end of development (which comports with the idea of retribution), supposes a state of the individual soul entirely unlike the present; on the other hand, the supposition of a state of the individual soul like the present, i.e., a state of progressive development (which harmonizes with the idea of personal continuance), annuls the perfection of the church.
Accordingly, the doctrines relating to this point
are of less value as dogmatic than those already treated.
They rest upon our power of anticipation, which is
incompetent to construct a harmonious representation
of the future state. On that account we cannot ascribe
to the confessional articles on this question the same
FIRST PROPHETICAL ARTICLE: CHRIST’S RETURN
The Synoptists report sayings of Christ before his
death to the effect that he will come again at the fall
of Jerusalem. Though he is not represented as repeating such promises personally to his disciples in
his resurrection communications with them, they were
unable to conceive that those promises had been fulfilled. Similarly, after the destruction of the city
the literal interpretation of his words was inconsistently retained, and even though in later times Chiliasm
has been mostly abandoned, still the view that he will
return in person at the end of the present condition
It is evident, then, that the Christian consciousness of union with Christ is not satisfied with his spiritual presence in the church in the midst of our present condition of growth and change. In order to the realization of our personal continuance in union with him and, at the same time, of the perfection of the church, there is predicated an exercise of the sovereign power of Christ that puts an end to the propagation of the race and to the mingling of the good and the bad, so that by one sudden leap the church, heretofore subject to a wavering growth, becomes perfect. Accordingly the second coming of Christ is conceived as a return to judgment, and the permanence of the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ becomes the guarantee that this nature will not be subject to that dissolution which would result from cosmic forces. Thus the imagery of the doctrine results from the interest in personal continuance, but its certainty rests on the perfection of the church (§ 160).
The consciousness of the union of the body and soul in our personality renders it impossible for us to represent to ourselves the immortality of the soul apart from a bodily existence, without giving up the identity of our personal life before death and after. The continuity of self-consciousness seems impossible apart from memory, which, like other mental functions, appears dependent on bodily relations, so that the existence of the soul under entirely different physical relations would be inconsistent with its continuous self-identity. But the conception of the similarity of the present and the future life is, on the other hand, inconsistent with the perfection of the church. So that on this ground we are under the opposite necessity of conceiving the nature of the future world as different from the present, the body being conceived as immortal and sexual distinctions as lost; other wise the conflict between flesh and spirit, and there fore sin fulness, would remain.
The incompatibility of the representation of future personal continuance with the representation of the perfected church further appears in the abortive at tempts to offer a representation of the intermediate state and to adjust its relation to the resurrection state and to the general judgment. We conclude that it is impossible to present a definite and consistent representation of the connection between the present and the future life.
There remains as the essential content of this article: (1) the ascension of the risen Redeemer is only possible if there lies before all human individuals in the future life a renewal of organic life connected with our present state; (2) the unfolding of a future state is conditioned on the divine power of Christ and on cosmical changes effected through the universal divine world-government, though the representation of these changes is a problem never perfectly to be solved by men (§ 161).
The fundamental idea underlying Christ’s representation of the Final Judgment is the total separation
of the church from the world so far as the perfection
of the former excludes all influence of the latter. But
to suppose that this means a total separation between
believers and unbelievers is to conceive wrongly the
distinction of the visible and the invisible church,
inasmuch as it overlooks the fact that the influence of
the world upon the church consists mainly in the fleshly
character which inheres in believers even till death.
Besides, a sanctification effected by such a sudden
deliverance destroys the continuous nature of personal
consciousness and introduces a magical element into
sanctification, thereby compromising the value of life-fellowship with Christ. Further, such a separation
of believers from unbelievers seems intended to secure
the happiness of believers rather than their perfection,
inasmuch as it is only by the contact of believers with
That which is of value in the idea of the final judgment is: (1) that perfect fellowship with Christ renders all evil non-existent for us, even in the presence of wickedness; (2) that if we are to conceive of the church as perfect while a portion of the human race remains excluded from the workings of its spirit, this is because that portion of the race is proof against it and consequently continues out of all contact with it (§ 162).
The condition of believers after their restoration
to life may be conceived under two forms: (1) a
sudden, but unchanging possession of the Most High;
(2) a gradual elevation to the Most High but, like
the development of Christ, without retrogression or
conflict. But the attempt to give a representation of
the two states introduces peculiar difficulties. The
former annuls the connection with the present life
and implies, in the equally perfect state of all believers, the want of that mutual influence which is
What, then, is that which we receive in that future life? The common answer is, that eternal life consists in the vision of God. But wherein does that consciousness of God differ from the present? In its immediacy in contrast with the mediate character of the present? But this is hardly consistent with the preservation of the personality. So that, from which ever side the problem is approached, it seems that we must remain uncertain as to the manner in which the state which is the highest perfection of the church can be obtained and possessed by an immortal personality (§ 163).
It has usually been assumed that the figurative discourses of Christ which are supposed to refer to those
who die out of fellowship with him represent them as
in a state of permanent unhappiness. (See
NOTE.--All attempts to develop the idea of the individual future life and its relations to the present life out of the idea of the perfection of the church and its relation to the unperfected church, or to make a place for the perfected church by means of the idea of the future life, turn to myths, i.e., a historical presentation of the super-historical, or to visions, i.e., an earthly presentation of the super-earthly. “These were every where the forms of the prophetical, which in its higher meaning made no claim to produce a knowledge in the proper sense, but is only determined to shape principles already acknowledged into motives of action.”
Section 3. Those Attributes of God Which Are Related to Redemption (§§ 164-69)
For the Christian consciousness everything in the
universe is viewed in relation to the redemption,
either as organic to the self-expression of the awakened
God-consciousness, or as material to be manipulated
by it. From this same point of view the divine world-government requires to be described. But we are here
to be on our guard against falling into the error of
treating this divine government of the world as supervening upon the creation in the way of something additional or supplementary. They are at bottom the
Since, as has been already shown (§ 46, note), that
element of our self-consciousness which we call the
consciousness of sin cannot be referred immediately
to the divine causality, but mediately only through
the consciousness of grace, the latter element must be
the determining one. We may say, then, that the
nature of things and all the complexity of their relations have come to be what they are on account of
the revelation of God in Christ which redeems men,
or develops the human spirit to perfection. Consequently the whole course of human affairs and of
natural events would have been other than it is, had
Accordingly from the unity of the divine causality it follows that the church or the kingdom of God, in its whole extension and in the full effect of its development, is the one object of the divine world-government, and every individual object of the divine government is such only in relation to this one object and for this alone. Hence the absurdity of a division of God’s providence into general and special, and the inconsistency of eternal damnation with the divine world-government.
A distinction of attributes can appear in the divine
world-government only by viewing the divine causality
from human standpoints. As in our apprehension of
human causality we distinguish inner intention from
the mode of its execution, so also divine causality on
its inner side as a unity may be described as will; but
on its outer side in relation to its object as a manifold,
it may be regarded as understanding. The redemption
and the founding of the kingdom of God, in which
there is a union of the divine essence with human
nature, being the focal point of the divine world-government, the inner thought (disposition) exhibited
in this is divine love, which is just the will to unite
with and dwell in another. And the skill by which
the totality of existences is subjected to this end of
realizing the divine love is divine wisdom, which is
just the perfect correspondence of processes with the
1. The Divine Love
The divine love, as the attribute by virtue of which the divine nature communicates itself, is made known in the work of redemption. If it be objected, on the one hand, that this view is mystical and overlooks the love of God in those courses of Nature and of human affairs that conserve and elevate the life; and, on the other hand, that it is too narrow because it fails to recognize that all spiritual development depends on the possession of reason which is the image of God in man, it may be replied to the first objection, that the highest elevation of life is in the God-consciousness, which is suppressed outside the sphere of the Christian redemption; and to the second, that while all men have the capacity for the God-consciousness, yet fear and not love pervades their minds before receiving Christ’s redemption, and no human good of any kind which is not brought into connection with the God-consciousness can relate itself properly to the divine love.
When we assert that “God is love,” meaning there by that love
is the sole attribute which can be equated with the being or essence of God, we
are not to be understood as accepting any conception of God which has been
obtained in a speculative way, but we have only to show why this attribute of
God is thus differentiated
While, as has been said already, the divine omnipotence is that attribute by virtue of which all finite things exist, this entire divine act is thereby posited without motive. The same is true of the other divine attributes treated above. None of these can be by themselves original expressions of the divine essence. Righteousness and holiness imply the antithesis between Good and Bad which cannot exist for God in himself. These attributes act in a limited sphere and they are subordinate to love and wisdom, that is, in the work of redemption they are to be reckoned as preparatory.
Again, while both love and wisdom express the very essence of God, we cannot say that God is wisdom as we say that God is love, because we have the immediate consciousness of love only in the consciousness of redemption and it is the ground of the representation of all the other divine attributes. It is when we extend our personal and our race-consciousness to the whole complex of forces in the universe that we see that wisdom is the perfection of love. Where almighty love is, there must absolute wisdom be (§§ 166, 167).
2. The Divine Wisdom
According to our position in an earlier portion of
this work, wisdom and omniscience in God are the
same, only the former corresponds to the antecedent
view of his operations and the latter to the consequent
We do not thereby admit the antithesis of end and means in the world, except in the sense that the means is embraced in the end, as a part in the whole.
To the Christian the redemption is the key to the
understanding of the divine wisdom, and the whole
divine economy is interpreted in the light of the revelation of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit. But this
by no means implies a desire to find in individual occurrences a particular relation to the kingdom of God.
This would degenerate into an opposition to scientific
investigation. Nay, such occurrences as, presumably,
are unconnected with the world-system and yet can
not be separated from human concerns, must turn to
the damage of the progress of the redemption and
must also be excluded from the provisions of the divine wisdom. All things in the world that can be
ascribed to the divine wisdom must also be referable
to the redeeming new-creating revelation of God.
Thus the peculiar work of the wisdom of God is just
the extension of the redemption. This means, of
Conclusion: The Divine Trinity (§§ 170-72)
Our whole apprehension of Christianity stands or falls with the union of the Divine Being with human nature, This union appears first in the person of Christ, and by virtue of it the idea of redemption is concentrated in his person. It appears also in the common spirit of the church, and by virtue of this, the church bears and propagates the redemption through Christ. These are the essential elements of the church doctrine of the Trinity. The defense of the doctrine has been moved by the religious interest--the concern to conserve the absolute character of the redemption by rejecting the idea of subordinate divinities in Christ and the Holy Spirit. This is confirmed by the fact that those parties in the church which have denied the Trinity have held an entirely different view of the redemption on all sides of it.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the keystone of the whole structure of Christian doctrine with respect to this essential point: the equivalence of the divine nature in Christ and in the spirit of the church with the divine nature in itself.
But to the further elaboration of this dogma in the
creeds and confessions the same value cannot be as
signed. In these the union of the divine with the human
Such a doctrine of the Trinity cannot be made to rest upon the Logos-doctrine of John’s Gospel, for this logology has seemed to afford support to the Arian and Athanasian formulae alike, and its interpretation is not settled. If such a doctrine was in John’s mind, why did he not set forth a similar statement concerning the Holy Spirit, especially since he mentions the Spirit so frequently in his gospel, and why did he offer no caution against polyolatry?
Nor can this doctrine be framed from the statements of Christ and his apostles as a combination of authoritative testimonies concerning a supersensuous fact. That would be just as little a doctrine of faith (Glaubenslehre) in the original and proper sense of the word as are the doctrines of the resurrection and the ascension. Moreover this supposedly transcendental fact does not affect our faith in Christ or our fellowship with him.
NOTE.--A doctrine of the Trinity derived from universal conceptions, or a priori, could have no place in Christian doctrine, even if there were a verbal coincidence, and could render no service to it. Such a doctrine in itself would not be of a religious character for its source is different.
The difficulty of conceiving each of three persons as equal to two others and to the divine essence is beyond the compass of thought. If the Godhead of all three DC less than the one supreme Essence, then our life-fellowship with Christ and our participation in the Holy Spirit are no fellowship with God, and all that is most valuable in Christianity is altered. If each be equal to the others, the difficulty is to find the rule for the distinction of the persons without the introduction of some elements that involves inequality. This is manifest in the Catholic statements of the doctrine. Similar contradictions appear in the canons which have been offered for the representation of the relation of the triplicity of persons to the unity of the Essence. If we assume triplicity we do not reach the unity, and if we assume the unity there is no room for triplicity. We possess no analogies whereon to base such a representation. The ecclesiastical doctrine, therefore, can furnish no support to the fundamental truth of Christianity.
The same difficulty arises when we attempt to
relate each and all of the three persons to the divine
causality. The dogmaticians have felt this, for they all
assume the divinity of the Father and attempt to prove that of the Son and the
Spirit, which shows that notwithstanding
The traditional trinitarian formulae come to us
from a time when the great mass of Christians were
recently recruited from heathenism. It was a very
easy matter for echoes of heathen thought to steal in
when the question of plurality or distinction in God
was discussed, and it is just as natural to find that
the definitions presented in those earlier times should
be quite unsuited to later times when a mingling of
heathen elements is no longer to be feared. If the
value of the doctrine lies in the affirmation that God
is in Christ and in the common spirit of the church,
then there arises the problem how to relate the peculiar existence of God in another to his existence in
and for himself and in relation to the world in general.
But there is no prospect of obtaining a formula which
will be sufficient for all time inasmuch as, since we
have to do only with that God-consciousness which
is given in our self-consciousness and with the world-consciousness, we have no available formula for the
expression of the existence of God in himself as distinct from his existence in the world, and we are
driven to borrow the desired formula from speculation; but that is to be untrue to the nature of
dogmatics. And inasmuch as all our dogmatical expressions for the relation of God to the world are
unavoidably anthropomorphic, how can we expect to
It is evident that the solution of the problem of the Trinity can be only approximate and progressive. Interest in it must rise ever afresh. We can expect no final statement. It will remain a problem. The customary placing of the doctrine of the Trinity at the head of the dogmatical system gives the misleading impression which, nevertheless, the history of the church contradicts, that the acceptance of this doctrine is the indispensable condition of faith in the redemption and in the founding of the kingdom of God in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Such a procedure results in making speculation rather than the Christian consciousness the basis of Christian doctrine.
A clear apprehension of the value of Schleiermacher’s theological system is not to be obtained apart from an examination of the manner in which the treatment of religious questions by the Christian scholars of modern times has been affected by his views, and a consideration of the extent to which his doctrinal discussions supply a solution of the difficulties that confront faith at the present. The amount of attention that is now being given by German students to this subject is significant of the large place he has secured among his countrymen, and a broad survey of the direction of religious thought in the world at large indicates the prophetical character of his insight into the religious needs of our own day. All that will be attempted in the present connection is to offer a few suggestions respecting the worth of his system that may be of some use to the reader whose acquaintance with recent theological speculation is limited.
There were some among Schleiermacher’s contemporaries who saw that the publication of his mature
views in Der christliche Glaube constituted a notable
landmark in Christian thought. His friend Gass wrote
(see the entire letter in Schleiermachers Briefwechsel
wit Gass, Berlin, 1852, pp. 193 ff.) in November, 1822: “On this point no man shall dispute me, that with thy
In his Outlines of Theological Science (Kurze
Darstellung des theologischen Stadiums), to which reference has been made
in an earlier part of this work, Schleiermacher had presented a scheme of the
treatment of the science of theology as a whole, exhibiting
Closely allied to this service is another of like kind.
Before his time an assumption common to the orthodox
and the rationalists was that theology presents to our
minds a sum of objective facts or truths, whether the
knowledge of them came by external communication
or sensible observation or by philosophical reflection
aided and supplemented by inference. Religious faith
was a consequence of receiving this objective knowledge. It requires only a little reflection to see that
in any instance the theory makes the scientist, the
philosopher, or the theologian an authority in religion
to which the consciousness of the common man is
subject. When, as is sure to happen with progress,
portions of this supposed knowledge turn out to be
unreliable or even bogus, faith is shaken or shattered
Schleiermacher’s influence contributed to introduce a new treatment of several of the theological disciplines, particularly the Philosophy of Religion, Apologetics, Church History, and Dogmatics.
(1) PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The earlier sporadic attempts at a philosophy of
religion proceeded according to a wrong method and
on false assumptions. The opponents of orthodoxy
attempted to adjust the facts of religion to an abstract
doctrine of the world or of human nature arrived
at independently of an analysis of the religious consciousness or of its actual history. The orthodox
theory, in turn, was rather a philosophy of revelation
or of the “plan of salvation.” Both sides proceeded
in ignorance of the facts when they assumed that the
history of religion was a history of the increasing
corruption of the original pure religion. Schleiermacher compelled theologians to approach the matter
from a new viewpoint: First, by emphasizing the historical character of Christianity and placing it in a definite
Second, holding religion to be an essential element
of our self-conscious existence and viewing man
whether in the individual or in the race as a unity, he
pointed out that the unfolding of the religious life is
bound up with the whole of our symmetrical human
progress from the lower plane of the flesh to the higher
plane of the spirit. There are inklings of this view
in Lessing and Hume, but Schleiermacher was the
first to present it in a well-thought-out form. In no
other way can we attain to a philosophy of religion
worthy of the name. A fine statement of his service
in this field is given by Bender (Schleiermacher’s Theologie mit ihren philosophischen Grundlagen, Vorwort, iv):
“Schleiermacher’s greatest service is the
fruitful application of the analytical method to the
(2) APOLOGETICS
Apologetics has been recast. The age that closed with Hume and Kant was prolific in apologies for Christianity, but they all were cumbered with the false assumption that was held in common by the orthodox and the rationalists, that religion consists of doctrines to be believed. The difference between them was in the quantum of the credenda. Dependence on external authority turned apologetics into a collection of “evidences.” With his usual keen discernment of the problems of his time Schleiermacher saw that the first need of the apologist was a new definition of that which was to receive its theoretical justification, a new statement of the essence of Christianity. Herein he recognized the historical relation of apologetics to dogmatics: it is the prius of dogmatics.
There were two contentions urged by him: first,
that religion is an integral and necessary element of
our self-consciousness and hence our recognition of
this fact must be distinguished from our estimate of
its value; second, that Christian faith is related fundamentally
The battle on behalf of Christianity has been fought on side-issues too long. The scattered and ill-ordered defense which till very recent times has been characteristic of English and American apologetics must at length make way for an analysis of its fundamental nature, a valuation of its traditional elements and a philosophy of its beliefs, if the needs of our times are to be met.
(3) CHURCH HISTORY
Apart from the consideration that Schleiermacher’s view of the teleological nature of the Christian
religion and his emphasis on the cardinal relation of its
Founder toward it strengthened the new interest in
church history, this department of theology was influenced by him in a special way. It was mainly
through reading the Discourses (Reden) that the
great Neander was led from Judaism to a warm
(4) DOGMATICS
It is most of all in the department of dogmatics
that Schleiermacher’s theological influence has been
manifest. His principles lead to the annihilation of
dogma in the old sense of a formal doctrine necessary to salvation. Dogma in
that sense is promulgated by authority. Its truth is independent, and it is to
be received independently, of experience; it is a law
to faith rather than an utterance of faith. Christian
dogmas were a determination of the course the Christian religion in man must take, rather than a description of the course it actually does take. The Christian
religion was at the bottom statutory and its experiential character a matter of secondary importance.
The whole Roman Catholic system rests on this assumption, and Protestant theology unfortunately followed, the difference between them being in degree.
The difference that was most in evidence was in the
authority obeyed. Hence traditional Protestantism
held to certain doctrines as authoritatively revealed
truths. When their unification was not accomplished
the doctrines of the faith appeared as so many membra
By exhibiting Christian doctrine as the expression of a distinct type of religious life Schleiermacher inaugurated a revolution in the conception and method of Christian theology. He elevated the conscious inner life above formal doctrine and subjected the latter to the test of conformity to the former. He made theology a descriptive rather than a normative science. Doctrinal forms become fluent rather than static. They become symbols of a progressive religious life and at the same time a means of its further development, which again reacts upon the doctrinal statements, so that they become in time evidently inadequate and must submit to reconstruction.
His position involved a radical change in the common view of the source and authority of Christian doctrine. The Bible was regarded as a body of divine legislation or pronouncements. The proof-text method of handling the Scriptures was a consequence. The violence thereby done to the Scriptures and to Christianity itself is plain to us today.
Schleiermacher saw that within and behind and
beyond the Bible there was a power of spiritual life
of which our Christian doctrines become such interpretations as the human mind at any stage of its
progress is capable of giving to this vital reality. The
various doctrines arise out of the manifold relations
of the spirit of Christianity to the world of experience
We may claim, therefore, that Schleiermacher has not only liberalized Protestant theology and paved the way for a new basis and a new method of treatment, but he has also spiritualized and Christianized it. For the liberalism of Schleiermacher was not the liberalism of the rationalists and the “free-thinkers” who have reduced the content of religion to the limits of their boasted “reason”; but it was a liberalism that grew out of the consciousness of a life in communion with God which is unutterably rich and cannot submit to limitation by the forms of thought or worship or organization that have arisen at any period of its history. Me has Christianized theology. For by positing the essence of Christianity as the basic principle of any system that can claim to exhibit Christian truth, and by finding in the person of Christ in his redemptive relation to us the root of all that is Christian, he pointed out the means of differentiating the truly Christian from the pseudo-Christian doctrines.
Many objections have been made to the general
principles of his dogmatics. Of these objections we
may notice three: First, it is said that his conception
of theology is subversive of the authority of all doctrine. It is true that the separate authority of all
doctrinal formulae is destroyed. Authority is transferred
to the religious spirit--let us say, the Spirit of God,
Second, it is said that Schleiermacher’s view makes religion individualistic and subjective and does away with its normative character. There is no space here to answer this objection at length, but this may be said in reply: Religion that is not a matter of subjective experience is not religion at all, and doctrine that does not express subjective conviction is meaning less or worse; while it is also true that every man must be his own theologian, whatever the consequences. At the same time Schleiermacher has indicated a way of escape from mere subjectivism by emphasizing the communion-forming power of Christian faith. Through the continuity and development of the Christian communion a continuous and normal and therefore normative character is secured.
Third, objection is made to his classification of dogmatics under the head of historical theology, and with reason. For the aim of dogmatics is to set forth the doctrines that are essential to Christianity, that is, to arrive at a final and complete statement of Christian truth. Yet it is to be remembered that final truth or truths can only approximately be known by us, All dogmas indicate simply stages in our approach to this goal and must be arranged in an order of succession upon earlier attempts to do the same thing. Our dogmas may have final value for ourselves, but for coming generations their value will be historical.
We conclude this part of our estimate by saying that Schleiermacher has rendered a priceless service to theological science by compelling the Christian thinker to recognize the vital relation of the inner life to all fundamental doctrinal formulation and the necessity of testing the value of it by the worth of its ministry to that life.
II. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF HIS SYSTEM
It is in the actual working out of his theological scheme that Schleiermacher’s defects as well as his virtues as a theologian become most evident. A few of the most important elements of his system are here selected for comment with the aim of suggesting lines of criticism that may be carried out through the body of his theology.
(1) THE NATURE OF RELIGION
The first thing to notice in Schleiermacher’s definition of religion is his method of reaching it. True
to the tendency of those times to seek for an explanation of the nature of all the forms of human knowledge
in psychology, Schleiermacher discovers religion to be
an ultimate element of the self-consciousness. Accepting the common division of
ultimate psychic facts into feeling, thought, and will, he finds that religion
is a universal human experience in the form of feeling. This he regards as no
inference but an immediate result of introspection. The analysis of individual
experience
This union of the results of an examination of personal experience and of historic fact is certainly necessary in order to obtain an adequate view of the nature of religion, but on both sides of his investigation Schleiermacher was cumbered by doubtful pre suppositions.
In the first place, he assumes that religion is an elemental fact and the discovery of the form of the elemental experience in which it is seen establishes its universality; whereas it is certain that the religious experience is very complex and is interwoven with all our human experience. Besides, the nature of religion is not more truly ascertained by an examination of our inner experiences than it is by the survey of the activities which it brings into effect. Schleiermacher’s method as carried out by him seems to make religion itself an effect.
In the next place, objection must be made to his
method of using the historical material. To seek
for the common element in all the. religions as constitutive of their essence is to treat the lower forms
as if for purposes of definition they were as valuable
as the higher. The true method is to discover the
inner character of the highest religion and to interpret
the lower forms in the light of it, to wit: that it is to be
understood as the final expression of that which can
now be seen in the lower in germinal form. For it is
only in so far as the spirit of the higher form can
We notice, next, the definition itself. Religion is described as a form of feeling rather than of thought or will. I think the reasons for his attempt to find religion in feeling are not difficult to discover. There was the reaction in his mind against the traditional orthodoxy and the rationalism that made religion a matter fundamentally of the intellect and disparaged emotion, with the consequence that religion became dry doctrine or abstract morality with a dependence on authority. There was also a reaction in his mind against Kant’s theory that religion is tributary to the demands of the categorical imperative, its source being in will. On the positive side, however, his definition of religion is a result of his own deep emotional experience in the devotional meetings of the Moravians, which never lost their worth to him, combined with the influence of the Romanticism that helped to banish the alien rationalism from his mind.
His more complete determination of the nature
of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence indicates to us the source of the definition. In the religious experience there is a rich and varied play of
emotion. Why select the feeling of absolute dependence as fundamental and solely constitutive? The
answer is that this definition of it coincided with his
world-view and is an inference from it. Spinoza’s self-differentiating Substance expressing itself in an
infinity of forms, Calvin’s God the absolute Will,
His account of religion is also too meager. For religion embraces all the activities of the human spirit. It is at the root of the noblest, most elevated, most refined feeling and also of the purest morality and the keenest and most comprehensive mental action. Schleiermacher vindicates a place for religion alongside of intelligence and morality, whereas it is superior to them, since it supplies the impulse to the cultivation of them and therefore in the best sense embraces them. His definition of religion makes it aesthetic and destitute of moral quality, and seems logically to make progress in religion itself impossible.
Notwithstanding, he has rendered valuable service to theology in this definition of religion by insisting on the worth of the emotions, so much disregarded by the theologians of the day. For it is certain that there has never been a far-reaching revival of faith apart from deep emotional experience.
More than this, Schleiermacher has himself supplied the corrective of his own defective view in his declaration that Christianity, the highest religion, is teleological in character. Religion is to be defined from the point of view of the end that it seeks. This is to deny that religion is essentially feeling, for the latter sort of religion would be aesthetic in character and not teleological.
(2) RELIGION, KNOWLEDGE, AND REVELATION
Any theory of religion that finds it in a simple psychological experience will meet with difficulty when it tries to relate this experience to other fundamental activities of our nature. It is incumbent on the theologian to show that his view of religion issues in a view of the world and in a morality that satisfy the claims of our intelligence and our conscience. The first of these is our present concern. If religion does not bring us into a knowledge of reality not otherwise attainable its professions remain unvindicated.
The great question is whether in the religious experience we come to know that God exists. If that
experience be simply feeling, it can surely lead us
nowhere beyond itself. But Schleiermacher affirms
When Schleiermacher goes on to say that we are
aware of God as the Whence (Cause) of our religious
self-consciousness, it is difficult to see in what respect
this statement differs from the affirmation that the
being of God is for us an inference from the experience of dependence. If this be so it is not clear
why an inference from the other forms of our experience may not be equally valuable for our needs.
If religion is independent of science it must surely
If this be not granted, then we are shut up to one of two alternatives. Either we have only the experience of a unique feeling or at least an idea which we objectify and project into a realm beyond all phenomenal existence, so that God becomes only a name for a certain reflection of our consciousness; or else for our knowledge of the existence of God we are ultimately dependent on the information which a competent authority communicates to us.
With regard to the second of these, even if it be
true that we first came to believe in the existence of
God through the affirmation of some trusted human
friend and to that extent we obtained a knowledge
of God’s existence as a supposed fact in the same
manner in which many other facts are made known to
us, still the competency of any person or body of persons to witness to the existence of God as an objective
fact cannot be admitted. Mere “information” can
only avail to place his existence among the complex
of observable facts, but a God whose existence can be
so described is no God. The statement, “There is a
God,” can have meaning to anyone only on the condition that it appeals to some want of his nature and
Turn to the other alternative. According to Schleiermacher’s account, the predication of the existence of God may be nothing more than a psycho logical function. This is to leave us without any adequate explanation of the invincible tendency of the human mind to attach universal validity to its idea of the existence of God and at the same time to attach to it infinite worth. The difficulty arises out of his defective view of the religious consciousness. It does remain true that it is in the religious experience God is given. We become aware of him then. The existence of God is a dogma of religious faith.
God is an object of religious knowledge; not that herein we have a positive addition to the sum of our knowledge, any more than in the affirmation of a moral judgment we introduce the knowledge of an additional collection of facts. Moral reality is given in and with moral experience. The certainty that we have moral knowledge is found in the moral experience. Just so is it with religious knowledge. It springs out of religious experience and is implicated in it. That there is a specifically religious experience Schleiermacher abundantly established.
The question is, Wherein does this religious knowledge consist? I apprehend that it is unnecessary to
assert that knowledge about the objects of sense-perception, whether one’s own or another’s, cannot
be called religious knowledge. The knowledge of
But in his description of the nature of religion he misses the essential point. The religious experience is governed by the consciousness of personality. In it the man conies to true self-consciousness. He knows in it his own worth because in it he comes to know another personality in whom he finds the fulfilment of his longings and the end of his being. It is this recognition of and self-commitment to a personality in whom the desires of his soul find satisfaction that constitute his religion. Some of its forms are very crude but it is universal. In many people it may appear first in absolute trust and devotion to a father or mother, or it may reach its climax in faith in Christ, but everywhere it consists in a personal--thinking, willing, feeling--relation to a dominant personality.
In this religious experience there is religious knowledge.
It is plain that Schleiermacher’s view of religion
in relation to knowledge involves a new construction
of the idea of revelation. Kaftan (Dogmatik, §4)
complains, and rightly, of the obscure place he allows
it. From his apprehension of religion as subjective
condition rather than objective truth this is to be expected. At the same time here also he has offered
suggestions that go far beyond his own views. One
of these is that, for the Christian, revelation is not to
be considered apart from the person of Christ. An
other is that it inheres in his personality. A third is
that it affects us not merely as knowing subjects but
practically, that is, it is inseparable from the experience of salvation. This means, substantially, that
This seems to carry with it the acceptance of Schleiermacher’s contention that revelation is to be posited of a personality and the impression he makes on our minds. For the Christian, therefore, Christ is revelation, not merely a revealer. What he said and did constitute revelation to us only in that his deeds and words are the manifestation to us of a personality whose advent into the sphere of our activity effects a change in our relations with God. If all our relations Godward find their determination in him, then he is the whole of revelation to us. That which is said about him is revelation in a secondary sense, No statement of objective fact can itself be revelation, for revelation is never mere information.
The bearing of this conception of revelation on the
import of the predictive clement of the Scriptures is
obvious. The references in the New Testament, for
example, to the things to come appear less in the
character of descriptions of events and conditions yet
future, than as utterances of the assurance of faith.
That is, our future relations to God and the course of
At the same time it must be maintained that there
is a knowledge of the future given to faith. For the
believer the gospel of Christ brings a guarantee of
the ultimate character of future events--they can
bring him nothing but good. A forecast of the future
issues out of faith. It is impossible for the Christian
to believe that he will be abandoned by God, The
future cannot bring his Blessed relation to God to an
end. The Christian knowledge of the future is a
faith-knowledge. It is knowledge of a higher order
than that which sense-perception or a philosophy of
being can produce. It is a knowledge of our eternal
(3) CHRISTIANITY, CHRIST, JESUS
The order in which the above words occur is indicative of the method of Schleiermacher’s approach
to the theological treatment of history. The merit of
having been the first of modern theologians to frame
a definition of Christianity in which the name of its
Founder appears central is subject to qualification. The
governing principle of his theological construction does
not readily make room for the activity of a historical
personage as a factor in religion. His whole system
is rooted in a conception of religion rather than in an
apprehension of personality. In keeping with this
viewpoint he proceeds from a conception of the nature
of Christianity to such a representation of the person
of Christ as shall be in harmony with it. Consequently
one of his chief problems is how to relate Christ to
Christianity. The difficulty of the problem increases
in ratio with the growth of the historical spirit and
our progress in the knowledge of the actual events
Schleiermacher’s representation of the manner in which Christ relates himself to the Christian is two fold. At one time he says that everything in Christianity is to be referred to the historical fact of Christ’s advent into the sphere of our activity and the original impression his person made. That impression, he says, is retained in the Christian communion and perpetuated in the world through being communicated by this communion to those persons who come within it.
His other statement on the subject is to the effect
that Jesus possessed a unique God-consciousness and
that his God-consciousness, being communicated to
Again, it is noteworthy that our theologian continually uses the name Christ instead of the name
Jesus. This is not accidental. It indicates the point
of view from which he construes the extant materials
relating to the historical career of Jesus. It is well
known also that he makes the Gospel of John rather
than the Synoptics the main scriptural source of his
doctrine of the person of Christ. This preference for
John’s Gospel is similarly significant of his method of
determining what elements of the gospels are of value
for the dogmatician. The narratives are evaluated on
the basis of a standard derived from another source.
Only those portions are esteemed to have interest for
the dogmatician which serve to set forth the character
of Jesus as Redeemer. He goes even farther and decides on the same basis what sort of affirmations may
be made concerning his mental and physical life: for
example, that his physical, mental, and moral growth
must have been normal. He makes the perpetuation
of Christ’s own self-presentation in the consciousness
of the historical Christian communion the ground for
In keeping with this method of construing history he dismisses the accounts of the resurrection on the ground that faith in Christ is independent of them. Hereby he exposes himself to the charge which Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu Wrede, (1-66) against him: “Schleiermacher did not seek the Jesus of history but the Jesus Christ of his Glaubenslehre, that is, the historic personality who is fitted to the self-consciousness of the Redeemer which he presents. The empirical reality simply does not exist for him. . . . . Historical questions relating to the life of Jesus are for him only momenta in his dialectic.”
The point is well taken, though overstated. It finds
illustration in his classification of the heresies relating to
the person of Christ. They are described, not according
to their use of material alien to the character of Jesus
as it is depicted in the narratives of the evangelists or
according to their neglect of essential facts in his
career, but according to the manner in which they
annul the redemption as Schleiermacher conceives it.
That is to say, his conception of Christianity determines his doctrine of the person of the Christ and this
again becomes the criterion of the worth and, to some
extent, of the trustworthiness of the New Testament
accounts of Jesus. But in this respect Schleiermacher
was not a “sinner above all the other Galileans.” Both
Catholic and Protestant theologians have been led to
The criticism that Schleiermacher failed to avoid the a priori method of construing the personality of Jesus is to be modified, however, by reference to the emphasis he placed on the religious experience as a source of knowledge. He said that the Christian consciousness is a continuation of the God-consciousness of Jesus. This should lead to an examination of the self-consciousness of Jesus, but Schleiermacher failed here to follow his own clue and fell back on the dogmatical reconstruction of the person of Christ.
The error is a serious one from the point of view
of history as well as religion. Our conception of
Christ and of the salvation he brought must ever submit to the test of historical research if either he or
his salvation is to be a factor in the lives of men. To
express the same idea, in axiomatic form, the Christ
of theology must agree with the Jesus of the gospels.
Nay more, that conception of salvation which is truly
Christian, if Jesus of Nazareth is the founder of
Christianity, must always represent such a salvation
as could arise out of the deeds and words, the personal
(4) PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM
Schleiermacher’s distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism has become famous: “Protestantism makes the relation of the individual to the church dependent on his relation to Christ; Catholicism makes the relation of the individual to Christ dependent on his relation to the church.” It has been severely criticized by Ritschl. He says:
This formula, however, is inconsistent with the very principle with which Schleiermacher enters upon the doctrine of
redemption, namely, that the consciousness of redemption
through Christ is referred to the mediation of his religious
fellowship. It was only because Schleiermacher was unable
to develop this idea that he lapsed into the opposite formula
in his Glaubenslehre. This formula, however, is
false. For even the evangelical church’s right relation to Christ is both
historically and logically conditioned by the fellowship of believers;
historically, because a man always finds the community already existing when he
arrives at faith, nor does he attain this end without the action of the
community upon him; logically, because no action of Christ upon men can be
conceived except in accordance with the standard of Christ’s antecedent purpose
to found a community. This position, however,
On the question of Schleiermacher’s consistency Ritschl is undoubtedly in the right. The basis of Schleiermacher’s theology is non-churchly. So also is every system of thought which regards the religious experience as the expression of immediate relationship with God, or, transferring it to the Christian realm, with Christ. Now if there is any single force whose creative influence in the Reformation is more marked than others it is the spirit of individualism. It is true that this principle was imperfectly grasped and only partially recognized by the Protestant thinkers who erected the Protestant church systems and the Protestant creeds. The full admission of its claims would have clothed the specter of Separatism (a sort of nightmare to Ritschl himself) with flesh and blood and apparently have allowed free play to the combination of revolutionary forces known as “Anabaptism.” The spirit of religious freedom consequently was confined within very narrow limits, and whenever it be came too self-assertive it was crushed. But individualism revived in the eighteenth century, and now at length it has won on all sides a recognition of its surpassing moral vigor, evangelistic zeal, and social firmness. The future seems to be its own.
Though Schleiermacher belonged to this modern movement his theological position was compromised by the necessity he felt of avoiding a breach in church relations. The attempt he made to mediate between individualism and churchism is in some respects admirable. But it forced him to use the word church in a double sense, the religious sense and the corporate sense. The most signal instance of this is seen in his treatment of the doctrine of baptism, where he views the baptismal act as the exercise of the church’s will to receive the baptized into that communion from which all the operations which affect the new birth issue, so that the act is to be considered as in some sense the communication of the Holy Spirit. Baptism becomes the final act in the series in which the church expresses its will to extend itself, which it does by receiving new members. That is to say, the act of baptism becomes efficacious, not because of the will of the recipient, but by virtue of the will of the church which to all intents and purposes is to be regarded as identical with the will of Christ. Plainly the term church can refer here only to the corporate organization whose officials administer the “sacrament.”
This position is substantially the same as the
Roman Catholic. When Ritschl tries to clear away
the non-churchly features of Schleiermacher’s theology
at this point he only succeeds in making it more
Roman Catholic in tone.
So far then as concerns the issue between these two theologians we must takes sides with Schleiermacher. The two mutually contradictory attitudes represent the two inconsistent momenta in Luther’s movement, the churchly and the evangelical.
Schleiermacher’s statement is nevertheless open to serious objection. In the first place, his method of arriving at the distinction is defective, namely, by ascertaining the principal grounds urged by each for rejecting the other’s view. The basis of attack in controversies is sure to reflect the prevailing ideas of the time, but after all it may indicate a mere side-position, because the parties to the strife may have failed to apprehend the full significance of what is attacked or defended. A better method of reaching the bottom principles of the two movements would be to trace historically the process of their differentiation from a common beginning.
In the next place, the form of Schleiermacher’s statement is open to objection because in saying that,
for the Protestant, the relation of the man to the
church is dependent on his relation to Christ the church
is apparently treated as the end to which Christ is the
means. It is difficult here again to tell what he means
by the church, whether the spiritual fellowship of the
saved or the ecclesiastical organization. .If it be the
latter, then the statement is not true to the practice
of those Protestant churches that admit to member
ship many who are: confessedly without conscious relation to Christ. If by church he means the spiritual
The trouble with this whole attempt is that it introduces into dogmatics an artificial factor. The starting-point of theological activity is not the consciousness of an ecclesiastical body but the consciousness of the individual. The fact is that the great doctrinal systems have sprung from this source and have afterward been adopted by some church as an approximate expression of common convictions. Otherwise theological freedom would be crushed at the beginning. The. unsuccessful efforts of Schleiermacher to make out an inner connection between his views and the creeds show how he was hampered by this artificial rule. He, as well as Ritschl, was afraid of Separatism.
His opposition to the idea that each man holds a
personal relation to Christ was reinforced by his philosophy: the universe is a unity; the creative will of God
had reference to the world, not to individuals; the
redemption has to be interpreted as the purification of
human nature universally, not as individual purification. According to this we may well ask, How can
there be any recognition of the individual whatever?
Can he be anything more than a temporary eddy in the
ceaseless stream of personal life? The whole work
of redemption becomes the transmutation of the universal
Naturally enough, when Schleiermacher tries to justify the Protestant practice of infant baptism he falls back into the realism of the Catholics: the children are within the church and stand in an ordered relation to the operation of divine grace; the church extends salvation to the individual by propagating its religious consciousness in him, by extending its fellowship to him. The radical defect in Schleiermacher’s theology is found in his essentially erroneous views of human personality.
We are not precluded hereby from a recognition of the value of his contention that the religious life is a community life. It is true that there is a necessary connection between faith and the communion of the faith. A church, as an association of believers, is the organism in which faith seeks its full expression, The isolated believer cannot rise to the full assurance of the objective truth of his faith, or propagate it, or realize its ethical character, without the community,
But while the believer and the community of faith
are mutually involved, the primacy belongs to the
former. Faith is an attitude Godward of the personal, individual consciousness. It is an act in which
the man, in response to the self-revelation of God, devoted himself to the end of his being. The opposite
view would render true human progress impossible.
CONCLUSION
By the application of his powerful dialectic to the varied spiritual material at his command Schleiermacher succeeded in producing a system which for religious warmth and inspiration has never been surpassed in the history of theology. But this system is superior to the fundamental conception of religion that he placed at its base. For the feeling of absolute dependence comes short of a constructive principle of theology and has no meaning apart from the theory of the world and of man from which it originates. Some of his followers have endeavored to discard the aid of philosophy and metaphysics in the unfolding of a doctrinal system, with no greater success than he.
Notwithstanding, it remains the imperishable honor
of Schleiermacher that he grasped the whole problem
of theology in a new way and compelled theologians
of all schools to follow him. He vindicated for the
religious life the claim to utter supremacy in any
theory of the relations of God, man, and the world,
lie has gradually forced modern theology to attempt
Among the works which may be consulted in a study of Schleiermacher and his place in Protestant theology are the following:
Der christliche Glaube. 4 vols. Gotha, 1889.
Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums. Halle: Otto Hendel. (A translation, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, including Lücke’s Reminiscences, by W. Farrer, was published in Edinburgh, 1850.)
Monologen. Halle: Otto Hendel.
Platons Werke, 1804, 1817, 1828.
Gundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre, Berlin, 1803.
Discourses on Religion. Transl. by John Oman. London, 1893.
Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher. Ed. W. Robert son Nicoll.
Sämmtliche Werke. Berlin, 1840.
Schleiermachers Briefwechsel mit Gass. Berlin, 1852.
The Life and Letters of Schleiermacher. Translated by Miss Rowan.
Erinnerungen von Schleiermacher. Lücke.
Schleiermachers und C. S. von Brinkmans Gang durch die Brudergemeine. Leipzig, 1905.
Schleiermachers Theologie mit ihren philosophischen Grundlagen. By W. Bender. Nordlingen, 1878.
Schleiermachers Reden über Religion. By A. Ritschl. Bonn, 1874.
Die Entwicklung des Religionsbegriffs bei Schleiermacher. By E. Huber. Leipzig, 1901.
Schleiermachers “Glaubenslehre” in ihrer Bedeutung für Vergangenheit und Zukunft. By C. Clemen. Giessen, 1905.
Die Grundlagen der Christologie Schleiermachers. By H. Bleek. Freiburg, 1898.
Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl. D. F. Kattenbusch. Giessen.
Schleiermachers Vermächtnis an unsere Zeit. Kalthoff. Leipzig.
Christentum und Wissenschaft in Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre. By H. Scholz. Berlin, 1909.
La philosophie religieuse de Schleiermacher. By Edmond Cramaussel. Paris, 1909.
Numerous small pamphlets.
History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion. By Pünjer; transl. by Hastie. Edinburgh, 1887.
History of Protestant Theology in Germany. By I. A. Dorner; transl. by Robson and Taylor. Edinburgh, 1871.
History of German Theology in the Nineteenth Century. By Lichtenberger; transl. by Hastie. Edinburgh, 1889.
The Development of Theology. By O. Pfieiderer; transl. by Smith. New York, 1893.
Das Bild des Christentums bei den grossen deutschen Idealisten. By Lülman. Berlin, 1901.
Critical History of Free Thought in Relation to Religion. By A. S. Farrar, New York, 1863.
Leland’s View of the Deistical Writers, London, 1837.
Religious Thought in England. By J. Hunt, London, 1870 ff.
Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century. By J. Hunt. 1896.
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. By Sir L. Stephen. New York, 1902.
Rational Theology and Christian Thought in England in the Seventeenth Century. By J. Tulloch. Edinburgh, 1872.
Manual of Religious Thought in Britain in the Nineteenth Century. By J. Tulloch. New York, 1885.
The Problem of Faith and Freedom. By John Oman. London, 1906.
Von Reimarus zu Wrede. By A. Schweitzer. Tübingen, 1906.
Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus. By O. Ritschl. Vol. I. Leipzig, 1908.
Agnosticism, 94
Albertini, 11, 17, 39.
Anabaptists, 70, 72, 73 ff., 98, 102, 119, 328, 334.
Analogy (Butler’s), 85 ff.
Angels, 161 ff.
Antinomianism, 76.
Apologetics, 134 ff., 304 f.
Apostles’ Creed (mentioned), 70.
Aristotle, 25.
Arminianism, 76, 89.
Arianism, 290.
Arndt, John, 59, 99.
Asceticism, 195.
Athanasian Creed, 290.
Atonement, 19, 20, 70, 71, 78, 89.
Aufklärung. See Illuminism.
Augustine, 25, 113.
Authority (in religion), 26, 74 f., 95 f., 225, 253 f., 308 f.
Bacon, 79.
Baptism, 72 f., 73, 230, 253, 258 f., 264, 329; infant, 73, 230 f., 260 f., 333.
Baptists, 73, 89, 99.
Barby, 10, 15, 16, 23.
Bengel, 100.
Berkeley, Bishop, 83, 87.
Bible, 71, 86, 150, 157, 196, 252 ff., 257 ff., 307.
Boehler, 102.
Bunyan, 99.
Butler, 83 ff.
Calvin, 25, 68, 113, 231, 312.
Calvinism, 4, 76, 86.
Canon of Scripture, 255 ff.
Categorical Imperative, 95.
Catholicism, 70 f., 146 f., 327 f., 333.
Chalcedonian Formula (mentioned), 70.
Chiliasm, 227.
Christ: humiliation of, 226; incarnation of, 84, 137 f., 233, 248; person of, 11, 26, 70, 132 f , 136 ff., 145, 152 ff., 174, 176, 180, 186, 199, 228, 322 ff.; resurrection and ascension, 212, 226; sufferings of, 224; supernatural origin of, 198 f., 206 ff., 216; work of, 134 f., 200 ff., 213 ff., 220, 224.
Christianity, definition of, 132, 133 ff., 305, 322 f.
Church: definition of, 117, 237 ff., 329 ff.; Calvinist or Reformed, 4, 26, 42, 57 f., 76, 148; invisible and visible, 132, 133 ff., 305, 322 f.; Lutheran, 57 f., 76, 148; Roman, see Catholicism; origin of, 239 ff.; perfecting of, 273 ff., 283; permanent features of, 251 ff.
Churches: 270 f.; free, 101, 299.
Church and state, 57 ff., 76, 225 f.
Church and world, 249 ff., 269 ff.
Communion: religious, 125, 133, 173 f.; Christian, 134, 139 f., 153, 195, 197, 201 f., 215, 224, 228 f. See also Church.
Conversion, 229 ff.
Cosmology, 157, 163.
Covenant theology, 184.
Creation, 156 f., 199, 210, 214 f., 218, 233.
Creeds and confessions, 69 f., 75, 149 ff., 156, 206 f., 289.
Critique of Pure Reason, 93 f., 105.
Critique of the Practical Reason, 94 f.
Cromwell, Oliver, 99.
Decrees of God, 233.
Deism, 81 ff., 93, 105.
Democracy, 46, 57.
Dependence, absolute, 121, 124, 163.
Descartes, 25, 90.
Devil, 161 ff., 183.
Diderot, 83.
Discourses on Religion, Pref. viii., 32, 37 f., 38, 39, 106 ff., 305 f.
Dissenters, 76, 99.
Docetism, 146, 209.
Dogma, Christian, 149 ff., 151.
Dogmatics: materials of, 149 ff.; meaning of, 116 ff., 143, 306; origin of, 141 ff.; method of, 144 ff., 151 f., 157, 164, 176.
Dort, Synod of (mentioned), 76, 89.
Ebionitism, 146.
Election, doctrine of, 240 ff., 244.
Encyclopaedists, 13.
Ernesti, 8, 92.
Ethics, 119 ff.
Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, 97 ff.
Evil: kinds of, 87, 161, natural, 187; source of, 161, 227; relation to sin, 87, 191.
Evolution, 123 f.
Faith, 195, 196, 225. 229, 238, 301.
Fetichism, 127, 329.
Forgiveness, 232 f.
Foreknowledge, divine, 343 f.
Foreordination. See election.
Formula of Concord, 76.
Freedom, 121, 153 f., 190.
Future punishment, 12, 19, 277, 282 f.
Future state, 49 f., 241 f., 244, 275 ff., 281 ff., 321 f.; intermediate, 279.
Gnadenfrei, 8, 32.
God: meaning of, 122 f., 206 ff., 313, 318 f.; attributes, 90, 163 ff., 166 ff., 191 ff., 201, 283 ff.; proofs of existence, 90, 155, 315 ff.
God-consciousness, 122, 130, 135, 153, 174, 176, 186, 201 f.
Grace, 176; 189 f., 194 ff., 200 ff., 229 f., 284.
Grotius, Hugo, 89.
Guilt, 182 f., 227, 232; of the race, 187 f. See also Sin.
Halle, 4, 11, 19. 24 f., 29, 47, 100.
Harms, Pastor, 106, 110.
Hegelianism, 298, 326.
Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 81.
Herder, 16, 35, 93.
Heresy, 145 ff., 325.
Holiness, 192.
Holy Spirit, 138, 245 ff., 255 f., 257, 267, 273.
Human depravity, 13, 178 ff., 183. See also Sin.
Hume, David, 13, 87 ff., 95 ff., 303, 304.
Illuminism, 13, 91, 106.
Immortality, 95. See also Future State.
Incarnation. See Person of Christ.
Infallibility, 272 f.
Judaism, 82, 129, 131 f., 136, 188.
Judgment, final, 280 f.
Justification, 71, 229, 232 ff.
Kant, 16, 25, 28, 37, 93 ff., 312.
Keys, office of, 253, 265 f.
Kingdom of God, 195, 219 f., 224 f., 235 f., 239 f., 267, 268, 284, 286, 288.
Knox, John, 68.
Kurze Darstellung, etc., 51, 110, 299.
Lambeth Articles (mentioned), 76.
Lavater, 16.
Leibnitz, 9:, 113, 313.
Lessing, 16, 25, 92, 113, 303.
Locke, 25, 79, 80 f.
Logos, doctrine of, 290.
Luther, 25, 68, 98, 113.
Lutheranism, 15, 76. See also Church.
Manichaeism, 145, 178, 183, 189, 190.
Melanchthon, 25, 68, 307.
Methodism, 101 ff.
Ministry, Christian, 253, 256 ff.
Miracles, 82, 84, 94, 160, 220.
Mohammedanism, 129, 131 f., 136.
Monologues, 109 f.
Monotheism, 128 ff., 136 f.
Moravian Brethren, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19,43.
Moravianism, 15, 23, 101 ff., 312.
Mysticism, 14, 96.
Neander, 305 f .
New Birth. See Regeneration.
Nicene Symbol (mentioned), 70.
Niesky, 9, 14, 15 f.
Nonconformists, 76.
Obduracy, 190.
Origen, 25, 292.
Pantheism, 108, 129 f.
Pelagianism, 145, 178, 189, 190.
Perfection: of Christ, 196 ff.; of man, 172 ff., 177, 179, 187, 205; of the world, 170 ff., 187.
Philosophy of religion, I26 ff., 302 ff.
Pietism, 15, 99 ff.
Piety. See Religion.
Plato, 8, 25, 32, 42, 113.
Polytheism, 128.
Prayer, 160, 253, 266 ff.
Preservation, 156 ff., 109.
Priesthood, 125.
Primitive man, 174, 183, 205.
Protestantism, 53, 67 ff., 75, 77 ff., 146 ff., 306, 327 f., 333.
Providence, 26, 285.
Punishment, 227, 232. See also Future Punishment.
Puritanism, 99.
Quakers, 73, 99.
Race-consciousness, 173, 180 f., 182 f., 201, 226, 246.
Rationalism, 4, 37, 38 ff., 73, 89, 93 f., 97, 146, 304.
Reason, 253 f.
Reconciliation, 216 ff.
Redeemer. See Christ.
Redemption, 134 f., 176, 190; consciousness of, 151; how wrought, 196 ff., 213 f.
Reden. See Discourses.
Regeneration, 160, 227 ff., 234, 259, 269 f.
Religion: definition of, 106 ff., 119 ff., 154 f., 172 f.; nature of, 320 ff.; kinds and stages of, 126 ff.; natural, 40, 82, 83 ff., 132 f.; positive, 132; revealed, 79, 83 ff., 132 f.; supernatural, 79, 81; true and false, 127.
Renaissance, 73.
Repentance, 229, 232.
Resurrection, the, 277, 279 f.
Revelation, 81 f., 86, 92, 96 f., 133 f., 201, 205, 314 ff., 319 ff.
Revival, evangelical, 97 f.
Righteousness, 193.
Ritschl, Albrecht, 298, 327 f.
Roman Catholicism, 95, 307, 327. See also Catholicism.
Romanticism, 38, 105, 312.
Sabellianism, 209.
Sack, 27, 33, 108.
Sanctification, 227 f., 233 ff., 280.
Skepticism, 13, 14, 16.
Schlegel, F. R., 36, 32 f.
Schwenkfeldt, Caspar, 73.
Scholasticism, 209.
Scriptures. See Bible.
Second Coming of Christ, 277 f.
Separatism, 43, 101, 195, 328, 331.
Sin: consciousness of, 175, 178 f., 184. 186, 187, 190, 235, 284; doctrine of, 177 ff.; hereditary, 181 f., 187, 210; actual, 184 f.; God’s relation to, 188 ff., 198 f.; punishments of, 100, 193 f., 201, 2l6, 222.
Socinianism, 76, 78.
Spangenberg, 102.
Spener, 99 f.
Spinoza, 25, 90, 113, 312.
Spirit of Christ. See Holy Spirit.
Spirit of God. See Holy Spirit.
State churches, 99. See also Church and State.
Supernatural and natural, 231 f., 240, 248.
Supper, Lord’s, 14 f., 65, 253, 261 ff.
Testament: Old, 137, 150, 2<4, 256; New, 151, 161, 251 f., 254 i.
Theology, natural, 79, 88, 96, 139, 165. See also Rationalism; Revelation.
Traducianism, 207, 209.
Trinity, 70, 84, 207, 209, 289 ff.
Voltaire, 13, 83.
Wesley, John, 98-102.
Wesley, Charles, 102.
Whitefield, 98.
Will, the, 179 ff.
Wolff, 25, 91.
Zinsendorf, 11, 20.
Zwingli, 68,
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