No More Learning

For the Omnipresent God far from no one who earnestly seeks him and prepared to carry out his counsels. And who was ever more deserving of his help, or ever enjoyed more marked proofs of the favour of divine Providence, than the founder of the Christian religion As regards the person of Jesus, the Gospel story of his supernatural birth must be considered a pious legend of Jew ish origin, having also its parallels in many other nations and
with all assertions of the miraculous nature of Jesus fall to the ground but this not the case with the conviction that his remarkable endowments and powers, as well as the con ditions of the age favourable to their development and em
must be ascribed to God as their cause. Of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the two natures in Christ, there are, Wegscheider does not wish to deny, some germs in the Bibli cal writings but since in its developed form the doctrine gives no assistance to virtue, and in fact in the highest degree detrimental to the influence of the example of Jesus, which was given for our imitation, besides wholly contra
sound reason and some plain passages of Scripture, best to adhere to the more simple form of doctrine
revering and imitating Jesus as truly a Divine delegate, terpreter of the Divine will, prototype of men destined to be filled with true religion and virtue, who was himself full of the Divine (numen, Oeiov), and placed before us in this capa
city a dignity not without God. Against the ecclesiastical doctrine of the substitutionary satisfaction of the death of Christ, the objections of a theological and moral character which had been urged from the time of the Socinians are brought forward, and to them others are added of a cosmo-
nature difficult to suppose, he holds, that in the second person of the Trinity God himself, the Governor of innumerable sidereal systems, should have determined to descend in a human form to this earth, such tiny part of the universe, to suffer death at the hands of the Jews, and there by to offer himself as a propitiatory sacrifice to himself. A
thought which gives expression to the undoubtedly just feel ing that the Christian consciousness has not remained unin fluenced by the Copernican theory, and must abandon anti-
? ployment,
dicting
logical
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? Ch. KANTIAN RATIONALISTS.
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quated mythological ideas. Moreover, Wegscheider suffi ciently unprejudiced to perceive that the doctrine of satisfaction cannot by fair exegesis be wholly eliminated from the Scrip tures he looks upon as conveying Christian truth in form suited to the times of the apostles, and to which a certain
pedagogical value still attaches for some minds, while on the other hand more advanced minds are entitled, on the ground of other forms of Scriptural teaching, to regard the doctrine as a mere symbol, intended to indicate that by a faithful ob servance of the religion taught by Jesus and attested by his death, we shall be pleasing to God without any further sacri fices and ceremonies. The doctrine of the atonement may also be interpreted as a symbol of the love of God and Christ
to men, or of the consecration of a new religion as a new covenant between God and men. With regard to these criticisms of the doctrine of the atoning work of Christ, we must allow, as undoubtedly just, that various religious motives are represented in which we can accept as valuable, though we are able to give expression to them in another form. Moreover, precisely the deepest religious element in the doc trine, which was also adumbrated in the Pauline germs of had
been previously much better expressed by Kant his ethical
idealistic version of the dogma, than by any of his successors
amongst the theologians, who none of them penetrated so far as he beneath the mere surface of the matter. The same was the case with respect to the doctrine of salvation. Presup posing the fact of a "radical evil," Kant had pronounced not
merely a reformation of morals, but a change of mind and principle, or a "regeneration" of the entire man, the condi tion under which we may hope to be regarded by God as good, the Searcher of hearts accepting the good principles instead of the actual perfect goodness which can never exist and with this Kant had connected the Protestant doctrine of
justification by faith. The theologians of the school under consideration continued, true, to lay great stress upon feeling and disposition as opposed to external and individual acts, and looked upon this as the pivot of Protestant soterio- logy but that this good disposition something profoundly different from the natural selfish mind, and based upon a radical transformation of the mind, they did not teach, because, unlike Kant, they regarded men as by nature essentially good and only in part morally enfeebled and impeded by sensuous
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ness or bad example. By this view the Biblical and ecclesi astical distinction between the natural and the new man was in their case softened down to a gradual moral reformation, under which a man may feel assured of the Divine approba tion according to the measure of his worthiness. And it can hardly be disputed that but poor provision is thereby made to meet either the moral earnestness of ideal requirements or the religious need of an assured salvation and a quieted con science--two objects which the Protestant doctrine of justifi cation by faith is intended to secure. Kant's teaching was more profound and was in closer touch with the Protestant soteriology than the post- Kantian Rationalism ; as Fichte and Schleiermacher show, a development of Kant's moral and re ligious philosophy in the direction of religious mysticism was possible ; but from the Kantian Rationalists it was rather a retrogressive turn in the direction of the popular philosophy that it actually received.
This school could not for long satisfy the newly awakened
and deeper religious feeling, and had accordingly to make room for a more profound mode of thought. At the same time, it had not merely done good service in its day in freeing the churches from the curse of an intolerant dogmatism, but there is conveyed a lasting lesson, worthy to be laid to heart now not less than then, in the words of Wegscheider, in the preface of his Institutiones Theologies: "In the interpre tation and criticism of the opinions and doctrines of early times, theologians ought to take greatest care to combine the use of sound reason with the results of the learning of so many centuries. Then only will they follow in the footsteps of the great Reformers, who in their noble struggle against so many injurious errors never claimed themselves to have made an end of all inquiry, and never grudged to their successors progress in religious knowledge. The teachers of the Church ought particularly to endeavour to communi cate to the people the teaching of Christ and his Apostles regarding God and duty in all its purity ; to show that the truth of this teaching does not depend on ancient dogmatic formulas and pedantic interpretations of Biblical
? passages, but is borne out by the properly developed nature of our own mind ; to no longer try to defend forms of doctrine which were adapted only for the thought of certain people and times, but gradually to lay them aside and adopt a simple
? ? ? Ch. THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE.
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form of teaching, such as indicated in the New Testament itself to permit the sparks of true morality and piety to flash from the light of genuine Christian doctrine, instead of offering the smoke of ancient opinions as the light of know ledge " We honour the genuine Protestant love of truth which finds utterance in such words we still acknowledge the vocation proposed to theology by those men but, certainly, in the meantime we have learnt that the fulfilment of this vocation far more difficult than they thought, that presupposes both more thorough historical inquiry and more profound insight into the facts and laws of the religious and moral life than they could command. For this reason we have not only grown more cautious in our criticisms of what
old, but also more patient with its adherents, than was the habit of the Rationalism of the Kantian school.
The transition from the rationalistic theology of the Kantian school to the theology of Schleiermacher was made De Wette, who adopted the philosophic standpoint of the semi-
Kantian Fries, who desired to complete the Kantian critical system in an anthropological direction. All our knowledge,
? Fries and De Wette taught, limited to the world of phenomena, which directly perceived in space and time, and has to be reduced to concepts by the understanding.
But this " philosophy of the understanding " not the true one, for beyond the world of ideas demanded by the reason these ideas are not objects of knowledge, but of faith: namely, the idea of imperishable being, or of the soul, of absolute independent power, or of freedom, and of the unity of the absolute Whole, or of all-conditioning cause -- God. These ideas have no connection which can be philosophically proved with the phenomenal world which the object of our knowledge, but they are in complete contradiction to
since our experience presents everywhere only the finite and incomplete, nowhere the eternal and infinite. Nevertheless we feel that these ideas have full truth and unconditional certainty. true they must never be assigned a place
our philosophy of the understanding, which has to do solely with the mechanism of finite causes and effects but they form the foundation of our higher or " ideal philosophy," which arises when we, by means of emotional presentiment, bring those ideas to bear upon the world, and judge of the
world aesthetically and religiously their light. The religious g. t.
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DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ideas are of themselves, when conceived by the speculative faculty, without life, inasmuch as they arise only by the nega tion of finite limitations, that by means of the abstraction of reality but they obtain their positive significance, and become of value in life when they are taken up by the emotions, and clothed the picture-language of the poetic and symbolising imagination. All religious propositions with which theology occupied must therefore be carefully distinguished from intellectual knowledge, as they are part of the ideal view of the world, and only the symbolical expression of
be set at rest only both are completely separated, --know ledge being confined to the world of experience, faith being directed to the ideal world, and comprehended under the aesthetic view of things. In particular three kinds of aesthetico- religious feeling must be distinguished enthusiasm, kindled by the idea of the personal dignity and immortal destination of man, and also by the view of the beauty of nature, and the reign of purpose in history submission, which, under the feeling of one's own imperfection, rises above the evils of the world to faith in the higher spiritual realm of things, which blooms in eternal undimmed beauty beyond the imperfections
and fragments of terrestrial things lastly, the feeling of
which quickens the idea of God into the idea of eternal Goodness, guiding all things for the best, and recti fying all confusion while for the understanding the idea of God nothing more than the empty form of absolute Unity. To these three religious feelings, to which correspond, De Wette holds, the aesthetic ideas of the epic, the drama, and the lyric, all religious statements must be referred, in such a way as to be symbols of the feelings, and find in them the test of their truth. In this consists the true function theology. not its business to substitute for dogmas its own speculations or mere moral doctrine (after the manner of the Kantians), but in the first instance to give an historical account of them, and then to interpret them in accordance with their religious symbolism. Figures and symbols must
to the erroneous confusion of this
surmising feeling.
ideal philosophy, expressing itself in symbols, with intellectual knowledge, that all dogmatism and scholasticism must be ascribed. And dogmatism misunderstands as much the
? nature of religious feeling as of knowledge, whilst to owing the endless conflict between faith and knowledge, which can
worship,
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not be dispensed with, for we always want them in the repre sentation of religious feelings, and do best to adhere to the figurative language which we have inherited. But must be set free from the fetters of intellectual abstractions, and re stored to aesthetic intuition. This the goal at which Pro testantism must finally arrive. When scientific criticism has succeeded in releasing religion from the misleading influence of the understanding, leaves to the rule of religious feeling and its handmaid --art.
De Wette has laboured to recast dogmatic theology from this point of view such way that we cannot withhold from him the praise of having done his best to reconcile the just claims of religious feeling with those of rational thought, although must be confessed that his attempted reconcilia tion was led too much by subjective considerations of taste, without the needed objective foundation, to hold its place beside the theology of Schleiermacher, with its profounder structure. At the same time, well worth while even now to take a glance at his mode of treating the leading ideas of dogmatic theology. 1
Divine revelation we find in every religious phenomenon which so impresses us with the power of the religious truth and beauty conveyed in as to make us feel ourselves lifted beyond ourselves and our own spiritual capacity. That Chris tianity a divine revelation, an ideal judgment, which cannot be proved by evidence of the understanding, though theological reflection has to show its general necessity just as a judgment of taste regarding the beauty of work of art cannot be proved, though can be so far established as to be shown to satisfy the requirements of art. In doing this the content of this revelation must be first examined, to see what relation holds to reason, with which nothing good and beautiful can be in opposition, as otherwise man would come
into collision with himself. Inasmuch, therefore, as will be found that nothing has been prescribed Christianity but the eternal ideas of reason in their greatest purity and fulness, the belief in as a revelation thereby justified. Rationalism
accordingly itself nothing else than the philosophical view of faith in revelation, so far that we must acknowledge a revelation whatever furthers an important degree the
We follow his work, Ueber Religion und Theologic, and ed. , 1821.
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historical development of the religious mind, such as has been the case with Christianity in the very highest degree. The
doctrine of inspiration is likewise only a form of expressing
the fact that the Biblical writers were animated enthusiasm, without however possessing infallible wisdom, which, moreover, is a matter belonging to the understanding. Canonicity, in the religious sense, may be ascribed to those writings which contain divine truth, and is therefore indepen dent of the historical view of the Biblical books.
The part of dogmatics which deals with general principles must be criticised strictly in accordance with the speculative and ethical ideas of philosophy. Definitions of the Divine attributes must be referred to the philosophical ideas of God, without sacrificing their virtue as popular symbols. The Mosaic myth of the creation may pass as a figurative repre
sentation of the truth that the world is eternally postulated by the divine omnipotence. Angels and devils are mytho logical figures which may be retained in sacred symbolism and art, though neither historical nor metaphysical truth may be looked for in them. The doctrine of the Trinity must be
interpreted
exaggeration to deny that man has any power to do good ; such a doctrine
overlooks the fact that there is in man an inward moral power, which, it is true, requires to be aroused from without in order to act. In so far, therefore, man stands in need of salvation, of divine grace. Yet the Holy Spirit and human reason must not be conceived as opposed to each other, but the latter subordinated to the former ; grace and freedom are two views taken from different standpoints, the
by holy
? as the forms of the revelation of God, whether in the world generally, when Son and Spirit can be referred respectively to the formal and the real principle of the universe, or in the Christian revelation in particular, the doctrine then containing the truth of the different views of God (though in the false scholastic conception of these views
as persons), giving expression to the superiority of Christi anity to Judaism and Heathenism. Of the anthropological doctrines, the myth of the Fall must be regarded as a symbol of what is always taking place in each man. On the one hand, it is correct that we must look upon our propensity to evil as guilt, and that we are unable, with all our moral effort, to attain to inward peace, inasmuch as we cannot rise to true holiness. On the other hand, it is a dogmatic
? ? ? Ch. THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. IOI
former belonging to faith, the latter to observation and reflection, while both are correct and are not mutually ex clusive. Election and reprobation at the same time the work of God and man, though God's not according to his absolute will, but according to his relative operation within the historical world of sinful men. The dogma of the two natures in Christ as a conception a contradiction, but easily admits of reduction to these two views in relation to nature, Jesus a man, but regarded aesthetically and relation to the ideal, he God and as both ways of regarding him are at bottom one, so he but one person, the God-man, not two persons. " Away, therefore, with those barren dogmatic formulas, of which, moreover, the Bible and the
people's faith know nothing Let Christ be regarded as a divine
? messenger, as God-man, as the image of God let us not be too stingy with our glorification of him, let us not too anxiously weigh our expressions At the same time, we must not forget that we are dealing not with truths of the intellect, but simply with religious ideality (Sclibnheit), and whoever speaks of this subject to the people, let him never do with out the elevation and the warmth of devout enthusiasm. " While hitherto the history of this dogma has been occupied with the conflict of truth with beauty, from this time forth " the period must follow in which beauty will maintain its claims side by side with truth. " (De Wette correctly per ceives that the essence of Christological controversies about the relation of the historical and the ideal, but the problem not solved by the simple comparison of the intellectual, or true, and the ideal, or aesthetic view. The doctrine of the atonement
only a beautiful, aesthetico-religious symbol of the thought that Christ has restored to our sin-troubled hearts inward peace, so that we can look up to God, the holy Judge, with confidence. As Christ all ideas take an historical and personal form, so also this highest idea of atonement, order that the whole life of humanity might be mirrored in him. As his death, suffered for us, he represented the highest moral perfection and the complete victory of the spirit over the flesh and sin,
we may make this our own by faith him he raises us to his own height, as we with him set ourselves free from the rule of the flesh and this assurance gives us peace of mind, so that we no longer dread God, but are sure of his grace. The idea of sacrifice this connection to be understood
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only in the sense of a moral example and type of purified
and pardoned humanity. The doctrine of justification by faith contains the religious truth, unrecognised by modern moral theology, that man cannot be saved by his own merit, which is as nothing before God's holiness, but alone by the grace of God. The doctrines of eschatology must be interpreted as symbolical mythology, which have at their basis the truths of anthropology and soteriology (eternal life, the victory of good in the kingdom of God).
It appears from these dogmatic views, as well as from the excellent hints for practical theologians, that De Wette occu pied as free a position as the Rationalists with regard to the literal authority of the creeds of the Church, but that he sought to give their due value to the religious feelings, which the
Rationalists had not done, and, with a more unfettered mind towards history, to maintain the connexion of the present life of the Church with the past. It may be regarded as a defect from the point of view of a scientific theology, that he tried to effect this only by means of an aesthetical treatment of the dogmas in question, which was often somewhat confused ; but
for the practical purposes of theology, which he always kept in view, the advantages of his method of treatment may well have exceeded its disadvantages. In this respect De Wette occupies a position nearest to Herder in his relation to the
Rationalists ; and, of our contemporary theologians, Hase is the spirit nearest of kin to him. And in the prosperity of the churches of Thuringia lies the best proof that the prospects of that church are not unpromising, which follows in the course marked out by Herder, De Wette, and Hase.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER II.
"
Whilst Rationalists and Supernaturalists carried on their warfare with each other, without either side being able to gain the victory, because both represented a partial truth and shared false premises, a stronger than either came upon them, who struck into new courses. I refer to Schleiermacher, from whose work, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsdtzen der evangelisclien Kirche im Zusammenhang dargestellt ( i st ed. ,
182 1 ; 2nd ed. , 1831), dates an epoch in the history of modern theology. The error common to both of these contending par ties had been that they conceived the Christian faith as a num ber of traditionary doctrines which appeared to stand in such hopeless opposition to the rational thought of modern times that one of the two must make room for the other ; the endless contention being -- which of the two must yield, and how far ?
Schleiermacher took the ground from under this contention by removing its main pre-supposition. The Christian faith, as he showed, does not consist in any number of positive doc trinal propositions such as have arisen from intellectual reflec tion upon that faith ; this faith is not a doctrine, or a system of doctrines, but a condition of devout feeling, a fact accord ingly of inward experience, neither produced by thought nor depending on its existence, but, like all experience, simply an object to be observed and described. He took up, therefore, a position opposed to the standpoint of the Supernaturalists,
on the one hand, by conceiving the Christian faith not as a doctrinal authority given us from without, but as an inward condition of our own self-consciousness, which must be con nected with the remaining contents of our consciousness and the laws of our mind. On this point Schleiermacher occupies completely the position of modern idealism, for which there can be no truth that does not rise out of and answer to the
human mind. On the other hand, he maintained, in opposition 103
THE THEOLOGY OF SCIILEIERMACHER's " GLAUBENSLEHRE AND HIS SCHOOL.
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essentially the same as that of the Christian Church, at all events in the Protestant form of That this supposition can be taken as correct only with very considerable limitation, what might
be expected in the case of man whose religious nature had been in his youth nurtured in the peculiar form of piety of the Moravian community, and whose mind had been formed by the study of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, and who his first work, his Discourses on Religion, had appeared as a disciple of Romanticism, with its thoroughly modern form of thought. may be allowed that in the two decades which lapsed between his Discourses and his Glaubens-
lehre, Schleiermacher had thrown off the extravagances of Romanticism, and had brought his entire mode of thought much more into accord with the faith of the Church still,
TV cannot be doubted, and his Glaubenslehre shows most plainly, that the varied elements of his rich education had a far-reaching influence upon his religious consciousness so that his religious feeling differed from that of the Church in some character istic points. Accordingly, in spite of all his honest effort to harmonise and bring into one the individual and the com
mon elements, his Glaubenslehre, which proceeds from this
subjective experience, retains everywhere a marked indivi dual character which could not make any direct claim to
104 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
[ ,' to the Rationalists, the view that the Christian faith is not a product of rational thinking, but a condition of the heart, a feeling preceding thought and supplied independently of it ; moreover, a feeling not of the devout individual only, but of the Christian, or specifically of the Protestant, Church ; accord ingly a fact not merely of individual experience, but of the common experience of a historical community ; an experience,
which, like all positive experiences in history, must j >>y>>e received and intelligently described, while it cannot and may
therefore,
AF rr not be reasoned away.
From the basis of religious experience, therefore, Schleier- macher seeks to give an account of the Christian faith, sup
all that his own is posing along religious experience
? the Church. However, we must not on this account reproach Schleiermacher, when we remember that the same objection would some degree have to be made to
every attempt to give an account of the Christian faith from
the standpoint of the present fact, must be pronounced really one of Schleiermacher's merits, that by his example he
general acceptance
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asserted the claims of individuality to a place in theology also, / and put an end to the miserable delusion of a sole and exclu
sive possession of the truth. It is true that the perception
of this is yet far from being universal ; but I venture boldly
to assert that in future it will be regarded as a principal cri terion of true theological education, that the theologian should remain conscious of the individuality of his way of looking at things, and should renounce all claims to doctrinal authority of universal validity.
The individual character of Schleiermacher's
system appears forthwith in his definition of religion, which
had great influence also upon his doctrine of God. "Religion,
he teaches, is " the feeling of absolute dependence ; in our
relation to the world our consciousness is always divided be
tween a feeling of relative freedom and a feeling of relative dependence, according as our active or passive states of mind predominate ; but when we rise above the interchange of these
relative states of feeling to the unity of the higher conscious iW
ness, we get the feeling of an absolute dependence, which is one with the consciousness of God ; inasmuch as the source of this feeling, in which the antithesis of relative freedom and dependence vanishes, can only be the unconditioned cause of all conditioned interaction of beings, that is -- God. Acute as this deduction is, it cannot be said that it describes accurately or fully the nature of the religious feeling, particularly in its Christian form. The religious feeling of reverence contains, together with the sense of dependence on God, the sense of obligation towards him, and of relationship and of exaltation to him ; in this devout consciousness there is in addition to the feeling of passive dependence also the feeling of moral alliance, and accordingly of a free relation of the will ; where by the idea of God also obtains a much richer content than that of mere causality ; at the same time the immediate reli gious feeling can receive a different qualitative characterisa tion, as the basis of the difference in relative value of the feelings belonging to various stages of religion ; whilst in the case of Schleiermacher's simple feeling of dependence nothing more is possible than a quantitative difference in the degree of strength possessed by the religious feeling in proportion to the secular consciousness. But it is clear that a merely quanti tative estimate of the religious feeling, according to the strength of its presence in consciousness, is not sufficient for the deter-
theological
v
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io6 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk II.
mination of its qualitative value ; otherwise the devout feeling, for instance, of a Mohammedan would be equal to that of a Christian. If we ask how Schleiermacher came to give such a meagre account of religious feeling, emphasising what may be called the physical side of dependence on an infinite cause, to the neglect of the moral side, represented in the feeling of alliance with a voluntary power related spiritually to ourselves, we can hardly be wrong in tracing the origin of this defect to the influence of the philosophy of Spinoza, whose cognitio Dei intuitiva is nothing else than the reference of all finite phenomena to the necessary causality of God, --that the feel ing of our dependence upon it. This supposition confirmed by Schleiermacher's doctrine of God, which connected with his imperfect theory of the nature of religion.
Having based his system of belief upon devout states of feeling, of which he conscious as a member of the Church, for Schleiermacher the questions with which apologetics had usually been occupied lose their relative importance and appear in an entirely new light. Above all the Scriptures cannot, from
v his position, be any longer regarded as the foundation of faith. In the introduction to his dogmatic system, Schleiermacher
hardly comes to speak of them at all, but deals with them under the head of the Church's means of grace. He regards them as a product of the Holy Spirit as far as the latter the common- spirit (Gemeingeist) of the Church. This spirit has borne witness to Christ in the apostolic writings, not essentially otherwise than later writings, only more at first hand, and more under the immediate impression of the Apostles' per sonal acquaintance with Jesus, such as the men of a later generation did not enjoy. On this account the writings of the New Testament possess a special dignity as normative for all subsequent accounts of Christianity but not so the writings of the Old Testament since the connexion of Chris tianity with the religion of the Old Testament according to Schleiermacher, only very loose and indirect. Speaking gene rally, not the reputation of the Scriptures upon which faith Christ rests, but this faith must be pre-supposed before a special reputation can be assigned to the Scriptures. Least of all may this reputation be based upon their inspiration, for supposing even that the latter could be proved from the New Testament writings, the conviction of would still be very far from Christian faith, and could by no means directly pro
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duce since this faith can proceed only from the total impres sion of the personality of Jesus.
The normative dignity of the New Testament writings rests solely upon the fact that that
impression can be obtained from them, that they, therefore, truly transmit the image of Christ. On the other hand, the reports they contain of external miracles, which Jesus said to have done or been the subject of, are matter for criticism. The miracles cannot be regarded, according to the usual habit, as supports of Christian faith, for the simple reason that they presuppose the latter, and must be understood by means of For as Christian faith finds in Christ the highest revelation, miracles may reasonably be expected of him (though they can be called such only relatively, as con taining something extraordinary for contemporary knowledge of the connexion between physical and mental life), without at all taking them out of the realm of the regular and orderly phenomena of nature. Though Schleiermacher nowhere offers an express critique of the traditional doctrine of miracles, whether of the actuality or the possibility of the recorded miracles, he still lays down the general principle that the interests of religion the necessity can never arise of regarding an event as taken out of its connexion with nature in conse quence of its dependence on God. Even the miracles at the beginning and the end of the life of Jesus, which are so often looked upon in the Church as the foundation of faith in Christ, do not form, according to Schleiermacher, an essential part of
faith in the person of Jesus, since his disciples already pos sessed this faith, although they still knew nothing of those particular miracles.
At the same time Schleiermacher does not altogether reject the idea of the miraculous, or the supernatural, or revelation. All these terms represent in his view facts of religious experi ence which exceed ordinary experience but inasmuch as they are experiences of the religious emotions, which, must be remembered, are part of human nature, they must also have a side related to nature, and can accordingly be supernatural only
a relative sense. By revelation he understands the origi
nality of religious phenomenon, whether be in a personality or in life, of such moment as to form the foundation of reli gious community this definition excludes both external com munication and tradition, and also intentional invention and reflection, while includes divine communication and promul-
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I08 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [BV. II.
gation. Only this communication must not be regarded as in the first instance a didactic influence upon the mind in the form of knowledge, but as the peculiar and extraordinary effect pro
duced by the total impression of a personality upon the general consciousness of those who come within its range ; which does not exclude direct instruction, but includes it only as one factor amongst others. In heathenism, too, such personalities must be looked upon as revelations of God, in whom the divine is like wise typically made known in an original manner, and such as cannot be explained from the immediate historical surroundings. Yet every such revelation is still only something relative, since only the universe as a whole could be called the absolute reve lation, every individual phenomenon, however original it may be, being intelligible only from the general condition of the community to which it belongs. In any case, therefore, no claim of absolute truth can be made for any revelation, since this would" "involve a manifestation of God as he is in himself, whilst an effective manifestation of him can only give expres sion to what he is in his relation to us. This is true also of Christianity. Its origin in the person of Jesus is super
natural in so far as the peculiar spiritual contents of his per son cannot be explained from the natural surroundings of his life, but can have proceeded only from the general source of spiritual life by a creative act of God. But this supernatural origin is at the same time natural, in so far as the rise of a higher original life must be conceived as the effect of a power of development inherent in the race, a power which finds expression, in conformity with divinely ordered laws, though laws hidden from us, in certain men at certain points, that by them the rest of mankind may be helped onwards. As the highest development of the spiritual power of our race, the unique phenomenon of Christ is not an absolute, but only a relative miracle. In the same way, that which is "above reason " in Christianity consists only in its transcending the or dinary human reason, not in its exceeding the rational faculties of mankind at large, Christianity being in reality their highest perfection. And, again, the doctrinal propositions of the Christian faith are in so far beyond reason as their religious content is not evolved from rational reflection, but is given as a special experience, which, like every other similar experience, can be received only by a love willing to behold it ; but they are at the same time perfectly rational, in as far as they must
? ? ? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 109
conform to the same laws of logical thought to which all other propositions are subject.
In these statements the relation of Schleiermacher to Ration
alism and Supernaturalism is very plainly presented. With the former he rejects the absolute miracle, and looks upon
Christianity as a productof human nature, of its original spiritual energy, yet -- and thereby he goes over to the position of the
--
latter not as the product of ordinary thought and reflection,
of man's rational nature ; and moreover, as an unique historical phenomenon, which is embodied in the person of the Saviour,
but as an original creation of the highest development
and has accordingly to be acknowledged as a positive fact of revelation. Christian faith therefore, according to Schleier macher, not merely faith in universal religious or moral truths, but the historical person of Jesus as the Saviour, whose characteristic influence to produce in us the Christian con sciousness of salvation. And hereby the business of Christian theology becomes for Schleiermacher even more positive than for the Supernaturalists of that time has, according to him, to describe faith in Christ as the Saviour, as given the Christian Church, and to draw out connectedly into the various doctrinal propositions therein implied but has nothing to do with other sciences and philosophy. Dog matic propositions, he demands, ought to be " the outcome of the observation of religious states of feeling," and ought on no account to be mixed up nor confounded with speculative propositions which are due to quite different interests. " Dog matic theology will never stand as firmly upon its basis as the physical sciences have long done upon theirs, till the separation of the two kinds of propositions so complete that such a strange question, for instance, as whether the same proposition can be true philosophy and false in theology, could not arise, for the reason that a proposition cannot occur in the one in the same form as occurs in the other, but the difference must be presupposed however great the similarity may seem to be. "
? " The Protestant Church convinced that the special shape peculiar to its doctrinal propositions quite independent of all schools of philosophy, and does not owe its origin at all to any speculative interest, but solely to the satisfaction of im mediate self-consciousness means of the genuine and unadulterated institution of Christ. " Neither will Schleier macher admit that at the beginning of the formation of
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? IIO DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Christian doctrine speculation had any influence on the subject-
matter of dogmatic propositions ; an opinion with which no historian of the present day will agree, seeing the influence of
Greek speculation is plain enough in the theology of Paul or
John !
We have not here to ask whether the rigid separation of
from philosophy demanded by Schleiermacher is possible, but whether he himself fully carried it out. So far as the form of his doctrinal propositions goes, this is undoubt edly the case ; he carefully avoids all reference to philosophical matter, and all direct and declared dependence on philosophical schools and systems. Still, no one can fail to see that not only his own philosophical education generally, but also a definite philosophical system, exerted a profound influence upon his theology. Nor could his critical distinction between the form of ecclesiastical doctrine and its religious subject- matter, his appeal from the traditionary objects of faith to the religious subject's own inner life as the source of their origin, be conceivable apart from the school of critical idealism. And how could we explain the wide departure of Schleier- macher's doctrine regarding God and the world from that in vogue in the Church, and its close approach to the doctrine of Spinoza, if it had really been deduced simply from the con sideration of the religious feelings of Christians ? Strauss, we must allow, was right when he said,1 " None of the leading propositions of the first part of Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre can be fully understood save as they are re-translated into the formulae of Spinoza, from which they were originally taken. The relation of God to the world (which forms the basis of his entire theology), according to which both God and world are conceived as equal magnitudes, only that the former is the absolute and undivided unity, while the latter is the unity divided and differentiated, can be explained only from the relation of the natura naturans to the natura naturata of Spinoza. "
theology
? In a note in his Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher
throws out the passing but pregnant remark, that pantheism is consistent with religion if it is only meant to represent some form of theism, and the word is not simply a masked materialistic negation of theism. " If we keep pantheism to the customary formula, One and All, even then God and the
Charaktcristikcn und Kritiken, p. 166.
incidentally
? ? ? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER.
Ill
world remain distinct, at least in point of function ; and there fore a pantheist of this kind, when he regards himself as part of the world, feels himself with this All dependent on that which is the One. " There can be no doubt but that Schleier- macher has here characterised his own view of God and the world, as it is presented best of all in his Dialektik, but plainly enough in his Glaubenslehre. At the beginning of his work, in the deduction of the idea of God from the feeling of dependence, Schleiermacher lays emphasis on the point that the word " God" is only an expression for the " whence" of our absolute dependence, but is by no means given or to be conceived as an object : to conceive of God apart from the world would be empty mythology. God is the correlative unity to the multiplicity presented as the world. Creation and Preservation are forms of expression for the eternal causality or omnipotence of God, which is so completely represented in the totality of being, that in the divine omnipotence there is no excess of potentiality beyond the totality of the actual, nor in the latter anything in excess of the former. Omnipotence and the totality of natural causes are commensurate, the former never coming in the place of the latter to meet a defect, but everything exists and arises solely and wholly by means of the natural system of things ; so that each thing existing by virtue of all, and all things entirely by the divine omnipotence, all things undivided subsist through one. This in fact, an exact formulation of the " immanence " of God as taught by Spinoza. But Schleiermacher holds not only Spinoza's theory of immanence, but also his idea of substance, with its simple unity of being and operation to the exclusion of all definitions. In his view the divine attributes do not denote any distinc- tions in God, or even so much as an objective difference his relation to the world which would be to conceive God as a multitude of functions, and therewith, Schleiermacher thinks, to bring God into the region of antitheses but they denote only the various modes in which we refer our feeling of depen dence to God, different aspects in which God's causality (in itself simple) presents itself to our consciousness. That
as neither in time nor space, but as conditioning both, this
divine causality his omnipresence and eternity as extent one with the totality of natural causes, though differing in
form, his omnipotence as living or spiritual causality, called his omniscience relation to our moral conscious
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? 112 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ness, it is his holiness or justice, inasmuch as together with sin we have conscience, and connect the feeling of guilt with evil--and both in virtue of divine arrangement ; in relation to the consciousness of salvation, the divine causality becomes love and wisdom. All these distinctions, therefore, are con fined to the human consciousness of God, and have no founda tion in the objective nature of God, which does not admit of any distinctive qualifications, as they would only contradict the infinity of God, according to Schleiermacher ; in full agree ment with Spinoza's canon, Omnis determinatio est negatio. An absolutely simple causality of this kind, in which there is no distinction between posse and facere, facere and velle, velle and scire, nor any succession of acts and states, but everything is simply one eternal act, is at all events not a personality, nor can it scarcely be thought of as spiritual being, having nothing in common with anything which constitutes for us the spiritual ; it is in reality simply operative power, like Spinoza's substance. From the first it has been remarked that this
of God fails to meet the need of the Christian religious consciousness ; nor was Schleiermacher able to bring it into harmony with the religious consciousness in any other way than by reducing the latter to the mere feeling of depen dence, thereby detracting from its moral side as we saw above (p. 105). It is therefore certain that Schleiermacher cannot be regarded as the unprejudiced interpreter of the universal, still less of the Christian, religious experience, in his treatment of the primary ideas of religion and God, but that he has reduced them to the dimensions of his philosophical system.
And how did he possibly find a transition from this basis to the Christian faith, and make the account of this, rather Spinozistic than Christian, conception of God a description of the religious consciousness of the Christian community ? By
the antithesis between the consciousness of God and sense-consciousness (answering to the opposition in Spinoza of the reason to the imagination) with that between sin and salvation of the Christian consciousness. This identification was effected thus : the predominance of the sense-consciousness over the consciousness of God, or the hindrance of the latter by the former, becomes to us the consciousness of sin and religious unhappiness, or the need of salvation ; while, on the contrary, the predominance of the God-consciousness over the sense-consciousness, in which
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identifying
? ? ? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 113
every act of the latter is determined by the former, becomes to us the consciousness of the removal of that hindrance, or of salvation, of the strength and blessedness of the higher self-consciousness. Between the one and the other of these two states of feeling lies the entire life of the religious consciousness. But while the condition of the hindered con sciousness of God is the general experience of mankind, the
condition of the delivered and unhindered consciousness is the special experience of the Christian Church, and is the operation of its Founder. Thus what is primarily a difference within consciousness becomes likewise an objective difference between mankind in its natural condition, as needing salvation, and mankind as Christian and saved. It is easy to perceive that these conditions, described by Schleiermacher as "sin and salvation," are really what Spinoza described, in the last two books of his Ethics as the servitus et libertas humana, and what is by Kant called the supremacy of the lower, sensuous, and of the higher, rational, desires. The difference is simply that the transition from the one condition to the other is in the view of the philosophers made as a psychological and ethical process within the consciousness and by virtue of its natural human constitution ; whilst in the system of our theologian the change appears as an historical process in the consciousness of human society, having its origin and effective cause in a definite point of human history. If it is true that the human race is the macrocosmic type of individual life, the right to identify the various states of the religious personal conscious ness with the different phases of the historical development of humanity cannot be disputed ; but then neither can the logical
inference be avoided, that the same laws and forces which condition the change of states in the individual will also produce the analogous change in the historical life of the race, without calling in the aid of special and unique causes alien to all customary experience. We shall subsequently see what treatment this inference met with in Schleiermacher's
theological system.
The antithesis of sin and salvation, or grace, is made by
Schleiermacher the basis of the disposition of the second or special part of his treatise, after he had in the first part treated of the religious consciousness without reference to this antithesis, or the fundamental questions of God and the uni verse and the original perfection of man. In each part the
-V
? G. t. 1
? ? ? 114
DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
materials are arranged so that the religious consciousness as such is first described, and then the doctrines concerning the world and God that are therein implied. As regards the doctrine concerning God, there is the disadvantage in this
that the doctrine is nowhere dealt with con nectedly, but only in fragments here and there ; which, it must be allowed, offered the advantage of veiling the want of an objective conception of God. In other respects this arrange-
l ment involves a number of difficulties : for instance, the Christology falls under the account of the Christian conscious ness, whilst it ought surely to have an historical object as its subject-matter ; again, the doctrine of the Church is placed under the declarations of the Christian consciousness regard ing the world. The eschatology is handled in loose connec tion with the rest of the work as a " prophetic article. "
Sin, Schleiermacher describes as the opposition of the flesh to the spirit, as the hindrance of the higher self-conscious ness, or God-consciousness, by the lower, sensuous or finite consciousness. It has its natural rise in the priority of man's sensuous development to his spiritual development, and of
his intellectual development to his power of will. It is there fore the inevitable outcome of human nature as such, and not an external inheritance from Adam. By the first sin of the first parents no alteration of the nature of the human race was brought about, which would have been impossible, but that first sin was only the first appearance of the sinfulness which is a property of human nature as such, and was to be looked for in the first parents. The ecclesiastical doctrine of two consecutive states, status integritatis and status corruptionis, must therefore be interpreted as the two sides of man's original perfection, both of which always belong contemporaneously to our nature, or of the endowment with God-consciousness and of an original sinfulness, or sensuous weakness. Rational as this re-interpretation of the traditional doctrines of the primi
tive state and the fall undoubtedly must be remarked that
Schleiermacher's view of the nature of sin as unsatisfactory
as the essentially similar view of Spinoza, according to which evil only defective power the reason over sense- affections whereas a true analysis of the moral consciousness, uninfluenced by philosophical prepossessions, will always discover in evil a conflict of the selfish individual will with the obligations of the law of the whole, and therein a self-contradic
arrangement,
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? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 1 15
tion within the mind itself, not merely a contradiction between mind and sense. With great dialectical acuteness, Schleier- macher brings the other traditionary articles under this head into accord with his totally different premises. He adopts without reserve the position that the sinfulness inherent in the nature of the human race must be regarded as a total inability to do good, which, while it must not be exaggerated so as to cancel the capability of salvation, is still so far infinite that it cannot be completely removed even by the power of salvation. Guilt must also, according to Schleiermacher, attach to original or hereditary sin, it being reckoned not to each man in his individual capacity, but to the race as the common guilt of a common act ; so that the consciousness of it always involves at the same time the general human need of salvation. Finally, Schleiermacher goes even a step beyond the traditionary doctrines in maintaining that actual sin proceeds to such an extent from original sin, that in the entire sinful race not a single moment occurs in which contradiction of the God-consciousness is wholly absent. Accordingly the dif ference in point of merit amongst men must not, according to him, be sought in the various degrees of their sin, but solely in their nearer or more distant relation to salvation ; an assertion in which appears the same subordination as in Spinoza of the moral point of view to that abstract level ling conception of evil as the general malum metaphysicum
^
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? of the finite.
Schleiermacher's soteriology starts from the position, that
we are conscious in the Christian community that our God-con sciousness constantly advances so as to gradually overcome the hindrances proceeding from the sense-consciousness, attended by the corresponding approach to the condition of blessedness.
But since this advancement cannot originate in the life of sin common to humanity, where nothing but unhappiness is developed, it must, Schleiermacher argues, have its origin in the new common life of the community founded by Jesus, and be accordingly traced back to the saving activity of Jesus as its cause. The question arises therefore, To be the cause of such
an effect, what must the person of Jesus have been ? The answer is : Our experience as Christians of the increasing
of our God-consciousness could proceed from the person of Jesus only if this consciousness was actually present in him in absolute measure ; that only the ideal type of
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Il6 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
religion was in him historical, and his entire life was that of the religious model, person and idea in his case perfectly
corresponding. As this typical, model man, according to Schleiermacher's exposition, Christ was distinguished from all other men by his essential sinlessness and absolute perfection, which excluded not only all actual sin, but also all possibility of and accordingly everything like a moral struggle and further, by his freedom from error, having never himself originated an erroneous notion, nor adopted one from others as one of his convictions. This perfect God-consciousness of Christ must be regarded as properly God in him, and as the one perfect revelation of God in the human race. In this respect his person was a miraculous phenomenon the common life of sin, not to be explained by that life itself, but only by a new creative act of God, which may be called a second creation, or rather completion of creation, being really one with the first creation, as part of the same universal system of nature. this only -- that the phenomenon of Christ had its cause in a creative act, or an original attainment of the human race as unaffected by sin, --which Schleiermacher regards as the true essence of the doctrines of the supernatural origin of his life while, on the other hand, the suspension of
the natural parental participation in the origination of his life adds nothing of essential moment to the matter. In general, the miraculous the person of Jesus must not be conceived in such a way as to negative the sameness of his nature and ours. Though may trace its origin to the miraculous (in the above sense), the complete historical character of his subsequent life must still be held fast. To this belongs the gradual unfolding of his powers, including the spiritual ones, save that this will have proceeded without contradictions and struggles, as the constant and regular passage from the in nocence of childhood to full spiritual vigour further, his specific nationality, the qualification of his ideas and actions by the habits of thought of his nation and his age, although
not allowed that his personal activity, but only his re ceptivity, was subject to this limitation. In so far, Schleier macher grants that further progress in advance of the historical form of the appearance of Jesus, as this was con ditioned by temporal and national limitations, not only possible, but a fact but this not an advance beyond his essential nature, which will, on the contrary, be only more
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and more fully brought out by the progressive development of the Christian world. Schleiermacher thus makes evidently the well-known distinction between the ideal principle which was revealed in Jesus and the form the principle takes as a historical phenomenon. In the communication of the principle itself consists the work of Christ : his work as Saviour is that of imparting to others the strength of his consciousness of God ; his work as Reconciler is the communication of the happiness of this consciousness ; effects which were at first the immediate work of Christ, but subsequently could only be produced by the continued operation of his spirit and example in the mind of believers. To the ecclesiastical dogma of vicarious satisfaction, Schleiermacher attaches the following meaning : Christ made satisfaction in so far that a source of inexhaustible blessing was opened in his person and activity as Founder of the Church; but this satisfaction is not vicarious, inasmuch as the blessing of it belongs only to those who also enter into fellowship with Christ ; to his sufferings, on the other hand, a vicarious character attaches, since by virtue of his sinlessness, his own person would have been beyond the reach of the universal calamity connected with sin ; but this
form of substitution is not satisfaction, individuals in the Christian community having, as we all know, still themselves to suffer. In other words, Schleiermacher rejects the idea of a transcendental reconciliation through the atoning sufferings of Christ as the representative of mankind before God, and puts in its place the historical view of the matter, according to which Christ by the total impression of his personality had such a strengthening and beatifying influence on men's
religious consciousness that they felt themselves saved and reconciled, that delivered, or gradually being delivered, from the hindering and miserable contradiction between the higher and lower self-consciousness. this stronger con sciousness of God, proceeding from Christ, which, as the consciousness of the Christian community, the "holy Spirit. " As the God-consciousness of Christ the divine him, so the holy Spirit " the union of the Divine Being with human nature the form of the common spirit of the community, as animating the collective life of believers. " The holy Spirit, therefore, the same saving principle the community that primarily appeared the person of Jesus the form of an individual life and the saving work of this principle the
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? n8 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
production, in those individuals who open themselves re ceptively to of a life of invigorated and felicitated God- consciousness similar to that which was typically present in Jesus. In this " consists "conversion and justification," the two aspects of regeneration," in which a new religious con sciousness produced in the believer by the "common Chris tian spirit of the community, and new life, or sanctification,"
prepared for.
Looked at from this point, Schleiermacher's soteriology
does not in principle differ from Kant's philosophical doctrine, and that of his followers, according to which the victory of the good principle over the bad, or of reason over sense, effected by " faith the ideal Son of God," -- that by the
of the divine idea of man into the heart and the quickening of the divine spirit in man. In both systems salvation an inward process in man, the deliverance of his higher divine being from the hindrances of his lower nature and both agree also in regarding this inward deliverance and renewal in the individual life as evoked and sustained by the moral community, the foundation of which must be traced to
There finally, agreement regarding this common spirit of the higher religious and moral life as having proceeded from the Founder of this community with original energy and purity, and as therefore to be beheld in his person as in a typical example for imitation. But while the philosophers generally go no further, and see no cause for supposing that the relation of this ideal principle to the human personality in the person of Jesus was essentially different from what
in other men, Schleiermacher feels obliged to trace the origin of this common Christian spirit to a personality of unique perfection, or sinlessness and freedom from error. But he has failed to show either the congruity of this supposition with
ground for the logical necessity of the supposition itself. For all that he alleges with regard to the experiences of the Chris tian community as to the common spirit of a strengthened and felicitated God-consciousness -- experiences which con fessedly never go beyond a relative approximation to perfection and felicity --by no means presupposes an origin of absolute quantitative perfection of God-consciousness, the psychological possibility of which exceedingly problematic but that experience fully accounted for on the supposition of the na
reception
? Jesus.
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the sameness of Christ's nature and ours or any good
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? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCIILEIERMACHER. I I 9
ward qualitative truth of the God-consciousness which is present in the community as a fact of experience. Schleiermacher had previously himself acknowledged that the inward quali tative truth of a religious principle must not be at once con
founded with the personal perfection of its first preacher. In his Discourses he had pronounced the confounding of the fundamental fact in which a religion takes its rise with the fundamental idea of this religion itself a " great mistake," which has misled almost everybody and given a false direction to the view of almost all religions. But it cannot be denied that this mistake lies at the basis of his own dogmatic theory of the ideal person of Christ. That he could thus deceive him self on this point may be psychologically explained from the peculiar personal wants of his religious nature, in which the Moravian impressions of his early days continued to operate. And for the practical value of his theological system that error worked advantageously, without doubt, helping as it did to bring it into line with ecclesiastical tradition. It is true that what was in Schleiermacher's case an
? inconsequence, based on individual peculiarities, was made by others the
principal thing and the starting-point of a positive retrograde
movement in dogmatics.
It remains to state the chief points of Schleiermacher's
doctrine of the Church, its essential characteristics, and its origin and consummation. He rejects the traditionary distinc- >/ tion between the visible and the invisible Church, as contra dictory terminology ; for what is invisible is not actually the Church, and what is the Church is not invisible. The proper meaning of this distinction he finds very justly in the re
lation of the operative Christian spirit in the Church to the natural, sinful elements, or the world, still present in --
that in the opposition of the spirit and the flesh, transferred
to the whole body of the Church.