No More Learning

] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 105
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
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I
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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? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 107
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
? conception
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? ? ? 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
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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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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
strength
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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
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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. only to the first aspect
of the Church that the predicates of unity, universality, sanc
tity, and infallibility are to be applied to the historical form
of on the other hand, only so far as actually approxi mating to its ideal. Amongst the means of grace, "prayer
the name of Christ" admirably handled. represents the common desire and will of the Church as directed to the consummation of the kingdom of God, and its presentiment of what truly salutary, having so far the promise of being heard. But this must not be conceived as involving anything
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? 120 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY.
[Bk. II.
approaching a magical influence upon the divine will, such
prayer having simply a strengthening effect upon the pray ing community itself. The sacraments are treated from the
part of the candidate on reaching the adult age (confirmation) is demanded, as necessary for completing the sacramental means of grace.
To the most subtle and acute portions of his work belongs his treatment of the doctrine of election. As early as 1819, Schleiermacher had published an essay in defence of the Calvinistic doctrine on this head, the fundamental ideas of which are worked out in his Glaubenslehre in a somewhat modified form and with more of an eirenical than apologetic purpose. The distinction between elect and non-elect is based certainly upon " divine predetermination, which may not be made dependent on foreknowledge, as thereby the divine causality would be made conditional ; at the same time the articles of predetermination and foreknowledge have equal right to be retained side by side, inasmuch as they represent simply different ways of looking at the same thing. " (This reminds us of the way in which Spinoza, in his Theologico- Political Treatise, explains the divine determination as identi cal with the divine knowledge. ) Nevertheless, Schleiermacher relieves the harshness of the Calvinistic doctrine
the dualism of elect and non-elect to the historical form of the kingdom of God, and denying its validity as the definitive end of things. In the course of historical development, it is a necessary law that all cannot be at the same time received
into the Christian community, but some are preferred to others, who are for the time put back. This distinction is founded on the general relation of the kingdom of God to the world, and is accordingly presupposed in the divine order of things. But it is not an absolute, but only a relative differ ence, between an earlier and a later reception into the sphere of the operations of divine grace. This temporary difference will sometime cease in a final universal salvation ; with this
of the union of the Lutheran and the Reformed
standpoint
(Calvinistic and Helvetian) confessions ; with a rejection of extreme views, various forms of the idea of a sacrament are admitted ; Schleiermacher's own view approaches most closely the spiritual form of the Reformed confessions. Under infant baptism, the addition to the rite, which has importance pri marily for the Church only, of a personal confession on the
? by limiting
? ? ? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 121
consolatory outlook faith rises above the apparent harshness of the doctrine of election, without in any way letting go the unconditionality of the divine decrees.
With these prophetic glances into the future of the con summation of the Church, " the prophetic articles," as Schleiermacher entitles his eschatological sections, are occu pied more closely. At the commencement he makes the general observation, that the description of the perfected condition of the Church, since it does not arrive in the course of human life on the earth, is directly of use only as the model towards which we ought to approximate. He then proceeds to say of the belief in personal immortality, that it is not connected in general with faith in God, for it was possible to expound the
latter without reference to also possible to conceive
a resignation of individual immortality based, not upon a . materialistic denial of the spirit, but upon a humble conscious- ness of the limitation of all individual life with such view,
the supremacy of the God-consciousness would be perfectly consistent, while would also require the purest morality and spirituality of life. On the other hand, there may be an irre ligious, eudaemonistic form of faith in immortality for instance,
? " whenever the faith postulated on behalf of retribution
only. " " therefore, must be admitted that the continu
ance of personal existence may be rejected form prompted more thoroughly by godliness than the case with other forms of its adoption, the connexion of this belief with the consciousness of God as such cannot be maintained. " But though faith immortality not directly connected with faith God, still connected with faith in Christ,
so far as Christ's promise of the lasting fellowship of his
followers with himself presupposes, not only his, but also
our own personal immortality (but this probably only a less simple form of the truth, that the hope of immortality based upon the Christian consciousness of the indestructible salvation of the devout children of God). As regards the conceptions of the Church as to the future life and the con summation of all things, Schleiermacher's opinion, " they ought to have a place in dogmatic theology only as ten tative efforts of an insufficiently authorised faculty of surmise {A hnungsi'ermogen), conjunction with the reasons for and the considerations against them. " The difficulties of the doctrines appear to him especially that the conceptions formed of the
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? 122 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II-
consummated condition of the whole Church, and again of the perfected condition of individual souls after death, nowhere fully agree together ; it is as difficult to conceive of the con summated Church, after the analogy of the present one, as in continual development, as it is to think of it as completed and so without movement, the latter condition presenting no ends for active work for one another. The only course left for us, therefore, in this matter is to put the imagination, to whose sphere all these things that are foreign to our present experi ence pertain, under the protection of exegetical science, and to work up the materials which it supplies.
At the end of the work is added a section on the Trinity. It follows of itself from what has already been said on Schleiermacher's doctrine as to the divine attributes, that he
? could not acknowledge hypostatic distinctions in the Divine Being. His dialectical critique of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity is as admirable as the historical estimate of the various motives which led to the construction of this doctrine is unsatisfactory. It is undoubtedly correct that the doctrine is not a direct utterance as to the Christian self-consciousness,
but only a combination of several of such, --namely, of our union with God by the revelation of Christ, and by the com mon spirit of the Christian Church. Schleiermacher explains, therefore, the Trinity modalistically of the various forms of the revelation of God, and justifies his procedure by an appeal to the early example of the Sabellians.
The entire theology of the last half-century, as far as it seeks at all to remain in touch with critical thought, has been in some degree or other influenced by the theological system of Schleiermacher. But of the numbers who called themselves disciples of Schleiermacher, it has been only a very few who have succeeded in maintaining that combination of keen logical thinking, inward devoutness of feeling, and close sympathy with the life of the Church, which constituted the chief char acteristics of the master. In the case of the majority, the requirements of their personal devout feeling, and still more regard to the real or supposed wants of the churches, pre vailed to such an extent as to lead them to put on one side the critical element in the theology of Schleiermacher, and to use his formulae rather for the purpose of hiding or modifying the difficulties of the supranaturalistic theology than to en courage them to advance beyond the old standpoint along the
? ? ? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 23
theology " {positive Vermittlungstheologie) rendered the ser vice to Church life of softening the old antitheses, of bringing parties nearer to each other, and, in opposition to the narrow ness of strict confessionalism, of giving effect in the Church to a certain breadth of religious views, together with warmth of devout feeling. But as regards scientific theology, it marks, in general, not so much an advance beyond as a falling back behind Schleiermacher, even though we must admit that in some points its divergence from him was justified.
In the System der christlichen Lehre, by Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, in the Dogmatik (left unfinished) of Twesten, in Ull-
mann's works on the Sinlessness of Christ and the Nature of Christianity, in Julius Muller's book on Sin, and in other representatives of this school, the prevailing aim is to save as much as possible of the traditional matter of the ecclesiastical dogmas, while softening down their offensive features by forms \ . of expression borrowed from Schleiermacher's theology. Nor
in this effort was there wanting, on the part of the above- named theologians, either learning or dialectical ingenuity : what they lacked was critical power and simple thoroughness and consistency of logical thought. The one amongst them who possessed most independence of thought was Nitzsch ; but his desire to be profound caused him to sacrifice clearness, and his affected brevity often issued in oracular ambiguity.
He took as his starting-point the fundamental thought of Schleiermacher, that religion is not doctrine but life, direct consciousness, feeling. At the same time he sought to bring religious feeling into closer connexion with knowledge and volition than Schleiermacher had done ; he laid special stress --and justly--on the recognition of a necessary and radical union of religion with morality, treating both dogmatics and ethics together accordingly in his System der christlichen Lehre. In his exposition of the idea of revelation, the origi nality, the new beginning of a religious phenomenon in the life of humanity, is made the prime feature, and then follows what
new paths of the master. It is true this "positive mediating
? to be an extension of the idea so as to embrace heathen religions, as far as they can be conceived as an education for Christianity ; but, after all, this preparation for Christianity was only negative and ideal, while the positive and real preparation is to be found only in the facts and events
of Old Testament history. With the supranaturalists, Nitzsch
promises
? ? ? 124 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Blc II.
places miracles and prophecies principally amongst the specific facts of revelation. Miracles are to be regarded as super natural, creative acts ; yet not as unnatural or contrary to law, but only as a higher nature in the lower one. Indeed, he does not hesitate to say, " Miracles and nature, though distinct, cannot be separated ; for the complete idea of nature involves that of miracle, and the true idea of miracle that of nature. "
Irreconcilable conceptions are to be reconciled by thus playing fast and loose with words ! So with reference to prophecy, at first the rational point of view is presented, that prophecy has essentially to do with the divine in history and relates to the
of God as a whole, not to the details of outward events. Nevertheless, prediction of single events of the future, though only to a "moderate" extent, must not be excluded from prophecy. The fulfilment of prophecy, how ever, must not be conceived as a complete "consequence," but as an analogical or typical correspondence, which admit also of a repeated and gradual fulfilment. That we have the confusion of two totally opposite points of view on the one hand, development in accordance with law, and on the other, a supernatural prediction of accidental details. For Scripture, too, Nitzsch demands "completely unique union of the divine word with the human, a quite peculiar economy," by which the miraculous character of an infallible authority
secured to the Bible. Thus in his Prolegomena, to go no further, the standpoint of Schleiermacher absolutely put back to that of the supranaturalists and the same thing occurs in the body of the work, especially in his Christology. Twesten, true, excels Nitzsch in the formal clearness of his reasoning, though the material weakness of his incon gruous principles thereby made only the more obvious. His Dogmatik der Evangelise h-Lutherisc hen Kirche, of which, however, only the first part, as far as the doctrine of the angels, has appeared, surprising attempt to deduce the ideas of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century from the
kingdom
? of the modern consciousness, in which attempt not all the arts of a sophistic scholasticism avail to bridge the wide chasm which parts the two points of view.
In Julius Muller the scholasticism was carried so far as to revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theo logical friends. Other representatives of this supranaturalistic
religious feelings
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? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. (25
Mediating Theology will come before us subsequently, either amongst the apologists in opposition to Strauss, or amongst the speculative eclectics.
The only theologian among the immediate pupils of Schleiermacher who has taken up his ideas in their purity and
developed them with independence, is Alexander Schweizer. j | The significance which he ascribes to his master's Glaubenslehre, and the direction in which he seeks to further develop he has clearly stated the introductory paragraph of his own Christliche Glaubenslehre nach protestantisc hen Grundsatzen
"The distinctive nature of Schleiermacher's theological system subjectivity open and free towards the true objectivity, or an objectivity such as can really live the devout subject and make itself felt as the truth. That which marks the present stage of our development in the Church, which has been far more widely reached than openly confessed, not Schleiermacher's person and his dogmatic labours, but the freedom in appropriating traditional dogmas which was evinced by him as an obligation upon our time
and which has since Schleiermacher been still more urgently imposed upon us as duty. Unmistakably our age needs and demands free development of theology as well as of piety, of congregations as well as of the Church, a free, independent sphere for the religious life, system of religious belief which represents the faith that really believed and believable, a conscious advance beyond dogmatism and dogmatics. " Theology must not take its matter merely from
the Scriptures, nor merely from the ecclesiastical creeds, nor again merely from the reason, in so far as has not been brought under the influence of Christian experience but from
the faith itself of the Protestant Church, that the devout consciousness, as far as has been brought under the influence of the general experience of the Protestant Church its
historical development. The common Christian life of the churches the sphere which alone Christian experiences can adequately arise. Our faith based upon Christian experi
ence. accordingly never merely feeling, but always like wise thought and impulse, i. e. , tends to pass into doctrine and action, especially as the feeling itself arises consequence of doctrine and action, or produced and determined in us as Christian feeling. Although religious feeling the primary and original element of subjective piety, on the other
(1863-73).
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? 126 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
hand it is neither an isolated thing, inasmuch as it can only be
made intelligible by its expression in doctrine and practice, nor is it what it is save through the influence of the religious practices and teaching by which we are surrounded. As little as the non-ego can be construed from the pure ego can a definite, clear, and complete system of faith be deduced from the devout ego, that from the emotions of the ego which we call feelings, without the incorporation, consciously or unconsciously, of the objective experiences of the Church which are represented in its doctrines. true that Schleiermacher desired this, but he identified his own devout
too much with those of the Church. an excellence of Schweizer's Glaubenslehre that a definite dis tinction drawn in between subjective and objective faith, and a mutual interaction and regulation of both maintained. Connected with this a further difference by which Schweizer gave fuller development to the theology of Schleiermacher on the speculative side. If devout feeling the source from which doctrines are derived, cannot be also the canon by which these doctrinal statements are to be judged. For this purpose devout feeling an element too indefinite, variable, purely subjective, with regard to which impossible to be sufficiently certain either as to the measure of its agreement with the feeling of the Church or as to its intrinsic truth.
Not only must its place in the development of Christian piety be in each case proved, a condition which Schleiermacher did not sufficiently observe, but must also be determined from another side than the historical one--by the ideal of religion itself, since we are by Christian experience placed in a position to find and recognise that ideal. The moral and religious perfection of man an ideal which lives within our souls, having been aroused and fostered by Christian experience especially, and taking definite shape in our conceptions, helps to determine our religious feelings also. Whatever contradicts this ideal our traditionary religion cannot be to us the truth Christianity, whatever impure and perishable accretions may have sometimes accidently adhered to essentially one with the ideal of perfect religion, and must therefore take the form called for by this ideal as well as by Christian experience. As objective knowledge generally,
I the truth established by the agreement of empirical observation with the idea obtained by the speculative method,
feelings
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so in religion certain truth is reached by the agreement of experience with the religious idea. The excellence of Christianity, which guarantees for it imperishable duration, is that in its essential matter it coincides with the idea of perfect
religion, and simply seeks to realise Christianity comes to its true self, not in the reason of rationalism, but in the ideal of perfect piety. The one proper canon of truth, to be followed by theology in its criticism of traditionary matter,
to compare the historical form with the idea, and to require the approximation of the former to the latter. precisely the excellence of this canon of truth that not one so definitely formulated as, for instance, the Apostles' Creed for no period in a position to produce an infallible formula to serve as the canon of truth for all the future. This canon must be itself subject to improvement, advancing with universal and Christian knowledge. The ideal of perfect
godliness will be perceived more purely and fully in proportion as Christian experience advances, since our ideals are brought to life and full consciousness by means of the experience that answers to them. Guidance into more truth takes place in the interaction of progressive Christian experience and of the ideal of absolute religion and morality, rendered growingly
? that experience, so that whatever does not satisfy that ideal cannot be genuinely Christian, however long
may have dogmatic currency.
These are the principles of genuine Protestantism, and at
the same time of genuine modern scientific theology. The ideal factor, the idea which lives within us of the perfect
religion, recognised, together with the factor of experience in the consciousness of the Church, as the canon of truth in the construction of theological doctrines, and at the same time acknowledged that this religious ideal not always the same, or to be put into an exact formula for all time, but develops, advances, and deepens. Such principles cut the ground from under dogmatism every form, not only the dogmatism of orthodoxy, but also of rationalism and specula tion, while they clear the way for a treatment of theological doctrines which both conservative and free, in which the valuable elements of past development are preserved and the course opened and the direction shown for progressive development in the future. Schweizer accordingly declines to place dogmatic theology (as Schleiermacher desired) in
perfect through
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? 128 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
the division of ecclesiastical statistics, as a historical science,
but assigns to no less than to ethics, as essential the duty
of preparing for and directing the future development of faith. In accordance with these principles, Schweizer puts the
various doctrines in a form which not
productive than rational. The dignity of Scripture, he
religiously
maintains, must be asserted in opposition to ecclesiastical tradition, to fanatical claimants of special illumination, and to abstract reason uninfluenced Christianity. But this authority carried to excess and urged against reason generally, even when brought under the influence of Christian experience or applied to scientific matters, whether the department of historical criticism or of the physical world,
must cease to serve the truth, and could only give rise to error by presenting non-religious matters as religious, and thereby promoting superstition. The Scriptures supply what
necessary for salvation, a form abundantly recognis able by the Christian community in its free development,
precisely when exegesis acknowledges no binding canon tradition. Nor the authority of the Scriptures based upon
mechanical, or any other supernatural inspiration of their contents, but simply upon their recognisable value and the historical position of their authors.
In Schweizer's hands the doctrine of God likewise takes more satisfactory form than in Schleiermacher's system. Instead of going back, as his master had done, to the philo sophy of Spinoza, Schweizer recurs to the theology of the Calvinistic Church, which the unconditioned and universal causality of God, as the basis of the certainty of salvation, made the centre point of the theological system. Schweizer had previously traced minutely the historical development the central doctrines of the Reformed Church, and makes use his historical and critical inquiries his Glaubenslehre. He defines God as the living cause whose operation the founda tion of the world as one of law and order. The world of nature and the world of moral order, with the life of salvation in the kingdom of God, are absolutely dependent on God and they are thus dependent as ordered worlds, so that their order never interrupted by their dependence on him, but
caused and preserved thereby. In the order of nature, God's omnipotence and omniscience, eternity and omni
presence,
are manifested the order of the moral world his
less
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holiness, truth, and righteousness ; in the life of salvation in the kingdom of God, his paternal love and wisdom, which called into existence by Christ the religion of salvation, prepared for by the religion of nature and the religion of law, and which guide and consummate its course in conformity with a necessary historical order. The truth of the doctrine of predestination is found in the unconditional dependence upon divine grace of the entire course amongst men of the Christian life of salvation ; but the Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the divine decrees, with its particularism and definitive dualism, must be given up.