CHAPTER II: THE METHOD OF DOGMATICS (§§ 20-31)
THE METHOD OF DOGMATICS (§§ 20-31)
In a statement of the doctrines of the Christian faith, as has been already pointed out, we cannot begin with some principle externally given and then develop from it by a dialectical process a system of doctrines; but since Christianity is a modification of the self-consciousness, Christian doctrine will be the expression of that self-consciousness and all alleged doctrines of Christianity must be tested by the same. In the course of history a great number of these in a more or less systematic form have already appeared, It is necessary, therefore, to find a rule for the testing of them and then a principle according to which they may be arranged and combined in an articulated system.
I. SELECTION OF THE DOGMATICAL MATERIAL
The Christian religion is historical in character, Christian piety arises in no individual independently, but is propagated in the Christian communion and through it. This communion, comprehending many individuals, is, by virtue of its common inner character, a truly unitary life; it is one moral person existing under conditions of spiritual sickness or health. The fundamental basis of this communion is the peculiar essence of Christianity, and this once ascertained, we may then distinguish from it that which springs from an alien source; that is, what is heretical may be separated from what is of the church. Now, since the peculiar nature of Christianity consists in this, that all pious impulses are referred to the redemption which comes from Jesus of Nazareth, the rule is herewith supplied for the detection of heresy in doctrine: to wit, by ascertaining the different ways in which the essence of Christianity may be contradicted while the appearance of it is retained. We hereby obtain at the same time a rule for the detection of error or defect in our own apprehension of it.
There are two ways of annulling the essence of Christianity while accepting the reference of the impulses of religion to Jesus redemptive activity as its basis, namely, by a wrong view cither of human nature or of the nature of the Redeemer. The result is that in neither is there implicated a participation in true Christianity. In the former case heresy arises when the redemption is accepted, but cither man's need of it or his capacity to receive it is implicitly denied. Of those heresies which arise from a defective view of man's nature, Pelagianism, implicitly denying man's need of redemption, while admitting the full capacity of his nature; and Manichaeism, implicitly denying man's capacity for redemption while admitting his need, are respectively the types embracing all.
The second class of heresies arises when the redemption is accepted but Christ's ability to effect it is implicitly denied. This also occurs in a twofold manner, either by a denial of Christ's pre-eminence over all other men, or by a denial of his essential likeness to them, If Christ is the Redeemer, i.e., if he is the definite point of commencement of a constant and living, and therefore unhindered, activity of the God-consciousness in such a way that all others have part therein only through him, he must have an exclusive and peculiar dignity among men, and at the same time must possess an essential likeness to them. When the former is so exclusively emphasized that the latter seems a mere appearance, the heresy is of the docetic type; when the case is the reverse, the heresy is of the ebionitic type. Opposition to the essence of Christianity in any other form is not heretical but antichristian.
NOTE.--Supernaturalism is often akin to Manichaeism and Docetism, and Rationalism to Pelagianism and Ebonitism.
The evangelical dogmatician must assume the additional task of developing the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism into clear consciousness and of establishing it in a formula. For, just as the peculiar nature of Christianity is not to be found in an abstract conception of religion and religious communion, so also, since the religion of the individual and his relation to Christ does not arise or continue in him independently of the Christian communion, the peculiar nature of Protestantism is not to be discovered in a general conception of Christianity. For the Reformation was no mere reform of abuses; it was a point from which proceeded a peculiar formation of the Christian communion, a communion antithetical to Catholicism. To state the same thing somewhat differently: Just as Christianity is a phenomenon in history, an empirical fact, and its existence and character cannot be deduced from abstract conceptions of religion in general; so also Protestantism is a historical phenomenon and likewise is not to be deduced from the abstract conception of Christianity. The historical facts cannot be made to correspond with dialectical processes. The central point of opposition between the two communions can best be discovered by inquiring for those qualities in the one church which are the chief ground of objection in the other. The principal Roman Catholic accusation against Protestantism is that it is destructive of the ancient historic church and is incapable of building up an unbroken and enduring communion, but is ever fluctuating and ever tending to dissolve into mere individualism. On the other hand, Protestantism makes its chief objection to Catholicism that it robs Christ of his honor by laying all stress on the idea of the church and referring every thing to it, and that thereby Christ is subordinated to the church. Each accuses the other of slighting the Christian principle, but in an opposite way. The antithesis is capable of being stated briefly, thus: Protestantism makes the relation of the individual to the church dependent on his relation to Christ; Catholicism makes the relation of the individual to Christ dependent on his relation to the church. In Protestant dogmatics, therefore, the conception of the relation of the individual to Christ is primary and fundamental.
NOTE.--There is no sufficient obstacle to the union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches since their doctrinal disharmonies do not rest on a fundamental difference in the religious frame of mind or a difference in morality and ethics, but they are solely an affair of the schools.
From the inherence of Christian piety in a communion it follows also that a statement of doctrine is not the mere independent opinion of an individual, but is an expression of the peculiar religious consciousness of the Christian communion in which he lives and upon which he also reacts. Thus there comes to light a characteristic of Protestantism dogmatics: it is not an inventory of doctrines finally determined; but the free play of the individual factor in religious life and reflection is combined and interrelated with the common life and doctrine of the ecclesiastical body in which he inheres and which has itself come into existence by this very activity of individuals. Protestant dogmatics possesses both an ecclesiastical character and individual peculiarity and originality, and consequently not only is but ever is becoming. The process of the transformation and development of doctrine which began at the Reformation is to go on, unhindered, indefinitely.
NOTE.--The terms orthodox and heterodox have no validity in Protestant dogmatics.
Christian dogmatics and Christian ethics are best treated separately, because, while both are expressions of a Christian religious frame of mind, and while in their combination they present the whole reality of the Christian life, the former represents a static modification of human nature, the latter represents its activity (§§ 21-26).
II. THE FORMATION OF DOGMATICAL STATEMENTS
There already exists in ecclesiastical creeds, confessions, and doctrinal formularies a mass of professedly Christian doctrines, (a) Each one of these separate doctrinal propositions admits of a critical test; then the consistency one with another of all these is to be tested in order to unite all the truly Christian doctrines into one integral system. Every doctrine must conform to the following conditions: (1) It must be confessionally true, i.e., it must be a true expression of the Christian consciousness in some given church communion; (2) it must be scripturally true, i.e., it must be a genuine expression of that piety which appears in the New Testament; (3) it must be scientifically true, i.e., it must be logically consistent with other true expressions of the Christian faith and also with the facts of the objective consciousness; the terminology of dogmatics must be strictly scientific. These three tests are to be applied in the order named. Or, to put it in a word, Christian dogma must be the self-consistent expression, dialectically exact and in systematic form, of the common continuous Christian consciousness and in harmony with the unity of human nature. That conformity with some Protestant confession is made a test prior to conformity with the New Testament is not prejudicial to the latter, because, in addition to the fact that the Protestant church symbols themselves are professedly based on the Scriptures and the necessity of going back from the creeds to the Scriptures would arise only in case their interpretations of the latter are suspected, there is the further consideration that no individual opinion, purporting to be Christian, which does not possess apparent homogeneity with the expressed consciousness of a historic communion can be considered worthy of being called a dogma.
That dogmas must be based on the New Testament rather than the whole Bible follows from what has been said of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, if a doctrinal statement can be shown to rest on the New Testament no additional weight can be given it by a further reference to the Old; while, if it be supported by the Old Testament alone, it cannot claim to be Christian. Further, it is quite inappropriate and misleading to import the very expressions of Scripture into a doctrinal system, for this is to overlook the difference between scientific language and the free, popular, and rhetorical usage in the Scriptures. Isolated texts are to be used only when they evidently issue from the same body of pious excitations as those which are expressed in the dogmatical propositions.
(b) The range of Christian dogmatics is deter mined by the consciousness of redemption. Within this consciousness lies a fundamental antithesis. On the one side is the need of redemption, a repression and limitation of the God-consciousness, a felt inability to erect the feeling of absolute dependence into a position of supremacy over all the activities of life. On the other side is the certainty of redemption through Jesus Christ, i.e., the God-consciousness is now put into a commanding position in all the energies of life, and this power to hold all in subjection to the religious feeling is referred to Christ. This does not imply that the consciousness of the need of redemption has disappeared; it may indeed be more vivid; but it is now specifically Christian.
Consequently, all professedly Christian doctrines must conform to the demand that they have their source in the Christian consciousness of redemption. Thus it is impossible for Christian dogmatics to take over from so-called "natural theology" descriptions of a religious consciousness common to all men, or the results of speculative theology, however true these may be in themselves. Nor can this be done with doctrines of the person of the Redeemer, relating to a time anterior or posterior to, or apart from, his redemptive activity, or with doctrines of a state of humanity in which men no longer feel the antithesis implied in redemption, since those doctrines are not expressions of the Christian consciousness, whatever else they may be. Nor again can the discoveries of science in any field whatever or the products of meta physical speculation, all of which may be independent of the higher self-consciousness, be accepted as elements of a Christian doctrinal system until they have been reinterpreted from the standpoint of the Christian religious experience. According to this view no assertions of mere historic fact or of speculation about this Redeemer himself are entitled to a place in Christian doctrine.
Since all Christian piety rests upon the appearing of the Redeemer, nothing that concerns him can be set forth as distinctly Christian doctrine which does not stand in connection with his redeeming causality and is not capable of being referred back to the original impression which his existence made.
(c) As regards the framework in which dogma is to be exhibited: Since religion is in the last analysis the feeling of absolute dependence, and since that higher consciousness comes into actual supremacy over the sensuous consciousness in the Christian experience of redemption, Christian dogmatics will naturally commence with a description of the distinctively Christian consciousness. But since, as has been shown, the feeling of absolute dependence is inseparable from a world-consciousness over against which a God-consciousness stands, Christian dogmatics will also present a doctrine of the world and a doctrine of God from the standpoint of redemption.
We shall treat the historic confessional statements under these three heads and in the order indicated. This order of discussion differs from that which has been the rule among dogmaticians. They have given the question of the being and nature of God the first place in the order of topics, but our method is more in harmony with the requirements of science and the needs of the religious spirit (§§ 27-31). __________________________________________________________________
I. UNFOLDING OF THE RELIGIOUS SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS (§§ 32-61)
The Christian consciousness presupposes and involves the consciousness of absolute dependence on God. But in that peculiar modification of the religious consciousness which is experienced in Christianity the exaltation of the God-consciousness from a condition of repression to a position of dominancy over all the sensuous impulses is referred to Christ, so that there can be no reference (relation) to Christ in which there is not also a reference to God. The pain which is felt at being unable to realize the supremacy of the God-consciousness is attributed to a want of communion with the Redeemer, while the satisfaction experienced in the opposite state is contemplated as an impartation which has come to us out of this communion; so that there is no religious activity or potency within the Christian communion in which a reference to Christ is not involved.
It has been pointed out already that the religious feeling is never experienced in isolation from other experiences but always in connection with a world-consciousness; and that the perfection of the God-consciousness is dependent upon the perfection of the world-consciousness. In other words, we find ourselves, as part of a world-whole, relatively free and relatively dependent. But over against this unity of a world organized and possessed of perfect interrelations in which we have our own definite place, there stands a higher unity upon which we feel ourselves and the world-unity absolutely dependent. The obliteration of the distinction between these separate unities annuls either the feeling of absolute dependence or the feeling of freedom, and contradicts human experience. Both of these two antithetical unities are therefore involved in the Christian consciousness.
The experience of this feeling of absolute dependence is not contingent on any peculiar circum stance in human life, as though it were accidental and not absolutely constituent of human nature, nor does it vary in its character in different men, but is the same in all. The difference in degrees of perfection among men does not consist in a distinction in the quality of this feeling but is to be referred to the degree of development of the intellectual functions. (See above.) Supposed instances of a human self-consciousness which is destitute of the God-consciousness disappear on close analysis, except in those individuals whose intelligence is entirely undeveloped.
But even if our contention that the feeling of absolute dependence and the God-consciousness involved in it constitute a potency essential to human nature were successfully impugned, we should be under no compulsion to formulate in our dogmatics a proof of God's existence, for such "proofs" would only issue in an objective consciousness of God's existence which could have no place in a system which is based on immediate inner certainty. Moreover, experience has shown of how little avail are such demonstrations in the face of theoretical atheism. It is not the business of dogmatics to secure an admission of the God-consciousness but to develop its content.
To resume: Since the Christian religious consciousness is connected with a consciousness of unity with the world on the one hand and involves the feeling of absolute dependence on God on the other, Christian dogmatics will naturally begin with a description of the religious consciousness so far as the relation between God and the world is expressed in it; it will proceed further to describe the qualities of the world and the attributes of God so far as these are involved in that relation. It may be repeated also that such a doctrine of God and of the world is not supplementary to, or to be supplemented by, a scientific or philosophical doctrine of God and the world. Christian dogmatics rests upon its own basis, namely, the Christian religious consciousness, and it is complete in itself. Whatever cannot be evolved from the religious consciousness cannot be admitted to a place in dogmatics, because it lies outside the sphere of religion.
Section I. Description of the Religious Consciousness, so Far as the Relation between God and the World Is Expressed in It
Only when we feel ourselves to have a place in that organic whole we call Nature, or, as otherwise expressed, only when we are conscious of belonging to that unity which we call the world, with its division into parts universally related to one another, do we recognize our absolute dependence upon that higher infinite unity we call God. Our absolute dependence on God involves the absolute dependence of the world also. Hence the doctrine of the world from the view point of religion is summed up in the proposition: The totality of finite being exists solely by dependence on the Infinite,
The creeds express this doctrine in the twofold form of the creation and the preservation of the world by God. Were not the use of these terms already established it would suffice to designate the whole relation of the world to God by either of them. If creation, instead of denoting a divine activity which began and ended at a definite point, were used to designate the continuous and uninterrupted activity of God in the world, it would include the idea of preservation. Or if, for example, we think of the species in connection with the individual existences embraced in it, the creation of the individuals is just the preservation of the species and the latter would include the former. In this way they become fairly interchangeable. The only distinction between these two conceptions is that the former adds to the latter the conception of a beginning of the relation of dependence. However, we have no consciousness of a beginning of existence, but only of a continuous existence, and therefore Christian dogmatics can produce no special doctrine of creation, but has only a negative interest in it. That is, dogmatics supplies the rule that no doctrine of creation can be accepted as Christian which is inconsistent with the world's complete and continuous dependence on God, as, e.g., the doctrine of a pre-existent material which was the subject of God's formative activity, or the doctrine of a commencement of divine activity at creation, both of which limit the dependence of the world to a circumscribed period, And, on the other hand, our discipline occupies a position of freedom in relation to scientific investigation. For example, for dogmatical purposes it is immaterial whether the account of creation given in Genesis be in accordance with the facts or not, or whether we have in this book an inspired account of the manner in which the world came to be; for in any case these an; questions of cosmology or of a doctrine of the Bible. Dogmatics is only concerned with those matters in so far as they stand related to religious feeling. The pious self-consciousness underlying the doctrine of creation is satisfied with that doctrine, (1) as expressing the idea of the world's origination through God, so long as God is not thereby brought into the relation of antithesis or limitation; (2) as referring the world's origin to divine activity, so long as it is not viewed as similar to human activity; (3) when it views the origin of the world as time-filling and conditioning all change, with out the divine activity itself being made thereby temporal.
The doctrine of preservation more suitably sets forth the fundamental religious consciousness. It has been pointed out already that the highest development of the self-consciousness involves a consciousness of our being a part of the articulated world-whole, and this again is a condition of the highest development of the God-consciousness. Hence the highest knowledge of the world and the highest knowledge of God are interdependent, being a twofold expression of one and the same self-consciousness. Scientific and religious conceptions of the world are not antagonistic but complementary. The divine preservation of the world and universal natural causality are one and the same thing viewed from different standpoints. The affirmation of our religious consciousness that all that affects us exists in a relation of absolute dependence on God falls into line with the intuition that all is conditioned and determined by the world-order. If the common idea were true that the religious and the scientific view of things are mutually exclusive and that when the religious consciousness is more lively the scientific activity will be correspondingly weaker, and conversely, then the growth of scientific knowledge would result in the gradual extinction of piety, and the interests of religion would be opposed to all research and further extension of knowledge--altogether in contradiction with the truth that the impulse to world-knowledge and the impulse to seek God are both essential to the human soul. Now, it is quite true that the unusual and stupendous events in nature stimulate the religious feeling most thoroughly, but that is not because of the obscurity of their relations with other phenomena, but just because they manifest the most clearly the subjection of all human existence and activity to universal potencies and by this stimulate our sense of dependence. But this itself is just the most perfect admission of the universality of the world-order. Apart from this admission the religious consciousness could not be connected with every natural event.
NOTE.--The distinction between general and special preservation is opposed to the universal interests of religion, and so also is the distinction between preservation and co-operation, for they imply the operation of forces which do not proceed from God. To add to these the idea of divine government is to make further confusion, for it introduces the antithesis of means and end to God, which implies a difference in the degrees of the immediacy of the relation of things to God.
Because of the prominence which is given to the subject, particularly in apologetic writings, it is pertinent to apply the principles here enunciated to the subject of miracles. It is commonly supposed that an event which lies outside the fixed order of nature and which cannot, therefore, be accounted for by natural causality, has a special religious value because the divine causality is demanded for its explanation. But this is to suppose that the religious sphere lies outside of the universal order of relations, making the religious synonymous with the arbitrary and exalting the quality of arbitrariness to the rank of a divine at tribute. Nay, it does more: it separates God from the world and makes a religious view of the world impossible. It is destructive of science and of religion too.
If it be urged that the Christian belief in the hearing of prayer and the new birth demands a belief in miracles it may be replied here (though these subjects are to be treated later) that our view relates prayer to the divine preservation so that the prayer and its fulfilment or non-fulfilment are only parts of the one original divine order of things. As to the new birth--if the revelation of God in Christ is not something absolutely supernatural then Christian piety cannot require that anything which coheres with that revelation, and issues from it, be absolutely supernatural. Yet it is to be noted that our knowledge of the relations of the physical and spiritual is too limited to warrant a denial of the historicity of certain remark able events related in the New Testament. But this is a question for scientific investigation and not for dogmatics.
The operation of influences which constitute limitations upon our life is not to be denied. There is a difficulty in connecting them with God. for it seems to make him the source of evil, including the morally bad. While dogmatics has nothing to do with the origin and continuance of evil as an existence, but has only to show how it consists with universal dependence, a reference to the difficulty just mentioned is justifiable. If we divide these life-limiting forces into two classes: natural evil, by which human existence is partly annulled, and the bad, by which human activity is partly overcome in a conflict with others, the one class of opposing forces representing the totality of the powers of nature and the other class the entire combination of human activities; then it may be pointed out that the very forces of Nature which further individual human existence up to a certain point are also those which limit and extinguish it. The same double effect is seen in the operation of social influences. It will appear, then, that the furthering and the limiting of life are mutually conditioned. The personal existence of the individual is conditioned by the very influences which limit him. Accordingly it becomes plain that evil and good do not occupy two separate spheres, but both taken together constitute the world as it is. That is to say, evil is not for itself as such ordained by God, because it never exists by itself but only in relation to the good, of which it is a condition. All this is true, whether we speak of the "mechanism of nature" or of "free causes." Both belong to the universal order of nature, the cosmos.
APPENDIX: DOCTRINE OF ANGELS AND OF A DEVIL
The idea of these spiritual existences is brought over from the Old Testament into the New Testament and occurs in the popular discourses of Jesus and the Apostles. But whatever may have been their attitude toward the prevalent belief in such beings, it is to be observed that they give us no didactic utterance on the subject. Also, the creeds, while referring to such beings, for the most part elaborate no doctrine of angels or of a devil. And this is natural. For while there is nothing impossible in the idea, dogmatics as such has no positive concern with it. Our discipline is only interested to prevent an injury to the religious feeling through the direction of faith to an activity other than God's, or through the idea that the fixed order of Nature may be interfered with or abrogated by other beings, and thus the absolute relation of God to the world be compromised.
As to bad angels, every attempted doctrinal representation of them is full of self-contradictions. As to the doctrine of a supreme bad spirit called the devil, whatever may be the source of the idea--whether in the belief in a servant of God who announces the evil doings of men, or in oriental dualism with its doctrine of absolute evil, or in the Jewish view of the angel of death--it can have no place in Glaubenslehre (a doctrine of faith). For if there is a personal actual existence absolutely opposed to God, a religious view of the world is impossible and faith in the Redeemer is compromised. For if the devil be a part of the world-whole, then God as absolute causality is not present to the whole of existence, the totality of experience cannot be referred to God, and religion ceases to be fundamental to human nature as a part of the totality of being. And if, on the other hand, the devil be not a part of that articulated totality we call the world, then the unity of the universe in relation to God is destroyed, our dependence on God ceases to be absolute, God is no longer absolutely God. Hence also, the redemption by Christ is compromised. For if the devil be not included within its sphere, our redemption is not complete, for the totality of being ceases to be subordinate to Christ. He becomes only a help against a power from which he does not afford absolute protection. A belief in the devil can be by no means a condition of faith in God or in Christ; nor may we discuss his influence within the kingdom of God. The doctrine of angels or of a devil is a question of cosmology, and not of theology. Such a doctrine cannot be a Christian dogma, because it cannot be an expression of the Christian consciousness. Moreover it is sure to fall into contradiction with growing scientific knowledge. Yet as long as men are conscious of the influence of inexplicable evil forces it is proper and necessary that the idea be utilized in religious communications of a practical and liturgical character (§§ 32-49).
Section 2. Doctrine of God. The Divine Attributes Which Are Implicated in the Religious Self-Consciousness so Far as It Expresses the Relation between God and the World
If, as has been pointed out, the feeling of absolute dependence, which is the essence of religion, is implicated in the specifically Christian consciousness, and if this consciousness of immediate relation with God arises only in connection with the consciousness of having a place in that universally interrelated whole which we call the world, then Christian dogmatics involves a doctrine of God and a doctrine of the world which arise from that fundamental religious feeling, apart from those doctrines which express the experience of redemption, which is specifically and exclusively Christian.
Such a doctrine of God is not to be viewed as a description of God in himself, for we possess no objective knowledge of God; and even if such were possible, it could not become a part of our discipline; because, as it does not spring out of the religious feeling but stands in an external relation to it, such knowledge, if introduced into dogmatics, would constitute an alien element destroying its unity. The usual method followed in the discussion of this subject has produced confusion and a contradiction of the religious feeling. The various experiences of the religious spirit which have been expressed in poetry or popular discourse have been handled by the dogmaticians in a speculative way, as if they constituted a sum of knowledge about God. The necessity of divesting such expressions of their figurative and anthropomorphic form by a critical process before they can be utilized as material for a scientific statement has produced a skepticism in regard to religion, because it has become plain that in those ways no actual scientific knowledge of God was furnished. And when by a speculative process (e.g., via eminentiae, negationis et causalitatis) various classes of divine attributes are set forth (e.g., the natural or metaphysical and the moral, or the active and static, or the absolute and relative, or the original and derivative), it is made to appear that our knowledge of God is made up of a composite of mutually independent attributes, and hence that the object himself of this knowledge is a composite being. In this way the unity of the religious life in mankind is destroyed because the nature of the religion each individual enjoyed is made to depend upon that special attribute of the divine nature to which he subjects himself.
Instead of such "natural" or "rational" theology, we must found our science upon the simple fundamental feeling of absolute dependence which (since man is receptive in this experience) furnishes us with the divine causality as the principle of dogmatics. Hence the attributes that may be ascribed to God will be those which express the various ways in which the feeling of absolute dependence is referred to God as the absolute causality. We necessarily posit absolute causality in God as that from which the feeling of absolute dependence is the reflection in our self-consciousness. There are various modifications of this feeling, that is, it is referred to God in various ways; and hence arises the necessity of positing in God attributes which correspond to the various ways of referring the fundamental religious feeling to God. Now these modifications arise from our relation to the universally interrelated totality of Nature in which we are. The range of our experience (or of the consciousness of our relations) is limited to this world, and hence the feeling of absolute dependence is experienced only within the world-whole (world-order) and through it. That is to say, for us the absolute divine causality finds its full expression in the totality of the forces of Nature. But since, on the other hand, our interrelations with the world-whole itself furnish us the feeling of relative freedom and relative dependence toward it, whereas along with the world we are absolutely dependent on God, our relation to God is the antithesis of our relation to the world; that is to say, the infinite, divine causality and finite, natural causality are antithetical. Hence the divine causality as corresponding in range to the totality of natural causality may be called the divine Omnipotence, but as the antithesis of finite and natural causality, the divine Eternity. But as these are mutually involved, it were better perhaps to say, God is the Eternal Omnipotence, or the Omnipotent Eternal. The attributes of omnipresence, and omniscience are simply another way of saying the same thing, through a comparison with the finite.
To carry out more fully the comparison with the finite, we may represent the absolute divine causality from the religious standpoint as follows:
1. God is eternal--that is: because no moment of time can be disconnected with God, the religious consciousness relates the world to God as the power which, itself out of time, conditions all that is temporal and time itself. This is more than to say that God is without beginning and without end. "Immortability" adds nothing to this conception and is objectionable.
2. God is omnipresent--that is: the religious spirit, because it admits no place in the whole world to be destitute of a religious stimulus, declares that the causality of God is absolutely unspatial but conditions all that is spatial and space itself. It cannot be said that there is a difference in the degree of his presence in different places, as, e.g., the spirit of man compared with dead forces; the only difference is in the receptivity of various existences. "Immensity" is objectionable, for it imports spatiality into the being of God.
3. God is almighty--that is: the articulated totality of nature with its universal connection of causes and effects is grounded in the infinite causality of God and is a perfect expression of it, and consequently all actually happens to which there exists a causality in God. What has not happened could not have happened. To make a distinction between the actual and the possible, or between God's power and God's will is to create confusion.
4. God is omniscient--that is: the divine omnipotence is to be conceived as absolute spirituality. We cannot speak of the divine perception, experience, comprehension, or vision, for these involve a sensuous element and therefore put God within antithesis. To ascribe contemplation, memory, foreknowledge, mediate and immediate knowledge, or pure thought to God in doctrinal statement is open to the same objection: they transfer human activities to God and implicate him in human imperfection. His causality is living, absolutely spiritual. He relates himself to the object of knowledge in an eternal omnipresent way. As God knows every individual in the whole, so he knows the whole in every individual thing.
APPENDIX
Unity, infinity, and simplicity are commonly classed with the four above-named attributes of God, but they can be admitted only if they possess dogmatical content.
a) As to unity.--Numerical unity is an attribute of nothing; the unity of existence and essence, like that of the individuals and the species, belongs to speculative thought. For the religious consciousness the expression "unity of God" signifies that the unity of all pious excitations is given with the same certainty as these excitations themselves. Accordingly unity is not so much a single attribute as it is the mono theistic canon which underlies all investigation into the divine attributes and is as little capable of proof as the divine existence itself.
b) As to infinity.--This means negation of limitation. To predicate infinity of God amounts to a precaution against attributing anything to God which can be thought under limitation, and thus it is only mediately an attribute of all divine attributes.
c) As to simplicity.--It is used to negate materiality in God, to exclude the idea of parts or combination in him, in short, divine participation in anything whereby we designate the finite as such. As infinity is an attribute of all attributes, so simplicity expresses only the unseparated and inseparable mutual involution of all divine attributes and activities. As infinity guards against the predication of anything in God that is thought within limits, so simplicity is a precaution against attributing to God anything which essentially pertains to the sphere of antithesis (§§ 50-56).
Section 3. Doctrine of the World. The Nature of the World, Which Is
Implied in the Religious Self-
Consciousness, so Far as It Expresses
the Universal Relation between
God and the World
Since the religious consciousness expresses a relation between God arid the world, it implies a religious view of the world-constitution. The doctrinal statement which describes that view will be the answer to the following question: If the consciousness of absolute dependence on God arises only in connection with the world, how must the religious self-consciousness view the world which excites this experience? Consequently, such a doctrine of the world is not to be confounded with a scientific account of it or to be considered as a rival thereto, since the latter proceeds by objective perception and ratiocination.
The religious principle is an essential and universal element in human nature, but this principle never comes into consciousness except under the influence of impressions received from the world, of which human nature is an integral part. Further, that the God-consciousness be connected with every experience is a demand upon our nature; consequently every world-impression must be capable of exciting the religious feeling. Otherwise the God-consciousness would be only a contingent feature of human existence, and God's eternal, living omnipotence would be unable to obtain expression in the world. That is to say, if all finite being as it affects our consciousness is refer able to the eternal almighty Causality, the world must be such a world that every impression it makes upon us tends to produce in us the religious feeling. In other words, the religious consciousness presupposes the original (i.e., independent of special circum stances) perfection of the world. This is not to be understood as the equivalent of a doctrine of a definite condition of the world, past, present, or future, but it refers to the permanent ever self-identical relations which underlie all historical events. Such a perfection is ideal, never provable, and never demonstrably realized, but for our consciousness it is necessarily postulated as the presupposition of all world-history. The world-history is the developing, but ever incomplete, manifestation of that perfection.
But the self-consciousness is not exhausted in that identity with the world of which we are aware in our consciousness of dependence, along with the world, on God; for in self-consciousness we also recognize the antithesis between ourselves and the world. Hence a religious view of the world involves, besides a doctrine of the original perfection of the world, a doctrine of the original perfection of man.
1. The Original Perfection of the World
Since this original perfection of the world is a postulate of the self-consciousness, it can be a doctrine of the world, not as it is in itself, but only as related to man, the religious being. The relations between man and the world are twofold--each acts upon, and is acted upon by, the other. The perfection of the world in relation to man is therefore likewise twofold: (1) By means of the human physical frame, which both unites him to the world and becomes the organ of his spirit in relation to the world, it affects him on the real side; and on the ideal side it presents itself as knowable by him, and thus furnishes to him every where and at all times incitements to activity; it both supplies to him sensation and stimulates his powers of knowledge. (2) As receptive of man's activity and through the physical organism which is operated by his activity, the world offers itself to man as the organ of his self-expression; and as he thus extends his dominion over it more and more, it awakens in him the consciousness of the divine causality as that of which his own is an image.
NOTE.--This doctrine of the original perfection of the world is to be distinguished from that doctrine of the world which represents the present world as the best out of many possible worlds, and as well from that of a former condition of the world which has passed away and has been changed into the present imperfect world. The former is the product of rationalistic speculation; since the time of Leibnitz particularly, it has been assigned a place in so-called natural or rational theology. It is not a product of the religious consciousness, and it at tributes to God such anthropomorphic conceptions as mediate knowledge and alternative choice. The latter doctrine has sprung from the narrative in Genesis and the legendary lore of many peoples; it appears in the story of a prehistoric golden age. On the one hand, as bare history, it could have no dogmatical importance; and, on the other hand, it destroys the entirety of the divine control and preservation of the world, and so is prejudicial against the religious feeling.
2. The Original Perfection of Man
As the original perfection of the world is perceived only in reference to man, so the original perfection of man is here considered only in reference to God. The God-consciousness appears in the feeling of absolute dependence. This feeling of absolute dependence, as has been said before, occurs always in connection with the sensuous consciousness; the tendency to the God-consciousness thus appears as a condition in separable from human nature, because this tendency is experienced in the character of a demand upon human nature to rise to that state in which the human soul is conscious of communion with God. Now piety (religion) consists in this, that we are conscious of this tendency as a living impulse issuing from our very nature and constitutive of it in the sense that the destruction of this impulse would be the destruction of our nature. Therefore those states which condition and are involved in the appearing of the God-consciousness throughout the whole life of man after the spiritual (mental) functions are developed, must be essentially involved in human nature. Hence it must be possible for man so to govern the world and appropriate it to the aim of his life that all the impressions he receives from it, whether they offer hindrances or helps to his life, whether they are transformed into intellectual cognitions or merely affect his sensuous nature in feeling, may be so brought into connection with the God-consciousness that it dominates them all.
But besides this inner impulse to arrive at the realization of the God-consciousness, and inseparable from it, there is an impulse to externalize this religious feeling, that is, to communicate to others that same religious feeling; and this is the same as to establish a communion (association) among men based upon that religious feeling. With this impulse is involved the adaptability of human nature to circulate and appropriate the religious consciousness. In short, the self-consciousness, which is fundamentally religious, by development necessarily becomes a race-consciousness, and the possibility of this is grounded in human nature itself. Out of this original perfection of human nature proceeds the possibility of the propagation of a specific religious experience, i.e., the possibility of founding a religious communion.
But as to the degree in which the religious consciousness has been developed in particular men, that is a matter for the historian and not for the dogmatician. Accordingly all that dogmatics may predicate of primitive man is: since religion is a necessary and universal element of human nature, it must have existed in primitive man to the extent that he was able to communicate it to posterity. Religion must be as old as the human race. When, however, men speak of an "original righteousness" in Adam, they make the mistake of taking as a type of righteousness a mere original capacity for development out of which no positive gain came to mankind since, according to the common view, that "righteousness" was lost; whereas, the true manifestation of righteousness is to be sought in Christ, in whom it came as a gain to all mankind. Summarily then, original perfection pertains to human nature, in that man possesses the original capacity of connecting all his experiences with God, that he is capable of propagating that same religious attitude to all men, and that all men are consequently capable of receiving it (§§ 57-61). __________________________________________________________________
II. THE ANTITHESIS IN THE RELIGIOUS SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS (§§ 62-169)
Introductory
There is no self-conscious human existence from which the God-consciousness is entirely absent, yet there is no human existence in which this religious feeling constitutes the whole of experience. The sensuous consciousness and the God-consciousness are always combined in some relation to each other. In one case they are so related as to produce an experience of pain, in the other so as to produce pleasure. The former is the pre-Christian state. In it religious feeling has not attained an ascendancy in the activities of life; the God-consciousness is not extinct, but repressed, not entirely wanting, but dominated by sensuous experience. In relation to the God-consciousness our condition is that of dissatisfaction or pain.
In the Christian religion, as teleological in character, all experience is judged by its relation to the activities of life. Accordingly, when the Christian looks back to his former state, just described, he regards the repression of the God-consciousness in himself ^s proceeding from his own act and not from an external source; from his present point of view religious feeling in him was subjected to sensuous experience by his own act of alienation from God; that is, he is conscious of it as sin.
But now in relation to the God-consciousness his experience is one of enjoyment, pleasure, satisfaction. The God-consciousness has now come to its rightful position of supremacy in the activities of life, and sensuous experiences are subjected to it. He has entered into communion with God. And this turning to God it is impossible for him to refer to his own activity, for alienation from God is his own original act, and if the turning to God were to be referred to the same, then the repression of the religious feeling would be only occasional, and the consciousness of the need of redemption would be only contingent. But it is a fact of Christian experience that the dominancy of the God-consciousness is ascribed to a source outside of one's self, it is a redemption; and this redemption is viewed as an arrangement by the will of God, so that faith in it is a harmony with God's will. Communion with God is the effect of a communication proceeding from Jesus Christ. He is Redeemer in that the control of the activities of life by the God-consciousness is referred to his act. There is no universal God-consciousness without a reference to Christ, nor a relation to Christ which is not referred to the God-consciousness. This is what is meant by the Christian consciousness of Grace--communion with God dependent on a communication from the Redeemer.
Consequently, redemption involves the consciousness of sin and the consciousness of grace. These two essential elements of Christian experience are to be understood only in relation to one another. This antithesis in experience never disappears though it is true that the former element, by means of the latter, continually diminishes. As in the pre-Christian state the God-consciousness was not extinct but subjected to sensuous control, so now in the state of grace the consciousness of sin is not extinct but is steadily diminished as the energies of life become increasingly pervaded by the religious consciousness. Doctrines which are specifically Christian must be drawn from the Christian religious consciousness, from the inner experience of Christians. Dogmatics has to do only with this Christian view of sin and grace and does not attempt to construe them in a cosmological, historical, or speculative way. With sin as a world-element, or with conditions antecedent to the appearing of sin or subsequent to its disappearance, or with sin as a metaphysical principle our discipline has nothing to do, because these lie outside the sphere of the religious self-consciousness. Our doctrine of sin must be of sin in relation to grace, and our doctrine of the world, of men, and of God in relation to sin, must be determined by the Christian consciousness of the relation between sin and grace (§§ 62-64).
The framework in which the doctrines of sin and grace are to be exhibited will be the same as in Part I, and for a similar reason. __________________________________________________________________
I. FIRST SIDE OF THE ANTITHESIS: UNFOLDING OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN (§§ 65-84)
If it be attempted to set forth a doctrine of sin in and for itself, such a doctrine could not form a consistent whole with that, already exhibited, of the religious consciousness in general. First, as man's own act it would appear contradictory to the tendency to the development of the God-consciousness as a living impulse in man, and inconsistent with the original perfection of human nature. Second, since in the state of sin a man exists in his place within the world-whole, then sin, as not proceeding from the divine causality, would destroy the unity and integrity of Nature, because it would be an entity existing in opposition to the divine omnipotence. Third, if it be referred to the divine causality, then, that attribute which represents the divine causality in relation to sin must be out of harmony with other divine attributes, and so the unity of the divine nature would be destroyed. Finally, if sin has developed in man on occasion of receiving impressions from the world, the perfection of the world in relation to man is destroyed. If, therefore, we are to avoid both the Manichaean and Pelagian heresies, which in opposite ways denied the reference of sin to the divine causality, the Christian consciousness must be viewed in its unity, and sin must be considered only in reference to redemption, and only so can it have a place in dogmatics.
Section 1. Sin as the State of Man (§§ 66-74)
The method adopted in this work requires that sin be treated from the standpoint of the personal consciousness. Sin and the consciousness of sin are not to be separated. It is an experience of the God-consciousness being hindered by sensuousness from controlling the activities of life and it is expressed in a feeling of pain, dissatisfaction. But no activities of life, not even those which are governed by the impulses of religion, are without the appearing of sin in consciousness, at least in germ, in some way--warning, presentiment, self-reproof, regret. Ami so we may say that in all the stages of human development, if we except the states of innocency and obduracy, a strife exists between the lower impulses and the higher--a struggle of flesh and spirit against each other.
Thus sin is a historical phenomenon in human consciousness and pertains to all peoples and ages. Its appearance indeed is the outcome of the perpetuation in some degree of an earlier sensuous state in which the higher functions of human nature had not yet been differentiated. Now, were the development of the capacities of human nature regular and unbroken, there would be no consciousness of the repression of the higher spiritual nature by the lower and sensuous; if the normal unfolding of the judgment were always accompanied by a parallel development of the powers of will, then there would be no consciousness of the control of spirit by flesh, no consciousness of sin, or, to state it in equivalent terms, no sin. But as a matter of fact judgment and will power are unevenly developed. Of that we are conscious as sin, and this very sin-consciousness is conditioned by the presence of the higher, the religious, consciousness. Therefore sin does not annul the original perfection of man. But for that original perfection there could be no sin. Sin is conditioned by the very capacity for the development of the God-consciousness: a bad conscience would be an impossibility but for the persistent consciousness of a something better. Yet it is the outcome of his former undeveloped sensuous state before the God-consciousness appeared.
But, on the other hand, sin is not conformable with that original perfection of human nature. Were it so, i.e., were it only a consciousness which we have of good, yet lacking when individual acts and states are held in mind, sin would be unavoidable. But this would be incompatible with the redemption, for we may feel the need of redemption and may be capable of receiving it only in case sin is unavoidable. There fore the defect of will-power in comparison with the judgment must be viewed as a confusion and damage produced in our nature. And since it is the Christian redemption which gives validity to the consciousness of sin (for sin is only in relation to redemption), the clear and full consciousness of sin cannot arise out of the precepts of the law, but from the appearing in history of a God-consciousness which developed to an absolute strength, i.e., from the manifestation in history of a sinlessly developed human perfection, which is seen in the person of the Redeemer. If this had not appeared in him, there could be no hope that it could ever appear in us.
While, however, it is true that we come to a consciousness of sin in connection with personal activities and as our own act, when the self-consciousness widens itself from the individual to the family, from the family to the state, and from the state to the race (for the self-consciousness in its widest range is a race-consciousness), the race-consciousness is seen to involve a sin-consciousness. Hence the final ground of sin is to be found, beyond the individual personal consciousness, in the race. Accordingly sin is to be considered first, as hereditary, and second, as empirical or actual.
1. Hereditary Sin
There is, then, a sinfulness already present in every man before he commits acts of sin, and coming from a source beyond his own individual existence. But in what does this sinfulness consist? It must consist in a relation to the possession of the God-consciousness as the good of man. It is not, there fore, something of positive nature in itself, but a defect consisting in a total inability to bring the activities of one's nature under the control of the religious feeling, Not that a total incapacity in relation thereto, and so a total absence of all good, is thereby presupposed, for the redemption and the preaching of it imply such a capacity as the indispensable condition of its effectuation, and without it salvation would be such a total remaking of human nature as would render redemption unmeaning; or, were it impossible to remove that inability entirely, sin would be some thing infinite in itself and the redemption impossible. That capacity to receive the God-consciousness is, then, not: a good in itself, but a good in relation to the redemption and, as we shall see, the product of it; and so it cannot be reckoned in any sense as personal righteousness. That good in human nature is, however, only receptive, and human activity cannot supply to that capacity a positive good.
But can there be personal guilt in relation to that which comes from beyond the individual himself? Not if this original sin fulness be sundered from connection with the actual sins in which it appears and be viewed as a something existing in itself. But that would remove it beyond the range of Christian piety (which is ever teleological), and therefore beyond the range of dogmatics. The guilt of sin is the individual's because the act of sin is his, but the guilt is not the isolated individual's, for the individual cannot be isolated. The self-consciousness in its full significance is a race-consciousness. The whole race is a unity, the constituent members of which propagate their activity everywhere and at all times. Every individual act of sin is, on the one hand, caused by other sins and, on the other hand, causative of other sins, it is both propagated by antecedent sin fulness and propagates sinfulness. The consciousness of sinfulness is a common, universal consciousness. The individual thus represents the whole race both in space and time; his act is the act of the race and his guilt a race guilt. (This is the truth which is relatively described in the common theological terms, reatus, corruptio naturae, vitium originis, morbus originis, etc.)
From the standpoint of the self-consciousness widened to a race-consciousness, the race-consciousness is a sin-consciousness. Yet the tendency to the God-consciousness is never wanting and the effort to realize it never vanishes. In this effort conjoined with a sense of helpfulness against the power of the flesh, there arises an anticipation of help coming from without--of redemption. As the guilt is a race-guilt, so we shall see the redemption is a race-redemption.
But the common doctrine that universal sin fulness in the race is the product of an alteration of human nature effected by an act of our first parents cannot be accepted. For if Adam's nature before the fall were different from his nature afterward and from universal human nature now; then, in the first place, the unity of the race would be destroyed and there could be no race-consciousness; and, in the second place, it involves the impossible assumption that an individual can so operate upon his own nature and that of all succeeding generations as to destroy it. The impossibility of accounting in this way for the change appears in the attempts of theologians to account for the first sin by attributing it to unbelief, pride, lust, ambition, etc., all of which presuppose it. And this failure is inevitable since no individual can act from outside his own nature, but only within it. Or else such attempts involve the assumption of a hopelessly bad being, the devil, and so lead to Manichaeism. We cannot accept the unity of the race except on the ground of a common consciousness. Consequently Adam's nature was related to his own sin in the same way as our nature to our sin. The derivation of our sinfulness from a first individual act of sin committed by our first parents can never be an element of our redemption- faith, and a natural and unprejudiced exegesis of those passages of Scripture which are supposed to support that view will yield no such result. (See Rom. 5:12-21; I Cor. 15:21, 22; II Cor. ii 13.) The same is true of the Traducianist and the Covenant theory. The Mosaic narrative cannot be viewed as a historical account of the first act of sin; its value lies in its universally representative character. Wherefore the inborn sinfulness must have existed in the race from the very commencement. Apart from this there could be no universal capacity for redemption. "Sin in general and especially original sin' is the joint act and the joint-guilt of the whole race" (§§ 70-72).
2. Actual Sin
That hereditary sin is ever breaking forth in actual sin is an expression of the Christian consciousness. For first, the clearness with which we perceive that we are never free from sin is proportioned to the clearness with which the Redeemer is presented to our self-consciousness; and second, our consciousness of sin is not empirical or contingent, but universal and necessary. That is, it is not as isolated individuals we are conscious of sinning, but as a constituent part of the totality of mankind, and hence we are as certain that others constantly commit sin as we are of our own sinning. Thus the consciousness of universal sinfulness and of universal sinning are the same viewed from different points; were they really separable, our tendency to sin would be nothing actual, and our sinning would be traceable to external influences. Consequently, within the whole range of sinful humanity no activity is ever exerted in which the God-consciousness is pure and unopposed, and there is no form of sin which any man in himself is incapable of committing.
Apart from their relation to the redemption, there are no distinctions of worthiness among men in respect to sin, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. When, for example, one man appears better than another on the ground of possessing a more powerful religious consciousness, on the other hand he must appear worse, so soon as we consider that the actual sins he does commit indicate a stronger opposition to the spirit on the part of the flesh. The disposition to separate ourselves as better than others disappears with a vivid conception of the person of the Redeemer, for with it we become vividly conscious of our implication in the universal sinfulness and equally conscious that the Redeemer stands out of connection with it. But there is a distinction between men according as they partake of the Redeemer's God-consciousness or are destitute of it. In all men the God-consciousness and the sin-consciousness so exist, only in the case of the redeemed the God-consciousness gradually prevails over the sin-consciousness, rendering all the activities of the nature good; while in the case of the unredeemed the case is the reverse. Hence the sins of the redeemed are pardonable because they are the reaction from a sinful state whose power is diminishing and finally to disappear, and therefore they tend not to multiply or to reproduce themselves in other people; while with the sins of the unredeemed the case is the reverse. With the former good works are prevalent, while their sins are, as it were, the shadows of the sins of their earlier state; but with the latter sinful works are prevalent, while their good deeds are the still remaining, but gradually diminishing, anticipations of a better state, the reflection only of what is a living power in others (§§ 73-75).
Section 2. The Nature of the World in Relation to Sin: Doctrine of Evil (§§ 75-78)
Since a doctrine of the world has a place in dogmatics only in so far as regards the world's relations to man, there can be no discussion here of sin as affecting the constituent elements of the world, but only of the relations which exist between man and the world on account of sin. Those relations may be comprehended in the two statements: that on account of sin the world appears different to man, and that the effect of sin is to destroy the original harmony between man and the world. According to the doctrine, al ready set forth, of the original perfection of man and of the world, human life is not opposed or hindered in the exercise of its energies by the forces of nature, but all that is in the world in its operation upon human nature, even when it produces weakness, sickness, and death, must be promotive of the higher consciousness, the religious life. But whenever in experience the flesh prevails over the spirit (i.e., when sin enters into the life) then these things appear as opposed to the development of human energies, that is, they appear as evil. In this respect we may speak of natural evil in the world. But evil is also social (a preferable expression to "moral" evil, which includes the bad) in that the operations of sin in one individual become productive of evil to others. Thus sin and evil are correlated. The human race is the locus of sin; sin is, in its totality, the act of the race. Correspondingly, the whole world in relation to men is the locus of evil and evil in its totality constitutes the suffering of the entire race.
Sin and evil are therefore related to each other as cause and effect. To reverse this relation and make evil the cause of sin is to contradict the teleological nature of Christianity, to turn ethic into aesthetic, and to deny the Christian conception of God. Evil is the effect, and, as referred to the divine causality (for it cannot be referred to the operation of any being or force outside of God), the punishment of sin--social evil, immediately, on account of the directness of men's relations to one another, and natural evil, mediately. But this is incapable of application to the individual in his isolation from the rest of mankind. For as sin, properly understood, is the act of the race in its entirety, and as the guilt is a race-guilt, so also evil in its totality is the punishment of the race in its unity. Otherwise the true conception of the relation between sin and evil would be found in that of heathenism, and, in a degree, of Judaism--namely, that magical view which represents suffering and misfortune as punishment for the individual's sins--which would make vicarious suffering an impossibility.
Section 3. The Attributes of God Which are Related to the Consciousness of Sin (§§ 70-85)
In the religious consciousness all experience is referred to the absolute causality of God; therefore sin and evil as elements of that consciousness imply divine attributes which are comprehended in the divine causality or omnipotence. For us sin exists as a universal fact of consciousness. Therefore there is a sense in which God is the author of sin; but, on the other hand, in the Christian consciousness sin and grace are antithetical, and therefore, if there is not an antithesis within the divine nature, God cannot be the author of sin in the same sense in which he is the author of grace.
Now it has been shown that neither sin nor grace exists in and for itself but each only in relation to the other; both are implicated in redemption. The solution of the difficulty in connection with the reference of sin to God cannot, therefore, be found by making a distinction between God's permission and God's decree, for these are equivalent to his preservation and creation, which for the religious consciousness are the same. But the solution is found thus: In redemption there is the consciousness of special divine communication in regard to sin--a communication of power to overcome it. But with the reception of this communication the sin-consciousness does not disappear instantaneously, but only gradually, and therefore to our actual experience never entirely. It is, therefore, God's will that sin should gradually be banished through grace, but this is to say that it is God's will that sin should exist (for us, not for him), else the redemption could not occur. So that the conclusion of the matter is: God is the author of sin, but the author of sin only in the sense that it should exist as gradually disappearing in the presence of grace.
The Pelagian attempts at a solution by attributing sin and grace, as regards the exertion of energy in them, to man alone, abandons a practical (ethico-religious) interest, which postulates the impartation of a perfectly pure moral impulse, in the divine omnipotence to a theoretical interest, which advocates a similar relation to God on the part of all forms of living activity; for the denial of the operation of divine causality in redemption makes the redemption a mere seeming. The Manichaeans, on the contrary, sacrifice the theoretical interest to the practical by confining the exercise of divine causality to grace and denying it to sin (which supposes the operation of another will independently of the divine and limiting its operation), so that the feeling of absolute dependence, and with it, the absolute divine causality, is lost.
Hence if we are not, with the Manichaeans, to ascribe to sin an existence in itself, independent and op posed to God; or, with the Pelagians, to minimize and gradually annul the antithesis of sin and grace, the ecclesiastical doctrine that God is not the author of sin but that it is founded in human freedom, needs amendment. For while it is true that every act of sin is the definite act of the individual himself and is neither to be charged to a nature which is common to all men nor to other individuals, yet human freedom, to be real, must be grounded in the divine causality, and consequently human sin, if it be mere appearance, must have the same ground. The consciousness of sin, and therefore sin itself, pertains to the truth of our existence--but only in relation to redemption. The consciousness of sin is the consciousness of an opposition to the divine will that is to be removed. These conditions, namely, that the God-consciousness is to be developed in men through the gradual annulling of an opposition in man to the divine will, have themselves been appointed by God. For an absolute contradiction to the will of God, i.e., absolute obduracy, does not pertain to human existence. That is, God has ordered sin as that which makes the redemption necessary. Sin is ordered of God because otherwise the redemption also could not be ordered of him, and, therefore, not sin in-and-for-itself, but sin in reference to the redemption. . . . . It is ordered of God that natural imperfections should be apprehended by us as evil in the measure in which the God-consciousness is not yet dominant in us (82:2). Or, if we may distinguish between God's commanding will which requires the absolute control of all energies by the religious feeling, and God's producing will, in accordance with which the power of the God-consciousness is only gradually realized and therefore always defective in actuality, then we may say, God has ordered that that defect in the lordship of the spirit over the flesh should be sin to us, i.e., that it should produce in us a consciousness of the need of redemption.
From this the doctrine of evil follows naturally. Sin being the joint guilt of the race, evil is its joint punishment. Evil is thus produced by human freedom, but is grounded ultimately in the divine causality. But evil is not in-and-for-itself, but only in reference to sin, as sin also is only in reference to the redemption. Consequently evil becomes a source of a stimulus to the consciousness of the need of redemption. Other wise evil would seem to be joined to sin by arbitrary divine determination.
Since all divine attributes must be viewed as modes of the divine causality, and sin and evil are ultimately grounded in the divine causality, the divine attributes which correspond with sin and evil will be the divine holiness and righteousness.
1. God is Holy
Those actions which flow from the God-consciousness possess such a worth in our self-consciousness that every deviation from them in action is apprehended as a limitation of life, i.e., as sin. The activity of the self-consciousness as the apprehension of this inequality of judgment and will is what we mean by conscience. Without this inequality there would not be conscience, and without conscience the acts which result from this inequality would not be sin. Sin therefore, as the universal human state of the need of redemption, implies the activity of conscience in all mankind. This is the purely Christian expression of the need of redemption, but it is in nowise to be under stood as if we would admit the existence of conscience only when the need of redemption is acknowledged. To put it differently: implicated in the consciousness of sin by conscience is the apprehension of the divine causality as legislative for all mankind; this legislative divine causality is what we mean by holiness; holiness in God Is that attribute whose reflection is conscience in man. The usual and popular definition of holiness in the liturgical and homiletical field to the effect that it is the divine pleasure in the good and displeasure with the bad, assuming as it does that "good" and "bad" are to be understood as the actions of finite free beings, is open to the objection that it implies passivity in God, and since a state of God is thus determined by human actions he is placed in a relation of reciprocity with men. Such a static attribute of God is no predicate of our religious consciousness (§ 83).
2. God is Righteous
Similarly the righteousness of God is that attribute which corresponds to our consciousness of the connection between actual sins and evil. Evil is indeed the effect of the universal sin fulness, as has been shown; but evil is apprehended as evil, i.e., as punishment of sin, only in and with the consciousness of actual sin. But with this consciousness of actual sin is involved the universal sin fulness of man and hence universal desert of punishment in man. Hence the divine righteousness is the divine causality apprehended as producing in the human soul the consciousness of the desert of punishment. And as the idea of desert of punishment, or the idea of evil as necessarily connected with sin, has meaning only in reference to the redemption, so also it is only in reference to the redemption that the divine righteousness is fully to be understood. If it be objected that this definition makes no room in the idea of righteousness for the reward of well doing, among other things we may say in reply that the Christian consciousness admits no actual rewards but regards all rewards as undeserved and therefore referable to the divine grace.
Our exposition brings out the truth that the divine holiness and righteousness cohere but at the same time are differentiated (§§ 84, 85). __________________________________________________________________
II. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ANTITHESIS: UNFOLDING OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GRACE ( 86-169)
Introductory
While the consciousness of sin is a personal experience, it relates not merely to the individual but embraces the collective life of mankind. It is as a member of the body of humanity, as a participant in its common life, that he is conscious of sin and unblessedness. To this universal condition testify the confessions, offerings, purifications, and penances in all religions. While these are usually aimed at the avoidance of punishment rather than the extinction of sin their inevitable failure to remove unhappiness amounts to an expression of an inclination toward Christianity as that religion in which is found a Redeemer in whom appears the substance instead of the shadow. Moral development of the peoples tends in the same direction, because with moral progress there is a sharpening and intensification of the dissatisfaction connected with moral failure. And although for the distinctively Christian consciousness there is an acknowledgment of the unavoidability of sin and an assurance of its gradual disappearance, these convictions are the outcome of the growing power of the God-consciousness and are consequently accompanied by a more painful sense of the need of redemption and of the hopelessness of its removal by the personal efforts of men, because these efforts must partake of the sinful character of that common life of humanity from which they issue. Hence in Christianity the pre-eminent worth of redemption and the supreme place of the Redeemer.
The Christian experience of a growing dominancy of the God-consciousness and, in the same degree, of a growing blessedness, is not owing to any definite form of activity or of conditions, such as devout meditation or ascetic practices (for these have content of happiness only in so far as they contribute to the performance of those activities which one's vocation calls for), but it is owing to participation in a new community which springs from the divine operation. That is to say, the Kingdom of God has come and the collective life of this new community constitutes it. This new life in men is by faith referred to Jesus Christ as its author, which is the same as to say that in him the kingdom of God appears. This Christian experience has indeed its source in Christ, but it never exists apart from the Christian community. The acceptance of the former with a denial of the latter involves separatism and fanaticism and is destructive of the essence of Christianity, because, in supposing that an individual could have, as it were, Christ for himself alone, it annuls the definite historical continuity of Christianity and renders an actual propagation of the activity of Christ impossible. The reverse attitude, i.e., the acceptance of the communal character of Christianity, with a denial of the necessity of a reference to Christ personally, makes his historical appearance only a link in a chain of prophets, supposes that the new community could arise out of the old sinful collective life of humanity, and involves a denial of the universality of sin. It is to say, as does the Roman Catholic church in effect, that Christ is Redeemer because the church has constituted him such.
If we ask: In what way specifically is the redemption wrought by Christ? the answer is: By an impartation of his sinless perfection through the communion founded by him. The affirmation that Jesus possessed sinless perfection does not admit of proof in the ordinary sense. The Scripture proof fails because, uncertainties of meaning aside, all it can show is that this was the original form of Christian faith. The proof by reference to miracles and prophecies fails because it could only show how the primitive Christian faith arose and, besides, it is purely external. Our proposition is not to be understood as equivalent to an assertion that at a time when the consciousness of sin both as personal and collective was powerful in many men, all that was necessary was that a moral pre-eminence should fitly exhibit itself in a public life in order to bring about an ascription to such an. individual of the desired sinless perfection as the only possible succor of men. For this is as if it were said that faith had constituted Jesus the Redeemer. It would involve a gradual diminution of the certainty of his value as we become farther removed from the original impression of his person, and it would make room for the expectation of another to whom that perfection might be ascribed more worthily. But our meaning is that the acknowledgment of that perfection is the work of Jesus himself and that out of that acknowledgment arises the new collective life which is therefore founded by Jesus; the action of this new communion reproduces the same faith and is itself therefore just the operation within the communion of that personal perfection of Jesus. If it be objected that an impartation of sinless perfection through a body, in every member of which there are manifestations of the universal sinfulness, is impossible, the answer is: these manifestations are the still remaining expression of that collective life which was controlled by sin before the new life appeared in the midst of it, and the impartation of the absolutely powerful God-consciousness in Christ (in the historical Christian communion) is as yet inner experience received by an impression from without. In regard to this experience there are two statements to be made: (1) from the image of Christ, which subsists in that Christian society with which the individual comes into contact, as its collective act and its collective possession, he receives an impression of the sinless perfection of Christ which, on the one hand, gives rise to a perfect consciousness of sin in himself, and, on the other hand, removes his unblessedness; (2) within this Christian society, in spite of all its errors and sinful manifestations, there is an ever-working inner impulse toward the true and good; this is from Christ, and in spite of all reactions will ever increasingly manifest itself outwardly. These two elements constitute a true impartation of the perfection of Christ.
The existence of this illimitable power of the God-consciousness in Christ and its operation within the human race may be regarded as supernatural or as natural, according to the point of view taken. In view of the human race constituting a collective life which naturally propagates sin, this communication coming from a power without it is a supernatural work. But in relation to the Redeemer himself the existence of this new collective life is no miracle but the normal working of that supernatural power in its assumption of natural ethical forms and in its appropriation to itself of the material surrounding it. Similarly of the individual's transition from the old collective life into the new; in relation to his former life the change is of supernatural origin, because it arises from a source beyond that old life; but in respect to the new life it is a natural event because it is its normal mode of activity. In the initiative divine activity is the supernatural, but by virtue of the living human receptivity the supernatural takes on historical, natural form. But the perfect connection between the old stage of human existence and the new stage brought in by the advent of the Redeemer lies only in the unity of the divine thought.
Now sin, in and for itself, is non-existent for God and no object of his counsel; so also a redemption merely in reference to sin can be no object of the divine counsel. But since sin consists in the inability to realize the God-consciousness, therefore the sin-consciousness (which has been shown already to be one with sin) as a necessary condition of the receptivity of the God-consciousness is a good in relation to the highest development of human nature. Without it there would have been no living receptivity for the impartation of Jesus gift. Without it that full development of man which appears in the perfect ascendancy of the God-consciousness in the self-consciousness would not take place; and hence, redemption from sin may be designated as the completion of the creation of human nature. But this means that Christ, by virtue of that absolutely powerful God-consciousness which is his original endowment, enters with creative power into the course of human history to stimulate human nature to a perfect consciousness of its sinfulness and to an assimilation of his own perfection. With the bringing of his activity under the law of human development there is assured its gradual extension over the whole race. And since to the religious consciousness creation and preservation are at bottom equivalents, we conclude that the whole race of man has been ordered and preserved with reference to the impartation of the sinless perfection of Christ--the whole race from the beginning has a relation to the Redeemer.
The unfolding of the consciousness of grace in the same framework as was used for the unfolding of the consciousness of sin will accordingly complete the dogmatic (§§ 86-90).
Section I. The State of the Christian so Far as He Is Conscious of Divine Grace (§§ 91-112)
In all the various forms of Christianity the fundamental element of every Christian's consciousness of grace is that of fellowship with God only in a life-fellowship with Christ of such a sort that in our need of redemption we are freely receptive to his free self-originated activity in the communication of his absolutely sinless perfection and blessedness. These two elements, Christ's activity and our receptivity thereto, will yield for us a discussion of the manner in which the Redeemer and the redeemed appear in the Christian consciousness of grace, in two divisions. In the first division will appear those propositions concerning Christ which are immediate expressions of this consciousness of grace; and in the second, those propositions which describe the relation between grace and the state of sin in the human soul, as that relation is mediated by Christ.
FIRST DIVISION: DOCTRINE OF CHRIST (§§ 92-105)
In the doctrine of Christ we may take our starting-point either from his person or from his activity. These are inseparable and each finds in the other its full expression. It is in respect of his work that we treat him as Redeemer; we set him over against all other men in such a way that their conscious blessed relation to God is ascribed solely to him as the author of it and not in any degree to themselves or others. But this is to ascribe an exclusive and absolute dignity to his person. Or, if we regard him as the one in whom the creation of human nature is perfected, we then ascribe to him a quality which is not the product of his environment, or which he owes to the developed insight of those who so regard him, but which, on the contrary, is itself the secret of their personal development. But this is to assign an absolute and exclusive value to his activity. Thus his person and his work correspond in value. We are not to conceive of a dignity of his person which is not fully exhibited in his activity, nor of an exhibition of activity which has its spring in any degree outside of himself. However, in deference to current ecclesiastical formulae, we may treat of his person and of his work separately. Our method will be to exhibit these, first, as related to the individual, and then, as related to the church, which must be the perfect revelation of the worth of the Redeemer, just as the universe is a perfect revelation of the attributes of God.
1. The Person of Christ
The Christian communion as a union of men produced through participation in a common religious life, as a union moreover into which all other religious associations are destined to pass, finds that life entirely in Christ, and owes the exercise of all its activities to him as their source. Accordingly the worth of the Redeemer must be so conceived as to account for this effect. This religious energy, i.e., the power of the God-consciousness, must have existed in him in a perfect archetypal form and must have determined the character of all the activities of his life, none of them being destitute of it or possessing it imperfectly, and thus the communion-forming activity of Christ is manifested, not in special acts, but in the entire course of his career. Since it is in the Christian communion the activity of Christ is exercised, that communion must be a perfect embodiment of the energy resident in him.
If it be objected that in the Christian communion the religious condition is never absolutely perfect, but is ever in need of development, and that, therefore, it is not necessary to attribute to the Redeemer such an archetypal character, but only such a character as served for the prefiguration of the end which the communion ever strives to attain; and hence that such ascriptions of dignity to Christ are only the hyperbole of believers, we reply: If this were the case, with the widening of the personal self-consciousness to a race-consciousness, i.e., so as to include the whole race, there must arise a hope and expectation of some time surpassing Christ, at least in the case of the noblest of its members; but as a matter of fact such a hope never has arisen and never could arise without destroying that very communion whose development is sup posed to produce the hope; and further, if this absolutely perfect religious energy did not exist in Christ, it would be impossible to account for the possession of such an archetype by the Christian communion. It can have arisen within the religious consciousness in no other way than through the exhibition of it in a historical, personal life.
If it be further objected that the imperfect human conditions, the unperfected state of language, of science, etc., in which Christ's life was lived, rendered the appearing of such an archetype impossible and that he must constitute only a link, though an important one, in that gradual, continuous religious evolution which can be traced from early Jewish life, we may reply; At that rate Christ would be only a more or less original and revolutionary reformer of Jewish law and such a new communion as has actually arisen would be impossible; and further, since in such a case his life could only have been the product of that general sinful life of which men universally partake, the experience of redemption through him could never have occurred and the claim of Christianity finally to draw all other religions to itself and to develop out of itself ever-increasing perfection and blessedness could never have arisen.
The only possible explanation of the appearing of Christ in the sphere of human life is that it was a miraculous manifestation; his personal spiritual life sprang by a creative divine act from the universal fountain of spiritual life, so that the idea of man, as the subject of the God-consciousness found in him historically an absolute realization. Or to state it differently: From his birth onward, along with the gradual unfolding of his natural powers, the God-consciousness possessed absolute control over the energies of his being. On the one hand, this makes it impossible that there should ever have arisen within him the slightest trace of a sin-consciousness or an inner moral conflict or uncertainty. On the other hand, his physical and mental equipment must have been conditioned by the age and the environment, otherwise we must attribute to him an empirical omniscience and omnipotence which would be fatal to the historical character of his life. Hence the appearing of Christ in the world was both absolutely miraculous and perfectly natural.
The Redeemer, then, possessed sameness of nature with all other men. His freedom from sin does not annul his perfect identity with the race, since, as we have seen, sin does not pertain to the essence (Wesen) of man, but is rather a destruction of his nature, as is implied in the very consciousness of sin as guilt. Yet his activity, or the peculiar personal worth which conditioned it, is not thereby compromised or made attributable to other men. Faith in Christ implies that he held such a relation to the human race as none other could have, i.e., owing to the absolute power of the God-consciousness in him, his person was archetypal, which is the same as to say that God was present in him as a person.
We cannot speak with truth of the presence of God in any individual thing or in man but only of his presence in the world. Not in any individual thing, for this would imply division in God. Not in man, for neither man's activity nor his rational thought in its attempts to present a pure and true conception of God, is free from sensuousness. Consequently we are not able to sec in unconscious nature or conscious rational life a revelation of God unless we have first seen it in Christ, in whom the God-consciousness was present as his own personal being and innermost self. And since it is only through him that the God-consciousness comes to possess others, and since, further, it is only in reference to man that the world can be said to contain a revelation of God, we can say that all revelation of God in man and in the world is mediated through Christ.
But if, on the other hand, he shared in common with us the whole process of natural human development, yet without being involved in human sin, the beginning of his life must be regarded as an original act of human nature, i.e., an act of human nature as not affected by sin. And thence onward to the completion of his life there must have been such a filling of his nature with the God-consciousness as completely exhausted human receptivity. Therefore we may regard the beginning of Christ's life as the perfected creation of human nature. As the creation of the first Adam constituted the self-propagating physical nature of man, so the appearing of the second Adam constituted for the same human nature its new self-propagating spiritual life. Both rest on one indivisible, eternal, divine decree, and they form in the higher sense one and the same (though beyond the grasp of our thought) coherent unitary Nature.
Proceeding from this standpoint, the current doctrinal formulae, which in large measure have arisen from speculative, apologetic, and polemic interests, may be subjected to critical treatment and restatement.
1. "In Jesus Christ the divine nature and human nature were united in one person." The aim of those passages in the historic creeds which so describe the Redeemer is doubtless to inculcate the possibility of a communion between him and us in the new common life which he originated, and at the same time to express the being of God in him; from which follows that in our relation to him unlimited veneration for him and brotherly fellowship with him are combined. But the terms of the creedal statement are open to criticism: First, the name Jesus Christ is used to designate not only the subject of the union of the two natures but also the divine nature of the Redeemer before its union with the human; so that the union appears no longer as a moment (potency) constituting the person Jesus Christ, but rather as the act of this person himself. Whereas, in the New Testament the name Jesus Christ is used only of the subject of this union. Second, the use of the term nature in reference to both the divine and the human is confusing. Besides, the terms God and nature represent opposite conceptions in our thought. Nature properly denotes the sum of finite existences, the manifold phenomenal world in contrast with the unconditional and the absolutely simple. We cannot use the term natural properly of God. The creeds betray here the play of heathen ideas. Third, the creedal statement implies a relation between nature and person opposed to general usage. For while usage allows the ascription of the same nature to several individuals or persons, here one person has two entirely different natures. Now person properly denotes a life-unity and nature the general content of his modes of action, or the law of the interaction of the conditions of life within a definite realm. But how can there be a unity of life with a duality of natures, especially since one has a large sphere and the other a small? Between them the self-identical ego is lost. It is impossible for the mind to construe the figure of such a person. The outcome is either the melting of the two natures into a third, which is neither divine nor human, for the sake of maintaining the unity of the person; or the separation of the natures at the cost of neglecting the person; or the subordination of one nature to the other. The history of the subject exhibits all these results. Fourth, the question whether Christ had two wills is inevitably raised. If he had only the human will, then the divine nature is abbreviated, or if only the divine, then the human nature is abbreviated. But if he had two wills, the unity of the person would be unreal; and, further, since understanding and will cannot be conceived as independent, the question of the duality of the under standing is involved. Fifth, the formula quoted does not harmonize with the same creedal statement of the doctrine of the Trinity which abandons the unity of person for the sake of unity of "essence." And when we ask how the divine "nature" in Christ relates itself to the divine "essence," no answer is possible.
It is evident that the creedal statement carries us far away from the religious interest into hair-splitting and speculation. Its practical use in the church is small indeed. There is here offered as a substitute for it the following: The Redeemer is like all men in the possession of the same human nature, but distinguished from all men through the absolute power of the God-consciousness which constituted a personal existence of God in him. In him the human was the perfect organ for the reception and presentation of the divine. All that was human in him came forth from the divine. In this sense may be justified the statement: In the Redeemer God became man.
2. "In the uniting of the divine nature with the human, the divine alone was active or self-communicative and the human only passive or receptive, but during the continuance of the union every activity was common to both." The object in making special mention of a beginning of Christ's existence was to exclude the idea of a something subsequently added to him--which would be an injury to faith in his person. But since we are not immediately affected by the beginning of his existence the formula involves a work of supererogation. Further, the beginning and the continuance of Christ's existence constitute a unity. The beginning of his personal existence is the beginning of his activity and every moment (potency) in his activity, so far as it can be regarded apart, is at the same time a new becoming of his peculiar personality.
The idea that the divine nature took up the human into the unity of its person is objectionable, not only because of the impropriety of the expression, "divine nature," but particularly because it makes the personality of Christ entirely independent of the personality of the second person of the Trinity, with which it is nevertheless regarded as identical. The view is not distinct from Sabellianism, and it is unfair to all those views which approach Sabellianism to connect this formula with the doctrine of three persons in one essence. Historically a knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity had no connection with that original impression of the personality of Christ which produced the first disciples faith or with their apprehension of him in thought. Moreover, since human nature can become a person only in the same sense in which persons exist in the Trinity, then the three persons in the divine essence must be, like human persons, separate self-existences, or else the human personality of Christ becomes unreal. The Docetism of the formula also appears in the putting of the human into a passive condition in the beginning of Christ's personal existence, which is yet not the case with the beginning of any other personal existence. But if he was a perfect human person, the formation of this person must have been an act of human nature. The contradictions inherent in this formula have given rise to the scholastic doctrine of the impersonality of the human nature of Christ previous to its union with the divine, and the doctrine of the supernatural generation of Christ. The former, while aimed at refuting the view of those who held that the Word was united with Christ after he had become a human personality, is guilty of making the human in Christ less perfect than it is in us. The latter is entangled in the difficulties arising from the varying representations in the New Testament Scriptures and falls back upon a doctrine of the Scriptures. Its dogmatic value could be only in relation to the question of hereditary sin and the implanting of the divine in human nature. Christ's freedom from the universal state of sin would not be secured by the exclusion of the male from the act of procreation; it would also necessitate absolute purity in all the woman's progenitors, and so annul the universal sinfulness. The doctrine is connected with asceticism.
That part of the creedal statement .which draws a distinction between the divine activity in the act of union and the subsequent divine activities treats divine activity as temporal and so brings God into the sphere of antithesis. All that is meant to be gained in the above statement and in the doctrine that the union was personal is secured by our statement that the person of Christ was the product of an original divine creative act the separate momenta of which appeared in his human development. In Christ the creation of humanity was perfected.
3. "Christ was distinct from all other men through his essential sinlessness and his absolute perfection." By essential is to be understood that which has its ground in the inner character of his personality, namely, the conjunction of the divine and the human in his person. Inasmuch as liability to temptation and error seems to be hereby denied, it is difficult to construe the statement in relation to his feelings and thoughts without annulling his sameness of nature with us. With this doctrine the idea of the natural immortality of Christ is connected; it is not, however, embodied in any of the symbols of the faith or grounded in any biblical passage, but it rests upon the opinion that death is the penalty of sin. But, in accordance with the view of evil already presented, we can accept this idea no farther than to say that for Christ death was no evil. His immortality is given him in his resurrection. Natural inability to die denies natural capacity to suffer. If this doctrine is meant to conserve the view of Christ's death as proceeding from his own free will, it necessitates a miracle on Christ's part so as to make himself mortal in order to be killed, and so virtually makes him a suicide. The predicate of absolute perfection adds nothing which may not be referred to the union of the divine with human nature. We may say only this, that just as the Redeemer could appear first only at a certain time and only from a certain people; so also the divine activity would not have laid hold on human nature to constitute a human personality by any such act as could involve in any way a malformation. In regard to his body all that can be posited is that it must have been a suitable organ of that union of the divine and the human.
The events of Christ's resurrection and ascension, as well as the promise of his return to judgment, are to be excluded from forming a part of the doctrine of his person, because they do not come into direct relation to faith in him nor could such visible events have any connection with his elevation to spiritual lordship or with his redeeming power; but they depend upon a doctrine of the records. Therefore they cannot be an expression of the religious consciousness of redemption or represented as constitutive of his redeeming activity. Christ's promised continual presence and his continuous influence upon his disciples are not mediated by these events, for their faith in him was prior to any expectation of such occurrences; so also with many Christians since. The ascension served only contingently for the accomplishment of the seating at God's right hand, and this, again, is only an expression of the peculiar and incomparable worth of Christ; and the promise of the return served in like manner for the satisfaction of the longing to be united with Christ. But the important point is: Faith in Jesus has not arisen from particular statements about Christ or acts of his, but from the total impression of his person; from which follows only this, that no individual events appear which could prevent that faith (§§ 93-99).
2. The Work of Christ
It has been pointed out that the dignity of the person of Christ and the value of his work are religiously equivalents. The worth of his person consists in the absolute power of the God-consciousness in him, as an original possession. However, it possesses that worth for us, not as a mere object of our contemplation, but because this consciousness is self-communicating, and so passes to us. The expression and impartation of this God-consciousness is rendered possible by the original perfection of man and of the world. His work, then, is summed up in his self-communication, and it may be regarded either from the point of view of the Redeemer's activity, or from that of the experience (reception) of it by the redeemed. The latter will be dealt with in the section which treats of the manner in which communion with the Redeemer is expressed in the soul of the individual. The former will be treated here.
A. The possession by Christ of the God-consciousness to the degree that it had absolute control of all his energies involves his sinless perfection and blessedness. By the impartation of that God-consciousness to men, they obtain a communion with him in that perfection and blessedness. That is to say, they obtain redemption and reconciliation.
1) Redemption.--The personal consciousness of the individual is a consciousness of sin and imperfection, and all his activities bear that stamp; but when through our relation to Christ we have a participation in his consciousness, sin is regarded by us, just as it was by him in his sympathy with us, not as constituting our fundamental character, but as an alien element to be overcome. Thus Christ has taken us up into a participation in his activity which constitutes the state of grace, and henceforward all our activities are to be regarded as his activity in us. Or, to state it conversely, the advancement of our higher life is the act of the Redeemer, now become our personal act. This expresses the Christian consciousness- of grace. The impartation of his God-consciousness to us is an act of self-revelation, and our conscious need and acceptance thereof is effected in us by his working upon us. Now, if the personality of the Redeemer is owing to an original creative act of God, so that we may say that God was personally present in him and that all his activities proceeded from the being of God in him, then the penetration of our nature by the activity of the Redeemer must likewise constitute the being of Christ in us and form us into a new personality (cf. Gal. 2:20; Rom. 8:10; John 17:23; II Cor. 13:6; Rom. 6:2, 6, 11; I Pet. 2:24; Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:22, 24). Thenceforth all impressions upon us are received differently, our personal self-consciousness is new, the man is a new man. And though the new man may still be conscious of imperfection and sin, these no longer pertain to his inner personality, which has become one with Christ; but they pertain to the outer relations of his being, so that he counts them alien and opposed to his nature.
And further, since the divine creation had reference, not to individuals as such, but to a world and only to individuals as related, constituent parts of the whole, then the activity of the Redeemer must be world-forming, and its object human nature universally, and not individuals as such. Thus the whole act of Christ in redemption consists in the implanting of the governing God-consciousness, in the propagation of the creative divine activity, as a new principle of life, in the whole of human nature, and all the energies of human nature become the organs for the propagation of the God-consciousness in those who come into spiritual contact with the communion in which that consciousness is operating, i.e., with the new organism which Christ has formed for himself. The calling of Christ is his work of bringing individuals to an acceptance of this new life- fellowship with himself through the activity of the communion in which it now dwells; and his animating activity refers to his relation to the common life as the cause of its continuance in the church and in the individual. This mystical apprehension of redemption stands mid-way between two other modes of representing the Redeemer's work, which may be designated as the magical, and the empirical The first is that which attributes to Christ a redeeming activity independently of the founding of the Christian communion as the means of its propagation--some say, through the medium of the written word, others say, without it; and the second attributes all to his example and doctrine, and thus renders his personal appearing in the world unnecessary. But the proof of the superiority of our view is found only in experience.
2) Reconciliation.--If God was in Christ in such a way that the God-consciousness was his whole personal consciousness, perfect blessedness as well as sin less perfection is involved; that is to say, nothing in the world, in human existence, or in his own experience, became an evil to him through repressing or limiting that inner life, but rather a means for its exercise. Therefore his self-revelation to men as an act of self-communication brings them into the communion of that blessedness. Thus his reconciling work comes to expression as the result of his redemption. Hence, for the believer as for Christ, evil is excluded. Pain, sickness, sorrow, death are no longer evils to him; they do not limit his religious life, but serve rather for its guidance and progress. Through the possession of a common life with Christ the connection between sin and evil ceases for him. The old man has ceased to be. Sin is forgiven, punishment is ended. This is the common consciousness of all believers.
As in redemption, so in reconciliation, this mystical apprehension stands in contrast to the prevailing magi cal and empirical views, the former annulling the naturalness of Christ's continuous efficacy, and the latter its supernatural beginning and distinctive peculiarity. For the former makes the communication of Christ's blessedness independent of our reception into a life-communion with him, by making the forgiveness of sins an external and arbitrary result of Christ's sufferings, and blessedness a reward externally and arbitrarily conferred on account of these sufferings. On this supposition there would be no more assurance of blessedness within the Christian communion than without it. The latter, by making our blessedness dependent upon our wavering development in religious life, fails to establish a constant assurance in the heart and places Christ in the same relation to us as it places other men.
While our view of redemption and reconciliation does not accord to the sufferings of Christ themselves a primary relation to our salvation, this is justifiable on the ground that the opposite view would exclude a perfect acceptance into life-fellowship with Christ prior to his death. His sufferings constitute an element of the second rank, immediately in relation to reconciliation and only mediately in relation to redemption. As concerns redemption: the perfection of Christ's saving activity could be manifested only in case it yielded to no opposition, not even to that involving his death. This perfection does not He in his sufferings but in his submission to them. But when leaving out of sight the founding of the new communion, the climax of his career is isolated from the rest of his life and his submission to sufferings for the sake of those sufferings themselves is looked upon as the sum of his redemptive activity, we have a magical view, a caricature of the doctrine of redemption. As concerns reconciliation: reception into the fellowship of Christ's blessedness depends on a longing for it on the part of those who, conscious of their unblest state, have received an impression of the blessedness of Christ. The blessedness of Christ could perfectly appear only as it proved itself superior to the fulness of sufferings, and so much the more as these sufferings resulted from the opposition of sin. Here the Redeemer's sympathy for the unblest enters on its highest phase. On this side, then, it is not his submission to sufferings but the sufferings themselves which become the highest sanction of faith in his blessedness. But surely that view is a caricature which, entirely overlooking the necessity for immovable blessedness in Christ and isolating a single element in his activity (and that too sometimes, his physical sufferings) as the ground of salvation, posits the reconciling power of his sufferings directly in this, that he freely gave up his own blessedness and actually, even if only temporarily, became unblest.
Our view, on the contrary, keeps in mind that salvation for men is found in their reception into a life-fellowship with Christ; that such is nothing else than a continuation of that creative divine act whose manifestation in time began in the constitution of the person of Christ; that every intensive exaltation of this new life in its relation to the disappearance of the collective life of sin is itself a continuation of that divine activity, and that in this new life is attained the original destiny of humanity, beyond which for a nature like ours there is nothing to be conceived or to strive for.
B. The common division of Christ's activity into the prophetic, the priestly, and the kingly is not arbitrary, but corresponds to the three factors operating in the development of the theocracy among the Jews. It was therefore a natural form of early Christian teaching in which a comparison with Judaism necessarily appeared, and in which there was ascribed to Christ a relation to God and men that exhausted the sphere of the divine economy of salvation.
1) The prophetic activity of Christ, as of the Jewish prophets, appeared in doctrine, prophecy, and miracle. The source of his doctrine was the pure original revelation of God in him, and, so far as the inner production of his thought is concerned, it was independent of the Jewish law. The essential content of it was his self-presentation, the setting forth in discourse of the creative God-consciousness as it stamped itself on his mental faculties so as to bring men into communion with himself. It may be divided into three inseparable portions: (1) the doctrine of his person which again on its outer side is (2) the doctrine of his calling or of the impartation of eternal life in the Kingdom of God, and on its inner side is (3) the doctrine of his own relation to God as the Father to be revealed through him. His doctrine is therefore summed up in the presentation of his person as the original revelation of God. The sufficiency and inexhaustibleness of this renders Christ the climax and end of all prophecy.
His prophecies, as did the Jewish (we refer not to special and hypothetical predictions but to their broad universal character), referred to the consummation of the Kingdom of God. Since this is given in himself, all prediction is completed and ended in him. We are speaking not of isolated predictions, but of the one all-embracing prediction of the historical unfolding of the revelation of God in himself, involving, of course, a foretelling of the downfall of the temporary, and, at the time, opposing, Jewish theocracy. Apostolic predictions are to be received as an exposition or an echo of Christ. All supposed predictions or anticipations of future events falling outside this field are to be subjected to natural psychic research.
His miracles at the time of their performance possessed value for those who beheld in them an exhibition of his person, but in themselves no longer possess validity for our consciousness because of our separation from these occurrences in time and space. They are subjects for scientific investigation and pass beyond the range of dogmatics. In place of them we have today the knowledge of the quality, range, and continuance of the spiritual workings of Christ. For us all miracles are comprehended and therefore ended in the one great spiritual miracle of his appearing. The miracles pertained to his prophetic office because they were a setting forth of the being of God in him.
2) The high-priestly office of Christ is not so suitable a description of his work because of the many contrasts between him and the Jewish high priest. As self-presentative, his priestly work is prophetic; and as supplying his people's needs, his intercession is a kingly office. Yet the prophetic and priestly offices may be distinguished thus: In his prophetic work Christ's self-presentation regards men as in antithesis to himself, and aims at making them receptive of union with him, which union is ever incomplete; his high-priestly work accepts our union with him as consummated in that, by a life-communion with him by which we participate in his perfection, his pure will to fulfil God's will is actively present in us, if not in performance, at least as motive. Though our manifestation of this oneness with him is ever incomplete, it is acknowledged by God as absolute and eternal, and is so posited in our faith. Accordingly it may be said that he represents us as the principle of our new life, that his righteousness is reckoned to us, and that we become objects of the divine good pleasure--not in any external sense, but as one with him in inner life. But we cannot ascribe to him a fulfilment of the law for us nor a fulfilment of God's will in our behalf in any other sense.
Turning now to what is commonly designated as the passive obedience of Christ in contrast with his active obedience, which has just been discussed (though we must remember that these are merely distinctions of convenience), we may describe it as follows: Christ suffered for our sins, not as punishment, but by his coming into contact with human sin and misery. But for him nothing, not even death, was evil, and hence could be no punishment for sin. Similarly also for the redeemed; because the consciousness of guilt is removed by our union with him, the connection between evil and our sins, i.e., punishment, ceases for us. Herein, then, we see the redemptive value of Christ's sufferings: In his suffering unto death there is manifested to us an absolutely self-denying love, and thus is presented in perfect clearness the manner in which God was in Christ to reconcile the world to himself. In his sufferings perfect holiness and perfect blessedness stand before us. Just as the active obedience of Christ has its high-priestly worth pre-eminently in this, that God sees us in Christ as associates in his obedience; so the high-priestly worth of his passive obedience consists pre-eminently in this, that we see God in Christ and Christ as the most immediate participant in the eternal love which sent and equipped him.
From this point of view we may correct two prevailing misinterpretations of his death. The first is the almost antiquated so-called "wounds-theology," which thinks to find the worth of Christ's sufferings in an emotional contemplation of them in detail. But this doctrine of salvation by contemplation annuls Christ's activity and destroys his priesthood. The second of these misinterpretations is that view which understands the doctrine that Christ's death removes our punishment, in the sense that he bore in his death as the sum of all evils that measure of punishment demanded by the sins of the human race and thereby satisfied the divine righteousness. But apart from the implication that the divine nature must have participated in the sufferings of Christ, the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction wrongly makes God the arbitrary author of Christ's sufferings, removes punishment from its natural connection with the morally bad, and so ignores the unity of nature. So far as Christ's work is satisfying--i.e., in that through the one entire act of his life, he became the eternally inexhaustible source of all life that is spiritual and blessed--in that respect it is not vicarious; because we are still under the necessity of exhibiting that same activity of life in communion with him. And in the respect in which he is our representative--i.e., in his feeling the sinfulness of others badness just in that respect he did not offer satisfaction, because those not yet in communion with him must feel their own unblessedness before they can enter into his communion, and because they will afterward share his sympathy for others. But he is our satisfying representative in that he presents human nature in perfection by the manifestation of his archetypal worth in his redemptive activity, so that God regards in him the totality of believers and sees in his free devotion to death such a perfection of redeeming power as is sufficient to bring the whole race within his communion.
Finally, Christ's intercession refers, not to single petitions for individual men, but to his relation to the totality of the redeemed in such a way that in our prayers to God his co-operation appears in the purified and perfect God-consciousness of the Christian communion. In this sense it is only through him that our prayers are well-pleasing to God and efficacious.
Thus Christ is the climax of all priesthood, because he exhausts its significance, and he is the end of all priesthood because he is the perfect mediator between God and the human race for all time. At the same time, his priesthood has passed over to the communion of believers in that his whole redeeming activity is exhibited in them. They stand toward the rest of humanity in a similar relation to that of the Jewish priesthood toward the people. This annuls all special priesthood and the meritoriousness of all individual actions or sufferings.
3) The kingly office of Christ relates to his living union with believers in a communion; it refers not to a special relation to individuals but only to them as members of his community. Since the communion arises out of the impartation of his consciousness, he is the continuous and inexhaustible source of supply for all its needs; the kingdom of God begins, subsists, and is perfected in his person. He is the animating principle of that communion, the power that draws men into it, the source of all legislation in it, and hence absolutely and exclusively lord over it. His personal consciousness produces the laws of its life, and these are accordingly eternal; all legislation proceeding from another source is alien to his kingdom.
The question may be propounded: How does this kingdom stand related to the universal divine government? This question proceeds on theoretical grounds and produces only a theoretical difficulty. Faith is directed to Christ simply as source of grace and of the spiritual power and glory which flow from it, and when anything is said of his possession of a power over the natural world, as if he shared the lordship over it with God (which is contradicted by his prayers to God), this leads us beyond the sphere of faith. In the sphere in which Christ's power is exercised it is of course infinite, but that sphere is the communion founded by him, and therefore he has power over the world only in the sense that through the communion of believers--by their presentation of his person in word and deed--his redeeming activity is exerted upon men in drawing them to himself.
Accordingly also Christ is the climax and end of all spiritual kingship. All other sorts of spiritual authority, as that of the teacher over his scholars, the exemplar over his imitators, the legislator over his subjects, are only partial and belong to a lower and subordinate grade. In this respect he stands contrasted with all other founders of religions. All other kinds of kingship end in his because they are only an imitation of his. This involves a separation of his kingdom from all political and civil powers, which effectuate their decrees through the use of material force. Christianity is neither a political religion nor a religious state or theocracy. By the purely spiritual authority of his God-consciousness he puts an end to both. The farther his reign is extended and established the more clearly will church and state be separated and therefore the more harmoniously will they co-exist.
NOTE.--Christ's humiliation and exaltation: These expressions must be excluded from a doctrinal statement of Christ's person and work, since the conditions so designated have no bearing on his person in itself or his work in itself, or the relation of his person to his work. The supposition of an earlier condition of Christ's which was higher than his earthly, or of a later higher condition, is inconsistent with the unity of his person and militates against faith in his person as he was manifested on earth. It implies also impossible changes in the divine nature, as that to the absolutely extreme and eternal, and, there fore, self-identical, a humiliation may be ascribed; or self-contradictory conceptions of the relations of the divine and human in him, as that the attributes of one or another are alternately subject to limitation or quiescence. It is contradicted by Christ's own statements concerning his own relations to the Father while on earth, which do not regard his sitting at God's right hand as an exaltation (cf. John 1:51; 4:34; 5:17, 20 ff.; 6:57; 8:29; 10:30, 36). The idea has arisen from Phil. 2:6-9, a rhetorical passage of an ascetical character, which has been interpreted didactically. The whole doctrine destroys the unity of Christ's person and the reality of his earthly life, and is fatal to faith in his redemption (§§ 100-105).
SECOND DIVISION: THE MANNER IN WHICH COMMUNION WITH THE PERFECTION AND BLESSEDNESS OF THE REDEEMER IS EXPRESSED IN THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL (§§ 106-12)
The personal self-consciousness, properly under stood, is a race-consciousness, from which the consciousness of sin is inseparable. The individual identifies himself with a collective life which is sinful, and that collective sinful life is expressed in the soul of the individual as personal guilt and ill-desert. The experience of a repression of the God-consciousness is connected with external events in such a way. that they become evils, i.e., punishment of our sins, which is the experience of unblessedness. In this state of the individual previous to his entering into a life-communion with Christ the God-consciousness is not constant and dominant, but appears only in intermittent flashes.
But by the working of Christ, through the word and the activities of the communion which has its life-source in him, this relation of the individual states and activities to the God-consciousness is changed, for these are now continuously controlled by it as the governing force of the personal life. Or, as otherwise stated, the self-consciousness of the individual is fundamentally altered because it is identified with a new collective life which originates in the God-consciousness of Christ. But the man, though a new personality, is still, as regards the unity of his psychical life, the same. The new state is grafted on the old, as it were. The change forms a turning-point from which onward the new life is in a condition of becoming. This turning-point is regeneration, and the progressive development of the life there from is sanctification.
These terms have a reference to the race. The entrance of Christ into the sphere of human existence was potentially a new creation of the entire race. The beginning; of that new creation of the race is its regeneration; the gradual extension of that creative act throughout all the members of the race is its sanctification. The relation of the person of Christ to the rest of humanity is in analogy to the relation between the divine in him and his human nature; only that in the latter case at the very first a pure personality arose and the extension of the God-consciousness in his human nature was uninterrupted, whereas in the former case, on account of the identity of the subject in the old and the new states, elements from the old state of sinfulness interfere with the regularity of the development. Now, the regeneration of the race actually appears only in the regeneration of the individuals; and since the communion of believers consists of the totality of the sanctified energies of all who have been received into a fellowship of life with Christ, so also the sanctification of the individual involves in itself the operation of all those forces by which the communion is formed, held together, and extended.
1. Regeneration
Regeneration may be regarded in two ways: (1) Reception into communion with Christ may be regarded as a settled permanent relation of man to God; formerly his relation to the divine holiness and righteousness appeared in the consciousness of guilt and desert of punishment, but with entrance into communion with Christ that disappears. (2) Reception into this communion may be regarded as a change in the form of life: in all the energies of life the will was formerly controlled by sensuousness and those impulses which sprang from the God-consciousness only coursed through the life without determining it, but now the relation is reversed. That is, in the first of these aspects regeneration is justification; in the second it is conversion. These are inseparably held together in the experience of fellowship, a fellowship which involves both a participation in Christ's perfection and a participation in his blessedness.
1) Conversion.--In the beginning of the new life of communion with Christ there are for the individual experience two elements--repentance and faith. Both are the outcome in the individual of Christ's self-presenting (prophetic), self-communicating (kingly) activity as exercised in that communion with which he comes into contact, by word and deed. Repentance is related to the past life in its totality (and not to separate acts merely, as it would be if produced through the law), and manifests itself in the form of regret for the sinfulness of the past and a change of mind as to the aim and purpose of life. It is a transition from activity in the old life to a subjection to the energy of the new; accordingly it implies faith. Faith is an act receptive of the Redeemer as presented in the Christian communion. It is no mere static condition, for human life is essentially active, and Christian piety is teleological. Even in its receptivity of the divine grace human nature is active. And if we go back from effectual divine grace which actually brings a man into communion with Christ, to that prevenient grace which shows itself, according to the laws of our nature, in the indistinct, often fitful, longing for redemption, we shall find that this is that original divine impartation which was bestowed at the creation of the race and which constitutes human nature, and that this impartation itself was bestowed in relation to the full redemptive activity of Christ which was yet to appear, so that a man's co-operation in his own conversion is not independent of grace. Here appears the parallel between the divine redemption of the race as it is actualized in the individuals comprising the race, and that divine creative act which consisted in the formation of Christ's person and the permeating of his being with the God-consciousness.
The contention of many teachers both in the English and in the German church that children born in the bosom of the Christian church are to be received as children into its fellowship because they are already members of the body of Christ and have already been regenerated in their baptism, is to be rejected. For in all, whether born in the church or out of it, those forces which cause the rise of sin are at work and in all there is the tendency to degrade the divine to the sensuous. Infant baptism does not affect this power of sin in them, so that all are equally in need of conversion. The only actual distinction is that those who are born in the church stand in a natural and ordered connection with the operations of divine grace and are therefore already subjects of the gospel call, while the others stand in a contingent relation to that call. Indeed, our creeds connect only the original baptism of adults and those who ask for it with the new birth and extend it to infant baptism only, as it were, by permission. They mean to say no more than Calvin when he said that "the seeds of repentance and faith" were in these children. To bind together the sacrament of baptism and the new birth is to fall into a view of them as magical. Faith and conversion must ever and everywhere arise in the same way as with the first disciples, namely, through the whole prophetic activity of Christ; only that now the self-presentation of Christ is mediated through those who preach him, who are the organs of his activity.
But to say, that to some Christ is immediately and inwardly revealed without the word, is to make the redemption flow from the bare idea of the Redeemer and renders the actual appearing of Christ unnecessary. And to leave the operations of divine grace in conversion without actual historical connection with the personal efficacious work of Christ is to abandon all certainty of the identity of this inner Christ with the historical. If now, on the contrary, the true view is that all that operation upon the mind from the first impression of the preaching of Christ up to its establishment in converting faith is to be ascribed to the activity of Christ, then all these operations of divine grace are supernatural; but since they are in |a natural historical connection with the personal life of Jesus and continue it historically they are also natural.
2) Justification.--Justification implies forgiveness of sins and acknowledgment of sonship with God, and it depends upon faith in the Redeemer, as has just been shown. The divine act of justification is not to be sundered from the working of Christ in conversion. Justification for the self-consciousness which rests in contemplation is the same as is conversion for the consciousness which passes over into stimulus of the will. Corresponding with the two sides of conversion, repentance finds its issue in the forgiveness of sins, just as faith becomes for thought the consciousness of sonship with God as that which is the same as the consciousness of fellowship with Christ. Not that forgiveness precedes faith, but that it declares the end of the old state just as does repentance, and sonship with God expresses the character of the new state just as does faith. Both depend on the whole activity of Christ just as in the case of conversion, but immediately and in themselves they denote only that relation of man to God which supervenes upon the consciousness of guilt and desert of punishment.
Justification and conversion are synchronous. The converted man is a new man. For in this new life-fellowship with Christ sin is no longer active, but it is an afterworking or reaction of the old man. He no longer appropriates it to himself but reacts against it as an alien force, and accordingly the consciousness of guilt is removed. In him the consciousness of sin always becomes, on account of faith, the consciousness of forgiveness of sins.
But justification is not an isolated act or pronouncement dependent upon some empirical activity or event, for this is to make the divine activity temporal and dependent in its nature, which would destroy the feeling of absolute dependence on God. Rather, there is one eternal and universal decree to justify men for Christ's sake. This decree, again, is one with the decree to send Christ; were it not so the sending of Christ might be without effect. And the decree to send Christ is one with that for the creation of the human race so far as human nature is first perfected in Christ. And since in God thought and will, will and deed are inseparable, therefore all these constitute one divine act for the alteration of our relation to God. The manifestation in time of the divine act takes its beginning in the incarnation of Christ, from which the total new creation of mankind proceeds, and it continues in the union of individual men with Christ. We have therefore to assume only one divine act of justification gradually realizing itself in time (§§ 106-9).
2. Sanctification
The idea of holiness in men has been brought over into the New Testament from the Old, where it is apprehended as an attribute of God. But for Christians, not holiness, but sanctification, i.e., movement toward holiness, is the appropriate term because of their increasing separation from the pre-regenerate state and their gradual approach to that of Christ. The state of sanctification is, accordingly, not to be compared with the state in which the man was governed by sin but with that state in which he came under the power of prevenient grace. That grace affected him from without by stimulating thoughts and feelings which tend toward repentance and faith and also by prompting to actions which by repetition become habits. Such actions while they do not spring from individual regeneration are to be viewed as specifically the actions of the Christian collective life which exercises a power over the individuals who come within the sphere of its operations, like that of native citizens over the foreigners resident among them. The state of regeneration is to be distinguished from the new birth, not by the number of individual actions or a whole series of them, but by this, that the will to be no longer in that former sin-producing collective life has become a power of repulsion of sin, which power is itself an outflow from the submission to Christ's operation and becomes established as a steady willingness to be controlled by Christ. In the new collective life within which the regenerate man has fellowship with Christ, his natural powers are taken up and appropriated by Christ's activity, whereas formerly they were exercised entirely within the sinful collective life. The regenerate man's life possesses therefore an affinity to Christ's in respect to both sides of it, his sinless perfection and his blessedness. Since the activities of the regenerate are now exercised within this new collective life, their energies are exerted reciprocally, producing in each member of this new body a gradual religious development.
The development must be gradual. For since the God-consciousness has come into a relation of control over the energies of human life only through a direct communication, after being regularly repressed by the sin-consciousness, it must be regarded as sustaining continually the opposition of this lower principle now gradually disappearing. Though this development is gradual, it is not perfectly regular for experience, because it occurs in the midst of a conflict, and there are times when the power of sin is exhibited in actions which obscure for the time the presence of the new spiritual power, just as in the former condition of life there occurred at times actions proceeding from the prevenient grace of God which obscured for a little while the presence of sin. In this respect Christ's development onward from his birth and the development of the regenerate are not strictly parallel. Yet the occasional recurrence of the consciousness of sin does not annul the connection with Christ so as to negative regeneration as a divine act of union with human nature, or sanctification as the state of that union.
To express the same in another manner: In the activities of the regenerate there are two elements, the permanent and the variable. The permanent element is that ever self-renewing will (power) of the kingdom of God which wrought in Christ, and this is that participation in the sinless perfection and blessedness of Christ already spoken of; for all the power of good is within the kingdom of God and all the power of sin lies without it. The variable element appears in the isolated acts of sin which burst out in the life of the regenerate producing pain and unhappiness.
The sins of the regenerate are not destructive of the state of grace because such never occur without the forth-putting on their part of effort (though in sufficient) against sin; likewise the good deeds of the regenerate are never unopposed by sinful tendencies or untainted with sin. The conflict with sin exists always; the difference in the character of the acts in the two cases is one of degree. The sinful deed proceeds from the old sinful collective life from which he has been personally separated and consequently no new form of sin arises in the regenerate man, and, so soon as he acknowledges the act as his own (i.e., repents), with the return of his consciousness of identification with the new collective life the consciousness of forgiveness arises. Hence we may say the sins of the regenerate are always accompanied by forgiveness.
The good deeds of the regenerate are objects of the divine good pleasure, not as isolated empirical deeds of the individual concerned, for no single act is unmixed with sin, but in so far as they are the product of the new collective life with which he now identifies himself. That is to say, the good deeds of the regenerate are the product of their union with Christ, and the merit they possess is Christ's, so that, strictly speaking, it is only the person and that too only as God sees him in Christ--that is the object of the divine good pleasure, and his works only for the sake of the person. Consequently the regenerate claim no personal reward (§§ 110-12).
Section 2. The Nature of the World in Relation to Redemption. Doctrine of the Church (§§ 113-63)
The redemptive energy of Christ originally lay simply in himself. In the exercise of it he created a new spiritual organism through which it is historically propagated in the world. All the redemptive energy of Christ is accordingly comprehended within this new body, which is the communion of believers in him. Now, the consciousness of redemption involves a consciousness of participation in the communion of the regenerate, for this communion has not first to be established by an act of the regenerate, but in regeneration they already find themselves within it, and they trace the workings of grace through which they become participators in the redemption, to its activity.
This activity was exerted upon them prior to their consciousness of redemption, their felt need of redemption being an effect of it. Consequently, there is no absolute leap out of one sphere into the other, else conversion would be an unhistorical occurrence, effected by some incomprehensible influence operating outside the universe of causes and effects. But just as there already existed prior to the advent of Christ, through the work of prevenient grace, a circle of individuals prepared to receive the redemption as it was to be ministered by the personal work of Christ himself, so now also there is in the world an outer circle of individuals upon whom the activity of the inner circle which consists of the communion of believers is exerted; and since in regeneration there is a consciousness of being already within that communion outside of which no redeeming activity is exerted, these people must have been already before regeneration within the outer circle of that communion. The world, then, as the field in which the church's work is to be done, stands in an antithetical relation to the church, but on the other hand is destined to pass over into it. Here we find the explanation of the Christian's conscious sympathetic relation to all things human. For while the world, notwithstanding its original perfection, is for men, apart from the redemption, the locus of sin and evil, through the advent of Christ a new element has entered into it, namely, Christ's own self-imparting perfection and blessedness. Through him, then, the world becomes to us the locus of perfection and blessing.
We perceive, then, that the law of self-organization, as it appears in the naturalization of the super natural in Christ, finds its parallel in the communion founded by him. For the incarnation of Christ in relation to human nature in general corresponds to the regeneration of the individual in relation to the whole nature of the individual; so also to sanctification, as the progressive appropriation by Christ of individual functions, corresponds the work of the Christian communion as an organic body which progressively organizes itself and appropriates to itself the mass (i.e., the world) which lies over against it. Three stages in this process may be defined: (1) the origin of the church, or the manner in which the church is builded out of the world; (2) the present existence of the church in antithesis to the world; (3) the removal of this antithesis in the perfection of the church. Though the second is alone present immediately to experience, and therefore constitutes the kernel of this whole section, it will be better to discuss these stages in the historical order.
FIRST DIVISION: THE ORIGIN OF THE CHURCH (§§ 115-25)
The character common to all the regenerate is the governing will of the kingdom of God. That will is exerted in two forms, (1) in gaining other individuals and receiving them into the kingdom, (2) in the process of perfecting the work of the kingdom in ourselves and the other members by mutual and complementary activity. But this spatial extension of the kingdom and this co-operative and mutual influence are subject to those circumstances of time and place in which the members of the kingdom find themselves placed. Accordingly, on the one hand, the origin of the church must be viewed in its relation to the divine world-government, because the individuals composing the church are called out of the world; and on the other hand, in relation to the moving, unifying principle which constitutes all the members of the church one moral person. These will be treated under the titles Election, and Communication of the Holy Spirit.
1. Election
The consciousness of redemption in Christ is so related to the consciousness of unity with the race, that the incarnation of Christ is viewed as potentially the regeneration of the human race. Hence the desire to communicate the gospel to the world. The actual spread of the gospel is gradual--from the individual to the mass, from nation to nation, and from generation to generation--being subject to these conditions which determine all human activity. That is to say, participation in redemption is subjected to the laws of the divine world-government. This must be true in reference even to the mysterious fact of the rejection of the gospel by some and its acceptance by others. Just as in Christ the supernatural becomes natural, so the church as the possessor of that super natural which was in Christ appears in its course in the world as a natural historical phenomenon.
The final ground of the divine government of the world is the divine good-pleasure, and in the last analysis it is to this we must refer the facts of the gospel's earlier and later reception in different places, its acceptance and rejection by different individuals while living, and its failure to reach the ears of others before they die. We have, therefore, to face the problem of defining this divine will with clearness and without inner contradiction. Now, it is not an offense to Christian sympathy that some are received earlier than others into the communion of redemption, nor is it ever supposed that the sum of final blessedness is thereby lessened. It is as vain to hold the opposite view, that it would have been better if the regeneration of the individual had occurred earlier, as to contend that it would have been better for the totality of mankind if Christ had come before he did, or to lament the fact that the world was not created earlier. But when it is supposed that those who die without participation in the redemption are forever excluded from it, there is created, on the contrary, a discord in Christian sympathy with the race. Not only is it a violation of the unity of the race, but it imparts arbitrariness and particularism into the divine will. To reply by saying that these opposite destinies are ordained for the sake of manifesting in the one case the divine mercy and in the other case the divine righteousness is to overlook the truth that the divine righteousness is adequately exhibited in the reward given to Christ and the punishment of men as long as they adhere to the old life of sin, And further, to separate in this manner the divine attributes is to describe God as an unlimited being with limited attributes and to overlook the mutual inclusiveness of all his attributes. The antithesis between the church and the world must be regarded, therefore, not as final, but as temporary; not as absolute, but as relative, and as destined to disappear by the ultimate absorption of all into the church. The gradual progress of sanctification in the individual and the gradual transition of those who are in the outer circle of the workings of grace into the inner circle are analogous. This is simply the natural form which the divine activity necessarily assumes in its historical manifestation, the inevitable condition of all temporal effectiveness of the word that "became flesh."
1. The doctrine of fore-ordination is a consequence. The self-consciousness of the regenerate and the feeling of absolute dependence are one, since our activity in the kingdom of God is referred by consciousness to the sending of Christ and is recognized as dependent on our place in human relations; so that the order in which the redemption is actualized in each man is one with the carrying out of the divine world-order in relation to him. Thus the time and manner of the individual's entrance into the communion of Christ are only a result of the determination of the manifestation of the justifying divine activity by the universal order of the world, and they are a part of the same. Hence the kingdom of grace, or the kingdom of the Son, is absolutely one with the kingdom of the Omniscient Omnipotent One, or of the Father; and to say that the state of those to whom grace has been given is a work of that divine grace which was in Christ is one and the same thing as to say that it is a result of the divine foreordination.
And further, since the Christian consciousness recognizes only one foreordination--namely, that to participation in the blessedness of Christ--the unity of the race-consciousness and the universality of the world-order can be in harmony with the Christian consciousness of redemption only by the acknowledgment of the foreordination of all mankind to an ultimate reception into the kingdom of grace.
2. From the above doctrine of election may be deduced also the doctrine of the determining grounds of election.
Of free existences, why are some chosen and others not? The peculiar condition of each individual in the human race is due to his place in the development of the divine world-government. If, then, we seek the determining grounds of the election of an individual absolutely in the beginning of all things, we shall find these in the divine good-pleasure; but if we seek the grounds of election in the final results attained in the end, we posit the divine foreknowledge. Divine good-pleasure and divine foreknowledge are one and the same principle viewed from opposite standpoints.
If, therefore, regeneration be viewed as the actualization of the union of the divine and human nature, and the justifying divine grace as the temporal and individual continuation of that universal act of union which began in the incarnation of Christ, then the rule of the divine procedure must be the same in both cases. That is, the time and place which was chosen must have been absolutely the best and the results must have reached the maximum of efficiency. That moment in the life of the individual must have been the time when he would exercise faith. From this point of view therefore the election of the individual is grounded in his foreseen faith. But this again is itself determined by the divine causality operating in the world's course, which causality rests in the divine good-pleasure, which is concerned with no individual in and for himself, but with the world-whole.
NOTE.--But if while we trace the origin of the Christian church to the divine good-pleasure, we admit that a part of the human race is forever lost, the contemplation of that good-pleasure affects our race-consciousness and our personal consciousness in opposite ways, one painfully and the other pleasurably, and hence admits of no pure impartation of the blessedness of Christ to us. It becomes necessary therefore that we conceive the divine foreordination to salvation as embracing ultimately the whole human race (§§ 117-20).
2. The Communication of the Spirit
All those who are in the state of sanctification are conscious of participation in the perfection and blessedness of Christ, which is dependent on the indwelling of God in him. This possession of the perfection and blessedness that were in Christ belongs to the believer in the form of that absolutely constant will of the kingdom of God as the inner impulse of life. It is not as isolated individuals standing in independent personal relation to Christ that Christians are conscious of this possession, but only in their relation to the Christian communion as members of it. This spirit, which constitutes the will of the kingdom of God, is the common spirit of the Christian communion. It is this spirit that furnishes the life-unity of the communion, and makes the members of the communion a moral person. The impulse felt by all the members of the communion to assemble together, to combine in an effort for the extension of the kingdom among those who are not yet consciously within it, and to effect that mutual working which produces the harmonious development of all their various, but now unified, energies, is just the expression of the life of that one spirit dwelling in them all. This is the indwelling of the divine in the church, conditioned by the indwelling of the divine in Christ.
This common spirit of all the sanctified is thus the Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of God, and the bestowal of that Spirit by Christ is what is meant by the Communication of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is therefore just the common spirit of all those who are sanctified, who together form one moral person, having the one aim, common to all, of furthering the whole, and possessing peculiar love to one another. If it be objected that our use of the term does not coincide with common usage, we may reply that it is in harmony with the New Testament where the Holy Spirit is not regarded as our individual enduement apart from his connection with the totality of believers, or as a peculiar quality of separate personalities, but as the unitary possession of them all (cf. John 16:7 ff.; Acts 1:4, 5; John 20:22, 23; Acts 2:4; I Cor. 12:4; Rom. 8:9; Acts 10:47; 19:2; 2:38). On this point the expression of the Christian consciousness may be treated as twofold. First, in analogy with that unity which constitutes a nation, where the common and self-same national character inheres in each citizen but is modified by his original disposition, the Christian church is one through this common spirit, but its activity in each individual is conditioned by the state in which the new birth found him. Second, this common spirit is one because in all it is from one and the same source, namely, Christ, since the communication of it coincides with the rise of faith in him and the recognition of that faith in others.
It may be said further in objection: If, as has been stated, all peoples are destined to pass over into the Christian communion by virtue of the unity of the race, then, since there cannot be two life-unities for one and the same whole, the common spirit of the Christian church is simply the common spirit of the human race. The answer is: It is just in the possession and communication of the Holy Spirit that the unity of the members of the human family--now, alas! torn asunder by mutual jealousies and animosities--becomes an accomplished fact. Through Christ as Founder there is realized a union which by faith and in love embraces all men, so that the race-consciousness and the God-consciousness become one and inseparable. But on this very account we can say that the Holy. Spirit is no natural principle developing itself in man outside of Christ.
The believer is conscious of possessing this spirit with the act of faith in Christ, which arises through that representation of Christ which is given in the preaching of him. But this gift is no longer received direct from Christ personally, as was the case with his first disciples. Up to the time of Christ's separation from them they were only in the state of a developing receptivity in relation to his spirit. The transition from receptivity to self-activity took place for them in the days of the resurrection. Up to the time of Christ's separation from them, their relation to him was that of a household to its head or of a school to its teacher--upon the death of the leader dissolution was the result. But with the separation of Christ from his disciples they became conscious of their possession of his Spirit as their common spirit; they ceased to be a school and became a church; they ceased to be merely receptive of his teachings and nature, and became spontaneous and communicative in relation thereto. The Holy Spirit was thus communicated to them as their common possession, and was thenceforth communicated by them to those who were in the stage of preparatory grace in which they themselves had once been. Whenever these also, apprehending Christ by faith, are transformed from a merely receptive to an active condition in their place within this new collective life founded by Christ, it may he said that they have received the Holy Spirit.
Consequently, the life and activity of the church proceeds historically--not in some secret, magical, or mysterious way--from Christ. His incarnation was the naturalization of the supernatural, the union of the divine with human nature. So the communication of the Holy Spirit constitutes the union of the Divine Being with human nature in the form of a common spirit animating the collective life of believers which Christ founded. The operations of the Holy Spirit are not to be found in something outside the Christian church or in some superhuman nature or in some divine power affecting human nature from without; but the Holy Spirit is an actual spiritual force in the souls of believers and must be conceived of as united with the human nature in them, so as to become one with it. Each believer participates in this common spirit, not in his personal self-consciousness regarded by itself alone, but only in so far as he is conscious of his existence in this whole, personal peculiarities being no element in this common consciousness. If then we regard the union of the divine with Christ's human personality as an endowment of human nature in its collective capacity, participation in the Holy Spirit and fellowship of life with Christ are one and the same, reversely contemplated. The Christian church animated by the Holy Spirit is in its purity and perfection the perfect image of the Redeemer, and every regenerated individual is a complementary constituent part of this communion, That is to say that in the Christian church as a collective life, as a moral person, the modes of apprehension and of action are the same as those of the Redeemer because the same human powers are united with the same divine principle. This image, however, appears in its perfection only when we view the human race (with which the church is destined to be identical) apart from sin, and is to be progressively realized. Accordingly, if we contemplate the church's gradual realization of its ideal according to the divine order of its extension and development in the world, we shall see that in its entirety it is at every instant at v the highest stage of perfection possible to it and carries in itself the ground of a highest perfection yet to be attained. This, however, is apprehensible only to faith and is not demonstrable by experience (§§ 121-25).
SECOND DIVISION: THE CHURCH IN ITS COEXISTENCE WITH THE WORLD (§§ 126-59)
The church is the creation by the Spirit of Christ, out of individuals in the world, of a communion whose common spirit is the same Holy Spirit. Its state of existence in the world must, then, be in analogy with that of the person of Christ. In him the supernatural, the divine, as the abiding self-identical element of his person, united to itself the natural, the human, which was the variable element of his person. So also in its common spirit the church possesses an ever self-identical element, which makes its appearance in a variable element, the world. The church and the world are not to be described as two mutually exclusive entities, as if it sufficed to say that just as the world is not the church, so the church is not the world. Such a view tends to separation and legal righteousness. A better and more adequate statement would be the following: The world is excluded from participation in the church because in itself it is mere nullity and negation--not a self-contained unity, but a manifold of elements temporarily, oppositely, and contingently related. That alone which is permanent in the world is the feeling of the need of help which itself is a product of the Holy Spirit's self-exertion upon the world and is the basis of the church's title to the world.
Since the aim of the church is ever the same, namely, the realization within itself of the image of Christ, the mode of the existence of the divine in the human must remain the same as it was in him. The variable element in the church, as in Christ, is due to the human nature in and through which the Holy Spirit works. Now, human nature as undetermined by the Holy Spirit is the world, and therefore all that is variable in the church is due, not to its common spirit, but to the world, and the manner of the Spirit's work among men depends on peculiarities of temperament and circumstances of individuals and, on a larger scale, of nations.
All in the church which is not wrought by the Holy Spirit is of the world and constitutes its attack upon the church. To this pertain the sins of the regenerate and all error and perversion, which are destined to disappear from the church and yet re-enter into it with each new convert. The differences within a Christian society arise from the same causes.
All this discussion amounts to saying that Christianity is a power developing itself historically in the world. A treatment of it as such involves a discussion of its permanent, self-identical elements and its variable elements (§ 126).
1. The Essential and Permanent Features of the Church (§§ 127-47)
If our Christianity is to be the same as that of the first disciples, it must arise like theirs from the influence of Christ. But since his influence is no longer an immediate, personal one, we are in need of a demonstration of the identity of our Christianity with that which appears in their presentation of the personality of Christ. For this we are dependent on the Scriptures of the New Testament. They show that from the influence of Christ himself and from his disciples testimony about him there actually proceeded the church-forming activity promised by him. They also complement the immediate utterances of Christ, because we can refer the ordinances and acts of his first disciples to the teachings and expressed will of Christ as their source. They are thus the work of the Spirit of Christ which is the common spirit of the church. With the loss of the original oral testimony the Scriptures remain the only original authority. But they would become a dead inheritance, did we possess these only and were the ever self-renewing activity of the church wanting. Thus the living testimony of the church and the Scriptures are the two elements indispensable for the historical identity and the truth of faith. Moreover, since the immediate personal influence of Christ is wanting, the institution and renewal of life-fellowship with Christ must issue from the church and be referred to its acts--that is, such acts as can be referred to Christ himself. For, on the one hand, the church is his organism and all her essential activities are the image of Christ's activities, and, on the other hand, all that is effected by them is the progressive actualization of redemption in the world, and therefore her activities are just the continuation of the activities of Christ.
It is true that there are many Christian churches mutually opposed in varying degrees. Their differences concern not the reality of a common life-fellowship with Christ, but the relations between the outer forms which represent it and the inner fellowship implied in them. The most important question as to all these differences is, whether they are grounded in these spatial and temporal differences which appear in the spiritual nature of men and are therefore unavoidable, or whether they are grounded in the world's attack upon the church and are therefore defects. But amid all the divisions of the Christian communion its universal self-identity appears in a triple manner: the testimony of Christ, the formation and preservation of life-fellowship with Christ, and the reciprocal relation of influence between the individual and the whole. The first of these is exhibited in the Scriptures and the ministry of the Divine Word, and these, as constituting the church's immediate presentation of Christ, are an image of his prophetic activity. The second is furnished in baptism and the Supper, and these represent his high-priestly activity. The third appears in the office of the keys and in prayer in the name of Jesus, and these represent Christ's kingly activity (§ 127).
1. Holy Scripture.--The Scripture of the New Testament is a work of the Holy Spirit as the common spirit of the church, and forms only a particular instance of the universal testimony of the church in its presentation of the image of Christ to men. The written word possesses, however, a superiority over the original word which was merely spoken, not in its higher authoritativeness, but in that it furnished a means of testing our present testimony of Christ by that which was originally given. Yet this word is to be viewed as no dead possession (legal conception), but as an ever self-renewing activity of the church in its work of awakening faith in Christ by its presentation of him to the world.
It is faith in Christ which gives rise to reverence for the Scriptures, and not the converse. For, if faith in Christ is to be made to repose on the authority of the Scriptures, then that authority itself can be established only by an appeal to the reason common to all men. That is to say, faith is made dependent on a scientific demonstration of the authenticity, accuracy, and truth of the Scriptures, and those who are in capable of making the necessary investigation are dependent on external authority. Faith is subordinated and proportioned to intelligence or ability. Believers are graded in two classes as in the Romish church. Moreover, on these terms a man might become a Christian without a felt need of redemption--without repentance and a change of mind. Such a faith could never issue in a life- fellowship with Christ. Even the apostles proceeded not from the interpretation of the Old Testament to faith in Christ, but first, stimulated by the Baptist's testimony, rose to faith in Christ by witnessing his words and deeds and then proceeded to interpret the Old Testament in this new light. Accordingly, while it is proper to refer to the Scriptures for the sake of showing that an article of faith is an original element of Christian piety, yet a doctrine does not necessarily pertain to Christianity because it is taught in the New Testament, but rather owes its place in the New Testament to its relation to Christianity. The opposite view would make dogmatic theology a collection of individual propositions without inner connection. Herein lies the justification of our bringing forward a doctrine of the Scriptures at this point.
It is Christ's Spirit as the common spirit of the communion which gives utterance to itself in the historical and epistolary writings of the New Testament, and each one of these writings is an utterance of that Spirit, so far as it represents the common spirit in which all the writers participated. Thus it comes that the Spirit of Christ as a living presence in the Christian communion is the source of a decision between canonical and apocryphal works and is also the ground for a continuous and never-ending adjudication upon the character of the various contents of these same works. At the same time these Scriptures, as the first members of the series of presentations of Christ, are the norm of all subsequent presentations of him, inasmuch as they stand as the presentation of the person of Christ by those who, of all those whose writings we possess, stood nearest to Christ, and who were thus protected by the purifying influence of the living remembrance of the whole church from those dangers to their faith which arose out of their earlier Jewish forms of thought and life. But the peculiar spiritual endowment which came in this way to these apostolic men does not involve a distinction between the spiritual quality of their acts and that of their writings, as if they were animated and impelled by the Spirit in a lesser degree in the one case than in the other. Neither are the sacred books to be regarded, on account of the apostolic endowment, as demanding an exegetical and critical treatment peculiar to themselves. For just as in the doctrine of the person of Christ, so also in regard to the Scriptures, the activity of that spirit which operates in the church exhibits itself as an inner (the divine) expressing itself organically through an outer (the human). Similarly the narrative and epistolary portions of the Scriptures stand in a common relation to the apostolic office.
The selection of the individual books for the Canon is to be regarded as proceeding analogously with the selection and combination of the historical elements. We are not to conceive of a definite and final decision given by apostolic authority, but of the gradual adjudication upon extant works, professedly Christian, by the Spirit which was common to the whole church. While, therefore, the Scriptures are to be subject to the freest investigation, the self-recognizing activity of the Holy Spirit in the church warrants the statement that the various books of the New Testament were given by that Spirit, and the collection of the same has been made under his guidance.
The Scriptures of the Old Testament cannot be allowed to claim the same dignity. The spirit of the Old Testament is not the spirit of the New, because it is the spirit of law. Its place in our Bible and the customary use of it in Christian teaching are owing partly to the manner in which Christ and his apostles and the early Christians in general made reference to it when as yet the Canon of the New Testament had not been formed, and partly to the historical connection between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue (§§ 128-32).
2. The ministry of the Divine Word.--The preaching of Christ was a presentation of himself. The preaching of the Christian communion is the presentation of Christ. But since this communion is the image of Christ, its preaching is also self-presentation. Self-presentation is self-communication to those who are receptive of it, and therefore we may say that the common spirit of the communion, which is just that which constitutes it a communion, communicates itself as the Spirit of Christ to those who assume a receptive attitude toward it. This Spirit which Christ him self communicated is the Holy Spirit which gave the Scriptures, and thus the self-communication of the Christian communion is a supplying of the Divine Word and must always submit to the test of conformity with the Scriptures.
Now each member of the communion, in his participation, to some degree, in this work of self-communication, seeks to present only that in himself which is of Christ, and to that degree he is an organ of the divine word. The influence of the members is mutually exercised and it is exerted through all the various activities of life without any definite plan or conscious arrangement. But owing to difference of temperament, talent, outer circumstances, and breadth of Christian experience, these activities of the members, both upon one another and upon the world, vary in degree and extent, some members being prevailingly active and others prevailingly receptive. And inasmuch as the common spirit of the communion must find expression in the orderly public assembly and the organized work of the Christian society, it becomes necessary, so as to secure an orderly and regular ministry, to set some individuals formally apart to the public service of the Divine Word. They can perform this only when they represent the communion as organs of its common spirit. And therefore they are to be designated to their office by the act of each several communion in which they inhere. Yet, of course, the occupants of church offices are not to be considered as exhausting its spiritual activities so as to preclude the spontaneous exercise of his gift on the part of each member of the formation of religious associations within the church. If the whole of the Christian communion could express itself in the doctrines and rules which the church sets forth and which these ministers as organs of its spirit declare, then these doctrines and rules and the public preaching of them would be free from error. But spatial and temporal relations render this impossible. Hence the necessity of binding the public ministry of the word to the Holy Scriptures (§§ 133-35).
3. Baptism.--Baptism is an act of the church by which it signifies its will to receive an individual into its communion. The common spirit of the communion being Christ's spirit, its act of reception succeeds upon, and takes the place of, Christ's personal act of choosing individuals for his fellowship during his ministry, and it occurs as an act of faith in his promise, which is attached to the baptismal act. Therefore, since communion with Christ, regeneration, and justification are fundamentally one, the act of baptism is to be regarded as indicating the exercise of God's justifying .activity upon the individual baptized and as conveying the assurance of this possession. Were the whole church present and represented in the act, because of the activity of the Holy Spirit in all its fulness within the church, the highest canonical authority would attach to its decree: the baptismal act and the new birth would absolutely coincide. This, of course, is not demonstrably the case, and therefore there is no absolute coincidence between the administration of baptism and the extension of Christian fellowship.
The act of baptism has an inner and an outer side. The inner side is the spiritual intention to receive the baptized into the communion from which issue all the operations of the Spirit which effect the new birth, and the outer side is the physical act through which the intention is conveyed. Hence it is not correct to say that the baptism is conditioned by the new birth, because that is to presuppose an activity in the church prior to being received in it, which is ab surd. On the contrary, then, we must say that the new birth is conditioned by baptism, that is, when baptism is taken to be the final act in that series in which the church expresses its will to extend itself, which it can do only by receiving new members. Accordingly it is through baptism rather than through the fluctuating experience of sanctification that we become personally assured of possessing the new birth. But of course this assertion is to be understood not in reference to the mere external act but the motives which underlie it. This assertion of the validity of the act in view of the intention is not to be understood as referring to the definite consciousness of the administrator, but as referring to the church, whose act it is. Hence its validity for the entire church, even though it be administered by one of the relatively opposed societies into which the church is divided. For in all of these the ordinance is referred back to Christ's own institution (Matt. 28:19, 20; Mark 16:16). The baptized accepts the church's intention, and hence his faith is necessary to the fulfilment of that intention. His faith is the individual act of self-appropriation of the perfection of Christ, but with it there is also the appropriation of the blessedness of Christ which is enjoyed only in the communion of believers. He who believes will enter this fellowship. This is done in baptism, which is properly called the seal of divine grace. Yet the absence of faith at the time on the part of the person baptized does not in validate the act or render necessary the repetition of it on the rise of faith; but the reception into the communion remains incomplete, just as it does also when faith exists but baptism has not been performed. In the former case the baptism looks forward to a faith yet to be exercised; in the latter case it looks back. Therefore it is true, in both cases, that baptism as the act of receiving the individual into the communion conveys the title to participation in the perfection and blessedness of Christ which is the essence of the Christian communion.
Thus infant baptism is valid, but only when respect is had to a confession of faith, to be made consequent upon perfected instruction, as the final act pertaining to that instruction. Though there are no traces of infant baptism in the New Testament, it is justifiable on the grounds of the necessities of the church and the demands of the parental feelings of those who are members thereof (§§ 136-38).
4. The Supper.--Beginning with a baptism properly administered the Christian has an experience of blessedness in Christ. But the development of this consciousness is not steady and uninterrupted; hence arises the necessity that our consciousness of blessedness should be confirmed and strengthened. Christian blessedness, outwardly regarded, is a communion with other believers; inwardly regarded, it is a communion with Christ, a personal (individual) attitude toward him. These are coincident and reciprocally operative. Against both of these two sides of the Christian life, the repressive influence of the world is continually at work. Hence arises the necessity for private meditation on the one hand--for hereby the believer excludes the influences of the world by presenting Christ to himself out of the Scriptures--and for public divine service on the other for the mutual fellowship of believers is strengthened and stimulated by the exhibition of a common Christian love. And this at the same time both expresses and comprises the fellowship of each one of them with Christ. To this latter, the public divine service, the Supper belongs.
Christians do experience in the Supper a peculiar strengthening of their spiritual life, and have done so ever since the time of its institution by Christ. In it Christ is presented to them. In the public gathering of the church as such, he supplies a participation in his flesh and blood. In this connection two questions arise: (1) How does the Supper as a supplying of the flesh and blood of Christ relate itself to that purely spiritual participation which he himself declared to be necessary? (2) How docs the Supper as a constituent part of public divine service distinguish itself from other parts of the same?
To begin with the latter: The Supper is distinguished from all other kinds of public worship in that, while in other forms of worship the degree in which the different members of the communion are actively or receptively related to one another varies according to their gifts and their place in the communion, in the Supper all the members are similarly placed in a receptive relation to the blessedness of Christ. The administrator is nothing more than the organ of Christ's institution. The inworking of this blessedness in the case of each believer proceeds solely and immediately from Christ himself, through the word of institution in which the redeeming and communion-forming love of Christ is presented and ever operates as a stimulus to piety. The peculiarity of the Supper is this individual and exclusive immediacy of presentation of Christ, this independence, in its working, of all changing personal conditions and relations.
In regard to the former question: In that discourse of Christ where he speaks of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood he had neither the Supper nor another definite action in mind, but he referred to the periodic renewal of our fellowship with him. The Supper lends itself naturally to such a description, In the Supper each member is conscious of a sympathy with all the others, so that as he knows that the others more closely unite themselves to Christ in it, he feels that he also is more closely united there by to them all. Thus each member represents to the others the whole society, and indeed the whole Christian communion. But this spiritual benefit is dependent on the definite observance of the rite which has been blessed and sanctified through the word of Christ. In and for itself there is nothing incomprehensible in the ordinance.
Consequently the teaching of the Roman Catholic church is false when it affirms both that the union of the elements with the body and blood of Christ is accomplished and that the spiritual benefit is attached to the elements of the Supper through contemplation and veneration of them, apart from the act of participation; for this is to make its effect of a magical character. Those sacramentarians are also in error who see in the elements only a representative image of spiritual participation. We hold, on the contrary, that the response to Christ's invitation to spiritual eating and drinking of himself is so actualized in the Supper through the word of institution, that believers find spiritual participation assured to them in the sacramental act which, when rightly administered, is an unfailing means of access to it. Similarly we reject the view of those who deny the connection between the Supper and spiritual participation in Christ and regard it as a command of Christ to be observed for all time in the church, simply as a testimony or confession. For in the first place this view robs the Supper of its pre-eminence as a public service; and in the next place it destroys its identity at all times. For in its original institution there were none present to whom the disciples could give their testimony, and there have always been other means by which the members of the church recognize their mutual faith. Any view of the Supper is defective which fails to see in it a renewal of the assurance of the forgiveness of sins, that is, of fellowship with Christ, which is subject to interruptions by the consciousness of sin. Thus as baptism by uniting us with the body of Christ introduces the consciousness of regeneration (the certainty of forgiveness), so this repeated presentation of Christ in the Supper by the whole society of believers confirms the certainty of forgiveness by strengthening and restoring the interrupted consciousness of regeneration. This is ministered in the Supper by the assembled community of faith, for union with Christ (which is forgiveness) is not to be thought of apart from the union with believers (§§ 139-42).
5. The office of the keys.--If the church were a perfect whole with nothing of the world in it, so that every individual within it would be a perfect organ of the common spirit, then the will of the whole church would be the will of every individual member. But since this is not the case, and since there arises in every individual some opposition to the will of the common spirit of Christ, that will comes to him as law. Where the individual member is definitely not subjected to it, then the church counts him as not truly a member. This legislative and judicial activity of the church is simply the perpetuation of the legislative and administrative power of Christ, which inheres in the church by virtue of its possession of his spirit; it is an exhibition of his kingly activity.
Every new subjection of an individual life to this activity of the church is a new acquisition achieved by its common spirit. Then the church, by extending to the individual the God-consciousness which is to supply to him the law of his spiritual life, first affords to him an entrance into the communion and afterward as signs to him his definite and proper place within it.
The church, then, according to Christ's own utterances, has the power of binding: that is, it deter mines through command and prohibition what may or may not be done; and of loosing: that is, of leaving certain matters to be determined by the individual. The limit of this power of the church is assigned by the necessity of preserving the common mind or feeling; as when, for example, some individual member does that which, if left unreproved, would damage the well-being of the others, or when some individual places the persons of others in contempt by setting himself above them so as to try to make his personal act or thought the will of the common spirit.
But just because this kingly activity of Christ in the church is living and abiding, there can be no decree which is final and valid for all time, but these must ever be subject to amendment. Hence also, there can be no ban of final exclusion from the church or abandonment of effort to bring the individual within its communion (§§ 144, 145).
6. Prayer in the name of Jesus.--The church's historical progress in the world is opposed by obstacles without and within: without, by the opposition of that part of the world which the church has not yet taken possession of and assimilated; within, by the worldly elements remaining in each of its members. Hence the church's common consciousness is of its imperfection. Now the longing to realize the aim of Christ's mission being a living and abiding element of the church's life, this, conjoined with the consciousness of imperfection, implies on the one side a sense of need and on the other side a presentiment of what is necessary to the fulfilment of that aim. All progress in this direction is ascribed through the God-consciousness to the divine world-government, and is expressed in thankfulness or resignation according as it is realized in some particular or not. But so far as the matter appears undecided it is expressed in prayer, i.e., an inner connection between the God-consciousness and the wish directed toward the best end.
It is inevitable that the thinking subject should outline in many forms the manner in which the fulfilment of its aim appears possible. Hence the particular petitions in prayer. The judgment of each individual as to what particular occurrences would contribute to the end in view is, of course, defective and of uncertain value. Those of them who possess a gift analogous to the prophetic are therefore adapted to exercise a special influence on the whole body in the direction of its petitions. Beginning with Christ himself there have appeared from the earliest times individuals in whom the personal motives have been excluded and who possessed that foresight which qualified them in an eminent degree as organs of the common will of the church in respect to prayer.
True prayer, which is always united to an interest in the kingdom of God as the church's end, is the expression of the common spirit of the church in respect to its needs; i.e., it is an activity of the Holy Spirit in the form of anticipation and desire.
To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray in the matters which concern him (Angelegenheiten), or (which is the sane) in his mind or spirit. That prayer is therefore a prayer in the name of Jesus in which those who pray occupy his relation to the kingdom of God, i.e., they pray in accordance with his government of his church. The whole church being a perfect reflection of Christ, that only is a prayer in the name of Jesus which has underlying it the total consciousness of the church, i.e., a prayer whose content has reference to the whole state of the church. This is the common prayer of the church on all occasions. Such prayer is always heard. This is the prayer of faith--not a separate faith that the prayer will be heard--but faith in the permanence and supreme worth of the kingdom of God which Christ founded. Every particular petition is heard so far as it agrees with this norm.
Consequently, prayer is not the exercise of an influence upon God. Such a view of prayer postulates a reciprocation between the creature and the Creator, represents its effect as empirical (akin to magical), and contradicts the fundamental thesis of this work. Prayer and its fulfilment have a common basis in the character of the kingdom of God. For prayer is that Christian anticipation which is developed out of the whole activity of the divine spirit, and its fulfilment is an expression of the governing activity of Christ in relation to the same object. In this sense we may say that neither one can be without the other, for both grow out of the same divinely ordered conditions. Thus true piety and true prayer always go together (§§ 146,147).
2. The Variable Elements of the Church Owing to Its Coexistence with the World (§§ 148-56)
If everyone who receives the spirit of Christianity retained no longer any of the characteristics of his former life, but became receptive solely of the common spirit of the church, then the separation between church and world would be absolute and their influence be merely that of reciprocal opposition and enmity. But though the true ego of the regenerate man is that of delight in the divine will, his new birth is no instantaneous transformation of his whole being. Worldly elements inhere in all those who constitute the church; so that church and world are not spatially and temporally separated. At every empirical manifestation of human life both appear. Where faith and a communion in faith are found, there also are sin and a communion in universal sin fulness. Only by abstraction can the church be isolated. The workings of the church, which consist in the union of the Holy Spirit with human nature, constitute a coherent and co-operative whole, but Invisible, because never in empirical separation from the world. The totality of the connected operations of the Spirit constitutes the Invisible Church. These same operations as connected with reactionary elements of sin which appear in the lives of the regenerate constitute the Visible Church. Within the visible church, church and world coexist.
Hence, while the whole truth of redemption be comes the believer's possession through the communication of Christ's perfection to him, and while a present guidance into the truth is assured by the consciousness of sonship with God in a life- fellowship with Christ, the reaction of his former state affects his conceptions of life and his activity of will, so that there is, on the one hand, only a gradual transformation of his ideas, and this involves inevitably a degree of falsity in all external expressions of this inner truth; and, on the other hand, only a gradual change in the direction of his life-energies occurs, and this involves a certain degree of impurity of motive. This, of course, pertains to the communion as well as to the individual. Hence the twofold contrast between the invisible church arid its empirical manifestation in the visible church, the contrast in thought and in action: to wit (to mention these features in the reverse order), while the invisible church is one, the visible church is divided: and while the invisible church is infallible, the visible church is subject to error. The invisible church must be one, for the spirit is one, and since the communion of the Spirit is just the self-recognition of the Spirit, the invisible church must be wherever this self-same Spirit is, i.e., throughout all Christendom. The universal impulse to externalize the common consciousness in determinate forms results in variety, difference, and separation, as a consequence of the antitheses antecedently existent among men, such as arise from difference of speech, nationality, political and geographical relations, civilization, and many other inner and outer conditions. In this way arise different church societies (communions). But these in no wise involve a destruction of communion with other Christians. Particular separations may arise through the workings of the Spirit as they lead to a perception and rejection of worldly elements which appear in the church, or they may arise from the opposite cause. In the former case the separations are only apparent. For the Spirit is always a principle of unity. It is the mind of the flesh that separates in reality.
But at the same time, owing to the unlimited power of attraction possessed by the love of Christ in those persons in whom the Spirit dwells, there can never arise in one communion the desire that another communion may be annihilated; but there must ever arise efforts to express the oneness of spirit in attempted unions. There is always the implicit acknowledgment that all these separated communions form, potentially, according to divine arrangement, a larger communion capable of including all Christians when the necessary conditions are present. If two professedly Christian communions have nothing in common, then one or both is un-Christian. But such a total annulling of this communion is impossible so long as both hold to their historical connection with the revelation proclaimed in the Gospel and no other revelation is acknowledged as the basis of their origin. Hence even heretics are in the church after all. Present differences and divisions in the Christian church are only relative and destined to disappear in the final realization of unity.
The invisible church is infallible, but the visible church is liable to error. Here we consider truth and error only in the religious sphere. In the activity of the pious consciousness truth and error are always mingled, because the persistence of sensuousness renders our conception of the aim of the church and our relation to it more or less impure and false. Every one finds the source of error in himself, and therefore believes it is always present in some degree in all. But, on the other hand, with the confession of Christ the truth is ever present. Hence there can be no church-communion which is entirely destitute of it.
The same must have been true of the early church and of the apostles as individuals; but the whole church and the whole truth being in the common spirit, the false tendencies of the individuals naturally annul one another, and hence the church invisible possesses the whole truth and is infallible. This allows, how ever, that every partial-church can err even in its official presentations. Nor would an individual church at any one point of time possess the whole truth, for every period has its one-sidedness, which a later time corrects. Therefore no doctrinal statements, even if unanimously offered, would express final and perfect truth. Everyone must test them for himself and acknowledge them as Christian in so far as they harmonize with his personal religious consciousness or with Scripture. The improvement of public doctrine becomes not only a personal duty but also a right in the exercise of which he is to suffer no limitation.
The gradual improvement of the church's doctrine will be a consequence.
Now the error existing in every part of the church being an error in relation to the truth which it possesses, the degree of error must be gradually diminished, the more the Holy Spirit in the church appropriates the organism of thought in its members. This is wrought out through the influence of the whole church upon the individual members in its public services, and through the influence of all those who are specially endowed with a clear Christian consciousness. We may conclude, therefore, that all error is finally to be banished.
THIRD DIVISION: THE PERFECTING OF THE CHURCH (§§ 157-63)
The sufficient ground of the perfecting of the church lies in the Holy Spirit as its common life-principle. That perfection implies, on the one hand, the expansion of Christianity over the whole earth and the disappearance of all other religious communions with their opposing and contaminating influences; and, on the other hand, it implies that the church ceases to take the world into itself. That is to say, that the present increasing conflict with sin which is characteristic of the church militant--owing to the consciousness of sin which is continuously being renewed by the propagation of the race--gives place to that condition in which the church has assimilated the world, that is, the church triumphant.
But our Christian consciousness is unable to set forth as its immediate self-expression the condition of the perfected church because it is without analogy in our experience and would exist under conditions entirely unknown to us. Strictly speaking, therefore, there can be no doctrine of that state. Yet the biblical prefigurations of the future life have received so much attention in the church that we are under the necessity of inquiring as to their source. None of the New Testament utterances on this subject can become to us articles of faith to be received on authoritative testimony because, surpassing our powers of apprehension, they constitute no description of our actual self-consciousness, and consequently they may have a place in a doctrinal system (Glaubenslehre) only in so far as they concern the person of the Redeemer and our relation to him.
Now, although faith in the persistence of the human personality after death, or, to use the common expression, in the immortality of the soul, is found universally and prevailed in the time of Christ and his apostles, it is not on that account entitled to a place in Christian doctrine. How, then, came this faith to be united with our Christian religious conscience? There are two possible ways: either it was discovered by intellectual processes and became objective truth, or it was originally given in and with the immediate self-consciousness with or without connection with the fundamental God-consciousness. If in the former way, then the doctrine pertains to the sphere of the higher natural science and depends on scientific investigation. But scientific study on the contrary often gives rise to opposition to the belief in immortality, The so-called rational proofs of immortality are nothing more than attempts to relate this belief to the body of scientific knowledge. To give these arguments a place in our Christian doctrine is to base dogmatics on philosophy. As to the other possibility, while there is a denial of immortality which is connected with atheism, on the other hand there may be a renunciation of personal continuance which springs from a view of Spirit as creative and self-expressive. On this view individual souls may be a product of the transitory action of Spirit and there fore themselves transitory. This is quite compatible with the supremacy of the God-consciousness, the purest ethics, and the highest spirituality. Conversely, immortality may be postulated out of a selfish interest in the sensuous life where morality and religion are only a means to enjoyment. It is evident therefore that faith in personal continuance is not essentially connected with the God-consciousness.
The true Christian ground of the assurance of immortality lies in faith in the Redeemer himself. His confidence in his own personal continuance is seen in his promises of a reunion with his followers. He could say these things only as a human person, and on account of the sameness of human nature in him and in us the same confidence is valid in our case. Faith in the Redeemer demands the immutability of our connection with him. In that life-union with him lies the true Christian assurance of personal continuance. In this way we see that he became the mediator of immortality, not only to those who believe in him, but to all without exception. For if immortality had not pertained to human nature, then a union of the divine being with human nature constituting such a personality as that of the Redeemer would not have been possible.
Faith in the continuance of our personality is naturally accompanied by an effort to represent that state in some of the forms of the imagination. The attempted solution of the problem how to represent the church in its perfection and at the same time the state of the souls of men in the future life, appears in the ecclesiastical doctrine of "last things." But it is impossible to combine the two in one harmonious representation. The perfection of the church, i.e., an end of development (which comports with the idea of retribution), supposes a state of the individual soul entirely unlike the present; on the other hand, the supposition of a state of the individual soul like the present, i.e., a state of progressive development (which harmonizes with the idea of personal continuance), annuls the perfection of the church.
Accordingly, the doctrines relating to this point are of less value as dogmatic than those already treated. They rest upon our power of anticipation, which is incompetent to construct a harmonious representation of the future state. On that account we cannot ascribe to the confessional articles on this question the same dignity as to those already treated. They may be designated Prophetical Articles. Continuance of personal existence as the abolition of death appears under the representation of the resurrection of the body. The perfection of the church, as conditioned on the one hand by the exclusion of the unbelieving from further influence upon the church, appears under the representation of the final judgment, separation of believers and unbelievers. As contrasted on the other hand with the "church militant," and implying the exclusion of imperfection in believers, it is presented as eternal blessedness. The condemnation of unbelievers not being a matter of Christian experience is no separate article of faith. Finally the comprehension and necessary condition of the whole is presented under the representation of Christ's return (§§ 157-59).
FIRST PROPHETICAL ARTICLE: CHRIST'S RETURN
The Synoptists report sayings of Christ before his death to the effect that he will come again at the fall of Jerusalem. Though he is not represented as repeating such promises personally to his disciples in his resurrection communications with them, they were unable to conceive that those promises had been fulfilled. Similarly, after the destruction of the city the literal interpretation of his words was inconsistently retained, and even though in later times Chiliasm has been mostly abandoned, still the view that he will return in person at the end of the present condition of the earth has continued almost universal to the present time. Apart from this literal interpretation we have no biblical guarantee of his personal return or of a universal separation of the good and the bad; and yet no representation of these events is possible, for every attempted definite image of the event dissolves, and in lieu of a physical presence we are able to retain only his powerful activity in relation to world-affairs.
It is evident, then, that the Christian consciousness of union with Christ is not satisfied with his spiritual presence in the church in the midst of our present condition of growth and change. In order to the realization of our personal continuance in union with him and, at the same time, of the perfection of the church, there is predicated an exercise of the sovereign power of Christ that puts an end to the propagation of the race and to the mingling of the good and the bad, so that by one sudden leap the church, heretofore subject to a wavering growth, becomes perfect. Accordingly the second coming of Christ is conceived as a return to judgment, and the permanence of the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ becomes the guarantee that this nature will not be subject to that dissolution which would result from cosmic forces. Thus the imagery of the doctrine results from the interest in personal continuance, but its certainty rests on the perfection of the church (§ 160).
SECOND PROPHETICAL ARTICLE: THE RESURRECTION
OF THE BODY
The consciousness of the union of the body and soul in our personality renders it impossible for us to represent to ourselves the immortality of the soul apart from a bodily existence, without giving up the identity of our personal life before death and after. The continuity of self-consciousness seems impossible apart from memory, which, like other mental functions, appears dependent on bodily relations, so that the existence of the soul under entirely different physical relations would be inconsistent with its continuous self-identity. But the conception of the similarity of the present and the future life is, on the other hand, inconsistent with the perfection of the church. So that on this ground we are under the opposite necessity of conceiving the nature of the future world as different from the present, the body being conceived as immortal and sexual distinctions as lost; other wise the conflict between flesh and spirit, and there fore sin fulness, would remain.
The incompatibility of the representation of future personal continuance with the representation of the perfected church further appears in the abortive at tempts to offer a representation of the intermediate state and to adjust its relation to the resurrection state and to the general judgment. We conclude that it is impossible to present a definite and consistent representation of the connection between the present and the future life.
There remains as the essential content of this article: (1) the ascension of the risen Redeemer is only possible if there lies before all human individuals in the future life a renewal of organic life connected with our present state; (2) the unfolding of a future state is conditioned on the divine power of Christ and on cosmical changes effected through the universal divine world-government, though the representation of these changes is a problem never perfectly to be solved by men (§ 161).
THIRD PROPHETICAL ARTICLE: THE FINAL JUDGMENT
The fundamental idea underlying Christ's representation of the Final Judgment is the total separation of the church from the world so far as the perfection of the former excludes all influence of the latter. But to suppose that this means a total separation between believers and unbelievers is to conceive wrongly the distinction of the visible and the invisible church, inasmuch as it overlooks the fact that the influence of the world upon the church consists mainly in the fleshly character which inheres in believers even till death. Besides, a sanctification effected by such a sudden deliverance destroys the continuous nature of personal consciousness and introduces a magical element into sanctification, thereby compromising the value of life-fellowship with Christ. Further, such a separation of believers from unbelievers seems intended to secure the happiness of believers rather than their perfection, inasmuch as it is only by the contact of believers with unbelievers that many perfections of the former come to manifestation. Yet even that happiness would be destroyed by the pain which arises from sympathy with the lost. Finally, the contemplation of the righteousness of God, as exhibited in the final rejection of unbelievers, could afford no counterbalancing satisfaction, because the element of arbitrariness is thereby introduced into the idea of God.
That which is of value in the idea of the final judgment is: (1) that perfect fellowship with Christ renders all evil non-existent for us, even in the presence of wickedness; (2) that if we are to conceive of the church as perfect while a portion of the human race remains excluded from the workings of its spirit, this is because that portion of the race is proof against it and consequently continues out of all contact with it (§ 162).
FOURTH PROPHETICAL ARTICLE: ETERNAL BLESSEDNESS
The condition of believers after their restoration to life may be conceived under two forms: (1) a sudden, but unchanging possession of the Most High; (2) a gradual elevation to the Most High but, like the development of Christ, without retrogression or conflict. But the attempt to give a representation of the two states introduces peculiar difficulties. The former annuls the connection with the present life and implies, in the equally perfect state of all believers, the want of that mutual influence which is involved in a perfect life and necessary to its externalization. The second would involve disharmonies and waverings with the consequent dissatisfaction and consciousness of imperfection, which in a free existence is consciousness of guilt. Indeed the outcome is a view of the future life as in all essential features a repetition of the present. The problem therefore remains unsolved.
What, then, is that which we receive in that future life? The common answer is, that eternal life consists in the vision of God. But wherein does that consciousness of God differ from the present? In its immediacy in contrast with the mediate character of the present? But this is hardly consistent with the preservation of the personality. So that, from which ever side the problem is approached, it seems that we must remain uncertain as to the manner in which the state which is the highest perfection of the church can be obtained and possessed by an immortal personality (§ 163).
APPENDIX: ETERNAL CONDEMNATION
It has usually been assumed that the figurative discourses of Christ which are supposed to refer to those who die out of fellowship with him represent them as in a state of permanent unhappiness. (See Matt. 25:46; Mark 9:44; John 5:29. ) But an examination of the connections (Matt. 24:30-34; John 5:24, 25) and of passages with an opposite representation (I Cor. 15:25, 26) throws doubt upon this view. Moreover, eternal condemnation cannot be conceived apart from such a condition as either implies spiritual progress on the part of the damned or unhappiness on the part of the blessed. Accordingly, the milder doctrine that through the power of the redemption at some time there will be a universal restoration of all human souls possesses an equal right.
NOTE.--All attempts to develop the idea of the individual future life and its relations to the present life out of the idea of the perfection of the church and its relation to the unperfected church, or to make a place for the perfected church by means of the idea of the future life, turn to myths, i.e., a historical presentation of the super-historical, or to visions, i.e., an earthly presentation of the super-earthly. "These were every where the forms of the prophetical, which in its higher meaning made no claim to produce a knowledge in the proper sense, but is only determined to shape principles already acknowledged into motives of action."
Section 3. Those Attributes of God Which Are Related to Redemption (§§ 164-69)
For the Christian consciousness everything in the universe is viewed in relation to the redemption, either as organic to the self-expression of the awakened God-consciousness, or as material to be manipulated by it. From this same point of view the divine world-government requires to be described. But we are here to be on our guard against falling into the error of treating this divine government of the world as supervening upon the creation in the way of something additional or supplementary. They are at bottom the same thing. The Christian faith that all things were made with a view to the self-revelation of God in the flesh and the establishment of the kingdom of God by the extension of that revelation to the whole range of human nature, requires therefore that the divine world-government consist in no mere isolated acts of influence upon a world which pursues its own course in general independently of such interference; but rather the divine world-government and the course of Nature, the natural world and the kingdom of grace, fill the same sphere. That is to say, the whole ordering of Nature from the beginning would have been other than it is had not the redemption through Christ been determined for the sinning race. As for intelligences other than human, we have no such knowledge of their relation to us as would enable us to include more than our own human world--that realm in which redemption is effected--in our survey of the divine government.
Since, as has been already shown (§ 46, note), that element of our self-consciousness which we call the consciousness of sin cannot be referred immediately to the divine causality, but mediately only through the consciousness of grace, the latter element must be the determining one. We may say, then, that the nature of things and all the complexity of their relations have come to be what they are on account of the revelation of God in Christ which redeems men, or develops the human spirit to perfection. Consequently the whole course of human affairs and of natural events would have been other than it is, had not God decreed the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ and with the communion of believers through the Holy Spirit.
Accordingly from the unity of the divine causality it follows that the church or the kingdom of God, in its whole extension and in the full effect of its development, is the one object of the divine world-government, and every individual object of the divine government is such only in relation to this one object and for this alone. Hence the absurdity of a division of God's providence into general and special, and the inconsistency of eternal damnation with the divine world-government.
A distinction of attributes can appear in the divine world-government only by viewing the divine causality from human standpoints. As in our apprehension of human causality we distinguish inner intention from the mode of its execution, so also divine causality on its inner side as a unity may be described as will; but on its outer side in relation to its object as a manifold, it may be regarded as understanding. The redemption and the founding of the kingdom of God, in which there is a union of the divine essence with human nature, being the focal point of the divine world-government, the inner thought (disposition) exhibited in this is divine love, which is just the will to unite with and dwell in another. And the skill by which the totality of existences is subjected to this end of realizing the divine love is divine wisdom, which is just the perfect correspondence of processes with the end conceived in all its relations. But while in man will and understanding never perfectly correspond, in God they are one,
1. The Divine Love
The divine love, as the attribute by virtue of which the divine nature communicates itself, is made known in the work of redemption. If it be objected, on the one hand, that this view is mystical and overlooks the love of God in those courses of Nature and of human affairs that conserve and elevate the life; and, on the other hand, that it is too narrow because it fails to recognize that all spiritual development depends on the possession of reason which is the image of God in man, it may be replied to the first objection, that the highest elevation of life is in the God-consciousness, which is suppressed outside the sphere of the Christian redemption; and to the second, that while all men have the capacity for the God-consciousness, yet fear and not love pervades their minds before receiving Christ's redemption, and no human good of any kind which is not brought into connection with the God-consciousness can relate itself properly to the divine love.
When we assert that "God is love," meaning there by that love is the sole attribute which can be equated with the being or essence of God, we are not to be understood as accepting any conception of God which has been obtained in a speculative way, but we have only to show why this attribute of God is thus differentiated from the others which have been presented already.
While, as has been said already, the divine omnipotence is that attribute by virtue of which all finite things exist, this entire divine act is thereby posited without motive. The same is true of the other divine attributes treated above. None of these can be by themselves original expressions of the divine essence. Righteousness and holiness imply the antithesis between Good and Bad which cannot exist for God in himself. These attributes act in a limited sphere and they are subordinate to love and wisdom, that is, in the work of redemption they are to be reckoned as preparatory.
Again, while both love and wisdom express the very essence of God, we cannot say that God is wisdom as we say that God is love, because we have the immediate consciousness of love only in the consciousness of redemption and it is the ground of the representation of all the other divine attributes. It is when we extend our personal and our race-consciousness to the whole complex of forces in the universe that we see that wisdom is the perfection of love. Where almighty love is, there must absolute wisdom be (§§ 166, 167).
2. The Divine Wisdom
According to our position in an earlier portion of this work, wisdom and omniscience in God are the same, only the former corresponds to the antecedent view of his operations and the latter to the consequent view. Wisdom is the divine work regarded as producing such a world as if it were an absolutely coherent divine work of art; that is, such a work as, after the analogy of the human, constitutes a simple and originally perfect self-presentation or, rather, communication of the Supreme Being. The development of our consciousness of the wisdom of God consists in this, that this communication in its temporal progress becomes to us ever increasingly a perfect presentation of the almighty love of God.
We do not thereby admit the antithesis of end and means in the world, except in the sense that the means is embraced in the end, as a part in the whole.
To the Christian the redemption is the key to the understanding of the divine wisdom, and the whole divine economy is interpreted in the light of the revelation of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit. But this by no means implies a desire to find in individual occurrences a particular relation to the kingdom of God. This would degenerate into an opposition to scientific investigation. Nay, such occurrences as, presumably, are unconnected with the world-system and yet can not be separated from human concerns, must turn to the damage of the progress of the redemption and must also be excluded from the provisions of the divine wisdom. All things in the world that can be ascribed to the divine wisdom must also be referable to the redeeming new-creating revelation of God. Thus the peculiar work of the wisdom of God is just the extension of the redemption. This means, of course, that the most minute investigation of the facts of nature and the effort to penetrate into the hidden depths of the divine purpose are to be commended (§§ 168, 169).
Conclusion: The Divine Trinity (§§ 170-72)
Our whole apprehension of Christianity stands or falls with the union of the Divine Being with human nature, This union appears first in the person of Christ, and by virtue of it the idea of redemption is concentrated in his person. It appears also in the common spirit of the church, and by virtue of this, the church bears and propagates the redemption through Christ. These are the essential elements of the church doctrine of the Trinity. The defense of the doctrine has been moved by the religious interest--the concern to conserve the absolute character of the redemption by rejecting the idea of subordinate divinities in Christ and the Holy Spirit. This is confirmed by the fact that those parties in the church which have denied the Trinity have held an entirely different view of the redemption on all sides of it.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the keystone of the whole structure of Christian doctrine with respect to this essential point: the equivalence of the divine nature in Christ and in the spirit of the church with the divine nature in itself.
But to the further elaboration of this dogma in the creeds and confessions the same value cannot be as signed. In these the union of the divine with the human in Christ and in the Spirit of the church is referred back to an eternal separation within the Supreme Being in dependently of these two acts of union. Then the member of this separated Being who was designated to the union with Jesus is named Son; and the same process taking place in reference to the Holy Spirit, the other member is called Father. In this way arose the description of God as a unity of essence with a trio- of persons. But such a separation within the Supreme Being is no expression of a religious consciousness and never could be.
Such a doctrine of the Trinity cannot be made to rest upon the Logos-doctrine of John's Gospel, for this logology has seemed to afford support to the Arian and Athanasian formulae alike, and its interpretation is not settled. If such a doctrine was in John's mind, why did he not set forth a similar statement concerning the Holy Spirit, especially since he mentions the Spirit so frequently in his gospel, and why did he offer no caution against polyolatry?
Nor can this doctrine be framed from the statements of Christ and his apostles as a combination of authoritative testimonies concerning a supersensuous fact. That would be just as little a doctrine of faith (Glaubenslehre) in the original and proper sense of the word as are the doctrines of the resurrection and the ascension. Moreover this supposedly transcendental fact does not affect our faith in Christ or our fellowship with him.
NOTE.--A doctrine of the Trinity derived from universal conceptions, or a priori, could have no place in Christian doctrine, even if there were a verbal coincidence, and could render no service to it. Such a doctrine in itself would not be of a religious character for its source is different.
The difficulty of conceiving each of three persons as equal to two others and to the divine essence is beyond the compass of thought. If the Godhead of all three DC less than the one supreme Essence, then our life-fellowship with Christ and our participation in the Holy Spirit are no fellowship with God, and all that is most valuable in Christianity is altered. If each be equal to the others, the difficulty is to find the rule for the distinction of the persons without the introduction of some elements that involves inequality. This is manifest in the Catholic statements of the doctrine. Similar contradictions appear in the canons which have been offered for the representation of the relation of the triplicity of persons to the unity of the Essence. If we assume triplicity we do not reach the unity, and if we assume the unity there is no room for triplicity. We possess no analogies whereon to base such a representation. The ecclesiastical doctrine, therefore, can furnish no support to the fundamental truth of Christianity.
The same difficulty arises when we attempt to relate each and all of the three persons to the divine causality. The dogmaticians have felt this, for they all assume the divinity of the Father and attempt to prove that of the Son and the Spirit, which shows that notwithstanding formal orthodoxy they actually follow Origen in holding that the Father alone is absolutely God and that Son and Spirit are God only by participation.
The traditional trinitarian formulae come to us from a time when the great mass of Christians were recently recruited from heathenism. It was a very easy matter for echoes of heathen thought to steal in when the question of plurality or distinction in God was discussed, and it is just as natural to find that the definitions presented in those earlier times should be quite unsuited to later times when a mingling of heathen elements is no longer to be feared. If the value of the doctrine lies in the affirmation that God is in Christ and in the common spirit of the church, then there arises the problem how to relate the peculiar existence of God in another to his existence in and for himself and in relation to the world in general. But there is no prospect of obtaining a formula which will be sufficient for all time inasmuch as, since we have to do only with that God-consciousness which is given in our self-consciousness and with the world-consciousness, we have no available formula for the expression of the existence of God in himself as distinct from his existence in the world, and we are driven to borrow the desired formula from speculation; but that is to be untrue to the nature of dogmatics. And inasmuch as all our dogmatical expressions for the relation of God to the world are unavoidably anthropomorphic, how can we expect to avoid the same defect when we approach the complicated problem of distinguishing the peculiar (personal) existence of God in Christ as an individual and his existence in the church as a historical whole from the omnipotent presence of God in the world in general, of which the other two are yet only parts?
It is evident that the solution of the problem of the Trinity can be only approximate and progressive. Interest in it must rise ever afresh. We can expect no final statement. It will remain a problem. The customary placing of the doctrine of the Trinity at the head of the dogmatical system gives the misleading impression which, nevertheless, the history of the church contradicts, that the acceptance of this doctrine is the indispensable condition of faith in the redemption and in the founding of the kingdom of God in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Such a procedure results in making speculation rather than the Christian consciousness the basis of Christian doctrine. __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________
III. AN ESTIMATE
A clear apprehension of the value of Schleiermacher's theological system is not to be obtained apart from an examination of the manner in which the treatment of religious questions by the Christian scholars of modern times has been affected by his views, and a consideration of the extent to which his doctrinal discussions supply a solution of the difficulties that confront faith at the present. The amount of attention that is now being given by German students to this subject is significant of the large place he has secured among his countrymen, and a broad survey of the direction of religious thought in the world at large indicates the prophetical character of his insight into the religious needs of our own day. All that will be attempted in the present connection is to offer a few suggestions respecting the worth of his system that may be of some use to the reader whose acquaintance with recent theological speculation is limited.
There were some among Schleiermacher's contemporaries who saw that the publication of his mature views in Der christliche Glaube constituted a notable landmark in Christian thought. His friend Gass wrote (see the entire letter in Schleiermachers Briefwechsel wit Gass, Berlin, 1852, pp. 193 ff.) in November, 1822: "On this point no man shall dispute me, that with thy dogmatics a new epoch will begin not only in this discipline but in the whole of theological science." The truth of this prediction soon began to appear. A succession of notable German theologians received their theological impulse from him, and while scarcely any one of them can be called a mere disciple of his, for he founded no school of thought strictly speaking, an important part of their contributions to theology consists in the development of the fruitful ideas found in germ on almost every page of his great work. Men like Nitsch, Twesten, Schweizer, Hofmann, Julius Müller, the famous present-day thinkers of the Ritschlian school, such as Harnack, Kaftan, and Herrmann, gladly admit their indebtedness to him, while Albrecht Ritschl, who gave to this school its name, owes a large portion of the fabric of his system to Schleiermacher. Even during his lifetime Schleiermacher's influence was powerfully felt in Germany. No doubt the peculiar charm of his personality had something to do with it, but the warmth of his piety and the vigor of his thinking are the chief reasons. For the impression made by his views has increased with the passage of time and the interest in them continues unabated to the present. No school of religious thought in that country is without elements of theology derived from him, not even the school that seems the most opposed to him, the Hegelian. By his recognition of the originality of the religious endowment and his insistence on its basic relation to all the forms of religious expression, by his admission of the full right of biblical criticism and at the same time his demand for a religious interpretation of Scripture, and by his tendency toward free-churchism as opposed to state-control he became the head of a liberal movement which adopted his free attitude toward the creeds. On the other hand, by taking his stand distinctly within Protestantism and seeking to find in the accepted creeds and confessions an inner connection with the Christian religion in the wide sweep of its implications, he imparted a stimulus to those conservative "confessional" theologians who aimed at maintaining the authority of the standards of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. At the same time the school of mediating theologians found a fore runner in him. The general dependence on Schleiermacher is evident in the attempts of men of all schools to solve the problems of theology along the lines suggested by him and to clear his system of what seemed to them defects. What is true of Germany is true in an appreciable degree of England and America. Modern theology is in no small degree a development of the ideas of Schleiermacher.
I. HIS INFLUENCE ON THE CONCEPTION AND METHOD OF THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
In his Outlines of Theological Science (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Stadiums), to which reference has been made in an earlier part of this work, Schleiermacher had presented a scheme of the treatment of the science of theology as a whole, exhibiting its various disciplines as expressive severally of a fundamental religious principle and as; constituting in their mutual relations and their inner unity an organism of the Christian consciousness. In his Glaubenslehre (the systematic presentation of the Christian faith, which has been set forth in the body of this work) this conception of theology was carried out more in detail and at great length in the section on dogmatics. Instead of the haphazard treatment of the common theological disciplines which, unfortunately, is still very general among theologians and in which the arrangement and method of treatment are determined largely by empirical considerations, with the result that each of these disciplines holds a purely contingent place in our religious reflection, their very existence and their integration in a system are made dependent on their fundamental relation to a determinate mode of faith. For example, apologetics, church history, practical theology, are not to be brought to the service of Christianity from without or borrowed from philosophy or science, but they spring out of the very nature of the Christian spirit as it seeks to express and propagate itself. Accordingly their value is always to find its main test in their faithfulness to the religious attitude of mind out of which they spring. In consequence theology is pre served from degenerating into a cast-iron system of doctrine or a system of mechanical rules which cramp and paralyze the spirit. Instead, there arises the necessity of the free development of theology pari passu with the free activity of the spirit of religion. In this way Schleiermacher helped to save Protestant theology from the withering effects of an orthodox despotism and a dry scholasticism and made it live again. Notwithstanding his inadequate apprehension of the nature of religion in general and his defective view that theology arises out of church needs and finds its aim in church guidance, it is to his lasting credit that he pointed out that the value of theological science and the direction of its development must al ways be determined by its relation to practical religious needs--in the case of Christianity to the imperative propagation of the Christian faith. That is, Christian theology serves its end only when it becomes a support and a guide to Christian evangelism.
Closely allied to this service is another of like kind. Before his time an assumption common to the orthodox and the rationalists was that theology presents to our minds a sum of objective facts or truths, whether the knowledge of them came by external communication or sensible observation or by philosophical reflection aided and supplemented by inference. Religious faith was a consequence of receiving this objective knowledge. It requires only a little reflection to see that in any instance the theory makes the scientist, the philosopher, or the theologian an authority in religion to which the consciousness of the common man is subject. When, as is sure to happen with progress, portions of this supposed knowledge turn out to be unreliable or even bogus, faith is shaken or shattered and the spirit is kept in terror of losing its hold on reality by the discovery of new facts that contradict the system of knowledge out of which its religion came. Schleiermacher's insistence on the original relation of the religious experience to theology and doctrine elevates the life of the common man, curbs the proud spirit of the intellectual aristocrat, and gives to faith its rightful place as the root rather than the product of the progress of knowledge.
Schleiermacher's influence contributed to introduce a new treatment of several of the theological disciplines, particularly the Philosophy of Religion, Apologetics, Church History, and Dogmatics.
(1) PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The earlier sporadic attempts at a philosophy of religion proceeded according to a wrong method and on false assumptions. The opponents of orthodoxy attempted to adjust the facts of religion to an abstract doctrine of the world or of human nature arrived at independently of an analysis of the religious consciousness or of its actual history. The orthodox theory, in turn, was rather a philosophy of revelation or of the "plan of salvation." Both sides proceeded in ignorance of the facts when they assumed that the history of religion was a history of the increasing corruption of the original pure religion. Schleiermacher compelled theologians to approach the matter from a new viewpoint: First, by emphasizing the historical character of Christianity and placing it in a definite relation to the progress of religion in general, he drew attention to the basis of fact, without which a philosophy of religion is a worthless speculation, and gave a profound significance to it. By thus supplying an impulse to the comparative study of religions he forced the abandonment of the customary contrast between Christianity as the exclusively true religion and all other religions as exclusively false, which, as Professor Brown (Essence of Christianity, p. 175) points out, had been characteristic of Christian thought on the subject from Barnabas to Kant. While the state of the knowledge of the history of religions at the time rendered his own philosophy of religion of little lasting worth his conception of the subject anticipated modern methods.
Second, holding religion to be an essential element of our self-conscious existence and viewing man whether in the individual or in the race as a unity, he pointed out that the unfolding of the religious life is bound up with the whole of our symmetrical human progress from the lower plane of the flesh to the higher plane of the spirit. There are inklings of this view in Lessing and Hume, but Schleiermacher was the first to present it in a well-thought-out form. In no other way can we attain to a philosophy of religion worthy of the name. A fine statement of his service in this field is given by Bender (Schleiermacher's Theologie mit ihren philosophischen Grundlagen, Vorwort, iv): "Schleiermacher's greatest service is the fruitful application of the analytical method to the investigation of the religious process in itself and in its relation to the whole spiritual (intelligent) life; and as a complement to this ever one-sided subjective method he emphatically postulated the comparative investigation of positive religions: that has been the firm starting-point and central viewpoint of all succeeding theology."
(2) APOLOGETICS
Apologetics has been recast. The age that closed with Hume and Kant was prolific in apologies for Christianity, but they all were cumbered with the false assumption that was held in common by the orthodox and the rationalists, that religion consists of doctrines to be believed. The difference between them was in the quantum of the credenda. Dependence on external authority turned apologetics into a collection of "evidences." With his usual keen discernment of the problems of his time Schleiermacher saw that the first need of the apologist was a new definition of that which was to receive its theoretical justification, a new statement of the essence of Christianity. Herein he recognized the historical relation of apologetics to dogmatics: it is the prius of dogmatics.
There were two contentions urged by him: first, that religion is an integral and necessary element of our self-consciousness and hence our recognition of this fact must be distinguished from our estimate of its value; second, that Christian faith is related fundamentally to the person of Jesus Christ. It is to be admitted, of course, that he did not himself realize fully the value of a historical study of our religion. His own view of Christ was speculative rather than historical. In this he shared the defects of his time, and yet it remains to his credit that, as Brown says (op. cit. p. 176): "Schleiermacher was the first modern theologian to write a definition of Christianity in which the name of its founder occupies the central place." Here again he prepared the way for modern developments. The Life-of-Jesus movement is a part of the new tendency he inaugurated.
The battle on behalf of Christianity has been fought on side-issues too long. The scattered and ill-ordered defense which till very recent times has been characteristic of English and American apologetics must at length make way for an analysis of its fundamental nature, a valuation of its traditional elements and a philosophy of its beliefs, if the needs of our times are to be met.
(3) CHURCH HISTORY
Apart from the consideration that Schleiermacher's view of the teleological nature of the Christian religion and his emphasis on the cardinal relation of its Founder toward it strengthened the new interest in church history, this department of theology was influenced by him in a special way. It was mainly through reading the Discourses (Reden) that the great Neander was led from Judaism to a warm Christian faith. The peculiar stamp of his great teacher can be detected in Neander's treatment of church history as history of the Christian religion. In our times the value of Schleiermacher's insight into the relation of religion to the origin and life of the religious community appears in the gradual displacement of ecclesiastical history by the history of religions.
(4) DOGMATICS
It is most of all in the department of dogmatics that Schleiermacher's theological influence has been manifest. His principles lead to the annihilation of dogma in the old sense of a formal doctrine necessary to salvation. Dogma in that sense is promulgated by authority. Its truth is independent, and it is to be received independently, of experience; it is a law to faith rather than an utterance of faith. Christian dogmas were a determination of the course the Christian religion in man must take, rather than a description of the course it actually does take. The Christian religion was at the bottom statutory and its experiential character a matter of secondary importance. The whole Roman Catholic system rests on this assumption, and Protestant theology unfortunately followed, the difference between them being in degree. The difference that was most in evidence was in the authority obeyed. Hence traditional Protestantism held to certain doctrines as authoritatively revealed truths. When their unification was not accomplished the doctrines of the faith appeared as so many membra disjecta. This was the form in which theology appeared in Melanchthon's Loci Communes and which German dogmaticians inherited from him.
By exhibiting Christian doctrine as the expression of a distinct type of religious life Schleiermacher inaugurated a revolution in the conception and method of Christian theology. He elevated the conscious inner life above formal doctrine and subjected the latter to the test of conformity to the former. He made theology a descriptive rather than a normative science. Doctrinal forms become fluent rather than static. They become symbols of a progressive religious life and at the same time a means of its further development, which again reacts upon the doctrinal statements, so that they become in time evidently inadequate and must submit to reconstruction.
His position involved a radical change in the common view of the source and authority of Christian doctrine. The Bible was regarded as a body of divine legislation or pronouncements. The proof-text method of handling the Scriptures was a consequence. The violence thereby done to the Scriptures and to Christianity itself is plain to us today.
Schleiermacher saw that within and behind and beyond the Bible there was a power of spiritual life of which our Christian doctrines become such interpretations as the human mind at any stage of its progress is capable of giving to this vital reality. The various doctrines arise out of the manifold relations of the spirit of Christianity to the world of experience which itself is ever changing. This interpretation of the place of doctrine connects Schleiermacher with the Anabaptists and the early utterances of Luther rather than with the confessional booths.
We may claim, therefore, that Schleiermacher has not only liberalized Protestant theology and paved the way for a new basis and a new method of treatment, but he has also spiritualized and Christianized it. For the liberalism of Schleiermacher was not the liberalism of the rationalists and the "free-thinkers" who have reduced the content of religion to the limits of their boasted "reason"; but it was a liberalism that grew out of the consciousness of a life in communion with God which is unutterably rich and cannot submit to limitation by the forms of thought or worship or organization that have arisen at any period of its history. Me has Christianized theology. For by positing the essence of Christianity as the basic principle of any system that can claim to exhibit Christian truth, and by finding in the person of Christ in his redemptive relation to us the root of all that is Christian, he pointed out the means of differentiating the truly Christian from the pseudo-Christian doctrines.
Many objections have been made to the general principles of his dogmatics. Of these objections we may notice three: First, it is said that his conception of theology is subversive of the authority of all doctrine. It is true that the separate authority of all doctrinal formulae is destroyed. Authority is transferred to the religious spirit--let us say, the Spirit of God, Authority, nevertheless, remains, not legal, but dynamic.
Second, it is said that Schleiermacher's view makes religion individualistic and subjective and does away with its normative character. There is no space here to answer this objection at length, but this may be said in reply: Religion that is not a matter of subjective experience is not religion at all, and doctrine that does not express subjective conviction is meaning less or worse; while it is also true that every man must be his own theologian, whatever the consequences. At the same time Schleiermacher has indicated a way of escape from mere subjectivism by emphasizing the communion-forming power of Christian faith. Through the continuity and development of the Christian communion a continuous and normal and therefore normative character is secured.
Third, objection is made to his classification of dogmatics under the head of historical theology, and with reason. For the aim of dogmatics is to set forth the doctrines that are essential to Christianity, that is, to arrive at a final and complete statement of Christian truth. Yet it is to be remembered that final truth or truths can only approximately be known by us, All dogmas indicate simply stages in our approach to this goal and must be arranged in an order of succession upon earlier attempts to do the same thing. Our dogmas may have final value for ourselves, but for coming generations their value will be historical.
We conclude this part of our estimate by saying that Schleiermacher has rendered a priceless service to theological science by compelling the Christian thinker to recognize the vital relation of the inner life to all fundamental doctrinal formulation and the necessity of testing the value of it by the worth of its ministry to that life.
II. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF HIS SYSTEM
It is in the actual working out of his theological scheme that Schleiermacher's defects as well as his virtues as a theologian become most evident. A few of the most important elements of his system are here selected for comment with the aim of suggesting lines of criticism that may be carried out through the body of his theology.
(1) THE NATURE OF RELIGION
The first thing to notice in Schleiermacher's definition of religion is his method of reaching it. True to the tendency of those times to seek for an explanation of the nature of all the forms of human knowledge in psychology, Schleiermacher discovers religion to be an ultimate element of the self-consciousness. Accepting the common division of ultimate psychic facts into feeling, thought, and will, he finds that religion is a universal human experience in the form of feeling. This he regards as no inference but an immediate result of introspection. The analysis of individual experience is supplemented and confirmed by a survey of the inner nature of historical religions of all grades.
This union of the results of an examination of personal experience and of historic fact is certainly necessary in order to obtain an adequate view of the nature of religion, but on both sides of his investigation Schleiermacher was cumbered by doubtful pre suppositions.
In the first place, he assumes that religion is an elemental fact and the discovery of the form of the elemental experience in which it is seen establishes its universality; whereas it is certain that the religious experience is very complex and is interwoven with all our human experience. Besides, the nature of religion is not more truly ascertained by an examination of our inner experiences than it is by the survey of the activities which it brings into effect. Schleiermacher's method as carried out by him seems to make religion itself an effect.
In the next place, objection must be made to his method of using the historical material. To seek for the common element in all the. religions as constitutive of their essence is to treat the lower forms as if for purposes of definition they were as valuable as the higher. The true method is to discover the inner character of the highest religion and to interpret the lower forms in the light of it, to wit: that it is to be understood as the final expression of that which can now be seen in the lower in germinal form. For it is only in so far as the spirit of the higher form can be discovered operating in the lower forms that they are really of any value for the purposes of definition.
We notice, next, the definition itself. Religion is described as a form of feeling rather than of thought or will. I think the reasons for his attempt to find religion in feeling are not difficult to discover. There was the reaction in his mind against the traditional orthodoxy and the rationalism that made religion a matter fundamentally of the intellect and disparaged emotion, with the consequence that religion became dry doctrine or abstract morality with a dependence on authority. There was also a reaction in his mind against Kant's theory that religion is tributary to the demands of the categorical imperative, its source being in will. On the positive side, however, his definition of religion is a result of his own deep emotional experience in the devotional meetings of the Moravians, which never lost their worth to him, combined with the influence of the Romanticism that helped to banish the alien rationalism from his mind.
His more complete determination of the nature of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence indicates to us the source of the definition. In the religious experience there is a rich and varied play of emotion. Why select the feeling of absolute dependence as fundamental and solely constitutive? The answer is that this definition of it coincided with his world-view and is an inference from it. Spinoza's self-differentiating Substance expressing itself in an infinity of forms, Calvin's God the absolute Will, Leibnitz' monads each mirroring the universe in its individuality, the scientific principle of Causality as the final explanation of all phenomena, combined to impress on his mind the conception of religion as the expression of the unity of the universe in the human soul or, as otherwise expressed, the effect of which God alone can be predicated as the Cause. Here God is Causality, or, as he says in one place, God is the Whence of our religious experience. Schleiermacher thinks God is given in and with the feeling of absolute dependence, but if so it is only as Causality he is given--he is no Personal Being. I think it is plain that his definition of religion is an inference from his conception of the world. He appears to have fallen into the common fault of the theologian, that of drawing his religious doctrines from his metaphysics instead of evolving a world-view that is a product of religious faith.
His account of religion is also too meager. For religion embraces all the activities of the human spirit. It is at the root of the noblest, most elevated, most refined feeling and also of the purest morality and the keenest and most comprehensive mental action. Schleiermacher vindicates a place for religion alongside of intelligence and morality, whereas it is superior to them, since it supplies the impulse to the cultivation of them and therefore in the best sense embraces them. His definition of religion makes it aesthetic and destitute of moral quality, and seems logically to make progress in religion itself impossible.
Notwithstanding, he has rendered valuable service to theology in this definition of religion by insisting on the worth of the emotions, so much disregarded by the theologians of the day. For it is certain that there has never been a far-reaching revival of faith apart from deep emotional experience.
More than this, Schleiermacher has himself supplied the corrective of his own defective view in his declaration that Christianity, the highest religion, is teleological in character. Religion is to be defined from the point of view of the end that it seeks. This is to deny that religion is essentially feeling, for the latter sort of religion would be aesthetic in character and not teleological.
(2) RELIGION, KNOWLEDGE, AND REVELATION
Any theory of religion that finds it in a simple psychological experience will meet with difficulty when it tries to relate this experience to other fundamental activities of our nature. It is incumbent on the theologian to show that his view of religion issues in a view of the world and in a morality that satisfy the claims of our intelligence and our conscience. The first of these is our present concern. If religion does not bring us into a knowledge of reality not otherwise attainable its professions remain unvindicated.
The great question is whether in the religious experience we come to know that God exists. If that experience be simply feeling, it can surely lead us nowhere beyond itself. But Schleiermacher affirms that in the feeling of absolute dependence God is immediately given to the religious man. This feeling being original and fundamental to human nature, religion is freed from a dependence on a knowledge of God obtained beforehand by purely intellectual processes and from seeking its justification in the acceptance of a God whose existence is a postulate of the practical reason. He is not to be understood as declaring that the speculations that arrive at a predication of God's existence are useless or invalid, but that the knowledge so obtained is not religious knowledge and that it can constitute no part of dogmatics. We do not proceed from a knowledge of God to a religious experience, nor do we reason from the religious experience to the knowledge of God, for the religious experience and the God-consciousness are one and the same. It is not to be assumed that the God given in religious feeling is identical with the God whose existence is predicated as the outcome of speculative processes. That remains a problem to be solved. Thus far his position is sound.
When Schleiermacher goes on to say that we are aware of God as the Whence (Cause) of our religious self-consciousness, it is difficult to see in what respect this statement differs from the affirmation that the being of God is for us an inference from the experience of dependence. If this be so it is not clear why an inference from the other forms of our experience may not be equally valuable for our needs. If religion is independent of science it must surely be unprogressive, for there is no impulse to knowledge in an unqualified feeling. If, however, the religious experience be more comprehensively stated and is made to embrace the moral and the intellectual, the defect indicated may be overcome and the statement may still hold good that it is in the religious experience that we are truly aware of God.
If this be not granted, then we are shut up to one of two alternatives. Either we have only the experience of a unique feeling or at least an idea which we objectify and project into a realm beyond all phenomenal existence, so that God becomes only a name for a certain reflection of our consciousness; or else for our knowledge of the existence of God we are ultimately dependent on the information which a competent authority communicates to us.
With regard to the second of these, even if it be true that we first came to believe in the existence of God through the affirmation of some trusted human friend and to that extent we obtained a knowledge of God's existence as a supposed fact in the same manner in which many other facts are made known to us, still the competency of any person or body of persons to witness to the existence of God as an objective fact cannot be admitted. Mere "information" can only avail to place his existence among the complex of observable facts, but a God whose existence can be so described is no God. The statement, "There is a God," can have meaning to anyone only on the condition that it appeals to some want of his nature and makes him aware of himself in relation to his higher destiny.
Turn to the other alternative. According to Schleiermacher's account, the predication of the existence of God may be nothing more than a psycho logical function. This is to leave us without any adequate explanation of the invincible tendency of the human mind to attach universal validity to its idea of the existence of God and at the same time to attach to it infinite worth. The difficulty arises out of his defective view of the religious consciousness. It does remain true that it is in the religious experience God is given. We become aware of him then. The existence of God is a dogma of religious faith.
God is an object of religious knowledge; not that herein we have a positive addition to the sum of our knowledge, any more than in the affirmation of a moral judgment we introduce the knowledge of an additional collection of facts. Moral reality is given in and with moral experience. The certainty that we have moral knowledge is found in the moral experience. Just so is it with religious knowledge. It springs out of religious experience and is implicated in it. That there is a specifically religious experience Schleiermacher abundantly established.
The question is, Wherein does this religious knowledge consist? I apprehend that it is unnecessary to assert that knowledge about the objects of sense-perception, whether one's own or another's, cannot be called religious knowledge. The knowledge of events recorded in the Scriptures, the knowledge of ante-mundane or post-mundane facts, the knowledge of facts which angels or inspired persons are supposed to communicate to us, the knowledge of the state of departed spirits which the Society for Psychical Research may announce--none of these things, vary as they may from the absolutely sure and sublime to the absolutely ridiculous, can be designated as religious knowledge for us unless they have their source in a religious experience. We may be made neither more nor less religious by getting this information. Neither is knowledge of a moral law and its operations in itself religious knowledge. Thus far Schleiermacher's contention must be granted.
But in his description of the nature of religion he misses the essential point. The religious experience is governed by the consciousness of personality. In it the man conies to true self-consciousness. He knows in it his own worth because in it he comes to know another personality in whom he finds the fulfilment of his longings and the end of his being. It is this recognition of and self-commitment to a personality in whom the desires of his soul find satisfaction that constitute his religion. Some of its forms are very crude but it is universal. In many people it may appear first in absolute trust and devotion to a father or mother, or it may reach its climax in faith in Christ, but everywhere it consists in a personal--thinking, willing, feeling--relation to a dominant personality.
In this religious experience there is religious knowledge. It is the knowledge of personality. In religion I become aware that there is a personality to whom I may yield myself absolutely, to whom, accordingly, I owe everything. This personality we call God. The relations in which I find myself with him are most fitly described in the terms of human, personal relation ship. From this point onward we enter upon the task of reinterpreting the world of sensibility and the world of moral conduct in terms of this personality. This is to give a religious interpretation of the world. In the knowledge of God there is given, therefore, a knowledge of the world; not that new facts are added, but all facts are made new. In the capacity of religious experience to furnish this new interpretation of the world the claim that we know God finds its final vindication.
It is plain that Schleiermacher's view of religion in relation to knowledge involves a new construction of the idea of revelation. Kaftan (Dogmatik, §4) complains, and rightly, of the obscure place he allows it. From his apprehension of religion as subjective condition rather than objective truth this is to be expected. At the same time here also he has offered suggestions that go far beyond his own views. One of these is that, for the Christian, revelation is not to be considered apart from the person of Christ. An other is that it inheres in his personality. A third is that it affects us not merely as knowing subjects but practically, that is, it is inseparable from the experience of salvation. This means, substantially, that revelation is religious in its nature, not merely that it concerns religious matters, but it is not to be posited in any case where the religious consciousness is not an element in the communication of that which is revealed. Revelation can occur to any man only in so far forth as he is religious. Revelation is saving. To say that we have a revelation from God is to say that we have come into a consciousness of blessedness in relation to him.
This seems to carry with it the acceptance of Schleiermacher's contention that revelation is to be posited of a personality and the impression he makes on our minds. For the Christian, therefore, Christ is revelation, not merely a revealer. What he said and did constitute revelation to us only in that his deeds and words are the manifestation to us of a personality whose advent into the sphere of our activity effects a change in our relations with God. If all our relations Godward find their determination in him, then he is the whole of revelation to us. That which is said about him is revelation in a secondary sense, No statement of objective fact can itself be revelation, for revelation is never mere information.
The bearing of this conception of revelation on the import of the predictive clement of the Scriptures is obvious. The references in the New Testament, for example, to the things to come appear less in the character of descriptions of events and conditions yet future, than as utterances of the assurance of faith. That is, our future relations to God and the course of affairs cannot be in opposition to our present state of blessedness. On such an interpretation a discovery that an apostolic writer was mistaken in regard to actual matters of fact in the present or the future would give no shock to faith. It seems even to imply that inspired men have no knowledge of the future in the same sense in which we have a knowledge of any fact. This is the view that is brought out in Schleiermacher's Prophetical Articles. All eschatological representations become symbols of a spiritual hope, not forestatements of events. Their value consists not in any positive knowledge they convey but in the inspiration they give to faith and hope. For the times when Schleiermacher wrote this was a revolutionary interpretation of prophecy, and even in our own day it makes progress slowly, but it underlies the whole of the new movement in biblical interpretation.
At the same time it must be maintained that there is a knowledge of the future given to faith. For the believer the gospel of Christ brings a guarantee of the ultimate character of future events--they can bring him nothing but good. A forecast of the future issues out of faith. It is impossible for the Christian to believe that he will be abandoned by God, The future cannot bring his Blessed relation to God to an end. The Christian knowledge of the future is a faith-knowledge. It is knowledge of a higher order than that which sense-perception or a philosophy of being can produce. It is a knowledge of our eternal relations with God without which all other knowledge evaporates in phantasy. Without this knowledge all thought of the future is bound to end in despair. It is the only knowledge that enables us to say that for men there is any future whatsoever. This is what gives a deep solemnity to the forecast of the future found in the New Testament. That forecast is based on the confidence that "whether we live or die we are the Lord's." Had we nothing more than this we might well rest content.
(3) CHRISTIANITY, CHRIST, JESUS
The order in which the above words occur is indicative of the method of Schleiermacher's approach to the theological treatment of history. The merit of having been the first of modern theologians to frame a definition of Christianity in which the name of its Founder appears central is subject to qualification. The governing principle of his theological construction does not readily make room for the activity of a historical personage as a factor in religion. His whole system is rooted in a conception of religion rather than in an apprehension of personality. In keeping with this viewpoint he proceeds from a conception of the nature of Christianity to such a representation of the person of Christ as shall be in harmony with it. Consequently one of his chief problems is how to relate Christ to Christianity. The difficulty of the problem increases in ratio with the growth of the historical spirit and our progress in the knowledge of the actual events of Jesus life. The modern aptitude for historical study had been so far aroused in his time that he felt the seriousness of the problem and tried to point the direction of its solution. In an examination of his speculations on the subject we are to keep in mind that, consistently with his mystical habit of mind and his relative depreciation of personality, Christ (i.e., Jesus) could scarcely be to him a basis of theology but rather a problem for theology. If some of his statements may be taken to represent an opposite view they are in consistent with his more fundamental doctrine or they must be interpreted in the light of the latter. It is significant that he says it is open to the theologian to choose without disparagement either one of two courses: either to proceed from a doctrine of the person of Christ to a doctrine of his work or from a doctrine of his work to a doctrine of his person.
Schleiermacher's representation of the manner in which Christ relates himself to the Christian is two fold. At one time he says that everything in Christianity is to be referred to the historical fact of Christ's advent into the sphere of our activity and the original impression his person made. That impression, he says, is retained in the Christian communion and perpetuated in the world through being communicated by this communion to those persons who come within it.
His other statement on the subject is to the effect that Jesus possessed a unique God-consciousness and that his God-consciousness, being communicated to believers, becomes redemption to them. The former view is connected with the idea that faith is a personal act directed toward a personal object. The latter view is more consistent with the idea that Christ is simply the first in an unbroken succession. In the one case Jesus seems to hold the God-relation to believers; in the other case he seems to stand in an archetypal relation to them. In the one case Christianity is an attitude toward Christ; in the other Christ is Christianity.
Again, it is noteworthy that our theologian continually uses the name Christ instead of the name Jesus. This is not accidental. It indicates the point of view from which he construes the extant materials relating to the historical career of Jesus. It is well known also that he makes the Gospel of John rather than the Synoptics the main scriptural source of his doctrine of the person of Christ. This preference for John's Gospel is similarly significant of his method of determining what elements of the gospels are of value for the dogmatician. The narratives are evaluated on the basis of a standard derived from another source. Only those portions are esteemed to have interest for the dogmatician which serve to set forth the character of Jesus as Redeemer. He goes even farther and decides on the same basis what sort of affirmations may be made concerning his mental and physical life: for example, that his physical, mental, and moral growth must have been normal. He makes the perpetuation of Christ's own self-presentation in the consciousness of the historical Christian communion the ground for the affirmation of a historical personal life corresponds to it, for otherwise, he says, this consciousness could never have arisen.
In keeping with this method of construing history he dismisses the accounts of the resurrection on the ground that faith in Christ is independent of them. Hereby he exposes himself to the charge which Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu Wrede, (1-66) against him: "Schleiermacher did not seek the Jesus of history but the Jesus Christ of his Glaubenslehre, that is, the historic personality who is fitted to the self-consciousness of the Redeemer which he presents. The empirical reality simply does not exist for him. . . . . Historical questions relating to the life of Jesus are for him only momenta in his dialectic."
The point is well taken, though overstated. It finds illustration in his classification of the heresies relating to the person of Christ. They are described, not according to their use of material alien to the character of Jesus as it is depicted in the narratives of the evangelists or according to their neglect of essential facts in his career, but according to the manner in which they annul the redemption as Schleiermacher conceives it. That is to say, his conception of Christianity determines his doctrine of the person of the Christ and this again becomes the criterion of the worth and, to some extent, of the trustworthiness of the New Testament accounts of Jesus. But in this respect Schleiermacher was not a "sinner above all the other Galileans." Both Catholic and Protestant theologians have been led to substitute a metaphysical concept, a hypothetical personage, for a historical personality. Not until the Life-of-Jesus movement began in modern times was the loss realized. Hegelianism with its Christ was just another case of the substitution of an abstract idea for a concrete person. Transcendental philosophy gave us an intellectual concept christened with the Redeemer's name, but left us to discover that in place of Jesus we had only an abstraction, stone instead of bread.
The criticism that Schleiermacher failed to avoid the a priori method of construing the personality of Jesus is to be modified, however, by reference to the emphasis he placed on the religious experience as a source of knowledge. He said that the Christian consciousness is a continuation of the God-consciousness of Jesus. This should lead to an examination of the self-consciousness of Jesus, but Schleiermacher failed here to follow his own clue and fell back on the dogmatical reconstruction of the person of Christ.
The error is a serious one from the point of view of history as well as religion. Our conception of Christ and of the salvation he brought must ever submit to the test of historical research if either he or his salvation is to be a factor in the lives of men. To express the same idea, in axiomatic form, the Christ of theology must agree with the Jesus of the gospels. Nay more, that conception of salvation which is truly Christian, if Jesus of Nazareth is the founder of Christianity, must always represent such a salvation as could arise out of the deeds and words, the personal character, of Jesus. The inner certainty of a moral renewal coming to us in connection with our objective examination of the historic facts is an indispensable factor in our estimate of him, but it stands in the second rank. Otherwise we should never be. certain that the being we call our Christ is the same with Jesus of Nazareth, and we might have to seek the historical origin of our religion in another direction.
(4) PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLICISM
Schleiermacher's distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism has become famous: "Protestantism makes the relation of the individual to the church dependent on his relation to Christ; Catholicism makes the relation of the individual to Christ dependent on his relation to the church." It has been severely criticized by Ritschl. He says:
This formula, however, is inconsistent with the very principle with which Schleiermacher enters upon the doctrine of redemption, namely, that the consciousness of redemption through Christ is referred to the mediation of his religious fellowship. It was only because Schleiermacher was unable to develop this idea that he lapsed into the opposite formula in his Glaubenslehre. This formula, however, is false. For even the evangelical church's right relation to Christ is both historically and logically conditioned by the fellowship of believers; historically, because a man always finds the community already existing when he arrives at faith, nor does he attain this end without the action of the community upon him; logically, because no action of Christ upon men can be conceived except in accordance with the standard of Christ's antecedent purpose to found a community. This position, however, is distinguished from the Catholic view by the fact that it pays no attention to a legal organization of the community of believers. . . . . Schleiermacher's formula, moreover, is merely the reflection of the pietistic disintegration of the idea of the church.
[15]
On the question of Schleiermacher's consistency Ritschl is undoubtedly in the right. The basis of Schleiermacher's theology is non-churchly. So also is every system of thought which regards the religious experience as the expression of immediate relationship with God, or, transferring it to the Christian realm, with Christ. Now if there is any single force whose creative influence in the Reformation is more marked than others it is the spirit of individualism. It is true that this principle was imperfectly grasped and only partially recognized by the Protestant thinkers who erected the Protestant church systems and the Protestant creeds. The full admission of its claims would have clothed the specter of Separatism (a sort of nightmare to Ritschl himself) with flesh and blood and apparently have allowed free play to the combination of revolutionary forces known as "Anabaptism." The spirit of religious freedom consequently was confined within very narrow limits, and whenever it be came too self-assertive it was crushed. But individualism revived in the eighteenth century, and now at length it has won on all sides a recognition of its surpassing moral vigor, evangelistic zeal, and social firmness. The future seems to be its own.
Though Schleiermacher belonged to this modern movement his theological position was compromised by the necessity he felt of avoiding a breach in church relations. The attempt he made to mediate between individualism and churchism is in some respects admirable. But it forced him to use the word church in a double sense, the religious sense and the corporate sense. The most signal instance of this is seen in his treatment of the doctrine of baptism, where he views the baptismal act as the exercise of the church's will to receive the baptized into that communion from which all the operations which affect the new birth issue, so that the act is to be considered as in some sense the communication of the Holy Spirit. Baptism becomes the final act in the series in which the church expresses its will to extend itself, which it does by receiving new members. That is to say, the act of baptism becomes efficacious, not because of the will of the recipient, but by virtue of the will of the church which to all intents and purposes is to be regarded as identical with the will of Christ. Plainly the term church can refer here only to the corporate organization whose officials administer the "sacrament."
This position is substantially the same as the Roman Catholic. When Ritschl tries to clear away the non-churchly features of Schleiermacher's theology at this point he only succeeds in making it more Roman Catholic in tone. [16]
So far then as concerns the issue between these two theologians we must takes sides with Schleiermacher. The two mutually contradictory attitudes represent the two inconsistent momenta in Luther's movement, the churchly and the evangelical.
Schleiermacher's statement is nevertheless open to serious objection. In the first place, his method of arriving at the distinction is defective, namely, by ascertaining the principal grounds urged by each for rejecting the other's view. The basis of attack in controversies is sure to reflect the prevailing ideas of the time, but after all it may indicate a mere side-position, because the parties to the strife may have failed to apprehend the full significance of what is attacked or defended. A better method of reaching the bottom principles of the two movements would be to trace historically the process of their differentiation from a common beginning.
In the next place, the form of Schleiermacher's statement is open to objection because in saying that, for the Protestant, the relation of the man to the church is dependent on his relation to Christ the church is apparently treated as the end to which Christ is the means. It is difficult here again to tell what he means by the church, whether the spiritual fellowship of the saved or the ecclesiastical organization. .If it be the latter, then the statement is not true to the practice of those Protestant churches that admit to member ship many who are: confessedly without conscious relation to Christ. If by church he means the spiritual fellowship of the saved, his statement is substantially true, but it is still exposed to the criticism that it makes this fellowship of a higher character than the relation to Christ which is a means to it. These two relations ought to be regarded as one in principle.
The trouble with this whole attempt is that it introduces into dogmatics an artificial factor. The starting-point of theological activity is not the consciousness of an ecclesiastical body but the consciousness of the individual. The fact is that the great doctrinal systems have sprung from this source and have afterward been adopted by some church as an approximate expression of common convictions. Otherwise theological freedom would be crushed at the beginning. The. unsuccessful efforts of Schleiermacher to make out an inner connection between his views and the creeds show how he was hampered by this artificial rule. He, as well as Ritschl, was afraid of Separatism.
His opposition to the idea that each man holds a personal relation to Christ was reinforced by his philosophy: the universe is a unity; the creative will of God had reference to the world, not to individuals; the redemption has to be interpreted as the purification of human nature universally, not as individual purification. According to this we may well ask, How can there be any recognition of the individual whatever? Can he be anything more than a temporary eddy in the ceaseless stream of personal life? The whole work of redemption becomes the transmutation of the universal sin-life into a new life-whole. It seems then that it is not the man who is lost or saved but human nature, and ultimately salvation becomes a world-process.
Naturally enough, when Schleiermacher tries to justify the Protestant practice of infant baptism he falls back into the realism of the Catholics: the children are within the church and stand in an ordered relation to the operation of divine grace; the church extends salvation to the individual by propagating its religious consciousness in him, by extending its fellowship to him. The radical defect in Schleiermacher's theology is found in his essentially erroneous views of human personality.
We are not precluded hereby from a recognition of the value of his contention that the religious life is a community life. It is true that there is a necessary connection between faith and the communion of the faith. A church, as an association of believers, is the organism in which faith seeks its full expression, The isolated believer cannot rise to the full assurance of the objective truth of his faith, or propagate it, or realize its ethical character, without the community,
But while the believer and the community of faith are mutually involved, the primacy belongs to the former. Faith is an attitude Godward of the personal, individual consciousness. It is an act in which the man, in response to the self-revelation of God, devoted himself to the end of his being. The opposite view would render true human progress impossible. It would make each man, so far forth as he is religious, merely a product of the community life. Personal initiative, the prime factor in all great revivals of religion, would fall away. For in all ages the impulse to religious progress lies in a new consciousness of personal Nation with God. Thus the man is truly greater than the church. Roman Catholicism must yield to the spirit of the true Protestantism.
CONCLUSION
By the application of his powerful dialectic to the varied spiritual material at his command Schleiermacher succeeded in producing a system which for religious warmth and inspiration has never been surpassed in the history of theology. But this system is superior to the fundamental conception of religion that he placed at its base. For the feeling of absolute dependence comes short of a constructive principle of theology and has no meaning apart from the theory of the world and of man from which it originates. Some of his followers have endeavored to discard the aid of philosophy and metaphysics in the unfolding of a doctrinal system, with no greater success than he.
Notwithstanding, it remains the imperishable honor of Schleiermacher that he grasped the whole problem of theology in a new way and compelled theologians of all schools to follow him. He vindicated for the religious life the claim to utter supremacy in any theory of the relations of God, man, and the world, lie has gradually forced modern theology to attempt the radical reconsideration of every traditional doctrine. The truth is that he has revived and enforced the standpoint of many of the Anabaptists of the Reformation period and prepared the way for the rejection of the mediaeval scholasticism and the ancient Catholicism which the Reformers dared not abandon. Moreover, his whole treatment of the problems of theology is so rich in suggestion that every theologian of the present day is his debtor and many of his most stimulating ideas are still awaiting development. __________________________________________________________________
[15] Justification and Reconciliation, 549 (2d ed., English transl.).
[16] Ritschl's views on the subject are strongly brought out in his Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, par. 89. __________________________________________________________________
WORKS OF REFERENCE
Among the works which may be consulted in a study of Schleiermacher and his place in Protestant theology are the following:
I. HIS OWN PUBLISHED WRITINGS
Der christliche Glaube. 4 vols. Gotha, 1889.
Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums. Halle: Otto Hendel. (A translation, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, including Lücke's Reminiscences, by W. Farrer, was published in Edinburgh, 1850.)
Monologen. Halle: Otto Hendel.
Platons Werke, 1804, 1817, 1828.
Gundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre, Berlin, 1803.
Discourses on Religion. Transl. by John Oman. London, 1893.
Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher. Ed. W. Robert son Nicoll.
Sämmtliche Werke. Berlin, 1840.
II. STUDIES OF SCHLEIERMACHER
Schleiermachers Briefwechsel mit Gass. Berlin, 1852.
The Life and Letters of Schleiermacher. Translated by Miss Rowan.
Erinnerungen von Schleiermacher. Lücke.
Schleiermachers und C. S. von Brinkmans Gang durch die Brudergemeine. Leipzig, 1905.
Schleiermachers Theologie mit ihren philosophischen Grundlagen. By W. Bender. Nordlingen, 1878.
Schleiermachers Reden über Religion. By A. Ritschl. Bonn, 1874.
Die Entwicklung des Religionsbegriffs bei Schleiermacher. By E. Huber. Leipzig, 1901.
Schleiermachers "Glaubenslehre" in ihrer Bedeutung für Vergangenheit und Zukunft. By C. Clemen. Giessen, 1905.
Die Grundlagen der Christologie Schleiermachers. By H. Bleek. Freiburg, 1898.
Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl. D. F. Kattenbusch. Giessen.
Schleiermachers Vermächtnis an unsere Zeit. Kalthoff. Leipzig.
Christentum und Wissenschaft in Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre. By H. Scholz. Berlin, 1909.
La philosophie religieuse de Schleiermacher. By Edmond Cramaussel. Paris, 1909.
Numerous small pamphlets.
III. FOR THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT DURING THE PERIOD UNDER SURVEY
History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion. By Pünjer; transl. by Hastie. Edinburgh, 1887.
History of Protestant Theology in Germany. By I. A. Dorner; transl. by Robson and Taylor. Edinburgh, 1871.
History of German Theology in the Nineteenth Century. By Lichtenberger; transl. by Hastie. Edinburgh, 1889.
The Development of Theology. By O. Pfieiderer; transl. by Smith. New York, 1893.
Das Bild des Christentums bei den grossen deutschen Idealisten. By Lülman. Berlin, 1901.
Critical History of Free Thought in Relation to Religion. By A. S. Farrar, New York, 1863.
Leland's View of the Deistical Writers, London, 1837.
Religious Thought in England. By J. Hunt, London, 1870 ff.
Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century. By J. Hunt. 1896.
History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. By Sir L. Stephen. New York, 1902.
Rational Theology and Christian Thought in England in the Seventeenth Century. By J. Tulloch. Edinburgh, 1872.
Manual of Religious Thought in Britain in the Nineteenth Century. By J. Tulloch. New York, 1885.
The Problem of Faith and Freedom. By John Oman. London, 1906.
Von Reimarus zu Wrede. By A. Schweitzer. Tübingen, 1906.
Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus. By O. Ritschl. Vol. I. Leipzig, 1908. __________________________________________________________________
INDEX
INDEX
Agnosticism, 94
Albertini, 11, 17, 39.
Anabaptists, 70, 72, 73 ff., 98, 102, 119, 328, 334.
Analogy (Butler's), 85 ff.
Angels, 161 ff.
Antinomianism, 76.
Apologetics, 134 ff., 304 f.
Apostles' Creed (mentioned), 70.
Aristotle, 25.
Arminianism, 76, 89.
Arianism, 290.
Arndt, John, 59, 99.
Asceticism, 195.
Athanasian Creed, 290.
Atonement, 19, 20, 70, 71, 78, 89.
Aufklärung. See Illuminism.
Augustine, 25, 113.
Authority (in religion), 26, 74 f., 95 f., 225, 253 f., 308 f.
Bacon, 79.
Baptism, 72 f., 73, 230, 253, 258 f., 264, 329; infant, 73, 230 f., 260 f., 333.
Baptists, 73, 89, 99.
Barby, 10, 15, 16, 23.
Bengel, 100.
Berkeley, Bishop, 83, 87.
Bible, 71, 86, 150, 157, 196, 252 ff., 257 ff., 307.
Boehler, 102.
Bunyan, 99.
Butler, 83 ff.
Calvin, 25, 68, 113, 231, 312.
Calvinism, 4, 76, 86.
Canon of Scripture, 255 ff.
Categorical Imperative, 95.
Catholicism, 70 f., 146 f., 327 f., 333.
Chalcedonian Formula (mentioned), 70.
Chiliasm, 227.
Christ: humiliation of, 226; incarnation of, 84, 137 f., 233, 248; person of, 11, 26, 70, 132 f , 136 ff., 145, 152 ff., 174, 176, 180, 186, 199, 228, 322 ff.; resurrection and ascension, 212, 226; sufferings of, 224; supernatural origin of, 198 f., 206 ff., 216; work of, 134 f., 200 ff., 213 ff., 220, 224.
Christianity, definition of, 132, 133 ff., 305, 322 f.
Church: definition of, 117, 237 ff., 329 ff.; Calvinist or Reformed, 4, 26, 42, 57 f., 76, 148; invisible and visible, 132, 133 ff., 305, 322 f.; Lutheran, 57 f., 76, 148; Roman, see Catholicism; origin of, 239 ff.; perfecting of, 273 ff., 283; permanent features of, 251 ff.
Churches: 270 f.; free, 101, 299.
Church and state, 57 ff., 76, 225 f.
Church and world, 249 ff., 269 ff.
Communion: religious, 125, 133, 173 f.; Christian, 134, 139 f., 153, 195, 197, 201 f., 215, 224, 228 f. See also Church.
Conversion, 229 ff.
Cosmology, 157, 163.
Covenant theology, 184.
Creation, 156 f., 199, 210, 214 f., 218, 233.
Creeds and confessions, 69 f., 75, 149 ff., 156, 206 f., 289.
Critique of Pure Reason, 93 f., 105.
Critique of the Practical Reason, 94 f.
Cromwell, Oliver, 99.
Decrees of God, 233.
Deism, 81 ff., 93, 105.
Democracy, 46, 57.
Dependence, absolute, 121, 124, 163.
Descartes, 25, 90.
Devil, 161 ff., 183.
Diderot, 83.
Discourses on Religion, Pref. viii., 32, 37 f., 38, 39, 106 ff., 305 f.
Dissenters, 76, 99.
Docetism, 146, 209.
Dogma, Christian, 149 ff., 151.
Dogmatics: materials of, 149 ff.; meaning of, 116 ff., 143, 306; origin of, 141 ff.; method of, 144 ff., 151 f., 157, 164, 176.
Dort, Synod of (mentioned), 76, 89.
Ebionitism, 146.
Election, doctrine of, 240 ff., 244.
Encyclopaedists, 13.
Ernesti, 8, 92.
Ethics, 119 ff.
Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, 97 ff.
Evil: kinds of, 87, 161, natural, 187; source of, 161, 227; relation to sin, 87, 191.
Evolution, 123 f.
Faith, 195, 196, 225. 229, 238, 301.
Fetichism, 127, 329.
Forgiveness, 232 f.
Foreknowledge, divine, 343 f.
Foreordination. See election.
Formula of Concord, 76.
Freedom, 121, 153 f., 190.
Future punishment, 12, 19, 277, 282 f.
Future state, 49 f., 241 f., 244, 275 ff., 281 ff., 321 f.; intermediate, 279.
Gnadenfrei, 8, 32.
God: meaning of, 122 f., 206 ff., 313, 318 f.; attributes, 90, 163 ff., 166 ff., 191 ff., 201, 283 ff.; proofs of existence, 90, 155, 315 ff.
God-consciousness, 122, 130, 135, 153, 174, 176, 186, 201 f.
Grace, 176; 189 f., 194 ff., 200 ff., 229 f., 284.
Grotius, Hugo, 89.
Guilt, 182 f., 227, 232; of the race, 187 f. See also Sin.
Halle, 4, 11, 19. 24 f., 29, 47, 100.
Harms, Pastor, 106, 110.
Hegelianism, 298, 326.
Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 81.
Herder, 16, 35, 93.
Heresy, 145 ff., 325.
Holiness, 192.
Holy Spirit, 138, 245 ff., 255 f., 257, 267, 273.
Human depravity, 13, 178 ff., 183. See also Sin.
Hume, David, 13, 87 ff., 95 ff., 303, 304.
Illuminism, 13, 91, 106.
Immortality, 95. See also Future State.
Incarnation. See Person of Christ.
Infallibility, 272 f.
Judaism, 82, 129, 131 f., 136, 188.
Judgment, final, 280 f.
Justification, 71, 229, 232 ff.
Kant, 16, 25, 28, 37, 93 ff., 312.
Keys, office of, 253, 265 f.
Kingdom of God, 195, 219 f., 224 f., 235 f., 239 f., 267, 268, 284, 286, 288.
Knox, John, 68.
Kurze Darstellung, etc., 51, 110, 299.
Lambeth Articles (mentioned), 76.
Lavater, 16.
Leibnitz, 9:, 113, 313.
Lessing, 16, 25, 92, 113, 303.
Locke, 25, 79, 80 f.
Logos, doctrine of, 290.
Luther, 25, 68, 98, 113.
Lutheranism, 15, 76. See also Church.
Manichaeism, 145, 178, 183, 189, 190.
Melanchthon, 25, 68, 307.
Methodism, 101 ff.
Ministry, Christian, 253, 256 ff.
Miracles, 82, 84, 94, 160, 220.
Mohammedanism, 129, 131 f., 136.
Monologues, 109 f.
Monotheism, 128 ff., 136 f.
Moravian Brethren, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19,43.
Moravianism, 15, 23, 101 ff., 312.
Mysticism, 14, 96.
Neander, 305 f .
New Birth. See Regeneration.
Nicene Symbol (mentioned), 70.
Niesky, 9, 14, 15 f.
Nonconformists, 76.
Obduracy, 190.
Origen, 25, 292.
Pantheism, 108, 129 f.
Pelagianism, 145, 178, 189, 190.
Perfection: of Christ, 196 ff.; of man, 172 ff., 177, 179, 187, 205; of the world, 170 ff., 187.
Philosophy of religion, I26 ff., 302 ff.
Pietism, 15, 99 ff.
Piety. See Religion.
Plato, 8, 25, 32, 42, 113.
Polytheism, 128.
Prayer, 160, 253, 266 ff.
Preservation, 156 ff., 109.
Priesthood, 125.
Primitive man, 174, 183, 205.
Protestantism, 53, 67 ff., 75, 77 ff., 146 ff., 306, 327 f., 333.
Providence, 26, 285.
Punishment, 227, 232. See also Future Punishment.
Puritanism, 99.
Quakers, 73, 99.
Race-consciousness, 173, 180 f., 182 f., 201, 226, 246.
Rationalism, 4, 37, 38 ff., 73, 89, 93 f., 97, 146, 304.
Reason, 253 f.
Reconciliation, 216 ff.
Redeemer. See Christ.
Redemption, 134 f., 176, 190; consciousness of, 151; how wrought, 196 ff., 213 f.
Reden. See Discourses.
Regeneration, 160, 227 ff., 234, 259, 269 f.
Religion: definition of, 106 ff., 119 ff., 154 f., 172 f.; nature of, 320 ff.; kinds and stages of, 126 ff.; natural, 40, 82, 83 ff., 132 f.; positive, 132; revealed, 79, 83 ff., 132 f.; supernatural, 79, 81; true and false, 127.
Renaissance, 73.
Repentance, 229, 232.
Resurrection, the, 277, 279 f.
Revelation, 81 f., 86, 92, 96 f., 133 f., 201, 205, 314 ff., 319 ff.
Revival, evangelical, 97 f.
Righteousness, 193.
Ritschl, Albrecht, 298, 327 f.
Roman Catholicism, 95, 307, 327. See also Catholicism.
Romanticism, 38, 105, 312.
Sabellianism, 209.
Sack, 27, 33, 108.
Sanctification, 227 f., 233 ff., 280.
Skepticism, 13, 14, 16.
Schlegel, F. R., 36, 32 f.
Schwenkfeldt, Caspar, 73.
Scholasticism, 209.
Scriptures. See Bible.
Second Coming of Christ, 277 f.
Separatism, 43, 101, 195, 328, 331.
Sin: consciousness of, 175, 178 f., 184. 186, 187, 190, 235, 284; doctrine of, 177 ff.; hereditary, 181 f., 187, 210; actual, 184 f.; God's relation to, 188 ff., 198 f.; punishments of, 100, 193 f., 201, 2l6, 222.
Socinianism, 76, 78.
Spangenberg, 102.
Spener, 99 f.
Spinoza, 25, 90, 113, 312.
Spirit of Christ. See Holy Spirit.
Spirit of God. See Holy Spirit.
State churches, 99. See also Church and State.
Supernatural and natural, 231 f., 240, 248.
Supper, Lord's, 14 f., 65, 253, 261 ff.
Testament: Old, 137, 150, 2<4, 256; New, 151, 161, 251 f., 254 i.
Theology, natural, 79, 88, 96, 139, 165. See also Rationalism; Revelation.
Traducianism, 207, 209.
Trinity, 70, 84, 207, 209, 289 ff.
Voltaire, 13, 83.
Wesley, John, 98-102.
Wesley, Charles, 102.
Whitefield, 98.
Will, the, 179 ff.
Wolff, 25, 91.
Zinsendorf, 11, 20.
Zwingli, 68, __________________________________________________________________
Indexes __________________________________________________________________
Index of Scripture References
Jeremiah
[1]17:5-8 [2]18:7-10
Matthew
[3]24:30-34 [4]25:46 [5]28:19 [6]28:20
Mark
[7]9:44 [8]16:16
John
[9]1:51 [10]4:34 [11]5:17 [12]5:20 [13]5:21 [14]5:24
[15]5:25 [16]5:29 [17]6:57 [18]8:29 [19]10:30 [20]10:36
[21]16:7 [22]17:23 [23]20:22 [24]20:23
Acts
[25]1:4 [26]1:5 [27]2:4 [28]2:38 [29]10:47 [30]17:27-30 [31]19:2
Romans
[32]1:21 [33]5:12-21 [34]6:2 [35]6:6 [36]6:11 [37]8:9 [38]8:10
1 Corinthians
[39]12:4 [40]15:21-22 [41]15:25-26
2 Corinthians
[42]11:3 [43]13:6
Galatians
[44]2:20
Ephesians
[45]4:22 [46]4:24
Philippians
[47]2:6-9
Colossians
[48]3:10
1 Peter
[49]2:24 __________________________________________________________________
Index of Latin Words and Phrases
* Unitas Fratrum: [50]1
* credenda: [51]1
* locus: [52]1 [53]2 [54]3 [55]4
* membra : [56]1
* momenta: [57]1 [58]2 [59]3
* pari : [60]1
* persona grata: [61]1
* prius: [62]1
* pro licentia: [63]1
* quantum: [64]1
* reatus, corruptio naturae, vitium originis, morbus originis: [65]1
* reservatio mentalis: [66]1
* via eminentiae, negationis et causalitatis: [67]1
__________________________________________________________________
Index of German Words and Phrases
* Angelegenheiten: [68]1
* Aufklärung: [69]1 [70]2 [71]3 [72]4
* Frömmigkeit: [73]1
* Glaubenslehre: [74]1 [75]2 [76]3 [77]4 [78]5 [79]6 [80]7 [81]8
[82]9 [83]10 [84]11 [85]12
* Landwehr: [86]1
* Reden: [87]1 [88]2
* Wesen: [89]1
__________________________________________________________________
Index of Pages of the Print Edition
[90]i [91]ii [92]iii [93]iv [94]v [95]vi [96]vii [97]viii
[98]ix [99]x [100]xi [101]xii [102]1 [103]2 [104]3 [105]4
[106]5 [107]6 [108]7 [109]8 [110]9 [111]10 [112]11 [113]12
[114]13 [115]14 [116]16 [117]17 [118]18 [119]19 [120]20 [121]21
[122]22 [123]23 [124]24 [125]25 [126]26 [127]27 [128]28 [129]29
[130]30 [131]31 [132]32 [133]33 [134]34 [135]35 [136]36 [137]37
[138]38 [139]39 [140]40 [141]41 [142]42 [143]43 [144]44 [145]45
[146]46 [147]47 [148]48 [149]49 [150]50 [151]51 [152]52 [153]53
[154]54 [155]55 [156]56 [157]57 [158]58 [159]59 [160]60 [161]61
[162]62 [163]63 [164]64 [165]65 [166]66 [167]67 [168]68 [169]69
[170]70 [171]71 [172]72 [173]73 [174]74 [175]75 [176]76 [177]77
[178]78 [179]79 [180]80 [181]81 [182]82 [183]83 [184]84 [185]85
[186]86 [187]87 [188]88 [189]89 [190]90 [191]91 [192]92 [193]93
[194]94 [195]95 [196]96 [197]97 [198]98 [199]99 [200]100
[201]101 [202]102 [203]103 [204]104 [205]105 [206]106 [207]107
[208]108 [209]109 [210]110 [211]111 [212]112 [213]113 [214]114
[215]115 [216]116 [217]117 [218]118 [219]119 [220]120 [221]121
[222]122 [223]123 [224]124 [225]125 [226]126 [227]127 [228]128
[229]129 [230]130 [231]131 [232]132 [233]133 [234]134 [235]135
[236]136 [237]137 [238]138 [239]139 [240]140 [241]141 [242]142
[243]143 [244]144 [245]145 [246]146 [247]147 [248]148 [249]149
[250]150 [251]151 [252]152 [253]153 [254]154 [255]155 [256]156
[257]157 [258]158 [259]159 [260]160 [261]161 [262]162 [263]163
[264]164 [265]165 [266]166 [267]167 [268]168 [269]169 [270]170
[271]171 [272]172 [273]173 [274]174 [275]175 [276]176 [277]177
[278]178 [279]179 [280]180 [281]181 [282]182 [283]183 [284]184
[285]185 [286]l86 [287]187 [288]188 [289]189 [290]190 [291]191
[292]192 [293]193 [294]194 [295]195 [296]196 [297]197 [298]198
[299]199 [300]200 [301]201 [302]202 [303]203 [304]204 [305]205
[306]206 [307]207 [308]208 [309]209 [310]210 [311]211 [312]212
[313]213 [314]214 [315]215 [316]2i6 [317]217 [318]218 [319]219
[320]220 [321]221 [322]222 [323]223 [324]224 [325]225 [326]226
[327]227 [328]228 [329]229 [330]230 [331]231 [332]232 [333]233
[334]234 [335]235 [336]236 [337]237 [338]238 [339]239 [340]240
[341]241 [342]242 [343]243 [344]244 [345]245 [346]246 [347]247
[348]248 [349]249 [350]250 [351]251 [352]252 [353]253 [354]254
[355]255 [356]256 [357]257 [358]258 [359]259 [360]260 [361]261
[362]262 [363]263 [364]264 [365]265 [366]266 [367]267 [368]268
[369]269 [370]270 [371]271 [372]272 [373]273 [374]274 [375]275
[376]276 [377]277 [378]278 [379]279 [380]280 [381]281 [382]282
[383]283 [384]284 [385]285 [386]286 [387]287 [388]288 [389]289
[390]290 [391]291 [392]292 [393]293 [394]294 [395]295 [396]296
[397]297 [398]298 [399]299 [400]300 [401]301 [402]302 [403]303
[404]304 [405]305 [406]306 [407]307 [408]308 [409]309 [410]310
[411]311 [412]312 [413]313 [414]314 [415]315 [416]316 [417]317
[418]318 [419]319 [420]320 [421]321 [422]322 [423]323 [424]324
[425]325 [426]326 [427]327 [428]328 [429]329 [430]330 [431]331
[432]332 [433]333 [434]334 [435]335 [436]336 [437]337 [438]338
[439]339 [440]340 [441]341 [442]342 [443]343 [444]344 __________________________________________________________________
This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org, generated on demand from ThML source.
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