An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

by Edward Caldwell Moore

The religion of feeling, as advocated in the Reden, had left much on the ethical side to be desired. This defect the author sought to remedy in his Monologen, published in 1800. The programme of theological studies for the new University of Berlin, Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums, 1811, shows his theological system already in large part matured. His Der christliche Glaube, published in 1821, revised three years before his death in 1834, is his monumental work. His Ethik, his lectures upon many subjects, numerous volumes of sermons, all published after his death, witness his versatility. His sermons have the rare note which one finds in Robertson and Brooks.

All of the immediacy of religion, its independence of rational argument, of historical tradition or institutional forms, which was characteristic of Schleiermacher to his latest day, is felt in the Reden. By it he thrilled the hearts of men as they have rarely been thrilled. It is not forms and traditions which create religion. It is religion which creates these. They cannot exist without it. It may exist without them, though not so well or so effectively. Religion is the sense of God. That sense we have, though many call it by another name. It would be more true to say that that sense has us. It is inescapable. All who have it are the religious. Those who hold to dogmas, rites, institutions in such a way as to obscure and overlay this sense of God, those who hold those as substitute for that sense, are the nearest to being irreligious. Any form, the most outré, bizarre and unconventional, is good, so only that it helps a man to God. All forms are evil, the most accredited the most evil, if they come between a man and God. The pantheism of the thought of God in all of Schleiermacher's early work is undeniable. He never wholly put it aside. The personality of God seemed to him a limitation. Language is here only symbolical, a mere expression from an environment which we know, flung out into the depths of that we cannot see. If the language of personal relations helps men in living with their truth—well and good. It hinders also. For himself he felt that it hindered more than helped. His definition of religion as the feeling of dependence upon God, is cited as evidence of the effect upon him of his contention against the personalness of God. Religion is also, it is alleged, the sentiment of fellowship with God. Fellowship implies persons. But to no man was the fellowship with the soul of his own soul and of all the universe more real than was that fellowship to Schleiermacher. This was the more true in his maturer years, the years of the magnificent rounding out of his thought. God was to him indeed not 'a man in the next street.' What he says about the problem of the personalness of God is true. We see, perhaps, more clearly than did he that the debate is largely about words. Similarly, we may say that Schleiermacher's passing denial of the immortality of the soul was directed, in the first instance, against the crass, unsocial and immoral view which has disfigured much of the teaching of religion. His contention was directed toward that losing of oneself in God through ideals and service now, which in more modern phrase we call the entrance upon the immortal life here, the being in eternity now. For a soul so disposed, for a life thus inspired, death is but an episode. For himself he rejoices to declare it one to the issue of which he is indifferent. If he may thus live with God now, he cares little whether or not he shall live by and by.

In his Monologues Schleiermacher first sets forth his ethical thought. As it is religion that a man feels himself dependent upon God, so is it the beginning of morality that a man feels his dependence upon his fellows and their dependence on him. Slaves of their own time and circumstance, men live out their lives in superficiality and isolation. They are a prey to their own selfishness. They never come into those relations with their fellows in which the moral ideal can be realised. Man in his isolation from his fellows is nothing and accomplishes nothing. The interests of the whole humanity are his private interests. His own happiness and welfare are not possible to be secured save through his co-operation with others, his work and service for others. The happiness and welfare of others not merely react upon his own. They are in a large sense identical with his own. This oneness of a man with all men is the basis of morality, just as the oneness of man with God is the basis of religion. In both cases the oneness exists whether or not we know it. The contradictions and miseries into which immoral or unmoral conduct plunges us, are the witness of the fact that this inviolable unity of a man with humanity is operative, even if he ignores it. Often it is his ignoring of this relation which brings him through misery to consciousness of it. Man as moral being is but an individuation of humanity, just as, again, as religious being he is but an individuation of God. The goal of the moral life is the absorption of self, the elimination of self, which is at the same time the realisation of self, through the life and service for others. The goal of religion is the elimination of self, the swallowing up of self, in the service of God. In truth, the unity of man with man is at bottom only another form of his unity with God, and the service of humanity is the identical service of God. Other so-called services of God are a means to this, or else an illusion. This parallel of religion and morals is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza. There is something almost oriental in his mood at times. An occasional fragment of description of religion might pass as a better delineation of Buddhism than of Christianity. This universality of his mind is interesting. These elements have not been unattractive to some portions of his following. One wearied with the Philistinism of the modern popular urgency upon practicality turns to Schleiermacher, as indeed sometimes to Spinoza, and says, here is a man who at least knows what religion is. Yet nothing is further from the truth than to say that Schleiermacher had no sense for the meaning of religion in the outward life and present world.

In the Reden Schleiermacher had contended that religion is a condition of devout feeling, specifically the feeling of dependence upon God. This view dominates his treatment of Christianity. It gives him his point of departure. A Christian is possessed of the devout feeling of dependence upon God through Jesus Christ or, as again he phrases it, of dependence upon Christ. Christianity is a positive religion in the sense that it has direct relation to certain facts in the history of the race, most of all to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But it does not consist in any positive propositions whatsoever. These have arisen in the process of interpretation of the faith. The substance of the faith is the experience of renewal in Christ, of redemption through Christ. This inward experience is neither produced by pure thought nor dependent upon it. Like all other experience it is simply an object to be described and reckoned with. Orthodox dogmatists had held that the content of the Christian faith is a doctrine given in revelation. Schleiermacher held that it is a consciousness inspired primarily by the personality of Jesus. It must be connected with the other data and acta of our consciousness under the general laws of the operation of the mind. Against rationalism and much so-called liberal Christianity, Schleiermacher contended that Christianity is not a new set of propositions periodically brought up to date and proclaimed as if these alone were true. New propositions can have only the same relativity of truth which belonged to the old ones in their day. They may stand between men and religion as seriously as the others had done.

The condition of the heart, which is religion, the experience through Jesus which is Christianity, is primarily an individual matter. But it is not solely such. It is a common experience also. Schleiermacher recognises the common element in the Christian consciousness, the element which shows itself in the Christian experience of all ages, of different races and of countless numbers of men. By this recognition of the Christian Church in its deep and spiritual sense, Schleiermacher hopes to escape the vagaries and eccentricities, and again the narrowness and bigotries of pure individualism. No liberal theologian until Schleiermacher had had any similar sense of the meaning of the Christian Church, and of the privilege and duty of Christian thought to contribute to the welfare of that body of men believing in God and following Christ which is meant by the Church. This is in marked contrast with the individualism of Kant. Of course, Schleiermacher would never have recognised as the Church that part of humanity which is held together by adherence to particular dogmas, since, for him, Christianity is not dogma. Still less could he recognise as the Church that part of mankind which is held together by a common tradition of worship, or by a given theory of organisation, since these also are historical and incidental. He meant by the Church that part of humanity, in all places and at all times, which has been held together by the common possession of the Christian consciousness and the Christian experience. The outline of this experience, the content of this consciousness, can never be so defined as to make it legislatively operative. If it were so defined we should have dogma and not Christianity. Nevertheless, it may be practically potent. The degree in which a given man may justly identify his own consciousness and experience with that of the Christian world is problematical. In Schleiermacher's own case, the identification of some of his contentions as, for example, the thought that God is not personal with the great Christian consciousness of the past, is more than problematical. To this Schleiermacher would reply that if these contentions were true, they would become the possession of spiritual Christendom with the lapse of time. Advance always originated with one or a few. If, however, in the end, a given portion found no place in the consciousness of generation truly evidencing their Christian life, that position would be adjudged an idiosyncrasy, a negligible quantity. This view of Schleiermacher's as to the Church is suggestive. It is the undertone of a view which widely prevails in our own time. It is somewhat difficult of practical combination with the traditional marks of the churches, as these have been inherited even in Protestantism from the Catholic age.

In a very real sense Jesus occupied the central place in Schleiermacher's system. The centralness of Jesus Christ he himself was never weary of emphasising. It became in the next generation a favorite phrase of some who followed Schleiermacher's pure and bounteous spirit afar off. Too much of a mystic to assert that it is through Jesus alone that we know God, he yet accords to Jesus an absolutely unique place in revelation. It is through the character and personality of Jesus that the change in the character of man, which is redemption, is marshalled and sustained. Redemption is a man's being brought out of the condition in which all higher self consciousness was dimmed and enfeebled, into one in which this higher consciousness is vivid and strong and the power of self-determination toward the good has been restored. Salvation is thus moral and spiritual, present as well as future. It is possible in the future only because actual in the present. It is the reconstruction of a man's nature and life by the action of the spirit of God, conjointly with that of man's own free spirit.

It is intelligible in Schleiermacher's context that Jesus should be spoken of as the sole redeemer of men, their only hope, and that the Christian's dependence upon him should be described as absolute. As a matter of fact, however, the idea of dependence upon Christ alone has been often, indeed, one may say generally, associated with a conception of salvation widely different from that of Schleiermacher. It has been oftenest associated with the notion of something purely external, forensic, even magical. It is connected, even down to our own time, with reliance upon the blood of Christ, almost as if this were externally applied. It has postulated a propitiatory sacrifice, a vicarious atonement, a completed transaction, something which was laid up for all and waiting to be availed of by some. Now every external, forensic, magical notion of salvation, as something purchased for us, imputed to us, conferred upon us, would have been utterly impossible to Schleiermacher. It is within the soul of man that redemption takes place. Conferment from the side of God and Christ, or from God through Christ, can be nothing more, as also it can be nothing less, than the imparting of wisdom and grace and spiritual power from the personality of Jesus, which a man then freely takes up within himself and gives forth as from himself. The Christian consciousness contains, along with the sense of dependence upon Jesus, the sense of moral alliance and spiritual sympathy with him, of a free relation of the will of man to the will of God as revealed in Jesus. The will of man is set upon the reproduction within himself, so far as possible, of the consciousness, experience and character of Jesus.

The sin from which man is to be delivered is described by Schleiermacher thus: It is the dominance of the lower nature in us, of the sense-consciousness. It is the determination of our course of life by the senses. This preponderance of the senses over the consciousness of God is the secret of unhappiness, of the feeling of defeat and misery in men, of the need of salvation. One has to read Schleiermacher's phrase, 'the senses' here, as we read Paul's phrase, 'the flesh.' On the other hand, the preponderance of the consciousness of God, the willing obedience to it in every act of life, becomes to us the secret of strength and of blessedness in life. This is the special experience of the Christian. It is the effect of the impulse and influence of Christ. We receive this impulse in a manner wholly consistent with the laws of our psychological and moral being. We carry forward this impulse with varying fortunes and by free will. It comes to us, however, from without and from above, through one who was indeed true man, but who is also, in a manner not further explicable, to be identified with the moral ideal of humanity. This identification of Jesus with the moral ideal is complete and unquestioning with Schleiermacher. It is visible in the interchangeable use of the titles Jesus and Christ. Our saving consciousness of God could proceed from the person of Jesus only if that consciousness were actually present in Jesus in an absolute measure. Ideal and person in him perfectly coincide.

As typical and ideal man, according to Schleiermacher, Jesus was distinguished from all other founders of religions. These come before us as men chosen from the number of their fellows, receiving, quite as much for themselves as for others, that which they received from God. It is nowhere implied that Jesus himself was in need of redemption, but rather that he alone possessed from earliest years the fulness of redemptive power. He was distinguished from other men by his absolute moral perfection. This excluded not merely actual sin, but all possibility of sin and, accordingly, all real moral struggle. This perfection was characterised also by his freedom from error. He never originated an erroneous notion nor adopted one from others as a conviction of his own. In this respect his person was a moral miracle in the midst of the common life of our humanity, of an order to be explained only by a new spiritually creative act of God. On the other hand, Schleiermacher says squarely that the absence of the natural paternal participation in the origin of the physical life of Jesus, according to the account in the first and third Gospels, would add nothing to the moral miracle if it could be proved and detract nothing if it should be taken away. Singular is this ability on the part of Schleiermacher to believe in the moral miracle, not upon its own terms, of which we shall speak later, but upon terms upon which the outward and physical miracle, commonly so-called, had become, we need not say incredible, but unnecessary to Schleiermacher himself. Singular is this whole part of Schleiermacher's construction, with its lapse into abstraction of the familiar sort, of which, in general, the working of his mind had been so free. For surely what we here have is abstraction. It is an undissolved fragment of metaphysical theology. It is impossible of combination with the historical. It is wholly unnecessary for the religious view of salvation which Schleiermacher had distinctly taken. It is surprising how slow men have been to learn that the absolute cannot be historic nor the historic absolute.

Surely the claim that Jesus was free from error in intellectual conception is unnecessary, from the point of view of the saving influence upon character which Schleiermacher had asserted. It is in contradiction with the view of revelation to which Schleiermacher had already advanced. It is to be accounted for only from the point of view of the mistaken assumption that the divine, even in manifestation, must be perfect, in the sense of that which is static and not of that which is dynamic. The assertion is not sustained from the Gospel itself. It reduces many aspects of the life of Jesus to mere semblance. That also which is claimed in regard to the abstract impossibility of sin upon the part of Jesus is in hopeless contradiction with that which Schleiermacher had said as to the normal and actual development of Jesus, in moral as also in all other ways. Such development is impossible without struggle. Struggle is not real when failure is impossible. So far as we know, it is in struggle only that character is made. Even as to the actual commission of sin on Jesus' part, the assertion of the abstract necessity of his sinlessness, for the work of moral redemption, goes beyond anything which we know. The question of the sinlessness of Jesus is not an a priori question. To say that he was by conception free from sin is to beg the question. We thus form a conception and then read the Gospels to find evidence to sustain it. To say that he did, though tempted in all points like as we are, yet so conduct himself in the mystery of life as to remain unstained, is indeed to allege that he achieved that which, so far us we know, is without parallel in the history of the race. But it is to leave him true man, and so the moral redeemer of men who would be true. To say that, if he were true man, he must have sinned, is again to beg the question. Let us repeat that the question is one of evidence. To say that he was, though true man, so far as we have any evidence in fact, free from sin, is only to say that his humanity was uniquely penetrated by the spirit of God for the purposes of the life which he had to live. That heart-broken recollection of his own sin which one hears in The Scarlet Letter, giving power to the preacher who would reach men in their sins, has not the remotest parallel in any reminiscence of Jesus which we possess. There is every evidence of the purity of Jesus' consciousness. There is no evidence of the consciousness of sin. There is a passage in the Discourses, in which Schleiermacher himself declared that the identification of the fundamental idea of religion with the historical fact in which that religion had its rise, was a mistake. Surely it is exactly this mistake which Schleiermacher has here made.