Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian 9780567677082, 9780567677105, 9780567677099

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ESSENTIAL TRINITARIANISM

T&T Clark Explorations in Reformed Theology Paul T. Nimmo and Paul Dafydd Jones

ESSENTIAL TRINITARIANISM: SCHLEIERMACHER AS TRINITARIAN THEOLOGIAN

Shelli M. Poe

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10010 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com First published 2017 © Shelli M. Poe 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Shelli M. Poe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​0-​5676-​7708-​2 ePUB: 978-​0-​5676-​7710-​5 ePDF: 978-​0-​5676-​7709-​9 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

To my parents, Karissa Celeste (Gambrel) Poe and Bobby Gene Poe Jr., for their lifelong love and encouragement

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix x Part I REREADING SCHLEIERMACHER

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION a. Schleiermacher’s Critics b. Complexity in Trinitarian Theologies c. Chapter Overview d. A Final Word Chapter 2 SCHLEIERMACHER’S APPROACH a. An Eternal Covenant between Christian Faith and Academic Inquiry b. Antispeculative Doctrine c. Different Conceptual Structures in the Doctrine of God d. Anticipating Implications for Trinitarianism

3 4 16 23 27

29 30 39 45 48

Part II SCHLEIERMACHER AND THE TRINITY Chapter 3 REJECTING IMMANENT TRINITARIANISM a. Schleiermacher’s “Trinitarian Treatise” b. An Antispeculative Objection c. Conceptual Difficulties d. Sabellianism Reconsidered

53 56 62 69 75

Chapter 4 CONSTRUCTING ESSENTIAL TRINITARIANISM a. Three Distinctions-​in-​Relation b. Personhood and the Divine Life c. Toward Divine Personhood d. Conclusion

81 82 95 104 114

Contents

viii

Chapter 5 DEVELOPING ECONOMIC TRINITARIANISM a. Methodological Divergences b. Jesus of Nazareth c. The Spirit in the Church d. Preparation for the Union of the Divine Essence with Human Nature e. Relating the Doctrines of the Immanent and Economic Trinity

115 115 118 121 124 130

Part III TENSIONS AND CONNECTIONS Chapter 6 DIVINE ALTERITY a. Via Causalitatis b. Apophatic (Verneinung) Attributes c. Coherence of Alterity and Trinity Chapter 7 CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD a. Distinguishing Christian God-​Consciousness from General Religious Consciousness b. Christomorphic Anthropology

137 138 139 150

159 160 167

Chapter 8 CONCLUSION a. Apophasis and Kataphasis b. Christian Ecumenism c. Eco-​Theology

171 175 179 182

Bibliography Index of Authors and Subjects

185 197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Paul T. Nimmo and Paul Dafydd Jones for their skillful editorial work in bringing this manuscript to publication. Working with Paul Nimmo to sharpen and refine the manuscript has been a great gift. Double thanks are due to Paul Jones, who served as my dissertation director at the University of Virginia, where much of the groundwork for this book was undertaken. His careful feedback and gracious mentorship during my doctoral studies and beyond have been invaluable. Conversations with Margaret E.  Mohrmann, Kevin J.  Hart, and Trenton Merricks, who served on my dissertation committee, have also remained with me through the years. In addition, my colleagues in the Schleiermacher Unit at the American Academy of Religion have been wonderfully beneficial interlocutors along the way, especially Terrence N. Tice and Catherine L. Kelsey. Those involved in Millsaps College’s Works in Progress faculty cohort also deserve special thanks for entertaining my unfinished thoughts: Steven G. Smith, Elise L. Smith, Anne C. MacMaster, and Elizabeth E. Egan. Thanks, as well, to my summer 2015 undergraduate assistant Katie Lane Kirkland, who assisted in the preparation of a draft of the manuscript and from whom I expect great things. I also want to express my deep gratitude to those who have supported me during the process apart from direct influence on the book. Emily O. Gravett, Karen V. Guth, and I walked together through our doctoral work. Their friendships over the years have provided sustenance I scarcely could have done without. My beloved stepchildren, Henry and Maggie, have revived my spirit over and again with their silliness and tender hearts. Finally, I want to thank my spouse and partner, Jody Benjamin Walker, for his daily love and support. The moments we share create an undercurrent of joy in my life that provides renewal each day. Shelli Marie Poe Jackson, Mississippi May 2017

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ABBREVIATIONS Works of Friedrich Schleiermacher CF: H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, eds., The Christian Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 1999). CG: Martin Redeker, ed., Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhang dargestellt (1830–​1831), (Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999). OD I: Moses Stuart, trans., “On the Discrepancy between the Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of a Trinity in the Godhead (Part One),” Biblical Repository and Quarterly Observer 5, no. 18 (April 1835): 265–​353. OD II: Moses Stuart, trans., “On the Discrepancy between the Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of a Trinity in the Godhead (Part Two),” Biblical Repository and Quarterly Observer 6, no. 19 (July 1835): 1–​116. OG: James Duke and Francis Fiorenza, trans., On the Glaubenslehre (Atlanta: Scholars, 1981). OR: Richard Crouter, trans., ed., On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). BO: William Farrer, trans., Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1850). DE: Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson, trans., On the Doctrine of Election, with Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr. Bretschneider (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012).

Part I R EREADING S CHLEIERMACHER

Chapter 1 I NTRODUCTION

This book sets out the view that Friedrich Schleiermacher is an authentically and creatively Trinitarian thinker in his magnum opus, Der christliche Glaube (1830–​ 31), which is translated as The Christian Faith and referred to as the Glaubenslehre. Speaking to his authenticity as a Trinitarian thinker, Schleiermacher forms his entire theological system in accordance with the indwelling of God in Christ and the activity of his Spirit after the Redeemer is no longer present on earth. These are the basic Christian facts that a doctrine of the Trinity seeks to bring into line with Christian monotheism. Accordingly, the theology of the Glaubenslehre revolves around Christ while bearing a Trinitarian shape: God’s preparation in creating and governing the world before the incarnation, the incarnate life of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the continuing union of the divine essence with humanity in and through the Spirit of Christ in the Church. To highlight the extent to which Schleiermacher’s theology is shaped by attention to Christ, I  employ the word “Christomorphic.”1 By this term, I  mean that Schleiermacher’s theology, considered generally, and his understanding of God, in particular, are determined by the redemption Christians receive in and through Christ. A key text in elucidating Schleiermacher’s Christomorphism is the following: “Christ therefore was determined as He was, only because, and in so far as everything as a whole was determined in a certain way; and conversely, everything as a whole was only so determined, because, and in so far as, Christ was determined in a certain way.”2 In what follows, the term “Christomorphic” is 1 Richard R.  Niebuhr and Alister E.  McGrath use the term “Christomorphic” as well. Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion:  A  New Introduction (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock), p. 210; Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology:  From the Enlightenment to Pannenberg (New  York:  Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 26. Brian Gerrish considers Niebuhr’s expression “apt.” Indeed, he continues, “insofar as this makes Christ the ‘reformer’ of human knowledge of God, Niebuhr rightly claims that Schleiermacher was more faithful to Calvin than was Barth” (Brian Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], p. 176). I take up a few points of similarity between Schleiermacher and Calvin in Chapter 2. 2  CF §120.3, p. 555.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

shorthand for the concept relayed in this passage of Schleiermacher’s text. Because Schleiermacher’s theology is shaped in accordance with the divine determination to unite with human nature in and through the person of Christ and his Spirit in the Church, it highlights God’s threefold economy of salvation. Speaking to Schleiermacher’s creativity as a Trinitarian thinker, his work exhibits a way of thinking about God that is textured by three basic expressions of the divine essence:  divine causality, love, and wisdom. These are not merely divine attributes, on equal dogmatic footing with other attributes like divine justice, holiness, or eternity. While such attributes are legitimate and instructive ways of describing God, for Schleiermacher they do not express the very essence of the divine. A Christian understanding of the very essence of God is, for Schleiermacher, directly related to the reception of redemption by God in Christ and the Spirit. As such, God is essentially love. Moreover, the purposes and plans of divine love are outlined by divine wisdom. And the actualization of divine wisdom occurs in and through divine causality or activity. These three coinhering expressions of the one divine essence are derived from and therefore presuppose the divine economy of salvation. In this way, Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre can be read as offering a careful and creative understanding of God and God’s relation to the world, which attends to both the threefold economy of salvation and the triune divine essence. Setting out this view of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre is important, because scholars would generally dispute the claim that he is an authentically and creatively Trinitarian thinker. He is often viewed, instead, as an overly subjective theologian or one who might be accused of sexism because of his privatization of Christianity or as a “liberal” thinker situated within his Enlightenment and Romantic contexts. In the first section of this chapter, I briefly take account of the viewpoints of Schleiermacher’s critics to situate the import of the thesis that this book advances and to clear a way for a fresh interpretation of Schleiermacher. In the second section, I introduce the meaning of “essential Trinitarianism” as I am using the phrase. I then introduce the backward-​moving method of interpretation by which Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre might be read in order to arrive at a view of his theology as essentially Trinitarian. I also highlight some important benefits of proceeding in this way in the interpretation of Schleiermacher’s theology. In the third and final part of this chapter, I proceed to offer a detailed overview of the argument that unfolds in the chapters to follow.

a.  Schleiermacher’s Critics 1.  Subjectivism Perhaps the most prevalent contemporary interpretation and critique of Schleiermacher’s work is that he is a psychological subjectivist.3 In brief, the charge 3 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine:  Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 1984). Martin Luther himself was charged

1. Introduction

5

is that Schleiermacher’s talk of God is simply talk of humanity in a loud voice. This interpretation has held much sway in recent years among Schleiermacher’s Anglophone readers. It originated in Emil Brunner’s and Karl Barth’s work and runs through H.  R. Mackintosh, to George Lindbeck and those who read Schleiermacher through him.4 Karl Barth bulks large when considering this current of critique, and because it has had such influence in the history of modern theology, I will address it at some length here. Although Barth initially entertained the thought that Schleiermacher’s Speeches were “the most important and correct writings to appear since the closing of the New Testament canon,” his view drastically changed by 1921.5 In the winter semester of 1923–​24, he writes, I have indeed no reason to conceal the fact that I  view with mistrust both Schleiermacher and all that Protestant theology essentially became under his influence, that in Christian matters I do not regard the decision that was made in that intellectually and culturally significant age as a happy one, that the result of my study of Schleiermacher thus far may be summed up in that saying of Goethe: “Lo, his spirit calls to thee from the cave: Be a man and do not follow me.”6

The charge Barth holds against Schleiermacher is largely consistent with Emil Brunner’s assessment: he does not do justice to the Word of God, but is a “mystic” focused on the human subject.7 In his discussion of proposition nine of The Christian Faith, Barth puts it this way: similarly in his own day. For a discussion of Luther and Schleiermacher in relation to this charge, see Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, pp. 47–​56. 4  For a summary of the broad interpretive view of the history of modern theology made popular by Barth’s followers, see Van A. Harvey, “A Word in Defense of Schleiermacher’s Theological Method,” Journal of Religion 42, no. 3 (1962), pp. 151–​70 (166–​7). As an example of Lindbeck’s influence, see Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), p. 70, and Jacqueline Mariña, “Schleiermacher on the Outpourings of the Inner Fire:  Experiential Expressivism and Religious Pluralism,” Religious Studies 40, no. 2 (2004), pp. 125–​43 (129–​30). 5  Karl Barth, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher,” The Theology of Schleiermacher:  Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923–​24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 261–​79 (262). 6 Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 16. 7 See Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und Das Wort:  Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichen Glauben (Tübingen:  J. C.  B. Mohr, 1924). For an explanation of Brunner’s critique of Schleiermacher, see Christine Helmer, “Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a Historical-​Theological Trajectory,” Journal of Religion 83, no. 4 (2003), pp. 517–​38. Even so, Barth sought to distance himself from Brunner’s views in particular ways. See Karl Barth, “Brunners Schleiermacherbuch,” Zwischen den Zeiten 8 (1924), pp. 49–​64. See Helmer for the historical development of this critique in Brunner

6

Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian A theology of man is not an impossibility as such, though by itself it would not fulfil the task of Christian theology. But it would have to be the story of the “sickness unto death” from which man suffers in relation to God. Schleiermacher’s theology, however, is even further afield from the task of Christian theology than Kierkegaard’s, for under the pretext of Christian theology it raises a song of triumph to man, celebrating both his union with God and his own cultural activity, and necessarily coming to grief in so doing.8

Further, “a theology that has chosen piety as its theme—​even though this be Christian piety—​may not and cannot reach any other conclusion than that of the relativism which finds revelation in the individual as such and therefore in principle in every individual.”9 In short, Barth sees Schleiermacher’s theology as a form of anthropology. When he claims that “[paragraph] §14 restricts faith to the inner emotion of real sensing,” he means that Schleiermacher is not attending to the real object of theology, the revelation of God.10 Barth judges Schleiermacher’s theology as failing precisely in limiting itself to the religious self-​consciousness rather than taking the Word of God as its starting point and content.11 In line with this interpretation, H. R. Mackintosh, one of Barth’s Anglophone devotees, claims that Schleiermacher did not take seriously the self-​revelation of God in God’s word, instead encouraging the religious believer to become bent inward, the soul becoming “absorbed in its own states.”12 As Mackintosh puts it: It is only in a relative sense, therefore, that we can speak of the Dogmatic [sic] of Schleiermacher as an authentically Christian book. . . . [I]‌t would be roughly true to say that he has put discovery in the place of revelation, the religious consciousness in the place of the Word of God, and the mere “not yet” of imperfection in the place of sin. Thus the gulf set between him and the Reformers is wide and deep.13

and Barth in Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2014), pp. 23–​108. 8 Barth, Theology of Schleiermacher, p. 230. 9  Ibid., p. 233. 10  Ibid., p. 243. 11  It should be noted as well that “there was always a political cast to Barth’s suspicion of Schleiermacher; the young Swiss theologian wondered if the Berlin pastor would have signed the manifesto favoring the Kaiser’s aims in World War I as readily as did Barth’s own theological teachers” (Richard Crouter, “Schleiermacher and the Theology of Bourgeois Society: A Critique of the Critics,” Journal of Religion 66, no. 3 [1986], pp. 302–​23 [305]). 12 Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology:  Schleiermacher to Barth (London: Nisbet, 1937), p. 48. A contemporary critique of the same sort is offered by Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 3–​4. 13 Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, 100. H.  Richard Niebuhr also advances this view in a different way by placing the early Schleiermacher in the category of cultural

1. Introduction

7

These words were published in Great Britain in 1937, just nine years after the first English translation of the Glaubenslehre was published. Readings of this type persisted throughout the late twentieth century, at least in part because Mackintosh’s work was a primary point of Anglophone reception for Brunner’s and Barth’s interpretations of Schleiermacher and alternative visions of Christian theology. George Lindbeck continues this interpretation, building on the American edifice of neo-​orthodoxy, by arguing that Schleiermacher is an “experiential expressivist” who is only interested in doctrines as “noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations.”14 The similarity with Barth’s view is apparent. On this view, The general principle is that insofar as doctrines function as nondiscursive symbols, they are polyvalent in import and therefore subject to changes of meaning or even to a total loss of meaningfulness, to what Tillich calls their death. They are not crucial for religious agreement or disagreement, because these are constituted by harmony or conflict in underlying feelings, attitudes, existential orientations, or practices, rather than by what happens on the level of symbolic (including doctrinal) objectifications.15

In other words, what is important for experiential-​expressivists is not the objective Word interpreted in doctrines, but human states and practices. Implicit within this approach, Lindbeck argues, is the view that different religions are merely various expressions of a common experience of the Ultimate.16 Lindbeck argues against this view, claiming that one can “no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general.”17 As I  show in all of the chapters to follow and emphasize in Chapter  7, Schleiermacher is an odd choice of theologian to whom to attribute an affirmation of religiosity in general. Further, Lindbeck is mistaken in conceiving of Schleiermacher’s theology as concerned solely with prereflective experiences. It is accommodation. H. R. Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper, 1937), p. 193. 14  George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine:  Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1984), p. 16. See also Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospels as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1985) pp. 25–​31; “Piety, Narrative, and Christian Identity,” Word and World 3 (1983), pp. 148–​59, reprinted in Constructing Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991), pp. 126–​41. Brian Gerrish defends Schleiermacher against Lindbeck’s charge in “The Nature of Doctrine,” Journal of Religion 68 (1988), pp.  87–​92. See also Georg Behrens, “Schleiermacher Contra Lindbeck on the Status of Doctrinal Sentences,” Religious Studies 30, no. 4 (1994), pp. 399–​417. 15 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, p. 17. 16 Ibid., p. 23. 17 Ibid.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

one of the main burdens of this book to show that Schleiermacher is not an experiential expressivist or psychological subjectivist, but rather sets forth a theology that is always shaped with a view to the divine activity in Christ and his Spirit. As Redeker puts it, his object is “the living community with Christ the Redeemer which contains the relationship of faith between God and man.”18 More specifically, Schleiermacher can be viewed as an “essential Trinitarian” who pays close attention to the divine economy. As this book’s chapters proceed, it will become apparent that the Brunner-​Barth-​Lindbeck interpretation of Schleiermacher is quite distant from a faithful reading of his Glaubenslehre. 2.  Sexism and the Privatization of Christianity Interpreting Schleiermacher as a subjectivist has gone hand in hand with the accusation that his work, at least implicitly, could reinforce sexist attitudes among Christians. Contemporary feminists are chief among those who take up this criticism, though there is considerable interpretive disagreement among them about Schleiermacher’s works and legacy.19 Some praise him for his attention to female characters and his use of irony when employing stereotypical gender images.20 Others argue that his appreciation of “the feminine” is tied to patriarchal ways of thinking.21 These authors argue that Schleiermacher’s highlighting of “the female character” and his association of femininity with religion is a result of a socioeconomic shift of the time, which led to an increase in the relegation of women to the home.22 For instance, Grace Jantzen combines an interpretation of Schleiermacher as “privatizing” religion with a representative charge of sexism. One will also notice here Lindbeck’s interpretive influence:

18 Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher:  Life and Thought (trans. John Wallhausser; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p. 108. 19 See Patricia Ellen Guenther-​ Gleason, On Schleiermacher and Gender Politics (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), pp. 1–​6. 20  See Kurt Lutni, Feminismus und Romantik: Sprache, Gesellschaft, Symbole, Religion (Vienna: Böhlau, 1985), pp. 183–​6; Ruth Drucilla Richardson, The Role of Women in the Life and Thought of the Early Schleiermacher (1768–​1806) (Lewiston, NY:  Mellen, 1991); Dawn DeVries, “Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Dialogue: Bourgeois Ideology or Feminist Theology?” Journal of Religion 69 (1989), pp. 169–​83. 21  See Marilyn Chapin Massey, Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal (Boston: Beacon, 1985); Sheila Briggs, “Schleiermacher and the Construction of the Gendered Self,” in Schleiermacher and Feminism:  Sources, Evaluations, and Responses (ed. Iain G. Nicol; Lewiston, NY:  Mellen, 1992), pp. 87–​94; Katherine Faull, “Schleiermacher—​A Feminist? Or, How to Read Gender Inflected Theology,” in Schleiermacher and Feminism:  Sources, Evaluations, and Responses, pp. 13–​32. 22  For critiques of Schleiermacher more generally as a bourgeois theologian, see Yorick Spiegel, Theologie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft:  Sozialphilosophie und Glaubenslehre bei

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For Schleiermacher the individual subject of the Enlightenment has private intense feelings which are seen as the core of religion. Cultural or material positioning would not at bottom affect the experiences or even the subjects who have them; only the way they would later describe the experiences would be affected. By such a gesture of privatization, religion could be removed from the political realm. . . . There is, however, every reason to see that his account of religion was highly congenial to the dominant classes in an age of capitalist and imperialist expansion. It became possible simultaneously to foster depth of inward “religious feeling” and to aver that spirituality has nothing to do with politics, that it is quintessentially private: a view still often maintained in society at large.23

Jantzen goes on to explain that “such privatization without reference to the material conditions of people’s lives is convenient for dominant males but has disastrous consequences for women and all oppressed groups.”24 Here, Jantzen combines her understanding of Schleiermacher as focused on “private intense feelings” with a critique of the way that this focus can be used politically to relegate women to the private sphere and to maintain power over nondominant classes. While I am inclined to agree with the latter group of authors insofar as they highlight the ways in which Schleiermacher did not fully overcome the sexism of his day, Jantzen’s critique is not appropriately aimed at his theology understood as a whole. As I show in the chapters to follow, he understands the essence of religion as distinct but not separate from the rest of human knowledge and activity. His emphasis on the unified divine activity that orders the universe in and through Christ and the Church requires that Christian piety be conceived as connected with and issuing forth into the world in all its activities.25 He is, therefore, not an advocate for the privatization of Christianity. 3.  Uncritical Adoption of Enlightenment Thinking A third interpretation and critique of Schleiermacher’s work is that it is too infused with the Enlightenment to be considered faithful to Christianity. Iain Nicol and Allen Jorgenson, in their introduction to Schleiermacher’s essay on the doctrine of election, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Munich: C. Kaiser, 1968); Dieter Schellong, Bürgertum und christliche Religion: Anpassungsproblem der Theologie seit Schleiermacher (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1975). For a response to these critiques, see Crouter, “Schleiermacher and the Theology of Bourgeois Society,” pp. 302–​23. Crouter concludes, “If Schleiermacher accommodated himself to anything, it was to the reform efforts that failed but that challenged the prevailing prerogatives of aristocracy and crown in his nation.” 23 Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine:  Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington/​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 117. 24 Ibid. 25  Theodore Vial, Schleiermacher: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 101–​17.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

observe the commonplace charge that his theology was “so thoroughly invested in an uncritical employment of Enlightenment themes and philosophy as to have neither historical nor dogmatic utility for those wishing to engage the mainstream Christian tradition.”26 One version of this charge is that Schleiermacher is an idealist.27 Another is that he is a Spinozist. I will take each of these interpretations in turn. Early on, Schleiermacher’s work was associated with the philosophical approaches taken by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–​1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–​1854), two thinkers at the University of Berlin who radicalized the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804).28 Generally speaking, early idealists were rationalistic and holistic. As Peter Thielke explains, “The rationalist aspect of German Idealism can be captured in the idea that a systematic account of the world cannot leave anything inexplicable, at least in principle.”29 And not only that:  as Thielke also observes, for early German idealism, “ultimately everything must be understood in terms of a single whole or Absolute.”30 Among the contemporaries of Schleiermacher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–​1819) was one of the first to interpret Fichte as propounding an atheistic stance; he later accused Schleiermacher of having similarities with Fichte.31 26  Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson, “On the Doctrine of Election: An Introduction,” in On the Doctrine of Election, with Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr. Bretschneider, by Friedrich Schleiermacher (trans. Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), pp. 1–​19 (1). 27  See, for instance, Hans-​Joachim Birkner, Theologie und Philosophie: Eine Einführung in Probleme der Schleiermacher-​Interpretation (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1974). 28  Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-​ Theological Comparison (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006), p.  11. See F. W.  J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) (trans. Peter Heath; Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. xix. The reader may note Hegel’s absence from this list. Almost from the beginning, Schleiermacher and Hegel were not on good terms. This might suggest that Hegel did not influence Schleiermacher. Yet the situation might be a bit more complicated than that. As Richard Crouter argues, “In the decade of the 1820s each figure served tacitly as the intellectual foil for the work of the other and . . . at the height of their careers, it was virtually impossible for either figure to express his views on religion or philosophy without implicitly confronting the thought of the other figure” (Richard Crouter, “Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin:  A  Many-​Sided Debate,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48, no. 1 [March 1980], pp. 19–​43 [21–​22]). See also Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, p.  170. For a fuller discussion of Schleiermacher’s relations to Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Schelling, see Manfred Frank, “Metaphysical Formations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. Jacqueline Mariña; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15–​34. 29  Peter Thielke, “Recent Work on Early German Idealism (1781–​1804),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 2 (April 2013), pp. 149–​92 (151). 30  Ibid., p. 152. 31  Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Open Letter to Fichte,” Philosophy of German Idealism (ed., trans., Ernst Behler; New York: Continuum, 1987).

1. Introduction

11

In addition, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–​1860) claims to have identified a parallel between Schelling’s three principles and “three moments” in Schleiermacher’s understanding of God.32 Schelling’s three idealist principles are: “1) God as the highest primordial ground, the indifference, 2) nature or the real, the ground in God, and 3) God in immanent meaning, i.e., God as Spirit or as Ideal.”33 These correspond, Baur suggests, to Schleiermacher’s three moments in the idea of God: “1) absolute God in the most strict sense, 2) God as God, without any relation to Christ as the Redeemer, and 3) God in Christ or the perfect idea of God through the consciousness of redemption in Christ.”34 Baur is surely mistaken. Although the order of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre may mislead some readers, he offers a theology that is concerned neither with “absolute God in the most strict sense” nor with “God as God, without any relation to Christ as the Redeemer.” On the basis of his own principles, Schleiermacher would find an exploration of those concerns to be out of Christian theological bounds on the basis of their speculative nature. For Schleiermacher, everything in Christianity is “related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”35 He is theologically concerned only with God ad extra (i.e., in relation to creation), rather than God in se (i.e., considered as though creation might have never existed). Although Baur may have misconstrued the similarity between Schelling’s and Schleiermacher’s understandings of God, he at least correctly identified a shared goal of Schleiermacher, Kant, and many early German Idealists: to overcome the split between empiricism and rationalism.36 Baur argued that the Glaubenslehre is an example of “ideal rationalism,” which he defined as “those historical forms of consciousness in which the ideas of reason appear in the course of temporal-​ historical development.”37 Schleiermacher’s theology, he explains, “seeks to mediate between the supernaturalism of traditional church doctrine and the claims of

32 Cf. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung Gottes in ihre Geschichtlichen Entwicklung, vol. 2 (Tübingen:  Osiander, 1841); Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider and Heinrich Gottlieb Tzschirner also found similarities between Schleiermacher and Schelling (See OG, p. 99); Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, pp. 102–​3. 33  OG, p.  104 n.  28. See Ferdinand Christian Baur, Comparatur gnosticismus cum Schleiermacherianae theologiae indole (1827) and “Anzeige der beiden academischen Schriften,” Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie 1 (1828), pp. 220–​64. 34  OG, p. 104 n. 28. 35  CF §11, p. 52. 36 See Paul Guyer, “Introduction:  The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (ed. Paul Guyer; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–​27; Henry E. Allison, Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, revised ed. (New Haven/​London: Yale University Press, 2004). 37  OG, p. 98.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

reason.”38 Baur is on the right track here, in the following sense: Schleiermacher seeks to describe church doctrines as grounded in the concrete faith of Christian communities that are receptive to the always prior divine economic activity, while describing those doctrines such that they are intelligible to a modern audience. He does so by adopting a transcendental method of considering the conditions of possibility for particular realities within the properly theological sphere.39 Schleiermacher takes the divine economic activity as received in Christian piety—​ which is emphatically not synonymous with the claims of reason—​as the beginning point for theology. He then makes further claims about the divine life, always in relation to creation, just insofar as such claims are rooted in the doctrine of the economic Trinity. By using the transcendental method within the bounds of his nonspeculative theology, Schleiermacher attends to the concrete piety of believers in the ordering and circumscribing of his doctrinal material. In this way, his work is indeed partly inspired by Kant’s transcendental idealism. However, it is not in any way a work of natural theology or apologetics, which use the ideas of reason in an attempt to persuade a rational audience of the truth of Christian claims. Rather, Schleiermacher begins with the received redemption of the Christian community, and uses transcendental reasoning to explicate and make intelligible Christian claims. A second version of the charge of uncritical Enlightenment thinking comes from Schleiermacher’s early critics, who maintained that his rejection of divine personhood indicated his acceptance of Spinozism.40 Schleiermacher primarily formed his own views of Baruch Spinoza (1632–​77) through Jacobi. On Jacobi’s reckoning, Spinoza posited the relation between God and world as one of identity (“deus sive natura”). That is, God is not a being or an existence, but is being or existence itself. In addition, for Spinoza, a person’s relation to God is primarily 38 For more on Baur, see Alister McGrath, “The Hegelian Critique of Schleiermacher:  Strauss, Baur and Feuerbach,” in The Making of Modern German Christology: From the Enlightenment to Pannenberg (New York: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 32–​52. 39  Although Schleiermacher rejects Kant’s restriction of religious claims to what must be posited in order to explain the reasonableness of morality, he nevertheless adopts Kant’s practice of transcendental reasoning. That is, Schleiermacher considers the conditions for the possibility of certain givens. The given, in this case, is the divine economic activity. And so Schleiermacher considers what must be posited about the divine life as the conditions for the possibility of the indwelling of the divine being in Christ and the Church. I  will offer a fuller explanation of Schleiermacher’s transcendental method in the third section of chapter four. 40  Johann Friedrich Ferdinand Delbrück was a prominent critic in this regard. See Johann Friedrich Ferdinand Delbrück, Erörterungen einiger Hauptstücke in Dr.  Friedrich Schleiermachers christliche Glaubenslehre (Bonn:  Adolf Marcus, 1827). The Earl of Shaftesbury, who paved the way for the acceptance of Spinoza, had a significant impact on Schleiermacher’s thought. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (ed. Hermann Mulert; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922), p. 174. For a contemporary exploration of this claim, see Ernest Boyer Jr., “Schleiermacher, Shaftesbury, and the German Enlightenment,”

1. Introduction

13

understood and enacted in the modes of philosophy and science.41 The pantheistic aspects of Spinoza’s thought, coupled with his emphasis on philosophy and science as the way to relate to God, led Jacobi to interpret Spinoza’s work as offering an ultimately atheistic form of monism.42 An accusation of Spinozism along this trajectory of critique from Jacobi was serious for those scholars who were keen to distinguish creator from creation and who saw religious piety, as opposed to philosophical reflection, as the appropriate response to God. Schleiermacher was, in short, being charged with a philosophical form of pantheism. This accusation—​first leveled at the Speeches, and then later applied to the Glaubenslehre—​was made in the context of newly influential philosophical critiques of theism, the rise of historical criticism, and modern scientific inquiry.43 In that context, Schleiermacher’s ecclesiastical superior, S. G. Sack (1738–​1817), wrote: “I can acknowledge the book [the Speeches], now that I have read it through with deliberation, as nothing more than a spirited apology for pantheism, a rhetorical presentation of the Spinozistic system.”44 D. F. Strauss (1808–​74) reiterated Sack’s view, denouncing Schleiermacher as a “clever Spinozist” who “had pulverized Christianity and Spinozism so fine, for mixing, that it would take a sharp eye to distinguish the two.”45 This charge has persisted in twentieth-​century scholarship. For instance, John Cobb claims that “Schleiermacher requires little more than that the universe as a whole be understood as a living and infinite unity on which each of its parts must be seen as absolutely dependent. Specifically, Schleiermacher finds fully acceptable the philosophy of Spinoza.”46 Certainly, Schleiermacher takes the Spinozistic formula “One and All” (All-​ Einheitler) to be closely related to his own doctrine of God. He famously praised Spinoza in his Speeches, and echoes of Spinoza’s thought can be found in his own Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 2 (2003), pp. 181–​204. I  will treat the critique of Spinozism in Chapter 4. 41  For a discussion of the German pantheism controversy, see Brian Gerrish, “The Secret Religion of Germany:  Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 4 (Oct 1987), pp. 437–​55; Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Gérard Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi: Text with Excerpts from the Ensuing Controversy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988). 42  Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinozas (Breslau: G. Löwe, 1789). 43  Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (New York: Oxford, 2010), p. 4. 44  Albert L. Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801 between Chaplain Sack and His Protégé Schleiermacher,” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 1 (1981), pp. 101–​21 (113). 45  David Friedrich Strauss, Dogmatik, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1841), quoted in Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, p. 79. 46 John Cobb, Living Options in Protestant Theology:  A  Survey of Methods (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), p. 131.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

work.47 Even so, Schleiermacher’s use of the feeling of absolute dependence (das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl), for which he is so well known, is actually a mechanism by which he consistently upholds the distinction between creator and creature; the asymmetrical relation of dependence between God and creatures fixes a clear distinction between them.48 In addition, Schleiermacher identifies the appropriate Christian response to the divine activity as piety, which is not reducible to knowing (in philosophy or science) or doing (in ethics).49 Julia Lamm deftly and convincingly argues that Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God, “while indeed influenced by his appropriation of Spinoza and neo-​Spinozism, is developed in the Glaubenslehre in such a way that it is free from the charges of pantheism commonly made against it.”50 As Lamm notes, the intentionality or purposive directionality inherent within Schleiermacher’s understanding of God sets it apart from Spinoza’s thought.51 Moreover, Lamm demonstrates that it is precisely in his description of divine love that Schleiermacher decisively departs from Spinoza. She explains, “Spinoza refuses to apply the attribute of love to God. First, to do so would be against piety, which for him is a life lived according to the ‘dictates of reason,’ because it would bring God into the contradictions and fluctuations of human emotions. Second, love is not a divine attribute because it does not express the essence of God.”52 For Schleiermacher, in contrast, love is the very essence of God, and Christian piety is essentially a disposition or attunement to God rather than a knowing. Clearly, Schleiermacher and Spinoza parted ways here.53 4.  Non-​Trinitarian Theology Moving to the final interpretation and critique of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre to be taken account of here, Trinitarian histories typically do not single out Friedrich Schleiermacher as a giant within the doctrine’s positive construction. He has, it is often repeated, relegated the Trinity to an “appendix” to The Christian Faith. It is true that Schleiermacher devotes just ten pages to the doctrine at the end of his mature work. Moreover, much of this material consists of critical remarks. Given that the doctrine of the Trinity has been a source of confusion and controversy throughout Christian theological history, the fact that 47  OR, p. 24. See Julia Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 48  Schleiermacher says that he admitted the possibility of pantheistic piety “because of what I had said about Spinoza in my Speeches, although I myself had noted that it is irrelevant since no form of religion is pantheistic” (OG, p. 49). 49 See Chapter 2 for Schleiermacher’s understanding of such pious attunement. 50 Lamm, The Living God, p. 6. 51  Ibid., p. 201. 52  Ibid., p. 215. 53  For a fuller comparison of Schleiermacher and Spinoza, see ibid., pp. 216–​28.

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15

Schleiermacher raises critical questions about it ought not to surprise or offend. However, his critics have been very quick to note that what can be gleaned positively from his explicit comments on the doctrine of the Trinity indicates his Sabellian tendencies: he prioritizes divine unity and conceives of divine plurality always vis-​à-​vis divine activity in the world.54 There are, of course, plenty of other historical reasons that Schleiermacher has been sidelined from more constructive theological discussion. To a large degree, however, the assumption that his mature theology may be legitimately marginalized from scholarly engagement is rooted in an often-​repeated claim regarding his theology: Schleiermacher finds no use within it for the Trinity. As a preliminary response, there is no doubt that Schleiermacher is not a Trinitarian of the sort familiar to those steeped in the classical tradition. Throughout this book, I use the descriptors “traditional” and “classical” to refer to the doctrine of the Trinity as it has been developed within the history of Trinitarian thought up to the Reformation period and beyond. Within that history, the Trinity has been understood primarily with reference to two doctrines: the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and the doctrine of the economic Trinity. Fred Sanders observes that those terms were introduced into common theological circulation by the Lutheran theologian Johann August Urlsperger (1728–​1806), who distinguished between a Trinity of being, on the one hand, and a Trinity of revelation, on the other.55 Sanders notes that the goal in making the distinction, for Urlsperger, was to deny that the missions reveal the persons. Whatever Urlsperger’s original purpose and meaning, these terms have become part of Trinitarian parlance ever since. Although the terms are relatively new, the ideas represented in the doctrines of the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity are now so well known that I will not reiterate them in detail here. Suffice it to say that first, the doctrine of the immanent Trinity includes three hypostases or “persons”:  the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three are all equally and eternally divine. Moreover, these three constitute the Godhead. The Christian God is identical with the three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the economic Trinity, second, summarizes and describes the economy of salvation, in which God acts in relation to the world: God creates, preserves, and governs the world; God is in Christ, reconciling the world to Godself; and God is present in the world through the Holy Spirit. Schleiermacher is not a Trinitarian theologian, if by that we mean that he affirms these two traditional doctrines. However, it is also not the case that Schleiermacher relegates the Trinity to an appendix. The key to the way forward in Schleiermacher’s interpretation is to recognize the complexity of possible Trinitarian positions.

54  Chapter  3 contains an explanation and analysis of Schleiermacher’s relation to Sabellianism, a “heretical” movement during the early centuries of Christian history. 55  Fred Sanders, The Triune God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), pp. 149–​50.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

b.  Complexity in Trinitarian Theologies Although the terms “essential,” “ontological,” and “immanent” can sometimes be used synonymously vis-​à-​vis the doctrine of the Trinity, Claude Welch differentiates the essential from the immanent in his tentative formulation of three types of Trinitarianism:  economic, essential, and immanent. In his formulation, economic Trinitarianism refers to “the threefoldness of God in his revelation or historical manifestation.”56 Here we have “the threefold self-​manifestation of God in history.”57 Essential Trinitarianism includes “the doctrines of homoousios [same-​ substance], coeternity and coequality, and such terms as hypostasis and persona [persons] as indications of the ‘essential’ character of the divine distinctions.”58 Immanent Trinitarianism adds to essential Trinitarianism “the doctrines of internal relations (i.e., generation and procession) and coinherence.”59 After formulating these distinctions, Welch asserts that they do not have any real benefit for expanding legitimate Trinitarian options. He explains, “I do not believe . . . that there would be any great material advantage in offering a formal substitute for the traditional categories.”60 Although the distinctions “have real utility when used with care,” Welch states, with an acerbic nod toward Schleiermacher, that “there can be no doctrine worthy of the name Trinity which does not affirm the ‘essential’ character of the distinctions,” and “there can be no doctrine of an ‘essential’ Trinity that does not include the doctrine of relations.”61 In short, Welch believes that there is no legitimate alternative to the classical form of the doctrine of the Trinity, which includes all three of his distinctions: economic, essential, and immanent. It is possible, however, that Welch’s terminology may be more useful and significant than he himself is prepared to acknowledge.62 Specifically, it may be that these distinctions can helpfully clarify exactly what Schleiermacher is pointing his readers toward in the Glaubenslehre. However, if the distinctions Welch makes are to elucidate Schleiermacher’s own position, they certainly require some modification, given that Schleiermacher explicitly rejects talk of eternal distinctions between divine hypostases or persona.63

56  Claude Welch, In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 294. 57  Ibid., p. 293. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Robert Williams also finds Welch’s terminology helpful. See Robert R. Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian:  The Construction of the Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), pp. 153–​4. 63  CF §170.1, p. 739.

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17

1.  Essential Trinitarianism As I  will use the phrase, “essential Trinitarianism” indicates, first, that the divine essence is united to human nature in the person of Christ and in the Holy Spirit of the Church, which is made possible through the divine creative activity. This aspect of the definition coheres with Schleiermacher’s understanding of that which is “essential” in the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Schleiermacher identifies those essential aspects with the idea that there is one God, related to humanity in three movements:  preparation for the union (Vereinigung) of the divine essence (Wesen) with human nature, the union of the divine essence and human nature in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the union of the divine essence and human nature in the Church through the Spirit. These essential aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity are the threads that hold together Schleiermacher’s entire Glaubenslehre. Second, in my usage, “essential Trinitarianism” indicates that, although Schleiermacher explicitly restricts his focus to the economic Trinity, he quietly retains a threefold structure of the divine life in his treatment of divine causality, love, and wisdom. In other words, although Schleiermacher does not explicitly draw this out, there seem to be three essential distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life—​causality, love, and wisdom—​which are inferred from the divine economy. My usage of the phrase “distinctions-​in-​relation” and my inclusion of causality along with love and wisdom within this aspect of the definition go further than Schleiermacher’s explicit statements regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. He calls for a Protestant development of the doctrine and acknowledges that he himself has made a “preliminary step” toward a new understanding of the Trinity. It is my contention, however, that Schleiermacher’s text provides the grounds for a novel development of the doctrine of the Trinity to an extent that he may not have recognized. I will argue that the elements of essential Trinitarianism I will bring out here are, in fact, derived from his text and his thought. My interpretive contribution, then, is to highlight and summarize these elements in a way that will make clear the resources for essential Trinitarianism that are found within Schleiermacher’s theology. I also aim to draw Schleiermacher’s thought into conversation with traditional terminology in a way that he did not. Although he seems not to have explicitly recognized it, the structure of the divine life that his text sets forth bears many of the characteristics of the immanent Trinity’s hypostases. Nonetheless, those structural features remain indicators of the primary contours of the divine life always in relation to the world rather than considered apart from it. I will argue below that the three divine distinctions-​in-​relation I  find in Schleiermacher’s text—​ causality, love, and wisdom—​are homoousios, coeternal, coequal, and coinherent (that is, perichoretic). As Schleiermacher describes them, divine causality, love, and wisdom are expressions of the very essence of the divine life. They mutually implicate one another and are at work in all divine activity. Even so, they are not “persons” in the traditional sense of the word, and no technical theory of generation and procession is posited. To maintain the distinction between the doctrine

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

of the immanent Trinity and the structure of the divine life in what I am calling the “essential Trinity,” I will refer to what God would be like apart from creation by using the phrases “immanent Trinity,” “God in se,” and “God in Godself.” In contrast, I  will refer to what Schleiermacher would deem legitimately inferred descriptions of God—​those considered always in relation to creation—​by using the phrase “divine life.” Thus, while I am indebted to Welch’s terminology and his placement of essential Trinitarianism between immanent and economic Trinitarianism, my language and argument are far from a reiteration of his view. I seek a more precise articulation and development of one particular possibility of defining “essential Trinitarianism.” This possibility, I  want to suggest, is at least implicitly found within Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre and, as I will show in the rest of the book, counts as a faithful interpretation of his theology. Interpreting his work this way allows me to differentiate Schleiermacher’s approach from more speculative approaches. I  will suggest that his approach could be insightful for others who wish to think along an antispeculative track. In addition, using the language of essential Trinitarianism clearly allows me to use Trinitarian terms in treating Schleiermacher’s thought in the Glaubenslehre. Beginning with his antispeculative approach: Schleiermacher does not affirm the doctrine of the immanent Trinity as a theological statement regarding the noumenal God, because he refuses to consider God in se within the task of theology. In fact, for him, a doctrine that would be faithful to the reality of God in se is quite literally unthinkable. Human beings are always situated in particular contexts and understand themselves, the world, and God through particular lenses. Humanity has no objective, contextless vantage point from which to make perceptions or judgments, and especially not with regard to the divine. Given this ontological situation, then, it is impossible to make epistemological claims about God in Godself without using concepts and language acquired in and fitted to the phenomenal realm. Thus, while claims about God in Godself may be offered based on the logical necessity of conditions for the possibility of a given thing, independent assessment of the faithfulness of those claims to the divine reality is impossible. This means that, for Schleiermacher, the being of God in se remains independently inaccessible to human thought. However, according to Schleiermacher, this does not mean that the principles or tenets of Christian faith must be restricted to the creaturely realm. If the biblical text, for instance, were to make a clear claim about God that is not verifiable or not falsifiable, then that claim might still legitimately be accepted. Nonetheless, such a claim would not be part of theological thinking itself for Schleiermacher, but would be one of the first principles or starting points of Christian theology, which, being “given,” have neither fully convincing rational explanation nor defense. The doctrine of the immanent Trinity cannot be one such first article of faith for Schleiermacher, because he, along with the vast majority of Christian theologians, does not find the technicalities of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity clearly expressed in scripture. In addition, Schleiermacher does not find the doctrine of the immanent Trinity integral to the reception of divine activity in redemption.

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On Schleiermacher’s account, then, the doctrine of the Trinity ought always refer to “God with us,” rather than God considered apart from humanity.64 By describing Schleiermacher’s work in Trinitarian terms, I am able to capture more adequately the faithfulness of his theology to distinctively Christian ways of thinking. His theology is not, I  will argue, sufficiently understood by means of an investigation into his Enlightenment and Romantic influences alone. Nor is his theology sufficiently interpreted with reference to religious human experience, generically defined. Instead, a fuller grasp of his work in the Glaubenslehre is achieved by attending to his treatment of divine creative activity, Christ, and his Spirit in the Church, in addition to the life of God as causality, love, and wisdom. Using Trinitarian terms to summarize these aspects of Schleiermacher’s theology allows me to highlight not only his reforming work on the doctrine of the Trinity, but also his continuity with traditional elements of Christian thought. 2.  Reading in Reverse The methodological key to interpreting Schleiermacher as an essential Trinitarian is to read his Christian Faith backward. Rejecting the hermeneutic tradition that reads the Glaubenslehre in terms of a generic form of human religiosity, this analysis begins with the doctrine of the Trinity. The resulting interpretation and analysis foreground the Trinitarian content and structure of Schleiermacher’s theology, establishing the priority of the claims presented in the later portions of the Glaubenslehre. This method is a partial enactment of what Schleiermacher himself suggested in his Letters to Dr. Lücke, where he said that he may have done better to reverse the order of his Glaubenslehre. On this arrangement, “The first definite statements about God would have been that, in sending Christ, God renews the human race and establishes the spiritual Kingdom in us. The first divine attributes would have been wisdom and love. In short, the entire doctrine would have been treated as it is now, but in reverse order.”65 Reading the Glaubenslehre backward allows Schleiermacher’s interpreters to break free from one of the predominant ways of approaching his theology; namely, with a preoccupation with the God-​consciousness. While there is good reason for detailed attention to the God-​consciousness, this way of approaching the Glaubenslehre raises particular questions and steers the interpretive conversation in directions that are now well trodden, even if not conclusively settled. The alternative method of treating the Glaubenslehre backward has the potential to create new interpretive and constructive paths. In my treatment, this method highlights the antispeculative character of Schleiermacher’s mature thought and draws out his distinctively Christian mode of thinking. While these are two aspects of Schleiermacher’s work that a backward-​reading method highlights for 64  I will explore his antispeculative approach further in the second and third chapters. 65  OG, p. 56.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian

me, I anticipate that other interpreters who go down this road will find many more emphases hitherto occluded by a primary focus on the God-​consciousness. 3.  Benefits of Essential Trinitarianism In addition to highlighting Schleiermacher’s nonspeculative approach and allowing his readers to see his continuity with and reform of Christian thought, this way forward affords readers at least four further benefits. First, reading Schleiermacher as an essential Trinitarian addresses worries about the coherence of the Christian Faith. Second, it offers a way through the dialectic of apophasis and kataphasis that has been a significant part of Christian theological reflection since its beginning. Third, essential Trinitarianism seems to possess fewer conceptual difficulties than the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Finally, this interpretation of Schleiermacher highlights some resonance with contemporary theologies. Beginning with the first of these benefits, essential Trinitarianism helps Schleiermacher’s readers assess debates about the coherency of the two parts of his Glaubenslehre. In Part One, Schleiermacher presents divine attributes that relate to the Christian consciousness of the relation between God and the world. In Part Two, he offers divine attributes that relate to the Christian consciousness of sin and grace. A common critique is that Schleiermacher’s remarks about divine love and wisdom in the second part of his work contradict his treatment of the divine attributes in the first part.66 I suggest that a careful analysis and interpretation of his essential Trinitarianism could contribute to resolving this debate in a way that could also be insightful for contemporary constructive theologians. My analysis of Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian thought shows that the divine attributes detailed in Part Two are primary and determinative for the attributes of Part One. A second benefit of interpreting Schleiermacher as an essential Trinitarian is that this approach carves a way through a series of dichotomies that Christians have wrestled with since the ancient Christian era: transcendence and immanence, apophasis and kataphasis, hiddenness and revealedness. Since the terms “apophasis” and “kataphasis” will be a substantive part of my treatment of Schleiermacher’s work throughout this book, I will introduce them here. Sarah Coakley explains that the Greek noun apophasis may derive from either of two verbs. It may come from the verb apophemi, which means “saying no” or “saying negatively,” or from the verb apophaino, which carries the connotation of revelation. In the former case, apophasis is synonymous with the via negativa.67 This is the particular sense in which I will use the term here. Furthermore, I use “negative theology” in the first sense Bernard McGinn offers in his threefold 66  I will treat this critique in Chapter 6, focusing on the argument presented in Bruce McCormack, “Not a Possible God But the God Who Is,” in The Reality of Faith in Theology (eds. Bruce McCormack and Gerrit Willem Neven; Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 111–​39. 67 Sarah Coakley, “Introduction—​ Re-​ thinking Dionysius the Areopagite,” in Re-​ thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), pp. 9–​10 n. 30.

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21

typology: “the theological practice of ‘unsaying’ claims about God, of negating the positive to express God’s uniqueness and transcendence.”68 My usage of “apophasis” is grounded in Schleiermacher’s discussion of the methods by which theologians may ascribe attributes to God.69 In that discussion, he repeatedly uses the terms “der Verneinung” (negation) and “Absprechung” (denial), contrasting this with “der Positiv.” However, Schleiermacher does not explicitly identify negation or denial with the Greek apophemi, as above. As such, if I were to maintain a stricter usage of terms in my presentation of Schleiermacher’s view, I might call the divine attributes of Part One “abstracted” or “derived” from the reception of redemption, and the divine attributes of Part Two “given” in the reception of divine redemptive activity. While this stricter usage would certainly be correct, correlating negation and apophemi is useful within my treatment of Schleiermacher’s work insofar as this allows me to demonstrate the contemporary import of his thought. At any rate, I am emboldened to use “apophasis” and “kataphasis” in my treatment of the Glaubenslehre, because Schleiermacher explicitly states that he places more importance on the concepts being employed than on the names used to describe those concepts.70 As for the sense in which I will use the contrast between apophasis and kataphasis, Andrew Louth’s explanation of the difference between the two in the scholastic versus the mystical traditions proves instructive: For the scholastics, the distinction between apophatic and cataphatic theology became a logical dialectic by which theological language was refined; for the mystics, the distinction between cataphatic and apophatic became the gulf between a superficial theology of affirmation, which was thought to reduce God to rational categories, and a loving abandonment to God in a felt experience of darkness, disorientation, bewilderment, and ecstasy. In this mystical tradition, cataphatic and apophatic are torn apart: the cataphatic reduced to the operations of the reasoning mind, the apophatic to be explored only by love, which in its longing after God penetrates the darkness.71

Schleiermacher’s understanding, I shall contend, is much closer to the scholastic than the mystical construal of this distinction.72 As Schleiermacher himself states, 68  Bernard McGinn, “Three Forms of Negativity in Christian Mysticism,” in Knowing the Unknowable: Sciences and Religions about God and the Universe (ed. John D. Bowker; London: I. B. Taurus, 2008), pp. 99–​122. 69  CF §§50–​51, pp. 194–​203. 70  OG, p. 38: “I think that everyone knows that I place little weight on definitive terminology so long as I am convinced that I mean the same thing as the other person.” 71  Andrew Louth, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 137–​46 (143). 72 See Chapter 7 for this argument.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian It has been from the beginning the business of Christian Dogmatics to regulate these representations, so that the anthropomorphic element, to be found more or less in all of them, and the sensuous which is mixed in with many, may be rendered as harmless as possible. . . . And in this direction the age of Scholasticism contributed much that was profound and excellent.73

Schleiermacher uses negative statements to regulate and refine positive statements about God. He therefore does not rend these categories from one another, but uses them in concert to make sophisticated doctrinal claims. Because Schleiermacher’s text can be read as offering an essential Trinitarianism, which deals with the dichotomy between the kataphatic and apophatic in coherent and innovative ways, I suggest that his Christian Faith should not be sidelined from the contemporary revitalization of interest in Christian doctrines and the doctrine of the Trinity in particular, but should be mined for its constructive theological contributions. Third, essential Trinitarianism may evoke fewer conceptual problems than the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of his Glaubenslehre is partially meant to help his readers approach that doctrine without being encumbered by the conceptual quandaries that have arisen within the history of Trinitarian thinking. The conceptual frameworks within which discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity are usually set and the concepts typically employed were briefly introduced above: immanent, economic, hypostases, persona, essence, activity, homoousios, perichoresis, equality, distinctions, relations, processions, and so forth. The quandaries involved in using these concepts and properly relating them to one another are familiar to students of the classical form of the doctrine of the Trinity.74 In the Enlightenment and Romantic contexts, Schleiermacher saw these puzzles acting as so many stumbling blocks for those who might otherwise have given the Christian faith a hearing—​and for no good theological reason. By waiting until the end of the Glaubenslehre to offer what has been called his “Trinitarian Treatise,” he intends to demonstrate to his readers that a distinctively Christian system of doctrine can be constructed that retains the essential ideas that the doctrine of the Trinity was meant to safeguard and avoids the espousal of a conceptually fraught Trinitarian grammar. The great mystery of the Christian faith ought to be the fact of the divine good-​pleasure toward creation, rather than a set of conceptual difficulties. Rather than offering an anti-​Trinitarianism or suggesting that the Trinity is irrelevant, Schleiermacher’s work holds out the possibility of a form of Trinitarianism that may be germane to contemporary constructive Trinitarian theologies. A final benefit of my interpretation of Schleiermacher as a Trinitarian theologian is that it provides some resonance with contemporary theologies, including feminist theology, ecumenical theology, and eco-​theology. Drawing on my interpretation of Schleiermacher as an essential Trinitarian, feminist theologians might 73  CF §50.1, p. 195. 74  I will treat these conceptual difficulties in Chapter 3.

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find new resources for speaking of God as triune without inscribing androcentric relationships into the heart of the divine life. My constructive articulation of divine personhood, inspired by Schleiermacher’s thought, might contribute to making ecumenical ties across the conservative-​liberal theological spectrum. Finally, Schleiermacher’s theology could encourage eco-​theological attempts to highlight the interdependence of the web of existence and God’s preserving activity in relation to creation. Interpreting Schleiermacher as an essential Trinitarian, therefore, could not only supply theologians with a fresh reading of his Glaubenslehre and his place in the history of Christian thought on that basis, but also contribute to the advancement of contemporary theologies that wish to take the conversation further. My treatment of Schleiermacher here is, as such, not an attempt to reify an intellectual school of Schleiermacherianism, which the author himself did not intend,75 but to show how his thought might be used constructively to achieve a goal we both share; namely, to bring the Christian faith into conversation with the particular time and place in which the Christian community currently finds itself.

c.  Chapter Overview 1.  Part One: Rereading Schleiermacher In order to demonstrate my thesis that Schleiermacher is a nonspeculative thinker, which contributes to the way in which I interpret him as an authentic and creative Trinitarian theologian, Part One continues with a comparison of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre with John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I argue that, in some important ways, Schleiermacher intensifies Calvin’s theological convictions.76 For Calvin, “The pious mind does not dream up for itself any god it pleases, 75  OG, p. 34. 76 Some key texts in this regard include Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation; “Schleiermacher and the Reformation:  A  Question of Doctrinal Development,” Church History 49, no. 2 (June 1980), pp. 147–​59; and The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Walter Moore, “Schleiermacher as a Calvinist:  A  Comparison of Calvin and Schleiermacher on Providence and Predestination,” Scottish Journal of Theology 24, no. 2 (1971), pp. 167–​83; Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election; Martin Ohst, Schleiermacher und die Bekenntnisschriften:  Eine Untersuchung zu seiner Reformations-​und Protestantis-​ musdeutung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989); Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996). See also Bruce McCormack, “Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective:  Karl Barth’s Theological Epistemology in Conversation with a Schleiermacherian Tradition,” Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); “Review of Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher,” Theology Today 55, no. 3 (1998), pp. 482–​85. See also Kevin Hector, “Actualism and

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but contemplates the one and only true God . . . as he manifests himself.”77 With the added impulse of modernism at his back, Schleiermacher develops Calvin’s antispeculative commitment by more faithfully deriving the divine attributes from lived Christian piety, which is anchored in divine redeeming activity. 2.  Part Two: Schleiermacher and the Trinity In the second section of the work, I make the first moves in my extended analysis of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God, working from the end of the Glaubenslehre to the beginning of his explication of the consciousness of grace. Starting from Schleiermacher’s “Trinitarian Treatise,” I move backward to his treatment of the Living God, who is essentially love and wisdom, and then to his discussion of divine governance, Christ, and the Spirit of Christ’s Church. I begin in Chapter 3 with Schleiermacher’s explicit discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity in paragraphs 170 to 172. I argue that his call for a reexamination of the doctrine is motivated by concerns about appropriate scriptural hermeneutics, the need for antispeculative doctrine, conceptual clarity, and ecclesial unity in diversity. Schleiermacher argues against the idea that an implicit form of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity can be found within the Bible. A binary or triadic schema can be found therein; however, a full doctrine of the immanent Trinity cannot easily be lifted from its pages. Further, creating such a fully fledged doctrine, Schleiermacher argues, is outside the bounds of properly limited Christian thought about God. The antispeculative strain of his Reformed tradition is apparent here. Schleiermacher thinks it inappropriate for Christians to try to consider God as God would be apart from creation. Given that many have undertaken to do this, however, Schleiermacher points out a number of intellectual problems with the doctrine they have produced. Because he aims at conceptual clarity within his system of doctrine, he critiques the traditional form of the doctrine of the Trinity by highlighting its seemingly irresolvable conceptual puzzles. Finally, Schleiermacher argues that rejections of and alternatives to the traditional form of the doctrine of the Trinity should be considered legitimate within the Christian community. Because the doctrine is not clearly found in scripture, is speculative, and is conceptually puzzling, room should be made within the Church for doctrinal diversity. In this chapter, then, I primarily focus on Schleiermacher’s criticisms

Incarnation:  The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8/​3 (July 2006), pp. 307–​22; Catherine Kelsey, Thinking About Christ with Schleiermacher (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2003); Terrence N. Tice, Schleiermacher (Nashville:  Abingdon, 2006); Sung-​ Sup Kim, Deus Providebit:  Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). 77  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), I.ii.2, p. 42; cf. I.xiv.4.

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of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and highlight his tendency toward an understanding of the Trinity that has similarities with his new interpretation of Sabellianism. Chapter 4 moves further backward in the Glaubenslehre, from a discussion of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity to Schleiermacher’s account of divine attributes in paragraphs 164 to 169. I conclude that, far from being a crude modalist viewing God as an absolute monad that merely appears in different forms through time, Schleiermacher maintains three distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life. Causality, love, and wisdom are not simply divine attributes; they are expressions of the very essence of God. I will then argue that, within Schleiermacher’s text, divine causality, love, and wisdom can be drawn into conversation with the language of the Trinitarian tradition by showing how they are homoousios and perichoretic, sharing in eternity and equality. However, Schleiermacher consistently rejects the procession of divine hypostases from one another, considered apart from creation. Further, he thinks of the term “person” and its cognates as unduly anthropomorphic to serve as attributions for God. Because personhood is linked to modern conceptions of personality, the terminology of personhood is rendered inappropriate in a system of doctrine that aims to guard against illegitimate forms of anthropomorphism, with regard to both divine distinctions and divine unity. However, I also argue that, while Schleiermacher explicitly rejects attributing personhood to the divine unity, key strands of his theology are actually in keeping with such an attribution. In fact, he retains the use of personal analogies throughout the Glaubenslehre in service of his understanding of God. His usage of personal analogies suggests that, although it would be faithful neither to the letter of Schleiermacher’s text nor to his own preferences when he explicitly addresses the issue, it would be in the spirit of what he has actually written to claim that there are three nonpersonal distinctions-​in-​relation within the one personal divine life. In Chapter 5, I treat Schleiermacher’s economic Trinitarianism, taking another step backward through his doctrine of God as it is found in the second part of the Glaubenslehre, chiefly in paragraphs 91 to 125. I analyze his discussion of the union of the divine essence with human nature in the person of Jesus Christ and the common Spirit of the Church (Gemeingeist der Kirche). While this section of the Glaubenslehre is not explicitly identified as a treatment of divine attributes, it is the concrete reception of redemption to which all the divine attributes Schleiermacher considers are related. My discussion of Christ and the Spirit is followed by an analysis of divine justice and holiness, which are taken up in paragraphs 79 to 85 as the attributes that relate to the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature. I argue that, throughout these paragraphs, Schleiermacher offers a Christomorphic theocentrism; he points his readers toward divine causality in love and wisdom as revealed in and through Christ and the Spirit. In this way, his understanding of the divine life and activity is not generically conceived, but is always shaped by the economy of salvation as received in the faith of the Christian Church.

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3.  Part Three: Tensions and Connections In the third section of the work, I  offer the final elements in my analysis of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God, working from the explication of the consciousness of sin back to the divine attributes vis-​à-​vis the general relation of God and the world. In the process, I discuss some potential tensions within the Glaubenslehre as a whole. I also begin to explore connections between Schleiermacher’s magnum opus and contemporary theologies, in order to show how the interpretive content of this book lays the groundwork for and anticipates further constructive work that draws inspiration from his theology. Chapter 6 consists of a discussion of divine otherness, including the attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. These attributes are primarily apophatic, or negative, circumscribing the limits of human speech and concepts about God. Since these are the first divine attributes that Schleiermacher takes up in his own ordering of the Glaubenslehre in paragraphs 50 to 56, some of his interpreters have given apophasis interpretive priority. By treating the apophatic divine attributes last, I  put them in their proper place in relation to the kataphatic attributes. For, as Schleiermacher himself notes, without being filled out by the foregoing discussion, they are “merely vague and barely living ideas.”78 If they are taken “strictly by themselves, we are bound to say that belief in God as almighty and eternal is nothing more than that shadow of faith which even devils may have.”79 When considered at the end of a discussion of Schleiermacher’s full doctrine of God, however, the apophatic or negative attributes that begin the work serve an important function:  they circumscribe the limits of his primarily kataphatic approach, nuancing the positive claims he makes throughout the Glaubenslehre. I will argue that the apophatic attributes of Part One do not stand in tension with his kataphatic or positive claims in Part Two. I suggest that Parts One and Two are not finally contradictory, but coherent. In Chapter 7, I discuss Christian God-​consciousness in light of Schleiermacher’s full doctrine of God. My aim in this chapter is not to provide an irrefutable argument that advances all the important conversations that have surrounded the idea of the God-​consciousness. My more modest purpose is to show that when the Glaubenslehre is read backward, a primarily apophatic interpretation of the God-​ consciousness, which is the basis of a supposed Schleiermacherian mysticism, is not warranted.80 Whatever might finally be said of the intricacies of Schleiermacher’s conception of the God-​consciousness, a satisfactory interpretation requires that it be treated within the context of his fully articulated doctrine of God. In the final chapter, I follow up on some of the connections of Schleiermacher’s mature work to contemporary theologies. I outline three ways the system of doctrine he constructs could advance constructive theology. First, Schleiermacher’s 78  OG, p. 57. 79  CF §167.2, p. 731. Cf. James 2:19. 80  For a brief and nuanced summary of Schleiermacher’s relation to “mysticism” in The Christian Faith see Helmer, Theology and the End of Doctrine, pp. 120–​2.

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theology grounds the doctrine of God, Christology, and pneumatology in the incarnate life and community of Christ. This primarily kataphatic form of theology could be helpful for feminist theologians intent on highlighting particularity within lived Christian communities. Second, a Schleiermacherian understanding of God could provide a common language for those on the right and left sides of the theological spectrum, allowing for an ecumenism that has hitherto been left relatively unexplored. An understanding of divine personhood like the one advanced in Chapter  4, specifically, could aid ecumenical endeavors within the Church. Third, Schleiermacher’s emphases on interdependence and the harmony of faith and scientific reasoning cohere with eco-​theologies. Schleiermacher’s work could offer further theological resources for all those concerned with the advancement of ecological living.

d.  A Final Word In the chapters that follow, then, I intend to offer a fresh look at Schleiermacher’s mature work, presenting an interpretation and analysis of the Glaubenslehre that faithfully represents his view and anticipates how it might be developed further. A sustained theological consideration of his doctrine of God and doctrine of the Trinity, in particular, is well overdue. Through such consideration, I aim to shift current estimations of Schleiermacher’s doctrinal contributions to Christian theology and to expand the constructive theological possibilities within contemporary Trinitarian thought.

Chapter 2 S CH LE IE R M ACH E R’S A PPROAC H

In this chapter, I  seek to situate the work of Schleiermacher particularly in the theological trajectory that runs through John Calvin,1 who approaches the theological task with an openness to academic learning and a disdain for speculative thinking.2 By analyzing the Glaubenslehre’s audiences, Schleiermacher’s purpose in writing the work, and some features of his understanding of God relative to those of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, I will show that, at the heart of 1  Brian Gerrish is the historical leader in linking Schleiermacher with Reformation thought. See Brian Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation:  Essays in Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Alexander Schweizer, Die Glaubenslehre der evangelisch-​reformierten Kirche dargestellt und aus den Quellen belegt (2 vols; Zurich: Orell, Füssli, 1844–​47); Wilhelm Niesel, “Schleiermachers Verhältnis zur reformierten Tradition,” Zwischen den Zeiten 8 (1930), pp. 511–​25; Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 248–​59; Sung-​Sup Kim, Deus Providebit: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014); Paul T. Nimmo, “Schleiermacher on Justification: A Departure from the Reformation?” Scottish Journal of Theology 66 (2013), pp. 50–​73. For a detailed analysis of Schleiermacher’s use of Reformed authors and Confessions with regard to the doctrine of predestination, see Anette I. Hagan, Eternal Blessedness for All? A  Historical-​Systematic Examination of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reinterpretation of Predestination (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013). 2  A number of Protestants since the Reformation have displayed particular disdain for speculative thinking. Martin Luther, the early Philip Melanchthon, and Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf are notable among them, according to Samuel Powell (Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001], pp. 12–​46). And Powell appropriately places Schleiermacher within this strand of thought. He indicates that Schleiermacher substantially influenced the later Ritschlians, for example, by reinforcing Luther’s conviction that theology begins with salvation history and providing an understanding of revelation that treats neither church doctrine nor the biblical texts as infallible reiterations of divine truths (ibid., pp.  155–​60). Schleiermacher’s influence, Powell indicates, could also be felt in Jürgen Moltmann’s theology insofar as Moltmann makes divine, self-​communicative love central (ibid., pp. 258–​9). Tracing Schleiermacher’s place in this trajectory of thought is important and instructive.

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their mature works, these authors share two convictions: first, there is an eternal covenant between Christian faith and intellectual inquiry; and second, God is to be conceived as always already in relation to humanity. In other words, I will highlight their openness to academic learning, along with the particularly antispeculative cast of their respective theologies. Despite these similarities, Schleiermacher and Calvin differ with regard to the conceptual structure of their doctrines of God. Calvin advances a dipolar understanding of God as creator and redeemer, while Schleiermacher’s understanding combines these poles such that redemption is identified with divine creating activity. While structured differently, however, the theological approach Schleiermacher favors is consonant with the dynamics of Calvin’s work insofar as it extends his antispeculative commitment. Schleiermacher intensifies Calvin’s antispeculative approach, making his work more consistent and constructive than his early modern progenitor’s. By reading Schleiermacher in this way, I  show that neither is he the originator of an entirely new way of doing theology, nor does he stand outside all viable theological traditions. Rather, he stands in a line of Protestant theologians who are committed to understanding God in relation to the world rather than apart from it.

a.  An Eternal Covenant between Christian Faith and Academic Inquiry Turning to the first of the two similarities between Calvin and Schleiermacher that I will address, both thinkers maintain a covenant between Christian faith and intellectual inquiry. Schleiermacher does so when writing the Glaubenslehre with three audiences in mind: the faculty of the new modern university of Berlin, clergy in training within an Enlightenment context, and both Lutheran and Reformed Christians worshipping in a Protestant Prussia. I will consider each of these audiences in turn before discussing the ways that Schleiermacher risked undermining his own endeavors. I will then offer a brief consideration of the similarities between Schleiermacher’s and Calvin’s thought in relation to their audiences and goals for writing. 1.  Theology in the Modern University As chair of theology and rector of the University of Berlin, as well as pastor of Trinity Church (Dreifaltigkeitskirche), Schleiermacher wrote Der christliche Glaube, first published in 1821–​22 and revised in 1830–​31, for at least two purposes and audiences. First, he sought to address his academic colleagues in Berlin who were interested in what role and place theology was to have in the modern academy. The University of Berlin was, as Thomas Albert Howard explains, “the first German university, at least in the formulations of its founders if not entirely in actual practice, to sever the centuries-​old tie between confessionally defined Christianity and university education. It was the first European university founded under purely national, secular auspices, bearing the imprimatur of neither emperor nor pope.”3 3  Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006), p.  131. For a fuller and more

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Schleiermacher’s “models of university and theology,” he continues, “helped establish the institutional conditions for the renewed legitimation and ‘scientization’ (Verwissenschaftlichung) of theology in the nineteenth century.”4 Keeping this context in mind, Schleiermacher argues that theology’s presence as a university discipline does not undermine the new separation forged between higher education and confessional institutions. Theology, according to Schleiermacher, is not unscientific (unwissenschaftlich); the task of the theologian is to offer didactic descriptions or representations of the doctrines of the Christian Church at a given time and place.5 Schleiermacher’s own theology, specifically, offers an account of the “doctrine now current in the Evangelical [Protestant] Church.”6 His theology is a context-​specific endeavor that requires conceptual and logical rigor aiming at clarity, precision, and accuracy. Further, accurately accounting for a church’s doctrines requires broad historical knowledge about the development of doctrine throughout the centuries. Although Schleiermacher sometimes retains the word “dogmatics,” his work actually includes a proposal to change the task of theology from Dogmatik to Glaubenslehre, a teaching or doctrine of faith.7 Gerrish explains, “Historical thinking had dissolved the concept of dogma as a permanently valid definition of the church’s teaching, and where there are no dogmas there is (strictly speaking) no more dogmatics. The theological task is to give a disciplined account of the faith that prevails in a particular religious community at a particular time.”8 Schleiermacher argues for Glaubenslehre’s place in the modern academy by conceiving of it as an intellectually rigorous endeavor that requires historical nuanced account, see Zachary Purvis, Theology and the University in Nineteenth-​Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a more general consideration of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the relation between church and state, see Jerry Dawson, “Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Separation of Church and State,” Journal of Church and State 7, no. 2 (spring 1965), pp. 214–​25. 4 Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University, p. 133. 5  CF §16.1–​2, pp.  79–​80. Cf. §3.4–​5, §13.1–​2. Cf. Eilert Herms, Herkunft, Entfaltung und erste Gestalt des Systems der Wissenschaften bei Schleiermacher (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1974); and Günter Meckenstock and Joachim Ringleben, Schleiermacher und die wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums (Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991). 6  BO, p. 161. See Richard Crouter, “Shaping an Academic Discipline: The Brief Outline on the Study of Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. Jacqueline Mariña; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 111–​28. Two German words are used for the English “Protestant”: “evangelisch” and “protestantisch.” The passages from the Brief Outline reproduced in this chapter render the German as literally as possible into English. 7 See Brian Gerrish, “From Dogmatik to Glaubenslehre:  A  Paradigm Change in Modern Theology,” in Continuing the Reformation:  Essays in Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 239–​73. 8 Ibid., p. 11.

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knowledge and is grounded in present communities.9 In this way, Schleiermacher signals to his academic colleagues that theology is not an exercise in speculation that is ungrounded in the empirical and historical world. Rather, he claims that the basis of his work in the Glaubenslehre is “simply and straight-​forwardly empirical.”10 Although “simply and straight-​ forwardly” is assuredly an overstatement, as will be seen below, Schleiermacher’s understanding of the task of theology allows a clear indication of its relation to other academic disciplines within the university. In the introduction to Der christliche Glaube, he explains the connection of Glaubenslehre—​which, according to the Brief Outline, is part of historical theology11—​to historical science, hermeneutics and exegesis, geography, philology, philosophy, ethics, and psychology. By doing so, he details the scope and place of Glaubenslehre within modern academic investigation. Even so, Schleiermacher resists ceding priority to a Wissenschaftsbegriff (concept of science) and to the dictates of natural science. For example, he claims that Christians ought not unquestioningly to accept that those things are impossible which natural science now maintains are impossible: We should admit, in general, that since our knowledge of created nature is continually growing, we have not the least right to maintain that anything is impossible and also we should allow, in particular (by far the greater number of New Testament miracles being of this kind), that we can neither define the limits of the reciprocal relations of the body and mind nor assert that they are, always and everywhere, entirely the same without the possibility of extension or deviation.12

Potential scientific development in understanding the relationship between body and mind motivates Schleiermacher not to foreclose the possibility that miracles 9  Because Schleiermacher prefers the term “Glaubenslehre,” I will use that term without an article to refer to what might traditionally be called “dogmatics.” When the definite article is used (i.e., “the Glaubenslehre”), I refer to Schleiermacher’s masterwork, Der christliche Glaube. 10  OG, p. 45. Schleiermacher was not averse to speculation in the philosophical realm. Gerrish puts it succinctly: “Speculation has its own legitimacy, but it belongs on the scientific tree at another point than dogmatics. And if the dogmatic theologians find it useful to appropriate speculative categories, they may do so only insofar as the content of the categories is determined by their own science, not by that of the philosophers. The fundamental question concerns the way in which talk about God is generated. The dogmatician’s sole concern is with statements that arise out of the immediate religious consciousness” (Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, pp. 154–​5). For those interested in Glaubenslehre, according to Schleiermacher, speculation is ruled out of court. 11  BO, pp. 162–​76. 12  CF §47.3, pp. 183–​4.

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like those the New Testament witnesses discuss actually occurred. However, Schleiermacher likewise asserts that “no single instance of it [i.e., the miraculous] can be known to us, and we are nowhere required to recognize it.”13 By making statements like these, Schleiermacher is not giving priority to a system of rules imposed on Christianity from the outside. Rather, he believes that “the general interests of science . . . and the interests of religion seem to meet at the same point.”14 On the one hand, abandoning the idea of the absolutely supernatural is in the interests of Christian faith, considered on its own terms, because it allows for an understanding of divine activity as permeating life rather than intermittently intervening within and interrupting it. On the other hand, paying heed to living Christian communities and their development over time is in the interests of science, which aims at empirical and rational understandings of the world in its entirety and complexity. In this way, Schleiermacher affirms a covenant between the interests of Christianity and intellectual inquiry.15 2.  Theology for a Modern Church In addition to addressing his academic audience, Schleiermacher’s masterwork was meant, secondly, to guide clergy in training. For this audience, in Richard R. Niebuhr’s words, Schleiermacher “presents theology as the servant of the church’s preaching.”16 While this may sound plainly ecclesial, Niebuhr points out that, although theology “is related genetically and linguistically and institutionally to preaching, it is not the same thing as preaching. Theology is an instrument of criticism not of conversion.”17 It is in this way that theology serves the Church. Niebuhr explains, If it is the business of preaching to confess faith and to exhort others to faith, the business of dogmatics is to examine the confessional and hortatory 13  Ibid., p. 183. 14 Ibid. 15 See Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Chapter 4. 16 Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, p.  15. Cf. Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (trans. John Wallhausser; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p.  105; Brian Gerrish, Foreword to The Christian Faith (eds. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; New York: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 88; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense. With an Appendix Regarding a University Soon to be Established (1808) (trans. Terrence N. Tice and Edwina Lawler; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon, 1991). For a full treatment, see Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996). 17 Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, p. 15. See also Schleiermacher’s comments in the opening pages of the General Introduction to Christliche Sittenlehre: Selections from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics (ed., trans. James M.  Brandt; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), pp. 19–​23.

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Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian language of preaching (and also of hymns, the liturgy, etc.), less as a censor than as a Socratic partner who is concerned that contradictions, inconsistencies and superfluous connotations be purged and that in the process the integrity of the consciousness out of which this discourse arises be more steadily acknowledged. Thus, the dialogue of dogmatics with the church is unending, and in its fundamental purpose of drawing forth the content of that consciousness and representing it in the clearest fashion humanly possible it must play the role of critic as well.18

More than mere description, then, theology subjects Christian faith to criticism and refinement within a specific context. As such, Schleiermacher claims that the theologian may, to be sure, have “an influence upon the form and manner of treatment, and [this regulative influence may] even assert itself at particular points by intentional correction of the usual position. And this of itself makes it clear that our definition by no means excludes improvements and new developments of Christian doctrines.”19 Glaubenslehre includes both an account of and guidance for Christian piety. The goal is to clarify and even strengthen piety by offering conceptual commentary on it. More specifically, Schleiermacher explains that “the Protestant treatment of Dogmatics must strive to bring into distinct consciousness the relation sustained by every separate article of doctrine to the antagonism that governs the period in which we live.”20 In Schleiermacher’s day, that “great antagonism” was the intellectual and social unrest of early nineteenth-​century Europe, particularly what Niebuhr calls “the rise of the natural and historical sciences with their latent threat of cultural imperialism.”21 If Schleiermacher can show how Christian faith and natural and historical sciences are not at loggerheads in describing and refining the Church’s doctrines, then Christian preachers can use his critical analysis of Christianity in their ecclesial context. It is partly for this reason that Schleiermacher orders the Glaubenslehre as he does, beginning with divine attributes relating to creation and ending with attributes relating to redemption. Schleiermacher explicitly notes two reasons he follows that general order of presentation. First is his “strong dislike” for anticlimactic texts. Second, he explains, After a complete discussion of the doctrines of redemption and the kingdom of God, there would have been scarcely any other option than to deal as briefly as possible with all those doctrines now contained in the first part. And there can be no doubt that this would have been detrimental not only to the book itself,

18 Richard R. Niebuhr, “Schleiermacher:  Theology as Human Reflection,” Harvard Theological Review 55, no. 1 (1962), p. 21–​49 (35). 19  CF §19.3, p. 90; cf. BO §§3, 15, 18, 19, 26, 27. 20  BO, p. 170. 21  Niebuhr, “Schleiermacher: Theology as Human Reflection,” pp. 21–​49 (38).

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nor just as it pertains to me personally, i.e., as a reflection of my point of view, but also as it relates to the present needs of our church.22

Schleiermacher wants to equip clergy to assure their congregations of divine providential activity despite the skepticism or doubt arising from the wide-​reaching intellectual changes of the time.23 As such, he begins with those doctrines that concern the compatibility of Christian doctrine and the sciences. In this way, Der christliche Glaube aims at describing and critically refining the Christian faith of Prussian Protestantism in the context of nineteenth-​century Europe in order to serve the Church’s needs. 3.  Christian Union in Protestant Prussia Schleiermacher also indicates that his Glaubenslehre “had been composed with special reference to the Union of the two Protestant communions—​the Lutheran and the Reformed.”24 This motivation can be seen as one facet of his commitment to national unity. At that time, Prussia was a conglomerate of territories primarily in the north and east of what is now Germany. After the French invasion of Halle in 1806, Schleiermacher, who was the son of a Reformed chaplain to the Prussian army, hoped for German unification. Under the rule of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, Schleiermacher worked for unification academically, politically, and ecclesiastically. Academically, he was heavily involved in the foundation of the University of Berlin (1810) led by Wilhelm von Humboldt. He became the chair of theology and the first dean of the theological faculty in 1810, and became rector of the university in 1815. Politically, Schleiermacher was appointed as an advisor on education in the Ministry of the Interior. He also edited the Prussische Zeitung (Prussian News) from 1810 to 1814, which published arguments for a popular uprising against Napoleon. Ecclesially, Schleiermacher served Trinity Church in Berlin, Prussia’s capital, from 1809 until his death. He welcomed the unification of the Reformed and Lutheran Churches that Friedrich Wilhelm III also desired, and joint communion was celebrated in his church from 1817. 22  OG, p. 60. 23  Paul Jones makes a suggestion similar to this in his review of Thomas Albert Howard’s Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Paul D. Jones, “Review of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 75, no. 4 (2007), pp. 1006–​9 (1009). 24  CF, “Author’s Preface to the Second Edition,” p. xiv. See Klaus Penzel, “A Chapter in the History of the Ecumenical Quest:  Schelling and Schleiermacher,” Church History 33, no. 3 (1964), pp. 322–​7 (330–​3); Walter E. Wyman Jr., “The Role of the Protestant Confessions in Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith,” The Journal of Religion 87, no. 3 (2007), pp. 355–​85.

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The Glaubenslehre was partly intended as an intellectual bulwark for the establishment of that communion. Schleiermacher undertook to show that “it ought to be regarded as a fundamental characteristic of the Union accomplished in these lands that there exists no necessity for any dogmatic adjustment between the two sides, still less for a new Confession.”25 If the union was partly motivated by Schleiermacher’s desire for national unity, it was also motivated by the primacy he gives to the life of the Church. Carol Jean Voisin states it well: “Schleiermacher thought it was an egregious error to subordinate the intellectual and practical life of the church to ecclesiastical formula.”26 In these ways, Schleiermacher wanted to show his university colleagues the conciliatory relationship between the academic discipline of theology and nontheological academic inquiry. In addition, he was concerned to show clergy in training the harmony between faith, science, and the doctrine of the Protestant Churches. Finally, he hoped to provide a theological touchstone for both the Lutheran and Protestant communities such that Protestant Prussia could be unified and the life of the church thereby enhanced. 4.  Methodological Barriers to Schleiermacher’s Goals Schleiermacher nonetheless risked undermining his own efforts to show the eternal covenant between Christian faith and intellectual inquiry because of two methodological decisions, both of which have to do with the order of his presentation in the Glaubenslehre. First, in his introduction, he begins with comments relating Glaubenslehre to other disciplines in the academy. Second, he fails in the first part of the work to connect the receptivity of humanity to the capacious divine activity with the particular person and work of the Redeemer. While useful for his academic audience, these elements combined to sound the alarm for those concerned about the modern breakdown of “traditional” theology. Schleiermacher did not anticipate such alarm, because he took for granted that Christians could only understand any presentation of the Christian faith with and through a firm conviction regarding the Redeemer. He therefore erroneously assumed that his ecclesial audience would keep in mind their firm conviction that Christ is the Redeemer through which they are brought into a familial relationship with God as they read the introduction and first part of the Glaubenslehre. As he explains to his critics in the second of his Letters to Dr. Lücke, “I presumed—​and did not fail to say so—​that all would somehow bring along with them in their immediate self-​consciousness what was missing, so that no one would feel short-​ changed, even though the content was not presented in dogmatic form until later.”27 25  CF, “Author’s Preface to the Second Edition,” p. xiv. 26 Carol Jean Voisin, “A Reconsideration of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Treatment of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 1981; Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1981), p. 59. 27  OG, p. 57.

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Although one might admire Schleiermacher’s optimism about his ecclesial readers, the history of his reception bears out the suggestion that he might have done better to take a less rosy view of his Christian readers’ interpretive predispositions. 5.  Similarities with Calvin Whatever his failings in this regard, by structuring his Glaubenslehre in this way, Schleiermacher was generally following the table of contents set out in Calvin’s Institutes:  first, knowledge of God the creator; second, knowledge of God the redeemer; third, the reception of grace; fourth, the society of Christ. Just so, Schleiermacher’s table of contents roughly reads: first, the relation between God and the world; second, the antithesis of sin and grace, which is constituted by (third) the reception of divine grace in the redeemer, and (fourth) the origin and coexistence of the church with the world. Though I  will argue below that Schleiermacher’s and Calvin’s doctrines of God are conceptually different in structure, it remains the case that Schleiermacher generally follows Calvin’s order of presentation of the doctrinal content.28 There is also a limited similarity between Calvin’s and Schleiermacher’s audiences and purposes for writing. Drawing a close comparison would be inappropriate, given their radically different contexts in sixteenth-​century France and Switzerland and nineteenth-​century Prussia. Nonetheless, both authors speak simultaneously outside and within the Christian Church in a reconciliatory mode. I have already noted Schleiermacher’s academic and ecclesial audiences. Similarly, the original readers of Calvin’s Institutes also included both political authorities and candidates for ecclesial ministry. One of Calvin’s aims was to convince political authorities that Protestants are inappropriate candidates for religious persecution. As he states in his 1535 prefatory address to King Francis I, “Most Christian King of the French,” When I first set my hand to this work, nothing was farther from my mind, most glorious King, than to write something that might afterward be offered to Your Majesty. . . . But I perceived that the fury of certain wicked persons has prevailed so far in your realm that there is no place in it for sound doctrine. Consequently, it seemed to me that I  should be doing something worthwhile if I  both gave instruction to them and made confession before you with the same work.29

After reminding his reader of the persecution of Protestants in France, he asks the king to make an inquiry into the case, not for his “own personal defense, thereby to return safely” to France, but for “the common cause of all believers . . . a cause completely torn and trampled in your realm today.”30 He concludes by appealing 28  Nimmo, “Schleiermacher on Justification,” pp. 50–​73 (72). 29  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), Preface.1, p. 9. 30  Ibid., Preface.2, p. 11.

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to the king in this manner: “Your mind is now indeed turned away and estranged from us, even inflamed, I may add, against us; but we trust that we can regain your favor, if in a quiet, composed mood you will once read this our confession, which we intend in lieu of a defense before Your Majesty.”31 Calvin saw his Institutes, in part, as an attempt to clear Protestants of the charge of seditious extremism and put an end to the persecution that resulted from such a charge. In addition, Calvin sought to influence his ecclesial readers such that they would not retreat into protectionist mode in relation to the rise of Renaissance humanism.32 Some Christians were at pains to defend themselves against this movement, which included prominent figures who expressed skepticism about Christianity and subjected sacred texts to scholarly study. In response, Calvin employed his humanist education and skills within the Institutes to show that humanism is not, in itself, an adversary of Christian faith. In the first pages of his book, Serene Jones notes, “Calvin exhibits his knowledge of classical Latin and Greek literature by making explicit reference to such figures as Gaius Caligula (a Roman emperor), Diagoras (an atheist cited by Cicero), Plato the philosopher, and Gryllius (a commentator on Cicero).”33 Moreover, he treated the Gospel texts as, among other things, themselves works of rhetoric and interpretation. “Calvin was little troubled,” William Bouwsma explains, “by discrepancies among their accounts; indeed he was scrupulous to identify them. . . . To Calvin the notion of verbal inerrancy would have suggested willful blindness.”34 Rather than seeking to defend against a humanist approach to scriptural texts, Calvin embraced the knowledge of literary thinkers and scholarly study of the Bible. This similarity of purpose in relation to their audiences highlights Calvin and Schleiermacher’s shared view that genuine Christian faith, on the one hand, and intellectual inquiry that is not preemptively regulated by church authority, on the other, need not be antithetical to one another but can work together. In On the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher links this view to the Reformation: Unless the Reformation from which our church first emerged endeavors to establish an eternal covenant between the living Christian faith and completely free, independent scientific inquiry, so that faith does not hinder science and science does not exclude faith, it fails to meet adequately the needs of our time and we need another one, no matter what it takes to establish it. Yet it is my firm conviction that the basis for such a covenant was already established in the 31  Ibid., Preface.8, p. 31. 32  For a discussion of Calvin’s relation to Renaissance humanism, see Donald Williams, “John Calvin: Humanist and Reformer: The Influence of Calvin’s Early Humanism on His Work as a Christian Theologian,” Trinity Journal 5 (1976), pp. 67–​78. 33  Serene Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 1995), p. 33. 34  William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-​Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 121–​2.

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Reformation. . . . Precisely this position, my dear friend, represents that of my Glaubenslehre.35

The compatibility of church doctrine and an academic or scientific spirit, broadly conceived, are touchstones for Schleiermacher’s appreciation of Calvin’s Institutes. He highly esteemed that work on account of both Calvin’s attention therein to concrete Christianity and his precise and systematic method. Gerrish explains: First, the Institutes is a priceless work because it never loses touch with the religious affections, even in the most intricate material. . . . In other words, Calvin, we may say, never lost sight of the fact that theology really is about the actual Christian religion. Second, Schleiermacher ranked the Institutes highly for sharpness of method and systematic compass . . . what Schleiermacher admired most in Calvin’s Institutes was exactly what he himself strove to achieve in his own Glaubenslehre: a dogmatics that has at once a churchly character, given by its consistent reference to the Christian affections, and a scientific character, given by the exactness and mutual coherence of its concepts.36

Whether addressing political or university authorities on the compatibility of Protestant theology with life in the body politic or academia, or attempting to reassure their ecclesial readers that Christianity is not undermined by scholarly inquiry, both Calvin and Schleiermacher are motivated by a shared conviction that Christian faith and intellectual endeavor are compatible with one another.

b.  Antispeculative Doctrine Turning to the second similarity between Calvin and Schleiermacher: both thinkers also share at least three substantive similarities that center their theologies on divine activity in relation to humanity, in an effort to avoid speculative doctrine. First, knowledge (or consciousness) of God and self-​knowledge (or self-​ consciousness) are intertwined. Second, for both Calvin and Schleiermacher, Christian faith involves more than cognitive assent to propositions. It involves the whole person. Third, divine activity is, for both authors, understood in relation to creation, and specifically to humanity. These similarities can be summarized by saying that for both Calvin and Schleiermacher, God is always “God for us” and “God with us.” In other words, they are both antispeculative theologians.37 35  OG, p. 64. See also Andrew Dole’s Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2009) and “Schleiermacher and Otto on Religion,” Religious Studies 40, no. 4 (2004), pp. 389–​413. 36 Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, pp. 184–​5. 37  For an overview of Schleiermacher’s antispeculative approach in relation to Karl Barth’s critique, see James Gordon, “ ‘A Glaring Misunderstanding’? Schleiermacher, Barth

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1.  Knowledge or Consciousness of God and Self Within Calvin’s work, this commitment to antispeculative doctrine is seen, first, in his treatment of human knowledge of God. In Book One of the Institutes, Calvin couples knowledge of God and the self-​knowledge of human beings as two intertwined aspects of wisdom: Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. . . . [T]‌he knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him. Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.38

For Calvin, one cannot know God without knowing humanity, and one cannot genuinely know humanity without knowing God. Reflection on humanity leads to the idea that “our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God,” while reflection on God leads to a legitimate evaluation of humanity’s “righteousness, wisdom, and virtue.”39 Serene Jones argues that in these opening words of the Institutes, Calvin is neither offering a straightforward description of wisdom nor simply making an argument regarding the knowledge of God as theology’s beginning. Rather, he is using a puzzle familiar to his humanist readers in order to draw in a wide audience for the Institutes. Jones explains, Although he does present his own position on the matter at the end of the third paragraph [i.e., that an affirmation of divine knowledge is the only proper starting point in the quest for wisdom], the “argument” of the chapter appears to have been designed to orient the reader dispositionally toward Calvin’s project rather than simply to put forth arguments in support of either self-​knowledge or divine wisdom. In other words, his account of theological methodology functions to dispose or situate the reader toward the project he has undertaken rather than to discuss, in more abstract terms, the proper starting point for theology.40

Given Calvin’s rhetorical skill, there ought to be no doubt that his opening chapter is partially meant to draw his humanist audience into the conversation. He also seems to be doing something more than straightforward explication with his Christian audience in view. After Calvin maintains that the proper starting point and the Nature of Speculative Theology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16, no. 3 (2014), pp. 313–​30. 38 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.i.1–​2, p. 35. 39  Ibid., I.i.2, p. 38. 40 Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, p. 109, p. 112.

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for wisdom is a consideration of the knowledge of God, he begins Chapter 2 as follows: “We shall not say that, properly speaking, God is known where there is no religion or piety.”41 Thus, having prioritized knowledge of God, Calvin turns to Christian piety as the required context within which one may come to such knowledge. The precise way self-​knowledge and knowledge of God are intertwined is disclosed in his discussion of the purpose of the knowledge of God. For Calvin, knowledge of God consists in “what is to our advantage to know of him.”42 It is “to our advantage” to know about divine support, government, nourishment, and blessing. Moreover, knowledge of God is intertwined particularly with knowledge of humanity’s limitations. Christians self-​consciously recognize that they “owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, [and] that they should seek nothing beyond him.”43 Edward Dowey explains, The term “knowledge of God” throughout Calvin’s writings does not refer to the knowledge of observation, or discovery, or remembering, but it is an elliptical expression, a shorthand including both divine revelation and its reception in human knowledge. In strictest adherence to Calvin’s own conceptuality, “The ‘knowledge of God’ is always man’s knowledge of God’s revelation (according to the principle of accommodation) and the very revelation of God always in a radical way implies man’s self-​knowledge (according to the principle of correlation)”.44

Knowledge of God and self-​knowledge are, therefore, substantially interdependent. Attending to the human subject does not draw attention away from the centrality of the divine activity, but enables legitimate consideration of God. For Schleiermacher, too, consciousness of God and of humanity “cannot be separated from one another.”45 Consciousness of God is included in consciousness of the self, because, much like Calvin’s view, humanity is always already in relation to God as the one on whom humanity absolutely (schlechthinnig) depends.46 In point of fact, “the feeling of absolute dependence becomes a clear self-​consciousness only as this idea [i.e., the idea of God as “the Whence of our receptive and active existence”] comes simultaneously into being.”47 Thus, although some interpreters 41 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.ii.1, p. 39. 42 Ibid. 43  Ibid., I.ii.1, p. 41. 44  Edward A. Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 248–​9. The quoted text within the passage is from the first edition of Dowey’s work by the same title, published as The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952, 1965), p. 24. 45  CF §4.4, p. 17. 46  Ibid., §4, p. 12. 47  Ibid., §4.4, p. 17; bracketed text is from CF §4.4, p. 16.

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might claim that Schleiermacher “begins” with human self-​consciousness while Calvin “begins” with knowledge of God, the mature discourses of both authors presume that the divine activity always precedes and conditions creaturely being, acting, and knowing, and that genuine knowledge of God or the human cannot occur without the other. An emphasis on humanity in both Calvin’s and Schleiermacher’s mature works is not contrary to but complements their focus on God. Claude Welch confirms this interpretation: “Here Schleiermacher’s view was continuous with Luther’s constant insistence on the for us and Calvin’s opening statement in the Institutes that the knowledge of God and of self are given together.”48 2.  Holistic Christian Faith A second way that Calvin and Schleiermacher both exhibit an antispeculative commitment is that for both of them, the essence of piety does not consist in a dry articulation of an abstract doctrine of God. For Calvin, notions (notitia) or cognitions (cognitio) play a part in the Christian’s orientation to God insofar as God is conceived as the creator and sovereign of all created beings. However, “knowledge” of God is simultaneously inflected by humility, love, and reverence, which are inculcated by the Christian’s awareness of her creaturely dependence upon God. For Calvin, considering God induces “reverence joined with love of God.”49 He asks, “How can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him?”50 Schleiermacher takes it one step further. He identifies the essence of piety (Frömmigkeit) as a type of feeling (Gefühl): “The piety which forms the basis of all ecclesial communions is, considered purely in itself, neither a knowing nor a doing, but a modification of feeling, or of immediate self-​consciousness.”51 Gefühl is not an emotion or series of affections, but is, in this context, a consciousness or an awareness of absolute dependence.52 Such a consciousness only becomes clear when it is joined with an idea of God as the Whence (Woher) of existence, or that on which 48  Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1799–​1870, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 78. 49 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.ii.1, p. 41. 50  Ibid., I.ii.2, pp. 41–​42. 51  CF §3, p. 5. 52  For an introduction to this concept, see Louis Roy, “Consciousness According to Schleiermacher,” The Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (April 1997), pp. 217–​32; Julia Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–​1794,” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 1 (Jan. 1994), pp. 67–​105; Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Ursprüngliches Gefühl unmittelbarer Koinzidenz des Differenten:  Zur Modifikation des Religionsbegriffs in den verscheidenen Auflagen von Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 75 (1978), pp. 147–​86.

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one is absolutely dependent. Robert Merrihew Adams explains, “It is evidently Schleiermacher’s view that the feeling of absolute dependence will exist in a pure, clear, strong form only in contexts in which it is supported by appropriate conceptual thought.”53 Piety also gives rise to action while, as with conceptual thought, remaining distinct from it. Schleiermacher writes, “on the one hand, it is strongest in our most vivid moments, and either directly or indirectly lies at the root of every expression of our wills, and, on the other hand, it can be grasped by thought and conceived of in its own nature.”54 With Calvin, then, Schleiermacher does not understand piety as a set of theoretical propositions that is unconnected to other aspects of life, but as an awareness of the absolute dependence of the whole of creation upon God.55 Piety thus plays an essential part in the formation of whole persons: Every moment in which piety has a predominant place will contain within itself one or both of these [knowing and doing] in germ . . . for were it otherwise the religious moments could not combine with the others to form a single life, but piety would be something isolated and without any influence upon the other mental functions of our lives.56

I will return to the God-​consciousness in Chapter 7, after Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God and my reading of his doctrine of the Trinity have been set forth. For now, I want to emphasize the character of piety as essentially other than knowing and doing, though inseparable from them. As such, the theologies Calvin and Schleiermacher offer consistently claim that knowledge of God is always personally implicating for humanity. 3.  Divine Activity in Relation to Creation A third feature of antispeculative doctrine found in both Calvin’s and Schleiermacher’s work is that for both figures, knowledge of God is dependent 53 Robert Merrihew Adams, “Faith and Religious Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, pp. 35–​51 (39). 54  CF §3.5, pp. 11–​12. 55  Schleiermacher adopts this formulation of the essence of piety because he wants to deny that “the amount of knowledge in a man must be the measure of his piety” (CF §3.4, p. 9). If that were the case, “there would then emerge a hierarchy of intellectual cultured, a priesthood of speculation, which I for my part cannot find to be very Protestant” (OG, p. 41). 56  CF §3.4, p. 9. Although feeling is the mediating link between knowing and doing, its definition is not midway between the definition of knowing and doing. See F. LeRon Shults, “Schleiermacher’s ‘Reciprocal Relationality’:  The Underlying Regulative Principle of his Theological Method,” in Schleiermacher on Workings of the Knowing Mind: New Translations, Resources, and Understandings (ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson; New  York:  Edwin Mellen, 1998), pp. 177–​96 (181).

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upon divine activity in relation to creation. “The pious mind,” Calvin states, “does not dream up for itself any god it pleases, but contemplates the one and only true God. And it does not attach to him whatever it pleases, but is content to hold him to be as he manifests himself.”57 Knowing God is enabled by the manifestation of divine power, “by which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-​flown speculation.”58 For Calvin, recognition of the divine activity occurs in living experience, which is always set in the context of and made possible by the manifestations of divine power in creation and human history. Likewise, for Schleiermacher, consciousness of God is never a general, ahistorical experience. The awareness of being in relation to God as an absolutely dependent creature always occurs within a particular context and is determined by that context. Schleiermacher explains, “God-​consciousness, as it is here described, does not constitute by itself alone an actual moment in religious experience, but always in connexion with other particular determinations.”59 Indicating the essential determination, Schleiermacher writes that “within the Christian communion, there can be no religious experience which does not involve a relation to Christ.”60 For Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre is therefore not founded on speculation regarding a general monotheistic God-​consciousness: “The present work entirely disclaims the task of establishing on a foundation of general principles a Doctrine of God, or an Anthropology or Eschatology either, which should be used in the Christian Church though it did not really originate there.”61 Rather, Glaubenslehre always proceeds on the basis of the positive, living encounter of Christians with Christ’s Spirit in the Christian community. As Schleiermacher states, In the actual life of the Christian, therefore, the two are always found in combination: there is no general God-​consciousness which has not bound up with it a relation to Christ, and no relationship with the Redeemer which has no bearing on the general God-​consciousness. The propositions of the first part [of the system of doctrine], which lay less direct stress on what is distinctively Christian, are on that account often treated as Natural Theology of an original and universally valid kind, and as such are overrated by those who are themselves less permeated by the distinctive element in Christianity. Others, again, underrate these propositions as attainable even apart from Christianity, and will only allow those propositions which express a relation to the Redeemer to rank as specifically Christian. Both parties are in error. For the former propositions are in no sense the reflection of a meager and purely monotheistic 57 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.ii.2, p. 42. Cf. ibid., I.xiv.4. 58  Ibid., I.x.2, p. 97. 59  CF §32.1, p. 131. 60 Ibid. 61  Ibid., §2.1, p. 3. Cf. BO §§1, 2, 5, 22, 23.

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God-​consciousness, but are abstracted from one which has issued from fellowship with the Redeemer.62

This means that Schleiermacher’s theology is pneumatologically Christomorphic. As Francis Schüssler Fiorenza explains, “the Christian experience is not as such an experience of ‘utter dependency’ [in and by itself] but rather an experience of the power of our redemption.”63 It is, in other words, the Christian’s reception of the divine activity in Christ and his Spirit in the Church. At all points, the divine activity is set in relation to Christ and his Spirit vis-​à-​vis the temporal and spatial life of the Christian community.64 To summarize, for Schleiermacher, speculation “destroys the essence of Christianity by postulating an activity of Christ that is not mediated in time and space; and at the same time it so isolates itself that what has been achieved in it can have no continuing influence.”65 By emphasizing Christian piety as a form of Gefühl, Schleiermacher inflects Calvin’s antispeculative focus on “God with us” in a post-​enlightenment manner. The similarities between Calvin and Schleiermacher that I  have considered above, then, are twofold. First, Christian faith and academic inquiry are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. They exist in an “eternal covenant” with one another. Second, God is understood by both figures as always already in relation to humanity. They both espouse an antispeculative commitment that forbids them from attempting to think about God apart from creation. I have drawn out that commitment in three ways: knowledge (or consciousness) of God and self-​knowledge (or self-​consciousness) are intertwined; Christian faith is personally implicating and therefore does not merely consist of assent to cognitive content; and divine activity is conceived in relation to creation and humanity. In at least these three ways, for both Calvin and Schleiermacher, God is pro nobis and God with us.

c.  Different Conceptual Structures in the Doctrine of God Even though Calvin and Schleiermacher both insist on an eternal covenant between faith and intellectual inquiry, and both understand divine activity always 62  CF §62.3, pp. 261–​2. 63 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Understanding God as Triune,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, pp. 171–​ 88 (182). Contrast this with Mark Husbands’s inaccurate interpretation in “Calvin on the Revelation of God in Creation and Scripture:  Modern Reception and Contemporary Possibilities,” Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (ed. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), pp. 25–​48 (29). 64  See Kevin Hector, Theology without Metaphysics:  God, Language and the Spirit of Recognition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 47–​102. 65  CF §87.3, p. 360.

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in relation to humanity, they nonetheless treat the doctrine of God differently in their works. Calvin operates with a distinction between God as creator and God as redeemer, whereas Schleiermacher operates without such a distinction. Schleiermacher understands God most basically as the creator. The difference can be attributed to his more thoroughgoing antispeculative approach. 1.  Duplex Cognitio Dei For Calvin, there are two kinds of knowledge made available to humanity by God of “his own most hallowed lips” within history: First in order came that kind of knowledge by which one is permitted to grasp who that God is who founded and governs the universe. Then that other inner knowledge was added, which alone quickens the dead souls, whereby God is known not only as the Founder of the universe and the sole Author and Ruler of all that is made, but also in the person of the Mediator as the Redeemer.66

God is known first as the creator. In a second step, God is known inwardly by realizing that the creator is also the redeemer of that creation. This polarity between knowledge of God the creator and knowledge of God the redeemer, also referred to as the duplex cognitio Dei, saturates Calvin’s work. Dowey explains, “The duplex cognitio Dei, although formulated exactly for the first time by Calvin in the Institutio, 1559, is not an hapax legomenon, but an unvarying element characteristic of his thought from at least 1539 on.”67 There is, however, a difference between Calvin’s usual treatment of the distinctions within divine revelation and the way he treats them in the passage from the Institutes cited above. In the usual treatment, the distinctions are more dialectical than chronological. As Dowey describes it, the relation between knowledge of God the creator and of God the redeemer is a dialectical “double presupposition”: (1) The redemptive knowledge must be seen to have come from God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the same God to whom Scripture points in the natural order and the moral law, whom Scripture describes as the Triune Creator and Sustainer of the world. This is a logical or conceptual presupposition. It is not a propaedeutic or a first lesson in redemption, for merely opposing a Christian interpretation of the Creator to a heathen one does not produce faith; we know the Creator only in the gratuitous promise of mercy in Christ which is the other presupposition: (2) The knowledge of God the Creator comes only to those illuminated by the Spirit in faith, although the knowledge of faith, properly speaking, is not God as seen in his general creative activity, but as seen in the special 66 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.vi.1, p. 70. 67 Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, p. 253.

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work of redemption in Christ. Thus, the knowledge of the Redeemer is an “epistemological” presupposition of the knowledge of the Creator.68

In other words, Christians only know God as the creator through their knowledge of the redeemer. As Calvin states, It will be rash for us to decide that God is well disposed toward us unless he give witness of himself, and anticipate us by his call, that his will may not be doubtful or obscure. But we have already seen that the sole pledge of his love is Christ, without whom the signs of hatred and wrath are everywhere evident. . . . Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.69

For Calvin, faith in God is properly grounded in Christ and the Holy Spirit. However, once knowledge of God as redeemer has been realized through divine revelation, one may appropriately speak of God the creator and God the redeemer in logical distinction from one another; this allows Calvin occasionally to slip into a chronological presentation of the duplex cognitio Dei. 2.  Simplex Cognitio Dei Like Calvin, Schleiermacher insists that, for the pious Christian, everything is connected to the Redeemer, and he sometimes writes of creation and redemption as distinct activities. Yet ultimately, he maintains that God is the creator whose power is redemptively Christomorphic. As Schleiermacher states, the divine activity in creation is centrally shaped or formed by Christ: “Christ therefore was determined as He was, only because, and in so far as everything as a whole was determined in a certain way; and conversely, everything as a whole was only so determined, because, and in so far as, Christ was determined in a certain way.”70 This means that, for Schleiermacher, redemption cannot be understood as conceptually distinct from the activity of creation. While for Calvin, faith in Christ the redeemer is required to rightly know God the creator, for Schleiermacher, redemption is the “completion, only now accomplished [in Christ and the new corporate life], of the creation of human nature.”71 Both the beginning of creation and its completion are instances of the divine, unified creative activity, carried out in time and space. Thus, whereas Calvin has two conceptual poles between which he moves in a theological dialectic of creation and redemption, Schleiermacher has a conceptually 68  Ibid., p. 256. 69 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.ii.7, p. 551. 70  CF §120.3, p. 555. 71  Ibid., §89, p. 366.

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unified understanding of divine activity. For Schleiermacher, God is simply the creator who shapes the world in relation to Christ.72 One reason for this difference between Schleiermacher and Calvin is that Schleiermacher finds this way of understanding God in relation to creation useful for solving theological problems. While describing one of these problems—​namely, how to understand God’s relation to the “fall” of humankind—​he highlights the difference between himself and Calvin on exactly the point I have been describing: Calvin understands creation and redemption as conceptually distinct, whereas Schleiermacher does not. He explains, Thus, I  cannot possibly do otherwise than also to concur with Calvin in this matter too [i.e., that the fall is grounded in divine predestination], although I would not want to say it as he did, that Adam as Adam was destined to fall; but, rather, I would want to say that it was on account of the fact that the human race was destined to sinfulness and to redemption that Adam became the Adam who was to fall. Moreover . . . one could come off more easily if one were to say that prior to Christ human nature in general would have possessed neither the capacity to resist nor the ability not to sin. Moreover, this does much to resolve the matter at issue here in that it is easier to account for the way in which God created a human nature that, as it were, would first come to completion through a second creation than to assume that God in fact created in its first exemplars a better nature but willed that thereafter they would change for the worse.73

The upshot of this difference is that whereas Calvin understands the creator as willing creation and redemption, Schleiermacher understands the creator as willing an ongoing creation, with the telos of redemption, in time. The distinction made here, between Calvin’s duplex cognitio Dei and Schleiermacher’s simplex cognitio Dei, may seem a fine point. However, the difference exemplifies Schleiermacher’s thoroughgoing antispeculative commitment. By maintaining the unity of the divine activity as Christomorphically creative, Schleiermacher more faithfully derives the divine attributes from lived Christian piety—​anchored in the divine redeeming activity—​than does Calvin.74

d.  Anticipating Implications for Trinitarianism To summarize, I  have argued in this chapter that Schleiermacher is situated within the trajectory of thought that runs through Calvin. I  have highlighted 72  As we will see in Chapters 4 through 5, it is for this reason that Schleiermacher does not appropriate the divine activity of creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit. This distinguishes his view from both Sabellius’s and the more classical view. See Fiorenza, “Understanding God as Triune,” pp. 171–​88 (181). 73  DE, p. 59. 74 Cf. Wilfried Brandt, Der heilige Geist und die Kirche bei Schleiermacher (Zürich: Zwingli Verlag, 1968).

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two primary similarities. First, both share the conviction that there is an eternal covenant between academic inquiry and Christian faith. These two—​intellectual activity and Christian piety—​need not be understood in a competitive relationship. Instead, both Calvin and Schleiermacher understand Christian faith and intellectual endeavor to be compatible with and complementary to one another. While Calvin’s Institutes sought to persuade political and ecclesial audiences that Protestants could exist harmoniously within the body politic and in relation to Renaissance humanism, Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre was in part meant to explicate theology’s place in the modern German university for his academic colleagues, to equip clergy-​in-​training for practicing their faith during an age of skepticism and science, and to justify the union of the Prussian Protestant Church. In both authors’ contexts, it was important to show that Christian faith, higher learning, and political engagement do not hinder or exclude one another. Calvin and Schleiermacher also share a commitment to antispeculative doctrine. First, knowledge of God and self-​knowledge are intertwined such that one can only know God as “for us” and “with us.” While both Calvin and Schleiermacher take knowledge of God and self-​knowledge to be intimately intertwined, however, Schleiermacher does not make the rhetorical gestures that Calvin does in signaling that knowledge of God properly comes before knowledge of humanity. Rather, Schleiermacher clearly and consistently insists that God-​consciousness and self-​ consciousness exist simultaneously. Second, both authors understand Christian faith as more than cognitive assent to propositional statements. For Calvin, Christian faith generates humility, love, and reverence for God as Christians come to clear theological ideas. Schleiermacher goes further by emphasizing the essence of Christian piety as consciousness of one’s absolute dependence upon God, a consciousness that draws the whole of the human person—​in her knowledge, activity, and disposition (Gefühl)—​into relation with God. One’s intellectual life, activity, and basic consciousness are all involved in Christian piety. Third, both thinkers ground theological claims in the pious reception of divine activity as it is related to creation and human history. They do not dream up a god as they please, or describe a general religious experience on the basis of principles arising outside the Christian community, but link their doctrines of God to the redemptive activity received concretely in the Christian Church. In this way, neither Calvin nor Schleiermacher has much tolerance for speculation about the divine activity apart from the world. Although Calvin and Schleiermacher share these features of thought, Schleiermacher took Calvin’s antispeculative approach further. While for Calvin the divine power manifests itself within creation and redemption, which can be considered as separate activities, for Schleiermacher the divine activity consists in a creative process that comes to completion in and through Christ. As such, he lays out his doctrine of God progressively in the Glaubenslehre, and it reaches completion only with a full explication of the economy of salvation. Those familiar with Protestant theological history might anticipate a substantial implication of Schleiermacher’s antispeculative commitment for his understanding of God: the immanent Trinity might be seen as a speculative doctrine insofar as it deals with God as God would be apart from creation. As we will see in

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the next chapter, because of this feature of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, Schleiermacher does not find a place for it within his system of doctrine. As I will show, he does indeed reject the traditional doctrine of the immanent Trinity. However, this rejection ought not lead Schleiermacher’s interpreters to the conclusion that his antispeculative approach necessarily leads to the demise of the doctrine of the Trinity. While, as Powell is right to state, “Schleiermacher’s view of doctrine enabled the Ritschlians with good conscience to claim the heritage of the Reformation,”75 and they, for the most part, swiftly neglected the doctrine of the Trinity, that is not the whole story about Schleiermacher himself. What Ritschlian and other liberal theologians ignored is Schleiermacher’s call for a reformulated Trinitarianism that more adequately expresses the Christian faith than the traditional form. Schleiermacher is in search of an approach to the doctrine of the Trinity that is grounded in the Christian reception of divine activity in Christ and the Spirit, that does not attempt to leap over humanity’s creaturely epistemic limits, and that recognizes the contours of the divine life as revealed by the person of Jesus Christ and his Spirit in the Church. Contrary to what Schleiermacher’s reception history might incline his readers to believe about the implications of his openness to academic inquiry and his antispeculative approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, I will show in the following chapters that the understanding of God set forth in the Glaubenslehre sets the stage for a novel form of Trinitarianism that does not spell the doctrine’s death, but points a way toward its revitalization.

75 Powell, The Trinity in German Thought, pp. 159.

Part II S CHLEIERMACHER AND THE T RINITY

Chapter 3 R EJECTING I M M ANE NT T R I N I TA RIA N I SM

In the first part of this book, I noted the charges of Spinozism, idealism, and psychological subjectivism as the interpretive background upon which I offer the present analysis of Schleiermacher’s theology. As Van A. Harvey describes it in broad strokes, the history of modern theology made popular by some of Schleiermacher’s critics is as follows: After the Reformers, Protestantism hardened into a scholasticism which proved quite unable to deal with the intellectual revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Protestant liberalism responded to this challenge but so capitulated to the spirit of the new age—​its immanentialism [sic], optimism, and anthropocentrism—​that there was nothing distinctive left for Christianity to defend. Neo-​orthodoxy, happily, rejected this optimism and immanentialism [sic] while reserving what was best in liberalism, its honesty and critical spirit. The neo-​orthodox revolt was based on a rediscovery of the “strange new world within the Bible”, the transcendence of God, the sinfulness of man, and the Reformation principle sola fidei, sola gratia.1

Although Harvey characterizes this interpretation of the history of modern theology as a myth, it has been influential. Schleiermacher’s part has been seen particularly in capitulating to the spirit of the Enlightenment and Romanticism by turning to the human subject rather than the divine object of faith. The first part of this book attempted to clear the way for a reconsideration of Schleiermacher’s theology by placing it in a different interpretive history. I have located Schleiermacher in the theological trajectory that is partially anchored in John Calvin. Schleiermacher not only takes a similar approach to Calvin in terms of the covenant between academic inquiry and Christian faith, but takes Calvin’s antispeculative approach even further, in part by offering a simplex cognitio Dei rather than a duplex cognitio Dei. When Schleiermacher is read as a theologian who expands the legacy of Calvin rather than as the poster child

1  Van A. Harvey, “A Word in Defense of Schleiermacher’s Theological Method,” Journal of Religion, 42, no. 3 (1962), pp. 151–​70 (166–​7).

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of Protestant liberalism, his work might be interpreted along lines that may be less familiar but do more justice to his thought. In Part Two of this book, I offer an analysis of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of the Trinity. What I intend to show is that, although Schleiermacher’s work does not by any means express the classical doctrine of the Trinity, the Glaubenslehre implicitly offers an “essential Trinitarianism.”2 This means, first, that it affirms certain essential aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity: the divine essence is united to human nature in the person of Christ and in Christ’s Spirit in the Church. Second, the Glaubenslehre affirms three interrelated, distinctive expressions of the divine essence; namely, causality, love, and wisdom. Take away these two characteristic features of Schleiermacher’s theology—​the union of the divine and the human, and the triune divine essence—​and the entire theological edifice crumbles. I  will demonstrate Schleiermacher’s movement toward essential Trinitarianism by interpreting and analyzing the Glaubenslehre’s understanding of God in a backward movement, beginning here with his explicit treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity. In this chapter, I first discuss the placement of Schleiermacher’s treatise on the Trinity at the end of the Glaubenslehre. I take account of three potential reasons his readers may not have attributed to the Glaubenslehre a significant role for the doctrine of the Trinity: they may not have read the text through to its conclusion, they may accord more significance to topics that appear first in the text, and they may not allow for doctrinal diversity with regard to the Trinity. Having taken account of these tendencies in Schleiermacher’s readers, I  then argue that he had good reasons for waiting until the end of the Glaubenslehre to comment explicitly on the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather than a sign of the insignificance of the doctrine, Schleiermacher’s placement of the Trinitarian Treatise is actually a result of his desire to revitalize it within Protestant theology. He first aims to convince his readers that a genuinely Christian theology could be offered apart from the traditional doctrine of the Trinity—​one that maintains the union of the divine essence with human nature in and through Christ, and that relates everything to redemption in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Only after they have been so convinced might they be willing to think freely about the traditional doctrine’s strengths and weaknesses. Before turning to Schleiermacher’s objections to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, I take account of the Protestant company he keeps in calling for its revitalization; namely, Martin Luther and John Calvin. Although Schleiermacher clearly goes further than these first-​and second-​generation Reformers, they too had hesitations about the value of the technicalities involved in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Second, I discuss Schleiermacher’s antispeculative objection to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Drawing on claims advanced in Chapter  2, I  show that Schleiermacher’s hesitations about the doctrine of the immanent Trinity arise in part because of his commitment to theology as a historical discipline 2  Claude Welch, In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 294.

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rather than a speculative discipline, in which it would be legitimate to consider what God might be like were creation never to have existed. I then show that Schleiermacher shares with immanent Trinitarians a concern to uphold divine grace and uniqueness. Though immanent Trinitarians may attempt to uphold divine grace and divine singularity differently than Schleiermacher does, they nonetheless share a commitment to sola gratia and the divine alterity. Moreover, Schleiermacher also allows for making some inferences about the divine essence on the basis of divine activity in relation to creation. In the course of this argument, I  consider the connection of Schleiermacher’s historical thinking to his attitude toward Hebrew scripture. While there is much in his commentary on Judaism that needs significant recalculation, Schleiermacher nonetheless refuses to read Christian doctrines back into the Tanakh. This refusal respects the Hebrew scriptures’ integrity. If a doctrine of the Trinity is to be developed within Protestant Christianity, it will need to take the New Testament as its distinctive source; theologians cannot instrumentalize the Tanakh for Christian ends. However, because the New Testament does not contain the doctrinal intricacies developed later in Trinitarian thought, Schleiermacher raises the question of whether the doctrine of the immanent Trinity goes beyond its properly Protestant base in scripture. Third, I  highlight the conceptual difficulties that Schleiermacher raises against the doctrine of the immanent Trinity itself. In many ways, he is simply reiterating elements within debates about the Trinity that have occurred throughout Christian history. If the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is to be upheld, Schleiermacher would have it avoid Monarchianism and tritheism. These pitfalls, as he sees it, are difficult to avoid, with regard to both the inequality of the persons and essence and the inequality of the divine causality and the persons. I treat these inequalities in two subsections, before a final subsection on Schleiermacher’s concern to avoid placing such stumbling blocks before would-​ be Christians. The chapter concludes with a reconsideration of Sabellianism. I take account of Schleiermacher’s own reinterpretation of Sabellius’s understanding of the Trinity, which serves as a platform to begin thinking in novel ways about the doctrine. I  then explicate the two questions Schleiermacher asks his readers to consider, so as to encourage a revitalization of the doctrine: first, whether the idea of eternal personal distinctions in the divine essence are clearly present in the New Testament, and second, whether the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” are used within scripture in the same ways they are used in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. If one can answer these two questions, Schleiermacher believes, a new construction of the doctrine of the Trinity could be achieved. In short, this chapter identifies Schleiermacher’s motivations for critiquing the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and sets the stage for his own reformulation of the doctrine of the Trinity—​a reformulation that takes the doctrine seriously and retains what he characterizes as its essential features, while avoiding its speculative elements. In terms of the reading of Glaubenslehre that commences here, we begin at the end, with paragraphs 170 to 172, while drawing also on Schleiermacher’s

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“sequel” to those paragraphs, “On the Discrepancy Between the Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of the Trinity.”3

a.  Schleiermacher’s “Trinitarian Treatise” Many of Schleiermacher’s readers report that he does not have much use for the doctrine of the Trinity. Beginning with his contemporaries, Curran observes, “Hegel notes in exasperation, the Trinity has a central role to play in the whole ecclesiastical history of Christian piety, but by the time we get to the end of the Glaubenslehre, there doesn’t seem to be any room at the inn!”4 Others have repeated this interpretation into the present. Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s comment is representative: Schleiermacher “relegated the doctrine of the Trinity to an appendix to Christian theology.”5 Ted Peters writes, even more starkly, “I must disagree with Schleiermacher to the extent that he makes the doctrine of the Trinity an expendable appendix to monotheism.”6 Given this hermeneutical trajectory, readers of the Glaubenslehre might be surprised to find therein the following passages: An essential element of our exposition in this Part has been the doctrine of the union of the Divine Essence with human nature, both in the personality of Christ and in the common Spirit of the Church; therewith the whole view of Christianity set forth in our Church teaching stands and falls. For unless the being of God in Christ is assumed, the idea of redemption could not be thus concentrated in His Person. And unless there were such a union also in the 3  Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über den Gegensatz zwischen der Sabellianischen und der Athanasianischen Vorstellung von der Trinität,” Theologische Zeitschrift 1, no. 10 (1822), pp. 265–​353. The critical edition is published under the same title in Kritische Gesamtausgabe (ed. Hans-​Joachim Birkner, et al.; vol. I/​10, ed. Hans-​Friedrich Traulsen with Martin Ohst; Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 223–​306. 4 Thomas H. Curran, Doctrine and Speculation in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre (New  York:  Walter de Gruyter, 1994), p.  299. See G. W.  F. Hegel, “Auszüge und Bemerkungen: Aus Schleiermachers ‘Glaubenslehre’ Bd. 2, 1822,” Berliner Schriften: 1818–​ 1831 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997), pp. 684–​8. 5 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us:  The Trinity and Christian Life (New  York:  Harper One, 1991), p.  251. With this estimation, she is echoing Claude Welch in In This Name:  The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock; previously published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 4. See also Mark Husbands, “Calvin on the Revelation of God in Creation and Scripture:  Modern Reception and Contemporary Possibilities,” in Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (ed. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink; Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2012), pp. 25–​48 (31); and Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 5th ed., 2011), p. 258. 6  Ted Peters, God as Trinity:  Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993), p. 89.

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common Spirit of the Church, the Church could not thus be the Bearer and Perpetuator of the redemption through Christ. Now these exactly are the essential elements in the doctrine of the Trinity. . . . The doctrine of the Trinity has no origin but this; and at first it had no other aim than to equate as definitely as possible the Divine Essence considered as thus united to human nature with the Divine Essence in itself. . . . In virtue of this connexion, we rightly regard the doctrine of the Trinity, in so far as it is a deposit of these elements, as the keystone [Schlußstein] of Christian doctrine, and this equating with each other of the divine in each of these two unions, as also of both with the Divine Essence in itself, as what is essential in the doctrine of the Trinity.7

According to Schleiermacher, the essential features of the classical doctrine of the Trinity are the key to the theological perspective he sets forth in the Glaubenslehre.8 Though some would identify the three persons in one Godhead as the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity, Schleiermacher identifies the union of the divine essence with human nature as the crucial part of the doctrine. By doing so, he is highlighting the motivation for the doctrine of the Trinity rather than the technical terms that arose later in the doctrine’s development. The doctrine of the Trinity was developed in order to offer a vocabulary and grammar that Christians can use when discussing the divine being in Christ while retaining a clear commitment to monotheism. As such, rather than identifying the three persons in one Godhead as the central feature of the doctrine of the Trinity, Schleiermacher centers on that which gave rise to the doctrine. Using his own metaphor, the union of the divine essence with human nature is the stone placed in the center of an arch that keeps both sides from collapsing. Without the being of God in human nature, neither redemption through Christ nor its communication through the common Spirit 7  CF §170.1, p.  738; cf. §§94 and 123. The passage after the first ellipses is from CF §170.1, p. 739. 8  For a discussion of the appropriate translations of “Schlußstein” as “coping-​stone” and “keystone,” see Curran, Doctrine and Speculation, p. 306. A “coping-​stone” is a stone set on top of a structure that caps it off and reinforces its strength. A “keystone,” on the other hand, is a stone that is placed in the middle of an arch that holds both sides in place. The debate about how to translate “Schlußstein” is, at base, about the importance and place of Schleiermacher’s treatment of the Trinity within his Glaubenslehre. Curran argues that Schlußstein ought to be taken as the coping-​stone rather than the keystone, because “the doctrine of the Trinity should be considered independently of Gottesbewußtsein” (ibid.). Curran is incorrect in his reading, because he does not make a distinction between the historical form of the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine in its essence. Clearly, the doctrine of the Trinity in its historical form is not the keystone of the Glaubenslehre, because for Schleiermacher, the historical form of the doctrine can be considered apart from the consciousness of God received in and through Christ and the Church. However, it is equally clear that the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity is, in fact, that without which Schleiermacher’s entire system would fall apart. This translation issue needs to be settled by a careful consideration of the place of the doctrine within the system of doctrine.

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of the Church as “bearer and perpetuator” would exist. As the keystone of the Glaubenslehre, the doctrine of the Trinity is a crucial summary of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Christian faith. 1.  Potential Explanations for Misreadings Clearly, all of Schleiermacher’s interpreters did not take him at his word about the doctrine’s importance for his Glaubenslehre. This skepticism might be accounted for in at least three ways. First, as Schleiermacher himself feared, some likely did not read the work through to the end. Early in his career, Barth told his students that only the first twelve sections of the Glaubenslehre needed to be read in order for some to decide that the rest was not worth the time and energy.9 Yet, second, for those who did read Schleiermacher’s work in its entirety, the placement of the treatise on the Trinity at the end may have had some effect on their estimation of its importance. Barth can once again serve as an example of this kind of evaluation. He states, “The fact that Schleiermacher can use his doctrine of the Trinity only as the conclusion to his dogmatics and not equally well as its beginning shows that it does not have constitutive significance for him.”10 This type of reasoning seems to assume that the order of the subjects to be dealt with in the text has some bearing on each subject’s importance within the system of doctrine. This is a curious position to maintain when reading a truly systematic work, wherein all subjects are interdependent on the others. Schleiermacher himself notes this peculiarity in On the Glaubenslehre: It does seem strange that some of my critics claim that the one merit due my work is for its systematic arrangement, when I do not care whether or not the second part comes first. . . . I could be so bold as to claim that it is advantageous for a dogmatics to undergo such a reorganization. It is a sign that the dogmatics stays within its limits and seeks to be nothing more than a suitable and skillful arrangement of what is simultaneously present and mutually interrelated.11

Elsewhere, Schleiermacher offers reasons for arranging the system the way he has. As we have seen in Chapter 2, he knows that it might be prudent to begin in one place rather than another based on the circumstances and purposes for writing a text, and that the location of a doctrine within a specific section might bear on its 9  Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923–​24 (ed. Dietrich Ritschl; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), p. 243. 10 Barth, Church Dogmatics I/​1 (ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; London/​ New York: T&T Clark, 2nd ed., 1975), p. 303. Barth goes so far as to discount the intention of the author in choosing a placement for the doctrine of the Trinity: “The choice of this order, irrespective of the reasons for it, is unmistakably a factual confirmation of the presence and urgency of at least the problem of the Trinity.” 11  OG, p. 69. Cf. ibid., pp. 49–​50.

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meaning.12 Even so, if a work is truly systematic, meaning that every doctrine is interdependent, then the conceptual significance of a doctrine’s theological location is substantially mitigated. A third potential account of why Schleiermacher’s readers have interpreted his text contrary to the author’s own estimation is that they have been unwilling to recognize as “Trinitarian” anything other than the doctrine as formulated and developed by authors such as Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas. This reason for rejecting Schleiermacher’s work is worth more consideration, because it relates directly to one of his principal aims at this juncture in his Christian Faith. In part, Schleiermacher concludes rather than begins with the Trinity because he wants to show how one might maintain the essential elements of the doctrine of the Trinity without espousing it in its conventional form: “it is important to make the point that the main pivots [Hauptangelpunkte] of the ecclesiastical doctrine—​the being of God in Christ and in the Christian Church—​are independent of the doctrine of the Trinity.”13 Schleiermacher aims to produce a theological system that does not depend on the classical formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Those who reject Schleiermacher’s doctrine of the Trinity on the basis that it does not represent the classical formulation would certainly have his understanding. 2.  The Placement of the “Trinitarian Treatise” In addition to the reasons outlined in the second chapter of this book relating to the scientific developments of his age,14 Schleiermacher placed his discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of the text, because it is not until the end that readers would be in a position to have before them the full treatment of the economy of salvation and its relation to the doctrine of God. It is important to remember that Schleiermacher does not reserve a separate place within his Glaubenslehre for the doctrine of God. Rather, divine attributes are correlated at different points in the text with descriptions of the relation of God to the world, consciousness of sin, and redemption. Because the divine attributes are placed throughout the Glaubenslehre instead of in one doctrinal location, Schleiermacher treats the doctrine of the Trinity at the culmination of his work.15 The placement of the explicit treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of the Glaubenslehre also coheres with Schleiermacher’s antispeculative orientation, whereby he details the economy of redemption that proceeds from the created readiness for the union of the divine essence with human nature to that union accomplished in the person of Christ and by the Spirit of Christ in the Church. The process of redemption continues to take place in the present and into 12  Ibid., p. 90. CF §28.2, p. 120. 13  Ibid., §170.3, p. 741. 14  These include the rise of historical and natural sciences within the modern university. See pages pp. 30–36. 15 Schüssler Fiorenza, Francis, “Understanding God as Triune,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, pp. 171–​88 (176).

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the future for Schleiermacher, through the enduring presence of the Spirit in the Church. The redemptive work of God in the Church continues moving toward a full establishment of God’s reign on earth, in accord with the gracious election of all to blessedness. This temporal movement from readiness for the union, to the union itself, to an ever-​widening influence of redemption, makes the placement of the Trinity at the end of the doctrinal work quite appropriate, since the divine attributes relating to redemption—​love and wisdom—​are treated only after the economy of salvation is detailed. Only after the facts of redemption are presented does Schleiermacher state that love and wisdom are true expressions of the very essence of God. Without having previously discussed the concrete salvation history that occurs in Christ and the Church, these would be empty words. Only after love and wisdom are given content by the history of salvation does Schleiermacher venture to say that they are essential to the divine life. Thus, just before treating the doctrine of the Trinity at the end, Schleiermacher underscores that the divine power (Kraft) of love and wisdom that is expressed in each movement of time is not a mere appearance (Erscheinung), but is essential to God.16 3.  Calls for Protestant Revitalization Before turning to the specific reasons for Schleiermacher’s deviation from the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, it is important to note that his discontent with that formulation is nothing new. In fact, he was in good Protestant company; the Reformers themselves indicated some ambivalence about the doctrine. Brian Gerrish notes that “Luther, in particular, expressed strong doubts about the practical usefulness of technical Trinitarian language, even of the term ‘Trinity’ itself.”17 Calvin, too, evidences certain misgivings about some aspects of Trinitarian language, which he thinks are rather confusing. He claims, “I could wish [Trinitarian terms] were buried, if only among all men this faith were agreed on: that Father and Son and Spirit are one God, yet the Son is not the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but that they are differentiated by a peculiar quality.”18 Calvin nonetheless adopts the classical doctrine of the Trinity because of his interpretation of scripture and the “natural inclinations” of the human mind, both of which place the Father first, then the Son, then the Spirit.19 Even so, he is willing to disregard the multitudinous technicalities of the doctrine. As Calvin states, “it is far safer to stop with that relation [of the Father and the Son] which Augustine sets forth than by too subtly penetrating into the sublime mystery to wander through many evanescent speculations.”20 Like Luther and Calvin before him, but taking their 16  I will return to this in Chapters 4 and 6. See pp. 82–95, 138–50. 17  Brian Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), p. 39. 18  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), I.xiii.5, p. 126. 19  Ibid., I.xiii.18, pp. 142–​3. 20  Ibid., I.xiii.19, p. 144.

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antispeculative instincts further, Schleiermacher is not interested in maintaining historical doctrines simply because they are part of the Christian tradition. He raises particular questions about the traditional formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity because he is not convinced that it is properly related to the Christian’s pious reception of the divine activity. That is not to say, however, that Schleiermacher wants to disregard the doctrine of the Trinity wholesale—​far from it. He remains convinced that the essential features of the doctrine of the Trinity are key to the Christian faith. As Paul DeHart rightly notes, “Schleiermacher’s entire discussion of the Trinity is intricately linked with, in fact substantively derivative of, certain earlier sections of his dogmatics; it is a kind of meta-​doctrine, coordinated with and coordinating the central Schleiermacherian accounts of how Christian redemption functions.”21 As such, Schleiermacher himself calls for “a reconstruction of [the doctrine of the Trinity] corresponding to the present condition of other related doctrines.”22 A distinct minority of interpreters have pointed to this call for reconstruction as Schleiermacher’s signal achievement. Carol Jean Voisin, for example, states:  “Not since the Nicean and Constantinopolitan Councils and Augustine has the doctrine been acknowledged as such a pivotal and creative part of the Christian doctrine of faith. To be sure, no Protestant made such a claim for the Trinity before Schleiermacher.”23 Schleiermacher’s call for a Protestant revisitation of the doctrine stirred debate, even in his own age.24 For example, Moses Stuart, who translated and introduced Schleiermacher’s “On the Discrepancy,” a sequel to the conclusion of his Glaubenslehre, asked, “Why should this branch of Christian theology so long have remained in so imperfect and unsatisfactory a state, while most other Christian doctrines have been advancing as to illustration, precise statement, and confirmation?”25 The doctrine of the Trinity, Schleiermacher 21 Paul DeHart, “Ter mundus accipit infinitum:  The Dogmatic Coordinates of Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian Treatise,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52 (2010), pp. 17–​39. 22  CF §172.2, p. 749. 23 Carol Jean Voisin, “A Reconsideration of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Treatment of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 1981; Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1981), pp. 142–​3. 24  For a sampling of the debate, see Friedrich Lücke, “Fragen und Bedenken über Die Immanente Wesenstrinität, oder Die Trinitarische Sebstunterscheidung Gottes,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 13 (1840), pp. 63–​112; and Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, “Über Die Wesentliche Dreieinigkeiten Gottes,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 14 (1841), pp. 295–​345. 25  Moses Stuart, OD I, p. 318. By Schleiermacher’s own indication, “On the Discrepancy” is the sequel to §190 of the Glaubenslehre. In it, he follows up on some of the considerations introduced in the Glaubenslehre. He does so by comparing the Athanasian and Sabellian views of the doctrine of the Trinity. A  significant conclusion of “On the Discrepancy” is that Sabellianism should be taken to be more sophisticated than had previously been

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asserts, stands in need of attention, specifically by Protestants. As Robert Francis Streetman observes, We must come to terms with his statement that Protestantism has not yet added anything distinctive in its treatment of the Trinity, and that therefore the doctrine remains incomplete. This may be taken as an exhortation to Protestants, of a non-​speculative cast, to reaffirm the essential truth of the doctrine (which as a Christian Schleiermacher could never have relinquished), on a Biblical, practical and evangelical base.26

By pointing to the need for a specifically Protestant treatment of the doctrine, these authors are emphasizing the Reformation commitment to sola scriptura. Once Protestants had questioned the standing of traditional creeds and confessions, allowing for the possibility that some of these documents might not be reliable interpreters of divine revelation, they created a vacuum in Protestant theology: if the classical doctrine of the Trinity cannot be found explicitly within the New Testament, and if the creeds and confessions that spell out the grammar for Trinitarian expression are open to error, then Protestants need to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that derives from their own distinctive Christian faith.27

b.  An Antispeculative Objection Moving now to Schleiermacher’s critique: He is troubled by the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, particularly with regard to eternal distinctions between divine hypostases or persons posited on the basis of the union of the divine essence with human nature in the divine economy of salvation. For the immanent Trinitarian, according to Schleiermacher, each of the economic unions of God and humanity—​ first in the person of Christ and then in the Church—​“is traced back to a separate understood. Rather than a species of modalism, Sabellianism is understood as a valid form of Trinitarianism. For an account of Moses Stuart’s involvement in the Trinitarian debate in America, see Jeffrey A. Wilcox, “ ‘A More Thorough Trinitarian’: Moses Stuart, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the Trinitarian Debate in Antebellum New England,” in Schleiermacher’s Influences on American Thought and Religious Life, 1835–​1920. vol. 1 (ed. Jeffrey A. Wilcox, Terrence N. Tice, and Catherine L. Kelsey; Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), pp. 159–​89. See especially pp. 170–​8 for a discussion of Schleiermacher’s translated essay. 26  Robert Francis Streetman, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Trinity and its Significance for Theology Today” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Drew University, 1975; Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1975), p. 312. 27  See also Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 87–​103; and Eckhard Lessing, “Zu Schleiermachers Verständnis der Trinitätslehre,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 76 (1979), pp. 450–​88.

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distinction posited independently of such union, and eternally, in the Supreme Being as such.”28 1.  Dogmatics as Part of Historical Theology The most concerning aspect of this doctrine for Schleiermacher is that it does not arise out of Christian piety: “the assumption of an eternal distinction in the Supreme Being is not an utterance concerning the religious consciousness, for there it could never emerge.”29 The doctrine of the immanent Trinity could not emerge as an utterance of the Christian consciousness, because pious reception of divine activity is always related to Christ, and the Christian’s redemptive encounter with Christ does not necessitate the positing of eternal distinctions between divine hypostases.30 Schleiermacher asks, “Who would venture to say that the impression made by the divine in Christ obliges us to conceive such an eternal distinction as its basis?”31 He disagrees with the belief that one could know “that the Godhead was Father, Son and Holy Ghost, in itself and from eternity, and would have been such had there been no creation, or had it never united itself with our nature, nor ever dwelt in the community of believers.”32 Schleiermacher is, therefore, averse to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity insofar as it is posited at a remove from the union of the divine with human nature in Christ and the common Spirit of the Church. Christians simply do not know anything about God apart from Christ and his Spirit in the Church. “We have no formula for the being of God in Himself as distinct from the being of God in the world,” he states.33 The reason is that we would have to “borrow any such formula from speculation, and so prove ourselves disloyal to the character of the discipline at which we are working.”34 By objecting to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, Schleiermacher is underscoring the antispeculative cast of his theology. 28  CF §170.2, p. 739. When Schleiermacher describes the “ecclesiastical doctrine,” he refers to Gregory of Nazianzus, Athanasius, and Augustine’s Confessions, along with the Gallic Confession (1559), the Belgian Confession, and the Athanasian Creed (Quicunque Vult). Although Schleiermacher affirms the intention of the Athanasian Creed—​namely, that there be an equality of the three persons and one divine essence—​he disagrees about how the unity and trinity of God are to be described and understood. 29 Ibid. 30  Schleiermacher’s criterion for a doctrine’s inclusion in Glaubenslehre is based on his understanding of the essence of Christianity; namely, “that in it all religious emotions are related to the redemption wrought by Jesus of Nazareth” (CF §22.2, p. 98). 31  CF §170.2, p. 739. 32  OD II, p. 70. Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher und die Trinitätslehre, vol. XI (ed. Martin Tezt; Texte zur Kirchen-​und Theologiegeschichte; Gütersloh:  Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1969), p. 88. 33  CF §172.1, p. 748. 34 Ibid.

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Schleiermacher’s antispeculative commitment is part and parcel of the historical character of Christian Glaubenslehre. As Richard Crouter explains, “everything in Schleiermacher’s approach to theology hinges on this awareness of the church’s religious reality and the need to give it intellectual definition.”35 Schleiermacher engages in the theological task by taking account of the Church, which has preserved Christian consciousness in various times and places. This keeps the theologian from being too individualistic or idiosyncratic, and requires that theological works include discussions of confessions and debates within Christianity. In this way, in Crouter’s words, “the historic symbols, which first arose from Scripture, enable Schleiermacher to utilize the entire sweep of the Christian past as grist for his dogmatic mill.”36 Symbols and controversies over the doctrine of the Trinity are, therefore, to be taken seriously within doctrinal theology. At the same time, speculation about the being of God apart from creation is ruled strictly out of bounds. Since immanent Trinitarianism, in particular, is identified as being a speculative endeavor, he rejects this portion of the tradition. 2.  Similarities with Immanent Trinitarianism Schleiermacher’s readers might want to pause here to reconsider the lines of argument that have been offered by other authors in favor of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. I  do not have space to do justice to all such arguments, but two important reasons for maintaining a doctrine of the immanent Trinity in the history of Christian thought have been that it underlines both divine freedom and divine immutability. The doctrine of the immanent Trinity, focusing on God in Godself, underscores for Christians that God is not consumed or coerced by the God-​world relation. God, for immanent Trinitarians, could have been God without the world and would still have been the same God—​Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet God freely chooses to create and remain in relation to creation. Schleiermacher’s readers should not underestimate the force of this claim. Claims of divine freedom and immutability, underscored in immanent Trinitarianism, are a way to safeguard divine grace within salvation history and the divine identity in relation to the world. Freedom ensures that God offers salvation to humanity out of sheer gratuitous love. Divine immutability ensures that God remains who God is despite the vicissitudes of time. As I will show in Chapter 6, Schleiermacher also underscores the gratuity and uniqueness of God’s relation to creation. However, he does so differently, by using the traditional doctrines of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. It is important to see here that Schleiermacher recognizes the significance of these two reasons for maintaining the doctrine of the immanent Trinity—​ upholding both divine grace and the divine identity as unchanging. He simply 35  Richard Crouter, “Shaping an Academic Discipline: The Brief Outline on the Study of Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, pp. 111–​28 (116). 36  Ibid., p. 121.

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attempts to maintain these features of the Christian faith in what he sees as a more thoroughly antispeculative fashion. In addition to recognizing this shared concern with immanent Trinitarians, it is important to notice that Schleiermacher’s antispeculative convictions do not keep him from discussing the divine attributes, and even describing some of those attributes as more disclosive than others. He does not—​and does not wish to—​ avoid all inferences from divine economic activity to the divine life. Just as one might infer from a human person’s activities in the world something about the intentions or character of that person, so too is it theologically legitimate to make inferences from divine activity to the divine life, considered always in relation to creation. Thus, Schleiermacher upholds an antispeculative reserve about God in se while making claims about the divine life on the basis of the Christian reception of divine activity in relation to the world. Schleiermacher only wishes to remove the classical tradition’s understanding of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity as fundamental for Christian faith. This is the ultimate motivation for his discussion of the Trinity at the end of his Glaubenslehre. He explains, Neither the criticism nor the points of attachment needed for the new construction can be placed on a right foundation if the doctrine in question (which is not directly a statement about our Christian consciousness at all) is set up as a fundamental doctrine, and therefore, of course, arrived at in a speculative way. The same speculative tone then comes to be imported into the doctrine of the Redeemer and of the Holy Spirit, as being dependent on the doctrine of the Trinity; and thus the door is opened wide to the influx of speculative elements.37

It is an open question, of course, whether those who take the classical doctrine of the Trinity as a fundamental doctrine of faith must necessarily come to it speculatively. Further, it is not a foregone conclusion that if one encounters the doctrine of the Trinity before receiving divine redemptive activity, then one’s faith will henceforth be subject to speculative influences. What is important to note here is that Schleiermacher comes to the doctrine of the Trinity last, so that his readers, who he hopes will develop the doctrine in new directions, will have a pneumatologically Christomorphic understanding of God before them while surveying, criticizing, and developing it. 3.  The New Testament as the Distinctive Source for the Development of the Doctrine of the Trinity Schleiermacher’s antispeculative conviction is partially evidenced in his attitude toward the relation of Christianity to the Tanakh, which he refers to as the Old Testament. While some of his early statements about the Old Testament and Judaism clearly stand in need of swift correction, there are also notable features 37  CF §172.3, p. 749–​50.

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of his thought in this regard that may deserve to be highlighted as of interest for constructive theology today.38 The most important of these features for the current discussion is that Schleiermacher refuses to advance the notion that a Christian doctrine of the Trinity can be speculatively read back into the Tanakh. In this, Schleiermacher recognizes the integrity of Hebrew scripture and Judaism on their own terms. That is, he does not view Christianity as inevitably arising out of Judaism or out of the prophecies of the Tanakh, but he views Christianity and Judaism as separate religions. As one instance of Schleiermacher’s conviction that the views and doctrines of Christianity cannot be read into Hebrew scripture, consider his claim that the ground of Christian faith is not the authority of the Old Testament: If it be said that in their case [i.e., the first Christians], from the Apostles onward, their grounds of faith sprang from their belief in Scripture, that is, in the Old Testament and especially in the prophecies of Christ it contains, we need only add to what was said above on this point that although the Apostles, at the outset of their connection with Jesus, do describe Him as the Figure whom the prophets foretold, it is impossible to take this as meaning that they had been led to faith in Him by the study of these prophecies and by the comparison of their contents with what they saw and heard in Jesus. On the contrary, it was a direct impression which awakened faith in souls prepared by the testimony of the Baptist, and their description of Jesus was only an expression of this faith combined with their faith in the prophets.39

A proper reading of the Tanakh, in other words, will not inevitably convince readers that Jesus of Nazareth is the Promised One. Rather, Christians so believe because they have first encountered Christ. This is important, because it underscores the reception of faith as a work of divine power in and through Christ rather than as a result of the ratiocinations of speculative thought. It is only, Schleiermacher states, “after deluding ourselves by unconscious additions and subtractions that we can suppose we are able to gather a Christian doctrine of God out of the Prophets and the Psalms.”40 A reading of the Tanakh does not, therefore, lead inevitably to an affirmation of Christianity. In fact, reading the Tanakh with this goal in mind has, in Schleiermacher’s view, “gravely injured” the Christian “practice of the exegetical art.”41 The two Testaments are historically related, to be sure, but each has its own integrity. 38  For a nonreductive reading of Schleiermacher’s view of scripture in his later theology and a list of possible constructive insights to be gleaned from his view of scripture, see Paul T. Nimmo, “Schleiermacher on Scripture and the Work of Jesus Christ,” Modern Theology 31, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 60–​90. 39  CF §128.2, p. 592. 40  Ibid., §132.2, p. 609. 41  Ibid., p. 610.

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This feature of Schleiermacher’s thought has implications for his evaluation of the doctrine of the Trinity. The New Testament, rather than the Bible in general, is distinctively Christian scripture in the strictest sense, because Everyone must admit that if a doctrine had neither direct nor indirect attestation in the New Testament, but only in the Old, no one could have much confidence in regarding it as a genuinely Christian doctrine; whereas if a doctrine is attested by the New Testament, no one will object to it, because there is nothing about it in the Old.42

This view of Christian scripture precludes Schleiermacher from claiming that the triadic and dyadic formulations of the New Testament (Father, Son, Spirit; Father, Son) may be used to identify a preexistent Christ referred to within Hebrew scriptural utterances. Rather, Schleiermacher’s antispeculative approach to the ancient prophets in particular and biblical interpretation in general here leads him to consider how the doctrine of the Trinity might be constructed so as to be distinctively Christian. The question for Schleiermacher will be whether the classical tradition’s understanding of that doctrine is required or enabled by the reception of faith in and through Christ. Schleiermacher holds that the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is not explicitly described in the New Testament. In this he agrees with Christian theologians for whom, in Christine Helmer’s words, “it is a truism that in Scripture one cannot find the Trinity as given in its orthodox formulations.”43 Hand in hand with his conviction that the immanent Trinity is not explicitly found within the New Testament, Schleiermacher also suggests that it is not implicitly to be found there either. Evidence of this, according to Schleiermacher, is that the doctrine of the immanent Trinity generates the need to guard against polytheism, even though this need is not evidenced within the pages of the New Testament. Schleiermacher explains: Underlying the elaboration of the doctrine is not merely a desire to reproduce very exactly our Christian consciousness that the Divine Essence in both forms of union is the same, and also is equal to the being of God per se; rather, it was only after the distinction had been eternalized and made antecedent to the union that there arose a need to guard against the semblance of polytheism, and to secure that this, in a sense separated, being of God was none the less embraced within the unity of the Divine Essence.44

Because there can be found no need to guard against polytheism in the New Testament, even in the Gospel of John, Schleiermacher argues that even this 42  Ibid., §27.3, p. 115. 43  Christine Helmer, Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2014), p. 113. 44  CF §170.2, p. 740.

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evangelist most likely did not believe in the classical doctrine of the Trinity. New Testament writers refer to God, Father, Son, Logos, and Spirit, but they do not see the need to defend their faith against polytheism. In this way, Schleiermacher suggests that early Trinitarian readings of the Gospel are anachronistic.45 If the New Testament writers did not need to guard against polytheism, then Christians should not affirm a doctrine of the Trinity that would occasion the need for such a defense. Schleiermacher’s argument here is not without its flaws. It is clearly an argument from silence, a notoriously weak form of argument: the absence of argumentation against polytheism does not signal any reasons for such an omission, and such reasons could be manifold. In addition, if one takes an organic view of theological development, the early Trinitarian controversy could be taken as evidence of rather inchoate claims in the New Testament text becoming explicitly described and defended with time. Nonetheless, there is good exegetical reason to support Schleiermacher’s conclusion. Daniel Boyarin, for instance, argues that the use of the term “Logos” in the prologue of John’s Gospel is thoroughly Jewish.46 Citing Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish community, the Septuagint’s frequent employment of “Word of God,” and a number of texts in use among Aramaic-​, Hebrew-​, and Syriac-​speaking Jews, Boyarin shows that John 1:1–​5 is best understood as unexceptional Jewish midrash on Genesis 1. According to his interpretation, this text is not an early form of immanent Trinitarianism, but a rhetorically useful introduction to the incarnation. Although Schleiermacher argues that faithful interpreters will not find a doctrine of the immanent Trinity within the New Testament, he entertains the possibility that if the doctrine were to arise “so definitely out of the utterances of Christ Himself and of the Apostles concerning him that we had to accept it on their testimony,” then Christians should accept it “as a combination of testimonies regarding a supersensible fact.”47 Even if such exegesis could be established firmly, however, Schleiermacher writes that the immanent Trinity would not be “a ‘doctrine of faith’ in the really original and proper sense of that phrase,” because the essence of the Christian faith is redemption by God through Christ and his Spirit.48 Since the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is not rooted in redemption, it is not a “really original and proper” part of the Christian faith. Schleiermacher explains that “our faith in Christ and our living fellowship with Him would be the same 45 Powell, The Trinity in German Thought, p. 92. See CF §170.2, pp. 739–​40. 46  Daniel Boyarin, “Logos, A Jewish Word: John’s Prologue as Midrash,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament (ed. Amy-​Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler; New York: Oxford, 2011), pp. 546–​49, and “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (July 2001), pp. 243–​84. See also Masanobu Endo, Creation and Christology: A Study on the Johannine Prologue in Light of Early Creation Accounts (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 2002) and Richard Bauckham, “Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of John,” in Contours of Christology in the New Testament (ed. R. N. Longenecker; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 147–​62. 47  CF §170.3, p. 740. 48  Ibid., p. 741.

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although we had no knowledge of any such transcendent fact, or although the fact itself were different.”49 This being the case, he continues, “we can wait all the more calmly to see whether the exegetical results on which these expansions of the doctrine rest are any more fully confirmed by the latest work on the subject than has hitherto been the case.”50 The approach taken here is a good example of how Schleiermacher seeks to provide a way for his ecclesial audience to recognize and appreciate the advances being made in exegesis without fearing that those results would dramatically change their faith. Thus, although certain essential features of the doctrine of the Trinity are central to the Christian faith, the intricacies of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity are not. This would be the case with or without a firm exegetical argument for the view that the biblical authors were on their way to the doctrine of the Trinity as it has been developed in the classical tradition.

c.  Conceptual Difficulties In addition to Schleiermacher’s antispeculative objection to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, he identifies a number of conceptual problems within it. First, he argues that the doctrine secures for itself neither equality between the divine persons nor equality between the persons and the divine essence. Second, it is difficult to relate the divine unity and trinity to the divine activity. Before detailing these conceptual problems, however, it is important to note that the difficulties Schleiermacher highlights here are not new. Indeed, the familiarity of these problems ought to be instructive: Schleiermacher is not placing himself outside the Christian community simply by virtue of the fact that he is critically analyzing the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. He is doing what Christian theologians throughout the centuries have done by delineating and exploring a doctrine’s merits and weaknesses. I will revisit some of these difficulties in the fourth section of this chapter, where I draw heavily on the sequel to the Glaubenslehre’s Trinitarian Treatise, “On the Discrepancy.” 1.  Inequality of Persons and Essence The first conceptual problem Schleiermacher identifies with the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is that it cannot secure for itself the equality it demands. The doctrine requires equality of each of the persons in relation to the others, as well as equality between the one divine essence and the three persons. One might be able to secure such equality by mere stipulation. Schleiermacher grants that such an approach “would be sufficient to bar out all inequalities if it were not for the inconsistency which emerges as soon as side by side with this equality the attempt is made to perpetuate the method of distinguishing the Persons.”51 But in order to 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51  Ibid., §171.2, p. 743.

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distinguish the three, Schleiermacher worries that the theologian “can only represent the Persons in a gradation, and thus either present the unity of the Essence as less real than the three Persons, or vice versa.”52 The result is a tendency toward either an inequality of the persons in a version of Monarchianism, which preserves divine unity, or an equality of the persons in tritheism, which preserves divine distinctions. To see how Monarchianism might result from distinguishing the three persons, take, for instance, the distinction between the Father and the Son, described by Schleiermacher as follows: “the Father eternally begets, but is Himself unbegotten, while the Son is begotten from all eternity but not Himself begetting.”53 “Begetting,” on the classical interpretation, indicates a relation of dependence. As Gregory of Nyssa explains, “While confessing the unchangeableness of the nature, we do not deny the difference in cause and causality, by which alone we seize the distinction of the one from the other. . . . There is the one which depends on the first.”54 In short, the Son depends for his existence on the begetting activity of the Father. This relation, for Schleiermacher, implies that greater power and glory should be attributed to the Father: If power has dwelt in the Father from all eternity to beget the Son as a second divine Person, whereas in the Son no such power dwells, and no relation of dependence in which the Father stands to Him can be adduced as a counterweight, undeniably the power of the Father is greater than that of the Son, and in addition the glory which the Begetter has with the Begotten must be greater than that which the Begotten has with the Begetter. The same holds true for the Spirit.55

For Schleiermacher, if the Father possesses a power that is lacking in the Son and the Spirit, and additional power provides the Father additional glory, then the Father is “superior to the other two Persons.”56 Such inherent superiority, or gradation among the persons, would seem to be indicative of Monarchianism.57 An argument against Schleiermacher’s view here might be that the mutuality or reciprocity he thinks is lacking between the Son and the Father may be found 52  Ibid., §171, p. 742. 53  Ibid., §171.2, p. 743. 54 Gregory of Nyssa, “Concerning We Should Think of Saying That There Are Not Three Gods, to Ablabius,” in The Trinitarian Controversy (ed. William G. Rusch; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), pp. 149–​61 (160). 55  CF §171.2, p. 743. 56 Ibid. 57  Interestingly, Calvin maintains that the Son is autotheos, or divine self-​existence, with respect to the divine essence. He does this in an attempt to avoid Monarchianism, even as he affirms that with respect to the three persons, the Son is “from the Father.” See Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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in the Son’s power to confer on the Father the title “Father.” Biologically speaking for the human species, one cannot be a father without a child, and vice versa. The analogy here would be that the Father has the power of rendering the second person of the Trinity the “Son,” and the Son has the power of rendering the first person the “Father.” Although this line of thought has some prima facie plausibility, it ultimately does not seem to succeed, because in this analogy, the power of the Son is not the same kind of power that the Father possesses. The Son’s presence may allow the begetter to be called “Father,” but without the Father’s power to beget in the first place, the Son would not have such naming power. The relation between the Father and the Son, in other words, still depends in origin on the Father. Only in the exercising of the Father’s originative power might one say that the Father and the Son have mutuality with regard to their relational naming. If it be averred that paternity and filiation in God are coeternal, however, then the analogy reaches the limits of its usefulness and the equality of the persons becomes a mere statement once again. In order to keep thinking about the problem, one would have to adopt a new analogy, as Gregory of Nazianzus does: “In reference to the cause, they are not without beginning. But it is clear that the cause is not by all means older than those things of which it is the cause. The sun is not older than its light.”58 While this analogy of sun and light might help the reader understand the coeternality of the Father and the Son, it does not provide an understanding of the equality, mutuality, or reciprocity of the persons. As such, Monarchianism does not seem easy to avoid. Schleiermacher also argues, in the second section of this first objection, that it is difficult to maintain the equality of the divine essence with the persons. According to the traditional doctrine of the immanent Trinity, Schleiermacher posits, “The Persons are distinguished from each other by peculiar properties not predicable of the Divine Essence in itself.”59 As Augustine maintains, for example, “it was not God the Father, not the Holy Spirit, not the trinity itself, but only the Son who is the Word of God that became flesh.”60 Nonetheless, Schleiermacher explains that, on this view, “the Divine Essence itself has existence only in these three Persons, but not outside or apart from them (whether as a fourth Person or impersonally), and even in them does not distribute different attributes to different Persons, but resides in each Person whole and undivided.”61 These two claims—​the distinction of persons on the basis of peculiar properties and the unity of an undivided divine essence—​are difficult to conceptualize together. Tritheism seems to lurk on the horizon. Schleiermacher thinks the best aid to understanding this aspect of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is the following analogy:  “the conception of a 58  Gregory of Nazianzus, “Third Theological Oration,” in The Trinitarian Controversy, pp. 131–​47 (133). 59  CF §171.3, p. 744. 60  Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity (ed. John E. Rotelle; trans. Edmund Hill; Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1991), p. 411. 61  CF §171.3, p. 744.

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species with the individual members it contains; for the conception of a species is similarly present whole and undivided in its individuals, but nowhere outside them.”62 With this analogy, one can conceive of the difference of persons and the unity of the divine essence. However, this analogy does not get the doctrine of the immanent Trinity very far. The same problem of inequality arises, because theologians must begin either from the unity of the essence (i.e., the species), “in which case,” according to Schleiermacher, “the distinction of Persons appears subordinate and falls into the background,” or from the distinctions of the Persons (i.e., the individual members of the species), “in which case the unity as being abstract falls into the background.”63 Between these two starting points, he contends, “no genuinely middle course seems possible.”64 But if the analogy of species and individuals is rejected, then supporters of the doctrine are, for Schleiermacher, “really . . . not in a position to form any definite ideas on the subject.”65 Since definite ideas are the currency of theologians, he goes no further on this route. Conceptual clarity in itself, however, is not Schleiermacher’s only reason for rejecting the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. It is important to note that he is concerned about inequality among the persons, and between the divine essence and the persons, because inequality of either type places in doubt the existence of the divine in the person of Christ and the Spirit. But this existence of the divine in Christ and the Spirit is precisely what is so essential to Schleiermacher’s own understanding of the Trinity. As Streetman recognizes, If one person, whichever it be, does not participate equally with the others in the Unity of the essence, then for Schleiermacher that person is not fully divine. Thus, in relation to that person (however highly He may be esteemed) we do not have fellowship with God. And therefore the essential truth of the Trinity—​that in the Son and the Spirit God is redemptively revealed in our midst—​can no longer be affirmed.66

Schleiermacher is concerned about the conceptual difficulties inherent within the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, because in his view they threaten the union of the divine essence with human nature in the person of Christ and in the Spirit of the Church. Of course, it could be objected that, although Schleiermacher’s motivation for rejecting the doctrine might be fair enough, the specific form that his rejection takes, or his specific implementation of an alternative, might be a mistake. Nonetheless, it is important to note that, beyond simply being concerned about the conceptual difficulties contained within the classical doctrine of the 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64  Ibid., p. 745. 65  Ibid., p.  744. Schleiermacher cites Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, and Theodoret as allowing the analogy and Augustine as rejecting it. 66  Streetman, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” p. 199.

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Trinity as such, Schleiermacher had an important intratheological reason for rejecting the doctrine as currently formulated—​his desire to maintain a robustly high Christology and pneumatology.67 2.  Inequality of Causality and Persons The second conceptual problem with the doctrine of the immanent Trinity that Schleiermacher identifies is its difficulty in showing “how unity and trinity are related to the divine causality . . . alike in redemption and sanctification and generally in creation and preservation.”68 The question here is how the divine activity is related to each person. According to Gregory of Nyssa, one representative of the classical tradition, “No activity is divided into the hypostases, completed individually by each and set apart without being viewed together.”69 Rather, divine activity “starts off from the Father as from a spring; it is effected by the Son, and by the power of the Spirit it completes its grace.”70 As Schleiermacher sees it, the following conclusion must be reached: Either that these causalities all belong to the one Divine Essence as such, and to the Persons only in so far as they are one in Essence, but not in so far as they are distinct from each other, or they belong to the three Persons as such, and to the unity of Essence only in so far as it consists of the Persons.71

The difficulty of relating the unity of the divine essence and the trinity of divine persons to divine causality is clearly related to the first conceptual problem described above and results in the same dichotomy. Thus, Schleiermacher believes that this difficulty comes down to the same choice between Monarchianism and tritheism.72 3.  The Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity as a Stumbling Block Because Schleiermacher does not think the traditional formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to the Christian’s reception of redemption, and because he thinks the conceptual difficulties inherent in it actually cloud the essentials of the Christian faith, he suggests that the doctrine of the immanent Trinity be regarded as a historical stage of Christian thinking about God that did not reach its intended aim. In fact, Schleiermacher thinks that it will serve for many as a 67  Cf. Kevin W. Hector, “Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (July 2006), pp. 307–​22 (320). 68  CF §171.4, p. 745. 69  Gregory of Nyssa, “Concerning We Should Think of Saying,” pp. 149–​61 (156). 70 Ibid. 71  CF §171.4, p. 745. 72  Ibid., pp. 745–​6.

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stumbling block to embracing Christian faith. His explanation at this point is worth quoting at length: It is natural that people who cannot reconcile themselves to the difficulties and imperfections that cling to the formulae current in Trinitarian doctrine should say that they repudiate everything connected with it, whereas in point of faith their piety is by no means lacking in the specifically Christian stamp. This is the case often enough at the present moment not only in the Unitarian societies of England and America, but also among the scattered opponents of the doctrine of the Trinity in our own country [Prussia]. That circumstance supplies a further reason why we should strive to secure freedom for a thoroughgoing criticism of the doctrine in its older form, so as to prepare the way for, and introduce, a reconstruction of it corresponding to the present condition of other related doctrines. The position assigned to the doctrine of the Trinity in the present work is perhaps at all events a preliminary step towards this goal. One who is a believer in the ecclesiastical sense of that word can scarcely arm himself with the equanimity needful alike for an impartial criticism of the old procedure and for a new construction, until he has become convinced that it is possible for our faith in the divine present in Christ and in the Christian communion to find fit theological expression, even before anything has been heard of those more exact definitions which go to form the doctrine of the Trinity.73

In short, those modern Christians who take the doctrine of the immanent Trinity as essential to Christianity and also have difficulty conceiving of the doctrine might desire to leave the Church. But in Schleiermacher’s view, an exodus need not take place. He aims to open the possibility that Christians can be Christians, and perhaps even Trinitarians, without being immanent Trinitarians. By placing explicit discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of his Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher is making room for those who would otherwise become Unitarians and the apostate to consider the Christian faith without being encumbered by a doctrine they find, in an age of reason and scientific development, conceptually objectionable. Although clearly concerned with this portion of his audience, Schleiermacher also waits until the end of his work to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly, because he wants his ecclesial audience to see how the whole essence of the Christian faith can be set forth without making recourse to the technical details of the classical doctrine of the Trinity. That should free them, in Schleiermacher’s view, to consider a critique and development of the doctrine without fear that they would thereby be doing detriment to the essence of their faith. Powell sums up Schleiermacher’s opposition to immanent Trinitarianism in this way: Schleiermacher condemned the traditional doctrine of the Trinity for lacking a relation to Christian faith and piety, for its lack of Biblical support, for its 73  Ibid., §172.2–​3, p. 749.

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incoherence and for its speculative character. . . . Its customary position in the system of theology opposed the fundamental principle of Christian theology—​ the restriction of authentic knowledge of God to the revelation of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.74

Schleiermacher’s reflection on the Trinity within the Christian faith starts with divine revelation in and through Christ and the Spirit. He thinks of his own work as only a “preliminary step,” and the direction he wants his readers to move is toward consideration of a Sabellian-​inspired reading of the Trinity. In the following section, I describe Sabellianism, paying close attention to the distinction between Sabellius’s view as typically portrayed and Schleiermacher’s understanding of Sabellius’s theology. Schleiermacher’s understanding of Sabellius’s work is rather different from the customary understanding. This description of his interpretation of Sabellianism will set the stage for Chapter 4, in which I discuss Schleiermacher’s step toward “essential Trinitarianism.”

d.  Sabellianism Reconsidered Historical information about Sabellius is scarce. Most mentions of him in the early literature date from the fourth century, over one hundred years after his lifetime. Moreover, Sabellius’s views were often conflated with those of Marcellus of Ancyra, making it more difficult for later chroniclers to identify the specifics of his teachings.75 Nonetheless, he is typically categorized as a sophisticated type of modalist Monarchian, and he was influential enough that as late as 533 CE, the second council at Constantinople invalidated any baptisms he performed.76 Stuart contends that the opposition to Sabellianism made “by Augustine, Basil, Hilary, Euthymius, and others, shews beyond all question that Sabellianism had spread far and wide, and that it was considered as being fraught with danger in respect to the Nicene Creed.”77 According to the typical description, set forth by William Rusch, Sabellius held that “God was a monad, expressing itself in three operations.”78 In other words, there is one divine being, and there are three names commonly used for the one Godhead to indicate its various activities. “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” therefore do not refer to three enduring, let alone eternal, hypostatic distinctions in the Godhead, but to different temporary manifestations of divine power. Sabellianism as it is frequently understood, as in the sketch offered by Rusch above, is antithetical to Schleiermacher’s own view of the Trinity. Schleiermacher sympathizes with Sabellius’s perspective only after a careful investigation of his 74 Powell, The Trinity in German Thought, p. 95. 75  Rusch, “Introduction,” in The Trinitarian Controversy, pp. 1–​27 (9). 76 Ibid. 77 Stuart, OD II, p. 36. 78  Rusch, “Introduction,” in The Trinitarian Controversy, pp. 1–​27 (9).

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teachings, which yields an interpretation quite different from the typical view. He offers his interpretation in “On the Discrepancy Between Sabellian and Athanasian Method of Representing the Doctrine of the Trinity,” written in 1822 as a kind of unofficial postscript to the Glaubenslehre.79 Since this text is not as widely read or referenced as the Glaubenslehre, I will use quotations liberally in what follows in order to offer a more direct introduction to Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Sabellianism. Schleiermacher interprets Sabellianism as the position that the “Trinity was not essential to Godhead as in itself considered, but only in reference to created beings and on their account.”80 In other words, Sabellius restricts the doctrine of the Trinity to the divine economy. The first person “is called Father as considered in reference to the creation.”81 Specifically, the Father is “manifested by all the powers of life and animation which form the organic structures of the universe.”82 The second person comes into existence as the Godhead is united to human nature in the incarnation.83 Indeed, “the person itself sprung from the union.”84 This clearly works against any form of adoptionism.85 It is also important to note here—​because it differentiates Sabellius’s view from the Athanasian view and relates to one of the conceptual difficulties previously identified—​that the divinity of the Son is not derived from the Father. Rather, both the Father and the Son proceed from the Godhead.86 Sabellius retains the biblical names “Father” and “Son” for the first two persons of the Trinity, because the second person of the Trinity is connected to “an arrangement of the world made by the Father.”87 As for the third person of the Trinity, after the incarnation, the Holy Spirit “dwelt in the community of Christians, i.e., the church, as one in one.”88 Again, Sabellius “did not view the church as first having existence, and then the Spirit as uniting with it; but the church itself took its rise . . . by his union to it.”89 Furthermore, within the Church, each believer is “a peculiar exertion 79  Whether Schleiermacher interprets his sources properly and offers a better historical view of Sabellius’s position than the standard position is irrelevant for my purposes. Since Schleiermacher’s analysis of Sabellianism indicates the interpretation that he was willing to consider sympathetically, I am more interested in his analysis than its historical accuracy. On the latter, see Streetman, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” pp. 240–​87. 80  OD II, p. 52. 81 Ibid., p. 56. 82 Ibid., p. 60. 83 Ibid., p. 48. 84 Ibid., p.60. 85  Cf. DeHart, “Ter mundus accipit infinitum,” p. 27. 86  OD II, pp. 46–​7. 87 Ibid., p. 57. 88 Ibid., p. 58. 89  Ibid., p. 60. In this way, “every development of personality in the Godhead, even the second and third, must be regarded as in its nature creative.”

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of the active power of the Spirit.”90 Thus, on Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Sabellius, “In governing the world in all its various operations on finite beings, the Godhead is Father. As redeeming, by special operations in the person of Christ and through him, it is Son. As sanctifying, and in all its operations on the community of believers, and as a Unity in the same, the Godhead is Spirit.”91 For Sabellius as interpreted by Schleiermacher, then, God is triune: there is one deity revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through (respectively) divine creation and governance, incarnation and redemption, and union with the Church and sanctification. Sabellius maintains a Trinity, therefore, “only in relation to the various methods and spheres of action belonging to the Godhead.”92 The crucial difference between Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Sabellius and the standard hearing Sabellius receives is that in Schleiermacher’s reading, once the Godhead is united to human nature, the Son is never “absorbed” back into the Godhead, the Godhead then remaining as it would have been without the Son. The same goes for the Holy Spirit. As such, Schleiermacher holds that “Sabellius did not regard the personality of the Godhead as a transitory phenomenon.”93 There is not simply one God who is called three different names at three different times. Rather, the Trinity is the Godhead revealed, and “each member of the same . . . is a peculiar mode of this revelation.”94 It is imperative to note that Schleiermacher does not explicitly adopt Sabellianism wholesale in “On the Discrepancy.” Rather—​and this is the critical point—​Schleiermacher suggests that “one should develop an understanding that goes beyond the contrast between Athanasius and Sabellius.”95 He moderately states that “to the Sabellian views we cannot refuse at least to yield our testimony, that they are the result of originality of thought and independence of mind.”96 When Schleiermacher broaches the topic of Sabellianism in the Trinitarian Teatise of the Glaubenslehre, he asks his readers to reflect on two questions, which echo the conceptual difficulties already described above, in light of the utterances of Christ and New Testament scripture. First, he considers “the relation of the unity of the Essence to the trinity of the Persons,” asking whether the idea of eternal distinctions in the divine essence is clearly and definitely present in the New Testament.97 “There can scarcely be a better test,” Schleiermacher claims, “than to ask whether these passages could not also be explained by the Sabellian view set up in opposition to our ecclesiastical interpretation.”98 In other words, “the question is whether formulae cannot be devised which, without asserting eternal distinctions 90 Ibid., p. 58. 91 Ibid., p. 70. 92 Ibid., p. 70. 93 Ibid., p. 54. 94 Ibid., p. 61. 95  Ibid., p. 174. 96  OD II, p. 80. 97  CF §172.3, p. 750. 98 Ibid.

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in the Supreme Being, are yet equally capable of exhibiting in their truth both unions of the Essence with human nature.”99 Clearly Schleiermacher thinks this is possible, which implicitly seems to lend some weight to his interpretation of Sabellianism as a legitimate theological possibility, without actually offering a full endorsement of the Sabellian position. Second, Schleiermacher asks his readers to consider, in relation to the traditional doctrine, “whether it was right at the outset to give the name ‘Son of God’ solely to the divine in Christ, and to relate the term ‘Father’ to one of the distinctions in the Divine Essence and not rather to the unity of the Divine Essence as such.”100 Schleiermacher suggests here that within scripture, “Son” could refer to “the whole Christ,” while “Father” and “Spirit” could refer to the “Supreme Being” or the unity of the divine essence.101 If one were to resolve these two problems, then “a new construction could easily be arrived at.”102 According to Schleiermacher’s interpretation of the Sabellian view, as noted above, there is one God who governs the world, redeems it in Christ, and sanctifies the community of believers. God is called Father before being united with humanity in the incarnation; God is called Father and Son during and after the incarnation; God is called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit during and after God sanctifies believers in the Church. God exists and is known in these three ways; the Trinity is the revelation of the divine in the economy of salvation. However, Schleiermacher shows some hesitation about moving forward on the Sabellian view. This seems to be because of the need for scriptural exegesis to determine whether “Son” in scripture always refers to the whole Christ, and whether “Spirit” in scripture always refers to the Supreme Being apart from Christ. Schleiermacher seems to think “Son” does refer to the whole Christ rather than the second person of the immanent Trinity. But he would not understand “Spirit” as referring to the Supreme Being apart from Christ and his followers. If that were the case, the Holy Spirit might not be conceived in special reference to the Church, whereas for Schleiermacher, as we will see in Chapter  5, the Spirit’s relation to Christ’s Church is of utmost importance. Thus, it is likely due to Schleiermacher’s interpretation of scriptural references to the Spirit, wherein the Spirit is closely related to Christ and the body of Christ, that he does not adopt Sabellianism in a more thoroughgoing way. Indeed, Schleiermacher aims to move beyond both the Athanasian and Sabellian doctrines. To summarize, Schleiermacher’s own preliminary construction of the doctrine of the Trinity draws on the traditional view of it and his own interpretation of Sabellius. Although his theology, I will argue, implicitly affirms essential distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life and bolsters the identity of the Spirit by emphasizing the Spirit’s relation to Christ’s Church in ways that go beyond Sabellius, Schleiermacher remains indebted to Sabellius for the latter’s 99 Ibid. 100  Ibid., p. 751. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid.

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single-​minded focus on the divine life in relation to the economy of redemption. In his critique of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and in his consideration of Sabellianism, Schleiermacher asks his readers to consider whether one could develop the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that is faithful to that doctrine’s essence and yet avoids the difficulties involved in ascribing hypostatic distinctions to the eternal God in Godself. In short, he is suggesting a doctrine of the economic Trinity and, as a consequence of his antispeculative approach, calling a halt to thinking about God in se. Whereas it might at first blush seem that Schleiermacher does not have much use for the doctrine of the Trinity, Powell accurately explains, “Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith does indeed contain appendices to various chapters and to these appendices he does in fact relegate discussion of traditional doctrines for which he has little use. The doctrine of the Trinity, however, is contained, not in an appendix (Anhang), but in the conclusion (Schluß ).”103 Schleiermacher arranges his Glaubenslehre the way that he does—​proclaiming only at its conclusion that the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity is its keystone—​because he aims at excluding speculation, building up the piety of Christian believers within the Church, and allowing for development of the doctrine. As such, his treatment of the Trinity performs a summary function at the climax of his mature work at the same time as it pushes his readers to continue the work he has begun: reconsidering the doctrine of the Trinity to see whether it might be brought better into line with certain antispeculative and biblical-​hermeneutical instincts. A number of features of Schleiermacher’s thought contribute to this reconsideration, including his conviction that a distinctively Protestant development of the doctrine is needed, his antispeculative objection to the doctrine, and the conceptual difficulties he identifies within the doctrine. Although Schleiermacher thinks Sabellianism, properly understood, holds promise as one way of thinking through the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not adopt it without reservation. Instead, he seems to hold out the possibility that scriptural exegesis will substantiate a strong correlation between Christ’s Church and the Spirit. In that case, while Schleiermacher would reject the doctrine of the immanent Trinity along with Sabellius, he would go beyond Sabellius’s account of the divine life by more substantially linking the Spirit of Christ to the union of the divine essence with human nature in the Church. In this way, Schleiermacher aims to move beyond the dichotomy between the Athanasian and Sabellian views of the doctrine of the Trinity.

103 Powell, The Trinity in German Thought, p. 90.

Chapter 4 C ONST RUCTING E SSE NTIAL T RI N I TA RIA N I SM

Although Schleiermacher rejects immanent Trinitarianism and calls for a moratorium on speculative theology, he does not refrain from making inferences about the divine life on the basis of divine economic activity. In fact, he seems to indicate that the divine life is textured in a threefold way when he discusses divine causality in terms of love and wisdom at the end of his Glaubenslehre. Because of this, some interpreters have gone so far as to say that Schleiermacher comes close to being an immanent Trinitarian despite his own reservations.1 Indeed, Robert Williams writes, “There is no significant cognitive difference between Schleiermacher’s . . . trinity and the immanent trinity of the tradition when properly qualified.”2 Williams perhaps overstates the case, but his claim is indicative of an important point: Schleiermacher is no crude modalist. To capture this insight, I am adopting the phrase “essential Trinitarianism” when describing the position that can be teased out of Schleiermacher’s text. Drawing on Claude Welch’s definition but modifying it in important ways, I describe essential Trinitarianism as a middle position between merely economic Trinitarianism (or crude modalism) and full-​fledged immanent Trinitarianism.3 This middle position includes two central features. First, the divine essence is united to human nature in the person of Christ and in the Spirit of Christ in the Church. Second, there are three expressions of the very essence of God: causality, love, and wisdom. Schleiermacher recognizes love and wisdom explicitly functioning in this way. My interpretive contribution is to add causality to these two. These three distinctions-​in-​relation, on my reading, are inferred from the divine economy of salvation and describe the very structure of the divine life. In this chapter, I will focus on bringing the second aspect of Schleiermacher’s essential 1  See Robert Francis Streetman, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Trinity and its Significance for Theology Today” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Drew University, 1975; Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975), pp. 206–​17. 2  Robert Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian: The Construction of the Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), p. 154. 3  Claude Welch, In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 294. See pp. 17–19 for my initial introduction of Welch’s distinctions.

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Trinitarianism to a fuller explication, showing how divine causality, love, and wisdom are, in the parlance of traditional categories, homoousios, coequal, coeternal, and perichoretic (coinherent).4 Nonetheless, as I will show, these distinctions are not “persons” in the traditional sense of the word for Schleiermacher, and no technical account of generation or procession is posited. Even so, I  suggest that Schleiermacher’s understanding of God nevertheless allows for a personal understanding of the divine unity, once the notion of “personhood” is regulated Christologically. The first section of this chapter is an exposition and interpretation of Schleiermacher’s understanding of divine causality, love, and wisdom in paragraphs 164 to 169 of the Glaubenslehre. My interpretive contribution here is to highlight divine causality as one of the genuine expressions of the very essence of the divine when it is considered in relation to divine love and wisdom. At the end of the first section, I point out three notable features of my reading of essential Trinitarianism. First, I discuss the relation of the divine essence to the divine economy, highlighting the antispeculative character of the doctrine of the essential Trinity. Second, I place Schleiermacher’s description of the divine essence in conversation with the traditional categories noted above and distinguish his treatment of the divine essence from traditional accounts of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Third, I demonstrate how my reading of Schleiermacher’s essential Trinitarianism avoids some of the conceptual difficulties that inhere within the traditional understanding of the Trinity. In the second section of the chapter, I examine Schleiermacher’s explicit rejection of “personhood” language for God alongside his somewhat surprising use of personal analogies within his Christian Faith. I  handle this tension by suggesting that he oversteps his own bounds by rejecting the notion of personhood for the unity of the divine life. In the course of this section, I  briefly consider Schleiermacher’s relation to Spinoza to clarify the context in which he is writing and to highlight the constructive significance of this chapter. In the third section of the chapter, I show how one of Schleiermacher’s modes of thought, transcendental reasoning, might be used to offer a relatively nonanthropomorphic understanding of divine personhood of the sort he might accept. This constitutes the positive side of my implicit critique of Schleiermacher’s treatment of personhood language. Drawing on his own thought, I offer an explicitly Christological grounding and regulatory mechanism for claiming that the one essential Trinity could be adequately described as personal.

a.  Three Distinctions-​in-​Relation I begin with my reading of the second aspect of essential Trinitarianism, which is an affirmation of three divine distinctions-​in-​relation as the essence of the 4  Moving backward, Chapter 5 takes up the first feature of “essential Trinitarianism.”

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divine life: causality, love, and wisdom. I take each of these structural features of the divine life in turn, beginning with causality. I show that causality, though not explicitly described as such by Schleiermacher himself, is part of the basic way he thinks about God. I analyze divine causality by attending to five of its significant features. Second, I exposit divine love and highlight the inseparability of the being and activity of God. Third, I take up divine wisdom and discuss its relation to love and causality. By referring to the “structural features,” “contours,” and “essential expressions” of the divine life in this and the following chapters, I  mean to indicate those aspects of Schleiermacher’s understanding of God that are expressions of the very essence of the divine. Thus, in my discussion, “structural features” replaces the classical terminology of hypostases or persona. Using “structural features” rather than “attributes” is consonant with Schleiermacher’s thought, since, in his own words, “the conception ‘attribute’ is not particularly well fitted to set forth the Divine Essence.”5 Schleiermacher prioritizes the divine “essence” over divine “attributes” because the former suggests a unity rather than plurality. Of course, he does list a whole series of divine attributes at different locations throughout the Glaubenslehre. The point here is that when Schleiermacher discusses God, he does not simply put all divine attributes in a list, which could all equally well describe God as if all were equally disclosive. The structural features of the divine life are basic to Schleiermacher’s way of thinking about God. 1.  Causality I turn, first, to divine causality, with the goal of expositing Schleiermacher’s use of causality in The Christian Faith, showing that causality belongs with love and wisdom as a genuine expression of the divine essence. Schleiermacher employs the notion of causality from the beginning of his Glaubenslehre, and references to it permeate the whole text. In the first part of the Glaubenslehre, he identifies God as “the sole original activity” or “the sole Determinant” of creation.6 As Powell writes, “Schleiermacher proposed that the only appropriate way of conceiving God is by means of the idea of ‘activity.’ ”7 And in the introduction to the Glaubenslehre, 5  CF §167.1, p. 730. 6 Ibid., §37.1, p.  144, and §38, p.  146. Albert Blackwell notes the similarity of Schleiermacher’s and Calvin’s doctrines of God as Creator. See Albert Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence between Sack and his Protégé Schleiermacher,” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 1 (1981), pp. 101–​21 (108). Maintaining my backward-​moving interpretive method, I will fully discuss the divine causality in Chapter 6 and return to it again in relation to the God-​consciousness in Chapter 7. Here, I only intend to show that divine causality is not an attribute among other attributes, but, for Schleiermacher, is a basic way of understanding God. 7  Samuel Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 97.

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Schleiermacher states that the “really original signification” of the word “God” is “the Whence” of created existence.8 As such, he indicates that “all the divine attributes to be dealt with in Christian Dogmatics must somehow go back to the divine causality.”9 For instance, he states that “by the eternity of God we understand the absolutely timeless causality of God.”10 In the next paragraph, he writes, “By the omnipresence of God we understand the absolutely spaceless causality of God.”11 Likewise, in the second set of divine attributes considered in the second part of the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher describes the holiness of God as “that divine causality through which in all corporate human life conscience is found conjoined with the need of redemption.”12 The full meaning of divine causality comes to the fore progressively throughout the Christian Faith, as it is nuanced and given particular content in the sections within which Schleiermacher details the divine attributes, some of which have just been briefly noted. This repeated usage of “divine causality” within Schleiermacher’s theology, I would suggest, has special significance for the doctrine of the Trinity. It indicates a basic way in which he thinks of God. Schleiermacher’s treatment of divine causality culminates at the end of Part Two.13 There, in paragraphs 164 and 165, the divine causality is described as that to which Christians trace their consciousness of communion with God—​ communion that occurs through the divine redemptive activity in Christ and the Christian Church. To be sure, the divine attributes that correspond to redemptive activity in Christ are love and wisdom.14 Yet in both cases, divine causality is invoked. Causality is understood within the Christian faith to be in concert with divine love and wisdom—​causality being the actualization of God’s redemptive love and wisdom. In this way, causality is assumed in Schleiermacher’s discussion of love and wisdom, such that divine love and wisdom cannot be conceived apart from divine causality. Given the intertwined relationships of divine causality, love, and wisdom, it seems to me that divine causality ranks alongside love and wisdom as an expression of the divine essence itself. While this goes beyond Schleiermacher’s explicit claims, the text implies it at every turn precisely because it is a description of God at the most basic level. Causality is not an attribute like eternity, omnipresence, or holiness, for example. These, as we shall see, are fundamentally descriptive modifiers of the divine being rather than descriptions of the divine being itself. Unlike these attributes, causality, when taken with love and wisdom, is a structural feature of the divine life. 8  CF §4.4, p. 16. 9  Ibid., §50.3, p. 198. 10  Ibid., §52, p. 203. 11  Ibid., §53, p. 206. 12  Ibid., §83, p. 341. 13  Ibid., §§50–​61, 79–​85, 164–​9. 14  Ibid., §165, p. 726.

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To analyze further what I  see as this first structural feature of God in Schleiermacher’s thought, I  will explore the divine causality as it is articulated in the closing paragraphs of the Glaubenslehre by means of five organizing categories:  intentionality, teleology, universality, Christomorphism, and unconditionality. First, divine causality is intentional. For Schleiermacher, the divine causality is no bland stopgap for an infinite regress of causes. He indicates the intentionality of divine causality by referring to the divine decree:  “we cannot conceive the divine causality otherwise than as decree in its eternity.”15 Recognizing the importance of “decree” within Schleiermacher’s thought, as well as his important monograph dedicated to the topic,16 a number of recent books have highlighted his doctrine of election and, more generally, his view of providence or predestination.17 Although there was early controversy about the extent and kind of determinism present in Schleiermacher’s account of these doctrines—​such that he was accused of mechanistic thinking despite his clear disavowal of such a framework of thought—​Julia Lamm has decisively shown that his attribution of intentionality to God is one of the features of his work that sets it apart from Spinoza’s thought.18 For Schleiermacher, divine causality determines the universe not mechanistically, but intentionally. Second, for Schleiermacher, divine causality is teleological. The ultimate goal of the divine causality or government is “redemption [of humanity] and the foundation of the Kingdom of God.”19 For this reason, at the end of his Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher points his readers ahead toward consideration of Christian ethics on the basis of Christian faith: “for we are now confronted with the task of more and more securing recognition for the world as a good world, as also of forming 15  Ibid., §172.3, p. 750. 16  Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Doctrine of Election, with Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr.  Bretschneider (trans. Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012). 17  See, for instance, Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-​Theological Comparison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Sung-​Sup Kim, Deus Providebit: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2014); Anette I. Hagan, Eternal Blessedness for All? A  Historical-​ Systematic Examination of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reinterpretation of Predestination (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013). 18  Julia Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park, PA:  Pennsylvania State University, 1996), p.  9, p.  217. Cf. Günter Meckenstock, Deterministische Ethik und kritische Theologie:  Die Auseinandersetzung des Frühen Schleiermacher mit Kant und Spinoza, 1789–​1794, vol. 5 (Schleiermacher-​Archiv; Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991). 19  CF §165.1, p. 726. The German here indicates that redemption and the foundation of the Kingdom of God is the pivot (“der Angelpunkt”) of the divine government (“der Weltregierung”). See CG, p. 445.

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all things into an organ of the divine Spirit.”20 Schleiermacher points his readers to ethics at the end of his work because he understands his Glaubenslehre and Christliche Sittenlehre as two parts of one whole. As James Brandt explains, Ethics stands as a complement to dogmatics; only together do these two comprise the whole of doctrinal theology. Both theological disciplines are equally grounded in Christian piety, for piety includes both a sense of “interest” that finds expression in Christian discourse and is systematized by dogmatics and a sense of “impulse” that gives rise to action and is systematized by ethics.21

Near the end of Schleiermacher’s explication of his doctrine of God, then, he points his readers onward to consideration of the practical task of understanding and establishing the reign of God because this is the final telos of the divine intention or decree concerning the universe. Divine causality aims at the redemption of all under the gracious divine reign of love and wisdom. Turning to the third feature of Schleiermacher’s understanding of divine causality, it is important to observe that divine causality always takes as its object the universe or creation as a whole. The universality of divine causality can be parsed in two ways. On one level, creation does not stand as an aggregate of finite beings that is generally independent of the divine causality, as if it is “going its own way on the strength of the divine preservation, the divine government only exerting influence on it through special isolated acts, so as to bring it into harmony with the kingdom of grace.”22 Rather, God creates and orders all things, and does so “with a view to the revelation of God in the flesh, and so as to secure the completest possible impartation thereof to the whole of human nature, and thus to form the Kingdom of God.”23 The divine causality, in other words, does not separate the world of nature from the world of grace; the two “are absolutely one.”24 On another level, the universality of divine causality is such that the one single and all-​encompassing decree focuses on the whole of creation, rather than on individual creatures. The decrees familiar to Schleiermacher’s Reformed readers—​for example, decrees of creation, fall, and election—​may be thought of as distinct only with a view to the accommodation of the limited human mind. In actuality, there 20  CF §169.3, p. 736. 21 James Brandt, Introduction to Selections from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics, by Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. and trans., James M. Brandt; Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2011), p.  10. See also Kevin M.  Vander Schel, Embedded Grace:  Christ, History, and the Reign of God in Schleiermacher’s Dogmatics (Minneapolis:  Fortress, 2013); Hans Joachim Birkner, Schleiermachers christliche Sittenlehre im Zusammenhang seines philosophisch-​theologischen Systems (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964). 22  CF §164.1, p. 723. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

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is but one divine intention and decree behind creation, incarnation, and redemption.25 It is therefore a mistake to assume for any particular thing a special divine will that is separate in any manner from the whole of creation.26 Each individual is within the whole, both “conditioning and conditioned,” and the whole is never subordinated to the individual.27 Each thing stands in relation to each other thing as part of the whole, upon which the divine good-​pleasure is set. A fourth category for understanding divine causality is Christomorphism. We have already encountered Schleiermacher’s Christomorphism in Chapter  2. For Schleiermacher, the divine good-​pleasure is the intention to unite the divine essence with human nature in the person of Christ and in the Christian community. In the present context, his Christomorphism adds concrete particularity to the universality of divine causality. Schleiermacher explains: Everything in our world would have been disposed otherwise, and the entire course of human and natural events, therefore, would have been different, if the divine purpose had not been set on the union of the Divine Essence with human nature in the Person of Christ, and, as a result thereof, the union of the Divine Essence with the fellowship of believers through the Holy Spirit.28

In this passage, Schleiermacher’s Christomorphism, his teleological focus, and the universality of the divine causality cohere. His notion of divine causality is ultimately grounded in the divine economic activity revealed in Christ and his Spirit. Fifth and finally, an important corollary of the facets of divine causality detailed above is that the divine intention is absolutely unconditioned:  “it is the decree itself that first conditions all things.”29 The anti-​Pelagian force of this claim is also implicitly anti-​Manichean; not only is all of creation absolutely dependent on the

25  For a discussion of the Protestant scholastic understanding of the divine decrees, see Heinrich Heppe, “The Decrees of God,” in Reformed Dogmatics (ed. Ernst Bizer; trans. G. T. Thomson; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), pp. 133–​49. See also Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008). For a treatment of the similarities and differences between Calvin’s and Schleiermacher’s doctrines of election, see Suzanne McDonald, “Theology of Election: Modern Reception and Contemporary Possibilities,” in Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (ed. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), pp. 121–​42 (122–​7); and Kim, Deus Providebit, pp. 25–​33, 94. 26  CF §164.3, p. 725. 27 Ibid. 28  Ibid., §164.2, p. 724. 29  DE, p. 67. See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), III.xxiv.1–5, wherein Augustine is copiously cited.

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divine good-​pleasure, but in addition, there is no other force that competes with the divine decree.30 “Even sin,” Schleiermacher explains, “is embraced under divine fore-​ordination, in spite of its really being contrary to the notion of the Kingdom of God; it reckons sin, however, as among the preparatory and introductory elements of the divine government of the world.”31 We will return to the Christian consciousness of sin and the complexities of Schleiermacher’s account of sin in Chapter 5. For now, I simply want to draw attention to his notion that all things, even sin, are absolutely originated and conditioned by the divine purpose, which “is directed to a single end.”32 For Schleiermacher, “nothing can really be save as it is also an object of the divine love.”33 Divine causality—​ intentional, teleological, universal, Christomorphic, and unconditioned—​is a structural feature of the divine life, grounded in the divine economy of salvation. God unconditionally creates and determines the world in relation to Christ, which culminates in the reign of God in the whole of creation. As such, causality is a fitting expression of the divine essence when it is joined to divine love and wisdom. 2.  Love I turn now to that second structural feature of the divine essence, love. “Love” is singled out by Schleiermacher as a uniquely fitting designation of the divine essence, because love is the motive that gives divine causality a determinate character.34 While divine causality has the reign of God as its goal and orders everything in relation to Christ and his Spirit in order to establish that reign, causality itself does not offer the motivation for this intended goal. The divine motivation or disposition is none other than divine love. As such, Schleiermacher states that “love alone and no other attribute can be equated thus with God,” being “made the equivalent of the being or essence of God.”35 In paragraph 167, he simply affirms the scriptural definition from 1 John 4:16 that “God is love.”36 This statement might be somewhat surprising to forward-​reading interpreters of the Glaubenslehre, since it occurs after nearly 750 pages of detailed doctrinal reflection and development. Yet at the end of the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher straightforwardly articulates the biblical notion that arguably underlies his entire doctrinal system. 30  Nicol and Jorgenson, “On the Doctrine of Election:  An Introduction,” in On the Doctrine of Election, pp. 1–​19 (12–​13). 31  CF §164.3, p. 726. 32 Ibid. 33  Ibid., §169.2, p. 736. Emphasis in the original. 34  Ibid., §167.2, p. 731. 35  Ibid., §167.1, p. 730. 36  Ibid., §167.heading, p. 730. 1 John 4:16 states: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

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In paragraphs 165 to 167, Schleiermacher describes love as the impulse to unite with and be in the creaturely other. But this is no general or abstract notion of love. In his letters to Dr. Lücke, Schleiermacher refers to the ground of his theology as the incarnation, which is the self-​communication of the divine essence to others.37 As he states, in the person of Christ, “the Supreme Being imparts Himself ” and “this constitutes the very essence of divine love.”38 In other words, divine love is the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ and the continual indwelling of God in humanity through the Spirit. This love reveals itself unequivocally in God’s “protective and fostering care” of the person in the process of being redeemed, wherein she becomes conscious of her relation to God and her will is brought into line with the divine intention to establish the divine reign.39 Indeed, until it comes in through the redemptive person and work of Christ, “knowledge of the divine love” will always remain a matter of doubt, according to Schleiermacher.40 It is the divine self-​impartation in Christ that reveals compellingly God’s “protective and fostering care” of humanity. As Lamm rightly notes, “the notion that love alone applies to the essence of God would mean nothing apart from the experience of redemption.”41 That is because divine love simply is redemptive activity in and through Christ and the Spirit. It is important to note here that for Schleiermacher, there is no gap between the being and activity of God. As for the divine being, God is love, which is seen through the divine essence uniting with human nature in the person of Christ, and then in turn uniting with and dwelling among humanity in Christ’s Spirit. As for the divine activity, God works in creation-​redemption to provide a “protective and fostering care” of humanity, which brings humanity to consciousness of God in Christ through the Spirit. These two, the divine being of love and the divine activity of creation-​redemption, intertwine precisely because they are both conceived in relation to and therefore grounded in Christ. Here again, Schleiermacher wishes “to have nothing to do with any conception of God reached by way of speculation,” but grounds his notion of divine love in Christ and Christ’s Spirit.42 3.  Wisdom While love is the impulse to unite with the other through self-​impartation, Schleiermacher describes wisdom as “the principle that orders and determines the world for the divine self-​imparting which is evinced in redemption.”43 Wisdom’s 37  OG, p. 59: “I would have wished to construct the work so that at every point the reader would be made aware that the verse John 1:14 is the basic text for all dogmatics.” 38  CF §166.1, p.  727. Cf. CG, p.  446:  “das höchste Wesen sich mitteile und darin das Wesen der göttlichen Liebe bestehe.” 39  CF §166.1, p. 728. 40  Ibid., §166.2, p. 729. 41 Lamm, The Living God, p. 217. 42  CF §167.1, p. 730. 43  Ibid., §168, p. 732.

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proper work “is precisely the spread of redemption.”44 It is “the art (so to speak) of realizing the divine love perfectly.”45 Here, Schleiermacher imagines the universe as “an absolutely harmonious divine work of art.”46 For him, divine wisdom artfully and perfectly realizes the divine love by outlining its plans and purposes in the universe: the goal is divine “self-​presentation and impartation,” which occurs principally in “the sending of Christ.”47 As such, Schleiermacher continues, “the growth of our consciousness of the wisdom of God consists in this, that His impartation in its temporal progress becomes for us ever more and more a perfect presentation of the almighty love of God.”48 From creation through the divine self-​impartation in Christ and on to the divine self-​impartation in the Spirit of the Church, divine wisdom becomes more clearly presented over time as divine love is more clearly revealed. At this point, Gerrish suggests, the propositional exposition of the Glaubenslehre gives way to “an essentially aesthetic vision of the world as the theater of redemption. In other words, it ends on a note much loved by the old Reformed divines: the world is manifestatio gloriae Dei.”49 Schleiermacher is careful to add that for the divine wisdom, there is no difference between means and end. All things within the world are so perfectly ordered that every particular is both means and end; “each of these categories is constantly abrogating itself and passing over into the other.”50 Moreover, because divine wisdom is perfect, God does not consider various means and choose one option from among them all, thereafter actualizing one among many equally viable plans. Rather, Schleiermacher writes, “without ascribing any limitation to God, we may assert that the divine wisdom is not capable of producing any other disposition of things, or any other ordering of their course, than that in which the divine love is most perfectly realized.”51 Divine wisdom realizes the divine love in the only way in which divine love finds its perfect satisfaction. Thus redemption, once again, is the key to understanding divine wisdom. Insofar as Christians wish to attribute something in the world to divine wisdom, it “must also be related to the redemptive or new-​creating revelation of God.”52 Because divine love and divine wisdom are so closely intertwined in this way, Schleiermacher identifies both of them with the divine essence: “Love and wisdom alone, then, can claim to be not mere attributes but also expressions of the very essence of God” (Ausdrücke für das Wesen Gottes selbst).53 Both of these 44  Ibid., §168.2, p. 735. 45  Ibid., §165.1, p. 727. 46  Ibid., §168.1, p. 733. 47  Ibid.; cf. Acts 17:24–​8. 48  CF §168.1, p. 733. 49 Brian Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation:  Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 169. 50  CF §168.1, p. 733. 51  Ibid., §165.2, p. 727. 52  Ibid., §168.2, pp. 734–​5. 53  Ibid., §167.2, p. 731–​2; CG, p. 451.

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are thus structural features at the heart of the divine life. Yet there is an asymmetry, or taxis (ordering), in view here:  Schleiermacher wants to retain divine love as the most basic feature of the divine essence, since without the intention of divine love, there would be nothing for divine wisdom to outline properly. From the human point of view, Gerrish explains, “The forgiven person is directly conscious of himself or herself as the object of the divine disposition of love; only by an extension of self-​consciousness does the experience of redemption lead one to affirm the perfect harmony of all things.”54 Thus, insofar as the Christian is immediately conscious of divine love in redemption through Christ, love has a certain priority. Consciousness of the divine wisdom follows as the Christian considers the way in which God brings the decree of love into reality. For this reason, “we do not say God is wisdom precisely as we do God is love.”55 Having established this taxis, however, Schleiermacher, almost in the same breath, immediately establishes their identity and equality: “we take the divine love as being also wisdom.”56 He goes back and forth in this way because of the intertwined relationship between love and wisdom. They are distinct features of the divine life, and Schleiermacher wants to give love priority in Christian Glaubenslehre. At bottom, however, the divine essence is one: “the two attributes are never separate in any way; they are so entirely one that each may be regarded as being intrinsically contained in the other.”57 For Schleiermacher, “where almighty love is, there must also absolute wisdom be.”58 Schleiermacher also adds that divine wisdom is “equivalent” to the divine creativity or causality:  “Both the wisdom and the omniscience of God are each equivalent to the other and to the divine creativeness and . . . we cannot set this equivalence aside without spoiling the conceptions themselves.”59 Thus, although the passage quoted at the beginning of the previous paragraph may suggest that divine causality is illegitimately designated as an expression of the very essence of God, that suggestion has merit only insofar as Schleiermacher is keen to avoid attributing causality, power, or activity per se to God. For him, a bland, general causality or power would not express the divine essence, to be sure. However, when divine causality is integrally linked with divine love and wisdom as three distinctions-​in-​relation that are posited and defined on the basis of the economy of salvation, then the illegitimacy of designating causality as a structural feature of God falls away. In fact, because divine love and wisdom are described in terms of divine causality, it seems to me that causality must rank alongside the other two. All three structural features—​divine causality, love, and wisdom—​are intrinsically related and stand in a mutual relationship to one another. 54 Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, p. 169. 55  CF §167.2, p. 732. 56  Ibid., §168.1, p. 732. 57  Ibid., §165.2, p. 727. 58  Ibid., §167.2, p. 732. 59  Ibid., §168.1, p. 734.

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4.  Essential Trinitarianism Before turning to Schleiermacher’s rejection of personhood language for these structural features, let me highlight a few notable features of essential Trinitarianism as I am explicating it here. The first point to be underscored is that for Schleiermacher, it is impossible to separate the divine essence from divine activity in relation to the universe. The divine essence is the loving intention to unite with the other through self-​impartation. The way divine love is imparted in the universe is beautifully outlined and ordered by divine wisdom. Divine wisdom, in turn, propounds the fullness of the divine causality; the whole round of the created universe is ordered toward the end of redemption and the reign of God. Thus, when Schleiermacher presents the divine essence in terms of causality, love, and wisdom, he does not retreat into a discussion of the divine in se; that is, speculation about what God would have been like or is like apart from creation. Instead, he offers an understanding of the heart of the divine life in relation to the universe, which is based on the divine economy of salvation. The fact that Schleiermacher refuses to think in sustained ways about what God would have been like without creation, however, does not preclude him from conceiving of causality, love, and wisdom as what I am calling distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life. In this second notable feature of my reading of his essential Trinitarianism, Schleiermacher’s doctrine of the Trinity bears marked similarity to descriptions of the immanent Trinity as they were historically developed in the classical tradition. As we have already seen, these three distinctions-​in-​relation are not merely divine attributes, but rank as genuine expressions of the divine essence. As Fiorenza describes it, Schleiermacher “is not maintaining that love and wisdom are merely the revealed manifestations of a hidden unknown monad. Instead, Schleiermacher is making a claim about the very essence of God.”60 There is perhaps more overlap between Schleiermacher’s theology and immanent Trinitarianism than has traditionally been acknowledged at this point. Moreover, he offers three structural features of the divine essence that are coinherent (perichoretic), coequal in divinity, coeternal, and homoousios. Divine causality, love, and wisdom are coinherent such that they pass into one another and are inseparable. They are all equally divine, and none occurs before the other. These relations can be posited because divine causality, love, and wisdom are all expressions of the very essence of God. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s understanding of God does not include a technical doctrine of internal relations, understood as the generation and procession of hypostases, for reasons outlined in the previous chapter. In short, conceiving of the hypostases and their relations to one another without speculation and such that they avoid both Monarchianism and tritheism seems to be an insurmountable task. Third, then, although the divine essence is textured in a threefold way as causality, love, and wisdom, these do not correspond to the classical tradition’s 60 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Understanding God as Triune,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, pp. 171–​88 (179).

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understanding of Father, Son, and Spirit. It is not the case that divine causality corresponds to the Father, divine love to the Son, and divine wisdom to the Spirit. My treatment of Schleiermacher’s usage of divine causality, love, and wisdom maintains the distinctions between them not in terms of genetic relations, as in the classical tradition, but in terms of conceptual relations. Schleiermacher gives love determinative priority, because without love, wisdom would have nothing to outline and causality nothing to actualize. Even so, causality is given priority in relation to love and wisdom insofar as love and wisdom amount to nothing without it. Wisdom, in turn, has priority when one wishes to emphasize the manner in which the creation of the world is lovingly accomplished. The three structural features of the divine essence hold together on the basis of these conceptual rather than genetic relations of dependence. In other words, there are no relations between divine love, wisdom, and causality that can be named in a way similar to that of filiation and spiration in the classical tradition. Rather, one can only repeat that divine love, wisdom, and causality are coinherent, homoousios, coeternal, and coequal. This way of distinguishing the three structural features of the divine life while maintaining their unity avoids some of the problems that Schleiermacher identifies with the traditional doctrine of the immanent Trinity in his conclusion to the Glaubenslehre. For instance, equality of the three structural features of the divine essence in relation to one another can be maintained with relative ease, given that none of these features has the power to generate any of the others. Causality does not generate love or wisdom, love does not generate wisdom or causality, and wisdom does not generate causality or love. Neither does causality conceptually proceed from love or wisdom, nor love from wisdom or causality, nor wisdom from love or causality. Their conceptual relation is grounded not in the nature of causality, love, and wisdom themselves, but in the divine economy of salvation, even as they cannot be appropriated to the three ways in which God is manifest in the economy of salvation. This also means that there is no apparent difficulty in understanding the equality of the three in relation to the divine essence. The problem Schleiermacher identified, as we have seen, was that by distinguishing the three persons by specific properties—​properties that one cannot predicate of the divine essence in itself—​ the divine essence seems to exist in a way distinct from the persons. The unity of the divine persons as constitutive of the divine essence, therefore, becomes difficult to square with the distinctions between them that do not seem predicable of the essence. On my reading of Schleiermacher’s understanding of God, in contrast, the divine essence just is the threefold unity of the divine life. In other words, the divine essence is causality, love, and wisdom, and these three “structures” are mutually intertwined. God is causal activity in relation to the universe, which is motivated or directed by love and perfectly outlined by wisdom. Furthermore, on this understanding, there are no predicates that could be attributed to the structural features of the divine essence that could not also be predicated of the divine essence itself. This way of understanding the three distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine essence, therefore, also avoids the danger of tritheism. In fact, tritheism

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does not even rear its head in this discussion. By understanding divine causality, love, and wisdom as the threefold texture of the divine essence, divine unity is never put in question. In addition, the relation of divine unity and trinity to causality in the economy of salvation, a second problem Schleiermacher identified in his discussion of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, does not present a conceptual difficulty on this form of Trinitarianism. The threefold structure of the divine essence is operative and fully present in each temporal moment of the divine economy, whether in preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature, in that union in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, or in that union with human nature in the common Spirit of the Church. It follows, then, that Schleiermacher is no crude modalist. God is not a monad, merely wearing different masks or playing different roles as time progresses. Rather, the divine essence itself is textured as causality, love, and wisdom. Neither is Schleiermacher a theologian for whom the divine essence progressively comes to be in the course of three temporal epochs of world history. The very essence of God is eternally love, wisdom, and causality. What comes to be in the process of history is not the divine essence itself, but humanity’s more perfect union with and understanding of the divine essence. God is revealed progressively in the three periods of the divine government of the world, but the divine essence itself is not originally bland causality, followed by a warming unto love, followed by an awakening to wisdom. Instead, the divine essence is always already the love, wisdom, and causality that is imparted and presented more and more perfectly to humanity over time. Admittedly, my reading of Schleiermacher’s essential Trinitarianism does have its own difficulties. Chief among them might be explaining why love, wisdom, and causality should be called expressions of the threefold structure of the divine being, rather than simply used as three important concepts that describe God. Because the distinctions are conceptual rather than genetic, they might seem less “concrete” as descriptors of the divine life than do Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If they are not genetically related, then, perhaps they should not be identified as “structures” of the divine life. This suggestion correlates genetic relations of dependence with the stable concreteness of the architectural metaphor of “structures.” A response to this suggestion might begin by affirming that causality, love, and wisdom do seem to be less stable and concrete than the genetic relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Although causality, love, and wisdom are descriptions of the divine life that are grounded in the concrete economy of salvation, these three expressions are lifted from that concreteness to a certain extent in order to express the essence of the divine life within the doctrine of the Trinity. Whereas Father, Son, and Holy Spirit retain some concreteness even in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity because of the analogies afforded by the genetic relations between them, love, wisdom, and causality are related by coinherence and therefore possess a certain fluidity or agility. For instance, Schleiermacher could make the following statements that place divine love, causality, and wisdom in various relations to one another: love is the motive of causality, wisdom outlines the plans of love, causality

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actualizes divine wisdom in creation-​redemption, creation-​redemption is divine love expressed in the world, the creative-​redemptive activity reveals the divine wisdom, divine activity is wise love, and so on. In these relations, love, wisdom, and causality flow into and out of one another even as they retain their distinctive meanings. In this way, then, causality, love, and wisdom do seem less concrete and more agile than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. The dynamism of causality, love, and wisdom underscores the fact that Schleiermacher conceives of God in terms of activity rather than substance. As such, the way in which the concepts of causality, love, and wisdom are coinherent, though troublesome for providing a stable image of the divine essence in terms of three distinct hypostases related in four precise ways (paternity, filiation, spiration, procession), may better cohere with the character of the divine being as Schleiermacher sees it. So although I am calling love, wisdom, and causality the three “structural features,” “contours,” or “textures” of the divine life, this architectural metaphor has its limits. While “structural features” is helpful for emphasizing that divine wisdom, causality, and love are essential to the divine life insofar as they, along with the threefold economy of salvation on which they are grounded, are the keystone of the Glaubenslehre, this metaphor may not cohere exactly to the dynamic character of the Living God. After describing the “structural features” of the divine life, essential Trinitarians might only be able to brush their hands against the roundness of divine love and the smoothness of divine wisdom before the flow of the divine causality continues to move in relation to the goodness of creation.

b.  Personhood and the Divine Life This interpretation of Schleiermacher’s essential Trinitarianism shares similarities with immanent Trinitarianism without succumbing to many of the conceptual difficulties that typically attend it. Yet it may be that those schooled in the classical tradition would still be hard-​pressed to seriously consider Schleiermacher’s view, because he dispenses with the language of personhood for God. As we have seen, Schleiermacher does not use the nomenclature of “persons” for the essential structural features of the divine life. In so doing, an important part of the classical tradition is set aside. Given that an affirmation of God as personal has been integral to the faith of many Christians from Schleiermacher’s day to today, the question arises as to whether theologians inspired by Schleiermacher might in any way retain the traditional terminology of “personhood” when speaking of the divine essence. The question is whether Schleiermacher’s interpreters could avoid unnecessary criticism of his view of God by adopting personhood terminology for the divine unity while rejecting immanent Trinitarianism. In this section, I consider Schleiermacher’s reasons for avoiding the term “person” vis-​à-​vis divine distinctions-​in-​relation. First, I briefly reconsider the charge

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that Schleiermacher is Spinozistic, in order to elucidate the historical context and constructive significance of this chapter. Second, I attend to his objections to the language of “person” for God and introduce his preferred term; namely, the “living” God. Third, I show how he nonetheless uses personal analogies for God within the Glaubenslehre. In the fourth and final section of the chapter, I offer a correction to Schleiermacher’s view such that, without significantly altering his method in the Glaubenslehre, essential Trinitarianism could include an affirmation of divine personhood. 1.  Schleiermacher’s Relation to Spinoza In the introductory chapter of this book, I offered a brief overview of the charge of Spinozism that was leveled against Schleiermacher in his own day. The accusation persists into the present in part because Schleiermacher rejects “personhood” as an appropriate way to describe God. Indeed, accusations of Spinozism and denials of divine personhood have been bound together. The original debate took place primarily in response to Schleiermacher’s first edition of the Speeches. The entirety of the discussion between Jacobi, Schleiermacher, and Sack lasted from 1793, when Schleiermacher engaged Spinoza’s thought at Friedrich Gedike’s “pedagogical seminary” in Berlin,61 to 1821, when his second revision of the Speeches was published with attached “Explanations.” Key to the dispute was whether the attributes of personhood and personality, or attributes associated therewith, like intellect and will, should be predicated of God. Although personhood and personal attributes might be logically distinct, for Schleiermacher the presence of the latter warranted an assertion of the former. As such, he can conflate these two, personhood and personal attributes, and treat them as synonymous. Schleiermacher denies that personality should be attributed to God, because in God intellect and will can never be isolated and separated from one another as they can be in finite personal beings. However, he also refuses to countenance an understanding of God that might be seen as fatalistic, dead, or mechanical. Schleiermacher’s ecclesiastical superior, S.  G. Sack, was the first to intensely engage with him about his alleged Spinozism because of his rejection of divine personhood. Following the publication of the Speeches, Sack wrote, I despise, disparage and condemn without reservation the (so-​ called) philosophy—​execrable, in my view—​that acknowledges at the summit of the universe no self-​conscious, wise and good Being; that makes me the creature of an Omnipotence and Wisdom that is nowhere and everywhere; that would rob 61  Schleiermacher produced two manuscripts on Spinoza during this time: “Spinozism” and “Short Presentation of the Spinozistic System.” These are found in Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher:  Kritische Gesamtausgabe (ed. Hans-​Joachim Birkner, Gerhard Ebeling, Hermann Fischer, Heinz Kimmerle, and Kurt-​Victor Selge; Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 1980) I.1, pp. 511–​97.

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me of the exalted joy, the indestructible, sweet need to lift up my eyes in thanksgiving to a Benefactor; that in the midst of my suffering cruelly deprives me of the comfort that there is a Witness of my painful feelings and that I suffer under the rule of a Goodness mindful even of my own well-​being.62

This particular formulation of the critique should ring somewhat hollow in our ears now that we have explored Schleiermacher’s closing paragraphs in the Glaubenslehre, which include a robust appreciation of divine intentionality, along with a focus on divine love and wisdom. Whatever the relation of the Speeches to the Glaubenslehre, it should be clear that in the latter, Schleiermacher understands God as the Wise and Loving One on whom humanity absolutely depends for its creation and redemption within the universe. Yet in spite of this, Schleiermacher certainly claims that “personhood” is not the best way, within a strictly theological rather than liturgical context, to describe God. Replying to Sack’s criticism, he writes, “No religion evolves out of the concept of the personality of God; this concept is not the source of devotion; no one is conscious of the source of his own devotion in that concept; more likely, the concept distorts devotion.”63 Schleiermacher thinks that the concept of personhood will likely distort devotion, it seems, because it is much too anthropomorphic. He is concerned that in attributing personhood to God, either God will be seen as inappropriately limited or the designation itself will be meaningless. Schleiermacher therefore explicitly rejects “personhood,” preferring the term “the living God.” 2.  Rejecting “Personality,” Affirming “the Living God” In the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher uses a cluster of terms that relate to personhood. He seems to use the terms “person” (Person), “personal” (persönlichen), and “personality” (Persönlichkeit) synonymously.64 Further, these terms are used interchangeably with others, including “individual” (Einzelne)65 and “subject” (Subjekt) or “ego” (Ich).66 Personhood is also correlated with the human “organism” (Organismus) or the human body, even as it is a feature of mental life.67 For Schleiermacher, personhood is that which gives a human organism psychological unity or the “unity of a natural life-​story.”68 This particular construction signals 62  Albert Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence between Sack and his Protégé Schleiermacher,” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 1 (1981), pp. 101–​21 (107). 63  Ibid., pp. 107–​8. 64  Lamm helpfully distinguishes Schleiermacher’s careful uses of “personal” and “personality” in the Speeches. See The Living God, pp. 95–​109. 65  CF §88.3–​4, pp. 364–​5 and §96.1, p. 393. 66  Ibid., §96.1, p. 391, p. 393. 67  Ibid., §93.4, p. 384. 68  Ibid., §97.3, p. 409.

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a distinctively modern understanding of personhood as the “continuous unity of self-​consciousness”.69 Still more specifically, Schleiermacher links personhood with reason and will, observing a clear distinction between these faculties. Persons, by this reckoning, are finite entities with distinct rational and willing capabilities; they are particular subjects of different natural life-​stories; and self-​consciousness depends on the physical body.70 If Schleiermacher supposes the concept of personhood is inextricably bound up with human individuality in this way, it is clear why he rejects it as an appropriate description of the divine life. In concert with the tradition before the advent of “social Trinitarianism,” if “persons” are understood synonymously with “individuals” with distinct self-​consciousness, God cannot be affirmed as tripersonal; that would violate Schleiermacher’s commitment to monotheism. Indeed, Schleiermacher might well agree with Karl Rahner that if a modern Christian speaks of God as three persons, then she “may verbally protest to the contrary, may emphasize the mysterious character of the Trinity, may know of the logical difficulties in reconciling the three ‘persons’ with God’s unity. Despite all this [s]‌he will have great trouble avoiding a hidden pre-​reflective tritheism.”71 Just as Schleiermacher refuses to say that God comprises three persons qua individuals, so too is he unwilling to say that the unity of the divine life is an individual ego that reasons and wills like a human consciousness. He posits the following rhetorical question: If you form to yourself a living conception of a person, must not this person of necessity be finite? Can an infinite reason and an infinite will really be anything more than empty words . . . ? And if you attempt to annul the distinction between reason and will, is not the conception of personality destroyed by the very attempt?72

Since God is not finite, it would be meaningless in Schleiermacher’s view to claim that God is personal, given that personhood is linked with finite reason and will. Representing God as a “personality” would therefore be rendered nonsensical in the attempt to make this characterization theologically acceptable.73 69  Ibid., §123.3, p. 573; see also CF §161.1, p. 709. For a treatment of “persons” that juxtaposes the Cappadocian understanding with modern usages, see Sarah Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity:  Current Analytic Discussion and ‘Cappadocian’ Theology,” in Powers and Submissions:  Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2002), pp. 109–​29. 70  CF §97.3, pp. 408–​9. 71  Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroads, 2003), p. 115. 72  Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Schleiermacher to Jacobi, 30 March 1918,” in The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in His Autobiography and Letters, vol. 2 (trans. Frederica Maclean Rowan; 2 vols.; London: Smith, Elder, 1860), pp. 280–​4 (283). 73 Cf. CF §50.1, pp. 194–​5.

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Further explication of Schleiermacher’s rejection of personhood language is found within his discussion of the traditional understanding of the human being as having been made in the image of God. Schleiermacher explains that it would be inappropriate to begin with human consciousness, even in its highest form, as the “image of God” and then analogically attribute a similar type of consciousness to God: Since this activity of the God-​consciousness occurs in us only in connexion with our physical and bodily organism, if we would argue regressively from the likeness or image of God, as it is and has been described here, to God Himself, then we should have to accept one of two alternatives: either the whole world is related to God in the same way as our whole organism is related to the highest spiritual power in us, in which case it would be difficult to see how God could fail to be identical with the world; or else there is something in God which at least corresponds to our psychical organization, which is largely constituted by the so-​called lower psychical forces; and in this way the idea of God would acquire a strong and really defiling admixture of humanity, and attributes would have to be ascribed to God which can mean nothing when taken as divine, or else attributes would have to be ascribed to men which could not be thought of as human.74

Because personhood is bound up with the bodily organism for Schleiermacher, attributing personhood to God would involve the Christian in one of two equally deleterious conclusions:  either God is dependent on the world in a similar way that human consciousness depends on the human organism, or God is conscious through finite capacities. These options either construct God in humanity’s image or, in an effort to avoid anthropomorphism, make humanity unrecognizable to itself.75 As should be expected given our exploration of divine love, wisdom, and intentional causality, however, Schleiermacher does not deny a personal God only to affirm an impersonal one. A “dead force” would not be something to which one could stand in meaningful relation. Lamm suggests that a threefold distinction is at work here:  For Schleiermacher, God is neither personal nor impersonal but nonpersonal.76 In his 1821 “Explanations” of the revisions he made in later editions of the Speeches, Schleiermacher uses the word “living” to capture this middle position. He writes, “As it is so difficult to think of a personality as truly infinite and incapable of suffering, one should make a great distinction between a personal God and a living God. The latter concept alone offers a proper distinction from materialistic pantheism and from atheistic blind necessity.”77 As Lamm

74  Ibid., §61.4, pp. 252–​3. 75  The implicit rejection of Spinozism here is worth noting. 76 Lamm, The Living God, p. 104. 77 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion:  Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (trans. John Oman; New  York:  Harper Torch Books, 1958), p.  116. The passage appears in Explanation 2.19.

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observes, while personal deity is conceived as essentially finite and impersonal deity amounts to material pantheism or atheistic fate, for Schleiermacher, a living God is active in connecting all things within the universe.78 As Schleiermacher states, “God cannot be represented otherwise than as living, for in the living as such all is activity.”79 At first glance, “living” might not seem to be a better term than “personhood” for Schleiermacher’s purposes. Taken on its own, “living” might be just as fraught with inappropriate metaphors as “personhood.” The term surely invokes images associated with biology:  nature, plants, animals, birth, and breath—​in short, creatures. However, “living” is decidedly less anthropomorphic and anthropocentric than “person,” given that it can be associated with the whole of the interconnected process of the universe—​including but not limited to humanity. Schleiermacher’s reference to the living God expands our focus to the panoramic scope of the divine love, wisdom, and intentional causality in relation to the universe. Consequently, when he rejects a “personal” view of God, what he actually finds objectionable is, as Lamm rightly notes, “making personality [i.e., “a God who wills and thinks as we do and who acts and interferes in natural processes”] an attribute of God.”80 3.  Using Personal Analogies The irony of Schleiermacher’s rejection of divine personhood is that it is precisely at the summit of his work—​his description of the intentional causality, love, and wisdom of God—​that he seems to come the closest to affirming attributes that would be related to divine personhood. It is here, as Lamm indicates, “at the heart and climax of his doctrine of God, that he finds the risk [of anthropomorphism] least avoidable.”81 Lamm continues: “The issue becomes, therefore, the degree of anthropomorphism allowed and whether or not it results in attributing a personality to God.”82 Schleiermacher writes, in response to the former issue, that the degree of anthropomorphism ought to be rendered as minimal as possible. And he ultimately answers in the negative to the latter issue, but it is worth noting the degree to which he approaches an ascription of some features of personhood to God in the material already surveyed. In addition to attributing love, wisdom, and intentional causality, predicates that are often associated with personhood, to God, Schleiermacher further uses at least four analogies in his exposition that would seem clearly to involve some notion of personhood. Before detailing these four analogies, it is worth noting, first, that Schleiermacher allows analogical reasoning only when the precise ways in which the similarities 78 Lamm, The Living God, p. 108. 79  CF §50.3, p. 198. 80 Lamm, The Living God, p. 107. The bracketed text comes from p. 106. 81  Ibid., p. 214. 82  Ibid., Emphasis in the original.

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and dissimilarities between the two terms in the analogy are clearly articulated; and second, that his limited use of analogical reasoning places personal attributes at the heart of the divine essence. Turning to the first note, Schleiermacher’s limited use of analogical reasoning is interesting, given his clear preference for the via causalitatis, which will be discussed in Chapter 6. His antispeculative commitment rules out an extended use of analogies, which may involve too much transferal of human or creaturely ways of life to the divine life. Even so, it seems that Schleiermacher is willing to use analogies when it is clear precisely what in the analogy under consideration is being considered similar to the divine being, and precisely where the difference lies.83 Second, Schleiermacher tentatively uses four analogies in the Glaubenslehre to convey his understanding of God. As such, it is not that he thinks all anthropomorphism must be rejected, but it must be regulated carefully so as not to characterize God in ways that would be contrary to the divine activity. When Schleiermacher uses analogies, however, they are striking because of their employment of characteristics that tend to be associated directly with personhood. Further, these analogies are not used to explain peripheral concepts, but are used in the explanation of such significant notions as divine eternity, activity, knowledge, and guidance or rule. Thus, what commonly might be identified as “personal” descriptors can be found at the very heart of Schleiermacher’s understanding of God. I will survey these four analogies, beginning with divine eternity. In Schleiermacher’s comparison between the human “I” and divine eternity, just as the human “I” persists in its identity despite its changing states, so the divine identity is grounded in itself even as it is related to the changing effects of divine causality.84 Schleiermacher explains: In so far as finite being produces time-​series with their content, thus remaining the same and identical with itself (as, e.g., the Ego, [das Ich] as the enduring ground of all changing spiritual states, especially of resolves [Entschlüsse], each of which again as a moment of the Ego produces a concrete time-​series), then, as the enduring causal ground relatively to the changing caused, it is posited as timeless. And with some such kind of analogy we must rest content.85

The personal “I” is analogous to the divine eternity, because both of these persist in identity even as they exist in relation to changing states. While a person might resolve to do different things in different times and places, that which has resolved to do such things is the enduring “I.” This “I” is analogous to divine eternity, which 83  Analogical reasoning, as is well known in part because of Thomas Aquinas’s use of the method, involves both similarity and dissimilarity. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province; 3 vols; Scotts Valley, CA: NovAntiqua, Latin-​English ed., 2008), Prima Pars, Q 12–13. 84  CF, p. 206. 85 Ibid.

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endures as the causal ground of changing times and states. It is precisely this sense of the “I” as the unity of a life that is analogous, for Schleiermacher, to the divine eternity. A second personal analogy Schleiermacher offers centers on the human artist. He finds this analogy useful because, to his mind, both the human artist and God act beyond the antitheses of the free and the necessary, the possible and the actual. The analogy is situated within a discussion of middle knowledge; that is, knowledge of, in Schleiermacher’s view, “what would have resulted had something happened which did not happen.”86 Middle or mediate knowledge, he proceeds to argue, “rests altogether upon the assumption of a possible outside the real, which we have already put aside” in the case of divine knowledge.87 He has rejected the assumption of a possible outside the actual because—​in a strong rehearsal of a very traditional position within the doctrine of God—​God can admit of no potentiality. The assumption of a possible in addition to the real would imply, he notes, that “there is in God eternally and imperishably a mass of rejected thoughts.”88 Such a catalogue of thoughts presupposes divine deliberation, and that, for Schleiermacher, is “a view which from of old every form of teaching in any degree consistent has repudiated.”89 God does not deliberate and then choose the best among possible courses of action. Rather, as we have seen in Schleiermacher’s account of divine wisdom, the actual is the only possibility, because it is the perfect satisfaction of divine love. “Hence,” he explains, “it would have been far safer, if one does start from what is human, to transfer to God, illimited and perfect, the certainty of the perfect artist, who in a state of inspired discovery thinks of nothing else, to whom nothing else offers itself, save what he actually produces.”90 Here God is considered to be like the perfect artist who creates with singleness of mind, without fluctuation or deliberation. There is no possible creation for the artist that is not actual. This may be an odd and rather perplexing view of the perfect human artist. However, it is worth observing that the distinction between reason and will—​ which, in his letter to Jacobi cited above, Schleiermacher argues is necessarily bound up with human personhood—​is overcome here even with reference to a human person.91 Both the perfect human artist and God transcend on this account any contrast between reason and will (or deliberation and motivated action), possibility and necessity. In this, God is said to be like a perfect human artist. 86  CF §53.2, p. 224. For a treatment of middle knowledge in Protestant Scholasticism, see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1 (ed. James Dennison Jr.; trans. George Musgrave Giger; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992), pp. 212–​18. 87  CF §55.2, pp. 224–​5. 88  Ibid., p. 225. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91  Schleiermacher, “Schleiermacher to Jacobi,” p. 283.

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Schleiermacher uses a third personal analogy to explain the coexistence of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. He begins with an account of human freedom and knowledge: We deem those people least free who cannot in general know their actions beforehand, i.e., those who are not conscious of any definite course of action. . . . In the same way we estimate the intimacy of relationship between two persons by the foreknowledge one has of the actions of the other, without supposing that in either case the one or the other’s freedom has thereby been endangered.92

In this passage, a certain level of human foreknowledge can clearly coexist with human freedom. And, in an analogous way, “even divine foreknowledge cannot endanger freedom.”93 As persons seem freer the more foreknowledge of their own actions they possess, and as human freedom does not seem to be compromised on account of others’ foreknowledge of a person’s future choices, so does divine knowledge of human action coexist with human freedom. Again, for all its potential infelicities, this is clearly a personal analogy to the extent that knowledge is typically associated with persons rather than inanimate or nonpersonal creatures. As a final example, Schleiermacher uses human discernment to describe the divine Spirit’s guiding activity in relation to the Church’s writings and doctrines. He writes, “we can hardly use any analogy but this, that we should conceive of the Spirit as ruling and guiding in the thought-​world of the whole Christian body just as each individual does in his own.”94 Here, the divine Spirit is analogous to the individual human mind. More specifically, Every man knows how to distinguish his own noteworthy thoughts, and how so to preserve them that he can count on bringing them up later in his mind: the rest he puts aside partly for later elaboration; others he simply disregards and leaves it a matter merely of accident whether they ever again present themselves to his mind or not. Indeed, he may occasionally reject some of his ideas entirely, either just when they occur or later. Similarly, the faithful preservation of the apostolic writings is the work of the Spirit of God acknowledging His own products; He distinguishes what is to remain unchangeable from what has in many respects undergone transformation in the later development of Christian doctrine.95

Schleiermacher is here conceiving the manner of the divine Spirit as analogous to that of the human person who distinguishes, regulates, and preserves her own 92  CF §56.3, p. 228. 93 Ibid. 94  Ibid., §130.4, p. 602. 95 Ibid.

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thoughts. While certainly imperfect, especially in light of his rejection of middle knowledge, the analogy is meant to show that God regulates or rules in the thought-​world of the Christian community. With these four analogies, Schleiermacher compares God to human persons. If it can be admitted that the “I,” creativity, knowing, and discerning and regulating thoughts are attributes routinely associated with persons, then it can likewise be admitted that at least some of the analogies Schleiermacher uses to describe the unity of the divine life are “personal.” What does this mean for an interpretation of his understanding of God? Given that divine causality, love, and wisdom are essential to the divine life, and given that Schleiermacher uses some personal analogies to describe God, we may wonder whether there might be a way to faithfully interpret but also extend his understanding of God such that Christians schooled in traditional doctrines of God might find his theology more tenable. Put a bit differently: Given Schleiermacher’s modern context and his understanding of personhood as inextricably linked to finitude and individuals, it would seem that he has good reason to distance himself from the use of “person.” However, given his tentative use of personal analogies to explain different aspects of a Christian understanding of God, it might be possible to both be faithful to his system of doctrine and also to describe the unity of the divine life as personal, his explicit claims to the contrary notwithstanding. This interpretive stretch might be possible as long as “personhood” could be conceived, first, in a relatively nonanthropomorphic way, in accord with Schleiermacher’s preferred understanding of God as “living.” Second, “personhood” would need to be conceived in a Christomorphic way, in accord with Schleiermacher’s focus on deriving divine attributes from the economy of salvation.

c.  Toward Divine Personhood Schleiermacher did not set out to elucidate a relatively nonanthropomorphic understanding of personhood. Instead, he affirmed a living, nonpersonal understanding of God.96 However, alongside the force of the analogies explored above, one of his modes of theological thinking suggests a way in which he could have attempted to offer a relatively nonanthropomorphic and Christomorphic understanding of personhood; namely, his transcendental reasoning about divinely enacted redemption in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. By “transcendental reasoning,” I am referring to the sort of argument Immanuel Kant frequently employed under the term “transcendental deduction”:  inquiring about the conditions for 96 This section of the chapter includes a revised portion of Shelli M. Poe, “Schleiermacher’s Transcendental Reasoning:  Toward a Feminist Affirmation of Divine Personhood,” Feminist Theology 24, no. 2 (January 2016), pp. 139–​55.

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the possibility of a given.97 It could be that by discerning the conditions for the possibility of redemption in Christ, Schleiermacher’s readers could clarify how speculative anthropomorphism in a concept of divine personhood could be kept to a minimum. In this section, then, I  am envisioning one way that Schleiermacher could have overcome his own hesitations about affirming divine personhood:  by regulating that notion Christologically.98 I  examine his account and rejection of the Christological heresies of Nazareanism, Manicheanism, Pelagianism, and Docetism, which occur in introductory paragraph 22. From Schleiermacher’s rejection of these positions, I infer four marks of human personhood as conditions for the possibility of redemption. These are the communicability of difference, activity in relation to matter, Christologically centered relationality, and discerning attention with circumscribed ineffability.99 I intend to link such marks of personhood with Christologically regulated soteriological claims, and then set them in relation to the doctrine of God.100 97 Wilhelm Dilthey’s far-​ reaching statement that Schleiermacher is the Kant of Protestant theology may go too far, but it is at least accurate insofar as Schleiermacher uses transcendental thinking and engages in theology as a traditioned and critical self-​description of the Church rather than as a speculative affair. As Martin Redeker puts it, Schleiermacher effected “a similar upheaval in the destruction of outdated metaphysics in theological thinking as Kant did in the realm of philosophy” (Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought [trans. John Wallhausser; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973], p. 150). 98  Robert Merrihew Adams has noted that when Schleiermacher writes of divine love and the divine in Christ, he deploys the language of “social union.” While this allows for the claim that Christ’s love is divine love, it does not allow for speculation about divine psychology: “God’s love is known to [Schleiermacher] only as an aspect of the divine causality, manifested specifically as teleology in the causation of redemption through Christ’ (Robert Merrihew Adams, “Philosophical Themes in Schleiermacher’s Christology,” Philosophia 39 [2011], pp. 449–​60 [460]). 99  Recent feminist theorists have already variously described versions of these marks of personhood. See Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1999); Marilyn Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 100  I am using “marks” here similar to the way that unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are considered “marks” of the Church. In other words, I  am not attempting to define persons, something that is ruled out by the basic ineffability of persons, to be described below. Rather, I  am attempting to highlight a few aspects of personhood. On the Christological regulation of doctrine, see Mary Streufert, “The Person of Christ from a Feminist Perspective,” in Transformative Lutheran Theologies:  Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives (ed. Mary Streufert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), pp. 135–​49 (139).

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1.  Transcendental Reasoning For Schleiermacher, Christ is humanity’s redeemer as its liberator, moving humanity from a state of bondage to sin and antagonism toward God to a graced state of unconstrained development of attunement to God.101 As we have seen in Chapter 2, God brings the creation of humanity to completion in Christ and Christ’s Spirit in the Church. Divine redemptive activity in Christ and the Church is, in this way, integrally connected for Schleiermacher to divine creative activity: “the decree that sent Christ forth is one with the decree creating the human race, for in Christ first human nature is brought to perfection.”102 This is one instance of Schleiermacher’s claim that in Christianity, “everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”103 For him, then, the redemption of humanity by God in Christ is the criterion by which all Christian doctrines are evaluated. Schleiermacher determines the scope of Christian claims by considering the conditions for the possibility of humanity’s redemption in Christ. In his dogmatics, he answers the question, What must be presupposed by the claim that Christ is the Redeemer?104 Schleiermacher proceeds, however, not by prescribing a full set of claims to which Christians must adhere. Rather, recognizing the important role of heterodoxy in the development of Christian doctrine, he restricts himself to the claim that the presuppositions required for redemption by God in Christ must exclude four positions:  Nazareanism, Manicheanism, Pelagianism, and Docetism.105 Schleiermacher is indicating the boundaries of orthodoxy by setting out the edges of thought beyond which Christians cannot go. In this way, his theological method here is similar to what Sarah Coakley, an influential reader of the Chalcedonian Formula, takes as that Formula’s function.106 However, Schleiermacher does not begin from historical judgments regarding the heretical or orthodox nature of these theological statements. Rather, beginning with his criterion for inclusion in a system of doctrine, when Schleiermacher 101  CF §81.2, p. 335, and §66.1, p. 271; cf. §74, pp. 307–​14. For an account of sin, see Walter Wyman Jr., “Rethinking the Christian Doctrine of Sin: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hick’s ‘Irenaean Type,’ ” Journal of Religion 74, no. 2 (1994), pp. 199–​217. For an account of attunement, see Kevin Hector, “Attunement and Explicitation: A Pragmatist Reading of Schleiermacher’s ‘Theology of Feeling,’ ” in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (ed. Brent Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 215–​42. 102  CF §109.3, p. 501. 103  Ibid., §11, p. 52. 104  See ibid., § 22.2, pp. 98–​9. 105  Ibid., §22.1, p. 97. 106 Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’ ” in The Incarnation:  An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 143–​63.

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speaks of the Nazarean, Docetic, Manichean, and Pelagian “heresies,” he uses the terms as useful indicators of something that contradicts what he understands to be the essence of Christianity while maintaining its appearance.107 This being his modus operandi, Schleiermacher acknowledges that it may well turn out that, for instance, “Pelagius himself should not be a Pelagian in our sense.”108 As such, the four positions that follow in the Glaubenslehre are not meant to identify historical people or arguments presented in historical texts, but are only intended to indicate to Schleiermacher’s readers the ways certain views deviate from the essence of Christianity. As Schleiermacher describes them, these positions would not allow God to redeem humanity in Christ, because “either human nature will be so defined that a redemption in the strict sense cannot be accomplished, or the Redeemer will be defined in such a way that He cannot accomplish redemption.”109 In the course of avoiding the positions above, Schleiermacher involves himself in a limited, Christomorphic description of human persons and the divine essence in Christ. In what follows, I attend to the various positions he seeks to avoid and then move to outline a series of marks of human personhood and divine personhood that his account might inspire. In this way, I seek to extend his transcendental reasoning in order to provide a series of controls governing theological speech about personhood and thus indicate how the notion of personhood in respect of God might be rehabilitated on the basis of Schleiermacher’s own insights. 2.  Communicability of Difference The Nazarean or Ebionite position, as Schleiermacher describes it, is that in which “the likeness of the Redeemer to those who are to be redeemed is made so unlimited that no room is left for a distinctive superiority as a constituent of His being.”110 Unlimited likeness would lead to positing in Christ “a need of redemption, however absolutely small, and the fundamental relationship [between the Redeemer and those in need of redemption] is . . . essentially annulled.”111 In other words, the Nazarean position understands Christ to be entirely the same as all others with regard to their human nature, such that Christ could not redeem humanity but would likewise stand in need of redemption. In contradistinction, for Schleiermacher, a dissimilarity between Christ and other human persons is the perfection of his attunement to God—​that is, his God-​consciousness.112 The 107  CF §21.2, p. 97. 108  Ibid., §22.1, p. 97. 109  Ibid., §22.2, p. 98. 110 Ibid., p. 99. 111 Ibid. 112  Cf. Louis Roy, “Consciousness According to Schleiermacher,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (1997), pp. 217–​32; and Robert Merrihew Adams, “Faith and Religious Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. Jacqueline Mariña; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 35–​51.

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Redeemer is therefore, according to Schleiermacher, “like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-​consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.”113 In other words, while both Christ and other humans share the same human nature, Christ’s human nature includes a constant and powerful attunement to his relation of absolute dependence upon God, who loves him and who wisely determines his being in relation to the entirety of the created order. Christ’s disposition is, therefore, characterized by his relating of every thought, emotion, and activity to God and the divine creative-​redemptive intention.114 Joining Christ’s powerful and constant God-​consciousness with the claim that humanity is redeemed by Christ’s influence on others, and treating his redemptive person as normative for understanding human personhood as such, it is possible to identify a mark of human personhood as being directed or oriented toward those who are other than or different from oneself.115 In other words, persons desire to be with and self-​communicate to others.116 This desire can be fulfilled because such influence is possible: difference is communicable. What is significant here is an affirmation of the communicability of difference as a Christologically generated condition for the possibility of redemption. Correspondingly, a Christomorphic understanding of divine personhood would include an affirmation of God’s directedness toward and desire for others. On such an account, God would seek to be with and communicate the divine essence to others who are other than or different from God. At the same time, in analogical dissimilarity, it would suggest that God is not susceptible to the reciprocal influence of others. The result would be that the way in which God intentionally establishes others’ existence allows for the communication of difference. Further, it is in and through the person of Christ that God is both other than humanity and communicable to humanity. The key here, as a condition for the possibility of redemption, is to retain both difference and communicability. Divine love requires an other who is susceptible to others’ self-​communicative influence. 3.  Activity in Relation to Matter Moving to the second “heresy,” Schleiermacher defines Manicheanism as supposing “an Evil-​in-​itself as being original and opposed to God, and think[ing] of human nature as suffering from that inability.”117 The inability in question is an inability to bring the feeling of absolute dependence into all human states of consciousness through Christ; that is, an inability to inculcate Christian piety “by 113  CF §94, p. 385. 114 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher (trans. Mary F. Wilson; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), p. 38. 115 Soskice, The Kindness of God, pp. 7–​8. 116  CF §110.2, p. 507. 117  Ibid., §22.2, p. 98.

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reason of a dominion which this original Evil exercises over it.”118 Manicheanism is, on this account, an ontologically dualistic perspective wherein pure evil exists in opposition to God and has dominion over humanity. Such dominion would rule out humanity’s ability to be redemptively influenced by Christ. In historical Manicheanism, of course, the dominion of evil was identified as or located within matter. Much to his credit, Schleiermacher does not conflate the duality of pure evil and God, on the one hand, with a duality of the human body and the human soul/​spirit, on the other. Instead, he understands human personhood as integrally linked to and intertwined with bodies. He posits that the “activity of the God-​consciousness occurs in us only in connexion with our physical and bodily organism.”119 Christomorphic God-​consciousness, then, is bodily; the body is the means by which God imparts the divine self to humanity in Christ. Generalizing, we might say that wherever human persons exist, they exist as material beings. And yet, as Jantzen notes, “A person transcends her body not because there is a ‘part’ of her that is not bodily (and which could perhaps survive bodily death), but because more things can rightly be said of her than are reducible to statements about her physical composition.”120 In other words, although human persons cannot be reduced to claims about matter, it remains the case that materiality, or the natural world, is actually a precondition for the possibility of redemption insofar as it is in and through the bodily presence and activity of Christ and the Spirit in the Church that redemption occurs, and in and through the bodily existence of the human being that redemption is appropriated and enacted.121 Turning to divine personhood in relation to Schleiermacher’s rejection of historical Manicheanism’s linking of evil and materiality, we might say that, while in human persons that which is irreducible to matter is organically and integrally related to the human body, in divine personhood that which is irreducible to matter is related to the entire created universe by dint of the divine good-​pleasure. The relationship between God and humanity with regard to this mark of personhood is not, therefore, strictly parallel. While human persons are by nature always bodily, God relates to the universe by virtue of God’s gracious creative-​redemptive will. Thus, while an extension of Schleiermacher’s rejection of Nazareanism could be used to uphold the communication of difference from God to human persons, an extension of his rejection of Manicheanism would ensure that the difference between human personhood and divine personhood is not envisioned as their relation to materiality, human personhood being bound up with matter and divine personhood being separate from matter. Rather, divine personhood could also be conceived as marked by activity—​the activity of creation-​redemption—​in relation to the material world. The difference, however, would be that God acts in relation 118 Ibid. 119  Ibid., §61.4, p. 252. 120 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 271. 121  Cf. Kevin Hector, “The Mediation of Christ’s Normative Spirit:  A  Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher’s Pneumatology,” Modern Theology 24, no. 1 (2008), pp. 1–​22.

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to matter on account of the divine good-​pleasure rather than being determined or conditioned to do so. 4.  Christologically Centered Relationality According to Schleiermacher’s description of the third heresy he considers, the Pelagian takes human persons to be so receptive to redemption that they may, by engaging various sources, be transferred from a state of antagonism toward God to a graced state of progress in attunement to God. Schleiermacher posits that Pelagians assume “the ability to receive redemption . . . so absolutely” that “any hindrance to the entry of the God-​consciousness becomes so utterly infinitesimal, that . . . the need of redemption is reduced to zero, at least in the sense that it is no longer the need of one single Redeemer.”122 Schleiermacher rejects this view on the basis of the Christian community’s self-​description, arguing instead that for Christians, the Redeemer and his Spirit are the loci of the divine redemption of humanity. In other words, he rejects Pelagianism because it contradicts the essence of Christianity; namely, that every religious affection relates to the redemption accomplished by God in and through Christ. On Schleiermacher’s view, redemption by God in Christ presupposes that a human person relates to others both as someone who is partially constituted and constitutes herself by engaging with others and as someone who is fundamentally ordered by God in her relations to the whole created order.123 In other words, persons are who they are in relation to others under a distinct set of conditions. As Marilyn Friedman conveys this idea, Each [autonomous] competency must always be understood as presupposing some particular range of conditions under which an agent is able to exercise that competency. People can do things only so long as the necessary enabling conditions are present and the possible disabling conditions are absent. . . . [Autonomous persons] are products of socialization by other selves into communities of interacting selves within which they are differentiated as distinct persons.124

An account of human personhood inspired by Schleiermacher would likewise emphasize the “enabling conditions” of human persons’ lives, which include socialization on local and global registers. As such, a mark of human personhood can be identified as relating to others in different ways under different sets of enabling conditions. The distinctness and uniqueness of Christ in this regard means that, while human persons retain their own influence and 122  CF §22.2, p. 98. 123  Cf. Katherine Sonderegger, “The Doctrine of Creation and the Task of Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 2 (1991), pp. 185–​203. 124 Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics, pp. 14–​5.

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being-​influenced in relation to others, they are ultimately related to others on the basis of the gracious divine determination, which sets creation in redemptive relation to Christ. Something similar might be said of divine personhood, at least insofar as an account of divine relationality would indicate the ways in which God is who God is for the world in creating-​preserving the world prior to the union of the divine essence with human nature, and in and through Christ and his Spirit. In short, the divine determines the world and the divine being in relation to Christ. Some conceptual complexity is involved here, in light of the previous chapter’s discussion of three distinctions-​in-​relation within the essential divine life. As such, it is worth reiterating here that the three ways in which God relates to creation in preparation, union in Christ, and union in the Church are not to be identified with the three distinctions-​in-​relation of divine causality, love, and wisdom. Rather, the three ways in which God relates to creation in the economy of salvation are ways in which the one eternal divine decree or the divine causality is worked out in time. It is important to distinguish, therefore, between the Christomorphic relationality of the one personal God and the three distinctions-​in-​relation that are found at the essence of the divine life. 5.  Discerning Attention and Circumscribed Ineffability Coming full circle, Schleiermacher’s rejection of Docetism is just the flip side of his rejection of Nazareanism. As he describes it, Docetism makes “the difference between Christ and those who are in need of redemption . . . so unlimited that an essential likeness is incompatible with it,” making redemption also “only an appearance.”125 In other words, Docetism posits that Christ and the rest of humanity are essentially dissimilar, thus preventing Christ’s benefits from being communicated.126 For Schleiermacher, in contrast, Christ exists as similar to other human beings, neither wholly different nor wholly the same. Two poignant similarities between Christ and other human persons can be highlighted here as presuppositions of the redemption of human persons by God in Christ; namely, discerning attention and circumscribed ineffability. By “discerning attention,” I am referring to a whole range of mental activities exhibited by human persons, including emotion, sensitivity, rationality, focus, intuition, discrimination, imagination, and lateral and linear thinking.127 Thus, “discerning attention” as I am using the term may include but is not limited to reason. It indicates a wide view of human persons’ mental activities. Clearly, human persons exhibit various and plentiful kinds of discerning attention, many of which are not accurately described as abstract cogitation but are involved in the faithful reception of the

125  CF §22.2, p. 99. 126  OG, p. 55. 127 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 69.

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gracious divine production of redemption, reliably communicated through the self-​proclamation and presence of Christ in the Church.128 In the divine case, an appropriate analogue for this mark of personhood might be considered the divine wisdom itself. However, whereas human persons discerningly attend to themselves, in many cases, and those around them by external acquaintance, God discerningly attends to creation by intentionally purposing all things as a whole. As we have already seen, wisdom is “the right outlining of plans and purposes” of the will, “these regarded in their manifold characteristics and in the whole round of their reciprocal relations.”129 In other words, wisdom is “the art (so to speak) of realizing the divine love perfectly.”130 On this account, a mark of divine personhood might be wisdom in creating and redeeming the whole of creation. An important correlate to human persons’ discerning attention and the divine person’s wisdom is their ineffability.131 However discerning human persons are, they are fully transparent neither to themselves nor to others. As Soskice puts it with reference to Augustine, “ ‘introspection’ leads to no autarchic self and no clear-​lit chamber of subjectivity, but to the acknowledgment that we remain mysteries to ourselves, known by God.”132 What this means in the context of this description of marks of human persons is that persons may not be exhaustively understood, defined, or circumscribed by a set of concepts or a series of propositions. Such ineffability “keeps the human being from ‘being finally dissected by reason’ ” and pushes human persons to recognize and ethically appreciate each other person’s individuality. As Jantzen explains, “If we were to approach another person simply as a concept, treat her as just an instance of a more general term, we would already be unethical, already violently subsuming that person’s individuality and otherness under a law of the Same.”133 Although Schleiermacher’s rejection of Docetism highlights the similarities between Christ and other human persons, both human persons and divine personhood, as revealed in Christ, retain some ineffability vis-​à-​vis human understanding. Ineffability is a safeguard against violence against human persons, on the one hand, and idolatry in relation to God, on the other.134 The dissimilarity within this analogy is that God is not a mystery to Godself. Nonetheless, describing God as personal in this way highlights the limits of 128  Cf. Catherine Kelsey, Schleiermacher’s Preaching, Dogmatics and Biblical Criticism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007). 129  CF §165.1, p. 727. 130 Ibid. 131 Cf. Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität. Reflexion über Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlass ihrer Postmodernen Toterklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) and Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt: Suhrekamp, 1989). 132 Soskice, The Kindness of God, p. 180. 133 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 235. 134  Ibid., p. 234. Cf. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, p. 160.

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human understanding with regard to the divine essence. Divine ineffability shores up the claim that God is not reducible to decree, concepts, or powers. Rather, to know God is always to be in relationship with One who exceeds expectations, concepts, and expressions, and who is making all things new. Ineffability, as described here, is a condition for the possibility of redemption by God in Christ insofar as redemption requires that human persons be constantly open to receiving transformation by God with each new moment. By extending Schleiermacher’s transcendental reasoning about human persons and God on the basis of divine redemption through Christ, I have been engaged in an exercise of analogical reasoning. Such reasoning recognizes both the correspondence and difference between human persons and divine personhood. As such, I have described persons in the following ways. Contra Nazareanism, human persons can be conceived as directed toward others and desiring to communicate themselves to others. Divine personhood, correspondingly, is directed toward and communicates Godself to humanity. In contrast, however, divine personhood is asymmetrically related to humanity. Whereas human persons are directed toward others who are given and seek to influence them, divine personhood gives the other and is not influenced by discrete temporal actions. Opposing Manicheanism, human persons act in relation to matter even as they are not reducible to matter. Similarly, Schleiermacher conceives of God as acting in relation to creation not in order to wrench the human soul out of its material trappings, but because acting in relation to the whole of creation is an expression of divine love of creation itself. Even so, whereas human persons are organically related to materiality, God acts in relation to material creation by dint of the divine good-​pleasure. Contrary to Pelagianism, human persons are co-​constituted in active relation to others while being fundamentally ordered by their divine determination in relation to Christ within the whole of creation. Divine personhood similarly includes relating to others in and through Christ, yet it contrasts with human personhood insofar as the one God does not come to exist temporally through God’s different relations to others. Rather, God sets the enabling conditions of social life Christomorphically in an eternal decree. Finally, contra Docetism, Schleiermacher’s account can be extended to suggest that human persons are marked by discerning attention and ineffability. This would be similarly true for divine personhood, with the dissimilarity being that God attends to creation not from outside acquaintance with it, as it were, but as its intentional creator. It is possible, then, to affirm divine personhood for the unity of the divine life in these ways despite concerns about speculative anthropomorphism, if one regulates the notion of personhood Christologically. That has been achieved by means of an extension of Schleiermacher’s transcendental reasoning about redemption by God in Christ. This method is clearly Christomorphic, and yet it emphasizes the dissimilarity between divine personhood and human personhood to create a relatively nonanthropomorphic result. This kind of extension of Schleiermacher’s transcendental reasoning ties theological anthropology and the doctrine of God to Christology, providing a discernible set of guidelines for making claims about divine personhood.

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d.  Conclusion What we have seen in this chapter is that, although Schleiermacher rejects the doctrine of the immanent Trinity along with its terminology of three “persons” and the internal relations of generation and procession, he could nonetheless have affirmed divine causality, love, and wisdom as three distinctions-​in-​relation within the one divine life. Moreover, as genuine expressions of the divine essence, causality, love, and wisdom share many of the features the ancients highlighted with regard to the immanent Trinity: these distinctions-​in-​relation could be conceived to be homoousios, coeternal, coequal, and perichoretic. Further, Schleiermacher’s system of doctrine is open to explicating the unity of the divine life through at least four personal analogies, granting that they are accompanied by the appropriate caveats and conditions. Finally, Schleiermacher’s own method of reasoning in this regard seems to be open to a Christological extension. This extension would draw on the ways he already recognizes the divine life as marked by features commonly associated with personhood: Divine causality, love, and wisdom go hand in hand with the communication of difference, activity in relation to a physical world, differentiated relationality centered on Christ, and discerning attention and ineffability. For these reasons, I  have argued that a Schleiermacherian understanding of God as one personal life, textured in a threefold way, is not only possible but can arise from a careful reading of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God. This conclusion can be bolstered by the fact that Schleiermacher, as he writes himself, “place[s]‌little weight on definitive terminology so long as [he is] convinced that [he] mean[s] the same thing as the other person.”135 What he calls a “Living God” may be more “personal” than he explicitly acknowledges. We may conclude that Schleiermacher is satisfied with neither a merely economic Trinitarianism nor a dry philosophical determinism. Rather, his work contains a rich understanding of the one divine life, which bears marks commonly associated with personhood and is textured in a threefold way as causality, love, and wisdom.

135  OG, p. 38.

Chapter 5 D EVELOPING E C ONOM IC T RI N I TA RIA N I SM

Having considered Schleiermacher’s rejection of the immanent Trinity and my reading of his essential Trinitarianism in the previous two chapters, in this chapter I  present his understanding of what scholars now refer to as the economic Trinity, which is articulated chiefly in paragraphs 91 to 125. Just prior to those paragraphs, in the first aspect of the second part of the Glaubenslehre, which explicates the Christian consciousness of sin, Schleiermacher explicitly discusses two divine attributes: divine holiness in paragraph 83 and divine justice in paragraph 84. These attributes are described in relation to his discussion of God’s preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature, the divine indwelling in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the continued union of the divine essence with human nature in the Spirit of the Church. This threefold description of the economy of grace, I want to suggest, forms the soteriological center and basis of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of the Trinity. It is here that the essential Trinity—​divine causality, love, and wisdom—​communicates itself in the incarnation, the Christian communion, and divine holiness and justice. In this chapter, then, I explicate the first aspect of essential Trinitarianism as I have defined it: the union of the divine essence with humanity in Christ and his Spirit, and the created readiness of the world for these unions. These are the threads that hold the entire Glaubenslehre together. Without the economy of salvation, the entire theological edifice crumbles.

a.  Methodological Divergences Before turning to an exposition of Schleiermacher’s text, I want to highlight two ways in which this chapter diverges methodologically from the rest of the book. First, by treating Schleiermacher’s explication of Christ and the Church, this chapter deviates from the book’s general focus on the divine attributes and the divine essence. Doctrinal claims about the divine attributes and essence are derived, in Schleiermacher’s work, from the reception of redemption in Christ and the Spirit. By treating the doctrines of Christ and the Spirit, then, this chapter focuses on that which grounds Schleiermacher’s doctrines of God and the Trinity. Second, within this chapter I interrupt my reading of the Glaubenslehre backward. Instead of treating the Spirit followed by the Redeemer, I  treat the Redeemer first to

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underscore the Christomorphic character of Schleiermacher’s thought. Taking account of these two methodological divergences will set the stage for my explication of Schleiermacher’s economic Trinitarianism. 1.  Between Divine Attributes: Christ and the Church First, on the relation of Schleiermacher’s description of the divine attributes to his explication of Christ and the Church:  The theological material explicated in the first two sections of this chapter is located in the Glaubenslehre between the divine attributes that relate to the consciousness of grace and those that relate to the consciousness of sin. It is in this central intervening material that Schleiermacher describes Christ and the Church. If I were to adhere strictly to an analysis of the texts in which he explicitly treats “divine attributes,” I would be compelled to gloss over his explication of Christ and the Church. Such a strict analysis would certainly better highlight the fact that, for Schleiermacher, the divine attributes are derived from a faithful reception of divine activity, which is then described in the doctrines of Christ and the Spirit. That is, the doctrine of God is one step removed from the doctrinal description of the Christian community’s encounter with God in the person of Christ and the common Spirit of the Church.1 Yet glossing over this material would seem to be odd, since Christianity is distinguished from other faiths “by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”2 It is important, therefore, to notice how the doctrine of God relates to the doctrines of Christ and the Spirit. The “derived” character of the doctrine of God in Schleiermacher’s thought might be considered to be the methodological enactment of the epigraphs from Anselm on the Glaubenslehre’s title page: “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but believe so that I may understand. . . . For anyone who has not believed will not experience, and anyone who has not experienced will not understand.”3 Once again, we see that Schleiermacher does not present his doctrine of God as a form of natural theology or an exercise in apologetics. Rather, he employs a kind of transcendental method, which is significant in part because it demonstrates once again his antispeculative modus operandi; his doctrine of God is a result of asking what one ought to say about God, given the Christian encounter with Christ and the Spirit, which is described in the doctrines of Christ and the Spirit. He takes as 1  CF §30, pp. 125–​7. 2  Ibid., §11, p. 52. 3 These epigraphs were omitted from the English translation of the Glaubenslehre edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart in 1999. The new translation and critical edition offered by Terrence Tice, Catherine Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler corrects this omission. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, vol. 1 (trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, ed. Kelsey and Tice; Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2016).

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given the Christian testimony of encounter with the divine in Christ and the Spirit. From that “given,” he proceeds to ask, What are the conditions for the possibility of the Christian reception of this divine activity? This is what it means to say that divine self-​communication in Christ and the Church grounds the doctrine of the divine attributes.4 By treating not only the explicit material on the divine attributes but also material on the redemption accomplished in and through the person of Jesus of Nazareth and carried forth in the common Spirit of the Church, it becomes possible to uncover the doctrines that are most closely related to the pious reception of divine activity. These doctrines ground both the divine attributes that have already been discussed in Chapter 45 and those related to the consciousness of sin to be discussed in this chapter. Although I began with Schleiermacher’s conceptual critiques of the immanent Trinity and my reading of his essential Trinitarianism, his epistemological starting point is here in the center of the work: the divine economy of salvation in Christ and the Spirit within created existence. Only because of the divine economy does he have grounds on which to make claims about God.6 Noticing the way in which the doctrines of Christ and the Spirit are “between” divine attributes in the Glaubenslehre highlights the antispeculative character of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God. 2.  Interrupting a Strictly Backward Reading A second methodological matter to notice is that in this chapter I  will diverge from a strictly backward movement through the Glaubenslehre. Reading backward here would require me to detail the Spirit, then Christ, and then the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature. But as we have seen, Schleiermacher’s thought is Christomorphic: the whole of creation takes the shape that it does because of Christ, just as Christ is who he is always in relation to the whole.7 Because of this Christomorphism, I  begin with Jesus of Nazareth, then consider the common Spirit of the Church, and then analyze the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature in the world. It might also be noted here that I  already violated a strictly backward reading of the Glaubenslehre in the first part of this book, when I  took account of Schleiermacher’s place in the antispeculative tradition that runs through Calvin. Chapter 2 involved a cursory treatment of the God-​consciousness in an explication of Schleiermacher’s approach to theology in the Glaubenslehre. However, the deviation from a backward-​reading method in either Chapter  2 or this chapter does not take away from the benefits offered by an overall backward movement 4 See Chapter 4, pp. 104–6. 5  These include divine love, wisdom, causality, and livingness. 6  We saw this in Chapter  2, where the antispeculative character of Schleiermacher’s theology was highlighted. 7  CF §120.3, p. 555.

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in Parts Two and Three of the book. On the contrary, these temporary deviations serve the reader in bringing to fullness the ideas contained in the Glaubenslehre as a whole. If Chapter 2 highlights the antispeculative character of Schleiermacher’s theology, this chapter offers the soteriological basis for his claims about the divine essence.

b.  Jesus of Nazareth Beginning with Jesus of Nazareth: Rather than viewing the Redeemer as a corrective measure for a state of affairs gone awry—​as, for example, in infralapsarian accounts of divine providence—​the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is, for Schleiermacher, the temporal actualization of the unconditioned divine intention to create humanity within the universe. In keeping with the simplex cognitio dei noted in Chapter  2, the redemption accomplished in the person and work of Christ is, Schleiermacher writes, “the completed creation of human nature.”8 What is unique about Christ, or that which completes human nature in him, is that God creates or “implants” (einpflanzen) in him a powerful and constant awareness of his relation to God.9 This “implantation” works against any form of adoptionism in Schleiermacher’s Christology. God does not find Jesus of Nazareth ready-​made, so to speak, and consider him extraordinary or useful, and therefore adopt him as God’s own. Rather, by implanting within Christ a powerful and constant God-​consciousness, God forms the person of Jesus Christ from the first. As Paul DeHart notes, “Schleiermacher confesses that the analogy famously used by the Athanasian creed, namely that God and human being unite to form the one Jesus Christ just as the rational soul and the body unite to form a single human person, fits his intentions here precisely.”10 And so Schleiermacher writes that the Redeemer “is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-​consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.”11 As Jesus grew, his awareness of God developed perfectly in conjunction with his other functions and properties and informed all of his thoughts, feelings, and actions.12 8  Ibid., §94.3, p. 389. 9 Ibid. 10 Paul DeHart, “Ter mundus accipit infinitum:  The Dogmatic Coordinates of Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian Treatise,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 52 (2010), pp. 17–​39 (27). 11  CF §94, p. 385. 12  See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus (ed. Jack C. Verheyden, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour; Lives of Jesus Series; Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1997), p. 98; and Catherine Kelsey, Thinking About Christ with Schleiermacher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), p. 73, p. 99.

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For Schleiermacher, Christ’s God-​ consciousness is an indwelling of God because it enables Christ to enact divine love toward those he encounters. As Schleiermacher states, “Now this ‘divine’ is the divine love in Christ which, once and for all or in every moment . . . gave direction to His feelings for the spiritual conditions of men.”13 Specifically, the divine essence—​love—​directs Christ’s relation to those he encounters. In him, divine love for others is felt and enacted. A constant and powerful awareness of the gracious divine love for creation not only sets Christ apart from others but also allows him to act in such a way as to communicate that divine love to others. In Christ, DeHart rightly notes that “God’s existence is ‘announcing itself ’ . . . it is . . . decisively revealed.”14 Going further, Kevin Hector makes a crucial point at this juncture:  What is most important about Christ “is not his God-​consciousness per se, but the fact that this consciousness is the means through which God’s being is incarnated.”15 Key to understanding the import of Jesus’s God-​consciousness is that such consciousness is not the end in itself; rather, most significant is that divine love is communicated by this consciousness to others. Without this, Christ’s powerful and constant awareness of his relation to God would be without further soteriological effect. Christ’s awareness of his relation to God, as one who is loved, is enacted by extending divine love to others. The importance of the distinction between Christ’s God-​consciousness per se and his God-​consciousness as the means by which the divine love is concretely actualized and communicated cannot be overstated. This distinction allows Schleiermacher to say both that human nature includes the possibility of divine indwelling and that Christ is unique. With respect to the former, it means that some weak form of God-​consciousness must be part of human nature. Otherwise, Christ would not have the continuity with human nature that enables Christians to claim his full humanity. His God-​ consciousness, then, is only quantitatively different from the rest of humankind’s awareness of their relation to God. Schleiermacher explains: As certainly as Christ was a man, there must reside in human nature the possibility of taking up the divine into itself, just as did happen in Christ. . . . Even if only the possibility of this resides in human nature, so that the actual implanting therein of the divine element must be purely a divine and therefore an eternal act, nevertheless the temporal appearance of this act in one particular Person must at the same time be regarded as an action of human nature, grounded in its original constitution and prepared for by all its past history.16 13  CF §97.3, p. 407. 14  DeHart, “Ter mundus accipit infinitum,” p. 22. 15 Kevin Hector, “Actualism and Incarnation:  The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (July 2006), pp. 307–​22 (312). 16  CF §13.1, p. 64.

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Christ’s natural possibility as a human being is not disrupted or done away with as a precondition for his being the Redeemer. The implanting of a powerful and constant God-​consciousness within him does not set him off from human nature as a thing alien to it. However, the person of Christ, formed as a result of the union of the divine essence with human nature, is qualitatively unique compared with the rest of humanity. In him, the divine love of humanity and creation is concretely actualized and communicated in a way that sets him apart from all others.17 Lori Pearson describes this delicate interplay as follows: Schleiermacher’s Christology underscores the individual humanity and development of the Redeemer (a parallel to Theodore and Nestorius), while at the same time emphasizing the priority and dominance of the divine in the Redeemer, so that this divine element constitutes the center of who he is and the source of all that he does (a debt to Cyril, and behind him to Athanasius).18

To accentuate the priority and predominance of the divine in Christ, Schleiermacher maintains that his existence is congruent with his natural history but inexplicable on that basis alone.19 In this sense, his existence is the result of supernatural, or unconditioned, creativity.20 Once the unconditioned enters into history, however, it conditions what follows and thereby “becomes natural”:  “Whenever I  speak of the supernatural, I  do so with reference to whatever comes first, but afterwards it becomes secondly something natural. Thus creation is supernatural, but it afterwards becomes the natural order. Likewise, in his origin Christ is supernatural, but he also becomes natural, as a genuine human being.”21 Schleiermacher is here affirming the divine activity in the constitution of the person of Christ while upholding the nature-​system’s integrity. The operations of grace do not overturn the natural progression of history.22 After the person of Christ enters the natural order, as Catherine Kelsey notes, “no further intervention of the supernatural is necessary for redemption.”23 17  Ibid., §94.2, p.  388. This move has patristic precedent, especially in Origen and Athanasius. 18  Lori Pearson, “Schleiermacher and the Christologies behind Chalcedon, Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 3 (2003), pp. 349–​67 (350–​1). 19  CF §93.3, p. 381. 20  Ibid., §97.3, pp. 408–​9. 21  OG, p. 89. 22  Andrew Dole, “Schleiermacher and Otto on Religion,” Religious Studies 40, no. 4 (2004), pp. 389–​416 (406). 23 Catherine Kelsey, Thinking About Christ with Schleiermacher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), p. 62.

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c.  The Spirit in the Church As we have seen, the person and work of Christ are never divorced from one another in Schleiermacher’s doctrinal system.24 The person of Christ, formed supernaturally as the completion of the creation of human nature, communicates the divine love to others, even as his person exhibits divine causality and wisdom. Centrally, he expresses in his personal being and activity the divine love for created humanity and the divine wisdom in bringing an increasingly fuller reign of divine love on earth. But just as Christ’s person and work are inseparable, so too are the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ and in the Church indivisible, because the latter is grounded in the former. At its center, redemption is, for Schleiermacher, grace-​effected receptivity to the divine activity in Christ and the fact that Jesus’s vital receptivity to God “connects the corporate life before the appearance of the Redeemer with that which exists in the fellowship with the Redeemer.”25 Entering that community of Christ, Schleiermacher writes, is “a creative production in us of the will to assume Him into ourselves, or rather . . . our assent to the influence of His activity.”26 That is, Christians enter into vital community with Christ by the gracious production of the will in them to be influenced by him. And, in turn, Christ’s total effective influence “is only the continuation of the creative divine activity out of which the Person of Christ arose.”27 In the Church, the divine essence continues to be united with human nature in and through Christ’s Spirit. This means that an increasingly powerful and constant awareness of the divine love may and will become part of the natural life history of all who have communion with the Redeemer. Since Christ is part of the natural order, the communication of his person as the enactment of divine love and wisdom to other human beings is not miraculous; it is, at least in one sense, natural. The Holy Spirit is, Schleiermacher writes, the union of the divine essence with human nature “in the form of the common Spirit animating the life in common of believers.”28 The work of the Spirit in that bond of common life, he continues, serves “to bring Christ into memory and glorify Him in us.”29 Thus, the following three phrases mean one and the same thing in Schleiermacher’s thought:  being drawn “into the fellowship of believers, having a share in the Holy Spirit, and being drawn into living fellowship with Christ.”30 To be sure, he recognizes that this is a rather different understanding of the Holy Spirit than what he takes to be the “traditional” view. Painting with broad brushstrokes, Schleiermacher claims that, according to that view, the Spirit is the one “to whom a participation in the creation 24 See Chapter 4, p. 89. 25  CF §88.4, p. 365. 26  Ibid., §100.2, p. 426. 27  Ibid., p. 427. 28  Ibid., §123, p. 569. 29  Ibid., §124.2, p. 576. 30  Ibid., §124.1, p. 575.

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of the material world is ascribed, or the Spirit whose indwelling is the cause of all sorts of extraordinary talents, or even the Spirit mentioned in connexion with the incarnation of Christ, at least so far as a physical effect is there ascribed to Him.”31 For Schleiermacher, in contrast, the Holy Spirit is more circumscribed: it is simply the union of the divine essence with human nature in the corporate life of the Church after Christ has departed from it. Schleiermacher explains that Christ had to depart from the community because “the more a common life depends on an individual life, the less is it an existence in common.”32 That is to say, the more a community depends on one of its members, or a founding member, for its existence and preservation, the less it is required to band together and act from within. He writes: As long as all spontaneous activity was in Christ alone, but in them [the disciples] mere susceptibility, the Kingdom of God in the narrower sense was confined to Christ alone. . . . And just as then in the disciples, so now in everyone the reminiscent apprehension of Christ must grow into a spontaneous imitation of Him. This common spontaneous activity—​which indwells all and in each is kept right by the influence of all, and prolongs the personal action of Christ—​in its unity and identity we have full right to call the common spirit of the Christian Church.33

In other words, Schleiermacher holds that followers of Christ must not only be receptive to the influence of Christ but also grow and become active as Christians. The departure of Christ from the Christian community therefore sets up the conditions under which his followers may more fully enact the reign of God. Samuel Powell explains: Schleiermacher began his doctrine of the Spirit with the observations that everything godly in the regenerate derives from Christ, and that Christ, no longer being a historical person, no longer exercises any directly personal influence on the regenerate. From this twofold observation he concluded that there must be something divine within the church that is the source of spiritual life and power. In fact, this something is the being of God in the corporate church, just as God was in Christ individually; and it is this being of God in the church that communicates to the regenerate the “perfection and blessedness of Christ.”34 31  Ibid., §123.1, p. 570. 32  Ibid., §122.2, p. 566. Schleiermacher is being faithful here to the dynamics of the fourth gospel as he understands them, especially as he sees them in John 17. See also OG, p. 47. 33  CF §122.3, p. 568. 34  Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 98.

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The perfection and blessedness of Christ is his personal activity in communicating the divine love and wisdom to others. Thus, when the members of the Church begin spontaneously to imitate Christ and thereby to extend the reign of God, they evidence the divine union with human nature now in the body of the Church. The union of the divine essence with human nature in the Church communicates divine love to its members by bringing Christ to memory and glorifying him. It is not what Schleiermacher calls a “person-​forming union,” as the incarnation was.35 Of course, he affirms God’s transformative power in the Church, such that persons are regenerated and therefore formed anew in important respects.36 When he distinguishes the incarnation as a person-​forming union from the union with the Church, he means only that the many members of the Church do not become one person; they remain distinct persons. At most, Schleiermacher can call their common Spirit a “moral person.”37 This is meant to indicate that, within the communion of the Church, individual persons are, indeed, formed and influenced by one another: “What each recognizes in the other is a common love to Christ,”38 he writes, such that “the fellowship of believers with each other and that of each with Christ are one and the same thing.”39 They associate because of what he describes as their “inward impulse to become more and more one in their common co-​ operative activity and reciprocal influence.”40 The organic repetition of love here is palpable: Just as the person of Christ is the realization of the divine intention to be in and with neighbors, so too Christ wills to be in and with his neighbors; and as a person comes to love Christ, she correspondingly wishes to influence and be with her neighbors as well. As Jacqueline Mariña explains, One cannot “share in the redemption and be made blessed through Christ outside the corporate life that he instituted.” One cannot “be with Christ, as it were, alone,” that is, to be with Christ is to be in the Christian community, and to live out the new way of being towards others that he instituted (CF, §87.3).41

In the Christian community, then, the faithful see divine redemptive-​creative activity come to life and fruition in the conforming of human persons to an 35  CF §123.3, p. 573. 36  Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Christ’s Resurrection an Image of Our New Life,” in Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), pp. 266–​78. 37  CF §125.1, p. 579. 38  Ibid., §121.1, p. 562. 39  Ibid., §163.1, p. 718. 40  Ibid., §121, p. 560. 41  Jacqueline Mariña, “Christology and Anthropology in Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (ed. Jacqueline Mariña; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 151–​70 (166). See §24.

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ever-​increasing love of God in and through Christ and, correspondingly, of others in the Spirit. It is important to note that the common love for Christ and the will to live and act as a community of love does not find its limit in the Church. Rather, for Schleiermacher, Christian love ramifies outward toward all of humanity. Indeed, he identifies the Spirit of the Church and a universal love of humanity with “the will for the Kingdom of God in its widest compass.”42 He explains, “the common spirit of the Christian Church, and every Christian’s universal love for men as a love alike for those who have already become citizens of the Kingdom of God and for those to whom this experience is yet to come, are the same One Holy Spirit.”43 Schleiermacher’s thought, by these lights, is always expanding outward from a consideration of the piety of Christians in community to the divine source of that piety in one direction and the interconnection and interdependence of creation in another direction.44 In this way, Schleiermacher understands the Church as part of the single divine will, which is universal in scope. “There is a single divine fore-​ ordination, according to which the totality of the new creation is called into being out of the general mass of the human race,” he explains, and “the totality of the new creation is equal to the general mass.”45 The Holy Spirit of the Church, which is the universal love of humanity, unites the divine essence with humankind as a whole. As such, Schleiermacher argues, there is “only a single unconditional decree by which the whole, as an undivided system, is what it is in virtue of the divine good-​ pleasure.”46 The Christian Church is part of the single divine will to love others. This sketch of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the divine essence as it is united to human nature in the Church highlights both the Christomorphism of his doctrine of God and the universal scope of divine activity in the world. He has an expansive vision of divine activity in and for the world through the Church, even as his thought remains distinctively Christomorphic and pneumatological.

d.  Preparation for the Union of the Divine Essence with Human Nature Taking a further step backward and returning to the material in the Glaubenslehre where Schleiermacher explicitly identifies and explores the “divine attributes,” we 42  CF §121.3, p. 565. 43  CF §121.3, p. 565; cf. §116.3, p. 536. 44  Cf. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, 1799–​1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 67; and Verheyden, introduction to The Life of Jesus, p. xli. 45  CF §119.3, p. 550. See DE, p. 73: “We can say that there is only one decree by which God determines what will become of each and every human being and thus that this decree is not at all different from the order according to which the dead mass is quickened by the divine Spirit.” 46  CF §120.4, p. 558.

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come to the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ and the common Spirit of the Church. Two divine attributes relate to this preparation: holiness and justice. By these attributes, Schleiermacher refers to the divine determination of the universe as a whole. As he writes, “the whole historical process is ordained by this divine causality.”47 As such, although preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature gives rise to Schleiermacher’s discussion of divine holiness and justice, these attributes are capacious. They are not limited to one period of time, even if they are presented in the context of the historical unfolding of the economy of grace. In other words, while humanity is introduced to divine holiness and justice in the preparation for the union of the divine with humanity, God does not cease to be holy or just after the union comes about. 1.  Holiness Schleiermacher understands holiness as the “divine causality that legislates in the corporate life of man.”48 There are, for him, two types of law: moral and civil. Moral law is constituted by the demands that spring from humanity’s consciousness of its absolute dependence upon God.49 Schleiermacher writes, “All modes of activity issuing from our God-​consciousness and subject to its prompting confront us as moral demands.”50 Just as Calvin would have it, when one becomes conscious of one’s absolute dependence upon God, one comes to realize “that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him.”51 The internal mandates that arise out of this relation Schleiermacher calls moral law, or true conscience.52 Even so, Schleiermacher recognizes that it is common for people to correlate the moral law with the idea of the good rather than to any relation to God. While it is the nature of Christian experience that “conscience is present only along with the need of redemption,” he nonetheless maintains that this “must not be taken to mean that we would assume the presence of conscience only where the need of redemption is recognized.”53 Schleiermacher is here underscoring the universality of conscience while recognizing a distinctively Christian experience and thus description of it. 47  Ibid., §83.2, p. 344. 48 Ibid. 49  Ibid., §83.1, pp. 341–​2. 50  Ibid., p. 341. 51  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), I.ii.2. 52  CF §83.1, p. 342. Cf. Romans 2:12–​16. The relation between consciousness of one’s relation to God and the moral mandates that result from this consciousness highlights the connection that exists between Glaubenslehre and Christian ethics for Schleiermacher. 53  CF §83.2, p. 343.

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It is important to note that Schleiermacher considers the moral law not solely in relation to individuals but also in relation to humanity as a whole as an interconnected, overlapping series of generations. The strength and purity of the will of a whole generation would, he explains, “of necessity influence the succeeding generation by awaking conscience in the adolescent; and the same thing would apply to the greater differences in development within a single generation.”54 In other words, the development and strength of conscience are transgenerational and intragenerational. Because of the discrepancy between humanity’s conscience writ large and the development of conscience in each individual or generation, moral law is supported by civil law. That is, since human nature is not developed enough for each individual to listen to true conscience without external support, civil law mandates right action. In such a way, conscience finds what Schleiermacher references as “outward expression in civil law.”55 When humanity does not act in accordance with true conscience expressed in moral or civil law, it sins. For Schleiermacher, sin is a disturbance or disruption (Störung) of human nature, which is “a result of the unequal development of insight and will-​power.”56 Readers might be reminded here of Paul’s words in Romans 7:14–​25, where sin is a consequence of the discrepancy between knowing and doing. It is what Schleiermacher calls “the self ’s struggle with itself to submit to God’s will.”57 Sin is, in effect, the disavowal of the divine will.58 Yet such a disavowal is, for Schleiermacher, only properly called “sin” when there is a consciousness of things being done better. Without this, he writes, “we regard their imperfection and the power of the flesh in them not as sin, but as grossness and ignorance.”59 As such, Schleiermacher also describes sin as “Godlessness, or, better, God-​forgetfulness.”60 And corresponding to the corporate nature of conscience, so, too, sin is primarily corporate. One generation conditions the sinfulness of the next.61 Although sin is, for Schleiermacher, “a state of bondage” in which “the free development of the God-​consciousness” has been arrested within humanity, it is not for that reason antithetical to the overall divine plan of salvation.62 Sin is, rather, the result of an incomplete human nature, and God wills a progressive completion of human nature. Schleiermacher therefore writes, “the fact that the 54 Ibid. 55  Ibid., p. 344. 56  Ibid., §68, p. 275. Cf. Romans 7. 57  OG, p. 46 58  CF §81.3, p. 336. 59  Ibid., §68.2, p. 277. 60  Ibid., §11.2, p. 54. 61  Ibid., §71.2, p. 288. Cf. Rick Elgendy, “Reconsidering Resurrection, Incarnation, and Nature in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 3 (July 2013), pp. 301–​23 (304–​5). 62  CF §81.2, p. 335.

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inefficacy of the God-​consciousness becomes sin in us is likewise wrought by Him, and wrought with a view to redemption.”63 Just as Calvin does not back down from espousing a form of supralapsarianism in which there is no distinction between divine permission and divine ordination,64 neither does Schleiermacher: It is through the commanding will of God present within us that the impotence of the God-​consciousness becomes sin for us. By that will, accordingly—​though it may be impossible to ascribe any particular act of sin to a divine causality specially pertaining to it—​sin has been ordained by God, not indeed sin in and of itself, but sin merely in relation to redemption; for otherwise redemption itself could not have been ordained.65

In short, God creates and conditions all things, including the existence of sin, with a view to redemption. Schleiermacher is here reiterating Calvin’s link between sin and the redemptive framework within which it appears. As Serene Jones explains, for Calvin, “Sin” . . . makes sense only within a theological framework where God’s positive purposes for humanity are a normative model for what sin deforms. “Sin” is therefore not an all-​purpose word describing everything “bad” or “wrong” as measured by our own personal standards or general social codes. To use the term “sin” properly, one must have a theological measure—​grounded in scripture and authenticated by the Spirit—​that tells us what goes against God’s will for humanity.66

By describing humanity’s sin as divinely ordained, Schleiermacher, too, emphasizes the redemptive framework within which all of human history is encapsulated. There is no sin apart from the divine redemptive will for humanity. More specifically, and more concretely, humanity’s need for redemption may only be fully recognized given the advent of Christ. Schleiermacher writes, It is of course true that the consciousness of sin comes from the law, but as the law in the very multitude of its precepts is but an imperfect representation of the good, and even in the unity of an all-​embracing maxim does not show how it can be obeyed, the knowledge of sin that arises out of it is ever in some respects incomplete and in some uncertain; and it is only from the absolute sinlessness 63  Ibid., §81.3, p. 336. 64 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xviii.1, p. 2. Cf. Edwin Chr. van Driel, “Schleiermacher’s Supralapsarian Christology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 3 (August 2007), pp. 251–​70. 65  CF §81.3, p. 337. 66 Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology:  Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), p. 98.

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and the perfect spiritual power of the Redeemer that we gain the full knowledge of sin.67

Once again divine causality—​here, qua holiness—​is Christomorphic. The divine determination of humanity’s need for redemption is only fully understood given the person and work of Christ. In the Christian Church, one becomes fully aware of sin only after one is already enveloped in the redemptive activity of the divine in Christ.68 A Christian understanding of divine holiness is, therefore, always to be placed in the context of the creative-​redemptive activity of the divine in Christ and the Spirit. That sin is always seen in light of already occurring redemption in Christ is one reason why Schleiermacher does not emphasize divine wrath. Martin Redeker observes that in an 1830 sermon titled “Nothing need be taught concerning the wrath of God,” Schleiermacher maintains that “the biblical images of wrath and judgement of God were anthropomorphisms. Wrath is a psychological emotion that has no place in the Christian understanding of God. God’s ‘No’ to sin is identical with his redemptive love.”69 It is for this reason that the divine attribute that corresponds to human sin is, for Schleiermacher, neither wrath nor condemnation but holiness, which is the cause of true conscience and civil law. In this way, Redeker posits, “Schleiermacher stands closer to Zinzendorf ’s viewpoint, according to which the fundamental disposition of Christianity is the joy and blessedness of experienced grace.”70 The divine attribute that relates to human sinfulness cannot be characterized as wrath, because the divine wisdom and love are primary and determinative. Sin is always set in the context of redemption in Christ and the Spirit. As such, the divine attribute that corresponds to human sin is holiness, as that divine causality that wisely legislates humanity as it comes to redemption in time. 2.  Justice Whereas holiness is that divine causality by which conscience is conjoined with the need of redemption, justice is, for Schleiermacher, “that divine causality which 67  CF §68.3, p. 279. 68  Cf. Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, pp. 60–​1. 69 Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher:  Life and Thought (trans. John Wallhausser; Philadelphia:  Fortress, 1973), p.  130. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Reformed but Ever Reforming:  Sermons in Relation to the Celebration of the Handing Over of the Augsburg Confession (1830), vol. 8 (trans. Iain G. Nicol; Schleiermacher Studies and Translations; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon, 1997). 70 Redeker, Schleiermacher, p.  130. For the connection of the Christian faith with joy, see also Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation (trans. Terrence N. Tice; Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1967) and Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch (Berlin, 2nd ed., 1826).

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in the state of universal sinfulness there is ordained a connexion between evil and actual sin.”71 He identifies evil as the persistent cause of hindrance to human beings’ life and flourishing vis-​à-​vis God and one another. Evils “either diminish the wealth of stimuli which further men’s development or make the world less tractable to human effort.”72 In particular, evils function to inhibit humanity’s awareness of its relation to God.73 For Schleiermacher, then, evil does not include “natural death and the bodily afflictions that precede it in the shape of disease and debility,” since these do not have to be “construed by the corporate consciousness as an obstruction to life,” understood as an inhibition of the God-​consciousness.74 Hence, he continues, “it is not by death, but, as Scripture says, by the fear of death, that we are subject to bondage.”75 Fear of death is one example given, because it is unhinged from the consciousness of one’s absolute dependence on divine love and wisdom. The connection between sin and evil is this:  “the measure in which sin is present is the measure in which evil is present.”76 Evil thus arises inevitably, for Schleiermacher, given the existence of sin.77 In fact, evil is the punishment of sin; it is retributive justice. Here, it is of critical and central importance to keep in mind throughout this material that Schleiermacher operates with a corporate understanding of both sin and evil. At no point does he claim that God punishes an individual for sin in a direct and individual way: “On no account must the evils affecting the individual be referred to his sin as their cause.”78 Rather, evil attends sin insofar as it relates to the interdependence of all creatures. “We posit the idea of a corporate penalty along with that of a corporate guilt,” and, in so doing, “we reach a complete vindication of the principle that all sin is reflected in evil, and that all evil can be explained by sin.”79 Working within a corporate rather than individualist vision, Schleiermacher claims that divine retributive justice consists in corporate suffering as a punishment for corporate sin. The difference between sin and evil, then, is that sin is an action of humanity, while evil is the consequent state of the world in which sinful humanity suffers.80 Divine justice says nothing of the particular case except that it is part of the comprehensive divine determination of the universe. In addition, it is important to note that, for Schleiermacher,

71  CF §84, p. 345. See Robert Merrihew Adams, “Schleiermacher on Evil,” Faith and Philosophy 13, no. 4 (October 1996), pp. 563–​83. 72  CF §76.2, p. 317. 73  Ibid., §75.1, p. 315. 74 Ibid. 75  Ibid., p. 316. Cf. Hebrews 2:15. 76  CF §75.3, p. 317. 77  Ibid., §75.1, p. 316. See also §84.1, p. 346. 78  Ibid., §77, p. 320. 79  Ibid., §84.2, pp. 348–​9. 80  Ibid., §82.3, p. 340. See also ibid., §76.3, p. 317.

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evil is not something that must be passively endured on account of the connection between sin and evil, but ought to be fought against.81 The purpose of divine justice, which determines a connection between sin and evil, is precisely to prevent and deter human sin.82 God establishes the connection between sin and evil in order to prevent humanity from developing habits that would do detriment to an awareness of divine redemption and to conscience.83 Schleiermacher explains, “Without that consciousness of penal liability, conscience would have no means of gaining a secure hold in any human soul still under the dominion of the flesh, and thus no means of generating there a consciousness of the need of redemption.”84 Since humanity is liable to sink into complete God-​ forgetfulness, it is the divine will that corporate guilt be accompanied by corporate suffering, such that it becomes possible for humanity to gain awareness of its sin and its need of redemption, if only retroactively.85 Indeed, Schleiermacher thinks that divine justice “would more aptly be designated wisdom.”86 Divine justice is not vengeance, just as divine holiness is not wrathfulness. However, by ordaining a connection between sin and evil, God ensures that in the fullness of time, the union of the divine essence with human nature will be efficacious for the redemption of humanity, regardless of human antagonism toward God. To summarize the divine attributes detailed in this portion of the Glaubenslehre: For Schleiermacher, holiness is the divine causality that legislates in the corporate life of humanity through moral and civil law. Holiness corresponds to divine love insofar as sin is ordained only for the sake of redemption. Justice is the divine causality that ordains evil as the punishment for humanity’s sin. It therefore corresponds to divine wisdom in preparing for humanity’s redemption. Here we see that at every point, Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God involves divine causality whose dynamic life is characterized by creative-​redemptive love and wisdom. The preparation for the union of the divine essence with humanity in Christ and the Church brings to the fore divine holiness and justice. But holiness and justice are correlated with divine love and wisdom, displaying the coherence of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Living God.

e.  Relating the Doctrines of the Immanent and Economic Trinity We have seen in this chapter that Schleiermacher’s Christology and pneumatology are focused on divine love and wisdom being enacted first in and through Christ, and then in and through the Christian Church, which is a second union 81  Ibid., §78, p. 322. 82  Ibid., §84.3, p. 350. See ibid., §84.1, p. 346. 83  Ibid., §84.3, p. 351. 84 Ibid. 85  Ibid., §84.4, p. 352. 86  Ibid., §84.1, p. 346.

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of the divine essence with human nature. In Christ, human nature is completely created with the implantation of a perfect God-​consciousness, which is the means by which Christ enacts the divine love toward others. A  weak and latent God-​ consciousness is natural to humanity, but the actualization of the divine love that occurs in and through Christ sets him qualitatively apart from all others. With Jesus’s entrance into the natural world, the influence of his enactment of divine love of others proceeds naturally within the Christian Church. The Spirit of Christ unites followers of Christ into a common body through their love of Christ, which ramifies outward to all of humanity and creation. The Church’s spontaneous, active imitation of Christ is therefore a continuing indwelling of the divine within human nature. To round out this presentation and connect the claims of this chapter with my broader concerns, let us turn to the relation of the economy of salvation offered here to my reading of the doctrine of the essential Trinity offered in the previous chapter. 1.  Hesitations about a Doctrine of Appropriations While it might be possible to correlate the doctrine of the essential Trinity described in the last chapter with the analysis of the economic Trinity just offered—​seeing divine causality as the governance of the Father, love as the incarnation of the Son, and wisdom as the communion of the Spirit—​Schleiermacher’s thought resists such correlation, at least insofar as he resists uniquely relating terms in this way. The essential Trinity as a whole—​causality, love, and wisdom—​is always at work in each of the temporal activities of the economic Trinity; namely, in preparation for the union with human nature, and in the union in Christ and his Spirit. In fact, as we have seen, Schleiermacher himself links love and wisdom with the attributes highlighted in the preparation for the union of God with human nature. Divine holiness is linked with love, and divine justice with wisdom. As such, the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature is not identifiable with the Creator or “causality” per se, but represents the perichoretic activity of divine love and wisdom. So also, the unions of the divine essence with human nature in the Son and Spirit are not identifiable with “love” or “wisdom” per se. The incarnation and Church communion are the divine wisdom perfectly enacting divine love, or divine love being actualized wisely. Bearing this in mind, it may be nonetheless acceptable—​for the purpose of explicitly pointing to the links between historical forms of Christian doctrine and biblical language—​for readers of Schleiermacher to identify the three movements of the economic Trinity with the biblical terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit.” The preparation for the unions can be identified with the Father, who is the God of Jesus Christ. The Son can be identified with the whole Christ or the Redeemer, Jesus of Nazareth. And the Holy Spirit can be identified with the God of the Church. This correlation of terms highlights the connection between historical and biblical forms of Christian faith with my reading of essential Trinitarianism, and therefore might have some limited interpretive benefit.

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This reading is partially borne out by Schleiermacher’s exegetical suggestions in his “Trinitarian Treatise.” There, he seems to suggest that in scripture, “Son” might refer to the whole Christ. He also suggests that “Father” and “Spirit” might both refer to the Supreme Being or God, without placing these terms in relation to historical time periods.87 Nonetheless, Schleiermacher himself understands the Holy Spirit to be the Spirit of the Church, thereby tying the Spirit to a particular temporal sequence in the economy of salvation. Since he understands the common spirit of the Church to be the Spirit of Christ, and the “Son” to be the whole person of Christ, it does not seem to contravene his own logic to use the biblical word “Father” to describe the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature. Even so, to be faithful to Schleiermacher’s thought, one would have to recall at every point that the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” do not refer to eternal hypostases whose activity is highlighted at different points of time in the economy of salvation. That is, one would need to be careful not to invoke a doctrine of appropriations to correlate the immanent Trinity with the economic Trinity when describing Schleiermacher’s thought. There is a further reason to hesitate, however, about correlating the “Father” with the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature: Not only does the Glaubenslehre avoid using “Father” in this way, consistently speaking of “God” and “divine causality” rather than the “Father” throughout the text, the text also dissolves a biologically male-​inflected connection between Jesus and God when it denies a literal interpretation of the notion of a virgin birth. Schleiermacher suggests that biblical texts sometimes seem to indicate that Jesus had a human father and was conceived in a natural way, and that if this were the case, it would not affect a Christian reception of redemption. In paragraph 97, where Schleiermacher discusses the origin of the Person of Christ, he claims that “it is quite possible to believe in Christ as Redeemer without believing in His supernatural conception in this sense.”88 The sense in question refers to “the complete expulsion of the male activity in the conception of Christ.”89 Tackling the exegetical issue first, Schleiermacher explains that stories of the virgin birth do not reappear outside of their original narration, and apostolic texts do not appeal to them. They also, Schleiermacher notes, “conflict with the genealogies of Christ, which go back to Joseph in a simple and straightforward way without taking account of these stories.”90 Further, in John 6:42, Matthew 13:55, and Luke 4:22, Jesus is called the son of Joseph by those who knew him.91 As for the dogmatic significance of the doctrine of the virgin birth, Schleiermacher finds next to none: we have “at most here and there a slight dogmatic colouring, either with reference to original sin or to the implanting of the divine in human nature,” but the virgin birth actually “is without any real bearing 87  Ibid., §172, p. 751. 88  Ibid., §97, p. 404. 89  Ibid., p. 403. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.

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on either question.”92 This is because sin is social, having “its root in the previous generation.”93 But “the being of God in a life cannot be explained by its origin from a virgin without sexual intercourse; and equally the absence of any paternal share in the new life cannot free that life from participation in the corporate life of sinfulness.”94 As such, Schleiermacher holds that, in and of itself, the virgin birth is not part of Christian doctrine proper. This exclusion suggests that, for Schleiermacher, God is not the biological “Father” of Jesus, with Mary as his mother. Rather, the divine activity that stands in relation to Christ is a “higher influence which, as creative divine activity, could alter both the paternal and the maternal influence in such a way that all ground for sinfulness was removed, and this although procreation was perfectly natural—​as indeed only this creative divine activity could avail to give completeness to the natural imperfection of the child who was begotten.”95 Conceptually, the divine creative activity would not be best and uniquely described as the “Fatherhood” of God, even though in scripture “God is constantly referred to by the name of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”96 Rather, properly speaking, the divine creative activity relates to the influence of Jesus’s father and mother in the same way. Thus, although Schleiermacher is not, in paragraph 97, making an explicit claim about the use of the term “Father” as a designation for the divine creative and governing activity prior to the union of the divine essence with human nature in the person of Christ, his comments here do suggest that, as a precise theological term, the name might not be any more uniquely fitted for the divine creative activity prior to or during the union of the divine essence with human nature than “Mother” might be. For Schleiermacher, then, the doctrine of the economic Trinity describes the lovingly and wisely caused temporal divine redemption of humanity. His readers might use the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” as biblical names for the three historical actualizations of the one eternal divine decree to redeem humanity, as long as they do not invoke a doctrine of appropriations whereby three persons of the immanent Trinity correspond to three movements of the economic Trinity. However, Schleiermacher himself does not use “Father” in that way within the Glaubenslehre, and his thought seems to suggest that divine creative activity is not best or uniquely identified with fatherhood. 2.  Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of the Trinity as Eternal and Temporal Comparing this outline of the doctrine of the economic Trinity to our previous discussions of the doctrines of the immanent Trinity and the essential Trinity, an important set of distinctions within Schleiermacher’s thought should be brought 92  Ibid., p. 404. 93 Ibid. 94  Ibid., p. 405. 95 Ibid. 96  Ibid., §33.3, p. 133.

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to the fore:  he understands the immanent Trinity as speculative, the essential Trinity as eternal, and the economic Trinity as temporal.97 The immanent Trinity, as we have seen, has, for Schleiermacher, largely become a speculative affair that includes a number of conceptual difficulties. His understanding of God avoids such speculation by grounding itself in the life of the divine considered in relation to the world. However, his understanding does not merely consist in a description of the work of the economic Trinity. Rather, on my reading of his essential Trinitarianism, his way of thinking ascribes a threefold structure to the eternal divine life. Because the essential Trinity is not temporally understood, the doctrine of the essential Trinity is not presented as a life story that proceeds in a linear fashion from past to present to future. Rather, the eternal divine life is one in its threeness:  it is unchangingly a matter of causality, love, and wisdom, and these three are perichoretically related. In contrast, when we come to Schleiermacher’s consideration of the divine economy of salvation, a historical movement from past through present to future is put front and center. Here, the divine life in relation to the universe is seen as a historical progression—​from preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature through that union in the person of Christ and in the Spirit of the Church. While the sequential form of the doctrine of the economic Trinity might highlight for Schleiermacher’s readers the intersection of biblical language with Glaubenslehre, the doctrine of the essential Trinity denies that the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is sufficient to capture the full scope of the Christian understanding of God. Because Schleiermacher’s understanding of God is characterized by unchanging love (and holiness), wisdom (and justice), and intentional causality, he considers the biblical terms seized upon by the classical Trinitarian tradition as insufficient for a fully orbed and robust doctrine of God. As such, although we have, in this chapter, been attending to the economic Trinity, we have not left the essential Trinity behind. The account of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God set forth in the chapters above now includes all of the divine attributes that are set forth in the second part of the Glaubenslehre. In the next chapter, I turn to its first part.

97  I will detail divine eternity in Chapter 6.

Part III T ENSIONS AND C ONNECTIONS

Chapter 6 D IVINE A LTE R I T Y

Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre navigates a way through theological epistemology in a newly modern context. By rejecting the doctrine of the immanent Trinity as speculative, Schleiermacher is setting appropriate limits for theological claims in a modern philosophical context, where the thought of Immanuel Kant bulks large. Moreover, by developing a doctrine of the economic Trinity, which is the basis for my reading of his essential Trinitarianism, Schleiermacher offers a theology that is grounded positively in the history of the Christian Church. As a theologian operating within the context of a modern university, then, he wrestles with the limits of human knowledge in a way notable for its heightened philosophical sensitivity to what can and cannot be known or said about God, and on what basis. Robert Williams takes this epistemological context as a key for understanding Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God as a whole. Williams suggests, “Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God and divine attributes is structured by the fundamental contrast between God hidden and revealed.”1 In this chapter, I explore how Schleiermacher deals with this contrast between the unknown and the known. Rather than using the categories of hiddenness and revealedness, however, I  will treat his understanding of God in terms of a contrast between the negative or apophatic and the positive or kataphatic. Those terms correspond roughly to his usage of “der Verneinung” (negation) and “Absprechung” (denial), in contrast to “der Positiv” in paragraphs 50 to 56. To exposit Schleiermacher’s handling of apophasis and kataphasis, I  move further backward in the Glaubenslehre, treating the divine attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Although he does not explicitly name these as “apophatic” attributes, my explication of the attributes themselves will show the degree to which they indicate what God is not, for Schleiermacher. Expressing the attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience within a contrasting apophatic-​kataphatic framework, I argue that he puts these apophatic attributes to limited but purposeful use in Part One; apophasis circumscribes and nuances his primarily kataphatic approach. At the end of the chapter, I  return to Williams’s suggestion to consider whether Schleiermacher 1  Robert Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian: The Construction of the Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), p. 147.

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successfully holds the apophatic and kataphatic in tension within the Glaubenslehre. Schleiermacher himself certainly maintains that his work is coherent, despite his interpreters’ misreadings based on its order of presentation. And I agree, arguing that the Glaubenslehre’s two parts are truly complementary to and coherent with one another, such that when the work is read backward, the genuine character of Schleiermacher’s theology clearly comes into focus.

a.  Via Causalitatis In his doctrine of God, Schleiermacher explicitly rejects the via negativa and the via eminentiae, taken exclusively on their own, in favor of the via causalitatis, or the way of causality, as his theological method:  “All the divine attributes to be dealt with in Christian Dogmatics must somehow go back to the divine causality.”2 Divine causality is essential to his understanding of God, along with love and wisdom, because it expresses God’s relation to the world as received in Christian faith: the universe is absolutely dependent upon God. At this point in the text, however, Schleiermacher is interested not only in descriptions of Christian piety but also in the way in which Christian doctrine refines these representations:  “it has been from the beginning the business of Christian Dogmatics to regulate these representations, so that the anthropomorphic element, to be found more or less in all of them, and the sensuous which is mixed in with many, may be rendered as harmless as possible.”3 In order to safeguard theological claims from improper anthropomorphism, Schleiermacher uses the via negativa and the via eminentiae to render statements made with the via causalitatis as legitimate as possible. He explains, “to this conception [of causality] the other methods must first be applied, i.e. that the finitude of causality must be denied and its productivity posited as unlimited.”4 As Schleiermacher makes statements utilizing the mode of causality, then, he also speaks in negative terms and points to the way God exceeds human being and activity.5 In this way, he requires that certain negations and qualifications attend positive claims about God. In Part One, these negations are emphasized. They appear as the following claims: God is neither temporal nor localizable (i.e., limited to one place), nor limited in power and knowledge. As expressed by the via eminentiae, God is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. However, Schleiermacher notes that even the way of eminence still negates in the sense that it denies limitations. As such, for him, the via negativa and the via eminentiae are essentially the same: “The 2  CF §50.3, p. 198. This was evident in Chapter 4, where Schleiermacher’s understanding of the divine essence is structured by divine causality, along with love and wisdom. 3  Ibid., §50.1, p. 195. 4  Ibid., §50.3, p. 198. 5 Ibid.

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identity of these two methods becomes quite obvious in the idea of Infinity, which is at the same time the general form of absence of limits, for what is posited as infinite is also freed from limitation.”6 However, Schleiermacher goes on to say, “at the same time it shows quite generally that by negation we can only posit an attribute in so far as something positive remains behind the negation.”7 Because negative theological methods presuppose something positive, Schleiermacher adopts the via causalitatis as an “independent” method, in contrast to the via negativa and the via eminentiae.8 When the Glaubenslehre is read backward, beginning with the claims of Part Two, the unconditionality and universality of divine causality indicate the absoluteness of the loving and wise divine election of the other. “Absolute” in this context means that the divine election of humanity to blessedness is not dependent on humanity in any way, but is an unconditioned determination made by God. At the end of each subsection to follow, I will link Parts One and Two to highlight the way that what I am calling the doctrine of the essential Trinity infuses the negative divine attributes of Part One with definite content.

b.  Apophatic (Verneinung) Attributes 1.  Eternity For Schleiermacher, eternity does not stand on its own as a divine attribute; rather, it has cognitive content only in relation to divine causality. As he states, “The idea of eternity does, of course, express a contrast to the causality contained in the natural order, but primarily only as far as this is conditioned by time.”9 Whereas natural causality is temporal, divine causality is not. In addition, whereas natural causality is conditioned by time and temporal things, divine causality conditions all temporal things and even time itself.10 Taken strictly by itself and from a distinctively Christian perspective, this twofold definition of divine eternity does not amount to much. Schleiermacher himself suggests that belief in God as eternal “is nothing more than that shadow of faith which even devils may have.”11 However, the fact that he presents eternity in terms of a modification of divine causality is an initial indication that the first and second parts of the Glaubenslehre can only adequately be understood when they are read in light of one another. As we shall see, Schleiermacher considers eternity a distinctively Christian divine attribute only when it is joined to Christomorphic 6  Ibid., p. 197. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9  Ibid., §51.2, p. 202. 10  Ibid., §52, p. 203. 11  Ibid., §167.2, p. 731.

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love and wisdom. In what follows, I  look at three aspects of Schleiermacher’s understanding of time:  reciprocity, externality, and change. Relative to these notions, divine timelessness or eternity can be conceived as unconditionality, inwardness, and changelessness. In each case, I will highlight the connections he makes between the divine attribute of eternity and the doctrines of the essential and economic Trinity. First, as Schleiermacher understands it, the temporal sequence of the finite world is integrally bound up with reciprocity. Objects in the universe are engaged in an “interrelationship of partial causality and possibility.”12 Every finite object is partially determining and determined by other objects throughout time.13 The whole world and all of its parts are enclosed within this web of influence and counterinfluence, including the forces of nature, on which “we ourselves do, in the same sense in which they influence us, exercise a counter-​influence, however minute.”14 Thus, the human being is both passively receptive and spontaneously active within a world of reciprocal relations. In contrast, divine causality is not characterized by this kind of reciprocity, but is absolutely unconditioned (Unbedingte):  “There is nothing in God for which a determining cause is to be posited outside God.”15 An implication of this for Schleiermacher is that in God “no distinction between the potential and the actual can be allowed.”16 Rather, the entirety of the universe is determined by the one divine intention. Claiming that God is eternal, in this first sense, means that divine causality is absolutely unconditioned love for the whole of creation. Eternal causality is just divine grace—​unmerited gift. An important aspect of unconditional divine causality is that it is not conceived as a series of causalities, discrete actions, or special gifts. We have already noted this in Chapter 4, where divine causality was first presented, and in the discussion of holiness and justice in Chapter 5. Schleiermacher urges his interpreters to observe carefully “the difference between a universal and an individual cause. For in the totality of finite being only a particular and partial causality is given to each individual, since each is dependent not on one other but on all the others; the universal causality attaches only to that on which the totality of this partial causality is itself dependent.”17 For Schleiermacher, then, divine causality does not intend the particular and partial per se, but in divine wisdom God intends each finite being always in relation to the whole. Because of this construal, divine grace is not a response to one individual, one intercessory prayer, or one prayer of repentance 12  Ibid., §51.1, p. 201. 13  Ibid., §4.2, p. 15. 14 Ibid. 15  Ibid., postscript to §54, p. 219. For more on the active nature of divine eternity and causality, see Bruce L. Boyer, “Schleiermacher on the Divine Causality,” Religious Studies 22, no. 1 (1986), pp. 113–​23. 16  CF §54.3, p. 214. 17  Ibid., §46.2, p. 175.

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considered in itself at a particular time. Wise divine causality corresponds always to the whole of creation, and divine grace has as its object the entirety of the sphere of reciprocal relations. So, a first way in which eternity differs from time is that divine causality is not affected reciprocally but is unconditional and universal love, wisely conditioning all things. A second feature of time to which eternity stands in contrast is space. In the sphere of reciprocal relations, space and time form a matrix within which finite, material things exist. Since God is not a thing, “the temporal oppositions of before and after, older and younger disappear in coincidence when applied to God.”18 Stated in a spatial register, God is not external, but inward (innerlich).19 By using this term, Schleiermacher does not mean what many in the previous tradition of Christian theology before him did. As he explains that history, there has been “a duality in God—​a purely inner life in virtue of the inactive attributes, and a life related to the world in virtue of the active attributes.”20 On this view, inwardness might suggest that God simply gazes upon Godself in eternity. Schleiermacher’s usage of “inwardness” is quite in opposition to this view. In fact, he essentially links “inner life” and “activity,” such that attributing inactive attributes to the inner life of God would be a contradiction in terms. Schleiermacher notes that when the inactive attributes are investigated, “we find that there is really no inner life described by them.”21 They are merely formal and negative, and therefore without definite content. As such, he dispenses with the distinction between active and inactive attributes, along with the “presupposition of a separation between what God is, in and for Himself, and what He is in relation to the world.”22 Correlating the doctrine of the essential Trinity that I set forth in Chapter 4 with “inwardness” here, we can see that the inner life of God is not void, but is the pure activity of love and wisdom. The essence of the divine life is what can be said about God based on God’s relation to the world. Along with mutual conditioning and spatial extension, Schleiermacher identifies change as a third feature of temporality. Divine causality, in contrast, is unchangeable.23 One way of describing this aspect of divine eternity is in terms of objects and their properties. If an object changes, it gains or loses at least one property. It cannot lose essential properties without ceasing to exist. Likewise, an object cannot gain essential properties without becoming a different object altogether. If an object changes while remaining the same object, it either loses or gains an accidental property. However, God has no accidental properties; all divine attributes 18  Ibid., §52.1, p. 204. 19  Ibid., §52.2, p. 203. 20  Ibid., §50.3, p. 198. For an account of the distinction between inactive and active divine attributes and of Schleiermacher’s conception of eternity, see Boyer, “Schleiermacher on the Divine Causality,” pp. 113–​23. 21  CF §50.3, p. 199. 22  Ibid., §50.4, p. 200. 23  Ibid., §51.1, p. 201.

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are necessary. To say that God is unchangeable, then, means that God is not capable of gaining or losing any properties. Were we to take into full account the discussion of divine inwardness above, the language of objects and properties here would seem inappropriate from the start, since God is not considered by Schleiermacher to be a thing. However, I use this language, first, because it is a relatively straightforward way of understanding why God might be said to be unchangeable, and second, because in spite of the difficulty of using spatiotemporal language at this point, it nonetheless illustrates heuristically how time, space, and change go together. For Schleiermacher, eternity negates all of these notions and their attendant features. Divine causality is not reciprocal, individual, partial, extended, or malleable; rather, it is unconditioned, universal, and active. Bringing the Glaubenslehre’s second part more fully to bear on this discussion, I begin with the unconditionality of eternity. I will then turn to the active character of eternity and the unchangeability of God. First, Schleiermacher himself links eternity to divine love in Christ precisely through the contrast between divine unconditionality and the sphere of reciprocal relations: “Both the essence of things in their relations to each other and the order of reciprocal interaction between them . . . exist through God (in so far as they do exist) relatively to the redeeming revelation of God in Christ.”24 That is to say, nothing in the relative sphere of creation exists except through the unconditioned determination of the world in relation to Christ. Second, we have also seen that, for Schleiermacher, the inwardness of the divine life means that God, while active, is not a spatiotemporal “thing” within the universe. Bringing the essential Trinity into view, we can say that the inner life or activity of God is love and wisdom. The inner life of God is not inactive self-​ contemplation, but active and wisely carried out love of the other:  love in the preparation for the union of the divine essence with human nature, love in the realization of that union in the person of Christ, and love in the continuing actualization of that union with human nature in the Christian Church. Third, Schleiermacher states that in God’s eternity, the divine is unchangeable. Williams posits that “Schleiermacher’s declarations that God is not in time and that there is no change in God should be interpreted as applying to the immutable element in God (love) but not to the mutable element (power). Love alone is completely identified with God, but divine power is subordinated to and directed by love. . . . God’s love does not change and is not subject to time; God’s love is unconditional.”25 This is not the best way of describing Schleiermacher’s thought, since it introduces one “element” in God as mutable and subordinates one element to the other, forcing a dichotomy that need not be seen as dichotomous. My description intends to show the coherence of the divine attributes rather than point up a fundamental contrast among various attributes. However, Williams’s description 24  Ibid., §164.2, p. 724. 25 Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian, p. 183, p. 184.

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helpfully highlights the unchangeable and unconditional divine love that undergirds the varied temporal actualizations of divine activity in the economy of salvation. Divine changelessness means that the gracious or unconditioned love of God is unwavering, and divine wisdom applies to the whole of creation. To summarize: Divine eternity is not synonymous, in Schleiermacher’s thought, with a flat and entirely negative description of God as “timeless.” Rather, eternity refers to God in relation to the whole of time: God determines all that is temporal in accord with divine love and wisdom. The eternal divine life means God’s gracious and wise love of the world. At least, for Schleiermacher, that is the assurance given to Christians in and through their reception of divine activity in Christ and the Spirit. In the process of being redeemed, Christians have assurance of the gracious divine love, which is worked out with the perfection of divine wisdom. In short, what divine eternity highlights is that the essential Trinity—​the universal causality of love and wisdom—​graciously conditions the whole of time. 2.  Omnipresence Omnipresence is a second divine attribute considered in the first part of the Glaubenslehre. Schleiermacher has already introduced space as a corollary of time in his treatment of divine eternity, but here divine omnipresence brings space and spatially extended objects into the foreground. He explains, “By the omnipresence of God we understand the absolutely spaceless causality of God, which conditions not only all that is spatial, but space itself as well.”26 The parallel between eternity and omnipresence is clear. Schleiermacher is here emphasizing “the negation of all remoteness” in God’s relation to the universe.27 In contrast to finite causality, which has effects that are more or less distant from their place of origin or central point, the effects of divine causality are not mitigated by distance.28 Rather, divine causality is powerful to the same degree in every place: “the effects of his causal being-​in-​Himself are everywhere.”29 The doctrine of omnipresence thus indicates that divine causal activity is everywhere present in the finite realm. For Schleiermacher, this quality of God’s activity potentially allows persons to apprehend the divine power in every finite causality they encounter.30 If some are not conscious of the divine presence, this is not to be accounted for by means of a distinction in the divine presence but only in “the receptivity of the finite being to the causal activity of which the divine presence is related.”31 In sum, Schleiermacher posits that God is everywhere powerfully active, but finite beings vary in their receptivity to God. 26  CF §53, p. 206. 27  Ibid., §53.2, p. 208. 28 Ibid. 29  Ibid., p. 209. 30  Ibid., §53.1, p. 207. 31  Ibid., p. 208.

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Expressed positively in relation to Schleiermacher’s claims in Part Two of the Glaubenslehre, omnipresence indicates that divine love and wisdom are active in the entirety of the spatially extended universe.32 There is nowhere one could go to flee the divine activity of wisely enacting gracious love. Since divine eternity and omnipresence are two related ways of distinguishing God from the universe in its finitude as created, much of what could be said about divine omnipresence would sound similar to what has already been detailed above. Divine omnipresence actively conditions the whole of space. Reading Part One in light of Part Two, the difference between divine eternity and omnipresence can be captured as follows: Eternity indicates the gracious depths of the divine love, while omnipresence indicates the breadth or scope of such love within the universe. Taken together, eternity and omnipresence signify that the universe owes its being entirely to gracious divine love, and that the multiplicity, diversity, and unity within the universe are a consequence of the actualization of the plans and purposes of divine wisdom. All temporally and spatially extended objects, as well as time and space themselves, are conditioned by the divine causality of love and wisdom as revealed in the person of Christ and Christ’s Spirit in the Church. 3.  Omnipotence Omnipotence is, for Schleiermacher, a way of further elucidating what has already been affirmed in the doctrines of divine eternity and omnipresence; namely, God’s relation to the universe:  “the entire system of Nature, comprehending all times and spaces, is founded upon divine causality.”33 Omnipotence, once again, simply places all of finite being under divine causality.34 For Schleiermacher, omnipotence means, first, that nothing exists that falls outside the scope of divine activity: “the divine causality is posited as equal in compass to finite causality.”35 This means in turn that “there is never anything of any kind which can begin to be an object of the divine causality though previously—​hence somehow independent of God and opposed to Him—​in existence.”36 The universe and everything therein is absolutely dependent upon the divine good-​pleasure. Further, God does not intermittently intervene within the natural order. Divine activity does not “enter as a supplement (so to speak).”37 Instead, God upholds the natural order of the universe as a whole.38 Schleiermacher explains, “everything is and becomes altogether by means of the natural order, so that each takes place through all and all wholly through the divine omnipotence, so that all indivisibly 32 Cf. OG, p. 57. 33  CF §54, p. 211. 34  Ibid., §51.1, p. 201. 35 Ibid. 36  Ibid., §54.1, p. 212. 37 Ibid. 38  Ibid., §54.4, p. 215.

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exists through One.”39 There can be no finite causality apart from the natural order that God establishes and upholds.40 Second, omnipotence means that divine causality, in Schleiermacher’s words, “is completely presented in the totality of finite being, and consequently everything for which there is a causality in God happens and becomes real.”41 The second portion of this statement is familiar, as it has been presented in our discussion of the first aspect of omnipotence—​the divine intention to love is irresistible and applies to the universe as a whole. The first portion of the statement should also be familiar, given our discussion of eternity: the Christian has no ground for speculating about the divine causality considered apart from creation. However, Schleiermacher presents the idea in a new way when he states that divine causality has no effective remainder outside of finite being. As we have seen, his doctrine of God is circumscribed by its grounding in the Christian’s awareness of her relation of absolute dependence upon God, which is revealed in her coming to recognition of her redemption by Christ. On the basis of this awareness, “we lack any point of connexion for making demands upon the divine causality which extend beyond the natural order.”42 In words echoing his discussion of divine wisdom and eternity, then, Schleiermacher posits that “what does not hereby become actual, is also, so far as He is concerned, not potential.”43 This means that, for him, divine omnipotence is not power in general or power to do anything logically possible.44 Rather, omnipotence indicates the lack of competitive relations between any existent and divine activity. At work in both of these aspects of omnipotence is Schleiermacher’s conviction that it is impossible for natural and divine causality to be at odds: “God co-​ operates in every case with activities which are appropriate to the nature of the active thing, but only and always according to his own causality, which is entirely different from that which belongs to the sphere of reciprocal action.”45 That divine and natural causality “co-​operate” means that they exist in a harmonious relation. This is possible because, in Schleiermacher’s view, divine causality is of a different kind than natural causality.46 We have already seen the primary difference between 39  Ibid., §54.1, p. 212. 40 See Julia Lamm, The Living God:  Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 226. 41  CF §54, p. 211. 42  Ibid., §54.2, pp. 212–​3. 43  Ibid., p. 213. 44  Ibid., §54.3, p. 214. 45  Ibid., §49.2, p. 192. 46  Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-​ Theological Comparison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 99. So far from being an enemy to her theology, as she takes him to be, Schleiermacher is Kathryn Tanner’s ally in her quest for a noncompetitive relation between God and the world (Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001], p. 8).

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them—​the difference between a particular and a universal cause. The divine causality creates and preserves the universe as a whole; within this overarching causality, particular causalities are exhibited relative to one another. Schleiermacher explains: So with regard to every individual thing—​the fact that it exists and that it exists in this way—​we can say that God wills it conditionally, because everything is conditioned by something else. But that whereby something else is conditioned is itself conditioned by the divine will; indeed in such a way that the divine will upon which the conditioning rests, and the divine will upon which the conditioned rests is not different in each case, but one only and the same; it is the divine will embracing the whole framework of mutually conditioning finite being: and this naturally is the absolute will, because nothing conditions it. In this way everything individual would be willed by God conditionally, but the whole willed absolutely as a unity.47

Finite causalities, therefore, differ from divine causality in that the former are particular and relative while the latter is universal and absolute.48 In this way, divine and natural causality do not compete with one another but cohere. Here, Schleiermacher is not so much developing a notion of primary and secondary causalities as he is underscoring the difference between divine causality, which has the universe as a whole as its object, and natural causality, which has particular beings within the universe as its subjects and objects. Divine and natural causality cohere because divine causality upholds natural causality without being a part of it. Brian Gerrish offers this summary and analysis of the matter at stake: “God and nature are not, so to say, in competition in the religious consciousness, as though what is assigned to natural causality must inevitably be taken away from God. Divine causality and natural causality, though different in kind, are coextensive; they belong together.”49 A proper doctrine of the divine concursus, according to Schleiermacher, implies that finite and divine causality not only are compatible, but must be taken together. There is no possibility of separating divine activity from finite activity. Schleiermacher claims that we cannot “think of God’s willing Himself, and God’s willing the world, as separated the one from the other. For if He wills Himself, He wills Himself as Creator and Sustainer, so that in willing Himself, willing the world is already included; and if He wills the world, in it He wills His eternal and ever-​present omnipotence, wherein willing Himself is included.”50 He bases this claim on the Christian’s awareness of her absolute dependence upon 47  CF §54.4, p. 216. 48  See Katherine Sonderegger, “The Doctrine of Creation and the Task of Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 2 (1991), pp. 185–​203. 49 Brian Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation:  Essays in Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 204. 50  CF §54.4, p. 217.

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God. Schleiermacher’s nonspeculative theology restricts itself to a consideration of the One who is revealed as creator-​redeemer in the person of Christ, the Christ whose existence is the result and expression of the union of the divine essence with human nature. The Christian has no basis on this foundation for positing a distinction between the divine in se and the divine ad extra. As such, finite and divine causality go together, though they are different in kind. In light of the material on the gracious activity of God that appears later in the Glaubenslehre, therefore, omnipotence signifies the actualization of love that divine causality carries out wisely in the present universe—​the manifestatio gloriae Dei. As Francis Schüssler Fiorenza explains, “It is the distinctively Christian experience of the divine causality that experiences and understands God not as power, but primarily as love (with wisdom the perfection of love)—​so much so that God’s very being is love.”51 This loving relation is clearly not competitive, and does not allow for separation between God and the world. Rather, divine omnipotence illustrates the almightiness of divine love. In Schleiermacher’s hands, divine omnipotence is apophatic in the sense that it denies that divine or universal causality shares the reciprocal, relative, and conditioned character of finite causality. Yet the apophatic elements of divine omnipotence, taken across the whole of the Glaubenslehre, are continuously complemented by kataphatic claims. In a postscript to the doctrine, Schleiermacher highlights the importance of the kataphatic content of divine attributes. He contrasts the idea of omnipotence with that of independence, where the latter would be “simply a negative attribute and, as it were, a shadow-​picture of omnipotence.”52 Omnipotence is not merely, negatively, the absence of constraint but also, positively, the expansive power of love and wisdom that determines everything in the universe. When the Glaubenslehre is read backward, we can see that this universal determination is shaped by the divine good-​pleasure to create and redeem in and through the person of Christ and his Spirit. As Schleiermacher states in On the Glaubenslehre, “omnipotence makes itself manifest in the consciousness of the new spiritual creation.”53 Christians come to know divine omnipotence through their consciousness of divine love, actualized concretely in and through the person of Christ and his Spirit in the Church. 4.  Omniscience Omniscience and omnipotence go hand in hand. As Schleiermacher describes their relationship, omniscience “well emphasizes the fact that omnipotence is not to be thought of as a ‘dead’ force.”54 Rather, divine causality is living, vital, 51  Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Understanding God as Triune,” p. 176. See also Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (trans. John Wallhausser; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p. 123. 52  CF, postscript to §54, p. 218. 53  OG, p. 57. 54  CF §52.2, p. 203.

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or absolutely “spiritual.”55 Omniscience could be expressed just as adequately, Schleiermacher states, by using the phrase “Absolute Vitality.”56 Divine vitality is of fundamental importance for him, since “a lifeless and blind necessity would not really be something with which we could stand in relation.”57 This relation is clearly not to be understood as mechanically causal. As Lamm explains, “To say that God is living is to say that divine causality is not ‘blind’ but acts with ‘purpose’ and that this divine causality is something with which we stand ‘in relation’ because there is communication, a divine ‘self-​presentation and impartation.’ ”58 Omniscience indicates the absolute vitality of the divine life in relation to the universe. This is a partial reiteration of what Schleiermacher has already said vis-​à-​vis divine eternity. What is added here, however, is an insistence that divine omniscience does not mean that God has a consciousness like human consciousness.59 Unlike the latter, which is characterized by a succession of knowing followed by willing (or vice versa, as the case may be), divine knowledge is simply the divine will. Schleiermacher explains: The divine thinking is the same as the divine will, and omnipotence and omniscience are one and the same. And . . . in God there is no duality between thought and word . . . this precisely is the point expressed in all formulae which exhibit the divine Word as creating and preserving; and it is quite correct to say, as has been said in multifarious ways, that everything exists by reason of God’s speaking or thinking it.60

The divine will is simply the divine activity, since there is no succession or time lapse between what God desires and what God does. Divine knowledge of the world is the creation of it, and God’s self-​communication of the divine wisdom corresponds to the entire scope of the universe.61 Herein lies, for Schleiermacher, the coincidence of omniscience and omnipotence. As he states, “God knows all that is; and all that God knows is, and these two are not two-​fold but single; for His knowledge and His almighty will are one and the same.”62 Here, as we have already seen in Chapter 4, Schleiermacher is aiming to avoid Molinism, a view that endorses counterfactual or middle knowledge. According to Molinists, God “would know just what would have resulted had something happened which did not happen.”63 Instead of endorsing middle knowledge, 55  Ibid., §55, p. 219. 56  Ibid., §52.2, p. 203. 57  Ibid., §55.1, p. 219. 58 Lamm, The Living God, p. 223. 59  See Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation, p. 162. 60  CF §55.1, p. 221. 61  Ibid., p. 220. 62  Ibid., p. 222. 63  Ibid., §55.2, p. 224.

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Schleiermacher upholds the divine determination of everything without any process of divine deliberation. Divine omniscience lovingly and perfectly governs the world of time and space. Turning to my correlation of Part One with Part Two at the end of the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher directly links omniscience with divine wisdom, saying, The divine omniscience indicates in God precisely the same as the divine wisdom does; only that the timeless relation involved naturally has for us a twofold aspect, wisdom being the word that looks forward, omniscience the word that looks backward. Moreover, the latter is in the same relation to the divine as the former; all existence being posited in God simply as that which is mediated by his love.64

Here, very explicitly, we see that by reading the Glaubenslehre backward, the doctrines presented in the first part of the theological system point to the divine love and wisdom. They can, thereafter, become enriched with Christomorphic and pneumatological significance. Summarizing the negative divine attributes dealt with here—​eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience—​we have, first, noted that for Schleiermacher divine causality is unconditioned by time. Instead, it conditions all temporal subjects and objects, and conditions even time itself. This means that divine causality is not in reciprocal relationship to finite causality, being influenced by the forces of nature or any particular individual within the realm of the finite. Instead, divine causality is absolutely unconditioned. In addition, it is not a finite, particular cause, but has the universe as its scope. Divine eternity also means, for Schleiermacher, that divine causality is neither spatial nor inactive. Further, divine causality does not change. Its unchangeability corresponds to the full scope of divine activity. Since divine activity is universal in scope, intending the entirety of the web of reciprocal relations as a whole, divine causality may not be conceived, on Schleiermacher’s rendering, as mutable. Second, Schleiermacher states that divine causality is omnipresent. This means, for him, that just as God is not conditioned by time, neither is God conditioned by space. Instead, divine causality determines the universe spatially and is present throughout the finite sphere. Third, divine causality is omnipotent. For Schleiermacher, divine omnipotence indicates that nothing exists outside the scope of divine causality. All finite things exist through the One. In addition, there is nothing that could have existed outside of the divine One. In all things, natural and divine causality are in noncompetitive harmony, being of two different kinds. Divine causality is universal, whereas finite causality is particular. Finally, omniscience indicates that divine causality is not a dead force, but is vital or living.

64  Ibid., §168.1, p. 732.

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Divine causality, for Schleiermacher, is intentional or purposive in relation to creation. The divine will simply is, without any deliberation, the divine activity. For all their elegance, I have shown that these negative, or apophatic, divine attributes, which highlight the alterity of God in comparison to creation, are without definite content apart from Part Two of the Glaubenslehre. Schleiermacher himself would agree. Explaining the order of the Glaubenslehre, he states, A scientific work is not a dinner party where the host first passes around the best wine in the hope that the intoxication it produces will make more palatable the inferior vintages that are brought in later. In fact, I had consciously done my best to ensure that such an interpretation would not arise. I had stated clearly enough that the first part, though truly a part of the structure itself, was only a portal and entrance hall and the propositions there, insofar as they could be set forth in an Introduction, could be no more than outlines that would be filled in with their true content from the ensuing discussion.65

Part Two fills in the content of the divine attributes described in Part One. When they are brought together, divine eternity signals that God’s love for the world is not dependent upon the finite. God’s love is not individual, partial, or changeable. Instead, divine love is universal, active, and unwavering. Divine omnipresence indicates that wherever creatures may travel, they will always encounter divine love and wisdom. There is nowhere one could go to get away from the grace of God. Divine omnipotence, for Schleiermacher, means that the whole of the created order is enveloped by divine love. God loves it all, plans and purposes it as a whole, and wisely sets everything—​both Godself and the world—​in relation to Christ and his Spirit. In Christ, the very being of God is revealed as love. Divine omniscience, finally, means for Schleiermacher that divine love is wisely carried out in relation to the world. Divine causality is not an impersonal force, but refers to the Living God. Only when the apophatic divine attributes are filled in with their kataphatic content in this way is the real force of the first part of the Glaubenslehre adequately understood.

c.  Coherence of Alterity and Trinity Having considered the divine attributes set forth in the first part of the Glaubenslehre—​eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience—​let me return now to Williams’s suggestion, which I  mentioned at the opening of this chapter. He maintains that Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God is “structured by the fundamental contrast between God hidden and revealed.”66 While it is certainly the case that there could be hidden aspects of God that are not negative but positive 65  OG, pp. 56–​7. 66 Williams, Schleiermacher the Theologian, p. 147.

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attributes, Williams offers the contrast between hidden and revealed as a framework for understanding the two parts of the Glaubenslehre, which Schleiermacher describes as negative and positive in content. As such, though the terms “hidden” and “negative,” on the one hand, and “positive” and “revealed,” on the other, are not necessarily correlates, I am correlating them here because of the similar function these different terms play in Williams’s and Schleiermacher’s texts. Williams’s position that Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God includes a fundamental contrast has been supported by my analysis insofar as Schleiermacher elucidates his theological positions by stating them both negatively and positively. In Part One, he states that God is timeless and conditions time itself; that God is not externally extended and conditions space itself; that divine causality is unconditioned; and that God does not have a consciousness like human consciousness. God is not within the realm of opposition, antithesis, contrast, finitude, reciprocity, interdependence, time or space: God is not creaturely. This is the sense in which Schleiermacher believes God is infinite: “For infinite does not really mean that which has no end, but that which is in contrast to the finite, i.e. to that which is co-​determined by other things.”67 All this sounds thoroughly negative. Yet the relation we find between negative and positive statements in the Glaubenslehre is overstated as a “fundamental contrast” if that phrase is meant to indicate equal dogmatic significance on either side of the contrast. Taken as a whole, in the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher shows a clear preference for the kataphatic, using apophasis as a way of nuancing the latter so as to avoid inappropriate anthropomorphism. God is, for Schleiermacher, the pure activity of love, which is intentional and purposive, determining everything in the universe. In more biblical terms, God is the loving and wise Creator-​Redeemer. In Christ and the Spirit of the Church, God powerfully produces and conforms the world to the divine good-​pleasure. When the Glaubenslehre is read backward, it becomes clear that the kataphatic and apophatic elements of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God complement and cohere with one another, rather than being at odds. He purposefully uses a circumscribed form of apophasis in order to nuance and highlight his kataphatic claims. All of this raises the question of whether Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God as presented in Part One is ultimately compatible with that presented in Part Two.68 Bruce McCormack maintains that “the treatments of the being and attributes of God in Parts I and II are not finally compatible due to the role played in Part I by the ancient concept of the ineffability of God.”69 However, 67  CF §56.1, p. 231. 68  Sung-​Sup Kim provides a literature review on this topic. See Sung-​Sup Kim, Deus Providebit: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth on the Providence of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), pp. 107–​38. 69  Bruce McCormack, “Not a Possible God But the God Who Is,” in The Reality of Faith in Theology (ed. Bruce McCormack and Gerrit Willem Neven; New York: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 119. Kim also follows this line of interpretation, as do Gregory Walter and Carl Krieg. See Kim, Deus Providebit, pp. 137–​8. Cf. Gregory Walter, “Trinity as Circumscription

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Lamm suggests the very opposite, that the two presentations are compatible. She asks, “In identifying love as the essence of God, or in even allowing himself to speak of the divine essence, does he abandon his own postcritical concerns and methodology?” Her reply is, “Not exactly.” She explains:  “The fact that Schleiermacher dares to say that ‘love alone and no other attribute can be equated thus with God’ (Gl.2 §167.1; CF 730) is actually a consequence, not a violation, of the method he has employed throughout the Glaubenslehre.”70 Whereas McCormack claims the two parts are incompatible, Lamm argues that Part Two follows from Part One. We have here a significant matter of contention in Schleiermacher scholarship. In support of McCormack’s claim, we can see, for instance, that Schleiermacher makes statements like the following: “Neither in isolation nor taken together do the attributes express the Being of God in itself (for the essence of that which has been active can never be known simply from its activity alone).”71 Certainly this seems to be an expression of the doctrine of divine ineffability.72 McCormack claims that this divine ineffability espoused in Part One is incompatible with an identification of the divine essence as love revealed in Christ, which is offered in Part Two. He puts the matter succinctly by considering whether the order of the Glaubenslehre could be reversed without changing the content of Part One, a question very germane to the enterprise undertaken in this book: If, now, you were to ask the question: could I begin with the concrete [Part II] and “abstract” from it in such a way as to arrive at the same results as were set forth in Part I? the answer would have to be “no.” And the reason is that all you can learn from the experience of redemption is that the Christian is absolutely dependent upon God for her redemption; you cannot generalize on the basis of this context-​specific relation and say “and, therefore, everything that is, is absolutely dependent upon God.” . . . Even more importantly, you could not arrive at a concept of divine “ineffability” (and the associated concepts of simplicity, impassibility, and timelessness) on the basis of a starting-​point in the Christian experience of redemption! . . . What controls Schleiermacher’s treatment of the of Divine Love according to Friedrich Schleiermacher,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50, no. 1 (2008), pp. 62–​74 (64); and Carl E. Krieg, “Schleiermacher: On the Divine Nature,” Religion in Life 42 (1973), pp. 514–​23. 70 Lamm, The Living God, p. 218. Other scholars have contended that Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God is consistent as well, including Robert Williams, Richard R.  Niebuhr, Gerhard Ebeling, and Jay Richards. For a review of their positions, see Jay Wesley Richards, “Schleiermacher’s Divine Attributes: Their Coherence and Reference,” Encounter 57, no. 2 (spring 1996), pp. 149–​70. 71  CF §50.3, p. 198. 72  A classic treatment of the divine ineffability can be found in Gregory of Nyssa, “Concerning We Should Think of Saying that There Are Not Three Gods, to Ablabius,” in The Trinitarian Controversy (ed. William G. Rusch; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), p. 152.

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being and attributes right up to the reversal which takes place in paragraph 167 is his treatment of the feeling of absolute dependence in paragraph 4.73

McCormack is suggesting here that it is, in truth, the feeling of absolute dependence—​conceived apart from the divine economy of salvation—​that underpins the conceptual work of Part One in the Glaubenslehre, and that Part Two is fundamentally in conflict with this starting point. He maintains that there are two inconsistencies in view. The first is between the context specificity of redemption and the feeling of absolute dependence. The second is between the Christian experience of redemption and the divine attributes of simplicity, impassibility, and timelessness. If McCormack is correct, then my work in this book has been not simply to interpret and analyze Schleiermacher’s theology, but to substantively reconstruct it by eliding this set of inconsistencies. However, I have intended to offer a faithful interpretation of Schleiermacher’s theology, and I have good reason to believe that this is what I have achieved thus far. Two claims made in McCormack’s incompatibility argument will be tested critically: first, the claim that one cannot move from an experience of redemption in Christ to the claim that everything as a whole is absolutely dependent upon God; and second, the claim that the concept of divine ineffability cannot be derived from the Christian experience of redemption. Turning to the first claim, McCormack states that “all you can learn from the experience of redemption is that the Christian is absolutely dependent upon God for her redemption; you cannot generalize on the basis of this context-​specific relation and say ‘and, therefore, everything that is, is absolutely dependent upon God.’ ”74 If Schleiermacher had an individualistic view of humanity, this would certainly be true. However, because of his notion of the Naturzusammenhang, or the interconnected process of nature,75 and the human species-​consciousness that results from it, the generalizability McCormack is looking for is present and effective on the basis that the human organism is one organic whole. As we have already seen in the foregoing discussion of the single divine decree, Schleiermacher invites his readers to imagine “the creation of the world and, along with this, the entirety of the interconnectedness of nature to be one divine act.”76 Everything is determined by this organic, interconnected natural process.77 Under such a 73  McCormack, “Not a Possible God But the God Who Is,” p. 136. 74 Ibid. 75 Terrence Tice, Catherine Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, co-​translators of Christian Faith:  A  New Translation and Critical Edition (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2016), translate “Naturzusammenhang” as “interconnected process of nature.” I adopt this translation of the term throughout. 76  CF §38.2, p.  147. See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Doctrine of Election, with Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr. Bretschneider (trans. Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson; Columbia Series in Reformed Theology; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006); and Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election, pp. 37–​103. 77  CF §46.1, p. 171.

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conception, each part fits together with the other parts so that, in Schleiermacher’s words, “all could just as well be for the purpose of each part, just as each part could be so for all.”78 This interconnectedness of the natural world is no insignificant aspect of Schleiermacher’s theology. It features heavily in his doctrine of creation, anthropology, ecclesiology, and soteriology. Most fundamentally, the Naturzusammenhang is involved in the Christian’s sense of her relation to God. For Schleiermacher, these two fully coincide:  “the fullest conviction that everything is completely conditioned by and grounded in the totality of the interconnected process of nature and the inner surety regarding the absolute dependence of all that is finite on God.”79 Recognition of the universe as an interconnected process of nature goes hand in hand with the Christian’s sense that everything as a whole depends upon God.80 Continuing to exposit this passage from Schleiermacher, humanity, for its part, is not lifted out of the interconnectivity of nature.81 Everything is conditioned by the Naturzusammenhang. Not only human bodies, but also objective human consciousnesses are “conditioned and determined by the interconnected process of nature.”82 Moreover, human nature itself is constituted with reference to each instance of human being.83 Schleiermacher explains, “If in an individual being within the given species something shows itself that would contradict the earlier definition, then the species would have been wrongly defined all along, and it would have to be defined differently. Or, on the other hand, the identity of the given individual being would simply have been mistaken.”84 The whole of human nature is, therefore, defined with reference to each individual human being. The inverse is also true: each constituent of human nature always has reference to the whole. As Schleiermacher puts it, personal self-​consciousness includes human “species-​consciousness” (Gattungsbewuβtsein).85 In other words, consciousness of oneself includes consciousness of the whole of humanity. The reality of the

78  Ibid., §58.2, p.  237. Cf. Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 79  CF §46.2, p. 173. 80 See Jon Paul Sydnor, Ramanuja and Schleiermacher:  Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012), pp. 145–​6. 81  CF §58.1, p. 236. 82  Ibid., §46.1, p. 170. 83  Ibid., §72.3, p. 299. 84  Ibid., p. 296. This is similar to Judith Butler’s understanding of the constitution of universal concepts. She describes formation as an open-​ended process of constitution and reconstitution that leaves room for “unknowingness about what [the universal] is and what it might include in a future not fully determined in advance” (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender [New York: Routledge, 2004], p. 191). 85  CF §60.2, p. 246.

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Naturzusammenhang grounds a co-​referential and co-​constituted understanding of oneself and humanity within the universe. All of humanity and the whole of creation are, for Schleiermacher, in turn shaped or determined by Christ. He explains, “Christ had come to be determined in the way he was only because and insofar as the whole given interconnection of things was also determined in a certain fashion, and, in reverse, the whole given interconnection of things would have been determined in the way it was only because and insofar as Christ too would have been determined in a certain fashion.”86 Despite the apparent mutuality implied in this passage between the determination of Christ and the determination of the world, priority is given to Christ insofar as his person revises the definition of the human species. The relationship is thus asymmetrical, as can be seen in Schleiermacher’s further explanation: The creation of human being is first completed in Christ. This is the case, since that which is his most inner core is distinctive from all others, then the existence of God dwelling in him must relate to human nature taken as a whole in the same way as the prior innermost core of being a human being related to the human organism taken as a whole. This analogy has already run through the entire presentation up to now, though not explicitly expressed.87

Humanity’s creation is completed by the union of the divine essence with human nature in Christ’s person.88 Because of the nature of humanity, Schleiermacher goes so far as to say that “Christ was always coming into being even as a human person at the same time as the world was coming into being.”89 Here we see the extent of his Christomorphism and its interconnection with his theological anthropology and doctrine of creation. What this means in the context of McCormack’s argument is that Schleiermacher can, in fact, generalize from the Christian’s absolute dependence upon God for her redemption in and through Christ to the absolute dependence of the entire universe upon God. Each human being is an interconnected part of the human species, which is an interconnected part of the whole of the process of nature. And that interconnected process of nature is itself Christomorphic. If the individual is absolutely dependent upon God for her redemption, she can only be such in and with the whole of humanity and the Naturzusammenhang, since “Christ was coming into being even as a human person at the same time as the world was coming into being.”90 86  Ibid., §120.3, p. 555. 87  Ibid., §97.4, p. 411. 88  For an excellent introduction to Schleiermacher’s Christology, see Kevin Hector, “Actualism and Incarnation:  The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (July 2006), pp. 307–​22. 89  CF §97.2, pp. 401–​2. 90 Ibid.

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There still remains McCormack’s second point. He claims that “you could not arrive at a concept of divine ‘ineffability’ (and the associated concepts of simplicity, impassibility, and timelessness) on the basis of a starting-​point in the Christian experience of redemption.”91 Certainly one could not arrive at such concepts if the Christian experience of redemption included the independent action of humans contributing to their redemption. If, however, redemption is completely a matter of grace, which requires that the divine good-​pleasure is the exclusive basis of human redemption, then divine impassibility and eternity could be warranted by the Christian reception of redemption. These divine attributes are simply the negative way of saying that Pelagianism is out of theological bounds. The human does not independently cooperate in her redemption, but redemption is entirely based on the graciousness of the divine love and wisdom as prepared for in creation and received in the person and work of Christ and his Spirit. The general notion of ineffability—​the inability to comprehensively explain or fully express the divine life—​is, then, an authentically Christian notion when it is tied to the unconditional divine good-​pleasure as the basis for humanity’s election to blessedness. There is no explanation for grace; it is simply given. And divine ineffability, as an authentically Christian doctrine, will depend on and arise precisely from the Christian experience of redemption. McCormack is correct, however, to assert that divine simplicity is not implicated by the Christian experience of redemption, if simplicity would disallow Trinitarian distinctions. If my interpretation thus far is correct, Schleiermacher can be read as an essential Trinitarian who maintains distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life. Of course, plenty of Trinitarian thinkers ascribe simplicity to the divine nature, even granted Trinitarian distinctions. They can do this because the relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are genetically conceived. But for Schleiermacher’s thought, which maintains not genetic but conceptual relations between the three expressions of the very essence of God, it is important to emphasize that the divine life is not plainly simple in the sense that any attribute can be substituted for any other attribute. While divine causality, love, and wisdom are perichoretic and the divine essence is a unity, these three distinctions are not synonymous. Thus, in Schleiermacher’s thought, simplicity appears to apply only in relation to the divine attributes associated with negative theology: omnipotence, eternity, omnipresence, and omniscience.92 He explains, “Since these two ideas—​omnipotence and eternity—​are here related only to the 91  McCormack, “Not a Possible God But the God Who Is,” pp. 111–​39 (136). 92 Robert M.  Adams acknowledges that “Schleiermacher’s arguments about divine simplicity are not among his most rigorous, and their implications are not developed in satisfying detail” (Robert Merrihew Adams, “Philosophical Themes in Schleiermacher’s Christology,” Philosophia 39 [2011], pp. 449–​60 [453]). I agree with Adams on that score; my comments here are an attempt at interpreting his statements about simplicity in the context of the entire Glaubenslehre. Robert Sherman’s argument seems to concur with mine. See Robert Sherman, “Isaak August Dorner on Divine Immutability: A Missing Link

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divine causality, it may at once be proved in their case also that the individual attributes in their differences correspond to nothing real in God.”93 He goes on to say, “But each of these two ideas also must in itself be an expression for the Divine Essence, because neither can betoken anything different in God; and thus omnipresence too, when ascribed to the divine causality, is itself eternity, and omniscience is itself omnipotence.”94 These apophatic attributes are only limiting concepts that help to avoid inappropriate anthropomorphism, and they essentially mean the same thing: God is unconditioned and conditions all. The four negations used to describe divine unconditionality—​eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience—​are just so many different ways of underlining the same emphasis on the gracious divine activity. Schleiermacher’s positive account of the divine life, however, goes further than this negative account, indicating that the divine life is causality, love, and wisdom in relation to the universe, and this life is communicated in the preparations for the union of the divine essence with human nature, that union in the person of Jesus Christ, and the continuing union with the common Spirit of the Christian Church. The divine essence is not therefore simple, at least insofar as divine causality, love, and wisdom are perichoretically related distinctions within the divine life, and insofar as the divine life is temporally actualized in relation to the world; that is, in the economic Trinity. Thus, what can be said of the relationship between the divine attributes treated in Part One, in their simplicity, cannot be said of the divine attributes treated late in Part Two, in their perichoretic fullness. As I have shown in Chapter 4, the attributes of causality, love, and wisdom are structural features of the divine essence, and their relations to one another are carefully drawn. Divine simplicity applies only to the divine attributes detailed in Part One. It can therefore be seen on the basis of these two investigations that McCormack’s conclusion that Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of God is controlled by the feeling of absolute dependence conceived apart from the context-​specific redemption of Christians is ultimately unsatisfying. When the Glaubenslehre is read backward, it can be seen that Schleiermacher describes the feeling of absolute dependence on the basis of the Christian’s absolute receptivity to gracious divine love in Christ. His fourth paragraph, I contend, is “controlled” by Part Two. In conclusion, I have argued here that when the Glaubenslehre is read backward from the doctrine of the Trinity, the apophatic in Schleiermacher’s thought serves to elucidate the contours and limits of his primarily kataphatic doctrine of God. Presented in reverse order, the apophatic is meant to safeguard his doctrine of God from idolatrous anthropomorphism by limiting the claims arrived at by means of the via causalitatis. In addition, the apophatic itself is controlled by the doctrines between Schleiermacher and Barth,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 3 (July 1997), pp. 380–​401 (see especially p. 388 and pp. 400–​1). 93  CF §51.1, p. 201. 94  Ibid., §51.2, p. 203.

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of the essential Trinity and the economic Trinity. Thus, the claims Schleiermacher makes in the first part of the Glaubenslehre are not a simple reiteration of ancient metaphysics regarding the Supreme Being, but are the result of a limiting procedure added to the via causalitatis carried out in an essentially Trinitarian Christian community.

Chapter 7 C ONSCIOUSNE SS OF  G OD

Schleiermacher’s work ushers his readers into a new theological era, one that reckons with humanity’s epistemic limits in a distinctively modern register. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Schleiermacher uses the apophaticism of Part One in the Glaubenslehre to set in place epistemic safeguards to keep his theology from undue anthropomorphism and to uphold the gracious divine activity in relation to the world. Yet some interpreters of his theology have made too much of his apophaticism and have relied too heavily on the Introduction to the Glaubenslehre, rather than seeing the Introduction as a rarefied abstraction of the center of his thought.1 These interpreters tend to highlight at-​oneness, thereby dissolving distinctions and categories between God and humanity.2 Presentations of such at-​ oneness may include an emphasis on ineffable experiences of the unknown and the dissolution of the self. As an example, Wendy Farley claims that Schleiermacher views the religious subject as experiencing the ineffable in an incommunicable state of consciousness.3 However, such an interpretation neither fully accounts for the kataphatic center and import of his theology nor fully considers how that kataphasis relates to his purposeful use of apophasis. These are concerns we discussed in the previous chapter. More needs to be said on this topic, however, as we move further backward in the Glaubenslehre to Schleiermacher’s initial discussions of his infamous “God-​consciousness” in the Introduction.4 1  Both of these interpretive moves cohere with an emphasis on Schleiermacher’s supposed “turn to the subject.” In Chapter 2, I have shown that by “turning to the subject,” he is in the company of Calvin, who also considers the doctrine of God in relation to humanity. 2  For example, see Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 2011), “Duality and Non-​Duality in Christian Practice:  Reflections on the Benefits of Buddhist-​Christian Dialogue for Constructive Theology,” Buddhist-​Christian Studies 31 (2011), pp. 135–​46, and “Schleiermacher, the Via Negativa, and the Gospel of Love,” Theology Today 65 (2008), pp. 145–​57. 3 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 68. 4  For a brief overview of the scholarly debate about Gefühl and the God-​consciousness in relation to mysticism, see Gorazd Adrejc, “Bridging the Gap between Social and Existential-​Mystical Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘Feeling,’ ” Religious Studies 48 (2012), pp. 377–​401.

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My first aim in this chapter is to analyze Schleiermacher’s presentation of “God-​consciousness” in relation to his understanding of God. Using Farley’s interpretation as a foil, I  intend to disentangle Schleiermacher’s mature theology, especially his notion of God-​consciousness, from interpretations that focus on the Glaubenslehre’s introductory material. Contrary to interpretations that emphasize the Introduction, in the previous chapters of this book I argued that the Glaubenslehre describes and regulates Christian statements, which are set forth as reliable indications of the divine identity and activity and are made on the basis of the reception of redemption effected through the Spirit of Christ in the Church. This chapter continues that line of argument by showing that Schleiermacher’s acclaimed “God-​consciousness” is best understood in the Glaubenslehre not as a generic form of religious consciousness, but as grounded in the Christian reception of redemption in Christ and the Spirit.

a.  Distinguishing Christian God-​Consciousness from General Religious Consciousness In contemporary literature, the trend to link Schleiermacher’s understanding of the God-​consciousness to general forms of human religious consciousness most likely began with Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience.5 Proudfoot argues that, as a Romantic response to the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher tries to secure religion against modernity by insulating it within the realm of feeling. Grace Jantzen echoes Proudfoot, explaining that the modern construction of mysticism occurs “under the long shadow of Kant. This shadow stretches through the work of Schleiermacher and William James, who try to retrieve religious and mystical experience from Kantian structures by seeing such experiences as unique, intense, subjective states of consciousness.”6 Following this interpretive tradition and 5 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1985). Thandeka has a similar interpretation in “Schleiermacher’s ‘Dialektik’: the Discovery of the Self that Kant Lost,” Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 4 (October 1992), pp. 433–​52. 6  Grace M. Jantzen, “Feminists, Philosophers, and Mystics,” Hypatia 9, no. 4 (fall 1994), pp. 186–​206 (194). See also Jantzen, Becoming Divine:  Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 113–​19. Compare George Lindbeck’s characterization of Schleiermacher as an “experiential expressivist,” in George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine:  Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 1984), p.  16; similarly, see Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospels as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1985), pp. 25–​31, and “Piety, Narrative, and Christian Identity,” Word and World 3 (1983), 148–​59, reprinted in Constructing Public Theology:  The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991), pp. 126–​41. Brian Gerrish defends Schleiermacher against Lindbeck’s charge in “The Nature of Doctrine,” Journal of Religion 68 (1988), pp. 87–​92. See also Georg Behrens, “Schleiermacher Contra Lindbeck on the

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emphasizing the nonconceptual aspects of “feeling,” Farley claims that “Pseudo-​ Dionysius, Schleiermacher, and Mechthild of Magdeburg are among those lovers whose writings dwell in the liminal space where we know only that we do not know.”7 According to Farley, Schleiermacher achieves his particular version of “unknowing” by challenging the adequacy of cause-​effect and subject-​object distinctions.8 While God is the source of all that is structured by dual distinctions, God Godself is not subject to duality of any kind. Moreover, as Farley interprets Schleiermacher, the duality between God and creation can be overcome from the human side by attending to a nondual “part of our primordial psychic makeup.”9 There is “a dimension of mind that is itself nondualistic. This opens an area in which not only causality but the difference between self and other dissolves. Where there is no self and no other, no soul and no (personal) God, there is no cause and effect.”10 Mystical union with God is reached by tapping into this mental arena that resembles the divine insofar as it is nondual. This dimension of mind, though it can never be an object for consciousness, is “the underlying condition for sensible [dualistic, everyday] self-​consciousness.”11 It is a preconscious mental structure that “connects sense data, memories, emotions, thoughts, and decisions together and gives us the experience of existing as a particular person.”12 Farley identifies this structure of consciousness with Schleiermacher’s phrase “immediate self-​ consciousness” (unmittelbaren Selbstbewusstsein).13 Status of Doctrinal Sentences,” Religious Studies 30, no. 4 (1994), pp. 399–​417; and Christine Helmer, Theology and the End of Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), pp. 149–​69. 7 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 68. Throughout her work, Farley uses both the early and late Schleiermacher, citing the Speeches, Christmas Eve:  Dialogue on the Incarnation, and The Christian Faith as though they are all of one piece. While my concern is with her use of the mature Schleiermacher, I have resisted any attempt to create an artificially neat separation of the sources she uses by engaging only those paragraphs that reference The Christian Faith. It is also important to note that insofar as Farley cites The Christian Faith, she refers almost exclusively to paragraph 5.  She is not the first or only reputable scholar to proceed on this basis; it is common for interpreters to appear never to have read further than the Introduction. Yet, as with the relation between the early and late Schleiermacher, the relationship between The Christian Faith’s Introduction and the remainder of the text is a highly contested one. See, for instance, Hans Frei’s treatment of Schleiermacher in Types of Modern Theology (ed. George Hunsinger and William Placher; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 34–​46, pp. 65–​91. 8  Farley, “Schleiermacher, the Via Negativa, and the Gospel of Love,” pp. 145–​57 (150), and Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 81. 9 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 81. 10 Ibid., p. 68. 11 Ibid., p. 80. 12 Ibid., p. 81. 13 Ibid.

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Through the immediate self-​consciousness, the human is united with the divine.14 Further, Farley claims that, for Schleiermacher, immediate self-​consciousness simply is God-​consciousness.15 Immediate self-​consciousness is thus not the way to actualize God-​consciousness; the two are actually identical. Evidence that one has tapped into this preconscious psychic structure is found in expressions of love and compassion, since these are feelings and actions that Farley believes display a breakdown of dualistic concepts like self-​other and subject-​object.16 There are at least two interpretive issues at stake here:  first, whether Schleiermacher’s discourse in the Glaubenslehre about “God-​consciousness” is a discussion of humanity’s psychic makeup in general and denotes a preconscious structure of the human mind in particular; and second, whether, according to his mature text, God-​consciousness is nondualistic in terms of subject-​object and cause-​effect distinctions, such that immediate self-​consciousness is identical to God-​consciousness. After treating these interpretive claims, I  will take account of the admittedly misleading statements Schleiermacher makes in the Introduction and argue that these statements may be more adequately understood when interpreted in light of his claims from the later portions of the Glaubenslehre. Doing so again draws attention to Schleiermacher’s Christomorphic anthropology. 1.  Christian God-​Consciousness Turning to the first interpretive issue: In paragraphs 32 to 35, Schleiermacher maintains that God-​consciousness is the immediate feeling of being absolutely dependent upon God.17 This type of immediate feeling is contained in every Christian self-​consciousness as the only way that God and the human can be united in self-​ consciousness. In other words, the self can only be conscious of its relation to God as one who is absolutely dependent upon God. The reason has already been seen in previous chapters: only the feeling of absolute dependence upon God adequately testifies to humanity’s reception of graciously given redemption in and through Christ and the Spirit. The immediate feeling of absolute dependence on God is, for Schleiermacher, contained in every Christian self-​consciousness: he explicitly observes that his discussion of the God-​consciousness presupposes “the whole Christian religious consciousness.”18 As an antispeculative theologian, Schleiermacher makes it clear that all talk of the feeling of absolute dependence is an abstraction from 14  Farley, “Schleiermacher, the Via Negativa, and the Gospel of Love,” pp. 145–​57 (150). 15 Ibid. 16 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 82. 17  CF §32–​5, pp. 131–​41. For an account of Schleiermacher’s notion of Gefühl in his early work, see Julia Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl,” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 67–​105. 18  CF §32.1, p. 131.

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the particularities of lived Christianity: God-​consciousness does not “constitute by itself alone an actual moment in religious experience.”19 Correspondingly, he writes that, within the Christian community, “there can be no religious experience which does not involve a relation to Christ.”20 The reverse is also true: “if anyone should maintain that there might be Christian religious experiences . . . which contained absolutely no consciousness of God, our proposition would certainly exclude him from the domain of that Christian belief which we are going to describe.”21 As we have seen in Chapter 5, given that Christ’s person was wisely created by God and God dwelt in him thereafter as the activity of love, by dint of Christ’s very existence, a relation to Christ includes a relation to God. A  relation to Christ, in turn, occurs through engagement with the Christian community, in which God dwells in and through the common Spirit of Christ’s Church. As Schleiermacher explains, “God-​ consciousness” is derived from “the religious consciousness as it appears and is recognized everywhere in the Evangelical (Protestant) Church.”22 In the Glaubenslehre’s Introduction, Schleiermacher further identifies religious consciousness with “piety,” a word I have been using throughout this book because of its currency in his context as that which forms the basis of religious communion in the Protestant Church. As he defines it, “the self-​identical essence of piety, is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”23 Christian piety is the consciousness of being in relation to God, and this consciousness occurs in and through Christ and his Spirit. As I briefly noted in Chapter 2, Schleiermacher famously describes pious God-​ consciousness as a modification of Gefühl (feeling).24 Gefühl is not synonymous with “emotion” or any particular emotion (though both joy and sorrow, for example, are compatible with piety). Piety is not essentially conceptual, but it is nonetheless a conscious state. Schleiermacher uses the phrase “immediate self-​ consciousness” to modify Gefühl: So that if anyone takes the word “feeling” in a sense so wide as to include unconscious states, he will by the other word [i.e., self-​consciousness] be reminded that such is not the usage we are here maintaining. Again, to the term “self-​consciousness” is added the determining epithet “immediate,” lest anyone should think of a kind of self-​consciousness which is not feeling at all.25 19 Ibid. 20  Ibid., p. 132. 21  Ibid., p. 131. 22 Ibid. 23  Ibid., §4, p. 12. 24  Ibid., §3, p. 5. 25  Ibid., §3.2, p. 6.

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Pious Gefühl, in other words, is a conscious state in which one is aware of one’s relation of absolute dependence upon God. As Robert Williams describes it, pious Gefühl is the concrete, lived relation between the self and God.26 Although piety is essentially a modification of Gefühl, God-​consciousness, along with other modifications of feeling, is compatible with conceptual thought. In fact, Schleiermacher states that “as regards the feeling of absolute dependence in particular, everyone will know that it was first awakened in him in the same way, by the communicative and stimulative power of expression or utterance.”27 Indeed, he explains, “the feeling of absolute dependence becomes a clear self-​ consciousness only as this idea [i.e., the idea of God as the co-​determinant in the feeling of absolute dependence] comes simultaneously into being.”28 While pious self-​consciousness remains essentially an immediate feeling, this feeling becomes articulable when the co-​determinant of the relation of absolute dependence is referenced. The coincidence of feeling and conceptual thought occurs most naturally in the context of the communication of the redemption accomplished by God in and through Christ and his Spirit within Christian communities.29 The above discussion reveals that, for Schleiermacher, the following terms are synonymous: “piety,” “pious feeling,” “pious immediate self-​consciousness,” “consciousness of being absolutely dependent,” and “God-​consciousness.” It is important to notice that, contrary to Farley’s usage, “immediate self-​consciousness” per se is not a synonym for “God-​consciousness.”30 For Schleiermacher, “immediate self-​consciousness” without a qualifier means nonconceptual awareness of the self, and there are innumerable ways one might be nonconceptually aware of the self. Immediate self-​consciousness only becomes synonymous with God-​consciousness when it is a religious self-​consciousness; that is, when one is aware of one’s relation of absolute dependence upon God. Pious Gefühl, therefore, is neither a pre-​or unconscious structure of the human mind nor an unutterable state, though it is, in itself, preconceptual.31 Pious feeling “can be grasped by thought and conceived of in its own nature.”32 God-​ consciousness is not, then, a condition for experience and thought that remains itself insusceptible of conceptualization. As Claude Welch explains, “the living religious self-​consciousness is actually bound to, dependent on, an occurrence in 26 Robert Williams, “Schleiermacher and Feuerbach on the Intentionality of the Religious Consciousness,” Journal of Religion 53, no. 4 (1973), pp. 424–​55 (439). 27  CF §6.2, p. 27. 28  Ibid., §4.4, p. 17. 29  For a discussion of Schleiermacher’s Dialektik in relation to God-​consciousness, which involves thought-​speech in a community, see Richard R. Niebuhr, “Schleiermacher on Language and Feeling,” Theology Today 17 (July 1960), pp. 150–​67, esp. pp. 161–​7. 30  Cf. Williams, “Schleiermacher and Feuerbach,” pp. 424–​55 (434). 31  Cf. Louis Roy, “Consciousness According to Schleiermacher,” Journal of Religion 77, no. 2 (1997), pp. 217–​32 (230–​1). 32  CF §3.5, p. 12.

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the past, that is, an event really in man’s history.”33 We have already seen the way that, for the Christian community according to Schleiermacher, the Christian religious self-​consciousness is always tied to redemption through Jesus of Nazareth. In this way, God-​consciousness is rather different than a preconscious “principle” or “structure” of the human mind that would allow mystical union with the ineffable divine. As Schleiermacher asks rhetorically, “Tell me, is it really not sufficiently clear that, when I speak of the consciousness of sin, the need for redemption, and the contentment that we find in Christ, I am referring to actually experienced facts and not to facts of consciousness prior to experience?”34 Here we see just how far criticisms like the following, from Ian McFarland, miss their mark:  “Yet (contra Schleiermacher) this relationship of dependence is not a generalized ontological fact [about human self-​consciousness] that can be known by anyone through a bit of disciplined introspection . . . The form of a person’s dependence is a function of her calling in Christ.”35 This passage is not contra Schleiermacher. In fact, it nicely explicates Schleiermacher’s own position. Fiorenza explains, “The consciousness of grace is such that the Christian experience is not as such an experience of ‘utter dependency’ but rather an experience of the power of our redemption.”36 “God-​consciousness” is merely an abstraction from the lived piety of Protestants who trace their redemption to Christ and his Spirit in the Church. McFarland’s error is the one this thesis seeks to address: the error of reading the Glaubenslehre from start to finish and never looking the other way. 2.  Cause and Effect, Subject and Object Moving now to the second interpretive issue identified above: Contrary to Farley’s interpretation, Schleiermacher attends both to cause and effect and to the difference between subject and object directly in his understanding of God-​consciousness. He writes, “As regards the identification of absolute dependence with ‘relation to God’ in our proposition: this is to be understood in the sense that the Whence of our receptive and active existence, as implied in this self-​consciousness, is to be designated by the word ‘God,’ and that this is for us the really original signification of that word.”37 God, for Schleiermacher, is the Whence or universal cause of creaturely existence in general and of the feeling of absolute dependence in particular. As I have shown in Chapters 4 and 6, his theological method centers primarily on 33  Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1799–​1870, vol. 1 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1972), p.  83. See also Christine Helmer, “Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a Historical-​Theological Trajectory,” Journal of Religion 83, no. 4 (2003), pp. 517–​38 (536). 34  OG, p. 45. 35  Ian McFarland, The Divine Image: Envisioning the Invisible God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), p. 81. 36  Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Understanding God as Triune,” pp. 171–​88 (182). 37  CF §4.4, p. 16.

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the via causalitatis. We have already seen that, for him, God loves creation, wills its existence and preservation, and wisely determines and conditions creation as a whole. God is always pro nobis. For this to be the case, God cannot be synonymous with humanity or with natural causality, but must be other than creation. For Schleiermacher, then, God is neither part of the universe nor the universe considered as a whole.38 We have already seen in Chapter 6 that Schleiermacher emphasizes the otherness of God in the first part of the Glaubenslehre because of his concern to avoid anthropomorphism. Here we see that, right at the beginning, in the Introduction’s fifth paragraph, he is already on guard against anthropomorphism: Religious men know that it is only in speech that they cannot avoid the anthropomorphic: in their immediate consciousness they keep the object separate from its mode of representation, and they endeavor to show their opponents that without this integration of feeling no certainty is possible even for the strongest forms of objective consciousness or of transitive action.39

Any time human language is employed to describe God, anthropomorphism will be present to some degree. While Schleiermacher certainly cautions against anthropomorphism, however, it is not because he thinks that language, including cause-​effect and subject-​object distinctions, is entirely inadequate to express the divine attributes. Rather, he wants to avoid anthropomorphism as much as possible because he does not want people to forget that in relation to God, humanity cannot have certainty about God based on arguments or concepts that can be fully known and therefore mastered. Instead, the relation between God and humanity is entirely based on the gracious divine activity. This corresponds to the feeling of absolute dependence on God in Christ and his Spirit. Farley frequently cites paragraph 5, however, to shore up the claim that God-​consciousness is a realm of mind that is prelinguistic and preconceptual.40 Yet the passage cited above is better understood as indicating simply the recognition on Schleiermacher’s part that although Christians must use some degree of anthropomorphism if they wish to speak of God, they know that they remain in a relationship of absolute dependence upon, rather than mastery over, God. Certainty comes to the Christian not through proofs for the existence of God, philosophical speculation, moral argumentation, or knowledge of Church doctrine. Rather, the Christian is assured of God’s active love and wisdom in the grace-​conditioned reception of divine activity in Christ and his Spirit. By understanding God as the “Whence” or cause of the universe, Schleiermacher writes cause and effect into the fabric of his theology. The via causalitatis allows him to avoid some measure of anthropomorphism by emphasizing the asymmetrical 38  Ibid., p. 16–​8. 39  CF, postscript to §5, p. 26. 40 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 70, p. 80.

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and nonreciprocal relation of God to creation. In pious self-​consciousness, one is aware of the causal relation between one’s self and the co-​determinant of the self who is other than one’s self. This makes it difficult to forget that God is unconditioned and is not an object whose essence or existence can be mastered.41 That Christians infuse their speech about God with the feeling of absolute dependence serves as an implicit recognition of salvation by grace alone. It is only on that basis that confidence about their relation to God can be legitimately maintained.

b.  Christomorphic Anthropology If Farley’s interpretation of Schleiermacher’s theology is mistaken in the ways detailed above, it is nonetheless the case that Schleiermacher makes claims in the Introduction to the Glaubenslehre that have led interpreters in the direction Farley has taken. I will argue in what follows that these claims may be more adequately understood when read in concert with his claims from Part Two of the Glaubenslehre. Bringing these two together, Schleiermacher’s Christomorphic anthropology comes to the fore. In the Introduction to the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher claims that God-​consciousness is an essential feature of human nature.42 Likewise, he claims that pious self-​consciousness is “a universal element of life.”43 And elsewhere, he describes piety as “an original and innate tendency of the human soul,” which is awakened in particular ways in particular religious communities.44 In the introductory paragraphs of the Glaubenslehre, the meaning of these claims would seem to be simply that, to quote Schleiermacher himself, there is a “tendency of the human mind in general to give rise to religious emotions, always considered, however, along with their expression, and thus with the striving for fellowship, i.e. the possibility of particular religions.”45 This “tendency,” or susceptibility, certainly seems to imply that there is in humanity a general feeling that can be expressed and developed in any number of particular ways corresponding to different particular religious communions.46 However, these statements, taken out of the context of the whole Glaubenslehre, are only half-​truths for Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher claims that God-​ consciousness is an essential element of human nature not because of a supposedly objective observation that all human 41 Bruce McCormack offers an insightful explanation of feeling’s distinction from knowing and doing as “capacities.” See Bruce McCormack, “Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective: Karl Barth’s Theological Epistemology in Conversation with a Schleiermacherian Tradition,” Journal of Religion 78, no. 1 (January 1998), pp. 18–​37 (21). 42  CF §6.2, p. 27. 43  Ibid., §6.1, p. 26. 44  Ibid., §5.3, p. 22. 45  Ibid., postscript to §6, p. 30. 46 Ibid.

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beings have a general religious feeling. Rather, he does so because he understands “the beginning of the life of Jesus as the completed creation of human nature.”47 As we have seen in Chapter 5, human nature is divinely defined by Christ in relation to the rest of humanity; all of humanity constitutes an interrelated whole. As such, Schleiermacher goes so far as to say that “Christ even as a human person was ever coming to be simultaneously with the world itself.”48 Here, he understands humanity as one unified organism. All of humanity exists in relation to Christ, and Christ is the completion of human nature. Because God determines human nature in relation to Christ as its completion, Schleiermacher can and must say that consciousness of God, whether in its weak or strong form, is part of human nature—​this is at the heart of his Christomorphic theological anthropology.49 When Schleiermacher talks of the essence of human nature in the Introduction to his Glaubenslehre, then, he utters half-​truths to the extent that the fullness of his theology has not yet come into view. After reading the whole of his work, it becomes clear that the “general susceptibility” to religious feeling he speaks of in the Introduction is derived from his Christology. Thus, in the Introduction, statements that may sound at times like descriptions of humanity in general on the basis of empirical observations or rational postulates are, in fact, based on Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Church’s normative claims about Christ. As he states at the outset of the Introduction, The present work entirely disclaims the task of establishing on a foundation of general principles a Doctrine of God, or an Anthropology or Eschatology either, which should be used in the Christian Church though it did not really originate there, or which should prove the propositions of the Christian Faith to be consonant with reason. For what can be said on these subjects by the human reason in itself cannot have any closer relation to the Christian Church than it has to every other society of faith or of life.50

In other words, Glaubenslehre is not Natural Theology, philosophy of religion, or apologetics. Accordingly, it is rather difficult, on the basis of Schleiermacher’s work, to generate a generic anthropology regarding God-​consciousness made on the basis of either a posteriori observations or a priori structures of the human mind. Schleiermacher maintains that piety is part of the essence of human nature, because he understands human nature as such to be determined by Jesus Christ.51 Any propositions in the Introduction that are “borrowed” from other fields of study are legitimately dogmatic only when coordinated with and grounded in the distinctive and authentic features of Christian theology. 47  Ibid., §94.3, p. 389. 48  Ibid., §97.2, pp. 401–​2. See Chapter 5, pp. 118–​24. 49  CF §97.4, p. 411. 50  Ibid., §2.1, p. 3. 51 Cf. OG, p. 45.

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Schleiermacher’s comments regarding God-​consciousness in the Introduction to The Christian Faith are therefore a mere gateway to the richness of the linguistic, conceptual, traditioned, particular expressions of the Christian’s awareness of her absolute dependence upon God, all of which arises on the basis of the divine loving and wise activity in Christ and the Spirit.52 Far from being taken as this gateway, however, Schleiermacher himself laments that “the Introduction has been regarded as the main subject and core of the book, although it was intended only as a preliminary orientation.”53 He continues, expanding his focus to the entirety of Part One: “I had stated clearly enough that the first part, though truly a part of the structure itself, was only a portal and entrance hall and the propositions there, insofar as they could be set forth in an Introduction, could be no more than outlines that would be filled in with their true content from the ensuing discussion.”54 The fullness of Schleiermacher’s understanding of God—​as the fullness of his understanding of the feeling of absolute dependence—​becomes clear only after reading the whole work, where the divine activity is progressively described. Thus, what he offers in the Introduction is not the center of his theology but a beginning step toward the doctrines that follow.55 It seems that interpretive confusion about Schleiermacher’s theology at this point has arisen because of the complexity of his method and the manner of his presentation of doctrine in his mature work. Reading the Glaubenslehre backward, we can see that Schleiermacher grounds his theological reflection on the divine causality as it is received in the piety of the Prussian Protestant Church of his time. He maintains that the divine essence is united with human nature in Christ and in the Church. Christians unconditionally depend, through grace, upon the activity of divine love and wisdom in bringing about the union of the divine essence with human nature. And the feeling of absolute dependence upon God in Christ and his Spirit for creation-​redemption is what Schleiermacher calls piety. Thus, what appears at the beginning of the Glaubenslehre as the God-​consciousness is actually the final step in a logical and methodological sequence:  1)  a description of the faith of the nineteenth-​century Prussian Protestant Church regarding divine union with human nature; 2) a formulation of doctrine regarding divine causality, love, and wisdom, which is based on that faith; 3) an emphasis on grace within that formulation, using the notion of absolute dependence upon God; and 4) an identification of the sola gratia character of divine love and wisdom in the actualization of Christ and his Spirit with the pious, immediate self-​consciousness of creation’s

52 For an exemplary explication of the process of the communication of piety, as Schleiermacher conceives it, see Hector, Theology Without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 79–81. 53  OG, p. 56. 54 Ibid., p. 57. 55  Cf. Brian Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation: Essays in Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 205.

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absolute dependence upon God. It is no wonder that Schleiermacher’s interpreters have stumbled over this aspect of his thought. Schleiermacher summarizes the relation of his notion of the God-​consciousness to Christ and the Church, along with the relation of the two parts of the Glaubenslehre, in a way that helpfully captures the import of this chapter: In the actual life of the Christian, therefore, the two are always found in combination: there is no general God-​consciousness which has not bound up with it a relation to Christ, and no relationship with the Redeemer which has no bearing on the general God-​consciousness. The propositions of the first part [of the system of doctrine], which lay less direct stress on what is distinctively Christian, are on that account often treated as Natural Theology of an original and universally valid kind, and as such are overrated by those who are themselves less permeated by the distinctive element in Christianity. Others, again, underrate these propositions as attainable even apart from Christianity, and will only allow those propositions which express a relation to the Redeemer to rank as specifically Christian. Both parties are in error. For the former propositions are in no sense the reflection of a meager and purely monotheistic God-​consciousness, but are abstracted from one which has issued from fellowship with the Redeemer.56

Glaubenslehre always proceeds on the basis of positive, historical, living experience within Christian communities, and “God-​consciousness” is no exception. Although God-​consciousness is introduced before the exposition of doctrinal claims proper, and in a forward reading therefore seems to be presupposed by and not founded upon all that follows, it is, in actuality, a product of Schleiermacher’s already distinctively Christian consciousness. He downplays this distinctively Christian consciousness for the purpose of situating Christian theology in relation to other disciplines within the modern university. However, the notion of Christian God-​consciousness is not, ultimately, an exercise in speculation or based on a set of diverse empirical observations, but a theological product of close attention to the gracious reception of redemption effected through the Spirit of Christ in the Church, and the conditions of human existence and divine activity that make it possible. In the final analysis, God-​consciousness has its proper place in Christology, and on this basis the concept can be expanded into an aspect of theological anthropology. This discussion of the God-​ consciousness highlights the fact that Schleiermacher’s essential Trinitarianism permeates every aspect of his thought. Even, or perhaps especially, at the point where many interpreters have thought Schleiermacher abnegated his task as a theologian of the Church, his Glaubenslehre is true to the essential features of Christianity. The Christian God-​consciousness is the deeply felt conviction that, in grace, humanity exists in relation to divine love, which is actualized wisely in and through creation-​preservation, Christ, and the Spirit. 56  CF §62.3, p. 262.

Chapter 8 C ONCLUSION

From his own time to the present day, Schleiermacher’s readers have approached his work with their fault-​finding faculties in full swing. His Glaubenslehre was criticized such that even when he read his own work, “this person and that person float before one’s mind, first at one passage and then at another.”1 Hand in hand with the accusation that he relegates the Trinity to an appendix, he has been charged with psychological subjectivism or “experiential expressivism,” sexism, Spinozism, and idealism. Although some of these charges have limited merit, they are routinely overstated. Schleiermacher responded in the following way to the criticisms that emerged during his lifetime: “The best that can be said of me is that I am not what they take me to be. Nor would I probably say anything more, except perhaps to say to those who have made contradictory charges against me . . . that they should first come to agree among themselves.”2 Yet even his fiercest critics openly expressed their opposition to his writings “with a grudging acknowledgement of Schleiermacher’s genius and achievement.”3 Brunner describes him as the only great theologian of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Barth admitted, It may be surprising that I have declared myself to be at odds with Schleiermacher only with reservations:  rebus sic stantibus, “for the present,” “until better instructed.” Something like a reservation, a genuine uncertainty, may rightly be detected here. The door is in fact not latched. I am actually to the present day not finished with him. Not even with regard to his point of view. As I have understood him up to now, I  have supposed and continued to suppose that I  must take a completely different tack from those who follow him. I am certain of my course and of my point of view. I am, however, not so certain of them that I can confidently say that my “Yes” necessarily implies a “No” to Schleiermacher’s point of view. For have I indeed understood him correctly? Could he not perhaps be understood differently so that I would not have to reject his theology, 1  OG, p. 33. 2 Ibid., p. 36. 3  Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-​ Theological Comparison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6.

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but might rather be joyfully conscious of proceeding in fundamental agreement with him?4

Barth continues with a hope for the future of theology: “I would like to reckon with the possibility of a theology of the Holy Spirit, a theology of which Schleiermacher was scarcely conscious, but which might actually have been the legitimate concern dominating even his theological activity.”5 Mackintosh follows suit, also sounding a note of respect for Schleiermacher when he writes, Next to the Institutes of Calvin, it is the most influential dogmatic work to which evangelical Protestantism can point, and it has helped to teach theology to more than three generations. One could no more understand present-​day systematic thought without this book—​its faults equally with its virtues—​than one could understand modern biology without Darwin.6

Continuing this train of thought, Richard R.  Niebuhr argues that the “study of Schleiermacher is eminently worthwhile, if only because it forces the imagination out of the provincialism and parochialism of the present and requires us to think the perennial problems and affirmations of Christianity from a standpoint other than that from which we are accustomed to proceed.”7 Even by his critics’ estimation, then, Schleiermacher remains an important figure to grapple with in Christian history.8 In fact, James Graby maintains, One of the more instructive programmes available to the systematic theologian as well as the historian of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century protestant theology is the consideration of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century protestant theology in terms of its positive and negative critiques of the thought of Schleiermacher. Indeed, a paraphrase of Alfred North Whitehead to the effect that protestant

4 Karl Barth, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher,” in Karl Barth:  Theologian of Freedom (ed. Clifford Green; Making of Modern Theology; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), pp. 66–​90 (84). 5  Ibid., p. 89. See also Barth’s comment: “I opposed Schleiermacher and subjectivism because it was necessary at the time. Another time, those who have learned something from the Church Dogmatics may perhaps begin with Christian subjectivism. Why not?” (Karl Barth, Karl Barth’s Table Talk (ed. John D. Godsey; Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963), p. 13. 6 Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology:  Schleiermacher to Barth (London: Nisbet, 1937), p. 60. 7 Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion:  A  New Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), p. 14. 8  For a brief history of Schleiermacher’s reception through the 1960s, see James K. Graby, “Reflections on the History of the Interpretation of Schleiermacher,” Scottish Journal of Theology 21, no. 3 (September 1968), pp. 283–​99.

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theology during this period is but a series of footnotes to Schleiermacher, even though it oversimplifies the thought of the period, does have considerable truth.9

Schleiermacher’s reception history is important to acknowledge here as a way of situating the import of my argument. I hope to have offered in this book a fresh interpretation of Schleiermacher that might convince his readers that he is an authentically Christian, Trinitarian theologian for whom the person of Christ and the Holy Spirit operative in the Christian Church are of essential significance. This book has been motivated by two primary questions. First, what are we to make of Schleiermacher’s status and place in the history of Christian thought, especially with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity? Second, how does Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre hold together internally? What is the relation of the Trinity to Part One and Part Two, and what are the respective roles of kataphasis and apophasis within them? In answering these questions, I have put forward four primary theses: First, Schleiermacher’s work is more adequately understood by interpreting the Glaubenslehre backward rather than forward, given that this interpretive procedure brings the specifically Christian content of his thought to the fore. Second, Schleiermacher’s work can be interpreted as offering a doctrine of the essential Trinity, which makes claims about the divine life, but does so always in relation to the world. Third, despite Schleiermacher’s concerns about using “personhood” to describe the Living God, his Glaubenslehre actually employs personal analogies for God. Using his own Christological method to regulate a notion of divine personhood, his readers could, in fact, present a doctrine of God inspired by his work that includes divine personhood when referring to the one divine life. Fourth, Schleiermacher primarily adopts the kataphatic via causalitatis as his method and uses negative theology to nuance his positive claims. As such, his Glaubenslehre presents a coherent doctrine of God as presented in Parts One and Two. Beginning with the first three theses, which answer my first primary question: I set the discussion in motion by considering Schleiermacher’s interpretive reception. Building on recent work, I offered an interpretive lens that sought to recover and illuminate the theocentric and Christomorphic features of his mature work and rejected the hermeneutic tradition of reading the Glaubenslehre as offering a generic form of religiosity. Instead, I read the Glaubenslehre from back to front, starting with Schleiermacher’s discussion of the Trinity and moving from the positive to the negative aspects of his doctrine of God. Proceeding in this way, I have shown that the often-​repeated interpretation of Schleiermacher that understands him as an experiential expressivist, concerned with the subject in relative isolation and preoccupied with private states, dramatically misinterprets his mature work. I have advanced the second thesis that Schleiermacher can be read as a Trinitarian theologian. Although he rejects the traditional form of the doctrine, his work is an instance of what I  have described as essential Trinitarianism. 9  Ibid., p. 284.

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Essential Trinitarianism maintains the essentials of the Christian faith: the union of the divine essence with human nature in the person of Christ and the common Spirit of the Church, and the preparation for that union in divine creation-​ preservation. In addition, essential Trinitarianism includes an implicitly threefold structure of the divine life in relation to the world: God is causality, love, and wisdom. These three expressions of the very essence of God are homoousios, perichoretic, coequal, and coeternal. As such, they bear marked similarity to the relations of the Trinitarian hypostases of the classical tradition while avoiding speculation. Although these are genuine distinctions-​in-​relation, Schleiermacher consistently restricts himself to a discussion of the divine life in relation to the world. This antispeculative commitment undergirds his theological procedure throughout the Glaubenslehre. Third, I have argued that, despite Schleiermacher’s worry about using the term “person” for God, his mature work nonetheless employs a number of personal analogies for the divine life. Indeed, he offers resources for Christologically regulating divine personhood such that a relatively nonanthropomorphic notion of divine personhood could be conceived. His own transcendental and Christological mode of reasoning seems to leave open the possibility that a rendering of his doctrine of God might include an affirmation of the one personal divine life, structured in a threefold way. Drawing these three theses together, if my answer to the first question has been convincing, then Schleiermacher’s place within modern and contemporary theology needs serious reevaluation. Schleiermacher has often been seen as the scapegoat for much that is troubling about “liberal” Christianity; scholars will need to reckon with the fact that he was a constructive theologian in the modern age who called for a specifically Protestant reexamination and revitalization of the doctrine of the Trinity—​a doctrine that has been a source of controversy and difficulty from its inception. In his own work, he offers resources for this revitalization. Indeed, my reading of his doctrine of the Trinity avoids many of the difficulties that he believes plague the traditional form of the doctrine. The danger of tritheism does not arise, because the three distinctions-​in-​relation within the divine life are conceptual rather than genetic relations of dependence. Monarchianism is avoided as well, since causality, love, and wisdom are truly perichoretic structural features of the divine life considered in relation to the world. Definitional questions regarding these three features, as well as conceptual quandaries regarding their relations, may actually be less difficult to manage here than the parallel questions in the classical tradition. In short, what Schleiermacher presents, on my account, is an innovative and careful step toward a reformulation of a much-​contested doctrine. As such, his status within the history of Christian thought should not be that of a marginal figure who serves to remind us of theological pitfalls, but of a central and instructive thinker who challenges us to carry out the theological task with epistemic humility and a commitment to the essentials of the Christian faith. Considering the second of my primary questions and my fourth thesis, Schleiermacher’s focus on the economy of salvation within his theology indicates

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that he is an antispeculative, primarily kataphatic, distinctively Christian theologian who uses apophasis in a circumscribed and purposeful way. The two parts of his Glaubenslehre do not stand in tension with or contradiction to one another. They are coherent. Divine eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience serve to attest the Protestant refrain, sola gratia, over and again. Reading the work backward, these divine attributes emphasize the graciousness of the divine good-​ pleasure in relation to the whole of the universe. In the remaining sections of this concluding chapter, I will move the discussion further, anticipating a few ways Schleiermacher’s thought might be used constructively for contemporary theologies. Given the limitations of space, each possible trajectory will only be outlined.

a.  Apophasis and Kataphasis Schleiermacher’s work, it seems to me, could both beneficially contribute to the mitigation of sexist idolatry within Christian theologies and communities, and also work against the contemporary interest in radical apophasis among Christian feminists, which I would argue works at cross-​purposes with feminist aims. Many contemporary feminist theologians consider the employment of the via negativa a chief way to promote the flourishing of all human beings.10 These attempts may be part of the current “ ‘apophatic rage’ (as one scholar has termed the current post-​Heideggerian turn in continental philosophy and theology).”11 Sarah Coakley argues that one motivation for pursuing the apophatic in Pseudo-​ Dionysius, in particular, is that it has been seen as a “means of an end-​run around Kant’s ban on speculative metaphysics.”12 Apophasis provides a way to deal with 10 For an account of some of these feminists since the 1980s, see Sigridur Gudmarsdottir, “Feminist Theology and the Sensible Unsaying of Mysticism,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 273–​85. See also Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no.  4 (December 2008), pp. 905–​33. Examples include Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston:  Beacon, 1985); Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy:  Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is:  The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Herder & Herder, 2005); and Kathryn Tanner, “In the Image of the Invisible,” in Apophatic Bodies, pp. 117–​34. 11 Sarah Coakley, “Introduction—​ Re-​ thinking Dionysius the Areopagite,” in Re-​ thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), p. 1. The phrase was coined by Martin Laird, OSA, in “ ‘Whereof we speak’:  Gregory of Nyssa, Jean-​Luc Marion, and the Current Apophatic Rage,” Heythrop Journal 42 (2001), pp. 1–​12. 12  Coakley, “Introduction—​Re-​thinking Dionysius the Areopagite,” p. 4.

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the problem of what may be said about God that both has roots much earlier in Christian history and accords with recent continental thought. Moreover, by denying knowledge of God, or primarily affirming what God is not, feminists argue that the resultant theological “unknowing” is less available for use as a tool of oppression and more likely to avoid the kind of idolatry that occurs on the basis of understanding theological claims too literally. As such, Catherine Keller puts her finger on the pulse of much of contemporary feminist theology when she writes, “the folds of feminist discourse and the folds of apophatic theology may prove mutually disclosive.”13 Wendy Farley expands on this point: “divine transcendence cautions us against all of the idolatries we carry around in our heads and in our churches: ideas about God that displace the desire for the Good beyond even our best thoughts.”14 Divine transcendence here functions as a synonym for the apophatic unsaying of God, which makes room for a contemplative desire for the infinite. It is a theological commonplace that human beings cannot fully grasp the inexhaustible richness of the divine identity and activity. Yet some theologians have gone further by offering a presentation of God informed by what might be called “radical apophasis.” Consider, for example, Pseudo-​Dionysius’s claim that the supra-​essential being of God “is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence.”15 On such a view, God is totaliter aliter.16 Elizabeth Johnson reiterates this view as she constructs a Rahnerian-​inflected Thomistic form of feminism. Drawing on Augustine and the Cappadocians’ affirmation of divine incomprehensibility, she explains, God’s unlikeness to the corporal and spiritual finite world is total. Hence human beings simply cannot understand God. No human concept, word, or image, all of which originate in experience of created reality, can circumscribe divine reality, nor can any human construct express with any measure of adequacy the mystery of God who is ineffable. . . . It is proper to God as God to transcend all similarity to creatures, and thus never to be known comprehensively or essentially as God. In Augustine’s unforgettable echo of the insight of earlier Greek theologians, Si comprehendis, non est Deus: if you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.17 13  Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender,” pp. 905–​33 (909). 14  Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 11. Emphasis in the original. 15  Pseudo-​Dionysius, “The Divine Names,” in Pseudo-​Dionysius: The Complete Works (trans. Colm Luibheid; New York: Paulist, 1987), pp. 47–​132 (54). 16 The phrase “totally other,” or totaliter aliter, is reminiscent of the dialectical work of the early Barth. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 17 Johnson, She Who Is, p. 105. My emphasis.

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Whether in its premodern, modern, or contemporary formulation, the point for radically apophatic theologians is that there is an infinite qualitative distinction between God and the world. One implication of this view is that Christian speech and theology include a heavily negative dimension. While feminists employ radical apophasis as a safeguard against sexist idolatry, a cause I fully endorse, this approach has at least three serious drawbacks. First, building into feminist theology a device that requires all theological claims, including statements that God is loving or gracious, to be denied as adequate indications of the divine essence ought to give feminist theologians considerable pause. As Keller recognizes, radical apophasis “will build into theology a mechanism for the unsaying of its patriarchy. But at the same time, it builds into feminist theology itself an autodeconstructive device: a spiritual principle of unknowing. If we unsay we also permit our pet positions to be unsaid.”18 Although some form of apophaticism, in the sense of a recognition of the limits of human speech, will be a common part of Christian theologies, radical apophasis threatens to undo any form of Christian convictions about God. Second, radical apophasis creates an apophatic lacuna that, as Coakley warns, “may leap to the place of ‘unknowing,’ leaving curiously intact the sexual stereotypes it claims to overcome.”19 An appeal to divine mystery will not in itself undo male or masculine doctrines of God within the theological imagination. As Beverly Wildung Harrison explains, “This ‘wholly other’ God is, for them, still Father, Lord, King, all concrete terms of male agency. He remains, always, whatever else they aver of God, a male image.”20 Because radical apophasis undermines positive theological claims, it cannot offer alternative images or concepts that are not immediately undone as well. Patriarchy, sexism, and heterosexism are therefore untouched by radical apophasis at the level of theological imagination. Third, by its nature, radical apophasis downplays rather than celebrates concrete particularities. Beverly J. Lanzetta seems to recognize this feature of radical apophasis when she explains, An apophatic Christology approaches reality from the side of emptiness and reads his [i.e. Christ’s] message of salvation from the vantage point of the divine abyss. All are called not to his name, his ministry, or even his person, but are called to sustain the tension between the saying and the unsaying, and between the living and the dying, in which God’s nonviolent heart yearns for unconcealment.21 18  Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender,” pp. 905–​33 (915). 19  Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2002), p. 68. 20  Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics (ed. Carol S. Robb; Boston: Beacon, 1985), p. 228. 21  Beverly J. Lanzetta, The Other Side of Nothingness:  Toward a Theology of Radical Openness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 91.

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Those who want to affirm particularity of any kind, whether by way of race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or some other category, will have a hard time doing so with a radically apophatic frame of mind. If the particularity of Christ is erased in an apophatic Christology, then the particularity of Christians, individually and as a group, might also be erased from, or at least become peripheral to, Christian theological reflection. As such, radical apophasis is perhaps not well suited for achieving inclusive Christian communities where particular concrete persons are included as particular concrete persons. The affirmation of concrete forms of difference may, in this context, provide only an ad hoc addition to a radically apophatic theology. For these three reasons, if feminist theologians want to assist in breaking the hold that patriarchy, racism, sexism, and heterosexism have within the Christian Church, radical apophasis may not prove to be a felicitous helpmate. A  limited form of apophaticism may remain useful as a way of keeping theologians from hyperliteralism about theological claims and allowing space for critique of those claims. A totalizing form of apophaticism, however, may not be as useful as many feminist theologians might wish. Radical apophasis works at cross-​purposes with feminist theological aims by undermining all positive doctrinal statements, thereby failing to offer alternatives to masculine language for God and working against the goal of establishing inclusive ecclesial communities that welcome particular persons as concrete persons. It is here that a kataphatic interpretation of the mature theology of Schleiermacher such as the one I have offered in this book might be used to advance feminist theology in its stand against both propositionally reductionistic theology and irredeemably sexist idolatry.22 Schleiermacher’s mature work allows the doctrine of God to be grounded in the incarnate life and community of Christ—​that is, in the fecundity and creativity of the divine life in relation to the world. One example of this, already partially treated above, is that Schleiermacher’s understanding of the divine could make possible a Christologically regulated understanding of human personhood that steers clear of gender essentialism and links the post-​resurrection Christ to the diverse bodies within the Church. In this way, his approach potentially enables a genuine transformation of the Christian imagination while keeping undue anthropomorphism at bay. Part of this transformation could also include some form of Trinitarianism. Many feminists are involved in efforts to revitalize the doctrine,23 partially because the doctrine of the Trinity arguably sums up the distinctive Christian understanding of the divine and may be used to present Christianity’s highest values. 22  For reasons of space, I  can only offer outlines and contours of what this might look like. 23 Cf. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self:  An Essay “On the Trinity” (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2013); Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us:  The Trinity and the Christian Life (New  York:  Harper One, 1991); Katherine Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

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As a particular way in which Schleiermacher’s work could be useful for feminist thought, it might be recognized here that his essential Trinitarianism, as I have interpreted it, allows a description of the divine life that could use the historical nomenclature of “Father” and “Son” when conversing with ancient biblical witnesses, but does not utilize masculine pronouns and names for the essential structure of the divine One. By removing androcentric relationships and “persons” from the doctrine of the Trinity, feminist theologians could offer a way for Christians to think and speak about God that responds constructively to Mary Daly’s statement “If God is male, then the male is God.”24 At the heart of the divine life in essential Trinitarianism, we do not find Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but intentional causality, love, and wisdom. Even so, this description of the divine life is grounded in the economy of salvation: in the created web of existence, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the Spirit of Christ that lives on in the multiplicity and variegated diversity of the body of Christ. If Christian communities could embrace liturgically refined expressions of divine causality, love, and wisdom as adequate descriptors of the divine life, this could go some way toward encouraging just relations within Christian communities and relationships.

b.  Christian Ecumenism Schleiermacher’s work could also be useful for current ecumenical efforts between those on the right and left sides of the theological spectrum. Specifically, my reformulation of his doctrine of God, in terms of divine personhood, could provide a common theological language for “conservative” and “liberal” Christians. I  use the terms loosely, as they may not be as useful as we might be led to believe. For instance, consider Gary Dorrien’s definition of “Liberal Theology.” Dorrien understands it primarily as a mediating movement that has four defining characteristics. First, liberal Christianity has its roots in Protestant thought at the turn of the nineteenth century. Second, it is reformist, in that it attempts to reconcile Christianity with “the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry.”25 Third, it is committed to the authority of reason and experience. Finally, liberal theologians conceive of Christianity primarily as a way of life. The limitations of this definition become clear when we see that both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin would arguably fit the bill as liberal theologians on Dorrien’s definition, save that they lived before the turn of the nineteenth century. An easy demarcation of liberals from conservatives on the basis of themes or theological convictions, therefore, might not be possible. At bottom, the term “liberal” in theology may simply gesture toward a certain 24 Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 19. 25 Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology:  Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–​1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. xxiii.

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theological mood of intellectual curiosity, and a belief in the provisionality of theological statements, in light of modern thought. However, there is good reason to think that one significant difference between “liberals” and “conservatives” is their distinct formulations of theological language. Liberal theologians may prefer to speak of God as, for instance, the “ground of being,” one’s “ultimate concern,” or the “horizon of being.”26 In part, they prefer to speak in such ways because they are legitimately concerned to avoid anthropomorphism and the ways that “a personal God” has been used to oppress people. As an example, for Wendy Farley, “The idea of God as a person, a being, with omnipotent powers is essential to the logic of domination by which some are saved and others damned, some orthodox and others heretics, and by which women and sexual minorities, the afflicted and the rebellious, remain perennial outsiders.”27 As such, some liberal-​minded readers might not find something like “the One who wisely loves creation” a satisfactory appellation. For those toward the right side of the theological spectrum, on the other hand, anthropomorphic features of God, modeled on the maleness and supposed masculinity of Jesus of Nazareth and the God he speaks of, are commonly and deeply held convictions. For instance, Kallistos Ware states that “almost always the symbolism used of God by the Bible and in the Church’s worship has been male symbolism,” and that although “we cannot prove by arguments why this should be so, yet it remains a fact of our Christian experience that God has set his seal upon certain symbols and not upon others.”28 That being the case, if “we were to start saying ‘Our Mother who art in heaven,’ instead of ‘Our Father,’ we should not be merely adjusting an incidental piece of imagery, but replacing Christianity with a new kind of religion.”29 More traditional, conservative Christians like Ware aim to restrict theological language to androcentric sayings about God. Since I have used Schleiermacher’s work in conversation with feminist thought in order to construct a notion of divine personhood, the particular way I go about describing divine personhood might be just as unpopular among conservatives as among liberals. Nonetheless, a Christologically regulated notion of divine personhood might achieve a middle way that could, to some extent, allow conservative-​ and liberal-​leaning readers alike to speak the same language regarding the doctrine of God. This ecumenical task is important when the line between conservative and liberal cuts across denominations, threatening not only the organizational unity of Christian churches but also Christians’ ability to speak intelligibly to one another. 26 For example, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 163–​289; Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (trans. William Dych; New  York:  Continuum, 1994); Daly, Beyond God the Father; Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away. 27 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, p. 66. 28  Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, revised ed., 1995), p. 42. 29 Ibid., p. 43.

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R. Marie Griffith is one feminist author who recognizes the need for a shared understanding between conservatives and liberals, specifically among women.30 Feminists cannot claim to be genuinely concerned about the oppressed and marginalized when they do not listen to the voices of both liberal and conservative women. Griffith argues that class-​based interests are at work in the insularity between liberal feminists and conservative women. She states that the “general hostility toward religious and cultural ‘backwardness’ is fueled by interests that are profoundly class-​based.”31 While Griffith’s project is an ethnographic depiction of evangelical women and my work is an explicitly theological enterprise, the same conviction undergirds both:  there is a need for liberal feminists to pay attention to concepts dearly held by conservative women, and, I would add, to present their Christian theologies and theological epistemologies in a way that attempts to mitigate insulating, perhaps class-​ based, theological differences. An interest both liberals and conservatives share is the person of Christ. By attending to Christology when formulating their accounts of God, the two groups may be able to forge a common language. As Bruce McCormack notes, the person of Christ is “the one empirical reality in which God is both empirically given and non-​given at the same time, viz. the God-​human in whom divine and human exist in a single subject.”32 By bringing the doctrine of God into greater relationship with Christology in the way this book has attempted by drawing on the work of Schleiermacher, perhaps Schleiermacher could once again aptly be called a “liberal evangelical.”33 The Schleiermacherian reformulation of the doctrine of God that I have offered in Chapter 4 provides a vision of God that is both relatively nonanthropomorphic and personal, concerned to root out idolatrous speculation and maintain an essential relation to Christ. Of course, holding divine personhood in common will not entirely bridge the gap between conservative and liberal. I  do, however, hope that an embrace of divine personhood—​along with the recognition that Schleiermacher offers a legitimate alternate form of Trinitarianism—​might be part of an effort to identify theological language that could have resonance in both conservative and liberal circles. This effort could contribute to the investigation and construction of ecumenical interests across the theological spectrum.34 30  R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 31  Ibid., p. 205. 32  Bruce McCormack, “Not a Possible God But the God Who Is,” in The Reality of Faith in Theology (ed. Bruce McCormack and Gerrit Willem Neven; Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 111–​39 (138). 33  Brian Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), p. 31. 34  See Shelli M. Poe, “Locating Prayerful Submission for Feminist Ecumenism: Holy Saturday or Incarnate Life?” Feminist Theology (forthcoming).

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c.  Eco-​Theology Schleiermacher’s thought is also helpful for eco-​theologians who share a concern for ecological, planetary living.35 Notions of interconnectivity, community, and diversity direct Schleiermacher’s thought throughout his Christian Faith so robustly that, admitting some anachronism and exaggeration, we might arguably call him an ecological theologian before his time. Because of Schleiermacher’s emphases on the embodied reality of the divine activity in Christ and the common Spirit of the Church, the eternal covenant between faith and science, and the interdependence of all creatures, his doctrine of God could provide a theological ground for projects within the burgeoning fields of eco-​theology and eco-​ feminism and related Christian economies.36 Take, for instance, Sallie McFague’s call for a doctrine of God that is different than that implied by the neoclassical economic model. According to a neoclassical view, God is imagined as heavenly, otherworldly, above, distant, and external to creation. In an ecological model, on the other hand, “God is radically present in the world, as close as the breath, the joy, and the suffering of every creature. The two views of God and the world, then, are very different:  in the one God’s power is evident in God’s distant control of the world; in the other, God’s glory is manifest in God’s total self-​giving to the world.”37 While McFague’s description and assessment of the God-​world relation here may lack the theological subtlety of Schleiermacher’s work, she points to the importance of emphasizing the kataphatic divine One who, though always qualitatively distinct from the world as its eternal Whence, wisely loves the world and self-​communicates to the universe. Because of these features of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God, his mature work could bolster feminist constructions that highlight creaturely interdependence, the self-​giving of God under the conditions of time and space, and the importance of viewing faith and the hypotheses of natural science as congruent. In these ways, Schleiermacher’s work could contribute to contemporary eco-​theologies. Across all three of these trajectories of enquiry and engagement, it seems that Schleiermacher’s theology could contribute in important ways to constructive theologies. First, his work could curb sexist idolatry while halting the current feminist 35 See A Theology for Ecological Living:  Schleiermacher and Sustainability (ed. Shelli M. Poe; Columbia Series in Reformed Theology; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, forthcoming); and Poe, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology as a Resource for Ecological Economics,” Theology Today 73, no. 1 (2016), pp. 9–​23. 36 On the latter, see, for example, Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), pp. 31–​85. In this discussion, Tanner builds on the noncompetitive relation between God and creatures and the asymmetrical absolute dependence of the creature upon God. 37  Sallie McFague, “God’s Household: Christianity, Economics and Planetary Living,” in Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), p. 134.

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turn toward radical apophasis. Second, a corrected form of Schleiermacher’s work in the Glaubenslehre may allow scholars to make some headway in the ecumenical conversation between conservative and liberal Christians on a significant point of contention, the doctrine of God. Third, his theology could contribute to eco-​theological aims of just and planetary living. In these and other ways, Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith could benefit the contemporary revitalization of interest in Christian doctrines, and the doctrine of the Trinity in particular. These are, however, but three ways of taking forward the insight and creativity of the work of Schleiermacher. There may be many more. Specialists and nonspecialists alike are beginning to take notice and reevaluate their understanding of his work as the founder of modern theology. In this book, I have reconsidered what is, allegedly, Schleiermacher’s greatest weakness, his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity. Where others imagine that he has marked this doctrine for demolition in the reconstruction of Christianity in the modern age, I have shown that Schleiermacher has not only called for its revitalization but also offered a plan for making it the centerpiece and key to Protestant Christianity.

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INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS absolute dependence 14, 41–​3, 49, 108, 125, 129, 145, 153–​7, 162–​70 abstract, 21, 42, 45, 72, 89, 111, 152, 159, 162, 165, 170 academia, 13, 29–​33, 35–​6, 38–​9, 45, 49–​50, 170 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 43, 105 n.98, 107 n.112, 129 n.71, 156 n.92 Adrejc, Gorazd, 159 n.4 Allison, Henry E., 11 n.36 analogy, 25, 71–​2, 82, 94, 96, 99–​104, 108, 112–​14, 118, 155, 173 anthropomorphism, 22, 25, 53, 97, 99–​101, 105, 113, 128, 138, 151, 157, 159, 166, 174, 178, 180–​1 antispeculativism, 12, 18–​20, 23–​4, 30, 39–​40, 42–​3, 45–​6, 48–​50, 53–​4, 59, 61–​5, 67, 79, 82, 101, 116–​18, 147, 162, 174–​5 apophasis, 20–​2, 26, 137–​9, 141, 143, 147, 149–​51, 156–​7, 159, 173, 175–​8, 183 Aquinas, Thomas, 59, 101 n.83, 179 Augustine of Hippo, 71, 87 n.29, 112, 176 Barth, Karl, 5–​7, 58, 171–​2, 177 n.16 Bauckham, Richard, 68 n.46 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 11–​12 Behrens, Georg, 7 n.14, 160 n.6 Beiser, Frederick C., 13 n.41 Birkner, Hans-​Joachim, 10 n.27, 86 n.21 Blackwell, Albert L., 13 n.44, 83 n.6, 97 n.62 Bouwsma, William J., 38 Boyarin, Daniel, 68 Boyer, Bruce L., 140 n.15, 141 n.20 Boyer Jr., Ernest, 12 n.40 Brandt, James M., 33 n.17, 86 Brandt, Wilfried, 48 n.74 Briggs, Sheila, 8 n.21 Brunner, Emil, 5, 7–​8, 171 Butler, Judith, 154 n.84

Calvin, John, 23–​4, 29–​30, 37–​49, 53–​4, 60, 70 n.57, 83 n.6, 87 n.25, 87 n.29, 117, 125, 127, 159 n.1, 172, 179 Chalcedon, 106 Christ see Redeemer Christomorphism, 3, 25, 45, 47–​8, 65, 82, 85, 87–​8, 104–​5, 107–​11, 113, 116–​17, 124, 128, 139, 149, 155, 162, 167–​8, 173 church, 8, 12, 23, 24, 29 n.2, 30–​1, 33–​9, 42, 44–​5, 49–​50, 59, 60, 63 n.28, 63, 64, 69, 74, 76–​8, 103, 105 n.97, 116–​17, 121–​4, 131, 163, 168–​70, 178 civil law, 125–​6, 128, 130 classical doctrine, 15, 16, 22, 48 n.72, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67–​9, 70, 72–​4, 83, 92–​3, 95, 137 Coakley, Sarah, 20, 98 n.69, 106, 112 n.134, 175, 177, 178 n.23 Cobb, John, 13 n.46 concursus see divine causality confessions, 29 n.1, 30, 31, 33, 35 n.24, 36, 62, 63 n.28, 64 conscience, 84, 125–​6, 128, 130 consciousness Christian, 64–​5, 67, 84, 146, 163, 170 general monotheistic, 44, 170 of God, 19–​20, 39–​45, 49, 89, 91, 107–​10, 118–​20, 131, 143, 159–​70 of self, 6, 36, 39–​45, 49, 91, 98–​9, 125, 161–​2, 164–​7 of sin, 88, 115, 126–​7, 130 covenant, 30, 36, 38, 45, 49, 53, 182 Crouter, Richard, 6 n.11, 9 n.22, 10 n.28, 31 n.6, 64 Curran, Thomas H., 56, 57 n.8 Daly, Mary, 175 n.10, 179, 180 n.26 Dawson, Jerry, 31 n.3 DeHart, Paul, 61, 76 n.85, 118–​19 Delbrück, Johann Friedrich Ferdinand, 12 n.40

198

Index of Authors and Subjects

DeVries, Dawn, 8 n.20, 23 n.76, 33 n.16 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 12 n.40, 105 n.97 distinctions-​in-​relation, 25, 55, 62–​3, 67, 70–​2, 77–​9, 81–​2, 91–​5, 111, 114, 156, 174 as coequal, 16, 92–​3, 174 as coeternal, 16, 71, 92–​3, 174 as coinherent, 16–​17, 82, 92–​3, 94–​5, 131, 134, 156, 157 and generation, 16, 82, 92 as homoousios, 16, 92–​3, 174 and procession, 16–​17, 25, 82, 92, 95 (see also personhood) divine alterity, 21, 26, 55, 64, 112, 150 attributes, 4, 19–​21, 24–​6, 34, 48, 59, 60, 65, 71, 83, 84, 90, 92, 99, 115–​17, 124–​5, 130, 137–​9, 141–​2, 152, 166 causality, 70, 73, 81–​8, 91–​5, 131–​2, 138–​50, 146, 149, 165–​6 (see also decree, God as determinant) consciousness, 148, 151 (see also intentionality, omniscience) decree, 85–​8, 91, 106, 111, 124, 130, 133, 146, 148, 150, 153 essence, 4, 17, 54–​7, 69–​73, 78, 81–​4, 87–​95, 152, 157 eternity, 16–​17, 25–​6, 62–​4, 67, 70–​1, 75, 77, 79, 84–​5, 94, 101–​2, 132–​4, 139–​53, 156–​7, 174–​5 good-​pleasure, 22, 87–​8, 109–​10, 113, 156 governance, 77–​8, 85–​6, 88, 131, 133 grace, 37, 55, 64, 86, 115–​16, 120–​1, 128, 140–​1, 150, 156, 165, 167, 169–​70, 175 holiness, 84, 115, 125–​8, 130–​1, 134 immutability, 64, 103, 134, 141–​3, 149 (see also eternity) intentionality, 14, 85, 87–​90, 91, 97, 100, 108, 112–​13, 119, 123, 140, 145, 150–​1 justice, 125, 128–​30, 134 life, 12, 17–​19, 50, 60, 65, 79, 81, 83, 94–​5, 98, 104, 114, 134, 147–​8, 157 love, 14, 17, 20, 25, 60, 64, 88–​95, 105 n.98, 119, 121–​4, 128, 143–​4, 147, 150, 152 omnipotence, 144–​7, 148, 149, 156–​7, 175 omnipresence, 84, 143–​4, 150

omniscience, 91, 147–​50, 156–​7 self-​impartation, 29 n.2, 75, 78, 86, 89–​90, 117, 142, 148 unity, 15, 25, 48, 67, 69–​78, 83, 93–​5, 98, 102, 104, 156 wisdom, 4, 17, 20, 25, 40–​1, 60, 84, 89–​91, 92–​7, 102, 112, 130, 131, 145, 149, 169 Docetism, 105–​7, 111–​13 Dole, Andrew, 13 n.43, 33 n.15, 39 n.35, 120 n.22, 154 n.78 Dorrien, Gary, 179 Dowey Jr., Edward, 41, 46 ecclesiology see church economy of salvation see redemption ecumenical, 35–​6, 49, 179–​81 Elgendy, Rick, 126 n.61 Ellis, Brannon, 70 n.57 empiricism, 11, 32–​3, 168, 170, 181 Endo, Masanobu, 68 n.46 Enlightenment, 4, 9–​14, 19, 22, 30, 45, 53, 160 epistemology, 18, 50, 117, 137, 159, 174, 181 (see also knowledge) ethics, 14, 32, 85–​6, 112, 125 n.52 evil, 108–​9, 129–​30 experiential expressivism, 4, 7–​8, 160 n.6, 171, 173 faith, 8, 12, 23, 30–​1, 33–​5, 36, 38, 47, 61, 66, 68, 85–​6, 128 n.70 Farley, Wendy, 159–​62, 164–​7, 176, 180 Faull, Katherine, 8 n.21 feeling see Gefühl feminism, 8–​9, 22, 27, 105 n.99, 175–​9, 180–​1, 182 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, 45, 48 n.72, 59 n.15, 92, 147, 165 Frank, Manfred, 10 n.28, 112 n.131 freedom, 38, 54, 64, 74, 102, 103, 126, 133 Frei, Hans, 161 n.7 Friedman, Marilyn, 105 n.99, 110 Gefühl, 14, 42, 45, 49, 159 n.4, 162 n.17, 163–​4 (see also consciousness, piety) Gerrish, Brian A., 3 n.1, 5 n.3, 7 n.14, 10 n.28, 13 n.41, 23 n.76, 29 n.1, 31, 32

Index of Authors and Subjects n.10, 33 n.16, 39, 60, 90–​1, 146, 148 n.59, 160 n.6, 169 n.55, 181 n.33 Gockel, Matthias, 10 n.28, 23 n.76, 85 n.17, 145 n.46, 153 n.76, 171 n.3 God ad extra, 11, 19, 39, 42, 45, 49, 147, 166 ad intra (in se), 11, 18, 65, 79, 92, 147 as creator, 14, 30, 37, 42, 46–​8, 83 n.6, 113, 131, 146, 147, 151 as determinant, 3–​4, 83, 85, 88, 89, 111, 124 n.45, 125, 128–​30, 139–​40, 142–​3, 147, 155, 164, 167 as father, 41, 48 n.72, 55, 60, 63, 67, 70–​1, 73, 75–​8, 93, 94–​5, 131–​3, 134, 177, 179–​80 as Spirit, 17, 19, 45, 48 n.72, 55, 56–​7, 63, 70, 75–​7, 87, 89, 103, 116–​17, 121–​4, 131–​4, 172 as incarnate, 54–​7, 68, 72, 76, 87, 89, 118–​24, 130, 155, 178 as legislator, 125, 128, 130 as Son 63, 64, 67, 70–​1, 75–​8, 93, 95, 131–​3, 134 as sustainer, 46, 146 as Whence, 41–​2, 84, 165–​6, 182 God-​consciousness see consciousness of God Gordon, James, 39 n.37 Graby, James K., 172 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, 42 n.52 Gregory of Nazianzus, 71 Gregory of Nyssa, 59, 70, 73, 152 n.72 Griffith, R. Marie, 181 Gudmarsdottir, Sigridur, 175 n.10 Guenther-​Gleason, Patricia Ellen, 8 n.19 Guyer, Paul, 11 n.36 Hagan, Anette I., 29 n.1, 85 n.17 Harrison, Beverly Wildung, 177 Harvey, Van A., 5 n.4, 53 Hector, Kevin W., 23 n.76, 45 n.64, 73 n.67, 106 n.101, 109 n.121, 119, 155 n.88, 169 n.52 Hegel, G. W. F., 10 n.28, 56 Helmer, Christine, 5 n.7, 26 n.80, 67, 161 n.6, 165 n.33 Heppe, Heinrich, 87 n.25 Herms, Eilert, 31 n.5 Hollywood, Amy, 175 n.10

199

Horton, Michael, 5 n.4 Howard, Thomas Albert, 30, 31 n.4, 35 n.23 humanism, 38, 49 Husbands, Mark, 45 n.63, 56 n.5 Hypostases see personhood idealism, 10–​12, 53, 171 idolatry, 112, 157, 175–​8, 181, 182 immutability, 64, 134, 141–​3, 149 ineffability, 105, 111–​13, 151–​3, 156 interdependence, 23, 27, 124, 129, 151, 153–​5, 182 inwardness, 123, 140–​2, 154 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 10, 12–​13, 96, 102 Jantzen, Grace, 8–​9, 105 n.99, 109, 111 n.127, 112, 160 Johnson, Elizabeth, 175 n.10, 176 Jones, Paul D., 35 n.23 Jones, Serene, 38, 40, 127, 128 n.68 Jorgenson, Allen G., 9, 10 n.26, 88 n.30 joy, 128, 163 kataphasis, 20, 22, 26–​7, 44, 137–​9, 147, 150–​1, 157, 170, 173, 175, 177–​9 Keller, Catherine, 175 n.10, 176–​7 Kelsey, Catherine, 24 n.76, 112 n.128, 116 n.3, 118 n.12, 120, 153 n.75 keystone, 57 n.8, 58, 79, 95 Kim, Sung-​Sup, 24 n.76, 29 n.1, 85 n.17, 87 n.25, 151 n.68, 151 n.69 knowledge of creation, 32, 102 of God, 3 n.1, 37, 39–​43, 44, 46–​7, 49, 75, 89 and piety, 9, 14, 43, 167 n.41 (see also consciousness) of self, 39–​43, 49, 103, 126–​7, 176 Krieg, Carl E., 151 n.69 LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, 56, 178 n.23 Laird, Martin, 175 n.11 Lamm, Julia, 14, 42 n.52, 85, 89, 97 n.64, 99–​100, 145 n.40, 148, 152, 162 n.17 Lanzetta, Beverly J., 177 Lessing, Eckhard, 62 n.27 liberalism, 4, 50, 53, 174, 179–​81 Lindbeck, George, 4 n.3, 5, 7–​8, 160 n.6

200

Index of Authors and Subjects

literal interpretation, 132, 176, 178 Louth, Andrew, 21 Lücke, Friedrich, 61 n.24 Luther, 4 n.3, 5 n.3, 29 n.2, 35–​6, 42, 54, 60 Lutni, Kurt, 8 n.20 Mackintosh, Hugh Ross, 5–​7, 13 n.45, 116 n.3, 172 Manicheanism, 87, 105–​9, 113 Mariña, Jacqueline, 123 Massey, Marilyn Chapin, 8 n.21 matter, 108–​10, 113, 141 McCormack, Bruce, 20 n.66, 23 n.76, 151–​ 3, 155–​7, 167 n.41, 181 McDonald, Suzanne, 87 n.25 McFague, Sallie, 175 n.10, 182 McFarland, Ian, 165 McGinn, Bernard, 20 McGrath, Alister E., 3 n.1, 12 n.38, 56 n.5 Meckenstock, Günter, 31 n.5, 85 n.18 miracles, 32–​3, 120, 121, 132 modalism, 25, 62 n.25, 75, 81, 94 modernity see Enlightenment Moltmann, Jürgen, 6 n.12, 29 n.2 monarchianism, 55, 70–​1, 73, 75, 92, 174 monotheism, 56, 57, 98, 170 (see also general monotheistic consciousness) Moore, Walter, 23 n.76 moral law, 125–​8, 130 Muller, Richard, 87 n.25 mysticism, 21, 26, 159 n.4, 160–​1, 165 natural causality, 139, 145–​6, 166 natural theology, 12, 116, 168 Naturzusammenhang see interdependence Nazareanism, 105–​6, 107–​8, 109, 111, 113 negative theology see apophasis New Testament, 32–​3, 55, 62, 65–​9, 77 Nicol, Iain G., 9, 10 n.26, 88 n.30 Niebuhr, H. Richard., 6–​7 n.13 Niebuhr, Richard R., 3 n.1, 29 n.1, 33–​4, 152 n.70, 164 n.29, 172 Niesel, Wilhelm, 29 n.1 Nimmo, Paul T., 29 n.1, 37 n.28, 66 n.38 Nitzsch, Carl Immanuel, 61 n.24 Ohst, Martin, 23 n.76

pantheism, 12–​14, 85, 96–​7, 99–​100 Pearson, Lori, 120 Pelagianism, 87, 105, 106–​7, 110–​11, 113, 156 Penzel, Klaus, 35 n.24 perfection, 90–​1, 93–​4, 102, 106, 107, 112, 118, 122, 123, 128, 131 personhood and Christ, 4, 17, 56–​7, 82, 89, 132, 147, 155, 168, 181 divine, 12, 15–​16, 17, 25, 62, 63, 69–​73, 76–​8, 82–​3, 92–​123, 132, 174, 179, 180 human, 39, 43, 49, 65, 154, 155, 161, 178 Peters, Ted, 56 philosophy, 10, 13–​14, 32, 96, 105 n.97, 114, 137, 166, 168 piety, 6–​9, 12–​14, 24, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42–​3, 45, 48, 63, 74, 79, 86, 97, 108, 124, 138, 163–​5, 167–​9 pneumatology, 27, 45, 65, 73, 124, 130, 149 (see also God as Spirit) Poe, Shelli M., 104 n.96, 181 n.34, 182 n.35 politics, 6 n.11, 9, 35, 37, 39, 49 Powell, Samuel, 29 n.2, 50, 62 n.27, 68 n.45, 74, 79, 83, 122 privatization of religion, 4, 8–​9, 173 Protestantism, 3 n.1, 5–​6, 17, 23 n.76, 24, 29 n.2, 30, 31, 34–​9, 43 n.55, 49–​50, 53–​5, 60–​2, 79, 86, 87 n.25, 90, 102 n.86, 105 n.97, 163, 165, 169, 172, 174–​5, 183 Proudfoot, Wayne, 160 Prussia, 35–6, 37, 49, 74, 169 Pseudo-​Dionysius, 175–​6 Purvis, Zachary, 31 n.3 Rahner, Karl, 98, 176, 180 n.26 rationalism, 10–​12, 18, 33, 168 reciprocity, 32, 70–​1, 112, 123, 140–​2, 145, 147, 149, 151, 167 redeemer, 8, 11, 30, 36, 37, 44–​7, 65, 106–​7, 108, 110, 115, 118–​20, 121, 128, 131, 132, 147, 151, 170 Redeker, Martin, 8, 11 n.32, 33 n.16, 105 n.97, 128, 147 n.51 reformation see Protestantism religion see piety revelation see divine self-​impartation

Index of Authors and Subjects Richards, Jay Wesley, 152 n.70 Richardson, Ruth Drucilla, 8 n.20, 43 n.56 Ringleben, Joachim, 31 n.5 Ritschl, Albrecht, 29 n.2, 50 Romanticism, 4, 19, 22, 53, 160 Roy, Louis, 42 n.52, 107 n.112, 164 n.31 Rusch, William G., 75 Sabellianism, 15, 25, 48 n.72, 55–​6, 61 n.25, 75–​9 Sanders, Fred, 15 Schelling, F. W. J., 10–​11 Scholasticism, 21–​2, 53, 87 n.25, 102 n.86 Schweizer, Alexander, 29 n.1 science, 13, 14, 32–​5, 38, 49, 182 scripture, 6, 18, 24, 38, 46, 55, 62, 64, 65–​7, 68, 71, 77–​9, 88, 129, 132–​3, 180 self-​consciousness see consciousness of self sexism, 4, 8–​9, 175, 177–​80, 182 Sherman, Robert, 156 n.92 Shults, F. LeRon, 43 n.56 simplicity, 153, 156–​7 sin, 20, 26, 37, 48, 59, 88, 106, 126–​30, 132–​3, 165 Sonderegger, Katherine, 110 n.123, 146 n.48 Soskice, Janet Martin, 105 n.99, 108 n.115, 112 spatial, 45, 47, 84, 141–​4, 149, 151 speculation 8 n.22 see antispeculativism Spiegel, Yorick spinoza see pantheism Strauss, David Friedrich, 13 Streetman, Robert Francis, 62, 72, 76 n.79, 81 n.1 Streufert, Mary, 105 n.100 Stuart, Moses, 61, 75 Sydnor, Jon Paul, 154 n.80 systematic, 3, 22, 24, 25, 39, 44, 50, 57 n.8, 58–​9, 75, 86, 88, 106, 121, 124, 144, 149, 172 Tanner, Kathryn, 145 n.46, 175 n.10, 178 n.23, 182 n.36 temporal, 25, 31, 33, 45, 47–​8, 60, 77, 84, 90, 94, 101–​2, 111, 113, 118–​19, 125, 128, 130, 131–​3, 134, 138–​44, 148, 149, 151, 155, 157 (see also eternity) Thandeka, 160 n.5

201

theology, 12, 18–​19, 22, 30, 31–​4, 39, 40, 49, 64, 65, 81, 86, 89, 97, 138, 147, 169–​70, 172 Thielke, Peter, 10 Thiemann, Ronald F., 7 n.14, 160 n.6 Tice, Terrence N., 24 n.76, 116 n.3, 153 n.75 Tillich, Paul, 7, 180 n.26 transcendental method, 10, 12, 104–​7, 108, 113, 116, 174 (see also Kant) Trinitarian Treatise, 14–​15, 56, 79, 171 Trinity economic, 12, 15, 16, 17, 62, 65, 79, 114, 131–​4, 157 essential, 8, 16–​19, 20, 22–​3, 54–​5, 56–​7, 59, 61, 81–​3, 92–​5, 131–​3, 134, 143, 179 immanent, 15, 16, 17–​18, 24–​5, 49, 53–​5, 62, 63–​5, 67–​9, 71–​4, 81, 92–​5, 132–​4 tritheism, 55, 67–​8, 70–​1, 73, 92–​3, 98, 174 Turretin, Francis, 102 n.86 unconditional, 85, 87–​8, 118, 120, 124, 139, 140–​3, 149, 156–​7, 169 (see also absolute dependence) union of the divine and human see God as incarnate universality, 44, 85–​8, 124, 125, 129, 139, 140–​3, 146–​7, 149–​501, 54 n.84, 165, 167 Vallée, Gérard, 13 n.41 Vander Schel, Kevin M., 86 n.21 van Driel, Edwin Chr., 127 n.64 Verheyden, Jack C., 124 n.44 Vial, Theodore, 9 n.25 Voisin, Carol Jean, 36, 61 Walter, Gregory A., 151 n.69 Ware, Kallistos, 180 Welch, Claude, 16, 18, 42, 54 n.2, 56 n.5, 81, 124 n.44, 164 Wilcox, Jeffrey A., 62 n.25 Williams, Donald, 38 n.32 Williams, Robert R., 16 n.62, 81, 137, 142, 150–​1, 152 n.70, 164 Wyman Jr., Walter E., 35 n.24, 106 n.101 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus Ludwig von, 29 n.2, 128