Leithart: Schleiermacher still not rebabilitated

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was, for all intents and purposes, the father of liberal Protestantism. His well-meaning but misguided attempts to reconcile the Christian faith with the criticisms raised by its "cultured despisers" of the Enlightenment era opened the door for more radical revisions. Despite the best efforts of Karl Barth, the influence of Schleiermacher is still felt in liberal Protestant circles to this day.

Chief among the weaknesses of Schleiermacher's theology was his muddled Christology, which rejected, or at least strongly criticized, the Chalcedonian Formula, which declared that Jesus Christ was "at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man."

In an article first published a decade ago in the Harvard Theological Review, Lori Pearson attempted to rehabilitate Schleiermacher, claiming that his "Christology continues the ‘Antiochene’ tradition of protecting the absolute integrity of Jesus’ human identity while at the same time maintaining a more ‘Alexandrian’ emphasis on a single (divine) subject that is the source of all Christ’s redemptive activities.”

It is a valiant effort but, as Peter Leithart notes, it is unconvincing for several reasons.

First, Schleiermacher’s characterizations of the problems of classic Christological formulae seem contrived, and arise only because of idiosyncratic and rigid definitions of terms. There cannot be two natures in one person, he argues. That’s because “nature” refers to a conditioned, limited, corporeal existence, moving between activity and passivity; it doesn’t apply to God at all. Besides, he argues, a nature is normally a universal in which individuals participate, and it makes no sense to say that an individual person partakes of two natures at the same time. Person, he says, denotes a unity, but a double-natured being like Christ cannot really ever be unified.

But who says that “nature” has such a restricted meaning? In Christology, it obviously doesn’t. And classical Christology answers the question about unity by insisting that Christ is a single subject, the eternal Logos, who assumed a full human nature. That hardly satisfies our every curiosity, but then one wonders if Schleiermacher’s questions take sufficient account of the fact that in talking about Christ we are talking about an unparalleled mystery.

Pearson points out that for Schleiermacher the main problem with the two-natures doctrine is pastoral and perhaps apologetic: “It cannot give any guidance in the proper preaching of Christ,” Schleiermacher claims. It cannot, perhaps more precisely, make any sense to the cultured despisers to which Schleiermacher wanted to appeal.

The second problem is that even when there are “parallels” with classical Christology, Schleiermacher has put them in a quite different framework. Sein Gottes in ihm, Schleiermacher affirms, but this affirmation comes at the end of a sentence that identifies the Sein Gottes with Jesus’ fully operational God-consciousness: “The Redeemer. . . is like all men in virtue of the identity of his human nature, but is distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him” (Christian Faith 94). As Pearson explains it, “The Redeemer has what other humans have (a God-consciousness), but in a perfectly ordered and complete way. Since, however, the Redeemer has this perfect God-consciousness, he is a new creation, a ‘new implanting’ . . . of the God-consciousness in human nature.” In this way, Jesus is, Schleiermacher says, the one in whom “there is an existence of God in the proper sense.”

On Pearson’s description, further, Schleiermacher’s position is inconsistent. On the one hand, the God-consciousness is something he shares with other humans; yet she claims that he also “takes great pains to protect the immutability and impassibility of God” by exempting the “inner” divine life principle from the changes of his humanity. It’s not clear how these two statements cohere: Pearson says that Jesus’ “God-consciousness went through a process of development” (p. 357) and, quoting Schleiermacher about Jesus’ determination by His cultural identity, “such determination in no way concerns the real principle of His life but only the organism.” Perhaps the contradiction is Pearson’s and not Schleiermacher’s, but it’s there.

On Pearson’s description too, Schleiermacher combines Alexandrian and Antiochene motifs in a way that results in a (somewhat modified) Apollinarianism. Jesus has a full humanity in Schleiermacher’s scheme, but a “divine principle” of some sort or other plays the active role of shaping all Christ’s actions. Apollinarianism is far more orthodox, because at least it affirms that the Logos occupied the empty soul-space of the humanity of Christ; Schleiermacher insists that the Redeemer is not the second Person, not the Logos: “The Person of Christ began only when He became a man” (Christian Faith, 105). For all his talk of Sein Gottes, there doesn’t seem to be much to distinguish the Redeemer from an inspired man.

Pearson has shown that formal parallels to Chalcedon are evident in Schleiermacher. To my mind, though, she only confirms the common charge that he revised Christology in the direction of psychology and, one cannot avoid the Barthian charge, anthropology.

Wolfhart Pannenberg would still give Shcleiermacher a hearing but, in doing so, he treads on dangerous ground. Leithart notes in a follow-up post:

Pannenberg (Jesus – God and Man (scm classics), 285) offers a more sympathetic summary of Schleiermacher’s Christology than I have done. He agrees that Schleiermacher’s definition of “nature” as “a limited being existing in opposition to others” doesn’t fly: It “does not meet the patristic doctrine, since its concept of nature is interchangeable with the concept of being.” This addresses also to Schleiermacher’s objection that the language of Trinitarian theology and Christology clash.

But Pannenberg thinks that Schleiermacher is on stronger ground in his objection that using nature flattens the Creator-creature distinction: “how can divine and human be so subsumed under any single concept, as if both could be mutually coordinated as more precise specifications of one and the same universal?” asks Schleiermacher.

Pannenberg thinks this question “scores a direct hit” since “one cannot speak of divine being and human being as though they were on the same plane.” While admitting that “this was not the intention of patristic Christologies,” he argues that the “two-natures doctrine is objectionable” for just this reason.

A point taken, but I wonder if any language about God can meet Pannenberg’s strictures, including his own. In formulating his objection he speaks of “divine being and human being.” Has he treated God and creation “as though they were on the same plane”?

"But What Will You Do When the End Comes?"

“He is a good man,” was the assessment about Jesus from some of the Judeans during the Feast of Booths, as recorded in John 7:12. Others saw things differently. “No, he is leading people astray,” they said, as though Jesus were some Judean version of the Pied Piper. Quite often in contemporary circles, these are the parameters of the debate when the subject is Jesus. Even the church has, from time to time, been drawn into the fray, although it decided long ago that Jesus far exceeded such humanistic categories.

C.S. Lewis scoffed at the idea, prevalent in his day, of reducing Jesus to the level of a good moral or ethical teacher. Lewis rightly pointed out that the claims Jesus made about himself demand that we either worship him as Lord or dismiss him as a crazed lunatic or, worse yet, a liar. If Jesus was (and is) everything he claimed to be, we have no choice but to fall at his feet and, with Thomas, confess, “My Lord and my God!” But if he is none of those things he claimed, then all of his words and all of his teachings must be dismissed as the rantings of a delusional megalomaniac of very questionable character.

Consider the immediate context of the verse cited above. Jesus is in Galilee, staying out of Judea because some people there “were seeking to kill him.” As the time for the Feast of Booths rolls around, his brothers urge him to go public. Sarcasm and unbelief are apparent when they say to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world” (John 7:3-4). Although at least two of Jesus’ brothers, James and Jude, eventually became not only believers but pillars of the early church, at this time, they viewed Jesus as something of a fanatic and an embarrassment to the family. Within their contextual framework, Jesus’ response is all too typical of his penchant for weirdness: “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. You go up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come” (John 7:6-8).

Take this response out of the context of the whole of Jesus’ redemptive work (as so many humanists wish to do with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount) and you have what sounds precisely like the ravings of a lunatic. What practical moral or ethical teaching can the unbeliever take from, “You go up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come?” Put back in its proper context, however, Jesus’ words make perfect sense. To an unbelieving audience, Jesus speaks a word of judgment. His message to his unbelieving siblings is, “You have the good life now, so go ahead and party on. But a time is coming when you will have to give an accounting. You have it easy. But my task is a bit more difficult. I’m the One to whom you will eventually have to give that accounting.”

Understood in this context, Jesus’ words echo Jeremiah. “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?” (Jeremiah 5:30-31).

Ever since the days he walked on this earth, Jesus has had his admirers who say, “He is a good man,” and his detractors who say, “No, he is leading people astray.” Neither of these options will do in light of the whole of Jesus’ Person and work. You cannot dismiss his claims to be fully God without also dismissing his character as a man. You cannot have “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” without “You go up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.” The choice is not between Jesus the “good man” and Jesus the Pied Piper. The choice, as Lewis so aptly put it, is between Jesus, liar and lunatic; or Jesus, Lord of all.