RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Lichtenberger Liiebner
1886 he did accept the chancellorship of St. Paul's cathedral. He was, as might be expected, deeply interested in the Old Catholic movement, and attended the Bonn conference of 1875, took a leading part in it, and translated the record of its proceedings.
Bibliography: The principal biography is by J. O. Johnston, Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon, London, 1904. Others are by A. B. Donaldson, ib. 1905; G. W. E. Russell ib. 1909, and in DNB, xxxiii. 223-228.
LIDWINA (LIDWIGIS, LIDIA), SAINT: Dutch virgin; b. at Schiedam (4 m. w. of Rotterdam) Mar. 18, 1380; d. there April 14, 1433. Born of prosperous parents she was of so great beauty that she was besieged with suitors from her thirteenth year. She had no desire for marriage, however, and prayed to God that he would make her so loathsome that no man could look upon her with pleasure. Coming from church on Candlemas day, 1394, she slipped on the ice and broke her hip, and for the rest of her life underwent terrible sufferings, which she endured with such incredible patience that she has been said to hold the same place in the dispensation of the New Testament that Job does in that of the Old. She had an altar erected in her chamber and during the last years of her life partook of holy communion every few days. She had many ecstatic visions, beholding hell, heaven, and purgatory. Pilgrims flocked to her bedside and many wonderful cures were said to have been performed. Her day in the Roman Catholic calendar is Apr. 14.
Bibliography: The early Vitce are collected in ASB, Apr., ii. 270-365. One of them is in Fr. transl. by J. Bruchman, Besancon, 1840, and in Dutch by G. A. Meyer, Nimeguen, 1890. Consult: W. Moll, J. Brugmann en het godsdienstig leven . . in de 15. eeuw, Amsterdam, 1854; KL, vii. 1974—79 (where other literature is given).
LIE: Any false statement made with intent to deceive, also any reservation, equivocation, or concealment of the truth for the purpose of misleading our neighbor. It is in this comprehensive sense that the divine command, " Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," is to be interpreted. Christ designates the devil as the source of the lie and as the father of liars (John viii. 44); and after he had established the kingdom of truth upon earth (John xviii. 37) his disciples combatted falsehood with might and main (cf. Eph. iv. 25; Tit. i. 12-14). John expressly states that liars are excluded from the city of God (Rev. xxi. 8, xxii. 15). Attempts have been made to adduce Biblical examples of the " white lie," or " necessary lie " (Notliige), but the prevarications of Abraham about Sarah (Gen. xii. 11-13, xx. 2), and the deceptions of David (I Sam. xxi. 2, 13, xxvii. 10) do not come under this category, not to speak of the lies of Sarah (Gen. xviii. 15) and Jacob (xxvii. 19). However, the Old Testament seems to endorse to a certain extent the kind of necessary deception employed by Rahab to save the spies in Jericho (Josh, ii.), and in a similar case by Michael (I Sam. xix. 13-17). Perhaps such deception is justifiable where a human life is at stake, or where a lie seems necessary to the accomplishment of some higher good; but even then it should be possible to surmount the difficulty without lying.
(Karl Burger-}-.)
LIEBNER, lib'ner, KARL THEODOR ALBERT:
German Lutheran theologian, of importance in the history of the newer constructive theology; b. at Schkolen, near Naumburg, Mar. 3, 1806; d. in Switzerland June 24, 1871. Along with the consciousness that in the modern critical period a special task was laid upon theological science, he found his life-work in the conviction that in order successfully to meet the ever-growing opposition there was requisite a wider development of the Christian ethical content; and that the first requisite was to give full play to the radically decisive ethical factor in Christianity and give it in contemporary ecclesiastical and scientific consciousness the place which it holds by intrinsic right in the Christian scheme.
After the completion of his education at Leipsic (marked by special attention to Kant) he was influenced by his further studies in Berlin (under Schleiermacher, Hegel, Neander, Marheineke), and by his reception into the Wittenberg Theological Seminary (under Heubner and Richard Rothe). It was here that he wrote his first book: Hugo von St. Victor und die theologischen Richtungen seiner Zeit (Leipsic, 1832), which is valuable for its exposition of the union of mysticism and gnosis before the Reformation in the school of St. Victor, and for its bearing on the struggles and aims of our time. This theme is continued in the treatise (in the TSK) Ueber Gersons mystische Theologie, which he composed in his first pastoral charge (Kreisfeld, near Eisleben), 1832, as well as in the academic treatise Richardi a S. Victore de contemplatione doctrina, which, along with some treatises on practical theology (1843-44), and some sermons, he published at Gottingen, whither he had been called in 1835 as professor of theology and university preacher.
Called in 1844 to Kiel, to succeed Dorner as professor of systematic theology, he wrote there his principal work, Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt (Gottingen, 1849) . In Christ the God-man, Liebner finds the solution of the spiritual struggle of our time. Here, where the divine dwells in the human in bodily substance, he discerns the truth and fulness of religion, personally absolute religion; the ethical appears to him as the inmost and profoundest essence of Christianity, as its absolutely deepest and richest content, in fact the center-point of all things divine and human, the principle governing all manner of being and thought, in the immanent and permanent vital process in God and in the world. By the aid of this thought he sees how the conceptions men have of God and religion correspond; how subordinate and one-sided ideas of God can beget none but subordinate and partial ideas of religion: the physical conception of God as being, causality, and the like, begetting a mere physical conception of religion (feeling of dependency, of the infinite in the finite); the logical conception, a merely logical religion (perception, knowledge of the divine, etc.); the exclusively ethical conception of God, an exclusively ethical conception of religion (external positivism and moralism, formal orthodoxy and rationalism). In view of these partial ideas which
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