THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
dilute, if not disintegrate and dissolve, the essence of Christianity, Liebner brings to bear the entire force of contemplative and speculative reasoning in order to conceive as a whole the organic cooperation of the physical, logical, and ethical, and thereby to maintain the full, unmaimed, and undiluted effect of Christianity.
Starting from the principle of the Incarnation, Liebner now more lucidly exhibits the relation of faith and knowledge, showing how the one postulates and presupposes the other; how faith can as little be void of thought as can God; and how Christianity is a redemption both for mind and heart. Participation in the life of salvation is also participation in the ideas of salvation which are inseparably connected with it, every divine gift and grace is at the same time a task to be worked out by human effort; so we are to work out, as the proper content of thought, the salutary ideas immanent in the facts of salvation, under constant and formative guidance of God's word and of the Spirit who leads into all truth. As faith without works is dead, so is it also dead without knowledge. On the ground of such faith rests, for Liebner's theology, the certainty that theology itself, as the scientific self-consciousness of Christianity, must also find its scientific principles in its own peculiar content, the Gospel, with full confidence that the vital Christian fund of faith is susceptible of scientific elaboration. In this consciousness, his theology disarmed prejudices against faith on the one hand and knowledge on the other, by showing in the relation between God and the universe, Creator and creature, God and man, spirit and nature, freedom and necessity, etc., how the atomistic conception of diversity is unable to discern or comprehend the idea of unity; how it severs and dismembers unity, and is in the last analysis a conception of death and decay. He shows equally how the monistic conception of unity loses sight of and confounds diversity: whereas faith, when comprehended in its vital truth and depth, manifests itself as the deepest ground and motive for a truly organic philosophy, which does justice to both diversity and unity. These fundamental ideas are especially expanded in his Introductio in dogmaticam christianam (Leipsic, 1854-55), which he wrote at Leipsic, whither he had been persuaded to go after declining calls to Marburg and Heidelberg.
In 1855 he was appointed court preacher and vice-president of the Superior Consistory of Saxony. The manner in which he embraced this position as an opportunity to increase his already richly blessed labors appears from his writings: Ueber das Wesen der Kirchenvisitation, a memorial to the official visitors (1857); Ueber den Stand der christlichen Erkenntnis in der deutschen evangelischen Kirche, an address before the Conference at Eisenach in 1859, incidentally describing the constructive work of the new era (Dresden, 1860); his Reformation sermon in 1864; a second volume of sermons, Predigt-Beitrdge zur Forderung der Erkenntnis Christi in der Gemcinde (1861), and the Jahrbiicher fiir deutsche Theologie which he founded in conjunction with Dorner, Ehrenfeuchter, and others, for the support of his constructive theology.
Bibliography: M. M. Ruling, Zur Erinnerung an . T. A. Liebner, Dresden, 1871; C. Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie, pp. 371 sqq., Leipsic, 1864; A. Miicke, Die Dogmatik des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 280 sqq Gotha, 1867.
LIETZMANN, lits'man, HANS: German Protestant; b. at Dusseldorf Mar. 2, 1875. He was educated at the universities of Jena (1893) and Bonn (1894-97; lie. theol., 1896), and after teaching in a gymnasium at Bonn in 1898-99, became privatdocent at the university in the same city in 1900. Since 1905 he has been professor of church history at Jena. He has edited Kleine Texte fur theohgische Vorlesungen und Uebungen (Bonn, 1902 sqq.; Eng. transl., Materials for the Use of Theological Lecturers and Students, Cambridge, 1902 sqq.) and Handbuch sum Neuen Testament (in collaboration with H. Gressmann, E. Klostermann, F. Niebergall, and P Wendland; Tubingen, 1906 sqq.), and has written: Der M enschensohn (Tubingen, 1896); Catenen, Mitteilungen uber ihre Geschichte und handschriftliche Ueberlieferung (1897); Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule, i. (1904); and Das Leben des heiligen Simeon Stylites (Leipsic, 1908).
LIFE AND ADVENT UNION. See Adventists, 4.
LIFTING, SYNOD OF: The second Austrasian synod held during the reign of Carloman, apparently in 743, at Liftina?, in the sixteenth century called Lestines, the modern Estinnes (7 m. s.e. of Mons), Belgium. Many things occur in its acts which do not really belong there, and others have scant independent value, being mere confirmations of the first Austrasian synod of the previous year. It marked an important step in advance, however, in that the principles of church government already fixed in the earlier synod were now more accurately defined as an adherence to primitive usage. Direct dependence on the canons of the earlier Fathers (i.e., the ecumenical councils) was expressly postulated and the attitude assumed toward unlawful marriages prepared the way for the entrance of the Roman code into the kingdom of the Franks. Still more important was the legal aspect, which was equally momentous for Church and State, inasmuch as it involved the moot question of the enormous secularization of the eighth century. They seem to have begun chiefly with Charles Martel, who invested laymen with bishoprics. After the death of Charles the process of restitution began in Austrasia, when the newly consecrated bishops were reinstated in the possessions of the Church, although the greater portion still remained in the hands of laymen as precariw. In Neustria, on the other hand, those who held ecclesiastical estates retained their illegal property until the accession of Pepin, who gradually put an end to this state of affairs, partly by actual restitution and partly by the system of precarias which he could revoke at pleasure, even though secularization was still practised to some extent both by him and Carloman.
The provisions of 742 and 743 are important as inaugurating a real, though limited, restitution and as guaranteeing a regular mode of procedure. At the synod Carloman reached an agreement with the bishops. Those who had received ecclesiastical fiefs from the king held them only for life, the