RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Redemption Reden
of Christ is presented only as a distant condition precedent to salvation, the actual accomplishment of which follows on the supplying of grace through the medium of the Church. Although mysticism attempted to satisfy the craving for redemption partly by evasion of the Church's mediation and partly by pressing it into the service of the inner hfe, it failed to reach a personal ethical conception of redemption, because it placed the ethical and mystical union with God above the remission of sin. Luther, on the other hand, made the remission of guilt accomplished by Christ's intervention the fundamental principle. The holy sufferer bears the wrath of God and satisfies his justice; 7. Refor- but he is also the mighty conqueror who mation and delivers us from our tyrants — the law, Later sin, death, the devil, and hell — and so Doctrine, abolishes, with sin and guilt, all the powers of evil whose dominion was founded by the fall of man. His great conception was only partially adopted by Protestant dogmatics. Melanchthon merely developed the notion of legal atonement as a necessary condition of forensic justification. Osiander was unable to bring out clearly the relation between the objective fact of redemption and the subjective justification. The more the doctrine of redemption was dominated by the idea of satisfaction, the less was it possible to include in a dogmatic system the whole train of salutary consequences which Luther connected with it. The doctrine of the royal office of the exalted savior gave the most room for them; but it considered redemption as but supplementary to the historical work of salvation. In opposition to this, Pietism, with its special interest in sanctification and in eschatology, paid great attention to the doctrine of redemption. Rationalism, with its hard morality, lost all understanding of the remission of sin and thus of redemption. Kant's deeper moral conception came near postulating this grace for the eradication of evil; but his fixed principle of moral autonomy caused him to reduce what for him was the symbolic language of dogma to interior moral processes. Schleiermacher taught his followers to recognize the central point of the Christian faith; but his optimistic conception of sin as an inevitable stage in human development, his half-pantheistic idea of God, and his naturalistic-esthetic notion of the religious and moral life prevented him from fully realizing the Christian doctrine of redemption. The newer dogmatic writers have in great part striven to recover more fully the Scriptural and the Reformation conceptions of the subject.
It is essential to the completeness of the Christian doctrine of salvation that it should teach not only a reconciliation of man with God but a redemption as well, which transforms the whole life of the redeemed and their relation to the world. 8. Require- Redemption in its inmost, religious ments of the sense is reconciliation, the change in Doctrine, man's relation to God by the removal of the guilt of sin. Redemption in its ethical and its eschatological meanings is the consequence of this. But the close connection of these elements can be preserved only when the atonement is regarded as the pledge and the beginning of a
new development for humanity. The believer, his sins forgiven, is transplanted with his risen Lord into the supernatural kingdom of God; the dominion of sin is broken forever in him; the source of his life is not in this world but in that which is above. Such a redemption carries with it the abolition of evil, which is already, so far as it is the positive penalty of sin, removed with sin. The common ills of life are no longer penalties to the believer, since they can not harm his relation to God. Even death has to the Christian no longer the character of a punishment, since his real life already belongs to the other world. The entire removal of evil is hindered partly by the results of past sins, partly by the coexistence in the world of those who reject salvation. The older Protestant dogmatics, therefore, in harmony with the New Testament, looked for the conclusion of the process of salvation to follow upon the second coming of Christ. Modern writers, inclining to dispute the universal connection of evil with sin, and looking with Schleiermacher for a merely subjective conquest of it, do not feel justified in including a positive abolition of evil in the idea of redemption. But the hope is inseparable from Christian belief that God will create new surroundings for the new life of his children, which shall correspond to their higher nature and allow it to develop freely and fully. In this connection with redemption lies the real foundation of Christian eschatology. (O. Kirn.)
Bibliography: The literature under Atonement (particularly the works of Baur and Ritschl); the treatises on the history of doctrine (see Doctrine, History of, especially the works of Harnack, Seeberg, Loofs, and Shedd); the subject is explicitly or implicitly discussed in all works on systematic theology (see Dogma, Dogmatics for full list of titles), which often add lists of literature; and, for the Biblical side, the principal treatises named in and under Biblical Theology (especially the works by Oehler, Schultz, Duff, Dillmann, Charles, Davidson, Bennett, Holtzmann, Stevens, Weiss, and Beyschlag). -Consult further: E. Colet, Practical Discourse of God's Sovereignty, London, 1673, reissue, Philadelphia, 1854; T. Win tie, Expediency, Prediction, and Accomplishment of the Christian Redemption Illustrated, Oxford, 1794; J. Goodwin, Redemption ^Redeemed, London, 1651, reissue, 1840; C. Beecher, Redeemer and Redeemed, Boston, 1864; R. W. Monsell, The Religion of Redemption, London, 1866; H. Wallace, Representative Responsibility . Divine Procedure in Providence and Redemption, Edinburgh, 1867; J. G. Wilson, Redemption in Prophecy, Philadelphia, 1885; C. Graham, The Glory of God in Redemption, London, 1892; J. Orr, Christian View of God and the World, pp. 333 sqq., Edinburgh, 1893 ; A. Titius, Die neulestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit, vols, i.-iv., Freiburg, 1895-1900; W. Shirley, Redemption According to Eternal Purpose, London, 1902; G. A. F. Ecklin, Erlosung und Versohnung, Basel, 1903; R. Herrmann, Erlosung, Tubingen, 1905; D. W. Simon, The Redemption of Man, 2d ed., Edinburgh, 1906; DB, iv. 210-211; DCG, ii. 475-484.
REDEMPTORISTS. See Liguobi, Alfonso Maria di, and the Redemftorist Order.
REDEN, re'den, FREDERIC A, COUNTESS OF:
German philanthropist; b. at Brunswick May 12, 1774; d. at Erdmannsdorf (a village near Schmiedeberg, 31 m. s.s.w. of Liegnitz) May 14, 1854. In 1802 she married Count Reden, who, like herself, though humanitarian in ideal, was then devoid of special religious interests. The establishment of the Prussian Bible society in 1814, however, led him to found the Buchwald society in the following year
Redenbacher Reformation