THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
munication of the power of his consciousness of God; and atonement, or the communication of the blessedness of such consciousness. The result of the work of Christ in the faithful is regeneration. The new life becomes permanent and indestructible through sanctification, and when regeneration is declared by Schleiermacher to be indelible, he is influenced in his view by psychological and metaphysical presuppositions.
In the forefront of Schleiermacher's theory stands his interpretation of election, the object of which is the new creature as a whole, its end 10. Election, salvation exclusively, while in choice Pneumatol- or rejection of individuals and peoples ogy, In- by the divine governance of the world spiration. he sees no final judgment. The doctrine of the communication of the spirit is also closely connected with the theory of the Church, since Schleiermacher regarded the Holy Spirit as the spirit pervading the whole community founded by Christ. In the Church he distinguished between essential and immutable elements arising from its relation to Christ and the Holy Spirit, and transitory components based on its contact with the world. The former included, besides preaching and the sacraments, the power of the keys (i.e., of legislation and discipline) and prayer in the name of Jesus. His concept of preaching was modified by his rejection of the Old Testament and his tenet of the inspiration of persons rather than of writings. Schleiermacher denies that infant baptism has any certain connection with regeneration, and rejects both the sacramentarian and the rationalistic interpretations of the Lord's Supper. The union of the Church with the world gives rise to the distinction between the visible and invisible Church, the former being in error and division through the influence of the world, while the latter is one and infallible. Eschatology is discussed from the point of view of the perfection of the Church. The work of redemption reveals two other qualities of God: love, the principle of God's communication of himself; and wisdom, which regulates its activity. The work concludes with an attempt to define the Trinity, and lands the author in something closely akin to Sabellianism.
It is generally thought that Schleiermacher's theological attitude must be interpreted with the help of his philosophical views, but his own statements show that while he felt that his philosoii. Schlei- phy and his theology to some degree inermacher's fluenced and even approximated each Philosophy other, he held that neither was dependand ent on the other, and he expressly de- Psychology, nied that both could be reduced to the same formula, while with equal explicitness he disavowed the intention of creating a philosophical dogmatics. In harmony with this the Glaubenslehre shows only the formal influence of philosophy. The philosophical writings of Schleiermacher are all fragmentary sketches of drafts of lectures, and they show that their author's dogmatic system was already essentially formed when he sought to formulate his philosophy. To Schleiermacher philosophy was not a closed science, but a never-ending problem, so that one can not
speak of philosophical results, but only of philosophical presuppositions and the determination of rules for dialectics, or the art of thought. The object of thought is knowledge, but this implies correspondence not only of thought with being but also equal conformity to law in the case of the connection of ideas. The harmony of all human thought with being implies a higher presupposition, for if thought is to become conviction, there must be a supreme unity which subsumes the antithetical terms of ideal and real. But since this unity can not itself be known, its recognition is simply faith, a basal conviction incapable of further demonstration; and the connotation of this supreme unity is the correlated ideas of God and the world. After 1818 Schleiermacher supplemented this train of thought by another, which paved the way for the Glaubenslehre. Unity of will is as necessary as unity of knowledge; knowledge is thought preceded by being, will is thought followed by being. Unless will is to be resultless, there must be a conviction that being is accessible, and since all can not speculate, this second way of gaining conviction concerning God is the more usual. Since, however, the concept of God is demanded both by knowledge and will, the home of this idea must be in that element of human consciousness which underlies both knowledge and will, or, in other words, in the feelings, which constitute the transition from thought to will and form the common basis of both. Accordingly, the consciousness of God is originally given in the feelings. God and the world are indissolubly connected. To imagine the world without God is to miss the bond of union; to imagine God without the world is to form an empty concept. Yet God and the world are not identical, for the world is the supreme unity inclusive of all antitheses, while God is the supreme unity exclusive of all antitheses. Both ideas, therefore, sustain a distinct relation to knowledge, God being the terminus a quo and the world the terminus ad quern. In his lectures on psychology Schleiermacher declined to proceed from such metaphysical concepts as spirit and matter, or soul and body, affirming that only the ego, as the nexus of body and soul, was immediately given. In psychical life there are, therefore, only relative antitheses, which imply the original unity and exclude all dualistic theories. But these functions appear only in various degrees of interaction, and the relative antitheses fall into the three categories of affective and effective activities, objective and subjective consciousness, and consciousness of the ego and of others. The three categories proceed from each other in the order named, and the supreme unit)- of all is reached in religious feeling, in which even the antithesis of nature and the ego disappears.
Side by side with his works on dogmatics and the
psychology of religion, independent value attaches
to Schleiermacher's system of ethics. He had early
become dissatisfied with the theories
12. His of Kant, and in his Monologen had Science of sought to set forth positive ethical
Ethics. ideals. At Stolpe he abandoned
Schlegel's idea of an ethical revolution
in favor of a critical reform of ethical theories, and
he pursued this purpose in his lectures on ethics at