A question came up on Twitter, a question I posed to some others in conversation about Schleiermacher. My question had to do with Christology, in particular, Schleiermacher’s Christology. I have heard from others that his Christology was less than orthodox, and thus, of 
course was always skeptical of him in this regard (and in other areas as well). As we all know by now, Schleiermacher is most known for his theology of ‘feeling’ or ‘absolute dependence’ on God; a dependence that is grounded in what he calls ‘God-consciousness.’ What begins to emerge as you study his seminal writing found in his Christian Faith V2 §96, is something that might sound quasi-orthodox in regard to who Christ is. But upon further reading it also seems that Schleiermacher is not all that committed to the idea that the Christ necessarily needed to be God in flesh, per se. It still seems as if, for Schleiermacher, Jesus was an exalted human, or a demiurge between God and humanity; even if God’s exclusive and only demiurge. In other words, it is hard to parse out whether Schleiermacher’s understanding of Jesus equals an actually orthodox understanding of the ecumenical homoousios, or that Christ is consubstantial God and human in his singular person as Jesus. Indeed, in §96 Schleiermacher would like to dispense with what he calls ‘scholastic’ language about the Christ; when he refers to the language of “scholastic” he has in mind the grammar constructed at definitive Church councils like: Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon. Although in §96 he interacts with the: 1) Augsburg Confession (1530); 2) Anglican Articles of Religion (1571); 3) Second Helvetic Confession (1566); 4) Gallican Confession (1559); 5) First Helvetic Confession (1536); 6) Solid Declaration (in Formula of Concord 1577); 7)Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (325, 381); and 8) Symbolum Quicunque Vult (=so-called Athanasian Creed, after late 4th cent.) (p. 581-83). For the most part he is jettisoning the Christological grammars articulated in and through these confessions and catechisms, insofar as he finds them convoluted in regard to explicating a picture of Christ that he finds satisfactory. He essentially arrives at the conclusion that these declarations about Christ, with their heavy metaphysical and even physical focuses on ‘natures’ ‘persons’ and even ‘being’ leads the Christian into the dire pit of viewing Christ either from highly Docetic, Ebionite, or Nestorian portrayals of Jesus Christ. And so, he offers his alternative grammar about Jesus; an alternative that, I think, ends up landing even deeper in the weeds of the mysteries that the ecumenical creeds were simply hoping to circumnavigate with biblical and gospely fidelity.
Here is how Schleiermacher summarizes his critique of a conciliar understanding of Jesus at the end of §96. You will notice that he retains a desire to present a Christ who is certainly greater than the rest of humanity; even exemplary and what he calls more pointedly ‘prototypical humanity.’
Now, above we hope to have laid down the ground for a treatment that seeks to denote the interrelation of what was divine and what was human in the Redeemer in such a way that the two expressions—most troublesome, to put it mildly—namely, “divine nature” and “duality of nature in the same person,” are avoided entirely. We may hope this, for suppose that the difference between the Redeemer and us is established in such a way that, instead of our clouded and weak God-consciousness, in him there was an absolutely clear God-consciousness, one that was exclusively determining every element of his life, hence one that must be regarded to be a steady living presence, consequently to be a true being of God in him. Then, by virtue of this difference, everything that we lack exists in him, and also, by virtue of his likeness with us, a likeness limited only by his absolute sinlessness, everything is such that we are able to grasp it. That is, the being of God in the Redeemer is posited as his innermost primary strength, from which all his activity proceeds and which links all the elements of life together. However, everything human simply forms the organism for this primary strength and relates itself to that strength as its system both for taking this strength in and for presenting it, just as in us all other strengths have to relate to or intelligence. Thus, if this expression departs greatly from the former scholastic language, nonetheless it rests in equal measure on the Pauline expression “God was in Christ” and on the Johannine expression “The Word became flesh,” for “word” is the activity of God expressed in the form of consciousness and “flesh” is the general designation for what is organic.[1]
As we read with Schleiermacher there is an opaqueness that is hard to crack. We see him working in and around the ‘orthodox’ grammar, but with his usual misgivings about what has come before. Schleiermacher is all about an evolving, reformulating of past theological developments; some might say he was all about ‘always reforming’ (semper reformanda). Unlike someone like Karl Barth, though, Schleiermacher was seemingly willing to abandon the whole apparatus and grammar developed in what is often known as ‘The Great Tradition’ of the Church, and start completely over; the above passage from Schleiermacher illustrates this spirit.
If we were to directly ask Schleiermacher if he believed that Jesus was the God-Man, under Chalcedonian pressures, he might say: ‘yes, I can agree with the spirit of that, but not the letter.’ Beyond this, as illustrated by our passage, Schleiermacher’s Christological re-telling sounds an awful lot like what we get in adoptionistic christologies. I am referring, in particular, to the emboldened phraseology from Schleiermacher’s §96. It seems as if, for FS, the ‘being of God’ comes upon the human anime and gives it its defining reality. Then again, this might be FS’s attempt to simply restate the ancient categories of anhypostasis/enhypostasis. He remains rather enigmatic, really, when it comes to what he thought of Christ. Probably because he was unwilling to operate under the standards that we typically use in order to categorize whether someone is ‘orthodox’ ‘heterodox’ or ‘heretic.’ I think ultimately what makes it so hard to frame FS in this area is that his primary motivation isn’t to articulate a normal Christology, instead he is ulteriorly (to that) seeking to present his vision of how it is that humanity has knowledge of and relationship with the One true and living God.
I was going to attempt to write an essay level engagement with §96, but as usual, I don’t have the time or physical energy to do that at the moment. Until then, blog posts will have to suffice.
[1] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith: Volume 2 §96, trans. by Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 590.