Schleiermacher: The Christian Faith, 62-85


            
This is the fourth in a series of reflections on Fredrick Schleiermacher. This one will focus upon his Doctrine of Sin.

           Schleiermacher continues to affirm that every doctrine must connect with the religious or pious self-consciousness. Christian experience is aware of sin and grace (62-64). He will direct us to dogmatic statements concerning the self and then to the hints they provide of dogmatic statements we can make about God. He will remind us that if a person becomes aware of the divine attributes, as he understands them in the previous section a person is already turning toward God.

            He begins with his exploration of sin (65-85). We have awareness of sin only because we have a sense of what is good and best. Thus, our intuition of the Infinite is only in apparent contradiction with our awareness of sin. Sin is our resistance to the intuition of our dependence upon the whole or Infinite. We might also say that if we have a natural openness to the Infinite, sin is closing off ourselves off from the Infinite. This closing of the self off from the Infinite creates pain. Yet, for the Christian, sin never exists without consciousness of the power of redemption. Sin-consciousness could lurk in the most exalted moments of religious self-consciousness. Such a consciousness arises out of the universal human experience of our incapacity for good. In fact, he places the main accent of his account of sin on its communal aspect. He does not affirm the historical existence of Adam, of course, but he does affirm the social nexus of the sinfulness of the human race. Sinfulness is present in individuals prior to sinful acts and thus has its basis outside their individual existence. The common act and guilt of the human race is present prior to our individual participation in sinful acts. Although we participate in this universal sin of the human race simply by our birth, we do not have guilt until our participation continues in our willful act of sin.[1] He will offer the insight that we have difficulty explaining sin apart from a prior sinfulness. Thus, even the serpent simply exposed a prior inclination in Adam to move against his intuition of his absolute dependence upon God.[2]

Just as have a universal notion of sin, we are aware also of the universal need for redemption. We participate personally in the universality of sin or transgression. God is the author of this sin-consciousness in the sense that it makes us aware of our need for reliance upon the Infinite. This awareness is an event within our subjective consciousness. In this sense, though, God did not will it. Sin becomes the effect of the God-consciousness. Sin has reality only in our consciousness of God. Thus, God opposes that which resists God and seeks to disturb and destroy humanity and the world. Sin weakens our God-consciousness in the form of displeasure with the being and action of self. Sin has reality because God negates it in the process of salvation and redemption. If God is the author of sin in this sense, God also negates it in the sense of ignoring, rejecting, excluding, and judging it. Thus, he admirably describes the subjective experience of the reality of sin. One might suggest (with Barth), however, that we are aware of grace before we have an awareness of sin, but such matters require much thought. Sin is world-consciousness, not just sensuality, which obstructs our God-consciousness. He even has a strong conception of sin as corporate act and corporate guilt. Thus, sin is not just a psychology of voluntary actions. He takes the gravity of evil and its punishment seriously. The evils that occur in the world objectively have no connection with sin, for we find death and pain where no sin exists. However, subjectively, we experience them as punishment for sin, given our universal participation in sin.[3]

Jesus the Redeemer must be able to make a change from sin to grace. He reminds us that from the standpoint of Christology, Jesus as the Redeemer, we properly understand sin. God considered sin, looking ahead to the need for redemption and consummation.[4] Redemption means reconnecting our original goodness with the original goodness of creation, both of which arise out of divine causality. The grace of God negates sin and sin exists only in this relationship to the grace of God. The danger here is that grace seems dependent upon sin. Sin becomes positive, for without sin, grace would not exist. Yet, we can question whether grace would be grace in this scenario. He needs a more consistent application of his belief that sin opposes grace. It has only a relative existence. The conflict is a genuine encounter in our lives and in history. In this conflict, grace has priority over sin. Yet, as much as he seems to direct us to Christ, his focus seems to be the inner process of the Christian consciousness, thereby making it subjective rather than Christ centered. Our experience of sin makes us aware of the divine attributes of holiness, justice, and mercy. Divine holiness causes the discord we experience in our conscience. God is the physician who prescribes the medicine. Our consciousness of divine justice makes us aware of evil as opposition to the original goodness of humanity and of the world. Yet, he also gives us the impression that divine righteousness is a matter of rewarding the fulfillment of the divine will and punishing its rejection.[5] He also has an odd notion that divine mercy is a matter for poetry and sermons, but has nothing to do with an attribute of God. It might be better to suggest that chooses mercy as a quality of the divine self who gives mercy freely in response to human suffering.[6]

A quite real problem arises if we remember that all of this happens within the subjective consciousness of the Christian. He seems to think that the simple consciousness of our need for redemption will have the desired impact on us. He suggests that grace and redemption are operations of the consciousness. His focus is the facts and emotions of the Christian consciousness. Christ becomes one of these facts and emotions! One might rightly conclude (as Barth does) that while Schleiermacher offers a great beginning in our understanding of sin and grace, we will need a fuller understanding through closer adherence to a biblical standard. Reading this section, Schleiermacher does not seem to treat sin with as much dismay as one might wish, or grace with as much joy as one might wish. He writes from a standpoint of peace. The idea that one might actually need an encounter with God to bring the needed transformation from sin to grace seems alien to him.[7]

Let us be clear at this point. Schleiermacher has done a great service in his anthropological approach to help the reader identify the social nexus of human sinfulness and our personal participation through our thoughts and actions. If sin closes us off from the Infinite, then our redemption lays in re-opening humanity and us as individuals to the Infinite. We can also see the Christ-centered nature of his exposition in that Jesus as the redeemer reveals deeper dimensions of human sinfulness. Our sin-consciousness raises to a new level our desire for the divine as holy, just, and merciful. He has a less firm grasp on the notion that it may well take an event in our lives that will open us to Jesus the redeemer of our lives and of humanity. We can clarify that event if we are willing to explore the revelation of God we find in Scripture and in Jesus. We can clarify that event in exploring the nation of the act of faith. Bultmann can actually help us here. Schleiermacher is generally unwilling to move into these explorations.



[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume II, 256-7.
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume II, 213.
[3] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume II, 268.
[4] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume II, 264.
[5] Barth, CD II.1, 377-8.
[6] Barth, CD II.1, 370.
[7] Barth, CD III.3, 319-334 and concisely in IV.1, 376-7.

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