Embedded Grace

Christ, History, and the Reign of God in Schleiermacher's Dogmatics

Kevin M. Vander Schel

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699970
• eBook ISBN: 9781451465242
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Scholars are now at work not only rethinking Schleiermacher's relation to the modern and contemporary theological tradition, but re-examining the dogmatic intricacies and commitments within his texts. Situated within this revisionist milieu, the author takes up the important issue of the coordination of grace and history in Schleiermacher, arguing for its significance in understanding the dynamics of Schleiermacher's dogmatics and its grounding and realization in Christology. The project not only continues the recasting of Schleiermacher's work in its wider context, but unpacks the dogmatic network within the paramount texts, as well as bringing crucial texts to the fore often neglected in English language scholarship. As such, this volume performs an innovative rethinking of revelation, grace, history, Christology, and ecclesiology in Schleiermacher, with particular attention to the pivotal dogmatic volume, The Christian Faith, and the unpublished Ethics. A commanding volume for scholars and students in modern and contemporary theology.

7

Divine Grace and the Historical Unfolding of Christian Action

Again he asked, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

— Luke 13:20-21 (NRSV)

The previous chapter examined the structure and foundation of Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics. These lectures treat the Christian life as a distinctive form of historical human action resulting from the original influence of the Redeemer. Distinctively Christian action is grounded in Christ’s redemptive activity, and this activity endures in Christian community as the efficaciousness of the divine Spirit. The characteristic threefold structure of purifying, propagative, and representational action in the lectures derives from this new, redeemed life. Thus the organization of Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics adheres to the same general strategy witnessed in his Christian Faith: that of the supernatural-becoming-natural. The event of Christ introduces a causal force elevating human historical action to its consummation in the Reign of God.

This analysis makes clear one side of Schleiermacher’s conception of historical Christian action. Distinctively Christian action is the historical product of Christ’s redemptive activity, and through the church this action extends Christ’s original influence throughout the world. The present chapter describes a further significant aspect of historical Christian action: the relation of the new Christian life to existing cultural and historical institutions, customs, and structures.

It is in addressing this difficulty that Schleiermacher’s conception of Christian action offers its most original contribution. His Christian Ethics depicts the Spirit’s work as an elevation and permeation of all human living. Here Christian action appears not as a supervening form of life operating outside normal historical development but as a productive force at work within it. This consideration leads to the main aspect of the lectures on Christian Ethics: the vision of Christian action as the adoption and appropriation of natural and historical development by the Spirit.

Much of the material content in Christian Ethics concerns various specific relationships involved in this development. Schleiermacher aims to treat the Redeemer’s influence not only as it affects the human person, but also as it transforms human living and human activity in their entirety, through all the different ethical tasks with which human activity is engaged in the world.^[1] Accordingly, the scope of the work extends to the full expanse of human “ethical living” (Sittlichkeit) in all its different cultural forms, customs, traditions, and institutions.

The following analysis traces the arc of Schleiermacher’s vision of the Spirit’s elevation of human history, beginning with his descriptive approach and proceeding to his treatment of historical development under the three species of Christian action.

The Rule of Grace

The first step to grasping Schleiermacher’s account of Christian action’s historical development in his Christian Ethics is to understand the work’s properly descriptive form. In place of the usual focus on the ethical imperative, as prescriptive commands or specific duty, Schleiermacher presents his own Christian ethics as fundamentally description, an indicative account of the character of the new life in Christ and the Spirit. According to the introductory lectures, “Christian Ethics should describe all human action that is similar to the action of Christ”; it “should describe all action that can be presented as emerging from the efficaciousness (Wirksamkeit) of the Holy Spirit in the human soul.”^[2]

The work’s nonimperative bent lends it a unique complexion. The object of Christian Ethics is not to first establish or bring about the Christian ethical life as something that must be inculcated by instruction. Instead, this new life is presupposed: “there was a Christian living before a Christian Ethics (christliche Sittenlehre).”^[3] Its task is to set out a description of the Christian life as it has already come to exist in Christian community.

Accordingly, the material presentation of Schleiermacher’s Christian Ethics proceeds as a description of Christian moral custom, or Sitte, as it has developed in the church. As he describes it in a note from 1809, “The main source (Hauptquelle) for Christian Ethics is the living Sitte existing there.”^[4] The content of the work unfolds as a series of reflections on this moral custom in its various natural and historical relationships. Through this descriptive style, Schleiermacher intends to distance his own treatment from the predominant focus on ethical norms or duties in the study of Christian ethics. Instead, he gives the work a different form, one that he argues parallels classical traditions in ethics,^[5] is more adequate to the expressions of the New Testament, and that highlights the expanding lordship of the Spirit in human history.

Schleiermacher notes that the tendency toward the ethically prescriptive has dominated the modern study of Christian ethics for Catholics and Protestants alike. Roman Catholic treatments have laid emphasis on the “command” (das Gebot) passed down from clergy to laity.^[6] Protestant presentations, dominated by Rationalist tendencies and operating in the shadow of Kant, have located Christian morality in the “teaching of duties” (Pflichtenlehre), an emphasis imitated also in Supranaturalist approaches.^[7]

Schleiermacher regarded this emphasis on ethical commandments to be incongruent with the Christian life. He found the most adequate form of Christian ethics not in commands that restrict action but in a description that promotes it by illuminating the connection of the various aspects of Christian living with the original redemptive activity of Christ as communicated in the Spirit. Thus his Christian Ethics rejects the inadequate focus on command and the prescription of duty in favor of a presentation more appropriate to this leading of the Christian Spirit, whose impulses go beyond the law alone: “We want to let Christian Ethics have this form, which best expresses the Spirit of Christianity, the opposition against the law (den Gegensatz gegen das Gesetz).”^[8]

Schleiermacher finds precedence for this more appropriate form already in the New Testament. “We find besides the form of command (Form der Gebothe) another form already in Scripture,” that of the “merely descriptive” (bloß beschreibende).^[9] Although the gospels and epistles clearly do contain concrete commandments, he argues that the descriptive form nevertheless has priority, as it appears where the issues discussed are the most essential. One finds this form, for example, in 1 Corinthians 13 in the Pauline discussion of agape and again in the letter to Galatians (Gal. 5:22-23), regarding the fruits of the Spirit.^[10] The discrepancy, for Schleiermacher, is no mere matter of style; this more descriptive form corresponds to a deeper, more central New Testament teaching. When Paul discusses Law (e.g., Rom. 2:12-16), Schleiermacher argues, he refers not only to the mosaic law but to “the law-like form altogether” (die gesetzliche Form überhaupt), and so also to the moral law.^[11] The positive role of these laws is like that of the tutor in Galatians (Gal. 3:23-24). It serves to guide human action in its “ethically raw condition” (sittlich rohem Zustand).^[12] When human action is fully pervaded by the Spirit, however, it will no longer have a need either for law or its consequent punishments. Indeed, when one attends to the context in which these prescriptive commands occur in the New Testament, one finds it precisely in those passages addressing relative neophytes—those in whom the Spirit does not yet exer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Diverging Theological Paths
• Rationalizing the Supernatural
• Charting an Alternative
• The Distinctive Shape of Christian Thought
• The Contingency of Grace
• The Distinctive Shape of Christian Action
• Divine Grace and the Historical Unfolding of Christian Action
• Conclusion: Historically Embedded Grace
• Bibliography
• Index