# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1894. 39

right, who held a searching sermon against the aberrations of human understanding in morals on the text: Behold, this I have found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many devices." (Eccl. 7:30.) So also Prof. Bender (in: Schleiermacher's Theology, 1876, vols. I and II), who points to the deception and juggling of Schleiermacher in his treatment of the doctrine of the Church and of election (II, 507) with the words: "One can read another sense into this doctrine of election, deceived by Schleiermacher's reliance on the ecclesiastical expressions." — Thus, whoever, from the ecclesiastical expressions that Schleiermacher brings in his doctrinal paragraphs, thinks of something more biblical, reads into it something that Schleiermacher himself does not put into it at all. — That our judgment is correct will become clear from what follows. Schleiermacher calls his Glaubenslehre a doctrine according to the principles of the Gospel. But the Gospel is the message of Christ. Let one now look into Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre and see what kind of Christ is presented there. So it says II, § 93, 3 of the person of Christ: "If one wanted to deny this dependence of development on environment, one would logically have to assume an empirical omniscience in Christ. . . . The same omniscience of Christ one would also have to assume with regard to the various human conditions and their treatment. True humanity would, however, be lost even here." § 94: "The Redeemer is therefore like all men by virtue of the sameness of nature, but different from all by the steady potency of his God-consciousness, which was a real being of God in him." What, however, is to be thought of the being of God in Christ, § 95 says: "The ecclesiastical formulas about the person of Christ require continued critical treatment." These ecclesiastical formulas of the true deity of Christ have, in Schleiermacher's view, arisen only out of disputes. Through them the doctrine of Christ's person and deity had to be overloaded with a multitude of determinations which stand in a relation to the immediate Christian consciousness that is demonstrable only through the history of the dispute. § 96: "In Jesus Christ the divine nature and the human nature were united in one person." According to Schleiermacher we therefore need not believe an omniscience of Christ; for that, according to his truly appalling blindness, has no value for us. The powerful consciousness of God which Christ had in his heart was his divine nature. The Christ of the Epistle to the Colossians, a Christ of eternal being, Schleiermacher does not know. The old pious teachers of the Church and the Confessions, who understood and confessed his eternal nature under Christ's divine nature, have only caused great confusion. "The New Testament Scripture does not know this usage at all," says Schleiermacher, "indeed the expression Son of God is used by it