# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

it, where it speaks independently, only of the subject of this union and not of the divine in it prior to it." And to this he makes the remark: "No one will surely want to cite John 1:18 or 17:5 as instances against this assertion." Schleiermacher therefore makes it gross enough; he denies that Christ has an eternal, personal deity. Even so immoderate an admirer of Schleiermacher as Gass (Real-Encyclopädie, art. Schleiermacher) concedes of Schleiermacher's doctrine of Christ: "The assertion of a real being of God in Christ it holds in suspense. To assume a pre-human existence of Christ in a personal sense is accordingly no religious necessity." Now it is dreadful to say that all adherents of the newer theology are admirers of Schleiermacher and can take his denial of the eternal deity of Christ so coolly, and speak quite calmly of the heresies of their Schleiermacher in view of verdicts of condemnation such as 1 John 4:2, 3. But to them theological cleverness is everything, the truly ingenious Scripture nothing, because it is not what it itself wants to count for.

To show that Schleiermacher's doctrine of Christ is wholly anti-biblical and denies Christ, we want to quote literally what Schleiermacher says of the redeeming activity of Christ. It says in the second Lehrstück [section]: On the office of Christ, that is, on Christ's work, as follows in § 100: "The Redeemer takes believers up into the potency of his God-consciousness, and this is his redeeming activity." § 99: "The facts of the resurrection and the ascension, as well as the prediction of his return for judgment, cannot be set up as a proper component of the doctrine of his person." — Against such talk let a believing Christian now hold the preaching of the holy apostles, how they everywhere make the fact of the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ the core of their Gospel. And then people still rhapsodize (Gass, Herzog 551) about the love of Christ of such a denier of Christ. What is all the talk of love of Christ worth if we do not love him as he first loved us, if we do not love him after the pattern in which the heavenly Father loves the Son: Therefore the Father loves me, that I lay down my life (John 10:17). And I lay down my life for the sheep (verse 15). — It is, however, the custom among the overwhelming majority of German theologians to exalt Schleiermacher's significance immoderately. It sometimes seems as if the worry played a part that whoever departs from the traditional admiration of Schleiermacher might expose himself to the verdict of spiritlessness, of lack of understanding for what is full of spirit. Now it is to be the construction of the whole Glaubenslehre by which Schleiermacher has an imperishable significance. And yet the admirers themselves admit again, meekly, that the system of Schleiermacher in its construction stands close to that of Calixt and of the later old-Lutheran theologians. And that is so. The under-