# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

mediation of Scripture as the Word of God, indeed must arise. There we would, so far, indeed have the outright enthusiasm. — Yet, since Schleiermacher has after all declared experience as the proof of the Spirit to be the way to faith, one might see whether Schleiermacher did not say something about how the Spirit, here suddenly experienced, is imparted to a person, and indeed of such a kind that he really showed himself free of enthusiasm. And indeed we have in his Glaubenslehre (Part II, Section II, Chief Part I, Lehrstück II) a section on it. So let us hear what he says:

2. On the Imparting of the Holy Spirit. There § 121 tells us first of all this, that in all persons living in sanctification there is the consciousness of an inner impulse to common cooperation and mutual working upon one another. "That is the common spirit of the collective life founded by Christ." Schleiermacher himself explains that the Holy Spirit presented in the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity is precisely not the Holy Spirit of the New Testament writings, because these "present to us the Holy Spirit only in the believers." The Holy Spirit is a person in the sense in which "everyone sees the peculiar shape of humanity in a people as One, and even he who ascribes being only to individuals can still say that the personality of each is the national character modified by the original disposition." So: insofar as the common spirit lives a pious personal life in the individual Christians, one can speak of a person of the Holy Spirit. As one speaks of a national spirit, so one can also speak of the Holy Spirit as the spirit of the congregation. P. 288: "The Holy Spirit is the innermost vital force of the Christian Church as a whole." § 122: "The Holy Spirit could be imparted and received completely as this common spirit only since the departure of Christ from the earth." Therefore he is supposed to have been still incomplete in the fellowship of the apostles. Now Schleiermacher said earlier that before joining the fellowship a person must be certain of finding his account in the fellowship, that is, in Schleiermacher's language, the person must believe. And now he reminds us again that he also said: "even the preparatory workings of grace came to each from this community," that is, from the Christian congregation. But how, then, do they come to him from it? At best from the living testimony of the congregation, as he calls it. But this is, as we have already learned, not the Word of Scripture. As little as Schleiermacher's holy spirit is the Holy Spirit of the Bible, so little is the Bible, the Word of God, according to Schleiermacher the means of imparting the Holy Spirit to a person. So even now we cannot do otherwise than call Schleiermacher an enthusiast. To fulfill all righteousness, we want to look at: