Schleiermacher's Argument about the Old Testament

Endorsing Semler's call for a “free investigation of the canon” unfettered by doctrinal constraints, Schleiermacher rejected the notion that “the sacred books require a hermeneutical and critical treatment departing from the generally valid rules” of interpretation.Footnote ⁵ For him, this freedom was an inviolable bequest from the Reformers whose aim was to let the Bible speak for itself apart from the yoke of ecclesiastical tradition. “It is thoroughly Protestant,” he contended, “to allow everyone the free application of the exegetical art as based on philology.”Footnote ⁶ He realized that this would occasion revision, and in some cases rejection, of certain cherished Protestant beliefs about the biblical canon, though he predicted that historical scholarship would prove to be more problematic for the ot than for the nt.Footnote ⁷ Although the documentary hypothesis had yet to receive its classic formulation from Wellhausen, there was already by Schleiermacher's time a well-established tradition of doubting Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, critical scholarship was questioning the view that the prophets had predicted the coming of Christ and was beginning to look upon the prophetic oracles as messages addressed to the particular historical circumstances of their own times.Footnote ⁸

Schleiermacher was convinced that the Christian effort to prove Jesus' messianic status on the basis of ot prophecy was a mistake and that the nt's appeal to it was strictly an intra-Jewish affair of the first century. He conceded that while a Jew of that time might well have become persuaded that the prophecies referred to Jesus, such an opinion necessarily presupposed faith in the inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that a Gentile convert could not have been expected to possess. Indeed, such proof had not really been decisive even for Jewish believers whose conversion was brought about by the powerful impression the personality of Jesus made upon them, not by arguments about prophecy. Hence, far from being troubled by the negative results of historical scholarship, Schleiermacher sought to put them to good theological use. The lesson to be learned is that faith in Jesus can stand on its own apart from appeals to the ot.Footnote ⁹

Schleiermacher believed the time had come for the church to acknowledge that the ot is a “superfluous authority” for dogmatics. He justified this departure from Christian tradition by arguing that a doctrine taught only in the ot but not in the nt could hardly be said to possess a genuinely Christian character; by contrast, a doctrine taught only in the nt would not be questionable because nothing about it was to be found in the ot.Footnote ¹⁰ While there are few doctrines which at one time or another have not been justified by appealing to the ot, he was of the opinion that such appeals had done damage to the intellectual integrity of exegesis by foisting an alien meaning upon the text.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, they had unnecessarily muddied the later development of Christian doctrine: “we have to thank the dogmatic attachment to the Old Testament for much that is bad in our theology; and if Marcion had been correctly understood and not denounced as a heretic, our doctrine of God would have remained much purer.”Footnote ¹² Hence, both subdisciplines of theology, exegesis and dogmatics, have a stake in the question of the ot.Footnote ¹³

Yet Schleiermacher did not actually call for the excision of the ot from the Bible. He recognized that the ot is the indispensable source for understanding the history of the Jewish people from which Jesus and his first disciples descended. For that reason alone, a thorough acquaintance with the ot is essential for grasping the many literary references and linguistic idioms of the nt writings, and Schleiermacher fully expected ministerial candidates to know Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Greek.Footnote ¹⁴ His point, rather, is theological. He distinguished the historical fact of Christianity's origin in the Jewish milieu from the normative question of appealing to the ot in support of Christian doctrine. Since only the nt writings were produced under the influence of Jesus' ministry, they are the first in the series of presentations of Christian faith which alone can serve as the norm for all subsequent presentations of it.Footnote ¹⁵ Hence, however important its historical value for understanding the context of the nt, the ot should not be taken as canonical: “To include the Jewish codex within the canon means to view Christianity as a continuation of Judaism and is at odds with the idea of the canon.”Footnote ¹⁶

For Schleiermacher, early Christianity was a completely new religion and stood in the same relation, religiously speaking, to Judaism as to paganism, notwithstanding its historical ties to the former.Footnote ¹⁷ Whereas conversion to Christianity required that Gentiles abandon their idolatrous worship, it required that Jews relinquish the Mosaic legislation. Accordingly, the step from Judaism to Christianity was as much a transition to another religion as the step from paganism to Christianity. Schleiermacher anticipated the objection that there was a far greater leap “from the side of paganism, insofar as it first had to become monotheistic in order to become Christian.”Footnote ¹⁸ He countered this objection by pointing out that the Gentiles had long been inclined toward monotheism through the influence of their own philosophers who for centuries had criticized Greco-Roman polytheism. Furthermore, Judaism at this time “was no longer based exclusively on Moses and the prophets” as a result of the many foreign influences it had incorporated since the Babylonian exile.Footnote ¹⁹ Seen in this light, the sharp dichotomy between Judaism and Hellenism breaks down and it is evident that the church was a new formation in the religious sphere: “if Christianity is related in the same way to Judaism as to paganism, then it can no more be a continuation of Judaism than a continuation of paganism.”Footnote ²⁰

In opposition to the rationalism of the Enlightenment with its “natural religion,” Schleiermacher set out to rehabilitate “positive” (i.e., historically given) religion, each instance of which is a unique entity with its own distinct identity or “essence.” In order to identify the essence of any positive religion, it is necessary to specify four features: 1) its stage of religious development, 2) the type of religion it represents, 3) its central idea, and 4) its originating event.Footnote ²¹ Each positive religion has an “outward unity,” reflecting a definite origin in history, and an “inward unity,” which is a peculiar modification of the elements it shares with other faiths at the same stage and of the same type. Christianity's essence can thus be formulated as follows:

Once the essence is ascertained, the relations of Christianity to other religions can be set forth with precision. Unlike premodern theologians Schleiermacher did not assume that monotheism was the earliest form of religion, although he did consider it to stand at the apex of human religious development. Judaism, too, is monotheistic and belongs to the “teleological” (or moral) type. Greco-Roman polytheism, however, not only reflects a lower stage of development but also belongs to the “aesthetic” type wherein the sense of moral obligation is not constitutive of the religious consciousness. Still, the contrast between Judaism and paganism with respect to stage and type of religion did not lead Schleiermacher to conclude that Christianity is related to Judaism in more than a merely external historical manner. He detected in Judaism an affinity with a less developed stage of religion (“fetishism”) since its monotheism is corrupted by nationalism, whereas Christian monotheism is free of this defect.Footnote ²³ And while the teleological character of Judaism is expressed in the form of obedience to law, in Christianity it assumes the form of exhortations indicating how moral action springs forth from the consciousness of redemption. So even in those respects which the two religions share, there are profound differences between them.Footnote ²⁴ Since everything in Christianity is related to the redemptive efficacy of Jesus, “Christian piety, as it emerged right from the start, is not to be understood by means of the Jewish piety of that or of an earlier time: thus in no way can Christianity be viewed as a reshaping or a renewal of Judaism.”Footnote ²⁵

Since the ot reflects Jewish religion, confusion as to the essential nature of Christianity necessarily arises from the traditional practice of placing both testaments on equal footing as two parts of one canon of scripture. The ot cannot be for Christians what it is for Jews, namely, an indivisible whole.Footnote ²⁶ The ot contains elements that are foreign to the church so that “whatever is most definitely Jewish has least value” for Christians and even those passages in it that appear compatible with Christian piety are only “of a more general nature and not distinctively Christian.”Footnote ²⁷ Aside from the fact that the ot can be claimed as a Christian book only when exegetical violence is done to the plain historical meaning of its literal-grammatical sense, placing the ot on the same level as the nt diminishes the central significance of Jesus in an Ebionite (Jewish-Christian) manner. Moreover, those Christians who are especially fond of the ot evince a legalistic mentality not in keeping with the Christian conception of the moral life.Footnote ²⁸

Although his assessment of the ot is negative in its import for the church, it is necessary to recognize its double-sided character. The clear implication of Schleiermacher's argument is that Christians should acknowledge the integrity of Judaism as a distinct religion which is to be understood on its own terms quite apart from any relation to Christianity. As Joseph Pickle points out, “Schleiermacher's appreciative assessment of Judaism recognizes the uniqueness of Judaism and rejects attempts to treat it or the Old Testament as a preparatio evangelii.”Footnote ²⁹ Hence, Schleiermacher conceded that the ot really belongs to the synagogue, and not to the church, after all. The most important theologian of the nineteenth century thus departed from the classical Christian tradition by upholding the Jewish character of the ot. But precisely because the ot is Jewish, it cannot also be Christian.

Critique of Schleiermacher's Portrayal of Judaism and Early Christianity

Schleiermacher's methodological insistence upon the distinctiveness of each positive religion cleared the way for the possibility of an impartial historical treatment of Judaism in its own right. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Judaism betrays certain prejudices that reflect his own Christian starting point. Consequently, his reconstruction of the history of religion invites criticism to the extent that it fails to meet the requirements of a genuinely historical interpretation. Since his proposal regarding the ot is so closely tied to his view of the church's relation to Judaism, of chief concern here is his argument that Christianity is not to be understood as a continuation or development of Judaism.

The characterization of the ot as “Jewish” is subject to some important qualifications not made by Schleiermacher himself. He apparently assumed that Judaism was the religion of Israel even before the exile.Footnote ³⁰ Yet modern study has shown that Judaism first began to take shape during the exilic crisis of Israel's earlier national religion and so is not identical with pre-exilic religion. This insight has ramifications for Schleiermacher's critique of Jewish monotheism as bearing an affinity with a lesser form of religion (“fetishism”) on account of its ties to a particular nation. By comparison with Judaism, pre-exilic Israelite religion was not a thoroughgoing monotheism but, rather, a “henotheism” since Israel's national deity was not yet conceived consistently in radical terms as the creator and sovereign of the entire world. Accordingly, a genuine monotheism developed in consort with the emergence of Judaism, not in spite of it! While vestiges of the pre-monotheistic Israelite religion are embedded in older strata of the ot, these traditions were subject to reinterpretation from the monotheistic perspective of the Jewish redactors of the ot. Hence, Schleiermacher's criticism of Jewish monotheism as less than pure results, in part, from his lack of adequate knowledge of the actual historical relations between pre-exilic Israelite religion and post-exilic Jewish religion, including the theological struggle of monotheism with henotheism that is reflected in the literature of the ot. But this is not the entire explanation for his view. Curiously, Schleiermacher's critique of Judaism as particularistic shows the unwitting influence upon him of the Enlightenment's preference for a universal rational religion. The irony here is that he thereby betrayed his own groundbreaking recognition of the irreducibly particular nature of actual religion which he articulated in his polemic against “natural religion” as an artificial intellectual construct.Footnote ³¹ Judaism is constituted by the twin poles of universality (reflecting its monotheism) and particularity (rooted in its special vocation to bring all peoples to monotheism). But particularity is not the same as “particularism,” just as universality is not identical with “universalism.” Christianity is just as particular as and no less prone to particularism than Judaism.Footnote ³²

Schleiermacher's portrait does not, moreover, sufficiently differentiate the post-exilic Judaism that put its indelible stamp upon the final form of the ot from the Judaism of the rabbis after the destruction of the second temple. Judaism, as classically defined, is a post-Christian development that cannot be simply identified with the Jewish religion evident in the later formative period of the ot. Prior to the rabbinic period, there was no such thing as a monolithic or “orthodox” Judaism commanding the allegiance of all Jews. In fact, there were varieties of Judaism, each of which claimed to embody the authentic continuation of Israel's religious heritage. The crucial point is that the Bible (Tanakh/ot) does not belong to rabbinic Judaism in any simple sense. Indeed, the results of historical criticism have been no less troubling for traditional Jewish beliefs about the Bible.Footnote ³³ While the ot is certainly Jewish, it is not to be equated with classical Judaism as though the latter were the inevitable outcome of the former.Footnote ³⁴

Since the religion we now call “Christianity” began its existence as one variety of Judaism, it is anachronistic to describe it as a new religion in its original phase, as Schleiermacher did; indeed, it is difficult to identify at what stage in its history we can speak of it as a different religion from Judaism. Yet if this is the case, must we not grant that the nt, too, is in a real sense a document of Jewish religion? In his critique of Schleiermacher, Barth correctly understood that, humanly speaking, the entire Bible is

Although the nt is full of polemics against non-Christian Jews as well as against other Christians (Jewish and non-Jewish), it breathes throughout the spirit of Jewish piety.Footnote ³⁶

The historical picture is further complicated by the insight that all of these varieties of Judaism, including Christianity, were profoundly influenced by Hellenism. Wayne Meeks argues that “ ‘Judaism’ was in some senses a Hellenistic religion. … Like the other varieties of Judaism, the earliest Christian groups were simultaneously Jewish and Hellenistic.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet Schleiermacher did not view Christianity as either Jewish or Hellenistic, and certainly not as simultaneously Jewish and Hellenistic, since for him it was a completely new formation equidistant from both Judaism and Hellenism. Although he perceived the influence on Judaism of what would later be called “syncretism,” his mode of conceiving each religion as a distinct entity implies a view of the religions as having only external or accidental relations to one another. Even if we should wish to allow for a more dynamic model of their mutual relations, Schleiermacher's thesis that Christianity stood in the same relation of religious discontinuity to Judaism as to paganism is hardly persuasive. It is not clear, moreover, what we are to make of this rather surprising assessment given his classification of paganism as a polytheistic religion of the aesthetic (i.e., non-moral) type. On his own terms, this means that paganism not only represented a lower stage of religious development than Judaism but also differed in kind from it. Indeed, he invoked Greco-Roman paganism as his chief illustration of an aesthetic religion:

It is pertinent to recall Schleiermacher's view that the “inward unity” of any positive religion is to be understood as a “peculiar modification” of that which is shared with religions of the same type and at the same stage of development.Footnote ³⁹ Yet what else can this mean other than that early Christianity was a peculiar modification of Jewish religion?Footnote ⁴⁰ In his lectures on hermeneutics where he attempted to sort out the differing relations of dependence upon Hebrew and Greek evident in the nt, Schleiermacher concluded:

Here there appears to be an inconsistency in Schleiermacher's argument. From the perspective of hindsight, we know that what began as a Jewish sect developed into a distinct religious community whose self-definition had to be hammered out in polemics against rabbinic Judaism as well as against paganism. But from this fact of history it does not follow that the material substance of Christian religion is as discontinuous with Judaism as with the Hellenistic religions from which the church drew the majority of its converts. Schleiermacher was right to point out the philosophical developments on Greek soil that had prepared for the reception by non-Jews of a monotheistic and ethical religion. Yet his comparison of pagan converts to Jewish converts is misleading since the latter did not understand themselves as rejecting the legacy of Israel for a new religion but, rather, as embracing its fulfillment. This was clearly true of the apostle Paul.Footnote ⁴²

The conclusion is unavoidable that the historical foundation of Schleiermacher's argument about the ot is inadequate inasmuch as it presupposes an undifferentiated view of pre-rabbinic Judaism as well as an interpretation of early Christianity as only accidentally related to the religious heritage of Judaism. For this reason, Pickle has rendered the following ironic verdict: “The advocate of historical-critical understanding accepts a view of Judaism that is utterly ahistorical.”Footnote ⁴³ While Schleiermacher cannot be held responsible for not having had the benefit of recent biblical scholarship at his disposal, it is nonetheless the case that his commitment to the historical-critical method invites these criticisms of his own historical reconstruction. In this connection, we are brought back to the idea that Christianity, like every other positive religion, has a distinguishing “essence” that identifies it as a unique entity in the religious realm. This idea was much debated in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the widespread acknowledgment of the demise of the orthodox doctrine of scripture, it answered the need for a conceptual tool to bridge the empirical study of history and the normative task of theology. On the other hand, the notion of a distinguishing “essence” presented its own problems. The ambiguity inherent in this notion is whether the essence of a religion is an abstraction from history intended merely to characterize a set of related phenomena or whether it is also meant to serve a critical purpose in relation to them.Footnote ⁴⁴ In practice, it appears to do double duty in this regard, although this is not objectionable provided that the proper conceptual distinctions are made between these two functions.Footnote ⁴⁵

Schleiermacher reasoned that the essence of Christianity can be determined in a scholarly manner only by comparing Christianity to the other positive religions. In this he was surely correct. Two questions must be asked, however. The first is whether such a concept is not too static to do justice to the dynamic character of a movement in history. Given that religious traditions undergo real change and development over time, does not the assumption of an essence hamper our appreciation of their dynamic character? This objection is valid whenever an abstract conception of a phenomenon is mistaken for the concrete phenomenon itself. But this confusion is not inevitable. Indeed, we cannot even speak of movements in history (say, the Renaissance or the Reformation) apart from the application of abstract concepts to the interpretation of the historian's empirical data. And all historians who are more than mere chroniclers necessarily hazard some general characterizations of broad movements in history and culture. This commonplace has to be stressed in response to those scholars who reject the very notion of an essence on the grounds that such an idea is foreign to temporal phenomena. No doubt, a large part of the problem stems from the connotations the word “essence” has acquired in our postmodern intellectual situation where “essentialisms” of one kind or another are rightly suspected of falsifying the complexity of reality. Yet it is erroneous to think that Schleiermacher intended to reify an abstraction. Although it may be desirable to come up with new terminology to designate such a conceptual operation, this does not obviate the need to specify wherein the enduring identity of a religious tradition consists if we wish to avoid a complete nominalism in historical interpretation.Footnote ⁴⁶

This recognition of the legitimacy, even indispensability, of inquiring into the essence leads to our second question, namely, whether the quest to define what makes Christianity distinctive must depend upon a comparison with the other religions that implies their inferiority. As I see it, there is no reason, for instance, why the identity of Christianity has to be purchased at the cost of a sharp contrast or opposition between it and Judaism given their inextricably close historical relations and substantial material overlaps. While Schleiermacher's concept of an essence can be defended in principle, his use of it in fact is vulnerable to this criticism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hence, an updated attempt to implement this task must renounce any apologetic motive when attempting to define the essence of Christianity in relation to Judaism. But in itself there is nothing wrong with his formal definition of Christianity's essence: like Judaism, it is an ethical monotheism; but unlike Judaism, its central figure is Jesus and its central idea is redemption from sin.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Jewish Jesus and the Nature of Christian Faith

Schleiermacher posed the question: “Was Christianity something new or not?” In light of the foregoing discussion, the question should not be formulated so starkly as “new or not,” since on historical grounds alone we have to say that Christianity was relatively new even if not absolutely so. Yet Schleiermacher disagreed. To his mind, Christianity represents an absolutely new beginning in the religious realm which cannot be explained by what preceded it historically. Here, however, we are dealing with more than a strictly historical judgment on his part since a particular theological construal of Christian faith co-determines his argument. He said as much in his lectures on hermeneutics: “The question cannot be decided in an immediately hermeneutic manner and therefore shows itself as a matter of conviction.”Footnote ⁴⁹ To be sure, in the final analysis how we think about Christianity's relation to Judaism (and, hence, to the ot) is a theological question, the answer to which is indicative of a theologian's entire construal of the nature of Christian faith. While one cannot move directly from history to theology in positivistic fashion, there is nonetheless a critical interrelation between the two, especially for a theologian who affirms without qualification the results of historical-critical study. Yet in moving from the empirical questions of the historian of religion to the normative questions of the theologian, a shift is being made from a standpoint “external” to Christianity to one that is “internal” to it.Footnote ⁵⁰ Whereas the essence must be determined through comparative study, theology (in the sense of dogmatics or systematic theology) requires that the theologian stand within the church, sharing its distinctive religious experience, and seeking to give as accurate a description of it as possible.Footnote ⁵¹

Though Schleiermacher is most often remembered for his famous redefinition of religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence,” of greater importance perhaps was his proposal of a historicized model of dogmatics (Glaubenslehre) designed to transcend the dichotomy beyond supernaturalism and rationalism occasioned by the Enlightenment's challenge to the Reformation heritage. The components of this model are the following: first of all, faith is not an assent to doctrinal propositions, but a matter of the heart or, to use his terminology, the religious affections. Indeed, one may share Schleiermacher's affective view of faith without endorsing his theory of religion in every detail. Second, doctrines are understood as intellectual attempts to explicate the understanding of human existence in the world before God implicit in the Christian religious affections.Footnote ⁵² Third, historical study teaches that the church's doctrines have changed over the course of time. Fourth, the task of dogmatics is to discern the logical or systematic connection between the various doctrinal loci as representing in their totality the historically particular experience of redemption through Christ that constitutes the church as a distinctive religious community.Footnote ⁵³ Fifth, since dogmatics concerns the state of Christian doctrine in the present moment, it must be open to further doctrinal revision for the sake of the best contemporary understanding of the Christian religious affections wherein faith consists. Formal agreement with Schleiermacher's model and method of dogmatics does not, however, entail endorsing all of his material conclusions. This distinction between the formal and material elements in Schleiermacher's dogmatics is crucial if there is to be an internal criticism of his positions that does not—as in the case of an external criticism such as Beckmann's—presuppose a completely different conception of the theological enterprise.Footnote ⁵⁴ In my judgment, there are three interrelated doctrines to be interrogated for the sake of proposing a revision of Schleiermacher's construal of the nature of Christian faith. These are: christology, soteriology, and the multiple meanings of revelation.

We cannot fail to notice what many scholars have labeled as Schleiermacher's “christocentrism.” Of course, all Christian theology is christocentric in some sense inasmuch as the person of Jesus is the central revelation of God that constitutes the church as a distinct religious community. But Schleiermacher's theology is christocentric in a much stronger sense on account of his conviction that redemption from sin is mediated through Jesus alone. Schleiermacher affirmed that Jesus, by virtue of his incomparable relation to God, quite simply is the new element that cannot be explained by any historical antecedents. He conceived of Jesus as a person whose consciousness of God was unbroken by sin; indeed, the religious ideal for human existence became an actual fact in this one individual.Footnote ⁵⁵ Here we meet the sole miracle in Schleiermacher's theology.Footnote ⁵⁶ For him, denial of this claim would spell the end of Christian faith.Footnote ⁵⁷ Still, he was certain that his view of Jesus was a necessary inference about who he really must have been given his actual redemptive influence upon the present religious experience of Christian believers. In spite of his assurance in this regard, however, there are grave problems with such an idea. For one thing, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine what it would mean to say of a real human being that he or she was entirely without sin.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is easy to suspect a “docetic” strain at work here, notwithstanding Schleiermacher's explicit rejection of this ancient heresy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, the admittedly imperfect consciousness of God on the part of Christians does not require a perfect consciousness of God as its sufficient source, but merely a more powerful and vivid one.Footnote ⁶⁰ Also, this conception has negative implications for the question of Jesus' relation to Judaism. In Susannah Heschel's analysis, Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher feared that if Jesus had not perfectly embodied the religious ideal, then he was “only a more or less original and revolutionary reformer of the Jewish law.”Footnote ⁶²

It is pertinent to recall Schleiermacher's calm predication that historical-critical scholarship would be more damaging for the traditional Christian assessment of the ot than for that of the nt. Yet in no wise has the historical basis of Schleiermacher's theology been more badly shaken than by the subsequent course of research into the gospels as sources for our knowledge of who Jesus was. Schleiermacher was confident that John's gospel provides us with a reliable report of Jesus' teaching from which we can form a picture of his inner life.Footnote ⁶³ Accordingly, the message proclaimed by Jesus was about his own unique relation to God. This assumption that the christological teaching of John's gospel accurately depicts what Jesus taught about himself in turn accounts for the antithetical relationship between Jesus and Judaism in Schleiermacher's interpretation.Footnote ⁶⁴ But this view founders on the later insight of critical study that the synoptic gospels, not John, contain the most authentic reminiscences of Jesus' teachings. In his survey of the nineteenth century's quest for the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer concluded:

If Schleiermacher had been constrained to base his view of Jesus' preaching on the evidence of the synoptic evangelists instead of relying on John, he would have been forced to confront head-on what became the major problem of nt scholarship in the nineteenth century: the relation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.

The only figure to the left of Schleiermacher analyzed in Beckmann's study is David Friedrich Strauss.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was in the work of Strauss that this distinction became crucial for the scholarly study of the nt. Strauss, too, faulted Schleiermacher for teaching “not an historical, but an ideal Christ.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In sharp contrast to Schleiermacher, Strauss clearly saw that in his religion Jesus was a Jew and that the church's christology as reflected, for example, in John's gospel attests to what Christians later taught about Jesus after his death.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Strauss understood that even in its christological faith the church was still primarily a Jewish phenomenon. The nt's witness to Jesus as the messiah was born of a lively continuation of religious motifs found in the ot.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hence, for Strauss, the ot and its interpretation in second-temple Judaism were the formative influences upon the presentation of Jesus in the gospels. Two consequences follow from this distinction between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. First, Jesus did not teach the gospel that Christians later taught about him, as Schleiermacher mistakenly assumed.Footnote ⁷⁰ Second, the actual content of Jesus' message can only be understood in relation to his Jewish context. This means that Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian.Footnote ⁷¹

These considerations would require Schleiermacher to rethink the historical basis of his christological doctrine. More importantly, they would most certainly entail revision of his historical reconstruction of Jesus' teaching in the direction of what he pejoratively called “Ebionitism,” i.e., a view that qualifies the absolute uniqueness of Jesus by stressing his continuity rather than discontinuity with Judaism. Schleiermacher well understood what this would mean for his theological position:

This alternative view which was rejected by Schleiermacher is, however, completely in keeping with the results of contemporary scholarship on Jesus. Hence, if we are in earnest about the historical Jesus, as Schleiermacher was in principle, we have to surrender unhistorical claims that insulate Jesus' religiosity from his Jewish milieu.Footnote ⁷³ We may properly seek to delineate Jesus' distinctiveness in relation to his milieu, but this is not to deny that the religion he taught was a form of Judaism. Though Schleiermacher insisted upon the Jewish character of the ot, he did not view the ot as a document of equal religious value to the nt.Footnote ⁷⁴ This assessment reflects his conviction that Christianity is not only a different religion from Judaism but also superior to it. He further assumed that this view was consonant with what Jesus taught. This claim is now undermined by the insight that Jesus was wholly rooted in the Jewish tradition.

Strauss clearly saw that it is no longer possible to assume an identity between the church's proclamation about Jesus and the proclamation of Jesus. But if the church's kerygma represents a development beyond what the historical Jesus taught, the question arises as to how we are to understand the material relation between them.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although the christological faith of the church is not based directly on the teachings of Jesus, it nonetheless first arose in response to his distinctive embodiment of Jewish faith.Footnote ⁷⁶ His central message concerned the coming of God's sovereign reign (“the kingdom of God”) and he called upon his fellow Jews to be prepared to receive it. As such, his preaching was about God, not about himself.Footnote ⁷⁷ Without rejecting the Torah in principle, he differentiated between greater and lesser commandments in it. He continued aspects of the prophetic tradition in his concern for the poor and the oppressed. He pointed to evidence of God's providential care in the ordering of nature as had Israel's wisdom teachers before him. In all these respects, Jesus' teaching and ministry were firmly rooted in the ot/Jewish tradition. H. Richard Niebuhr spoke of the faith that came to expression in Jesus' words and deeds as a paradigmatic illustration of Israel's “radical” or thoroughgoing monotheism. The historic significance of early Christianity, as Niebuhr noted, is that it made this faith available to non-Jews without requiring of them conversion to Judaism.Footnote ⁷⁸ This crucial step obviously required a critical sifting of the Jewish scriptures for the purpose of discerning what was still valid for the new community under altered circumstances. But this development did not negate the material connection between Jesus' faith in God and the faith of Israel to which he was heir. Rudolf Bultmann emphasized that no matter how critical Jesus may have been in relation to the other Jewish teachers of his day, the content of his preaching was

Even the love-command that has been so important in Christian ethics is derived from Jesus' summary of the Torah. Correctly understood, then, the faith of Christians is not opposed to the Jewish faith of Jesus; rather, it is trust in and loyalty to God through Jesus.Footnote ⁸⁰ “Christian faith is not belief in a miracle,” not even the miracle of Jesus' sinless perfection, but “the confidence that Jesus' witness [to God] is a true one.”Footnote ⁸¹ Hence, Christian faith cannot be construed as standing in a completely antithetical relationship to Judaism without pitting itself against Jesus' own faith as a devout Jew.

Claude Welch is correct in characterizing Schleiermacher's position as representing only a “halfway” solution to the modern problem of christology. Unlike the classical problem of trying to affirm Jesus' humanity given the prior assumption of his self-evident divinity, the modern problem was to ask in what sense Jesus could be divine given his genuine humanity.Footnote ⁸² But it is possible to go further than Welch does by arguing that even this new formulation of the christological problem is flawed insofar as it asks “about the being of Jesus in himself, as distinct from asking about the meaning of Jesus for us.”Footnote ⁸³ Instead of asking about Jesus' own relation to God (about which we could know next to nothing in any case), we should be asking another question: what does Jesus mean for those persons who have experienced redemption as a result of their encounter with him? Christological reflection thus properly begins, not with a question about the being of Jesus in relation to either divinity or humanity, but with the given fact of his salvific impact upon those who call themselves “Christians.” The question “What does Jesus actually do for Christians?” is, as Brian Gerrish rightly notes, “the crucial one to ask in any Christian community, if the christological project is to be duly launched.”Footnote ⁸⁴ It is this aspect of Schleiermacher's approach—namely, his insistence that christology arises from reflection upon Jesus' redemptive influence— that remains worthy of development since, if pursued consistently, it would allow us to state the meaning of Jesus for contemporary Christian experience while leaving behind untenable claims about the historical Jesus and his supposedly sinless relation to God.

If we ask how Jesus is efficacious in a redemptive manner today, we have to address the role of preaching in the church. Although Schleiermacher affirmed that the faith of Christians in every age is none other than that experienced by Jesus' original disciples, he did acknowledge a difference in the medium through which this faith has been evoked and sustained:

After Jesus' death, it is the nt's portrait of him that serves as the occasion for an experience of redemption. This biblical picture of Christ thus takes the place that Jesus once had in relation to those who came into personal contact with him. In this respect, the church's proclamation can be understood as a continuation of Jesus' ministry. Such a focus on the nt's depiction of Jesus and its actualization in the church's preaching does not require assertions about Jesus that exempt him from the contingencies of his own historical circumstance as well as from our common humanity.

This modification of Schleiermacher's proposed avenue to christological reflection need not entail the problematic conclusion that redemption from sin can be achieved only through an encounter with Jesus, an assumption he shared with the classical tradition that he in other ways sought to revise. Not only is redemption for Schleiermacher the central idea in the Christian religion, but Jesus is its only mediator.Footnote ⁸⁶ He spoke of “the conviction, which we assume every Christian to possess, of the exclusive superiority of Christianity” without, however, giving a satisfactory explanation as to why we should be convinced of this.Footnote ⁸⁷ A paradox in Schleiermacher's thought is precisely how this “absolutist” conception of christology and soteriology is to be related to his celebration of diversity in religion.Footnote ⁸⁸ Whereas the premodern tradition had seen in religious diversity a symptom of sin, Schleiermacher viewed it as reflecting the varying historical circumstances in which religions originate and develop. It appears, however, as though he wanted to have it both ways: while an appreciation of diversity is ingredient in a genuinely historical understanding of religion, all Christians are nonetheless agreed that redemption can come only through Jesus. But this latter assertion reflects an absolutizing of what is historically relative and thus is contrary to a truly historical viewpoint. We must find some distinction that will allow us to extricate ourselves from this contradiction while still acknowledging the legitimate motive that misled Schleiermacher to fall victim to it. A descriptive account of the Christian religious experience rightly emphasizes what Schleiermacher understood, namely, that Christians are those who are certain that their own experience of redemption is constituted by a relation to Jesus. The Christian religious affections thus have a necessary connection to the figure of Jesus as mediated by the church's gospel. Yet it does not follow that a redemptive experience of God must always be constituted by a relation to Jesus. Such a claim exceeds the bounds of Schleiermacher's method of dogmatics, which cannot render judgments about non-Christian religious experience.

Wesley Wildman, tracing what he calls “the Absolutist Principle” back to the church's earliest stages of christological reflection, explains the basic confusion here:

This brand of christocentrism and its corollary that salvation is a human possibility solely in connection with Jesus are, in Wildman's view, the major doctrinal factors that have also created the problem of the church's relation to Judaism. The church's traditional polemic against the synagogue is a consequence of universalizing its historically particular religious experience so that those who stand in other streams of religious history are viewed as simply bereft of anything like the redemptive benefits that accrue to Christians as a result of their relation to Jesus. In place of absolutism, Wildman proposes a “modest” christological conception that does not make such exaggerated claims.

Niebuhr, who was conscious of his formal continuity with Schleiermacher's method, made virtually the same point: “A critical historical theology cannot … prescribe what form religious life must take in all places and all times beyond the limits of its own historical system.”Footnote ⁹¹ By declaring that apart from Jesus the consciousness of God is tainted and impure, Schleiermacher violated the strictures of his own theological method, which only allows for a descriptive account of the Christian religious experience.Footnote ⁹²

Schleiermacher did not derive all knowledge of God exclusively from Christ in Barthian fashion. The revelation in Christ has a “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt) in the innate awareness of God given with human self-consciousness simply as such.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, in Schleiermacher's usage, “revelation” is not a theological principle that stands in an oppositional relation to the mode of understanding to be derived from the historical interpretation of religion, as is the case with Barth (and presumably also Beckmann). Revelation, for Schleiermacher, refers either to the original revelation of God to human self-consciousness or to the historical revelation in Christ that is the basis of the church's proclamation. Still, it may be asked whether there is not also a third sense in which we can and should speak of revelation in reference to that religious development wherein the original revelation, which in itself may be quite inchoate, did in fact become a clear monotheistic consciousness of God. Paul Tillich, a theologian who was quite explicit about his indebtedness to Schleiermacher, made precisely this point when he differentiated between three senses of revelation as “universal,” “preparatory,” and “final.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Since the meanings of “universal” and “final” are sufficiently similar to the two senses of revelation found in Schleiermacher's thought, we ought to inquire into what Tillich meant by a “preparatory” revelation. Speaking as a Christian for whom Jesus as the Christ is the final revelatory event in history, Tillich nevertheless attributed an unparalleled significance to the history of Israel:

Tillich thus claimed that “the Old Testament is an inseparable part of the revelation of Jesus as the Christ.”Footnote ⁹⁶ What is apparent in Tillich, though missing from Schleiermacher, is a deep appreciation of the religious significance of Israel's history as having provided the indispensable presupposition of the church's faith in Jesus.Footnote ⁹⁷

Schleiermacher was right to locate what is new about Christianity in the religious significance Jesus has for Christians. But to say that Jesus is of central importance to Christians is not to say that everything important in Christianity began with him. Nonetheless, there is one respect in which Schleiermacher credited the history of Israel, namely, when he said that a universal redeemer could only have come from a monotheistic people.Footnote ⁹⁸ He also acknowledged that the Christian notion of redemption, presupposing as it does the reality of freedom and consequently of guilt on account of sin, is intelligible solely on the basis of the teleological type of religion which first emerged in Israel. Are these not admissions that, apart from the prior religious development in Israel, the church could never have arisen in the first place? On his own terms, would it not be possible for Schleiermacher to grant the truth in what Tillich said since he well understood that ethical monotheism is an ingredient in the Christian religious experience?Footnote ⁹⁹

Cumulatively, these various considerations more than suffice to justify the conclusion that Schleiermacher's formal method of theology allows for a revision of his material positions in the doctrinal loci of christology, soteriology, and the multiple meanings of revelation. While Schleiermacher was correct to identify the essence of Christian faith as monotheistic and ethical and focused on the figure of Jesus for the purpose of redemption from sin, he was wrong to draw such a sharp antithesis between Israel's faith and that of the church. Indeed, there is every reason to affirm a strong material connection between the Jewish message of Jesus and the church's proclamation of his ongoing significance. Christians need not deny the indispensable role played by the Israelite-Jewish tradition in establishing precisely those presuppositions without which neither Jesus nor the church would have been possible and on the sole basis of which their fundamental import is intelligible. Of course, to say that these alternatives to Schleiermacher's own views are allowed by his method is not to imply that he personally would have agreed with them. The point is simply that another theologian, working from the same model for theological inquiry initially proposed by Schleiermacher, can arrive at a different construal of the nature of Christian faith that likewise claims to be a faithful rendering of the religious affections evoked and sustained by the church's preaching. It is not necessary to demonstrate more than this in order to make a convincing case that Schleiermacher's material interpretation of doctrine can be criticized according to the methodological criteria he set forth as adequate to the unprecedented responsibilities of modern theology. All the same, this alternative proposal has the advantage that it coheres with the best historical scholarship in a way no longer true of Schleiermacher's theology.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Historical Criticism and the Canon of Scripture

The question of the ot's right to a place in the Christian Bible did not first arise with historical criticism. Quite early in the church's history, the ot became problematic because it was also the Bible of the synagogue (Tanakh). Since Marcion believed that Jesus taught an altogether new religion antithetical to Judaism, he was completely consistent in arguing that the church should dispense with the Jewish Bible in favor of a canon of distinctively Christian writings. Yet he was alone in his categorical rejection of all spiritualizing modes of exegesis. When the proto-orthodox church repudiated Marcion's proposal by retaining the ot as the first part of its canon, it simultaneously rejected his insistence upon the literal sense of the text.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The church thereby secured its christological exegesis of the ot, which backed up its claim that Israel's scriptures belong to the Christians, not to the Jews. For this reason, the anti-Marcionite church never refuted Marcion on his own terms, but rather implicitly accepted his formulation of the crucial issue: if the ot is not Christian, it cannot be canonical.

Although Schleiermacher shared Marcion's view of the absolute novelty of Christianity in relation to Judaism, he did not defend it on the mythological grounds that Jews and Christians worship two distinct deities. On the basis of historical scholarship, he recognized the real differences between the ot and the nt that had been smoothed over by premodern forms of exegesis; as a result, he was right in criticizing previous theologians for trying to make the ot say something about Jesus that it does not say. His argument underscored the legitimate rationale for historical criticism, namely, that it alone makes possible an understanding of the biblical texts free from the distortions of anachronism.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, it is to his credit that he frankly acknowledged the Jewish character of the ot and pleaded for an end to the church's historic polemic against the synagogue over its rightful possession. He was, moreover, prescient in his prediction that critical scholarship would occasion difficult problems for the church's inherited theology.

For the sake of arriving at a different conclusion than Schleiermacher's about the ot's place in the Christian canon, must we abandon the strictly historical perspective in favor of a special theological or “sacred” hermeneutic that treats the Bible as a unique case to which the general rules of interpretation do not apply? Should these turn out to be in fact our only options, then modern Protestant theology has certainly been brought to an impasse by historical criticism. But there is another option beyond this impasse that has not been sufficiently considered. Beckmann's inadequacy is that he never thinks of arguing against Schleiermacher's thesis on the basis of the latter's own hermeneutical presuppositions. This failing mirrors that of nascent orthodoxy, which was unable to reply to Marcion except by evading his direct challenge. Like Hofmann and Barth, Beckmann tips his hat to the legitimacy of historical-critical readings of the Bible in principle but only to shift the grounds of discussion by appealing to dogmatic categories of interpretation derived from the nt in order to argue for the canonical status of the ot. The irony here is that Beckmann has tacitly accepted Schleiermacher's neo-Marcionite formulation of the basic issue: either the ot is not strictly speaking a Christian book, in which case the church should hand it back to the synagogue, or the true meaning of the ot consists in its prophetic witness to Jesus as Israel's messiah, in which case the Jews' claim to it is invalidated by their lack of faith in its christological referent. After his otherwise admirable recounting of the story of historical-critical research into the ot, Beckmann concludes with this pronouncement: “For the sake of the faith affirmed in the New Testament, Christian theologians must insist against the Jewish ‘no’ that Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah promised in the Old Testament.”Footnote ¹⁰³ But it can be asked of Beckmann why Christian theologians must continue to press this claim. Not only has historical research into the ot undermined the traditional “proofs” of Jesus' messianic status, but even the very idea of a “messiah” appears to be a mythological or symbolic one, as Strauss clearly understood.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the early Christians, by ascribing this title to Jesus, radically redefined its content in light of his non-messianic fate. Drawing a very different conclusion from historical study, Rabbi Michael Hilton calls upon Jews and Christians to revise their theological traditions on the basis of a “more accurate understanding … of the relationship between the two faiths”:

Hilton's proposal thus points the way beyond that untenable impasse of either an ot historically interpreted as a document of Jewish religion and, hence, antithetical to Christianity (Marcion, Schleiermacher, Harnack) or an ot spiritually interpreted as a witness to Christian faith and, hence, denied to Judaism (Hofmann, Barth, Beckmann).

The modern impasse in Protestant theology with respect to the ot results from the dual legacy of the Reformation. The Reformers insisted that the Bible be allowed to speak in its own voice and that the Bible should be the sole norm of Christian doctrine. Their rejection of the allegorical method and correlative insistence upon a literal exegesis undergirded their use of the Bible as the critical principle for testing the medieval tradition. Prior to modernity, these two commitments could be affirmed simultaneously because it was axiomatic that the Bible as a whole provided an unambiguous foundation for doctrine. But in the modern period, these two aspects of the Reformation heritage came into conflict. Historical scholarship not only separated ot and nt into distinct fields of study but also identified within each testament diverse theological traditions that could not easily be harmonized. Perceiving the problem, Schleiermacher fought against an uncritical use of the Bible as a proof text for doctrine. For him, this entailed three departures from the inherited approach to the scriptures: first, the “true” or normative nt canon has to be critically distinguished from its received historical form; second, the nt should not be used to support Protestant doctrine against Catholicism; and, third, the ot cannot be invoked to defend Christianity against Judaism. The first two points are relatively non-controversial in theology today. Still, his handling of the ot continues to be denounced. Yet the usual alternative to it, illustrated by Beckmann, is even more problematic. Schubert Ogden locates the problem here in the assumption that the ot is to be judged by the same critical norm as is the nt.

Here Ogden formulates the theological question of the ot in the only way it can be taken seriously on the basis of Schleiermacher's premises. This question can be rephrased by asking whether Schleiermacher's perfectly sound argument against an illicit use of the ot in Christian theology precludes altogether the possibility of an admissible use therein.

Since Schleiermacher acknowledged the necessity of a theological criticism (Sachkritik) of the nt scriptures, there is no reason in principle not to insist upon a similar approach to the ot. Only in this case the theological criterion should not be the kerygma as in the nt, but rather the indispensable monotheistic-ethical presuppositions on the sole basis of which the nt's christological and soteriological affirmations are intelligible and apart from which they are easily distorted in a dualistic and polytheistic manner. Accordingly, the ot's enduring import for the church is to insure that its faith is never interpreted in such a manner that explicitly contradicts or even implicitly denies these presuppositions which are contained in all authentic proclamation of the gospel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ That the ethical monotheism to which the ot bears definitive witness has as a matter of fact actually functioned in this sense as a necessary—though not sufficient—norm by which to test the adequacy of the various interpretations of the gospel found in the nt and the post-biblical tradition is ample warrant for deeming the ot to be of indispensable religious and theological value to Christian faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This rationale for attributing a definite sort of canonical status to the ot—different from that of the nt but no less important—does not sidestep the challenge of historical criticism to traditional theology. It also validates the legitimate motive at work in the ancient church's retention of the ot without endorsing the inadequate argumentation on which it based this decision.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Not the least advantage of this alternative systematic proposal for formulating both the question and its answer is that it is not constrained to secure its positive valuation of the ot by diminishing the import of historical criticism, thus pitting a special theological hermeneutic against a so-called “general” hermeneutic.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Moreover, it does not entail a denial of the synagogue's equally valid claim to possession of Israel's scripture.Footnote ¹¹¹

Ernst Troeltsch, who pursued the theological implications of a consistently historical approach to religion more fully than anyone either before or after him, noted that “the strictly historical interpretation of Christianity has made tremendous strides and has furnished a historical-critical picture very different from that which lay before … Schleiermacher.”Footnote ¹¹² Regarding the ot, he affirmed: “To acknowledge Christianity … is also to recognize the religion of Israel as its prior stage and presupposition, for without it, Christianity is incomprehensible.”Footnote ¹¹³ Nonetheless, he gave this positive assessment of Schleiermacher's new departure for modern theology: “His program simply needs to be carried out consistently. Hardly any change is necessary.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ While Schleiermacher's execution of his self-appointed task is justifiably subject to criticism, we must look upon his program for theology as “an unfulfilled possibility and not as an accomplishment forever witnessing to the errors following from his methodological starting point.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Perhaps the true service of historical theology consists not only in providing new angles of vision that illuminate the ambiguities of our religious past, but also in reminding us of unfinished business that has to be on any agenda for future constructive work.