The rationalist Johann Friedrich Röhr makes a passing but telling comment in his 1823 review of Schleiermacher's then recently published Glaubenslehre,Footnote 1 when moving on from the doctrines of redemption and reconciliation: “We can pass over the explanation of the ecclesial doctrine of the prophetic, high priestly, and kingly office of Christ. More important is the doctrine of justification.”Footnote 2 Röhr's disinterest has, in large part, been retained by more recent theological considerations of Schleiermacher. Despite ample recognition of the fact that Schleiermacher rejuvenated the doctrine of Christ's threefold office after a period of general neglect, extended reflection upon the actual implications of Schleiermacher's understanding of Christ as prophet, priest, and king for the rest of his system, and his doctrine of redemption in particular, has been lacking. In both editions of the Glaubenslehre, however, four complete sections are devoted to the threefold office, which with two preceding sections on the redeeming and reconciling activity of Christ make up Schleiermacher's doctrinal heading “Of the Work of Christ” within his division on Christology.Footnote 3
A half century later and in contrast to Röhr, Albrecht Ritschl recognized the interrelated nature of the threefold office and redemption in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre, and offered a criticism that will helpfully frame the current study. Ritschl argues that while Schleiermacher attempts to make new use of Christ's priestly office, he is unsuccessful because operating under the “schema of Christ's high-priestly work” requires certain commitments to concepts of divine justice exemplary of the “old school”—exactly those that Schleiermacher intends to reject. Ritschl concludes, “Now, to reject this idea was not enough; it required to be superseded by another. That a blank [Lücke] was left instead, has led to the result that Schleiermacher's elucidations glide from the schema of the priestly office into those of the prophetical and of the kingly. The dialectic which makes this possible is not masterly.”Footnote 4 It is my contention that while Schleiermacher may have merely filled in “a blank [that] was left,” an account of the redeeming work of Christ under the schema of his non-priestly offices need not simply be this, and in fact can follow quite naturally from the Glaubenslehre.
There are numerous theological projects by which one might propose to improve upon the weaknesses of Schleiermacher's doctrine of the Redeemer as identified by Ritschl. Here I intend to pursue only one such project, focusing on the moment in Christ's redeeming work when certain Gospel accounts imply that he was forsaken by God on the cross. In particular, I will incorporate the Glaubenslehre's account of the threefold office of Christ into a new reading of the cry of dereliction by explaining Christ's godforsakenness as the end of the prophetic office of Christ.Footnote 5 This interpretation will require a revision of Schleiermacher's account of Christ's abandonment by God, though it will remain faithful to the broader purposes of Schleiermacher's doctrine of the person and work of the Redeemer. My proposal is constructive rather than merely exegetical—it goes beyond what Schleiermacher actually affirms explicitly in his Glaubenslehre. Throughout the essay, it will become clear that in certain instances (mostly with regard to Christ's prophetic office) my proposal builds upon and opens new possibilities for Schleiermacher's thought, while in other instances (mostly with regard to Christ's cry of dereliction) my proposal is a departure from Schleiermacher and offers a significant corrective for his Glaubenslehre. The development of my proposal, however, relies entirely on the Glaubenslehre and Schleiermacher's other writings.
This approach to a doctrinal account of the godforsakenness of Christ is substantially different from most current treatments, which are primarily concerned with the problem of division within the Godhead presented by a separation of the Father from the Son.Footnote 6 In contrast to the current Trinitarian focus, Schleiermacher's problem is always one of christological psychology. The theological relevance of a revision of Schleiermacher's position, then, is wider in scope than simply a contribution to Schleiermacher research. By offering a novel approach to Christ's godforsakenness as the end of the prophetic office of Christ, this proposal has the potential to open up a dialogue that has thus far remained within the confines of the recent revival of Trinitarian doctrine.
Schleiermacher on the Godforsakenness of Christ
Schleiermacher steadfastly rejects any abandonment of Jesus by God as contradictory to the unique dignity of the Redeemer, and he is especially concerned to offer an adequate alternative interpretation for the cry of dereliction in light of this commitment. Schleiermacher's explicit conclusions on the event of dereliction, then, present an immediate obstacle to my proposal. In the following section I will discuss his account in the Glaubenslehre and other writings, reserving my own constructive proposal for later.
In the 1830–1831 Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher's mature account of the cry of dereliction, recounted in Matt 27:46 and Mark 15:34, is presented within a discussion of the passive obedience of Christ:
But this misunderstanding [that Christ's suffering was punishment] only reaches its height in the view that the suffering of Christ is a transference of punishment in the still more exact sense that God (who nevertheless, according to the doctrine of the Church itself, is not in general the Author of punishment) appointed His suffering for the Redeemer as punishment, so that Christ is supposed to have felt the primary and most direct punishment of sin, namely, the divine wrath, as striking Him and resting upon Him. This theory, on the one hand, deprives the human consciousness of Christ of all human truth, by regarding as His personal self-consciousness what from the nature of the case could in Him be only sympathy. And, on the other hand, it is obviously based on the assumption that there is an absolute necessity in the divine punishment, without any regard to the natural connexion of punishment with moral evil.Footnote 7
In a footnote appended to this passage, Schleiermacher makes an abbreviated reference to a proposed solution for the difficulty of the cry of dereliction.Footnote 8 A more extensive treatment is offered in his 1832 Leben Jesu lectures:
I believe that it is improbable that Christ fell back into a state of mental distress. Christ's word on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ has a bearing on this. I cannot think of this saying as an expression of Christ's self-consciousness. I can think of no movement when the relationship between God and Christ could have changed. It must always have been the same. Christ's oneness with the Father can never have been ended, but that seems to be what such a saying indicates. Some claim that such a state of abandonment by God was a necessary part of the plan of redemption. I admit gladly that I do not believe that. It contains an untruth, for if such a one had been abandoned by God he would have to be an untruth. He was an object of divine favor and must always have been that. Therefore his cry of dereliction must have been a self-deception or untruth. A theologian in Zurich, the saintly Hess, has also said that, and he is not one whom anyone can accuse of rationalism. When we recall that the saying is the first part of a psalm in which a number of circumstances are referred to as descriptions of a state of suffering which literally was reproduced in Christ's experience, it is natural that he cited this state (or: cry) as a beginning of this description. He did not isolate it as a description of his situation, but as a referring of those who could hear him to the entire psalm.”Footnote 9
Leben Jesu parallels the Glaubenslehre in several respects. In both works, Schleiermacher is concerned that suffering/abandonment is being construed as “necessary” for redemption. There is the argument that for a Redeemer who is defined by his perfect God-consciousness, to lose such vital connection with God would be to make his identity as Redeemer an “untruth.” There is also a positive evaluation of Johann Jakob Hess,Footnote 10 who argues that the cry of dereliction should be understood as a shorthand reference to Psalm 22 in its entirety, which does not dwell on suffering but rather upon the provision of God.Footnote 11 The explanation of the cry of dereliction as shorthand for Psalm 22 first appears in the 1830–1831 Glaubenslehre,Footnote 12 and can also be found in the 1833 sermon “On the Redeemer's State of Mind in His Final Hours.”Footnote 13 The reinforcement of Schleiermacher's claims about the suffering of Christ by such a hermeneutical argument follows upon critiques charging that the 1821–1822 Glaubenslehre privileges an ideal Christ over the historical Jesus. Schleiermacher opposes the idea that Christ suffered abandonment on the cross, but needs to offer a more substantial textual explanation of his own view if it is to remain a plausible alternative theory of the cry of dereliction.Footnote 14
Schleiermacher's rejection of previous interpretations of the cry of dereliction is predicated upon two prior commitments: 1) his opposition to a vicarious substitution whereby Christ suffers the punishment of sinners and 2) his opposition to any break in the perfect God-consciousness of Christ. According to Schleiermacher, if Christ were set at odds with God either through a loss of consciousness or through active—even if redemptive—vicarious punishment for sin, his status as Redeemer would be compromised. As a result, Schleiermacher can find no positive content for a doctrine of the suffering of Christ. He adequately explains away the difficulty of the situation, though without the event contributing to his system in any way. It is “superfluous” (überflüssig), to borrow Schleiermacher's terminology from elsewhere.Footnote 15
Yet while Schleiermacher elsewhere sets many traditions of piety and poetic descriptions aside as indifferent to dogmatic theology, the suffering of Christ does not appear to be treated in this way. In an earlier discussion of superstitions about outstanding physical attributes of the Redeemer, Schleiermacher states,
Mortality and the capacity for physical suffering are so closely connected that such a natural immortality in Christ would make the capacity of human nature in His Person for suffering a mere empty phrase, and no great worth could be attached to His physical sufferings without self-contradiction.Footnote 16
The implication is that Christ's suffering is not simply an empty phrase, that it does bear great worth, and for this reason it cannot be self-contradictory. In §104.4 Schleiermacher has only explained why the cry of dereliction is not self-contradictory. It is less clear that his account explains its great worth or how it could be more than simply an empty phrase.
In order to suggest how such an explanation might work, I will propose an account of the cry of dereliction that makes a positive contribution to the doctrine of redemption while attempting to work within Schleiermacher's framework to the greatest possible extent. In order to achieve these goals, I will resituate the account of the cry of dereliction within the prophetic office of Christ (§103) rather than Schleiermacher's placement of it within the priestly office (§104), and I will appeal to Schleiermacher's actualismFootnote 17 in order to establish a christological basis for Christ's own godforsakenness on the cross.
Like Schleiermacher, my proposal will be theological and biographical in form. This categorization is important and requires some explanation before moving forward because of the historical-critical questions involved in the use of Passion Narratives as christological sources.Footnote 18 If current scholarly consensus does not take the episode of the cry of dereliction to be a reliable account of the execution of the historical Jesus, then is any theological rehabilitation of the godforsakenness of Christ thus rendered passé? If Schleiermacher's naïve understanding of Gospel textual criticism is no longer tenable, it would seem that any new proposal remaining within Schleiermacher's original framework would share the same fate.
There is certainly much in Schleiermacher's exegetical and text-critical work that has been left behind by modern biblical studies, but his outdated opinions—even concerning the Synoptic Gospels—are not related to the Passion Narrative in such a way that would render his theology or my revisionist proposal obsolete. It is not actually clear what Schleiermacher thinks of the historical reliability of the cry-of-dereliction narrative; he does use theological arguments to reject the godforsakenness that is often inferred from this narrative, but does not comment upon its historicity. Elsewhere, Schleiermacher argues that although Mark was written with the intention of appearing as an eyewitness, he clearly was not one based upon the stylized nature of the writing; this sets Schleiermacher in agreement with current scholarship.Footnote 19 Schleiermacher's views on source criticism roughly follow Griesbach, and Schleiermacher was instrumental in the early work on proto-Gospel writings.Footnote 20 Heinrich Saunier even dedicated his 1825 Ueber die Quellen des Evangeliums des Marcus to Schleiermacher, who was his teacher. Schleiermacher did not come to the Gospel narratives uncritically, then. Yet he still claims to offer biographical accounts, uses the Gospel of John extensively for his Christology, and feels a theological need to wrestle with canonical narratives that he does not always take to be historically reliable. How can such theological structures be plausibly employed today, when biblical scholarship rejects what Schleiermacher seems to have taken for granted?
What can often come across as credulity or lack of sophistication in Schleiermacher's biblical criticism is actually the result of hermeneutical commitments concerning the place of scriptural canon in the work of theology, the implications of historicity for the religious significance of various events, and the disciplinary distinctions between biblical, pastoral, and dogmatic theology. The result may be a dogmatics deemed passé from the perspective of historical Jesus scholars or biblical literalists, but such an assessment would fail to recognize what Schleiermacher is doing as a biblical scholar and a theologian. Christine Helmer has helpfully identified the central issue as one of theological concept formation that schematizes reality as presented in the New Testament witness.Footnote 21 For Schleiermacher, the scriptural witness to the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth is thus more complicated than merely reporting historical facts:
By virtue of Schleiermacher's own claims concerning the identity of influence emanating from Christ's postmortem and antemortem presence, literary coherence can be applied as a criterion to any expression of experience of Jesus. The systematic coherence of a doctrinal system, in fact, reflects precisely the relation of systematic coherence to contemporary personal conviction regarding the transformative effect of Jesus. What Schleiermacher means by historical proximity to Jesus is the immediacy of Jesus’ presence to every age.Footnote 22
This evokes a theory of religious experience and faith that is more widely known through Kierkegaard's rejection of the “follower at secondhand,”Footnote 23 but it is just as present in Schleiermacher (albeit with a different mode of communal transmission, explanation of which would be beyond the scope of this essay); the historical proximity of the Gospels to Jesus of Nazareth is less relevant for theological reflection than is the influence of Jesus upon the representation of his life and work in the scriptural witness. The doctrinal account of the cry of dereliction as presented in Mark or Matthew thus depends on an affirmation of a divine influence upon the community of believers (including both the Gospel writers and the modern theologian), but not any claims of historiographical access to the historical Jesus. Schleiermacher, like much current scholarly work on the use of the psalms by New Testament authors, is primarily concerned with the use and effectiveness of literary structures for the presentation of a coherent account of Jesus as Messiah / king of the Jews,Footnote 24 lamenting sufferer,Footnote 25 or Redeemer.Footnote 26
Schleiermacher on the Prophetic Office of Christ
Schleiermacher rejuvenates the munus triplex schema for Christology in §§102–105 of the Glaubenslehre (CG 1 §§123–126), although in doing so he also perpetuates some of the characteristic weaknesses of the model as it has been traditionally executed. Chief among these weaknesses is the relatively small role that the prophetic office plays in Christology, and particularly for the doctrine of redemption. At the same time, Schleiermacher's discussion of Christ as prophet offers the groundwork for a more substantial account of the person and work of the Redeemer.
Though Calvin's Institutes by 1559 included an account of the prophetic office of Christ, and Calvin insists “his anointings as prophet and as priest have their place and must not be overlooked by us,”Footnote 27 the primary basis of Christ's messianic identity is taken to be his kingship. The priestly office pertains most clearly to Christ's redemptive activities of reconciliation and intercession. Significantly, however, Calvin does present Christ as the “end of prophecy” in a way that readers of Schleiermacher will find anticipatory: “The perfect doctrine he has brought has made an end to all prophecies. All those, then, who, not content with the gospel, patch it with something extraneous to it, detract from Christ's authority.”Footnote 28 J. F. Jansen's classic study on Calvin's Christology notes this deficiency concerning the prophetic office, and more recently Stephen Edmondson has attempted to build upon Jansen's analysis in order to make sense of the prophetic office as it relates to redemption. Edmondson claims, “Christ's prophetic office, then, in relation to this revelation is not to give the revelation but to explain it. Christ is to make plain who he is and what he has done among us so that we might see, understand, and be grasped by the love of God evident in his history. Christ is the interpreter of God's revelation.”Footnote 29
This formulation is more than simply appropriate for Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre. Insofar as the basis of Christ's redemptive work is the assumption of believers into the God-consciousness (CG 2 §100) of which he stands as the ideal (CG 2 §93), the redemptive significance of the prophetic office arguably becomes more prominent than the royal or sacerdotal office since its purposes are better fitted to the communication of an ideal in experience. Concerning the feeling of absolute dependence, Schleiermacher claims, “Everyone will know that it was first awakened in him in the same way, by the communicative and stimulative power of expression or utterance.”Footnote 30 Likewise Schleiermacher discusses redemption primarily under the auspices of the priesthood of Christ,Footnote 31 but this may be because he is so preoccupied with critiquing atonement by vicarious substitution. That is, his negative argument concerning the history of doctrine forces him to linger within the confines of the priestly office of Christ where traditional atonement theories have been most applied, though a further positive development of the doctrine of redemption as I have here proposed may be more productively taken up elsewhere. For Schleiermacher, the obvious candidate appears to be the prophetic office because of its communicative nature. The assumption of Christ's God-consciousness in the church would presumably occur along such lines in order to avoid the depiction of redemption as a magical transaction. What, then, would an account of the redemptive significance of the cry of dereliction as an event of Christ's prophetic activity look like?
Schleiermacher associates the prophetic activity of Christ with his teaching, and while he discourages the practice of taking Jesus's public ministry as beginning with his baptism or supposing his baptism marks a significant change in his prophetic office, he does acknowledge that John's baptism “helps us to understand His public appearance historically: He marked His more open transition from seclusion to public life by an act of confession which inevitably evoked a more definite opinion about Him, to which He was able to attach His teaching.”Footnote 32 The prophetic activity of Christ during his public ministry served to draw sinners toward fellowship with him, and preparation for such a union was necessarily marked by a consciousness of sin. For this reason, Schleiermacher makes the prophetic office a part of the redemptive activity of Christ.Footnote 33 The experience of faith in redemption disallows demonstration of necessity or proof in the work of Christ. Rather, “Our purpose is simply to show that the perfect satisfaction to which we aspire can only be truly contained in the Christian's consciousness of his relation to Christ in so far as that consciousness expresses the kind of relation which has been described here.”Footnote 34 This resistance to proof in Christ's prophetic ministry expands upon the main thesis of §14: “There is no other way of obtaining participation in the Christian communion than through faith in Jesus as the Redeemer.”Footnote 35
As Redeemer, Christ acted in a perfect receptive fashion to the pure activity of God and actualized the divine essence in himself. Schleiermacher takes this basis of the work of the Redeemer in his personal union with God as the effective element in the Redeemer's own fellowship with humanity:
If every activity of the Redeemer proceeds from the being of God in Him, and if in the formation of the Redeemer's Person the only active power was the creative divine activity which established itself as the being of God in Him, then also His every activity may be regarded as a continuation of that person-forming divine influence upon human nature.Footnote 36
What is imparted to human fellowship is the being of God in Christ, actualized in prophecy (understood here as teaching in word and deed, rather than as mere predictions). The Redeemer was the climax of all prophecy because of the unsurpassable presence of God in him. The prophetic activity of Christ was continuous and always a complete representation of his person, which in turn fully imparted the being of God in him:
Like the teaching of the prophets, His too was always the direct utterance of His whole being, hence not to be separated from the total impression His being made. And from this it follows for His teaching, that (since His inspiration was not transient but constant) every utterance of His moved spirit in speech and accompanying expression contains elements of teaching, and serves as confirmation of His teaching proper, inasmuch as it bears witness to the being of God in Him.Footnote 37
In addition to his identity as the climax of all prophecy, Christ was the end of all prophecy. Schleiermacher uses this christological identifier in the same sense that Calvin does in Institutes 2.15; no greater truth would follow that would carry humanity beyond the revelation of God in Christ. The first discussion of prophecy in §14, postscript, hints at such an end in Christ, but does so in less clarified language because here only “the prophecies of the Jewish prophets regarding Christ” are considered: “They disclose to us a striving of human nature towards Christianity, and at the same time give it as the confession of the best and most inspired of earlier religious communions, that they are to be regarded only as preparatory and transitory institutions.”Footnote 38 The end of prophecy is elaborated in §103.3, and recalled in §157.2 as the reason for our lack of knowledge of the future consummation of the church.Footnote 39 Schleiermacher also associates the fulfillment of the Redeemer's work with a clarifying of previous prophecy.Footnote 40 These descriptions establish Christ as a revelatory endpoint, although more can be said about the redemptive efficacy of the prophetic work of Christ.
The end of prophecy comes most decisively with Christ's ascension, when he was no longer present on earth to fulfill his prophetic office and the Spirit became present in the Christian fellowship. During the period of his suffering and death, however, Schleiermacher recognizes a window where the prophetic office of Christ was no longer present to the public: “For the people His work as a teacher came to an end with His arrest, but for the disciples only with His ascension.”Footnote 41 While penultimate, this absence of prophecy is significant insofar as the prophetic ministry “is addressed to men in view of their opposition to Christ, in order to make them susceptible of union with Him.” The public ministry of Christ's prophetic office is primary, while the continued ministry to the disciples after his resurrection then “bears on the distinction between Christ and them which still persists.”Footnote 42 This distinction between public and private ministry may also serve to blunt Schleiermacher's concern that the beginning of Christ's public ministry in his baptism should not be construed as the beginning of his prophetic office, and allow us to draw parallels in Christ's activity between his baptism by John (the beginning of his primary prophetic task) and his suffering on the cross (the end of it).
Godforsakenness as the End of Prophecy
In the previous two sections, Schleiermacher's interpretation of Christ's cry of dereliction and his prophetic office have been outlined and set in historical context. It is time to remedy the “blank” identified by Ritschl by offering a new reading of Christ's godforsakenness as the end of prophecy in himself, defending it according to Schleiermacher's own terms in the Glaubenslehre.
In contrast to the beginning of Christ's public ministry where the Spirit descended upon him and the Father spoke a word of approval concerning the beloved Son, the end of Christ's public ministry is marked by exactly the opposite. When Christ was interrogated by his accusers, he was silent. When he was exhorted to prove his Sonship by coming down from the cross, he remained obedient unto death. The end of prophecy means that the work of the Redeemer toward which all prophecy had pointed was now fulfilled, and anything that might be said further to move beyond this work of redemption would not be appropriate to Christ's prophetic office or recognizable as Christian truth.
This is not the only implication of the end of prophecy, however. Because Christ's activity perfectly represented the being of God in his person to humanity, the silence of Christ is also inseparable from an original silence in God. The Spirit of the fellowship departed as his disciples were scattered during the arrest, and, most importantly for present consideration, Christ felt the abandonment of God on the cross. The godforsakenness of the Redeemer corresponds to the end of prophecy that comes in the completion of the work of Christ in his suffering and death. God's silence is as determined and active as God's words spoken at Christ's baptism, but insofar as it marks an end to prophecy, it leaves a communicative void in the event of the cross where there had earlier been a public proclamation.
Upon what basis would God abandon his own? According to Schleiermacher, “The divine wisdom is not capable of producing any other disposition of things, or any other ordering of their course, than that in which the divine love is most perfectly realized.”Footnote 43 This realization of divine love through wisdom is not an absolute occurrence in creation, however, because “sin invariably brings with it a diminution of the God-consciousness, and therefore of the divine impartation.”Footnote 44 Further, the divine causality ordains sin with the intention of drawing humanity toward redemption.Footnote 45 There does, then, seem to be some basis for God's self-diminution from human consciousness that is not only compatible with, but even directed toward God's ultimate redemptive purpose.
In order to understand how godforsakenness can work within an actualist Christology in accordance with Schleiermacher's doctrine of sin, it is helpful to consider Schleiermacher's term Verneinung: denial or negation. The inefficacy of the God-consciousness is wrought in us by God to establish sin, ultimately with an aim to our redemption:
In so far as the sin consisted in the impotence of the God-consciousness, it would be a mere negative [nur eine Verneinung], i.e. something that could be neither a divine thought nor the result of a divine act; however, a mere negation [die bloße Verneinung] of power does not amount to sin, and, in fact, the mind is never satisfied to have sin explained as simply a defect. The defect becomes sin for us only in virtue of the fact that the God-consciousness, impotent against the sensuous impulse, disavows [verneint] as consciousness of the divine will that state of defect, whether simultaneously or before or after; for, without such disavowal [Verneinung], which is simply the recognition of a commanding or prohibiting divine will, there is no sin. We shall accordingly be able to say that, as the recognition of a commanding will is wrought [bewirkt] in us by God, the fact that the inefficacy of the God-consciousness becomes sin in us is likewise wrought [bewirkt] by Him, and indeed wrought [bewirkt] with a view to redemption.Footnote 46
Often in the Glaubenslehre, sin is described in terms of its effect, as “obstruction of life” or “diminution of the God-consciousness.” It is clear from the above passage, however, that sin is never a “mere negation,” but rather a recognition and denial by the God-consciousness of our own negative response to the divine will. When the divine will is fully instantiated in the life of a human, however, such sinful denial exhibits itself as more acute. Schleiermacher does not broach this consideration very extensively,Footnote 47 but doing so will offer constructive possibilities for the doctrine of Christ's suffering. Those who reject Jesus of Nazareth actually reject the divine will perfectly revealed and imparted in the work of the Redeemer. Following Schleiermacher's schema, then, the God-consciousness “denies” (verneint) such rejection: or, God abandons humanity, and this is received as a feeling of godforsakenness.Footnote 48 But this does not yet explain why Jesus was forsaken on the cross. According to Schleiermacher, the sinlessness of the Redeemer implies a lack of defect in the God-consciousness, giving no basis for recognition of sin in him.
My proposal for the denial of God experienced by Christ, on the contrary, can be established using Schleiermacher's concept of “sympathy” (Mitgefühl). In the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher mentions three primary forms of sympathy relevant to his Christology. In §97.3 he posits a “sympathy with the condition of men” as “necessary, almost constant, in Christ, so that in a sense all His actions depend upon it.” This is a passive state of Christ's humanity, and must somehow be reconciled with the redemptive activity of God in him. Christ's sympathy, then, must be conceived “not as moved for and through itself, but only as taken up into association with an activity of the divine in Christ.”Footnote 49 The second form of sympathy is “sympathy with sin,” which is actually a particular case of the basic human sympathy in Christ and the sole ground of his suffering.Footnote 50 It also “serves to make complete and perfect our imperfect consciousness of sin.”Footnote 51 The perfection of our consciousness of sin is already attributed to the Redeemer in §68 as necessary and “the basis of the full consciousness of sin as a derangement of our nature, and of faith in the possibility of redemption by the communication of the spiritual power [of the Redeemer's sinlessness].”Footnote 52 In God's denial, which identifies sin as sin, the sympathy of the Redeemer is never absent. A mediating position presents itself here. The perfection of the God-consciousness in Christ instigates the divine “disavowal” (Verneinung) in order to “disavow as consciousness of the divine will that state of defect” in humanity. Yet the Redeemer is also sympathetic to this sinful state and so becomes subject himself to the divine disavowal. In a sermon from 1831, Schleiermacher speaks of the Redeemer's cry as “the words which could only be the expression of this sympathy with the sin of the world, ‘My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’”Footnote 53
In its third and most developed form, the sympathy of Christ is now sympathy with Unseligkeit. While Mackintosh and Stewart employ the translation “misery,” this rendering risks losing the sense of Schleiermacher's intended contrast with blessedness (Seligkeit) and of suggesting a conflation with suffering, so that when Schleiermacher criticizes the idea that Christ “experienced, even if only for moments, real misery,”Footnote 54 the point is easily mistaken for an argument against the agony of Christ on the cross rather than against his loss of a state of blessedness. Schleiermacher is at pains to articulate the Redeemer's sympathy with “unblessedness” amidst his own unflagging blessedness, and all within a situation of dire agony. In his Christian Ethics, the significance of this unblessedness (Unseligkeit) for the work of the Redeemer is stated more clearly:
To think of his blessedness as impulse and as communicated to us, we must . . . think of him carrying our deficiency of blessedness [Mangel an Seeligkeit] in a sympathetic way, so to speak, so that our formulation also finds application to him, and a deficiency of blessedness [Mangel an Seeligkeit] must be posited [gesezt] in him so that it can become an impulse. This deficiency originates in him in his expanded self-consciousness, in his feeling with us our lack of blessedness [unsere Unseeligkeit mitfühlen], and this is in him the impulse for the whole of his redeeming activity.Footnote 55
As explained here, Christ's sympathy actually results in a positing of our own state within himself and his state within us; he “became sin for us.” The implications of Christ's mitfühlen for Schleiermacher are thus stronger than usually interpreted. The key is that the deficiency of blessedness originating in sympathy “must have been present only as the result of an impulse which was determined in the manner appropriate to Him . . . when as sensation or feeling [it] remain[s] wholly within the limits of the quiescent consciousness.”Footnote 56 Quiescence here is acquiescence: the receptivity of the Redeemer to the divine causality perfectly expressed in his acts. If it is a steady peacefulness, it is the sort of peacefulness about which Schleiermacher preaches in the 1831 sermon quoted above. Christ's peace amounts to the fact
that He was eternally, and in all respects, one with His Father; that whatever His eye rested on around Him, His spirit considered as a work of God; that He suffered His will to be determined by no emotion of His own mind, without having first recognised the will of God in what was required of Him; and that thus the one effect constantly kept pace with the other.Footnote 57
Christ's experience of suffering in abandonment as I have interpreted it was surely not a moment of calm and serenity, but nor did it threaten the peace and blessedness of the Redeemer as elaborated here. Christ recognized the will of God in his obedience unto death; indeed, he knew that his crucifixion and abandonment was the work of God. In giving himself up to be crucified, he “kept pace with” God even in his agony. It was a fulfillment of the Redeemer's peace and blessedness to end his prophetic vocation by receiving the silence of God and actualizing it during his own final hours. Further, it is important to affirm that God's silence was also an immanent peace within Godself rather than a reaction to, or determination of, human sin. God's silence was restfulness in the steadfastness of the divine impartation in the face of human rejection.
This account of the cry of dereliction offers positive content for Schleiermacher's doctrine of redemption; it explains what the end of prophecy entails within the redemptive ministry of Christ. This account also applies Schleiermacher's actualism to the suffering and death of Christ, adapting events that are normally taken to be passive and identifying an active element within them: the Redeemer was silent before his accusers for a reason pertaining to his prophetic work. He did not simply pass the time. Nor were the Father and the Spirit simply absent; rather, the activity of Christ in his suffering and death perfectly represents the pure activity of God in him. The Redeemer experienced this as godforsakenness.
Objections
The most serious objection to my account of the godforsakenness of Christ is that it threatens the status of Jesus as the Redeemer by compromising his perfect God-consciousness. The reasons for this objection are somewhat complicated and various, and deserve extended treatment. Two fundamental arguments drive the objection, and have already been mentioned as the primary reasons established by Schleiermacher for his view on the cry of dereliction. I believe that the first argument is not relevant to my account of the cry of dereliction, but I will address it in order to offer the most comprehensive consideration of Schleiermacher's thought and further demonstrate the extent to which Schleiermacher's system is receptive to my account of the cry of dereliction. The second argument is a more direct challenge to my account, and will require a critique of Schleiermacher's situating of the dignity and work of Christ in expounding upon his godforsakenness.
1) In the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher's primary objection to interpretations of the cry of dereliction as suffering is that such a state introduces an inappropriate consciousness of sin in Christ through the experience of divine punishment:
This theory . . . is obviously based on the assumption that there is an absolute necessity in the divine punishment, without any regard to the natural connexion of punishment with moral evil. This again can hardly be divorced from a conception of the divine righteousness which has been transferred to God from the crudest human conditions.Footnote 58
The concern quoted above is that a theory of divine punishment on the cross contradicts the necessary connection between punishment and evil. In §76 Schleiermacher states that “all evil is to be regarded as the punishment of sin,”Footnote 59 yet on the cross punishment was inflicted upon a sinless Redeemer for whom no consciousness of evil as punishment for sin could be present. For Christ to have recognized godforsakenness as punishment, he would have had to have taken into himself a consciousness of sin when only sympathy with sin is appropriate to the Redeemer. To do so as a substitute for human immorality more generally would have been to raise to the level of divinity “the crudest human conditions.”
I take this objection to be inapplicable to my account of the cry of dereliction because I have not argued for a godforsakenness that constitutes punishment. My account of the cry of dereliction pertains to the exemplary and didactic activity of the prophetic office of Christ, and takes the end of prophecy demonstrated by Christ's silence before his accusers to be a “witness to the Being of God in Him,”Footnote 60 so that an original silence in God must have been present at the close of the prophetic activity of Christ. The cry of dereliction is an indication by Christ of this silence, which was experienced as forsakenness. But God's action was not a punishment of Christ; it was rather a denial of the human rejection of the Mediator who as Mediator is also receptive to that divine denial, objectively as a human and subjectively as the perfect instantiation of the divine causality. Christ is a “satisfying representative” rather than a “vicarious satisfaction.”Footnote 61
While my account does not depend upon a doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, however, it is important to note that nothing in it contradicts such a model. Godforsakenness understood as the end of Christ's prophetic office and an active receptivity to the divine judgment of human rejection could be affirmed alongside of an account of the divine wrath exercised against Christ who “was made sin for us.”Footnote 62 Such a unified theory would go beyond the intentions of this essay and also stand in more direct contradiction with Schleiermacher's basic premises, but the broad compatibility of my proposal across quite contrasting interpretive approaches to the atonement offers some indication of its doctrinal potential.
2) The more compelling objection to my account of the cry of dereliction is not offered in the Glaubenslehre, but rather in the Leben Jesu lectures:
I can think of no movement when the relationship between God and Christ could have changed. It must always have been the same. Christ's oneness with the Father can never have been ended, but that seems to be what such a saying indicates. Some claim that such a state of abandonment by God was a necessary part of the plan of redemption. I admit gladly that I do not believe that. It contains an untruth, for if such a one had been abandoned by God he would have to be an untruth.Footnote 63
For this objection, it is inconsequential whether the state of godforsakenness is taken to be a divine punishment, or suffering, or an instance of divine wrath.Footnote 64 The event of abandonment by God threatens the being of God in Christ, regardless of why it has occurred or what else it represents as a physical experience. I have asserted that the end of prophecy in Christ's own prophetic office must imply a silence of God in order to have been reproduced in Christ's obedient activity. But this seems to mean that I have argued for the necessity of the “untruth” that Schleiermacher identifies here. Doing so simply embeds the problem more deeply rather than resolving it.
The problem, for Schleiermacher, hinges on the preservation of the dignity of the Redeemer. The Christology of the Glaubenslehre explores the doctrine of the Redeemer according to the necessary conditions for the redemption of humanity,Footnote 65 which become the basis for Schleiermacher's strong insistence on the absolute sinlessness of the Redeemer.Footnote 66 In order to stand as the ideal and impart blessedness to humanity, the Redeemer's blessedness must be continuous. Otherwise, Christ himself would stand in the same position as the rest of sinful humanity, perhaps as an exemplar, but even as such not able to redeem.Footnote 67 The Glaubenslehre was “developed out of the Christian consciousness of redemption. The criterion for the adequacy of the dogmatic doctrines was whether they could ensure the enduring significance of the person of Jesus that the Christian faith professed.”Footnote 68
Schleiermacher asserts rather straightforwardly that a condition of godforsakenness threatens the blessedness of the Redeemer by threatening his perfect God-consciousness. No explanation is present for why this is the case—apparently because such a conclusion seems obvious. I believe, however, that the effect of divine abandonment deserves closer scrutiny.
It should initially be stated that the problem is not one of an inner struggle in Christ. Schleiermacher associates the temptation of Jesus in the desert, his prayer to the Father in Gethsemane, and his cry of forsakenness on the cross as related episodes of struggle, though he deals with each one differently.Footnote 69 On the cross, however, there is no indication that Jesus struggled to submit to the will of God. He was in agony and questioned why God had abandoned him, but this is not the sort of struggle that Schleiermacher finds problematic. An experience “involves sin in [Jesus], if we take it as meaning that there was even an infinitely small element of struggle involved,”Footnote 70 but here he is referring to a struggle with the temptation to sin, or with the resolve to obey the will of God, rather than any general situation of pain or strife. Further, I have argued for an understanding of the crucifixion in which Christ perfectly actualizes the withdrawal of God through his own withdrawal in the end of prophecy—the close of his public ministry, his silence before accusers and soldiers, and his refusal to come down from the cross in order to demonstrate his Sonship.Footnote 71 Schleiermacher has expressed this christological actualism in the “quiescent consciousness” discussed above; persistent quiescence signals a total lack of moral struggle in Christ.Footnote 72
Yet Schleiermacher thinks that a disruption is present nonetheless, and he speaks of it in more general terms of association with a state of misery if not directly as a failure of effortless obedience. In §11.2, Schleiermacher seems to hint at Christ's predicament in connection with evil and sin:
The evil condition can only consist in an obstruction or arrest of the vitality of the higher self-consciousness [die Lebendigkeit des höheren Selbstbewußtseins gehemmt oder aufgehoben], so that there comes to be little or no union of it with the various determinations of the sensible self-consciousness, and thus little or no religious life. We may give to this condition, in its most extreme form, the name of Godlessness [Gottlosigkeit], or, better, God-forgetfulness [Gottvergessenheit].Footnote 73
Yet while these conditions are perhaps suggestive of godforsakenness (Gottverlassenheit), there are important differences. Christ was not godless nor forgetful of God on the cross, even in being forsaken by God. Schleiermacher thinks that godforsakenness in itself is an obstruction of the God-consciousness—but is it? If “to feel oneself absolutely dependent and to be conscious of being in relation with God are one and the same thing,”Footnote 74 one would have to argue that the feeling of absolute dependence was also absent on the cross, and this seems difficult to establish. On what basis could Christ lament abandonment by the “whence” of a dependence that he did not even feel?Footnote 75
The dilemma is a question of directionality in the identity: Does God-consciousness determine the feeling of absolute dependence, or vice versa? Does an apparent lack of God-consciousness signal a lack in the feeling of dependence, or does the feeling of dependence in Christ reassure us that the God-consciousness of Christ remains amidst the void created by forsakenness? This ambivalence is also present in consideration of Christ's suffering. Did Christ not suffer because this would put his sinlessness in question? Or does his sinlessness reassure us that the sufferings of Christ can be affirmed without fear of their implications for his dignity?Footnote 76 As Ritschl puts it, “In Christ Himself blessedness and the power of the God-consciousness are made to be regarded as independent of each other, and as reciprocally conditioning each other”Footnote 77—but this very reciprocity amidst independence makes it unclear which status is determinative in a situation where they seem to conflict.
It will be most helpful for a clarification of the present argument to consider a critique made by Karl Bretschneider against Schleiermacher concerning the very problem of God-consciousness in the suffering Christ. In an 1825 article on the concept of redemption in the 1821–1822 Glaubenslehre, Bretschneider writes,
It is thus not inconsequential when the author asserts that there was never a struggle within Jesus and that his sinlessness was not at all the consequence of a struggle. . .. What justifies the author in conceiving of such an idea about Jesus? I have found nothing that allows me to take his concept as anything other than a speculative interpretation of the ecclesial doctrine of the two natures in Christ. The Gospel history, which is here absolutely alone to be consulted, contradicts the idea of the author. It describes moments in the life of Jesus in which this supernatural sinlessness was not in him, but rather when he felt and struggled as a human, and therefore (according to the author's theory, though it is not our own) must have sinned.Footnote 78
In response, Schleiermacher asserts only more trenchantly his adherence to the principle of the sinlessness of the Redeemer, and strikes out at what he takes to be Bretschneider's use of the scriptural account of Christ's suffering against such an adherence: “This power [to redeem] is to be attributed completely and exclusively to Christ and . . . no trace of a need for redemption exists in his person. I hold to this presupposition so firmly that I would not allow any biblical passage that appears to say the opposite to lead me to change my mind.”Footnote 79 Schleiermacher reasserts his commitment to the exclusive redemptive power of Christ, although this is not what Bretschneider is questioning. Rather, Bretschneider is criticizing Schleiermacher's conception of God-consciousness and inner struggle, which has led to the false dilemma of choosing between Christ's sinlessness and adherence to the scriptural account. Bretschneider's point is that, given Schleiermacher's doctrine of sin and blessedness, the Gospel accounts of the suffering of the Redeemer present serious problems for Christ's unique dignity. It is only reasonable to reassess the doctrine of sin in light of the problems it creates for a biblical doctrine of redemption.
Schleiermacher, however, would not entertain such a revision: “To consider as sin the self's struggle with itself to submit to God's will is a stricture from which I cannot dispense myself. And for that reason I cannot attribute such a struggle to Christ without annihilating the basic presupposition [Grundvoraussetzung].”Footnote 80 The “basic presupposition” to which he refers is the complete and exclusive power of Christ to redeem based upon his sinlessness. Yet on this point, Schleiermacher is actually responding to the criticism of Christlieb Julius Braniss, and not those of Bretschneider. Braniss argues that the Christ of the Glaubenslehre is different only in degree from an exemplar like Aristotle, and Bretschneider actually agrees with Schleiermacher against this charge of Braniss.Footnote 81 In conflating his response to these two quite separate arguments, though, Schleiermacher misses the significance of Bretschneider's point. By simply refusing to reconsider the doctrine of sin, Schleiermacher establishes a second and unspoken “basic presupposition” against Bretschneider that constrains his own doctrine of the Redeemer within the limits of his psychology.
I believe that Bretschneider's criticism identifies the problem of Schleiermacher's equivocation concerning the historicity of the Redeemer with impressive precision. While its reception has suffered somewhat from Schleiermacher's infelicitous response in his Sendschreiben (in On the “Glaubenslehre”), the critique deserves continued recognition. Bretschneider's concern serves well as a response to the second objection to my proposal. I have argued above that the relationship between godforsakenness and the God-consciousness, or sinlessness and suffering, is ambiguous in the Glaubenslehre. As a result, it is unclear which principle should determine our interpretation of an event like the cry of dereliction, or in Schleiermacher's terms, which (if either) is the Grundvoraussetzung. More positively, this ambiguity leaves open possibilities for the Glaubenslehre that are recognizably Schleiermacherian despite some disagreement with Schleiermacher's own conclusions.
Conclusion
Much in the received wisdom on Schleiermacher's thought conspires against the obviousness of the above proposal. Schleiermacher's doctrine of redemption, though usually no longer misread as a version of moral exemplarism, does focus more on the incarnation and a developmental approach to Christ as the second Adam than on the atoning work of the cross. When the suffering and death of Christ is considered, its importance for the doctrine of redemption is usually stymied by the introduction of a supposed Docetism in Schleiermacher, which insists upon a meek and mild Christ crucified, whose suffering is not exactly denied, but comes across as uneventful and insignificant for the redemptive work of God.
In contrast, I have proposed an interpretation of the cry of dereliction that revises Schleiermacher's explicit conclusions about the event of Christ's abandonment by God while hewing closely to the structure, content, and purpose of Schleiermacher's doctrine of the person and work of the Redeemer. Instead of interpreting the godforsakenness of Jesus as a defeat for his unique and persistent dignity as Redeemer, I have presented an understanding of godforsakenness as the end of prophecy. God is silent and withdrawn from Jesus, and Jesus perfectly actualizes this abandonment in his own public silence, which marks the climax and end of all prophecy. My proposal strengthens Schleiermacher's account of the threefold office of Christ precisely where it is weakened by the Glaubenslehre's preoccupation with older views of the atonement connected to the priestly office. My proposal also builds upon the growing recognition of Schleiermacher's actualist Christology by offering an account of Christ's perfect manifestation of God's redeeming work in his suffering and death. Schleiermacher's enduring significance as a dogmatic theologian of the redemption has recently experienced something of a renaissance of attention, and the current work stands as a contribution to this wider conversation, which holds significant promise for Schleiermacher interpretation as well as constructive theology more generally.
