Ja und Nein zu Schleiermacher

Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering have assembled a star-studded collection of contributors for their The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford Handbooks in Religion) . The book covers the entire history of Trinitarian thought – from the Old and New Testaments, through patristic and medieval developments, into the Reformation and modern era – and then surveys contemporary dogmatic and practical treatments of the Trinity. It’s a big book – 600+ pages – but the individual articles are fairly brief and, from the ones I’ve sampled, quite readable. Looks to be a standard reference work for the future.

Samuel M. Powell writes the chapter on 19th-century Protestant Trinitarian thought, which, contrary to some reports, did actually exist. His treatment of Schleiermacher helpfully exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of his work (pp. 270-2).

Schleiermacher is often accused of consigning the Trinity to an appendix. Powell disagrees: “Schleiermacher placed the Trinity last in his system, not because it forms an appendix . . . but instead because it forms the keystone . . . of Christian doctrine,” and as such is “important to understanding his system.” Christian Faith is organized to move from theological abstractions about God toward concrete knowledge of God. Along the way, “The penultimate concepts for God are wisdom and love, for these attributes are most concretely related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus.” At the capstone is the Trinity, which “when fully articulated, would express the most concrete knowledge of God . . . . the Trinity has to come last because it depends on the historical appearance of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

Ja zu Schleiermacher.

But Nein too. Though “Schleiermacher did not reject every aspect of the traditional doctrine,” he reformulated the whole in the light of the his conviction that the feeling of absolute dependence was the touchstone of all doctrine. He thought that the “traditional doctrine said to much,” since “nothing in the actual experience of believers . . . requires belief that God exists as three eternally distinct persons.” God, he argued, is “a unity without difference.” The Trinity does indicate a truth: “in the incarnation, the divine being (which, Schleiermacher insisted, should be thought of as an activity) was united with human nature in a person-forming activity. The result of this activity was Jesus Christ. Thereafter, the divine being was united with human nature a second time; however, in this case the union was not person-forming but community-forming. The result was the Church and its common spirit, the Holy Spirit.” These “uniting-activities,” in contrast to the immanent Trinity, “were directed experienced in the Christian life and expressed in the New Testament and creedal affirmations about Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

In sum, “For Schleiermacher . . . the doctrine of the Trinity is not about eternal, personal distinctions in God. It is instead the way in which, in history, the divine being unites with human nature.” The “distinctive features of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God” are thus these: “God as a unity without difference, the divine being as pure activity, the process by which God becomes a Trinity by successive unions with human nature.”

To which we again say, Nein.