Schleiermacher and the Christologies Behind Chalcedon

Extract

Although Schleiermacher's Christology is one of the most commented-upon doctrines of his dogmatic system, little scholarship exists on its relation to patristic Christology.One exception is an article by Richard Muller (“The Christological Problem as Addressed by Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in Perspectives on Christology [ed. M. Shuster and R. Muller; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1991] 141–62) that shows how “the doctrinal intention behind Schleiermacher's way of affirming the divinity of Christ evidences common ground with the dogmatic intention” of Chalcedon (p. 142). Muller's main objective is to demonstrate that Schleiermacher's Christology does not violate what he calls “patristic orthodoxy.” He does not explore in detail how Schleiermacher's doctrine of Christ may draw (whether intentionally or not) on the Christologies of specific patristic figures or schools. George Hunsinger, in an article outlining Karl Barth's debt to Martin Luther, makes a very brief comparison between Schleiermacher's Christology and that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, labeling both as “spirit-oriented” because they hold that “Jesus points us to the Holy Spirit” and not vice versa. Thus, in Hunsinger's view, these Christologies are focused only formally on Christ, but substantively on the Holy Spirit. See “What Karl Barth Learned from Luther,” Lutheran Quarterly 13:2 (1999) 129. Given Schleiermacher's view of the church, as well as his conception of the dependence of the believer and the community upon Christ, Hunsinger's interpretation is not convincing. To many this gap in scholarship will seem understandable and even appropriate, given Schleiermacher's famous rejection of two-natures language in his major dogmatic work, Der christliche Glaube.Henceforth Gl. All references to passages from Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche in Zusammenhange dargestellt follow the English translation of the second German edition offered in The Christian Faith (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928). Occasionally I supply in parentheses the German original, from the standard critical edition edited by Martin Redeker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960). In this essay, I shall identify parallels between Schleiermacher's Christology and some of the Christologies “behind” Chalcedon—those conflicting Christologies that Chalcedon attempted to mediate. By examining the way in which certain emphases of Cyril of Alexandria, on the one hand, and Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, on the other, are present in Schleiermacher's own doctrine of Christ (especially in Gl. §§93–99), I shall argue that Schleiermacher does not simply reject Chalcedon, but rather reconfigures its combination of apparently disjunct christological traditions in a new and creative way.