Friedrich Schleiermacher's Christmas Eve: A Dialogue
Friedrich Schleiermacher's Christmas Eve: A Dialogue
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Raised as a member of the Herrnhuter Brethren, Schleiermacher reacted against the intellectual narrowness of this Pietist tradition whilst developing in his own way the emphasis on "experience." Following study at the University of Halle, he was ordained and appointed as Reformed preacher at the Charité in Berlin. Whilst in Berlin, Schleiermacher associated with representatives of "Romanticism," including Friedrich and August Schlegel and Novalis. In 1799, in response to encouragement, especially from Friedrich Schlegel, he published Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers.
After a brief spell as Professor of Theology in Halle, Schleiermacher returned to Berlin where, in 1810, he became Dean of the Theology Faculty in Berlin's new university. Schleiermacher wrote and lectured in ethics, hermeneutics, philosophical, dogmatic, and practical theology and translated the dialogues of Plato. In 1821, he published his magnum opus, The Christian Faith, a systematic theology developed upon the principle that Christian doctrines "are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech."
Christology and the Christmas Eve Dialogue
Toward the end of Christmas Eve, Leonhardt, Ernst, and Eduard attempt to account for the re-creative power of the celebration, as that power has been exhibited in the women's stories. These speeches should not be detached from their dialogical context but, keeping in mind the overall structure - as suggested on the class handout, for instance - here is a brief summary of the proposals made by Ernst and Eduard.
Ernst starts from our present religious consciousness and attempts to find its identity and origin in Christ: "some common inner cause must underlie [the "all-inclusive" power of Christmas]." The essence of Christmas and of the "new birth" is a universal (as opposed to private) and redemptive joy, a joy that transcends the oppositions of pain and pleasure, happiness and sorrow. The birth of Christ, he claims, is the "first bright spot" in the history of redemption. Our human experience involves the "cleavage of time and eternity, appearance and being." In the "original, natural state," however, there is no such opposition. If this is the intended goal and true fullness of human life, we can neither bring it about nor possess it. If, though, it does occur in history, it must do so as the divine gift of a new and redeeming beginning, a beginning in one whose life begins and continues in this way. Christ is, therefore, a new creation in time and the origin of a new birth for us. "We only attain to harmony through redemption, which is nothing other than the overcoming of these oppositions and which on this account can only proceed from one for whom they have not had to be overcome."
Christmas, furthermore, presents us with "the concentrated vision of a new world," a new world, the innermost reality, re-creative origin, and fulfillment of which is given in time, in the Christ child. This "concentrated vision" may be "re-presented in a thousand images and in the most varied ways," a point that the women's stories have already demonstrated.
Ernst concludes that Christology is thus released from the severity of a historian's demands for verification. The weight of theological warrant falls on "the necessity of a Redeemer, and hence upon the experience of a heightened existence." This does not make history irrelevant, firstly, because it is an historical process of redemption and, secondly, because some "trace-elements" of the historical origin are required, though they need only be the "smallest elements." The freedom this method promises with regard to historical-criticism has been reclaimed in C20th theology in connection with "the quest for the historical Jesus." Both Tillich and Rahner provide good examples of this re-appropriation of Schleiermacher's approach. Schleiermacher's magnum opus, The Christian Faith presents a much more thoroughgoing and sophisticated account of Christ as the origin in time of the "God-consciousness" that is redemption.
Eduard begins from the Christian and Johannine confession that "the Word was made flesh," a very important text for Schleiermacher. At the center of Christmas, he argues, is "man-in-himself," that is, humanity in God which is, at the same time, humanity in its fulfillment. Human beings are the creatures in which this finite world comes to self-knowledge. As such, humanity is the union of life's eternity and life's becoming: "eternal being and its ever-changing process." As a creature of becoming, a human being can and does become lost in the flux of things, seizing on the knowledge of what passes away and thus losing the knowledge of what passes away as a manifestation of eternal life. Redemption is restoration to that self-knowledge which is also a knowledge of others and of all creation: a knowledge that is love and joy. "He finds redemption, that is, in that the same union of eternal being and of the coming into being of the human spirit, such as can be manifested on this planet, arises in each person and thus each contemplates and learns to love all becoming, including himself, only in eternal being."
Redemption, in this sense, cannot come simply through the individual's own thought and action but is dependent upon a community of redemption. The self-knowledge, the love that is redemption is, after all, knowledge of oneself-in-community, oneself in the embracing life of humanity and of the earth. The "higher life and peace of God" exists "only when a person sees humanity as a living community of individuals, cultivates humanity as a community, bears its spirit and consciousness in his life, and within that community loses his isolated existence and finds it again in a new way." This community is the community realized and promised in the church.
The redeemed community has come into being historically. It did not fall from heaven but began in time and its life is passed on through society, through the changing forms of a common life. Of course, whilst this "new birth" is now passed on from one inner life to another, the transmission, through which an inner life is awakened and a common life sustained and renewed, had a beginning in time, an initial communication. The one from whom this common life took its rise and origin must have had the fullness of this self-knowledge, this redeemed humanity in himself. Thus he was the origin and "light of the world." We are reborn through the church, the Son - "the Son of Man without qualification" - "needs no rebirth but was born of God originally." In the Christ child and, therefore, in every birth and in every human being, we recognize and celebrate the Redeemer and the shared life - Christ's Spirit - that unites us with God and with one another: the new world born and struggling to be born.