[Click here for the companion YouTube video]
QUESTION: The prologue of the Gospel of John explicitly says that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and that the Word was God. But John makes no mention of the Holy Spirit also being God, although the Holy Spirit is mentioned many times in the Gospel. Do you think that John believed that there is One God consisting of three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? If yes, why did he not discuss the divinity of the Holy Spirit. If no, would it also be OK for believing Christians to question whether the Holy Spirit is a divine person in the same way as the Word?
FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER (1768–1834). Friedrich Schleiermacher was a Prussian pastor, professor, and theologian who made significant contributions to numerous fields of study including philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics. He is most commonly referred to as the Father of Liberal Theology. Schleiermacher published his first great work, On Religion, in 1799. Its impact was immense. At the time, rationalism dominated the approach of Enlightenment theologians and supernaturalism dominated the approach of conservative theologians. On Religion was a strong challenge to both positions. Schleiermacher’s theology was subjective and focused on achieving a sense of absolute dependence on God. Authority from personal religious experience, therefore according to Schleiermacher, is even higher than Scripture. For Schleiermacher, our personal religious experience consists of the divine relation personally through Christ and communally through the Holy Spirit. Beyond this, Schleiermacher views the doctrine of the Trinity speculative and not supported by Scripture. He addresses this in the last chapter of On Religion, from which our readings are taken.
READING 1. An essential element of our exposition in this Part has been the doctrine of the union of the Divine Essence with human nature, both in the personality of Christ and in the common Spirit of the Church … each of the two above-mentioned unions is traced back to a separate distinction posited independently of such union … But the assumption of an eternal distinction in the Supreme Being is not an utterance concerning the religious consciousness, for there it could never emerge. Who would venture to say that the impression made by the divine in Christ obliges us to conceive such an eternal distinction as its basis? Anyone who were to find this task set us in the Johannine conception of the Logos … if the Trinity had been in the Apostle’s mind, his exposition would very easily have lent itself to a similar introduction of the Holy Spirit, whose name occurs so often in Christ’s discourses as reported by John; nor would he have lacked opportunity elsewhere to bring in this other member, and to speak of the place of the Spirit as that which was in the beginning with God and was God. [On Religion, §170, ¶1]
READING 2. [N]o equality is possible between the unity and the trinity; either more realistically we must make the unity superordinate as the essence common to all three, in which case the distinction of Persons appears subordinate and falls into the background, which the divine monarchia stands out; or more nominalistically we must make the trinity superordinate, in which case the unity as being abstract falls into the background. Then what has immediate existence for our religious consciousness–namely, the divinity of the Holy Spirit and the divinity of Christ, as also the relation of Christ as Son to the Father–comes to the front; but so, too, does the danger of falling into tritheism. Between these two lines of thought (for we must always start either from the unity or from the trinity) no genuinely middle course seems possible which would not really be an approximation to one or the other. But from our assumptions neither the subordination of the unity to the trinity nor the converse follows; hence as regards the distinctions existing in the Supreme Being from all eternity there is nothing for it but either to accept one of the two courses indicated, which conflicts with what the credal passages insist on, or, if we shrink from what they insist on, to conclude that it is impossible for us to definitely to reach either point–the unity or the trinity; we remain hesitating between the two [On Religion, §171, ¶3]
READING 3. We have less reason to regard this doctrine as finally settled since it did not receive any fresh treatment when the Evangelical (Protestant) Church was set up; and so there must still be in store for it a transformation which will go back to its very beginnings … That circumstance supplies a further reason why we should strive to secure freedom for a thoroughgoing criticism of the doctrine in its older form, so as to prepare the was for, and introduce, a reconstruction of it corresponding to the present condition of other related doctrines. The position assigned to the doctrine of the Trinity in the present work is perhaps at all events a preliminary step towards this goal. [On Religion, §172, ¶¶1-3]
Leave a Reply