Schleiermacher on the Atonement

Influenced by the philosophy of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, Schleiermacher was ordained in the German Reformed Church in 1794. He defined religion as the “feeling of absolute dependence”, Christianity being the highest although not the only true religion. His thoughts on the atonement of Christ are found in The Christian Faith, p. 100-105.

Schleiermacher reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and argued that religion was a matter of the heart, not the head. He speaks of God as the object of our sense of god-consciousness, yet with almost no stress on his personal nature. Sin is spoken of as the struggle between man’s lower consciousness, the natural impulses belonging to this life of senses, and his god-consciousness.

Under this scheme, redemption becomes the liberation of our god-consciousness from its oppression by our lower consciousness. This is accomplished not by the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-man, but by Jesus the archetypal man. Jesus was the man who embodied this god-consciousness. He was not supernatural but his example transcends common humanity.
The Redeemer them is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of his god-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.

Though enormously influential, Schleiermacher’s view is biblically inadequate, not distinctively Christian and depends in fact on a kind of pantheism. Talk of forgiveness of sins is quite remote to Schleiermacher...