Justified True Belief

(●) The Berlin preacher who defended religion to people who had stopped believing in it, by moving it out of the head and the hands and into the heart. + Imagine trying to explain to a room of clever, kind, thoroughly modern friends why you still go to church. They are not hostile. They simply think the whole business belongs to an earlier stage of the world, something their grandmothers needed. That was the room Friedrich Schleiermacher was standing in when he was thirty, and the book he wrote for those friends changed what theology would be for the next hundred years. His answer was that they had been arguing about the wrong thing. Religion, he said, is not a set of facts you sign off on, and it is not a code of behavior you keep. It is something more basic than either: a way of being aware of yourself as small and held and not your own. Get that right, he thought, and the quarrels between faith and modern learning look different. Historians of doctrine have called him the father of modern theology ever since, and the ones who most disliked where his road led have been the loudest about how important he was. He is on a Christian apologetics shelf for two opposite reasons. He is the man who kept theology in the modern university when it was close to being shown the door, and he is the man whose method taught a century of theologians to look inside the believer for the ground of what they taught. One signature fact holds the two together: the German translation of Plato that educated Germans still reach for was made by this Reformed pastor, in the evenings, while he was writing sermons.

(●) 1768 AD: Born to an army chaplain in Breslau, and handed at fourteen to a community that spoke of Jesus as though he were in the room. + Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau, in Prussian Silesia, a city now called Wrocław and standing in Poland. His father Gottlieb was a chaplain in the Prussian army, a Reformed minister who followed the regiments, and the family moved as the army moved. While Friedrich was still a boy his parents came under the influence of the Moravian Brethren, known in German as the Herrnhuter after the estate of Herrnhut where Count Zinzendorf had sheltered them. The Moravians were pietists. Pietism is the movement in German Protestantism that measured a Christian by the warmth of the heart toward Christ rather than by the correctness of the doctrine held, and the Moravians took that further than anyone: they sang, they kept diaries of their souls, they spoke of the Savior with an intimacy that startled outsiders. In 1783 his parents sent him to the Moravian school at Niesky, and two years later on to the community’s seminary at Barby, near Magdeburg. He was happy at Niesky, and that is worth saying plainly, because the break that came a few years later was never a revolt against the people who had taught him. The school gave him Greek and Latin, and it gave him a piety he never entirely lost. It also gave him what strict schools have always given clever boys: the boys read what the community allowed, and they smuggled in what it did not.

(●) 1787 AD: At eighteen he wrote to his father that he could not believe what Barby taught, and left for the university at Halle. + The letter is dated 21 January 1787, and it is one of the saddest documents in the history of modern theology. He had been writing to his father about doubts, describing them at a careful distance, as troubles that some students had. Now he admitted they were his own. He could not believe, he wrote, that the one who called himself the Son of Man was the true, eternal God, and he could not believe that his death was a vicarious atonement, that is, a death suffered in the place of guilty people and counted to them. His father, who had trusted the Moravians with his son, replied in anguish and for a time broke off the correspondence. The boy did not lose his faith so much as lose the shape it had been given, and he spent the rest of his life trying to find a shape that would hold. He left Barby that spring for the University of Halle, where his mother’s brother Samuel Stubenrauch taught, and read Kant, the philosopher who had recently argued that the mind cannot reach past the world of experience to prove God at all. Later he would look back on the Moravian years without bitterness, and the proof of it is a letter written fifteen years afterwards from the middle of that world. Writing to his publisher Georg Reimer on 30 April 1802, from the Moravian settlement at Gnadenfrei in Silesia where his sister Charlotte lived, he said that his sense of a higher world had first stirred in that place, and that he had become a Herrnhuter again, only of a higher order. That is not how a man writes about a cage he got out of.

(●) 1796 AD: Chaplain to a Berlin hospital, he fell in with poets who thought religion was beneath them, and wrote a book aimed straight at his friends. + The years in between were the ordinary apprenticeship of a young Prussian clergyman, and there is nothing in them to suggest what was coming. He passed his first theological examination in 1790, and that October he went as a private tutor to the children of Count Dohna at Schlobitten in East Prussia, where he stayed nearly three years, until May 1793. Ordination followed in 1794, then two years as assistant preacher at Landsberg. In 1796 he came to Berlin as chaplain to the Charité, the city’s great hospital, and the post gave him three things: a small salary, a great deal of dying to attend, and his evenings free. He spent those evenings in the Berlin salons, above all in the drawing room of Henriette Herz, and there he met the young writers of the Romantic movement, the generation then in revolt against the tidy reasonableness of their fathers. For two years he shared lodgings with Friedrich Schlegel, the sharpest of them. These were people who read everything, admired Goethe, and regarded Christianity as an exhausted subject, the way one might regard alchemy. Schleiermacher liked them enormously, which is the part that matters. It galled him that friends he admired had written off the thing he cared about most without ever once looking at it. So in 1799 he published, anonymously, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. The title says who it was for. The argument was that his friends had rejected a caricature: religion as a set of propositions about how the world got here, or as a moral police force. Strip those away, he told them, and what is left is something they already half knew, an awareness of the infinite pressing on the finite. The book made him famous, and it made him suspect, and both were permanent. A year later came the Soliloquies, a New Year’s gift of a book about the self, and a defense of a scandalous novel by Schlegel that respectable Berlin never quite forgave him.

(●) 1802 AD: Sent to a small Baltic town in something close to exile, he began translating Plato, and came back to a professor’s chair. + In 1802 he left Berlin for Stolp in Pomerania as court preacher. It was a quiet, provincial posting, and it came at the end of a bruising few years: a long and hopeless attachment to Eleonore Grunow, the unhappy wife of a Berlin clergyman, and the wreck of his standing in the city over the Schlegel affair. He arrived without friends, and he worked. The work was Plato. He and Schlegel had planned a complete German Plato together; Schlegel drifted away from it, and Schleiermacher finished it alone, volume after volume from 1804 to 1828, with introductions that argued for the first time that the dialogues form a deliberate sequence and must be read as a whole. It is still the German Plato. There is something fitting in the fact that the theologian who told his contemporaries to read religion from the inside spent a quarter of a century learning to read one dead author from the inside. In 1804 the University of Halle gave him a chair, and he began the lecture courses he would repeat for the rest of his life: on ethics, on hermeneutics (the art of working out what a writer actually meant), on the history of philosophy. He had two good years of it. Then in October 1806 Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army at Jena, French troops entered Halle, and the university was closed. Schleiermacher stayed on in the occupied town for a while, and made his way back to Berlin in 1807 with no post and no income.

(●) 1809 AD: He married his dead friend’s widow, took the Trinity Church pulpit, and helped build a university out of a beaten country. + Ehrenfried von Willich, a younger friend and former student, had died in 1807 leaving a widow, Henriette, and two small children. On 18 May 1809 Schleiermacher married her. He was forty; she was half his age. The marriage lasted the rest of his life, and the house in Berlin filled up with children, stepchildren and students. That same year he became preacher at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche, the Church of the Trinity in Berlin, and he held that pulpit until he died. It is easy to forget, reading his systematic theology, that the man was above all a preacher, in a black gown, in front of the same congregation, week after week for twenty-five years. His printed sermons ran to volumes, and Berliners who could not follow a word of his lectures came to hear him. Prussia after Jena was a defeated state trying to rebuild itself from the schoolroom up, and Schleiermacher threw himself into it with both hands. He preached patriotic sermons under the occupation, with the French listening. He wrote a memorandum on what a German university should be, at a moment when Prussia was about to need one. So when the University of Berlin opened in 1810, largely on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s plan, Schleiermacher had helped shape it, and he became the first dean of its theological faculty. In 1811 he published the Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, a small book that laid out how the subject should be divided and taught, and the division it proposed is roughly the one seminaries still use.

(●) 1821 AD: He built the whole of Christian doctrine from a single starting point, while quarrelling with his king and being watched by the police. + Der christliche Glaube, The Christian Faith, appeared in two volumes in 1821 and 1822, and in a heavily revised second edition in 1830 and 1831. German writers usually call it by a shorter name, the Glaubenslehre, which means the teaching of the faith. It is his masterpiece and the most influential Protestant systematic theology written since Calvin’s Institutes. A systematic theology is simply an ordered account of everything the church believes, laid out so that each doctrine stands in its place. Every such book has to begin somewhere, and what made his different was where he chose to begin: not Scripture, not the creeds, but the believer’s own consciousness of God, from which every doctrine had to be derived or else set aside. He was not a comfortable churchman in these years. He had welcomed the Prussian Union of 1817, which joined the Lutheran and Reformed churches in one body, and he was Reformed serving a united congregation. But when King Friedrich Wilhelm III tried to impose a service book of his own devising on those churches, Schleiermacher fought him in print, publishing in 1824 a pamphlet on the liturgical rights of Protestant princes under the pen name Pacificus Sincerus, the sincere peacemaker. Not many men whose salary came from the crown would have picked that particular fight. The government was already unhappy with him. He had been friendly with reformers the state distrusted, and in the years of political reaction after 1819 his correspondence was opened and his conduct investigated. In 1829 he answered his critics in two open letters to his friend Friedrich Lücke, defending the book and putting the question that had driven him since he was thirty: whether Christian faith and honest learning were really going to have to choose sides against each other.

(●) 1834 AD: He died at sixty-five, and Berlin walked behind the coffin in tens of thousands. + He was at work to the end, and the end came fast. He preached his last sermon on 2 February 1834 and gave his last lecture on 6 February. Then came an inflammation of the lungs, and on 12 February he died, aged sixty-five. Before the end he asked for the Lord’s Supper, and celebrated it in the bedroom with his family. His doctor had forbidden him wine, so he took water, remarking that Christ in blessing wine had blessed water too. Karl Barth, who spent his life arguing against Schleiermacher’s theology, retold that scene and said that the fervor with which he did it is beyond all doubt. The funeral was extraordinary. The historian Leopold von Ranke, who was then teaching in Berlin, put the procession at twenty to thirty thousand people. His own students carried the coffin, the mourners on foot stretched more than a mile, and about a hundred carriages followed, the king’s and the crown prince’s at their head. Much of that crowd had come for the patriot and the preacher rather than the theologian. It is worth holding on to: the man whose system later generations would fight over was, to the city that buried him, its pastor.

What He Taught

(T1) Religion is neither a kind of knowledge nor a kind of behavior, but a province of the mind of its own. + Stand at the edge of the sea in bad weather and something happens to you before you have formed a single thought about it. You are not calculating the volume of water. You are not deciding what to do. You are simply, for a moment, aware of being very small in front of something very large. Schleiermacher’s claim is that religion lives at that level, underneath both thinking and doing, and that the whole eighteenth-century quarrel about it had been conducted at the wrong depth. His contemporaries had offered two accounts of what religion is, and he thought both of them missed. The rationalists said religion is a body of truths about God that reason can check, so that believing is a matter of getting the propositions right. Kant said religion is morality, and that God is a postulate of the moral life: not something reason can prove, but something a person has to assume if the good that duty commands him to aim at is to be possible at all. Schleiermacher answered that each of them had described something religion produces rather than religion itself. Doctrines come afterwards, as attempts to say what has been felt; conduct comes afterwards, as what follows from it. The thing itself he called, in the 1799 Speeches, intuition and feeling: an immediate awareness of the infinite in and through the finite, not an inference drawn from it. He is not saying that Christians believe nothing and do nothing. He is saying that the believing and the doing grow out of a soil that is neither. The gain was real. A friend who had shut the door on Christianity because the astronomy in Genesis looked wrong, or because the moral rules seemed borrowed, was being told that he had not yet met the thing he was rejecting. The cost was real too, and Christian readers have pressed it ever since: if religion is a region of experience, it is not obvious how anything said about God from that region could be true or false rather than merely sincere.

(Q) "True science is complete vision; true practice is culture and art self-produced; true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite." + Source: Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Second Speech (Oman translation, 1893). Three things are being kept apart in one sentence: what knowing is at its best, what doing is at its best, and what religion is, which is neither of them. The Second Speech is where the whole case is made, and where he also writes that the contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal (T1).

(T2) Piety is the feeling of being absolutely dependent, and to feel that is already to stand in relation to God. + Twenty-two years after the Speeches he had found a sharper phrase for it, and The Christian Faith opens by defining piety as the feeling of absolute dependence. The German is schlechthinniges Abhängigkeitsgefühl, which comes out in English as something like the sheer feeling of dependence, and it takes a moment to hear correctly, because the word feeling in English suggests a mood that comes and goes. He meant something more like a standing awareness. Think of the difference between two relationships you are in right now. With another person, you are partly dependent and partly free: your neighbor can affect you, and you can affect your neighbor back. Absolute dependence is the other kind, the relation in which everything is received and nothing is returned, where you did not give yourself existence and cannot hold yourself in it for the next five minutes. Nothing inside the world stands to you like that. Whatever does stand to you like that, he says, is what the word God names, and being aware of it is not the conclusion of an argument but the floor under all the arguments. Christians have found a great deal here that they recognize, and it would be strange if they had not. "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God" (Psalm 42:1) is not a proof, and Augustine’s restless heart is not an inference. Where the trouble starts is not with the definition itself but with what the definition then permits. If absolute dependence is what piety is, then everything the church teaches has to be checked against it, and a doctrine that cannot be got out of that feeling has no obvious way to get in.

(Q) "the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God." + Source: Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §4 (Mackintosh and Stewart translation, 1928). The book is built out of numbered propositions with commentary hung on them, so §4 means the fourth of those propositions, and the clause quoted completes his definition of what all piety has in common, whatever the religion. The two halves of the clause are doing a great deal of work. The awareness and the relation are not two facts, one of which proves the other; they are one fact described twice (T2).

(T3) Doctrines are the church’s attempt to put its own experience of God into words. + A grandmother tries to tell you what it was like when her first child was born. She reaches for words, and the words are true, and they are also plainly less than the thing. Schleiermacher held that Christian doctrines work like that. They are descriptions, put into speech, of the Christian’s awareness of God as it has been awakened by Christ. The awareness is first; the sentences are the church’s report of it. He drew the consequence without flinching. Since the report depends on the experience, the authority of Scripture cannot be the ground on which faith in Christ rests, because a person has to have some faith in Christ already before he will grant Scripture any authority out of the ordinary. Now, before that is taken for less than it is: he is not saying that Scripture does not matter, and he did not treat it as one book among many. The New Testament remains for him the norm by which every later account of the faith is measured, the first in a long series and the standard for the rest. What he is saying is that it comes second in the order of discovery, and only second. This is the hinge of everything, and it is why he is called the father of modern theology. Before him, a Protestant theologian argued from a text given by God to conclusions about God. After him, an entire tradition argued from the religious life of the believing community to conclusions about God, and treated the texts as that community’s earliest and best expressions. Everything Christians have gained and lost from him follows from this one move.

(Q) "The authority of Holy Scripture cannot be the foundation of faith in Christ; rather must the latter be presupposed before a peculiar authority can be granted to Holy Scripture." + Source: Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §128 (Mackintosh and Stewart translation, 1928). The proposition sits in his treatment of how the church stays itself across the centuries. Alongside it, §15 gives the definition it rests on: Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech (T3).

(T4) Christ redeems by drawing believers into the strength of his own unbroken awareness of God. + Everyone knows one person around whom they are simply better. Not lectured, not shamed, just steadied: their calm gets into you, and things you could not manage alone become possible in their company. Schleiermacher built his account of salvation out of that ordinary experience, raised to its limit. Start with what he thinks is wrong with us. It is not a legal debt, on his account, but a weakness. He calls it God-forgetfulness: the awareness of absolute dependence is there in everyone, but in us it is intermittent, crowded out by appetite and distraction, never in charge for long. In Jesus of Nazareth alone it was never crowded out. He is fully one of us in nature, and different from all of us in this, that his consciousness of God was perfect and constant, and that constancy, Schleiermacher says, was a real presence of God in him. Redemption is then what happens when he takes believers up into the power of that awareness, and the church is the community where the transmission goes on. Two things are worth naming plainly. He has given a serious answer to a real question, how a person actually changes, and he has recovered something the older textbooks could lose, that salvation is life shared with a person rather than a transaction filed somewhere. He has also, quite deliberately, set aside the account the New Testament gives of why the cross was necessary. The doubt he confessed to his father at eighteen, that Christ’s death was a death suffered in the place of the guilty, he never came back from.

(Q) "The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him." + Source: Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §94 (Mackintosh and Stewart translation, 1928). The proposition that governs his whole doctrine of Christ. Potency here means force or strength, not possibility: the point is that the God-consciousness in Jesus was never overpowered. Veritable means real rather than figurative, and with that word he meant to stand in the line of the old Alexandrian theologians who said that God was truly present in the man (T4).

(T5) Understanding what another person meant is an art, because misunderstanding is what happens by default. + Read a text message from a friend and you can get the tone exactly wrong. Now put two thousand years, a dead language, and a vanished world between you and the writer. Schleiermacher’s lectures on hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, begin from the assumption that misunderstanding is the normal case and that understanding has to be worked for at every point. Before him, interpretation was taught as a set of local repairs: rules for hard passages, one collection of them for the Bible, another for Roman law, another for classical poetry. He argued that there should instead be one general art of understanding, the same art whether the text in front of you is Paul or Plato, and that it runs on two legs. The grammatical side asks what the words could mean in the language and the moment they were written. The psychological side asks what this particular writer, with this life and these habits of mind, was doing by choosing those words rather than others. Neither leg finishes on its own, and the two check each other constantly, which is why the work goes in a circle: you understand the parts through the whole and the whole through the parts, going round until the reading settles. This is the least controversial and possibly the most durable thing he did. Through Wilhelm Dilthey, who wrote his biography, and later Hans-Georg Gadamer, it became the backbone of modern hermeneutics, and any preacher who has been told to ask what the author was doing with these words for these first readers is downstream of these lectures.

(Q) "misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point." + Source: Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 21–22 (Bowie translation, 1998). He is contrasting two working assumptions an interpreter can hold. The lax one assumes understanding comes on its own and only steps in when a passage looks odd. The strict one, which is his, assumes the opposite (T5).

(Q) "Shall the tangle of history so unravel that Christianity becomes identified with barbarism and science with unbelief?" + Source: Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, Second Letter, page 61 (Duke and Fiorenza translation, 1981). Written at sixty, defending his systematic theology to a friend, and as good a statement of what he thought he was for as he ever gave. He had watched educated Europe drift toward two camps, one that kept the faith by refusing to learn and one that kept its learning by giving up the faith, and he refused to accept that those were the only doors. Whether his own answer holds is the question everything after him has argued about.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He kept theology in the modern university, and gave it the shape it is still taught in. + In 1810 it was a live question whether a new research university had any business housing a faculty of divinity. Schleiermacher answered it in the Brief Outline of the Study of Theology of 1811, and his answer was practical rather than defensive: theology belongs in a university because the church needs leaders trained to a real discipline, and that discipline has parts that can be described. He set out three parts. Philosophical theology asks what Christianity essentially is and where its edges run, the question of what would still have to be true for a thing to count as this faith at all. Historical theology covers the whole record, from the biblical texts through the growth of doctrine down to the present state of the church, and for him three things a student would recognize all fell inside it: exegesis, which is the close reading of the biblical text in its own language; church history; and dogmatics, the ordered statement of what the church holds. Practical theology is the technique of actually leading a church, and he insisted on it as the crown of the whole rather than the leftovers, which was not the usual view then and is not always the usual view now. Divide that middle part into its biblical, historical and doctrinal pieces and the familiar fourfold seminary curriculum is standing there in front of you: Bible, church history, systematic theology, practical theology. He also showed, by living it, what a working theologian could look like. He translated Plato for twenty-four years. He wrote a short book in 1807 arguing on grounds of vocabulary and style that Paul did not write 1 Timothy, and produced a critical study of Luke’s Gospel in 1817 that Connop Thirlwall translated into English. He lectured on ethics, psychology, education and aesthetics, and through all of it he preached every Sunday. The breadth was itself the argument: a faculty that could produce work like that had earned its rooms.

(†) A century of theologians took his starting point and built on it. + What the nineteenth century took from him was permission to begin somewhere other than a proof text, and once that permission was granted the men who took it went in several directions at once. Albrecht Ritschl, the dominant German theologian of the second half of the century, worked from the religious community and the judgments of value it makes about Christ, meaning what the church finds Christ to be worth to it rather than what it can demonstrate about him. Ernst Troeltsch pressed the historical question further than Schleiermacher ever had, asking what happens to Christian claims when the historian treats them exactly like any others, with no exemptions. Wilhelm Dilthey, for his part, wrote a great unfinished life of him and carried his hermeneutics out of theology altogether, into the study of history and the humanities generally. The clearest debt of all is Rudolf Otto’s. Otto edited the centenary edition of the Speeches in 1899, and in 1917 published The Idea of the Holy, a book about the experience of the holy as something that seizes a person before any doctrine has explained anything to him. Otto is more careful than his teacher about insisting that the experience is an experience of something genuinely there, and that difference is not a small one. All the same, the enterprise itself, taking religious experience as the thing to be studied and worked from, is Schleiermacher’s. Two whole branches of study that hardly existed before him grew out of this soil. One is the academic study of religion as a subject in its own right, sitting in the university beside history and philology. The other is modern hermeneutics, which reached Hans-Georg Gadamer in the twentieth century by way of Dilthey and Heidegger. When a preacher today says that the point of exegesis is to hear what the author was saying to those readers in that situation, the instinct is an old one by now, and it has a Berlin address.

(†) Karl Barth broke with him completely and never stopped taking him seriously. + The revolt came from a Swiss village pastor who had been trained in the liberal tradition and found, in the trenches of the First World War, that it had nothing to say. Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans, published in 1919 and rewritten in 1922, hit German theology like a shell. His charge against the whole line that ran from Schleiermacher was simple and hard: it had begun with the human being and had never once got anywhere else, so that over a century God had quietly become a name for the depths of religious experience rather than the living Lord who speaks and is not anybody’s possession. Barth was not alone in saying it. Emil Brunner made the same case at book length in 1924 in Mysticism and the Word. Barth spent fifty years arguing with him and never once treated him as a minor figure. In his history of nineteenth-century Protestant theology he wrote that the first place in a history of the theology of the most recent times belongs and will always belong to Schleiermacher, and that he has no rival; he did not found a school, Barth said, but an era. At the very end of his life, in 1968, Barth allowed himself to wonder in print whether the two of them might yet understand each other in the kingdom of heaven. For readers in the middle, the honest summary is that the questions Schleiermacher forced are still the right questions. Where does theology start. What is the relation between the faith a person actually has and the doctrines the church states. How does a Christian speak to friends who think the whole subject is finished. Barth’s objection is not that he asked them but that his answers put the human being where God should stand.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the ground of doctrine, the cross, the empty tomb, and the God who is three. + It is fair to ask of any critic whether he is answering the man or a caricature of the man, so the criticism that counts here is the one drawn from what Schleiermacher himself wrote. He makes that easy. The Christian Faith is unusually candid about what its method costs, and it says so in his own numbered propositions. Four places show it. - Where doctrine comes from. He made the believer’s awareness of God both the source and the test, so that Scripture is granted its authority by faith rather than being what grants faith its footing in the first place (§128). Scripture describes the traffic running the other way: "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17). Paul is emphatic that his own gospel reached him as news from outside, and not as anything he worked up from within: "For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). - The cross. From the letter of 1787 to the end of his life he denied that Christ’s death was a death suffered in the place of the guilty, and his account of redemption in the Glaubenslehre is instead Christ communicating the strength of his God-consciousness (§100). The apostolic summary is put differently, and it is put first, before anything else in the list: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3); "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). - The resurrection. Because he would admit only what could be derived from Christ’s redeeming influence on the believer, he judged that the resurrection, the ascension and the return to judgment are not properly constituent parts of the doctrine of Christ’s person (§99). That is a decision about where they belong rather than a flat denial that they happened, but it moves them out of the load-bearing wall. Paul stakes everything on the opposite: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). - The Trinity. He placed the doctrine of the Trinity in a short conclusion at the very end of the book rather than at its foundation, on the ground that as the church has framed it the doctrine is not an immediate utterance about Christian self-consciousness but a combination of several such utterances (§170). Given his starting point that is consistent enough. Yet the church did not reason its way to the three names, it was given them, in the commission the risen Christ left: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19). A fifth follows from the same rule, and it reaches back into the Old Testament. He held that those writings owe their place in the Christian Bible to the New Testament’s appeals to them and to the historical link between Christian worship and the synagogue, and that they do not on that account share the normative dignity or inspiration of the New (§132). Jesus read his own Bible the other way round. On the Emmaus road, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). None of this makes him a cynic. He wanted to hold the faith and the modern mind together, and he died taking communion with his family. But the method he chose could only keep what the religious self can supply, and the gospel is at bottom an announcement of things done outside that self, in Judea, under Pontius Pilate, whether or not anyone felt them.