“Paul DeHart between Möhler and Schleiermacher: Unspeakable Cults as Correction and Continuation of Schleiermacherian Christology”

Paul DeHart’s Unspeakable Cults: An Essay in Christology offers one of the most innovative and important statements in recent Christology. It is also pursued throughout in explicit critical conversation with the Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. This paper argues that Unspeakable Cults—both in its constructive appropriation of Schleiermacher and in its well-placed critiques of him—charts a trajectory for and offers a signal contribution within a renewed Schleiermacherian Christology for the twenty-first century.

The paper pursues this claim first by turning backwards, to Schleiermacher’s Roman Catholic contemporary in Tübingen, Johann Adam Möhler—one of the most significant influences upon the ecclesiologies of both the Second Vatican Council and the Ecumenical Movement. As Grant Kaplan’s contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher makes clear, Schleiermacher was an important influence on both Möhler and his teacher Johann Sebastian Drey. While Möhler’s debt to Schleiermacher is especially apparent in the former’s influential Einheit in der Kirche and persists through to the end of his short literary career (Kaplan, 569), Michael Himes has emphasized Möhler’s critical turn away from Schleiermacher between the publication of his two most significant texts, the Einheit (1825) and the Symbolik (1832). Möhler’s perceptive and underappreciated critique is developed principally in his still-untranslated Athanasius der Große (1827). In it, he argues that Schleiermacher’s desire in the Glaubenslehre to avoid theological speculation—indebted both to his Reformed theological tradition, and to his post-Kantian acceptance of epistemology as “first philosophy”—leaves Schleiermacher with no principled reason to pass beyond an activity of God in relation to the world-system to an activity of God in se. That Möhler’s critique has teeth is further evidenced (and indeed, motivated) by Schleiermacher’s sympathy for the theological proposals of Sabellius, proceeding from the same speculative reserve. While Schleiermacher undoubtedly wishes to preserve some account of divine aseity and trinitarian relations as internal to the divine life, Möhler raises important questions about whether his theological methodology permits these full-throated affirmations.

By contrast, Paul DeHart’s broadly Thomist appropriation of Schleiermacher in Unspeakable Cults retains many of the distinctive elements of Schleiermacher’s Christology while answering Möhler’s critique decisively. Among the elements of Schleiermacher’s thought he retains are a non-interventionist account of God’s action that preserves the integrity of creation’s causal order, an ability to hold together a robust incarnationalism with critical scientific inquiry on the “historical Jesus,” and a lively sense of Christ’s continuing presence and agency in the world through the ecclesial mediation of his historical influence. Yet DeHart’s approach is distinguished from Schleiermacher’s by his refusal to grant epistemology philosophical priority over ontology within theological method, a refusal refuted in and authorized by DeHart’s philosophical nonfoundationalism. Freed from the post-Kantian aspiration of grounding theology as a scientific enterprise that motivates in part Schleiermacher’s turn to Gefühl (cf. Lamm 1994), DeHart demonstrates how Schleiermacher’s attention to the historical mediation of Christ’s presence is compatible with (and indeed, enriched by) a richly-imagined Chalcedonian Christology. In all this, DeHart models how a contemporary Schleiermacherian Christology offers distinctive advantages in drawing Christology into conversation with modern scientific understandings of the world, with contemporary historical-critical study of the Bible, and with critical scholarly approaches to the study of religion—thereby pointing one possible and attractive way forward for the further development of Schleiermacherian Christology.

Yet attention to how DeHart’s proposal answers Möhler’s critique of Schleiermacher opens consideration of his theology to one further set of conversation-partners. Möhler’s Symbolik is frequently identified as providing the motive impulse for nineteenth- and twentieth-century “mystical body” theologies, as variously encountered in Roman Catholic (Scheeben, Mersch), Anglican (Wilberforce, Gore), and Protestant thought (Nevin, Schaff). Möhler’s writings on this point themselves at least stand in continuity with and perhaps reflect the direct influence of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the relation of Christ to the church, which Julia Lamm has argued should be construed as “an extension of the incarnation to all humanity” (Lamm 2008, 137). After a post-Vatican II decline, theologies emphasizing the continuity between the Incarnation and Christ’s continuing life in historical Christian communities have found a resurgence in recent years, in thinkers as theologically and ecumenically diverse as Robert Jenson, Kathryn Tanner, M. Shawn Copeland, Jordan Daniel Wood, and Joseph Walker-Lenow. Attention to the continuity of Christ’s life with the life of the church (and, as Lamm suggests, all humanity) has emphasized not only the significance of ecclesial practice in mediating Christ’s presence in the world today, but also the agency of Christ active within the liberatory struggles of marginalized communities, bridging the realms of classical dogmatic and contextual theologies. 

 DeHart’s book not only offers another contribution to this vital theological discourse, but brings into focus Schleiermacher’s importance to the present shape of the landscape of contemporary Christology. In so doing, he allows us to see that Schleiermacherian Christology is not a peripheral voice speaking to a theological conversation centered elsewhere, but is already a force animating Christological discourse, and offers perhaps unparalleled resources for integrating historical theology, contextual theologies, and key interlocutors in Biblical studies and the critical study of religion.

References:

DeHart, Paul J. Unspeakable Cults: An Essay in Christology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021).

Kaplan, Grant. “Schleiermacher’s Influence on Roman Catholic Thought.” In The Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Andrew C. Dole, Shelli M. Poe, and Kevin M. Vander Schel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 557-574. 

Himes, Michael J. “ʻA Great Theologian of Our Timeʼ: Möhler on Schleiermacher.” Heythrop Journal 37.1 (1996): 24-46.

Lamm, Julia A. “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788-1794).” Harvard Theological Review 87.1 (1994): 67-105.

Lamm, Julia A. “Schleiermacher’s Treatise on Grace.” Harvard Theological Review 101.2 (2008): 133-168.