Johannes Von Hofmann on Atonement: A Summary and Critique

Heilsgeschichte and Atonement in the Theology of Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-1877): An Exposition and Critique By Jack Kilcrease, Ph.D. Jack Kilcrease is adjunct professor of theology at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Institute of Lutheran Theology at Brookings, South Dakota. Introduction Although Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-1877)1 has frequently been forgotten by twentieth-century Lutherans, his significance continues to be felt. Hofmann’s emphasis on definitive nature of history for the theological enterprise, finds an echo in the writings of Oscar Cullmann2 and Wolfhart Pannenberg.3 His reinterpretation of Luther’s theology of atonement as primarily centering on the conquest of demonic forces set the scholarly trajectory for Gustaf Aulén and several other twentieth-century Luther interpreters.4 Lastly, in his atonement theology, Hofmann greatly influenced both Aulén (that is, in his treatment of the subject in his dogmatics5) and the American Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde.6 See discussion of Hofmann’s theology in the following works: Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 593-601; Karlmann Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1993), 61-83; Matthew Becker, The SelfGiving God and Salvation History: The Trinitarian Theology of Johannes von Hofmann (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004); idem, “Appreciating the Life and Work of Johannes v. Hofmann,” Lutheran Quarterly 17, no. 3 (2003): 177-98; idem, “Hofmann as Ich-Theologie? The Object of Theology in Johann von Hofmann’s Werk,” Concordia Journal 29, no. 3 (2003): 265-93; idem, “Hofmann’s Revisionist Christology,” Lutheran Quarterly 17, no. 4 (2003): 288-328; idem, “The Self-Giving God: The Trinity in Hofmann’s Theology,” Pro Ecclesia 12, no. 3 (2003): 417-46; Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1969), 12-36; Lowell Green, The Erlangen School of Theology: It History, Teaching, and Practice (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2010), 105-33; Martin Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Gutersloh: G. Mohn, 1984), 20-3, 76-8, 113-7, 124-5, 182-6, 218-34, 254-71. Robert Schultz, Gesetz und Evangelium in der Lutherischen Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1958),110-20. In my writing of this piece, I am particularly indebted to the work of Becker and Forde. Not only did they give me much insight into Hofmann’s thinking, but their work directed me to the most important sections of Hofmann’s works. This article is partially based on chapter five of my doctoral dissertation The Self-Donation of God: Gerhard Forde and the Question of Atonement in the Lutheran Tradition. 2 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950); idem, Salvation in History, trans. Sidney Sowers (London: S.C.M. Press, 1967). 3 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, trans. Lewis Wilkins and Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,1968); idem, Revelation as History (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 4 See Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A.G. Hebert (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 107-8; Lennart Pinomaa, Faith Victorious: An Introduction to Luther’s Theology, trans. Walter J. Kokkonen, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 46-57; Philip Watson, Let God Be God!: An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 116-25. 5 See Gustaf Aulén, The Faith of the Christian Church, trans. Eric Wahlstrom and G. Everett Arden (Philadelphia: The Muhlenberg Press, 1948), 199-210. 6 See Gerhard Forde "The Work of Christ" in The Christian Dogmatics, 2 vols., ed. Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 2:5-104; idem, "Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ" in A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, eds. Mark Mattes and Steven Paulson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 85-97. 1 1 In the following essay, our goal will be to give an explanation of key themes in Hofmann’s theology. Beginning with briefly describing Hofmann’s early life and influences, we will then move on and give an exposition of the two most important aspects of his theology: his doctrines of Heilsgeschichte and atonement. Finally, we will end our discussion by briefly critiquing of Hofmann’s theology. In short, Hofmann’s approach is ultimately unsatisfactory because it fails to take key themes of historic Lutheran confessional theology seriously. To many, these failures can be primarily traced back to Hofmann’s Heilsgeschichte theology and its related Schleiermacherian-Pietist fixation on religious experience as a determinative criterion for the establishment of Christian doctrine. Although such criticisms are not without merit, at a deeper level, we will argue that these problems are rooted in Hofmann’s rejection of the orthodox Lutheran understanding of the full communication of the divine attributes within the hypostatic union (genus majestaticum) and its related doctrine of the omnipresence of the risen Christ. Therefore his distortion of the distinction between law and gospel, and his rejection of the orthodox Lutheran doctrine of atonement both follow from this faulty Christology. Hofmann’s Early Life and Influences Hofmann was born in a lower middle class home in Nürnberg to Lorenz Hofmann and his fourth wife, Eva Dorthea Buchner Hofmann in 1810.7 Early in his life, Hofmann’s father died and his mother was forced to take over the family business. In spite of the grueling hours that she worked maintaining the family business and caring for Hofmann and his numerous siblings, his mother found time to be heavily involved in a Lutheran Pietist movement emanating from Wittenberg.8 She regularly attended Bible studies led by the local pastor Johann Gottfried Schöner and participated in his pietistic cell called the Christenumsgesellschaft (Society of Christianity).9 Such pietistic influences provided by Hofmann’s mother were reinforced in his early education at the Melanchthon Gymnasium in Nürnberg.10 The school offered an education that was a synthesis of classical humanism (the emphasis of the school was on classical languages at which Hofmann excelled11) and Lutheran Pietism.12 For this reason, it may be safely surmised that Lutheran Pietism played an early and significant role in the life of the young Hofmann. Such a pervasive influence seems clear, even in spite his reported initial lack of zeal for the faith.13 In 1827, Hofmann briefly attended Erlangen where he studied under Christian Krafft. Krafft inculcated in the young Hofmann an appreciation for the importance of a deep study of the Scriptures.14 Krafft also spurred him on to a deeper personal piety.15 Both of these factors would later influence his choice to write biblical commentaries as part of his larger theological project. Another significant influence on Hofmann comes from his engagement 7 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 3; Green, 105. For the standard biographies of Hofmann see Heinrich Schmid, “Zum Gedächtnis an Hofmann,” in Vermischte Aufsätze von Professor v. Hofmann Ein Auswahle aus der Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kireche, ed. Heinrich Schmid (Erlangen: A. Deichert, 1878), v-xxiii; Paul Wapler, Johannes v. Hofmann: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der theologischen Grundprobleme, der kirchlichen und der politischen Bewegungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Adolf Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhanlung Werner Scholl, 1914). 8 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 3. 9 Green, The Erlangen School, 106. 10 Ibid. 11 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 3-4. 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Green, The Erlangen School, 106-7; Wapler, Johannes v. Hofmann, 11. 14 Green, The Erlangen School, 106-7. 15 Wapler, Johannes v. Hofmann, 16. 2 with the German Idealist philosophers who at the time dominated the University of Berlin.16 Hofmann moved to Berlin to continue his studies in 1829. Despite his initial lack of interest in their thought, Hegel, Schelling, and Kant represent important influences on Hofmann’s development.17 Particularly in the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling, history is seen as an eschatological process of divine and human self-development. Although it is of course, difficult to draw straight lines between these influences and Hofmann’s writings, such themes are clearly present in his later theology. The Reformed-Pietist father of Protestant Liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher, also stands as a major figure in the intellectual milieu of Hofmann’s student days in Berlin. In spite of the fact that Hofmann did not favor Schleiermacher as an exegetical theologian,18 aspects of Schleiermacher’s theology of consciousness appear to have exercised an influence on him.19 At Berlin, the thinker whom Hofmann found the most intellectually enticing was the Lutheran historian Leopold von Ranke.20 Ranke’s historical method relied on a strict empiricism. In this regard, Ranke’s method broke with the then pervasive influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he believed destroyed the relevance of human agency by causing the empirical and concrete reality of the historical process to become “circumscribed by a concept”21 (i.e., Hegel’s notion of history as the self-realization of the Geist).22 Nevertheless, Ranke did not deny the meaning and providential unity of history. On the contrary, he saw it as an unfolding of God’s plan for humanity. In fact, Ranke held that that God’s nature, will, and purposes could be directly read off the empirical process of history.23 After completing his academic degrees, Hofmann spent time at Erlangen as a professor, before teaching at Rostock between 1842 and 1845.24 Although he was very fond of Rostock and received a warm reception there, he eventually he returned to Erlangen25 where the Neo-Lutheran Renaissance led by Adolph Harleß and a number of other luminaries (von Frank, Delitzsch, Zezschwitz, Hoefling, Harnack, Thomasius, etc.) was well underway. Neo-Lutheran theology as it was practiced at Erlangen during the nineteenth century attempted to not merely revive of the classic Lutheran theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also reapply and in some cases reinterpret it in light of modern German philosophical and cultural movements (notably German Romanticism and Idealism) as well as newer historical research and exegesis. Throughout the nineteenth century and moving on into the mid-twentieth century, Erlangen became a hotbed of Neo-Lutheran theology.26 Considering Hofmann’s upbringing in the Bavarian Lutheran Church, as well as 16 Green, The Erlangen School, 107-8; Becker, The Self-Giving God, 5-7. Ibid.,6, 102-20. 18 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 5. 19 Ibid., 35, 40. 20 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 7. Hein, 124-5. 21 Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, trans. and ed. George G. Iggers, Wilma Iggers, and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 27. 22 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 23 See brief comments in Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, 100. See discussion of Ranke and his historical method in Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 253-88. Also see discussion in Becker, The Self-Giving God, 7, 91-102; Green, The Erlangen School, 107-8. 24 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 7-8; Green, The Erlangen School, 108. 25 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 8-9; Green, The Erlangen School, 108-9. 26 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 8-9. For sources on the Erlangen school, see the following: Karlmann Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1993); Lowell Green, The Erlangen School of Theology: It History, Teaching, and Practice (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2010); Martin Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Gutersloh: G. Mohn, 1984); Friedrich 17 3 his interest in the new intellectual movements permeating Germany, it is not surprising that he found a convivial intellectual environment among the theologians of Erlangen. Heilsgeschichte, Scripture, and the Structure of Religious Experience Having reviewed Hofmann’s early life and influences, we now turn to his understanding of Scripture, revelation, and Heilsgeschicte. In order to do this, we will primarily examine his book Biblische Hermeneutik, the content of which we will occasionally clarify with reference to some of Hofmann’s other works. This work is based on a series of lectures delivered by Hofmann to his students at Erlangen in 1860.27 In this work Hofmann argues that the Bible is a historical document that must be understood on the basis of empirical historical methods: “the Scripture is not a text book teaching conceptual truths but rather a document of an historical process, and . . . has originated within the history recorded therein.”28 At the same time, Scripture must be regarded as the document which the Church derives its identity and its concrete experience of God’s reality and truth. Hofmann begins by arguing that the Scriptures have been abused throughout the ages by a lack of attention to their concrete historical nature. This is primarily the fault of the Church Fathers and the medieval theologians who understood Scripture on the basis of allegory and often times reduced it to a sourcebook of dogma.29 During the Reformation, Luther and his colleagues returned the historical-literal sense of Scripture (sensus literalis) to its primacy and briefly restored the true sense of the Bible to the Church.30 Unfortunately, Protestant orthodoxy moved the study of Scripture back again to the previous state of affairs through the doctrine of plenary and verbal inspiration.31 This needlessly burdened the Bible with the abstract dogma of inerrancy and made it an infallible textbook of abstract doctrines, rather than a concrete product of the history of human interaction with God through the history of Israel and the early Church. At this point it should be noted in passing that in dealing with the question of inerrancy and verbal inspiration, Hofmann displays Ranke’s distain for anything but strict empiricism. In other words, he regards any intervening concept which guides one’s interpretation of Scripture (i.e., the supposition of verbal and plenary inspiration) as being distorting. Of course, orthodox Lutheran theologians would counter that the doctrine of inspiration is not something imposed on the text, but rather found within it (2 Tm 3:16, et al). Similarly, most contemporary philosophers and historians would consider Hofmann and Ranke’s belief in a strict empiricism to be both impossible and naïve. Put bluntly, all interpretation entails presuppositions.32 According to Hofmann, the abstract commitments of Protestant orthodoxy were unfortunately counteracted by the equally problematic rationalism of the eighteenth and Kantzenbach, Die Erlanger Theologie. Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung im Rahmen der theologischen Fakulta t, 1743-1877 (Munchen: Evang. Presseverband fur Bayern, 1960); Schultz, 98-120. 27 Johannes von Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, trans. Christian Preus (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1959), xi. This work is a good and somewhat abridged translation of Hofmann’s Biblische Hermeneutik (Nördlingen: Beck, 1880). 28 Ibid., 204. 29 Ibid., 4-9. 30 Ibid., 9. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 See similar claims from one of Bultmann’s more lucid moments: Rudolf Bultmann, "Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?" in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridian, 1960), 289-96. 4 nineteenth centuries (Hofmann here mentions Immanuel Kant and David Friedrich Strauss).33 Contemporary Rationalists were just as problematic as their Protestant scholastic predecessors. Just as the latter came to text of Scripture with the preconceived dogma of scriptural inerrancy, so too the former have come to the text with their rationalistic prejudice against miracles and prophecy. Hence, biblical scholars like Strauss have explained Scripture (which is a historical document) as “mythical”34 purely on the basis of their philosophical prejudices. Having considered both the dogmatic ditches of rationalism and scholasticism in tandem, Hofmann now moves to a discussion of what he considers to be a proper understanding of the Bible. According to our author, we must understand that the “Holy Bible bears authoritative testimony to the historical development which has taken place in the Church.”35 By “the Church” it appears that Hofmann means (in typical Lutheran fashion36) to refers to the whole people of God throughout the ages. Therefore, such a description includes ancient Israel as well. Through the communal history of the people of God, God works out his purposes for humanity. In Hofmann’s earlier Der Schriftbeweis, he claims that this purpose is the creation of a universal community of love and fellowship with God.37 He describes the gradual development of such a community as beginning with Abraham and his family, later expanding into the trans-familiar community of the nation of Israel and then finally becoming a universal and transnational phenomenon in the Church. In later life, he even went so far as to claim (in defiance of AC 17) that this would be consummated in Christ’s millennial rule on earth.38 It should be noted that Hofmann’s view of history here in many respects echoes that of Hegel, who also believed that the goal of history was the creation of an ideal community (the Sittlichkeit community).39 Similarly, it should be observed that this interest in the establishment of authentic community is common to the thought of many of the early nineteenth-century Romantics.40 Although, these purposes represent the meaning of all history, they are not the result of simple, natural historical development: “Like the Church and that development, the Scripture is not the result of the historical growth of mankind but the work of God. Within human history, its specific function is to serve the realization of God’s ultimate purpose both for history and in conflict with it.” In this sense, while Heilsgeschichte is characterized by gradual development, it is also, in a sense, disruptive in that it represents God’s disruption and “conflict with” the natural development of human history and its possibilities. In light of this fact, Hofmann characterizes this history as “miraculous” (wunderbar): All those historical events and results which are the realization of God’s ultimate purposes, that is, Holy History and its effects, we call “miracle,” because they stand in 33 Hofmann, 12-13. See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore Greene (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1960); David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 34 Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 13. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 Luther and the Lutheran scholastics both considered the Church to be an order of creation established in the Garden of Eden. See AE 1:92-7. Also see Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. Charles Hay and Henry Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1961), 60423. 37 Johannes von Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1857-1860), 1:22. 38 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 230-1. 39 See discussion in Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 376-88. 40 See discussion in Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 31-33. 5 opposition to the natural development of man . . . Scripture shares in this “miracle” of Holy History. Not only is it given to be the standard of the actual life of the Church, but it also belongs to the miraculous history of the Church. Scripture is a “miracle” both in its origin and in its content because it is the document of Holy History.41 Hence for Hofmann, the Bible’s account of salvation history as a “miraculous” development that disrupts limited human possibilities due to finitude and sin, find its confirmation in the religious consciousness of the individual Christian. Just as the history of salvation disrupts the continuity of purely temporal development, so too, conversion to faith in Christ disrupts the human person’s previous existence under sin.42 Christianity is “the relationship between God and man which has been mediated through Jesus Christ.” It “did not originate from the nature of this world as given through creation and perverted by sin.” We can know this because we are absolutely certain of Christ’s personal presence as mediated by faith: “[t]he Christian is more sure of Christ, in his past work and active presence, as the one who personally mediates his relationship to God, than of anything that is perceptible and given to his senses.” For this reason, the Christian becomes aware that the content of the Scriptures authentically communicates God’s reality and works because they bear witness to Christ and mediate the experience of Christ: “[i]n accordance with that fact, he evaluates the witness which Scripture bears to the history which forms the basis of that awareness and of which he [the Christian] is the result.”43 Hofmann holds that religious experience is of the utmost importance for the verification of the truth of Christian dogma. He goes so far as to say (in a famous and often quoted saying): “I the Christian am the material of the science of my theology.”44 The miracle of conversion and regeneration directs the believer to the community of the Church and the Scriptures, wherein Christ is the culmination of a “chain”45 of ever increasing miracles: Since Scripture is the document of Holy History, its content too must be miracle. Since basically Christ is the content of this history, He is the absolute miracle. All miracles in the Bible, both those that point towards Him and those which He performs Himself, must be understood and with reference to Him. . . . But since we understand and evaluate this history (whose product and testimony is Holy Scripture) in light of Jesus, the individual miracle has to be interpreted as part of an historical process of which Christ is the center. A Biblical miracle remains unintelligible and lacks true value for theological understanding when treated by itself and apart from the special place and significance for Holy History.46 In that Christ is the supreme miracle, he is the end product of salvation history and its great miracles. Hofmann argues that the chain of miracles that constitute salvation history begins with creation ex nihilo and moves on through the calling of the patriarchs and the establishment of the Israelite kingdom.47 For this reason the experience of conversion and faith in Christ is not that of the lonely individual, but is mediated through the participation of the believer in the ecclesiastical community. As we observed above, the experience of the faithful person within the Church of 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 28. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed., 1:10. Translation my own. Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 31. Ibid., 31-2. Ibid., 32. 6 God in Christ only makes sense if the whole miraculous chain of historical development presented in the Bible is, in fact, a generally accurate (though certainly not inerrant) description of the history of the people of God. In other words, if the chain of events were inaccurately presented in Scripture, the religious experience of the Christian would be either radically different or non-existent. Therefore, Hofmann relies on the continuity of historicalcommunal development to explain the link between the believer and the person of Christ. Hofmann referred to the total factual life situation of the Christian as the “Tatbestand.”48 Karlmann Beyschlag is therefore correct in asserting that Hofmann’s theology primarily functions by “discerning a correlation between personal religious experience and historical revelation.”49 We should stop at this point of our exposition to note that Hofmann’s accent on the importance of religious experience bears not only a strong resemblance to the Pietism of the his youth, but also to the modified, rationalistic Pietism of Friedrich Schleiermacher. As we have already observed, not only did Hofmann encounter Schleiermacher and his work during his sojourn in Berlin, but Schleiermacher’s presuppositions regarding the importance of religious experience in establishing the truth of Christian doctrine were highly influential among theologians of all stripes throughout nineteenth-century Germany. In his second edition of Der christliche Glaube of 1831, Schleiermacher sought to reconcile Christian doctrine with philosophy and the advances of learning brought on by the Enlightenment. To do this, he made all Christian doctrine depend on inferences drawn from varying states of religious consciousness.50 In particular, Schleiermacher accepted Kant’s supposition that because the mind imposes its own categories of analysis which one the senses, human beings cannot know things in themselves (ding an sich) but only things insofar as they have effects on our consciousness.51 For this reason, Schleiermacher insists that theological statements must center on our consciousness of God and not on abstract propositions.52 This being said, it is indeed possible to make true theological statements about the being of God or the “state of the world” (as he puts it) as long as they are based on inferences from our religious experience.53 Conversely, propositional statements that do not correlate to or explain states of religious consciousness are worthless abstractions. The most famous example of this principle is Schleiermacher’s consignment of the doctrine of the Trinity to a brief appendix at 48 See Becker, The Self-Giving God, 34-50. Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie, 63. Translation my own. See similar description in Kantzenbach, Die Erlanger Theologie, 192. See overall description of Hofmann’s understanding of salvation history and experience in: Becker, The Self-Giving God, 31-88; Green, The Erlangen School, 110-121; Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie, 124-35. 50 See Thomas Kelly, Theology at the Void: The Retrieval of Experience (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2002), 15. Kelly writes: “This is the key to the appeal to human experience in the defense of religion. He will try to reimagine and ground religion within a Kantian construct. Whatever objective data are dealt with by the mind are experienced through the forms and concepts conferred by the subject. But Schleiermacher goes even further by grounding his method in the human experience of God that occurs in the interiority of the subject and is accessible through simple reflection on the fact of existence. This becomes the comprehensive principle by which religion is redefined. It is this appeal to inner experience that made Schleiermacher’s apology for religion so effective.” Emphasis added. 51 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), 74, 87, 149, 172-3. See critique of modern Kantian epistemology in theology in Paul Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther through Leibniz (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009), 4386. Helmut Thielicke has traced back the theology consciousness to Descartes. See comments in Helmut Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, 3 vols., trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids : Wm. B. Eerdmans, 19741982), 1:38-64. 52 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. and ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (New York: T & T Clark, 1928), 125-8. 53 Ibid. 49 7 the end of the Glaubenslehre, wherein he expresses his belief that the ancient heresy of Modalism might be a better guide for interpreting the New Testament statements regarding the Father, Son, and Spirit than the Nicene Creed.54 Schleiermacher’s reasons for this marginalization of traditional doctrine of God are clear. Since (as we will observe below) the foundational experience of the divine is one of absolute dependence on God’s reality as the unitary ground of all being, the doctrine of the Trinity must ultimately lacks value. If religious experience is merely that of the creature’s dependency on the creator, then it is impossible to directly correlate such a consciousness to God’s internal Trinitarian relations. Schleiermacher’s deduction of Christian doctrine from religious experience represents a complex process that draws on many assumptions that few contemporary readers will find convincing. According to his Glaubenslehre, within our normal experience of the world there is “reciprocity”55 between a sense of freedom we possess toward various objects and dependency. No matter what the object of experience that one encounters, there is necessarily an element of both sensations. These secondary sensations contrast with the most primal experience of humanity, that of “absolute dependence.” When humans have such an experience, the reciprocity between freedom and dependency breaks down and the feeling of pure dependency becomes manifest.56 Because of the profound contrast between the feeling of absolute dependency and normal human experiences of the world, we are able to differentiate this sensation as representing our “consciousness of God.”57 Although the human feeling of dependency on God is universal, it is not consistent or perfect in its intensity. Moreover, as our consciousness matures we come to recognize a certain frustration in the development of this religious sense. This is due to sin, which is by definition “everything . . . that has arrested the free development of God-consciousness.”58 For this reason humanity is in need of redemption through Jesus. Jesus was a human being who possessed perfect and uninterrupted God-consciousness.59 While Schleiermacher rejected the orthodox Christian dogma of the two natures, he viewed the traditional doctrine of the divinity of Christ as pointing to Jesus’ God-consciousness which constituted a divine element within him. Possessing a superabundance of God-consciousness, Christ communicated it to the Church, which then in turn transmits it to those who subsequently associate themselves with the visible congregation of the faithful. The fact that we receive a constant increase in our God-consciousness within the visible community of the Church confirms Jesus’ historical reality. When left to itself human nature lacks the possibility of an uninterrupted development of its God-consciousness. This being the case, logically there must have been a human being at some point in the past that possessed perfect and uninterrupted God-consciousness which he transmitted to the Church. Otherwise, the intensification of God-consciousness that persons within the Church experience would be inexplicable, since the increase of God-consciousness in the Church must have a source. Since the source according to the witness of the New Testament of Jesus, the present community’s experience coheres with the historical record.60 As can be observed, Hofmann’s emphasis on the foundational nature of religious experience for Christian doctrine strongly mirrors Schleiermacher. Moreover, much like Schleiermacher, Hofmann views religious consciousness as being intelligible only the basis of a previous historical process. For this reason, both Hofmann and Schleiermacher argue that 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Ibid., 738-51. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16-7, 18. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 361. Ibid., 362-5. 8 the unbroken chain of the Church’s religious consciousness is the medium through which the believer is united to and becomes conscious of Christ and his saving work. The major difference between the two theologians is that because Schleiermacher believed Christian experience was exclusively that of the experience of God-consciousness in association with Christ, he rejected the authority of the Old Testament since it deals with the experience of the Israelite people prior to Christ.61 By contrast, as we noted earlier, Hofmann viewed the people of Israel and the Church existing within the same continuous process of Heilsgeschichte. What is evident from both of these approaches is to verify the truth of Christian doctrine in a manner that nineteenth-century Germans (trained in both Pietism and Enlightenment reason) would find credible. Beyond this though, one may detect in both treatments the consequences of rejecting of historic Lutheran claims regarding the communication of attributes within the hypostatic union. According to orthodox Lutheran teaching, the human Jesus receives the fullness of divine glory through his anhypostastic participation in the hypostasis of the Logos (genus majestaticum).62 For this reason, Lutherans have historically confessed that the “finite is capable of the infinite” (finitum capax infinitum) in contrast to the Reformed and Roman Catholic insistence that the “finite is not capable of the infinite” (finitum non capax infinitum).63 Beyond the clear Scriptural support for this proposition,64 the Lutheran theologians have insisted that because God’s infinite majesty contains within itself infinite possibilities, it must also include the possibility of making the finite capable of receiving itself.65 The ultimate consequence of this teaching is that the humanity of the risen Jesus is not confined to heaven, but is present in a mysterious sense with his Church in the Word and the sacraments.66 The believer therefore need not seek confirmation of the reality or truth of the gospel beyond the Word and the sacraments within which Christ is active and present, communicating his truth and benefits to faith. 61 Ibid., 608-11. See the discussion in the Lutheran Confession in FC, SD VIII in Concordia Triglotta: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, German-Latin-English, trans. and eds. W.H.T. Dau and F. Bente (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 1041. Here after cited as “CT.” Also see discussion in the following sources: Paul Althaus, Die Christliche Wahrheit: Lehrbuch der Dogmatik (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1952), 448-53; Johann Baier, Compendium Theologiae Positivae, 2 vols., ed. C. F. W. Walther (Grand Rapids: Emmanuel Press, 2005-2006), 2:52-70; Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1971), 241-6; Adolf Hoenecke, Evangelical Lutheran Dogmatics, 4 vols., trans. Joel Fredrich, James L. Langebartels, Paul Prange, and Bill Tackmier (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1999-2009), 3:89-99; Nicolaus Hunnius, Epitome Credendorum, trans. Paul Gottheil (Nuremburg: U. E. Sebald, 1847), 104-7; Leonard Hütter, Compendium Locorum Theologicorum Ex Scripturis Sacris et Libro Concordiae:Lateinisch-Deutsch-Englisch, 2 vols., trans. Henry Jacobs (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 2006), 2:928-32; Johann Gerhard, Theological Commonplaces: Exegesis IV, On Christ, trans. Richard Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2009), 203-87; Christian Luthardt, Kompendium der Dogmatik (Leipzig: Döffling und Franke, 1893), 201-4; John Theodore Mueller, Christian Dogmatics (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003), 275-83; Alexander von Oettingen, Lutherische Dogmatik: System der Christlichen Heilswahrheit, 2 vols. (München: Beck, 1897-1902), 2.2: 83-5;; Friedrich Philippi, Kirchliche Glaubenslehre, 6 vols. (Gütersloh: Drud und Berlag von G. Bertelsmann, 18701901), 4.1:260-76; Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 19511953), 2:152-242; Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881), 1:319-28; John Schaller, Biblical Christology: A Study in Lutheran Dogmatics (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1981), 68-78; Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 314-5. 63 R. Michael Allen Reformed Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), 19-22. 64 For example, Matt. 28:18, Jn 3:13, Phil 2:6, Col. 2:3, 2:9. 65 David Scaer, personal conversation. 66 Classical defense of this position is Johannes Brenz, De Personali Vnione Duarum Naturarum In Christo, Et Ascensu Christi In Coelum, Ac Sessione Eius Ad Dextram Dei Patris. Qua Vera Corporis Et Sanguinis Christi Praesentia in Coena explicata est, et confirmata (Tübingen: 1561). 62 9 As we have seen, it is fairly clear that Schleieramacher would reject such an account of Christology. Due to his Reformed background (Schleiermacher came from family of Reformed Pietists67) and acceptance of a mystical quasi-naturalistic account of Jesus’ divinity (if one indeed may call it that), it is clear that he would have never accepted the notion of the omnipresence of Christ according to both natures. This background sheds light on his understanding of the believer’s link with Christ through the Church’s mediation of religious experience. Lacking the a belief in the possibility of the risen and omnipresent Christ’s personal presence in Word and sacrament, Schleiermacher must rely on the chain of communal religious experience passed on from generation to generation to create a connection with the Messiah. In Hofmann we find a similar (though not identical) understanding of religious experience and community, and therefore it should not be surprising that Hofmann also rejects the orthodox Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum. Being less radical in his revisionism than Schleiermacher, Hofmann wished to maintain the Trinity and the two natures. Nevertheless, he was also intent on combing this with the newer metaphysical thinking gleaned (yet again) from German Idealism. In the process, our author reveals his deep discomfort with and his implicit rejection of, the Lutheran capax. Hofmann’s account of the Incarnation falls into the category of what was known in the nineteenth century as “Kenotic Christology.”68 According to this group of theologians, the traditional Christology which had assumed that the Incarnation did not alter the being of the second person of the Trinity, was hopelessly flawed and led inexorably to a form of Docetism. For this reason, (broadly speaking) these theologians claimed that in becoming incarnate the Son had in some sense contracted or partially divested himself of his divinity. Such a modification of the divine being was often referred to (using the traditional genera language of orthodox Lutheranism) as the genus kenoticum or tapeinoticum.69 As we will observe below, this argument was in part made possible by the German Idealist claim (present in Hegel and Schelling) that God is mutable and therefore changed and evolved through time.70 The two most famous proponents of kenotic Christology are Gottfried Thomasius (an Erlangen colleague of Hofmann and later opponent on the issue of atonement) and Wolfgang Gess. Whereas Thomasius satisfied himself with the proposition that Jesus had lost his divine power (omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.) in the Incarnation while retaining his moral qualities,71 Gess even more radically insisted that the Logos had in some sense contracted to Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 226-8. See Martin Breidert, Die kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gutersloher Verlagshaus: Mohn, 1977); David Brown, Divine Humanity: Kenosis Explored and Defended (London: SCM Press, 2011); David Law, “Kenotic Christology,” in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology ed. David Fergusson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 251-79; Thomas Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology: The Waxing, Waning, and Weighing of a Quest for a Coherent Orthodoxy,” in Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God, ed. Stephan C. Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74-111; Claude Welch, God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth century German Theology: G. Thomasius, I. A. Dorner, A. E. Biedermann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); idem, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972-1985), 1:233-40. 69 See brief discussion Brown, Divine Humanity, 232-3. 70 See confessional Lutheran critique in Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 2:292-6. 71 Gottfried Thomasius Christi: Person und Werk: Darstellung der Evangelisch-Lutheranischen Dogmatik vom Mittpunkte Christologie aus, 2 vols. (Erlangen: Andreas Deichert Verlag, 1886-1888), 2:411-2. See a discussion of Thomasius in the following sources: Beyschlag, 14-9, 24-6, 29-31, 83-5, 93-98; Green, The Erlangen Theology, 139-48; Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie, 246-54; Law, “Kenotic Christology,”255-8; Thompson, “Nineteenth-Century Kenotic Christology,”78-85; Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1:235-40. 67 68 10 the finite dimensions of a human soul. Reduced to this level, the second person of the Trinity had served in the place of the soul of the human Jesus.72 Beyond their obvious desire to avoid what they perceived as the creeping Docetism of traditional orthodoxy, it is also clear from the two aforementioned treatments is their implicit assumption that God in his infinite glory cannot communicate himself to the finite. Consequently, he must modify his being in some way to make possible his translation into the finite. Seen from this perspective, these accounts of the Incarnation represent a wholesale rejection of the Lutheran capax. This being said, it must be cautioned that these thinkers (particular those like Hofmann and Thomasius who viewed themselves as Lutherans) did not intend this. Nevertheless, it must ultimately be admitted that whether or not they intended such a denial the Lutheran capax in theory, they definitely did so in practice. In his treatment of the Incarnation, Hofmann makes claims similar to those advanced by his colleague Thomasius.73 In becoming human, Jesus remained the second person of the Trinity, while losing his divine attributes of glory: “We can . . . say that Christ has emptied himself of the divine glory, omnipotence, omnipresence and that out of a God has become a human being.”74 Although Christ lost his divine power, the inter-Trinitarian relationship of love between himself and the Father remained and developed over the course of his earthly life.75 The goal of this development of this perfect fellowship of love between Jesus and the Father was the actualization of such a relationship between God and humanity. Soteriologically and eschatologically, this relationship serves as the archetype and ground of all proper human relationship to God, and therefore grounds the fellowship of the new humanity with God as to be found in the community of the Church.76 Given Hofmann’s belief that Christ realized the perfect fellowship of love between God and humans, while at the same time having divesting himself of divine majesty, makes Hofmann’s reliance on the mechanism of the continuity of the Church’s communal religious experience becomes highly intelligible. Lacking the full glory of divinity (since he has eliminated it in the Incarnation) in his humanity, the earthly Christ cannot directly make his historical life and its saving reality contemporary to the believer. He must therefore rely on the continuity of Church’s religious experience as the spiritual and historical link between himself and the believer. This being said, it should of course be observed that Hofmann does often speak of the glorification of Christ (i.e., the return of his glorious attributes to his divine nature upon his ascension) and his continuing presence within the Christian community.77 Nevertheless, in many of his writings he identifies such a presence solely with the Holy Spirit as a surrogate for Christ in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the Reformed tradition: “But in order for [Jesus] to impart the life of his Spirit to his members, he had to leave the world and go to the Father, and thereby exchange the limits of the immanent life for the communion of the transcendent life of the Father: the outpouring of the Spirit was the expansion of the 72 Wolfgang Friedrich Gess, Christi und Werk, 3 vols. (Basel and : Bahnmaiers Buchhandlung, 18701887), 3:345-410 . Also see brief summary in Law, “Kenotic Christology,” 263-3; Thompson, “NineteenthCentury Kenotic Christology,” 87; Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1:234. 73 For a discussion of Hofmann’s Christology, see the following: Matthew Becker, “Hofmann’s Revisionist Christology,” Lutheran Quarterly 17, no. 4 (2003): 288-328; Breidert, Die kenotische Christologie, 161-84. Some theorize that Thomasius’ of the Incarnation was actually influenced by Hofmann. 74 Cited from Becker, The Self-Giving God, 181. Originally taken from Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 2.1:212. 75 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 1:154. 76 Johannes von Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2 vols., 1st ed. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1852-1855), 1:45. 77 Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 30. 11 transcendence which he had entered.”78 Hofmann does not indicate in any of his statements that he believes that God’s glory has been hypostatically communicated to Christ’s human nature, even in the state of exaltation.79 In light of this, Matthew Becker correctly observes that Hofmann does not accept the traditional Lutheran belief in the absolute omnipresence of Christ’s human nature: “. . . Christ’s presence is not ubiquitous: His Lordship over the world is only gradually spreading through the immanent Spirit through the Church.”80Although Hofmann does not appear to have rejected the Lutheran doctrine of the real presence,81 statements such as the ones cited above suggest that he might have viewed the real presence as being mediated by way of the agency of the Holy Spirit, much like the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.82 Nevertheless, it should be cautioned that the role of the Spirit in this regard is not entirely clear and therefore Christ’s substantial presence in the Lord’s Supper may simply represent an inconsistency in his system. In a manner reminiscent of Vatican II,83 Hofmann characterizes the Church itself as the most basic sacrament from which the others are derived.84 This is the case because, as we have seen, fellowship with the community itself and its religious experience communicates the presence of Christ through the Spirit. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are described primarily as antitypes of the types of circumcision and the Passover, rites connected with communal membership in Israel.85 The New Testament’s characterization of the sacraments as unity with Christ’s historic existence (i.e., baptism as dying and rising with Christ as in Romans 6; the Lord’s Supper as the reception of his sacrificed body and blood as indicated by the words of institution) are decidedly missing. From this two things are clear. First, Hofmann views participation in the historic continuity of the Church community to be salvific. Therefore, for him, the sacraments primarily function as a means of sealing a person within the Church and its collective redemptive fellowship with God. This is clear from his understanding of the sacraments as chiefly as parallels for rites that performed that task in ancient Israel. Secondly, in that he views God as limited by time and Christ as limited by the ontological distance between heaven and earth, Christians are united with Christ’s historical existence through the sacraments only in the sense that they come to participate in the communal situation of grace that brought about by Christ. Not only did Hofmann hold that the second person of the Trinity was changed through the Incarnation, but much like Schelling86 and Hegel,87 he sees history as the arena within 78 Cited from Becker, The Self-Giving God, 194. Originally taken from Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 1st ed., 1:169. 79 Despite his serious problems, Thomasius at least held that the theandric person of Christ was present with the Church on earth. Moreover, the genus majestaticum was operative in the state of exaltation. See Thomasius, Christi: Person und Werk, 1:331. 80 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 194. 81 Ibid., 209. 82 See history and description in John McKenna, The Eucharistic Epiclesis: A Detailed History from the Patristic to the Modern Era (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2008). 83 See Lumen Gentium, 1 in The Basic Sixteen Documents of Vatican II, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), 1-10. 84 Becker, The Self-Giving God, 206. 85 Ibid. Of course, theologically the New Testament authors agree that the sacraments are antitypes in this fashion (for example, Col 2:11-12 and Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper in the midst of Passover). Nevertheless, they are not exclusively so, and such a theme is relatively minor throughout the Bible. 86 See for example Friedrich Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 87 See the aforementioned G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 12 which the whole Godhead evolves. Contrary to the tendency of traditional Christian theology, Hofmann argues that anthropomorphic expressions found in the Bible “cannot be reduced to expressions of the eternal unchangeableness of God. For the result of such reasoning is that the diversity of God’s inner life and His dealings with this world no less than the diversity or the successive character of that which takes place in Him, would disappear in His eternal selfidentity.”88 We must therefore recognize that there “. . . is a history of a reciprocal interchange of life and mutual relation between God and mankind, and thus an historical nature of God which is no less evident than His eternal self-identity.”89 According to Hofmann, although the divine relationships the Trinity certainly do exist transcendently, they nevertheless also develop through the historical process of salvation. He writes: [God is] that community of Father and the Son in the Spirit, as it represents itself in the Heilsgeschichte, i.e., the Father is the one [who is] always prior, the Son is the one [who is] always coming, the Spirit is the one [who is] always present. In other words, the Father is the one [who is] always acting upon the world, the Spirit is the one [who is] always acting in the world, the Son is the one [who is] letting himself act in the world.90 Therefore, states Hofmann “The Bible speaks only of the eternal relationships in God as historical, and . . . the Bible does not designate this relationship as an eternal relationship but as an historical relationship . . .” and “apart from [this historical relationship] a person does not have the right to turn the representations of the [historical] directly into representations of the eternal.”91 Hofmann therefore seems to in part anticipate Karl Rahner’s later principle of the absolute identity of the immanent and economic Trinities.92 In time, God does express who he is in eternity by working out his purpose of love, and the internal Trinitarian relationships. Nevertheless, it must also be said that by entering into time God’s being takes upon itself a new character as it evolves through its struggle to establish a universal community of love. In this, Hofmann rejects the historic Christian doctrine of divine immutability in favor of German Idealism’s belief in divine mutability and self-development by means of the historical process. By this process, God’s eventual goal is to draw the Church, which he has established into his own fully-developed life of Triune love. Therefore, by entering into the historical process and allowing himself to be effected by it, the Triune God descends into a sort of kenosis with a redemptive goal.93 Through this divine kenosis, creation comes to recognize that “God [is] the immanent ground of life, and God [is] the archetypal goal of the world.”94 In anticipation of our discussion of atonement in the next section, the reader should observe two things about Hofmann’s insistence on the principle of divine evolution through salvation history. First, much like his treatment of Christology, the kenosis and evolution of God through the historical process suggest that the infinite God is incapable of entering into 88 Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 48. Ibid., 48-9. 90 Cited from Becker, The Self-Giving God, 144. Original source: Johannes von Hofmann, Die Dogmatik verlesungen 1842, in Christoph Luthardt, “Aus J. Chr. K. Hofmanns Vorlesung über Dogmatik,” Zeitscrift für kirchlische Wissenscht und kirchliches Leben 10 (1889): 51. 91 Cited from Becker, The Self-Giving God, 145. Originally taken from Johannes von Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2 vols. 2nd ed. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1857-1860), 1:206. 92 See Karl Rahner, The Trinity (London: Continuum, 1986), 21-4. 93 Becker’s characterization. See Becker, The Self-Giving God, 173-203. 94 Cited from Becker, The Self-Giving God, 144. Originally taken from Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 1:37. 89 13 the finitude of the world without modifying the fullness of his glory in some way. In this, the Lutheran capax is again implicitly rejected. Earlier orthodox Lutheran theologians accepted (along with the tradition of the ancient and medieval Church) that although God was infinite and immutable, he was, in some mysterious sense, able to act within world without compromising his changelessness or his other glorious attributes.95 By contrast, Hofmann does not appear confident in this fact and, therefore, must abandon traditional metaphysics in favor a new account of the divine being. Secondly, it should be observed that divine evolution means that through the course of salvation history God moves past certain stages in his reality and on to new ones. Therefore, according to Hofmann, the character of the God of the New Testament era is not absolutely identical with that of the Old. Once a new dispensation has been reached, the old character of the deity is modified and a new one emerges. To qualify this, it should, of course, be observed that Hofmann held that God’s Trinitarian identity and purpose (i.e., the creation of the universal community of love) did not ultimately change. Nevertheless, as we will see in the next section dealing with atonement, Hofmann holds that God can simply displace his relationship of wrath found in the Old Testament era by simply evolving past it in his choice to actualizing himself as exclusively a God of love in the person of Jesus. Hofmann’s Doctrine of Atonement In this section we will complete our discussion of Hofmann’s theology with a review of his theory of atonement. Hofmann began to publicly of express his discomfort with the confessional Lutheran teaching regarding substitutionary atonement began toward the end of his first period at Erlangen in 1842.96 Later, upon his return in 1845, he would become embroiled in a debate on the subject with a number of his Erlangen colleagues (notably Thomasius97 and Harnack98) and others (including F. A. Philippi99), the exhaustive details of which are beyond the bounds of our present study.100 In his lectures of 1842, Hofmann claimed that the orthodox Lutheran doctrine of atonement dissolved the concrete historical life and death of Jesus into an abstract doctrine foreign to the Bible.101 It did not represent the logic of the Scripture, but rather represented an alien concept of justice, wherein God gives everyone what they deserve.102 It assumes a quantitative understanding of justice and its restoration (i.e., infinite death repairs the infinite debt of sin).103 In light of these difficulties, the view of atonement found in the Lutheran symbolic writings and later Protestant scholastic theologians needed to be completely revised and reformulated. Hofmann believed that this particular task had fallen to him.104 95 See several examples in Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 129-35, 189-213. Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 36-7. 97 Theodosius Harnack, Luthers Theologie besonderer Beziehung auf seine Versöhnung und Erlösunglehre, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1969). Harnack’s study of Luther and his discovery of the doctrine of the hidden God were responses to Hofmann’s theology and his interpretation of Luther. 98 Gottfried Thomasius, Das Bekenntniss der lutherischen kirche von der Versöhnung und die Versöhnungslehre D. Chr. K. v. Hofmann's: Mit einem Nachwort von Th. Harnack (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1857). 99 F. A. Philippi, Dr. v. Hofmann gegenüber lutherischer Versöhnung- und Rechtfertigungslehre (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1856). 100 See summary in Becker, The Self-Giving God, 194-203; Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 12-78; Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie, 254-71. 101 Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 36-7. 102 Ibid., 37. 103 Ibid., 38. 104 Forde helpfully directs us to: Paul Wapler, “Die Genesis der Versöhnungsleshre Hofmanns” Neue Kirchliche Zeitscrift 25 (1914): 167-205. There is an appendix with some the above mentioned lectures included. 96 14 Hofmann’s mature atonement theology coheres perfectly with his understanding of Heilsgeschichte. As we have previously observed, Hofmann held that salvation history was a process wherein God worked to evolve an increasingly inclusive universal community to share in the loving communion of his Trinitarian life. For Hofmann, God’s most primal and eternal will was to establish a relationship love with humanity. Divine wrath entails a negative relationship of alienation from God and, therefore, it is not as primal as his love: “[God’s] wrath is not something eternal, but a historic relationship of God.”105 Because fallen humanity is alienated from God’s love, it necessarily enters into a state of revolt when confronted by divine grace. Historically, this revolt has found its expression in the persecution and martyrdom of those who represent God and his plan for humanity (i.e., the prophets of the Old Testament). Christ’s death was therefore the culmination of salvation history in that he was the supreme martyr among a succession of martyrs beginning with Abel.106 In the Old Testament period, God’s sending of prophets and other holy people to be martyred was intended to reveal two main things. First, as previously noted, it revealed that God’s gracious will of love remained ever present in spite of human resistance. Nevertheless, it also functioned as a means of revealing the sin of those who perpetrated such violence. Recognizing their sinful actions against those who were God’s servants, the evil of the unrighteous would exhaust itself in the death of the martyrs and thereby bring about repentance and a desire to do the good.107 Hofmann attempted to expand his idea of martyrdom as a means of subjective moral influence to the biblical practice of sacrifice as well. According to Hofmann, sacrifice did not represent a payment for sin, but was rather signified God’s gracious pledge of himself to humanity. In many of the sacrifices practiced by the patriarchs, the killing of the animal in the sacrificial ritual reaffirmed human dominion over creation (given in Genesis 1 and reaffirmed by animal sacrifice after the flood in Genesis 9).108 Similarly, Leviticus spoke of sacrifices of atonement “covering” the sinner through the blood of the animal. Hofmann interpreted this to mean that through engaging in the sacrifice, one publicly witnessed to the fact that he had received the reconciliation offered to himself by God.109 For this reason, sacrifice did not actually pay for sins, but publicly confronted people with their sin while at the same time giving them a visible sign of divine love and grace. In turning to the death of Christ, Hofmann also sought to reinterpret statements made by the New Testament authors regarding its substitionary nature and redemptive significance. When discussing Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 5:7 that “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,”110 Hofmann argued that this should in no way be understood as suggesting subsitutionary atonement: The self-offering of Jesus unto death corresponds to the inceptive enabling of redemption for the New Testament congregation. On this basis, nothing should be taught regarding an atoning power of the death of Jesus . . . For those to whom he [Paul] was writing it needed only to be known that the enabling of the new fellowship 105 Johannes von Hofmann, Theologische Ethik (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1878), 35. Emphasis added. Translation my own. 106 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 1st ed., 2.1:115-40. 107 Ibid., 2.1:139. 108 Ibid., 2.1:143-50. 109 Ibid., 2.1:1: 154. See summary in Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 41-3. 110 Unless indicated otherwise, all scriptural quotations are taken from the ESV. 15 between God and mankind, which first took place between God and Israel, was fulfilled in the death of the mediator.111 Elsewhere, Hofmann interprets Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 5:14 that Christ “died for all” as being merely for the good of all.112 When discussing the Apostle’s assertion that “if righteousness came by the works of the law, Christ would have died in vain” (Gal 2:21), Hofmann states that here the Apostle merely means that salvation comes through the fellowship with God established by Christ’s death, rather than legalistic deeds.113 Overall, when faced with the extremely difficult task of reinterpreting Paul’s statements regarding atonement, Hofmann argues that all scriptural passages that attach salvific significance to Christ’s death must be understood as referring to its subjective moral effect, rather than its role as an objective payment for sin. As we have seen before, this is determined by several aspects of Hofmann’s thought. First, there is a rejection of the idea of punitive wrath. Of course, Hofmann did believe that sin created the objective reality of alienation between God and humans. Nevertheless, Hofmann primarily sees such alienation in relational terms, rather than in punitive and legal ones. If God wishes to change his relationship with human, he need only reverse the situation by coaxing humans out of their alienation, rather than objectively paying a debt that they owe. Secondly, in keeping with this first point, since for Hofmann God is mutable he is capable of simply moving past his previously negative relationship with humanity and creating a new one by an act of fiat. By contrast, a belief in lex aeterna or eternal was part of assumption underlining the orthodox Lutheran teaching regarding atonement.114 Since God is eternal, he possesses an eternal statutory will which is identical with the commandments that he reveals through nature and the supernatural revelation of Scripture. God cannot deny himself (2 Tm 2:13) and, therefore, reconciliation must involve not simply a movement towards sinful humanity in grace, but also the fulfillment of his punitive justice in the form of the substititionary death of Christ.115 For Hofmann, the mutable God can simply abandon his old alienated relationship with humans and evolve into a new relationship of grace irrespective of whether the law is fulfilled or not. In turning to the exact details of Hofmann’s atonement doctrine, we see all of the aforementioned theological assumptions are operative. Much like the Old Testament prophets before him, Christ entered into creation as a revelation of God’s eternal love and desire for communal fellowship.116 As a result, Jesus suffered opposition from the fallen creation in its most extreme form.117 In this, Christ not only suffered opposition from sinful humanity, but also from Satan and the other forces of darkness. In their fallen state humans had become ensnared in the Devil’s power. For this reason, Christ must not only conqueror human sin, but also the power of Satan and his minions.118 Because God the Son identified with those suffering from the extreme alienation of sin and therefore it might even be said in this sense 111 Cited from Green, The Erlangen School, 123. Originally taken from Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 2.1:323. 112 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 2.1:325. 113 Ibid., 2.1.331. See commentary and discussion of these passages in Green, 123-4. 114 See summary in Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 3-9. Johann Baier summarizes the notion of lex aeterna nicely: “By the Law is understood the eternal and immutable wisdom and decision of God concerning those things which belong or do not belong to the rational creature, as such, united with His will, that they may or may not be done.” (Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 232). 115 Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 3-9; Schmid, 342-70. 116 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 1:40-2. 117 Johannes von Hofmann, Encyclopädie der Theologie. Nach Vorlesungen und Manuscripten herausgegeben von H. J. Bestmann (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1879), 84- 85. 118 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 1:441-51. 16 that Christ also suffered the wrath of God.119 In spite of this extreme alienation and opposition from the dark forces of the old creation, Jesus is triumphant, and, therefore once and for all, God’s reality was actualized as loving for humanity. Ultimately then, Christ did not effect “an objective transaction, fulfillment of an abstract demand according to the scheme of forensic justice [i.e., substitutionary atonement] but a historically new creation.”120 As we have previously observed in our discussion of Hofmann’s Christology, by the power of his resurrection and his sending of the Holy Spirit, Christ brings about a community of love. In this community, the relationship that the Father possesses with the Son becomes available to those who participate in it.121 This means that the purpose of Christ death is the actualization of a new historical situation in the life of the people of God. In light of this fact, it should be noted that Hofmann’s description of Jesus as a figure who suffers persecution in order to move along human communal progress is not unlike the Romantic idea of the artistic or scientific genius (often called a Promethean figure) who suffers to drive forward human civilization.122 Such an account of the work of Christ also has some interesting effects on Hofmann’s understanding of the distinction between law and gospel, as well as the nature of the Christian life. Contrary to the teaching orthodox Lutheran theology,123 Hofmann does not regard the law and gospel as two distinct words through which God acts on his creatures in the present age. Rather, because the divine being has developed within history, the law and the gospel are seen as distinctive life-forms appropriate to the people of God within the respective Old and New Testament periods. The first stage of Heilsgeschichte was the Old Testament dispensation of law. God called Israel and formed its distinctive national life on the basis of the law.124 Though the law and its legalistic works did not affect reconciliation between God and humans, it did helpfully point ahead to the final reconciliation in Christ.125 Whereas in the Old Testament era human beings entered into fellowship with God by adhering to the law, during the present the New Testament period Christ has become the basis of the divine-human relationship realized in the Church.126 Unfortunately, Israel made the law an end in itself and therefore failed to understand that the deeds of the law were only meant to point to the coming Christ. In this, Israel slipped into legalism.127 For this reason, when Paul contrasted law and faith, he meant merely to oppose “legalistic actions” to “an attitude which is contrasted with a legalistic outlook.”128 He did not mean to contrast two words, one that demands and the other that promises. Rather, the gospel is a new ethos of love, affected by Christ within the community. To the extent that the Christian lives out of his experience of the love of Christ and his sanctification, the Spirit guides him and he does not need any other written code: “The Spirit of Christ instructs as to what he [the Christian] must do, and motivates him to do it, and that which he then does is 119 Ibid., 1:47. Cited from Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 46-7. Originally taken from Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed, 2.1:57. 121 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 1st ed., 1:45. 122 Gerald Gillespie, “Prometheus in the Romantic Age,” in European Romanticism: Literary CrossCurrents, Modes, and Models, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 197-210. 123 See the classical expression in C. F. W. Walther, Law and Gospel, trans. Herbert J.A. Bouman (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1981). Also see the insightful, yet in some ways less orthodox treatment in Werner Elert, Law and Gospel, trans. Edward Shroeder (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). 124 Hofmann, Encyclopädie der Theologie, 77-8. 125 Ibid., 79-81. 126 Johannes von Hofmann, Die Schutzschriften für eine neue Weise alte Wahrheit zu lehren, 4 Pts. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1856-1859), 2:95. 127 Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 30-2. 128 Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, 186. 120 17 undeniably correct.”129 For this reason, the ethos of the gospel now means that the Christian lives under what Gerhard Forde refers to as a new “internal law.”130 Again, as we noted in part earlier, the problem of the law and atonement are dealt with by Hofmann by positing that within the historical process God has simply evolved past these realities and replaced his negative relationship with humanity with one of pure love and grace. In that God’s being is mutable and subject to time, his relationship of wrath has been safely consigned the past. In the unifying principle of love, the two words of law and gospel dissolve into a unitary principle of divine love.131 A Brief Critique and Constructive Response to Hofmann’s Theology In this final brief section, we will offer a critique and constructive response to the aspects of Hofmann’s theology that we have reviewed above. In his own time, Hofmann was a quite controversial figure, even among his own colleagues at Erlangen. For Thomasius and Theodosius Harnack, as well as F.A. Philippi of Rostock, Hofmann’s doctrine of atonement endangered justification by faith by making the work of Christ primarily about moral influence.132 Other critiques of Hofmann focused on his abandonment of the Lutheran lawgospel dialectic in favor a unitary principle of love. Robert Schultz, and, in a somewhat similar manner Fredrich Baumgärtel, have made this charge in their works.133 Lastly, Franz Pieper found what he called Hofmann’s “Ich-theologie” extremely problematic. For Pieper, Hofmann’s emphasis on religious experience and abandonment of the inerrancy of the Bible made his theology hopelessly subjective. This is the case even though Hofmann had clearly attempted to anchor the subjectivity of religious conscious in the objectivity of history and community.134 Though we do not have the space to examine these critiques of Hofmann’s theology in detail, we may say (based on our earlier investigations) that they are in a qualified sense generally on target. Like many of his contemporaries, Hofmann’s theology relies on religious experience to do much of the hard lifting of the verification of the truth of Christian doctrine. This is, for the most part, untempered by his appeal to history and community. It is the consciousness of religious experience that allows the Christian to judge the veracity the communal history presented in the Scriptures. For this reason, for Hofmann the ultimate source of all authority is human religious experience and not the Word of God. Such a focus on religious experience, as well as Hofmann’s corresponding notion of Christian conduct being formed by a new inner law of the Spirit smack of what Lutherans have historically called “Enthusiasm.” Luther famous described enthusiasm tied up with the origin of all sin in the Smalkald Articles.135 The essence of this phenomenon is the human being’s focus on the inner experience of the Spirit as the basis of our understanding of God and his will. Such reliance on our own divinized inner thoughts and feeling is problematic not because it subverts our ability to find a proper intellectual foundation for our abstract theological projects. Rather, as for Luther, the chief concern of the theologian is to break the cycle of self-justification by learning to properly distinguish law from gospel. Therefore, 129 Hofmann, Theologische Ethik, 78. Translation my own. Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, 33. 131 Green’s and Robert Schultz’s critique. See Green, The Erlangen School, 124. Also see Schultz, Gesetz und Evangelium, 110-20. 132 See works cited in footnotes 98-100. 133 Fredrich Baumgärtel, Verheissung. Zur Frage des evangelischen Verständnisse des Alten Testaments (Gütersloh: Carl Berelsmann, 1952). Green gives a short summary of the critique on page 118. Baumgärtel is mainly concerned with the dialectic of law and grace through the history of Israel leading to Christ. 134 Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 1:6. 135 SA, III.8; CT, 495-6. 130 18 enthusiasm is problematic because it attempts to silence God’s objective address to sinner in law and gospel. As long as the individual judges him or herself by his or her inner selfestimate, then he or she may see themselves as righteous and in no need of a savior. When humans move out from their own centered existence and begin to listen to who they are according to God’s dual address, such self-justification is no longer possible. According the law, they have not obeyed God’s commandments and neither could they ever have. Similarly, according to the gospel and its preaching of the cross, the hearer comes to recognize the depth of sin. Sin is so deep and terrible, that the divine Son of God has had to suffer the infinite judgment of God’s wrath.136 For real justification, we must live outside of ourselves in the person of Christ through faith. The enthusiast recoils from these truths and divinizes his or her own thought and feeling to protect him or herself against it. In this sense, in Hofmann’s preference for the Heilsgeschichte and its verification by religious consciousness may be read as an attempt to silence the voice of the law. In order to do this, Hofmann’s rejects God’s punitive justice, despite its ubiquity in Scripture (Dt. 32::41, Rom 2:6, 12:19, 2 Tm 4:14). In Hofmann thinking there is objective divine wrath in the form of a real alienation within the divine-human relationship, but for him such wrath is safely tucked away in the old dispensation. Though sin and its negative effects have continued this side of the millennial kingdom, the alienation and wrath of God are divided from the contemporary believer by the gulf of historical time. In fact, Christ himself is also historically divided from the believer by the gulf of history, but this is no matter. The Christian at present may luxuriate in his or her current interior experience of divine love as mediated to him or her by the historical community of the Church. God has, in a sense “gotten over” the law and its condemning effects. Nevertheless, this sort of theology does not really solve the problem of the law. As Paul shows, God’s wrath remains ever present under the thin veil of his creation (Rom 1:18). It is also present in the word of law that confronts the creature through the preaching office (Rom 2-3). God is not limited by time and neither can his will and presence as law be limited to a particular historical era. Being built into the structure of the world, God’s law is pervasive and cannot be escaped; the claim that it can by a particular theory about historical development is pure illusion.137 This is the fundamental flaw of Heilsgeschichte theology. It seeks to box God and his law into a particular historical era, when this is self-evidently not possible. The irony of the Heilsgeschichte theology is that in limiting God to time and consigning the threat of the law to a different dispensation, it also shuts up Christ (the only true solution to the problem of the law) in the historical past. Nevertheless, just as God in his glory and power in the law cannot be segregated from human existence, neither can the risen Jesus (who participates in the same divine power), be boxed out of human existence. Indeed, 136 See AE 26: 33. In addition, it follows that our sins are so great, so infinite and invincible, that the whole world could not make satisfaction for even one of them. Certainly the greatness of the ransom- namely, the blood of the Son of God- makes it sufficiently clear that we can neither make satisfaction for our sin nor prevail over it . . . But we should note here the infinite greatness of the price paid for it. Then it will be evident that its power is so great that it could not be removed by any means except that the Son of God be given for it. Anyone who considers this carefully will understand the one word “sin” includes the eternal wrath of God and the entire kingdom of Satan, and that sin is no trifle. (Emphasis added). Also see similar comments in Chemnitz, 148 and David Chrytraeus, A Summary of the Christian Faith, trans. Richard Dinda (Malone, Tx: Repristination Press, 2000), 37-8. 137 Gerhard Forde, "Fake Theology: Reflections on Antinomianism Past and Present" in The Preached God: Proclamation in Word and Sacrament, ed. Steven Paulson and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007), 215. Forde correctly writes: "Antinomianism is fake theology." In other words, since the law cannot be escaped, antinomianism does not achieve anything that theology is supposed to solve. 19 Christ himself promises to be ever present with his Church because he has received the fullness of divine glory (Matt 28:19-20). He promises that when the Church gathers around his Name (that is, the means of grace to which his Name is attached) his reality will be truly present there with them (Matt. 18:20). In this, those who hear the proclamation of grace presented to them in Word and sacrament will also hear the very voice of Christ through these means: “one who hears you hears me” (Lk 10:16). It was Luther’s great theological insight that he recognized this fact. Indeed, as Oswald Bayer has shown, it was the recognition that the word of absolution was identical with the very presence of Christ justifying the sinner that finally brought about the so-called “Reformation breakthrough.”138 In this, we observe that the risen Christ is limited by neither time nor space, and, therefore, may save his people in the midst of the old age of sin, death, and the law. This dual presence of God under the forms of law and gospel determines (to use a Trinitarian metaphor) Christian existence as one within the perichoresis of the ages. There is no orderly development in Christian existence (as in Heilsgeschichte). Rather, this side of the final kingdom of glory, there is a continuous dialectical interplay within the individual believer of the realities of the Fall, redemption, and the Last Judgment. Being addressed by God’s word of law and grace, the believer lives between the ages, caught up both under the weight of the rotting corpse of the old creation and the inbreaking of the new resurrected life. According to Bayer’s interpretation, this truth finds an important expression in the writings of Luther: Luther’s apocalyptic understanding of creation and history opposes modern concepts of progress. For Luther, the only progress is return to one’s baptism, the biographical point of rupture between the old and new worlds. Creation, Fall, redemption, and completion of the world are not sequential advance, one after the other, but perceived in an intertwining of the times.139 The Christian lives through Christ,140 who contains within himself the perichoretic unity of the ages. Christ is the son of Adam and takes upon himself the condemnation and sin of Adam’s race (Rom 5, 2 Cor 5:21). At the same time, Christ is the second Adam and the divine Son of the Father, who actualizes the new age of righteousness by the power of his active obedience and resurrection (Rom 5, 1 Cor 15).141 In that Christ unites within himself sin and righteousness, death and life, he prefigures the simul of Christian existence.142 The Christian’s existence in Christ therefore hangs suspended between the old and new ages. In the waters of baptism the Christian is united to the Christ’s death and resurrection. Even as the believer daily falls into sin, the baptized one may ever return to present reality of their baptism through faith.143 Indeed, as we have seen, Christ and the reality of his life are not constrained to the succession of time, and consequently the Christian united with him through baptism and its promise, therefore lacks this constraint as well. There is no need to enter into penance in order to repair one’s baptism as in the Roman Catholic tradition.144 Such a concept assumes that the reality of baptism is separated from the 138 Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 52-3; idem, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 240-1. 139 Oswald Bayer, “Martin Luther,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 51-2. 140 AE 31:371. Luther writes: “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor. He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love.” 141 AE 26:277-78. 142 See comment to this effect in Erich Seeberg, Luthers Theologie: Christus, Wirklichkeit und Urbild, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1937), 8. 143 LC, IV; CT, 733-43. 144 See Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Continuum, 2006), 224-6, 322-31. 20 Christian by an unbridgeable gulf of time. Consequently, one needs to find alternative means to actualize the same redeeming reality in the present. Similarly, the Christian has access to forgiveness through the very presence of Christ’s sacrificed body and blood in the Lord’s Supper. In the words of institution, Jesus describes his mysterious physicality in the Supper as the presence of his sacrificed body on the cross.145 The essence of Old Testament sacrifice was the separation of body from blood (Lev. 17:11) and, therefore, to speak of one’s own substance as separated (“this is my body”, “this is my blood” etc.) is to speak of them as something sacrificed. Again, Christ is not bound to time or space, and, therefore, the saving presence of his one sacrifice may be present to Christians throughout time (Rev 13:8).146 Therefore, the act of “remembrance” is not remembrance in the sense of a mnemonic aid, but in the Old Testament sense of God’s own promise being placed before one’s eyes (Exod. 2:24). In that the Christian orally receives Christ’s sacrificed body and blood and the promised attached to them in the Lord’s Supper, they receive the forgiveness of sin and the promise of the resurrected life that have become have become actual in Christ’s person. Conclusion Although there is little that the confessional Lutheran can find little theologically useful in the theology of Hofmann, his thought is extremely interesting and rich, therefore wonderful food for thought. His life and works are a fascinating blend of several intellectual currents in nineteenth-century Germany (Romanticism, Pietism, German Idealism, NeoLutheranism, etc.). Moreover, the theological errors in Hofmann’s thought serve as a proper catalyst for enabling confessional Lutherans to clarify their own principles. As we have seen this particularly true with regard to the Lutheran commitment to the truth of the gospel and the promise of Christ’s saving presence in Word and sacrament. 145 Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1966), 222. Jeremias writes that Jesus "is applying to Himself terms from the language of sacrifice . . . [e]ach of the two nouns [“body” and “blood”] presuppose a slaying that has separated flesh and blood. In other words: Jesus speaks of himself as a sacrifice.” 146 David Scaer, “Baptism and the Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 45, no. 1 (January-April, 1981): 48. What men view as historic crucifixion, God views as everlasting sacrificial atonement. What God views as eternal sacrifice, the church receives as sacrament. Sacrifice and sacrament describe the same "thing" but from different perspectives. Crucifixion and atonement are not two different events, but one event viewed from two different perspectives, human and divine. The Lord's Supper is the presentation of the sacrificial atonement among Christians at worship. 21