Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher

Theology Today, Oct 1998 by McCormack, Bruce L

Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 1996. 115 pp. $15.00.

The thesis of Dawn DeVries' elegantly written little study is stated with admirable clarity: "Schleiermacher's understanding of preaching as, in effect, an incarnational event that re-presents the person and work of the Jesus of history may be seen as a development of Calvin's notion of the sacramental Word, a development that made possible a relative indifference to doubts about the historical facts of the life of Jesus." In defense of this claim, the author (who is professor of theology at Union Seminary in Virginia) pursues a twofold strategy. The first takes place on the level of theory, the second on the level of homiletical practice. The theories of Calvin and Schleiermacher are set forth (in chapters 2 and 4) and the practices of each considered through sermons on common texts drawn from the Synoptic Gospels (in chapters 3 and 5). DeVries concludes with an assessment of the importance of the theme of the sacramental Word for late twentieth-century theology.

DeVries convincingly demonstrates that Calvin understood preaching to be an instrument of divine grace, a human act through which the Holy Spirit acts to make Christ present in the church to believers. In-truth, the success of this part of the argument is even greater than DeVries herself allows. It is quite true, as she says, that Calvin did not offer a full-blown theory of the preached Word. But the scattered statements he makes with respect to the sacramental character of preaching are sufficient to prove her point and if she wanted a more fully elaborated theory of how preaching functions to "bring" Christ to the believer, a brief examination of the parallel case-how the Lord's Supper functions to make Christ presentwould have been adequate to fill in the blanks.

Instead, DeVries tries to tease out Calvin's theory of the preached Word from an examination of selected sermons. This is a daring strategy that requires some comment. The reason DeVries takes up sermonic material is found in the larger goal that the thesis serves, namely that of demonstrating continuities between the theologies of Calvin and Schleiermacher. The nub of DeVries' argument is that Calvin himself prepared the way for Schleiermacher's relative indifference to the "historical Jesus" in that he, too, showed less interest in the life of Jesus (his miracles, especially) than he did in the salvific impact of Jesus on the believer. This is the weakest part of the argument, in my view, though not without merit. That Calvin should have evinced great interest in his sermons in the impact of Christ on the believer's life in the here and now offers no guarantee that he was disinterested theologically in the life of Jesus. Critics of DeVries' book will immediately point out that what has yet to be challenged will scarcely be fought for. And it is doubtless true that Calvin's relative lack of interest in the "historical Jesus" will be explained in part by his historical location-by the fact that he did not live to see the rise of Gospel criticism. But it also remains true that Calvin had greater existential focus, if I can put it that way, on the subjective side of soteriology than the objective. This is not to say that he had no clearly worked out understanding of Christ's work; it is simply to suggest that the real heartbeat of Calvin's piety-as it came to expression in his theology-is to be found in the Holy Spirit's work of making human beings participants in the benefits of Christ's work. For that reason, Calvin's pneumatocentric concentration in his sermonizing will not be explained by reference to his historical location alone. Still, I think DeVries' point might have been more convincing had she chosen to make it on the basis of theological materials rather than sermons. She would have been less exposed to superficial criticism had she done so.

This is a fine book and deserving of thoughtful, dispassionate consideration. No doubt, DeVries will have to face the questions of those who wonder whether the differences in content between the christologies of Calvin and Schleiermacher are not such as to render all alleged continuity a purely formal matter. For if material continuity were lacking, then the commonalities identified by her with respect to theories of the preached Word would indeed have less theological significance than she claims. They would not be sufficient to guarantee a continuity in doctrinal development between Calvin and Schleiermacher. DeVries will want to address that issue in greater detail in her future work. When she does, I suspect that she will find a more systematic-theological approach to the problem of continuity will help to sustain her argument.

That problem-as early critiques of DeVries' work demonstratecannot be adequately addressed where theology is treated atomistically, tracing the fortunes of formulations within a single doctrinal locus without regard for the internal, systematic connections in which it stands. There can be no question but that Schleiermacher's christology constituted a departure from Calvin's where the latter's orthodoxy was concerned. But Schleiermacher also shared with Calvin a number of theological concerns that impinged directly upon the Genevan's christology, for example, a concern for divine impassibility and immutability that expressed itself in a fairly radical Creator/creature distinction, the notion of accommodation in revelation (a matter on which Schleiermacher stands closer to Calvin than does Barth), and the preoccupation with salvation as a present experience. If, then, under the pressures created by the rise of biblical criticism and shifts in philosophical outlook, Schleiermacher was able to elaborate a christology that did justice to material concerns that also found expression in Calvin's christology, must we not admit a good deal of continuity that is concealed to view so long as one works rigidly within the confines of a single doctrine? To acknowledge that this is so does not, of course, automatically guarantee the success of Schleiermacher's christology. It simply shows that the problem of continuity has many more layers of complexity than is usually admitted.