Abstract
Daniel Pedersen belongs to a rising cohort of theologians championing the constructive potential of Friedrich Schleiermacher's theology. In two monographs and a number of articles, Pedersen energetically defends a related cluster of claims: Schleiermacher addresses seemingly insoluble theological conundrums particularly related to the natural sciences, Schleiermacher is more traditional than assumed, and criticisms of Schleiermacher often result from inattentive interpretation.
In this vein, Schleiermacher's theology of sin and nature is a commendation of Schleiermacher's theology of the origins of sin and evil. Pedersen accents the traditional—often Aristotelian, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Reformed—dimensions of Schleiermacher's thought and downplays Kant's influence. For Pedersen, Schleiermacher's developmental account of sin's origin, which requires no recourse to a morally pristine initial state, uniquely does justice to the role of violence in humanity's evolutionary past while securing the goodness of created nature. In what follows, I outline the book's argument and suggest it makes an important contribution to the interpretation of Schleiermacher but that its constructive dimension is underdeveloped.
For Pedersen, modern accounts of sin's origin fail to secure the link between being and goodness whereas traditional accounts secure this link by positing a prelapsarian state problematised by evolutionary science. The latter are, furthermore, afflicted by devastating weaknesses exposed by Schleiermacher. Rather than appeal to Eden's temporal priority, Schleiermacher secures the goodness of human nature teleologically. Human nature and the entire natural order are good because they are oriented towards humanity's uninterrupted God-consciousness (pp. 8, 197). While Schleiermacher's account requires causal necessitarianism and God's authorship of evil, Pedersen suggests Schleiermacher's commitments are either more traditional than they initially appear or accrue ‘no special burdens in comparison’ with more traditional views (pp. 11, 142).
In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Pedersen outlines Schleiermacher's objections to traditional views of the Fall of both angels and humans. Centrally for Pedersen's Schleiermacher, explaining sin's origins by appeal to a deficient act of will is inadequate because a causally complete explanation—reliant on the principle of sufficient reason—must explain why the sinner willed as they did. For Schleiermacher, an agent's acts are not explained by an indeterminate will but wholly by two factors: the agent's nature and the circumstances it faces (pp. 46–47, 131). This rules out tout court both libertarianism and the belief that an initial sin changed humanity's nature.
Chapter 5 outlines Schleiermacher's non-temporal account of the goodness and even perfection of human nature. His account is teleological, rooting human perfection and the perfection of the world in the ordering of all things to the perfecting of humanity's God-consciousness (pp. 105–106). Sin is what hinders this development (pp. 118, 124–27). This allows Pedersen's Schleiermacher to affirm that sin is deficient in that it falls short of humanity's end without undermining sin's causally complete and necessitated origin or positing a prelapsarian state (pp. 138, 147).
In chapter 7, Pedersen responds to theological objections to Schleiermacher's claim that God is the author and efficient cause of sin and evil. Sin and evil are inevitable given the sort of natures humans possess if they are to develop into a mature God-consciousness, yet evil is not therefore a means to a greater good. Though evil in itself is solely a negative hindrance to humanity's development, it is nonetheless indirectly necessary as a byproduct of humanity's maturing God-consciousness (p. 145). Therefore, even if God causes sin and evil, they are not directly ‘intended by God’, but rather—appealing to a double effect explanation—are concomitants of God's good intentions (pp. 148, 154).
The final chapter summarises the book's argument and draws out theological and historiographical implications, calling—in particular—for some reevaluation of what counts as ‘modern’ theology.
Pedersen undermines interpretations which see Schleiermacher evincing a merely ‘communal’ account of sin or a Kantian libertarianism. In this regard, he makes an important contribution, skilfully and with remarkable perspicuity exposing the underlying assumptions of Schleiermacher's hamartiology, situating it in its early modern, oftentimes Spinozian context, all while engaging rival interpretations. Pedersen explains and redeploys complex tracts of material in accessible and often argumentatively rigorous ways. There is much for interpreters of Schleiermacher and early modern theology to learn here. Nonetheless, I worry the constructive argument of the book—which contends that Schleiermacher's account of sin's origins is superior to both modern and premodern theologies (pp. 1–3)—is underdeveloped for two reasons. First, Pedersen neglects to sufficiently exposit the rival views he and Schleiermacher reject and thus oftentimes, objections raised by Schleiermacher taken to be decisive target an inadequately articulated viewpoint (which at times borders on caricature). Second, and relatedly, the most worrisome objections to Schleiermacher's account of sin's origins are, at crucial moments, not sufficiently addressed. Thus, Pedersen's claim that Schleiermacher accrues no special burdens over-against traditional perspectives is not sufficiently grounded. I provide some examples of each worry, but I must stress, these objections to the book's constructive component do not undermine the merit of the overall monograph, particularly insofar as the book touches on questions of Schleiermacher's interpretation.
In what is taken by Pedersen as a fatal objection to Fall narratives—even heavily reconstructed ones (pp. 180, 188)—Schleiermacher argues that if human nature were ‘changed’ at the Fall, the resultant creature would not be the same species as what came before. Prelapsarian and postlapsarian creatures would belong to ‘two different animal kinds’ (p. 49). Yet in arguing that the Fall effects not merely what humans do but what humans are, theologians often appealed to the loss of a superadded gift of original righteousness (Pedersen mentions this with merely a passing endnote on p. 57) or more generally to the inheritance of corrupted habits or dispositions (Pedersen does not address this). A human who inherits a corrupted disposition still possesses a generic human nature but is predisposed towards sin and thus what they are—what one might describe as their ‘nature’ in a broader, non-generic, sense—is different (e.g., ST I-II, q.82, a.1). Pedersen's Schleiermacher agrees that good/bad actions produce correspondingly good/bad facilities or dispositions (p. 42). Therefore, to defend Schleiermacher's objection, Pedersen—seemingly—needs to offer an argument for why dispositions cannot be inherited. As it stands, Pedersen's redeployment of Schleiermacher's claim that traditional accounts of the Fall which posit a corruption of humanity's nature are a ‘metaphysical impossibility’ (p. 180) is underdeveloped insofar as his criticisms do not challenge widespread accounts of original sin (federalist and realist accounts of original sin are likewise not explicitly addressed).
A similar worry arises in Pedersen's defence of Schleiermacher's novel claim that God is the cause of evil, which relies on Schleiermacher's tendentious claim that since causing sin/evil and creating out of nothing both involve ‘involvement … with nonbeing’, traditional theologians have no grounds to object to God causing evil since they believe God creates out of nothing (pp. 146–47). This argument might be thought to trade on an equivocation regarding non-being. Thomas—one of Pedersen's key dialogue partners—says: ‘Absence of good, taken negatively, is not evil … But the absence of good, taken in a privative sense, is an evil’ (ST I, q.48, a.1). Thomas goes on to explain that privative evil is not just being limited or not existing at all, but involves failing to possess something one should have, given the sort of thing one is. Pedersen's Schleiermacher then, because he does not address this traditional distinction between privative evil and mere non-existence and limitation, has not shown that—on traditional theologians’ own terms—creating out of nothing and causing evil are relevantly similar. Therefore, this defence of Schleiermacher's account of God as the cause of evil is underdeveloped. Further, this assimilation of the status of being created out of nothing and being evil threatens Pedersen's central constructive claims. Pedersen claims Schleiermacher secures creaturely being as good without appeal to a fall. Yet Pedersen's Schleiermacher in the context cited above—against his anti-Manichean intentions—blurs this distinction between creatureliness/finitude and evil. This blurring of the distinction between finitude and sin seems implied when Pedersen says that for creatures, ‘defect and natural limitation imply one another’ (p. 147). Or again, that ‘the nonbeing of sin is to the God-consciousness what nonbeing in general is to any finite nature’ (p. 155). Insofar as Pedersen's Schleiermacher is correct that creating creatures out of nothing and causing evil are very similar, this suggests that despite his intentions, he fails to sufficiently secure that creatures are good. If in response to this worry, he ramps up the distinction between the ‘non-being’ involved in creation and the ‘non-being’ of sin, Pedersen's defence of God-causing-evil is undermined.
I likewise noted that Pedersen does not adequately address central objections to Schleiermacher's position. For example, as Pedersen notes, for Schleiermacher loss, pain and sorrow are not evil but ‘unavoidable features of a teleologically perfect creation’ (pp. 150–52; see also p. 169). Nothing which befalls one is evil unless the maturation of one's God-consciousness is hindered, i.e., unless one sins (p. 171, see also Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina G. Lawler, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016, §76.2). Without sinning, one ‘is never filled with a consciousness of any evil, because evil is not able obstructively to affect one's common life with Christ’ (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §101.2). Pedersen thus is a bit too quick when he says that like ‘traditional accounts, Schleiermacher thinks all evil depends on sin’ (p. 170). For many Augustinians, all evil befalling humans depends upon the Fall, but this is very different from the Schleiermacherian position which denies a Fall and claims that nothing befalling an individual is evil apart from their own sin. Furthermore, for Pedersen's Schleiermacher, the only thing not directly intended by God is sin and evil (p. 153). Thus, horrific actions which affect one—even if they originate in what is sinful for another person—are part of the nature-system wholly intended by God. Therefore, on Pedersen's interpretation, it is not obvious that Schleiermacher's double effect arguments apply here. What this means is that the victim's horrendous suffering is directly intended by God so long as the victim does not sin. Perhaps there is some justification for Schleiermacher's account of these matters yet Pedersen does not address this seemingly central worry (related objections are raised by e.g., Robert Adams, ‘Schleiermacher on Evil’, Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 13.4 (1996), pp. 563–83), merely alluding in passing to Schleiermacher's ‘hints of Stoicism’ (p. 152).
To offer one more example, Pedersen aims to exonerate Schleiermacher from the worrisome question of whether sin and evil are willed by God as a means contributing to the world's good end (p. 153) by claiming ‘God cannot eliminate sin itself, only compensate for it’ because sin is a necessarily ‘attending … imperfection’ of the development of human God-consciousness. Sin is nonetheless not a means to an end because ‘God does not create already existing things within already existing circumstances, but creates the very things and their circumstances themselves’. Therefore, ‘the competition of means against ends (i.e., that ends would have to counterbalance means) … cannot be applied to God’ (p. 156). Yet Pedersen's Schleiermacher, as already shown, argued that the nature of human development toward God-consciousness requires human sin as an attending imperfection. Pedersen thereby defends God's authorship of sin by arguing—against the claim that means are never in competition with ends for God—as if certain ‘circumstances’ like the nature of human development constrain God, rendering sin an unavoidable byproduct of developing into a mature God-consciousness. Additionally, this claim that sin is a necessarily attending imperfection of humanity's natural development towards God-consciousness is in tension with Schleiermacher's treatment of Jesus, whose God-consciousness develops entirely naturally yet without sin (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §93.3). Thus, I find it hard not to see unresolved tensions in Pedersen's defence of the ‘signature move’ (p. 171) supposedly allowing Schleiermacher's account to reckon with evolutionary science, i.e., Schleiermacher's positing of God as the author of sin.
While I have described my unease with what I perceive as a lack of development in Pedersen's commendation of Schleiermacher's constructive theology, this must not overshadow the importance of this book's contribution. Pedersen's interpretation of Schleiermacher and the way he deploys this interpretation in conversation with interpretative rivals helpfully advances discussion of the interpretation of Schleiermacher's hamartiology and its relation to Schleiermacher's early modern context. Future assessment of Schleiermacher's account of sin's origins as well as Schleiermacher's theodicy cannot avoid this important book. Perhaps it is expecting too much from one monograph to offer an incisive interpretation of a seminal and complex figure as well as a decisive theological intervention undermining both modern and pre-modern accounts of the origins of sin and evil. Even if Pedersen strains to attain his ambitious constructive aims, he succeeds in helpfully summarising a set of issues constructive hamartiologies must face, particularly related to humanity's evolutionary history. He likewise clearly and compellingly offers an interpretation of Schleiermacher's account of this doctrine which should not be ignored. The book will be of use to both specialists interested in early modern moral theology and broader issues related to theodicy and the Fall, as well as—particularly in view of the clarity of Pedersen's presentation—to students being introduced to Schleiermacher.