In a very real sense Jesus occupied the central place in Schleiermacher’s system.  The centralness of Jesus Christ he himself was never weary of emphasising.  It became in the next generation a favorite phrase of some who followed Schleiermacher’s pure and bounteous spirit afar off.  Too much of a mystic to assert that it is through Jesus alone that we know God, he yet accords to Jesus an absolutely unique place in revelation.  It is through the character and personality of Jesus that the change in the character of man, which is redemption, is marshalled and sustained.  Redemption is a man’s being brought out of the condition in which all higher self consciousness was dimmed and enfeebled, into one in which this higher consciousness is vivid and strong and the power of self-determination toward the good has been restored.  Salvation is thus moral and spiritual, present as well as future.  It is possible in the future only because actual in the present.  It is the reconstruction of a man’s nature and life by the action of the spirit of God, conjointly with that of man’s own free spirit.

It is intelligible in Schleiermacher’s context that Jesus should be spoken of as the sole redeemer of men, their only hope, and that the Christian’s dependence upon him should be described as absolute.  As a matter of fact, however, the idea of dependence upon Christ alone has been often, indeed, one may say generally, associated with a conception of salvation widely different from that of Schleiermacher.  It has been oftenest associated with the notion of something purely external, forensic, even magical.  It is connected, even down to our own time, with reliance upon the blood of Christ, almost as if this were externally applied.  It has postulated a propitiatory sacrifice, a vicarious atonement, a completed transaction, something which was laid up for all and waiting to be availed of by some.  Now every external, forensic, magical notion of salvation, as something purchased for us, imputed to us, conferred upon us, would have been utterly impossible to Schleiermacher.  It is within the soul of man that redemption takes place.  Conferment from the side of God and Christ, or from God through Christ, can be nothing more, as also it can be nothing less, than the imparting of wisdom and grace and spiritual power from the personality of Jesus, which a man then freely takes up within himself and gives forth as from himself.  The Christian consciousness contains, along with the sense of dependence upon Jesus, the sense of moral alliance and spiritual sympathy with him, of a free relation of the will of man to the will of God as revealed in Jesus.  The will of man is set upon the reproduction within himself, so far as possible, of the consciousness, experience and character of Jesus.