The sin from which man is to be delivered is described by Schleiermacher thus:  It is the dominance of the lower nature in us, of the sense-consciousness.  It is the determination of our course of life by the senses.  This preponderance of the senses over the consciousness of God is the secret of unhappiness, of the feeling of defeat and misery in men, of the need of salvation.  One has to read Schleiermacher’s phrase, ‘the senses’ here, as we read Paul’s phrase, ‘the flesh.’  On the other hand, the preponderance of the consciousness of God, the willing obedience to it in every act of life, becomes to us the secret of strength and of blessedness in life.  This is the special experience of the Christian.  It is the effect of the impulse and influence of Christ.  We receive this impulse in a manner wholly consistent with the laws of our psychological and moral being.  We carry forward this impulse with varying fortunes and by free will.  It comes to us, however, from without and from above, through one who was indeed true man, but who is also, in a manner not further explicable, to be identified with the moral ideal of humanity.  This identification of Jesus with the moral ideal is complete and unquestioning with Schleiermacher.  It is visible in the interchangeable use of the titles Jesus and Christ.  Our saving consciousness of God could proceed from the person of Jesus only if that consciousness were actually present in Jesus in an absolute measure.  Ideal and person in him perfectly coincide.

As typical and ideal man, according to Schleiermacher, Jesus was distinguished from all other founders of religions.  These come before us as men chosen from the number of their fellows, receiving, quite as much for themselves as for others, that which they received from God.  It is nowhere implied that Jesus himself was in need of redemption, but rather that he alone possessed from earliest years the fulness of redemptive power.  He was distinguished from other men by his absolute moral perfection.  This excluded not merely actual sin, but all possibility of sin and, accordingly, all real moral struggle.  This perfection was characterised also by his freedom from error.  He never originated an erroneous notion nor adopted one from others as a conviction of his own.  In this respect his person was a moral miracle in the midst of the common life of our humanity, of an order to be explained only by a new spiritually creative act of God.  On the other hand, Schleiermacher says squarely that the absence of the natural paternal participation in the origin of the physical life of Jesus, according to the account in the first and third Gospels, would add nothing to the moral miracle if it could be proved and detract nothing if it should be taken away.  Singular is this ability on the part of Schleiermacher to believe in the moral miracle, not upon its own terms, of which we shall speak later, but upon terms upon which the outward and physical miracle, commonly so-called,