Schleiermacher had opened men’s eyes to the fact that the great work of Christ in redemption is an inward one, an ethical and spiritual work, the transformation of character.  He had said, not merely that the transformation of man’s character follows upon the work of redemption.  It is the work of redemption.  The primary witness to the work of Christ is, therefore, in the facts of consciousness and history.  These are capable of empirical scrutiny.  They demand psychological investigation.  When thus investigated they yield our primary material for any assertion we may make concerning God.  Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as learned on the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our great revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God.  Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think of Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a religious magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his manifestation and redemptive activity in Jesus.

None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God.  Less and less have men thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ’s righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of penalty.  This was the Anselmic scheme.  Indeed, it had been Tertullian’s.  Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God to men, more and more as of alienated men with God.  The phrases of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic, survive.  More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected into them.  No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the terms of Calvinism.  The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in some.  It worked revulsion in others.  It was protested against most radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him.  For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation.  Yet the development of his doctrine was deficient through the individualistic form which it took.  Salvation was essentially a change in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and having its ideal in Jesus.  Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer relation to the historic revelation in Jesus.  Furthermore, so much was this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in the universe.  To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem.