The Liberal Solution
change into the essence of faith. It leaves the ordinary historical character of faith unchallenged; in a questionable manner it shifts the onus from faith to love, from the gospel to the law, from religion to morality.
Over against this the Reformation took the position that revelation was not merely a narrative of past events but a word of God to us.
Therefore, faith wasn't just assent to the truth of historical reports but a heartfelt trust in the good news of salvation. The Reformation thereby restored the revelatory character to revelation, and the personal relation between God and man to faith. It again made them religion.
The Liberal Solution For all these reasons we have cited against historical proofs, many theologians following Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), began to champion another method to demonstrate the truth of the Christian religion and to lead people to the certainty of faith—the method of experience. This method held that the revelation given us in Scripture, particularly in the person of Christ, carries a unique character. It is not a product of scientific propositions that can be made acceptable to reason by proofs. Nor is it a mere doctrine requiring only intellectual agreement. No, Scriptural revelation is life; it has a religious-ethical content, which serves to make a man wise unto salvation, to make him independent from the world so he can stand in the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
The truth of that revelation can therefore be recognized only by the conscience, by the heart, by the will. It must be practically experienced, ex-perientially known; one must feel it in the soul.
Don't the Scriptures say only the pure of heart will see God? Only those who are born again will enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Only
those who do the will of the heavenly Father will confess that Jesus doesn't speak from Himself but that His teachings are from God.
The gospel of Christ does not address itself first of all to man as a moral being. It confronts him with the ethical choice of either remaining subject to the world and sin or sharing in the new life of freedom issuing from the influence of Christ's image in the Scriptures and in the church. Those who join in the faith of the church and allow themselves to be influenced by the image of Christ will have a saving experience. The gospel comforts the conscience, brings peace to the heart, strengthens the will, and endows the whole person with the power to live a new life. This experience assures one of the truth of the Christian religion, of the revelation of God's grace in Christ, and of one's own citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Among those who base the truth of Christianity and the certainty of salvation on such an experience, there is a marked difference in the character as well as the content of their experience. Some have in mind an experience that is the fruit of a special operation of the Holy
Spirit. Others regard it as a product of the image of Christ as it speaks to us in the Scriptures and lives on in the church. Still others see it as not much more than a further development of the religious, moral experiences that everyone undergoes in his heart and conscience from time to time.
Similarly there are also great differences about the content of such experiences. There are those who seek to construct an entire confessional dogmatics on it, for example, a Lutheran one. Others infer from it the religious-ethical truth of Scripture or the doctrine of the person and work of Christ. Still others believe this experience only establishes the inner life of Christ, that is, the ethical greatness of Jesus, apart from His miracles, His supernatural birth, His resurrection and ascension. Harnack even asserted that the person of Christ does not belong in the original gospel.