Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/133

 is at the same time of such a character that the region of the finite is left behind, and the finite is reduced to the condition of something subordinate, to being a far-away picture, which has its real existence only in the past and in memory, and not in Spirit, which is above all things present, and which has left that starting-point behind, and belongs to a region the value of which is of a totally different sort. The pious man can thus take advantage of everything in order to edify himself, and in that case this is the starting-point. It has been proved that several of the quotations made by Christ from the Old Testament are incorrect, and that the meaning extracted from them is not based on the immediate sense of the words. The Word, according to this view, is to be regarded as something fixed; but Spirit makes out of it something that is true. Thus the material history is the starting-point for Spirit, for faith, and these two characteristics must be distinguished from each other, and what we are first of all concerned with is the return of Spirit into itself, spiritual consciousness.

It thus becomes clear that it is the Church or Spiritual Community which of itself produces this faith, and that it is not, so to speak, created by the words of the Bible, but, on the contrary, by the Spiritual Community. So, too, it is not the material Present but the Spirit which teaches the Spiritual Community that Christ is the Son of God, that He sits eternally at the right hand of the Father in heaven. That is the interpretation, the witness, the decree of Spirit. If grateful peoples have only placed their benefactors amongst the stars, Spirit has recognised subjectivity as an absolute moment of the divine nature. The person of Christ has been decreed by the Church to be the Son of God. We have nothing to do in this connection with the empirical method of stating this, with the ecclesiastical method of determining the truth, with councils and such like. The real question is as to what the content essentially is, is in-and-for-itself. The true