for the truth, we do not occupy the Christian standpoint, the standpoint of the true religion.
The one side is this human side, this appearance of one who was a living man. As an immediate or natural man he is subject to the contingency which belongs to outward things, to all temporal relations and conditions; he is born, as Man he has the needs which all other men have except that he does not share in the corruption, the passions, the particular inclinations of men, in the special interests of the worldly life in connection with which uprightness and moral teaching may also find a place; on the contrary, he lives only for the truth and the proclamation of the truth, his activity consists simply in fulfilling the higher consciousness of men.
It is to this human side, therefore, that the doctrine of Christ chiefly belongs. The question is, How can such doctrine exist, and in what way is it formed? The doctrine in its first form cannot have been composed of the same elements as afterwards appeared in the doctrine of the Church. It must have certain peculiarities which in the Church of necessity partly receive another signification and are partly dropped. Christ’s teaching in its immediate form cannot be Christian Dogmatics, cannot be Church-doctrine. When the Christian community has been set up, when the Kingdom of God has attained reality and a definite existence, this teaching can no longer have the same signification as before.
The principal contents of this teaching can only be general and abstract. If something new, a new world, a new religion, a new conception of God, is to be given to the world of ordinary thought, then the first thing needed is the general sphere of ideas in which this can show itself, and the second thing is the particular, the determinate, the concrete. The world of ordinary thought, in so far as it thinks, thinks merely abstractly, it thinks only what is general; it is reserved for Spirit, which comprehends things through the Notion, to recognise
