Note 41 — THE DOGMATIC IMPORT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

Kant, like Schleiermacher (whose Christology in many respects recalls that of Kant),41 carries his appropriation of the Christology of the church no further than the death of Christ: of his resurrection and ascension, he says, that they cannot be available to religion within the limits of pure reason, because they would involve the materiality of all existences. Still, in another light, he employs these facts as symbols of the ideas of the reason; as images of the entrance into the abode of blessedness, that is, into communion with all the good: while Tieftrunk has yet more decidedly given it as his opinion, that without the resurrection, the history of Jesus would terminate in a revolting catastrophe; that the eye would turn away with melancholy and dissatisfaction from an event, in which the pattern of humanity fell a victim to impious rage, and in which the scene closed with a death as unmerited as sorrowful; that the history requires to be crowned with the fulfilment of the expectation towards which the moral contemplations of every one are irresistibly drawn—with the passage into a compensating immortality.42