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That Frei fails to realize this is due, I am certain, to his underlying Barthian, or Type 4, assumption that the two poles assumed by the typology are so related that they cannot finally have equal status, because one of them must sooner or later be assigned absolute priority, thereby determining the absolute posteriority of the other. Thus even in his interpretation of Schleiermacher, he speaks – altogether implausibly – of a "tension" in Schleiermacher's view between "Wissenschaft and theology" and of "SchleiennacherSchleiermacher's
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inability to integrate conceptually the idea of the university and the practical school of professional education" (pp. 119, 129). Or, again, the only way he knows to show that Schleiermacher's is a Type 3 theology is to argue – again, altogether implausibly – that it involves "a correlation between equals" and therefore to deny that, for the Schleiermacher of the Introduction to The Christian Faith, the "particular" is logically dependent on the "general," not the other way around, so that "the pious Christian self-consciousness" is not "correlated" with "the sense of absolute dependence," but is taken, rather, as necessarily presupposing it (pp. 81, 83, 65 ff.). Thus Frei's talk of "Schleiermacher's correlationist views" completely misses the possibility of a type of Christian theology – arguably, the very Type 3 that Schleiermacher pioneered in working out – for which it makes as little sense to talk about "correlating" the two poles, or "balancing" them, as it does to assign either of them an absolute priority, since each of them may be quite properly said to be prior to the other relative to one of the two claims expressed or implied in bearing Christian witness. Relative to the one claim of witness to be appropriate to Jesus Christ, critically validating it may be rightly assigned priority, while relative to the other claim to be credible to human existence priority may be equally rightly assigned to critically validating it.

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