Theologian · Modern
Friedrich Schleiermacher
1768–1834 · Liberal Protestantism; Romantic theology; hermeneutics
A Reformed minister in the Prussian Union, never in dialogue with Rome, whose account of religion as feeling the Catholic Tübingen School adapted and Pascendi (1907) condemned in its Modernist form.
Raised among the Moravians, a chaplain in Berlin among the Romantics, co-founder of the University of Berlin and for twenty-five years preacher at Trinity Church, Schleiermacher is the father of liberal Protestant theology. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) defended religion as neither knowing nor doing but an intuition and feeling of the infinite; The Christian Faith (1821, revised 1830) built a whole dogmatics on the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ and on Christ as the one man of perfect and unbroken God-consciousness, whose redemption is the communication of that consciousness to the church. Doctrines are accounts of Christian religious affections set forth in speech, revisable with the church's life; the Old Testament, the Trinity and the Chalcedonian formula were accordingly set at the margins. He also founded modern hermeneutics and translated Plato.
Why he matters: He shaped the Catholic Tübingen School: Drey's method and the young Möhler's Unity in the Church (1825) borrowed from him, and Möhler's Symbolism (1832) is the first great Catholic answer to his Protestantism; the Modernist crisis and Pascendi's condemnation of ‘vital immanence’ are a quarrel with his heirs. Every theology of religious experience, Catholic ones included, has to settle accounts with him.
Where to be careful
His account of religion as feeling and of doctrines as its changing expressions is what Lamentabili and Pascendi (1907) censure, and his denial that God can be known by reason contradicts Dei Filius; his reinterpretation of the Trinity and of the two natures of Christ, and his leaning to universal restoration, part from the Creeds and from Lateran IV on hell. Common ground: the sense that faith is a living relation before it is a proposition (Dei Verbum 5), and the primacy of the Redeemer's person.
Reading
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On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured DespisersFriedrich Schleiermacher · The second speech: religion as intuition and feeling of the universe.
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The Christian FaithFriedrich Schleiermacher · Sections 3 to 4 on absolute dependence; sections 93 to 105 on the person and work of Christ.
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SymbolismJohann Adam Möhler · The 1832 Catholic comparison of the confessions that answers him directly.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.