Schleiermacher - The Christian Faith

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Schleiermacher (Who)

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Pastor of Church of the Triune God (united Lutheran and Reformed congregation).

A monumental figure in the history of modern Protestant thought, Schleiermacher, influenced by his pietist upbringing as well as the Romantic movement that defined his time, argued that human intuition and powerful emotions are the essence of religion. He especially stressed the importance of that sense of absolute dependence and awe that humans feel for an almighty and infinite God. Raised and educated in a German * Moravian culture that he found to be overly restrictive, Schleiermacher enrolled in the University of Halle and immersed himself in a study of * Plato, * Aristotle and Immanuel * Kant. Ordi nation as a Reformed pastor in 1794 led him to Berlin to work as a hospital chaplain and subsequently into an ever-widening circle of friends who defined German Romanticism. Schleiermacher went on to a professorship at Halle and, in 1809, to an appointment as dean of the faculty of theology at the University of Berlin. In 1799, he published On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despis ers, a book designed to win back highly educated Europeans to the wonder and mystery of God. Other key works include A Brief Outline of Theology and The Christian Faith.

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Schleiermacher and Kant

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Schleiermacher: Three major influences--Kant, Romanticism, and biblical criticism.

Schleiermacher accepted Kantian rational/empirical (Schleiermacher emphasized the priority of the empirical), yet rejected Kant's claim that the noumena (supernatural) cannot be known. Schleiermacher approach sought a new approach to Christianity using Kant's assumptions, but not Kant's moral imperative theory.

The centrality of man in rationalism continued in Schleiermacher scheme, however, it was man's experience of the Infinite (in Christianity, "God") that precedes rationality. Hence, empiricism and knowledge God can both be maintained.

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Schleiermacher and Romanticism

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Romanticism involved “a desire to allow the individual’s feelings, however apparently irrational and unconventional, to have their way against the generalized notions of prudence, rationality, and even morality.” Without any way to grasp satisfying religion, the Romantics despised and rejected it. Schleiermacher, who regularly met with many Romantic thinkers, posited the idea of the feeling of absolute dependence to answer the Romantic movement of his day and make Christianity and religion appealing once more.

This is not to say Schleiermacher was not also reacting to the conservatives who still held to an intellectual understanding of religion or the Kantians who saw religion as stemming from morality. Schleiermacher’s thought is indeed a reaction to all three and an attempt to make Christianity viable in an intellectual world that had largely imbibed Kantian epistemology and Romanticism.

For Schleiermacher, what others “considered religion [to be was] . . . the mere external and dispensable husk concealing the real essence of religion,” a feeling of absolute dependence on the Infinite.

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Schleiermacher and Biblical Criticism

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Schleiermacher also worked within a world that accepted historical criticism of the Bible. He attempted to move hermeneutics forward to a place that would affirm the usefulness of the Bible while at the same time allowing a place for his own understanding of religion. Schleiermacher made hermeneutics an effort of understanding the discourse better than the author, and of realizing hermeneutics as a never-ending effort due to perspectivalism. Understanding means uncovering the author’s meaning behind the words of the text. In this way the words of the Bible were useful to understand the meaning of the author, a meaning that flowed from that author’s feeling of absolute dependence. Historical criticism then could only serve as an aid to better understand the author’s meaning and access the religious feeling behind the author’s articulation in the Bible; it could not harm any understanding of inspiration because the words of the text alone were not important.

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Schleiermacher and experience

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To experience is to participate in an interaction with something external to oneself. This is not a one-time process, but an oscillation between the external and the internal. In E. the external is brought into the internal, appropriated, and then sent out now incorporating aspects to what is eternal.

S. used this oscillation concept of experience to explain religion as the manifestations of varied communal expressions of their E. of God. S. could critique religious expression (e.g., doctrines), but he couldn't dismiss them wholesale, for they were part of a community's experience of God. However, their authoritative power was stripped.

E. of being utterly dependent has God has the referent.
"That object is God and God's entire, wholly interconnected process of creation and preserving the world" (Tice 28). Two aspects the experience of being self-conscious of being absolutely dependent: Anschauung and Gefühl.

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Schleiermacher and Anschauung and Gefühl

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Perception or intuition (Anschauung) of God's being and gracious activity in the world and humanity's sin, which is the state of being made aware of the need for redemption.

Feeling (Gefühl) of "the one eternal divine decree" of God's creative activity rising to redemption.

Two indispensable sides of the same coin: "in religious experience, therefore, without Anschauung there is nothing for feeling [Gefühl] to be about, and without Gefühl there is nowhere for perception [Anschauung] to go in the life of faith" (Tice 28).

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Schleiermacher and Consciousness

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Consciousness: An individual's stat of discerning awareness of some "other."

Religious or Christian Self-consciousness: Being not conscious of oneself but from oneself to God in relationship. Highest level of self-consciousness is being able to feel (or intuite) absolutely dependent in this relationship with God (aka Piety).

God-conscious: For Christians, that one Other to which our higher, immediate self-consciousness referes in the feelings of absolute dependence.

Piety: Highest stage of human self-consciousness, namely that we are conscious of our absolute dependance on God.

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Schleiermacher and Religion

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Religion is the term used to encapsulate the phenomenon of Piety and its manifestations in history.

Detail: Piety forms the fundament of religion. Piety is the highest stage of human self-consciousness. The object of that self-consciousness is the feeling of absolute dependence on the Infinite.

As each individual is determined by location, time, and other factors, his experience of religion will be unique to his situation. Positive religions necessarily arise as individuals select one of the many relations of mankind to the Highest Being, and view every other relation in light of it. Schleiermacher admits from the perspective of the nature of religion seems arbitrary, however “its characteristic distinction will not become clear to you until you yourselves belong to some one or other of them [religions]” (OR 113). This does not mean an individual must connect himself with an existing form of religious expression, but one should seek religion “through free choice by making a particular intuition of the universe the center of the whole of religion and relating everything therein to it” (OR 104). “The original intuition of Christianity is a more glorious, more sublime…extending farther over the whole universe” because Christ, its founder, is a mediator of the highest order (OR 115).

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Schleiermacher (Revelation, God and World)

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Revelation is (immediate) intuition of the interconnectedness between the Infinite, World, and individual, and the Infinite's gracious activity of redemption.

Detail: As the Infinite is recognized, we can recognize ourselves as individuals, yet all things are part of a Whole. The world is complete revelation of God (Panentheism). As one intuits the Universe, he is able to witness the spirit of the world revealing itself in creation. Thus the relationship between the individual and the Universe becomes inseparable. This relationship between the individual and Universe is so strong that Schleiermacher can say having religion means “intuition of the universe” (OR 24). So great is this idea of the Universe that it trumps any notion of God, which is ultimately a work of one’s imagination. Our imagination creates the world for us, and “you can have no God without the world” (OR 53).

Schleiermacher grounds revelation in the concept of causality. Religious consciousness only occurs through the action of “things” upon you. “All the divine attributes to be dealt with in Christian dogmatics must somehow go back to the divine causality, since they are only meant to explain the feeling of absolute dependence” (CF §50).

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Schleiermacher (God and World)

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The divine nature is not a matter of doctrine, metaphysics, or ethics, but of piety, or immediate awareness of God through his presence in the world (OR 25-26). God’s essence is indistinguishable from his attributes (CF §167). Humanity knows God only through its experience of the divine.

Through humanity’s complete dependence upon God, religious self-consciousness reveals him to be highest being, the final cause of all things (OR 23). Humanity’s position in a world that exists wholly dependent upon God reveals him to be the Creator and Sustainer of the world (CF §36).

God’s attributes manifested for the redemption of humanity in the world context simultaneously reveal God to be both distinct from the world and humanity, yet unified with them. Again, God and the world exist in dialectical relationship. God’s inwardness, holiness, and love exemplify his distinction from the world. His livingness, justice, and wisdom speak of his relation to the world. For Schleiermacher the nexus of this relationship is clear: “the world is a complete revelation of the attributes of God” (CF §92).

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Schleiermacher (Christ)

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Christ is the chief means by which humanity knows God. Highest potency of God-consciousness. His growth from purest innocence to purely spiritual fullness of power results in the removal of sinfulness (CF §§97–98). As he manifested divine love to humanity he acquired divine attributes. Christ being conceived thusly, one should avoid “incarnation” language that erroneously entangles eternal categories of God with temporal categories of humanity (CF §§96–97).

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Schleiermacher (Human Ability)

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All things caused by God. Ability to intuite God innate in humanity. Sin corresponds to wrong thinking on this ability to intuite the God/Universe/World.

Since Schleiermacher asserts God is the ultimate author of both sin and grace, he believes historical appeals to human freedom (e.g., Pelagians and Manicheans) fail because they reject divine causality/omnipotence.

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Schleiermacher (Sin)

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Sin is the lack of feeling of absolute dependence on God that results from a self-initiated repression of God-consciousness. In short, sin is arrested God-consciousness. The greater one apprehends God through the image of Jesus, the Redeemer, the greater their consciousness of sin.

In relation to the world, both sin and God-consciousness have always existed in each individual (CF §65). Yet sin never negates the potential for original perfection in humanity (CF §68).

Evil functions both naturally (e.g., disease) and through the social obstruction of God-consciousness (CF §71). Evil does not cause sin, but arises from human free will and sinfulness, and is itself the punishment for social sin (CF §§71, 76).

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Schleiermacher (Theology, Doctrines, and Creeds)

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Doctrines and creeds arise from the piety of historically situated communities. They are not binding, but are helpful it understanding how others have intuited the Infinite.

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Schleiermacher (Redemption)

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An individual becomes redeemed from sin by becoming keenly aware of the persistent pain that arises from evil. They are illuminated to their own sinfulness and the world’s. This in turn instills a desire for redemption, a redemption mankind cannot achieve on its own (CF §86). Confession and purification are simply not enough to remove sin; thus, the need for a redeemer arises. Jesus Christ became that redeemer. He encourages humanity to assimilate his own perfection—to strive for his level of God-consciousness. By entering into history to accomplish this, Jesus’s perfection is applicable to the entire human race.

Christ’s supreme level of God-consciousness established his qualifications as Redeemer.* He achieved full God-consciousness in his humanity, yet his divinity was supernatural as defined by the potency of that God-consciousness. In this he is suitable to serve as the Redeemer (CF §89). It is not by Christ’s vicarious suffering, Schleiermacher contends, but by being a satisfying representative that believers experience blessedness through the union of being in God through unity with Christ (CF §§101, 105). Christ’s work is the impartation of the impulses of his God-consciousness to the corporate life of men (CF §100).

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Schleiermacher (Church)

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In light of their solidarity with the Universe, individuals are connected and unified with one to another. For those that gather “in the name of the deity,” there is both unity and the assurance of everlasting life (OR 94). Every individual is a part of the Universe and is “worthy of the intuition of others” (OR 94). As a person continues to advance toward this solidarity with all things, “the more he communicates himself to others, the more perfectly do they become one” (OR 94). As a result, individuals become a unified humanity (OR 94). Those who most perfectly intuit the Universe are essentially members of the church.

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Schleiermacher (Bible)

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Super high view of Scripture. Record of those of the highest God consciousness. Biblical criticism provides the tools for understanding authorial intent, which connects to the expression of God consciousness.

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Schleiermacher (History)

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The context in which God, world, and humanity come together. History plays fundamental role in how God interaction with humanity, so much so, God is not conceived as existing apart from the world/history.