Friedrich Schleiermacher

German religious leader

• Born: November 21, 1768
• Birthplace: Breslau, Silesia, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland)
• Died: February 12, 1834
• Place of death: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)

Schleiermacher helped Christian theology address the challenges and opportunities that were offered theological thought by modern historical consciousness. His most lasting contribution has been his theological system.

Early Life

As Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (SHLI-ee-MAH-ker) was growing up in Silesia, his parents entrusted his education to the Moravian Brethren at Niesky. This Moravian community espoused a form of Lutheran piety associated with Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. They respected the primacy of the devotional life and particularly urged a devotion to Jesus over theological formulations. They also appreciated the disciplined life.

At Niesky, where the young Schleiermacher studied from 1783 to 1785, he followed a pietistic curriculum and also had his first taste of a humanistic education. First at Niesky and then at the Moravian theological school in Barby, he was engaged in the study of Latin and Greek. This Greek study was to prove to be the beginning of classical studies and eventually led to his great German translation of Plato. In these years, he came into contact with an impressive style of piety that continued to inform his life and thought. He withdrew from the seminary at Barby because he found little understanding among his teachers for his own honest struggles and doubts. His horizons were expanded beyond Moravian piety and his previous classical studies when, in 1787, he transferred to the University of Halle.

In Berlin in 1790, Schleiermacher passed his first theological examination, and shortly thereafter he accepted a position as a private tutor in the household of Count Dohna, in West Prussia. In 1793, he became a teacher in Berlin, and the following year he completed his second theological examination. In 1794, he also received ordination in the Reformed Church and entered its service as the assistant pastor in Landsberg. The tradition of Moravian piety, his classical studies, and his ordination for ministry in the Reformed Church all serve as the backdrop for Schleiermacher’s life’s work.

Life’s Work

Schleiermacher’s two most celebrated literary works are Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildten unter ihren Verächtern (1799; On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers , 1892) and Der christliche Glaube: Nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (1821-1822; The Christian Faith, 1928). Both works have their geographic place of origin in Berlin, yet they were written in two different periods of Schleiermacher’s life and are separated by two decades.

On Religion was written after several years’ experience as a preacher and after having worked on several philosophical treatises. The Reformed clergyman had been called to the Charité Hospital in Berlin as a chaplain and preacher. Close to the turn of the century, Schleiermacher was enjoying the cultural milieu of the new Berlin society and a circle of Berlin’s Romantics, to whom he had been introduced through his friendship with the poet Friedrich Schlegel. This was the beginning of the first creative period in his career. It was especially the speeches collected in On Religion that first made Schleiermacher famous. His audience was a circle of nontheological friends, the cultured despisers of religion, the literary and philosophical circles of society in the capital city. For them, piety had been displaced by aesthetic intuition.

In the first speech, which Schleiermacher calls an apology or a defense, he draws the distinction between religion’s trappings and religion itself. The young chaplain asks his friends why they have only been concerned with shells of religion rather than going to the kernel of the matter. That kernel concerns the “pious exaltation of the mind [Gemüt] in which… the whole world is dissolved in an immediate feeling of the Infinite and the Eternal.” The second and longest speech develops the nature or essence of religion.

Schleiermacher’s concern was that religion be certain of its own roots and its independence in its relationship to philosophy and to morality. Religion is not only knowing or rationalism. It is not simply doing or moralism. Religion starts and ends with history. History is the most general and the most profound revelation of the deepest and the most holy. What is the finest and dearest in history can only be received in the feeling of the religious mind. Religion has to do with receptivity; it has its life in gaining perspective or intuition and feeling (Anschauung und Gefühl). Perspective is oriented toward the Universum, which has to do not only with the universe of space but also with the spiritual or intellectual world and with the historical context of relationships.

The third speech collected in On Religion is about the cultivation or formation of religion. Piety lies beyond teaching. A teachable religion itself would be absurd. However, teaching can awaken piety in others. The fourth speech presents the relationship of religion and society and speaks of religious community, communication, and the church. The final speech discusses the God who became flesh, providing an overview of the phenomenological world of religion.

Following these speeches, in 1800 Schleiermacher published an ethical companion piece, Monologen: Eine Neujahrsgabe (Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies , 1926). Taken together, On Religion and Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies brought forth charges of pantheism. These charges, together with some concern about the young Schleiermacher’s circle of friends in Berlin, led his elder and friend Friedrich Samuel Gottfried Sack to encourage a stay some distance from Berlin in Stolp. Schleiermacher thus left Berlin to serve as a court chaplain in Stolp from 1802 to 1804. He later accepted a call to Halle as preacher to the university, which included academic duties in a special appointment, which eventually became a regular appointment as professor. Schleiermacher’s appointment made the theological faculty the first in Prussia to include both Lutheran and Reformed theologians.

When Schleiermacher returned to Berlin, he was a mature thinker, theologian, and philosopher. In 1809, he became preacher at Trinity Church, and in the same year he married Henriette von Willich, the widow of a friend who had died two years earlier. She brought two children into the marriage, and four other children issued from their union. By this time, the first edition of his translation of Plato’s dialogues had appeared. The following fall he became a professor at the new university in Berlin, where he was to remain almost a quarter of a century. He was the first dean of the university’s theological faculty, a position he occupied several times. He lectured in Christian ethics, church history, dogmatics, New Testament studies, and practical theology, as well as aesthetics, dialectics, ethics, hermeneutics, pedagogy, and psychology.

It was in the milieu of Berlin and his several responsibilities there that he conceived, composed, and published his major work, The Christian Faith. The two-volume work has a significant title, which translated reads, “the Christian faith systematically set forth according to the principles of the Evangelical church.” The last part of the title suggests that Schleiermacher was a church theologian who took history seriously. In his introduction to his magnum opus, Schleiermacher gives an explanation of dogmatics and its methods. After the introduction, he divided his work into two major parts. The first concerns the development of religious self-consciousness as it is presupposed by but also contained in Christian piety. It treats creation and preservation and also the attributes of God and the states of the world that correspond to creation and preservation. The original divine attributes are God’s eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience.

The second part of The Christian Faith develops self-consciousness as it is determined by the antithesis of sin and grace. This part appears to move from an understanding of sin to Christology, through soteriology (theology dealing with salvation), ecclesiology, and eschatology (theology dealing with the Second Coming and Last Judgment). The theologies discussed in the second part are both more dialectical and more unified or coordinated than this simplified schema would suggest. For Schleiermacher, pious self-consciousness is determined by the consciousness of sin and grace. The consciousness of each person is developed within a system of three coordinates: the human being, the world, and God. Sin, both original and actual, is understood as the human condition. The state of the world is thus evil, while God’s attributes are holiness and righteousness. The Christian is conscious of God’s grace. The Holy Spirit is the means of grace, which arises out of God’s love and wisdom.

Schleiermacher by and large held to the traditional dogmatic sequence of salvation history moving from Creation to the Last Judgment. His one departure from this traditional order comes in his treatment of the doctrine of God. Along with the doctrine of God’s attributes (love, wisdom, omniscience, and the like), the doctrine of God usually appears at the beginning of dogmatics. In Schleiermacher’s dogmatics, the doctrine of God’s attributes is treated in three sections over the whole of the work, but there appears to be no doctrine of God. The human experience of reality is thus called to serve in characterizing God’s attributes. Rather than being omitted in Schleiermacher’s dogmatics, God is described in relation to humankind’s experience of reality.

According to Schleiermacher’s method, each part of The Christian Faith consists of an ingenious tripartite arrangement that discusses pious self-consciousness, theology or divinity, and cosmology or the world; yet, in each section, the sequence of these topics is different. The self, God, and the world are therefore treated three times before Schleiermacher comes to the conclusion of his work. For the conclusion of the work, Schleiermacher transposed the doctrine of the Trinity, traditionally in dogmatic literature at the beginning with the doctrine of God, to the climax of his dogmatics.

Significance

Friedrich Schleiermacher is without a peer among modern theologians in the originality of his attempt to reconstruct the doctrine of God. His theology respects the fundamental distinctions between God and the world and between divinity and humanity, while affirming the interrelatedness of God, the self, and the world. In his life and thought, both piety and culture remained constant themes. He has rightly been recognized as the founder of modern theology.

Schleiermacher was not a theologian who disassociated himself from the preaching office of the church. Karl Barth has noted that Schleiermacher actively sought to present the most exposed, the most difficult and decisive theological position in the pulpit. That was true throughout his creative and mature life. Like Martin Luther and John Calvin before him, Schleiermacher gave himself year after year to the demands of both preaching and academic work.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. “Schleiermacher.” In Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1973. An appreciation and critique of Schleiermacher’s theology from Barth’s own perspective as a theologian who provides an alternative to Schleiermacher. Contains a modest index of names.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Edited and translated by Garrett Barden and John Cummings. New York: Continuum, 1975. This substantial work contains an analysis of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and the questionableness of Romantic hermeneutics. Gadamer was a student of Martin Heidegger. Includes a helpful subject and name index.

Gerrish, B. A. “Continuity and Change: Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Task of Theology.” In Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Schleiermacher is discussed in the context of the Reformed tradition. Includes a good treatment of Emil Brunner’s early work on Schleiermacher, which has never been translated.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. A brief introductory study that places Schleiermacher’s theology in a broad context.

Kelly, Thomas M. Theology at the Void: The Retrieval of Experience. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Examines how several philosophers have interpreted the experience of God, including Schleiermacher’s belief that people experience God and use language to mediate this human experience.

Kelsey, Catherine L. Thinking About Christ with Schleiermacher. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. An analysis of Schleiermacher’s Christology, discussing how he organized various beliefs about Christ into a coherent system.

Niebuhr, Richard R. Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Treats the elements of Schleiermacher’s style with fine discussions of his hermeneutical and historical background.

Redeker, Martin. Schleiermacher: Life and Thought. Translated by John Wallhausser. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973. An excellent introduction by the editor of the German critical edition of The Christian Faith. Contains a good bibliography and a brief index of persons.