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A Revelation of the Inward:Schleiermacher’s Theology and the

Hermeneutics of InteriorityGregory A. Thornbury

Gregory A. Thornbury is Instructor

of Christian Studies at Union University,

Jackson, Tennessee. He is co-editor of

the forthcoming volume Who Will Be

Saved? The Doctrine of Salvation at

Century’s End (Crossway). He has also

writ ten a chapter on A. H. Strong for

the revised edition of Baptist Theolo-

gians (Broadman and Holman). He is a

Ph.D. candidate at The Southern Bap-

tist Theological Seminary.

IntroductionFor nearly two centuries, the theology ofFriedrich Schleiermacher has provokedcontroversy. During the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, theologians havedebated, sometimes intensely, the mean-ing and applicability of Schleiermacher’scontribution for modern theology. Sym-pathy with Schleiermacher’s theology hasoften composed the dividing line betweenliberal and conservative, orthodox andheterodox. For example, Stephen Neilltold the story of J. C. Thirlwall, a fellowof Trinity College, Cambridge, who ranafoul with authorities in the Anglicanchurch in 1825 for translating Schleier-macher’s Essay on the Gospel of Luke. As aresult of his translation of Schleiermacher,Thirlwall was denied the bishopric ofNorwich, due to suspicions about his or-thodoxy. Several years later, when the seeat St. David’s was vacated, Lord Mel-bourne requested an interview withThirlwall in order to confirm Thirlwall’sorthodoxy. Neill recounted, “The PrimeMinister received Dr. Thirlwall in his bed-room; after an interview of some length,Melbourne turned to his departing guestand said: ‘I have done you a favor by pre-senting you with a bishopric; now I wantyou to do me a favor in return.’…Melbourne continued: ‘What the devilmade you translate Schleiermacher?’ His-tory has, alas,” Neill wrote, “concealed theanswer to the question.”1 Few theologianshave felt apathetic about the theology of

Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher forcestheologians to declare their commitmentsabout modernity, historical criticism, andtheological method. Widely acclaimed as“the father of modern theology,” FriedrichSchleiermacher irrevocably changed theterms of modern theological debate. Noone can afford to ignore Schleiermacher.

Schleiermacher ’s influence has, attimes, turned up in rather surprisingplaces. At the close of the nineteenth cen-tury, conservative evangelical theologiansbegan to look to Schleiermacher for inspi-ration. In the Southern Baptist tradition,E. Y. Mullins drank deeply from the wellof Schleiermacher ’s thought. Mullinsincorporated Schleiermacher’s emphasison feeling and experience into his ownsystem, and significantly altered thecourse of twentieth century Southern Bap-tist theology. Although Mullins expresseddisappointment with Schleiermacher’sposition on Scripture, he praised Schleier-macher’s success in “harmonizing therationalistic and supernaturalistic tenden-cies” in religion.2 Mullins appreciatedSchleiermacher’s location of epistemo-logical claims within the self-conscious-ness. By doing this, Mullins thought,Schleiermacher protected Christian truthclaims from the challenges of skepticalempiricism. Summing up Schleier-macher’s contribution, Mullins asserted,“Schleiermacher restored Christianity tothe inner life of men…. Christian con-sciousness [was] henceforth to be reck-

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oned with as a new force. The witnessof the spirit within was of the utmostimportance—experience and not theory[became] the basis of certainty.”3 “Schle-iermacher restored the experience to itsplace as an authority,” Mullins concluded,“and legitimized mysticism in the Chris-tian churches—hitherto this only a meresect. Now all are mystics.”4 Mullins’reorientation of the theological taskaround experience changed the course ofSouthern Baptist theology, and subse-quently helped to produce a populist the-ology among Southern Baptists whichextolled the importance of feeling andexperience. None of this would have beenpossible without the impact of Schleier-macher ’s theological contribution.Although Schleiermacher ’s thoughtremains one of the most complex contri-butions in the history of systematic theol-ogy, some of his ideas nonetheless havereceived wide popular acceptance, eventhough Schleiermacher himself staysunacknowledged as the source.

After Karl Barth declared in “TheStrange New World Within The Bible”that “One can not speak of God simplyby speaking of man in a loud voice,” someobservers declared the obsolescence ofSchleiermacher’s theology. Conventionalwisdom held that Barth and Brunner dealta decisive deathblow to Schleiermacher’santhropocentric theological method. Butas the influence of neo-orthodoxy haswaned at the end of the twentieth century,current scholars have declared the pro-found and ongoing influence ofSchleiermacher on both the church andthe academy. Perhaps more than any othermodern theologian, Schleiermacher ’sideas have found the most wide-rangingacceptance in the popular theologicalimagination. Unfortunately for Schleier-

macher, he has often remained unrecog-nized by those who have appropriated histheology. Schleiermacher inherited theepistemology of the Enlightenment andoffered a subjectivist account of theologyto his culture. Although Schleiermacherultimately failed to persuade the “cul-tured despisers of religion” of the valueof religion during his own time, henonetheless greatly influenced a subse-quent generation of church leaders andlay people who, like Schleiermacherplaced heavy emphasis upon personalexperience as the guiding norm fortheology. Schleiermacher’s long shadowfalls across many theological traditions,in both the liberal ones that praise him,and the conservative ones unaware ofhis influence.

Personal Background “If one should imagine both a religious

interest and a scientific spirit,” wroteFriedrich Schleiermacher in 1830, “con-joined in the highest degree and with thefinest balance for the purpose of theoreti-cal and practical activity alike, that wouldbe the idea of ‘a prince of the Church.’”5

Throughout his theological career,Schleiermacher attempted to be the“prince,” presiding over an entirely newstatement of the theological disciplineseminently fit for his age. Schleiermachersought a theological approach for the newintellectual day asserting itself upon theChurch, a method capable of rescuing thetheological disciplines from the brute factof the Enlightenment. Any attempt to re-claim the legitimacy of theology for theeducated German needed to meet Enlight-enment skepticism on its own terms—andsurmount them.

Schleiermacher faced the challenge ofreestablishing the importance of dogmat-

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ics in an era that hardly believed doctrinesmattered. Commenting on the rebellionagainst authority which marked the“enlightened” mind, Peter Gay observed,“Theirs was a paganism directed againsttheir Christian inheritance and dependentupon the paganism of classical antiquity,but it was also a modern paganism, eman-cipated from classical thought as much asfrom Christian dogma.”6 Consequently,Schleiermacher wanted to reclaim theol-ogy, but his reclamation proceeded on theterms of modernity. If “classical thought”suffered the same casualties as the doctri-nal distinctives of the Christian faith,Schleiermacher thought, then any pro-gram for recovery could not prosecute a“conserving” or “conservative” theology.The old metaphysic of Protestantism,asserted in the dogmatic sentences of theChurch and summarily deflated by Kant,he held, could not carry the weight placedon the faith. For Schleiermacher, theologyat the turn of the nineteenth century stoodin shambles, unfit to answer a cultureunconvinced by its necessity and unableto support a tottering post-Enlightenmentfaith. “Piety,” he asserted, “cannot be aninstinct craving for a mess of metaphysi-cal and ethical crumbs.”7

Schleiermacher’s entire theologicalcontribution served as a search for, articu-lation of, and systematization of theprincely “idea” to which he alluded in hisBrief Outline on the Study of Theology.

Schleiermacher sought to wed the reli-gious spirit to the sensibilities of a scien-tific age, thereby achieving a new Begriff,

an organizing idea to rehabilitate theol-ogy. Schleiermacher’s successors, despitetheir internal divisions concerning thesuccess of his theological rescue attempt,admired the scope and sheer comprehen-siveness of his renovation of the theologi-

cal task. As Rudolf Otto explained,

No matter what one’s attitudetoward Schleiermacher’s methodand his utterances on religion may be,one is time and again enthralled byhis original and daring attempt tolead an age weary with and alien toreligion back to its very mainsprings;and to re-weave religion, threatenedwith oblivion, into the incomparablyrich fabric of the burgeoning intellec-tual life of modern times.8

Despite his well-known condemnationof Schleiermacher’s theological method,Karl Barth esteemed his predecessor’swork. In Barth’s understanding, Schle-iermacher remains our contemporary.He writes,

Schleiermacher is not dead for usand his theological work has notbeen transcended. If anyone stillspeaks today in Protestant theologyas though he was still among us, itis Schleiermacher. We study Paul andthe reformers, but we see with theeyes of Schleiermacher and thinkalong the same lines as he did. Thisis true even when we criticize orreject the most important of histheologoumena or even all of them.9

Schleiermacher offered a theology formoderns—simultaneously obtuse andlucid, rigorously structural, and radicallydiscontinuous with traditional Protestantorthodoxy. At its very core, Schleier-macher’s understanding of the Christianfaith reads like an intellectual biographyof early modernity. It is inward, monadic,anthropologically absorbed, and unques-tionably driven by the Sitz im Leben ofmodern man.

Lest one view Schleiermacher’s theol-ogy as a purely altruistic attempt to res-cue theology from the prison ofEnlightenment rationalism, one needs tounderstand Schleiermacher’s own per-

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sonal situation that gave rise to his radi-cal reinterpretation of the Christian faith.While Schleiermacher sought to provehimself a faithful son of the Church, hedid not see himself as a preserver oforthodoxy. Schleiermacher’s methodol-ogy found its voice early in his theologi-cal career. Correspondence betweenSchleiermacher and his father during hiscareer as a student at the Moravian Semi-nary at Barby and the University of Hallereveals the profound departure of thetheologian from orthodoxy extremelyearly in his intellectual development.Frustrated with the “traditional doctrines”taught to him at the seminary, Friedrichreadied himself for larger pursuits.Despite the protests of Gottlieb Schle-iermacher, his son entered Halle andquickly began appropriating his instruc-tors’ critique of Protestant theology. Panic-stricken, Gottleib wrote letters to his sonseeking to reclaim him for orthodoxy.Faith in the Gospel traditionally under-stood by the Church, he argued, is indis-pensable to one’s salvation. Friedrichtortured himself with his father’s solemnwarnings, but refused to heed them. In aremarkable letter, dated January 21, 1787,the nineteen-year-old Friedrich admittedto his father that the old theology nolonger held its sway over his thinking andaffections. Friedrich Schleiermacher wroteto his worried father,

Faith is the regalia of the Godhead,you say. Alas! dearest father, if youbelieve that, without this faith, noone can attain to salvation in the nextworld, nor to tranquillity in this—and such, I know, is your belief—oh!then pray to God to grant it to me,for to me it is now lost. I cannotbelieve that He, who called Himselfthe Son of Man, was the true eternalGod: I cannot believe that His deathwas a vicarious atonement, because

He never expressly said so Himself;and I cannot believe it to have beennecessary, because God, who evi-dently did not create men for per-fection, but for the pursuit of it,cannot possibly intend to punishthem eternally, because they havenot attained it.10

With this remarkable phrase, FriedrichSchleiermacher repudiated Christianity.He could not, and would not believeorthodoxy any longer. He never changedthat belief. With this critical passage fromhis own pen, the interpreter of Schleier-macher immediately understands thedevelopment of his future theological pro-gram. His was no gradual modification ofChristian theology, or a mere updating oftheological expression in a new linguisticform. Rather, Schleiermacher rejectedProtestant theology at its core. He sum-marily denied the God of the conciliarcreeds, and the metaphysic of the biblicalworldview. Still, he continued to love theChurch. He wanted to see the Church sur-vive and thrive because he felt its pietyenergized human existence.

Despite all his infidelities, Schleier-macher was not an atheist, customarilydefined. He unswervingly held that con-sciousness of God fundamentally consti-tuted the authentic human being. Inreaction to the cold transcendence ofDeism, and to maintain a place for God inmodernity, Schleiermacher placed Godwhere He would be safe: in self-conscious-ness (Selbstbewußtsein). Schleiermacher’stheological system achieved a place forGod in piety—but at the expense of the-ology. Circumscribed by consciousness,Schleiermacher’s God sacrificed his meta-physical transcendence, his personhood,and his independent interaction with theworld. Given all of this, one may wonderwhy Schleiermacher did not sacrifice

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Christian theology altogether. The answerlies in the fact that Schleiermacher saw inChristian theology a coherence for belief,an area in which pure philosophy igno-miniously failed. Schleiermacher saw thatphilosophy left to itself ignored the essen-tially religious character of humanity. Inhis understanding, systematic theologydistinguishes an advanced religious belieffrom lower ones: “None but the subordi-nate forms of religion and smaller sectsfail to aim at completeness.”11 Systematictheology, for Schleiermacher, furtherlegitimizes religion.

Scholars of Schleiermacher’s theologylargely have avoided the issue of Schleier-macher’s early embrace of heterodoxyand its importance for the emergence ofhis theological system. Perhaps partlydriven by an impulse to justify his mod-ernism, or a lack of awareness of his sub-stantive rejection of historic theologicalpositions, Schleiermacher’s interpretersoffer either approbation or imprecationsregarding this great figure’s theologicalmethod, with the notable exception of onecharge: heresy. A term already outdatedby means of neglect from eighteenth andnineteenth century German clergy, heresyas a concept ceded to the prevailing spiritof the times. Unless one realizes thathis work in Glaubenslehre constitutes anapology for Schleiermacher’s early, sus-tained and avowed rebuff of suchfundamental doctrines as the deity ofChrist, substitutionary atonement, andeternal damnation, one cannot under-stand Schleiermacher’s theological pro-gram. Schleiermacher’s flirtation withpantheism, his subordination of the doc-trine of the Trinity to an appendix in hismajor expression of theology, and hismassive reinterpretation of the doctrinesof anthropology and sin stem not merely

from a perceived need for a restatementof Christian themes but from a fundamen-tal desire to reject categorically the ortho-dox faith of his father, the Reformers, theecumenical councils, and the Church.

The Intellectual and CulturalBackground to Schleiermacher’sThought

Schleiermacher’s new vision of Chris-tianity and the theological task grewout of a simultaneous conflict with andembrace of the new worldview producedby the Enlightenment. As a student enter-ing Halle, the demands of a German uni-versity immediately confronted the youngSchleiermacher. Thrust into an environ-ment in which education meant a com-prehensive knowledge of numerousdisciplines, Schleiermacher pursued hisstudies with vigor, demonstrating consid-erable ability in linguistic and biblicalstudies. Considerably different from hisstudies at the Moravian seminary at Barby,life at Halle forced Schleiermacher to con-front the major philosophical optionsprevalent in eighteenth century Germany.Between the time he was a Moravianseminary student and the time he wroteGlaubenslehre, Schleiermacher encoun-tered the stolid tradition of German ratio-nalism and the monumental work ofImmanuel Kant. This experience alteredvirtually everything in Schleiermacher’sintellectual development. As William C.Fletcher notes, “He immersed himself inthe learning of the philosophers, and thisgave the direction of his later theology.”12

But Schleiermacher did not follow anysystem slavishly. He remained critical anddistinguished himself far above the orderof routine philosophers. As Terrence Ticerightly remarks, “Schleiermacher hashad an undeservedly minor place in the

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histories of philosophy.”13

Schleiermacher and Rationalism atthe University of Halle

The University of Halle achieved areputation in the eighteenth century forthe seminal work of its faculty membersChristian Wolff and Johann Semler. Wolff(1679-1754), the University’s premier phi-losopher and a devoted follower ofLeibniz’s philosophy of monadic rational-ism, posited the verifiability of knowledgeon purely rational and empirical grounds.Wolff rejected the supernatural metaphys-ics of his pietist background and univer-sity, and drew a sharp distinctionbetween language (Wort) and reality(Sache). According to Wolff, one comes toknow the degree of correspondencebetween word and fact by a rational in-vestigation of their relationship, mediatedby the senses. Following both Leibniz andSpinoza, the authority of biblical revela-tion suffered the greatest casualties onWolff’s account of truth. As such, HansFrei remarked, “Among German philoso-phers, he (Wolff) more than anyone elseshaped the conceptual instrumentsrequired for liberating principles ofexplicative meaning from the fetters ofpietist reading.”14 Wolff’s philosophyreflected the height of German rationalis-tic thinking. By questioning the veracityof biblical references to miracles and his-tory and dismissing any affirmation ofthem by means of rationalistic and scien-tific principles, Wolff effectively separatedfaith from fact, with the implied intentionof undermining faith as classically definedaltogether.

Johann Semler (1725-1791), whotaught theology at Halle in the generationafter Wolff, pioneered the use of highercritical views in biblical interpretation.

Combining Wolff’s rationalism with theburgeoning field of biblical criticism,Semler gave rationalism a methodologyby which it could deconstruct the biblicaltruth claim. Intellectually emboldened bythe power of a purely scientific world-view, Semler claimed that the age ofEnlightenment provided the tools bywhich the historicity of the biblicalaccounts could be judged either asadequate or inadequate. Semler con-cluded that while the Bible does not teachus actual history, it conveys to us impor-tant spiritual truths that illumine the truemeaning of its words. Theology, Semlerexplained, comes to an impasse when itconsigns its doctrine to the historicalconditionedness of the Bible. Rather thanrelying on a simple application of theliteral meaning of Scripture, Semlermaintained, the theologian must uncoverthe affections and sentiments behindthe biblical accounts. In this way, truthachieves an actuality in each individual.Lewis White Beck explains Semler’s viewby saying,

We use our moral reason and ‘senti-ment’ in order to find the ‘true Chris-tian religion’ or the ‘private religion’(Semler calls it both) which is thesame for all Christians.... ThusSemler went beyond ordinarychurch history and biblical exegesis,which were his professional fields,to achieve the beginnings of anunderstanding of the developmentof dogma itself.15

Understanding the respective contribu-tions of Wolff and Semler plays a pivotalrole in charting the development ofSchleiermacher’s thought during his timeat the University of Halle. Wolff’s influ-ence was mediated to those ofSchleiermacher’s generation by its faith-ful proponent J. A. Eberhard. Eberhard

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advanced a philosophy of pure rational-ism, setting forth the proofs for the exist-ence of God as a certain path to meta-physics. Schleiermacher admitted theinitial attraction that a Wolffian rational-ism held. “For a long time,” he reflectedin his Soliloquies,

I too was content with the discoveryof a universal reason; I worshippedthe one essential being as the high-est, and so believed that there is buta single right way of acting in everysituation, that the conduct of all menshould be alike, each differing fromthe other only by reason of his placeand station in the world. I thoughthumanity revealed itself as variedonly in the manifold diversity of out-ward acts, that man himself, theindividual, was not a being uniquelyfashioned but of one substance andeverywhere the same.16

Eberhard ultimately did not convinceSchleiermacher of rationalism. Schleier-macher viewed Wolff’s and Eberhard’srationalism as a failed attempt to justifythe pursuit of metaphysics as aprolegomena to theology. Thus,Schleiermacher remarked, “Wolffian lan-guage remains unmistakably connected toscholastic language, which was nothingbut a confusion of metaphysics and dog-matics.”17 Nevertheless, Wolff’s critiqueof the supernatural elements of Christian-ity found sympathy in Schleiermacher’sthinking. After studying Wolff, Schle-iermacher came to the conclusion that asimple return to revelation was not pos-sible. Wolff’s rationalism allowed no roomfor a God to function outside of the worldof the mind and the historical process.

For his part, Semler confirmed forSchleiermacher the power of religious sen-timent in overcoming the difficultiesposed to biblical authority by higher criti-cism. Semler utilized a critical interface

with pietism to maintain the theologicaltask in the wake of the Enlightenment’srefutation of scriptural inerrancy. Inaddition, Semler offered an explanation asto how individual and public or churchpiety function mutually to change anddevelop doctrinal expression.18 In a sig-nificant sense, Semler served as a forerun-ner for Schleiermacher ’s theologicalamalgam of rationalism and pietism.

The Influence of Spinoza’sRationalism

Baruch Spinoza exerted considerableinfluence on Schleiermacher’s life andwork. Spinoza, the Dutch rationalist,advanced “panpsychism” in his approachto metaphysics. Panpsychism identifiesGod and Nature as one substance, andthus eliminates virtually any notion of adistinct personal dimension to the divinebeing. Spinoza taught that through ratio-nal appropriation of the world, the mindperceives the world as it actually is,thereby becoming a “mode of God,” anoutworking of the divine activity in theworld. Schleiermacher opposed Spinoza’spurely rationalistic approach to knowl-edge, but appreciated Spinoza’s attemptto locate God in the world. In his Speeches,

Schleiermacher seems quite favorablydisposed to a Spinozaic pantheism. Com-menting on the way in which piety sur-renders itself to the fabric of the universe,Schleiermacher notes, “here the Universeis put for God and the pantheism of theauthor is undeniable.”19 Although Schle-iermacher came under criticism for hispantheistic comments in both the Speeches

and the Glaubenslehre, he never revised thecomments or excised them from his pub-lished work.20 Schleiermacher disdainedany distancing of God from the world,whether in his self-revealing nature or in

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his action in the universe. Schleiermachersaw Spinoza as an ally in this respect,even if he rejected the rationalistic way inwhich Spinoza sought to resolve the prob-lem. As Richard Brandt put it, “Schle-iermacher is most sympathetic withSpinoza’s opposition to the theistic ideaof a transcendent God.”21

The Towering Figure ofImmanuel Kant

No other figure so shaped the contoursof Schleiermacher’s theological methodand philosophical outlook more thanImmanuel Kant did. As early as his daysin seminary at Barby, Schleiermacherdigested The Critique of Pure Reason andsubsequently considered Kant’s othermajor works, including Prolegomena to Any

Future Metaphysics and Religion within the

Limits of Reason Alone. When consideringthe impact of Kant on Schleiermacher, thecareful historian recognizes that Kant wasviewed in pietist circles, at least until thepublication of Religion Within the Limits of

Reason Alone, as a friend to and preserverof orthodoxy. During the days of Schle-iermacher’s early but pronounced “darknight of the soul,” Gottleib Schleiermacherencouraged his son to turn to Kant forhelp in undergirding his faith. Worriedthat his son might accept the explanationsof Wolffian rationalism, Gottleib Schleier-macher wrote, “As you are now attend-ing Eberhard’s lectures on metaphysics, Iwould recommend to you at the sametime to study and weigh maturely Profes-sor Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernuft, and alsohis Prolegomena of Metaphysics, so that youmay not be adventuring yourself into theboundless desert of transcendental ideaswithout some safe guide.”22 Upon hisfather’s suggestion, Schleiermacher vis-ited Kant at his home in Königsberg in

May of 1791. Although their meeting wasbrief, Kant impressed Schleiermacher.Schleiermacher admired the rigor ofKant’s philosophical method and subse-quently accepted much of Kant’s critiqueagainst early German Rationalism.

Although a satisfactory summary ofKant’s philosophical contribution liesbeyond the scope of this essay, the centralissues in his thought provide a criticalinsight into the philosophical methodfrom which Schleiermacher approachedthe theological task. Kant’s program, aswidely acknowledged, searched for abridge between the antiseptic and conflict-ing epistemologies of rationalism andempiricism. Against empiricism, Kantargued that there are synthetic a priori

judgments that are necessary to under-stand reality. These synthetic a priori state-ments do not and cannot derive their truthstatus from simple observation. In contra-diction of rationalism, Kant contended thatpure conceptual analysis did not constitutea proper epistemology for metaphysics.For Kant, the inability of pure reasonto apprehend “things in themselves”(noumena) constitutes a barrier erectedagainst a purely rationalistic account of theworld. Consequently Kant argued thatonly “things as we perceive them” (phenom-

ena) make themselves available to our per-ceptions for apprehension.

Kant’s famous “shift to the subject” andthe reorientation of epistemological cer-tainty to the thinking subject irrevocablysevered metaphysics from an objectivistaccount of truth. In the Critique of Pure

Reason, Kant distinguished between twoapproaches to theology, rational andrevealed. Revealed theology, he argued,failed to offer an adequate epistemologysince its categories hopelessly emanatedfrom the noumenal world. Rational the-

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ology suffered from the opposite problem:the fact that pure reason cannot appre-hend noumenal categories or “things inthemselves.” Still, Kant did not sacrificereason as the primary conduit throughwhich all theological truth must beknown. As a result, Kant concluded,“Now I maintain that all attempts of rea-son to establish a theology by the aid ofspeculation are fruitless, that the prin-ciples of reason as applied to nature donot conduct to us any theological truths,and, consequently, that a rational theol-ogy can have no existence, unless it isfounded upon the laws of morality.”23

Kant thereby constituted a “metaphysicsof experience” whereby categories in thenoumenal realm must conform them-selves to the perceptions of the thinkingself. Although “experience can neverteach us the nature of things in them-selves,” experience serves as the onlymediator by which the self can obtainknowledge.24

Experience, on Kant’s account, does notoffer meaning until sense perceptions areformed into concepts which are thenjudged by the intuitions of the self. Heargued that in order for sense perceptionsto become knowledge, the intuitions ofthe mind and concepts must coincide toform judgments. But what unites intui-tions and concepts in the mind? Theanswer is the self-consciousness, whatKant termed the “transcendental unity ofapperception.” On this account, all knowl-edge must pass through the self-con-sciousness in order for judgments to bepossible, and judgments according toKant, comprise our grasp of truth.

This review of the basic features ofKant’s epistemology form the most criti-cal element to the background of Schle-iermacher ’s theological method: the

mediating work of the self-consciousnessin all apprehensions of truth. Once oneunderstands what Kant means by the“transcendental unity of apperception,”one begins to understand the way inwhich Schleiermacher forms theologicaljudgments. Schleiermacher gains theexplanatory power of consciousness fromthe seminal work of Kant, and builds anentire theological system around it.Although many intellectual biographersof Schleiermacher note his critique ofKant’s theory of ethics, few have noted hisprofound indebtedness to Kant’s philoso-phy for the organizing principle of hisdeveloping theological system.25

The Culture of RomanticismSchleiermacher lived, preached, and

taught in an age that eschewed an authori-tarian account of truth and existence. Thetraditional domains of German author-ity—religion and philosophy—sufferedthe greatest losses during this period. TheRomantic era sought an individualizedaccount of reality, and neither the pro-nouncements of reason or revelation per-suaded the minds of culture in whichcreativity emerged as the highest virtue.If Kant’s philosophy initiated the shift tothe self, romanticism extended the notionto idealize self-realization. Regarding thespirit of the age, Jacques Barzun wrote,“Romantic striving may therefore besummed up as the effort to create some-thing out of Experience individuallyacquired. It is a striving because humanexperience does not automatically dictateits own forms or point out its own values.That the task of man is to discover thesefor himself is shown by his possession ofenergies and desires.”26 Schleiermacher’srejection of the traditional German ratio-nalism of Wolff and Leibniz coincided

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with a culture that increasingly despisedit as well.

Schleiermacher’s own colleagues at theUniversity of Halle, Schlegel and Hegel,helped define the distinctive feature ofromantic thought, following the seminalwork of the idealist philosophers Fichteand Schelling. Schlegel, Schleiermacher’sclose friend whom he met during his yearsas preacher at the Charité Hospital in Ber-lin, introduced him to the romantic ethosby reading the great poets of the age suchas Goethe. Schlegel helped Schleier-macher understand the romantic turnaway from religion.27 More specifically,Schlegel’s friendship with Schleiermachergreatly contributed to the pointed apolo-getic genius of the Speeches. BecauseSchleiermacher understood the world-view of the religious “cultured despisers”of romanticism, he was able to offeran “insider’s critique” to their objectionsto religion.

Ironically, the same Schleiermacherwho years earlier denied so many centraldoctrines of the historic Christian faithemerged as the champion for its continu-ance in the modern world. As WilliamDilthey observed, “Surrounded by indif-ference, he began, before anyone else, toassert the great historical task of theChurch which many years of preaching,serving the Church and theology hadimpressed upon him: he became the spiri-tual head of the Church of his time.”28

Schleiermacher knew how to appeal tothe sensibilities of his romantic audience.The opening pages of the Speeches indi-cate his keen perception, as Schleier-macher reversed the tables on the cult ofself-enhancement. If one seeks to achievethe ultimate end to human existence,Schleiermacher argued, one must experi-ence piety and share in the life of God

himself. The life of individual fulfillmentso stressed by the cultured despisers,Schleiermacher proposed, could not beattained apart from the very thing they sodespised: religion. “In your ornamenteddwellings, the only sacred things to be metwith are the sage maxims of our wise men,and the splendid compositions of ourpoets. Suavity and sociability, art and sci-ence have so fully taken possession ofyour minds, that no room remains for theeternal and holy Being that lies beyondthe world.”29 Piety, the true expression ofGod-consciousness, appeared with suchinfrequency in the post-Enlightenmentworld, Schleiermacher argued, that onlyvery few attain it. “Religion of such a sortis so rare, that whoever utters anythingof it, must necessarily have had it, fornowhere could he have heard it. Of all thatI praise, all that I feel to be the true workof religion, you will find little even in thesacred books. To the man who has nothimself experienced it, it would be onlyan annoyance and a folly.”30

Schleiermacher offered an account ofreligion that offered the benefits of reli-gion without the strictures of an authori-tative interpretative tradition. By locatingreligious feeling within the consciousness,truth in piety rather than doctrines,Schleiermacher’s culture could achievethe self-fulfillment they desired. The lifeof the pious achieves true greatness dueto Christianity’s relation to the highestform of self-actualization: the life of Jesus.Schleiermacher’s speeches accomplishedtheir intended purpose when they piquedthe curiosity of his culture to listen to hisaccount of the Christian faith.

Moravian PietismDespite Schleiermacher’s rejection of

the central theological convictions of his

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Moravian background, he salvaged whathe thought was the energetic principle ofthe tradition: piety. Given his appropria-tion of the cohesive feature of Kant’snotion of self-consciousness, Schleier-macher saw a correlation between his ownepistemology and the pietism of hisMoravian background. Consequently, theexplanatory feature of religion consists notprimarily in terms of doctrine or missionsbut in a distinct piety. Since doctrinalproposition no longer formed the centerof the theological enterprise, Schleier-macher saw the opportunity to redefinethe whole system on an entirely neworganizing principle, the religious self-consciousness. As Brian Gerrish observes,“In Schleiermacher’s own experience,the religious feeling remained relativelyconstant; what changed was his explica-tion of it.”31

In contradistinction to the otherbranches of the Reformation tradition,two features underscored the pietist theo-logical tradition. First, Pietism expresseda “relative lack of interest in the theologi-cal systems of Protestant orthodoxy.”32

Although historic Pietism never encour-aged a separation of life from belief,reform of life undeniably received themajority of consideration. Furthermore,pietism stressed the communal nature oftheological reflection, with holy living re-sulting in correct belief. Schleiermacherincorporated this perspective into hisunderstanding of the “development ofdoctrine” set forth in his Brief Outline on

the Study of Theology.33 Consequently,Schleiermacher is careful to state that dog-matic propositions (the pronouncementsof the Church) must stand in continuitywith the Church’s agreed upon statementof doctrines and propositions. This doesnot mean, however, that dogmatic formu-

lations cannot and will not change. ForSchleiermacher, “orthodoxy” and “hetero-doxy” do not refer to some objective,external standard, but rather to thereceived interpretation of the Christiancommunity.34 Both participate in a herme-neutical process by which the Churchstands in continuity with, but also infreedom from its existing body ofstatements.35

Given this understanding and back-ground to Schleiermacher’s thought, onebegins to see clearly the path undertakenin his theological method. The Glauben-

slehre is an exercise in maintaining conti-nuity with the structure of previouschurch dogmatics while simultaneouslyreinterpreting the system with an innova-tive set of guiding principles and a con-siderably different doctrinal language.

Development of Schleiermacher’sTheological Method andHis Architecture of Thought

With all of this prolegomena toSchleiermacher’s intellectual develop-ment, we understand his theological sys-tem as an attempt at a fundamentalrehabilitation, not only of theology, butalso of modern thought. Schleiermacher’stheology proposed an answer to theintellectual and cultural challenges of hisday while simultaneously claiming con-tinuity with larger church tradition. Inorder to accomplish this, Schleiermacherinvited his hearers to look inward for thefountain of religious truth, into the essenceof the religious self-consciousness. In theprocess, Schleiermacher constructed atightly construed approach to religiousdiscourse, and interiorized truth in theprocess. “You must transport yourselves,”he told the cultured despisers of religion,“into the interior of a pious soul in order

15

to understand its inspiration.”36

This interiorizing of metaphysicsrequired a complementary denouncementof the theological methods that sooffended early nineteenth century Ger-man culture. Appealing to Romanticprejudices, Schleiermacher eschewed theexisting theological propositions found inthe systems of Protestant orthodoxy, vili-fying them as the “undertakers of vitalreligion.” He writes,

What are all these systems, consid-ered in themselves, but the handi-work of the calculating under-standing, wherein only by mutuallimitation each part holds its place?What else can they be, these systemsof theology, these theories of theorigin and end of the world, theseanalyses of the nature of an incom-prehensible Being, wherein every-thing runs to cold argufying, and thehighest can be treated in the tone ofcommon controversy? And this iscertainly—let me appeal to your feel-ing—not the character of religion.37

The theologians, Schleiermachercharged, with their dogmatic pronounce-ments and tightly argued theologicalproofs, are to be held responsible for thedeplorable image of religion. The morethey dogmatize, the less they offer bymeans of explanation of true religion.Caricaturing his opposition for rhetoricalpurpose, Schleiermacher queried,

Name one among those [theolo-gians] who have brought down anykind of new revelation to us?… Youwill not blame me if I do not reckonamong them the theologians of theletter, who believe the salvation ofthe world and the light of wisdomare to be found in a new vesture offormulas, or a new arrangement ofingenious proofs.... Doctrine is onlyunited to doctrine only occasionallyto remove misunderstanding orexpose unreality.38

Such statements take on greater mean-ing when compared with Schleier-macher ’s early denials of cardinaldoctrines such as the deity of Christ,vicarious atonement, and eternal damna-tion.39 Schleiermacher’s derogatory state-ments about propositional theology donot refer merely to his disdain for itsmethod, but also disdain for its content.As Schleiermacher extended the ideasinitiated in the Speeches into systematictheological expression, he constructed thesystem in such a way as to maintain agrammatical continuity with the confes-sions of the church without sharing itsepistemological or metaphysical presup-positions. Schleiermacher felt as thoughhe could not simply return to the old Prot-estant metaphysic of Calvin that beganwith the transcendent God who makeshimself known through an externallygiven, rational, and objective revelation.Reflecting on his proposition that “Dog-matic Theology is the science that system-atizes the doctrine prevalent in a ChristianChurch at a given time,” he remarked,

It is obvious that the text-books ofthe seventeenth century can nolonger serve the same purpose asthey did then, but now in large mea-sure belong merely to the realm ofhistorical presentation; and that inthe present day it is only a differentset of dogmatic presentations thatcan have the ecclesiastical valuewhich these had then; and the samefate will one day befall the presentones too.40

Christian doctrines, therefore, are notobjectively revealed by God, but merely“accounts of the Christian religious affec-tions set forth in speech.”41 Consequently,Schleiermacher developed a theologicalepistemology with internal controls. Bylocating the confirmation of all truth state-

16

ments within self-consciousness heinteriorized doctrine into a place safe fromthe harsh objectivity of orthodoxy and theskepticism of the Enlightenment.42

The progression of Schleiermacher’stheological method unfolds with remark-able consistency, from his early skepti-cism, to the defense of a newly redefinedreligion in the Speeches and his subsequentMonologen, and finally to the systematicexpression of his thought in the Glauben-

slehre. No major shift marked Schleier-macher’s theological career. Although hepursued other interests during his teach-ing career at the University of Berlin, suchas the nature of hermeneutics, Schleier-macher focused on a new vision for thetheological task with astonishing concen-tration and devotion.

In developing his alternative system,Schleiermacher dismissed traditionaltheological and philosophical modes ofdiscourse with one remarkable phrase atthe beginning of his Glaubenslehre: “Thepiety which forms the basis for all ecclesi-astical communions is, considered purelyin itself, neither a Knowing nor a Doing,but a modification of Feeling, or of imme-diate self-consciousness.”43 In this briefstatement, Schleiermacher rejected tradi-tional Protestant dogmatics (a knowing),rationalism (a knowing), and Kant’s moralsolution of practical religion and the ethi-cal accounts of religion (such as Fichte’s)which followed him (a doing). Havingeliminated the other options, Schleier-macher offered his own proposal, builtupon a seemingly invulnerable category(a modification of Feeling, or of theimmediate self-consciousness).

In a manner strikingly similar to Kant’stranscendental unity of apperception,Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling andself-consciousness in the service of piety

serves as the means by which all theologi-cal judgments are made and as the bridgebetween knowing and doing. “For,indeed, it is the case in general that theimmediate self-consciousness is alwaysthe mediating link in the transitionbetween moments in which Knowingpredominates and those in which Doingpredominated, so that a different Doingmay proceed from the same Knowing indifferent people according as a determi-nation of self-consciousness enters in.”44

Drawing upon his Moravian background,Schleiermacher roots right belief in piety,not on an external claim based upon anobjective revelation. “Accordingly, onthe hypothesis in question” he argues,“the most perfect master of ChristianDogmatics would always be likewise themost pious Christian.”45 Schleiermachergoes on to say, “Knowing refers not somuch to the content of that knowledgeas to the certainty which characterizesits representations.”46

For Schleiermacher, “there are both aKnowing and a Doing which pertain topiety, but neither of these constitutes theessence of piety.”47 By essence he meansthat irreducible reality which undergirdsthe human as a spiritual being. Movingbeyond Kant, Schleiermacher gives his co-hesive principle an explicitly theologicalreference, stating, “The common elementin all howsoever diverse expressions ofpiety, by which these are conjointly distin-guished from all other feelings, or, in otherwords, the self-identical essence of piety,is this: the consciousness of being abso-lutely dependent, or, which is the samething, of being in relation with God.”48 Thefeeling of absolute dependence of whichSchleiermacher speaks (das Gefühl

Schlechthiniger Abhangigkeit) refers to thefact “that the locus of religion is the inner-

17

most realm of human existence.”49

Schleiermacher uses the terms “feelingof absolute dependence” and “conscious-ness of God” interchangeably, consider-ing them “an essential element of humannature.”50 This explanation offers an ac-count for how each human being pos-sesses fundamentally the same religiousconsciousness, thus providing Schleier-macher with a ready-made theology ofworld religions. On this view, Christian-ity is the highest level of religion, prima-rily because its founder exhibited thehighest degree of God-consciousness.Although I will have to say more on thisin the next section, I note here that forSchleiermacher, given the basic constitu-tion of each person as possessing God-consciousness, all religious systems existin a continuum with each other. Ratherthan viewing different religious world-views as discontinuous and antitheticalwith Christianity, Schleiermacher seesevery religious expression as movinginevitably to a Christian God-conscious-ness, the highest level of belief shared byall monotheistic faiths. For Schleier-macher, the non-Christian religions arewrong because they are arrested in aninferior stage of development. “It cantherefore justly be said,” Schleiermacherexplained, “that as soon as piety hasanywhere developed to the point ofbelief in one God over all, it may bepredicted that man will not in any regionof the earth remain stationary on one ofthe lower planes.”51

By placing the source for religious truthwithin human experience, Schleiermacherconstructed a system whose “teleologicalend” was discovery of the self, a self whichwas the extension of the world, theUniverse, and of God.52 Essentially,Schleiermacher conflates the terms “self-

consciousness” and “God-conscious-ness,” leaving his interpreters to grapplewith the question of where theologybegins and anthropology ends in his sys-tematic theology. Schleiermacher gaineda significant benefit from his method—a theology attractive to modernism. Hismethod intentionally operated at a highlyaggressive level, so aggressive that everydoctrine within the system by necessity

drastically accommodated itself to itsorganizing principle. Schleiermacher’suniform application of his method sooverwhelmed his system that few of hisfollowers missed its lack of objectivereferents that were once so characteristicof Protestant theology.

Critical Issue in Schleiermacher’sThought: Consciousness and theNature of Doctrine

As the “father of modern theology,”Schleiermacher forsakes the theologicalprecedents set by his forebears. Bybeginning his Glaubenslehre with anecclesiological focus (“we must begin witha conception of the Christian Church, inorder to define in accordance therewithwhat Dogmatics should be”) Schleier-macher makes it clear that, unlike Calvin’sThe Institutes, his work does not proposeto be a theology of revelation.53 Calvinbegins The Institutes with the assertion thattheology must start with the knowledgeof God the Redeemer. But as quicklyas Calvin introduces the subject, hedemonstrates that all human attempts tocomprehend God come to nothing. Con-sequently, The Institutes begins with ahelpless humanity desperately in need ofGod’s own self-disclosure, a revelationexternal from the world of fallen humanbeings. This God accomplishes throughhis gift of the Scriptures, the only source

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whereby “God bestows the actual knowl-edge of himself.”54

In stark contrast to Calvin, Schleier-macher by his own admission avows theGlaubenslehre to be a theology of inwardreflection, of relationship, and of sharedconsciousness. Displacing the metaphys-ics of scriptural revelation for the sensu-ous impressions of consciousness,Schleiermacher denies any notion thatrevelation entails a body of doctrinalpropositions.55 He asserts,

I am unwilling to accept the furtherdefinition that it [divine communi-cation] operates upon man as a cog-nitive being. For that would makerevelation to be originally and essen-tially doctrine; and I do not believethat we can adopt that position,whether we consider the whole fieldcovered by the idea, or seek to de-fine it in advance with special refer-ence to Christianity. If a system ofpropositions can be understoodfrom their connexion with others,then nothing supernatural was re-quired for their production. But ifthey cannot, then they can, in thefirst instance, only be apprehended…as part of another whole, as amoment of the life of a thinkingbeing who works upon us directlyas a distinctive existence by meansof his total impression on us; andthis working is always a workingupon the self-consciousness.56

Not only does Schleiermacher reject theidea that revelation imparts doctrine inthis passage, but he significantly alters thelocus for divine communication. For Schle-iermacher, Scripture does not mediateGod’s self-revelation to human beings.Instead, God communicates directly to theself-consciousness of the human beings.This communication comes in the form ofimpressions, not intelligible sentences. Asa result, Schleiermacher sees every humanbeing as a positive receptor of divine rev-elation. He writes, “therefore it may truly

be said even of the imperfect forms ofreligion...that they rest upon revelation,however much error may be mingled inthem with the truth.”57

With revelation conceived in this wayand doctrine construed in this fashion,every subsequent doctrine in Glaubenslehre

receives a radical revision. With respectto the doctrine of God, Schleiermacheraverts any traditional discussion of theissue, bizarrely treating his largest sectionon God under the section “explication ofthe consciousness of sin.”58 In fact,Schleiermacher avoids a sustained reflec-tion of theism. Schleiermacher’s consign-ment of truth to the self-consciousness, tofeeling and relationship, frames everydoctrine in such a way as to limit itsexpression to human feeling. Conse-quently, doctrine in Schleiermacher ’ssystem lacks an external referent, anontological truth status that denotes thatthe doctrine describes something objectiveabout God and his ways of interactingfrom the world. With regard to theattributes of God, Schleiermacher clearlymakes this very point in §50: “All attri-butes which we ascribe to God are to betaken as denoting not something specialin God, but only something special in themanner in which the feeling of absolutedependence is to be related to Him.”59

Stated differently, knowledge of God forSchleiermacher does not objectively cor-respond to the person of God himself, butonly offers us an ostensive internal refer-ence to the self-consciousness.60

Schleiermacher’s treatment of the Trin-ity serves as the most infamous exampleof his approach to doctrinal formulation.Traditionally considered in the first sec-tion of theological explication after thedoctrine of revelation, Schleiermacherconsigns the doctrine of the Trinity to little

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better than a footnote in his system. Speak-ing of the Trinity, Schleiermacherexplained, “this doctrine itself, as ecclesi-astically framed, is not an immediateutterance concerning the Christian self-consciousness, but only a combination ofseveral such utterances.”61 The reasonfor Schleiermacher’s displacement of thedoctrine immediately surfaces: the Trin-ity does not arise naturally from thehuman consciousness, and therefore mustbe regarded as an issue of subordinateimportance.

After recovering from the initial shockof Schleiermacher’s casual devaluation ofthe doctrine which produced seven ecu-menical councils and numerous creeds,one recognizes that Schleiermacher ’streatment of the Trinity simply follows hismethodology for the nature and formula-tion of Christian doctrine. Schleiermachertorturously struggles even to discuss theTrinity, and finally admits that in his view,one must sacrifice either a unity of Per-sons or of essence, despite the witness ofthe history of the Church to the contrary:

The ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trin-ity demands that we think of each ofthe three Persons as equal to theDivine Essence, and vice versa, andeach of the three Persons as equal tothe others. Yet we cannot do eitherthe one or the other, but can only rep-resent the Persons in a gradation, andthus either represent the unity of theEssence as less real than the threePersons, or vice versa.62

Dissatisfied with the doctrine of theTrinity, and frustrated by its unwillingnessto fit into his system, Schleiermacherexpresses hope that the doctrine can bereordered so as to accommodate theconsciousness of the human being, the uni-versal principle of doctrinal interpreta-tion.63 He writes, “We have the less reason

to regard this doctrine as finally settledsince it did not receive any fresh treatmentwhen the Evangelical (Protestant) Churchwas set up; and so there must still be morein store for it a transformation which willgo back to its very beginnings.”64

By interiorizing Christian doctrinewithin human experience, Schleiermachersacrifices God’s transcendence and thefoundation of the biblical metaphysic.Therefore one might be scandalized, butnot surprised, that Schleiermacher cannotreconcile the Trinity with his theologicalmethod. God as transcendent Sovereigndoes not exist in Schleiermacher’s theol-ogy; he appears only as an abstraction,“the divine causality” which provides acohesive fabric to the Universe. Karl Barthcalled Schleiermacher’s God “a neuter,”not a person, but a “thing.” Barthremarked regarding Schleiermacher’saccount of God, “God is given to us infeeling. Not given to us externally, asSchleiermacher assures us at length. Butsurely the neuter that is posited and givenis obviously not Spirit, not God, but, nomatter how abstract, a thing.”65 Barthwas correct. Despite his emphasis onrelationship, Schleiermacher does notpresent God as Father, or even fundamen-tally as Person.

Schleiermacher focuses his attentionprimarily on the person of Jesus Christand the believer ’s relationship withhim. But like every doctrine in his system,his consideration of the person of Christundergoes a drastic transformation.For Schleiermacher, Jesus of Nazarethachieves his place of high honor notbecause he is the second person of theGodhead, but because he possessed thehighest form of God- or self-conscious-ness. Richard R. Niebuhr comments thatSchleiermacher “present[s] the figure of

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Christ not as the ‘celestial’ but as thehistorical ‘intelligence’ that seeks to bringthis anarchic inner world under the gov-ernment of its motions.”66

According to Schleiermacher, Christ isthe Urbild, the perfect or ideal man whoshows humanity the way to God throughreliance on the feeling of absolute depen-dence. Despite Schleiermacher’s denial ofJesus’ full deity, he enthusiastically affirmshis humanity to the end that all of human-ity might participate in his example. “Forthis Second Adam is altogether like allthose who are descended from the first,only that from the outset He has an abso-lutely potent God-consciousness.”67

Again, “The Redeemer, then, is like allmen in virtue of the identity of humannature, but distinguished from them allby the constant potency of His God-con-sciousness, which was a veritable exist-ence of God in Him.”68 With self-,religious-, or God-consciousness as theonly pole of theological reference, everydoctrine emanates from a variation on thattheme. Schleiermacher defines sin as adenial of the feeling of absolute depen-dence. Redemption is construed as Christ’srescuing us from this denial: “The Re-deemer assumes believers into the powerof His God-consciousness, and this is hisredemptive activity.”69 As expected, thisdefinition of Christ’s salvific work defiesan orthodox definition due to Schle-iermacher’s novel recasting of meaning inChristian doctrine. Schleiermacher makesno mention of Christ’s coequality with theFather, homoousios, God of very God,because homoousios connotes a metaphysi-cal status about the person of Christ.

Throughout his work, Schleiermachercarefully avoids making metaphysicalpronouncements as they relate to theGodhead, and rejects such statements as

they relate to issues such as miracles.Schleiermacher critiques miracles onpragmatic, epistemological, and meta-physical grounds.70 He objects to the con-cept of any necessity for the supernaturalin religion: “It can never be necessary inthe interest of religion so as to interpret afact that its dependence on God absolutelyexcludes its being conditioned byNature.”71 As Schleiermacher wrote toLücke, “As for the miracles in the NewTestament...it will not be long before theyfall once more.”72 Of course, Schleier-macher claims this because in a doctrinalsystem predicated on consciousness, onedoes not need external or transcendentcategories to accomplish human perfec-tion in feeling and sensation. Despite hisprotestations to the contrary, Schleier-macher remains unmistakably a Kantianslave.73 Since we cannot actually knowthings-in-themselves, Schleiermacherthought, why flatter metaphysics bydwelling on the unattainable?74 Schleier-macher interiorized every subject withinfeeling, and thus feeling served as the-ology’s revelatory principle. As such,Schleiermacher deemed feeling “a revela-tion of the inward.”75 Protestant meta-physics as historically employed neverentered the equation.

Assessment of Schleiermacher’sTheological Method and Its Impact

Throughout this discussion, I havetraced Friedrich Schleiermacher’s system-atic interiorization of doctrine into thereligious self-consciousness. While manyinterpreters of Schleiermacher have re-garded him as a hero of modernity for hissignificant restatement of the faith, Iargued that his life and work were asimple outworking of an early andavowed denial of doctrines central to

21

Christianity occasioned by early moder-nity. Having never retracted this denial,and given his massive redefinition of theentire landscape of Christian theology, Isuggested the possibility that Schleier-macher (whether intentionally or unin-tentionally) constructed a way forChristian theology to make an apology forthe heterodoxy of modernity. His theol-ogy transformed the faith as opposed totranslating it.76

Schleiermacher’s theological systembrilliantly and consistently employed anepistemology worthy of the greatest phi-losophers of his age. By critically interact-ing with and against the philosophicaloptions available to him, he constructeda theological method that kept theEnlightenment at bay while simulta-neously mollifying the cultured despisersof religion. By framing his discussionwithin the life of the Christian community,Schleiermacher found a mode of discourseto see the Church life which he had grownto love survive his own generation. Inmany respects, Schleiermacher was everybit the champion, a “prince of the Church.”

Still, Schleiermacher remains a Janus-faced theologian. By retreating into thesafety of the self-consciousness in orderto save religion, Schleiermacher severedthe Church from the referent that madeits own internal dialogue the vibrant pro-cess he so admired. As this essay hasshown, Schleiermacher’s doctrines do notclaim to be the personal verbal witness ofa self-revealing God.77 James B. Torranceexpressed the thoughts of many interpret-ers of Schleiermacher when he queried,“if faith is defined non-cognitively as thefeeling of absolute dependence, and care-fully distinguished from any kind of sub-ject-object relationship, how is it possibleto do adequate justice to the truth content

of Christian doctrine?”78

Actually, it is a question thatSchleiermacher clearly answered in hisconstrual of consciousness and the natureof doctrine. For Schleiermacher, “truthcontent” is an unfortunate category mis-take that indicates a failure to ask the rightquestions of religion and theology. Truthcontent presupposes transcendent revela-tion, an objective means of verification,and a body of propositional truths, all ofwhich Schleiermacher expressly denied.His theology made simple claims of co-herence, not correspondence. “Dogmat-ics,” he writes, “stays within its limits andseeks to be nothing more than a suitableand skillful arrangement of what is simul-taneously present and mutually interre-lated.”79 Schleiermacher constructed atheology of limits (consciousness) notmetaphysics (revelation).

Schleiermacher irrevocably changedthe theological landscape of Protestant-ism. Conventional wisdom holds that The

Christian Faith was the most significanttheological work since Calvin’s Institutes.

Schleiermacher made every subsequentform of liberal theology possible. No onein the nineteenth century met Schleier-macher’s challenge with a statement oftheology that even approached thebreadth and scope of his work. As KarlBarth remarked, “Not until E. Brunner in1924 did anyone write against Schleier-macher with presuppositions that werereally different (even if they were perhapsonly relatively free from Schleier-macher!).”80 Barth may have just as wellincluded himself in that statement. AsRichard Niebuhr and many others haveconcluded, Barth never totally broke fromthe liberalism of Schleiermacher. Never-theless, the latter’s conflation of natureand grace so disturbed Barth that much

22

of the work from his dialectical phaseseems to be his attempt to exorciseSchleiermacher’s theological demons.

Despite the withering criticism that hereceived from Barth within, and from thepost-World War II neo-evangelicals with-out, Schleiermacher’s theology has seena reversal of fortunes in recent years.Approbation for Schleiermacher comesincreasingly from an unlikely front:evangelicalism. In his 1990 Bampton Lec-tures, The Genesis of Doctrine, AlisterMcGrath claims that George Lindbeckmislabeled Schleiermacher as an “experi-ential-expressivist” in The Nature of Doc-

trine.81 McGrath argues, “Schleiermacheris arguably closer to Lindbeck’s notion ofa ‘cultural-linguistic’ approach to doctrineon account of his emphasis on the role ofthe community of faith.”82 Since McGrathviews church tradition as such a criticalpart of the “hermeneutical spiral” in doc-trinal development, McGrath viewsSchleiermacher as more friend than foe inhis understanding of the construction ofdoctrine. Further, in his book The Making

of Modern German Christology, McGrathapplauds Schleiermacher’s theology forbeing “Christ-centered.”83 AlthoughMcGrath’s appropriation of Schleier-macher falls short of a ringing commen-dation, his placement of Schleiermacher’stheological hermeneutics within theparameters of Lindbeck’s postliberalposition enhances the likelihood of arevival of Schleiermacher among thoseevangelicals enamored with all thingspostliberal.

The recent anti-foundationalist andpietist emphases within evangelicalismshould also help Schleiermacher onceagain emerge from the shadows. BetweenClark Pinnock’s current exaltation ofexperience in theological formulation and

Stanley Grenz’s current fascination withPietism as the evangelical essential, it isonly a matter of time before evangelicaltheologians increase their appropriationof Schleiermacher. More concreteexamples exist. Timothy Phillips andDennis Okholm’s recent Christian Apolo-

getics in the Postmodern World containsan article by Nicola Creegan entitled,“Schleiermacher as Apologist: Reclaimingthe Father of Modern Theology.” Creeganargues that in a post-modern world thatrecognizes only subjectivist claims totruth, the need for an individualistaccount of Christianity makes Schleier-macher’s approach made to order for ourtimes. With anti-propositionalist and anti-foundationalist Evangelicals on the rise,the reclamation of Schleiermacher hasalready begun.

ENDNOTES1 Stephen Neill, The Interpretation of the

New Testament: 1861-1961 (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1966) 9-10.

2 E. Y. Mullins, “Outline of Lectures toGraduate Theology Class, Southern Bap-tist Theological Seminary,” TMs, p. 45,Special Collections, James P. BoyceLibrary, The Southern Baptist Theologi-cal Seminary, Louisville, KY.

3 Ibid., 46.4 Ibid., 46.5 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline on

the Study of Theology, trans. Terrence N.Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press,1966) 21.

6 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Inter-

pretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism

(New York: Vintage Books, 1966) xi.7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion:

Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans.John Oman (New York: Harper & Row,1958) 31.

23

8 Rudolf Otto, “Introduction,” inFriedrich Schleiermacher, On Reli-

gion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despis-

ers, trans. John Oman (New York:Harper & Row, 1958) vii.

9 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schle-

iermacher, ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans.Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rap-ids: Eerdmans, 1982) xiii. Barthfurther remarked concerning Schle-iermacher’s achievement, “The firstplace in a history of the theology ofthe most recent times belongs andwill always belong to Schleier-macher, and he has no rival....Nobody can say today whetherwe have really overcome his influ-ence, or whether we are still at heartchildren of his age…. One is morestrongly impressed every time oneconsiders him—by the wealth andmagnitude of the tasks he setshimself, by the moral and intel-lectual equipment with which heapproached them, by the manlysteadfastness with which he trod thepath he had once embarked uponright to the end as he entered uponit, unheedful of the favor or dis-favor of each passing decade, andendowing it by this very playfulnesswith the ultimate reality of all trueart. We have to do here with a hero,the like of which is but seldombestowed upon theology.”

10Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of

Friedrich Schleiermacher, As Unfolded

in His Autobiography and Letters, Vol.

1, trans. Frederica Rowan (London:Smith, Elder, and Co., 1860) 46.Brian A. Gerrish is the only majorbiographer of Schleiermacher tomake reference to this importantstatement in Schleiermacher’s let-

ters. After excoriating Schleier-macher’s father for his negativereaction to this statement, Gerrishseeks to explain this admission asthe beginnings of a new, more sub-stantive faith for Friedrich Schleier-macher. Gerrish states, “If we didtrace the story to its conclusion, wewould have to decide that whatSchleiermacher lost was not his faithin Christ but his first understand-ing of it.” See Brian Gerrish, A Prince

of the Church: Schleiermacher and the

Beginnings of Modern Theology

(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984)26. Gerrish’s dismissive comment isfar from satisfactory, and obscuresthe weight of this admission fromSchleiermacher, an admissionwhich he never rescinded norrepented of. To merely state thatSchleiermacher’s denial of the deityof Christ was an entrée into a moreprofound faith seriously devaluesthe importance of the doctrine of thedeity of Jesus Christ to the Christianfaith. The truth is that Schle-iermacher radically redefined hisunderstanding of Christ so as tobe utterly distinct and contrary to theChristology of historic Christianity.

11Schleiermacher, On Religion, 258.12William C. Fletcher, The Moderns

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1962) 22.13Terrence N. Tice, “Friedrich

Schleiermacher,” in The Cambridge

Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. RobertAudi (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1995) 716.

14Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical

Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and

Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics

(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974)99.

15Lewis White Beck, Early German

Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors

(Cambridge, MA: The HarvardUniv. Press, 1969) 292.

16Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schleier-

macher’s Soliloquies, trans. HoraceLeland Friess (Chicago: The OpenCourt Publishing Co., 1926) 30.

17Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the

Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr.

Lücke, trans. James Duke andFrancis Fiorenza (Chico, CA: Schol-ars Press, 1981) 83.

18For further consideration of therelationship between Semler andSchleiermacher’s understanding ofthe theological task, see TrutzRentdorff, Church and Theology,

trans. Reginald Fuller (Philadelphia:Westminster Press, 1966).

19Schleiermacher, Speeches, 24.20Schleiermacher sought to explain

himself vis-á-vis his comments onpantheism in his letters to Lücke.See Schleiermacher, On the Glauben-

slehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, 48-49.21Richard B. Brandt, The Philosophy of

Schleiermacher: The Development of

His Theory of Scientific and Religious

Knowledge (New York: Harper &Brothers, 1941) 36.

22Schleiermacher, Life of Schleier-

macher, 66.23Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Rea-

son, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,1990) 356.

24Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any

Future Metaphysics, trans. PaulCarus (Chicago: Open Court Pub-lishing Co., 1902) 51.

25To be certain, Schleiermacher ’srejection of Kant’s theory of ethicsas the only path into theological dis-

24

course deserves substantive atten-tion, and has been treated signifi-cantly elsewhere. The primary textin this regard is Schleiermacher’sown Introduction to Christian Ethics,

trans. John C. Shelley (Nashville:Abingdon, 1989). For secondaryconsiderations of this issue, see Wil-liam Alexander Johnson, On Reli-

gion: A Study of Theological Method

in Schleiermacher and Nygren

(Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill,1964). In addition, for a nice sum-mary of Schleiermacher ’s ownphilosophical method, see HughRoss Mackintosh’s classic, Types of

Modern Theology (London: Nisbetand Co., Ltd, 1937) 36-43.

26Jacques Barzun, Romanticism and the

Modern Ego (Boston: Little, Brown,and Co., 1947) 132.

27For an assessment of Schlegel andSchleiermacher’s relationship toromanticism, see Jack Forstman, ARomantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and

Early German Romanticism (Mis-soula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977).

28Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings,

ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1976) 43.

29Schleiermacher, Speeches,1.30Ibid., 9.31Brian A. Gerrish, “Friedrich

Schleiermacher,” in Nineteenth Cen-

tury Religious Thought in the West

eds. Ninian Smart, John Clayton,Steven Katz, and Patrick Sherry(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1982).

32Harry Yeide, Jr. Studies in Classical

Pietism: The Flowering of the Ecclesiola

(New York: Peter Lang, 1997) 25.33I am referring in particular to

Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, §196-231.

34Ibid., §203-204.35Ibid., §205-208. In §208, Schleier-

macher states, “Every dogmatictheologian who either innovates orexalts what is old, in a one-sidedmanner, is only a very imperfectorgan of the Church. From a falselyheterodox standpoint, he willdeclare even the most impeccableorthodoxy to be false; and from afalsely orthodox standpoint, he willcombat even the most mild andinevitable heterodoxy as a destruc-tive innovation.”

36Schleiermacher, Speeches, 18.37Ibid., 15.38Ibid., 17.39See pages 5 and 6 of this essay.40Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Chris-

tian Faith, eds. H. R. Mackintosh andJ. S. Stewart (New York: Harper andRow, 1963) §19.2.

41Ibid., §15.42The point I am arguing here is con-

firmed by Richard R. Niebuhr: “Thereligion that Schleiermacherdescribed in this way is a purelyformal and abstract religion, whichexists nowhere in actuality...heinsisted that religion alwaysappears in a particular social andhistorical form.” See Richard R.Niebuhr, “Friedrich Schleier-macher,” in The Encyclopedia of Phi-

losophy, Vol. 7, ed. Paul Edwards(New York: Macmillan PublishingCo. and The Free Press, 1967) 318.

43Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§3.44Ibid., §9.45Ibid., §9.46Ibid., §9.

47Ibid., §10.48Ibid., §12.49Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in

the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1 (NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972) 66.

50Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§6.1.51Ibid., §8.3.52Schleiermacher occasionally uses

the word “Universe” in the sameway he employs the word “God.”

53Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§2.2.54John Calvin, The Institutes of the

Christian Religion, Vol. 1, ed. John T.McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles,in The Library of Christian Classics,

Vol. XX. (Philadelphia: Westminster,1950) I.vi.1.

55Apologists for Schleiermacher willrightly point to §27 as evidence ofSchleiermacher’s regard for Scrip-ture in the statement of faith. §27reads, “All propositions whichclaim a place in the epitome ofEvangelical (Protestant) doctrinemust approve themselves both byappeal to Evangelical confessionaldocuments, or in default to these, tothe New Testament Scriptures, andby exhibition of their homogeneitywith other propositions already rec-ognized.” Three observations mightbe made in this regard. First, despitethe fact that Schleiermacher claimsthe importance of Scripture in theo-logical formulation, he betrays hisstatement by subordinating the doc-trine of revelation to a sub-sub cat-egory in his system of thought.Secondly, given the fact thatSchleiermacher denies that Scrip-tural revelation actually reveals doc-trine and exalts the consciousness

25

as the focal point of God’s commu-nication to humanity, one needquestion what positive role Scrip-ture could play in such a system.Finally, §27 speaks of the impor-tance of Scripture to Evangelical orProtestant theology. Having under-stood Schleiermacher’s heavy stressof the role of community in thearticulation of doctrine, this state-ment likely means nothing morethan the fact that Scripture is impor-tant to Evangelical theology becauseEvangelical theology grants Scrip-ture that place of authority.

56Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§10.3.57Ibid.58Ibid., §50-56. For a more detailed

consideration of this issue, see Rob-ert R. Williams, Schleiermacher the

Theologian: The Construction of the

Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: For-tress Press, 1978). The unique con-tribution of this work lies in itssuggestion that Schleiermacherwas a proto-phenomenologist whofocused on the structures of mean-ing rather than existence.

59Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§50.60This proposal by Schleiermacher—

the construal of truth as ostensiverather then objective—is a charac-teristic statement by twentieth cen-tury postliberals. An example of thiscan be seen in William C. Placher,The Domestication of Transcendence

(Louisville: Westminster/JohnKnox, 1996). Placher essentiallyargues that human language is in-capable of speaking univocallyabout God. Moreover, he disclaimsthe ability of theology to speak ana-

logically about God. Using Calvinas an example of this approach,Placher cites Tom Torrance whosays that knowledge of God inCalvin “is ostensive and persuasive,

but not descriptive. They point ustoward God and help to move ustoward lives of humility and obedi-ence before God, but they do notpurport to offer accounts of hisnature.” (58) The truth is that thiswas not the perspective of Calvin,but Schleiermacher.

61Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§170.62Ibid., §171.63Schleiermacher expresses sympathy

for the poor Unitarians in Great Brit-ain and America who simply can-not accept the traditional Niceneand Chalcedonian pronouncementsregarding the Trinity: “It is naturalthat people who cannot reconcilethemselves to the difficulties andimperfections that cling to the for-mulae current in Trinitarian doc-trine should say that they repudiateeverything connected with it,whereas in point of fact their pietyis by no means lacking in the spe-cifically Christian stamp. This is thecase often enough at the presentmoment not only in the Unitariansocieties of England and America,but also among the scattered oppo-nents of the doctrine of the Trinityin our own country. That circum-stance supplies a further reasonwhy we should strive to secure free-dom for a thoroughgoing criticismof the doctrine in its older form, soas to prepare the way for, and intro-duce, a reconstruction of it corre-sponding to the present condition

of other related doctrines” (§172.2).64Ibid., §172.65Barth, 217.66Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher

on Christ and Religion, The Libraryof Philosophy and Theology, eds.John McIntyre and Ian T. Ramsey(London: SCM Press, LTD, 1965)210.

67Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§89.2.68Ibid., §94.69Ibid., §100.70For a detailed consideration of this

area of Schleiermacher’s thought,see William A. Dembski, “Schleier-macher’s Metaphysical Critique ofMiracles,” The Scottish Journal of The-

ology 49:4 (1996) 443-465.71Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§47.72Schleiermacher, On the Glauben-

slehre, 61.73Along these lines, Nicholas Wolter-

storff’s recent article “Is it Possibleand Desirable for Theologians toRecover from Kant?” takes up theissue of modern theology’s existenceunder the long shadow of the phi-losopher from Königsberg. See Mod-

ern Theology 14:1 (January 1998) 1-18.74In this sense, we may view Kant as

Schleiermacher’s superior. Kant atleast was willing to attempt aknowledge of metaphysical catego-ries, despite the obstacles. Butperhaps in the final analysis, Schle-iermacher was more honest. Ifepistemological certainty of meta-physical categories is impossible,then avoid a discussion of themaltogether.

75Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,

§6.2.

26

76Millard Erickson’s now familiartypology for theology fits Schle-iermacher’s approach.

77This point is clearly demonstratedin his tacit rejection of the revelatorywitness of the Old Testament.

78James B. Torrance, “Schleier-macher’s Theology: Some Ques-tions,” The Scottish Journal of

Theology 21 (1968) 273.79Schleiermacher, On the Glauben-

slehre, 69.80Karl Barth, as cited in Gerrish, A

Prince of the Church, 20.81See Chapter 2 of Alister McGrath,

The Genesis of Doctrine (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1990).

82Alister McGrath, “Doctrine andDogma,” in The Blackwell Encyclope-

dia of Modern Christian Thought, ed.Alister McGrath (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1993) 117.

83Alister McGrath, The Making of Mod-

ern German Christology: 1750-1990

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994) 49.