SOURCE: “Friedrich Schleiermacher: Theology at the Dawn of Modernity,” in Great Christian Thinkers, SCM Press, 1994, pp. 157-84.

[In the following excerpt, Küng traces the development of Schleiermacher's theological philosophy and provides an overview of his major works.]

1. BEYOND PIETISM AND RATIONALISM

‘The first place in a history of the theology of the most recent times belongs and will always belong to Schleiermacher, and he has no rival.’ So says Schleiermacher's most vigorous opponent, who was to drive him from his pinnacle, and continues: ‘It has often been pointed out that Schleiermacher did not found any school. This assertion can be robbed of some of its force by mention of the names of his successors in Berlin, August Twesten, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch of Bremen, and Alexander Schweizer of Zürich. But it is correct in so far as Schleiermacher's significance lies beyond these beginnings of a school in his name. What he said of Frederick the Great in his Academy address entitled “What goes to make a great man” applies also to himself: “He did not found a school but an era”.’ So spoke the one who saw to it that Schleiermacher, ‘the church father of the nineteenth century’, did not also become the church father of the twentieth century: Karl Barth in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century.¹

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the offspring of two Reformed clergy families (both his grandfather and father were theologians, and his mother was the daughter of the Berlin chief court preacher Stubenrauch). He was born in Breslau in 1768 and took the name by which he was called from Frederick the Great, under whom his father had served as a Prussian military chaplain for soldiers of the Reformed confession. He was a highly talented young man, and because of the possibilities open to him could go several ways, though of course hardly into Lutheran orthodoxy—which was still strong in some circles.²

For already his grandfather Daniel Schleiermacher had been a Pietist. As a Reformed preacher he had been active in a radically pietistic community of apocalyptists and finally after disturbances in this sect (which was accused of magic and witchcraft) had to move to Holland.

His father, Gottlieb Schleiermacher, was also a Pietist; he too was at first the member of a Pietist community, but was to be alienated from it for a long time: it was only at the age of fifty that finally he felt at least inwardly that he belonged to the Herrnhuter Community of Brethren.

Moreover the young Friedrich could also have become a pietist when at the age of fourteen he saw his mother (who was soon to die) and his father (who was soon to remarry) for the last time, and was handed over to the care of the Brethren community, first at boarding school in Niesky, near Görlitz. Then, at the age of seventeen, he studied theology at the strict theological seminary of Barby near Magdeburg. Here the religion was one of the heart, which centred less on feelings of repentance and penitence as it did in pietistic Halle than on joy at redemption.

However, the young Schleiermacher hunted in vain at that time for the supernatural feelings and familiar converse with Jesus that the pious milieu required. Instead of this he found himself drawn to forbidden books, like Kant's Prolegomena to a Future Metaphysics (1783). The result was what might have been expected, for Schleiermacher now began increasingly to see the world no longer with pietistic eyes but with the eyes of the rational Enlightenment. Moreover after two years of theological study the student, now nineteen, wrote to his father (2 January 1787): ‘I cannot believe that he was the true eternal God who only called himself the Son of Man; I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement, because he never explicitly said as much and because I cannot believe that it was necessary, for it was impossible that God should have wanted to punish for ever men and women whom he evidently did not create for perfection but for striving towards it, because they had not become perfect.’³ This letter must have prompted bad memories for his father, and now it was only with some reluctance that he allowed Friedrich to study in Halle. For:

Friedrich's father, the pastor, had himself long been a rationalist, and indeed was a freemason stamped by the Enlightenment. Moreover in a letter to his son he explicitly confessed that ‘for at least twelve years’ he had ‘preached as a real unbeliever’.⁴

Moreover they were also rationalists at the University of Halle, founded barely a century beforehand in the pietistic spirit of August Hermann Franke: it was now a bastion of the Enlightenment. The leading German Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff had worked here and established numerous schools. Moreover the theological faculty had become open to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Its leading figure was Johann Salomo Semler (died 1791), who in his treatise on the free investigation of the canon had founded the historical-critical exegesis of the Bible in Germany and thus introduced a shift from the old orthodox theology to enlightened ‘neology’, to ‘new teaching’.

So it seemed most likely that Friedrich Schleiermacher would also become a rationalist. For at the age of nineteen he now—we are still talking of 1787—moved to this University of Halle, there to spend the next two years studying theology. He lived in the home of his uncle on his mother's side, Samuel Ernst Timotheus Stubenrauch, an enlightened Reformed theologian who became almost a second father to him. Indeed in his four semesters in Halle (until 1789) Schleiermacher studied not so much theology—he even had a pronounced antipathy to dogmatics—as philosophy, under Wolff's pupil Johann August Eberhard.

Schleiermacher the student wanted to create for himself the philosophical foundations for his own view of the world. And to this end he steeped himself in the Greek classics, above all Plato, and wrote his first academic work on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. To this end he steeped himself further in the main works of Immanuel Kant, which had been appearing in rapid succession since 1781; he also devoted most of his early, almost exclusively philosophical, works to Kant. No wonder that all this reinforced his scepticism towards traditional Lutheran orthodox dogmatics. Indeed, reading Kant would shape him for life; in his epistemology Schleiermacher remained a Kantian all his days. For him, too, pure reason has no competence outside the horizon of human experience.

And yet, specifically in matters of ethics and religion, Schleiermacher would not follow Kant. Kant's moral proofs for God and immortality seemed to him to have too little foundation, despite everything. How could God be the regulative principle of our knowledge if he is not at the same time the constitutive principle of our being? Schleiermacher remained convinced that in the world of thoroughgoing natural laws there is a last mystery which human beings have to respect. Here may be the deepest reason why Friedrich Schleiermacher, the passionate philosopher, in the last resort remained a theologian. Although he kept his love of philosophy to the end of his life, although he initiated modern Plato scholarship (in his obituary he was called a ‘Christian Plato’) with a translation of Plato's works (with introductions to all the Dialogues), and although, like Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin, he became a tutor after his studies (for more than six years, first at the castle of Count Dohna in East Prussia, from where he also visited Kant in his old age), Schleiermacher did not become a professional philosopher—unlike the Tübingen theologians Schelling and Hegel. Moreover Schleiermacher ended his theological study with the two ordination examinations (getting good to excellent marks in everything but the dogmatics which he hated) and finally became a preacher in the remote little town of Landsberg. Here he preached regularly in the spirit of the Christian Enlightenment, commending a reasonable faith, incessant moral striving and Jesus as the model of a right way of life; in addition he had already translated several volumes of English sermons. And a preacher he was to remain, indefatigable and loyal to his life's end.

However, in 1796 there was a decisive new move in Schleiermacher's life. He received a post in Berlin. At the age of twenty-eight he now became Reformed preacher at the great German hospital, the Charité, where he was to spend the next six years (until 1802). These were to be decisive, formative years, which were to give Schleiermacher the characteristics which distinguished him later. He had bidden farewell to both pietism and rationalism and yet had retained the legacy of both. As he once put it later, after all he had ‘again become a Herrnhuter’, but now ‘of a higher order’.⁵ Indeed during this Berlin period Friedrich Schleiermacher, this physically rather small, neat and slightly deformed man, but with great liveliness and agility, became the modern theologian, a man in whom piety and modernity were combined in an exemplary way.

2. A MODERN MAN

Schleiermacher's post as hospital chaplain in Berlin, where he had to preach to simple people, left him time to himself. He made use of this time. The man who hitherto had argued with modernity only in silence and solitude (conversations above all with philosophical books) now entered the social life of a modern city. He moved in the salons of educated Berlin society, where people talked about poetry and art, history, science and politics. It was an exciting time, still deeply marked by the French Revolution, though a counterpoint was already emerging. How much had changed in culture and society, in the sciences and in everyday life, as a result of the philosophical and literary Enlightenment and the political upheavals! Were not important corrections also due in the sphere of theology? Schleiermacher followed everything with a lively mind—without ecclesiastical blinkers and moralistic Christian prejudices.

A new period in church history did not begin with Schleiermacher, as was said in a communication to the students after his death, but it did come to theological maturity in him. Here the theological paradigm shift from the Reformation to modernity virtually takes on bodily form: Schleiermacher no longer lived like Martin Luther (and Melanchthon), still largely in a pre-Copernican mind-set, in a mediaeval world of angels and devils, demons and witches, borne along by a basically pessimistic and apocalyptic attitude, intolerant of other confessions and religions. It would never have occurred to him to have someone burned for having problems with a dogma of the early church, as Calvin did with the anti-trinitarian Servetus. Nor did he have difficulties with modern science, with Copernicus and Galileo, as did the Roman popes imprisoned in the mediaeval paradigm; in the nineteenth century the writings of the modern scientists remained on the Index of books forbidden to Catholics alongside the Reformers and modern philosophy (from Descartes to Kant). No, Schleiermacher, who even as a professor still went to lectures on science, remained convinced by Kant all his life that there is a thoroughgoing regularity in nature, which allows no ‘supernatural’ exceptions. A supernaturalism in theology? That was not Schleiermacher's affair.

So in Schleiermacher we meet a theologian who is a modern man through and through. That means:

He knows and affirms the modern philosophy with which he had grown up and which had reached its challenging heights with Kant, Fichte and Hegel; as a classical philologist he had also gained the respect of classical scholars by his masterly translation of Plato.

He affirmed historical criticism and himself applied it to the foundation documents of the biblical revelation; in the great dispute over the fragments of Reimarus he would have certainly been on Lessing's side against Goeze, the chief pastor of Hamburg; at any rate, later he inaugurated historical criticism of the Pastoral Epistles with a critical study of I Timothy, which he said could not come from the apostle Paul; later he attributed the writings of Luke to the community life of earliest Christianity and its oral tradition; he demonstrated the presence of a collection of sayings in the Gospel of Matthew; the writings of the New Testament were to be treated like any others; his hermeneutics (introduction to the understanding of texts) became a basic work for theological, philosophical and literary interpretations.

He affirmed and loved modern literature, art and social life above all. He himself played an active part here through his close links with the Berlin Romantic circles which were striving to get beyond the Enlightenment, above all with their leader, the twenty-five-year-old Friedrich Schlegel, who lived with him for almost two years, and Henriette Herz, the beautiful and witty thirty-two-year-old wife of Marcus Herz, the highly respected Jewish doctor who had been a pupil of Kant; he visited their salon almost every day, where the spirit of Goethe and Romanticism replaced that of the Enlightenment. So he was a theologian in the closest contact with writers, poets, philosophers, artists and political enthusiasts of every kind. That is how we are to imagine the young Friedrich Schleiermacher. Only now does his thought and writing achieve a broad horizon and finally succeed in combining the Romantic religion of feeling with scientific culture.

3. BELIEF IN A NEW AGE

So it is not surprising that Schleiermacher also had works published in the key journal of early Romanticism, the Athenaeum, edited by the Schlegel brothers. In addition to other anonymous fragments, he wrote, for example, the ‘Idea for a Rational Catechism for Noble Ladies.’⁶ The first commandment? It runs: ‘You shall have no lover but him; but you shall be able to be a friend without playing and flirting or adoring in the colours of love.’ Or the seventh to tenth commandments? They run: ‘You shall not enter into any marriage which would have to be broken. You shall not want to be loved where you do not love. You shall not bear false witness for men; you shall not beautify their barbarity with your words and works. Let yourself long for men's education, art, wisdom and honour.’ He was truly a theologian who simply in his attitude to women and their emancipation is far removed from the mediaeval and the Reformation paradigm, from their paternalism and sexism, and who not least had a living experience through women of the ethos of a spiritualized, interiorized Christianity.

However, the fact must not be concealed that in Berlin Schleiermacher finally fell passionately in love with Eleonore Grunow, the deeply religious wife of a Berlin pastor. Her marriage was an unhappy one, but although she loved Schleiermacher in return, she would not leave her husband even when in 1802, well advised by the anxious church authorities, Schleiermacher went into ‘exile’ in the small Pomeranian town of Stolp, a community of about 250 Reformed Christians. There he hoped that he would be able to marry Eleonore inconspicuously—to no avail, as the next three years were to prove. In his unhappiness Schleiermacher kept his sanity by translating Plato and producing the outlines of a critique of moral theory to his day (that of Kant and Fichte). Five years later, at the age of forty-one, he was then to marry Henriette von Willich, the twenty-year-old widow of a pastor friend who had died early. She was certainly a good housewife, but a less good partner (as she later fell completely under the influence of a clairvoyante and a revivalist preacher). Schleiermacher later revoked his seventh rational commandment for noble ladies, which could be understood as an invitation to divorce, in a sermon on the Christian household.

That Schleiermacher was also anything but conventional in his thinking about children—he himself had three daughters and a highly-gifted son who to his abiding sorrow died at the early age of nine—is shown in the same context by his fifth commandment: ‘Honour the idiosyncracies and whims of your children, that all may go well with them and they may live a mighty life on earth.’ Moreover Schleiermacher was to become a pioneer of modern education. Through his planning and organization he later not only left his stamp on Prussian schools but was also a co-founder of Berlin University and a decisive figure in establishing the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He was truly a theologian who in an astonishing way quite naturally took a place at the centre of modern life and played an active part in shaping it.

What did Schleiermacher believe in this new time? The spiritual foundation of all his activities was a new extended ideal of humanity. And he once formulated his ‘faith’ like this:

1. ‘1. I believe in infinite humanity which was there before it took the guise of masculinity and femininity.
2. I believe that I am not alive to be obedient or to dissipate myself, but to be and to become; and I believe in the power of the will and education, again to approach the infinite, to redeem me from the fetters of miseducation and to make me independent of the limitations of gender.
3. I believe in enthusiasm and virtue, in the worth of art and the attraction of science, in friendship among men and love of the Fatherland, in past greatness and future nobility.’⁷

Belief in infinite humanity, in the power of the will and education, in enthusiasm and virtue: should we make all this grounds for censuring Schleiermacher, as Karl Barth did? Should he be criticized for feeling responsible for the intellectual and moral foundations of society? For being concerned for the elevation, development and ennobling of individual and social life? For not only being interested in culture but also being increasingly involved in it—as preacher, writer, teacher, researcher and organizer? Indeed, for virtually embodying this modern culture as a man with a thorough intellectual and moral education? Indeed, we might ask back: how else should Schleiermacher have done theology in the Berlin of his time? On the basis of other, pre-modern presuppositions, as they had been worked out by philosophy, history and science in his time? Should he have remained, like others, in the mediaeval or Reformation paradigm instead of resolutely doing theology in the new modern paradigm, in his quite decisive concern for culture and therefore for education? But here a fundamental question arose for many of his contemporaries.

4. CAN ONE BE MODERN AND RELIGIOUS?

The young Schleiermacher primarily had contact with the educated among his contemporaries. And when on the occasion of his twenty-ninth birthday he was asked by those celebrating it to write a book by his thirtieth birthday (on the topic of how religion could be expressed in a new way today), he took up the challenge and in fact expressly addressed only the educated classes (he thought that one should preach to the uneducated). Of course Schleiermacher was well aware of how ambivalent the picture of religion was, particularly among these educated people, how it wavered between affirmation and rejection, assent and mockery, admiration and contempt. So while he addressed his book to the educated, he explicitly addressed it above all to the educated among the despisers of religion, who were at least to know what they either despised, or did not know properly because of their prejudices. Thus came into being his famous first work, On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured Despisers⁸ which appeared in 1799, when Schleiermacher was in his thirty-first year.

There is no doubt that all was not well with religion and theology at this time. Moreover, in these years some of Schleiermacher's most famous contemporaries—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin—had moved from theology into philosophy (or poetry). Certainly they had not given up ‘religion’ completely, and had incorporated it into their speculative metaphysical system—as philosophical thinkers who certainly cannot be said to have denied religion completely (above all not the ‘piety of thought’ claimed by Hegel); however, they themselves lived and thought on the basis of genuinely philosophical roots. Many of Schleiermacher's new friends showed only an incomprehension of religion.

It needed someone of the stature of Schleiermacher to adopt a counter-position here that was worth taking seriously. Moreover, generally speaking there was no one on the church theological scene who in these stormy times between revolution and restoration, Enlightenment and Romanticism, could ask the question ‘What about religion?’ as urgently, credibly and effectively in public as he could.

So this was Schleiermacher's concern on the threshold of a new century: a bold and original attempt to recall to religion, after the Enlightenment, a generation which was weary of religion and to which religion was alien and ‘to reweave religion, threatened with oblivion, into the incomparably rich fabric of the burgeoning intellectual life of modern times’.⁹ Or were only poetry and literature, holy philosophy and the sciences and the humanities, to determine the hopeful century that was dawning? Had not the poets and seers, the artists and orators, already always been mediators of the eternal and the most high, ‘virtuosi of religion’? Was a ‘sense of the holy’ to be the mark only of ordinary people, and not also of the educated? No, the topic of religion was a live one, because it was raised by the whole human disposition and was therefore undeniable. But everything depends on what one understands by ‘religion’.

5. WHAT IS RELIGION?

Religion is not science, nor does it seek ‘like metaphysics to determine and explain the nature of the universe’. Nor is religion morality, nor action: having an influence on the universe by moral action, ‘to advance and perfect the Universe by the power of freedom and the divine will of man’.¹⁰ Not that religion has nothing to do with understanding and morality. What ‘religion’ is about is something independent, original, underivable, immediate.

The peculiar feature of religion is a mysterious experience; it is being moved by the world of the eternal. So religion is about the heavenly sparks which are struck when a holy soul is touched by the infinite, a religious experience to which the ‘virtuosi of religion’ give direct expression in their speeches and utterances and which is communicated by them also to ordinary people. To be more precise, religion seeks to experience the universe, the totality of what is and what happens, meditatively in immediate seeing and feeling (these categories come from Fichte): ‘It is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It will regard the Universe as it is. It is reverent attention and submission, in childlike passivity, to be stirred and filled by the Universe's immediate influences.’¹¹

One can also say that religion is a religion of the heart: in it human beings are encountered, grasped, filled and moved in their innermost depths and their totality—by the infinite which is active in all that is finite. No, religion is neither praxis nor speculation, neither art nor science, but a ‘sense and taste for the infinite’.¹² This living relationship to the eternal, the infinite, represents the original state of each individual ‘I’, but this must be aroused. Religious experiences are countless, and patience is called for. So in the religious consciousness the two limits, individuality and the universe, make contact. From a historical perspective this means that religion is:

• —no longer as in the Middle Ages or even the Reformation a departure, transition into something beyond the world, supernatural;
• —nor as in Deism and in the Enlightenment a departure into something behind the world, metaphysical;
• —rather, in a modern understanding, it is the intimating, the seeing, the feeling, the indwelling of the infinite in the finite. The infinite in the finite or God as the eternal absolute being that conditions all things—this, we can say, is the modern understanding of God and not (as Schleiermacher adds in the second edition at the end of the excursuses on the idea of God) ‘the usual conception of God as one single being outside of the world and behind the world’.¹³ Like Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, Schleiermacher with philosophical strictness rejects any anthropomorphizing of God. God in the modern understanding is the immanent-transcendent primal ground of all being, knowledge and will.

This feeling is not to be understood in a restricted psychological sense as Romantic enthusiastic emotion, but in a comprehensive, existential way: as human beings being encountered at the centre, as immediate religious self-awareness (Ebeling compares this function with that of the conscience in Luther). Schleiermacher will later himself make this notion more precise, will withdraw the term ‘contemplation’ of the universe, which is open to misunderstanding (with the senses or spiritually?), in favour of the term ‘feeling’ and, as we shall see, speak more precisely in his The Christian Faith of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence.

6. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘POSITIVE RELIGION’

Now if religion is the feeling of ‘absolute dependence’, then is not a dog the best Christian?¹⁴—thus one of the most malicious bon mots about Schleiermacher's thought, made by Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, from 1818 his Berlin colleague in philosophy as successor to Fichte? No, witty and spiteful as this bon mot is (Schleiermacher ignored Hegel's polemic), it does not get to Schleiermacher's position. It is unjust, because it ignores not only the total, spiritual nature of ‘feeling’ but above all Schleiermacher's understanding of God with its emphasis on Christian freedom as compared with any religious servitude. So in ‘feeling’ before their God Christians are not as ‘dependent’ as dogs on their master.

No, on the contrary Schleiermacher is concerned with the inner freedom of the moral person—the source of eternal youth and joy—moreover freedom is also a key word in the Monologues, the second major work which Schleiermacher published after the Speeches (as a New Year's gift at the beginning of 1800) and in which he attempted to describe his religious view of life and the world in the form of a ‘lyrical extract from a permanent diary’.¹⁵ And in complete contrast to Hegel, already in the Speeches Schleiermacher is decidedly against the state church. For him, as a Reformed Christian, this is the source of all corruption. He called passionately for the separation of church and state following the French model, and in his fourth Speech on Religion virtually developed the programme for a radical reform of the church in which the parish communities would be replaced by personal communities (of the kind that he was later to have himself).

Anyone who thinks that in his Speeches Schleiermacher is simply practising ‘natural theology’ (something abhorred by many since Karl Barth) should note that he makes it emphatically clear over against the whole theology of the Enlightenment that for him there is no such thing as ‘natural religion’. This would in fact be a rational matter with a moral orientation, so that everything going beyond such a religion of reason would have to be rejected as ‘superstition’. No, for Schleiermacher such a natural religion or rational religion was an artificial product of philosophical reflection without that life and immediacy which characterize an authentic religion. So from the beginning, part of Schleiermacher's concern is that religion can be understood rightly only if it is not simply considered ‘in general’ but in the individual, living, concrete, ‘positive’ religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.).

So the Speeches end in a reflection on the ‘positive’ element in the religions. The basic notion is this. There is no ‘Infinite’ in itself, in pure abstraction. The infinite can always be grasped only in the finite: it empties and manifests itself in an infinite variety of forms. The view of the universe is always an individual one, and none of these countless views can be excluded in principle. So ‘religion’ must individualize itself in different religions. As a result, anyone who wants to understand ‘religion’ must understand the different religions. The individual religions may have lost their original lives and be identified with particular formulae, slogans and convictions; in the course of their long history they may have been distorted and deformed; nevertheless, they are authentic and pure individualizations of ‘religion’ if and to the extent that they make possible an experience of the infinite in the human subject, to the extent that they make a particular view of the infinite their central point, their central view, to which everything in this religion is related.

Thus in his Speeches Schleiermacher took great pains not only generally to disperse all the prejudices of his modern contemporaries about religion, but also to make them open to the positive element in religions, the positive element (‘the given’) in all religions. However, here we should note that in Schleiermacher the individual religions by no means all stand on the same level: Schleiermacher takes it for granted that what religion is has individualized itself most in Christianity. Christianity is thus relatively the best of all religions in human history. Christianity need not fear comparison with other religions.

Here we can only regret that Schleiermacher did not have more precise knowledge of the non-Christian religions (apart from Greek religion). Though with his stress on religious experience he had also brought out an important aspect of ‘religion’, in later years he never had so broad a knowledge of the history of religion as, say, his later Berlin colleague and rival Hegel. Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of religion treated the religions of humankind in a quite concrete way: as the great historical forms of the absolute Spirit revealing itself in the human spirit—beginning with the nature religions (the deity as a natural force and substance) in Africa, China, India, Persia and Egypt through Judaism, Greek and Roman religion, the religions of spiritual individuality, to Christianity, which, as the highest form of religion, includes in itself all its previous forms.¹⁶

And yet there is no denying that no theologian was to give such a boost to the future history, phenomenology and psychology of religion; no theologian worked it out intellectually to such a degree as Schleiermacher. If there is so much talk of experience in religious studies and theology, this is essentially because of him. If religion is no longer understood as mere private religion but in communal terms, this again is largely due to Schleiermacher. If Christianity can be understood as the best and supreme individualization of religion and so can be included in the comparison of religions, this too finds its legitimation, at least in principle, in Schleiermacher.

7. THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

For Schleiermacher, the easiest way of finding access to the spirit of religions is to have one oneself. And this is certainly particularly important for the one who ‘approaches the holiest in which the Universe in its highest unity and comprehensiveness is to be perceived’:¹⁷ Christianity. Nor can it be disputed, despite all criticism, that Schleiermacher made an essential contribution towards providing a constructive answer to the question of the essence of Christianity, which had been posed by the Enlightenment. His view is that the essence of every religion must be seen in a ‘basic vision’, its ‘vision of the infinite’.¹⁸

So what is the central vision, the original being, the spirit of Christianity, which can be defined despite all the historical distortions, despite all disputes over words and despite all the bloody holy wars? Schleiermacher sees the relationship between the finite and the infinite in Christianity as differing from that in Judaism. It is not determined by the idea of retribution, but as a relationship of corruption and redemption, hostility and mediation. Christianity is polemic through and through, to the degree that it recognizes the universal corruption and proceeds against the irreligion outside and inside itself. However, Christianity has the aim of pressing through to an ever-greater holiness, purity and relationship to God: everything finite is to be related everywhere and at all times to the infinite.

So Christianity represents religion in a higher potency, even if as a universal religion it should not exclude any other religion and any new religion. It does not have its origin in Judaism, but underivably and inexplicably in the one emissary on whom first dawned the basic idea of universal corruption and redemption through higher mediation. What does Schleiermacher admire in Jesus Christ? Not simply the purity of his moral doctrine and the distinctiveness of his character, which combines power and gentleness; these are human features. The ‘truly divine’ in Christ is the ‘glorious clearness to which the great idea he came to exhibit attained in his soul. This idea was, that all that is finite requires a higher mediation to be in accord with the Deity.’¹⁹ What does this ‘higher mediation’ mean?

All that is finite needs the mediation of something higher for its redemption, and this ‘cannot be purely finite. It must belong to both sides, participating in the Divine Essence in the same way and in the same sense in which it participates in human nature.’²⁰ Therefore he is not the only mediator but the unique mediator, of whom it is rightly said, ‘No one knows the Father but the Son and the one to whom he wills to reveal it’: ‘This consciousness of the singularity of his religion, of the originality of his view, and of its power to communicate itself and to awake religion, was at once the consciousness of his office as mediator and of his divinity.’²¹ It is beyond question that such a formulation of the significance of Jesus Christ even at that time made more than the orthodox frown.

8. A MODERN FAITH

From the beginning, Schleiermacher's christology of consciousness was sharply attacked: does not the revelation of God here become a mode of human knowing and feeling? Does not belief in Christ become an illuminating universal human possibility? Does Jesus Christ here still remain an objective historical entity which is distinct from pious feeling? Or is christology dissolved into psychology, a universal christological psychology instead of a concrete historical christology? And in all this is not the deity of Christ ultimately left out of account?

After the Speeches and Monologues, Schleiermacher clarified his christological position in a poetical-theological work, Christmas Eve²², composed as a ‘conversation’, which appeared in 1805. A year previously Schleiermacher had been rescued from his exile in Stolpe by a call to the University of Halle as extraordinarius Professor of Reformed Theology and University Preacher. In his ‘conversation’, which is set at a family Christmas celebration with music, songs and food, in imitation of Plato's ‘Dialogues’, various conversation-partners, all of whom he presents sympathetically with inner understanding, show how differently they understand the experience of Christmas and the person of Christ. Even now there is discussion as to which conversation-partner Schleiermacher identifies himself with, if he identifies himself with any of them. So we shall have to wait for Schleiermacher's ‘Dogmatics’ to get a clear answer to the question of his christology.

However, in the following years there was not much time to clarify his christology. In 1806 Napoleon inflicted a lightning defeat on the Prussians at Jena, also occupied Halle and closed the university. Schleiermacher, originally enthused by the French Revolution, changed under the pressure of events from being a Romantic cosmopolitan to being a Christian Prussian patriot; now he worked with the leaders of Prussian reform (above all with Freiherr vom Stein on a new constitution for the Prussian church), went off on secret missions, recruited volunteers, and in all this hoped for a fundamental change in political conditions under the leadership of Prussia—but in vain, as was soon to prove. However, the combination of Christianity and patriotism which he expressed even in sermons was not to benefit German Protestantism.

When Halle was attached to the kingdom of Westphalia which was founded by Napoleon, in 1807 Schleiermacher moved to Berlin, where he first gave private lectures on history and philosophy for a pittance, continued his lectures for educated people, went on working for the Patriotic Party, was active as a journalist, and took part in the discussions on the refounding of the University of Berlin (the model for German university reform in the nineteenth century): in his view, in its constitution it should be marked by autonomy, freedom of spirit and independence from the state.²³ Then in quick succession followed the honorary appointments which mark out the framework of his Berlin activity: in 1809 preacher at Trinity Church and marriage; 1810 professor at the university; 1811 a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Several times in the next years he was dean of the theological faculty: at that time he wrote his Brief Outline of Theological Study in the Form of Introductory Lectures (1811).²⁴ From 1810 to 1814 he worked as a member of the Education Commission in the Ministry of the Interior on the reform of Prussian schools. But in the restoration he was suspected by the reactionaries as being a revolutionary, and in 1814 he was dismissed because he argued for a constitutional state.

Schleiermacher's lectures in Halle and Berlin had now been sufficient preparation for him to write his theological magnum opus, which was to become the most significant Dogmatics of modern times. However, he deliberately avoided the word ‘dogmatics’, and instead of this chose the title The Christian Faith—but now with the significant addition ‘described consecutively in accordance with the Principles of the Protestant Church’.²⁵ It is a systematic theology with an artistic structure, which for its ingenious uniqueness and otherness can certainly be set alongside the Summa of Thomas Aquinas and Calvin's Institutes. It sought to be believing and pious, critical and rational, all at once—in its own way.

Schleiermacher's modern doctrine of faith thus differs both from mediaeval Summas and from any orthodox Reformation dogmatics which thinks of faith primarily as holding particular objective facts of revelation or truths of faith to be true.

By contrast, Schleiermacher's work:

• —has a strictly historical construction: for it, dogmatic theology
• —and this is said against both biblicism and rationalism—is not the science of an (allegedly) timeless, unchanged Christian doctrine, but is ‘the science which systematizes the doctrine prevalent in a Christian church at any one time’ (§19);
• —has an ecumenical form: the reference to a ‘church’ does not of course mean the authority of a magisterium but the confessional writings of the churches and their prime document, Holy Scripture. Here Schleiermacher did not think that the controversies between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine (unlike the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism) split the church; Schleiermacher argued more than anyone else for the Lutheran-Reformed Union, introduced in Prussia at the Feast of the Reformation in 1817 with joint eucharistic celebrations; he understood his Christian Faith as a dogmatics of union;
• —is related to experience: as was his wont, Schleiermacher begins from religious experience, the disposition or consciousness of Christians, the piety of the church community, in short from pious human consciousness (which, however, is collective and communal). The dogmatic statements in scripture and tradition certainly cannot be proved, but Schleiermacher can rightly claim to stand in the Christian tradition. For he explicitly does theology from the community of faith, from the church; not, though, to prove its faith but to make its innermost essence understandable in a critical and constructive way. So both the sayings of Anselm on the title page of his The Christian Faith are not just decoration from the tradition but express a consciousness of the tradition: ‘I do not attempt to know in order to believe, but I believe in order to know. For anyone who does not believe will not experience, and anyone who does not experience will not know.’²⁶

But what is the essence of Christianity according to Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith? The famous definition runs: ‘Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion, and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth’ (§11).

If we are to understand this definition of essence, which while simple is not all that easy to understand, we must remember four things:

• —In the three stages of religious development presupposed by Schleiermacher, fetishism—polytheism—monotheism (universally advocated in the Enlightenment)—Christianity stands at the uppermost level, not only as an ‘aesthetic’ religion (a religion of nature or destiny), but as a religion which corresponds to human nature in a ‘teleological’ way—i.e. is determined by a goal and thus is an ethical, active religion.
• —The ‘distinctive’ feature of Christianity, which sets it apart from all other religions, does not lie in its natural rational character but in its redemptive character: for everything is governed by the basic opposition of sin and grace and precisely in this way related to the ‘mediator’ Jesus of Nazareth.
• —Its christocentricity is emphasized by the prominent position of christology already in the ‘Introduction’: in Schleiermacher, christological statements stand at the point where in orthodox dogmatics there was a discussion of Holy Scripture. The central position of the person of Jesus Christ in Christianity is indispensable for Schleiermacher!

The fundamental methodological starting-point in the consciousness of faith is maintained: Schleiermacher does not begin from the objective story of Jesus of Nazareth, but from our pious Christian ‘consciousness’, the consciousness of the church community, of redemption through the person of Jesus Christ.

That brings us back to the question which we had to raise in connection with Christmas Eve: is the pious consciousness of the person of Jesus Christ related to a particular, concrete reality which thus is defined and definable, or is this particular figure included in a universal essence and meaning of history, and thus levelled down?

9. CHRIST—TRULY HUMAN

One difficulty about Schleiermacher's consciousness-christology was that the pious consciousness always only circles around itself, that it does not have any real object. This difficulty seems to me to be answered in The Christian Faith: Schleiermacher's christology is without doubt not just a postulate of the pious consciousness, is not the complex imagination of subjective faith. For we cannot overlook the fact that:

Christian consciousness, Christianity generally, is inconceivable without the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth as its historical origin.

So at the centre of Christianity stands not a general notion or a moral doctrine, but a historical figure and his redemptive effect on human beings and history after him. The christocentricity of The Christian Faith (and the picture of Christ in Schleiermacher's sermons) is thus not the result of Schleiermacher's speculation, but a consequence of the history of Jesus Christ himself and what followed from it.

In Schleiermacher the historical figure does not remain an abstract ‘saving event’; rather his history can be narrated. Moreover it is no coincidence that Schleiermacher wrote a Life of Jesus, which depicts Jesus of Nazareth with his unshakeable consciousness of God and his concern for suffering human beings. Certainly it is idealistic, all too orientated on the Gospel of John and the Greek ideal of ‘noble simplicity and silent greatness’, but nevertheless it is in no way simply in conformity with the ideals of the bourgeois society of Schleiermacher's time.²⁷ At the same time, by taking up the criticism of the Enlightenment, but applying it in accordance with religious and not purely rational criteria, in his The Christian Faith Schleiermacher carried out a large-scale demythologizing: not only of the Old Testament narratives of an original existence of the first human couple in paradise, a primal fall and original sin, angels and devils, miracles and prophecies, but also a demythologizing of the New Testament narratives of Jesus' virgin birth, nature miracles, resurrection, ascension, and the prophecy of his return.

So there is no doubt that Schleiermacher holds firm to the vere homo, the ‘truly man’, of the classical christological confession of the Council of Chalcedon (451). But what about the vere Deus, the truly God, who is said to be there in Jesus?

10. CHRIST—ALSO TRULY GOD?

Schleiermacher, too, did not want to go back to heretical solutions in christology. Moreover for his conception he distinguished his approach a priori: not only from docetism (towards which supernaturalism was now tending) on the right, which can see only a phantom existence in Jesus' human nature, but also from Nazoraeism (Ebionitism, to which rationalism now came close) which reduces the existence of the redeemer to the level of ordinary humanity.²⁸ Particularly in christology, Schleiermacher is a ‘Herrnhuter of a higher order’ when he attempts to transcend these oppositions.

It was a difficult task—why? Because the classical christological formula ‘Jesus Christ is one (divine) person in two natures (one divine and one human)’ had come under sharp criticism above all from the ‘neologians’ in the process of the Enlightenment. Jesus of Nazareth now appeared to many people as nothing but an ordinary man, as a more or less revolutionary Jewish improver of doctrine and the law, who to others could seem a teacher and model of moral and religious perfection. But that was too little for Schleiermacher; for him it was a quite ‘meagre’ ‘empirical’ view of redemption! And the alternative?

Was one, like the supernaturalists, to put forward what in fact was a ‘magical’ conception of redemption in which the punishment for human sin was as it were magicked away by the miraculous act of a satisfaction and a sacrifice of the Son of God, and Jesus was understood simply as the heavenly high priest mediating grace? There could be no question of that either. But what then? How was redemption to be interpreted meaningfully through Christ? And then above all: how was the relationship of Jesus of Nazareth to God to be described? In Schleiermacher's view the whole of Christianity stands and falls with the answer to this question.

Faithful to his starting point, here too Schleiermacher begins with the pious Christian consciousness—a ‘mystical’ view only in an inauthentic sense. What takes place there? Answer: in their consciousnesses, Christians can experience:

• —that they are utterly dependent on the world-historical impulse which Jesus produced: Jesus is both the historical starting point and the abiding source of a new relationship with God;
• —that the power of Jesus (which influences all movements of spirit, will and disposition) mediates consciousness of God in a redemptive and reconciling way;
• —that in this way a new kind of personal life, indeed historical ‘total life’, has entered history, which is not in the grip of the consciousness of sin but—under the emanation of Christ's consciousness of God—produces a consciousness of grace.

Despite all the demythologizing, the difference between Schleiermacher's christology and the Jesuology of the Enlightened rationalists is clear. According to Schleiermacher, it follows from an analysis of the pious Christian consciousness,

• —that Christ is the active one and human beings are recipients: it is Christ who overcomes the power of sin through his grace;
• —that Christ makes possible a living community with human beings and a new higher life in humankind;
• —that what is decisive for this is not individual features (which are possibly dubious), but the overall impact of his ongoing personality;
• —that this historical personality bears in itself a primal perfection, so that it is not only a model which human beings are to imitate but a primal image of the consciousness of God, which grasps and forms human beings.

So who was this Jesus Christ in his uttermost depths? The old Herrnhuter struggled passionately for the answer to this question. For a long time he had worked on new answers to old questions which were deeply religious and at the same time clear and simple. Now—in The Christian Faith—he can reply: Christ is for all human beings the same! To what extent? ‘In virtue of the identity of human nature.’ Christ is different from all human beings! To what extent? ‘By the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in him.’²⁹

A veritable existence of God in Christ? Schleiermacher leaves no doubt: whereas other people have only a general religious disposition and an ‘imperfect and obscure’ God-consciousness, Jesus's God-consciousness was ‘absolutely clear and determined each moment, to the exclusion of all else’.³⁰ This can be regarded ‘as a continual living presence, and withal a real existence of God in him’, in which at the same time his ‘utter sinlessness’ is given—and, as a presupposition of this, his innocence from the beginning.³¹ That means that in Christ ‘the being of God’ is there unbroken ‘as the innermost fundamental power within him from which every activity emanates and which holds every element together’³² (to use an illustration: just as the intelligence as the basic force in human beings orders and holds together all other forces). The eternal infinite is present in Jesus' consciousness with its unconditioned power and force without annihilating it; rather, it controls this consciousness and shapes the whole of Jesus' life so that he becomes an instrument, model and primal image. And this is decisive, for without a divine dignity in the redeemer there can be no redemption, and vice versa. So the new communion of life with Christ, the beginning of new life and the renewal of the disposition which is constantly necessary, is made possible—a process which takes part utterly in grace: that is the particular concern of Schleiermacher the theologian and above all the preacher.

So has the christological question been answered in Schleiermacher? Vere Deus? Truly God? Yes, Jesus is formed by the divine primal ground in a way unlike any other. Certainly, God is present everywhere in the finite as the one who is active, but in Christ the God-consciousness is the principle which shapes the personality. His God-consciousness must be understood as a pure and authentic revelation, indeed as the true and authentic indwelling of the being of Christ in the finite. This is no supernatural miracle, and yet it is something quite unique and miraculous in this world dominated by sin. Here the believer does not postulate God's being, but becomes one with the divine which has a living influence on history with Christ—Schleiermacher's great concern since the Speeches.

Was all this ‘orthodox’? Schleiermacher specifically states that with this interpretation of the divinity of Christ he is departing from ‘that language of the Schools as used hitherto’³³ (the doctrine of the two natures). He was all the more aware of doing this since, having given lectures on almost all the writings of the New Testament, he believed that his view could be grounded in the Bible; it was grounded ‘in the Pauline God was in Christ and on the Johannine the Word became flesh’³⁴! So Schleiermacher understood his own Christianity ‘not as an imitation of an ethical ideal, which was the approach of the Enlightenment theology of the time, nor as an obedient acceptance of incomprehensible dogmatic doctrinal statements, but as a completely inward determination by the historical Jesus and the God present in him’.³⁵

But is Schleiermacher on the other hand a ‘pluralist’? Schleiermacher would turn against any pluralist theology of religion which simply establishes different ‘saviours’ in the world and in so doing thinks that it has solved the problem of the religions' claim to truth. He was convinced that Christ ‘exclusively’ has the ‘being of God’, so that only in connection with him can it be said that ‘God has become man’.³⁶ ‘The Word became flesh’ is for Schleiermacher ‘the basic text of the whole of dogmatics’.³⁷

11. CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Of course from a present-day perspective dogmatic theologians can ask whether in his christological statements Schleiermacher reached the ‘heights’ of the christological councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. But Schleiermacher would reply that he regarded these conciliar christological statements—in the perspective of the New Testament and the present—as superseded, as ‘transcended’. Is not Jesus of Nazareth an authentic human person? Instead of being from eternity a second divine person who entered into human existence? Instead of a truly human person with a human will, are there then to be two natures and two wills and contradictory theories about the divine and the human in Christ? And on top of that, three persons in one divine nature? Is all this biblical, original? Is it all comprehensible and acceptable to modern men and women? There was good reason why in his The Christian Faith Schleiermacher put forward the programmatic thesis: ‘The ecclesiastical formulae about the person of Christ need an ongoing critical treatment.’³⁸ Moreover in an unparalleled piece of theological thinking he developed a modern christology not only beyond the two-natures doctrine of the early church, which was obviously time-conditioned, but also beyond the meagre Jesuology of the Enlightenment.

Of course Schleiermacher's doctrine also needs ‘ongoing critical treatment’—as he himself would certainly agree. And this ‘ongoing critical treatment’—soon two centuries will have passed since Schleiermacher's epoch-making achievement—will have much to criticize. For me, the most important questions to ask, especially about the christology which was also central for Schleiermacher, are these:

First, in Schleiermacher's consciousness theology there is certainly room for telling the story of Jesus; after all, he himself gave lectures on the life of Jesus. To this degree he is open to a ‘narrative theology’³⁹ (of the kind which today is simply called for in slogans). Nevertheless, there is a danger in Schleiermacher's approach and the subordinate role of the Bible in his The Christian Faith that our own experience of redemption will control the telling of the story of Jesus all too much, instead of constantly not only being newly inspired by the story of Jesus, but also being radically criticized and corrected by it. After all, the Christ of Christians is the abiding criterion and constant corrective of Christianity.

Secondly, the modern starting point of the human subject, from the consciousness of the community of faith, is to be affirmed in principle, even if one can find fault with Schleiermacher's definition of religion (‘the feeling of absolute dependence’) as an over-extension of the results of his analysis of the consciousness. But there is a danger which needs to be taken more seriously that as a result of Schleiermacher's generally philosophical and theological remarks about religion and the definition of the essence of Christianity in his ‘Introduction’ a prior decision has been taken as to ‘what content is left for christology if it is to be different from anthropology’.⁴⁰

Thirdly, Schleiermacher's idealistic interpretation of reality and harmonious basic mood hardly take the real experiences of negativity seriously with the necessary urgency: the alienation and fragmentation of human beings; suffering, guilt and failure; and the contradictions and disasters of history—all this seems to be taken up and transcended in the unity of the divine plan of redemption. Schleiermacher also interpreted Jesus' unshakeable consciousness of God idealistically in the light of the Gospel of John, and thus largely got round and interpreted away the darkness of God and the tribulation, despite all the divine inwardness.

Fourthly, in his great systematic work Schleiermacher certainly described the prophetic, high-priestly and royal office of Jesus. But in so doing he did not give a central place to the scandal of the cross and the hope of resurrection which are fundamental to the New Testament writings. So he remained incapable of taking Jesus' abandonment by human beings and God really seriously (not to mention his flirting with the hypothesis of a pseudo-death); in contrast to the synoptic evangelists, he sees death and resurrection as a seamless transition of an ideal figure of cheerfulness and pure love from the physical to the spiritual present, which makes possible direct access to him for all those who live after him.⁴¹

All these are questions which have finally pushed this modern theology into the twilight: a theology of modernity which in some respects has delivered itself over too much to the spirit of modernity.

12. NEVERTHELESS: THE PARADIGMATIC THEOLOGIAN OF MODERNITY

Schleiermacher died in the sixty-sixth year of his life, of inflammation of the lungs, on 12 February 1834, after celebrating the eucharist with his family. To the end he was a controversial man in his church. Just a decade earlier he had been cited three times to Berlin police headquarters for his support for a constitutional state, greater freedoms for the people, and for the students; there was a threat that he would be removed from his professorship. His very different opponents from the revival movement, conservative confessionalism and Hegel's camp to some degree pursued him even after death with their sharp repudiation.

However, his friends and supporters secured triumphs for him which he was still able to enjoy in the last years of his life—something not granted to everyone. Shortly before his death Schleiermacher was awarded an order and other honours, and in his last years he drew greater audiences than any other theologian or churchman, whether at lectures or sermons (ten volumes of sermons in the first complete edition of his work). His fearless attacks on any despotism and his concern to arouse a social concern among the upper classes (for example, shortening working hours) made him popular far beyond educated circles.

Given this influence, it is no surprise that Schleiermacher's funeral in February 1834 at Trinity Church in Berlin became an impressive demonstration of solidarity in which people of all classes and professions gathered together. If we follow the account of the historian Leopold von Ranke, between 20,000 and 30,000 people must have followed the coffin: ‘I recall what an impression it made on me when we buried Schleiermacher, and there was weeping all down the long street from every window and from every door’, an impression which is confirmed by other participants: ‘Perhaps Berlin never saw such a funeral. Everyone followed the coffin and the procession wound endlessly through the streets … Generals and former ministers, the committees of the ministry and the clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, teachers from the university and the schools, students and pupils, old and young—one might even say friend and foe. It was a recognition of a spirit such as is seldom seen.’⁴²

History has meanwhile often confirmed the verdict of such contemporaries. This Berlin professor of theology and academic philosopher; this interpreter of Plato and proclaimer of the gospel; this exegete, dogmatic theologian, ethicist; this critic and theologian of culture with a universal education, a passionate quest for truth and the ability to achieve public enthusiasm, was indeed a ‘rare’, outstanding spirit. He was an existential thinker with an amazing capacity for work, who has left behind him unmistakeable, deep traces wherever he worked. He was a many-sided scholar of the utmost precision and at the same time a brilliant writer and preacher for the cultural elite, who was convinced that the Reformation was continuing there and then. In the nineteenth century his The Christian Faith occupied and influenced all theologians, including the theology of his opponents.

But this Friedrich Schleiermacher, endowed with a sharp, ironic and witty spirit, continued to be remembered by his contemporaries not only for his advocacy of the truth in truthfulness but also for his concern to be a convincing Christian. Faithful to his ideal of an educated individuality, to the end of his life he was not only involved in university and academy but also in church and state, in the pulpit as well as at the lecture desk and above all in the study. He was an ardent patriot who fought for freedom, justice and reform, and at the same time an outstanding church teacher who followed his inner mission, and who also later always argued for the greatest possible independence of the church from the state (not a state church but a people's church with a synodical constitution), who against the king's will passionately attacked his liturgical reform from above and intrepidly made a stand against the king's right in internal matters and against an order of service which he had worked out personally. All in all this was a paradigmatic theologian, freely human and bound to God in a Christian way, the paradigmatic theologian of modernity.

As is well known, the most credible praise often comes from opponents. So let us leave the last word on Schleiermacher (like the first) to Karl Barth, who almost precisely a century after Schleiermacher's death, in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, was to present a great theological alternative to Schleiermacher in the twentieth century: ‘We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendour this figure radiated and still does—I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it—may honourably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again, may not hate here either.’⁴³

Notes

1. Cf. K. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 425.

2. For the biographical details see M. Redeker, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

3. F. Schleiermacher, letter to J. G. A. Schleiermacher, 21 January 1787, in F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H.-J. Birkner et al., Berlin 1980ff. (in the following notes cited as KGA), V.1, 49-52: 50.

4. J. G. A. Schleiermacher, ‘Letter to F. Schleiermacher of 7 May 1790’, in KGA V.1, 198f.

5. F. Schleiermacher, ‘Letter to G. Reimer of 30 April 1802’, in Aus Schleiermachers Leben. In Briefen, ed. L. Jonas and W. Dilthey, Vol. I, Berlin 1858, 309.

6. Cf. id., ‘Idee zu einem Katechismus der Vernunft für edle Frauen’ (fragment), in KGA I.2, 154.

7. Id., ‘Der Glaube’ (Fragment), in KGA I.2, 154.

8. Cf. id., On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), reissued with a preface by R. Otto, New York 1958.

9. R. Otto in his Introduction to On Religion, vii.

10. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 277.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 101.

13. Ibid.

14. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to Hinrichs' Religionsphilosophie (1822), in Werkausgabe XI, Frankfurt 1970, 42-67, esp. 58.

15. Cf. Schleiermacher, Monologen. Ein Neujahrsgabe (1800), KGA I, 3, 1-61.

16. Cf. H. Küng, The Incarnation of God. An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology (1970), Edinburgh 1987.

17. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 238.

18. Ibid., 235.

19. Ibid., 246.

20. Ibid., 247.

21. Ibid.

22. Cf. ibid., Christmas Eve. A Dialogue on the Incarnation (1806), Richmond, Va. 1967.

23. Cf. id., Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn. Nebst einen Anhang über eine neu zu errichtende, Berlin 1808.

24. Cf. id., A Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811), Richmond, Va 1966.

25. Cf. id., The Christian Faith (1821-22, second revised edition Berlin 1830-31), English translation, Edinburgh 1928.

26. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion I; id., De fide trinitatis et de incarnatione verbi, II.

27. Cf. F. Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus (1832), Philadelphia 1975.

28. The Christian Faith, §22.

29. Ibid., §94, p. 385.

30. Ibid., 397.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. D. Lange, ‘Neugestaltung christlicher Glaubenslehre’, in id. (ed.), Friedrich Schleiermacher, 85-105: 101.

36. F. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 397.

37. Cf. id., ‘Über die Glaubenslehre. Zweites Sendschreiben an Lücke’, in KGA I, 10, 743.

38. Id., The Christian Faith, §95, p. 389.

39. I myself have presented one in my On Being a Christian.

40. Cf. M. Junker, Das Urbild des Gottesbewusstseins. Zur Entwicklung der Religionstheorie und Christologie Schleiermachers von der ersten zur zweiten Auflage der Glaubenslehre, Berlin 1990, 210f.

41. Cf. Lange, Historischer Jesus, 170.

42. Both quotations come from Kantzenbach, Friedrich Schleiermacher, 146.

43. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 427.