SOURCE: “Main Themes in Schleiermacher's Theology,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of Modern Theology, Collins, 1987, pp. 35-65.

[In the following excerpt, Clements discusses the influence of Schleiermacher's writings on the philosophy and study of religion, focusing on his theological methods, nationalism, and ideas on the place of Christianity in relation to other religions.]

Our selection of themes from Schleiermacher's work and the corresponding texts chosen to exemplify his treatment of these do not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of his theology. They do, however, bring into relief the particular contribution which Schleiermacher made to the renewing of theology in his own day, and the ways in which subsequent theology and philosophy of religion have felt indebted to him. This does mean omission of certain areas of considerable interest in their own right, such as Schleiermacher's ethics and more general philosophy—not to mention his New Testament studies, in addition to the gospel material relating to his understanding of the person of Jesus, only a small amount of which we are able to deal with here.

The obvious starting-point in any treatment of Schleiermacher's theology is his analysis of religious ‘feeling’. We then move on to his criterion for the distinctiveness of the Christian religion, seen in christocentric terms. Only then is it appropriate to take up Schleiermacher's view of the nature and role of theology, even though in strictly logical terms it might be assumed that this should be the starting-point for a discussion of any theologian's thought. In Schleiermacher, however, religion as feeling is emphatically primary, and theology secondary. We shall then look at an element of particular importance in Schleiermacher's theological method, namely, the understanding of religion and theology as historically conditioned, and therewith the importance of a method of understanding historical documents (hermeneutics). The doctrine of God's action in the world, and the central doctrine of the person and work of Christ, then follow naturally. Next, the matter of Schleiermacher's Protestant patriotism, and his view of the relations of church and state, must be considered, since not only were these of utmost importance in his theological development but point to issues of continuing urgency in an age of ideology and nationalism. Finally, we shall examine briefly how Schleiermacher anticipated much of the ground to be debated in the field of the study of religions, and the place of Christianity in relation to other faiths.

1. RELIGION AS FEELING AND RELATIONSHIP

‘The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.’¹ ‘True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.’² Schleiermacher's ascription of religion to the realm of feeling marked the start of modern Protestantism's habitual emphasis on the knowledge of God as inward and experiential. It is an emphasis seen variously in a succession of figures as diverse as Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89), Adolf von Harnack (1851-1931), Ernst Troeltsch (1855-1923), Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), John Oman (1860-1939), H. H. Farmer (1892-1981) and John Baillie (1886-1960). However vulnerable the historicity of the biblical witness may appear to be, however problematical the traditional doctrinal formulae may sound in the light of modern thought, actual religious ‘experience’ as a fact of the believer's life cannot be gainsaid. Post-Enlightenment theology not only allows but often insists upon the place of ‘subjectivity’ in belief.

Schleiermacher's emphasis upon religion as feeling, though it owed much both to his Moravian nurture and his Romantic leanings at the turn of the century, was not the automatic expression of a past education and a present influence. It was a deliberately sustained emphasis, because Schleiermacher saw that in the face of rationalism and post-Christian Romanticism, there was a crucial need to state the unique and essential nature of religion as an indelible aspect of human existence, not an antique and superfluous adornment. His emphasis upon the ‘emotions’ or ‘consciousness’ was not an attempt to find a safe sanctuary for religion in the inner life, beyond the reach of rationalism and scientific materialism. True, in the Speeches Schleiermacher is at pains to distinguish religion as feeling, from activity (artistic or moral) on the one hand, and from knowledge (scientific or metaphysical) on the other. Quantity of knowledge is not quantity of piety. Schleiermacher was particularly anxious that religion should not enter the wrong competition with natural science, for religion could never win a contest on supplying information about the world. But the ‘feeling’ or ‘sense’ of God as the Infinite in which all finite things exist, does not subsist in isolation as some self-contained element of the human consciousness. It does not live apart from artistic or ethical activity, or from scientific or speculative knowledge. In turn, none of these activities can flourish without the ‘pious consciousness’. Schleiermacher's notion of religion as pertaining to feeling was thus part of a whole new anthropology of human existence. His Speeches are more than just a rescue-operation for the beleaguered ‘religious’ aspect of life. They comprise a positive, new vision of what it is to be truly human, in a wholeness, richness and freedom not known by the passing wisdom of the age.

The passages from the Speeches and The Christian Faith given below should therefore be studied very carefully in order to ascertain exactly what Schleiermacher understood by ‘feeling’ as the mode of religious apprehension. In The Christian Faith, it will be seen, the ‘pious consciousness’ is more precisely defined as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ (schlechtin abhängig). But it is in the second of the Speeches that the most intricate account of this ‘emotion’ is given. Here, while Schleiermacher speaks of the religious feeling as a self-consciousness, it is clear that this cannot mean simply a ‘consciousness of oneself’ without reference to any reality other than oneself. The self-consciousness of which Schleiermacher speaks is a consciousness of the self as determined by, or acted upon by, what is other than the self, as well as its own inwardly motivated actions. It is the self-in-relation which is the object of consciousness. This must be stated in view of the frequency with which, especially under the neo-orthodox attack, Schleiermacher has been accused of indulging in a concentration on the self's own feelings and emotions, resulting in an entirely subjectivist, individualist occupation with ‘religion’ instead of attending to the true ‘object’ of faith, namely God himself. This is to ignore the depth and subtlety of Schleiermacher's analysis, which sets forth not the self per se, but the self in relationship. It is the self grounded in a realm of what is other than the self, of other persons, the realm of nature and society, the whole finite realm grounded in the Infinite, which Schleiermacher is concerned with. The human consciousness is thus never entirely self- awareness, for the self can never be extracted from the realm of otherness.

We have then in Schleiermacher an intensely relational view of humanity. Emotions are significant not simply because they are ‘felt’, but because they are inward witnesses and responses to realities other than the self. In the second of the Speeches Schleiermacher with great delicacy uncovers how in every perception of an object external to ourselves, there is a primary moment of encounter of which we are barely conscious because it is so fleeting, when we are virtually one with that object in consciousness. In this sense Schleiermacher can dare to say that all true consciousness is religious, in that it relates us to what is other than ourselves, and takes us out of ourselves into an awareness of the total realm of the finite which in turn lives in the Infinite; and it is, ultimately, our consciousness of the world as the medium through which the infinite God is acting upon us, which is the heart of religious awareness. Schleiermacher's ‘feeling of absolute dependence’, it may be noted at this point, does not correspond to what are sometimes considered to be the typically ‘religious’ emotions of awe and wonder in face of the ‘numinous’, to use the famous terminology of Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Like Schleiermacher, Otto sought to identify a specifically religious element in human experience, and located it in the sense of the mystery which is both fearful and attractive, the mysterium tremendens et fascinans. Such a ‘numinous’ encounter comes as a strange irruption into the world of normal experience. But for Schleiermacher it is precisely the world of ‘normal’ experience which mediates the ‘religious experience’. The sense of being utterly dependent is given in and with this experienced world of relatedness. It is a world in which we feel partly, but never wholly, free as personal agents. It is a world in which we feel partly dependent in relation to many objects (other persons, family, nation, nature and so on). But further, in and with all this, in our openness to what is other to us, we have a sense of ourselves and all else being utterly dependent on—what? There is no item in the finite world to which such feeling is appropriate. It can only refer to the Infinite. God is the correlate of this religious consciousness. This of course is in a way parallel to Kant's argument for God as the inferred lawgiver behind the moral imperative.

Because Schleiermacher's understanding of ‘feeling’ or ‘self-consciousness’ is so thoroughly relational, it is not surprising that he expounds ‘religious emotion’ as incapable of surviving within the isolated individual. The individual, as was stated in the biographical section, is always seen by Schleiermacher in relation to the group of which it is a member, and which it mirrors in its unique, particular way. Schleiermacher continually sees the human self in relation to other selves in the actual world of space and time. His view of religion is therefore fundamentally communal—‘If there is religion at all, it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion.’³ The feeling of absolute dependence can only be communicated and cultivated by human fellowship, one to another. Here is one point where in Schleiermacher's case theology and life converge most conspicuously, for as has been seen Schleiermacher himself could not bear solitude. For him, to be an authentic individual, both in theory and practice, meant to belong to a circle, to which the individual could contribute something of himself or herself; and in turn it meant to mediate in one's own unique existence the characteristic life of the group to which one belonged. For Schleiermacher the friend and intimate of so many, the one who regarded the domestic scene and family happiness as the chief human goal, Schleiermacher the Prussian patriot, the relatedness of human existence was axiomatic in life as well as in theology. Closely parallel to this view of human interdependence was Schleiermacher's interest in language, the medium through which human communality is effected. Language exhibits in another way the relation between the individual and the community. The individual only learns the language by participating in the community. The language has its general, technical features transcending any one individual's use of them. But equally, the individual can give a unique and possibly highly creative and original use of the common language.

Relatedness, community, language: these features of human existence in space and time are comprehended within Schleiermacher's acute historical sense. The religious consciousness, especially, is drawn into a fascination with how the Spirit has affected selves in other times and contexts, and in this way the self becomes part of a still wider communion, educative and enriching, in a fellowship where communication takes place even across the centuries. We shall meet this again in Section 4 where we shall examine Schleiermacher's understanding of hermeneutics as a ‘conventional’ discipline. …

It was said earlier that Schleiermacher's emphasis upon the inward has become the stamp of much modern Protestant theology. His emphasis upon relatedness, on human interdependence, on community in history, has not always been followed so conspicuously. The existentialist theology of Rudolf Bultmann, for example, has an affinity with that of Schleiermacher in speaking of God only in terms of human existence as affected by encounter with God. But such theology has tended to detach the self from the concrete relations of society and church. The believer is set free to face his future in freedom, rather than to enter into new relations with others.

Finally, it should be recognized that in opening up the inner world of religious experience to precise description, Schleiermacher was anticipating a good deal of that philosophical method which has come to be known as phenomenology. This is the discipline which enquires into the fundamental structures of reality not by detached observation of the world, or by abstract reasoning or speculation, but by exploration of human consciousness as the experience of this reality. It is essentially a descriptive analysis of what is felt and experienced in common human awareness, and has been developed in distinctive ways by such figures as M. Scheler (1874-1928), E. Husserl (1859-1938) and M. Heidegger (1889-1976) in the twentieth century.⁴

2. THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF CHRISTIANITY: REDEMPTION THROUGH JESUS CHRIST

The relationship between ‘religion’ in general and Christianity as a particular faith has been one of the most keenly debated areas of theology for the past two hundred years. In Section 8, … we shall consider how Schleiermacher conceived this relationship. For the moment it suffices to say that while he began his theological career with an exploration of ‘religion’ in an unqualified sense, and opened The Christian Faith with a developed account of the ‘religious consciousness’ (the feeling of absolute dependence), he emphatically asserted the distinctiveness of Christianity as an historical religion. Just how he saw this distinctiveness was to be both typical and formative of much subsequent Protestant thought. It is summed up in one of the most important theses in The Christian Faith: ‘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.’⁵ This relatively simple-sounding statement is laden with vast implications. First, Christianity is a religion of redemption, by which Schleiermacher means a passage out of evil, enabled by some other agent than the self which is redeemed. In the case of a ‘teleological’ religion, that is, one where a moral rather than an aesthetic task predominates, this redemption must mean the passage from God-forgetfulness to God-consciousness, so that the latter awareness predominates in all the states and activities of life. Redemption is thus an inward, experiential change, and the essence of Christianity is, first, that this redemption is accepted as the work of Jesus, and second, that everything else in the scheme of belief is seen in relationship to this redemption.

With a new and peculiar intensity, Schleiermacher thereby focuses Christian identity and thought onto the figure of Jesus. The inward experience of redemption—the impartation of a God-consciousness or sense of absolute dependence as the key element of awareness—is given in the encounter between Jesus and the person concerned. Of course, Jesus and his redemptive work have always been constitutive of Christianity, and it can be argued that Schleiermacher was simply forwarding in more contemporary terms the classic Protestant terminology of the saving knowledge of God as stated by Martin Luther—by faith alone, by grace alone, by Christ alone. But Schleiermacher is making the redemptive experience of Jesus determinative on a new scale. For now, a doctrine or aspect of belief is properly Christian only as it is seen as somehow stemming from that Jesus-induced redemptive experience. A particular element has been made the hub of all thinking and activity, and a quite new understanding of the corpus of doctrine results. The various doctrines—creation, redemption, sanctification, church and so forth—are no longer self-contained items touching each other at their edges. Each of them, now, has to be seen as in some way a reflection upon the new consciousness given by Jesus to the believer within the believing community. The doctrine of creation, for example, is now not concerned with questions about the ‘origin’ of the world. Rather, it explicates those features of the absolute dependence of the world upon God as known through the feeling of such dependence, and that feeling is adequately given only by relationship with Jesus. (For exposition of the redemptive relationship with Christ, see Section 6. …) Similarly, the divine attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience are not to be taken as referring to ‘special’ qualities within God himself, independent of the world, ‘but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to him.’⁶ The religious self-consciousness given by Jesus has become the centre and connexion for everything else in Christianity.

The christocentricity of Protestant theology from Schleiermacher onwards has been most marked. Jesus, to use the language of contemporary fashion, provides the definition of God. This increasing emphasis upon the primacy of Jesus Christ for all comprehension of God was in part a compensation for the collapse of the traditional metaphysics which for centuries had appeared to fill with substance the talk about God existing in his own reality beyond the finite and temporal realm. After that collapse, God as an experience became more crucial than ever, and this could be located in the experience of the influence of Jesus. Towards the end of the nineteenth century this emphasis appeared as one of the foremost features of the Liberal Protestant theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann.⁷ Nor did it end there. Albeit on a different plane, the intense christocentricity of Karl Barth's theology of revelation can be seen as marking one of the elements of his Liberal Protestant nurture which he retained and transposed, while revolting against so much else in that ethos. There is redemptive christocentricity too in Rudolf Bultmann's existential view of grace. It is in the message of the crucified Christ that God's word comes and creates a new trust in the forgiving grace of God, freeing man from false attachment to this world. In more Anglo-Saxon vein, the emphasis appears in much of the personalist theology of the mid-twentieth century which was especially a feature of liberal Reformed theologians like John Baillie, who wrote: ‘It is not as the result of an inference of any kind … that the knowledge of God's activity comes to us. It comes through our direct personal encounter with him in the Person of Jesus Christ his Son our Lord.’⁸

Baillie's statement conveys well that typical modern claim that the personal, liberating encounter with Jesus is a self-authenticating experience of God. It need not and cannot be ‘proved’ by anything outside itself. No one expounded such a view more cogently than Schleiermacher himself in The Christian Faith where it became clear just how radically christocentric, in the context of the times, was his understanding of faith. The redemptive experience of Jesus is not substantiated by miracles, or prophetic fulfilments, or by claims to ‘inspiration’. In the biblical witness, according to Schleiermacher, such elements are rather the expression or predisposition of a faith in Jesus which is already held, than arguments or supports for that faith, a faith which has its own origin purely in the direct, personal communion with Jesus. Schleiermacher was thus detaching faith in Jesus from a generalized ‘belief in miracles’ or ‘belief in the Bible’ or ‘faith in the supernatural’. The one miracle is Jesus himself and his redemptive influence. All else has significance only if illustrative of that. In this way, Schleiermacher was anticipating much in the modern approach to the Bible which attempts to distinguish between essential truth and peripheral, symbolic expressions of that truth—for example Bultmann's attempt at demythologizing the ‘kerygma’ by distinguishing it from the ‘mythological’ expression in which it is cast. Schleiermacher himself would probably have said that he was merely applying again Luther's discriminating approach to the Scripture which, being ‘the crib wherein Christ lieth’, contains elements of greater and lesser spiritual significance.

3. THEOLOGY AS REFLECTION AND COMMUNICATION

Over the past two hundred years no greater question has faced theology than the issue of its own nature as an intellectual discipline. Is it in any way a ‘science’ comparable to those other branches of learning which have made such spectacular advances, and enjoy such great prestige, in the modern era—most obviously the ‘natural sciences’? Or can it claim to rival the refinement of philosophy, whether analytical or speculative, empiricist or idealist? Every student of theology soon learns that theologia literally means God-talk, speech or discourse about God. But ‘God’ has become problematical since the Enlightenment, so it is not surprising that the discipline has been questioned from within as well as without on what its status, purpose and methods should be. That uncertainty is reflected at a practical level within the policies of the modern university. What place does theology have in a modern, public centre of free enquiry and learning? At the most, it might be thought that the phenomenon of theology within the history of ideas should be allowed some attention, just as religion as a sociological phenomenon could lie on the syllabus within the social sciences. But does discussion of the content of theology, in such a way as assumes that issues of serious moment are at stake, have any place in the university as distinct from the seminary?

Friedrich Schleiermacher provided the first clearly articulated and thoroughly organized exposition of what Protestant theology should be in the nineteenth century. At first sight it is surprising that he should have taken so seriously the intellectual expression of Christian faith, for in the Speeches the young writer with Romanticist leanings emphasized religion as feeling, as distinct from doing and knowing. ‘Quantity of knowledge is not quantity of piety’.⁹ Religion was defensible insofar as it was distinguishable from ‘this miserable love of system’, the principles, dogmas and creeds which appeared to make orthodoxy a laughing stock to the educated of the day. Yet twenty years later the author of The Christian Faith produced the first truly systematic account of Protestant theology since Calvin's Institutes. There had not been a change of mind, but a shift in priorities.

The author of the Speeches was anxious to defend religion from charges arising out of mistaken identity. The cultured despisers assumed that Christianity comprised the worn-out dogmas, the discredited beliefs in providence, miracles and immortality, the contradictory or competing systems of this school and that. Such contempt, Schleiermacher acknowledged, was understandable; but it did not touch religion as religion, which is not theology or doctrine, but the inner, immediate consciousness of the Infinite in the finite, and is not attributable to either knowledge or action though it always accompanies both.

Schleiermacher makes clear that on one level piety and theology have no intrinsic connexion with each other. The very pious may be totally untutored in doctrine, the doctrinally erudite may be very short on piety. In religion, feeling is primary, and religious ‘knowledge’ is simply reflection upon that feeling. When the mature Schleiermacher comes to define the nature of theology, it is that ‘Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech’.¹⁰ They are not direct, literal statements about God in himself in the way that, for instance, the natural scientist gives ‘factual’ information about some aspect of the finite world in his purview. More was at stake for Schleiermacher here than an escape from an embarrassingly naive doctrinal orthodoxy. His sharp differentiation of piety from knowledge was, equally, a counter to the rationalistic assumptions of the philosophical idealism, first of Fichte and then of Hegel (from 1818 also teaching at Berlin, and dismissive of Schleiermacher). For the speculative idealists the human mind was in some way continuous with Absolute mind or spirit, and therefore able to comprehend the rationality of ultimate reality. For Schleiermacher, such speculation was presumptuous and was the antithesis to religion as the consciousness not of continuity with the devine, but of the absolute dependence of the finite on the Infinite (albeit an Infinite present in and with the finite).

For Schleiermacher, then, any ‘knowledge’ in religion, in an intellectual sense, could only be a reflection upon the conscious feelings of relationship to the divine, not a description or analysis directly of the divine per se (but, as we saw in Section 1, … neither were the feelings those of the self per se, in isolation from what is other). Schleiermacher was among the first to realize that theology defeats its own purpose if it speaks of God as if he were simply another ‘object’, distinguished from other ‘objects’ only by being ‘greater’ and ‘removed from’ the finite world. Such a ‘God’ is less than the truly Infinite One present in and to the whole universe. Such a view of God, says Schleiermacher, ‘as one single being outside of the world and behind the world is not the beginning and the end of religion’. True religion is not this—or any other—idea but ‘immediate consciousness of the Deity as he is found in ourselves and in the world’.¹¹ It is the immediate consciousness which is the material upon which theology works directly. This is the basic tenet of Schleiermacher which has drawn the later neo-orthodox fire, charging that he has substituted human feelings, human religiosity, human psychology and subjectivity for the proper subject-matter of theology, namely God's divinity and purpose as self-revealed in his Word. Again, the charge must be set against the evidence that Schleiermacher was interested in the ‘emotions’ precisely because they did point beyond themselves to the reality which had stimulated them.

But why should anyone bother with intellectual reflection upon the religious consciousness which, originating independently of knowledge, would appear to be capable of managing itself? Why does piety need doctrine or theology? For Schleiermacher the answer lies in his wider anthropology of knowing, doing and feeling. Notice that his basic thesis on doctrines states that they are accounts of the Christian religious feelings set forth in speech. We are back with Schleiermacher's historical, communal, relational view of humanity, the concrete manifestation of which is language, utterance. Feeling of any sort, he maintains, once it reaches a certain intensity manifests itself outwardly in voice and gesture, a communication of inner self-consciousness to others. This is so pre-eminently in religion and above all in Christianity: ‘The whole work of the Redeemer himself was conditioned by the communicability of his self-consciousness by means of speech, and similarly Christianity has always and everywhere spread itself solely by preaching. Every proposition which can be an element of the Christian preaching (kerygma) is also a doctrine, because it bears witness to the determination of the religious self-consciousness as inward certainty.’¹²

Hence the necessity for theology, which is a concomitant of the necessity for speech in the religious self-consciousness, the paradigm and historical origin of which is Jesus Christ. Theology and doctrine are therefore essentially statements of what can and should be the content of Christian preaching. Theology is thus fundamentally a Church discipline, or at least one which exists to serve the Church. In Richard Niebuhr's apt phrases, theology for Schleiermacher is the ‘countervoice of the Church’, or ‘preaching-faith's descriptive science of itself’.¹³ It is a sheer necessity for a communal religion. Further, there is an even deeper reason for theology—a theological (!) reason. Schleiermacher has already defined Christianity as the religion which refers everything to the redemption accomplished by Jesus, and the heart of that redemptive activity lies in Jesus' self-communication (by speech) of his own self-consciousness. Theology has a christological rationale in Schleiermacher.

Schleiermacher's Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1810) has already been mentioned (see above pp. 29f.), with its comprehensive yet succinct survey of how all the various sub-disciplines—from philology to dogmatics, from Church history to philosophy of religion—can be drawn into a coherent whole with a single overriding aim: that of serving ‘Church-guidance’. Its three-fold division into Philosophical Theology (considering what type of religion is Christianity), Historical Theology and Practical Theology was designed to make clear that, culminating in Practical Theology (worship, preaching, pastoral leadership etc.), it was indeed the service as ‘counter-voice’ of the Church that was intended.

Schleiermacher's scheme, notably, does not exalt dogmatics to a division on its own, but accords it a place within Historical Theology. Dogmatics describes the leading doctrines and their interconnexions in the Church of the present. As such, it is a descriptive discipline not essentially different from that which uncovers the structure of leading ideas at earlier stages of history. Nor does it attempt an apologetic or a demonstration of the truth of the content of doctrine. It simply sets out to expound these doctrines and their interrelationships as clearly as possible. The best illustration of what Schleiermacher intended and advocated is of course his own The Christian Faith, so tightly argued, with a masterly architectonic character, proceeding step by step in numbered theses, yet never forgetting the one basic principle of the religious consciousness, and always seeking to do justice both to the classic Protestant heritage and to the current intellectual and cultural scene. Quite apart from the contents of The Christian Faith themselves, Schleiermacher in constructing this edifice rid Protestant theology, in one mighty blow, of that piecemeal, fragmentary method of the scholastics who had dominated the scene through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who had reduced dogmatics to a disjointed series of commentaries on classical or disputed texts, the loci communes. With Schleiermacher, theology began again to think big and to think whole.

4. HERMENEUTICS: CONVERSATION WITH HISTORY

‘… Schleiermacher's idea of theology is imbued with a deep historical sense which, more than any other single feature of his thought, obtains for him the position of father of modern Protestantism.’¹⁴ That historical sense, we have seen in the preceding section, included even his understanding of dogmatics, which is not for him an attempt to state ‘timeless’ truths, but an uncovering of the present consciousness of the Church in its specific, contemporary historical situation. Theology becomes thoroughly historicized once it is realized that the sources and traditions from which it draws its main statements of belief and doctrine speak from contexts and in terms very different from those of the present. The interpretation of written texts then assumes enormous significance and hermeneutics, the discipline of such interpretation, becomes crucial for theology. The subject has provoked vigorous debate in twentieth century theology in a number of areas. The existentialist and demythologizing programme of Rudolf Bultmann and Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967),¹⁵ for instance, required a specific hermeneutical approach to the New Testament. They argued that if the gospel message of the New Testament, the kerygma of the saving power of Jesus Christ, was to become intelligible to contemporary people then it had to be distinguished from the obsolete, time-conditioned cosmology of first century Palestine in which it was expressed in the New Testament. The ‘mythology’, however, has not so much to be dropped, as re-interpreted. For instance, the language of ‘heaven’ being somehow literally spatially removed from earth ‘above’ the sky is, as it stands, nonsense in the light of modern astronomy. But it is not on that account meaningless, provided that the meaning it had for first century people is appreciated. But how do we penetrate to that meaning? Its meaning then, said Bultmann, had less to do with cosmology than with human self-understanding. It was a particular, time-conditioned cultural expression of the fact that man is conscious of being a finite creature living in space and time, but limited also by an invisible, transcendent realm on which alone he can ultimately rely for security. The text has therefore to be examined with a view to the human, existential significance of the concepts used, and only then will they be able to communicate with us today. Such a hermeneutic, in the view of its critics, effectively forced the bible to give a pre-determined existentialist message, but Bultmann and his allies at least question whether it is possible not to approach the bible with a ‘prior understanding’ of what it is about, and argue that a responsible hermeneutic will reflect carefully on any presuppositions it brings to the reading. A very different, though parallel, case is that of contemporary liberation theology¹⁶ which argues that no reading of the scripture is adequate which does not reflect on the socio-political context and involvement of both the reader and the original writer. For both the existentialist and the liberation (or political) theologian, what is at stake in both text and reader is a specific human situation and interest, which must be brought to light if there is to be authentic communication between past and present.

It is Schleiermacher who stands at the beginning of the whole hermeneutical concern in modern theology. He began lecturing on the subject at Halle, in his own words ‘endeavouring to raise that which has hitherto been nothing more than a series of disconnected and unsatisfactory observations into the dignity of a science, which shall embrace the whole language as an object of intellectual discernment, and penetrate from without into its innermost depths.’¹⁷ The issue was wider than theology alone, for classical studies and law also required the interpretation of documents from the past, and Schleiermacher sought the establishment of hermeneutics in the most comprehensive way as a discipline which could invoke principles whenever texts of any kind required interpretation. But further, Schleiermacher saw that the interpretation of writings (and other human artefacts such as monuments, architecture etc.) was an aspect of the still more fundamental human activity of understanding between persons. Communication requires that we should be able to discern what another person is thinking and feeling, and this we do by interpreting not only the spoken words we hear but also the facial expressions, gestures and total impression made upon us by the other person. We interpret the outward, physical sounds and movements by analogy with our own feelings and thoughts which produce such effects in ourselves, and thereby reach some understanding of the other person's consciousness and emotions. This of course is what every conversation involves, and for Schleiermacher the interpretation of a text and a conversation with another person are fundamentally the same operation. Both aim to know inner feelings, thoughts and motives via outward representations. So Schleiermacher says tersely: ‘The success of the art of interpretation depends on one's linguistic competence and on one's ability to know people.’¹⁸

Schleiermacher's own linguistic competence was outstanding, as shown in one of his greatest achievements, his translation of Plato into German. There is an interesting reference, in an autobiographical fragment, to his own early difficulties in the learning of Latin:

Here I saw nothing but darkness; for although I learnt to translate the words mechanically into my mother tongue, I could not penetrate into the sense, and my mother, who directed my German readings with much judgment, had taught me not to read without understanding.¹⁹

Perhaps it was exactly those early problems with his Latin which prompted his lifelong interest in the nature of translation and interpretation. But the reference to his mother's influence on his style of reading is suggestive also. As an adult he confessed to being a ‘slow reader’, often having to read a single passage many times over. This too bears on his hermeneutical teaching, which implies that, metaphorically if not actually, more than one reading of a text is necessary to discern its meaning. A part of the text—an incident in a play for instance—is seen in its significance only in the light of the whole plot, drama or argument. Equally, of course, the whole can only be appreciated in terms of its various elements. This is the basis of the famous hermeneutical circle, a continual reciprocity between whole and parts, which Schleiermacher envisaged as essential in the art of interpretation. The implication is clear, also, that interpretation can never be fixed and final. But above all, it was Schleiermacher's own ‘ability to know people’ which illuminated for him the art of interpretation, as he had come to know it as conversationalist, letter-writer and friend to so many. In hermeneutics, then, Schleiermacher's literary concerns and abilities, his historical sense, his anthropology of human relations and his own personal existence, all converged.

Schleiermacher's thinking on hermeneutics was first taken up in a major way by his biographer Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the philosopher of history.²⁰ Dilthey recognized the crucial significance for all historiography of Schleiermacher's insight that there is no direct way to the author's meaning in any given text, other than by the capacity of the reader or historian to discern analogies to his or her own inner experience, as suggested by the text. Historiography therefore contains an irreducibly subjective element, as is appropriate for what is a specifically human science, as distinct from a physical science. History is not primarily about bare ‘events’ in space and time, but about the human decisions, motives and feelings within those events. The historian reconstructs the past inwardly ‘re-living’ the events in imaginative sympathy. Dilthey in turn became highly important for German understanding of history as a human science, greatly influencing such philosophers of religion as Ernst Troeltsch and, later, existentialist philosophers such as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)²¹ with his depiction of human concern with the past as a resource in facing the future, and of the way immediate human awareness shapes the way the past is viewed. There is also a close parallel between Dilthey's concept of ‘re-living’ the past and the distinction made by the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of an event—and the historian's concern with the former.²²

In more recent years in the thought of such as H.-G. Gadamer,²³ there has been increasing criticism of the subjectivist emphasis in historical interpretation. What cannot be denied is the place of Schleiermacher as a prime mover in hermeneutics, with his dual recognition that the art requires the combination of the most exact philology, and the most sensitive human awareness in order ‘To understand the text at first as well as and then even better than its author.’²⁴

5. GOD AND THE WORLD

What does it mean to speak of God acting in the world, whether in nature or in human history? Are there special, extraordinary events which are to be ascribed to divine agency and labelled ‘supernatural’ or ‘miraculous’? Or does God somehow ‘direct, control, suggest’ everything that happens? Such questions became acute in the modern world, and still remain so, once the whole course of events in space and time was seen as an interconnecting whole, explicable in purely natural terms. There seems little need or room for ‘divine agency’ to explain happenings great or small.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was among the very first to deal with this question in the wake of the Enlightenment. Two developments in the eighteenth century had crucially changed the western way of regarding the world, at least for the educated. First, the Newtonian view of the physical universe as an uninterrupted system of cause and effect had become the standard and accepted picture. Second, Kant's theory of knowledge had argued that the concept of ‘causality’, as understood by natural science, could only apply to happenings within the finite realm of space and time; and outside the categories of space and time, reason cannot venture. To speak of God causing a particular thing to happen, in contradistinction to any spatio-temporal cause of that event, was meaningless. The remark of the astronomer Laplace to Napoleon, on being asked by the Emperor where God came into his system, is justly famous: ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.’

In this situation at the close of the Enlightenment, theology seemed faced with three main options. One was to let scientific rationalism have its say and banish all talk of God's activity from the world. This was the Deistic path, to a view of God apart from and outside the natural world of cause and effect, and who functioned as little more than a final moral arbiter over the universe. Another option, at the opposite extreme, was virtually to equate God and the natural order, so that all that happens is directly the doing of God, because everything is essentially part of the divine. This was the pantheistic way, greatly indebted to Spinoza. A third option, favoured among many orthodox theologians, was to allow a natural causation for the generality of events, but to posit specific events as special ‘acts of God’, manifested by miraculous occurrences testified to in Scripture. A general providence through the natural order was supplemented by an interventionalist special providence.

Schleiermacher rejected all three alternatives. The Deistic view was as far removed as could be imagined from his own conviction of the believer's communion with God in and through the world. ‘Your feeling is piety’, he states in the Speeches, ‘in so far as it is the result of the operation of God in you by means of the operation of the world upon you.’²⁵ But neither, despite his critics' accusations, did he even in the early Speeches lapse into pantheism. His account of religion as the consciousness of ‘all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal’, to be sought ‘in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering’, and to know in immediate feeling ‘only such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal’²⁶—this is not an equation of ‘all that is’ with God. It is rather a recognition of the existence of all things in God—in current parlance panentheism, not pantheism. Still less was Schleiermacher impressed with the orthodox rearguard action to defend the sporadic intervention of the supernatural (a term he rejected) in the world. In his view this amounted to a reduced view of the divine omnipotence. Schleiermacher at heart wished to remain true to the Reformed tradition of the universal sovereignty of God, his decree governing all things.

It was this inclusive doctrine which Schleiermacher sought to reconstruct. His treatment of God's preservative, directive activity in the world is contained in two relatively brief but brilliant passages in The Christian Faith (see texts, pp. 172-184) expounding the two theses: (1) ‘The religious self-consciousness, by means of which we place all that affects or influences us in absolute dependence upon God, coincides entirely with the view that all such things are conditioned and determined by the interdependence of Nature’²⁷; (2) ‘It can never be necessary in the interest of religion so to interpret a fact that its dependence on God absolutely excludes its being conditioned by the system of Nature.’²⁸

Schleiermacher entirely accepts the scientific picture of natural causation and interdependency as a seamless robe. The divine activity is not to be sought by attempts to find inexplicable rifts in the fabric, into which ‘supernatural’ explanations can be inserted. The religious sense is not dependent on those events which cannot, apparently, be explained by natural conditioning in the light of the present state of knowledge. Natural knowledge does not subvert the truly religious sense of dependence upon God, says Schleiermacher, which in fact is increased precisely in accordance with the extent of that knowledge—‘it can only be a false wisdom which would put religion aside, and a misconceived religion for love of which the progress of knowledge is to be arrested.’²⁹ Schleiermacher's perception was not always heeded, or known, in the nineteenth century, least of all in the English-speaking world with its battles of ‘science versus religion’. Even today, the argument against the ‘God of the gaps’ needs rehearsing in face of religious supernaturalism, and Schleiermacher's version of it still reads more eloquently than most.

The clue to the whole concept of God's governance and preservation of all things lies for Schleiermacher, as with everything else, with the nature of the religious consciousness. This is a sense of absolute dependence, which is of a different order from that partial dependence, or interdependence, of items within the natural order as such. It is an immediate awareness, not deduced from or inferred from our knowledge of the world. It is therefore in one sense quite independent of the natural conditioned order of finite causes. But in another sense it relates closely to this order—as a whole, not to certain parts of it. Crucial, if implicit, here is Schleiermacher's understanding of individuality (see above, pp. 20, 38f.). The role of the individual, we have seen, is to reflect in a particular way the character of the whole of which it is a member. For the human self this means, ultimately, to be a kind of microcosm of the whole universe. One could therefore say, that my religious consciousness is not only the sense that I am absolutely dependent upon the Infinite, but, because I belong to that whole finite realm which I perceive as a unity, my consciousness is also an awareness that that universe, too, is absolutely dependent. All that is, I perceive through my sense of dependence, is absolutely dependent upon God. It is both an order of natural causation and willed by God. Neither contradicts the other.

God is in all and active in all things, therefore, for through all that happens his will is being expressed. He is to be sought in all that occurs and not just in the ‘miraculous’. It should be noted that Schleiermacher did not dispute the historicity of the biblical miracles as such. What he did was to query how, faced with events however ‘unusual’ we could ever categorically deny a ‘natural’ explanation to them. The false distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ is to be abolished.

Schleiermacher was thus a pioneer in moving towards that modern distinction between a ‘scientific’ explanation of the natural relations between events and the ‘theological’ understanding that everything that affects us is grounded in God. The aim is to safeguard both the integrity of science as it explores a unified natural order, and the reality of God who, being unconditionally related to this whole natural realm, cannot be viewed as merely part of the series, or another item within it. With Schleiermacher we are on the way to the modern refusal to speak of God as an object within the world, a being among beings, but rather as the ground of all being, an approach which found its most impressive statement in the theology of Paul Tillich.

Schleiermacher's view of the whole finite order as ordained by God did not induce fatalism or passive resignation. Prayer and action are the means of man's free response to the operations of God through the world. ‘To be a religious man and to pray are really one and the same thing,’ he begins by saying in his sermon The Power of Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances. Man has the freedom to petition God, and the still more important freedom of being able to accept that which God disposes, and, in such acceptance, to find the highest good. ‘He who prays must remember that everything that befalls us has its end in ourselves, and is intended for our improvement and the increase of good in us.’³⁰ For Schleiermacher himself, it is likely that the critical year of 1806, the year of Prussia's downfall and the collapse of his own professional career in Halle, marked a turning-point in his advance from a predominantly passive piety, to a view of faith as involving a concerted commitment, a positive alignment of oneself with the shaping forces of history, as he gave himself to the cause of Prussia's rebirth.

6. THE PERSON AND WORK OF CHRIST

Christology formed the heart of the whole theological system of the mature Schleiermacher. One of his later critics, D. F. Strauss (1808-74) went so far as to suggest that The Christian Faith has only one dogma, that of the person of Christ.³¹ It would be truer to say that the person and work of Christ constitute that core. Christology and soteriology were inseparable for Schleiermacher, and in both doctrines he exerted a dynamic influence on Protestant thought.

The fundamental reference point for Schleiermacher was always, we have seen, the consciousness of God, and the distinguishing feature of Christianity was the reference of everything to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth, a redemption conceived as participation in the perfect God-consciousness of Jesus himself. It should again be recalled that for Schleiermacher the Christian life was never individualistic but a corporate existence in the Church, and ‘Christian experience’ is that of an historic community. The new corporate God-consciousness of the community originates in Jesus Christ himself. Schleiermacher's critics have sometimes concluded that the historic Christ on this basis is merely a postulate to account for the existence of the contemporary religious emotions. Such is not the case. There is a continual reciprocity between the contemporary experience and the historical figure who is its originator. Nor does Schleiermacher warrant the caricature that he makes Jesus simply the perfect Christian. The Christian is dependent upon Jesus for his religious consciousness, and the ‘perfect Christian’ in Schleiermacher's eyes would not be independent and self-sufficient in relation to Jesus.

Nor does Schleiermacher lose the historicity of Jesus to view, even though in the Christmas Eve dialogue of 1806 he seems prepared to allow the view that the present religious consciousness is of itself a sufficient pointer to an historical originator of such emotions, regardless of the degree of certainty of ‘hard’ historical evidence. But the God-consciousness of contemporary Christians is always filled out in terms of the historical Jesus. The believer is related to a recognizable historical figure in an immediate, living communion. Alongside the tightly argued christology in The Christian Faith, therefore, we have also Schleiermacher's Berlin lectures The Life of Jesus, one of the earliest in the great series of nineteenth century ‘lives’ which were to typify liberal theology.

Protestant liberalism has often been charged with reducing the historical Jesus to a moral and spiritual example or hero, in contrast to the one who saves lost mankind by his sacrifice. Schleiermacher's Christ, however, does not just serve as a spur to moral endeavour. His opening christological thesis runs: ‘If the spontaneity of the new corporate life is original in the Redeemer and proceeds from him alone, then as an historical individual he must have been at the same time ideal (i.e. the ideal must have been completely historical in him), and each historical moment of his experience must at the same time have borne within it the ideal.’³² The new life is not generated by the believer, or by the community itself, but is actually imparted through communion with the Jesus in whom it has its source and who is its ‘ideal’ realization. It must be noted, however, that when Schleiermacher speaks of ‘ideality’ (Urbildlichkeit) he does not mean an abstract model of perfection, but something nearer the Platonic ‘form’, that which actually imparts reality to a particular object which participates in it. Also, while Schleiermacher speaks of the ‘exemplary’ status of Jesus (Vorbildlichkeit) he does not mean a kind of model to be copied, but rather the way in which Jesus himself exemplified the human race by solidarity with it in the fullness of humanity.

Schleiermacher fully recognized, and faced, the demands of a christology which was aware that if Jesus was ‘truly man’ this meant historical man, that is, not just a figure who ‘really existed once upon a time’, but one who was subject to all the exigencies of historical life. This meant, first, a full recognition of the development of the human Jesus ‘in a certain similarity with his surroundings, that is, in general after the manner of his people’. Jesus was born into, lived in and became part of a specific social and cultural context. Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus is one of the first ‘lives’ to appreciate fully the need to see the figure being studied as set in that context. But also, with that appreciation comes awareness of a difficulty specific to christology:

If we are not permitted to tear any man loose from the general condition of his individual existence, therefore not from his rootage in the life of his people and not from his age, then this appears again to put an end to that application which we postulate is to be made of the knowledge of Christ, for we are in another age and belong to another culture. If therefore we cannot extract Christ from his historical setting in order to think of him within that of our people and our age, it follows again that the knowledge of him has no practical value, for he ceases to have exemplary character. But we can raise the question from another angle. If we are to think of him under the conditions of a definite age and a definite setting in the life of his people, does not this imply a greater diminution of the specific dignity of Christ?³³

Liberal theology was not always so sensitive to the issues surrounding the quest of the historical Jesus. But how can a person, rooted in one specific historical context, have significance for all contexts? Or, in Schleiermacher's own terminology, how can the ‘ideality’ of the Redeemer be conceived in ‘the perfectly natural historicity of his career’? Schleiermacher's answer lies in his conception of the unique God-consciousness of Jesus: ‘The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in him.’³⁴

Here we have reached the crux of Schleiermacher's whole theology, and certainly the most vigorously contested element. Is Schleiermacher's Jesus Christ simply another man who is conscious of God to a higher degree than other men are? Is he in any way qualitatively different from the rest of the race, with which, as human, he is in solidarity? Schleiermacher is far from naive on this issue, and is fully aware that he is positing a peculiarity in Christ's activity which yet ‘belongs to a general aspect of human nature’—but this by no means detracts from his dignity as Redeemer. For ‘to ascribe to Christ an absolutely powerful God-consciousness, and to attribute to him an existence of God in him, are exactly the same thing’. Before rushing to shut the orthodox doors against Schleiermacher, the reader is advised to weigh carefully every word in that sentence—and every sentence in section 94 of The Christian Faith (below, pp. 385-9). What Schleiermacher is seeking is a christological statement which expresses the belief that Christ is human and divine, but in the language and anthropology which he considered to be valid for his day, as distinct from that of the classical metaphysics of the first Christian centuries.

God's existence, says Schleiermacher, can only be apprehended as ‘pure activity’, for God is one who acts upon what is not himself, but is not himself acted upon (or, ‘passive’). God's existence in an individual requires not only that the individual be purely ‘passive’ in relation to God, but positively open to God through ‘vital receptivity’ which in turn ‘confronts the totality of finite existence’. This could only take place through an intelligent, conscious individual. However, the general level of God-consciousness among people is not an existence of God in human nature, for it is not allowed to predominate, being subjected to sensuous emotions at every point. Christ himself ‘is the only “other” in which there is an existence of God in the proper sense, so far, that is, as we posit the God-consciousness as continually and exclusively determining every moment, and consequently also this perfect indwelling of the Supreme Being as his peculiar being and his inmost self.’³⁵

Christ, one might paraphrase Schleiermacher as saying, is the one human being whose life, as human as ours, is at the same time, and in every moment, the activity of God in the world. The God-consciousness in him was fully potent and determinative in all that he was and did. This is more than a ‘psychologizing’ of the divinity of Christ, though it certainly demands a new look at the traditional classical formulae. Schleiermacher in fact insists on the need to criticize such traditional statements, while agreeing with their intention of stating the divine and human in the one person of Christ.

Christ's redeeming work, for Schleiermacher, consists in the impartation of his God-consciousness to the believer. Through personal communion with Jesus, the inner life of the believer is re-created. Christ is truly the second, life-giving Adam. The nascent God-consciousness is enabled to flourish and to become dominant over the sensuous, self-centred emotions. Schleiermacher was not afraid to call his soteriology ‘mystical’, in order to stress the union between Christ and the believer. Redemption and reconciliation are founded in this union, not in any extra-personal transactions or ransom-payments or penal satisfactions for sin, as in certain traditional theories of atonement.

Schleiermacher, it was noted earlier, was remarkably interested in both a new dogmatic formulation of the person of Christ, and the historical Jesus. This dual interest was a strength, but it also put his christology under strain. More serious than the question of whether Schleiermacher ‘psychologized’ the ‘divinity’ of Christ, is the question whether the picture given of Jesus' God-consciousness in his christology can really be substantiated by the historical picture of Jesus he draws from the gospel narratives. Schleiermacher's Jesus is essentially that of the Fourth Gospel, and indeed on various grounds he prefers the Johannine to the synoptic gospels as sources for the life of Jesus. Many today would of course query the assumptions of such a preference. But also linked with that preference is the fact that Schleiermacher's historical Jesus is remarkably untroubled in his God-consciousness, and indeed in his mental and emotional states generally. The synoptic accounts of the agony in Gethsemane are to be seen as ‘embellishments’ under the influence of later martyr-spirituality. The Markan account of the cry of dereliction from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ is not to be taken without reference to the whole of Psalm 22, which overall is a song of triumphant praise to God of which that line is but the beginning. All along Schleiermacher plays down the aspects of suffering and anguish in Jesus' life and death, and he seems clearly threatened by the implications of those parts of the narratives which suggest that, at what is literally the crux of soteriology, Jesus' God-consciousness—if such it still was—was an ineffably dark experience of God's absence. To admit this element would clearly place a question-mark not only over the christology, but over Schleiermacher's doctrine of God as well. A God who is experienced as absent by the derelict Jesus is no longer one who is ‘pure act’. Perhaps there is an element of passivity, of suffering, of withdrawal of himself by God in face of the world. Schleiermacher could scarcely contemplate that, and hardly any other theologian of the time would either. It was in fact Schleiermacher's philosophical counterpart at Berlin, Hegel, who sought to comprehend the experience of the ‘death of God’ within his intellectual system. But it was not until the more recent years of the twentieth century, in the thought of such as Bonhoeffer, Jüngel and Moltmann, and to some extent the ‘Process Theologians’ such as Hartshorne and Pittenger, that such far-reaching new conceptions of God have been seriously tackled in western theology.³⁶

7. NATION, CHURCH AND STATE

Schleiermacher, we have seen, was deeply stirred by Prussia's humiliation in 1806, and both in preaching and political activity shared in the struggle to promote a liberal reform of the Prussian state, to throw off the French yoke and, ultimately, to achieve greater unity among the German states. At least one major study has been produced of Schleiermacher's nationalism and the relation of this to his religious thought. If the thought of any theologian acquires significance in the light of his social and political context, in Schleiermacher's case some examination is required of how his theology and his patriotism related to each other. In his instance, this aspect becomes doubly significant in the view of the fateful development of German nationalism in the following century, and the question cannot be avoided whether Schleiermacher contributed to the historical roots of National Socialism. In any case, the issues of religious faith, national loyalty and the power of the state transcend Schleiermacher's own context and are with many of us today as well.

Schleiermacher's patriotism was far from being a crude glorification of the Fatherland, right or wrong. It was a highly moral crusade, and from the pulpit he tirelessly reiterated his belief that the nadir of 1806 was to be seen as a divine judgment—or at least a stern education—on the Prussians for the corruption which had overtaken their personal and public behaviour. Prussia had grown lax, dishonest, boastful without cause, the old virtues had been lost. The wrath of God had to strike ere there could be rebirth of the nation. When therefore the opportunity came to harry the doomed Napoleon retreating from Russia in 1813, Schleiermacher saw this as the heaven-sent signal for the Prussian revival. The sermon A Nation's Duty in a War for Freedom was delivered as the troops marched from Berlin. It reveals both the extent and the sharp limits of the ethical element in Schleiermacher's Prussian loyalty. The present hour was the time of opportunity to repent of the deep corruption into which Prussia had fallen. A new unity, determination and readiness for sacrifice was uniting king and people (the whole tone is highly similar to the sermons preached in Britain on the outbreak of the First World War). A sense of moral release was sweeping the people. The issue had at last become clear: either total liberation or total defeat, either being infinitely preferable to the sickly condition of subservience.

It becomes clear, however, that for Schleiermacher the highest moral good is the existence, unique characteristics and independence of the Fatherland itself. A foreign element degrades a developed nation, ‘for God has imparted to each its own nature, and has therefore marked out bounds and limits for the habitations of the different races of men on the face of the earth’.³⁷ Prussia must become truly Prussia, such is the divine purpose. It is at this point that the contemporary reader who has more than a slight acquaintance with the story of Nazism becomes uneasy, for such a theology of nationhood as being of the divine ordering was undoubtedly one of the entrenched Protestant beliefs which Nazi ideology was ready to exploit and incorporate into its own beliefs in blood, race and soil. Martin Redeker states of Schleiermacher's nationalism: ‘This is not a nationalism which absolutizes the people and state.’³⁸ That is correct; that Schleiermacher was no state absolutist his own readiness to confront the authorities and even the sovereign show. But Redeker goes on to differentiate this from the twentieth century ‘completely secularized and hence unrestrained nationalism and chauvinism’. This is somewhat innocent, for the ‘unrestrained’ nationalism which brought Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 was not ‘completely secularized’. Certain brands of it were highly religious, more especially that promulgated by the so-called ‘German Christians’ who held that nation and race were indefeasible ‘orders of creation’ decreed by God and therefore to be maintained to the utmost degree by whatever means proved necessary. While it would be a travesty to view Schleiermacher as some kind of proto-Nazi, it must be admitted that the ‘German Christians’ who welcomed Hitler would have been only too glad to read in this most illustrious German Protestant of the preceding century that the nation which trusts in God ‘is that nation … which means to defend at any price the distinctive aims and spirit which God has implanted in it, and is thus fighting for God's work’.³⁹

The affinity between religious passion and nationalism is well-known to social and political historians.⁴⁰ Indeed it could be argued that in the modern age nationalism has itself become a kind of religion for many, providing a ‘larger self’ to which the individual can relate in devotion, following the collapse of the conventional theism. In the case of Germany, it has been pointed out, it was Pietism which particularly fed the warmth of devotion to the Fatherland. In Schleiermacher the connexion is supplied, theologically and philosophically, by his understanding of individuality. The uniqueness of the individual is paralleled by the larger ‘individualities’ of the social groups to which he or she belongs—home, church, society, nation. In each case, the God-given nature of the individual, person or group, is to be expressed. And just as individual piety is a matter of feeling, so the successively wider attachments will be marked by appropriate feelings of loyalty and devotion.

This is certainly the point where fundamentally critical issues arise for Schleiermacher's theology. Why, for instance, is ‘nation’ regarded as the widest boundary of human belonging? Is this simply a case of religious blessing being given to the structures of the world as they are, without examination of the acceptability of these structures in the light of the divine purpose? More fundamentally still, but leading on from this, in beginning with the emotions of the contemporary religious consciousness and working back to Jesus as the originator of that consciousness, does Schleiermacher simply accept the ‘pious emotions’ at their face value? It seems that the connexion between Jesus and the religious consciousness is established in such a way that there is no point of detachment by which Jesus himself can become a critical criterion for the authenticity of those emotions. We have already had cause to comment on certain aspects of Schleiermacher's ‘Johannine’ Jesus in the preceding section. The feelings of piety and, correspondingly, of patriotic devotion, appear to be regarded as intrinsically valid. This was certainly an ingredient in the development of German Kulturprotestantismus, an amalgam of Protestant bourgeois values with German identity and culture which by the end of the nineteenth century made it hard for many to distinguish being Christian from being German. That world collapsed in the 1914-18 War, in the aftermath of which Karl Barth led a new attempt at a specifically christocentric critique of all social and political values.

Schleiermacher had a clear theology of the Church in relation to secular power, and this is stated in The Christian Faith—interestingly, not in the ecclesiological but in the christological section. Here it is the Lutheran doctrine of the ‘two kingdoms’ which predominates. Christ's kingdom is essentially that of the Church. He does not yet possess the kingdom of power which belongs to the Father. Civil government has no jurisdiction in the Church, for it is part of the general divine government of the world, operating even where there is no Christian religion. Even where Christians are involved in positions of responsibility in secular government the fundamental separation between the two spheres remains. The Christian is one who is governed personally by Christ in an inner vital relationship. This simply means that ‘everyone, whether magistrate or private citizen, has to seek in the directions given by Christ, not indeed right directions for his conduct under civil government (for this is always a matter for the art of politics), but certainly the right temper of mind even in this relationship’ (emphases mine).⁴¹ Bismarck, the shaper of German destiny in the later nineteenth century who had sat in Schleiermacher's confirmation class in Berlin, in fact exemplified such a combination of piety and Realpolitik. Political direction is thus an autonomous area immune from Christian ethical scrutiny. Schleiermacher can label ‘patriotism’ and ‘the common spirit of society’ as ‘fleshly motives’ for the formation of a Church within any society—a remarkable description in view of his own patriotic fervour in the pulpit. The reason is that Schleiermacher, as has happened so often in Protestant history, was primarily concerned to ensure the freedom of the Church from state interference and control. Once that freedom was apparently safeguarded or at least claimed, interest in a theology of civil society as such was minimal. Not only could secular power become a law unto itself, but the ‘fleshly motives’ of national solidarity, left free to roam without theological examination, could too readily appeal to the Church for baptism in pious fervour. In the early nineteenth century, in a Germany pitifully divided and weak, constituting a vacuum of power in a Europe beset on the one hand by Napoleonic France and on the other by Tsarist Russia, that might seem a happy coincidence of interests serving the cause of national liberation, and indeed a move towards a sane international order in Europe. A century later it was to prove fatefully different.

8. CHRISTIANITY AND THE RELIGIONS

The Enlightenment marked the end of an age of innocence for Christianity in its relations with other faiths. Of course the existence of Judaism, Islam and Indian religions had long been known. But it was only relatively recently that such wide religious diversity among mankind began to be seen as having powerful implications for the questions of religious truth and authority. Deism represented one approach to the issue, by attempting to distil out of man's innate moral sense and powers of reason the essential, common truth to which all religions pointed and thus to arrive at a universal ‘natural religion’. Problems of competing truth-claims would then be solved. Today the relationship between Christianity and ‘other religions’ is as open to debate as ever.

Schleiermacher was acutely aware of the questions posed by a multireligious world for a Christianity claiming a specific knowledge of God through Christ. His own response was highly original for his time. He first trenchantly rejected the Enlightenment's ‘natural religion’. Religion never effectively existed in such a generalized disembodied form as this ‘set of truths’. Religion of any power always took the form of a positive, historical religion. Christianity was certainly one of these historical religions. Non-Christian religions were not to be categorized as wholly in error. For Schleiermacher, Christianity certainly did have a specific character, in the centrality of the experience of redemption brought by Jesus. But that did not make Christianity totally discontinuous with the inwardness of the other religions. It was the most highly developed religion—‘the purest form of Monotheism which has appeared in history’, ‘the most perfect of the most highly developed forms of religion’ (emphases mine).⁴² Such statements have been cited as evidence that Schleiermacher effectively sold out the decisive revelatory nature of Christianity to a general conception of ‘religion’ of which Christianity is simply a particular case—the most perfect maybe but even then only as a matter of degree.

Before coming to a final judgment on this issue the student should again carefully consider the context in which Schleiermacher was writing and the view he was primarily contending against, namely, the Enlightenment with its love of ‘natural religion’. To Schleiermacher such a belief was a disembodied abstraction, wholly evacuated of what was truly religious, namely the feeling of dependence upon God. For Schleiermacher, while one could speak in general terms of ‘religion’ as feeling, such ‘feeling’ only occurred in distinct, specific, historically conditioned forms of existence, whether fetishistic, or polytheistic, or monotheistic, whether as ancient Greek religion or Judaism or Islam or Christianity. Again, Schleiermacher's notion of individuality surfaces here. Each religion must be examined in its own particular case and, by calling for a scientific study of the historical religions Schleiermacher can be justly recognized as a pioneer in the modern field of ‘the study of religions’.

It is incidentally also interesting to note how Schleiermacher assesses the historical situation of the three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.⁴³ Judaism he dismisses as ‘being almost in process of extinction’. Its limitation of the love of its God to Israel ‘betrays a lingering affinity with Fetishism’—and indeed its monotheism was not fully developed until after the exile. This last judgment is in accord with modern, standard historical criticism. The former sentiments may by some be thought to indicate an academic form of anti-Semitism (though Schleiermacher as a person showed no antipathy to Jews—his close confidante Henriette Herz was Jewish). Islam, on the other hand, is to be seen as, with Christianity, ‘still contending for the mastery of the human race’—a testimony to just how long-lived after the mediaeval period was the European fear of Arab advance.

EPILOGUE: BARTH AND SCHLEIERMACHER

‘Until better instructed, I can see no way from Schleiermacher or from his contemporary epigones, to the chroniclers, prophets, and wise ones of Israel, to those who narrate the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to the word of the apostles—no way to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of Jesus Christ, no way to the great tradition of the Christian church. For the present I can see nothing here but a choice. And for me there can be no question as to how that choice is to be made.’⁴⁴

This was Karl Barth's final word on Schleiermacher, the theologian whose works had inspired him during his student days, against whom he revolted during the First World War when he led the advance of the new theology of revelation, and with whom he conducted a continuing polemic. Schleiermacher, in Barth's eyes, was the ‘common denominator’ in that succession of Protestant liberal theologies which confused culture with Christian faith, and being found ethically bankrupt capitulated to the Kaiser's war policy in 1914. Moreover, in Barth's eyes it was Schleiermacher's shade which haunted the existential theologies of Bultmann and others. Worse still, Barth alleges, his presuppositions can be detected in the ‘death of God’ theology of the 1960s. ‘That Schleiermacher made the christianly pious person into the criterion and content of his theology, while, after the “death of God” and the state-funeral dedicated to him, one now jubilantly wants to make the christianly impious person into its object and theme, these certainly are two different things. In the end and in principle, however, they probably amount to the same thing.’⁴⁵ The root fault, according to Barth, lay in Schleiermacher's self-confinement within the ‘anthropological horizon’. His attention was given to the Christian, not the One in whom the Christian believes and worships. His attention was devoted to feelings of piety, not actually to God in his divine, utterly superior being. Only ambiguously is this theology rather than philosophy. Even when describing God as the source of the feeling of absolute dependence, Schleiermacher, according to Barth, is not unequivocal that faith is in relationship to ‘an indispensable Other’.

The student will have to pursue his or her judgment on the issue between Schleiermacher and Barth after first-hand reading of both theologians, and some informed discussion of them. The issues are indeed fundamental and far-reaching, well beyond the historical interest that may be taken in the two theologians themselves. But one observation may be permitted here. This is, that any judgment made upon Schleiermacher must take into account the particular context in which he lived and thought, and what, to him, were the main parameters within which a doctrine of God had to be plotted. For Barth, faced with what seemed like the total collapse of the liberal and idealistic theology in 1914-18, it appeared that theology was faced with an antithesis, a fundamental choice between speaking of God in his own reality and glory as revealed in his Word, and speaking of man in his religious and moral potentialities. But that is not the antithesis which Schleiermacher was conscious of facing at the end of the Enlightenment, and it is hard to see how that antithesis could have occurred to him then. If there was an antithesis facing him, it was between treating the knowledge of God in abstract metaphysical or moral terms, and seeing it as a matter of immediate consciousness affecting human existence.

It must be said that Barth nevertheless had a warm regard for Schleiermacher the human being and pastor. He was genuinely glad to find Schleiermacher's bust amid the rubble at Bonn in 1946. He had lectured intensively on Schleiermacher at Göttingen in 1923-24, and he includes an important essay on him in his survey of nineteenth century Protestant theology.

Finally, after all the criticism he has tirelessly aimed at Schleiermacher's head, Barth typically leaves us with an intriguing, almost wistful, suggestion that all might not be completely lost with Schleiermacher. What about, asks Barth, a theology ‘predominantly and decisively of the Holy Spirit?’—‘A theology of which Schleiermacher was scarcely conscious, but which might actually have been the legitimate concern dominating even his theological activity.’⁴⁶ In other words, theology must take account of what is actually felt as the experience of God's activity in human awareness. This, Barth felt, would be the task of a new theological generation. If that is so, Schleiermacher's name will certainly not be forgotten.

Notes

1. OR p. 36.

2. ibid. p. 39.

3. ibid. p. 148.

4. See J. Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought (London 1963), pp. 218-223.

5. CF p. 52.

6. ibid. p. 199.

7. See B. M. G. Reardon, Liberal Protestantism (Cambridge 1968).

8. J. Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, (Oxford 1939) p. 468.

9. OR p. 35.

10. CF p. 76.

11. OR p. 101.

12. CF p. 101.

13. R. R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (London 1965) p. 148.

14. ibid. p. 28.

15. See e.g. R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (London 1960); F. Gogarten, Demythologising and History (London 1955).

16. See e.g. G. Guttierez, A Theology of Liberation (London 1974); A. Fierro, The Militant Gospel (London 1977).

17. LS Vol. II p. 27.

18. Hermeneutics p. 101.

19. LS Vol. I, p. 2 f.

20. Cf H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey (London 1944).

21. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (London 1962).

22. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford 1946).

23. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London 1975).

24. Hermeneutics p. 112.

25. OR p. 45.

26. ibid. p. 36.

27. CF p. 170.

28. ibid. p. 178.

29. ibid. p. 171.

30. Selected Sermons p. 46.

31. Cf B. A. Gerrish. A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (London 1984).

32. CF p. 377.

33. The Life of Jesus p. 11.

34. CF p. 387.

35. ibid. p. 388.

36. See e.g. D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London 1971); N. Pittenger, The Lure of Divine Love (Edinburgh 1979); J. Moltmann, The Crucified God (London 1973); E. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Edinburgh 1983).

37. Selected Sermons p. 73.

38. M. Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (Philadelphia 1973), p. 89.

39. Selected Sermons p. 74.

40. See especially J. F. Dawson, Schleiermacher: The Evolution of a Nationalist (Texas 1966).

41. CF p. 471.

42. ibid. p. 38.

43. ibid. p. 37.

44. K. Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher (Edinburgh 1982) p. 271 f, and also Chapter VIII in his From Rousseau to Ritschl (London 1959).

45. The Theology of Schleiermacher p. 272.

46. ibid. p. 278.

Abbreviations

LS - The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in his Autobiography and Letters.

OR - On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.

CF - The Christian Faith.