Schleiermacher and Modern Theology

Friedrich Schleiermacher was preacher at the Charité hospital in Berlin when he wrote On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Schleiermacher, Life in Letters, vol. 1, pp. 138–140 (recollections of Henriette Herz)). His friend Henriette Herz recalled that he began it at Potsdam in the middle of February 1799 and sent her each speech as he finished it, to be passed on to the censor and the printer (Schleiermacher, Life in Letters, vol. 1, pp. 138–140 (recollections of Henriette Herz)). On 15 April he wrote to her that the last stroke had been put to it (Schleiermacher, Life in Letters, vol. 1, p. 207 (letter of 14–15 April 1799)).

The first speech addresses educated readers who, he says, have made their earthly life so rich that they no longer need an eternity and who will listen least of all to a priest; he admits that he belongs to that order (Schleiermacher, On Religion, First Speech). The second asks what religion is, and answers first that it is not knowledge, whether of the world or of God: “Quantity of knowledge is not quantity of piety” (Schleiermacher, On Religion, Second Speech). The contemplation of the pious, he says, is “the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite” (Schleiermacher, On Religion, Second Speech). In the wording of the first edition, as his translator John Oman gives it, religion “is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling”, and “religion is sense and taste for the Infinite” (Schleiermacher, On Religion, Oman’s appendix, ‘The First Edition’).

The fifth speech turns from religion in general to the religions. Against the “natural religion” his readers preferred, he holds that the positive religions “are just the definite forms in which religion must exhibit itself” (Schleiermacher, On Religion, Fifth Speech). He describes Christianity by what he calls its original intuition, in which “corruption and redemption, hostility and mediation” are the two fundamental elements, and says of Jesus that his idea was that everything finite needs a higher mediation to be at one with God (Schleiermacher, On Religion, Fifth Speech).

He carried the same starting point into his dogmatics, The Christian Faith, first published in 1821–22 and revised in 1830–31 (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, translator’s note). The first edition says that piety in itself is neither a knowing nor a doing but a disposition and modification of feeling, and that its essence is the feeling of dependence on God (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §§8–9 (first edition)). The second edition defines the element common to all piety as “the consciousness of our absolute dependence, or, which is the same thing, of our relation with God” (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §§3–4 (second edition)).

It draws the consequence for theology: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech” (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §15 (second edition)). The seat of religion is the same in both books, in feeling and not in knowledge or in conduct, and in the later one doctrine is treated as the description of that feeling (Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §§3–4 (second edition)).