WHO IS FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER?

April 10, 2023 Peter Hartwig

A woodcut of a young Scheleirmacher. Public domain.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (Shl-EYE-er-MAH-ker) is the most important theologian you’ve never heard of. Textbooks call him “the Father of Modern Theology” and “the Father of Liberal Theology.” As a matter of historical theology, those titles are well-earned. But you shouldn’t just know about Schleiermacher for the sake of historical theology; you should know about Schleiermacher because he can help you learn what it means to be a modern Christian.

Let’s start with a quick overview of the man’s life.

Friedrich Daniel Ernest Schleiermacher (1786-1834) was born in what was then Prussia and is today Poland. His family (whose surname ironically means “veil maker”) were Moravian Pietists; they believed intensely in the gravity of sin and power of the Crucifixion. They sent Friedrich to Moravian schools and to the historically-Moravian University of Halle. There he read the likes of Plato, Spinoza, and Kant — as well as the second generation of biblical criticism. Unsurprisingly, university was disorienting for the young Schleiermacher, and he underwent the painful experience of wrestling with the Pietism of his youth. But by the end of his education, he had assumed a stable-yet-novel theological position.

In 1796, Schleiermacher went to Berlin as a hospital chaplain. It was the glory days of a movement known as early German Romanticism. In the salons of the capital, Schleiermacher found a circle of notable Romantics who were ready to reintroduce the colors of imagination, feeling, and intuition to the blank, rationalist canvas of the Enlightenment. A good-natured fellow of 28 and a famously warm friend, Schleiermacher’s social life in this period was also a profound education in Romanticism. In fact, Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) was written at the insistence of these very friends.

Schleiermacher returned to Halle briefly as a professor in 1804, but by 1811 he was back in Berlin and things had really come together. He married the widow of a close friend, Henriette von Willich; he accepted a call at the famed, well-heeled Trinity Church; and he was installed as professor at the newly formed University of Berlin. His professorship gave him a since-unrivaled influence over the development of academic theology in the modern West. The man quite literally wrote the manual on how to organize a theological college: A Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811). As the University of Berlin became the blueprint for the modern research university, Schleiermacher’s recommendation came to serve as the basic model for theological higher education.

Perhaps even more influential was his great dogmatic work. While its official title is Der christliche Glaube or The Christian Faith, since its publishing, the book has affectionately been called the Glaubenslehre or “Faith Teaching.” In it, one finds the culmination of Schleiermacher’s reflection on, as the title suggests, “Christian faith.” More on this epochal piece of genius in a minute.

In Berlin as preacher and professor, he continued to revise the Glaubenslehre. He was active in the life of the university. Importantly, he also played an active role in the unification of the Evangelical and Reformed churches – an ecclesial arrangement which ended nearly two centuries of theological strife between Lutherans and Calvinists in present day Germany. In 1829, he suffered the sudden loss of his only son Nathanael to scarlet fever. Five years later, on February 12, 1834, Schleiermacher himself was laid to eternal rest by a funeral of some reported 20,000 attendees.

Before moving on to his thought, it is worth pointing out that Schleiermacher’s story is, in many ways, the archetypal story of modern faith. He is a thoughtful kid born to an intensely religious family who sends him to Christian school. Then he goes off to a college that used to be religiously affiliated. There he enters a period of wrestling with faith. He calls home, voicing questions that are nearly as painful for his family as they are for him. He finds new friends and pours himself into philosophy. By the time he emerges, he finds a way to live between the modern world and the Christianity of his childhood. He spends the rest of his life trying to worship, work, and write under the aegis of this hard-won faith embedded in community.

At the risk of simply writing our own world into his, haven’t you heard that story before: the story of faith transformed by modernity? Schleiermacher’s is the first of this genre. So too, his theology is the first of its kind.

Since before the Reformation, core features of the Christian faith had been looking pretty shaky. The heaviest blow to Christian theology was delivered by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He did it by demonstrating (or so it seemed) that you can’t really know God.

Kant’s theory of knowledge goes something like this. Human beings experience the world with our senses, but then our minds get about the task of “making sense” of it. It’s a two-step process:

Step one - the senses gather data through empirical experience

Step two - the mind interprets the sense-data

It’s kind of like the way your brain makes sense of the “ink” on this site to understand what I am trying to communicate. You see the black marks, but your mind recognizes them as words that you can read.

If you are thinking to yourself “Well, duh, that’s just how it all works,” then let me congratulate you on being a Thoroughly Modern Millie. As obvious as this may seem to you and me, it was no more obvious to the ancient and medieval theologians who built the foundations of Christian theology than it was to the classical philosophers whose tools they borrowed. And for the 18th century, it was downright revolutionary.

So, why would this be a problem? Well, if Kant was right, then the implication was that Christian theologians couldn’t possibly, actually know anything about God. You can’t smell or taste or see God — even the Bible says that. Put in Kant’s terms, your senses can’t gather any data here. At best, God could be a vague conjecture, a hypothesis. But God could never be known.

So by the end of Kant’s career and the beginning of Schleiermacher’s, Western European academia was treating theology the way an angsty teenager might treat their parents: You are so dumb! You don’t understand anything! You’re ruining my life! *Door Slam*

Schleiermacher’s great accomplishment was his ability to rescue Christian theology from a premature demise. He found a way through for Christian theology. We find this way forward outlined in the Glaubenslehre. It proceeds in three movements: religion, the religions, Christian religion. That is, first he explains the essence of “religion.” Then he explains “the religions” as concretizations and particularizations of that universal experience. Finally he sets forward Christian religion as the supreme religion which occupies the vast majority of the book. But this early three-step logic is the foundation for the entire piece. Let’s review it in detail.

The essence of religion is what Schleiermacher calls “the feeling of total dependence.” Now, by “feeling” (the German Gefühl) he does not mean emotion. He means something deeper — something like intuition or existential awareness of the fact that we are 100% dependent on something beyond us for our existence.

It might be helpful to go through a little thought experiment here. It is true that you are able to exercise some control over objects in the world around you; you could choose to shut your laptop or turn off your phone right now. At the same time, there are some things that exercise control over you! There are powers at work around you – both physical and metaphysical – that act upon your life. However, most fundamentally you actually do not exercise any control; you do not will yourself into being or control the universe. So while you have a relative amount of freedom in the world, you are fundamentally dependent. In other words, Schleiermacher thinks that we are inherently aware of ourselves as totally dependent. This is the essence of religion, of piety.

Can you see the genius here? He gets around Kant! Immanuel says, “You can’t experience God directly.” And Friedrich retorts, “No, but you can experience yourself as in relation to God.” That theological sleight of hand made all the difference.

Next, movement two: Schleiermacher goes on to say that the religions of the world are really just ways that the feeling of total dependence takes a concrete form. You never get the feeling of total dependence pure and simple. It always comes in the particular form of particular religion. Judaism or Islam or Bahai — they’re all the same kind of thing. They are ways of bringing the feeling of total dependence into our lives.

The religion that is best at doing this — and this is his third movement — is Christianity. Sure, it is one religion among many, but it is the best of them because it allows the feeling of total dependence to come through in the purest form: the consciousness of Christians that they have been redeemed. When Christians say that they have been saved by Jesus, Schleiermacher hears them voicing an existential awareness that they are entirely dependent on God. For the rest of the Glaubenslehre’s nearly 1200 pages, he goes on to revisit the traditional doctrines of Protestant theology. At every step, he demonstrates how these doctrines are expressions of the feeling of total dependence within the consciousness of redemption. It is a remarkable feat of systematic logic, demonstrating Schleiermacher’s towering brilliance and expert understanding of the Christian tradition — especially the Reformed tradition in which he ministered.

The effects of Schleiermacher’s project are many. He finds a way of presenting Christian theology that attempts to guide a modern reader very gently into the profundities of Christian faith. He develops a method for Christian theology that mediates faith to modern thought and culture. He circumnavigates the Kantian impasse. Perhaps the biggest effect, however, is that experience now gets the first and prime word in Christian theology. The object of theology is no longer God in the most direct sense, but rather the experience of God. This was a novel way of imagining Christian thought, a way that has come to be called “Liberal Theology.”

Schleiermacher is the historical font from which all other liberal theologies have flowed. Movements as recent as womanist and queer theology have pulled inspiration from Schleiermacher; even certain strains of Pentecostal theology have found a boon companion in him. His decision to mediate between Christian faith and the culture of modernity has proven to be one of the most generative intellectual decisions in the last half-millennium of Christian thought. You might affirm his decision or – like the great 20th century dogmatician Karl Barth – you might reject it. But whatever your orientation, studying Schleiermacher — especially in light of his own life — helps us see clearly what is going on in a modern world that often feels somehow threatening to Christian faith.