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10 Friedrich Schleiermacher Jeffrey Hensley Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was the most significant Protestant theologian between John Calvin and Karl Barth. A native of Breslau in Silesia, he was the son of a Reformed army chaplain and grew up within the community of the Herrnhuter Brethren (i.e., the Moravian Pietists). He was educated in Moravian schools, attending college at Niesky, seminary at Barby, and university at Halle. He was ordained in 1794 and was appointed Reformed chaplain at the Charité Hospital in Berlin.While there he was befriended by Friedrich Schlegel and others closely associated with the emerging Romantic movement in Prussia , and in response to their questions concerning the legitimacy of his religious commitments in light of modern sensibilities, he published his famous On Religion : Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799). In the Speeches he argued that religion, which he defined as “a sense and taste for the infinite,” was essential to the fully cultured and educated life. In religion, Schleiermacher contended, people intuit or feel themselves as part of a whole, as united with the infinite. Particular dogmas, while important to the historical self-understanding of individual religions, are not a necessary part of what it means to be religious. His Speeches became an instant classic of modern religious thought and propelled him to an academic career in 1804 as professor of theology at his alma mater in Halle. When the university was disbanded after the Prussian defeat of Napoleon in 1807, Schleiermacher returned to Berlin, where he was appointed preacher at Trinity Church in 1809 and, a year later, dean of the theological faculty of the newly founded University of Berlin. He retained both positions for the rest of his life. In 1821/22 he published the first edition of his magnum opus, Christian Faith, wherein he defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence and the essence of Christianity as that feeling qualified by the redemptive influence of Christ. His theology thus represented, on the one hand, a critique of a form of rationalism divorced from particular, concrete reli165 gious piety and, on the other, an openness to the critique of received orthodoxy in light of modern learning. By orienting theology around human self-consciousness and experience (rather than strict adherence to dogma or received interpretation of scripture), he opened up the possibility of Christian theology embracing modernity with all its scientific and historical findings and yet remaining deeply tied to the piety of its particular religious expression. Friedrich Schleiermacher is in many respects modernity’s theologian. His orientation of Christian theology, and particularly his Reformed theological inheritance, around human self-consciousness or experience—the “feeling of absolute dependence,” as he called it—represents his attempt to articulate the central claims of Christian theology to and for the modern Church. This was in stark contrast to the strict adherence to abstract dogma characteristic of the Protestant scholastics or the received interpretations of scripture evident in much of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Pietism. This reorientation of Christian theology around the limits of piety and around human experience became controversial in part for its perceived effect of minimizing the role that scripture could play as both a source and a norm in theology. If the universal experience of absolute dependence is the essence of religion, argued Schleiermacher’s critics, then how can scripture retain its normative function precisely as a check on the excesses of contemporary piety? How can scripture continue to provide the material content of theological reflection if experience is now seen as the primary context in which theology operates? Schleiermacher’s theology has been plagued since his own time by such criticisms, especially from theologians who see a deep contrast between biblically and experientially oriented theologies, between Word and piety, between scripture as God’s Word and experience as the theater of God’s act of redemption. But such criticisms have rarely taken seriously Schleiermacher ’s own account of scripture, which is presented systematically in Christian Faith.1 Nor did they take into account Schleiermacher’s own vocational self-description as a theologian, “wishing, as I always have, to be nothing but a servant of this divine Word in a joyful spirit and sense.”2 How might these criticisms be transformed, if not eliminated, by such an examination of Schleiermacher’s comments on the doctrine of scripture? Few have taken up this challenge, but it behooves anyone who wants to understand the fate of the...

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