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  • Christian Faith—A New Translation and Critical Edition by Friedrich Schleiermacher
  • R. David Nelson
Christian Faith—A New Translation and Critical Edition. 2 Vols. By Friedrich Schleiermacher. Translated by Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. xxxiii + 1140 pp.

This publication of an up-to-date, critical English translation of Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre is a major event in contemporary scholarship in the fields of theology, church history, and religious studies. Prior to the appearance of this two-volume set, the only complete translation available in English was the edition prepared in the late 1920s by a team of British scholars and edited by Hugh Ross Mackintosh and James Stuart Stewart. The Tice-Kelsey-Lawler edition is a significant improvement over its predecessor, rendering Schleiermacher's opus into a clear and elegant English text that is faithful to the German original. Explanatory footnotes illuminate the reasons behind certain translation decisions and provide commentary on the backgrounds and meanings of Schleiermacher's proposals and concepts in Romanticism and German Idealism. The editors supply numerous cross-references to other contemporaneous and antecedent sources. Of particular note are the echoes in Christian Faith of ideas Schleiermacher developed in Brief Outline for the Study of Theology (1830) and On Religion (31831). Readers will encounter here the new standard text of Christian Faith in English, packaged in a critical study edition that reflects leading scholarship in Schleiermacher's theology and in nineteenth-century Protestant thought.

This release should inspire fresh scrutiny of Schleiermacher's contribution to modern Protestantism. As Christine Helmer points out ("Schleiermacher for Lutherans," Lutheran Quarterly 29 [2015], 162–183), Lutherans are inclined to object to Schleiermacher's contention that religious experience originates in a pre-linguistic awareness of creaturely finitude that manifests itself in the form of, in the words of a locution he made famous, a "feeling of absolute dependence" upon the infinite God. This awareness-cum-feeling occurs before and independently of language. What goes missing in Schleiermacher's theology—and this is the root of the Lutheran concern—is the precedence and antecedence for faith of the external word of justifying grace through which God communicates his victorious righteousness and awakens sinners for the life of faith. Rather [End Page 458] than starting from the priority of the external word, Schleiermacher focuses on "seeing the (religious) experience as it is experienced, not on its subsequent articulation or even expression. It is an experience that precedes the rational act of expression . . . Language is inevitable . . . Yet the experience of love's unity precedes description and explanation" (Helmer, 170).

It is fascinating to observe how Schleiermacher develops these themes in Christian Faith. After an extensive introduction addressing a nest of prolegomenal concerns (notably, theology's borrowing of concepts from ethics, philosophy, and apologetics), he unfurls a complete first-to-second-to-third article dogmatic cycle. "Religious self-consciousness," which he identifies in the introduction as the pious acknowledgment of and dependence upon the infinite God, becomes something of a first principle, extending laterally through the three units on "The Doctrines of Faith" in order to show how this fundamental religious posture unlocks Christian understandings of the attributes of God and the doctrine of creation, the plight of sin and the redemptive agency of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and the essence and historical development of the "uneven and fluid" and yet "distinctively circumscribed" community of the church. The experience of God as the infinite other precedes and thus grounds the church's language of faith and its theological reflection. Preaching is ensconced within this discursive nexus. While Schleiermacher does concede that preaching can incite religious feeling, his focus is on various forms of Christian discourse as recitations, repetitions, and celebrations of the redemption enacted in Jesus.

To be sure, it is possible to follow Schleiermacher's lead by doing theology from the ground up—commencing from the general experience of religious self-consciousness and proceeding toward the particularities of Christian doctrine and practice—and still articulate an account of divinity in a distinctively Lutheran theological voice. One thinks of the recent programs of Pannenberg (who defines the imago dei...

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