Schleiermacher and His Importance in Christian Theology

A Statue of Friedrich Schleiermacher

     



       Often known as the father of modern (or liberal) Protestantism, Friedrich Schleiermacher spearheaded the movement of Christian theology to liberalism in the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century.  Schleiermacher made an incredible impact on the theology of his day.  The mark Schleiermacher made still lasts today.  Before getting to know about what Schleiermacher did, it is important to look at the background of his life. 
       Reformed theology was a main influence on Schleiermacher while growing up, because Schleiermacher's father was a Reformed chaplain.  When Schleiermacher came of age, his father sent him to a Moravian seminary.  At the Moravian seminary, Schleiermacher found himself in a world of the pietist movement.  This introduced Schleiermacher to the idea of personal religious experience.
    While Schleiermacher studied at the Moravian seminary, he began to question doctrines he once believed.  Doubt led Schleiermacher to express his feelings and concerns to his father in letter form.  Schleiermacher's father basically told Schleiermacher that if he kept on this course, Schleiermacher was headed straight to Hell.  At this point in Schleiermacher's life, there is a great turn in his theology. 
      After his studies at the Moravian seminary, Schleiermacher studied theology at the University of Halle.  During his studies, Schleiermacher came into contact with Higher Criticism and rational theology.  The University of Halle pushed its students to place theology after philosophy.  Philosophy was to lead the course of theology.  The Enlightenment made reason the basis for theology and epistemology.  Man's reason became central to understanding truth.  Therefore, it makes sense that Schleiermacher was introduced to philosophy as the foundation which theology must find its roots. 
     While Schleiermacher studied at the University of Halle, he came to accept Kant's epistemology.  Because of Schleiermacher's doubts and intellectual struggles with orthodox Christianity, the Enlightenment principle of reason and Kant's epistemology appealed greatly to Schleiermacher.  Schleiermacher felt as if he was intellectually stimulated by reason and personal experience.  Schleiermacher finished schooling at the University of Halle and became a professor at the University of Berlin. 
      With his intellect fulfilled, Schleiermacher saw that there were two main theatres that criticized Christianity: the men of the Enlightenment, and the Romanticists.  Schleiermacher felt it was his duty to save Christianity from these critics and show that Christianity was the best religion.  In an attempt to make Christianity relevant to the modern times, Schleiermacher wrote a systematic theology titled, The Christian Faith.  By making Christianity relevant to his culture and time, Schleiermacher changed Christianity and Christian theology to something that appealed to the people of the Enlightenment and the Romanticists.  For Schleiermacher, he was not destroying Christianity, but rather saving it.  This makes sense, especially knowing that Schleiermacher followed Kant's epistemology. 
       To Schleiermacher, Christianity is not about believing, faith, doctrines, morality, or ultimately about God, it is about one's personal experience with God.  Reiterated, Christianity is not necessarily about truth, but rather one's experience with God.  Schleiermacher believed that true religion is the feeling of absolute dependence.  Everyone feels God, and God is sensed in all religions.  Schleiermacher would say that though all religions reveal God, Christianity is the best way of connecting with God.  At some point, everyone comes to a realization of their total absolute dependence on God.
       In Schleiermacher's book, On Religion, Schleiermacher argues for a more experiential Christianity.  It is not to the Scriptures that one runs to find truth and experience God through His truth, but rather it is man's personal subjective experience with God that truly matters.  From On Religion, Schleiermacher basically says, "religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling, wishes to intuit the universe."  For Schleiermacher Christianity is all about feeling.
      As one sees Schleiermacher's main source of revelation about God, it is not too long of a stretch to see what Schleiermacher did with Christianity's core theological beliefs.  Theology becomes speaking of one's experiences/encounters with God.  Theology is not about stating truths, but rather about articulating and clarifying religious experiences. 
      Christ is central to Christianity, but what does Schleiermacher do with Christology?  For Schleiermacher, Jesus Christ is merely the man, or human, who had the greatest "God consciousness."  As such, Christ can become a medium through which his "God consciousness" is shared with others.  Though, by no means is Christi the only mediator.  This comes directly from Schleiermacher's book, On Religion, "[Christ] never maintained He was the only mediator, the only one in whom His idea actualized itself."  Sure, Christ must have known that there were others like Buddha, and Gandhi, and Zoroaster, and...  Christ is not any different from them in kind, nature, or being, just in degree.  This is what Schleiermacher believed. 
      Sin, for Schleiermacher, is merely God forgetfulness which offends God.  Therefore, redemption gives us the effect of "gaining victory over the sensuous impulses and ordering human consciousness in such a way that pain and melancholy give way to a new sense of equilibrium and joy, a new attunement of the soul in its relation to God and the world." (Christian Faith, 722)  It is not really about the penal-substitutionary sacrifice Jesus made so that we could be restored to our original relationship with God.  Rather than this, it is focused on experience and the feelings of man.  To Schleiermacher, redemption is not an objective historical event, but is rather the experience that takes place inside one's being when he/she realizes his/her total dependence. 
      Overall, Schleiermacher led Christian theology into a totally new arena.  No longer was there objective truth, but religion became focused on man's subjective experience with God.  In making Christianity relevant, Schleiermacher lost the validity of the Christian faith, because he based Christianity on the authority of man's subjective experience of God.  As a natural consequence of this, Schleiermacher downplayed the doctrine of sin and elevated man and man's experience to the center of theology. 

      Schleiermacher's works influenced his time greatly.  The impact Schleiermacher made was so great that liberal theology is still prominent throughout Western Civilization.  While making Christianity relevant, Schleiermacher and his works formed the fountainhead for modern liberal theology which holds the image of man and man's experience at the peak of religion rather than God.  

For More Information, Please See:

  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schleiermacher/