Theopedia

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Overview

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was a German Protestant theologian and preacher, professor at the universities of Halle and Berlin from 1796 to 1834.1 Craig Carter identifies him, alongside Baruch Spinoza, as one of the two founding figures of what he calls “the liberal project”: where Spinoza’s legacy is historical-critical study of the Bible, “the other branch of the liberal project is revisionist theology stemming from Schleiermacher,” a line running through Albrecht Ritschl to twentieth-century process theology and, in a more conservative form, into contemporary evangelical theology itself.2 Craig Carter likewise reports that Herman Bavinck named Schleiermacher, with Spinoza, as one of the two most influential promoters of pantheism in modern philosophy and theology.3

Life and Ministry

Schleiermacher served as a preacher and professor at Halle and then Berlin from 1796 until his death in 1834.1 Born in Breslau in 1768, the son of a Prussian army chaplain, he was educated from age 15 at a boarding school run by the Moravian Brethren before going on to the University of Halle, where he studied Immanuel Kant.4 He was ordained a Reformed minister in 1790 and, from 1796, served as a hospital chaplain in Berlin.5 In 1799 he published On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, defending religion against its Enlightenment critics.5 He became dean of the theology faculty at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1810 and its rector in 1815.6 His major dogmatic work, The Christian Faith, appeared in 1821 with a substantially revised second edition in 1830-31, building out the account of religion he had first set down in the 1799 Speeches.7 He died in Berlin in 1834.8

Theological Contribution

God-consciousness and the feeling of absolute dependence

Schleiermacher relocated the foundation of religion away from doctrine and toward feeling. A. A. Hodge summarized the system: “He considered religion to be a form of feeling, and to be grounded on our constitutional God-consciousness, which consists, on the intellectual side, of an intuition of God, and on the emotional side, of a feeling of absolute dependence.”1 On this account Christianity is simply the particular form that this constitutional religious consciousness took when it was generated in Christ’s disciples by their contact with him, and it continues to be generated in believers through communion with the church Christ founded, so that “the common Christian consciousness of the Church,” not Scripture, becomes the final court of appeal in matters of faith.1 Charles Hodge traced the same scheme in Schleiermacher’s own terms: man possesses both a self-consciousness, formed by his relation to the world, and a “Gottesbewusstseyn,” or God-consciousness, which is “not merely a consciousness of God, but is God in us in the form of consciousness.”9 Religion, on this definition, “consists in the feeling of absolute dependence”; sin is simply the feeling that arises when the self-consciousness escapes the God-consciousness’ control, and the corresponding sense that the God-consciousness ought to rule is the feeling of guilt.10 Louis Berkhof noted that Schleiermacher’s God-consciousness left no place for God’s personal decree: it reduced predestination to “a consciousness of utter dependence on the causality that is proper to the natural order with its invariable laws and second causes,” so that divine election collapses into simple natural determinism.11

Christ, redemption, and the Holy Spirit

Because redemption is worked out entirely within this scheme of consciousness, Schleiermacher held that Christ differs from other men only in degree: he is “the man in whom the God-consciousness, the divine nature, God…was from the beginning completely dominant,” and believers are redeemed by recognizing his sinless character and entering into communion with him through the church.10 Bavinck described the same christology in his own terms: “Schleiermacher brought [the term ‘redemption’] into vogue; he understands redemption to consist of the mystical communication of Jesus’s God-consciousness to the fellowship of believers resulting in a subjective change in them.”12 Bavinck contrasted this with Ritschl, who located the same shift in Christ’s ethical influence rather than his person, and concluded that both writers “shift the redemptive work of Christ away from Christ’s objective obedient sacrifice of propitiation on our behalf and in our place to the subjective mystical and moral influence on us and in us.”12 Charles Hodge drew out a further consequence: on this system “there is no place…for the work of the Holy Spirit,” since Schleiermacher “expressly denied” that the Holy Spirit is a personal being at all, treating the Spirit instead as a name for “the common life of the Church.”13

Scripture

Bavinck placed Schleiermacher’s doctrine of inspiration alongside the older liberal distinction between Scripture’s doctrinal and merely historical content, as the next stage in the same trajectory: Schleiermacher’s “dynamic conception…transferred inspiration from a quality or property of Scripture to the personality and aptitude of the authors,” so that the difference between the inspiration of the biblical writers and of ordinary believers becomes only a matter of degree, and Scripture itself is no longer revelation but merely “the record of revelation.”14

Historical Significance

Carter’s history of what he calls “the liberal project” makes Schleiermacher’s revisionist theology one of its two founding streams, continuing through Ritschl and into twentieth-century process theology and Hegelian panentheism, and surfacing again, in a more moderate form, in what Carter (following James E. Dolezal) calls “theistic mutualism” among contemporary evangelical theologians.2 Bavinck, as Carter reports, traced a comparable line, grouping Schleiermacher’s pantheistic tendency with Spinoza’s as decisive influences on later “modern philosophy and theology.”3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 53. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩ ↩2

  3. Craig A. Carter, “Creatio ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 8. ↩ ↩2

  4. Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 226. ↩

  5. Hill, The History of Christian Thought, 228. ↩ ↩2

  6. Hill, The History of Christian Thought, 230. ↩

  7. Hill, The History of Christian Thought, 231. ↩

  8. Hill, The History of Christian Thought, 232. ↩

  9. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 137. ↩

  10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:137-38. ↩ ↩2

  11. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 96. ↩

  12. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  13. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 449. ↩

  14. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩