Friedrich Schleiermacher(1768-1834)

Born in Breslau (the Germanized name for what is today the city of Wroclaw in Poland; as of 1871, it was part of the German Empire), Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the son of a Prussian army chaplain, and is today remembered as a influential Protestant theologian who devised a manner to defend belief in God from the criticisms leveled by the skeptics of his day. He was educated initially in schools administered by the Moravian Church--a Reformation denomination that originated in the mid-fifteenth century in ancient Bohemia and Moravia (what is today part of the Czech Republic) that emphasized the role of piety, or an inner experience of the Gospel's saving power, over dogma and the so-called trappings of ritual and institution. Against his father's wishes, Schleiermacher left a Moravian seminary in 1787 and, instead, moved to the University of Halle, in east central Germany. Founded in 1694, the University of Halle is considered to have been among the first so-called modern universities in which religious orthodoxy and Church control over the curriculum gave way to free rational inquiry. There, Schleiermacher was thoroughly schooled in, among other topics, philosophy, especially the work of influential Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant is today among a very small group of deeply influential writers from this period, remembered best for his attempts to bridge David Hume's arguments in favor of empiricism (the position that sensory experience is the basis of knowledge) with those of rationalism (the position that the innate ideas, or "categories," of human reason, not experience, are the basis of knowledge). In 1794 Schleiermacher was ordained, then served as a hospital chaplain in Berlin, and went on to represent the Romantic movement (a philosophically idealist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) by writing a number of important works that sought to defend religious faith against the attacks of Enlightenment skepticism (prompted both by empiricism and rationalism).

Major Works

On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799)

The Christian Faith (1820-1)

Quotation

"But if anyone should maintain that there might be Christian religious experience in which the Being of God was not involved in such a manner, i.e., experiences which contained absolutely no consciousness of God, our proposition would certainly exclude him from the domain of that Christian belief which we are going to describe.... [W]e assert that in every religious affection ... the God-consciousness must be present and cannot be neutralized by anything else, so that there can be no relation to Christ which does not contain also a relation to God.... Just as there is always present in Christian piety a relation to Christ in conjunction with the God-consciousness, so in Judaism there is always a relation to the Lawgiver, and in Mohammedanism to the revelation given through the Prophet."

- from Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (1820-1)

Select Web Resources on Schleiermacher

Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology entry on Friedrich Schleiermacher

Secondary Literature on Schleiermacher

Richard R. Niebuhr, "Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, pp. 316-319. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967.

B. A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology. Fortress Press, 1984.

Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, pp. 13-18. Fortress Press, 1995.

James M. Brandt, "Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst," The Encyclopedia of Protestantism, vol. 4, pp. 1656-1661.

B. A. Gerrish, "Schleiermacher, Friedrich," The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition. vol. 12, pp. 8159-8167. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.