In today's world of post-liberal, post-modern, radical orthodox theologies - and even more so in evangelical, Conservative Roman Catholic and several other conservative Christian systems of thought - Schleiermacher has become a favourite example of a theological apostate. A good recipe to start a theological essay these days is to sketch a "schleiermacherian" position, and then to sharply distance oneself from it by showing its "obvious" shortcomings, its naive view of doctrine and religion, and after that proceed to whatever version of conservative or post-something theology one wants to defend.
Not only are many of these treatments of Scheiermacher heavily biased, insufficiently informed, or simply erroneous; more importantly, they do not show any understanding of the valuable insights and relevancy of Scheiermacher's views for today's situation and dilemmas of Christian theology.
For a start, let me propose a short list of some - by no means all - still relevant claims of
Schleiermacher that are habitually ignored or misunderstood, but which I find illuminating insights that can and should inform responsible Christian theology today. I will have more to say on Schleiermacher in the future posts, but we got to begin - this blog, as well as an engagement with Schleiermacher - somewhere (so this list may seem quite arbitrary).1.) For Schleiermacher, religious experience or "feeling" is essential for Christian faith, doctrines are derivative.
This much is well known. But is it understood? Well, it has to be viewed together with other claims of Schleiermacher, like:
2.) The primary, original expressions of faith-experience are the poetic and the rhetorical (preaching, exhortation). Doctrinal systems are developed as a result of rational reflection upon the first two expressions of religious feelings.
3.) God can never be "an object" of experience, as one object among others. God as an ultimate reality is "the Whence" of all our knowledge (theoretical reason) and action (practical reason).
4.) So, importantly, the feeling of "absolute dependence", which is Schleiermacher's term to denote the most basic and genuine religious feeling, transcends subject-object structure. Rather, this God-consciousness, as he also calls it, is immediate, pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual, and puts us in touch with the Ultimate reality which is God (however, see the bullet-point 6.).
5.) This feeling not only "accompanies our whole existence" (The Christian Faith 4.3), but also colours it and in this way structures it. This is very similar to the claims about existential feelings made by fenomenologists such as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and also to Wittgenstein's notion that how we experience the world determines what we experience.
6.) However, Schleiermacher was well aware that, "if there is religion at all, it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion." (On Religion, p. 73). So, religion can only be "positive", particular, or situated in socio-historical reality: this means it is necessarily embedded in language, within the life co-shaped by traditions, doctrines, communities and practices. There is no other way a religion, or Christianity, could exist! It can not exist in isolation or just in abstraction. (This proves that George Lindbeck's accusation of Schleiermacher that the latter ignores cultural-linguistic realities and defends a possibility of a non-particular "general religiousness", not situated in time and place, is wrong).
My point is that there is more to Schleiermacher than Barth's or Lindbeck's caricatures of the former's theology. Much of contemporary Christian theology suffers from a far too hasty repudiation of the liberal protestant tradition.
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