Schleiermacher Speeches and The Christian Faith, 1-19

Over the years, Friedrich Schleiermacher has become something like a friend. I know him only through his writings, and a little biography, but that has been enough to feel some kindred feeling with him. In Acts 17:28 we read, “In him we live and move and have our being,” a quote from a Greek poet that I think summarizes quite well the sense that Schleiermacher for religion. In this too long essay, I intend to explore On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1800) and The Christian Faith (1830), Sections 1-19. These parts of his writings are influential and controversial.

Scholars will make the statement that one can mark the beginning of Protestant liberal theology with Speeches and its end with Barth when he wrote Romans (1922). His The Christian Faith set a pattern for modern theological reflection that continues to influence theologians today. Speeches is one of the classics in Christian theology. Jack Forstman, in a Forward he wrote to a translation of the book, described the setting that stimulated the writing of this book.

The Schleiermacher it (the book) gives us is the young Schleiermacher who, as Reformed (Calvinist) Chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin, a predominately evangelical (Lutheran) city, had sufficient free time to participate actively in the fermenting avant garde culture of that time and place. That avant-garde movement was what scholars call early German Romanticism, and it found its voice in the lively conversations that took place in the salons of wealthy Jewish women. Schleiermacher was introduced to the weekly drawing-room gatherings of Henriette Herz by the young Count Alexander Dohna, with whom Schleiermacher had become friends when not long before he had been tutor to the younger Dohna children at the family estate.

He fit the group. He was brilliant, witty, and articulate; he had a gift for friendship. He also shared the group’s reaction against enlightened rationality and detachment and against neo-classical ideals and an emphasis on proper decorum. (Friedrich Schlegel, who became Schleiermacher’s close friend, referred to the representatives of the Enlightenment mode as “harmonious dullards.”) More important, Schleiermacher shared his new friends’ sense of individuality and their appreciation of the infinite diversity of the world. He held their view of the human situation as one that can penetrate and understand neither infinite variety nor infinite unity but that strives to bring both together in a way that destroys neither pole and acknowledges the limitations of human finitude. Schleiermacher expresses this view early in the First Speech (“Defense”). It is foundational for the development of the Speeches, and it remained so in everything he wrote and taught throughout his life.

His closest friends within the circle decided to resolve the issue by insisting that he write a book. Friedrich Schlegel contrived the plan. On the morning of Schleiermacher’s twenty-ninth birthday (November 21, 1797) he was visited by Alexander Dohna, his brother, Henrietta Herz, Dorothea Viet, the brilliant daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who was married to a Berlin banker, and Friedrich Schlegel.¹

I had some surprise when I first read Speeches that I liked it as much as I did. Hegel remains a favorite philosopher of mine, but he ridiculed Schleiermacher. If he were the father of modern liberal theology, my evangelical upbringing would not naturally gravitate toward a favorable reception of this book. I have grown to appreciate Karl Barth so much over the years. Yet, Barth uses Schleiermacher as a foil. Every chance he gets he directs the reader of his Church Dogmatics to the places where he disagrees with Schleiermacher. He can also ridicule Schleiermacher, such as calling him the first female theologian because he was out of touch with his manliness.[1] Yet, Barth is relatively fair with him in his analysis. Where Schleiermacher gives us two brief sections on the ministry of the Word, Barth devotes the first two volumes and much fine print to an exposition of the Word. Schleiermacher has a relatively harmless appendix on the Trinity while Barth organizes his work around Trinitarian themes. With Hegel and Barth against you, I am not sure how you continue to stand as a thinker.

Yet, another theologian gives me some hope for Schleiermacher. His name is Wolfhart Pannenberg. He often has generous things to say, especially regarding the subject of this essay. Pannenberg is creative enough to chart his course in theological reflection. It seems to me now that he draws from the heart of the theology of both Barth and Schleiermacher as part of that creative theological energy he has. He is committed in a way Schleiermacher to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as an event of history. He is committed in a way Barth rejected to the apologetic task of anthropological justification for theological talk.

I am going to defend the thesis that Schleiermacher has developed an important dimension of the theological task that theology needs to continue today. I will grant that Schleiermacher begins with an awareness of some uncertainty regarding the truth claims of theology.[2] Yet, I wonder how many great theologians began in a similar way. I might be bold enough to say that Barth also must have had much uncertainty, given the massive production of Church Dogmatics.  Schleiermacher treads a dangerous path for any theologian. Does The Christian Faith represent the fall of Christianity?[3] I can only imagine that Barth has in mind the liberal theology of his time that agreed with Kaiser in WWI, some of which later justified the Nazi regime. Yet, his liberal brand of Christianity also bore much fruit in the 1800s, especially in its increased concern for ministries of compassion among the poor. The challenge of that time in industrial expansion desperately needed such reminders. However, I agree with Barth that Schleiermacher gave dogmatics new relevancy to the people of his time.[4] He takes the secular thought of his day seriously. He addresses the “cultured despisers” of his time directly by pointing them to God as they already experienced God, doing so in the name of God.[5] His entire approach is apologetic[6] in the sense that it seeks to address the concerns his time had with Christian thought and life. He allows that thought to shape some of the way he organizes his theology. The criticism of Barth is that he surrendered the themes of theology to the philosophy of his time.[7] Each reader, especially those willing to explore The Christian Faith, will have to determine whether he has done that. If so, he went too far. Yet, he clearly wanted to explain the Protestant confessions to his contemporaries. The spirit of his age involved a turn to the human subject, and he embraced that turn even while seeking ways to direct his contemporaries to life with God. Barth will accuse Schleiermacher of being arbitrary in this beginning of his theology, claiming to see clearly from that beginning.[8] I would like to say that Barth offered this criticism with a smile, since arbitrary is a charge often levelled against him. I think he was serious. In any case, he at least begins with the common human experience of feeling, and wants to lead us from there to reflect upon God. He takes our feelings seriously, in many ways anticipating some of the emphases of Freud and Heidegger. In some ways, Schleiermacher may well anticipate Bultmann in the emphasis upon the relation of the believer to Christ today,[9] but I do not view that as a bad thing. Yet, if I were to write a full systematic theology, I could not follow Schleiermacher in his suppression of the historical grounding of the Christian faith in Jesus of Nazareth and apostolic teaching. Our faith consciousness today needs to know it has integrity with that beginning.[10] I will want to modify his position, but still, feeling is an important indicator for the direction of our lives. If all he did was provide us with self-motivated Christian self-consciousness,[11] the aim of his theology remains unfulfilled. For all his concern for anthropology and feeling, has he set out upon a journey that will not bring him to the desired result?[12] If he is indeed an apologist among the idealists of his time, his attention to the human subject or the self will need to become a path for considering the claim of God upon an individual life. Barth does not think this can happen,[13] while I do. I think his pietism keeps him from disregarding a connection with Christ, but you as a reader will have to come to your conclusion. He values his German pietism and to some degree embraces it in a way neither Luther nor Calvin would find comfortable. I will even grant that he will make the themes of piety and religion central to this theology.[14] I disagree that such an approach is a bad thing. Yet, I have also found that he genuinely sought to communicate the Protestant teaching of the Confessions to the people of his time. Even Barth agrees that his theology aims at being a Christocentric one, although he commends Luther and Calvin for beginning with Christ.[15]  Each step he takes here is a dangerous one. Yet, I find myself in harmony with his approach.

Wayne Proudfoot makes it clear that Schleiermacher, in this book in particular, is responsible for the turn to religious experience, motivated by an interest in freeing religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs and ecclesiastical institutions and grounding it in human experience. He views this book as the most influential statement and defense of the autonomy of religious experience.[16] He does not point out that this turn to experience occurred in the context of the Kantian turn away from metaphysics. The concern of Kant for the “transcendental illusion” led to philosophers and theologians alike to be cautious of metaphysical statements. The turn to human experience became important as it explored a new basis for talk about God in anthropology. Such a turn toward experience, especially with the language of feeling for which Schleiermacher is famous, gives the appearance that he is arguing from what people will commonly regard as “just subjectivity.” Such a response would be wrong. First, no human being is “just subjective.” Every idea and thought arises out of engagement with people and the world. If one offers viewpoints or opinions, they do not have the capacity to be “just subjective,” for they arise of experience with the world and attempts to influence the world. Second, the appeal to experience is always an appeal to shared experience. We can see this at several points in his Speeches, as he asks his cultured despisers if they can connect with the experience or feeling, of which he is writing at various points. My point is that such an approach is not “just subjective,” but appeals to what might be a shared feeling regarding their experience of the one world they share. Truly subjective assertion would arise, however, if one pointed to something objective and outside oneself and declared that it was the “truth.” One might point to Torah, Jesus, the Bible, the Koran, Buddha, and so on, as points outside oneself that one asserts as true. Such a position comes far closer to being “just subjective,” paradoxically, than does Schleiermacher, for all his discussion of feeling.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote of Speeches:

It would seem to be the first book ever written on religion as such – not on a particular kind or instance and not incidentally, but explicitly on religion itself as a generic something.[17]

Barth will often criticize Schleiermacher for his anthropology. His criticism that he tries to conquer the consciousness of the age on its own ground may go a bit too far.[18] Barth says that no matter how profound our metaphysics of humanity, we are not talking of God. In fact, the more profound we are, the more emphatically we say “humanity” even when we use the word “God.” Sinful as humanity is, according to the revelation of God, humanity is thinking it can attain to God by its efforts. Kant writes of God, but when God is the necessary postulate of the limit and goal of pure reason and lawgiver for practical reason, Kant is only writing of the rational nature of humanity. Hegel writes of God, but when he writes of the Absolute Spirit, he means the progression of the human mind. Schleiermacher writes of God, but when he writes of that on which humanity depends absolutely he knows how superfluous God has become. His point is that if God “in and over the world” in only a higher degree of the movement that we know well enough as our own, it is hard to see to what extent beyond this God is necessarily self-motivated, and therefore to what extent there necessarily has to be a particular idea of God.[19]

Hegel will offer a famous form of ridicule of a central teaching of Schleiermacher. He is willing to place the root of religion solely in the realm of feeling. In that case, he would be right in saying that the best understanding of religion is that of absolute dependence. Further, in that case, a dog would be the best Christian. After all, the dog carries this feeling of dependence upon its master throughout its life. It also has feelings of hunger that it can satisfy with a bone. However, the basic drive of humanity is toward liberation, not dependence, of divine freedom rather than such a notion of religion as Schleiermacher has.[20]

Proudfoot draws a helpful distinction between the descriptive account of religious experience and an explanatory account. What we find in Schleiermacher is an attempt to describe what he believes is common to religious experiences. He may be wrong, of course, but that is what this book attempts to describe. Rudolf Otto has a different description, William James another, and Mircea Eliada another. However, to offer an explanatory account is to open the door for varieties of interpretation. One could have a theological interpretation, of course. One could also attempt to explain it from a variety of philosophical perspectives. One could also interpret from the standpoint of evolutionary science. The most difficult aspect of a non-religious interpretation or explanation of religious experience is whether it actually explains the force that religious experience has in transforming human life. Eliade will make the case that religious experience is “irreducible,” meaning that the object of religious experience is a privilege of the tradition out of which the experience occurs. Descriptive reductionism, however, seeks to understand religious experience by categories other than those categories internal to the religion. An example would be Ludwig Feuerbach, Freud, and Durkheim. Such an approach is willing to listen skeptically to the accounts of religious experience. The issue for such accounts, as always, is whether they adequately explain the power that conversion can have in the life of person, or the power it can have in the worshipping and serving community.[21]

In the first speech, Schleiermacher offers a defense of a set of speeches to the cultured despisers of religion. Peter Berger says that Schleiermacher is the father of the liberal synthesis of piety and secularism,[22] which we will notice in this first speech. For Schleiermacher, theological reflection must take place in the context of its cultured despisers. They determine credibility rather than the sources of theological tradition. As we will see, Schleiermacher will risk the content of theological tradition in order to make his appeal to the cultured despisers of religion.

As Schleiermacher begins, he acknowledges that matters of faith have not always belonged to everyone. Today, the cultivated people of this modern culture we have designed lives far from religion. The only sacred things are maxims from the ancients and the sociability they find in art and science. They have no room for the eternal, as well as what may lie beyond this world. Having made a universe for themselves, they have no need of thinking of the Universe that made them. They are especially not inclined to listen to religious leaders. Yet, such cultivated persons will appeal to experts in other fields. How is it that only with “experts” in the religious realm will they reject what they have to say? Yet, in spite of this, he knows of no age that has given religion a better reception than that of the present. He admits that as a youth he sought the unknown. He felt it as a necessity of his nature. He describes it as a divine call. This call determines his position in the world and makes him what he is. He acknowledges that Deity has divided the one great divine work among humanity into many forms. He thinks that each definite thing exists by melding together two opposite activities. He notes that the human soul has its existence in the struggle for individuality and the fear of aloneness. Yet, persons are far from knowledge of the whole. He refers to dull mediocrity for many human beings. Deity sends people with the gift of interpreting divine works in that they unite opposing forces. They seek order and connection, right and fitness. Such persons find because they do not lose themselves. They are ambassadors of God and mediators between limited individuals and infinite humanity. They interpret to individuals the misunderstood voice of God, reconciling God to the earth and to the place of God in the world. Such people are the true priests of the highest. Such persons strive to awaken the slumbering germ of a better humanity, to kindle love for higher things, to change common life into noble life, to reconcile the children of earth with the Heaven that hears them, and to counterbalance the deep attachment of the age to the baser side of humanity. Such persons speak of the kingdom of God and are the source of visions, prophecies, and sacred works. He wishes that such a sacred fire would burn everywhere. He submits himself to this power. He admits that what he praises of the true work of religion one find little in the sacred books.  He does not find the utilitarian approach of the English helpful. The French trample the holiest ordinances. Yet, his native German land finds all that adorns humanity. His goal is to show his cultured despisers that from which religion flows. He then offers an important distinction between the source of religion in feeling and the external manifestation of religion in ideas and institutions. He thinks his cultured despisers fear an eternal being especially in providence and the expectation of a future life in immortality. Considered from its center, religion expresses human nature. From the outside, religion is a product of time or history. He urges his cultured despisers not neglect this business of religion. Yet, they tend to start with the outside of religion, that of opinions, dogmas, and usages. If so, the focus is on the folly and superstition found in religious history. If you despise that, you do not yet despise religion. The reason is that religion is a feeling for the Infinite and Eternal. You will need to transport yourself into the pious soul and seek an understanding of its inspiration. Such a soul surrenders to the Universe. Turn away from what the cultured despisers usually consider as religion and turn toward the inward emotion and disposition. Further, in another important move, he refuses to appeal to how religion is the foundation for justice and order in the world. He will not appeal to religion as a necessary prop for morality, for to use religion as a tool in this way is to treat it with contempt. He does not want to appeal to religion to provide a legal constitution. If one needs to correct an evil, then do so, without the appeal to religion. Religion did not descend from heaven in order to serve another end, for then it becomes an accessory and unimportant. He maintains rather that piety springs necessarily from itself. It has a province of its own in the mind that belongs to it, in which it has unlimited sway. Religion is worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and best.  

In reference to the conclusion of the first speech, Pannenberg thinks Paul Ramsey is close to the relation between perception and feeling we find in Schleiermacher in which religions experience has a relation to the whole universe. Religion is not an accessory, but rather, piety springs necessarily by itself. A province of its own in the mind belongs to it, in which it has unlimited sway. This province is worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and best and for them to accept and know them.[23]

Then, in his second speech[24], he begins by saying that one sees religion in secret by those who love it. Proudfoot says Schleiermacher will make such personal appeals throughout the speeches. It becomes an “edifying discourse” at that point, seeking to elicit in the reader the experiences the author intends to communicate.[25] He deals with the nature of religion as the common basis of many religious phenomena. He wants to separate religion from its external form. As he wants to show in his second speech, religion “is not accustomed to appear openly, but is only seen in secret by those who love it.” His example is speech, which one learns because of sociability and interaction through the love of others. As he sees it, “one is, in operation, influenced and permeated by the ready love and support of the others.” Religion is a way of thinking, a faith, a peculiar way of contemplating the world. Religion is also a way of acting, a peculiar desire and love that expresses itself in conduct and character. Religion involves this distinction of the theoretical and practical. He wants to see the activity of religion as both recognition of duty and as the creativity and imagination of the artist. He admits that religion is about metaphysics, a way of relating us to God and the world. Religion is also about ethics. In both cases, we can identify specific disciplines in philosophy that relate to what religion will have to say. Yet, religion may be that which fuses both, and in that case, metaphysics and ethics have fallen into separate activities due to their separation from religion. Yet, piety cannot be a craving from metaphysical and ethical crumbs. If that were so, the learned would have little reason to despise the pious, for it would be debate over the value of knowledge over piety. He stresses that the object of his attempt to persuade, the cultured despiser, should not fight against a shadow. Rather, it must be something quite special to generate so much energy in opposition. What he wants to do is separate the outward form from the inner and true nature of religion. He wants to say that if the learned claimed God as the foundation of all knowledge and ethics, it would not be what the pious means by God. He considers religion as essentially contemplative. This statement leads to an important reflection.

He suggests that his cultured despisers have a largely Kantian view of religion that would distinguish between the theoretical and practical, and therefore, religion is a way of thinking or acting. His objective is to separate religion from the Kantian categories and thoughts we bring to it, and thus reproduce the world we think we know. He wants an area of experience that transcends the Kantian categories, thereby giving priority to the religious affections.

Schleiermacher wants to examine religion from both theoretical and practical reason. He begins with action. As he sees it, activity has to do with life and art. Piety, he will stress is not an activity that brings them together. It must be an original unity, which, he admits, would be difficult admission for a cultured despiser to make. If piety were that original unity, then morality and genius apart would be only fragments of the ruins of religion. The cultured despisers of his day would often admit that one could not understand nature without God. However, he maintains that such knowledge has nothing to with God. The quantity of knowledge is not the same as growing in piety. One can find a glorious display of piety in people who have little knowledge. In fact, even if the cultured despisers could put God at the apex of all knowledge, it would not be the pious person’s way of knowing God. For that reason, he will stress that true religion is essentially contemplative. The perception on which he insists is that the contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.  In itself, it is affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, one seeing God in it and it in God. True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite. He identifies this speech as focused on perception, feeling, and activity. After the perception of the Infinite and Eternal, your feeling is piety, as far as it expresses the being and life common to you and to the All. Your feeling is piety as far as it is the result of the operation of God in you by means of the operation of the world upon you. These feelings are exclusively the elements of religion. In contrast, ideas and principles are all foreign to religion. People are not pious who cannot show that they have originated in themselves and, being the outcome of their own feeling, are peculiar to them. He strongly commends this distinction between feeling and ideas. Religion does not arise from the impulse to know, but the operation of the nature of things upon the individual. The pious must be conscious that one’s religion is only part of the whole, that there may be perceptions and feelings belonging to other modifications of religion that one has not sensed. The whole religious life consists of two elements, that human beings surrender themselves to the Universe and allow themselves to be influenced by the side of it that is turned towards them, and that they transplant this contact which is one definite feeling, within, and take it up into the inner unity of life and being.

Hegel wanted perception related to reflection in order to give precision to the thought of the debatability of religious perception in the process of the religious life and its history. If religious perceptions thematize the implicit relation of the contents of experience to the Infinite, the question arises whether they do justice to the full complexity of the relation. Such a question is meaningful if the function of religious perceptions to give to the whole complex of the relations of meaning an expression that one might call symbolic in that it expresses one aspect of the totality of the universal, so that one may see the Infinite in the finite. The religious perception has to be representative of the totality from which one takes the finite.[26]

As Paul Ramsey sees it, God is a key word to express the totality of the commitment that one finds bound up with religious experience. One cannot derive this experience from perception. In a similar way, Schleiermacher viewed the concept of God as one among many possible interpretations of the experience of the All, the connection with the infinite, which one actively experiences in religion. In Christian Faith 4.4, the word “God” is an expression for direct reflection on the feeling of dependence, that on which we throw back our existence. God is co-determinant in this feeling of absolute dependence. Any further content of the idea of God must evolve from this. In this way, he wants to separate the feeling of dependence by some previous knowledge about God. The point Pannenberg is making, however, is that the approach to the word “God” through religious experience, still relies upon a concept of God to interpret the religious character of the experience. Here is how Schleiermacher puts it.

The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal. Where this is found religion is satisfied, where it hides itself there is for her unrest and anguish, extremity and death. Wherefore it is a life in the infinite nature of the Whole, in the One and in the All, in God, having and possessing all things in God, and God in all. Yet religion is not knowledge and science, either of the world or of God. Without being knowledge, it recognizes knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.

In the midst of all the activity, piety appears as surrender, submission as moved by the Whole that stands over against the individual. He invites the cultured despiser to consider this notion that one can accomplish nothing worthwhile that does not arise from the influence of this sense of the Infinite. Without this influence, how can anyone wish to comprehend the world in science? From where does the thirst arise? He also argues that the sense of self arises from an awareness of the whole.

The phenomenon of your life is just the result of its constant departure and return. It is scarcely in time at all, so swiftly it passes; it can scarcely be described, so little does it properly exist. Would that I could hold it fast and refer to it your commonest as well as your highest activities.

Did I venture to compare it, seeing I cannot describe it, I would say it is fleeting and transparent as the vapor which the dew breathes on blossom and fruit, it is bashful and tender as a maiden’s kiss, it is holy and fruitful as a bridal embrace. Nor is it merely like, it is all this. It is the first contact of the universal life with an individual. It fills no time and fashions nothing palpable. It is the holy wedlock of the Universe with the incarnated Reason for a creative, productive embrace. It is immediate, raised above all error and misunderstanding. You lie directly on the bosom of the infinite world. In that moment, you are its soul. Through one part of your nature you feel, as your own, all its powers and its endless life. In that moment it is your body, you pervade, as your own, its muscles and members and your thinking and forecasting set its inmost nerves in motion.

The incoming of existence to us, by this immediate union, at once stops as soon as it reaches consciousness. Either the intuition displays itself more vividly and clearly, like the figure of the vanishing mistress to the eyes of her lover; or feeling issues from your heart and overspreads your whole being, as the blush of shame and love over the face of the maiden. At length your consciousness is finally determined as one or other, as intuition or feeling. Then, even though you have not quite surrendered to this division and lost consciousness of your life as a unity, there remains nothing but the knowledge that they were originally one, that they issued simultaneously from the fundamental relation of your nature.

For him, religious life consists of two elements, that people surrender themselves to the universe of meaning allow oneself to receive the influence by the side of this universe of meaning turned toward the individual, and then transplant this feeling into the inner unity of one’s life. The religious life is nothing else than the constant renewal of this proceeding. All religion rests on views and feelings of universality. If we are to receive the life of the World-Spirit and have religion, one must first find, in love, humanity. Humanity and religion are united. A longing for love becomes religion. His concern is that some of his cultured despisers of religion have come to experience life in only a fragmented way. Will they be content with only a fragment? He thinks it will lead to narrowness. He wonders if they do not feel the call toward wholeness. He urges them to respond to the call of their deepest nature, and follow it.

            Although Sigmund Freud does not refer to Schleiermacher at this point, he does refer to a letter from a friend, Romain Rolland, who had just read a transcript of Future of an Illusion. His letter said that Freud had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments, which he identified in a peculiar feeling, which he testifies that he always has, and finds confirmed in others and supposes is present in millions of other people. The feeling is a sensation of eternity, a feeling of something limitless and unbounded, an “oceanic” feeling. Freud notes that he does not himself have such a feeling and does not find it easy for science to deal with feelings. However, the idea of people receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through such an immediate feeling that directs one to purpose is not in line with his theory. He will therefore seek a psychoanalytic explanation for such a feeling. He finds it in the infantile melding of ego and world, a boundary one slowly learns to discern in the stages of infancy. Originally, the ego includes everything and later it separates an external world from itself. The infant feels this intimate bond between ego and world that growth toward adulthood will end. In this way, the oceanic feeling his friend identified is a residue of the initial phase of ego feeling. Such a feeling is not the source of religious needs. The derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the infant and the longing for the father is incontrovertible, and is his explanation for religion.[27]

            Schleiermacher continues with his exploration of piety by saying that ethics, the science of action, is not the same as piety. Rather, the pious person, while contemplating human action, does not do so in a way that leads to an ethical system. The pious person seeks the action of God among human beings. Kant is right that morality depends on the consciousness of freedom, but piety is just as comfortable with necessity. Piety will linger with satisfaction on every action from God. Piety will linger on what that action reveals of the Infinite and Eternal. Yet, it will keep outside of theory and practice so that it can maintain its character. Piety becomes an indispensable third element of our human experience. He will contrast knowledge with piety, but he can also say, “The true and proper opposite of knowledge is presumption of knowledge.” He makes the relationship quite clear. “True science is complete vision; true practice is culture and art self-produced; true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.” He wonders if any worthy accomplishment of humanity arises from anything other than the influence of this sense for the Infinite. Without this sense, would one seek the comprehensive understanding of the world scientifically? Striving for art and culture are similar driving forces. They seek the unity of reason and nature and therefore the universal existence of all finite things in the Infinite.

            Schleiermacher will regularly appeal to the experience of his cultured despisers, reminding us again of his willingness to engage in edifying discourse.

But I must direct you to your own selves. You must apprehend a living movement. You must know how to listen to yourselves before your own consciousness. At least you must be able to reconstruct from your consciousness your own state. What you are to notice is the rise of your consciousness and not to reflect upon something already there. Your thought can only embrace what is sundered.

As he sees it, every act is an individual fragment, but at the same time part of a whole. Individual acts exist, but they do so as part of a link in a chain that moves toward the whole. The movement of life is a constant departure and return, which moves so swiftly that one can discern it. One cannot really hold it fast and refer to it the way one might like. He appeals to the original act of fellowship that one has with the Infinite, out of which every human act arises.

            He summarizes by saying that so far, this speech focuses on perception, feeling, and activity. They are not identical; yet, they are inseparable. He stresses that piety is this feeling they have, the being and life common to them and to the All. He finds religion in the realm of feeling. As he sees it, ideas and principles belong to knowledge different from religion. One can study religion scientifically, but this would be knowledge about religion and not religion itself. He will want to distinguish the false practice of religion from the true. Thus, those who parade their religion and boast of it are unholy and removed from divine life.

            Proudfoot points out that in trying to separate piety as feeling from knowing and doing, it becomes a receptive mode of consciousness which is unstructured by the forms and categories of the mind. This notion depends on the idea that the distinctive moment in the religious consciousness is independent of concepts and beliefs, and that the moment is a sense of the Infinite or absolute dependence, and that religious doctrines are extensions of this sense. Each aspect of this notion of Schleiermacher is open to dispute. Human experience is never fully receptive, for the human mind is always actively engaged in shaping a view of the world. Concepts and beliefs shape our notion of any experience that we call religious. The feeling, sense, or intuition to which he consistently appeals depends on religious doctrines. In essence, no human experience is immediate, if by that we mean without interpretation, a notion that relies upon Charles Stanley Pierce. He referred to it as the myth of the given, denying intuitive cognition and immediate consciousness. The matter before Schleiermacher is the same as that Rudolf Otto, Jonathan Edwards, and William James. Feeling, emotion, intuition, or sense is more characteristic of religion than some might think.[28]

            He will compare the feeling that is piety and religion to music.

Were I to compare religion in this respect with anything it would be with music, which indeed is otherwise closely connected with it. Music is one great whole; it is a special, a self-contained revelation of the world. Yet the music of each people is a whole by itself, which again is divided into different characteristic forms, till we come to the genius and style of the individual. Each actual instance of this inner revelation in the individual contains all these unities. Yet while nothing is possible for a musician, except in and through the unity of the music of his people, and the unity of music generally, he presents it in the charm of sound with all the pleasure and joyousness of boundless caprice, according as his life stirs in him, and the world influences him. In the same way, despite the necessary elements in its structure, religion is, in its individual manifestations whereby it displays itself immediately in life, from nothing farther removed than from all semblance of compulsion or limitation. In life, the necessary element is taken up, taken up into freedom. Each emotion appears as the free self-determination of this very disposition, and mirrors one passing moment of the world. It would be impious to demand here something held in constraint, something limited and determined from without. If anything of this kind lies in your conception of system then you must set it quite aside. A system of perceptions and feelings you may yourselves see to be somewhat marvelous.

            Such an analogy between music and religion is powerful. The sense, intuition, drive, or feeling of humanity to express itself in music is similar to that which Schleiermacher is suggesting about religion. Musical expressions shift from one culture to the next and from one generation to the next. No one would think of trying to get humanity on to the same page in terms of musical expression. One may not appreciate all musical expressions, of course. One can tolerate their existence. To some degree, the number of adherents a musical expression has will determine whether it continues to have existence other than in a museum. The point is that religion, understood as an expression of humanity, has its source in a universal feeling or orientation of humanity to express itself in this way. The expression involves ideas, rituals, interpretation of experiences, and traditions that do not force themselves upon adherents. Rather, they provide a context within which humanity expresses a natural orientation of it. Further, every religion will need to have adherents if it is to be anything other than a piece of museum history. Yet, this does not mean that the objective of human history is come to one religion. In fact, as various musical expressions are testimony to the multiplicity of human life, multiple religious expressions would also provide a testimony to the ability of humanity to appreciate and tolerate difference. In fact, we need difference in order to grow.

Religion is always good, for it expresses a common desire for higher life, toward the Infinite and Eternal. A single form of religion cannot express the whole of religion. In his notes, he makes this clear. He directs us to the introduction of his book, The Christian Faith, to show how all forms of religion, even the most imperfect, derive from the feeling or sense of the Infinite. He also finds it Christian to seek piety everywhere, and to acknowledge it under every form. He thinks Jesus did so with his disciples, to which I would refer to Jesus saying that one who is not against them is for them. He also refers to Paul and his speech in Athens in Acts 17. Further, even religion is only part of the whole. Another form of religion may well express this feeling toward the Infinite in a different way. He refers to “this beautiful modesty, this friendly, attractive forbearance” that springs from true religion. He refers to the saints as “seers of the Infinite.”

Seers of the Infinite have ever been quiet souls. They abide alone with themselves and the Infinite, or if they do look around them, grudge to no one who understands the mighty word his own peculiar way. By means of this wide vision, this feeling of the Infinite, they are able to look beyond their own sphere. There is in religion such a capacity for unlimited manysidedness in judgment and in contemplation as is nowhere else to be found.

He acknowledges that human thinking and striving will tend to draw a narrow circle, within which one finds the highest, and outside of which appears common and unworthy. Yet, the pious person makes everything holy, whether it adheres to a system of thought or action, or does not do so. Religion is the natural enemy of narrow thinking. Appealing again to music, “Uninterruptedly, like a sacred music, the religious feelings should accompany his active life.”

He has no interest in outward disciplines, spiritual exercises, privations, mortifications, and the rest, laying aside the Methodist movement of his time, the desert fathers of the Orthodox Church, and the disciplines of the monastic movement, especially those of the Franciscan and Carmelite tradition. This statement reminds us that the source of piety is important to him. If the source of the experience could be spiritual disciplines, then immediate experience would not be the source of what he has identified as piety. His statement that the greatest heroes of religion treated them with indifference is highly debatable. He urges putting aside fear in favor of love toward the World-Spirit. Interestingly, he does not think joy in nature, which many praise, is not religious. He refers to world systems that float in the air, another dig at the insufficient quality of thought and action.

Schleiermacher keeps probing this experience of the Infinite, the whole, the All, in contrast to experiencing life in fragments.  He will use another image, that of the work of art.

The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.

Now religion is to take up into our lives and to submit to be swayed by them, each of these influences and their consequent emotions, not by themselves but as a part of the Whole, not as limited and in opposition to other things, but as an exhibition of the Infinite in our life.

Suppose you are looking at a fragment of a great work of art. In the separate parts of this fragment you perceive beautiful outlines and situations, complete and fully to be understood without anything besides. Would not the fragment then rather appear a work by itself than a part of a greater work, and would you not judge that, if the whole was wrought throughout in this style, it must lack breadth and boldness and all that suggests a great spirit? If a loftier unity is to be suspected, along with the general tendency to order and harmony, there must be here and there situations not fully explicable. Now the world is a work of which you only see a part.[29]

          For Schleiermacher, all that is finite exists through the determination of its limits, which one must then “cut out” from the Infinite. Although most people think of their encounter with finite things as ends in themselves, a higher stage of awareness helps one perceive the dependence of finite things upon the Infinite. With the field theory in science, one could come close to this notion of the interconnection of physical reality.

            Barth will criticize Schleiermacher at this point by saying that his notion the “whole” is still a creature, even if it refers to the sum of creaturely being.[30] He is a monist.[31] If the theology of Schleiermacher ended here, I would agree. However, read within the totality of his thought, I do not think this is fair.

In a rejection of the nominalist tradition, he makes it clear that we can find nothing “simple,” for everything “is skilfully connected and interwoven.”

            He makes an interesting observation about his cultured despisers. They have an interest in humanity. Yet, for all their zeal, “you are always in difficulties with it, and divided from it.” They have an anxious desire to improve it and educate it. When they do not accomplish their desire, they cast humanity aside in dejection. They want to work on humanity. Yet, humanity displeases them. He then accuses them, in a way that I assume has the design of getting them to reflect upon their behavior in the world, as being “far too ethical.” By this, he means they have an ideal of an individual that corresponds to their vision of what humanity should become. He urges them to begin with religion and change the object of their contemplation to the Infinite. Work on individuals, of course, “but rise in contemplation, on the wings of religion, to endless, undivided humanity. Seek humanity in each individual.” He makes a good point in that the loss of the Infinite can make one cling to a fragment, an isolated experience, and lose sight of the longer vision.

            In another appeal, part of his edifying discourse to his cultured despisers, “Had you only the religion that you could have! Were you but conscious of what you already have!” He does not use the term “prevenient grace,” but as a United Methodist, I think that is the nature of this appeal to his cultured despisers. He wants them to see God as already active in their self-described secular lives. For him, human activity has an orientation toward mastery. However, when one becomes absorbed in this mastery, one runs the risk of its limits and chills, and makes one one-sided and hard. Such mastery of a narrow occupation will hinder one from participation in the world and a whole life. For a whole life, one needs this allowance for a feeling of the Infinite, which will bring one out of the narrow confines of that which one might gain mastery.

            He then identifies what he means by several topics that remain “hot” topics in theological circles today.

What is a miracle? What we call miracle is everywhere else called sign, indication. Our name, which means a wonder, refers purely to the mental condition of the observer. It is only in so far appropriate that a sign, especially when it is nothing besides, must be fitted to call attention to itself and to the power in it that gives it significance. Every finite thing, however, is a sign of the Infinite, and so these various expressions declare the immediate relation of a phenomenon to the Infinite and the Whole. But does that involve that every event should not have quite as immediate a relation to the finite and to nature? Miracle is simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant. To me all is miracle.

He is quite right in this assessment. He was close to the assessment of Augustine in his insight that we are unaware of the true nature of things in our everyday dealings with them because of the dulling effect of what is routine and because of our utilitarian approach to reality. We see things only in their immediate context and not as a manifestation of the universal. Religious perception sees the deeper nature of everyday events, experiencing them as miraculous, as an expression of the providence of God.[32]

What is revelation? Every original and new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight as I have just referred to.

What is inspiration? It is simply the general expression for the feeling of true morality and freedom.

What is prophecy? Every religious anticipation of the other half of a religious event, one half being given, is prophecy.

What is operation of grace? Nothing else manifestly than the common expression for revelation and inspiration, for interchange between the entrance of the world into humanity, through intuition and feeling, and the outgoing of humanity into the world, through action and culture.

            He admits that people might not think he has discussed religion at all, for he has not written of God or immortality, a reference to the Kantian system of thought for the realm of practical reason. He would dispute the analysis, for he thinks that he has written of God and immortality. He has presupposed both in all that he has written. Yet, he has written in the way he has because he does think that conceptions and doctrines regarding God and immortality are part of what he means by religion. Thus, he has continued his sharp distinction between ideas associated with religion and religious feeling. As he sees it, God is the highest unity, the whole, and in fact, we could not conceive wholeness without God. Such attention to religion that he finds in this feeling gives clarity that one without it will not have. The world will be little more than vague, confused, and chaotic. One who accepts this sense of the Infinite will be happier.

            He then makes it clear what he means by immortality.

This now brings me to the second point, to immortality. I cannot conceal that in the usual manner of treating this subject there is still more that seems to me inconsistent with the nature of piety. I believe I have just shown you in what way each one bears in himself an unchangeable and eternal nature. If our feeling nowhere attaches itself to the individual, but if its content is our relation to God wherein all that is individual and fleeting disappears, there can be nothing fleeting in it, but all must be eternal. In the religious life then we may well say we have already offered up and disposed of all that is mortal, and that we actually are enjoying immortality. But the immortality that most men imagine and their longing for it, seem to me irreligious, nay quite opposed to the spirit of piety. Dislike to the very aim of religion is the ground of their wish to be immortal. Recall bow religion earnestly strives to expand the sharply cut outlines of personality. Gradually they are to be lost in the Infinite that we, becoming conscious of the Universe, may as much as possible be one with it. But men struggle against this aim. They are anxious about their personality, and do not wish to overstep the accustomed limit or to be anything else but a manifestation of it. The one opportunity that death gives them of transcending it, they are very far from wishing to embrace. On the contrary, they are concerned as to how they are to carry it with them beyond this life, and their utmost endeavour is for longer sight and better limbs. But God speaks to them as it stands written, “Whosoever loses his life for my sake, the same shall keep it, and whosoever keeps it, the same shall lose it." The life that they would keep is one that cannot be kept. If their concern is with the eternity of their single person, why are they not as anxious about what it has been as about what it is to be? What does forwards avail when they cannot go backwards? They desire an immortality that is no immortality. They are not even capable of comprehending it, for who can endure the effort to conceive an endless temporal existence? Thereby they lose the immortality they could always have, and their mortal life in addition, by thoughts that distress and torture them in vain. Would they but attempt to surrender their lives from love to God! Would they but strive to annihilate their personality and to live in the One and in the All! Whosoever has learned to be more than himself, knows that he loses little when he loses himself.

As he concludes, he makes it clear in his further notes on the second speech that he expands and modifies his thoughts here in the introduction to his book The Christian Faith.

We find this emphasis on the importance of feeling later in The Christian Faith.

The Christian faith 3.2.

When we put feeling and self-consciousness side by side as equivalent, I do not mean that the experiences are synonymous. The term feeling has been in the language of common lifelong current in this religious connection. Scientific usage requires more precise definition, which is why I add "self-consciousness." If anyone takes the word feeling in a sense so wide as to include unconscious states, they will by the other word be reminded that such is not the usage we maintain. To the term self-consciousness, we can add the determining epithet immediate, lest anyone should think of a kind of self-consciousness that is not feeling at all. For example, some give self-consciousness the meaning of an objective consciousness, being a representation of oneself, and thus mediated by self-contemplation. Even when such a representation of ourselves, as we exist in a given portion of time, in thinking or willing, moves quite close to the individual moments of the mental state, this kind of self-consciousness does appear simply as an accompaniment of the state itself. However, the real immediate self-consciousness is by no means always simply an accompaniment. It may rather be presumed that in this respect everyone has a twofold experience. In the first place, it is everyone's experience that there are moments in which all thinking and willing retreat behind a self-consciousness of one form or another. In the second place, at times this same form of self-consciousness persists unaltered during a series of diverse acts of thinking and willing, taking up no relation to these, and thus not being in the proper sense even an accompaniment of them. Thus joy and sorrow are genuine states of feeling, in the proper sense explained above, whereas self-approval and self-reproach belong in themselves rather to the objective consciousness of self, as results of an analytic contemplation. Nowhere do the two forms stand nearer to each other than here, but just for that reason this comparison puts the difference in the clearest light.

The exploration of feeling by Schleiermacher is a form of anticipation of later psychological insights. Here is where I want to modify the position of Schleiermacher. One reason Hegel would write of the priority of the concept is that feeling is full of thought, even if reason must explore it in order to bring it to full expression. Proudfoot says we now know that ascriptions of emotions to ourselves and to others depend on complex sets of beliefs and grammatical rules. This means that the feeling or sense on which Schleiermacher relies so much as independent is in reality dependent on thought and activity in complex ways. Feeling depends on language and thought, and therefore a complex set of concepts and beliefs. This view depends on Aristotle, who makes it clear that concepts actually constitute emotions, such as shame or anger, as he discusses in his Rhetoric. What this means is that concepts, rules, and institutions constitute emotion, thereby implying that some emotions are accessible only within certain cultures. This view is consistent with Wittgenstein as well.[33] The horizon of feeling is the original familiarity within which we live our personal lives. Feeling fills our interior lives; it will bring to our awareness the social relations in which individuals live their lives. Schleiermacher connected religious experience closely with the concept of feeling. His discussion of feeling anticipated many of the insights of modern psychology. For him, feeling of “absolute dependence” indicates that our individual lives rely upon the totality of life.

Some psychologists isolate feeling without referring to the totality of life. This is surely a mistake. Phenomenology and psychology alike have verified the basic insight of Schleiermacher. With Heidegger, we can agree that mood discloses our being as a whole, constituting our openness to the world. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing toward the future, a way I want something to be. Feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of one's self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally present. Therefore, feeling has a regressive aspect in revealing the past and especially childhood experiences; it also has progressive aspect. Feeling is an anticipation of some future in either hope or dread. An additional implication of Schleiermacher is that he opened up the religious significance of feeling within the wholeness that makes the affective life. Their peculiar character consists in the fact that in them the wholeness of human life that is always present in feeling as such becomes thematic. In its reaching out to the totality of life, feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition. On the other hand, thought can never exhaustively transfer to its own sphere what is present in feeling. Unfortunately, he understood this receptivity as dependent in contrast to the spontaneous freedom also implicit in feeling. Because he never developed the notion of mood, Kierkegaard set the pattern that continues to influence discussion of this topic. Further, the passions receive no attention from him.

As Schleiermacher seems to see it, one has the whole of life, its total meaning, only in the individual and the specific, in which the whole manifests itself. Any intuition of meaning remains bound to a particular viewpoint. Such a view has ramifications in other authors. One can see that Wilhelm Dilthey highlighted the historicity of this process more strongly than did Schleiermacher. He writes of a final meaning of individual existence that one has at the time of death. Yet, Dilthey also appropriated the view of Schleiermacher of the relativity of this awareness to specific experiences within one’s own history. One has the whole only in and through fragments. Dilthey has had significance in that wherever the question of meaning has a relationship to the whole of life and of experienced reality, as in Tillich, in a way that each individual meaning possess its significance only from an all-encompassing context of meaning, the analyses of Dilthey is in the background. Frankl also has this view of meaning. He encourages people to trust in the meaningfulness of life through a total meaning that encompasses life as a whole. One grasps this total meaning through the mediation of concrete life-situations.

Schleiermacher discovered the significance of religious feeling within the wholeness that marks affective life. In religious feeling, the wholeness of human life, present in all feeling, becomes a theme, although Schleiermacher obscures his insights by reference to self-consciousness. Feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition. Thought can never exhaustively transfer to its own sphere what is present in feeling.

Schleiermacher was correct in indicating that the heart of religious feeling was receptivity and dependence. Augustine also placed a positive value on the affective life. Feelings have their place in self-transcendence and in the temporal flow of life. Feeling has a relation ecstatically to the world and the people around us. The orientation of human beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in the positive feelings and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy but also in joy and hope. We participate in the forming of the future by virtue of our capacity to conceive of and respond to new possibilities, and to bring them out of imagination and try them in actuality. New possibilities motivate us; goals and ideals attract and pull us toward the future, even while our past pushes us; the present brings together the push and the attraction, the past and the future.

The advantage of such an anthropological approach is that that the concept of God becomes an essential part of a proper human self-understanding, whether in relation to human reason or to other basic fulfillments of human existence. Such reflections do not prove the existence of God so much as refer people to an unfathomable reality that transcends the individual and the world. To put it in general terms, human flourishing needs to embrace this dimension of our humanity rather than cynically deny it. One may well live a human life in a secular way, but to find happiness, this dimension of our humanity needs to find expression in our thinking and living.

Schleiermacher argues that religion is a feeling of absolute dependence. Charles Taylor, in Varieties of Religion Today (2002, 51) points out that this view arises because of the frustration many people have with setting aside their convictions and passions in order to pass off their study as scientific. In this view, desire is not an obstacle to discovering truth. This feeling, similar to that of Descartes, is that the finite has its grounding in the Infinite and the temporal has its grounding in the Eternal. However, this feeling does not direct a human life, for one must view the subjective feeling toward the Infinite and Eternal in the context of reflective thought. In other words, feeling is not enough. The greatness of this view, as Pannenberg points out, is that religion is not additional to human life and world. In the view of Schleiermacher, the concept that we carve out finite life out of the Infinite suggests that religious questions are a central human concern, rather than an unnecessary addition that humanity can lose with no loss to itself. Secular awareness does not have this awareness, and thus, differs from religious awareness. In this sense, religion seeks to uncover for secularity a dimension of human life that it has lost, to its own detriment. Although Hegel made light of this view of religion, he actually approximates it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (241, 263), in which he says, “All that is true begins in its appearance.” He then says, “First it exists as intuition, faith, feeling, as the felt flash-like witness of the Spirit … and thus it must be developed from the interiority of feeling into the mode of representation.” In Christian Religion (292), he goes so far as to say that philosophy does not reject feeling. Rather, “The question is only whether the content of feeling is the truth and can prove itself to be true in thought.” Actually, as Robert R. Williams points out in “Hegel and Schleiermacher on Theological Truth,” the use of feeling by Schleiermacher may be his version of what Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty described as intentional consciousness and the primacy of perception. The feeling involved is toward the Infinite and Eternal. In this sense, religion is the pre-theoretical experience of that toward which philosophy moves through reflection. For Hegel, theology is closer to the picture thoughts of this feeling than is philosophy. For him, religion needs the further refinement that philosophy brings in order to reach its goal. Religion points beyond itself to speculative thought. William James[34] also described religion as a term for the feelings, actions, and experiences of individuals insofar as they realize that they are in relation to a divine power. Human beings themselves, with their feelings, actions, and experiences, are the basis of the religious search.

Against the notion of Schleiermacher that piety is a feeling of absolute dependence, R. Otto[35] will present a notion that has had much influence in understanding religious phenomena. The universal or All in Schleiermacher had the advantage of not denoting another world as opposed to everyday experience of this world. Rather, his relating of the finite to the infinite opened up a deeper understanding of finite reality itself, the finite being carved out of the infinite and hence always related to it. The greatness of his view of religion is that religion and its content were not additional to the ordinary reality of our world and us. What he offered was a deeper and more conscious understanding of the one reality of life. In contrast, the orientation of the concept of religion to the holy as distinct from the profane that we find in Otto implies a dualistic understanding that divides the religious from the nonreligious. In any case, both thinkers focus on the experience rather than the object toward which the experience directs one.  The danger of Otto is his contrast between the secular and the religious, in which the secular is clearly primary. Again, the value of Schleiermacher and his view of the universal or All is that awareness of the secular world is part of religious awareness. The secular is what it is only by its failure to make the religious connection with the infinite. He opens the door to a reflection on the superficial nature of secular awareness in that it conceals the fact that we carve out the finite out of the infinite and the totality.

Ninian Smart discusses the experiential or emotional dimension. Certain experiences can be important in religious history. Enlightenment, visions, conversions are important to religion. In Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, we find mysticism and the way ritual enhances ordinary experiences of devotion. In the secular worldview of America, we find the emotional occasions in celebrations of patriotism and the singing of significance songs. He will make the point that neither Schleiermacher nor Otto have conceived of religious experience broadly enough. He begins by thinking that one can isolate the numinous (theism), the panenhenic (at one with the world), and the contemplative or mystical (non-theism and experience of emptiness). He does not want to isolate the experiential from the ritual, organization, and ethical dimensions.[36]

Of course, this focus on experience or feeling has its problems as well.

Pannenberg warns of the danger of pointing to such experiences of faith, conversion, and regeneration, as the basis for certainty of the truth of Christian doctrine prior to all discussion of the individual themes [37] Schleiermacher[38] viewed the articles of faith as the expression of pious Christian states in verbal form. He sought a drastic revision in church doctrine on the basis to differing individualized formulations of the content of faith. The criterion for dogmatic presentation was the faith consciousness, of which church doctrine was its expression. This means one already decides the truth question by the subjective faith already present in consciousness. The theology of awakening, especially in Julius Muller and the biblical theology of Martin Kahler tried to draw the faith principle and scriptural authority closer together. The subjective experience of faith remained basic. The same was true of the Erlangen school and I. A. Dorner. They found in the experience of conversion the true religious basis of certainty, from which the scientific certainty of the truth of Christianity is to be distinguished. The advantage of this approach is that one can validate and appropriate as true only that which our own experience confirms. More dubious was the tendency to limit the principle of experience to conversion. Worse was the idea that this experience can achieve a guarantee of the truth of Christian doctrine prior to all discussion of the individual themes. Even Barth, as much as he wanted to move away from Schleiermacher, becomes an example of the point that as long as one thinks that one must establish the truth of Christian doctrine in advance of all discussion of its contents, one has little choice but to appeal the act of faith. Individual experience can never mediate absolute, unconditional certainty. It can do no more than clarify and confirm. The conditionality of all subjective certainty is part of the finitude of human experience. The believing I is not the locus of absolute truth. It becomes irrational fanaticism.

Wayne Proudfoot has a good point when he says that Schleiermacher has a polemic or apologetic in mind in his identification of feeling separate from thought and activity. The continual stress he brings that feeling and thought in particular are separate demands further reflection. As he admits, his second speech assumes God throughout. This is right. This also means that the Jewish and Christian notion of a monotheistic God is behind his speech. Most analysis today would suggest that feeling arises from thought, even if the thought is not clear to the person. Psychological practice arises precisely because people need help in identifying the experiences and thoughts that lay behind the feeling or mood that may dictate inappropriate behavior today. To take this a step further, the apologetic of Schleiermacher attempts to locate religion in human nature in such a way that he can protect religion from attack. The problem here is that one can explain this feeling toward the Infinite, this striving toward wholeness, in ways other than identifying it as religious. Of course, this assumes that this feeling or sense exists. In other words, science or evolution will have other ways of explaining it. It would appear, in other words, that science has an obligation, if we take evolution seriously, to explain the pervasive experience of religion throughout human history. If evolution is true, religion must have an explanation from that perspective. The precursor of these explanations is Feuerbach.[39]

The third and fourth speeches have little interest for the purposes of this exploration into the philosophy of religion. In the third speech, he does offer the opinion that people have emotions of religion, just as they have of art, philosophy, and all things great and beautiful. He refers to the World-Spirit appearing to everyone, giving all people a sacred longing and love toward the Eternal. However, the world overcomes them by focusing them on the unworthy limitation of their lives to the world.

In the fourth speech, he notes that religion must be social. One does not keep the creative work of one’s mind to one’s self. One has a responsibility to express it due to the natural experience of fellowship and mutual dependence. The spiritual nature that we have in common with human beings brings one to express and communicate with others.

In the end, as Pannenberg sees it, Schleiermacher saw that the religion of reason as defined by Kant could no longer function as a criterion for the truth of Christianity because he had to defend the independence of religion had against morality and metaphysics. In particular, in Speeches, the fifth speech, he makes his case.[40] He will make the point that Schleiermacher tacitly presupposes the basic perception of a religion to which one may refer the contents of the experience of its adherents. Such an observation exposes religious perceptions to the question whether they properly fulfill their function of bringing to light the Infinite in the finite. To this extent, religious perceptions have the character of assertions with truth claims. At least in relation to the polemic of Christianity against inadequate accounts of the presence of the Infinite in the finite in other religions, Schleiermacher sees the possibility of a conflict of truth claims.[41]

Schleiermacher begins his fifth speech by saying that his cultured despisers rightly despise someone engaged in the pursuit of trivial things. However, people engaged in the religious quest as he has defined it engage the highest pursuit, openness to the universe of meaning, seeking responsiveness from the universe and at one with it. The cultured despiser, in fact, may look at some engaged in such a pursuit and “the clear beam of light is reflected in its purity on you.” He refers to religion as the indwelling of all that is sublime and godlike in our nature. He refers to the “nobler fellowship of spirits,” in which people surrender self-will in order to become the work of the eternal, the all-fashioning World-Spirit.”

Schleiermacher offers the view that the lines between denominations within Christianity ought not to be rigid. He then argues, however, that different religions are not simply component parts of some original divine revelation. Pannenberg points out that at this point no religion is conceivable without content. The inalienability of religion became a ready means to counter effectively the dissolution of the object and contents of religion. He is far from indifferent to the content of religion.[42] He thinks the multiplicity of religion is due to the nature of religion. Each religion claims to be a separate form of revealing religion, so we need to be aware of that uniqueness they claim. He urges that his cultured despisers not satisfy themselves with the mere general idea of religion. He moves against the Enlightenment notion of a natural religion that one might follow without a community. He moves toward the notion of religion resigning itself from the Infinite and Eternal and discloses its nature in that actual practice of religion. Religion hides in the actual practice of religion. Thus, his cultured despisers need to acquaint themselves with the actual practice of religion. He makes it clear that if his opponents become open to “natural religion” while rejecting all forms of “positive (actual practice of) religion,” he would regard his project a failure. Natural religion understands its place, while religion as actually practiced will disturb your life. His concern now is that the cultured despisers may acknowledge the noble nature of religion, but despise the actual practice discovered in the religions of the world. Each religion claims to be true, and each contains elements that lack nobility. As historical entities, they are impure and earthly, while having heavenly beauty as well. In defense of religion, he wants to say that much we find that lacks nobility in religion is because people drag into some contest in the civil or political society. He also thinks that, regardless of the corruption of a religion, one will find traces of the divine, which he thinks of as the original fire that began each religion. His explanation for the multiplicity of religion is that while religion expresses the human relation to God, not everyone will apprehend this relation the same way. Differences in time and place will explain such multiplicity. However, he wants to go further. For example, within religion, individuals vary as to their perceptions of what they believe and what they do as adherents to that religion. In every religion, a quarrel exists between what is essential and what is not. Many will not understand the religion in which they supposedly live and for which they fight. He refers to sectarianism within a religion as those who are “infected with this mania” and who “certainly do not lack activity.” He grants that the study of religion may break down into various types we observe, but such a study does not explain the multiplicity of religion. His point in all of this is that one cannot really have a purely individual religion. Religion has a communal form. As he sees it, religion has definite forms so that those “who with their own religion pitch their camp in some positive form, have any fixed abode, and any well-earned right of citizenship in the religions world.” Such persons are advancing the general cause of religion. He can point to the heroes and martyrs of every religion as examples of nobility, but who are the noble among those who profess “natural religion.” They pride themselves on moderation and reduce their religion: “The little that their meager and attenuated religion does contain is of great ambiguity.” He stresses that natural religion has contempt for the actual practice of religious communities, while ignoring not showing the same contempt for other communities that also have horrendous some horrendous outcomes. One could think of science and politics here. He urges that his cultured despisers remember that the forms of religion are a fellowship with the universe of meaning, while they also regard the imperfections within which each form of religion must grow and consider its home. He stresses that the multiplicity of the religions has its basis in the nature of religion. An individual cannot possess all that religions have to offer. In the same way, a single religion cannot embody all that religion seeks to express concerning the Infinite and Eternal. They will vary regarding their resemblance to the Universal. In fact, the multiplicity we see regarding the religions was necessary for the complete manifestation of religion. Yet, each religion claims to be a distinct form of revealing religion. He urges his cultured despisers not to satisfy themselves with a general notion of religion. They need to abandon the notion of aiming at one religion and appreciate its multiplicity. They tend to hate “positive” religion, meaning the actual religions encountered in history. He stresses that religion enjoys freedom to cultivate itself as much as possible. Yet, some religions in their historical forms withdraw such freedom and seek to impose unnatural limits to thought. Every religion has traces of Deity, even if remote, and even if its actual practice has led to empty custom and abstract ideas. Yet, every religion has an element at its heart of true religion as he sought to describe it in these speeches. They once had “the molten outpourings of the inner fire.” Some definite forms of religion have become “a vague, sorry, poor thought that corresponds to no reality.” He criticizes the Kantian view of religion, a belief in a personal God and personal immortality, and therefore has reached everything in religion by demonstration. They have a meager and attenuated religion, such as providence, righteousness, and divine education in general. Their religion is far too vague to have any actual influence over how people actually live their lives. He admits that one will always have difficulty in discovering the spirit of the religions and then interpret them. However, as he has stressed throughout the speeches, the fundamental intuition of a religion is of the Infinite in the finite, some universal religion relation, which we can find at its center. One may never perceive this center without belonging to a definite historical religion.

He also urges them to consider the great wise teachers and poets in each religion. Yet, they should not seek some common denominator, for no religion has achieved its actuality, its potential presence in the world. He urges them not to pay attention either too rigid dogmatism in the presentation of any religion or to those who want to reduce their religion to acceptability among the irreligious.

At this point, Schleiermacher enters a discussion of Judaism, which he considers as having an expression of the infinite and the finite, as he would all religion. He makes the rather bold statement that Judaism is long since dead. He seems charmed by the childlike qualities of Judaism. He agrees that its prophecies are sublime and its messianic hope the best. Yet, its political nature is its downfall. Christianity came to introduce “not peace, but a sword,” making people aware of the darkness in which they live and the light that Christ brings. In his defense of Christianity, he mentions that it is aware that it can allow alien elements into itself.

As Schleiermacher continues, he says that piety will not rest with anything alien to it, so it will keep striving to see in all things finite the Infinite. He refers to the feeling of an unsatisfied longing directed toward the infinite. He refers to the difference one experiences between the sacred and profane, the noble and the common. He wonders about the mood that often overtakes human beings that search for universal meaning everywhere. He thinks that “if ever a Christian has allowed you to listen in the sanctuary” of his or her soul, you would understand the longing and sadness. He then appeals to the notion of Incarnation and Christ as mediator as carving out a special place for Christianity among the religions.

He then argues, 

The fundamental idea of every positive religion, being a component part of the infinite Whole in which all things must be eternal, is in itself eternal and universal, but its whole development, its temporal existence may not, in the same sense, be either universal or eternal.

His point is that religion appears in a temporal and spatial setting that will move against its universal claims. Christianity acknowledges this, and in that way is superior, for it acknowledges a day is coming when humanity will need no church or mediator.

            His conclusion is at least intriguing as he speculates differing potential end games of the debatable quality of the religious community. Half of the original intuition of Christianity is the corruptible quality “of all that is great divine in human things.” However, if a time should come humanity advances to a point where one can no longer “directly observe the retrogression of human affairs, I would gladly stand on the ruins of the religion I honor.” His point appears to be that if human beings were perfectible by their efforts, Christianity would show itself to be wrong. Yet, another Christian teaching “is that certain brilliant and divine points are the source of every improvement in this corruption of every new and closer union of the finite with the deity.” He then speculates that if a time were to come when “the power that draws us to the Highest” had equal distribution among most of humanity, he would willingly level all that exalts itself. Further, if Christianity becomes the sole type of religion, be aware that it scorns autocracy. It will not rule humanity alone. Christianity would see that it must honor each element within it, producing variety into infinity. It would respect that which is noble but came from outside of Christianity. It would still be aware of its corruptibility within “its own often sad history,” expecting “redemption from the imperfection that now oppresses it.” It may even see “other and younger … and stronger, and more beautiful types of religion arise outside of this corruption.” He then forms an interesting proposition.

It could see them arise close beside it, and issue from all points even from such as appear to it the utmost and most doubtful limits of religion. The religion of religions cannot collect material enough for its pure interest in all things human. As nothing is more irreligious than to demand general uniformity in humanity, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion. [Emphasis is mine.]

As a reminder, the past few paragraphs have dealt with the way Schleiermacher has sought to say that Christianity carves out a special place among the religions. Although he says much in a commendable way, Pannenberg rightly makes the point that we see now the attempt of Schleiermacher to carve out a special place for Christianity was illogical. His problem was that he still needed a general concept of religion as a norm. Yet, was not the general concept more philosophical than religious in nature? If so, it would go against his notion that religion was independent. He defines Christianity as the perfect realization of the general concept of religion, as did Hegel.[43]

In his epilogue, Schleiermacher offers an interesting observation and a question based on it.

But to me mankind is not everything, but an infinitely small part, a fleeting form of the Universe. There may be many beings above humanity, but every race and individual is subordinated to the Universe. Can God in this sense then be anything for me but one type of intuition?

He adds in a comment on the first edition:

To have religion is to have an intuition of the Universe, and while this idea of God suits every intuition, a religion without God might still be better than another with God.

Schleiermacher changes his argument in Christian Faith.[44] He begins with what he calls his philosophy of religion. He discusses the notion that religious communities have a relation to each other in two different ways. One is that they are in different stages of development and the other is that they are of different kinds. The household worship or tribal deity forms of religion is in contrast to a religion that must connect in civil society. For him, they require differing maturity of intellectual power. Each individual communion is capable of development within the character of its kind or genus. Such stages imply a direction or end game. In relation to others, religious communions will co-ordinate will and in others will be subordinate, and in still others superior. His position tacitly presupposes the possibility that forms of piety will be similar to that of Christianity, although he wants to be clear that this does not remove the superior quality of Christianity. His position omits the possibility that other religions are simply false. He accepts the maxim that error never exists in and for itself, but always along with some truth. He points to Romans 1:21ff and Acts 17:27-30 for support.

Next, Schleiermacher discusses the idea that forms of piety express the dependence of everything finite upon one supreme and infinite Being, which is the highest form of religion, that of monotheism. His point is that polytheism, while incorporating various gods and idols, found an incapacity in itself by adding such figures. It was not able to arrive at completeness. The sense of totality has not yet developed. His point is that these different representations depend on different states of self-consciousness. The one worships an idol is in a confused state of self-consciousness, and the same is true with polytheism. Belief in one God is an elevation of self-consciousness in that we have taken up the world into our self-consciousness. Conscious of self as finite, dependent on an infinite Being that embraces the world, we experience a connection to the entire world. His point is that self-consciousness in idol worship and polytheism is a connection only to an aspect of nature, a human quality, or a social relationship. Monotheism is by its nature a missionary religion, wanting to spread belief in this one God over all. At this point, he discusses Judaism, which limited the love of God to the race of Abraham. Islam has a passionate character, has strongly sensuous content of its ideas, and betrays the influence of the sensible we find in polytheism. For him, of course, Christianity stands at a higher stage of development. He does not consider here that both Jews and Muslims would deny that Christianity is monotheistic. He then asserts that Christianity is the most perfect of the most highly developed forms of religion. He notes that his view would disagree with those who think of no real piety existing at all outside of Christianity. They would suggest that lower levels show only superstition rooted in fear. The honor of Christianity does not demand such an assertion. His point is that in the earliest stages of religion, any fear that may motivate also has impulses of love. We must not deny the homogeneity of all these products of the human spirit.

Next, Schleiermacher discusses the idea that the widest diversity between forms of piety that subordinate the natural in human conditions to the moral. The passive state of absolute dependence in our consciousness provides the context for our action in the world, and thus arises out of consciousness of God. He wants to call this a teleological religion, in which the moral is the end game, and thus the advancement of the reign of God. If one retreats into oneself, the mental state is a subduing one. The aesthetic religion is one that focuses on the passive side and its feeling of absolute dependence. He sees Judaism, with its focus on a commanding will, primarily on the active and teleological side. Islam with its fatalistic character is on the passive or aesthetic side.

Next, Schleiermacher wants to propose that religious communities have an outward unity in history and an inner unity as a modification that occurs over time. Each religion is “positive” in that the individual content of all the moments of the religious life within one religious communion exists as a coherent historical phenomenon. This leads to a discussion of revelation. The idea of revelation signifies the originality of the fact that lies at the foundation of a religious communion. However, such a revelation is essentially doctrine or a system of propositions. In fact, doctrine is a system, and thus cannot depend upon anything supernatural. Such original moments are parts of another whole. The original fact will always be the appearing of such a being, and the original working will always be upon the self-consciousness of those whose circle he enters. It implies doctrine, of course. For him, it would be difficult to draw a line between what God reveals and what becomes known through inspiration in a natural way. One can regard no particular thing as divine revelation. If one faith wishes to establish the validity of its own application of the idea as against the others, it cannot accomplish this by the assertion that its own divine communication is pure and entire truth, while the others contain falsehood. For complete truth would mean that humanity came to know God in a complete way. However, such a truth could not proceed outwardly from any fact. Even if it did in some way come to a human soul, the person could not apprehend it and retain it as a thought. If it could not be in any way perceived and retained, it could not become operative. Any proclamation of God that is to be operative upon and within us can only express God in a relation to us, a limit arising out of natural human limitations in relation to God.

Schleiermacher continues with what he calls his apologetics. He begins by identifying Christianity as a monotheistic and teleological faith, distinguished from other such faiths by that fact that it relates everything to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. He admits that the development of doctrine historically and the variations of time and place, present difficulties. Christians believed differing things at differing times and places. Yet, if one tries to free oneself from all partiality and perceive an essence of Christianity, one is in danger of reaching a result far scantier and colorless. Yet, he thinks it better to begin with something scanty. For him, this means focusing on the notion that Christians trace back to Christ the communion to which they belong. They find redemption in Christ, signifying a passage from an evil condition that is represented s a state of captivity or constraint, into a better condition and signifying help given in that process by others. The lost condition is one of God-forgetfulness. One could feel the lack of a thing that lay outside of one’s nature as an evil condition, and one would need to recreate it to make good this lack. The possibility of kindling the God-consciousness remains in reserve even where one paints the evil condition of that consciousness in the darkest colors. For Christianity, this lost and redeemed quality is the focus of attention, and Christ has accomplished redemption. Through Christianity, redemption has become the major theme. The founder of this religious communion is Jesus. The influence of Christ is what unites the various Christian communions. The relation to the founder of the communion separates Christianity from other religious communions.

Schleiermacher then considers a special historical connection with Judaism, yet, it also has a relationship with heathenism. By this, he means that the transition from either to Christianity would be the transition to another religion. He admits the leap is greater when one starts with heathenism, but both require a leap. As he sees it, Christianity is not simply a remodeled, renewed, or continuation of, Judaism. For him, the Old Testament is useful to Christians, but “whatever is most definitely Jewish has least value.” [I will let the statement stand in this context, but I would suggest that scholarship has moved on from this position, thankfully. Much that is worthy in Christianity is also in Judaism.]

Schleiermacher then discusses revelation as supernatural and natural, supra-rational and rational. The appearing of a spiritual life is the result of the power of development that resides in human nature and expresses itself in particular people at particular points according to laws that, if hidden from us, are nevertheless of divine arrangement, in order through these people to help the others forward. He thinks all founders of religious communities have this endowment. However, and this is important for him, if we apply the principle to Christ, in comparison with him, everything that one could regard as revelation loses its character. Every other revelation had its time and place, but the destiny of Christ is to “gradually quicken the whole human race into higher life.” As he sees it, no one who does not take Christ in this universal way as divine revelation desires that Christianity should be an enduring phenomenon. Yet, this means that his appearing as the Son is a natural fact. His point here is that human nature is capable of taking up into itself the restorative divine element. Even if the possibility of this resides in human nature, he grants that one must regard its appearance in one particular Person as an action of human nature, grounded in its original constitution and prepared for by all its history. Without this notion, it becomes an arbitrary divine act. Regarding the supra-rational, he notes that one must accept an element of this in Christ, or else every human being would have the same capacity as Christ. Yet, one must not make too great of a difference between the supra-rational and human rationality. The highest goal that is set for the working of redemption is always a human state that not only would obtain the fullest recognition from common human reason, but in which also it is impossible always to distinguish between what is effected by the divine Spirit and what is effected by human reason. Human reason contains that which divine Spirit produces. He concludes this portion by saying that supra-rationality implies that a true appropriation of Christian teaching is not simply a science, and thus, is outside the realm of reason. One can only appropriate Christian teaching through each person willing to have the experience for oneself. Love can only apprehend one that wills to perceive it. One way of saying this is that some truths reveal themselves when we open ourselves in faith, commitment, and love to them.

He concludes his apologetics by saying that one participates in the Christian community through faith in Jesus as the redeemer. This means the facility and constancy of religious emotions, which means the cultivation of absolute dependence as conditioned by a Being placed outside of us. The religious community is to elicit this inward experience in others. For him, this is the essence of Christian preaching. It must always take the form of testimony as to the experience one has had, which shall arouse in others the desire to have the same experience. He has no desire to demonstrate the necessity of redemption. After all, one who is capable of being satisfied with oneself as one is will always manage to find a way out of the argument. In fact, even if one is aware of the need for redemption, the fact that many had this need in the time of Jesus and did not turn to him shows that one need not turn to Christ. He specifically rejects the notion that miracle, prophecy, or inspiration can demonstrate faith in Christ, for each presupposes faith. His point here is that the continuation of the Christian fellowship relies upon testimony to the effects of the development and cultivation of absolute dependence, but one cannot prove to others their need for this step.

To conclude, the greatness of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is that religion and its content were not additional to the ordinary reality human beings experience in the world. He offered a deeper and more conscious understanding of the one reality of life. His view does not presuppose the dualism of secular and sacred spheres that eventually depends upon the prior awareness of secularity and later moving toward the holy. In contrast, Schleiermacher proposes the constitutive condition of the awareness of finite objects and therefore of awareness of the secular of the world. Religious awareness stands in opposition to secular awareness only because the latter is not aware of the fact that finite objects are conditioned by their being carved out of the infinite and defined by it. Here, the antithesis of the sacred and the profane finds a place in Schleiermacher’s concept, but it is a derived and subordinate element. His theory can explain why one can view the holy in religious awareness as constitutive for our secular reality. It brings to light the truth of the finite itself that the superficial orientation of a secular awareness conceals by treating finite things merely as objects to control and use. The truth is that the finite is not self-grounded, but is carved out of the infinite and the totality. Pannenberg will often make the connection with Descartes. Our inexpressible awareness of the infinite as the condition of all understanding of the finite was the decisive argument in the third meditation of Descartes as he sought to prove that we have an innate knowledge of God. One can claim the intuition of the infinite that precedes all the other contents of the consciousness as knowledge of God only secondarily based on an express awareness of God in monotheistic religion. However, inasmuch as this is not an express theme, we do not yet have in it an awareness of God or an explicitly religious awareness. Only the form that is distinct from the finite medium but encountered in it is the concrete religious subject that modern studies have described very generally as power.

Such a definition of religion by Schleiermacher detaches it from the concept of God, which he deals with only in an appendix. In this case, God was simply one religious view among others. This idea was consistent with the objective of formulating the concept of religion as a universal concept that would describe common factors of both in all religions. Even today, detachment from the concept of God has been the final reason why there have been so many attempts at definition. For that reason, they also seem unsatisfactory.

            In support of the idea of separating God from the concept of religion are the arguments of F. Ferre, and E. Durkheim.[45] The result has been a purely anthropological definition of religion as a dimension of human life, perhaps its ultimate dimension as an expression of total commitment, or of comprehensive and most intensive evaluation. One could appeal to the thesis in Paul Tillich.[46] F. J. Streng[47] develops this notion into the thesis that religion is a means of ultimate transformation. He recognizes that some theologians will ask whether religion is a creative element of the human spirit or a gift of divine revelation. For the latter position, the point would be that the meaning of religion is that humanity receives something that does not come from humanity. It remains a gift to stand against humanity. For such persons, revelation is not a human possibility. Religion, far from being a creation of the human spirit, is a gift of the divine Spirit. Such theologians will appeal to Paul, Augustine, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin. From a secular perspective, one could ask whether religion is a lasting quality of the human spirit instead of an effect of changing psychological and sociological conditions. Such thinkers might go back to Comte and suggest that religion has no place in the scientific age. Religion is a creation of the human spirit, but not an essential quality of it. Tillich, however, wants to argue against both by saying that religion is an aspect of the human spirit. The human spirit presents itself as religious. Religion is the dimension of the depths of the human spirit. In a sense, religion is not at home anywhere in the human spirit in that it does not have a function. One cannot limit it to ethics, to a religious sense, to the artistic, or to feeling. His point is that religion is at home everywhere, in the depth of the human spirit. Religion points to the ultimate, infinite, and unconditional in the human spirit. If religion is present in all functions of the spiritual life, why has humanity developed religion as a special sphere among others, whether in myth or in religious communities? For Tillich, the answer is that the tragic estrangement of human spiritual life arises from the ground or depth of each of us. Religion opens up the depth of human spiritual life. Usually, the dust of our daily life and the noise of our secular work cover up its depth.  It gives us the experience of the Holy, of something that is untouchable, awe-inspiring, an ultimate meaning, and the source of ultimate courage. This is the glory of religion. However, beside its glory is its shame. It makes itself the ultimate and despises the secular realm. It makes its myths and doctrines, it rites and laws, into ultimates and persecutes those who do not subject themselves to it. It forgets that its own existence is a result of human tragic estrangement from its true being. It forgets its own emergency character. This is the reason for the passionate reaction of the secular world against religion, a reaction that has tragic consequences for the secular realm. Neither of them should be in separation from the other, and both should realize that their very existence as separated is an emergency, that both of them are rooted in religion in the sense of an experience of ultimate concern.

The value of such definitions is that they describe human positions and experiences that have religious content. The same is true of functional definitions that look at the function of religion in uniting society or culture and view it as a mastering of contingency. In some cases, the function of religion is as a source of self-awareness. In other cases, as we find in Durkheim, and H. Lubbe[48] the function is to bring awareness of meaning that embraces the world and society. Religion does have all these functions. Yet, such a functional definition cannot produce the effect desired. This weakness leads people like Peter Berger[49] to demand that we need a material or substantial definition of the nature of religion, as well as a functional description.

In reality, says Pannenberg, Schleiermacher sought to validate what the confessions said in the conditions of his time. His proposal may be open to criticism. However, this criticism is convincing only if it sets itself the same task as he attempted to perform. The task is how theology can make the primacy of God and divine revelation in Jesus Christ intelligible, and validate its truth claim, in an age that reduces to subjectivity all talk about God. What Schleiermacher has attempted to do is provide religion an independent basis in anthropology with its claim to a separate province in the mind. The concept of God became a product of religion. It therefore did not belong necessarily to it. In Christian Faith, the feeling of absolute dependence stands on its own, rather than as an effect of faith in God. However, feeling does not give us the concept of God and does not have a close bond with it.  In the feeling, it brings awareness of the implied “whence” of dependence. Nevertheless, the mature reflections of Schleiermacher suggest that awareness of God is an expression of religion or piety, not a consequence of the knowledge of God. At the close of Protestant liberal dominance, with the rise of Karl Barth, we will find a protest against the entire procedure. He wants to begin with the primacy of divine reality and its self-declaration over all human worship of God. The deity of God stands or falls with the primacy of divine reality and divine revelation over religion. Yet, as Pannenberg sees it, theologians cannot advance this primacy directly. It will have the character of mere assertion and even fanaticism if the theologian tries. The theologian needs the mediation of reasoning. The theologian needs to engage in a discussion of the problem that from the time of the Enlightenment has led to the domination of the concept of religion as a foundation for dogmatics. Barth acknowledged the primacy of anthropology, fought against it, but he could not change the situation.[50] 

The theologian today will need to augment the reflections of Schleiermacher from the analysis provided in psychology and existentialism as to the role of feeling and mood as they indicate our nature as human beings. Theology can rightly made use of such insights in order to find some common ground with life as the modern person experiences it. Yet, the theologian has an additional concern that involves being a faithful witness to Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. This will mean paying far more attention to the God of Israel and the Jewish faith. It will mean faithfulness to the apostolic witness concerning Jesus. It will mean faithfulness to the individual and corporate life that embodies continuing a loving relationship with Jesus, other believers, and the world. It will mean faithfulness to the hope of the renewal of creation in the image of the Son.

On a personal note, Schleiermacher remains a friend in theological development. For Barth, Schleiermacher was a foil. He thought he needed to do the opposite of everything Schleiermacher accomplished. A better path is to view him as someone upon whom we can build a better theology for our time. If Barth was right in saying that he renewed theology for his time, maybe he can inspire theology today to renew the theological task for our time.

Let it be so!

---

[1] Barth, CD III.4, 155.

[2] Barth, CD, III.2, 21.

[3] Barth, CD IV.1, 656.

[4] Barth, CD I.2, 785.

[5] Barth, CD I.2, 324.

[6] Barth, CD, II.2, 520.

[7] Barth, CD, I.1, 276.

[8] Barth, CD III.3, 345.

[9] Barth, CD III.2, 446.

[10] Pannenberg, Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 281.

[11] Barth, CD II.1, 270.

[12] Barth, CD, I.2, 9.

[13] Barth, CD, II.2, 541.

[14] Barth, CD III.2, 79.

[15] Barth, CD I.2, 123, 351.

[16] Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xiii. In addition, Barth, CD, I.1, 92.

[17] The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor, 1964), 64.

[18] Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 127-8.

[19] (Church Dogmatics, II.1, 28.1, p. 269-270)

[20] Hegel, preface to Hinrich, Religion, 1822.

[21] Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 190-227.

[22] Berger, Sacred Canopy (1967)

[23] Speeches (ibid, First Speech, 21, 36, 39)

[24] (ibid, 36, 45-58).

[25] Proudfoot, Religious Experience, xiv.

[26] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 167.

[27] Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, Chapter 1.

[28] Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 31, 61, 76.

[29] (Second Speech, p. 36, 49, 68)

[30] Barth, CD III.3, 172.

[31] Barth, CD III.3, 312.

[32]Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 46.

[33] Proudfoot, Religious Experience, xvii, 87.

[34] Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, 31)

[35] (The Idea of the Holy, 1923).

[36] Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred (1996)

[37] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume I, 40-48.

[38] Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 15.

[39] Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

[40] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 130.

[41] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 167.

[42] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 155.

[43] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 130.

[44] (I.II, 7-14, 8.4)

[45]Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion, 1968 and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915.

[46] Tillich, “Religion as a Dimension in Man’s Spiritual Life,” in Theology of Culture.

[47] Streng (Understanding Religious Life, 1969).

[48] (Religion nach der Aufklarung, 1986).

[49] Berger (The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, 1967, 175ff).

[50] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 125-8.