Wolfhart Pannenberg

The Christian Faith, Sections 32-61             In these sections, Schleiermacher explores the feeling of our absolute dependence further. The religious self-consciousness is an intuition that our limits of space and time, our finitude, depend upon a larger unity of the universe. When we become conscious of this dependence, we are on a journey toward the discovery of the meaning of our lives. We have an openness to that which transcends us. Schleiermacher would call such transcendence the Infinite, the Universe, or the All. We will not discover such meaning through insisting upon our isolated individuality. Individuals are not islands. The implication is that we do not discover meaning by focusing simply upon self. Rather, we discover meaning in our engagement with or openness to the world. Meaning comes from beyond us as isolated individuals.              Such a r...

The Christian Faith, Sections 20-31             In these sections, Schleiermacher will discuss his view of the method of dogmatics. We can see the Christ centered approach to theology when he says that we can define orthodoxy as adherence to the essence of Christianity, Jesus the Redeemer. Properly understood, I think most people who are Christians would agree with this. He has kept it simple. He also defends the idea that theologians will have their individuality in how they reflect upon these matters, something for which I hope we will have respect as well. [1] We need to have a degree of generosity as theologians work through the difficult matters of their task.             What do you think keeps one within the thought of Christianity? I might suggest a simple statement in Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the break...