Church historian Kurt Nowak with his Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (2001) has provided a comprehensive biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the Prussian (German) theologian, philosopher, educational reformer and liberal democratic activist that one of his greatest 20th century theological critics, Karl Barth, said was on the cutting edge of Christian theology of modern times. And that he would remain so for all time with "no one beside him". Barth applied to Schleiermacher a saying associated with Frederick the Great (Friedrich II, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786): that he founded not a school of thought, but rather founded an age. The ecumenical contemporary Christian theologian Hans Küng considers Schleiermacher the most important Christian theologian of the 19th century and the first Christian theologian who developed a distinctively modern view of Christianity.
Schleiermacher was a Reformed (Calvinist) minister and theologian who worked hard to encourage the unification of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions in Prussia that was encouraged by King Friedrich Wilhelm III (who ruled from 1797 to 1840) proposed in 1817. And Schleiermacher in his theological work not only encouraged that goal but embraced contemporary science and Biblical research in a way that most theologians of the time were reluctant to do. Among his scholarly achievements was a translation of the work of Plato into German, a work that is still highly regarded and is available online at Projekt Gutenberg-de. He was the first scholar to establish that the First Letter to Timothy in the New Testament was pseudo-Pauline, i.e., not written by St. Paul himself. He wrote extensively on church history, using an approach founded in the larger secular historical context.
He played an active role in the Prussian resistance to French domination and occupation, including running missions that could have brought execution had he been caught. But he was a successful secret agent. Schleiermacher embraced the reformist, democratic-republican and nationalist sentiments to which the anti-French resistance and the Wars of Liberation of 1813-15 gave widespread encouragement, and elaborated an extensive philosophy of the state. He played a key role in founding Berlin University in 1810 and persuading big names in German scholarship, including the famous philosopher Johann Gottlieb Ficthe (1762-1814), to come to the new university as professors. He encouraged educational reforms generally and is remembered as important in the field of pedagogy.
But it was his theological works that had the greatest influence, particularly his two-volume Der christliche Glaube [The Christian Faith], published first in (1821-22 and in a substantially revised edition in 1830-31), his early works Über die Religion, Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern [On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers] (1799) and Monologen [Soliloquies] (1800) and Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums [Short Description of Theological Study] (1811).
Schleiermacher’s theology was infomed by the philosophies of his time and took full account of the historical-critical Scriptural studies of his day. Going beyond Enlightenment rationalism, he argued that faith must be understood as involving both reason and emotion. This latter idea was especially appealing to the early German Romantic movement of which he became an influential part, not least through his friendship and working relationships with the brothers Schlegel, Friedrich (1772-1829) and August (1767-1845). The Romantic movement after the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 took on an increasingly Restorationist and conservative-to-reactionary cast. Schleiermacher didn't go down that road. He shared the early Romantic emphasis on the importance of Nature, a focus which was both a product of and a participant in a rapidly changing understanding of the role of religion in society and in understanding the role of humanity in both the natural and social world. Schleiermacher shared with other early Romantics the notion of uniting nature and reason and of the centrality of love to his theology.
He argued for the application of reason to Christian religious understanding and contended that the "signs and wonders" of the Bible should be understood as stories conveying important religious truths, not as actual physical events. His affinity with the Romantic thinkers is expressed in such arguments as the one he made about the Incarnation of Jesus: if God could take human form, that means that that humanity has the capability of taking on divine attributes. Some of his critics wrongly accused Schleiermacher of pantheism.
A key point in Der christliche Glaube is Schleiermacher's concept of the "absolute dependence" of humanity on God, a development in line with Calvinist concepts of predestination. Hegel criticized Schleiermacher on this notion of "absolute dependence", arguing that it removed the role of freedom in the relationship of humans to God, freedom being a core concept in Hegel's philosophy. Schleiermacher argued that the self-consciousness of human freedom was the highest form of worldly self-consciousness. But that the highest form of self-consciousness was piety toward God, which combined an aware of self, the world and God.
Schleiermacher argued that in Christian hermeneutics, the analysis and translation of the Christian Bible, that the Scriptures should be analyzed in the same way secular documents like Greek philosophical works should be treated. They needed to be understood in terms of their specific historical contexts and in terms of the individual perspective of the writer, so far as those could be determined. Their largest and more permanent theological value should be derived from that basic scientific understanding of the Biblical literature itself.
This was very much a part of the new approach to Biblical scholarship that was particularly associated with Germany. When Biblical literalism in the form we know it today in the United States began to crystalize in the latter decades of the 19th century around opposition to modern science in general and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in particular, Schleiermacher and other German scholars of his time and later were particular targets of literalist polemics for their historical-critical method of studying the Bible, a method which Fudamentalists came to call the Higher Criticism or simply "modernism".
Nowak gives quite a bit of attention to Schleirmacher's philological work, arguing that aside from his significant identification of I Timothy as pseudo-Pauline, that his direct contribution to Biblical historical-critical analysis were secondary. His theology was far more significant in providing a framework through which the findings of natural science and the historical-critical method could be understood in a Christian context without rejecting the findings and methods of science or rejecting Christianity (and other religious outlooks) for a purely materialist philosophy.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834)While his philosophical work is distinct from his theology, he saw his philosophy as consistent with his theology, and even considered philosophy his primary professional role. His Dialektik [Dialectics] (1811, with several later revisions) is his most important philosophical work. Dialectical thought went back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BCE) in Western philosophy, but Schleiermacher's Dialektik was a statement of his general philosophy, not simply an elaboration of a method. In it, he elaborated a theory of self-consciousness and focused on the problem of how thinking becomes knowledge. Theories of perception had become a major concern for science and philosophy, which in Schleiermacher's time were in the early stages of becoming distinct disciplines. Both disciplines still struggle to this day to refine their understandings of the relation of the human Subject to external Objects. Schleiermacher saw his Dialektik as providing the more general theory of perception and knowledge for which ethics and physics would provide the basic scholarly disciplines, as distinct from the highest knowledge represented by the general Dialektik. He did write an Ethik (1812-13) but never a systematic Physik.
Nowak's biography is mostly constructed chronologically, except for the period of 1807-1822, which he cover thematically. He stresses Schleiermacher's professional work, including discussions of the arguments in his theological and other works. But he also provides copious details of Schleiermacher's personal and family life. Unless we count the secret missions he ran on behalf of the patriotic resistence during the anti-Napoleon struggles - Nowak's narration of which is probably the most exciting part of a book not meant to be especially exciting - there no particularly scandalous or titillating material on Schleiermacher's private life. His much-younger wife Henriette did become interllectually and emotionally committed with an occultist named Karoline Fischer, whose brother eventually married one of the Scleiermachers' daughters. Schleiermacher found Frau Fischer quite a trial to deal with, approving neither of her nor her esoteric beliefs.
Nowak also includes an interesting story about Schleiermacher's frienship with Bettina von Armin (nee Bettina Brentano), who was the most prominent female intellectual in Prussia of her time, a republican activists who even did jail time for her political activities, and a generally fascinating personality. She had affairs in her single days with both Ludwig von Beethoven and Goethe, and she brought the two men together for their only meeting. They didn't really hit it off well personally, though Beethoven later wrote incidental music for one of Goethe's plays. The raciest Nowak's account gets is that Schleiermacher once tried to kiss Bettina. He was certainly in good company in that!
Nowak devotes a concluding section to Schleiermacher's influence, from Protestant and Catholic theology to philosophy to pedagogy and sociology.
His account provides a useful look of the period in which a democratic and patriotic movement first developed in Germany and in which classical German philosophy flourished and modern Biblical criticism developed, from the viewpoint of the life of the 19th century's most important Christian theologian. It makes a fascinating story.
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