by Rev. Prof. John Macquarrie (Expository Times, April 1969, pp. 196 ff.)

Full article available here – http://ext.sagepub.com/content/80/7/196.extract

Excerpts:

Schleiermacher’s thesis: Faith is the attitude of the whole person, not merely an assent of the mind.

Schleiermacher’s successor – Rudolf Otto, who credits Schleiermacher with nothing less than the ‘rediscovery of religion’, while his own great work, The Idea of the Holy, takes up where Schleiermacher left off. Karl barth on the other hand, emphasized the objective truth of the divine Word. In a long essay on Schleiermacher Barth criticizes his theology for its subjectivism, but generously acknowledges that ‘the first place in the history of the theology of the most recent times belongs and always will belong to Schleiermacher, and he has no rival’.

Although Schleiermacher represents the Romantic Movement and laid great stress on feeling, this is only part of the truth, as he saw it. The objection that his philosophy sought edification rather than seeking truth, is too much of a simplification. But this all points up the tension expressed in Bernard Lonergan’s book Verbum – Word and Idea in Aquinas, setting side by side operations of the heart and of the mind: ‘For Augustine, our hearts are restless until they rest in God; for Aquinas, not our hearts, but first and most our minds are restless until they rest in seeing him’. Schleiermacher would rather say ‘Dogmas are a knowledge about feeling’. Hegel’s summary of Schleiermacher’s theology: ‘the Absolute is not to be grasped in conceptual form – if it could, it would not be the Absolute.’ Schleiermacher would prefer to say that we see God only in a reflection, even in a riddle.

The essence of religion, for Schleiermacher, is expressed in his famous phrase, the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’, or, an earlier expression, the ‘sense and taste for the infinite’. But he realized also that faith, if it is to escape the danger of becoming mere superstition, must be tested by thought. Contemporary theology is more likely to stress, with Teilhard de Chardin, our responsibility as humans to be co-workers with God in building the universe.

For Schleiermacher, whatever roots his theology might have had in pietism, it is remarkably free from individualism. H Richard Neibuhr, comparing Schleiermacher’s description of religious experience with those offered by William James, judges the latter to be much more individualistic. Schleiermacher stressed the concurrence of feeling and thought, the sense of mystery and the reverence which it generates, and the sociality of human life in its ultimate context.