The Work
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern) was first published in Berlin in 1799 by Johann Friedrich Unger. Schleiermacher was twenty-nine years old and had not yet published any of the works that would establish his mature reputation. The book went through four editions in his lifetime (1799, 1806, 1821, 1831), each with substantial revisions that increasingly reflected his more conservative mature theology. The standard modern English translation is by Richard Crouter (Cambridge, 1988), which translates the first edition.
The book is generally regarded as the founding text of modern liberal Protestant theology. By relocating the essence of religion in human feeling and experience - specifically, in the 'feeling of absolute dependence' (Gefühl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit) - Schleiermacher provided a theological method that could survive the Enlightenment critique of revealed religion. His definition simultaneously defended religion against its Enlightenment critics and transformed theology from a discipline grounded in authoritative revelation to one grounded in the analysis of universal human experience.
Biblical Engagement
The book's engagement with Scripture is less direct than in Schleiermacher's later work, reflecting both the apologetic context (he is addressing cultured despisers who do not accept biblical authority) and the young Schleiermacher's Romantic rather than confessionally Reformed approach.
Psalm 8:1 - 'O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens' - represents the sense of the Infinite breaking through into the finite, the experience of standing before a greatness that exceeds all human categories. Schleiermacher's account of religious experience as the intuition of the Infinite in and through the finite is an attempt to articulate philosophically what the Psalmist expresses in poetry: the overwhelming sense of a presence that is not identical with any particular finite thing but is disclosed through all of them.
Acts 17:28 - 'For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring' - is Paul's engagement with Stoic philosophy in the Areopagus address, and it provides Schleiermacher with a biblical precedent for his own apologetic method: beginning with a universal human experience (the sense of participation in a greater whole) rather than with particular revealed doctrines. The phrase 'in him we live and move and have our being' expresses the Romantic-pantheistic sensibility of the Speeches - the sense that every human life is already embedded in the divine reality, whether or not it is explicitly religious.
Romans 1:20 - 'For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead' - provides the Pauline basis for Schleiermacher's claim that genuine religion is not confined to those who have received explicit biblical revelation. If God's eternal nature is visible in the creation to all who attend to it, then the religious experience of humanity generally - the universal intuition of the Infinite - is a genuine encounter with the divine, however distorted or partial.
John 4:24 - 'God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth' - supports Schleiermacher's argument that the essence of religion is interior and experiential rather than external and doctrinal. The 'spirit and truth' of which Jesus speaks is, for Schleiermacher, not primarily doctrinal correctness but the quality of the religious consciousness itself - the genuine 'feeling of absolute dependence' rather than mere performance of external religious duty.
Author and Context
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), the son of a Reformed chaplain in the Prussian military. He was educated at a Moravian school at Niesky and the Moravian seminary at Barby, where his encounter with Enlightenment philosophy first produced a crisis of faith. He studied at the University of Halle (1787-89) and began his career as a private tutor.
In 1796 Schleiermacher became a hospital chaplain in Berlin and entered the Romantic circle gathered around Friedrich Schlegel and the Athenaeum journal - the group that would define German Romanticism. The Speeches were written in this context and addressed to precisely this audience: the educated Berlin intellectuals who had rejected orthodox Christianity as intellectually untenable but who Schleiermacher believed were missing the genuine religious experience at the heart of all authentic religion.
The Moravian Pietist tradition of his formation was fundamental: despite his philosophical sophistication, Schleiermacher always insisted that religion is a matter of the heart rather than the intellect, and that the Pietist emphasis on personal religious experience - the Gefühl, the feeling - was the most authentic form of Christian spirituality. The Speeches are in some ways a Romantic translation of Moravian Pietism into the vocabulary of his educated contemporaries.
Structure and Argument
The book is organized as five speeches:
First Speech: Apologia - Why Schleiermacher is bothering to address the cultured despisers at all. He insists that they already have something like religion - they simply call it by other names.
Second Speech: On the Essence of Religion - The heart of the book. Religion is neither knowledge (metaphysics) nor practice (ethics) but a third thing: the intuition of the Infinite in the finite, and the feeling of absolute dependence that accompanies this intuition. Every moment of genuine experience contains a potential religious dimension: the sense that finite things are grounded in and penetrated by an Infinite reality.
Third Speech: On the Formation of Religion - How different religious traditions arise from the fundamental religious intuition. The diversity of religions is not an objection to religion but an expression of the inexhaustible ways in which the Infinite can be intuited through the finite.
Fourth Speech: On the Social Element in Religion - The need for religious community: the religious individual must be in relationship with others who share the religious consciousness, not because religion is a social function but because the Infinite can only be adequately apprehended through the diversity of multiple perspectives.
Fifth Speech: On the Religions - An overview of the historical religions, with a remarkable ending argument that Christianity is the highest religion because it makes the mediation between Infinite and finite - the Incarnation - its central theme.
Critical Reception
Immediate reception was mixed. The Berlin Romantics were enthusiastic; orthodox theologians were suspicious; the Enlightenment critics Schleiermacher was addressing were largely unpersuaded. F.H. Jacobi, to whom the book was partly addressed, found it too pantheistic. In the long run, however, the book was enormously influential.
Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy was defined in large part as a rejection of Schleiermacher: Barth's insistence that theology must begin with the self-revealing God rather than with human religious experience was a direct repudiation of Schleiermacher's experiential method. Barth devoted his final academic lecture to a critical engagement with Schleiermacher, suggesting that the conversation between them was never finished.
Paul Tillich's theology of correlation - which attempts to address human existential questions with the answers of Christian revelation - is more sympathetically related to Schleiermacher: Tillich also begins with human experience and asks what Christian faith says to it. His concept of 'ultimate concern' is a descendant of Schleiermacher's 'feeling of absolute dependence.'
Theological Significance
The book's enduring significance is its demonstration that theology can engage modernity on modernity's own terms without simply capitulating to the secular critique of religion. Schleiermacher's move - admitting that religion is not science and not morality, but arguing that it is a third and distinctive dimension of human experience - created the space for a distinctly modern theology that remained authentically religious.
The book also established the hermeneutical approach that would dominate liberal Protestant theology: beginning with human experience, using that experience as the criterion for evaluating religious claims, and understanding doctrines as second-order articulations of primary religious experience rather than primary truths to be imposed on experience from outside. This approach, however critiqued, set the terms of theological debate for the next two centuries.
Legacy
Schleiermacher's influence on the subsequent history of theology is incalculable. The entire tradition of liberal Protestant theology - from Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann through Adolf von Harnack through Rudolf Bultmann through Paul Tillich - flows from the methodological river he opened. The twentieth century's most influential systematic theologians - Barth, Tillich, Rahner - are all defined in their different ways in relation to him.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 8 (wonder before the divine majesty), Psalm 139 (the presence of God penetrating all of experience), Acts 17:16-34 (Paul's Areopagus address to educated pagans), Romans 1:18-23 (the knowledge of God available through creation), and John 4:19-26 (worship in spirit and truth).
Further Reading
- Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (2005) - the definitive English-language intellectual biography. - Brian Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (1984) - the most sympathetic and theologically sophisticated account of Schleiermacher's significance. - Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen 1923-24 (English tr. 1982) - the most important critical engagement, demonstrating both Barth's profound knowledge and his fundamental disagreement.