Category: Schleiermacher

In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it.

For Schleiermacher, redemption means being brought into “living fellowship” with the Redeemer. This is because, according to him, Jesus had a perfect “God-consciousness”–that is, he was fully aware of his absolute dependence on God, and this gave shape to his life in the world. The rest of us, by contrast, have a more partial or fragmented experience of God-consciousness, and so we fall into sin. However, by entering into the church–the community that was founded by Jesus and takes its bearings from the portrait of Jesus contained in the New Testament, we can come to share that perfect God-consciousness. When we enter into this “living fellowship,” the God-consciousness of Jesus becomes the core of our selves and, gradually, it comes to predominate–overcoming our sinful tendencies.

In Schleiermacher’s account, the cross is not necessary because salvation doesn’t require some act of atonement, either on our part or on God’s. Instead, our guilt is removed when we come to have the Redeemer’s perfect God-consciousness. In effect, our identity “in Christ” becomes our primary identity, so we are no longer defined by the “old Adam” and its sins. No guilt-atonement is necessary.

The resurrection isn’t necessary, he argues, because our situation has to be essentially the same as that of the first disciples who knew Jesus when he walked the earth. But they were able to be saved by entering into fellowship with Christ before his death. While we enter into that fellowship by means of the image of Jesus presented in the New Testament and mediated by the church, it is the same kind of relationship that the first disciples had. Otherwise, ours would be a wholly different faith. But this implies that the resurrection can’t be essential to our redemption. l think Schleiermacher is a bit ambiguous at this point (or possibly I’m misreading him), because I don’t see how we can enter into a “living fellowship” with Christ now, unless he’s alive in some sense. And that would seem to make the resurrection essential at least as a means by which fellowship with the Redeemer is made possible for succeeding generations.

More fundamentally, though, Schleiermacher’s account shows how focused his overall theology is on the interior life of the individual. For him, redemption is not a public, historical event, but one that takes place in the subjective consciousness of each person. By contrast, the New Testament seems to portray the cross and resurrection of Jesus as epochal events that objectively changed not only our situation before God, but also constitute a turning-point in the cosmic story. Not just human beings’ self-consciousnesses, but their bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, are to be redeemed from bondage to sin and decay.

You could argue that Schleiermacher’s account is a defensible “demythologization” of the language and imagery of the Bible and that it provides a more “existential” understanding of the Christian faith by dispensing with supernatural and/or metaphysical beliefs that many people no longer find plausible. But many Christians would protest that the public, embodied nature of our salvation is an essential aspect of the Christian message.

This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new book Unapologetic, a defense of Christian faith that carries ths subtitle “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.”

Since I’ve been deep in Schleiermacher recently, this set off some bells for me, and indeed Spufford’s argument, at least based on the article, does seem like a sort of updating of Schleiermacher’s argument for thinking of religion as an essential aspect of human nature which is rooted in a particular kind of feeling.

Spufford writes:

The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

As Scheleirmacher said in his Speeches, religion is a “taste for the infinite,” and in The Christian Faith he defined it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Doctrine, for Schleiermacher, is an elaboration of this feeling, but the feeling–piety–comes first and is more basic. Theology takes this as its starting point–it doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence. (Schleiermacher does allow that philosophy may construct arguments for God’s existence on its own terms, but this has little to do with the life of living faith.) Like Spufford, Schleiermacher didn’t deny that religion makes truth-claims, but its living heart is feeling.

Before I started reading him, I had some preconceptions about Schleiermacher, owing in large part to his reputation as the father of “liberal” theology. But the more I read him, the more convinced I am that those preconceptions were wrong.

First, I had assumed that Schleiermacher built his theology on the foundation of a “generic,” supposedly universal human religious experience. Yet he’s quite explicit that Christian dogmatics is essentially a reflection on the specifically Christian experience of being redeemed by Christ. The famous “feeling of absolute dependence” is, it seems, an explication of this experience, not a more foundational concept from which it is derived. It does seem that Schleiermacher regarded human beings as having an innate capacity for religious experience, but the content of Christian religious experience is not derivable from this.

Second, I was under the impression that Schleiermacher regarded doctrines as mere “expressions” of subjective religious experience without cognitive purchase on reality. This now seems completely wrong to me. It’s true that he says that dogmatics is an elaboration of Christian religious experience, but this seems to mean that dogmatic theology should make statements that, ultimately, derive their authority from Christians’ experience of redemption in Christ. We might put it this way: Christian dogmatic theology is the collection of statements about God and the world that must be true if Christian religious experience is valid or veridical. This method actually seems quite similar to the one used by many of the early church fathers–the debates over, for instance, the two natures of Christ were driven by considering what must be the case for Christ to be our redeemer. This is not “subjectivism” in some pernicious sense; rather, it roots theological reflection in the Christian experience of being saved by Jesus.

Both of these points seem closely related to the overall purpose of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics: he’s writing theology for the church, not as an exercise in free-floating speculation. In many ways, he seems close to some of the “post-liberals” who have so stridently criticized the liberalism Schleiermacher is said to have inaugurated. That said, I’m only through the first volume of The Christian Faith, and I’m not at all confident that I’ve fully grasped what Schleiermacher is doing. So consider these some provisional thoughts.

Schleiermacher treats miracles in part 1, section 1 of The Christian Faith under the more general heading of God’s creation and preservation of the world. He argues that the “interdependence” of finite beings in the world is fully compatible with each thing’s dependence on God at each moment of its existence. God is not one finite cause among others, but of an entirely different order of causality. God undergirds the entire order of nature, but does not appear within that order as one cause interacting with others. This seems similar to the traditional Thomistic distinction between “primary” and “secondary” causes.

He then goes on to argue against the conception of miracles as events that violate, interrupt, or overturn the causal order of finite beings (or what he often calls the “interrelatedness of nature”). That is, he denies that a miracle is a direct act of God that bypasses or dispenses with finite causality. Rather, God acts in and through finite things. Schleiermacher makes the familiar argument that if God had to intervene in nature to achieve the divine purposes, it would be a sign of a defect in God’s ordering of the world. “It follows from this that the most perfect representation of omnipotence would be a view of the world which made no use of such an idea” (47.1). He also maintains that such events would “destroy the whole system of nature” (47.2) in that they would break the link between past and future events. For Schleiermacher, such a view of miracles undermines the feeling of absolute dependence of every thing on God because it shows that the order of nature does not reflect God’s will–since God, by hypothesis, has to intervene in order to make the order of the world conform to his will. Moreover, Schleiermacher points out, we have no way of knowing that any purported miraculous event doesn’t have some deeper natural explanation that we’re simply not aware of.

“In this way,” he concludes,

everything–even the most wonderful thing that happens or has happened–is a problem for scientific research; but, at the same time, when it in any way stimulates the pious feeling, whether through its purpose or in some other way, that is not in the lest prejudiced by the conceivable possibility of its being understood in the future. Moreover, we free ourselves entirely from a difficult and highly precarious task with which Dogmatics has so long laboured in vain, i.e. the discovery of definite signs which shall enable us to distinguish the false and diabolical miracle and the divine and true. (47.3)

Schleiermacher’s view strikes me as very Reformed (not surprising, consider that he was a Reformed churchman). After all, if God orders everything that happens, why would God need to act outside of ordinary means to bring about his purposes? But it also makes me wonder how much the “feeling of absolute dependence” is itself filled with content that is specific to Reformed Christianity. Suppose instead we took the signature Christian religious experience to be something like “a feeling of being absolutely valued, or loved”: would that, using Schleiermacher’s method, yield a different understanding of God’s omnipotence (and thus also of miracles)?

Even still, I think Schleiermacher’s argument has merit. For example, many miracle stories in the Bible don’t seem to require us to view them as all-out suspensions or violations of the causal order. Often they seem to involve God working through created means (such as the faith that is deemed to be required to make some of Jesus’ healings efficacious). Schleiermacher also seems correct that an event can have religious significance without us being able to say definitively that it occurred “outside” the causal nexus. In fact, it’s not at all clear how we’d ever be in a position to make that judgment definitively.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear even to me, I started reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith recently. And the weird thing is, I’m really enjoying it. Schleiermacher is (in)famous as the “father of modern theology” or sometimes “the father of liberal theology”: he tried to re-establish Christian faith on a basis that took into account Enlightenment critics but also went beyond the narrow and sterile rationalist constraints that some Enlightenment thinkers tried to place on religion. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, is not based in thought (philosophy) or action (ethics), but a kind of experience, which he famously described as a “feeling of absolute dependence.” As I read him, this isn’t a purely subjective experience, but a clue to or an apprehension of an objectively existing relationship between the world and God, albeit one that we only become aware of in relation to ourselves. This experience is both the “datum” of religion and something which it is the goal of the religious life to cultivate.

This root religious experience, however, never comes to us “pure” so to speak. It always appears in a concrete form, which is conditioned by social, cultural, and historical factors, among other things. So, for Christians, the core religious experience is the experience of Jesus as our Redeemer. Everything in Christian theology flows from this. (This experience is always received within a “communion,” or church. Schleiermacher was no religious individualist.) According to Schleiermacher, Jesus possessed a perfect “God-consciousness”–which for him seems to mean something like an unwavering experience of this absolute dependence on the source of being. As Christians, we “catch” this God-consciousness from Jesus by being part of the church, and gradually we come to share in it more and more fully. (I’ve only just finished the–128 page!–introduction to The Christian Faith, so a lot of the details haven’t been worked out yet. But I think this is the general gist.)

One interesting thing that falls out of this account of the “essence” of Christianity is that Schleiermacher is able to explain what he calls the four “natural heresies” that tend to arise throughout Christian history. If the core of Christian experience is that of Jesus as our Redeemer, then this implies that (1) we are in need of redemption, (2) we can be redeemed, (3) Jesus is sufficiently unlike us that he can be our Redeemer, and (4) Jesus is sufficiently like us that he can be our Redeemer. So, according to Schleiermacher, your four modal heresies are those that deny one of these four propositions:

–“Pelagianism”–we don’t need redemption as such, though we may need someone who can show us how to be a little better.

–“Manicheism”–creation is so corrupted/wicked that it is essentially irredeemable.

–“Nazaritism” or “Ebionitism”–Jesus is just a human like us, so does not posses any special quality that can redeem us.

–“Docetism”–Jesus only appeared to be fully human, and so is too unlike us to provide the kind of redemption we need.

Schleiermacher is careful to point out that these are idealized types, and may not be perfectly instantiated in history. But he thinks that identifying them can help further clarify what the essence of Christianity consists in. In any event, I found the discussion enlightening.