Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834)

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born on November 21, 1768, in Breslau, Silesia, then part of Prussia, the son of a Reformed army chaplain. His father, Gottlieb, had experienced an evangelical awakening and was drawn to the Moravian Brethren, and at fourteen the boy was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, then to the seminary at Barby. The Brethren gave him what he would later call the home of his religious life: a piety of warm devotion centred on Christ, felt before it was argued. They also gave him the first crisis of his mind. At Barby he and his friends read Kant and the literature of the Enlightenment in secret, and when his doubts about the traditional doctrines of Christ's satisfaction and the atonement hardened, he wrote his father a painful letter asking to leave. The reply was grieved and severe. Gottlieb feared for his son's salvation, and the breach between them took years to mend.

In 1787 Schleiermacher enrolled at the University of Halle, where he studied philosophy, classics and theology, reading Kant, Aristotle and Plato with equal intensity. He passed his theological examinations in 1790 and served as a private tutor in the household of Count Dohna in East Prussia, an experience that taught him pastoral habits of mind alongside his scholarship. Ordained in the Reformed church, he held a curacy at Landsberg and then, in 1796, became chaplain at the Charité hospital in Berlin. Berlin changed him. He fell in with the circle of early Romantics around Friedrich Schlegel, lived with Schlegel for a time, and moved among the salons of Henriette Herz, whose gatherings drew together Jewish and Christian intellectuals. His own friendships there were not always easy to manage. His attachment to Eleonore Grunow, the unhappily married wife of a Berlin pastor, brought years of anguish before she finally chose to remain in her marriage.

From this world came his first major work, the Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers, published anonymously in 1799. It was followed by the Soliloquies and, in 1802, a move to Stolp as court preacher, a post he found isolating. In 1804 he was called to Halle as professor and university preacher. When Napoleon's armies closed the university in 1806, he returned to Berlin, and the occupation of Prussia shaped what followed. He preached to a nation under French domination, sharing the patriotic hopes of the Prussian reformers, and for a time his sermons carried a political weight that drew the suspicion of the authorities.

In 1809 he became pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Berlin, a post he held until his death, and in the same year he married Henriette von Willich, the young widow of a friend, who was twenty years his junior. They had four children, and the death of their son Nathanael at nine in 1829 was among the deepest griefs of his later life. In 1810 he took a chair at the newly founded University of Berlin, where he lectured across theology, philosophy, ethics and hermeneutics, serving as the first dean of the theological faculty and later as rector. He was a small man, slightly deformed from childhood, and a persuasive, unhurried speaker; his students and congregants found in his sermons what the learned world often missed in his books.

Church politics occupied much of his later years. He worked for the union of Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia, but resisted the king's attempt to impose a liturgy by royal decree, a stand that cost him favour at court. His devotion to Christ, to the Brethren piety of his youth, and to the congregation at Holy Trinity never wavered. He died of pneumonia on February 12, 1834, in Berlin, taking communion with his family in his last hours and speaking of the presence of Christ.

His Writing and Its Influence

Schleiermacher began publishing in the mid-1790s, and his early career was shaped as much by translation as by original work. He undertook a German version of Plato's dialogues, begun in collaboration with Friedrich Schlegel, which remained a standard rendering for generations and taught him a philosophical method he never abandoned: that understanding is a patient, conversational act rather than a deduction. The Speeches on Religion of 1799 announced his central move. Addressing educated Germans who had written religion off as outdated metaphysics or moral policing, he argued that it was neither. Religion, he said, is "the sense and taste for the infinite," an immediate awareness that precedes doctrine and ethics alike. The Soliloquies of 1800 turned the same inward attention to the moral self, and the Christmas Eve dialogue of 1806 gave his piety its most affectionate shape, a household conversation around a lit tree about the birth of Christ.

His great systematic work, The Christian Faith, appeared in 1821–22 and was substantially revised in 1830–31. Its governing proposal was that dogmatic statements are descriptions of the Christian religious self-consciousness, grounded in what he called the feeling of absolute dependence, and that this consciousness is wholly shaped by redemption in Jesus of Nazareth. Doctrine, on this account, is faith's own account of itself, not a body of propositions imposed from outside. The Reformed tradition he inherited had always insisted on the experiential knowledge of Christ; Schleiermacher rebuilt that insistence on new ground, in conversation with Kant's critique of metaphysics and the Romantic rediscovery of feeling. Alongside it he developed a theory of interpretation in his lectures on hermeneutics, a pioneering attempt to describe how any text, the Bible included, is understood, and he wrote a short guide to the organization of theological study, the Brief Outline on the Study of Theology, which shaped the shape of the modern university faculty.

The criticisms began in his lifetime and have not stopped. Pietist and confessional opponents charged that grounding theology in feeling dissolved its objectivity and reduced God to a projection of the believer's experience. Karl Barth, who spent a career wrestling with him, judged that Schleiermacher had made man the measure of theology and set the course of liberal Protestantism on a path that ended in cultural accommodation; yet Barth also confessed a lasting respect for him and never wrote him off. Emil Brunner's sharp dismissal of his Christology is an instance of the same quarrel. His treatment of the Trinity, which he relegated to the end of The Christian Faith as a derivative doctrine, struck many as an evasion. These objections are serious, and they are fair to the text.

Yet his influence runs through nearly everything that followed. He is commonly called the father of modern theology, and the claim is hard to dispute: Wilhelm Dilthey drew on his hermeneutics, Albrecht Ritschl and the liberal tradition built on his methods, and the questions he raised about experience, history, and the nature of religious language still organize the field. In the twentieth century his reception was reassessed by scholars who read him less as a liberal avant la lettre than as a Reformed theologian wrestling with modernity from inside the church. His preaching, collected in several volumes of sermons, remains the best corrective to the caricature of a cold academic.

Who should read Schleiermacher: Readers who suspect that the heart of faith lies in something deeper than argument, and who are willing to follow a demanding German thinker through technical prose to find it. He is especially useful for those wrestling with doubt, for pastors and teachers who want to understand where modern theology came from, and for anyone formed in a tradition that has trusted doctrine more than devotion. Start with the Speeches or the Christmas Eve dialogue rather than The Christian Faith. He is not for readers seeking a defence of traditional orthodoxy as such, nor for those who want a systematic theology with the Trinity and the authority of Scripture at its foundation. He asks to be read generously and argued with honestly.