Reflecting and Responding
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Making Sense of Our Experiences of God
What is religion? Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting; but intuition and feeling. Religion is the sensibility and taste for the immediate experience of the infinite. This feeling must accompany everyone who really has religion.
ON RELIGION
IT MAY SURPRISE YOU TO FIND FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER included here, known as he is as the “Father of Modern Theology.” But, many aspects of his thought started out right even if they eventually veered off course. Unfortunately, over the years, the criticism of Schleiermacher has mounted to the point that some of his most powerful and reliable insights have been completely forgotten. So, now we offer an opportunity for you to see into the complexity of this remarkable intellect, recognizing as we do that amidst the ocean of valid criticisms there still exists streams of living water that can refresh and nourish us.
As the nineteenth century opened, the cross currents confronting Christianity began to exact a huge toll on organized religion. Religious participation in many industrialized countries plummeted. The missionary expansion of Christianity throughout the world did little to stem the tide as more and more European churches declined. As these new developments gained momentum, former bastions of ardent belief collapsed. One of the most telling examples was in nineteenth-century Prussia, where the legendary theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher was born, lived and worked.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was born during a period of intense turmoil. His father was a civil servant and many of his uncles and grandfathers were pastors. Early in his life his father moved the family to Herrnhut, where they quickly fell under the spell of Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians. This time forever marked young Schleiermacher, who spent the rest of his life working out the implications of a religious faith based on vital experiences of God.
In early adulthood, while studying theology, he read translated editions of Robert Barclay and John Wesley. Both men articulated a confidence in religious experience that impressed Schleiermacher. Although he was never a Quaker or a Methodist, elements of each man’s thought influenced Schleiermacher long after he reached his mature thinking.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher’s Prussia was experiencing the general religious demise sweeping Europe. The most educated members of society had stopped participating in organized religion. More and more writers across all disciplines were condemning what they saw as the stifling effects of Christianity. Fewer and fewer intellectuals were pursuing a life with God. As a result, a general malaise settled over the educated members of many Christianized societies, robbing them of the opportunity for a life with God.
In the midst of this collapse, Schleiermacher wanted to recapture the vital necessity of our life with God. As a result, he wrote one of the most significant theologies of religious experience ever penned. Of all his works, his first treatise, On Religion, and his last and most significant work, The Christian Faith, do the best job of articulating his understanding of our experiences of God.
Beginning in 1799, with the writing of On Religion, Schleiermacher began to articulate a defense for religious experience that remains relevant today—relevant today because it captures the vital core of every legitimate experience of God. He was invited to do so by the cultured despisers of his day, the elite intellectuals who believed a life with God was irrelevant since they had outgrown their need for him. In quick order he compiled his thoughts into five distinct speeches, each capable of communicating the vitality of Christian experience he believed and cherished.
The Universal Experience
The first two speeches are introductory by nature and set the groundwork for his main thoughts. Speech Three begins with Schleiermacher outlining the way individual religious experience is available to every believer.
Schleiermacher’s goal is to show that our inward religious experiences and the way we express these religious experiences directly reflect our understanding of the spiritual life. That is to say, where we fellowship as Christians fundamentally shapes how we understand our personal experiences of God and whether we even believe they are possible. Our participation in what Schleiermacher calls the “outer forms of religious expression” guide and form our understanding of the spiritual life. In other words, it is no accident that Pentecostals report a much higher incident of religious experience than Presbyterians.
By contrast, the inner form is the context for our immediate experience of God. This intuition lays the foundation for the formation of the self, and continual attention to it drives us toward the completion of our nature. Schleiermacher believes every one of us is born with an innate capacity for God. This is the God-shaped vacuum of Augustine and Pascal. But our capacity for God does not mean we will experience him or even understand this experience properly when it occurs. We need guidance.
How Communities of Faith Form
In Speech Four, Schleiermacher addresses the role of the religious community in helping us understand our experiences of God. Schleiermacher makes a wonderful defense of the importance of the true church. A true church, he says, is one that believes and teaches the vitality of religious experience and helps each of us to understand our personal experiences of God. In his day, critics lampooned the church as the cause of all society’s problems. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, insisted that we recognize that a church is always comprised of the individuals who are in it. Thus, it is unwarranted to blame the church when it is always the people within the church who are the problem.
First, it is human nature to gather in groups. Humans are social beings and are drawn naturally to one another. It is also the nature of religion to draw people into groups. Therefore, the existence of religious communities is not innately evil or even bad, but normal and natural. Thus, rather than condemning the church, we should think together about why religious communities exist at all and how we can make the best use of them.
Then, Schleiermacher shows the way specific communities of faith help us understand our experiences of God. Through speaking, hearing and worshiping together, we are able to share our experiences of God and gain further insight by having others share theirs. This process guides us in understanding our spiritual experiences and demonstrates that the true church is based on mutual exchange, not repressive hierarchies. In this emphasis, Schleiermacher advocates a community where true religion is the mutual exchange between equals who have experienced God.
Why Communities of Faith Matter
In Speech Five, Schleiermacher deals even more specifically with the role of the community of faith. Here Schleiermacher outlines how various spiritual experiences take on particular forms. No single individual or religious group possesses the experience of God fully. From within the context of various Christian communities, we are able to interpret these experiences of God accurately. Since religious experiences are experiences of an infinite God, and since communities of faith are finite in nature, every experience of God must take on finite form if we are to understand its relevance in our life with God.
Ultimately, Schleiermacher argues for Christianity’s supremacy above all other religions because it provides the best explanation for understanding the role of our experiences of God. In every case, we are vulnerable to human interpretations that can distort our understanding. Although some have argued that participation in any religious community corrupts our experiences of God, Schleiermacher never subscribed to this belief. By contrast, he believed and advocated that the Christian life is known and understood only through the work of Christ and the mediating role of the church.
Toward the end of his life, Schleiermacher provided a penetrating interpretation and theology of our experiences of God in his work The Christian Faith. This work is rich and complex and represents an inversion of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin, as you remember, begins with God: “Knowledge of God and knowledge of man is inextricably linked; one cannot be had without the other. But out of deference to God we will begin with God.”
Schleiermacher, by contrast, wants to focus on how humans know, and he begins with how we interpret and understand our experiences of God within the context of our community of faith. He develops an elaborate system of interpretation and demonstrates the role of every aspect of our Christian life in helping us understand our experiences of God. “Piety” is the avenue to understanding these experiences, and the perfect experience of piety is mediated through our feeling of absolute dependence on God.
This inverted starting point raises important questions, but it is more accurate to view Schleiermacher as constructing the most compelling theology of spiritual experience in the modern era. All of this would influence the European elites to whom he was writing. At least it did so for a time, then their interest in God would fade quickly as they wandered off to pursue other interests.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
So many hats can be placed on Friedrich Schleiermacher: father of modern Protestant theology, distinguished professor at the University of Berlin, respected author, popular preacher and, perhaps preeminently, apologist for our experiences of God. In his lectures at the University of Berlin he engaged almost every branch of theology and philosophy: ethics (both Christian and other), history of philosophy, church history, psychology, logic, metaphysics, politics, New Testament studies, dogmatic and practical theology, pedagogy, aesthetics and more. Schleiermacher was the first world-class theologian to confront head-on the Enlightenment’s critique of Christianity. The subtitle of his book On Religion makes clear his intended audience: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers. In answering the critics of Christianity, Schleiermacher rooted Christian faith in a highly sophisticated understanding of our experiences of God. In his early writings he spoke of a “feeling” or “intuition” of the universe—what he called “the sense and taste for the infinite.” Later he spoke of “the feeling of absolute dependence.” Throughout, Schleiermacher was showing European intellectuals that religious experience was a valid means of human knowledge. William James, a century later, sought to do much the same thing for American intellectuals in his Varieties of Religious Experience.
Schleiermacher inverted the way in which we “know.” Calvin, for example, began with knowledge of God and moved from there to understand human nature. Schleiermacher instead begins with human nature, especially our experiences of God, and seeks to move from there to a robust theology of God. It is to Schleiermacher’s credit that he took the skepticism of his day seriously, engaging the critics of Christianity on their own turf, and sought to give a careful rationale for the Christian faith by appealing to religious experience as a valid means of moral knowledge.
What he sought to do for skeptics in On Religion he attempted to do for believers in The Christian Faith. Many have viewed this systematic effort to be one of the true classics of Christian theology. In this sense he should be considered the classical representative of the modern effort to reconcile science and philosophy with religion and theology. He sought to accommodate Christian faith to modernity.
Over the years many have questioned Schleiermacher’s orthodoxy on key points, even dubbing him the “father of modern liberalism.” Perhaps so. However, when I consider his twenty-five-year ministry at Trinity Church, Berlin, his poignant sermons, his fervent prayers and the thousands who lined the city streets upon his death, I cannot escape the vitality of his experience of Christ. And his desire that we experience this life as well.
The contrast between Schleiermacher and John Wesley is quite instructive. While both stressed the importance of experience, Wesley did so within the context of the primacy of Scripture. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, begins anthropologically, with how we as humans make sense of our experiences of God. Perhaps he could not have done otherwise, for those to whom he was speaking did not welcome or accept either Scripture or Christian tradition as authoritative sources of human knowledge.
Still, I cannot help but wonder if by beginning with religious experience Schleiermacher inadvertently undermined the confidence of a whole generation searching for a meaningful life with God. Karl Barth, in the twentieth century, along with many others, felt that Schleiermacher had taken theology down the road of human potentiality at the expense of God’s reality, majesty and grace. Barth’s critique is compelling. Even so, Barth retained a wistful appreciation for Schleiermacher, even speculating that “all might not be lost” with Schleiermacher if there can emerge a theology “predominantly and decisively of the Holy Spirit.”
The Pentecostal explosion in our day might be a partial fulfillment of this hope. It is certainly experiential to the core and deeply dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit. The additional element needed now, and an element that we are beginning to see in various places, is a sufficiently rigorous theology that can match the passion of Holy Spirit experience.
Gracious God, how do we engage our world faithfully and at the same time on terms others will find persuasive? Schleiermacher was dealing with Enlightenment ideas and the emergence of modernity. We’re faced with postmodernity. Experience is certainly important to our postmodern friends. But their idea of experience all feels so slippery and individualized. What are the anchors, the moorings for the ship of faith?
You want us to think this one through on our own, don’t you! Okay, we will do our level best. But please, Lord, come alongside us and guide us in our thinking. Amen.