Friedrich Schleiermacher

Life

Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in Breslau, in the Prussian province of Silesia. His father, Gottlieb Schleiermacher, was a Reformed minister who served as a chaplain in the Prussian army. Beginning in 1783 he studied at the school of the Moravian Brethren in Niesky, and from 1785 at the Brethren's seminary in Barby. There he was deeply influenced by Pietism, a movement that emphasized personal experience of faith and a life of piety. However, he came to question the Brethren's doctrines and transferred to the University of Halle to study theology and philosophy. At Halle he encountered Enlightenment thought, including historical criticism of the New Testament and the philosophy of Kant.

In 1796 he became Reformed hospital chaplain (a minister serving in a hospital) at the Charité in Berlin, where he associated with the city's Romantic literary circle. In 1804 he became professor of theology and university preacher at the University of Halle. When French forces occupied Halle, he returned to Berlin in 1806–1807, and thereafter he became a leading figure in German resistance to the French occupation and in the movement for national unification. In 1809 he became pastor of Trinity Church (Dreifaltigkeitskirche) in Berlin. He also took part in founding the new University of Berlin, where he taught as a professor from 1810 until his death. In his later years he combined pastoral ministry and preaching with lecturing in theology and philosophy. He died in Berlin in 1834.

Ministry and Achievements

• On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799): His first major work, consisting of five speeches. He wrote it to defend Christianity before an educated class that regarded religion as outdated. He argued that the essence of religion lies not in thought or moral action but in "intuition and feeling." It is regarded as one of the defining manifestos of German Romanticism.
• The Christian Faith (Glaubenslehre): The comprehensive statement of his theology. He described faith as "the feeling of absolute dependence," that is, the awareness of being wholly dependent on God. He regarded doctrine as the theoretical articulation of this pious disposition. In his Christology, he understood Jesus Christ as the archetypal human being who perfectly embodies the relationship with God.
• Philosophy and hermeneutics: He gained renown for translating the works of Plato into German. He is also regarded as the founder of hermeneutics, the discipline concerned with the principles of interpreting texts, and is accordingly called the "father of modern hermeneutics."

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea, Schleiermacher has been introduced mainly through theological and philosophical scholarship and translation. The philosopher Choi Shin-han translated On Religion (Handeul, 1997; Christian Literature Society of Korea, 2002) and The Christian Faith (Hangilsa, 2006) into Korean. No sources have been identified that document any specific influence he has had on pastoral ministry or the life of faith in the Korean church. Nevertheless, because he is regarded as the starting point of liberal theology, he is consistently discussed in accounts of the development of modern theology.

Assessment

• He is regarded as a figure who changed the direction of nineteenth-century Protestant theology and has been called the "Church Father of the nineteenth century." The German theologian Otto Weber held that the whole of nineteenth-century dogmatics stood under his influence, whether directly, indirectly, or by way of reaction, and compared him to Augustine.
• He is considered the first theologian to begin theology from the human being as the subject of faith and thought. It is precisely on this point that he has drawn criticism. Scholars holding traditional positions have long argued that the "religion" described in On Religion is closer to the pantheism of Spinoza (the view that the world as a whole is identical with God) than to Christianity.
• His defenders, by contrast, emphasize that his work was an attempt to defend the Christian faith in new terms to an intellectual class that had been losing its faith in the wake of the Enlightenment.